David Harvey’s Crises of Capitalism Talk With Animation
Jun 29th, 2010 by Conor McCabe
David McWilliams thinks that Ireland’s problems were caused by the gombeen men.
Fintan O’Toole disagrees. He thinks it was the cute hoors.
David Harvey has a slightly different take on what was happening in the worlds of business and finance while McWilliams and O’Toole were flicking through their Carleton for metaphors and similes.
Enjoy.
Brilliant!
Hope them two Daves get a mention in your forthcoming book as I had them contradicting themselves in a literature review:
David McWilliams in his books The Pope Children (2006) The Generation Game (2007) and Follow the Money (2009) ridiculed the commentary of the property bubble during this time was undermined by unsound free market ‘fundamentals’ of neo-liberal ideology as after quoting both John Maynard Keynes on falling markets: ‘These markets remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent’ (2007: 108) and a contemporaneous Irish economist; Morgan Kelly, who predicted house price ‘falls of between forty to sixty per cent in the next eight or nine years’ (ibid) McWilliams goes on to make comparisons of the Irish housing market to an out-of-control aircraft and the entire economy to a swimmer caught in a vortex. What is of interest is his admission that ‘there is no relationship between value and prices’ (2007: 112) as the reading, interpretation and use of theories pioneered by Geographers since the Marxian or Critical turn of the 1970s foremost the works of David Harvey and Neil Smith. Their most recent works on this phenomena in the Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development (2006) of Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space (2007) forms the theoretical underpinning of the study in which I undertook. It is interesting to note that Harvey, like McWilliams, predicted the onset of economic recession throughout the the past decade while McWilliams focused on the supposed ‘value’ as opposed to price of new build houses as Harvey (2006) posits a concept of value which ‘internalizes the whole historical geography of innumerable labor processes set up in conditions of or in relation to capital accumulation in the space-time of the world market’ (142)
The political division of the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland as part of the United Kingdom is made less and less tangible when one considers the economies of both states and the current straits both are in through the operation of the financial and property sectors in the current crisis. The task of understanding this is made more problematical not only by the variety of disciplinary approaches but, within geographical studies, that of scale. ‘The production of scale’ as argued by Neil Smith ‘is one of the conditions that makes the development of capitalism possible’ (2007: 185) it is further argued that ‘spatial integration through the price mechanisms of the commercial markets – at best sparse and superficial – is increasingly infiltrated at a more fundamental level by spatial integration through the law of value’ (ibid.). To this is added an expansion of the theorisations of a “spatial fix” such as that Harvey contended investment in the built environment and infrastructure and Lefebvre’s “social production of space” Smith puts scale from the urban to the global as representations of the ‘consumate geographical expression of the contradictory tendencies toward differentiation and equalization’ he then elaborates how the ‘scale of the nation state is a less direct product of this tendency’ (ibid.).
House prices in Northern Ireland are still falling and the market is the weakest of any in the UK, a new survey has suggested.
The Nationwide building society index is based on the price agreed, after a survey, by its mortgage customers.
It found that prices fell by 5.7% in the second quarter of 2010, compared to a 1% fall in the first quarter.
Northern Ireland was the only UK region to see a fall in prices in the second quarter.
On an annual basis, prices were down 5.2% - a slight deterioration from the 3% year-on-year fall in the first quarter.
Nationwide’s chief economist Martin Gahbauer noted that unemployment has continued to rise in Northern Ireland and is the joint highest across the building society’s house price regions.
The survey suggests the average price of a house in Northern Ireland is now £128,846.
It also suggests average prices for four regions within Northern Ireland:
City of Belfast - £191,536
Northern Ireland (North East) - £145,905
Northern Ireland (South East) - £160,423
Northern Ireland (West) - £114,592
The finding are broadly in line with other recent house price surveys.
Northern Ireland experienced a house price bubble in the first half of this decade but since about 2007 prices have plunged.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/10458234.stm