Author: Robert Gilles

Freedom in our contemporary global economy

Posted on

What is freedom? It seems that this question has become very important in the age of neoliberal decline of civic society. Recently, in an interview with the Guardian newspaper, the marxist philosopher Slavoj Zizek discussed freedom in our age of the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement. Zizek is as usual rather fuzzy about what exactly…

New paper posted

Posted on

I have posted a new paper, co-authored by Owen Sims, on critical nodes in directed networks. It addresses the appropriate definition of what exactly critical nodes or middlemen are in the general class of directed networks. We also discuss the link with contestability in networks. Visit the network analysis page for more information and PDF…

Thinking about networks and platforms

Posted on

I just posted a new paper with Dimitrios Diamantaras on how middlemen compete in a network environment. We view a middleman here as an explicit provider of a two-sided interaction platform. FRom that a theory of competitive behaviour is developed as ambiguous decision making in a game theoretic framework. Here the middleman is ambiguous whether…

Modern Political Economics: Chapter 6

Posted on

I continue to read “Modern Political Economy: Making sense of the post-2008 world” by Yanis Varoufakis, Joseph Halevi and Nicholas Theocarakis, published in 2011 by Routledge. Here I discuss Chapter 6. Chapter 6 is a very critical assessment of marginalism and neo-classical economics that came forth from the marginalist “revolution” in economic theorizing in the…

Modern Political Economics: Chapter 5

Posted on

I continue to read “Modern Political Economy: Making sense of the post-2008 world” by Yanis Varoufakis, Joseph Halevi and Nicholas Theocarakis, published in 2011 by Routledge. Here I discuss Chapter 5. This chapter considers and restates Marxist theories of the classical capitalist economy. Clearly, it continues from the previous chapter. As usual in the Marxist…