Suchergebnisse

The article addresses the relationship between the civilizational crisis and urban crises that cities have experienced in recent decades. In the West, it went from the urban crisis, located in the social economic system and political legitimacy, to the "disappearance of cities", in which the community has ceased to be founded in the proximity or local population density. In Latin America, the urban crisis of the twentieth century in Europe and the United States is rather the normal situation of its cities, and the civilizational crisis has worsened this situation, characterized by informality and the lack of adequate housing. ; El artículo aborda la relación entre la crisis civilizatoria y las crisis urbanas que las ciudades han experimentado en las últimas décadas. En Occidente se pasó de la crisis urbana, ubicada en el sistema económico social y la legitimidad política, a la "desaparición de las ciudades", en la cual la comunidad ha dejado de estar fundada en la proximidad o la densidad demográfica local. En América Latina, la crisis urbana del siglo XX en Europa y Estados Unidos resulta más bien la situación normal de sus ciudades, y la crisis civilizatoria ha empeorado esta situación, caracterizada por la informalidad y la carencia de viviendas adecuadas.

An influential body of scholarship in political science has investigated the impact of economic crisis on various political outcomes. The vast majority of these studies rely on annual growth rates (AGR) to specify economic crisis. I argue that this canonical approach comes with several logical shortcomings. It leads to misguided impressions of crisis severity; it makes no distinction between rapid expansion years and rapid recovery years; and it disregards the financial dimension of economic crises. I present and discuss three alternative approaches of measuring economic crisis, imported from economics: economic shocks, economic slumps, and measures of financial crises. Examples from the regime instability literature demonstrate that these alternative crisis measurements provide results that are theoretically more nuanced and empirically more robust. On this basis, the article encourages researchers to pay more attention to the way they measure economic crisis in general and to supplement the AGR approach with alternative crisis measures in particular.

The enormous financial and economic crisis unfolding in December 2008, combined with other urgent issues that can only be solved on a global level – the energy, food and climate crises – is a potential turning point toward an alternative system, perhaps another paradigm. But the actual form this will take is still unknown. Will it be a system based on global justice and sustainable development? Or will we fall back into a struggle of all against all, which is already happening in the fray of global society? Academics, NGOs and policymakers from the development cooperation field could and should seize the opportunities that the current wave of hope and high expectations offers. Although development aid is increasingly ill-equipped to tackle the problems that count, wider global answers and cross-border actions and responses are increasingly important. It is in this global realm that the big chances lie for real changes for the world's poor, for the millions affected by violent conflict and for the planet at large.

I'm returning to the question of whether American values have changed:  specifically, whether there's been a move towards money and careers and away from personal relationships.  Following a suggestion from Claude Fischer, I looked at the World Values Survey.  Starting in 1990, it has a series of questions asking how important various things are in your life:  very important, rather important, not very important, or not at all important.  People are asked about family, friends, leisure time, politics, work and religion.  The average ratings in the United States:Religion and work have clearly declined, while the others don't show any clear trend.  In 1990, family ranked first, then friends and work almost tied, then leisure and religion almost tied, then politics far behind.  Now it's family, friends, leisure, work, religion, politics.   Whatever you think about the decline in ratings of religion and work, people aren't turning away from personal relationships.Part of the reason I am interested in this issue is that many people say that the problems in American politics today reflect problems in society.  There are many variants of this analysis, but the idea that people have become more focused on themselves is a popular one.   Nicholas Kristof offered another one  the other day--that they result from stagnation or decline in working-class standards of living--so while I'm at it I'll look at his evidence.  Kristof says:  "Average weekly nonsupervisory wages, a metric for blue-collar earnings, were actually higher in 1969 (adjusted for inflation) than they were this year."  He doesn't link to his source, just says it's from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but I tried to reconstruct it from the Federal Reserve Economic Data.  He's right--in fact, average weekly nonsupervisory earnings are lower then they were in 1965.  There's been an increase in part-time work since the `1960s, which is related to increased labor force participation by women, so I also show the figures for real hourly wages.  They give a more optimistic picture, but still say that there's been essentially no progress since 1973.  However, there are actually two offsetting periods of change:  a decline from the early 1970s until the mid-1990s and a pretty steady increase since that time.  So any reaction to economic distress should have occurred in the 1980s or 1990s, not in the last few years.  Of course, these figures aren't definitive, but they're what Kristof uses.So what is the problem?  I agree with another New York Times columnist, David French, that it's primarily one  of political leadership.  Of course, that raises the question of why the quality of political leadership has declined.  I've had several posts that touch on that issue, but haven't addressed it directly--I'll do that in the near future.

Sanitary Crisis, Civilizational Crisis is the translation of Michel Maffesoli's Crise sanitaire, crise civilisationnelle. This paper can be taken as his pronouncement on the civilizational crisis that the COVID-19 pandemic acutely reveals. Maffesoli's text urges one to see beyond secondary causes or dramatic representations of the pandemic as a sanitary crisis, and to consider the primary, and tragic, causes of this event, understood as a crisis that marks the exhaustion of the logic of modernity. Following from a longstanding critique of the decadence of modernity and, by extension, of an "official society" ordered and controlled by an out-of-touch and morbid elite, Maffesoli makes unequivocally clear that this global pandemic is a direct consequence of a globalized progressivist, economicist, and utilitarian civilizational paradigm. The paper takes up the task of reflecting on how relationality, being-together, and being-with, can be thought in our current moment of civilizational crisis.