Comments on: Collapse in Cancun?

By: Michael Pollak

Michael Pollak — Sun, 30 Nov 2003 06:06:38 +0000

Daniel, I’m afraid what this exercise proves is that your globalarky scale is a failure. It’s main goal is to distinguish sense from nonsense. It fails to do that. Doug’s article, whatever its failings and mistakes, is better—more intelligent, more clear, more serious and more novel—than 90% of what’s written on the subject. Your scale fails to register that. But this scale is not just useless, it’s worse than the disease. When applied, it produces text that is even more boring and head up its ass than standard globalarky. If instead you’d written a short paragraph or two about Doug’s article stating your objections and reasons in your distinctive witty prose, it would have be 100 times more useful than this baroque exercise. And more pleasurable and more sound and more fertile. None of this should come as a surprise. The number of attempts to divine the truth of language through numbers can be counted on one hand (the recession index . . . hmmm, maybe one finger.) The strange thing is that a man who has devoted so much of his talent to unveiling numerical fetishism should so quickly fall under the spell of his own invention simply because it is sugared with jocularity. Is it a lingering effect of your deformation professionelle? Perhaps you have unwittingly uncovered the answer to why brilliant economists can inexplicably embrace nonsense when it’s in the form of a formula: because when it’s their formula, it makes them feel (blush, chuckle) like Newton. Now stop this right now young man and go back to writing. Short, sweet, and to the point.

By: Jason McCullough

Jason McCullough — Thu, 23 Oct 2003 20:54:15 +0000

Hey Daniel, Megan and Jim Glass are going on about Social Security privitization, and I think their positions are just bizarre accounting errors. Care to comment?

By: a different chris

a different chris — Thu, 23 Oct 2003 15:15:11 +0000

>nobody in their right mind who understood the issues could be against free trade in goods, in principle and in good faith Well, maybe you covered this with your good faith tag-on, but good faith is not a realistic hook to hang your country’s security on. (“In god we trust, all others pay cash.”) The problem is to economists everything is a widget. But if I sell you oil and you sell me military hardware, there is the distinct possibility that you may at one point decide that you want, how shall we put it…, “more say” in my pricing. Remember in GWI that the first thing the US did was shut down all the Iraqi tracking systems. Now I have no idea where Iraq sourced its electronics (it probably wasn’t the US) but some non-Iraqi government knew how it worked and told us. (I know that the Iraqi technology lagged due to incompetence not abdication, but my point is that abdication of home production would have guarenteed the result.) In a rough and cold world, you can extend this to basic foodstuffs and medicine. As a leader you have a responsibility to your people to make sure you don’t have a security hole in these areas. None of this applies to the First World, where say Germany could get all its food from Austrialia and all its military equipment from the US and still sleep soundly at night. But in, say, Africa, things are a little different.

By: David W.

David W. — Wed, 22 Oct 2003 16:31:26 +0000

In the spirit of acknowledging the inherent shortcomings of short pieces on this sort of topic, Daniel, I was wondering if you have written, or are aware of something written by someone else, that could serve as a primer on your views on international trade and international political economy more generally? I find your short-form views compelling and would like to see more. Am looking forward to more posts in this series.

By: geoff

geoff — Wed, 22 Oct 2003 15:06:11 +0000

The big problem with the Globollocks watch here, I think, is pretty much stated in the preface to the critique: “The purpose of the scale is at least partly to point out how difficult it is for anyone, no matter how solid their command of the issues, to write anything short about neoliberal policy which doesn’t end up materially oversimplifying.” That’s true of just about any short piece anywhere—any time you try to cram a nuanced technical argument into an abbreviated format(let alone a blog post) you’re going to have to oversimplify to get your point across. It might be preferable to focus less on these minutiae and more on the central thesis being presented, which would say far more about the status of the “neo-liberal” argument than a point scale for necessary minimization.

By: Matthew

Matthew — Wed, 22 Oct 2003 10:39:18 +0000

Really looking forward to more globBollocks watch from you! Doug’s article has some good points but seems muddled, he seems to have been confused by some Globbollocks talking points. Pointing out the smallness of the WTO or the “not-uniformly-consistent” nature of Anti-glob protester is to underevaluate the obscenity of the rich Western’s world latest WTO demands. The urgent priority had to be to reject them, and that is what the G22 did. A next step would be to make rich countries keep their promises, not to get confused comparing different types of protectionism…

By: Shane

Shane — Wed, 22 Oct 2003 05:42:03 +0000

Um, correction. Please sub— “By ridiculous I mean the priorities of self-sustaining localism and moral consumption, which is a common priority.” with— “By ridiculous I mean the priorities of self-sustaining localism and moral consumption, which are common.” Oy.

By: Shane

Shane — Wed, 22 Oct 2003 05:38:31 +0000

Doug Henwood wrote: “One point for ‘the antiglobalisation movement is better at saying what it’s against than what it’s for.” Sorry, but this is true, and in this context, quite important. (Any cliche points awarded to the scorekeeper for calling it an “antiglobalization” movement when that’s not really an accurate label?) It makes me wonder how much time DD has spent talking to demonstrators, organizers, and even movement intellectuals. There’s almost no coherent economic analysis behind a lot of the rhetoric – no sense of what role trade should play in the world. Though it’s not as bad as it was a few years ago, there’s still a lot of instinctive autarky in the movement; people like Walden Bello, Vandana Shiva, and Ralph Nader evoke a world of local self-reliaance and small-scale production that would require several billion steps backwards in material life. I’ll second that. The global justice movement, here in the US, has less a problem with giving ammunition to the enemy*, by way of self-criticism, than mollycoddling the ridiculous. By ridiculous I do not mean setting the record straight on the development of Korea, China, or India, nor do I mean sharp distinctions between trade and capital flows. By ridiculous I mean the priorities of self-sustaining localism and moral consumption, which is a common priority. Within the populism/anticorporatism there does remain some “instinctive autarky”. I still consider myself part of it (I was in DC in 2000 for the IMF/WB protests), and in no small part because of Doug’s work, but we’ve got a problem that is seriously limiting the movement. Far too few are saying anything about it on this side of the Atlantic. Considering the forum the article was posted in and the audience to which it was targeted, it would be better to measure the piece against the standards of Antiglobollocks. * – elsewhere you’ve mentioned an admiration for George Orwell—his 1945 essay “Through A Glass, Rosily” is superb on giving ammunition to the enemy

By: Doug Henwood

Doug Henwood — Tue, 21 Oct 2003 20:33:15 +0000

I love all the qualifiers that open this salvo, particularly this: “I repeat my earlier point that the Globollocks ratings apply to individual pieces, not to entire ouevres and certainly not to people.” In a piece only 1,391 words long, there are a lot of things one can’t say. I guess I’ll have to say them here, even though the pay scale is even lower than TheNation.com’s. Specific points: * “Mention of Korea “without qualification” — 3 points. This is probably harsh.” Indeed it is. I started writing about South Korea in 1988, I think, saying some rather kind things about the planning system and financial repression, much to the displeasure of some of my colleagues on the left. I guess it’s necessary to repeat things you’ve been saying for 15 years every time you bring up a topic, but it does get mighty inconvenient. But South Korea is now a rather rich country, and protecting absurd modes of farming seems a waste of resources. * Two points for “reference to capital flows in abstract without reference to actual capital flows” and one for “general equivocation between trade and capital flows” in a brief passage on Africa. If I’d been equivocating on the difference between the two flows I wouldn’t have used two words connected by an “and,” a grammatical construction that suggests different things are being invoked. And the kind of capital flows is pretty irrelevant in this context, since Africa gets little of any kind (aside from direct investment in the Nigerian oil sector). * One point for “mentions farm subsidies in an article without mentioning textile subsidies.” This is pretty damned weird, since there was absolutely no reason to mention textile subsidies in a column-length polemic. * Cliche points, which DD concedes are “enormously unfair in the context of DH’s entire work.” Well, damn, why award them then? And the specifics themselves are pretty important: 1) “One point for ‘the antiglobalisation movement is better at saying what it’s against than what it’s for.” Sorry, but this is true, and in this context, quite important. (Any cliche points awarded to the scorekeeper for calling it an “antiglobalization” movement when that’s not really an accurate label?) It makes me wonder how much time DD has spent talking to demonstrators, organizers, and even movement intellectuals. There’s almost no coherent economic analysis behind a lot of the rhetoric – no sense of what role trade should play in the world. Though it’s not as bad as it was a few years ago, there’s still a lot of instinctive autarky in the movement; people like Walden Bello, Vandana Shiva, and Ralph Nader evoke a world of local self-reliaance and small-scale production that would require several billion steps backwards in material life. 2) “[O]ne for ‘is it OK to put a Brazilian steelworker out of work to preserve an American job?” That’s pretty much the position of organized labor in the United States, which supported Bush’s steel tariffs. American unions have no sense of cross-border solidarity; they’re as unilateralist as W’s foreign policy. DD says: “nobody in their right mind who understood the issues could be against free trade in goods, in principle and in good faith.” Again, I have to wonder how much time he’s spent studying this movement. There are plenty of people who advocate “delinking” from the world economy (e.g. Samir Amin and Patrick Bond). But my argument isn’t with them so much as with the undeveloped nature of the discourse around trade within the global justice movement (a name much preferable to “antiglobalization”). But if my piece is being used by neoliberals as an ad for their cause, let me make my displeasure very clear: fuck ‘em. I think it’s wonderful that the global elite has to convene in remote places under heavy guard; I want their sense of being under siege to deepen and to disturb their sleep (if it isn’t disturbed already). But if you ask a bunch of demosntrators what is to be done, I’m afraid a lot of the answers would be rather embarrassing. And as I said in the piece, I don’t exempt myself from this criticism. But it’s now four years since Seattle; we’ve got to do better than this.

By: Antoni Jaume

Antoni Jaume — Tue, 21 Oct 2003 20:06:51 +0000

The most serious claims that altermondialists should do as to the WTO is that while “one state-one vote” looks quite fine, Orwell already warned that all animals are equals, but some are more equals. DSW

By: Doug

Doug — Tue, 21 Oct 2003 16:37:15 +0000

Yawn. Next post, please.