GenZedong

My hot takes follow.

Mason first talks about how public investments to decrease reproduction costs is not without contradiction, like trying to decrease labor costs directly as well. This is not at odds with Hudson et al whatsoever, it's a long-recognized contradiction in the development of industrial capitalism. Universal school accompanied industrialization at the same time that companies lobbied to decrease their own taxes to fund those schools. But nevertheless, the point is that the creation of that infrastructure won out despite the contradictions, and so did transportation, electrification, etc. This repeated itself in many contexts and with very different political movements in charge, with the main commonality being industrialization.

So, this is simply not a critique of the subject matter. It's as if someone read the cover and the Wikipedia summary and then decided they had an opinion to share with the world.

The next critiques are about saying cases where industrial capital is given credit for creating public investments had financialized characteristics as well, like land speculation. Again we have to revisit the idea of contradiction, because nobody is saying pure industrial capitalism existed separate from finance. The question is who is in the driver's seat. Buying land and building transit to it under the expectation of factories and houses being built along it is purely financial. But what would come of that investment if there wasn't industrial capital to pay the rents? Why does industrial capital want to build on transit in the first place - and why are the land speculators confident they'll build there? And why doesn't finance capital do this anymore?

Mason kind of gives Hudson et al some credit here, but also the main point is fairly unclear and is mostly left at the implication that if you can point to finance being historically important that means you've contradicted Hudson et al. The case is made poorly and the logic is unsound.

Mason then tries to make the case that the rise of finance is actually oscillatory, as if this contradicts Hudson et al. This... just doesn't do that? Mason conspicuously cites nothing to support the implication that the thesis of domination by finance is that it was a smooth global transition. Mason ends the paragraph by alluding to imperialism without using the word, lol.

Then we finally get to the strangest sections, though they do still follow a pattern that feels like straw manning, or maybe just non-sequiturs presented as if they have relevance. Some examples.

There is a widespread view that gains from ownership of financial assets have displaced profits from production even for many nonfinancial corporation [...]

An important aspect here is to distinguish between bulk means of income reported on balance sheets and control over enterprise. One of Hudson's main criticisms is that the rentier economy makes an appearance alongside commodities. It includes insurance, for example. The health insurance industry is a good example of this. It rakes in huge profits from debt and financial assets, sure. But it also rakes in huge amounta of money through monopolization and a manipulation of the availability and application of the commodities themselves, such as whether you get a treatment and how much it costs. Medical billing is a fight between commodity producers (hospitals) and the rentiers (insurance) and it changes how the entire commodity process functions. It's not just skimming off the top of an existing industrial capital (service) industry, it makes the industry itself massively more expensive. In short, the money made through direct finance is very large, but it's even larger than Mason is talking about, as Mason is crediting all profits made by, e.g., hospital services, to industrial capital.

But we can easily just do some basic comparisons. Other countries consume just as much or more healthcare services without forcing so much medical debt (and worse outcome) on their populations. An initial estimate of the impact should begin by attributing all of the excess healthcare expenses taken on by Americans, for example, to financialization.

Mason then repeats logic like this a few times. At one point they talk about most household debt being a mortgage, contrasting this with debt-funded consumption. I'm sure this floats in a lot of contexts in economics, but it is an absurd dichotomy in this scenario. Owning a place to live is also an act of consumption, you do actually need to live somewhere, and if you weren't paying a mortgage you'd be renting. It has a dual character due to the financialization of housing, but this is exactly the thing being criticized by folks like Hudson! Transformation of housing from even being a commodity to being a financial asset has driven the costs of housing up massively, so everyone attempting to have housing security is massively overpaying. They are forced to buy a financialized asset rather than mere commodified housing. To do so, they take on huge debts that they pay off for basically the rest of their lives.

This line really takes the cake: "Contrary to Hudson’s picture of an ever-rising share of income going to debt service, interest payments in the United States now total about 17 percent of GDP, the same as in 1975."

Imagine comparing debt servicing to GDP when criticizing Hudson's view, lol. The basic thesis Mason is trying to criticize holds that large amounts of GDP are unproductive and represent ballooning debt. If the economy has "grown" through unproductive sectors and debt servicing stays at the same rate, this means that the volume of debt service has significantly increased. Denominator went up through financial fictions, quotient stayed the same, so numerator also increased.

Also... why isn't the denominator household income adjusted for inflation (etc)? What a switcheroo!

Mason then lists 3 billionaires and says they got rich because they own specific companies not general financial assets. First, this cannot be taken seriously as an economic analysis trying to follow up listing even basic statistics. But even if we take this example, all 3 of them are tech monopolists that use monopoly power to leverage rents from their consumers. Zuckerberg through the monopoly of network effects and buying up competitors, ensuring that they are the only ones who can be paid for certain kinds of advertising (and charging absurd prices). Bill Gates, famous for the FUD strategy and eliminating the competition via "anticompetitive" (i.e. monopoly) tactics. Jeff Bezos, whose company is entirely debt-leveraged in order to create and maintain a monopoly on online ordering. Monopolies are also a feature of industrial capitalism, so you might not think I'm making a great counterpoint, buy I think it's important to recognize that all of these companies are heavily financialized and tend to focus their work more on maintaining their monopolies than actually creating valuable products, and are thus extracting rent. This happens to such a great extent that tech startups rarely even plan to compete for a significant amount of time - they are intentionally designed to get bought up by one of the monopolies. Often, the productive thing those startups made is then shuttered - the real goal was to prevent competition. Thus, the monopolies reverted the productive cycle in order to continue extracting rent.

Mason finally ends with a really awkward transition to claiming that Hudson et al's hypothesis has problems for advocacy, makes it so that those on the left decide to make alliances with industrial capital in order to fight finance. This is a simplistic narrative and I think it's Mason projecting their own reaction to the analysis than what anyone has advocated for. Hudson actually does basically nothing in terms of advocacy outside of getting Westerners to hate China or Russia a bit less by pointing out how what they're doing is economics that assists the public more than what the imperial core does. This makes me wonder what it is that Mason wants to advocate for that they perceive is stymied by Hudson's argument.