Michael Perelman

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx>]

Michael Perelman, who has already authored seventeen books, says that
he has "a good 50 books' worth of notes"!

*****   Another Day, Another Book
Seventeen and counting for radical economist
[A photo of Perelman with his bicycle:
<http://www.csuchico.edu/pub/inside/photos/Perelman_Michael.gif>.]

If worthwhile sociological insight can be gleaned from analyzing
famous people's trash, then it's high time someone took an informed
look at faculty offices. Particularly in spaces where decades of
thought and reading material have flourished undisturbed, like an
old-growth forest, the atmosphere assumes an almost eerie
multidimensionality.

A prime example can be seen in 601A Butte Hall, for 32 years the
campus think tank of radical economist Michael A.
Perelman....Jam-packed bookcases upstage more bookcases. A ragged
honor guard of books and papers line a shrinking footpath to the
desk, its outline softened by amorphous piles of printed matter.
Overall, the effect, heightened by Perelman's soft-spoken and shrewd
presence (part White Rabbit, part Cheshire Cat), is refreshing.
Here's a scholar -- a Marxist scholar -- of the old school, whose
views of how the world wags haven't changed much since his
Ph.D.-earning days at the University of California at Berkeley.

Perelman characterizes radical economics as a "predisposition" rather
than a formal discipline. ("Some economists would say it's an
undiscipline," he observed.)...It implies, he said, a "skepticism
that markets will give you the right decision; skepticism that the
environment will be treated in a rational way; skepticism that people
will be treated humanely."..."Economics is subject to fads," he
added. "From the 1930s through the 1950s, it was fairly progressive,
and from the 1970s till today it's gotten increasingly more
conservative. If you look at any campus in the country, you'll
probably find a more conservative center of gravity in economics than
any other discipline. Major universities especially grow more
doctrinaire every year." These days, he says, the tendency is to view
market economies as perfect, self-regulating mechanisms, which
doesn't leave much room for progressive, let alone radical, activism
in the field.

However, as a longtime theorist, Perelman still finds plenty to say.
Unbeknownst to many at California State University, Chico, he'll soon
publish his 17th book, Scarcity, Extraction, and Value in Economic
Theory. "There's one person in the history department who says he
reads my books," he acknowledged, "but I don't think many people have
an idea of what I write. I get much better reactions off campus."
Three of his books have been translated into Chinese, others into
Spanish. Last year's effort, Steal This Idea: Intellectual Property
Rights and the Corporate Confiscation of Creativity, is doing "OK,"
though his most popular book, one that languished for 14 years in the
editing offices at Duke University Press, is The Invention of
Capitalism: The Secret History of Primitive Accumulation.

An organized daily routine coupled with the latest scanning and
voice-recognition technology are key to Perelman's productivity. He
spends several hours a day reading and taking notes on whatever
currently interests him. This information is methodically transferred
into a labyrinthine filing system that, during his long career, has
achieved cyberspacial proportions. "My biggest fear," he admitted,
"is that something will happen to me and no one will know what to do
with my notes." With the aid of an index program, he can navigate
this intellectual galaxy and construct books fairly quickly. He
estimates that he's compiled a good 50 books' worth of notes.

Though disciplined, his scholastic life isn't compartmentalized.
"Teaching and writing are the same for me," he said. "I don't
distinguish between them. It's what keeps me alive -- the ability to
go into a classroom with something fresh to say." The classes he's
taught reflect his varied interests and have included history of
economic thought, United States economic history, economics of the
future, environmental economics, and a class on Karl Marx....

Taran March

<http://www.csuchico.edu/pub/inside/02_another_day.html>   *****
--
Yoshie

* Calendars of Events in Columbus:
<http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>,
<http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/>
* Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/>
* Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/>
* Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio>
* Solidarity: <http://solidarity.igc.org/>