Branko Milanovic on the insatiable drive to maximize income

Something strange seems to be happening on CT. Suddenly we (the readers) are being exposed to a lot of awful ideas which we are apparently supposed to take seriously.

I don’t know if this is a reaction to Trump and Brexit, that the CT bloggers think we have to engage with crazy right wing ideas and try to understand them, perhaps. However I think it’s a bad move. I think you should be writing about people with good ideas.

How about Fiona Robinson for example? https://www.temple.edu/tempress/titles/2048_reg_print.html

Much more interesting and better for us I think

and as Mr. Milanovic – as proof for his theory – has introduced ‘The Italian example’ – -(where he seriously insists that people are not happy because of a lack of growth)
let me introduce ‘The Swiss example’:

‘I think that it could be reasonably argued that no group of people in the history of the world has lived as pleasant lives as today’s Swiss. The advantage are well-known: lots of wealth, peace, moderate working hours, strong family and friendship bonds, acceptable weather, beautiful historical and natural sights, excellent and healthy food. Who then needs to grow? And Switzerland did not. It has by now stagnated for a generation and
while in Italy the GDP Growth Rate averaged 0.60 percent from 1960 until 2017 – in Switzerland it averaged just 0.42 percent from 1980 until 2017.
-(just also using data which supports my point)
Sooo – indeed:
‘One could say, “it does not matter if people are happy”. But the problem is that, while superficially people may be happy this Summer as they congregate on the beaches and drink aperol, there is even a deeper happiness in Switzerland without the presence
of growth.
The young are happy because they have a job market with one of the lowest unemployment rates in the world – and the most generous paying jobs.
The middle-aged people are happy by some wonderful challenging jobs, the old are happy because their pensions are about the highest in Europe.
And even they have achieved ‘a stagnant Arcadia’ they have build together – the ‘most competitive economy in the world’ -(in nearly every international survey)

Soo you can be very, VERY happy in… let’s call it ‘refining such a ‘the most competitive economy of the world’ – WITHOUT ANY ‘superficial economical growth!

Capisce!!

– or as my Italian Boyfriend would like to say:
‘ in a society where ‘extreme commodification is obviously linked with insatiability of some needs and desire to climb up in hierarchical rankings.

Makes him – especially an Italian very unhappy!

And the worst for every true Italian might be:
”today’s uber-capitalism which accepts only one ranking criterion, money (and since all other possible ranking criteria can be, through commodification, converted into the money-metric) and the desire for higher societal rank in the world of the Milanovices almost entirely identified with the desire for higher income.”

That’s why – especially ‘Italians’ – might be very, VERY unhappy?

Capisce Branko?

The point about desire for leisure in (1) seems to me to be worth emphasising. Plenty of evidence that people would like to realise more of productivity gains in an economy through more leisure time over higher consumption – reasonably spread, not stressed full time workers alongside unemployed, those on zero hours contracts. Relatively few employees are in a position to negotiate this, given power relations in labour markets (I would have thought Milanovic is enough of an old Marxist to realise that point). With unions emasculated and governments enthrall to labour market flexibility, the post war tools that led to falling working hours have been eroded

Why is it greed – and not pure fear – that must drive capitalism? I’m stealing a page from Schumpeter here. innovation, etc., the drivers of growth, come about perhaps not so much because members of a firm are greedy, but because if they fail to innovate, they will fail. Shameful bankruptcy, loss of income and living standards. It’s a “win or go home” kind of world. The only way it doesn’t turn into the Marxist dystopia is through growth, a product of – you guessed it. innovation and increased productivity. Capitalism contains the seeds of its own survival.

But reducing competition may not relieve us from the burdens of pursuing continued growth. For Schumpeter *also* points out that the protection from the forces of competition, a “fortress” behind which a firm can hide for a time, gives them some wiggle room to come up with bigger and better innovations (pace Mariana Mazzucato).

So I suppose I get to the same place as him… but not for the same reasons.

Hmm.

There is a new issue of Feminist Philosophy Quarterly which is about Catharine MacKinnon (it’s linked from Feminist Philosophers, just btw)

Anyway at one point there was a discussion of the phenomenon of erasing people’s viewpoint or experience (I can’t remember the terms but I guess people would know what I’m talking about).

Anyway that’s what Hobbes and Brankovic are doing – they are erasing caring. They are more specifically erasing my life experience. So therefore naturally I think – but how could you possibly take this seriously? It’s just patriarchy. That is so obvious. I’m genuinely puzzled about this. It’s like there’s been a whole world of knowledge and theory that is erased here in general, and I really don’t understand why.

The thing Fiona Robinson points out – the obvious thing, the thing that is actually staring everyone in the face – is that there would be no human population without caring.

there would be no human population without caring

Capital investment!

http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_5836eb7fe4b000af95edf12e

The question is, is this a claim about fundamental human nature or merely about the nature of humans who have been socialised in a culture saturated in capitalist market economy and its attendant ideology? If the former then it is clearly completely wrong; if the latter, it is at best partly correct.

The great pacesetter here is Hazel Henderson. It is unfortunate that her work is not better known.

Let’s not yet discard the need for “economic growth” by the GDP numbers (adding indicators for environment and quality of life) for policy in developing countries. At this moment, they need it.

But beyond this, I think that greed, fear, & competition will come to be regarded as caveman-canards.

I think that the moral sentiment we will confront soon is a cross between Schumpeter and Keynes: a moral disaffection and disconnection from ownership of the means of wealthgetting (and even boredom with it; see Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy), which is crossed with the potential of production to complete satisfaction of everyone, i.e. the satiety of most goods and services (see The Economic Possibilities of Our Grandchildren).

If artificial intelligence disemploys half the whitecollars in the next two decades, this sentiment may accelerate. Because nobody will have the money to buy the stuff that could obviously be produced to satiety.

In the future, growth will occur anyway. It is ensured by the human perception of comparisons (better? stronger? lighter? more fun?) and the fact that this perception is now married to the principles of modern science. We will be able to grow without environmental damage and resource depletion (although we still have work to do, to prevent these). Buckminster Fuller stated this position correctly, over a half-century ago.

But on the “insatiable human desires” thing? The deeper I go into this, the more I believe that the hypothesis of “insatiable human desires” is a false belief that was contingent upon the 17th-18th Century Enlightenment, and so then it became a beginning chapter in today’s economic textbooks. Locke, Hobbes, Smith etc. were engaged in devising a new system of psychology that would help to divorce society from the rule of monarchy and aristocracy, by promoting the growing interests of the individual. To them, greed was a theoretical affordance.

But if they were alive today, would these thinkers regard greed and competition as necessary “fundaments” of “human nature”? I doubt it. Hobbes maybe! But most of them were not so narrow. The Enlightenment recognized other desires, toward the arts, toward “natural philosophy” and “lovers of system”.

Indeed by the late 19th Century, many thinkers who were still in the Enlightenment tradition suspected that capitalism might be an historical phase that would end by satiation of the need for physical mechanisms — that this development had an endpoint.

It wasn’t just Marx, Verne and Wells. Very, very few people were so certain as to posit that capitalism was here to stay. They would not have been theoretically so foolish. I don’t find it in Marshall. Two great ones with thoughts rooted in this earlier time, Keynes and Schumpeter? Not so foolish either.

But, after that, our future expectations were waylaid for another century, by two World Wars, a Cold War, and the trente glorieuses of automobiles, highways, TVs, washers, dryers, etc. — and all of the income-producing employments upon these gadgets. Leading to the temporary growth of the Western middle class, and coinciding with a short period of income-gap moderation through gov’t policies, as Piketty shows. All of which APPEARED to make work-for-money a continuing and necessary condition of human nature, or of the cosmos.

I think the appearance that work-for-money is a cosmic necessity is a mistake, a very deep one, almost an epistemological mistake. It is inevitably going to cause a disaster. The question soon before us all, is whether it is necessary for society to drive the people to find new growth and inventions, by putting the people into lack-of-money. Must achievement be registered as a numerical growth?

I was always taken with Hobbes’s point that people might be satisfied with a moderate portion but feel, perhaps rationally, that they need more to secure the moderate portion they want. I’m less convinced, however, that there is no stopping point. Lacking any desire for a life of Trumpian excess, I would find my wildest material wants satisfied by a few million dollars, and my desire to secure that few million by a few more. That might work if I win a $10,000,000 lottery, but it might not work if I have to earn (as the world defines “earn”) the necessary ten million. Can a person who needs to generate ten million from money-making activity (I leave aside lucky entertainers and athletes, as special cases who can amass large amounts of money without specific money-generating skills) actually succeed in amassing that much if he or she is willing to stop there? Or do you have to be the sort of person who won’t stop to amass that much to begin with?

@19
”I know personally a lot of italians that are very unsatisfied of their economic situation.”

Me too – and at Mr. Bertrams other thread about “The Sovereign Myth” Kate writes:
”Greece is a lot less “sovereign” in the face of its foreign creditors than, say, Germany.”
As the euro is basically the mark. So I don’t think the “lost sovereignty” argument is crazy at all!” –
Right!? –
as isn’t your argument – ‘that we are not speaking just of “income”, but also of other things like job security that are indirectly correlated with income,”

– and I thought – somehow all of this seems to be related? – including the so called ‘liberal’ US economists – who during the Greek Crisis moved to the side of the: ‘We want our sovereignty back crowd’.
But then the Greeks -(like perhaps the Italians you are talking about?) – suddenly didn’t want their sovereignty back anymore – as it might have ment: ”no more dough with no interest rates – payable back… sometimes ”- or -(more important?) ‘NO MORE members in a Europe with countries who all had given up (‘part’) of their ‘sovereignty’ – in order to ‘form a more perfect union’.

And what it all means?

MY Italian friend seems to be still… ‘romanticized’ (copyright Milanovic) – while the Italians you were talking to -(and who I also know very well) might have been… ‘americanized’… or ‘germanized’?!

A friend of mine who has long since passed in old age always liked to tell stories of how, as a child, he would run to his father to complain of some ill-treatment from his mother and his wise father would listen patiently to his elaborate complaint and nod sagely saying, “Now Charlie, of course I have only heard your side of the story so far and it may be that I will see it differently when I hear your mother’s side, but just based on what you tell me, it sounds like your mother is right and you are wrong.”

The Milanovic you quote is all the enemy capitalist ideology, if not capitalism itself, needs to doom it to oblivion. “the careful obliviousness to reality that’s part of economics training” (Peter T) is certainly a wonder to behold.

Given that many of the most important problems facing civilization are economic in nature, it is mildly interesting that we handicap ourselves so in collectively thinking about economics.

@Nastywoman 24

I’d like to answer something but I really don’t understand your point.

Maybe Milanovic has a maximinizing view of Rawls’s difference pple while others like me, and I guess that you too, defend a non-maximinizing view according to which he government is not obliged to maximize income for the worst-off, provided that everyone has enough, because for example has other goals, like preserving nature

“Seems to me quite obvious that one of the permanent problems for capitalism is that people don’t have an insatiable desire for more and more material wealth. ”

It’s true that most people aren’t willing to put an unlimited amount of effort into increasing their material wealth — at some point, they’d rather have more leisure than more money and stuff. But at the same time, there aren’t very many who can’t think of *anything* more (or anything better) that they would want if it was free (or cheap enough). Is your own list of unfilled material desires completely blank (or do you think it would it be if not for advertising)? And, of course, one of the things that a growing economy provides is the same amount of stuff with a steadily decreasing amount of time and effort. Even in industrialized countries, food and clothing were major household expenses not that long ago, whereas now they make up a small fraction of the typical budget.

@28
‘I really don’t understand your point.’

I think my ‘point’ was ‘the insatiable drive to maximize income’ and how sad
that even Italians now seem to have it?

From the linked Milanovic blog post:

Even my “free” drinking-beer time has become a commodity: I use it to “network”. Thus even the free time needs to be justified in terms of leading to greater income. People attend speeches of famous economists (who, by the way, have commodified their speeches) not because they expect to learn much, but because they expect to find there others with whom they can “network” (meaning, create future lucrative connections during a time ostensibly spent “learning”). I could go on.

Milanovic does not seem to realize — or, if he does realize, doesn’t acknowledge here — that at least some people may engage or attempt to engage in “networking” not because they have an insatiable desire for ever more income but because they are looking for work of some kind. There’s a difference between, on the one hand, wanting to have a job (or thinking one’s life would be pleasanter psychically and/or financially if one did) and, on the other hand, wanting to maximize one’s income.

To be blunt, not everyone is fortunate enough to be a famous economist with a visiting professorship at the CUNY Grad Center and ‘the hottest chart [or curve]’ in economics, as I recently heard his so-called elephant chart called. Despite the fact that Milanovic writes acclaimed studies of global inequality, one senses from this blog post that he needs, in the colloquial phrase, to get out more.

Susan C.
“But (a) the birth rate tends to be lower in industrialized capitalist countries than pre-industrial ones. Even if some people are still having children, this might be taken as evidence in favour of the theory that under capitalism people seek status through wealth, and are therefore disincentivized from activities such as having children.”

Nope. It is mostly due to compulsory schooling, capital based pensions (including government pensions) and urbanisation. A middle class society is capital intensive and large families dilute the capital. It is that simple.

More generally, he’s talking not about insatiable desires for *income* but for *everything*. This is obviously ridiculous. I might be greedy and want a whole chocolate cake, but that doesn’t mean that if I’m given ten thousand of them I’ll want to eat the lot. I might be greedy and want a symphony composed for me, or a corporation to run, but that doesn’t mean I necessarily want a million symphonies or to be Emperor of the World.

Most desires are not insatiable. (It’s hard to find any that are, actually, at least in sane people.)

Ian Maitland

I have always been puzzled by the fact that some on the cultural left despise the accumulation of wealth but are horrified when it is not distributed equally. If wealth is dross why should we care that some people have more of it than others?

Wealth is, by definition, things that other people don’t have. If everybody in our country has it, then it can only be wealth by comparison with other countries where people don’t have it; if everybody in our time has it, then it can only be wealth by comparison with other times when people didn’t have it. Therefore, by definition, wealth is a form of inequality, and the desire to accumulate wealth is a desire to aggravate inequality.

– and sorry about having to come back to this ‘Italian Thing’ – and it might be…uncomfortable? – but this ‘insatiable drive to maximize income’ might be mainly an ‘American Thing’.
-(but NOT ‘German’ – there I made a mistake)

Like – every since Donald Trump asked my dad in the restroom of the Mar-a-Lago ‘how much he got’ -(supposedly ‘money’) I suspected it – and my dad never, ever was asked in any restroom in Italy -(or in Switzerland or Germany) ‘how much he got’?.

And when I heard that if somebody (like Branco?) wants an American passport he -(or she) also get’s asked: ‘How much he got’?
Meaning – America for sure wants to know if you have an ‘insatiable drive to maximize income’ before they give you a passport – while for example in Germany it doesn’t matter at all.
There they -(supposedly) ask you all kind of other ‘good’ things – about and I know it might be very uncomfortable for US Americans – especially the ones who got their being
American for free -(by the parent making ‘nookie’) – that this ‘insatiable drive to maximize income’ might be really this ‘American thing while an Italian just wants to drive a Ferrari – one time?!

@Nastywoman
I think I agree with you that the cultural value we sometimes give to wealth or income, where such wealth or income are a measure of the value of the person who has them instead of a measure of the stuff they can buy, sucks.
I believe it is true that this is more common in the USA than in other parts of the world.
I think Milanovic is wrong when he assumes that this is the reason we need growth: I think we need growth (expansion) because if the system doesn’t grow we go in recession, wich causes a lot of social problems.
The “wealth worship” isn’t really the reason we need continuous growth, because as pointed out upward wealth worship leads to a social hierarchy and as such is relative, growth can’t help.

@Reason 39
I don’t understand why you think that a “debt based” capitalist economy needs continuous growth, but a non debt based capitalist economy doesn’t:
Debt tends to accumulate because savers tend to reinvest their interest into other debt, so they have a “drive to accumulation”.
But the same goes for capitalists if they reinvest their profits into additional capital assets, so the only difference is if we assume that savers have a drive to accumulation, but capitalists don’t, which is a rather weird assumption imho.

“Isn’t why” should be “is or”. Stupid iPhone taking the wind out of my sails …

and about this @46
– needing ”growth (expansion) because if the system doesn’t grow we go in recession, wich causes a lot of social problems.”

It doesn’t at all if a rich country like US – distributes the wealth in a way Switzerland does.
And that’s why I posted the example of Switzerland -(countering Milanovics very annoying Italy example)

BE- cause if a country like Switzerland distributes the money the way it does – comes ‘NO GROWTH’ or so called ‘recession’ -(a stupid economical term) – the people are happy –
And that’s all we want – Right?
That the people are happy – or they erect a Doofus Von Clownstick for President and then Macron has to invite him for a parade just in order to get over the French recession by having US Doofuses believe – that we can visit Paris again and eat at Jules Verne and put a nice tip on our bill for our French Friends!!

So far as I can make out, the thread is largely indignation that, yes, we can too have capitalism without an unseemly obsession with making profits, endlessly, more and more and more. Unlike food or clothing or shelter, appetites for which are satiable, if only because of physical limitations on an individual humans’ capacity to consume, profit (and its manifestation as ownership) is indeed an insatiable need.

But the capitalist system is not a manifestation of human personality that constitute it, like the crystal whose shape is fundamentally determined by the charges and volumes of the ions that compose it. The nature of an army is not determined by the personalities of the soldiers. The existence of human beings who are not profit maximizers is as irrelevant to the function of the capitalist system as the existence of individual soldiers who are not happy warriors is to the function of an army.

So, yes, the man is right that the capitalist system is all about the endless pursuit of more and more profit, and this is an insatiable need. This is so true, that it should be a truism that the only economic crisis is a decrease in profits. Milanovitch may believe that what is necessarily true of capitalists is therefore true of everyone, or he may merely believe—correctly—-that it is basically true of every every effective actor in this system. And given the existence of private capital, with private power over the economy, then competition is inevitable. Even when individual capitalists jury rig individual accommodations with each other, the pacts break down.

The protest that “we” do not endorse these principles when we support capitalism (and its manifestation imperialism) is incorrect. They are not ugly excrescences added on by bad people pleasing themselves with their badness. An insatiable pursuit of profit and internecine competition with others (starting with the workers!) is inevitable. It is not a bad old idea, it is the reality.

Milanovic’s reasoning seems to me to suffer the same disconnect that game theorists suffer when trying to understand human behavior…

Some of you may be interested in this essay about the depressing pervasiveness of dominance behaviors. Nominally, it’s about the hostility and aggression of motorists against bicycles, and therefore irrelevant to Real People, but it happened to pop up as I was reading this discussion, and it sort of resonates. It’s not about grand political conflict, just people going about their ordinary daily business in ordinary daily life.

Nick Alcock 07.13.17 at 9:58 pm @ 40 —
It seems obvious that the desire for money and other abstract forms of wealth can be, and often manifestly is, insatiable. And not only in persons: corporations, states, and other institutions are set up precisely to embody an insatiable desire for wealth counters. That is why growth is always an issue: so that there can be more and more. A great many people may not be interested in it, but those who dominate and shape the social order are, because the social order is set up to serve them, by their design.

Anarcissie: very interesting, but worth noting that cyclists themselves skew heavily towards dominant social groups, at least in London
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/davehillblog/2015/oct/12/why-are-london-cyclists-so-white-male-and-middle-class

@19
“@Val: I don’t think you can draw a clean distinction between “caring” people and evil greedy patriarchists; ”

I am explicitly not drawing distinctions between types of people. That’s liberal individualism. It is what Chris is doing and it’s what I object to because he is ignoring gender.

Feminist theorists (in economics particularly Marilyn Waring) have conclusively shown that economics is – still – based on the idea that the production of commodities for trade is ‘real’ work, while caring for others (and the ecosystem, although that’s a slightly different issue) is at best subordinate and at worst invisible. This form of discourse and epistemology is a product of patriarchy.

This is not just a characteristic of right wing or pro-capitalism theorists. In fact, both Hobbes and Marx elided women and caring. Both said that ‘men’ needed to have children, but neither acknowledged women’s work in this. ‘Caring’, however, is much broader than only caring for children.

It’s pretty awful that CT bloggers, who would likely say they support feminism, just keep ignoring feminist theory.

@60 — It’s complicated. Coincidentally I just read an article complaining that very few of those who use bicycle ‘shares’ (that is, automated rentals like Citibike) in New York City are other than middle- and upper-class White people, and speculated as to the reasons. Among the speculations were internalization of dominant social values (riding a bicycle shows that you are poor, crazy, or otherwise marginal) to which secure middle-class types may be more immune. Another likely cause could be reasonable fear of the hostility which motorists and the police routinely show cyclists, compounded by very reasonable fear of racial hostility. Every motor vehicle is, after all, potentially a lethal weapon. Maybe someone will investigate.

@57+59
‘Branko Milanovic concludes: ‘All the rest is romanticism.’

– and even if ‘one knows personally a lot of Italians that are very unsatisfied of their economic situation’ – and ‘bearing in mind that those people one has met may, or may not, be representative of a group to which they belong’ – there still seems to be… concerning the issue of an ‘insatiable drive to maximize income’ – a little bit more ‘romanticism’ in a European country like Italy than – for example in the US – and I’m still not sure if Milanovic doesn’t regret that – as concerning – for example a two hour (business) lunch in Verona -(as instead of a 30 minutes sandwich in Manhattan – in order NOT to interrupt the ‘drive to maximize income’) – can make a yuuuge difference – if y’all know what I mean?!

And perhaps

@ 67
Yes it’s not that the CT bloggers are themselves boring, it’s about engaging with unworthy ideas. Maybe Milanovic tossed this off in a fit of gloom or cynicism or whatever – but it doesn’t seem like the deep thought that one would hope CT would be engaging with.

My particular frustration in this also, as I’ve said, is that this an area where there is loads of feminist theory and analysis, and it’s being ignored. I’d like to know why that is – not knowing, not caring, not being able to ‘see’?

This reminds me a lot of Waldman’s description of wealth as insurance. (This is one of the 10 most thought-provoking things I’ve read in the last decade; I strongly recommend it.)

Two themes that I wanted to comment on.

One, the left broadly defined has spent the last half-century trying to ensure that wealth and education are the only hierarchies that provide any value to those in them; it seems odd for a left-ish academic to mourn their success in this endeavor.

Two, I think it is critcal to note that “better and more expensive” does not necessarily mean “requires more raw materials.” My computer is 5% of the weight than my computer 20 years ago, and performs better.

@54

Yes, with these assumptions every social situation starts to look like a prisoners’ dilemma. The suboptimal outcome is I guess supposed to be mitigated by some deus ex machina technical innovation that will save us from living in a finite world populated by people mutually preying on each other.

“But without endless high growth how will people satisfy their bottomless greed?”

I think the part of the Milanovic post that renders it so hard for me to be charitable is where he asserts that everyone just wants to turn their relationships into networking opportunities, turn their apartment into a rental or car into a cab, and turn leisure activity into a brand on youtube/twitch/ravelry/whatever . I don’t begrudge the few people who thrive at this but I’m sick of being told it’s good for us all and anyway inevitable so just shut up and assimilate already.

Just to clarify a bit further – Chris was talking about individual ‘people’ making choices that don’t maximise their wealth, which is fair enough to a point – people do make choices.

But to ignore the whole history of gender, class, imperialism and colonialism – that history which Carolyn Merchant describes as positioning women, people of colour, and working class men as ‘resources’ for patriarchal capitalism – seems to be a strange oversight.

A particular example is when Chris says “people” choose to have children, which disadvantages them financially. I am not aware of any evidence that having children disadvantages men financially – as far as I’m aware the evidence usually suggests the reverse. Of course ‘the family’ income may decline, but conflating women with ‘the family’ and not acknowledging that it’s women who are financially disadvantaged by having children, seems to me again a strange oversight.

It all, as I say, looks like ignorance or blindness about gender, but why?

So, what does this non-Milanovician capitalism look like, and where is it?

Val, I may be mistaken (and you may not believe me), but I think I do understand, at least fairly well, what you write in this comment and in this comment. I don’t feel like any of that is news to me. Yes, I have previously heard that about how medicine in the Soviet Union was both a female-dominated profession and lower in the hierarchy of status and remuneration than in other countries where it’s a male-dominated profession (no, I didn’t specifically know that about telephonists in Australia, but it surprises me not at all); yes, I am aware of the importance of structural factors, and of power relationships; yes, I am aware that there is a connection between the fact that caring work is low paid or unpaid and the fact that it is predominantly done by women; and so on, and so on.

But none of that helps me to understand the thing I don’t understand, namely, what it is that you meant when you wrote ‘I am explicitly not drawing distinctions between types of people.’ I have tried to explain why this specific statement puzzled me and seemed to me not to fit with the rest of your comments, but perhaps I didn’t do a good job of it, because you have taken the trouble to respond to me, but in a way which does not help me to understand that statement.

Again I second Val: Why not discuss Raworth’s thoughtful, well-researched vision of a sustainable economy? Because she isn’t a “famous economist” by certain standards, that’s why.
If I may be permitted a little plug:
Growth in a Finite World – Sustainability and the Exponential Function
https://www.slideshare.net/amenning/growth-in-a-finite-world-sustainability-and-the-exponential-function
P. 98 you’ll find more literature on the topic of “Prosperity without growth” (Tim Jackson, 2011). The list is a few years old so Raworth doesn’t appear. Milankovic simply ignores a huge body of literature and he can get away with it, because well he’s famous. What is sad is that places like CT could be the space for pushing back against this ignorance.

nastywoman:

And then all kind of… can we call them ‘capitalists’? from all over arrived and they wrecked these perfect little (‘capitalistic’) societies

The answer to your question is “you can call them that as long as you also call the villagers “capitalists” if their societies were “perfect little (‘capitalistic’) societies”. But if it’s capitalist vs. capitalist, the word “capitalist” isn’t very useful, and you need to pick words that let you distinguish between the villages and the “outsiders”.

BTW, which of those flavors of “capitalist” is F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd?

@80
”What is sad is that places like CT could be the space for pushing back against this ignorance.”

– and what is even sadder is often the predominant theoretical -(or ‘academic’) pushback against theories which have to be already proven wrong in reality.

Like Milanovics Italian example he more or less bases his theory on – while in reality all these very well working economical concepts ‘WITHOUT GROWTH’ exist.

It’s a bit like the total ignorant US approach to Health Care – where WE -(the US) just could have picked one of the best (already existing and proven) – working models – but instead somehow we insist on discussing and inventing the whole thing from scratch?!

They are built on two “fundaments”: (a) at the individual level, greed and the insatiable desire for more, and (b) on the collective level, competition as a means to achieve more. These are not necessarily most attractive ethical characteristics for either individuals or collectives but they are indispensable for capitalism to function—they provide the engine that pushes it ever further

Apologies if someone has already said this, but the insatiable desire for more is not indispensable for capitalism to function. The Smithian argument with respect to butchers and bakers that we look “not to their humanity but to their self-love” is simply an argument as to why it doesn’t matter that human beings act selfishly, markets can produce good outcomes. It doesn’t say humans MUST act selfishly, otherwise the market will fail, far from it.

The benefits of markets (in appropriate situations and industries, not all ofc), are that they’re decentralised and allow multiple failure modes, rather than just subjecting the entire economy to Comrade Stalin’s Grand Plan, which can easily be gotten disastrously wrong. None of that *requires* selfishness – I can just as easily picture a market economy with totally selfless actors, everyone chipping in and helping out and trading on equal terms. (Obviously that leaves open the question of human nature and how selfish/selfless human beings really are/can be, but that’s another question)

And this isn’t even where growth comes from anyway. Really it comes from technological and scientific progress, cultural progress, including setting up new institutions and the rule of law, education, and Keynesian macroeconomic policies.

Anyway, it’s kinda ironic to have a discussion debating whether we can get growth down, when the big problem for the past ten years in the global economy is State’s consciously and unconsciously choosing lower growth rates and stagnation. Doesn’t seem like there’s an inherent tendency towards growth in capitalism in these circumstances.

of gloom or cynicism or whatever – but it doesn’t seem like the deep thought that one would hope CT would be engaging with

It runs through mainstream economics and other fields (IR?) and as Chris says had philosophical antecedents going back to Hobbes. Also arguably present in some more radical views (Bourdieu? R.D. Laing?) But by all means put your fingers in your ears and recite petty bourg verities about how people only really want ‘enough’ to live ‘decent’ lives if that makes you feel good…

But I also asked, ‘Where is it?’ That question was supposed to filter out non-implemented and failed utopian proposals, of which I have an ample supply already. I think Mr. Milanovic was talking about what is, not what ought to be.

p.s. clarification:

Re-reading the key passage excerpted in the OP, I see that M. does say that individual greed etc. is “indispensable for capitalism to function.”

By your (steven t. johnson’s) own statements @52, that view of M’s is wrong (“the existence of human beings who are not profit maximizers is as irrelevant to the function of the capitalist system as the existence of individual soldiers who are not happy warriors is to the function of an army”).

@LFC (but also to other commenters who IMHO misunderstand Milanovic’s position).
I think that Milanovic’s article should be read with M’s biography in mind: he was born in socialist Yugoslavia, then Yugoslavia had a rather traumatic change from socialism to capitalism, wich did lead to a very bad war and the dissolution of Yugoslavia itself.
He also has a certain knowledge of Marx, due to his upbriging, so he probably assumes that capitalism is based on continuous accumulation.
Now people all over the world have chosen capitalism over socialism, wich implies that people on the whole have chosen “accumulation for accumulation’s sake”, or at least growth in income over the more static soviet system. This is not a theory about psychology, it’s a description of an historical fact, at least from Milanovic’s point of view: how many serbians, croats etc. would like to go back to socialist Yugoslavia?

1) Since it is easy enough to scroll up and check, the problems so many have had with Branko Milanovic’s name (not to mention those deliberately mocking it) invites contempt and is possibly racist. Slavs and the Slavic descended don’t need this.

2) As far as reading feminists and incorporating feminist analysis, I currently have open Lisa Vogel’s 1983 classic and Esther Leslie’s biography of Walter Benjamin. Probably 40% of my reading is by women, and another 30% by half-woke men. If you want me to read particular women scholars, you have to make a good case, cause I already have hundred of books by women lined up. When am I gonna get to Agnes Heller?

As far as incorporating feminist critique into a given alien discourse, good luck, let me know, I have trying something similar for a decade.

(Sorry, please ignore comment with the guy’s name spelled wrong.)

I’ll third Val. Milanovic is well known (Chris Bertram has discussed him here before, I think) but Raworth sounds like someone whose theories might appeal to people who read CT, unless I’ve made a false assumption about who these readers are. Though Milanovic seems like someone who might appeal to this group also. But it seems very implausible that she’s as ignorant about the nature of capitalist economies and societies as he implies, so implausible that it appears to be gratuitously insulting. Why would he do this? Maybe to position her as too naively leftist to be listened to? Or maybe to position himself as a purer critic of capitalism than her? Or generally as a gatekeeper and her as someone we should agree with his policing of?

In fact, the fact that no one before Val brought this up, even, is strange.

okay, so feeling guilty or something I go look up “feminist economics” at Wikipedia. Wow, I don’t know those names and works at all, although I have encountered the themes repeatedly, in Silvia Federici, for instance. ( I am pretty much in the social reproduction camp.)

3rd principle, from Paula England, paraphrased: All actors are not selfish.

Care. Okay, one could base an analysis of the social world from a base of CARE (and it’s denial and exploitation), just as we do labour or marginal utility. This would be a radically different ontology from both traditional and Marxist political economy, theory would support a praxis, praxis would gradually and/or abruptly create a better world. I contend such an analysis is pretty incommensurable with other discourses, and would require their abandonment. Communication would breakdown, leading to hostility and resentment in both camps.

Intersectionality is really hard. Let me try a little.

Late capitalism is characterized, among many other things, by declining profits, overaccumulation of dead capital, and seriously increased global competition. In order to maintain accumulation, wages and relevantly, the social wage must be reduced. This increases underemployment and the amount of unpaid labour in social reproduction (everything from babies to housework to twitter and facebook to CT.) In addition, late (or all) capitalism is about techniques to extract value directly from unpaid labour and social reproduction.

Thus the “care economy” and the “value economy” are in a dialectical relationship, not merely overlapping, but describing the same thing from different standpoints. This is not so far from classical marxism, in which cooperation on the shop floor formed social and interpersonal bonds etc underpants etc revolution.

Thing is, the step in which I decide that the unpaid and socially reproductive cooperation between men on on the shop floor, or building onto his house, or going to community college is so qualitatively and radically different (rather than quantitatively, shades and degrees of privilege and power) than women doing the same things or other forms of unpaid labour is really hard. I can’t move uncritically to a feminist standpoint.

But I can see that a “caring” standpoint could be revolutionary and perhaps even effective. Try it out in Adelaide. I’ll be watching.

@93
”not sure what you’re parenthetically calling capitalist really should be called capitalist, as it conflates modern capitalism with most economic systems that preceded it.”

As I never have heard the word ”capitalism” I had to look it up and in the dictionary it said:
”an economic system in which resources and means of production are privately owned and prices, production, and the distribution of goods are determined mainly by competition in a free market ”

@79
But if it’s capitalist vs. capitalist, the word “capitalist” isn’t very useful, and you need to pick words that let you distinguish between the villages and the “outsiders”.

That is true??!

So would it have been better to write – that –
In a village ”an economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital goods, by investments that are determined by private decision, and by prices, production, and the distribution of goods that are determined mainly by competition in a free market” – is preferable to an ”outsider economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital goods, by investments that are determined by private decision, and by prices, production, and the distribution of goods that are determined mainly by competition in a free market”??!

Basically what Milanovich is saying is that growth is necessary, inevitable and desirable because there is no such thing as a general glut.

This is a “debate” in classical political economy and then in economics that should have ended two hundred years ago when Jean-Baptiste Say admitted that the “impossibility” of a general glut depended on how one defines “supply.” If not then, it should have ended 150 years ago when Alfred Marshall invoked the “magic wand of confidence” to prove that there is no such thing as overproduction. If not then, it should have ended 82 years ago when John Maynard Keynes showed why the economic system was not self-adjusting. If not then, it should have ended 20 or 30 years ago when it became clear to anybody with one functioning eye that trickle-down, supply-side economics didn’t trickle down.

At any rate, the whole point of the doctrine of the impossibility of a general glut was supposed to be a vindication of laissez-faire. Branko Milanovich is unwittingly promoting a doctrine of multi-national state intervention to insure continuation of a measure of “progress” whose most important advantage was supposed to emanate from its perpetual spontaneous generation.

Next, the government needs to build one, two, dozens… of nuclear power plants to insure that the perpetual motion machine doesn’t run out of fuel.

engels @ 103

Did you somehow miss the bit where I acknowledged that I was fortunate to be in the position I’m in?

Individual superannuation through work is compulsory in Australia. Again, as with the fact that Australia is a capitalist society, this is not a situation that I personally created, nor is it one that I agree with, because it’s inequitable. However, possibly because I am only one person in a population of 25 million, I have not yet been able to change Australian society completely (though I have to say that I have done a very good job on campaigning for our public health system on numerous occasions).

engels, if you are trying to say that no-one who has a decent (even modestly decent) income and a professional occupation should comment on CT, I think it would cut out most commenters. So why is it repeatedly me who has to be publicly singled out for contempt because of these things? Could it actually be because I’m a feminist?

Anyway enough of the personal spat. If you want to have reasoned debate with me, good, but if you try using contempt targeted at me again I will keep calling you on it.

nastywoman

As I never have heard the word ”capitalism” I had to look it up

The person to whom you’re referring said “modern capitalism”, not “capitalism”. The villages may well have been “capitalist” in the sense of the dictionary definition, but not in the sense of modern industrialized capitalist economies, as per, for example, orangewatch’s comment.

I think on reflection Corbyn doesn’t do negative politics does he, so he wouldn’t condemn the people, but he could have condemned the noxious ideas and lies they were telling.

MisterMr @94

Maybe Milanovic does think he’s simply describing historical facts, to use your phrase, but that’s not really how the blog post reads, istm. His biography/background is of some relevance, I suppose, but I don’t want to get into a discussion of the collapse of the USSR or the dissolution of Yugoslavia, not in this thread anyway.

(Btw, I don’t think the word socialism should be applied to the Soviet system, but that’s also best left for another occasion.)

The obvious play to invalidate your three arguments is to suggest that there are non-monetary values; that money is a means to an end. Children, for example. Or if you want to be cynical, that children are also a means to an end of personal — happiness? security? some fundamental biological teleology? Career choice can also be about status signals and all that, when money is traded against other similarly selfish aims.

Anyway, there’s nothing in your arguments that suggests that drawing the boundaries strictly around income is a fair move when discussing the Leviathan.

Alternatively, Hobbes has been discussed for a very long time, and there are quite a few potential critiques, including ones that don’t embrace humanism – but certainly some that do.

@Sandwichman 104

I think that Milanovic actually believes that capitalism causes general gluts, because I think (based on other posts on his blog) that he has an high opinion of Hobson, who had an underconsumptionist theory. I read his post as “oh dang, we collectively choose the capitalist route, so continuously increasing income becomes a necessity, wich could well cause gluts”. I cant read M’s mind tough so I could be wrong, however the idea that capitalism needs continuous growth and underconsumption theory are not opposed, they are often two sides of the same coin.
(Incidentally I don’t agree with M, I just think that his post is criticised for the wrong reasons).

@Val
I for one know next to nothing about feminist theory, and as a consequence I don’t know if I can engage a meaningful discussion with you.
However, for example, take the statistic that says that women in the USA have 80% of the income of men in similar occupations. This is a problem, isn’t it? But if this is a problem we want the income of women to increase, and we think that women are devalued by having a lower income, that is close to Milanovic’s point. We probably want women’s incomes to rise faster than men’s to close the gap, not that men’s income fall, and this requires overall growth. I’m not totally convinced by this argument (I think that income of some categories should fall), but it isn’t by itself an argument against this or that category of people.

Guy Harris@111 “Have you done any analysis that refutes the points he makes there?”

In 1880, if an economist contemplated a New York City with a metropolitan population in excess of eight million people, they might have concluded that the streets would be so deep in horse droppings the city would be effectively uninhabitable. I do not think we are justified in assuming technology will come to the rescue, but nor are we justified in assuming there will be no technological innovation. As for population and industrial production that stresses the carrying capacity of the biosphere? You tell me. Cite your sources, please.

Physical production can stagnate, or grow very slowly, while profits for the ruling class increase. Redistribution, revaluation after financial crises, speedup, etc.

Are people confusing themselves with notions about capitalist growth actually meaning an increase in human welfare? That capitalist growth doesn’t mean more wealth and income for the capitalists but a universal increase in the goods of life? That’s not capitalist reformism, but just plain capitalist apologetics.

Milanovic is not wrong because he endangers my “petty bourgeois verities” or because I need to believe that capitalism can be tamed morally. He’s wrong because he’s wrong about what people want and how they think. He – and people like Engels in this thread – are making a normative claim that humans are motivated by greed and the desire to accumulate more. This is simply not true. Engels mischaracterizes mine and Val’s position as privileged middle class people whining that money isn’t everything, and as always puts his own privileged arse on the side of the workers, but as usual he’s completely misrepresenting us. The issue here is not that money is more important than cultural capital (to draw on a recent internet controversy). The issue is the claim that the desire to grab more money is a fundamental part of human character or morality. That is fundamentally wrong , objectively and clearly, it’s just factually bullshit. If you can’t get something as basic as that right, you are a fucking idiot. It’s as equally bullshit as trying to build a feminist theory on “rape is biologically inevitable” or a social justice theory on “blacks are inferior.” Start from these positions and you will construct nothing of value.

As another commenter points out, capitalism doesn’t assume anything about the moral content of its actors, it simply assumed market competition is a useful way of organizing the distribution of resources. That’s it. Sure there is a scum of commentators that has floated to the top of the American right wing cesspit who think that this means all humans must be greedy grasping arseholes, but why would we waste our time on ideological discussion with such transparently mean-spirited and corrupt people? If Milanovic has imbibed their poison then I recommend questioning all his earlier work, rather than saying his earlier work justifies listening to this crap.

Also, if you’re a socialist revolutionary like Engels or McManus the hyper feminist , and you believe this rubbish Milanovic is spouting , you might want to ask yourself a few searching questions about how socialism will ever work against such a moral backdrop, and what legal and social mechanisms you will need to use to restrain this greed in a socialist society. If you’re having difficulty answering the second question, I believe Stalin and his buddies have a body of work on “the kulak problem” that you could look to for inspiration. Bonus revolutionary points if you see it as sensible guidance rather than a warning …

engels, do you perceive no difference in tone between

But by all means put your fingers in your ears and recite petty bourg verities about how people only really want ‘enough’ to live ‘decent’ lives if that makes you feel good…

and

Ime the idea that life isn’t all about money tends to be rather more popular among middle-class people than it is among the rich, the poor and the unionised working class.

and furthermore @ALL

– as somebody else has already mentioned Milanovic was born into ”communism” –
And as a (Italian) communist once famously mentioned that ”communism” is:
”When everybody drives a Ferrari” –
Milanovic perhaps REALLY was mainly thinking about that – when he wrote about an ”insatiable drive”? – and that ”communism” just hasn’t been done the right way (yet?)

Which could bring us to the question of:
”an economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital goods, by investments that are determined by private decision, and by prices, production, and the distribution of goods that are determined mainly by competition in a free market” –
(defined as : ”Capitalism”)

Perhaps it just haven’t been done right yet either? – even if a country like Switzerland -(and Germany) point to the fact – that ”great – great” paying jobs – a great social net – great affordable health care – great FREE education – great and long payed vacations – and a great life-work balance can be the result of ”an economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital goods, by investments that are determined by private decision, and by prices, production, and the distribution of goods that are determined mainly by competition in a free market” –

Which doesn’t mean that there are lots and lots of idiots – who prove the complete opposite.
Just like in Switzerland where the likes of of Roche, Nestlé, and ABB still exist – besides some really awesome – sustainable systems of a ”romantic little village economy” – and as my favorite cheesemaker always says:
”One day the (NOT GROWTH ORIENTATED) sustainable systems of a ”romantic little village economy” will take over completely -(the same way it already has taken over in some small communities in California – or anywhere else where sane people roam the earth)

Capisce?!

nastywoman:

<blockquoteAnd as a (Italian) communist once famously mentioned that ”communism” is:
”When everybody drives a Ferrari”

If that is, in fact, true, that leaves open the question of whether it’s a bug or a feature of communism. If Ferrari have finally figured out that thermoplastic fuse blocks probably aren’t the brightest idea in the world, perhaps it’s closer to a feature, although you’d probably best either equip them with some form of clutchless transmission – which I think newer ones have – or with lighter clutch springs. (And the excitement may well wear off after a while for some.)

I.e., not everybody would want a Ferrari. Trust me on this one, even if it shatters romantic notions of the wonderfulness of Ferraris.

Which doesn’t mean that there are lots and lots of idiots – who prove the complete opposite.
Just like in Switzerland where the likes of of Roche, Nestlé, and ABB still exist

And, in Denmark, the likes of Novo Nordisk still exist; that’s very nice for me, as, without companies such as Novo Nordisk, I’d be dead.

One day the (NOT GROWTH ORIENTATED) sustainable systems of a ”romantic little village economy” will take over completely

And they’ll be making either 1) injectable insulin or 2) treatments to let my beta cells grow back, without my immune system going on the attack against them again, hopefully. Otherwise, I won’t be around to enjoy those “romantic little village economies”.

Now, whether we’ll all be typing stuff onto Internet comment boards in that world is another question; unless there’s a way to make microchips without big expensive fabrication plants, of the sort that are unlikely to be buildable in a “romantic little village economy”, probably not. One might argue that we’d be better off without computers, cars, trains, automobiles, tractors, telephones, etc., and perhaps we would be, but if you’re going to predict a world made up entirely of “romantic little village economies”, make sure that world will be able to make everything you’d need, and that anything you’d want, but not need, that it couldn’t make is something you’d be willing to do without.

I think people in general are barking up the wrong tree with “capitalism” (I think it is just another form of power concentration – the alternatives aren’t really better). I think the problem is specialisation itself. If people put all their eggs in one basket, you are inevitably going to have very defensive lobbies pushing their particular special interests, the general good be damned. We need to reassure people about their economic security. Mass accumulation of assets is to a large extent just fear of losing privileges.

nastywoman:

”I’m not sure to what actual events in Swiss economic history the story you tell corresponds.”

Try it firstly with the ”Alpine Convention”

“The Alpine Convention in a nutshell” doesn’t seem to be particularly focused on small village cheesemakers. “PROTOCOL ON THE IMPLEMENTATION OF THE 1991 ALPINE CONVENTION IN THE FIELD OF TRANSPORT” speaks of “transferring an increasing amount of transport, especially freight transport, to the railways”. I don’t know of any locomotives being built by “romantic little village economies”.

The stuff I see on the Alpine Convention website looks pretty reasonable to me. But I’m kind of a left-brained person, and it all looks pretty left-brained to me; not much romanticism, which, for me, is a feature, not a bug.

Do you know that the home of Roche, Nestlé, and ABB came up with the idea to limit – in ”a ground-breaking referendum” – ”bosses” pay to 12 times that of lowest-paid staff … and that 34.7% of all Swiss already voted for that?

Yes, I did; I remember reading about it a while ago. It’s claimed here that the CEO-to-worker pay ratio (probably to the average worker, rather than the lowest-paid worker) in the US was 20-to-1 in 1965; even if you think pay is 100% determined by your “worth”, I’m not convinced that the CEOs of 2013 are 15 times better than the CEOs of 1965, so as to justify a 295-to-1 ratio in 2013.

But at least they banned “golden parachutes”, as they call them here in the US (called “golden goodbyes” in the article).

And about your idea that, the home of Roche, Nestlé, and ABB could hardly be described as having a romantic little village economy”.

It might be time for you to visit ”Die Alpen”??

Yes, although I suspect my visit would confirm my suspicion that, while the Swiss economy might include small village cheesemakers, most of the Swiss economy is made up of larger entities and Mittelstand-style businesses tied in with the Big Global Economy. (Blessed are the cheesemakers, but they’re less than 1% of GDP.)

@reason 127
(Note:I’m not an economist)

The problem is not “depositors” but creditors, aka “savers”. In my understanding a “debt based system” work this way:
Some people don’t want to spend, but they want to accumulate wealth. This could cause a recession but the government steps in and creates bonds, so the savers are happy because they get financial assets and the government recycles demand into the real economy through government spending; something similar happens through banks and private lending.
Eventually financial assets pile up and as they claim interest if the real economy doesn’t grow fast enough interests eat up a rising share of the pie.
The whole debt based economy exists because there is a group of people who wants to accumulate and not to spend, otherwise the government would have no reason to emit bonds.
If we speak of the real economy, as long as the economy is booming (expanding) a group of people (capitalists) is spending money not on consumption goods, but in additional assets (factories). When for whatever the reason they stop building new factories, a part of aggregate demand disappears, which makes existing factories redundant, which causes a vicious cycle of disinvestiment and fall in aggregate demand.
I take this as Marx’s theory of the business cycle, expressed in “demand side” terms.
From this point of view, the debt based economy is just a special case of the “overaccumulation” thingie, just what is accumulated is financial instead than real.
You say that there is no excess of capital, but this is true from your point of view but maybe not from the point of view of capitalists who would see their profit share fall as employment rises.

Regarding taxes and other ways to check accumulation, you might be right (I hope you are right actually) but this just mean that we accept that capitalism is based on greed and accumulation and we choose to put a check on it, not that capitalism is not based on greed and accumulation.

Val, JD, FaustusNotes: this will doubtless come as a blow to your inflated self-esteem but I really don’t care a great deal what any of you think of my behaviour or my politics.

Chris, I’ve got a fair bit of sympathy for what you’re saying; I didn’t object to the post but to some of the over-heated replies suggesting that the Milanovic/Hobbes views weren’t worth debating. I think the question of what poorer citizens of capitalist societies want is interesting and fraught. It seems hard to ignore the Hobbesian currents in popular culture anyway

PS. Val and FaustusNotes might reflect on the extent to which their online praxis lives up to their anti-Hobbesian principles…

This argument began with a psychological claim, didn’t it? The claim being that endless greed is the most important motivation of human behaviour and organising principle of society. This just seems empirically wrong to me. I know too many people who don’t give a shit about money beyond having enough to live on.

It may be true that these sentiments are more common in the middle class. Well, that makes sense, doesn’t it? In our current society, not having enough money leaves you gravely insecure and fearful. Of course poor people want more money, they need it. Once you have a certain degree of security, it becomes a secondary concern. I’d say that greed beyond that is a question of temperament rather than a universal. Maybe 20% of people think the way Milanovic says they do? I’d consider it an aberration. Most people can call an asshole an asshole.

I think the most interesting comment to come out of this was by whoever first brought up fear, because I think that’s something really missing from the standard analysis. I’ve spent my life on a low income and surrounded by low-income people, and our relationship to wealth is basically one of fear rather than greed. Fear of homelessness, basically. That’s the motivating factor, not a desire for status through wealth. That applies even more so for those with families.

I’m from New Zealand. Once in a while the business pages will publish an article bemoaning the tendency of business owners here to sell up when their business reaches a certain size rather than seeking to grow. There’s even a name for this – “the Three Bs”. Boat, bach (holiday home) and BMW. The idea being that business owners, having attained these three luxuries, decide they’ve done enough work and sell up. Well, what could be saner? It makes me feel a tinge of national pride.

@OP

First, I will play the devil’s advocate, even though I find Milanovic’s thoughts presented here neither congenial nor interesting and original at all. To begin with, I don’t think that he’s saying that income is people’s *only* priority; the fact that people may compromise and balance that desire with other priorities doesn’t seem to contradict his claim that social rank and income are *one* priority that is indispensable for the functioning of contemporary capitalist societies. And even if he had claimed that, the specific counterexamples wouldn’t necessarily disprove it:

1. Career choice: it could be argued that people choose things they know they are good at, because that maximises the plausibility of their attaining the highest possible income, or at least the highest possible social rank *within a specific sphere*. You know that you can never be anything like a great football player or a hot supermodel like some others in your class, so you study hard in order to become a tenured professor and hope that *this* will get you the status, prestige, adoration and fancy mobile phones that you crave.

2. Location: moving may lead to a lower *relative* social rank & income *within a specific community*. You know – better first in the village than second in Rome.

3. Children: children may be regarded as something that increases your status (after all, a perfect and complete life is commonly supposed to include having a partner, a family and children) or even specifically as a signal of income, as a luxury of sorts, an example of the ‘insatiable needs’ Milanovic mentions. You buy the children the most expensive clothes and toys, enroll them in the most expensive schools and so on – they’re like a Mercedes.

4. Political choices: political decisions, including ‘taking back control’ and reducing immigration, may be seen as a way to increase one’s social status and, frequently, income as well. Brexiters may have realised the country as a whole would get less resources, but they almost certainly thought that native Britons such as themselves (as opposed to immigrants, the immigrants’ employers, Eurocrats etc.) would get *more* resources (not just as a relative share, but also in absolute terms).

And now a couple of problems with Milankovic’s claims. First, as the examples show, even if people did inevitably want a higher social rank than other people, that still wouldn’t necessarily entail that they had to attain it through higher income, since there are other forms of prestige. Second, even if people did inevitably want to attain higher social rank specifically though attaining higher income than other people, that still wouldn’t necessarily entail growth, because the same thing can be achieved no worse and no better in a zero-sum game. Third, it is *not*, in fact, inevitable for people to attach great importance to attaining higher social rank and income – it is a fact of life that some people *are* more indifferent towards rank and prestige than others, and more inclined to view both other people and their own activities as something unique rather than something to be assigned a specific place in a hierarchy. These are also the more decent people, if I may venture to express a subjective political and philosophic preference, and often the more useful and less harmful ones in my experience. That is because there are just too many discrepancies between what leads to higher rank and income and what is actually beneficial for other humans.

Milanovic mentions insatiable needs, which is not *necessarily* connected to income and social rank at all. It is true that there always remains some part of your lifestyle that *could* potentially be made more convenient and comfortable – hence the so-called ‘insatiability’ – but that doesn’t have to mean that you desperately need ever more material resources. The same amount of food per month, the same amount of small luxuries per month, etc., with some variation – not an increase – are quite enough to keep a person happy.

There’s a lot to agree with in what people are saying here, but I still think we are tending to focus a bit too much on ‘human nature’ rather than social organisation.

So looking again at what Milanovic says:
“the really important counter-argument to Kate is that her proposal fails to acknowledge the nature of today’s capitalist economies. They are built on two “fundaments”: (a) at the individual level, greed and the insatiable desire for more, and (b) on the collective level, competition as a means to achieve more.”

He is ignoring two other “fundaments”, one obviously being an exploited working class, who (as we are all agreeing) are just trying to get by or escape poverty, rather than being driven by greed. The other is the ‘class’ of people who provide caring work, often unpaid or low paid, which historically has been organised by gender. It has been, and to a large extent still is, women who do this.

It’s really weird – it seems you can read an article almost every week in the mainstream media about how women still do most of the caring work and yet a prominent economist can still totally ignore it.

It is extraordinary to me, how much men are able to ignore women’s experience.

engels

Val, JD, FaustusNotes: this will doubtless come as a blow to your inflated self-esteem but I really don’t care a great deal what any of you think of my behaviour or my politics.

I don’t know how much you care, but the fact that you posted this comment demonstrates conclusively that you do care.

(I’ve a feeling there an interesting post by John Qoggin some years back about the tensions between these various Hobbesoid views: selfish genes v homo economicus v realism in IR…)

I cannot say that I am much impressed generally by casual references to “alternatives to capitalism” like these alternatives are in a box and on the shelf at Wal-Mart.

You’re in good company
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=recipes+for+the+cookshops+of+the+future

engels 134: “I think the question of what poorer citizens of capitalist societies want is interesting and fraught.”

It is certainly an interesting question and one that in my perception nowadays gets pathetically little public attention. However I haven’t see you contribute anything of substance to that debate we might have, except for suggesting that poor people only care about money, which I think is baseless and ignorant.

Huge mistake here by Milanovic and all involved. It is not ever increasing income that the uber rich and most everyone else seeks. What is sought it ever increasing price of assets. The ‘wealth’ of nations is measured in the mark to market price of assets and uber wealth is measured by the holding of assets, mostly financial assets.

The entire system is designed to inflate the prices of assets by the way. Such is the be all and end all of the ‘economy’ now. This will end.

MisterMr @132
“The whole debt based economy exists because there is a group of people who wants to accumulate and not to spend, otherwise the government would have no reason to emit bonds.”

I don’t think that is true, there is more bond issuing in war time when there is less accumulation due to desire to accumulate and more due to lack of production of consumption goods. And actually at present government bond issuance is a small part of credit creation, most of it is private.

It is also possible that investment can be made to save costs (either financial or environmental) rather than to expand consumption good capacity.

Hence it comes, too, that the social war, the war of each against all, is here openly declared. Just as in Stirner’s recent book [The Ego and Its Own], people regard each other only as useful objects; each exploits the other, and the end of it all is that the stronger treads the weaker under foot; and that the powerful few, the capitalists, seize everything for themselves, while to the weak many, the poor, scarcely a bare existence remains.

What is true of London, is true of Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, is true of all great towns. Everywhere barbarous indifference, hard egotism on one hand, and nameless misery on the other, everywhere social warfare, every man’s house in a state of siege, everywhere reciprocal plundering under the protection of the law, and all so shameless, so openly avowed that one shrinks before the consequences of our social state as they manifest themselves here undisguised, and can only wonder that the whole crazy fabric still hangs together.

@53

Faustusnotes, please try not to offer financial advice to people whose circumstances you know nothing about.

TM, I simply never said any of things that you appear to be angry about. I’ve also said before I think I’m not really interested in trying to argue with you.

It seems that I’m stuck in moderation for my misogyny again (the comment from 07.16.17 at 10:26 pm, currently with 10 approved comments after it). I just thought I should point this out to disprove Faustusnotes’ unfair accusations that CT bloggers give preferential treatment to racist brocialists such as myself. Give credit where it’s due! I tried to sneak in a misogynistic comment cunningly disguised as a rational contribution to the discussion, but Chris Bertram was on his guard.

TM 07.17.17 at 12:52 pm @ 149:
‘When Milanovic says that “De-emphasizing growth … is utterly unrealizable in societies like our modern societies”, does he understand what he’s saying? He’s saying that rather than trying to adapt “modern society” to the ecophysical limits of our planet, we should maintain an unsustainable economic system at all cost until we hit the hard limits and “modern society” collapses.’

It seems to me he understands that very well. The last paragraph of Milanovic’s cited article includes this: ‘If one really believed in, and wanted to argue for the incidental nature of economic growth (“whether or not the economies grow”), then he or she should start by trying to change the bases on which our (global capitalist) civilization has been built….’, but it is obvious that the incidentalists have no means, nor the slightest idea, how to actually change the bases on which our capitalist civilization has been built in any significant, general way. In any case they’re not doing it. Meanwhile our lords and masters are not only ranting about growth but very determinedly practicing it. They don’t care about the oncoming catastrophe, in the spirit of ‘In the long run, you’re dead.’

@Reason 154

I don’t really understand your point about war, it seems to me that it hasn’t anything to do with a normal economy.
Private credit creation is not different from government credit creation imho: if A buys at credit from B the bank will owe X dollars to B and A will owe X dollars to the bank; if B then spends X dollars to buy something from A then both credit and debt disappear. The amount of total debt can only increase if B doesn’t spend the money.

Perhaps though I misuderstood what you meant by “debt based economy”.

I don’t understand your point about investiment to reduce costs: if it recuces costs it increases profits, which increase the value of the capital asset.
It is also possible to invest to reduce eg. pollution, but usually businesses will do this only if forced by the goverment, precisely because such gains cannot be monetised/commodified.

Anarcissie 163: “Meanwhile our lords and masters are not only ranting about growth but very determinedly practicing it.”

Growth rates are much lower than they used to be in the good ol’ days. Maybe our lords and masters can’t will growth into being after all, just because they think it’s desirable.

I don’t know what “incidentalists” are supposed to be or whether I’m supposed ot be one of them, but I will freely admit that I do not have the means “to actually change the bases on which our capitalist civilization has been built in any significant, general way”. Do you? Does Milanovic? If you have the means, would you pass them over so I could use them too?

TM 07.17.17 at 9:16 pm @ 168 — ‘Incidentalist’ is short for Milanovic’s ‘one [who] really believed in, and wanted to argue for the incidental nature of economic growth.’

I would expect growth to become more difficult as a growth-episode matured, leading to ever more vigorous and indeed violent means to bring it about. Hence, mysteriously increasing imperial war, police surveillance, austerity for the poor, attrition of public goods, social stratification, media as propaganda, etc. etc. etc. — which we observe.

No, I don’t know of any way of affecting the social order above a very local level, given present conditions. But I think one early step must be to stop supporting fables about how capitalism can be reformed.

So we have the ‘people have kids for selfish reasons therefore looking after them doesn’t count as work’ line.

Channelling Dorothy Parker – though this is not a fresh hell, it’s a tired stale old hell.

– and I hope I (don’t) have to contradict myself – at least when it comes to the insatiable drive of a lot of Californians to maximize income from their houses? as there was this article in the NY Times about:
The Cost of California’s ”Hot Economy” – a Housing Crisis.
– and the writers blamed not not enough building (Growth?) for the crisis.

And I had to write them:
No it isn’t the Cost of a ”Hot Economy”.
It is mainly the Cost of ”Hot Speculation” – as you mentioned yourselves that there is a severe lack of AFFORDABLE homes –
There is absolutely NO lack of unnaffordable and luxury homes – as my e-mail account proves – by geting flushed everyday with offers of houses and apartments everywhere in California – for two, three – or more millions – after I toured a lot of these places a few month ago – from San Diego to SF.
And looking at these outrageous numbers from Europe you could come up with the idea of a conspiracy to turn the whole State of California into a very exclusive State for every ‘rich’ American -(not unlike ‘Manhattan’)

And with this conspiracy in mind – it says it all – if journalists blame a lack of building for the high housing prices.
Don’t they know -(from the housing bubble of 2008) – that if you turn Real Estate into a main object of specualation – you get the current California housing prices – the ”Boom” and then ”the Bust”?
And the excuse – that this time the ‘finacial bubble’ -(with suprime loans) isn’t as much in housing but more in cars Californians desperately need to ‘commute’ is no relief for the ‘average’ families which will (again) suffer the most from the speculative Bust.”

And then the NY Times changed the headline into:
California’s Housing Crisis Reaches a ‘Breaking Point’ – which – ”somehow” – made me think is Branko Milanovic ”in the market” for an apartment or house in NYC and he would prefer – if there wouldn’t be such an ”insatiable drive”… well you know what I mean…?

Anarcissie 07.17.17 at 10:28 pm Thanks, I know how to read. But what is that supposed to mean, “the incidental nature of economic growth”, that growth is a random phenomenon or what? Who argues for that?

I have pointed to the literature criticizing growth. Here are some refs:
• Herman E. Daly (1997): Beyond Growth: The Economics of Sustainable Development
• Herman E. Daly (2012): Eight Fallacies about Growth
• Richard Heinberg (2011): The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality • Tim Jackson (2011): Prosperity Without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet
• Kate Raworth (2017): Doughnut Economics

These I think are important contributions from economists who question the growth paradigm. Is Milanovic engaging with them, does he offer a critique of their theories, or whom is he even talking about?

“I think one early step must be to stop supporting fables about how capitalism can be reformed.”

I’m unimpressed with people who insist that nothing short of world revolution can save the world, and since the revolution isn’t coming, we might as well stop trying to do anything. Your pseudoradical rhetoric doesn’t invalidate my analysis, and neither does his pseudoradical rhetoric give Milanovic a free pass for promoting what are really economic fables, as shown in way too much detail in this thread.

people have kids for selfish reasons therefore looking after them doesn’t count as work

Nobody said that (looking after children is work and the burden of it falls disproportionately on women).

(Also, if your motivation for having kids was a selfless desire to do your duty for Australia or humankind, then I feel a bit sorry for your kids…)

@faustusnotes 173

“Engels, […] Your description of the conditions of the world from Marx, up above, bears no relationship at all to, for example, modern Japan, where I live. ”

What description? I scrolled up but I didn’t see it (i’ts a long thread).
What (written by Marx or Engels) bears no relationship to Japan?

For what I can tell from the outside, Japan looks like a very competitive society, expecially in education, where for example unpaid overtime is quite common. What is so un-marxist about Japan?

Mister Mr. @166
“Private credit creation is not different from government credit creation imho: if A buys at credit from B the bank will owe X dollars to B and A will owe X dollars to the bank; if B then spends X dollars to buy something from A then both credit and debt disappear. The amount of total debt can only increase if B doesn’t spend the money.”

???? Are you sure this is what you meant to write. It is completely mixed up.
What happens is A borrows X dollars from the bank (the bank then has a liability – money on A’s account and an asset the debt owed by A and A has an asset the deposit with bank and a liability the debt owed to the bank). Then A gives or transfers X dollars to B who now has an asset with bank and A no longer has an asset with bank. If B then buys from A the dollars move out of Bs account and land back on As. But the dollars still exist unless A pays the bank back.

But if the government borrows from the central bank it need never pay the debt back, and so long as the central bank remains the governments banker the government cannot go bankrupt which is where the real issues arise. So no, government debt and private are not the same thing, particularly if the government debt is owed to the central bank (i.e. it prints money).

As for the war thing, it was an illustration of a principle – i.e. that there are cases where the government creates debt for another reason than that people want to accumulate and not spend, sometimes the government wants to increase its spending faster than it increases taxes.

It seems that I’m stuck in moderation for my misogyny again (the comment from 07.16.17 at 10:26 pm, currently with 10 approved comments after it). I just thought I should point this out to disprove

If it makes you feel any better my comments stay in moderation even after comments posted after mine which are talking/ranting about me (not complaining at Chris or anyone else as I’m aware it’s a group effort but it’s still a bit odd)

There is a person on this thread who is impersonating me, but who is actually a defender of capitalism and claims to have had children for patriotic reasons. I haven’t seen her, but engels has spotted her on numerous occasions.

If anyone else sees her, please let me know.

Engels, do pay attention. I already do boxing and have done for 25 years. It doesn’t make dealing with revolutionary socialist misconceptions any easier, I can assure you.

I didn’t say Japan isn’t subject to the ills of capitalism, I said it’s not like the description you quoted. This would be because the description you quoted is from pre welfare state U.K., while I live in a society with a functioning welfare state and full employment. If you want to present a criticism of modern capitalism it might help to find someone writing about modern capitalism.

Has it never occurred to you that a beardy rich dude writing 120 years ago, who thought banging his maid was top notch revolutionary behavior, may not have a lot to say about modern economic relations? Or the best way to reform the modern social order?

engels @ 169
>I think you’re being a little unfair on the selfish gene proponents. The idea is that genes built humans (‘survival machines’ in Dawkins’ terms) to propagate genes and have given us the urges we have because they would have been effective in leading to their propagation in the primitive human world. I think that … doesn’t assume that anyone is ever motivated directly by the interests of her genes.

Well, since the genetically determined urges, especially in today’s world, are so far from necessitating actual reproduction, attributing actual reproduction primarily to the genetically determined urges (by designating it as ‘self-seeking behaviour on the level of genes’) seems inappropriate. If someone in today’s advanced capitalist societies, especially in the middle class and upwards, produces offspring and raises it, the chances are that they consciously and deliberately chose that, and the primary reason they made such a choice was not the urges, which they can satisfy in other ways, but cultural or ethical motivations at the level of the individual (motivations that would work even in the complete absence of the urges in question). Those motivations might range from the completely selfish to the completely unselfish – a desire to have what your culture has taught you to regard as a ‘complete’ or ‘normal’ life, a life like that of ‘other people’ or of your own parents, to be able to observe some sort of continuation or extension of your own self, a desire to give to someone what you were given by your parents (in a way, repaying a debt to humanity), to perpetuate the traditions/values/experience that you have acquired… you name it. Of course, inasmuch as every possible motivation and thought eventually presupposes some basic universal mechanisms of the human mind, every behaviour (including altruism, self-seeking behaviour on the level of the individual, cultural influences etc.) is attributable to the ‘selfish genes’ at *some* level, but that observation is so general as to be useless – basically a tautology.

@187
‘I think there is indeed a need for a lot more housing construction, and I think that the lack of building in, for example, the Bay area contributes to the problem you all are talking about.’

Me too – there is indeed a need for a lot more ”AFFORDABLE” housing constructing – but the problem we are talking about – ”the insatiable drive to maximize income” can’t solve that.

It makes – as proven in the Bay Area – ”the problem” even worst – (at least for everybody who is depending on ”affordable” housing)
And there is a very simple resolution to the problem – again proven by countries who don’t have concerning housing a much lesser ”insatiable drive to maximize income”.

and at @all
– that might be the main problem?
that it is in the case of the US centers of the ”insatiable drive to maximize income” NOT the ”insatiable drive to maximize income” which is the worst worrisome problem but this need to survive?

How do you survive – as an average American in an environment – where rent or housing could take 60 to 70 percent of your income? Or if you are a predominant ”younger” American by not beeing able to afford your own ”housing” and rent at all – and then sleeping so stereotypical in the basement of your parents house or on their sofa? –
you can’t survive that ”honorable” at all?
And then on top of it ”people” who can afford their own housing – making all these jokes about YOU becoming a ‘BernieBro’?

That is very, VERY… disappointing – and then in an effort of complete desperation YOU might join the very unpleasant bunch of ”Driving to maximize income Bro’s” – even sometimes going so far – joining a Wall Street Gambling Firm!

@reason 184

“What happens is A borrows X dollars from the bank (the bank then has a liability – money on A’s account and an asset the debt owed by A and A has an asset the deposit with bank and a liability the debt owed to the bank). Then A gives or transfers X dollars to B who now has an asset with bank and A no longer has an asset with bank. If B then buys from A the dollars move out of Bs account and land back on As. But the dollars still exist unless A pays the bank back.”

It seems to me your description of private money creation is more detailed but not significantly different from mine.

TM 07.18.17 at 10:32 am —
Because the ruling class of a capitalist state decides, under threat, that the more obedient members of the proletariat need to be bought off with a Welfare system for a while, does not mean that the state or capitalism has been reformed. It’s simply a tactic of self-preservation. When the threat recedes, Capital begins to rescind the Welfare. This procedural cycle can be clearly observed in the United States over the 20th and 21st centuries and I’m sure I don’t need to go into detail. One of the dark sides of the arrangement has been endless imperial war, carried out first by Great Britain and other colonial powers, and subsequently by the United States. That aspect of capitalism hasn’t been ‘reformed’ in the slightest. Others are militarization of the police, an ever-deeper system of surveillance, and the excitement of tribal passions to keep the proles fighting one another. Far from being eliminated or mitigated, these aspects of capitalism are being enhanced and expanded.

The essence of capitalism is domination and invidious exploitation of a working class by a propertied class. As many people do not like being dominated and exploited, the system can be preserved only by force, by means of violence, fraud, and manipulation. You can’t reform something away from its essence. You need to think about replacing it.

PS. I live in London and the Engels passage I quoted (nb. not Marx) seems to me pretty spot on.

Apropos:

https://mobile.twitter.com/helenksaunders/status/887278235226079233

TM 07.19.17 at 5:48 pm @ 203 —
Well, in this curious venue, it’s hard to know how simple-minded to be. My apologies if I’ve overdone it again.

Re ‘rational self-interest’ in 159, 191, 201: who is anyone to say which self-interest is ‘rational’? It gives me pleasure, therefore it’s rational and in my self-interest – that should be quite enough.

Re TM @ 197: engels’ ‘petty bourg verities’, as well as ‘sorry for your kids’ were, IMO, needlessly caustic and hostile-sounding formulations (and I say that quite independently of the fact that both expressed opinions were more or less contrary to the ones I had been expressing). However, your own ‘snowflake’ and ‘smart alec’ (the latter directed at Anarcissie) are completely overt insults, so I can’t help finding it a bit peculiar that you should be the one calling for more moderation.

Also, speaking of moderation – this might have been explained before, but if so, I have missed it: how are we supposed to interpret the non-chronological order of approval of the comments? Is this order supposed to reflect the degree to which the moderator appreciates a particular comment and considers it acceptable, or perhaps the degree to which he appreciates and trusts a particular commenter’s output in general? The way I see it, either my comment is bigoted, insulting and hopelessly idiotic, or it is not. If it is, it should be deleted. So far, none of my comments have ever been deleted, and yet it has become more and more common for them to be delayed relative to those of other commenters (thereby making it less likely for them to be read). For me at least, this engenders the distinct impression of a system of ‘gradient approval’, where one’s output is being graded by the authorities and placed higher or lower in some sort of hierarchy, one is penalised or rewarded (with decreased or increased exposure), and that for unspecified reasons about which one can only speculate. In the light of the comment policy, the tacit message of a relative delay would seem to be that one’s comment (or one’s overall output), while perhaps not so *completely* bigoted, insulting and stupid as to be deleted, is still at least *somewhat* bigoted, insulting and stupid, or at least *looks* suspiciously as if it might be bigoted, insulting and stupid. I can’t help wondering – is this intentional or just a side effect?

engels’ ‘petty bourg verities’, as well as ‘sorry for your kids’ were, IMO, needlessly caustic and hostile-sounding formulations

In my defence, they were directed at specific opinions, not individuals, and were embedded within substantive arguments which were entirely ignored (also, unlike some of my detractors I try to keep it brief)

F. Foundling@195 “Not to mention that for many, the transition to capitalism did not mean increased growth in income but the opposite.”

The thing is, the capitalist system is concerned with growth of profits. Capitalist restoration has been highly successful in restoring profits in the former Soviet Union. And the wealth of those profits is now entirely safe from the grubby hands of workers. Optimists are convinced the same is true in the People’s Republic of China. It is an article of faith that the growth of profits will benefit the mass of humanity. The number of billionaires can be considered the practical index of the success of capitalism in a given country.

Critiques of growth are not about criticizing capitalism for failing to actually meet human needs. Critiques of growth are not even about showing the impossibility of capitalist growth to meets the needs and wants of all humanity the same way it meets the needs and wants of the ruling class. Critiques of growth are about criticizing the mass of people for wanting things. Or at least so it seems. I’m not really seeing any indication otherwise. Again, most of the ire seems to be provoked by the thought our master cannot be expected to reform themselves, and be satisfied with what they have, rather than accumulating more and more.

Socialist states in the world economy and polity have functioned as strikes against capital. The fall of socialist states and the restoration of capitalism is functionally breaking a strike. Breaking strikes always encourages the bosses to take more.

Kim Stanley Robinson’s newest novel is very much about many of these issues. I had tried to post a snippet of dialogue from it before, to be informed that comments on this post were closed, and I’ve already returned the book to the library. But given the taste many here have for SF, any interested in this post would probably find the novel very interesting.

none of my comments have ever been deleted, and yet it has become more and more common for them to be delayed relative to those of other commenters

Cognitive illusion? Say they release 1/5 of the comments at random each time, if you get lucky you won’t see that others have been held back but if it’s you you’ll know it. Fwiw I don’t think the new system makes any sense and I’ve said so before.

– and I really like the moderation system here – as I practice – ”Random Dance” – and believe that one day we HAVE to stop making sense – and a threat were only comments make it nobody understands sounds kind of… interesting!

steven t johnson @212

Whatever the former Soviet Union was (bureaucratic collectivist(?), state capitalist(?)), it was not a socialist state.

As to China, it has managed to pull a large number of its people out of extreme poverty in recent decades, though a more egalitarian growth strategy could have done even more in that respect, while moderating the increase in inequality.

Henry @215:

Thank you for the explanation! That might explain what I’ve mentioned to some extent. So the user interface actually favours a *reverse chronological order by default* because the newest comments appear at the top. In that case – well, it’s your blog and your right to do whatever you want, of course. You can approve comments in alphabetical order, in order of length like the Surahs of the Quran, in a completely random order, or in accordance with any other principle that pleases you. Still, *if* you have decided that you want to make it possible for commenters to conduct a meaningful discussion and a conversation with each other, I think that it’s reasonably clear that the appearance of comments in any other order but the chronological one goes against this purpose – the dysfunctional consequences include not only changes in comment numbering and hence broken references, but also participants not seeing and not being able to react to some contributions to the discussion at all. So I will venture to suggest that for the given purpose, it might be better – and, if I’m not mistaken, not really noticeably more laborious – to scroll down to the bottom and start from the oldest comment, not the newest one (which is also what I at least do with my emails, other things being equal). In the same way, delaying all comments a little more would arguably have less negative effects than temporarily skipping some and thus scrambling the order. But, again, certainly, fiat voluntas vestra.

engels @214:
It didn’t seem plausible that the order could be random, technically. That aside, I now see that my wording was grammatically ambiguous. I didn’t mean to say that it happens more often to me than to other commenters, just that it seems to happen to me more often than it did before; it didn’t happen at all for some time after the new system was established, and recently it has been happening in, I think, about 50% of the cases. I do know that others are held back, too – I often accidentally find out later that someone has said something that I didn’t see and react to at the time.

Adding on to what Harry says, when I go through the moderation queue, and I see comments to someone else’s post that seem middling truculent towards someone else, I am inclined to leave them in the queue, because different posters have different degrees of toleration towards aggressive behavior and I don’t want to step on another poster’s toes. So if you find your comment languishing longer than others, it is possibly (not certainly) because your comment is sufficiently aggressive to be in the judgment zone. I suspect that other posters sometimes think similarly. That this means that aggressive comments looking to get fights going, or contribute to ones that are already ongoing, sometimes take longer in a general sense, is an emergent rather than intended property of the system (albeit one that I am not personally perturbed by).

Steven t Johnson @ 217

“I still do not see how people can favor a stationary capitalism without favoring stationary populations, something which has never been seen in human society before, so no one knows how this might work”

You may be aware that almost all wealthy nations now have birth rates below replacement rate, but it is not evident from your comment, so I’ll just emphasise it. The reason population keeps growing in wealthy countries is primarily immigration.

@steven t johnson
Trying to come up with a political normative/ideal type definition, that is capitalism=democracy, you end up with all sorts of misleading nonsense in my opinion.

I’ve never said, and never would say, that capitalism=democracy. I see no point or validity in this equation, whether it’s meant ideal-typically or otherwise.

Foundling 07.20.17 at 4:05 pm: I do care about debate standards a bit. I’m convinced that the bad behavior exhibited by some commenters would cease if there were more pushback from the rest. I ask you to consider that your conflating gratuitous insult with pushback provides encouragement for the bad behavior.

I don’t care that much about engels’ silly ad hominems but I don’t like to be falsely accused of misrepresenting another commenter, especially when I have taken the care to both quote verbatim what he said and engage with the content in detail, as I have done at 07.17.17 at 8:53 am, to which engels responded 07.17.17 at 2:23 pm. As of “smart alec”, that was snark but an insult? Certainly not. I think Anarcissie and I have had a respectful exchange here despite serious disagreement. Thanks!

Re the issue whether the USSR had real socialism – it depends on your definition. Do you define socialism as any case of state control of the means of production or only as control of the means of production by ‘the people’ (by a democratically self-governing collective)? Is it any case of control ‘by the society’ regardless of how that society itself is governed, or only control by a ‘society’ (a group of ‘associates’) that ‘truly’ (democratically) governs itself? If the former, how is Inca Empire-style ‘oriental despotism’ (or even feudalism) not ‘socialist’, and are we to accept that a slave plantation or a prison are internally organised in a ‘socialist’ way? Obviously, if these latter are socialisms, then they aren’t the socialisms that people dreamt of and fought for. ‘Revolutionary social-*democracy*’ was the name of the movement, ‘freedom’ was a buzzword, and even the ‘dictatorship’ was supposed to be ‘of the proletariat’.

The mechanism through which the ‘dictatorship’ would end up truly representing ‘the proletariat’ was partly a conventional representative-democratic one and partly – and most unfortunately – a matter of quasi-mystical faith: it was sort-of assumed that it would just happen by itself, in the same way as the state ended up representing the interests of the bourgeoisie in a capitalist democracy as well as in a capitalist dictatorship without the need of an official mechanism ensuring that. Well, it turned out that the difference between a democracy and a dictatorship did matter. That’s hardly surprising: when power is taken away from private hands and concentrated in the state – when it shifts from the economical into the political sphere – it should be obvious that the way in which that state and that political sphere is organised not only doesn’t decrease in importance, but it is exactly at that moment that it becomes crucial!

Even assuming for the sake of the argument that communist states were indeed states of the proletariat (or of ‘the people’), the connection between them and ‘their’ class turned out to be much more problematic than the one between bourgeois states and theirs. While they did seek to appeal to the population and created extensive welfare systems that benefited it, that seemed to differ only in extent and not in principle from what was done by many capitalist states. The states still remained highly distinct and alienated from the population, with sufficiently palpable differences in living standards and enormous differences in power, which is why capitalist restoration was so easy: the ruling elite was able to simply transform its political power into economic one without any significant resistance from the population. The people didn’t object to being deprived of its property, because it didn’t have the clear feeling that it was its property in the first place.

Ps—just for the record here’s what I said (which you did indeed copy-paste—awesome!)

Ime the idea that life isn’t all about money tends to be rather more popular among middle-class people than it is among the rich, the poor and the unionised working class.”

and here’s your version of it, beginning just a couple of sentences later:

engels really thinks that the only concern of unions is wages
Some of us (apparently not including engels) think that we should aim for an economy that doesn’t produce rich and poor people.
haven’t see you contribute anything of substance
poor people only care about money, w

Perhaps you see the problem. Or perhaps not.

TM@229 “Can you provide references for authors who favor a non-growing economy with population growth? I don’t know any who do. And can you provide evidence for the claim that population stability “has never been seen in human society before”? I think the opposite is true: the population growth of the last few hundred years has been totally unprecedented in tens of thousands of years of human history.”

Population growth is economic growth. A stationary economy therefore precludes population growth, unless some segment of the population suffers absolute immiseration. But then, at some point, inability to reproduce, or actual premature mortality will obtain as the inevitable result of increasing poverty.

In my best judgment, economists who advocate stationary economy need to address issues of population control. And, who is to be the permanent underclass. Or, how there is to be no more underclass. The thing about all the anti-growth people I’ve seen, is that that don’t seem to care about these issues. This is why they smell so fishy to me. They certainly don’t seem to be thinking through the issues. In other words, I think it is incumbent upon you to provide references to economists who address these problems.

As to the other issue, the supposedly unprecedented growth rates of the last few years, I do not have access to a university library. But, exponential growth in an invasive species like humanity is fairly common in nature. The massive absolute increases in population in the later stages is shocking. But looked at from a global perspective, since the population die off about 70 000 years ago, population growth has been fairly consistent. The apparent population explosion is just the later phase. I suppose you might argue that human population growth is logistic instead of exponential. But again, I think that claim is the one that needs more support.

Last and least, Germany has not been a stationary economy. Even more to the point, its workforce has undergo expansion and contraction with temporary workers, plus permanent immigration. You seem to be under the impression that what happens in one particular part of the global economy/ecology can be held to be typical of the whole. Or represents the norm the rest is approaching. Or something too confused to understand.

As to the other issue, the supposedly unprecedented growth rates of the last few years, I do not have access to a university library. But, exponential growth in an invasive species like humanity is fairly common in nature. The massive absolute increases in population in the later stages is shocking. But looked at from a global perspective, since the population die off about 70 000 years ago, population growth has been fairly consistent. The apparent population explosion is just the later phase.

The Toba catastrophe theory hypothesizes that the human population may have been reduced to as few as 10,000 individuals about 70,000 years ago. Global annual human population growth peaked at 2.1% in the early 1960s. Current growth rates are about 1.2%. Starting from 10,000 individuals, 70,000 years of 1.2% growth would have produced a current human population in excess of 10^362. What about 70,000 years of only 0.12% growth? Then more than 10^36 humans. The Sun and all the planets combined mass less than 10^31 kilograms.

engels: if “the idea that life isn’t all about money” isn’t very popular among “the poor and the unionised working class”, I gather the more popular idea among these groups is that life *is* all about money. If that isn’t what you meant to say, perhaps you haven’t expressed yourself very clearly and perhaps attacking the critic for taking your statement literally isn’t enhancing your credibility.

I also note that the sentences of mine you quote are pasted without context and not indicating omissions, another observation that isn’t enhancing your credibility.

@steven t johnson 07.25.17 at 3:10 pm

Most of what I would answer is already explicitly or implicitly stated in my original comment. Still, here are a few remarks.

1. As expected, you have a certain concept of socialism that is compatible with Soviet-style systems (adding some additional conditions to the one in my comment). I will reiterate that other people have different concepts, to which the factors I brought up in my comment are more integral than they obviously are to yours.

2. Apart from the definition of socialism, you mention some supposedly unique characteristics of the Soviet state; most of them are either not unique or highly disputable. You also mention the ways in which it benefited its population greatly; yet, as you know, it’s also easy to adduce ways in which it mistreated its population. That mixed bag of very good and very bad things proves that there was *something* unusual about it – nobody is denying that – but that is not at all the same as proving that it was a true socialist state.

3. A few things that you attribute to me and that I haven’t said:

3.1. ‘the socialist state was a mockery of humanity’ (no more than states on average are)
3.2. ‘there was no difference between the Soviet Union and the Yeltsin/Putin regimes’ (there was a difference, but not one of principle *concerning the power distance and alienation between the state and the population*)
3.3. ‘I love so much the Yeltsin/Putin regimes’ (I don’t)
3.4. ‘I extol some countries’ (I’m not really the extolling type, so you’re probably confusing me with someone else)

4. You dispute the easiness of capitalist restoration. What I referred to is that it became easy as soon as the ruling (‘Communist’) elite itself decided to embark on that course: there was no resistance *of the popular masses* and no attempt on the part of the *people* to defend or reassert its (alleged) control over the means of production. The events of 1993 were a conflict between extreme reformists and moderate reformists; neither side advocated a wholesale return to a Soviet-style planned economy (although, naturally, the remaining far leftists favoured Parliament). The attack on the living standards and the corruption that you mention are, if anything, more evidence of how easy restoration was: the elite was able to get away with enormous abuses without the people rebelling. At worst, the population would occasionally vote for the (more or less reformed) ‘Communists’, and that would change little or nothing.

5. Finally, you keep insisting vehemently, in spite of my comments, that since I do not approve of the Soviet-style system as it was, then I must approve of capitalism, or at least of capitalist restoration in the Soviet bloc. I’m sorry, but that dichotomy is false (speaking of which, no, I’ll have neither Zhou nor Jiang Qing, thank you very much). I do *not* personally regard the return to private ownership of the means of production in the late 1980s and early 1990s as a good thing at all, and I would *never* have chosen that route if that had depended on me. It’s not my fault that the ‘Communist’ establishment had decided firmly that they wanted exactly that, and that by their (mis)management of ‘socialism’ in the preceding decades they had successfully brought the majority of the population to a condition in which it wouldn’t object.

Matt 235: You are correct of course. It’s always weird when somebody tries to argue with elementary Math.

When I was teaching, I used this little exercise:

Starting from “Adam and Eve”, how many times has human population doubled until it reached the present level? And how long would it have taken humankind to reach that level at the current growth rate?

You don’t need a calculator for this. Remember the rule that ten doublings make a factor 1,000. 30 doublings make billionfold. So Adam and Eve needed only 32 doublings.

If we start more realistically from an initial population of 10,000, it’s just 20 doublings. At a constant growth rate of “only” 1%, it would have taken only 1,400 years for a population to grow millionfold, 2100 years to grow billionfold.

See slide 74 in the already referenced https://www.slideshare.net/amenning/growth-in-a-finite-world-sustainability-and-the-exponential-function
More material: https://www.slideshare.net/amenning/exponential-growth-casestudies
https://www.slideshare.net/amenning/the-human-population-challenge

Matt@235 Yes, exponential growth rates will result in population crashes, effectively resetting the process. New technology allowing resource mining has allowed this iteration of the same process to go on much larger. But there is no reason whatsoever to think that human populations have been stable. No evidence I know of suggests they have ever been anything other than growing exponentially til collapse. If you wish to argue human population growth has been logistic, I think the burden of proof is on you. The social mechanisms that accomplished this feat would be of great interest.

The thing about the anti-growth faction—which includes sustainable growth advocates, which means no growth beyond what won’t damage the biosphere—is that at this point, they display no interest in how population is to be controlled or how material benefits are to be distributed. Absent actual arguments on what they do advocate on these issues, the default is, population is to die off to carrying capacity, then excess mortality due to poverty will sustain a Malthusian utopia.

Lastly, genetic analysis indicated a population bottleneck from about 70 000 years ago. The Toba hypothesis may or may not be in favor right now, but it was proposed as an explanation of the genetic data. I suppose the population bottleneck could be identifying a key phase in speciation of homo sapiens. But that would be pretty unorthodox. All popular views see humanity as having a long, long, long history of natural selection perfecting the species, not just Evolutionary Psychology.

LFC@236 Freedom is not being able to buy what you want if you have the money, which is your implicit standard, whether you realize it or not.

In any event, you single out as support for an Egypt that had been attacked by the last imperialist colony attacking indigenous peoples; Soviet (also Cuban and E. German) support for the Angolan government whose defeat of South African troops at Cuito Cuanavale played such a vital role in the downfall of apartheid in South Africa; E. Germany, whose assistance at Cuito Cuanavale is so unforgivable.

Your assumption that no one could possibly think the restoration of a unified German state hasn’t promoted imperialist oppression may rest either on the assumption that if Germans can buy what they want they must be free, or that there is no such thing as imperialist oppression. Either belief seems shaky to me.

You would be better off explaining how the democratic countries have been supporting freedom. You can start with the US, detailing how it promoted freedom with its interventions with big invasions in Korea, in Vietnam, in Iraq, in Afghanistan…but don’t forget the smaller interventions like Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Panama, Haiti, Somalia, Lebanon, Syria, Iran. Or just your basic intervention in politics with money and propaganda, as done by James Jesus Angleton in Italy after WWII.

This is of course an incomplete listing. No doubt it would be simpler if everyone accepted the dogma, capitalism and democracy are indistinguishable and inseparable and inevitable (forever.)

F. Foundling@238 As to your effort at a reply, unnecessary as it was…
1.Many conceptions of socialism are incoherent, obscurantist, covertly propagandistic. You want to make an objection, you have actually make an argument, not just say in effect, other people disagree. All your objections as near as I can tell also refute the existence, if not the very possibility, of true democracy as well as true socialism. This would explain why you don’t want to actually express your argument, of course.

2. You won’t define a true socialist state, but you still insist that I provide a proof that the USSR met an ideal type. I don’t think ideal capitalist states existed. At their origins they were markedly very similar to the medieval societies which incubated them. Your cloudy simulation of actual thinking is irrelevant to reality. These ideal type, individual personal psychological/moralizing “critiques” ultimately cannot serve any purpose other than explaining how “my” side is superior.

As for the notion that there was nothing unique about the USSR by comparison to capitalist states, this is false. And this is disputable only for people who disregard mere facts. You have no problem with the system that carried on the anti-Communist crusade, because you equate, for example, like LFC above, the USSR with empire. The English are still in Ireland, but the USSR gave away its empire. Catalonia and the Basques are still part of Spain. Empire don’t give empires away. If you have deluded yourself into thinking the USSR in 1989 was like Portugal in 1975, you’re crazy.

3. If your point is that I’m not quoting your words, of course you’re absolutely correct. I am nonetheless correctly characterizing the impact of your words. For instance, your double standard for real capitalist democracies (insofar as you distinguish capitalism and democracy) where they go unexamined and socialism is rejected for not meeting an ideal has the effect of extolling the capitalist democracies. The years of adulation from people like you was of course years of effort dedicated to capitalist restoration. I’m sure you and your co-thinkers and your resolute forebears who fought the struggle of ideas against Soviet socialism for so long didn’t dwell on how you were implicitly extolling democracy/capitalism. That would have been impolitic. No doubt you disagree.

But amusingly enough, at one breath you claim there is no difference in principle between Soviet socialism (which evidently is wicked because it is not ideal democracy, i.e., in practice, capitalist,) and the Yeltsin/Putin regimes. Capitalist restoration is not a difference in principle? Then, the next you claim you don’t love Yeltsin/Putin. Redbaiting Yeltsin/Putin is not a sign of disaffection from Yeltsinism/Putinism, it’s discreet politics. Admitting you actually support the essentials of what they did would be embarrassing. Fundamentally you think Yeltsin/Putin improved things, because like LFC knows, freedom is being able to buy what you have the money to pay for. Not having enough money to be as free as you want is not a principled stand for democracy.

4. Again, you falsify the ease with which capitalism was restored. Stalin devoted immense efforts to weakening anybody else’s role in the state. No doubt it is rhetorically useful to pretend this was the inevitable outcome of socialism, which in principle destroys democracy by destroying capitalism. But I suggest it was precisely because it wasn’t inevitable that so much blood had to be spilled. The inevitable doesn’t need so much effort. Also, it is perfectly obvious to you that Stalin’s propagandists never lied about being orthodox Marxists, but not to everyone else. But it wasn’t just Stalin’s efforts, but yours and your co-thinkers who spent years at great risk slowly educating the people against socialism, with a wink and nudge that it was just criticism of this kind of socialism.

But of course you are right that the event itself means something. The thing is, when a dispute between extreme reformists (fellow counterrevolutionaries, you mean) and moderate reformists (also fellow counterrevolutionaries you mean,) into a massacre, it happened because angry crowds intimidated the police into giving up. Yeltsin had to get new troops. And, yes, I’m one of those people who thinks Yeltsin falsified the election results after as much as he could, and was still repudiated. I think that with leadership Yeltsin could have been ejected from office, fairly easily. But I also think that it was the deeply reactionary ideology sowed by people like you that intimidated the leaders with the thought that revolution is anti-democratic. It isn’t.

As usual, by the way, the reproach that the people didn’t rise up en masse to kick out the oppressors, therefore they must not be oppressors, but the champions of the will of the people, therefore it’s the people who are responsible for the evil? Doesn’t just apply to the Soviet Union in counter-revolution. Only your sycophancy toward the capitalist/democratic ideals you extol keeps you from exclaiming in indignation how easily the ruling classes plunged the entire world into war, killing millions of people. The Kaisers and the Prime Ministers and the Presidents (I exempt the Tsar lest I really provoke your ire.) Slaughter in the streets of Moscow mean nothing to you. Plainly if the people were worthwhile they would have sacrificed their lives, whether it’s the mob in Berlin or Paris or London or Rome or Moscow.

Sorry, to me, this smack of simple hatred of the common people. Losing your job, or having your wages not paid, or having rampant inflation eat away at the necessities of life are mere inconveniences, not intimidation! The people killed in Moscow meant nothing to you, but they meant something to people who were tempted to resist…terror. Your position is really, it’s not terror if it’s done by my side.

5. False dichotomies are easily refuted by simply pointing out your real position. Neither Zhou nor Jiang Qing is not a real position. I suspect your real position is Chiang Kai-shek’s successors. And so it goes for pretty much everything your say. When you will not say what you really want, everyone should assume the default, that you want what you imply. If you feel uncomfortable when what that is clearly put into words, everyone feels uncomfortable when they are caught out at meanness.

As for the Communist establishment firmly deciding that it wanted restoration, the State Committee on the Emergency was a fake? The CC members were CP establishment. How many of those people are billionaires and politicians today? (Or were when they died?)

stj 244: “No evidence I know of suggests they have ever been anything other than growing exponentially til collapse. If you wish to argue human population growth has been logistic, I think the burden of proof is on you. The social mechanisms that accomplished this feat would be of great interest.”

This is really precious. After having provided not one shred of evidence, not a single data point, no reference, nothing, to support your wild claims, you boldly declare that the burden of proof is on the other side to refute your absurd hypothesis of an eternal exponential growth/collapse cycle. No matter that such evidence *has* already been provided. FYI, if you were familiar even just with modern population data, you’d know that world population isn’t growing exponentially any more, it has been linear for about 30 years and all projections predict a stabilization by the end of the century, indeed a logistic growth pattern. As to the social mechanism stabilizing population, there is a huge literature on that topic, keyword demographic transition.

It’s also worth pointing out that no biological population ever has been observed growing exponentially over more than short time periods. What is observed in nature are a number of patterns – logistic growth, fluctuation, growth and collapse, stability. This is a well researched science and you show no indication of being even remotely familiar with the literature. This debate has become so bizarre one has to ask if you are some kind of fundamentalist cult member utterly invested in an obscure belief system.