Kulturkampf

[benji]

Two industries full of entitled overeducated idiots. Gaming has enough actual talent and autistic people that it's not constantly all of them at least. Journalism (especially corporate journalism) is full of little more than people who believe they're entitled to run the world just because they are themselves. Twitter, and now Bluesky, show how completely willingly people in that industry who know nothing believe they know everything and are entitled to opine on literally any subject without opposition.

As much as I condemn academia and you can find examples of it on those sites, it's not worse. Just the nature of specialized knowledge pursuit means most people, outside of English departments, recognize they literally don't know everything and can't master every topic by reading the first thing Google returns.

And it's funny I'm doing this now because this guy is a perfect example of academia's version:

Political economist • Assistant Professor at Cambridge • Book: The Future of the Factory • Newsletter: http://theglobalcurrents.com • Email: jlh202@cam.ac.uk

Yet he believes that it threatens democracy when the owner of a company lays people off. As I constantly reiterate because none of these people seem to know it, Bezos bought the WaPo from a billionaire. It's always in its famous era been owned by a billionaire. Has every lay off it's ever done been "destroying media they dislike"? 

Surely this guy does more to destroy large media by his "newsletter" which is published for free on Substack. He doesn't even seem to lock any articles behind a paywall, so you can read such enlightening fare as:

Economics has an elitism problem
A handful of elite universities control the discipline. That’s not excellence — it’s monopoly.

How economics lost its soul
Universities are training economists who can build models but don't understand the economy

Is this guy literally an idiot? I think it's plausible. Consider:

One the most fundamental critiques comes from scholars working to decolonize economics. In their 2025 book, “Decolonizing Economics: An Introduction”, Devika Dutt, Carolina Alves, Surbhi Kesar, and Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven make the argument that mainstream economics is built on Eurocentric and colonial assumptions that render it “ill-equipped to tackle critical questions, such as structural racism, uneven development, the climate crisis, labour relations, and how structural power shapes economic outcomes.”

This goes beyond complaints about concentration or gatekeeping. It challenges the very foundations of how economics understands the world.

Here’s their core argument:

Decolonizing economics entails challenging the norms of neutrality and objectivity that economists claim to speak from, while fostering alternative ways of understanding the economy that take seriously structural power relations and contemporary processes of economic development. Readers will come to understand the political stakes of decolonization and the wide range of scholarship that already exists that can help us grasp economics from non-Eurocentric perspectives.

The problem, as Dutt and her colleagues show, is that dominant economic theories emerged from specific historical contexts in Western Europe and North America. Yet they’re presented as universal truths applicable everywhere. This erases the diverse economic systems, practices, and forms of knowledge that exist in other parts of the world.

Think about the concepts economics takes for granted. What counts as “development”? What economic activities get measured and valued? The answers embedded in mainstream economics reflect Western historical experiences and priorities. They often marginalise or pathologize economic practices in formerly colonised regions.

The concentration of economic authority in elite Western institutions reinforces these biases. When most influential economists are trained at a handful of American and European universities, and when these same institutions control the discipline’s publication and reward structures, alternative perspectives struggle to gain recognition.

Indigenous economic knowledge? Non-Western theoretical frameworks? Insights from scholars in the Global South? They remain marginalised, dismissed as insufficiently “rigorous” or “scientific”— according to standards defined by the very institutions whose dominance is being challenged.

It's funny because a lot of the Twitter replies are just the usual blue checks yelling that this guy is a commie or whatever. Typically this is worth dismissing because it's just the right-wing slur. But no, Jostein literally is:

Pillar 1: Scale down ecologically harmful industries. This pillar emphasises the need to reduce production in sectors that are energy-intensive, resource-heavy, and socially unnecessary — for example, fossil fuels, industrial beef, fast fashion, and luxury goods. The goal is to directly reduce energy and material use while freeing up productive resources for socially and environmentally beneficial purposes. Tools include credit policy to restrict lending to harmful industries, consumer protection laws like ‘right to repair’, and targeted taxation on luxury and polluting products. This pillar repositions industrial policy to actively manage economic contraction in ecologically damaging areas, while remobilising and liberating resources towards a just and green transition.

Pillar 2: Organise production more around public benefit. The second pillar argues that production should be reorganised to prioritise public good over private profit. In the current system, the for-profit private sector largely controls investment and production, leading to overproduction of harmful goods and underproduction of socially necessary ones. Public financial instruments — such as state-led credit guidance and public investment — are key to ensuring that essential services like public transit, housing, and renewable energy are adequately provisioned. This pillar calls for stronger coordination across state policy levers and increased democratic control over economic planning, enabling societies to redirect efforts towards equitable and sustainable production.

Pillar 3: Global ecological justice. The final pillar addresses international inequality and the need for differentiated ecological responsibilities. High-income countries are primarily responsible for ecological breakdown and must reduce their resource and energy use. In contrast, lower-income countries require increased ‘ecological policy space’ to develop their economies and meet human needs. This entails allowing the Global South greater freedom to formulate industrial policy, receiving reparations or climate-related compensation from the North, and participating in a fairer global governance structure. Ultimately, this pillar promotes a just transition that empowers the South while holding the North accountable for historical and ongoing ecological exploitation.

Ironic isn't it that he writes about the need for kicking out Eurocentric economics and bitching about people studying models instead of economics, then he just goes for European straight white male Marx who built a model that doesn't work and has nothing to do with economics.

So the assumption about him is correct, he believes that everyone else has a duty to employ journalists even if they don't want to pay for their product. It's more democratic when your choices are forced on you, stop thinking with Eurocentric logic and understand the benefits of making decisions having decisions imposed on you based on incoherent nonsense.