Socialist utopia 2050 …

The old Zizek line about it being easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism has become a cliche.

In any case it obscures the fact that some people would prefer the end of the world to the end of capitalism.

Guardian commentators (dread phrase!) can snark all they want, but, 100 years ago Rosa Luxemburg wrote it’s ‘socialism or barbarism’.We chose barbarism and got….well you all know what we got.

Now the choice is ‘socialism or total environmental destruction’ and many people are intent on making the wrong decision. Again.

The key point, as the OP pointed out, is that no one actually believes in capitalism any more: hence all the blah blah Stalin, Chavez blah blah Utopian blah blah guff.

It’s literally ‘Project Fear’ because there’s no positive case to be made.

General objections to any kind of utopian thinking, even the very modest version in my article

Reading your article I feel one plausible response is that you haven’t actually tried to describe a utopia, so general objections to utopias don’t apply, but I would be interested in any response you have to those general objections.

What I haven’t seen, interestingly, is any suggestion that continuing expansion of financialised capitalism (aka neoliberalism) would produce a better outcome.

Continuing expansion? What would that be? Heute die Welt, morgen das Sonnensystem!?

Ali’s partner, Sam

I see what you did there.

Instead of free education, Sam received a grant of $100,000 at age 20, to be used in starting up a small business, in Sam’s case, a coffee shop. (A society without coffee shops would be a pretty poor excuse for utopia.)

In your version of 2050, what’s the failure rate for small businesses started by twenty-year-olds with grant funding, and how do the failed proprietors cope?

Like most workplaces, Ali’s credit union is open for the standard four-day, 30-hour week. With Monday as a regular day off

Why Monday? Why not Friday, or Wednesday?

I thought it might be worth trying to imagine life in Australia in 2050, a few decades into a socialist resurgence, though well before the emergence of society that could truly be described as socialist. In the utopian vein, I’m going to look at a future where everything has gone as well as could reasonably be hoped. However, I’m going to make every effort to be realistic in terms of the economic constraints involved, and not to invoke radical and unlikely changes in human nature.

In your version of 2050, what do the history books say about 2019?

RobinM

Have we already gone so far down the road to destruction that socialism cannot save us?

Yes. We are all going to die, the human race is going to become extinct, and the planet is going to become uninhabitable. If you were not already aware of these facts, I don’t think there’s any way of breaking them to you gently.

Hidari

The old Zizek line about it being easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism has become a cliche.

Maybe John Quiggin and I have stronger imaginations than you or Žižek.

In any case it obscures the fact that some people would prefer the end of the world to the end of capitalism.

I don’t think there are any such people. I think you’ve just made that up.

The key point, as the OP pointed out, is that no one actually believes in capitalism any more

I decided to test that proposition by doing a search on DuckDuckGo for “I believe in capitalism”. It turns out there are lots of people who are prepared to avow their belief in capitalism, some of them in significant detail.

Your piece, John Quiggin, wishes away scarcity. The outcomes it portrays are not what will actually happen if the policy changes you describe are enacted. Citizens of countries with a higher degree of economic freedom are richer. You can verify from the World Development Indicators and the Economic Freedom of the World index that freer countries have higher GDP per capita at purchasing power parity. You can verify that their citizens do benefit from this higher GDP per capita, as freer countries also have lower income inequality, as measured by income Gini coefficients. Incidentally, consumption inequality is the metric that one should be looking at. But the World Bank doesn’t provide data on that.

It is mainstream economics that taxes not on land value cause deadweight loss. As a rule, interventions by governments in an otherwise free market destroy potential wealth. The exception is when they correct for market failures. I interpret your recent book as suggesting that you agree with this. Your article has spent few or no words showing that your policy changes correct for market failures. Yet that is the only thing you should have been discussing.

Dictatorship and nationalism are bad. In a modern civilization, though, the main alternative to democracy is free markets. The kind of socialism you advocate is primarily about giving more importance to democratic markets and less to free markets. In a democracy, when you vote for a policy, only a small fraction of the costs and benefits come back to you personally. Therefore, you are not very incentivized to vote for good policies and against bad policies.

Costs and benefits incurred in a democratic market are massively externalized. As a consequence, voting systems are a bad aggregation mechanism. The market mechanism is a more efficient way to aggregate the individual decisions of many economic agents. It is not perfect because the real world features transaction costs and irrationality. Some transaction costs, and some irrationality, can be worked around using consensual contracts, or democratically enacted laws. Some cannot. A market of chimpanzees is not going to produce impressive outcomes, but neither is a democracy of chimpanzees. Transaction costs and irrationality are constraints of our universe. To say that markets are not perfect under these constraints is just to say that they are lawful: they do not create rationality out of nowhere and they cannot work around irreducible transaction costs; you cannot use them to create a perpetual motion machine. Your vision of social democracy should be lawful, too.

Contracts and laws are the same kind of thing. You can see them as Turing machines that implement a commitment device. They need to be supplemented by some enforcement mechanism that makes the commitment binding. The only difference between them is how they are created: consensually by multiple parties, through representative democracy elected with first-past-the-post voting, or any other mechanism of aggregation. That anything that can be done with laws can be done with contracts is part of the correct interpretation of the Coase theorem.

I do not object on principle to utopian thinking. I do not reason from surface analogies with the USSR or Venezuela. I do reason that, given economic reasons to believe that socialism is bad in general, observing bad outcomes from particular instances of socialism is more likely if the general reasons are correct than if they are not, and thus bad outcomes observed from particular instances of socialism are evidence that socialism is bad in general. That said, I consider the economic reasoning sufficient on its own to dismiss socialism, if not to forbid all socialist experiments forever, especially not by consenting people (similarly, I would like it if experiments in radical libertarianism were possible, which they are not under the system of Westphalian sovereignty). Finally, I know that political impossibility is not required for social desirability. Unilateral free trade, open borders and NGDP level targeting are great ideas, yet they are politically impossible.

If people have pushed back on your piece along those lines, it is likely that their arguments were bad. If that is the case, you should ignore them entirely and spend all your time responding to the arguments of your strongest intellectual opponents.

Inter alia, on 01.18.19 at 11:26 p.m. Matt wrote “… I would like to hear more on the relationship between UBI, work, and entrepreneurship … The pay is on top of the UBI, making it (when the task is one you enjoy), worthwhile to do, even though it doesn’t pay extremely well on its own …”.

In my view, the latter part brings out the key issue for the former: to be viable over the long term, a U.B.I. should be set at less than enough to live on by itself, but enough to provide a top up to otherwise inadequate wages, so people at the margins could price themselves into enough work to live on with that top up but would still have to seek and take that work. That would ensure enough entrepreneurship, productive work etc. was done to keep everything viable. This sweet spot would only fail if Malthusian constraints blocked it.

Unfortunately, there are also transitional issues – how to get there from here. That is why I prefer a Negative Payroll Tax approach like that of Professor Kim Swales of the University of Strathclyde and his colleagues (in the UK – see http://www.faxfn.org/feedback/03_jobs/jobs_tax.htm#23feb98a). There is also the related approach of Nobel winner Professor Edmund S. Phelps, McVickar Professor of Political Economy at Columbia University (in the USA – see http://www.columbia.edu/~esp2/taxcomm.pdf, or his book Rewarding Work).

If there is any interest I will provide some links to related work of my own, but this is enough to be going on with.

On 01.19.19 at 3:11 a.m. artifex wrote “It is mainstream economics that taxes not on land value cause deadweight loss. As a rule, interventions by governments in an otherwise free market destroy potential wealth. The exception is when they correct for market failures. I interpret your recent book as suggesting that you agree with this. Your article has spent few or no words showing that your policy changes correct for market failures. Yet that is the only thing you should have been discussing.”

For what it’s worth, that is precisely what my own investigations of Negative Payroll Tax suggested: that it would be a Pigovian fix for labour market imperfections. A simple thought experiment also suggests that U.B.I., Negative Income Tax and Negative Payroll Tax are long run equivalent in this respect, and also that Distributism would be a Coasian fix if it were ever achieved.

… and then the government was forced to call the IMF. The prime minister condemned the bloodsucking parasites of international finance, signed the massive austerity measures imposed by the IMF and transferred his own money to an offshore account before the devaluation…

@6

‘In a modern civilization, though, the main alternative to democracy is free markets’

Well this is unarguably true.

This definitely sounds better than the status quo but why call it socialism? Isn’t it nothing more than a very nice and gentle kind of capitalism?

@17 More flexible working hours is a good idea, and as an additional advantage you can use infrastructure more efficiently. Instead of having two bank offices open half a week and empty the rest, you have one office open seven days a week with both staff and customers rotating depending on which days of the week they work. Less wasted space will be extra important if you want to avoid cars and rely more on walking or public transit. Same with beaches etc where you can avoid the weekend crowding.

The disadvantage is that it will be harder to organize social events where everyone in a group is free at the same time, but with shorter working hours that should be easier than today.

When it comes to the “rather dead than red” crowd, I think the current crop of billionaire survivalists are a good example. Those who spend their money on bunkers to survive the collapse rather than use it to try to avoid it.

Can’t find the comments on the Guardian site, but one detail in the original post worries me.
“When Sam and Ali had their first baby, they were entitled to three full years of paid leave, to be shared between them.”

Very nice, but when Sam and Ali had their second baby, 17 months afterwards, were they also entitled for an equal amount of leave? And so on, and so forth?If not, why not?

To avoid criticisms of racism/sexism/Islamophobia: same argument applies to Allegra and Silvio, Sean and Aoife, Stephanie and Armand, Steve and Annie …

Over to you, JQ

“anything that can be done with laws can be done with contracts”
Maybe thats works if it is drawn up between two parties with equal power, but thats rarely the case. Too often a rich man holds almost all the cards, and the poor man has to accede to a very unequal contract because he needs to eat.

ccc

It’s rude to burst into other people’s conversations to insist that they should be discussing a different topic because it’s more important than the topic they were discussing.

It’s still rude even if your topic is actually more important than theirs.

I enjoyed this article and your thinking here very much.

* The continued expansions of financial are other capital are always possible, if those involved don’t care about anything else (which despite my general belief in the goodness of most, is already often the case among some). I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how capital—and not only financial capital in the current sense but all modes of capital, could become more “efficient” not only by automating as much as possible when it comes to labour (thus getting rid of pesky workers or at least making them desperate enough to accept often dramatically worsening conditions, which is kind of happening in some ways already) but by automating forms of consumption (thus getting rid not only of pesky/finicky consumers but also some of the inherent “contradictions” of capital that are supposed to pull it apart .. as in “how can you have consumers buying your stuff when they’re not working or not getting paid much). Amazon Go, etc, are heading this way. If you put this kind of thing together with where these post-consumer/post-human operations are almost happening already (that is, algorithmic financial trading from which humans are in many ways excluded), something unpleasant appears quite clearly. You can perhaps imagine a complex intertwined set of simulations of consumption that would supplant consumption as it has commonly been conceived and lived. In short, far fewer consumers needed if any, for the capitalists in their enclaves to do pretty well. For me this is a nightmare not a dream. For some sadly, it is already a dream scenario.

* Much as I like socialism/anarchism I don’t think that the choice is between socialism or environmental destruction—necessarily. Socialism has not been so crash hot on the environment. It is true, and this is why I liked the article, we need a lot of new ways of bringing the best aspects of socialism and whatever else into the situation, but I do have some fear of the remnants of old-fashioned socialism getting in the way, not because they’re bad per se, just because the environment often becomes just another add-on for some socialists of the old guard. Actually let’s put that differently. Although I’m pretty resolutely anti-capital, or at least post-capital, I think the decisions we are supposed to make *between* a lot of existing modes of thought are kind of tired (thus “Venezuala!” etc … on another site the other day I was told that if you didn’t like Capitalism, we’d end up with socialist dictatorship in China, the commenter failing to even know that China is currently awash with what Kai-Fu Lee calls something like a “cutthroat entreprenerial environment”, i.e. of venture capitalism). There are lots who think differently and usefully here, .. I like Kate Raworth’s thinking a lot. McKenzie Wark has detailed some in Molecular Red, which is an interesting and valuable book. There’s ECSA and (surprisingly many) other alternative startups and Michel Bauwens and the P2P people, etc etc. Then there are the likes of Haraway, Jason Moore and I think e.g. some younger thinkers immersed in the questions such as Stephanie Wakefield. They don’t of course all agree with each other—but whether things totally are in accord with each other or us is an academic question that we can probably do with a lot less of when it’s all hands on deck.

* I guess I also think that what too few are thinking about, probably because everyone is looking for *the* solution, often drawing from the solutions that have now become part of the problem, and often to individual problems, is that we are often avoiding the bigger picture (though I see the Socialist Utopia 2050 article and John’s other work as usefully heading towards this). The bigger picture is simply something like “catastrophic multiplicity”. Most of my friends hate this term, and I get why, but I think it’s currently perhaps useful. That is, at all levels, including people just trying to live their lives, no one’s going to be dealing with just one of these wicked problems (climate change and other environmental problems; a massive media and communications revolution that includes AI and big data and automation but exceeds these; social and economic and political shifts including some serious [in]justice issues; etc). Although all of these things do need specific expertise applied (all of them are themselves “multiplicities, however), we also have to somehow, and very quickly (see anything by Kevin Anderson, the UK based climate scientist), be able to deal with all together, and help others deal with them together. Which comes down, simply to, e.g., why is anyone going to deal with climate change if they can’t get a job (but it’s obviously a lot more than this). This is again why some of the suggestions in utopia 2050 are useful.

– and about:
what could life be – after the failure of the current ”racist and stupid Populism”…

Just as GREAT as in any multilingual – multinational and openminded society – with plenty of well paying –
and utmost important –
”satisfying” jobs.

“anything that can be done with laws can be done with contracts”

Libertarian utopia, every person their own lawyer.

@J-D #26: Good then that I stayed true to the topic explicitly set by the author: outcomes for “nearly everone” in Australia 2050.

JQ@31: doubt I’ll be there either in 2050, but in a general sort of way, what would be your preferences?

The most utopian aspect of this, of course, is the assumption that Australia has not been ravaged by the effects of Global Warming, aka Anthropogenic Climate Disruption.

– and about staying ”true to the topic explicitly set by the author” and ”utopia” –

As in 2050 the whole of Europe will have turned in a wonderful entertaining ”Amusement Park about the Romantic Past” and every ”old” city will have masterly restored every historical center – street and building – and the most important ”industry” for the whole of Europe will have become ”Tourism” – Australia still will be kind of lagging behind – as so called ”modern” or ”nature” ”Amusement Parks” like Bondi Beach or Sidney are no match for Paris, Rome, London or Venice –
AND Sidney wouldn’t be able (yet) – to charge the high entrance fees as Venice, Rome, Paris or London.

This vision comes across to me as an updated version of the Australia/NZ of the 50s and 60s – high equality, strong government, laid-back. Minus, of course, the racism, misogyny and other disfigurements of the period. Within an economics framework, what made that period work (and it did work, although definitely not for everyone)? Among other things, industry policy, tariffs, and controlled exchange rate were crucial. So Sam and Ali get a high wages and strong social support, but more expensive TVs, less state of the art cars and fewer overseas holidays?

@40
”AND Sidney wouldn’t be able (yet) – to charge the high entrance fees as Venice, Rome, Paris or London”.

My goodness I forgot BERLIN – and as already tons of Americans and Australians and even Chinese are moving to Berlin and only cities which attract the utmost diverse and entertaining ”fureigners” will turn into the GREAT Amusement Parks of the future – BERLIN will be right there – especially after NYC has become just too expensive for the ”artistic crowd of Progress”! – and the fact that the fanciest Bakers in New York around 2030 will make more money than bankers will NOT – and I repeat NOT STOP Berlin to be in the forefront of the Great Green New Deal!

Sounds great! sign me up! I want to make that happen for my kids and the coming generations.

JQ@31: not at all hijacking your thread, rather trying to continue your train of thought.

In the example I gave, surely the correct Green system would be to say that sure, you can have a long period of maternity/paternity leave for your firstborn, but after that, the one-child policy applies, stringently enforced. Got to keep the population down for sound environmental reasons, right?

ccc@45:

Language doesn’t work how you’re suggesting it does. If “everyone” is construed to mean – inclusively or exclusively – the inhabitants of the Great Barrier Reef, then your narrow “expansive” focus on human-reared morally relevant beings has no relevance. Likewise, if I am a WASP oligarch and assume “everyone” strictly means other WASP oligarchs, your conception and JQ’s become irrelevant. Words derive meaning from context, and acting as though non-existent context is present – or existing context is absent – specifically so that you can re-word utterances to your liking is reading in bad faith.

Equally importantly: the sociopolitical changes you want to see could occur or be denied under capitalism or socialism. Whether or not animal rights are dramatically expanded is of no moment to the economic posture adopted between homo sapiens. Animals will not be independent agents in any political system in 2050, so insisting that we redefine “everyone” to include them when in context “everyone” can unambiguously understood to refer to independent political agents is very much an attempt to change the subject.

A few comments:

Moreover, many of the wasteful and unproductive activities of the market economy have disappeared, so that the social value of production has increased even more.

There is a familiar technique of utopian literature in which it is just asserted that because the old way was inefficient, the new way will be much more efficient. Your piece is mostly free of this, but not here. For example, why should advertising be different in your world?

Also: Are we getting rid of markets, then? That seems unlike you. Or just getting rid of “the market economy”? If so, what’s that? How are we getting rid of it?

Such community groups have flourished, with generous public support for a wide range of causes and ideas.

“…except, of course, in the area of education, where they were known as ‘charter schools’ and were ruthlessly extirpated.” I never understood your attitude toward nonprofit charter schools in the book– you seem to have viewed them as as a sort of Privatization Lite rather than as “like government provision, except when they’re really bad they go out of business and go away.” In any case, there’s a definite inconsistency between your words about community control and your attitudes toward charter schools.

This approach contrasts sharply with that of the early 21st century, in which the public sector sought to harness the energy of the community sector to reduce the costs of achieving predetermined policy.

“Of course, some people referred to the process of predetermining policy as ‘democracy,’ but those people were beheaded and everyone continued to be happy in Happy Valley.”

There are just inescapable conflicts between preferences of the community and the polity (and the unions– take a look sometime at the community schools movement in New York City in the 1970s). You’re of course aware of this, and it’s not your responsility to write a lengthy essay about it, but it seems here a bit as if you’re papering over it.

I have no particular problem with the 5 to 1 wage ratio, but it does make it a lot harder to soak the rich. How are you paying for all this?

You’re pretty breezy about the abolition of intellectual property, considering how much importance you attach to technological progress. How’s that going to work?

Your article didn’t mention Aboriginal Australians. How do you see them fitting in?

– and after some of these – shall we say: ”a bit pessimistic outlooks”? I HAVE to share the very optimistic ”Utopia” of my Greek Cousin.

He thinks – that by 2050 – HE -(and all the other hoteliers in Greece) – can charge so much Euros for their rooms that ”the Greek Crisis” –
(which nearly evolved into a major EU crisis –
which nearly evolved into a world economy crisis) –
will be just ”a faint memory” –
(if some crazy Anglo-American Economists don’t come up with the idea again that the Greeks should exchange their very valuable Euros into a ”Mickey Mouse Currency”?) –

AND so my Greek Cousin thinks – that latest by 2030 EVERY Greek will be able to afford one of these very climate-friendly E-automobiles – AND to create ALL energy Greece uses by solar -(or other climate-friendly-sources) – and thusly his homeland will become THE ”Socialist Paradise of Europe” –
and thusly of the whole wide world!
-(take that Sidney!!)

ccc@97:

You’re ignoring the key point of the second paragraph. If the point is considering whether capitalism or socialism is the preferable socio-economic outlook for the future, trying to turn the conversation into one about how the socialism proposed isn’t pure enough is changing the subject. The systems being contrasted are not JQ’s imperfect socialism vs. your preferred socialism, they’re current capitalism vs. JQ’s imperfect socialism.

There are multiple subjects worth discussing. Not every conversation needs to be about you. You’re doing what you always do. You’re trying to hijack a thread onto your single issue, and you’re doing it to leftists because you perceive us as being easier to convince than the capitalists currently in power.

@
”For example what is your take on the political philosophy arguments in Kymlicka & Donaldson’s Zoopolis on similarlities in the disability rights an animal rights literature re representation, notions of citizenship and more”?

Now this question really threw me for ”a loop” – as I anyhow have this problem to focus -(on any subject) – and as a big fan of the concept ”Gesamtkunstwerk” if people like to talk about ”politics” I much rather like to talk about food – and as I really like ”food” and ”cooking” -(as it is undoubtedly an ”art” too) – and I anyhow try to cook more and more ”vegetarian” – and try to eat mostly vegetarian it all might work out?

That most of the so called ”advanced world” will eat more and more ”vegetarian” and that by 2050 we will have a lot of progress on this (YOUR) front too and you don’t have to ask such tremendously difficult questions anymore?

@Orange Watch #58: “the point is considering whether capitalism or socialism is the preferable socio-economic outlook for the future”

Precisely, and to do so we should examine how each policy set impacts the diverse interests in the wide set of all morally relevant individuals in the spatiotemporal slice under scrutiny. I’m participating in that substantive discussion. If you have some substantive arguments on that then I’m happy to discuss with you.

I’ve read most of the texts on Crooked Timber for the last 10 years and commented intermittently throughout that period. I visit, read and comment here because I’m broadly aligned with the progressive/egalitarian spirit of much of the writing and find the contributors’ work in political theory thought-provoking and important. Most of my comments over the years have been silent on non-human animals. I perceive the frontier of contemporary political theory to in recent years finally have dropped its blinders re non-humans (some decades behind moral philosophy!) and that side-lining “them” as a “separate issue” (set aside for some other time, which somehow never comes) is, to put it politely, no longer as reasonable a move as it once was considered to be in political theory.