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Once you can hang a price tag on something, you can in principle put a price tag on anything, including conscience and honor, to say nothing of body parts and children.
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David Harvey (A Companion to Marx's Capital)
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Thus Marx begins his attack on the liberal concept of freedom. The freedom of the market is not freedom at all. It is a fetishistic illusion. Under capitalism, individuals surrender to the discipline of abstract forces (such as the hidden hand of the market made much of by Adam Smith) that effectively govern their relations and choices. I can make something beautiful and take it to market, but if I don’t manage to exchange it then it has no value. Furthermore, I won’t have enough money to buy commodities to live. Market forces, which none of us individually control, regulate us. And part of what Marx wants to do in Capital is talk about this regulatory power that occurs even “in the midst of the accidental and ever-fluctuating exchange relations between the products.” Supply and demand fluctuations generate price fluctuations around some norm but cannot explain why a pair of shoes on average trades for four shirts. Within all the confusions of the marketplace, “the labour-time socially necessary to produce [commodities] asserts itself as a regulative law of nature. In the same way, the law of gravity asserts itself when a person’s house collapses on top of him” (168). This parallel between gravity and value is interesting: both are relations and not things, and both have to be conceptualized as immaterial but objective.
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David Harvey (A Companion to Marx's Capital)
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State interventions in markets (once created) must be kept to a bare minimum because, according to the theory, the state cannot possibly possess enough information to second-guess market signals (prices) and because powerful interest groups will inevitably distort and bias state interventions (particularly in democracies) for their own benefit.
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David Harvey (A Brief History of Neoliberalism)
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The rule that governs the behaviour of all capitalists is, then, 'accumulation for accumulation's sake, production for production's sake' (Capital, vol. 1, p. 595). And this rule, enforced by competition, operates independently of the individual will of the capitalist. It is the hallmark of individual behaviour, and thereby stamps itself as the distinguishing characteristic of all members in the class of capitalists. It also binds all capitalists together, for they all have a common need: to promote the conditions for progressive accumulation.
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David Harvey (The Limits to Capital)
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The most-studied evidence, by the greatest number of economists, concerns what is called short-term dependence. This refers to the way price levels or price changes at one moment can influence those shortly afterwards-an hour, a day, or a few years, depending on what you consider "short." A "momentum" effect is at work, some economists theorize: Once a stock price starts climbing, the odds are slightly in favor of it continuing to climb for a while longer. For instance, in 1991 Campbell Harvey of Duke- he of the CFO study mentioned earlier-studied stock exchanges in sixteen of the world's largest economies. He found that if an index fell in one month, it had slightly greater odds of falling again in the next moth, or, if it had risen, greater odds of continuing to rise. Indeed, the data show, the sharper the move in the first, the more likely is is that the price trend will continue into the next month, although at a slower rate. Several other studies have found similar short-term trending in stock prices. When major news about a company hits the wires, the stock will react promptly-but it may keep on moving for the next few days as the news spreads, analysts study it, and more investors start to act upon it.
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Benoît B. Mandelbrot (The (Mis)Behavior of Markets)
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Urbanization, we may conclude, has played a crucial role in the absorption of capital surpluses, at ever increasing geographical scales, but at the price of burgeoning processes of creative destruction that have dispossessed the masses of any right to the city whatsoever. The planet as building site collides with the ‘planet of slums’. [16] Periodically this ends in revolt, as in Paris in 1871 or the US after the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968. If, as seems likely, fiscal difficulties mount and the hitherto successful neoliberal, postmodernist and consumerist phase of capitalist surplus-absorption through urbanization is at an end and a broader crisis ensues, then the question arises: where is our 68 or, even more dramatically, our version of the Commune?
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Rebel Cities- David Harvey
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As holders of money, labourers are free to buy as they please, and they have to be treated as consumers with autonomous tastes and preferences. We should not make light of this (Grundrisse, p. 283). Situations frequently arise in which labourers can and do exercise choice, and the manner in which they do so has important implications. And even if, as is usually the case, they are locked into buying only those commodities capitalists are prepared to sell, at prices capitalists dictate, the illusion of freedom of choice in the market plays a very important ideological role. It provides fertile soil for theories of consumer sovereignty as well as for that particular interpretation of poverty that puts the blame fairly and squarely upon the victim for failure to budget for survival properly. There are, in addition, abundant opportunities here for various secondary forms of exploitation (landlords, retail merchants, savings institutions), which may again divert attention from what Marx considered to be the central form of exploitation in production.
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David Harvey (The Limits to Capital)
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Reflection on the forms of human life, hence also scientific analysis of those forms, takes a course directly opposite to their real development…Consequently, it was solely the analysis of the prices of commodities which led to the determination of the magnitude of value, and solely the common expression of all commodities in money which led to the establishment of their character as values. It is however precisely this finished form of the world of commodities—the money form—which conceals the social character of private labour and the social relations between the individual workers, by making those relations appear as relations between material objects, instead of revealing them plainly. (168–9)
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David Harvey (A Companion to Marx's Capital)
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I had no illusions about my role. Prince Charming with a price tag. I was the fantasy lover and like all fantasies, I vanished before dawn.
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Jane Harvey-Berrick (At Your Beck & Call)
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But the ability to hold the means of exchange (in defiance of Say’s law) also awakens a passion, a “lust for gold.” “The hoarding drive,” he says, “is boundless in its nature.” Witness Christopher Columbus: “Gold is a wonderful thing! Its owner is master of all he desires. Gold can even enable souls to enter Paradise” (229–30). Here Marx, quoting Columbus, returns to the idea that once you can hang a price tag on something, you can hang it on anything—even a person’s soul, as his allusion to the Catholic Church’s infamous medieval practice of selling indulgences (i.e., papal pardons that promised entry into heaven) suggests: Circulation becomes the great social retort into which everything is thrown, to come out again as the money crystal. Nothing is immune from this alchemy, the bones of the saints cannot withstand it. (229)
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David Harvey (A Companion to Marx's Capital)
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…My illness helped me to see that what was missing in society is what was missing in me: a little heart, a lot of brotherhood. The '80s were about acquiring—acquiring wealth, power, prestige. I know. I acquired more wealth, power, and prestige than most. But you can acquire all you want and still feel empty. What power wouldn't I trade for a little more time with my family? What price wouldn't I pay for an evening with friends? It took a deadly illness to put me eye to eye with that truth, but it is a truth that the country, caught up in its ruthless ambitions and moral decay, can learn on my dime. I don't know who will lead us through the '90s, but they must be made to speak to this spiritual vacuum at the heart of American society, this tumor of the soul.
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Harvey LeRoy "Lee" Atwater Life Magazine
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With the steady drop in the price of renewable energy and efficiency, “it now costs the same to destroy the climate or save it,” said Harvey. “The price is basically the same, but at the micro scale there will be different winners and losers.” Coal and oil companies and traditional utilities will lose out. Wind, solar, hydro, nuclear, and efficient and distributed energy purveyors will win. “At the macro scale, though, the whole world will win or the whole planet will lose. The impact will hit every generation going forward and will not respect national boundaries in the least.” It
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Thomas L. Friedman (Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations)
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Intended to maintain price parity with some target asset, USD, or gold, for instance, stablecoins provide the necessary consistency that investors seek to participate in many DeFi applications and allow a cryptocurrency native solution to exit positions in more volatile cryptoassets.
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Campbell R. Harvey (DeFi and the Future of Finance)
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The last and perhaps most interesting class of stablecoins are non-collateralized. Not backed by any underlying asset and using algorithmic expansion and supply contraction to shift the price to the peg, they often employ a seigniorage model where the token holders in the platform receive the increase in supply when demand increases. When demand decreases and the price slips below the peg, these platforms issue bonds of some form, which entitle the holder to future expansionary supply before the token holders receive their share.
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Campbell R. Harvey (DeFi and the Future of Finance)
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The drawback to non-collateralized stablecoins is that they have a lack of inherent underlying value backing the exchange of their token. In contractions, this can lead to “bank runs,” in which many holders are left with large sums of the token that are no longer worth the peg price.
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Campbell R. Harvey (DeFi and the Future of Finance)
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The gas price is determined by the market and effectively creates an auction for inclusion in the next Ethereum block.
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Campbell R. Harvey (DeFi and the Future of Finance)
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In early 2001, a fintech startup offered the following idea.2 Instead of individual corporations querying various banks to get the best rate, why not have an electronic system match the buyers and sellers directly at an agreed upon price and no spread? Indeed, the bank could offer this service to its own customers and collect a modest fee (compared with the spread). Furthermore, given that some customers deal with multiple banks, it would be possible to connect customers at all banks participating in the peer-to-peer network. You can imagine the reception.
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Campbell R. Harvey (DeFi and the Future of Finance)
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Adjusting supply up and down contractually defines a bonding curve: the price relationship between the token supply and a corresponding asset used to purchase the tokens. In most implementations, investors sell back to the curve using the same price relationship.
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Campbell R. Harvey (DeFi and the Future of Finance)
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Inefficiency. A centralized financial system has many inefficiencies. Perhaps the most egregious example is the credit card interchange rate that causes consumers and small businesses to lose up to 3 percent of a transaction's value with every swipe due to the payment network oligopoly's pricing power. Remittance fees are 5–7 percent. Time is also wasted in the two days it takes to “settle” a stock transaction (officially transfer ownership). In the Internet age, this seems utterly implausible. Other inefficiencies include costly (and slow) transfer of funds, direct and indirect brokerage fees, lack of security, and the inability to conduct microtransactions, many of which are not obvious to users. In the current banking system, deposit interest rates remain very low and loan rates high because banks need to cover their brick-and-mortar costs. The insurance industry provides another example.
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Campbell R. Harvey (DeFi and the Future of Finance)
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A once-and-for-all increase in prices due to low-end workers finally seeing their wages catch up to historical productivity increases is a desired policy outcome, not something to be avoided. Thereafter, the goal would be for wages to stay roughly par with productivity, thereby creating price stability.
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John T. Harvey (Modern Monetary Theory: Key Insights, Leading Thinkers)
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Since 2010, the price of electricity from utility-scale solar farms has fallen almost 90 percent. Onshore wind fell 60 percent in the same time. Advanced batteries, which power electric cars and are increasingly finding a role in balancing fluctuations on the electric grid, fell more than 80 percent. When highly efficient light bulbs made with light-emitting diodes, or LEDs, first came out just over a decade ago, you could easily pay $50 for one; nowadays they sell at Home Depot for $1.24 apiece, a decline of 97 percent.
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Hal Harvey (The Big Fix: Seven Practical Steps to Save Our Planet)
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What’s your price? If you let him know up front, he will let you know up front if it’s too high a price for him to pay. And then you can move on.
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Steve Harvey (Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man, Expanded Edition: What Men Really Think About Love, Relationships, Intimacy, and Commitment)
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With a market capitalization of $5 billion as of writing, the most popular crypto-collateralized stablecoin is DAI, created by MakerDAO9 and and backed by ETH and other crypto assets. It is soft pegged with economic mechanisms that incentivize supply and demand to drive the price to $1.
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Campbell R. Harvey (DeFi and the Future of Finance)
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The drawback to non-collateralized stablecoins is that they have a lack of inherent underlying value backing the exchange of their token. In contractions, this can lead to “bank runs,” in which many holders are left with large sums of the token that are no longer worth the peg price. There
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Campbell R. Harvey (DeFi and the Future of Finance)
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Another book, Deal, by journalist Harvey Aronson, came out in 1978. It’s also out of print, priced high online, and missing from area libraries. Aronson, now 93, did not respond to requests to discuss the Campisis.
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Joe Strupp (A Long Walk Home: A young woman’s unsolved murder and her sister’s lifelong search for answers)
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My life as a parent was a battleground for various belief systems,” she writes,[43] “all of which had one thing in common: an inability to come to terms with human variability.” Singer and her family were disabled in a way that no one knew how to name, so she created a name for them: they were neurodiverse, and they suffered because the world demanded they be neurotypical. These terms would be popularized by journalist Harvey Blume and widely adopted by disability advocates a few years later. The label neurodiverse includes everyone from people with ADHD, to Down Syndrome, to Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, to Borderline Personality Disorder.
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Devon Price (Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity)