Unequal Exchange: The Engine of Modern Imperialism
Torkil Lauesen joins us to discuss his book Unequal Exchange: Past, Present, and Future and the hidden mechanics of modern imperialism. Lauesen returns to the tradition of Arghiri Emmanuel to argue that while the world market tends to equalize prices, wages remain radically unequal across borders -- driving a structural transfer of value from low-wage production zones to high-wage consumer economies.
We walk through Lauesen's reconstruction of unequal exchange through Marx's value theory, the leading approaches to measuring global value transfer, and what contemporary estimates imply about…
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