(ECS4) Confronting Contemporary Capitalism

The 2008 financial crisis massively destabilized the neoliberal regime of capitalism. Yet, despite greater state intervention in responses to the crises, including COVID-19, neither do we appear to have returned to Keynesianism. So, what is the current conjuncture of capitalism? This session is a general call for theoretical and empirical interventions that aim to speak to contemporary capitalism and the challenges it faces, as well as the challenges we face in analyzing it. The themes include political trust, crises of capitalism, the re-emergence of inflation and the ongoing cost of living crises, imagination of a post-capitalist economy, as well as the study of contemporary capitalism utilizing novel tools such as AI and machine learning. Tags: Economics, Equality and Inequality, Policy

Organizers: Dean Curran, University of Calgary, Zhen Wang, University of Toronto; Chairs: Dean Curran, University of Calgary, Zhen Wang, University of Toronto

Presentations

Erin Flanagan, York University

Canadian Credit Unions and the Prospects for a Post-Capitalist Economy

The growing polycrisis in Canada associated with deteriorating living and working conditions in many nations have increased calls for a post-capitalist socialist economy. Among the most widely discussed means of accomplishing this goal is the late Erik Olin Wright’s call for eroding capitalism by developing alternative economic structures and processes. In this paper we consider how one of the means cited by Wright and others for eroding capitalist structures, credit unions, can contribute to this goal. Yet, despite their obvious advantages for most Canadians over the major profit-driven banks, membership in credit unions continues to represent only a minority of the Canadian population. In this paper we consider the role that credit unions and other alternative institutions can play in promoting Wright’s notions of equality and fairness, democracy and freedom, and community and soldarity in a post-capitalist society as well as the barriers to achieving these objectives. We propose that in addition to provide a model of collective ownership for other areas such as food distribution, housing, and telecommunications, credit unions can take on a broad advocacy role calling for public policy that more equitably distributes financial and social resources to the population.

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Non-presenting author: Dennis Rafael, York University

Bill Danielsen, Royal Roads University

Does more darkness equal more money? The relationship between the Dark Triad and Income

In our digital, globalized economy, the impact of an insider threat on an organization is significant to the point that it is almost difficult to quantify. Insiders are trusted employees who have legitimate access an organization’s systems and information. An organizations critical need and ability to detect and prevent insider threat incidents and attacks is crucial to its corporate success and relationship with its clients. This paper will explore the complex interplay between the Dark Triad personality traits of Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathology and their impact on income levels through the novel application of advanced machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence algorithms. Through ML algorithms such as gradient descent, random forest, decision trees, and support vector machines (SVM), we aim to provide a comprehensive understanding of how the Dark Triad traits influence individuals financial success. The Dark Triad traits are well-established and recognized as influential factors in shaping interpersonal dynamics, decision-making, and overall behavior. However, their specific contributions as a collective and their impact on an individuals economic success remain largely underexplored. By leveraging the power of ML models, we seek to uncover hidden patterns and nuances in the data that will provide novel insights into the relationship between these personality traits and financial success. To conduct this analysis, we collected a diverse dataset comprising demographic information, psychometric assessments for Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy, as well as corresponding income levels. This data was collected through a survey placed on a website (www.insiderthreat.ca) and included responses from 232 individuals who were over the age of 18 and resided principally in North America. To increase the number of observations, we created a custom algorithm for the specific task of generated synthetic data that mimic the structure and characteristics of the original dataset. Through data preprocessing and hyper parameter tuning, we were able to iteratively refine our models, minimizing prediction errors while enhancing the accuracy of our results. Random Forest and decision tree algorithms were deployed to identify nonlinear relationships and evaluate complex interactions among the independent variables. These ensemble methods are superior in capturing intricate patterns within datasets, allowing us to discern the nuanced impact of each Dark Trait on income level. Through the decision-making processes inherent to these ensemble algorithms, we aim to demonstrate the underlying relationship where Dark Triad Traits influence financial success. SVM is well-established in its ability to discern subtle patterns in high-dimensional data, which further contributes to our analysis. SVMs aid in uncovering the boundaries between income categories as seen through the lens of the Dark Triad traits and provide a clearer understanding of the extent to which these traits contribute to income disparities. The integration of these diverse ML techniques allows us to triangulate our findings and enhance the robustness and reliability of our conclusions. Preliminary results suggest that the Dark Triad traits of Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy do exhibit varying degrees of influence on income levels. Individuals who are high Machiavellianism, known for traits such as their strategic and manipulative tendencies, may navigate professional environments with greater success, positively impacting their income level. Narcissistic traits, characterized by an exaggerated sense of self-worth and self-importance, may lead individuals to seek high-status positions, also influencing their income levels. Psychopathy, noted by impulse control issues and a lack of empathy, may result in divergent effects on income, with potential advantages in certain competitive environments where it may present as "fearless leadership". In conclusion, this study uses an innovative approach to examining the relationship between the Dark Triad traits and income levels by leveraging MLalgorithms. Our findings contribute to the existing literature on personality and economics but also highlight the potential of advanced analytical techniques in providing detailed and rich analysis of complex and multifaceted relationships. This research provides a foundation for future explorations into the nuanced relationship between the Dark Triad, professional success, and other yet unexplored impacts this relationship may have.

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Non-presenting author: Mark Lokanan, Royal Roads University

Addison Kornel, University of Guelph; Edith Wilson, University of Guelph

What Counts as Affordable Housing?: The Consequences of Definitional Dilemma for Canadian Households

As graduate students studying housing, we have often been told to use “what the literature suggests” as a definition of affordability, only to run into a very troubling problem: there are two definitions of "affordable housing" in Canada. First, the National Housing Strategy’s largest funding program, the Rental Construction Financing Initiative uses 30% of the median income of the area that the project is proposed for as a metric for affordability. However, other programs utilize 80% of the market rate as a benchmark for affordability. Issues that arise from competing definitions of affordability have been raised by sociologists in Australia and the United Kingdom, but there has yet to be scholarly engagement with this discrepancy in the Canadian context. Where commentary does exist, it is within the realm of “grey literature”. Our aim with this research is to bring this concern into the realm of peer-reviewed scholarship to both investigate potential discrepancy in individuals served by affordable housing programs on the basis on competing definitions and begin a conversation about what competing standards of affordability mean for ongoing conversations of housing affordability within housing studies. As sociologists become more interested in housing issues, a fundamental practical question hangs over much of our research: What is “affordable housing”? And, when government programs use, and have used, different metrics of that affordability, which should we choose? Through a systematic review of “grey” policy literature and a quantitative analysis of CMHC and Statistics Canada data, we attempt to provide an answer to these questions for ourselves and other housing researchers in Canada.

Dean Curran, University of Calgary

Representation as Intervention: The Case of Money

Building on J.L. Austin’s account of ‘doing things with words’, a growing body of literature has sought to overcome the account of science as passively recording society and nature. This literature has often sought to highlight the ‘performative’ nature of social science – that social sciences do things, rather than just representing them. Most of these accounts have sought to overcome passive, neutral accounts of science by rejecting the representational role of social science. In terms of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, this literature conceives of social science more in terms of making than discovering social reality. This paper proposes an alternative account of the active nature of social science. Rather than rejecting a representational account of social science, this paper proposes to account for the active nature of social science through an account of representation as intervention. Representation as intervention illuminates this active characteristic of social science in two ways. First, it highlights how different methods of representation produce different representational accounts of social life. Second, it highlights how different representational accounts of social life in turn intervene in social life in different ways. As such, this approach can speak to the key performative insight of social science, which is that it does things in the world, without abandoning the fundamental representational insights of social science – that is, that social science is about social life, even if it perceives it in certain, specific ways and that these forms of representation actively reshape this reality. Having motivated an account of ‘representation as intervention’, this paper develops a provisional investigation of money as both a form of representation, and as a form of intervention through its representational qualities in contemporary social life. In this way, this paper aims to connect debates regarding the role of representation in social science more closely to contemporary debates in economic sociology revolving around economic performativity and the sociology of money.