Every Econ 101 class and Econ 101 textbook I know of covers labour supply..and… whether the income or substitution effect dominates.
It also covers the long list of untrue assumptions on which (neoclassical) microeconomics is based and lots of other stuff that is largely sidelined later (except for drawing the odd ideological pictogram like the Laffer curve). But none of that has much relation to how wealth is assessed. Leisure isn’t included in GDP these days is it?

government statistics departments collect statistics that are not simply a measure of monetary value, eg infant mortality, life expectancy. Why would they get funding to do that if the whole of the economic side of the government worked on the basis that monetary wealth is all?

Not ‘monetary wealth is all’; ‘all wealth is monetary’. But actually the former is kind-of not far off I’d say, so even in that case, I’d suggest the answer in a given case is going to be one of this complementary pair of alternatives:
1. Because not on the economic side, or
2. Because relevant to monetary wealth – e.g. life expectancy is of course important for planning pensions and some of the other economic accounting problems (worked out in terms of marketised commodities with their numeraire) which are causally related to matters of wealth.

all of human history suggests that there will be problems, even if there “needn’t” be a problem
Yes, but that’s an objection to anything you care to mention.
I was saying that the commitment to constitution-like overarching human rights + the existence of national institutions to enforce them means that the Greens have the resources to avoid any given form of oppression from occuring at the level of local government. I’m thinking from a UK perspective where the national legislature is supreme (regardless of treaties btw – until the judges take a new oath). In the US, well, I suppose voting Green at both State and Federal level would be one recommendation, but yes, as Stephen reminds me , the ‘States’ rights’ stuff is a problem (and one which renders your problems about coordination between locales particularly pressing.) Maybe constitutional amendments are called for?(!)

So the Greens are proposing a plan which even their supporters don’t know what it means.
I wouldn’t call myself a supporter, exactly. I just think that…well, what I said. The bit I quoted was vague, certainly, but given that, I know what it means. And that it doesn’t mean, say, ‘never decide anything nationally unless compelled to do so by logic and the laws nature’

If this is “without doubt the best extant vehicle for radical and left ideas” then the mind boggles at how bad the other extant vehicles must be.
Yes, mine is boggling away like a wrong ‘un.

I’m not recommending the Greens’ current manifesto as though it were a detailed and comprehensive legislative programme, still less one that could be carried out abruptly. I’m talking about the party itself as a vehicle for radical left ideas. (Forget Libertarians, that was an ill-advised afterthought based on my own theorising about where a consistent – and acceptable! – Libertarianism ought to end up…)

I suppose one way of looking at it is that environmental concerns draw attention to matters around the area of the ‘initial acquisition’ fudge in the Lockean property-rights model, and thus undermine the materialism that (in practice) depends largely on taking the material substrate as unproblematic. By taking a less materialistic viewpoint, we bring into focus proper human-centric concerns, rather than concentrating only on econometrically convenient pig-iron production figures. (Economist: ‘If economics is to be very widely and simply applied, we must make the following assumptions:(…). But economics is widely and simply applied. So the assumptions are well-made.’)

I’d say that helps with a project I’m interested in myself, which is severing (behavioural) Liberalism/Libertarianism from the conception of property-rights that has historically accompanied it. I guess that’s something that’s informally been done to some extent in US mainstream politics, where Liberal has a rather specialised use. OK that’s enough rambling for now…

Now I understand your point at 56. Ok, we’re broadly in agreement, although I think that we can still accomplish pushing class to the metal without letting up on race or gender – I’m a big believer in inter-group solidarity for political purposes, and I think that while intersectionality is a horribly academic phrase, there’s a real point behind it. After all, there’s a reason why social democrats in Europe started out with women’s suffrage and equal pay as one of their core political demands, or why interracial unionism has always been such a critical element of the American labour movement, whether present or absent.

Oh god no. I am definitely a materialist, and quasi-structuralist. I definitely think economic class is real and an extremely active agent of history, and always have. That is my point. Over the past generation that perspective has been sidelined to the privilege of “post/anti” structuralist perspectives – discourse theory, the linguistic turn and so on.

Marxism can never be redeemed, but the idea that a lot of people’s lives are restricted by the top of job they have, and how much money they can thus earn, is not a bad analytical starting point in social ‘scientific’ analysis.

I’m merely wondering if it is now time to relax the race/gender petal and once more push ‘class’ to the metal.

It’s not merely an exaggeration, it’s flat-out wrong. Every Econ 101 class and Econ 101 textbook I know of covers labour supply with the situation where a person gets a rise in their hourly wage and the professor/textbook then demonstrates that we don’t know whether they will increase the number of hours worked or decrease it, in more technical langauge whether the income or substitution effect dominates.

Also I observe that government statistics departments collect statistics that are not simply a measure of monetary value, eg infant mortality, life expectancy. Why would they get funding to do that if the whole of the economic side of the government worked on the basis that monetary wealth is all?

maybe it’s a bit more plausible as a description of a widespread tendency to disregard the dubious origins and the long-term value of raw materials

A more simpler explanation of this is the limitations of the human brain. I did my first degree in electrical engineering and there we ignored the dubious origins and long-term value of raw materials because all our brain power was going into one of two things: understanding how to manipulate the laws of physics as it acts on those materials once processed, and drinking beer. I bet you that people who spend a lot of time thinking about the dubious origins and long-term value of raw materials are spending less time thinking about something else that is also important.

But the human rights stuff + the fact that they say national ad regional govts still have a role suggest that needn’t be a problem.

On the other hand all of human history suggests that there will be problems, even if there “needn’t” be a problem. For example take the history of racial segregation in the southern US states, with the federal government winding up sending in the Federal Guard and northern people travelling down to participate in the civil disobedience campaign against segregation. Now yes, there was no need for the white Southerners to continue with racial segregation, they could have stopped doing it any time they liked. But even though they didn’t need to do so, they still did. How do the Greens plan to deal with those conflicts if they occur, even though they don’t need to occur?

I also note that you haven’t pointed out any source that addresses my questions about how economic activity between communities is worked out, how tax rules are applied across communities, whether people can withdraw money invested in a community, whether communities have some control over people whose education they have paid for, etc.

And ‘don’t decide centrally where you can decide locally’ depends on the word ‘can’ which will always be implicitly qualified and thus will bear a wide range of sensible interpretations.

Tim, earlier you said that you thought this sort of stuff was “without doubt the best extant vehicle for radical and left ideas”. Now you’re saying that you don’t even know what it means, as the word “can” is implicitly qualified, and could mean anything within a wide and I note undefined, range of sensible interpretations. So the Greens are proposing a plan which even their supporters don’t know what it means. Why would you want to vote for a programme if you don’t even know what it is? Also, according to you, the way that the Greens plan to deal with any conflict between their goals is to note that conflicts ‘needn’t’ occur, ignoring the detail that they could occur. If this is “without doubt the best extant vehicle for radical and left ideas” then the mind boggles at how bad the other extant vehicles must be.

StevenAttewell – thanks for answering my question. I’ll look into them some time.

I wonder to what extent we – intellectuals, scholars, and so – need to explicitly re-debate whether society does in fact contain objectively-identifiable structures that are far more ‘real’ than mere narratives and discourses constructed to fight other ideological battles. Perhaps the British were not so wrong after all, and the French are a little too over-excitable. ;)

A very informative post. I have to remind myself from time to time not to reflexively counter-attack against decentralizers when the states rights rubbish isn’t present.

Re: the poor/working class, I think a commitment to full employment is an important part of making the transition, as is perhaps playing up the anti-corporate, pro-people side. One of the successes of the environmental movement in the U.S – not the Green Party, and it’s still only to a limited extent – is coining the term “environmental racism” as a way to bridge the racial gap and talk to communities of color about the way that environmental hazards keep getting dumped in poor communities of color, and actually talk about distribution of wealth and power in society that way. Something like that, but for class, might be a good idea.

Tracy/Steve: I quite agree about the oppressiveness of small communities, esp isolated ones, and I’ve often argued in favour of the freedom of anonymity. But the human rights stuff + the fact that they say national ad regional govts still have a role suggest that needn’t be a problem. And ‘don’t decide centrally where you can decide locally’ depends on the word ‘can’ which will always be implicitly qualified and thus will bear a wide range of sensible interpretations.

In any case, one has to assume that all this stuff would end up being substantially watered down well before it got near implementation…

Also, Tracy: “We reject the view that wealth can be measured solely in monetary units, a view which allows its adherents to think it consists primarily of the results of human labour.”

Regarding the first half, the whole of the economic side of the governement basically works on that basis, and most of economics treats it as the default view (with welfare economics a specialist area). Maybe an exaggeration – I dunno?

I’m not sure about the second bit admittedly, but replace ‘labour’ with ‘human activity’ (to include the “enterpreneurial” role), and maybe it’s a bit more plausible as a description of a widespread tendency to disregard the dubious origins and the long-term value of raw materials, as well as ignoring intangibles in assessing wealth.

Mostly, it’s a focus that differs from the class/redistribution approach (which I’m basically happy with really), and thus to some extent fends off the usual ‘politics of envy’, ‘why level down’ canards that look like beig effective against the latter for the foreseeable future. I dunno, but I think it’s a possibility. How much it will appeal to the less educated, rich and well-informed sector is as suggested a signifcant issue, but I don;t think an alliance with what’s left of the Old left would necessarily be that difficult to achieve, and as for those not of the Old Left, what are they voting for at the moment? Also think it’s a long game, and we should be looking at how the under 25s are thinking at thet moment.

Very civilised thread you have going here.

The best example of this process is the British Liberal Party, as it shifted from the party of Gladstone to the party of Asquith and Lloyd George (and Beveridge and Keynes on the intellectual front). Arguably, you can see the same process in the American Democratic Party as it transitioned from the party of Grover Cleveland to the party of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (and John Kenneth Galbraith, Leon Keyserling, and Paul Douglas on the intellectual front).

My point is that I see an intellectual similarity between the modern Green movement in Europe, at least as it’s being described here, and the New Liberals, in the sense that both are reform oriented, largely middle-class, interested in social justice and economic redistribution, but not emerging out of the class-centered world of social democracy, socialism, or communism (although in some cases, willing to converse, learn, and borrow from it).

Jock Bowden – could be. In part, it may be a reaction to the kind of larger problem (globalization has screwed over our standard economic/class toolbox) of perceived incapacity on class. It’s not something that’s easily finessed, because ignoring race and gender isn’t the solution either.

The trick is to emphasize “intersectionality” solidarity. Interestingly, this is something that the American left went through much earlier in terms of race, just given the difference in our racial makeup . Unions and African-Americans especially have been struggling with this for a long time – “black and white unite and fight,” as the old slogan went – sometimes quite successfully in the case of the CIO, and sometimes disastrously as in the building trades unions. Of course, these days, the irony is that the labor movement, although at its weakest level numerically, is actually much better at dealing with these issues, in no small part because the union movement is now heavily black and brown and much more female than it used to be, which pushes union politics into getting this right.

Tim Wilkinson – maybe we can borrow some old-school American labor republican terms – how about the producing classes vs. the parasites? “All who labor by hand or brain in one big union,” and all that.

Regarding Greens and industry, I think one thing that’s missing is a commitment to full employment as well as GMI - if we’re going to be getting rid of industry, we need enough new jobs to make up the difference. Related question, as I continue to triangulate in on this, what is the Green position regarding the distribution of economic resources?

And I’m never impressed by all of this localist stuff. Maybe it’s because I grew up in a major city and am more comfortable with mass groups of people, but I like central government. Local communities can be some of the most oppressive – the larger you get, the more cosmopolitan you get.

On the one hand, yes, obviously, the lump of labour fallacy is a fallacy. On the other hand, I’ve seen massive protests by working class men over the shutting-down of mines, car factories, old fossil-fuelled power stations so I don’t think that it’s an entirely reasonable and natural argument to those people involved in the sector. And the skills involved can be quite different – there’s a reason that you can specialise in mine engineering. So I see possible political conflict there.

You think they haven’t got some (proper, welfare) economists on board? …An ecological society will be made up of self-governing communities of a variety of sizes which will regulate their own social and economic activities. (I know I’m mingling Tim’s own words with quoted material).

No mention in here of how these communities will regulate their own social and economic activities. For example, what happens if a member of a community decides to change their religious affiliation? Does the community have a right to demand that every member attend church? Or does a community have a right to stop members from attending church even if those members want to?

And how would economic activities be regulated, given the interlinked nature of economies? For example, say that my community decides that it wants to build a sewage treatment plant. I don’t actually know anything about how sewage treatment plants are built, but lets say they require metal components of a quality not found locally for that community. So how does the community get those materials? Or say a self-governing community wants to build employment by opening a large-scale mass-production solar cell manufactury and selling the product to other communities. What happens if the other communities don’t want to buy the solar cells? I don’t see how a community can regulate its own economic activities when economic activities are so interconnected.

If I invest in some project within a community can I withdraw my money and put it into another community? If so, under what circumstances?

How will tax laws apply across communities?

If a community pays for the education of its young people, does it have any rights to control what they do as adults? (Eg complaints by poor countries about their nurses being lured away by richer countries).

I haven’t run across a political party that does address such detail in their proposals, but I’ve never seen any sign that the Greens have thought seriously about what their principles here mean. Which makes me skeptical as to the quality of the economic advice the Greens are getting.

Nothing should be decided at a higher level if it can be decided at a lower one.

A lot of things can be decided at a lower level, without it necessarily being a good thing that they be decided at a lower level. Take the case of water rights – is it not possible that a local community would seek to use all the water in a big river basin and leave downstream communities dry?

And of course even in less extreme situations often there are arguments on the one hand for deciding at a local level, and on the other hand for deciding at a national level. Take publicly-funded healthcare – now local communities can make decisions about how to spend tax money on healthcare, but this means that you typically get discreprencies between areas as different areas make different decisions, and often have administrators of differing quality, which in the UK has drawn criticism as a “postcode lottery”. I don’t know of any knock-out argument as to whether public health-care spending should be local or national, the Green principle here implies that in the absence of such a knock-out argument it should be local, but have they really thought that through?

We reject the view that wealth can be measured solely in monetary units, a view which allows its adherents to think it consists primarily of the results of human labour.

And a view shared by no one I have ever met. And I have met people who are so free-market as to make me look like a card-carrying member of the Communist Party. (Admittedly attacking strawmen has appeal all over the political spectrum).