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This book documents the growth of unproductive activity in the United States economy since World War II and its relation to the economic surplus, capital accumulation, and economic growth. Unproductive activities broadly consist of those involved in the circulation process, including wholesaling and retailing, banking and financial services, advertising, legal services, business services and many (though not all) government activities. The results indicate that the level of unproductive activity in the postwar economy has been a significant factor in the slowdown in the rate of capital accumulation, productivity growth and the overall growth rate. Here, the villain is shown to be the gradual but persistent shift of resources to unproductive activities. The consequence has been a reduction in new capital formation and productivity growth and an erosion in the rate of growth in per capita living standards. Moreover, the rise in unproductive activity is itself seen to be rooted in the logic of advanced capitalism. The forces of competition, which in the early stages of capitalism lead to rapid technical change and productivity growth, promote non-productive and even counterproductive activities in its more advanced stages

AbstractMeasurement realism, the view that measurement targets quantitative attributes and that not all attributes are quantitative, has come under attack both from metrologists and philosophers. In this paper, I take a close look at two influential arguments against measurement realism: the argument from obsolescence and the argument from coordination. I concede that these arguments do challenge the epistemological position traditionally taken by measurement realists, but argue that the metaphysical core of measurement realism survives the challenge posed by these arguments. This metaphysical core is vital to maintaining a clear and ambitious standard for successful measurement.

Standard approaches to the analysis of crisis situations either take some psychological stance, where the individual is the unit of analysis, or they investigate groups of actors taking turns, where individuals act following their own interpretation of what others have done. Philosophers have characterized these two approaches as self-actional and interactional. Actions and interpretations clearly can be assigned to one or the other actor, which allows allocating the responsibility for a violent event to someone "culprit." A radically different, rarely chosen approach is a transactional one, where each action is understood as joint action both in space and in time that cannot be decomposed into independent individual contributions. In this paper, following a sketch of the differences in the epistemological under- pinnings between standard and transactional approaches, exemplifying analyses are presented and discussed from a violent encounter that left a streetcar passenger dead and a police officer before the courts of justice for homicide. Discussion topics include the attribution of cause and effect, understanding the historical trajectories of participant actors, and the consequences of analyzing events in terms of events (not substantive entities, and inter-actions).