Running out of excuses

I had this strange evening where I watched a bit of Jackie Kennedy talking smack about people and then heard this statistic about the increase in poverty and I was thinking of the alteration in attitudes toward poverty in the US between the Kennedy years and our years. I think the only thing that can explain the change in attitude, rhetoric and policy is the decline of the Soviet Union. There are no rival models, there’s no need for lip service about shared prosperity.

The depressing thing about your title here is that we’ve reached a point where no one seems to need an excuse anymore. They just don’t care.

Social democracy had a good run, but it seems to be over now. Capital can get back to grinding wages down inexorably to bare subsistence as the consumer society is deleveraged.

Capital temporarily lost control of the state because a climate of opinion, informed and at least partially formed by a fear of the consequences Marx predicted, dictated that Labor be allowed to organize to hold Capital at bay. But that worked so well for so long that people forgot the danger that had been averted, and so the climate of opinion has settled back to the entropic setting of letting Capital have free rein. It’s not so much that D politicians have been bought, as that they don’t really disagree anymore with the idea that, of course, the people who have made boatloads of money for their corporations must know best how to so order society as a whole that it makes boatloads of money.

Medicine was so wildly succesful at ending the 50% mortality by age six that used to prevail before childhood vaccinations, that people can no longer get their heads around 50% child mortality, much less imagine its actual return in our own time. So half-formed, entropic non-ideas, such as “that’s too many vaccines to throw at mere kids”, or, “well, maybe vaccines cause autism” creep back in and gain power. Of course, vaccinations actually could cause autism (they don’t), and avoiding all the autism in the world would still not get anywhere near justifying a return to 50% child mortality.

Public policy in general shares this problem with public health, that its greatest and clearest triumphs eventually destroy the climate of opinion that made them possible. When public policy works, it gets rid of the threat. But then people forget the threat was ever real, and they stop being willing to support the public policy that made their safe little world of blissful ignorance possible. So that world comes crashing in, and some wisdom is regained. Pathei mathos.

Social democracy had a good run, but it seems to be over now. Capital can get back to grinding wages down inexorably to bare subsistence as the consumer society is deleveraged.

Look, it’s typical of political junkies to attach political agency to events which might have no agency, and I think this is one of those things. I don’t, in fact, think increasing inequality is a political development, but rather an economic and technological one.

What this reminds me of, in a sense, is the course of European history from the aftermath of the Black Death right up to the Industrial Revolution. Wages in Western Europe in the aftermath of the Black Death were so high that they were not again matched until the early decades of the 19th century. In the main time, wages gradually fell and capital did squeeze more out of labour, via things like enclosure (which was related directly to the same social effects of Black Death which produced high wages). But enclosure, although sanctioned (eventually) by acts of Parliaments, wasn’t really a political event, some scheme cooked up by the plutocracy or whatever, as it much as it was an economic necessity. Without enclosure the Commercial Revolution, and subsequently the Industrial Revolution, was not possible, and we’d still be in a Malthusian world. Yet it also was tremendously hard on labour in its immediate effects.

It seems that we are in, in some way at least, a kind of modern parallel to enclosure. The high wages of the postwar era changed fundamentally the assumptions and bases of capitalism; what we are saying today are the inevitable results as the economic and technological changes become fully manifest, except instead of agricultural enclosure we have today a kind of digital and technological effect that does the same. But if this parallel is any use at all it does raise very difficult questions for the left as it does for the right: after all, would you have been the one to stop enclosure in its tracks? I don’t know what my ancestor was, lord or peasant, but I would much rather enclosure had happened no matter which one it is.

Ed @ #4 said:

The situation appears worse when you realize that two income households only became the norm in the 1970s. Before a big chunk of today’s labor force was diverted into household work, not compensated in any way that can be captured by the stats, but the salary of only one wage earner was sufficient to support a household.

The disutility of increased labour supply is persistently over-looked by some people posing as welfare economists. Median household income should be “normalised” to reflect the change in average hours supplied to the market by householders. By this standard, median household compensation per hour has declined drastically since the early seventies. Households have maintained their economic status by working longer hours and going deeper into debt. [1]

Measuring this would be tricky. Can anyone point to stats that attempt to summarise the change in median household labour hours over the past two generations?

But the general trends are clear. Most men seem to be working more overtime or in 24/7 mode. Obviously women are now all over the workforce compared to the days when their working career was behind the counter or at a typing pool. Even teenagers seem to have more part-time work, at least compared to a baseline set during the Huckleberry Fin days of the sixties and seventies.

My guess is that the median household, compared to a similar one in the seventies, now supplies about 30% more labour per week in order to achieve a significantly poorer income growth path.

Liberalisation of finance is causing a gradual immiseration of the lower-middle and working classes. We need to ramp up the class war.

[1] With compensating accumulation of assets, at least until the bubble burst.

One of the Economist’s anonymous correspondents once drew a connection between the death of social democracy and the end of conscription. I don’t know if the observation was original or not, but after much consideration I find it increasingly compelling. 1945 did not witness any events like ‘Red Clydeside’ etc. and ‘a land fit for heroes’, the election slogan of 1919, was finally made a reality with the Beveridge-inspired reforms. The US experience was different, but Between a River and a Mountain by Edmund F. Wehrle does an outstanding job of making sense of the divergent courses of social democracy in the USA and elsewhere in the postwar period; organised labour understood its needs differently there, and pursued different objectives.

In the era of automatic weapons, the powerful needed the mass levy. It’s worth comparing military expenditure in the pre-1914 era with today; expenditure was actually low, but the numbers of (cheaply-equipped) riflemen were enormous. Mass conscription is not useful in an era of self-guided munitions and automatic drones, and the political power of the working classes may have vanished with it.

I’m also baffled by the connection between land enclosures and the industrial revolution. Surely the evidence runs all the other way; before the industrial revolution came the golden age of the Dutch Republic, but the Dutch Republic was the freest, most egalitarian society of its time, and the one with the greatest social mobility.

Wrigley’s Energy and the Industrial Revolution connects industrialisation and fossil fuel exploitation with almost syllogistic precision.

I think (I guess I’m on Myles’ side) that this phenomenon is, at least in part (significant part), a result of technology/economics; specifically: globalization. Huge new army of unemployed, often on the edge of starvation, new means of separating labor markets from distribution/consumption markets, global finance, and so on. Not your Henry Ford economy any more; especially in the States, the center of international capital. ‘Social democracy’ is a good model for a national capitalist system, but not for an international one, and so it had to go.

Jack:

“Measuring this would be tricky. Can anyone point to stats that attempt to summarise the change in median household labour hours over the past two generations?”

Yes.

http://www.bos.frb.org/economic/wp/wp2006/wp0602.htm

“In this paper, we use five decades of time-use surveys to document trends in the allocation of time. We document that a dramatic increase in leisure time lies behind the relatively stable number of market hours worked (per working-age adult) between 1965 and 2003. Specifically, we document that leisure for men increased by 6-8 hours per week (driven by a decline in market work hours) and for women by 4-8 hours per week (driven by a decline in home production work hours). This increase in leisure corresponds to roughly an additional 5 to 10 weeks of vacation per year, assuming a 40-hour work week. We also find that leisure increased during the last 40 years for a number of sub-samples of the population, with less-educated adults experiencing the largest increases. Lastly, we document a growing “inequality” in leisure that is the mirror image of the growing inequality of wages and expenditures, making welfare calculation based solely on the latter series incomplete.”

Make of it what you will.

A. Kelleher @9
I’m not sure there’s any connection between the rise of neoliberalism and the end of conscription, but possibly one reason conscription has waned, in addition to technological changes in weaponry etc., is that the overall amount of armed conflict in the world has declined since the end of the Cold War. Also, major wars directly between great powers are extremely unlikely, perhaps entirely obsolete, decreasing the need for conscription. The main argument in favor of conscription has to do with social solidarity and shared sacrifice, considerations which have not managed (in the US context at any rate) to carry much political weight.

One of the Economist’s anonymous correspondents once drew a connection between the death of social democracy and the end of conscription. I don’t know if the observation was original or not, but after much consideration I find it increasingly compelling.

John Keegan (and I’m sure the observation isn’t original to him) points out the coincidence between the spread of social democracy and the spread of conscription in the late 19th century, but he doesn’t say that one led to the other: he limits himself to pointing out that if you have a large efficient bureaucracy, then it will be able to administer a) a social democracy and b) a conscription system. It’s like noting that the rise in people playing Halo goes along with the rise in people watching DVDs. It’s not that playing Halo also makes you want to watch DVDs, it’s just that both are applications of the same basic hardware.

Obviously, this argument doesn’t really work for the other end; you can’t really argue that governments in the 1970s became so incompetent that they were suddenly unable to administer social spending and conscription.

Wool was the basis of English international trade in the Commercial Revolution; and for wool to have become such a dominating force in the English economy it was inevitable that enclosure must occur.

I am not sure about this at all. Wool was a massive part of the English economy for centuries before enclosure. The Lord Chancellor has sat on a Woolsack since the 14th century.

I don’t know – the marginal revolution commentary seemed to identify one big issue you don’t list: immigration.

+10 million low skilled workers coming into the country have an impact on median wages just from their addition, as well as the follow-on impact that wages in those low-skill sectors (ag, construction, etc.) have gone down for native and non-natives alike. I know if farmers and construction firms had to attract labor without immigrants, they’d have to radically change their compensation packages to staff effectively…

Who cares how they vote, what choice do they have? They got two parties, both committed to the same economic policies. Ross Perot (Perot le fou), running against NAFTA, got 19% the popular vote in 1992; which was, all thing considered, an amazing success.

In terms of the discussion as to whether Enclosure was necessary for the industrial revolution to take place, the economic historian Robert Allen argued most recently in The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective that enclosure had a negligible impact. He cites rather the combination of high wages and low energy costs due to abundant and cheap coal which made it economical for people to substitute energy intensive inputs for labor. The book is quite good, but for those without a library to hand this Vox article seems to summarize some of his findings http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/3570.

I think that even they are amazed at how long they have been able to keep a lid on lower and middle class living standards in America while steadily enriching their masters.

Can we do away with this absurd fiction that the American economy was somehow unmoored from its wholesome, fair equilibrium by a bunch of scheming elites? Look: the whole thing was a cheat anyways, ever since the end of WWII in Europe. Do you know why the American automotive sector was so immensely fat and wealthy in the first few decades of the postwar era? Because the competition didn’t exist. When competition finally came on line in the form of Japan, it turned out American manufacturers had been making shitty cars all along and getting away with it. AT&T had a government-sanctioned monopoly (one that stretched across almost an entire continent) on telephony, which it milked, partially for the benefit of its equally fat union by imposing absurdly high prices on consumers. Why do you think US industrial companies had such ready foreign markets in the aftermath of WWII (thus having lots of fat to deliver to their workers, and in the process solving the excess labour problem that had always existed in the US)? Is it because they made substantially better products? Not starting the period about a decade after the war. It’s because they had the benefit of having markets formerly in the British and French orbit (hello, Brazil) carved up for their benefit as part of WWII negotiations.

So on and so forth. The entire facade of postwar American middle-class prosperity is a bit of a scam, because it is based upon the premise of the U.S. fiddling around with the kind of rules everyone else had to follow (but it didn’t, at least not at that point). When the U.S. starts having to follow the same rules, as trade and other rules became fairer among nations, of course it is less able to deliver outsized gains to its constituencies.

The insularity of Americans thinking that the fat prosperity enjoyed at the expense of other nations (what do you think the post-war British standard of living was?) was somehow a state of nature and was somehow divinely deserved is just utterly flabbergasting. You guys had a good run. Now you don’t anymore. This is a change in fundamentals, not some insidious scheme.

Myles,
Post-WW2 prosperity was not just a US thing. Have you ever heard of the trentes glorieuses (or the Wirtschaftwunder)? Read Hobsbawm on ‘the golden age’ — it wasn’t only such in the US. And I believe the post-war British standard of living was quite good, after a period of recovery in the late 40s-early 50s. Harold Macmillan ran in the late 50s on the slogan “you never had it so good”.

This is a change in fundamentals, not some insidious scheme.

The US economy grew nicely right through the last 50 years, because our newer industries, like microprocessors and software, made up for the slack in fading sectors, so your fading boom argument doesn’t hold. Germany’s inequality statistics have been relatively constant for the last few decades, but in America the tilt toward the rich has been increasing since Reagan. The systematic reduction of labor union membership and the lowering of upper-income tax rates, together with the demonization of government social programs led to a substantial shift of GDP toward the wealthy. This was hardly an “insidious” scheme; it was done quite openly by the best propaganda technicians that money could buy.

I’m no historian, but the significance of the Black Death in the long-run was not a temporary spike in “wages”, but likely that it loosened the institution of serfdom, leading on to its eventual demise in western Europe, just as it took hold in eastern Europe.

I’m sorry, but why are we even debating whether “increasing inequality is a political development”? In the last five years, we have had multiple empirical studies that have shown that countries with extremely similar levels of economic development have wildly different levels and growth patterns of inequality.

That’s like saying a ship sinking is caused by the ocean when you have one case in which a captain has managed to guide their vessel through the storm and the next ship over the captain is knocking holes in the bottom of the boat.

why are we even debating whether “increasing inequality is a political development”?

Because the rich wish to keep wages and taxes low. All of the Republican Presidential candidates are urging further tax cuts and resisting government efforts to create jobs. “Class Warfare” is the term the propaganda technicians have engineered to repudiate any suggestion that this is a deliberate assault on the living standards of the poor and middle class. The rich deny they are shifting more and more of the nation’s wealth into their own pockets by pushing the fairy tale that everyone who is “hard working” will become rich if the rich are given sufficient advantages.

Shorter Myles: Listen peasant you have had it far too easy for far too long.

Glen you are making me depressed. I would subscribe to your newsletter but I have lost the will to do anything but sit here gently sobbing and rocking slowly back and forth.

Re. Conscription

My core argument personally would be that the particular details of dispersed fighting exercised a reverse pressure on political ideology. Conscious of the need for mass support, politicians of both left and right began to characterise as just and reasonable what were in reality necessities. Note that Eisenhower and Nixon would have been horrified by modern rightwing thinking because it damages the power of the state.

The connection is less between conscription per se and social democracy than it is between the simple need for large numbers of motivated fighters and those fighters’ reciprocal power over government.

Interesting historic parallels may be drawn with the Swiss Confederation and the Dutch Republic, both at their prime unusually egalitarian societies that were fearsome opponents in war.

The era of rifled weapons produced dispersed fighting, meaning that the sergeant became the critical level of command without whom nothing could happen. Officers alone could not effectively discipline their men as previously with pistol and sabre because those men were no longer operating as a single cohesive block.

For reference purposes, I’ll list without argument some central examples:

A) The French Revolutionary Wars saw ‘swarms’ of fighters successfully defend the revolution against field armies wielded by the reactionary powers. This paralleled the Soviet experience in the 20th Century in that economic and social opportunity for the masses proved enough to counterbalance extremes of political terror that would otherwise have destroyed the state.

B) The US Civil war, especially in its later stages, saw extensive dispersed fighting and prefigured the conflicts of the 20th Century in ideology. Phil Sheridan later told the Prussians that if U.S. Grant landed in Lisbon with 100,000 men, he’d be in Berlin in six weeks. The boast wasn’t as fatuous as it sounds; the reactionary powers completely failed to understand the conflict’s implications.

C) Post-war, a long conflict occurred between what is now the NRA and conservative elements of the military over who should aim the weapons. The NRA favoured individual marksmanship, its opponents wanted officers to determine the range. The political elements of this dispute are still not fully resolved. The debate characterised the general inability to digest the implications of the Civil War.

D) The Boers’ fighting qualities impressed their many Prussian officers, though they also found that the men simply did whatever they pleased; fanatical troops enjoy this luxury when dispersed fighting demands individual initiative.

E) The implications of dispersed fighting finally became generally recognised during WWI. 1914 was characterised by ordered skirmish lines but by 1918 all offensives relied on the lowest levels of command formulating plans on the fly.

@17, LFC

The mass conscript army was in decline long before the end of the cold war, however. Military expenditure during the period was much higher than in the pre-WWI era, but the greater expenditure was lavished on far fewer troops.

This wasn’t uncontroversial. For example in the 60s and 70s, many felt that tiny numbers of pricey F-15s were a poor investment and that the Soviet choice of large numbers of simpler aircraft was superior. Time has settled that argument.

It’s also worth noting that the 1945-89 period was one of exceptional violence by historic standards, it’s just that most of the conflicts were civil conflicts. The period isn’t as unique as it might seem and not all wars are between geographically distinct enemies; consider, for example, the religious wars in Europe or the internecine conflicts between adherents of traditional and feudal law in Scotland and Ireland between ca. 1200 and 1750. The recent riots in Britain echo these conflicts in that they originated in many places at once.

There were food stamps in the 1940s, but that program ended in WWII. However, I take what I think is the point: The guy on food stamps still needs the food stamps even after we’ve defined him out of poverty by the food stamps. Pinhead, angels, etc.

Just to clarify, my thought is that we near a brink precisely because things have been going so well, Social Democracy worked so well, that people have grown complacent, and don’t understand, don’t remember, how austerity could deflate the consumer society back to a subsistence society. As we forget the School of Hard Knocks lessons that instucted us in a demand-side bias for societal action, supply side thinking is what we revert to entropically, because individuals and individual enterprises act on supply side principals. An individual family doesn’t go on a spending spree in order to pump up demand in the wider economy. That would be stupid and irresponsible. So we forget that society, through government, needs to go on counter-cyclical spending sprees just when that would be most irresponsible for an individual family, and precsiely because that would be so irresponsible for individuals that they have mostly quit spending. We forget that private vice is public virtue, as Mandeville preached.

I don’t see wisdom prevailing until and unless we have some School of Hard Knocks sessions. But that doesn’t mean that I, or anyone who might subscribe to my dismal beliefs, can know exactly what form, and how extensive the hard knocks have to be. Maybe we’ve already had enough, and we’ll pull back from the brink before it gets much worse than it is now. Maybe that last Republican candidate debate will get us to some moment of national clarity, we’ll realize we’ve hit rock bottom, and we’ll swear off supply-side thinking. But I’m a horrible judge of that prospect, because I hit personal clarity on Republican politicians a couple of generations ago, and I’ve never been able since to understand what folks see in that particular brand of the Demon Whiskey. It has no temptations for me, so I don’t understand its allure. I suspect that just about anyone reading this blog, trolls even included, is equally handicapped in that regard.

So, please, no wrist slitting. We’re in a stupid patch just now because we were recently uncharacterisitically perspicuous, and that led to good times, and good times breed stupidity. This is just another turn of the great wheel of earthly illusion. The current stupidity actually promises a rebirth of perspicacity, because human nature is such that we only learn reliably from the consequences of having been stupid. Pathei mathos, and we probably have some banner years coming up for teachable moments in that respect. We’ve been this ignorant and god-forsaken before and made it through it, and we’ll do so again, no doubt.

The canonical version of the argument that mass armies go along with democracy is not, as I understand it, an argument that mass armies go along with social democracy or liberalism. The democracy in question is democracy in the sense of Carl Schmitt so movements of reactionary populism or communism count just as much as social democracy or New Deal liberalism. In America, though, it seems to me that the fortunes of the left really did come to depend on conscription, albeit in an ironic way. I recall how quickly the air went out of the tire when Nixon ended the draft. It wasn’t just that military necessity made the masses relevant to political elites: obligatory military service made politics relevant to the masses.

Myles, there’s a world of difference between the rise of capital which was truly liberatory and todays tragic unfolding. Capital has overstayed its welcome: the bourgoise cannot rule and the workers can not yet rule, etc. The failure to achieve broader prosperity isn’t some accident: it’s the result of the political failures of a century of leftist activists.

Glen, why are you attributing this to stupidity? It’s the conditions. Capital is fluid, it doesn’t know national borders anymore. Labor is constrained by borders, and other parameters. And, for that matter, one reason for the working stiff to support the Republicans is their anti-immigration rhetoric. Most people are not irrational; propaganda plays a role, of course, but still, if they do something, and keep doing it for a long time, there must be a reason.

Peasants didn’t choose to erect cathedrals, their lords did. And there is a reason the peasants weren’t (most of the time) revolting and killing their lords: the lords organized and provided defense against invaders and bandits. I’m not buying the “pure stupidity” explanation; it’s just too easy.

Henri, why would increased mobility of labor combined with increased mobility of capital lead to a significantly different result? I’m not sure that the free sale of labor is going to reverse the ascendency of neoliberalism or overcome it.

I’m not buying the “pure stupidity” explanation; it’s just too easy.>/i>

How many examples do you want? Have you read polls on the number of Americans who believe in evolution, miracles, or the after-life? Do you think people buy lottery tickets because they comprehend their chances? Are you aware that a large fraction of Americans believe that Saddam Hussein was behind the 9/11 attacks? Look at Palin, Bachmann, and Perry: these are somewhat stupid people who appeal to extremely stupid voters.

Homo Sapiens is engineered by evolution to favor destructive simplifications (i.e., stupid ideas) because these promote tribal cohesion (USA! USA! USA!), and cohesive fighting units have survival advantages. Even the most highly educated circles are riddled with group-think and dogmatic stupidity (except for CT, of course!).

The most certain path to power in the modern world is the exploitation of stupidity, and that that is demonstrated by American politicians every day. This is why Americans believe that austerity is the path to prosperity, security restrictions make us free, and war is the path to peace. They are stupid.

Yet the global gini coefficient has gone down due to China and India, and the percentage of the population living in absolute poverty has decreased from 40 to 20% despite a tremendous a tremendous rise in population growth itself. I don’t understand why we take nation states for granted, aggregate all the individuals who live within them, and then make doom and gloom about inequality.

Henri, if your beliefs don’t change their action they aren’t meaningful. (Yeah, yeah, I know the response you are going to launch back at me, but honestly let’s stick on topic). The person buying the lottery ticket isn’t thinking “the outcome I desire is too rare to make this worth it” rather they are just feeling how good that million would be, irrationally. A working definition of irrational: if I can get money for nothing off you, you are irrational, and most people are.

Simon, that’s true, but at the same time inequality within countries as soared dramatically. This is the last excuse in some sense: if you want to make 10x what the Indians make, better work 10x as hard. And yes, its a fairly sympathetic position. But when one quarter of all americans are on food stamps, what does that say about how rich the poor Indians will get?

To
#58 Adrian Kelleher 09.14.11 at 9:02 pm
You say, quote ” By the late ‘70s, social democracy had accumulated lots of nonsensical baggage. Initially internationalist and universalist, the union movement..”

do you know what it means, when I say the socialist members voted for the war credits in 1914 ?

For the less educated: as war clouds gathered over Europe in the fall of 1914, the international socialist movement declared that this war was a war of the capitlist/ruling class, and socialists would not participate; the working people of Europe would reject the call to war, and the implicit nationalism, as a ploy of the ruling class.

In the fall of 1914, Chancellor Bismark asked the Reichstag for war credits; to a man, the socialists voted YES.
So the moral is, the union movement has been less then perfect a long time (and don’t even get me started on the history of hte AFL, and how black and women, to say nothing of less skilled CIO workers, were ignored (at best)).

A Kelleher:
that some decrease in the level of violence [after the Cold War] was only a return to historic norms
I think this is wrong. The data strongly suggest that the decrease in violence is not a return to historic norms but rather is quite unprecedented in historical terms. War-related deaths since 2000 have averaged 55,000 a year; they were twice that in the 90s, more than thrice that in the Cold War, orders of magnitude higher during WW2, and I don’t have the figures handy for pre-1939 but I would be very surprised if the interwar figure was as low as the post-2000 figure. See here.

Adrian Kelleher :

“This wasn’t uncontroversial. For example in the 60s and 70s, many felt that tiny numbers of pricey F-15s were a poor investment and that the Soviet choice of large numbers of simpler aircraft was superior. Time has settled that argument.”

Not really; the question was would the large numbers of poorer systems, used en masse and in a short time period, would swamp the lower numbers of better systems.

That contest never happened, due to the fall of the Soviet Union.

At that point, as far as the USA was concerned, any conventional battle was a larger number of better systems, with lavish support, against a far smaller number of poorer systems, with poor support.

I’ve seen histories of the first Gulf War which stated that by the time of the ground offensive, the US had more soldiers in the area of operations than the Iraqi Army did.

And outnumbered the Iraqi Air Force by – I don’t know – 10:1?

What about capital exports from the core to the periphery, as well as the drive to export neoliberal reforms? I’m not sure we can cleanly break out nations as policy zones.

@LFC

Well this study by researchers at Johns Hopkins placed the numbers of deaths by violence in Iraq alone at 655,000, and that only covered the time up to its publication in 2006. This figure alone exceeds your average of 55,000 p/a for the decade.

I don’t see how it’s useful to extrapolate a trend based on events since the second world war which was after all the greatest paroxysm of violence in human history. The 1914-89 period that historians term ‘the short 20th century’ can be pretty much written off as a reference point. Not only were there the world wars, there were also the numerous cold war crises (McArthur wanting to nuke China, Berlin ’48 and ’59, Cuba, USSR v China Island etc. etc.; Soviet diplomats were openly discussing the prospect of a preemptive strike on China’s nuclear arsenal in 1968) of potentially apocalyptic proportions.

Even today, the world is armed to a degree unimaginable in 1914. A nuclear exchange would see more people killed before the first winter was out than died in all the other wars in history.

The decline in violence since 1989 reflects a gradual ending of the cold-war conflicts. Some warring parties (e.g. Najibullah in Afghanistan) didn’t last too long while others (e.g. UNITA) held out longer but nobody denies that many cold-war fuelled conflicts have petered out over time. I would interpret this as a one-off change rather than a trend as in most cases it resulted from a single event: the collapse of the USSR.

@ 75 and 76. Not sure what either of you are saying!

@ A Kelleher
The 55,000 p/a figure is not ‘mine’ but that of the Peace Research Institute Oslo.

@76:

Yes, the U.S. has been running a CA deficit and thus by definition importing capital, a capital account surplus, for decades now. However, much of the incoming investment has been in gov. bonds and other relatively low yielding “fixed income” securities, which displaced domestic demand for such securities, while the incoming money was then recycled by Wall St. internationally into higher yielding investments abroad. In 2006, the official measure of the U.S. external deficit, the Net International Investment Position, stood at $2.6 trillion, which was amazing since it had shrunk from $3 trillion just a couple of years before, even as the U.S. CA deficit was ballooning to an unprecedented 6% of GDP. If one added up all the CA deficits since 1990, in fact, $2.9 trillion was missing from the NIIP account. The basic answer, aside from the relatively minor effects of $ depreciation, was that foreign equity investment and FDI by U.S. corps and wealthy individuals boomed while domestic returns were relatively lackluster. (The last available figure for the NIIP I could find, from 2008, stood at $3.4 trillion).

Some food for thought.

Bruce Wilder, thanks for the links.

Prof. Krugman (in his reply) and the late Maxine Udall agree that there may indeed be long-term structural problems with the US economy arising from eg. “massive distortions in or induced by financial markets”, to use Ms. Udall’s phrase. But that doesn’t mean that contemporary unemployment couldn’t be remedied by the sorts of political action (mostly fiscal stimulus) that Prof. Krugman has long advocated. And I note that Ms Udall calls for political action to remedy the long-run distortions caused by malfunctioning financial markets which were worrying her. Neither Ms. Udall nor Prof. Krugman rely on any sort of technological determinism to explain either contemporary unemployment or unemployment (misallocation of resources might be a better description) which might arise from long-run distortions.

As an aside, long-run distortions in the US economy (assuming they exist) might arise from a number of things. A malfunctioning financial sector is one, subsidies and tax breaks are another, militarisation is a third (I remember Seymour Melman on that). All of these, and maybe more, could be operating and interacting simultaneously.

Myles, on the other hand, seems to want to blame impersonal and inevitable historical forces for contemporary inequality. I suspect that implies a belief in structural explanations for contemporary unemployment in the US, which was why I commented above (78). In any event, political action will be necessary, even if only to remove distortions (see Udall), facilitate adjustment and minimise consequent pain.

Maybe I am puzzled by the excuses thing. I would seem to be one of the folks being treated as a fan of exploitation, an apologist, etc. But I do not feel compelled to “defend” the possibility that incomes have not stagnated nor do I feel compelled to defend the data for anything other than what it seems to be telling us.

Does it strike anyone here as possible that the data are perfectly correct but that we curmudgeonly limited government, property respecting, rule of law aspiring folks see it as possibly supporting our view of how the world works too? So while we all have a food fight about what the data actually are saying, there is far less constructive discussion happening about how we got here.

@ Peter. Your post reeks of paranoia and conspiracy. Just who are the elites, and what evidence have you to attribute to them such terrible motives, rhetoric aside? I would guess you have very little. I ‘m a student just out of college and support immigration because it seems to me that people come here to seek a better life, make more money, and gain more opportunities for fulfillment. Am I an elite trying to placate the masses as I get rich? I make close to minimum wage doing biomedical research, so I doubt it. As I’ve said earlier in this thread, would you, from your perch over your computer, choose that individuals in developing countries NOT have the opportunity to enrich themselves and their families? Who are you to make this decision? Who is really the elite in this instance?

I have to ask again, who are the “elites?” In one of the incredible absurdities of our modern political discourse, each end of the spectrum blames our problems on “elites.” They obviously are not referring to the same people, so I suggest that this term be discarded immediately for reasons of conceptual clarity and to bring out real arguments from the veil of rhetoric.

“Good spot, but increase in wages and reduction in serfdom are the two sides of the same coin.”

Umm…, Myles, did you miss the surrounding context? There really were no “wages” as a standard measure,- that required much further “developments”,- and the sort of simultaneity of “flip sides of the same coin” is a historical anachronism, induced by the fallacies of neo-classical economics.

Simon @90 (and @88) asks:
I have to ask again, who are the “elites?”

How about the top wealthy 400 individuals in the US, among others.

http://www.politifact.com/wisconsin/statements/2011/mar/10/michael-moore/michael-moore-says-400-americans-have-more-wealth-/

Who have between them more wealth than the bottom half of all households in the US combined. That is 400 individuals have more wealth between them than the poorest 150 Million Americans.

How about the top 1% income earners US, among others

http://www.vanityfair.com/society/features/2011/05/top-one-percent-201105
Who collect 24% of the US’s personal income, as much income as the entire US government.

As for the consequences of their recent activities:
http://anamecon.blogspot.com/2010/10/what-income-of-top-1-means-to-rest-of.html

Or:

http://anamecon.blogspot.com/2011/09/unemployment-average-wage-and.html

Now I don’t know what elites the Right refers to. Elite elementary school teachers, perhaps, or elite unemployed. But it seems the Left has a fairly well defined ‘elite’ they can point their finger at. It would be a shame to discard a term with such rich, and increasingly richer, connotations. As for this elite’s evil motives, I suggest mere, shortsighted greed, because I cannot believe that screwing over the society which is the very foundation of their wealth is in their own long term best interests. But I could be mistaken.

Simon,

A few more notes on the impact of immigration on education (disaster is the summary).

John Judis “End State Is California finished?”

“At the gathering, held in a plush conference room, one of the experts projected tables and graphs comparing various states. It was there that I had my own “AHA!” moment. The states with thriving educational systems were generally northern, predominately white, and with relatively few immigrants: the New England states, North Dakota, and Minnesota. That bore out the late Senator Patrick Moynihan’s quip that the strongest factor in predicting SAT scores was proximity to the Canadian border. The states grouped with California on the lower end of the bar graph were Deep South states like Mississippi and Alabama with a legacy of racism and with a relative absence of new-economy jobs; states like West Virginia that have relatively few jobs for college grads; and states like Nevada, New Mexico, and Hawaii that have huge numbers of non-English-speaking, downscale immigrants whose children are entering the schools. California clearly falls into the last group, suggesting that California’s poor performance since the 1960s may not have been due to an influx of bad teachers, or the rise of teachers’ unions, but to the growth of the state’s immigrant population after the 1965 federal legislation on immigration opened the gates.”

Michael Lind “Innovation and education won’t save our economy” “The overall PISA scores of American students are lowered by the poor results for blacks and Latinos, who make up 35 percent of America’s K-12 student population. Asian-American students have an average score of 541, similar to those of Shanghai, Hong Kong, Japan and South Korea. The non-Hispanic white American student average of 525 is comparable to the averages of Canada (524), New Zealand (521), and Australia (515). In contrast, the average PISA readings score of Latino students is 446 and black students is 441.”

Rice U. demographer Steve Murdock:

“By 2040, only 20 percent of the state’s public school enrollment will be Anglo, he said. Last year, non-Hispanic white children made up 33.3 percent of the state’s 4.8 million public school enrollment…. “The state’s future looks bleak assuming the current trend line does not change because education and income levels for Hispanics lag considerably behind Anglos, he said. “Unless the trend line changes, 30 percent of the state’s labor force will not have even a high school diploma by 2040, he said. And the average household income will be about $6,500 lower than it was in 2000. That figure is not inflation adjusted so it will be worse than what it sounds. ““It’s a terrible situation that you are in. I am worried,” Murdock said.”

You can go to http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/naepdata/ and get test data by race, state, school type, etc. More or less invariably, Hispanic score are somewhere between white scores and black scores, but much closer to black levels. A useful note is that the percent of Hispanics with “advanced” skills appears to always round to zero.

Simon,

For a useful description of the dominant elite, take a look at “The New Cosmopolitans” by Robert J. Shiller or you can just read the editorial page of the NYT or the WP. The New Republic has a rather good summary of elite opinion over at “Mediscare And Elite Bias”. I quote

“Elite opinion and the biases of the news media, which are generally synonymous, tilt left on social issues, like gay rights, abortion and immigration, reflexively deeming conservative views as bigoted and irrational. On economics, elite opinion tilts slightly right — opposed the the GOP agenda of debt-financed tax cuts, but strongly in favor of free trade. Elite opinion militantly favors deficit reduction and regards the cause of cutting entitlements as sacred writ.”

Myles (at 91): “I think the stagnation in middle-class wages over the past few decades in the US are possibly structural rather than political”.

In my quote from Prof. K. (at 78), he said: “Why is unemployment remaining high? Because growth is weak — period, full stop, end of story…”

Maybe that’s the explanation for stagnation in middle-class wages, too, but not necessarily. Lane Kenworthy points out that growth in wages and growth in the economy as a whole have parted company in the US since about 1973:
http://lanekenworthy.net/2011/01/31/the-great-decoupling/

He says in conclusion: ” …the big change in recent decades lies in the degree to which economic growth lifts middle-class incomes. If we want to understand slow income growth, that should be our focus”.

I think the answer to that question has got to be political. I don’t see what structural explanation there can be for incomes rising with growth before the mid-1970s, but not afterwards.

If, on the other hand, growth is over, then you have a structural explanation for stagnant middle-class incomes. But even in that case there will be social pressure for redistribution by political means, because the increasing wealth of the top decile or top one percent in the same period means that, in the absence of growth, they have managed to prosper at the expense of others.

Straightwood, that’s a nice ideological narrative you’ve got there! And that bit about poor people who disagree with you being dumb proles, well, it seems an awful lot like a “destructive simplification”. Narcissistic ideologue: meet mirror.

Way back in the fifth comment: “I don’t, in fact, think increasing inequality is a political development, but rather an economic and technological one.”

Economic and technological developments are political. Marx wrote entirely about economics and technology in Capital, but his critics seem to have thought it was a pretty darn political book.

@103

Rejecting evolution is not a matter of “disagreement;” it is objectively stupid. Many other popular beliefs (e.g., American Exceptionalism) are demonstrably false, and thus objectively stupid. People who hold many demonstrably false beliefs are stupid people. The notion that we should respect any persistent human belief is patently absurd. Human sacrifice, anyone?

@Greg. Some of your links don’t work. I don’t see any evidence that the top 400 richest tax payers influence public opinion. Warren Buffet is surely one of them and he just called for higher income tax. I don’t think Tiger Woods and JK Rowling (does she live here) are waging class warfare.

I meant like, literally don’t work by the way, not like, not work for me. Cheers.

Simon, are you for real? Like, are you an actual honest-to-God flesh-and-blood person? I would prefer to find out that you were a rogue spambot than someone that ill informed.

@ 107 I think you misunderstood my post. Do you understand that your positions are ideological? I’m not questioning voter ignorance. What you did was reduce the attitudes of the poor and middle classes toward things like redistribution and taxation to their stupidity, rather than to ideological differences. Lower-middle-class “tea partiers” don’t oppose your policies because the Kochtopus underneath their beds has tricked them, but because they have different understandings of justice and desert. You don’t acknowledge that they are being ideological because doing so makes the discussion more complex. Simplifying keeps your rants clean cut. And don’t be daft – we’re not talking about evolution or human sacrifice, we’re talking about income redistribution in liberal democracies. Your rhetoric is almost identical to Krugman’s, by the way. Remember, it’s only propaganda when they do it.

We’re well off topic, now. I won’t comment again.

Lower-middle-class “tea partiers” don’t oppose your policies because the Kochtopus underneath their beds has tricked them, but because they have different understandings of justice and desert.

Yeah, the understanding that an “essential” government service is one which they personally need when they’re in trouble, and everybody else can just f*ck off and die (like Ron Paul’s uninsured campaign manager). They oppose rational policies that would help everyone, and support policies that (unbeknownst to their ill-informed selves) are hurting them, because they’re both ignorant and selfish.

It’s amusing to note the way extreme relativism has migrated from left to right over the years.

don’t have to respect the VIEW of creationism or American exceptionalism. What we can do, in the spirit of William James, is to respect and appreciate the emotional comfort that these ideas provide to those who hold them.

Nice meaningless form of words, that. THEY certainly won’t perceive their ideas as “respected” until creationism is taught in all schools. I will not tempt Godwin by pointing to examples of even worse ideas that gave emotional comfort.

Speaking of ideology, yours makes your remarkably blind to reality.

Do you really want me to give you a list of some people whose ideas give them emotional comfort but with whom no decent human being should empathize? I think you can mange that task for yourself. Get real.

Well, to get all metaphysical, I basically am a determinist (this informs my stance on social justice) so I’m not going to view them as ULTIMATELY responsible for holding those views. I don’t know what happened to them in their youth-maybe they were abused, bullied, had mental/emotional troubles etc. I don’t know their friends, families, and personal professions. All I know is that in the heat of the moment they cheered for some pretty egregious things. I thus refuse to see them as something other than human beings like me.

I refuse to condescend to people who listen to Rush Limbaugh and disbelieve in evolution, though they put me in that position. I respect them enough as human beings to consider them capable of better things.

We seem to be trapping in lexical cobwebs. If I were to retire the compact term “stupid” and substitute “cognitively challenged,” how long before this would be denounced as a slur because it hurt the feelings of those to whom it was applied?

Is it a secret that huge profits are earned by taking advantage of stupid people? From gambling casinos, to drug dealers, to payday lenders, to stockbrokers, a huge chunk of the consumer economy is sustained by the increasingly refined exploitation of people with poor access to information and low ability to act in their own long-term interest.

The notion that the wishes of these people should be “respected” and their desire to further reduce their own living standards should be legitimized as the vox populi is arrant nonsense.

As you note later in your post, fatalism does not equal determinism, so I don’t know why you think that I am one (a fatalist). My actions have effects regardless of whether they were determined. And no, I do not think that” no one is oblligated to call an ambulance for someone in the street.” All I said was that I wanted to have empathy for people who have opinions different than mine. I think you and Steve have good points in response.

This might be an opportune moment to, once again, draw attention to Bob Altemeyer’s The Authoritarians.
http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/

Attitudes toward Darwinian evolution, justice and due process, or income distribution are attitudes — not political philosophy or economic analysis. They may be said to have deep psychological roots, I suppose. Maybe depends on what one means by the metaphor, deep. But, there’s no determined relationship to a political program or movement. The attitudes are just handles, where the hooks of populist appeals and slogans can catch hold, and political identification and organization develop tension.

The liberal tribe seems to have an aversion to making populist appeals, which would marshal the political activity of people with the attitudes of “authoritarian followers”. It is unfortunate, since it is hardly possible for a left coalition to achieve political power without a substantial fraction of them, and still be recognizably left; it is still more unfortunate, that right coalitions in which their numbers predominate tend to become deeply pathological and violent.

In American political history, successful integration of substantial blocks of people, with authoritarian attitudes in coalitions with reformist or progressive or liberal agendas has been associated with progressive change. In antebellum American politics, the formation of the Republican Party on an antislavery platform depended on the deliberate efforts of Republican leaders to take over and subvert the anti-immigrant Know-Nothings. Progressivism, in the early 20th century, received considerable strength from earlier Populism. FDR’s New Deal coalition rested in part on the populism, and Democratic Party identification of the southern white supremacists and big-city political machines. Martin Luther King’s nonviolent tactics worked as an appeal to national conscience, in part because of the predictable response of people with authoritarian attitudes to the kind of political theatre they created. (Oddly enough, the same people, who nod agreeably to racist demagoguery can also be deeply affected, in a good way, by scenes of peaceful people attacked with firehoses and police dogs.)

Bruce @130- a substantial fraction of them, absolutely, and I am very disheartened by the post-Clinton Democratic allergy to anything even remotely resembling populism- you may even have understated what a dangerous disaster that is. But the hard-core tea partiers (whom polls show to be despised by the great majority of the population) can’t possibly be among that fraction. Nor, thankfully, do they need to be.

The hard-core Tea Partiers are not authoritarian followers, in Altemeyer’s categorization; their attitudes appear to be better characterized by the concept of Social Dominance Orientation. These are not mutually exclusive attitude clusters, but the correlation is low among individuals.

The scary thing, politically, is when authoritarian followers find a demagogue, and the Tea Party, and its sponsors, seem to be shopping for a demagogue.

I’ve been noticing a lot of this bogus concern for workers in other countries of late. Must be the new neoliberal talking point to attempt to justify the obscene covetousness of the top 1% in the US and their rape of the working and middle classes.

Nobody who is so cavalier about the welfare of his fellow countrymen is genuinely concerned about all of humanity.

@Greg. Some of your links don’t work. I don’t see any evidence that the top 400 richest tax payers influence public opinion. Warren Buffet is surely one of them and he just called for higher income tax. I don’t think Tiger Woods and JK Rowling (does she live here) are waging class warfare.

Science guy entering the lists to make his pitch for rationality and the scientific method again.

Simon, rather than simply say that you don’t find some evidence presented “convincing” isn’t really helping anyone. Could you please – before and not after – the next person makes their case what sort of evidence you’re looking for, and what you would find acceptable?

If all you’re saying is that you won’t believe this until presented with signed and notarized confessions by 100 million people, well, I think we’d all have a better sense of just how seriously to take you.

I thought Peter Schaeffer’s comments were interesting and had some good links. I had intended to read them again this morning, only to find they’d been deleted (see 104). I for one would like to see them reinstated.

Harold, if wages are increased in India because of increased productivity caused by capital intensive production methods moving there, then there will be a shift of capital that will reduce the growth of US wages.

Like Harold, I do not see the logic that expects increasing productivity to reduce wages anywhere. If workers in India are producing more stuff, and trading with America, everyone should be better off — at least that should be well within the realm of the politically possible, as it is (I would think obviously) within the realm of the economically possible.

There are real issues of income distribution, of course. The U.S. is engaged in some serious disinvestment, which is driving down U.S. wages and median household income, and driving up the poverty rate. Public infrastructure has been allowed to age and deteriorate and financialization has pushed out a lot of manufacturing. But, those are issues subject to national policymaking, if we choose to rule ourselves, instead of allowing government by Goldman Sachs.

@ Scent again. The burden of proof is on you to show that the portion of the electorate who votes Republican is suffering from a false consciousness constructed by the wealthy rather than by their opinion of desert and justice, as John put it above. Otherwise, you’re beliefs are grounded in faith, and a particularly offensive one that when people disagree with me they are being manipulated

@Simon 145

But, then there is that border. We organize politically and economically, primarily around nation-states. It is not a question of “caring”; the operative questions are about organization, institution-building, funding public goods investment, etc.

Didn’t there used to be a leftist faction (hint, it began with a “t”) that opposed reform unless it involved a violent world-wide workers’ revolution? Perhaps this is what neo-liberals mean when they claim to be “leftist” while opposing unions and worker protections in one country while other countries don’t have them.

Bruce, we could organize within the nation state to smash it. Its a sad day when the followers of Leon Trotsky and of Milton Friedman meet and agree on the practical political issues because there are no other alternatives. This is the real tragedy of history, not the declining wages which are only symptoms of a deeper problem of capital.

Haha. I didn’t realize you were a Marxist, and the only one who understands the point I was trying to get at to boot! I wouldn’t say I’m a follower of Milton Friedman though (although I like some sections of Capitalism=Freedom).

It is much more likely that political views are influenced by hereditary/socially conditioned moral attitudes (see Jonathan Haidt’s TED talk for one of my favorite introductions) , religion, or even racism. This makes things much more complicated, and doesn’t allow us liberals to say “oh they’re being manipulated” but it both has evidence and squares much more nicely with salient aspects of our society. I will say that the right wing media may play into this, but is thus an epiphenomenom on more complex fundamentals of personality.

I’ve been noticing a lot of this bogus concern for workers in other countries of late. Must be the new neoliberal talking point to attempt to justify the obscene covetousness of the top 1% in the US and their rape of the working and middle classes.

Whether the concern is bogus or not is irrelevant. The fact of the matter remains, and is not affected by the degree of sincerity of the people who state such a fact; facts are independent therefrom. Overall welfare in the world has increased massively over the last 30 years. MASSIVELY. If the world welfare level continues increasing at such a pace it would be a beneficent deliverance of biblical proportions, almost unknown in the history of mankind. Look at China. Look at India.

Neoliberalism has played an undoubted and indubitable role in this massive increase of welfare in the world, and for this singular achievement neoliberalism should be praised. The caterwauling of left-wingers on this point is just so much nonsense.

I can sympathize with people complaining about the wealthy’s growing share of the economic pie. I can sympathize with the desire to raise taxes on the wealthy.

However, what confuses me to no end is the progressives continuing support of Keynesian economics. If you read the Keynesian economists, they are explicity stating that the way to increase employment is through deliberately targeting inflation (3-5%). They say this will have two benefits. It will spur demand and it will lower costs of labor. Inflation doesn’t effect the rich as much because they store most of their wealth in assets not money.

If I was the conspiracy type, I would guess that Democratic politicians actually prefer it when the rich are getting richer so long as they aren’t viewed as the cause. Or perhaps, people are just too dumb to recognize when they are working against their own interests as many commentators have already suggested.

In my opinion, you are screwed either way neither choice currently leads to more prosperity for the middle class.

Krugman’s latest column in the NYT seems to get at the heart of the matter. There has been a turn toward cruelty in the minds of a large portion of the electorate. This has obvious consequences for the apportionment of resources in our society. When the poor are despised as morally deficient, their suffering is not only tolerated, it is sought as a form of retributive justice. No amount of rational argument can prevail against a mood shift of this kind. One can only hope that the cyclic phenomena that brought us to this sad state will eventually take us back to enlightenment and reform.

Simon does not assent to the statement that “we know that the rich pay to influence public opinion.” How does the American Enterprise Institute get funded, I wonder, and who pays Rush Limbaugh and what is his salary, by the way?

If you animosity can be traced to my comment saying I support Yglesias’ neoliberal “agenda,” than I withdraw it. All I want is a dialogue, but all you persist in doing is misrepresenting my views and being obnoxious.

“Look at China. Look at India.

Neoliberalism has played an undoubted and indubitable role in this massive increase of welfare in the world, and for this singular achievement neoliberalism should be praised. The caterwauling of left-wingers on this point is just so much nonsense.”

Umm…Myles, if you mean by “neo-liberalism” the so-called Washington consensus set of policy prescriptions, then India and China are precisely not the examples to cite. India did partially “liberalize”, deregulate, its industrial economy, but it has maintained a tightly regulated banking system and capital controls. I don’t think the case of Red China needs much elaboration, since its level and many modes of government intervention and control are too well-known. IOW India and China have developed semi-successfully as free-riders on, not adherents to, the Washington consensus.

IOW India and China have developed semi-successfully as free-riders on, not adherents to, the Washington consensus.

Yes, I mean in the way the increase in free trade and capital movements, which is something propelled by the neoliberal revolution in the West, has been responsible for the massive growth in China and India. If the West didn’t liberalize economically, it would still have been difficult for China and India to sustain the degree of export-led growth (which would lead eventually to consumption-driven growth) that they did.

Insofar as policies in the West have contributed (and they indeed have) to the massive increase in human welfare and reduction in poverty in China and India, they are the policies of neoliberalism.

Umm…, Myles, once again, you do realize that massive CA imbalances are a principal causal factor behind the current global crisis, eh? And you do realize that most of global “free trade” is actually, directly or indirectly, infra-corporate transfers by MNCs, arbitraging FX deviations, most of all, as well as wages, taxes and regulations? And it’s obvious that all countries in the world can’t “develop” based on export-led growth. Neo-liberalism was not instituted for the sake of benefiting the workers in poorer countries any more than for the sake of benefiting workers in richer countries.

@ Harold “The effect is the same.” Is the same as what? I think what it indicates is that achieving a liberal political concensus will involve more than just taking over the airways, which we absolutly cannot support in a liberal society anyway, and which would just leave conservatives looking for more ways to confirm their worldview. It involves trying to establish dialogue with the right to help them comprehend our views on social justice and the appropriate role of government.

Well I’m not sure that I want to do that, as the Burkean in me wants a better plan to replace it first, but you do understand my point. “Capitalism would be remade even if all the people with FOX and whatever laundry list of groups you name died tomorrow.”

Simon @172

I have found Jonathan Haidt’s work on the diversity of moralities to be interesting and enlightening.

Simon. The wealthy in the US give huge sums of money to rightwing think tanks. These right wing think tanks then provide talking heads for TV/radio, and churn out blog content, opinion pieces in newspapers, as well as providing “experts” for various policy debates in Washington/TV/newspapers, etc. Right wing think tanks dwarf anything even on the centre-liberal side of things, yet alone on the left. The right also fund very successful astro-turfing operations, as well as operations such as the guy who shut ACORN down. The wealthy also channel funds to favoured candidates, and pay for political advertising.

George Soros mostly funds projects abroad. Buffet doesn’t fund anything very much.

Given a choice between zero growth, and growth; growth is better. Particularly if you’re middle class.

And it’s one of the triumphs of the propaganda we’ve been discussing in this thread to have made highly inflation-averse so many people who would benefit from moderate inflation, which would ease the pain of the deleveraging process that we’re nowhere near the end of. Support of policies that are personally harmful to you, because you’ve been misled into believing the contrary (by people with a pecuniary interest in misleading you), IS false consciousness.

Global growth rates globally have fallen under neoliberalism, in Africa and S. America rather dramatically

It takes quite some imagination to believe that South America did better under what preceded neoliberalism. Dude, Peronism started not working out in the bloody 1950’s. It never actually worked in the first place. In so far as it had any successes they were illusions. Brazil’s import-substitution strategy was in shambles before it even got underway.

WRT to Africa, that’s a political problem, not an economic one. The economic model of Botswana is sound and Botswana has been doing well.

Talking of false consciousness brings me back to an old pet theory of mine the Belief in a Just World (which I have banged on about at CT before). But it really does demonstrate that there is such a thing as false consciousness, we can prove it, and it can be and is manipulated by the political right for political reasons.

This contains details. Just scroll down through the graphs. It lapses into ‘economicsalism’ later on but the basic point is simple enough.

Cian, height doesn’t lie.

No, it correlates quite well with protein intake. You don’t actually need that much protein; people in the west get far more than they need. Its quite rare, outside famines, for peasants to not have access to sufficient protein.

The Japanese are becoming taller due to changes in diet, but it seems to be accompanied by increasing western style health problems. Simple metrics can be useful up to a point, but only so far.

Unfortunately I cannot find statistics on average heights across populations and times anywhere. But I would bet that height in India has increased since 1970, whereas you would have it decrease.

One very noticable change in the diets of people in both SE Asia and Africa, has been an increasing reliance of people moving to the cities on a far more restrained diet, which is nutritionally deficient. Its not poverty that leads to the nutritional diseases, its poverty within cities. Vitamin A deficiency for example.

I wouldn’t necessarily bet that people living in cities have greater access to meat than people living on farms, incidentally. Particularly with rapid rises in population.

So cian, now you are saying increases in height are bad? If it was so rare for peasants to have insufficient protein, why are Romans so short? I really don’t see the problem with having too much food instead of too little. The World Bank confirms it: the percentage of people in extreme poverty has dropped dramatically due to economic growth in India, growth that wasn’t happening until India liberalized.

As for Mao, well, we’ll just count the bodies from the Great Leap Forward. How many starving people does it take to convince you that Chinese economic policy was fucked up then?

@191

There’s a bit of a leap from Mao to neoliberalism. Jeez. Maybe one or two points in between deserve consideration?

Harold, true. My point was more that its not a very good proxy for health. I would guess mortality (possibly excluding child mortality) would be a better one.

Bruce,

India grew faster in the golden age than in the neoliberal era. The argument being made was that neoliberalism has led to unprecidented levels of growth. This isn’t true.

Growth doesn’t necessarily mean that poorer people become less poor. If they get some of the benefits of growth then it does, but neoliberalism tends to lead to policies that make that less likely (crack downs on unions, lower taxation, less schooling, no redistributive policies). In some countries, Mexico and the US for example, most of it has gone to the elites, with the poor seeing almost none of it.

As for Mao, well, we’ll just count the bodies from the Great Leap Forward. How many starving people does it take to convince you that Chinese economic policy was fucked up then?

The dead body period was not one of the growth periods. So despite that insanity, still China achieved greater growth. Not of course that modern China is a neoliberal state and while I suppose one can make the arguments its benefited from trade/capital liberalisation, Japan, S. Korea and Taiwan all grew in earlier periods following the same model, so its not the most convincing of arguments.

@Cian. Why would we discount infant mortality (http://tinyurl.com/3jbgn7c)? That seems like a pretty good indicator, as does life expectancy from birth, which has increased by twenty years despite a doubling of the population. Whatever is responsible for that, I’m quite happy to have it. Thats a lot of years people are enjoying they didn’t have before. As for “growth” being higher under Mao, along with other possible benefits, I’d say what we have now, without severe political repression and mass famine, is preferable, but I’m not sure we’re disagreeing about that. What would you like to see done to improve on what we have today?

Cian, that’s the problem! Time makes assigning causation experimentally very difficult. I’m not claiming neoliberalism is responsible for our increased capabilities to tackle these problems. Rather the decrease of tarif barriers enables poor countries to take advantage of them. In case you are forgetting the original post was claiming that the current economic climate was unequivocally bad because workers in the core capitalist states were suffering. I’m just pointing out its fairly shortsighted to look only at those workers, and life has gotten better since the 1970’s for a lot of people. The only question is what further improves it.

Straightwood, those countries you just mentioned also cut back on the welfare state during the 1970’s, and also deregulated. They weren’t exempt from neoliberalism just because they kept the tax rates high.

The beginning of my message got cut off, which is that Brad’s piece helps frame the argument I was trying to make, that, as Watson put it, “its fairly shortsighted to look only at those workers [US], and life has gotten better since the 1970’s for a lot of people.”

Straightwood, the European welfare state today is very different from the previous welfare states. Unions have come under attack, but were never as strong as in the US because the US takes a hands off bare knuckles approach to labor disputes: the union fights it out with the boss. In Europe these disputes were settled politically. Regulation is vanishing thanks to the EU. Europe is more like Brad de Long in policy terms then anything else. I don’t identify neoliberalism with massive cuts to the welfare state because that wasn’t what it was about. It was a narrative responding to widespread disenchantment with the way the welfare state claimed to regulate everyone’s life. The rhetoric that supported the welfare state in the 1950’s also supported anti-gay and anti-black legislation.

That doesn’t mean that we can’t or shouldn’t fight for universal healthcare and other social democratic provisions, but sticking our head in the sand about an emergent global division of labor seems foolish.

Brad de Long’s piece does indeed say that India adopted what could be called a neo-liberal policy. But even after “shrinkage” India’s government bureaucracy (I won’t even mention China’s) is still much bigger than ours. Our is very puny compared to other industrialized economies and is lacking many key personnel who serve a life-saving function in many cases — mine safety, and oil rig inspection come to mind. Our Civil Service needs to be expanded to match our growing population, not shrunk. Likewise our unions, as Watson Ladd pointed out, are not as strong as those of Europe and also need to be expanded, not curtailed, and the Taft-Hartley provisions, put in by reactionary Dixiecrats over Truman’s veto, repealed.

Simons assertions that he still “doesn’t know one way or the other” despite the ready availability of information in books and on the web suggests to me that he is insincere (to put it as kindly as possible). It is hardly a secret that Europe’s economy all together is bigger than the U.S.’s and also that it imports plenty from China and India. Europe’s social safety net and unions mean that its workers are healthier and more prosperous than those of the USA, a fact that stands as proof that Indian and Chinese prosperity do not require the immiseration of workers in other industrialized countries.

Wikipedia says:
The economy of the European Union generates a GDP of over €12,279.033 trillion (US$16,228.23 trillion in 2010) according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), making it the largest economy in the world. The European Union (EU) economy consists of a single market and the EU is represented as a unified entity in the World Trade Organization (WTO). .

European unions are weaker. They engage in strike actions less frequently, often cave to employee demands, and are only now importing organizing models from the US. Also, India is very big. I would be worried if their bureaucracy was smaller. David Harvey points out that 1973 saw a shrinking of the welfare state globably: I’m not sure a small shift one way or another is going to cancel out that pattern.

Watson:
Rather the decrease of tarif barriers enables poor countries to take advantage of them.

Despite the fact that lots of countries have used tarif barriers very successfully to develop, while operating in a world with tarif barriers you mean? For developing countries a lack of tarif barriers has usually made it impossible for their native industries to develop

In case you are forgetting the original post was claiming that the current economic climate was unequivocally bad because workers in the core capitalist states were suffering. I’m just pointing out its fairly shortsighted to look only at those workers, and life has gotten better since the 1970’s for a lot of people. The only question is what further improves it.

But you haven’t shown there’s a connection. Firstly EU workers have suffered a lot less, their countries are far more equal and they have a welfare state, albeit one that is being shrunk too. Secondly during the neoliberal period, when things have got worse (or at best remained static) for American workers, global growth rates have slowed. We’ve also had some pretty severe crises in the developing world caused by neoliberal policies on financial flows.

Those countries would almost certainly have grown anyway. The question is whether they would have grown faster with other policies (as I’d argue), or slower. I see very little evidence to suggest faster growth. The other question is whether most people in those countries would have done better with policies that advocated more equal distribution of wealth, investment in public health, education and infrastructure; rather than the policies advocated by neoliberalism which is very much opposed to these things being provided as public goods. I mean the US has had okay growth for 30 years, but most people haven’t benefitted from it. That’s also true of some developing world countries (Mexico in recent years, for example).

I don’t identify neoliberalism with massive cuts to the welfare state because that wasn’t what it was about.

It was one of the objectives of its architects, so I don’t think this is really sustainable as an argument.

It was a narrative responding to widespread disenchantment with the way the welfare state claimed to regulate everyone’s life.

If you’re talking about Europe, this is a fiction. There was no such disenchantment.

Prof. Quiggin has a point, though when you look at actual policies and their results, the US and non-US “brands” of neoliberalism may be a bit closer than they are in rhetoric.

Nah, I don’t think so. It’s true that the term ‘liberalism’ has different connotations, only because in the US it passes for ‘the left’. But the term ‘neoliberalism’, the “Washington Consensus” sort of thing, that means the same everywhere.

One is the historical realisation, in russia, China and elsewhere, that the post-war US economic model was actually better than what they had.

In China’s case the model was Japan, S. Korea and Taiwan. They’ve never been hugely impressed by the US model. And the reforms were not that dramatic.

Neoliberal reform in Russia was either a disaster, or the biggest act of larceny the world has ever seen, depending upon one’s perspective.

And even in the David Harvey sense (where nobody is inclined to call another a liberal for supporting labor unions), is it supposed to be that social democrats are now neoliberals because their theories have been incorporated within neoliberal consensus (in something like the American manner, maybe), or because they sold out and abandoned whatever part of their theory wasn’t compatible with neoliberalism in the sense of “classical liberalism”?

Soru,
yeah Hong Kong, and Hong Kong trading families in particular, had a lot to do with it. Though Taiwan also had factories and stuff there. It was a far more gradual process than people seem to realise. Really the let it happen.

I don’t know enough about Indian’s economy in practice to comment, though India is a very poor country overall. Quite a bit of Africa is richer, which doesn’t really fit the rhetoric. Bits of it are doing quite well; much of it is desperately poor still and doesn’t seem to be improving significantly.

But if you look up-thread, you will see some people describing modern China as neoliberal.

Yeah and I’ve heard people describe it that way in newspapers. I think its ignorance more than anything. China’s less neoliberal than W. Europe was in the 50s.

SoV,
Call me uncharitable, but I don’t find it too far beyond the bounds of possibilities that “far left liberal” is exactly how parts of the Serious, Responsible right in this country think of Joe Palooka. They are happy to have his support for their agenda of “reinstituting traditional religious values” (which they plausibly sincerely believe will result in economic prosperity, as much as any neoliberal who believes hard work and education are all it takes for anyone to prosper), and they are equally happy to have the Democrats to kick around so they can make a persuasive argument that that’s where JP belongs.

And why not? Isn’t it awfully exoteric to assume that the Republican-Democrat right-left split is more than a mere appearance, that it is an accurate representation of True Reality? Wouldn’t it be . . . neat . . . if the secret reality behind appearances were more interesting than this?

And best of all: they can privately support anti-racism, too. Only people like Joe Palooka are racists. Joe Palooka should by rights be a Democrat. Therefore, Democrats are the real racists. QED!!!

Sad.

I think some people are making something of a strawman of the ‘false consciousness’ idea. I’m not versed enough in traditional Marxist thought to give an account of what exactly Marx/etc. defined it as — but I think the following rough approximation of it as a hypothesis is plausible and could be made easily falsifiable (and I’d guess would be empirically supported): ‘Many people believe things that are not objectively in their own material best interest. This is due to a misunderstanding of certain issues (e.g. gold standard populism even though a gold standard is very likely not in the best interest of the poor or middle class) and/or moral beliefs (e.g. in the wrongness of redistribution) that conflict with their material conditions’ improvement (e.g. material benefits of redistribution.)’ Of course, you can argue about subjectivity and about relativism and all that and about what the utility-maximizing policy choice is from the implied options. But it seems there’s quite a bit of empirical evidence to support both those ideas. Dan Ariely (Duke economist) did some interesting work (http://danariely.com/2010/09/30/wealth-inequality/) that suggested that Americans are more accepting of less income distribution in part because they are simply uninformed on the actual distribution of income in this country.

Cian, I don’t think we can say that post-1975 recover was necessarily going to lead to more then the 2% growth India was known for before then.

Yeah I should have refrained from commenting on India, as I simply don’t know enough about it. The country’s development policies were pretty stupid, so its possible anything’s better. But at the same time that they weren’t growing, Taiwan, S. Korea, etc.

That said, most of the development has been in Kerala, AFAIK. Which is the part of Indian which has followed the sanest development policy (heavy investment in education, infrastructure and health), by the sort of Marxist government. They haven’t followed, and have pointedly ignored, much of the advice they were given. China I can see becoming a wealthy country given time, I’m more skeptical about India as a whole. Most of it still isn’t really developing all that much.

I’m also skeptical about tarif barriers: Its just another kind of theft from the poor by the domestically connected manufacturing class.

Yeah, but its a form of theft where the country gets richer, and the poor generally benefit quite significantly in that form of development. I mean S. Korea was really poor in the 50s. They were sending food parcels at one point from the North. People went north for the good life, and the North wasn’t really that great even with Soviet money.

Henri @219
But the term ‘neoliberalism’, the “Washington Consensus” sort of thing, that means the same everywhere.
‘Washington Consensus’ means the same (roughly) everywhere, but as has been discussed at CT before (notably by Ben Alpers, though also others) neoliberalism has a distinct meaning within the context of US politics. This is a well-known, demonstrable fact, going back to Charles Peters at Wash Monthly in the 80s. The two ‘neoliberalisms’ may be closer to each other than some think, as Steve LaBonne suggests, but the term ‘neoliberalism’ has one meaning in the ‘Washington Consensus’ sense and another meaning in the Charles Peters sense. The term Washington Consensus did not even exist when Peters published his ‘neoliberal manifesto’.