Reading Knausgaard brought many (and better!) memories of my own surging to the surface. That he had this effect tells something of the power of his writing. Naturally, I reflected on how much of what I remembered I could ever bring myself to tell. Though my own memories are generally much happier than his, there is much that I couldn’t bring myself to say: out of shame, embarrassment, but also out of care and love for others. I couldn’t and wouldn’t reveal some things because of a duty of respect and privacy to people. Even for people I no longer see or even know, I’d often think it unfair to them to reveal some moment of gaucheness, stupidity or cruelty that might say nothing about who they are now. Knausgaard has no such reservations: in order to serve his art, he is a shit. Though his father may have merited little mercy, it is hard to feel the same about his grandmother who seems to have been a generally fine and vigorous person, with an interesting life, until the return of her eldest son prompted and alcoholic unravelling supplemented by senility in her nineties. Cruel then, for Knausgaard to use his ability at close description to tell us about her bewilderment and incontinence in the days following Knausgaard’s father’s death.

All this is to say that I have considerable doubts about the ethics of Knausgaard’s project, even as I can’t help but admire both his artistic accomplishment and his psychological insight. I shall make a point to read the rest of the series though.

Early in my career as a professor, I graded students’ essay exams in the conventional way. I would pick up one test booklet at it time and read all the students’ essays in immediate succession, grading them as I went. I would then compute the total and go on to the next student. I eventually noticed that my evaluations of the essays in each booklet were strikingly homogeneous. I began to suspect that my grading exhibited a halo effect, and that the first question I scored had a disproportionate effect on the overall grade. The mechanism was simple: if I had given a high score to the first essay, I gave the student the benefit of the doubt whenever I encountered a vague or ambiguous statement later on. This seemed reasonable … I had told the students that the two essays had equal weight, but that was not true: the first one had a much greater impact on the final grade than the second. This was unacceptable. (p. 83)

Kahneman then switched to reading all the different students’ answers to each question. This often left him feeling uncomfortable, because he would discover that his confidence in his judgement became undermined when he later discovered that his responses to the same student’s work were all over the place. Neverthless, he is convinced that his new procedure, which, as he puts it “decorrelates error” is superior.

I’m sure he’s right about that and that his revised procedure is better: I intend to adopt it. Some off-the-cuff thoughts though: (1) I imagine some halo effect persists and that one’s judgement of an immediately subsequent answer to the same question in consecutive booklets or script is influenced by the preceding one; (2) reading answers to the same question over and over again can be even more tedious than marking usually is. I thing it would be even better to switch at random through the piles; (3) (and this may get covered in the book) the fact that sequence matters because of halo effects strikes me as a big problem for Bayesians. What your beliefs about something end up being can just be the result of the sequence in which you encounter the evidence. If right (and it’s not my department) then that ought to be a major strike against Bayesianism.

…quand le Prince hausse les monnoyes il en retire l’avantage reel de voler ses créanciers …

For which we had

…when the Prince raises the value of a currency he derives the real advantage of stealing from his creditors …

But, but …. Surely what the prince needs to do to steal from his creditors is the exact opposite? You inflate. You inflate away the debt. You make the currency worth less, not more. Isn’t Rousseau just writing nonsense then?

It turns out not, and, thanks to the help of the estimable Chris Brooke I now understand. My thinking on this, and that of just about all modern readers I suspect, is formed by thinking of fiat currency. But if we have currency that (purportedly) derives its value from its metallic content (such as gold) then you can debase the coinage by raising its face value whilst keeping the metal content the same. (Or alternatively, you could adulterate the metal or clip the coin to get the same effect.) Finding out this kind of thing really is great fun.

No doubt our “libertarian” friends approve of this shift, but those who don’t have an ideologically distorted view of liberty should be alarmed. First, the extension of chargeable private space means that the range of actions permitted to individuals who lack money is reduced. Lack of money reduces your purely negative freedom,[1] as anyone who tries to perform actions encroaching on the state-enforced private property of others will quickly discover. Second—and this point should hold even for those silly enough to reject the view that private property restricts the freedom of those who have less of it—the increase in privatized public space means that we are increasingly subject to the arbitrary will of private owners concerning what we can and can’t do. Rights of assembly? Rights of protest? Rights to do things as innocuous as take a photograph? All of those things are now restricted or prohibited on formerly public land across the United Kingdom or subject to the permission of the new private owner. The interest of those who endorse a republican conception of freedom is thereby engaged, as is those of liberal persuasion who think a list of basic liberties should be protected: less public space, less capacity to exercise those basic liberties. The proposed privatization of the roads is just an extension of this.

(The Liberal Democrats as part of the Tory-led coalition bear a particularly heavy responsibility for failing to prevent these changes for which the UK government has no democratic mandate. With luck they will be destroyed at the next election, as they deserve to be. Let no-one forget, though, how far the last Labour government took us down this path and legitimized these changes through measures like student fees and the Private Finance Initiative.)

fn1. For an argument to this effect and a demolition of the idea that lack of money confers lack of ability rather than unfreedom, see G.A. Cohen, Freedom and Money (PDF)

The democratic period after the fall of the patriarchs, although now looked back on by those who see universities as, ideally, “communities of scholars” turns out to have been only a brief interregnum. In the UK, we moved to an increasing conditionalization of funding (the taxpayer expects something in exchange for the money), a system of hierarchically-imposed production targets (the various research assessment exercises) and market competition among universities for academic “talent”. These talented souls bought in at a great price could then (at least for a time) dictate personal terms that undermined departmental communism. So it goes.

The increased conditionalization of funding has also given power to a management layer (the elite vice chancellors and their teams) who can mediate with the funders (government and industry) and need to force their employees to meet the production targets and whatever other desiderata flow from the realities of funding, realities that these managers also create through doing things like lobbying for student fees (or sitting on the Browne Review). Democratic structures of university governance are an obstacle to “efficient management” – a “luxury” “we” can’t afford – and, anyway, they tend to fall into disuse as now time-pressured academics cease to attend. (Incidentally, academic contribution to the wider society also falls away as people are increasingly focused on their narrow research and haven’t time for other stuff.)

Internally to the universities, pseudo-market accounting mechanisms are widely applied to departments (or larger units) now conceived of as cost-centres. Many of these units are permanently in debt, debts that they have no realistic prospect of ever discharging. Since they are in debt, they are in no position to argue with or resist the demands of senior management presented as requirement of market rationality: exchange begets hierarchy via debt again. Creditor departments (often the STEM subjects) regard themselves as (a) virtuous and (b) hard-done-by, as they too are being overworked, but think that this is largely to subsidize the lazy humanities and social sciences. With virtuous creditors set against sinful debtors (“Germans” versus “Greeks”) no basis exists for cross-institutional grassroots co-operation, for democracy or, indeed, communism. Which suits the managers nicely. They, in turn, as the essential mediators with the “real world” are much in demand, or so they claim, and deserve to be rewarded according to “market principles”.

Of course, it is tempting to get all indignant about this and to wish for the restoration of the more democratic and communistic elements of academia (and I often do). But it is important to note that this transformation has not largely occurred as the result of a power-grab by bad people, but, often, as the result of incremental application of the seemingly irresistible demands of rationality. There’s a Foucauldian story here too. It seemed reasonable for government to demand some kind of accountability for taxpayer funding, and accountability brings with it systems of accounting. Suspicions of cronyism and unfairness during the “democratic interregnum”, coupled with memories of the patriarchal era, brought with them demands for comparability, standards, transparency and so forth: standards needed consistent application. Complaints of administrative overburdening of academics brought forth specialist administrative teams and “efficiencies of scale” (which were often less efficient in practice, but the leakage of power had happened) and, anyway, we wanted to concentrate on what we do best (not that, given targets, expectations, and vastly increased student numbers we had much choice). All did not run headlong towards their chains but many did, and for those taking the decisions the aim was usually not to institute a new kind of university but rather to solve this resource problem or that, to secure some funding, to ease someone’s burden, etc. There were many micro-decisions and a lot of them not only seemed, but actually were, quite sensible at the time they were taken, at least within the constrained perspective available to those making them.

Sanchez:

when it comes to the ongoing Koch/Cato conflict, there’s a bafflingly widespread round of herp-derpery rippling through blogs on the left and the right, wherein people imagine it’s clever to point out the supposed irony of libertarian scholars failing to enthusiastically embrace a couple billionaires’ putative property rights over the institution. This is just strange. …I’m not arguing that Congress should intervene somehow. I’m arguing that exercising those rights as they seemingly intend to is a bad idea; that their direct control would, in itself, be damaging to Cato’s credibility; and that I’m not interested in working for the Republican talking-point factory that all evidence suggests they envision. Like rain on your wedding day and other infamous Alanisisms, that’s kind of crappy, but not “ironic” in any recognizable sense. I realize progressives think libertarianism is just code for uncritical worship of rich people, but as that’s not actually the case, the only irony here is that people think they’re scoring some kind of gotcha point when they’re actually exposing the silliness of their own caricature.

Well of course Sanchez is correct. Libertarians are as free as anyone else to criticize people for the way they exercise their rights, they just don’t think the state should coerce people to act in various ways. They can deplore Scrooge like selfishness just as sincerely as any leftie, they just think it would be wrong of the state to force Scrooge to be be nice to the poor. So it goes.

No doubt there are some soft and cuddly propertarians out there who insist on the rights to private property (and hence oppose enforceable positive duties) but who privately devote their time, money and other resources to helping the global (and local) poor. To those libertarians, I apologise in advance. However, to those libertarians who have spent ink and energy arguing that not only would it be wrong to force to rich to help the poor but also that it would be pointless or counterproductive I do not. And then there are those libertarians who don’t even both with pointless or counterproductive but who argue that the strong helping the weak is just wrong, namely the Randians. So, pure-in-spirit rights-defenders (of whom Julian Sanchez may be one): just take it on the chin for now and spend some time arguing with the wealthy that, whilst they have a perfect right to spend their money funding Cato (or Heritage, or the AEI) they really could make better use of their rights by sending their cash to the sub-Saharan poor or similar. (See also, this very old post of mine ).

Chris Bertram, Introduction
John Quiggin, The unmourned death of the double coincidence
Henry Farrell: The world economy is not a tribute system
Barry Finger Debt jubilee or global deleveraging
John Quiggin (slight return): The end of debt
Neville Morley: The return of grand narrative in the human sciences
Malcolm Harris: The dangers of pricing the infinite
Daniel Davies Too big to fail: the first 5000 years
Lou Brown: Good to think with
Richard Ashcroft: Money out of place: ‘debt’ and incentives
Rob Horning: Debt on the 12th planet

Stay tuned, as we’re hoping that David Graeber will be able to write a response to some of this soon, but that won’t happen for at least a week or so.

David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years begins with a conversation in a London churchyard about debt and morality and takes us all the way from ancient Sumeria, through Roman slavery, the vast empires of the “Axial age”, medieval monasteries, New World conquest and slavery to the 2008 financial collapse. The breadth of material Graeber covers is extraordinarily impressive and, though anchored in the perspective of social anthropology, he also draws on economics and finance, law, history, classics, sociology and the history of ideas. I’m guessing that most of us can’t keep up and that we lack, to some degree, his erudition and multidisciplinary competence. Anyway, I do. But I hope that a Crooked Timber symposium can draw on experts and scholars from enough of these different disciplines to provide some critical perspective. My own background is in political philosophy and the history of political thought: so that naturally informs my own reactions as do my political engagements and sympathies. So mine is merely one take on some of the book’s themes.

Most people who work in the capitalist West are in debt: both individually and collectively. That indebtedness takes many forms. I have a mortgage, and I have to work to pay it off. Many of the consumer goods I enjoy are bought on credit. My students, thanks to “reforms” to the British higher education system initiated by “New Labour” and put into operation by the ConDem coalition will have massive debts that they will be seeking to redeem for their entire careers. My employer has long standing debts to the banks, underpinned by covenants that require that it carry out its business to certain standards or face unfavourable renegotiation of terms. The entire people of Greece are in debt and face, as a consequence, years of austerity and the loss of much of their political autonomy. And many other countries are in the same position. As Graeber points out near the beginning of his book, many third world countries, having been sold loans from pressurizing Western banks, loans that they can’t repay, have had to implement “austerity” and accept tough conditions imposed by international bodies, such as the IMF. Debt reflects on these recent events in historical perspective, seeking out precedents, but also giving an account of the emergence of the debt and money as social institutions and the way in which out ambivalent attitude to these is infected by the way our moral language and our folk conceptions of sociality are infected with ideas of debt, owing, repayment, obligation and the like.

Graeber argues that human societies are always structured (despite appearances) around three competing moral principles: communism, exchange, and hierarchy. “Communism” is the principle familiar from Marx: from each according to their ability, to each according to their need. Each contributes what they can and we are sensitive to the vulnerability of other members of our family or community. This is the principle governing the “camping trip” of G.A.Cohen’s recent Why not Socialism? and, ideally, the principle at work in many families and friendships. Graeber argues (101) that this “baseline communism” is the “ground of all human social life”. “Exchange”, by contrast, is governed by an ideal of strict reciprocity among free and equal persons. I give you something and you give me something in return. It is, among other things, the ideal principle of market exchange. “Hierarchy” is a principle of authority and status: we are not equal, I have the right to command and you to the duty obey, in virtue of who we are. These principles aren’t mutually exclusive, and they have peculiar ways of morphing into one another. And it can be a matter of controversy and judgement which principle (or combination of principles) is at work at any particular moment. A moment’s reflection on the nuclear family will confirm the truth of this. There’s communism there, certainly, in the community of goods. There’s hierarchy in the relations between parents and small children. And there may be exchange too as we do deals to balance paid work and housework for example. One partner’s appeal to communism may look like a violation of exchange and reciprocity to the other, and, perhaps, a tacit assertion of domination and hierarchy.

There isn’t one particular way that these principles should ideally be instantiated. That is going to vary from one society to the next, perhaps depending on factors like size and technology. But when the exchange principle is coupled with money and with a system of lending and recording debt, the possibility exists for a kind of tyranny that is inimical to normal human sociality, to love, care, and friendship and which drives human beings to extremes of tyranny and degradation, always under the guise of meeting moral obligations. Such is the logic of the market backed by the state: those who find they have borrowed too much must repay, and must either subject themselves directly to their creditors or act in ways that promote the discharge of their debts to those creditors whatever the deeper human costs. As Graeber tries to explain the moral catastrophe of the Spanish conquest of the Americas he writes “For the debtor, the world is reduced to a collection of potential dangers, potential tools, and potential merchandise.” (319) Creditors (who, in turn may themselves owe to others) are similarly caught in a web of amoral calculation: ”… at the key moments of decision, none of this mattered. Those making the decisions did not feel they were in control anyway; those who were did not particularly care to know the details.” (319)” Such episodes and calculations recur though the book as slaves are sold and debtor parents consign their children to debt peonage or sexual exploitation.

Central to Graeber’s historical account is a transition from what he calls “human economies” to “commercial economies”. Both are societies with some form of monetary equivalence, and with the possibility of debt and credit. But in a human economy, an individual is part of a network of particular social relations (as mother, brother, cousin, wife) and the principal function of exchange is to maintain that system of relations and to effect “moves” within it. Debts may be incurred as the result of harms and get repaid with appropriate compensation. A marriage may require the bride’s family to pay or receive some token (in cows or sheep perhaps). Similarly, gift exchange is a way of affirming and reproducing a system of social relations. In a commercial economy, by contrast, money is used to buy and sell things and the commodification of the necessaries of life (housing, clothing, food) raises the possibility of the oppressive subjection of the needy to their creditors, a subjection that is all the more humiliating because is between supposed equals.

One way of reading Graeber’s musings on the three distributive principles and the transition from a “human” to a commercial economy is as a version of the “crowding out” hypothesis, familiar from thinkers such as Daniel Bell. According to the crowding-out hypothesis, market-based motivation has an intrinsic tendency to marginalize more other-directed forms of motivation, and, eventually, to undermine itself as the patterns of interpersonal trust and co-operation on which the market tacitly depends themselves become the object of instrumental calculation by market participants. On such accounts, the market itself depends on pre-modern systems of personal connection and on moral ties, which the market, a morally-free zone, erodes over time. Capitalism is its own gravedigger. The difficulty with this hypothesis is its tendency to see market society only in its most rapacious and competitive guise and not at all as a system of cooperation capable of generation new forms of sociality peculiar and appropriate to it. Yet as Sam Bowles has shown, market societies can actually engender high levels of mutual trust and dispositions to pro-social punishment (of free-riders and the like) which more clannish and “human” societies struggle with. Moreover, Graeber himself seems to recognize this when he discusses Medieval Islamic ideas of the market – “the world’s first popular free-market ideology” (278) – ideas supposedly influential on Adam Smith. Graeber mentions the Islamic economic scholar Tusi (1210-1274 AD) whose account of the the division of labour and the the way it enables individuals to realize the benefits of the complementary talents of everyone is strongly reminiscent of Rawls’s discussion of social union in section 79 of A Theory of Justice (a conception that Rawls also attributes to Wilhelm von Humbolt). Graeber’s discussion of medieval Islamic market society seems to pose a problem more generally for his account since it is in tension with his usual picture of commercial society as, essentially, the creature of coercive state power and raises the possibility of extended market-based co-operation based on trust and reciprocity.

Graeber’s tendency to see commercial society always in is most ruthless light is also manifest in his discussion of the genealogy of the modern concept of freedom, which he traces to the power that Roman slave-owners had over their households. He is certainly not entirely wrong about this. The idea of freedom as self-ownership, that individuals’ rights over themselves are best understood as being akin to those which a slave-owner would have over a chattel slave, is certainly alive and well both in political philosophy and in the folk-conceptions of freedom prevalent in capitalist societies. Ideas of freedom as rights to non-interference taken from Roman law have also been influential (I hesitate to identify the two conceptions, since Kant rejected one whilst, in his political philosophy, affirming the other). But it is hardly as if these understandings of freedom have been uncontested and it is probable that outside the Anglo-Saxon world (and sometimes even within it) they have not even been dominant. Discussions of two, or even three, concepts of liberty show that the reality is much messier than Graeber sometimes allows.

Taken together, the rejection of the idea that some version of commercial society might also be or become a system of cooperation and the assimilation of freedom to quasi-libertarian self-ownership implies that Graeber discards social democratic (or social liberal) visions of what the just society might look like. J.S.Mill, Hobson, Hobhouse and Rawls, along with Beveridge and Eleanor Roosevelt don’t get considered as a serious alternative. Presumably Graeber thinks that they either simply mask the nasty reality or represent a possibility that was briefly realized in the postwar years, but is now unrealistic. That may be fair enough, but not everyone will share his pessimism about the social-democratic project.

At the end of the book, Graeber discusses the future and alternatives to capitalism. Though he has some things to say that are highly congenial to me about the environment and about the tendency of capitalism to drive us all to excess work, this passage is quite deliberately somewhat open-ended and non-commital. I wonder whether a better expression of Graeber’s own political agenda is actually to be found somewhat earlier in the book, at the end of his account of the Axial age where he writes about it religious movements:

Where physical escape is not possible, what, exactly, is an oppressed peasant supposed to do? Sit and contemplate her misery? At the very least, otherworldly religions provided glimpses of radical alternatives. Often they allowed people to create other worlds within this one, liberated spaces of one sort or another. It is surely significant that the only people who succeeded in abolishing slavery in the ancient world were religious sects, such as the Essenes – who did so effectively by defecting from the larger social order and forming their own utopian communities. Or, in a smaller but more enduring example: the democratic states of northern India were all eventually stamped out by the great empires … but the Buddha admired the democratic organization of their public assemblies and adopted it as the model for his followers.” (250)

Does Graeber find in utopian and democratic resistance to the Axial empires an historic precedent for the Occupy movement to emulate? Perhaps our best possibilities lie not in grand schemes of societal transformation but in developing the “baseline communism” and the democratic instincts that persist even in the heart of modern capitalism. The anarchist writer Colin Ward used a phrase from Ignazio Silone – “the seed beneath the snow” – to make a similar idea vivid. We cannot take the beast on in a direct assault, and nor should we, but we can work together to develop a more human society within the nooks and crannies of the commercial one.

At the age of six, Polanski began a life of persecution, flight and the threat of incarceration – first from the Nazi invaders of Poland, then an oppressive communist regime, and finally the American criminal justice system after his newfound sense of freedom led him into transgression. The world must seem a prison, society a succession of traps, civilised values a deceptive veneer, life itself a battle against fate.

Like a number of other people, I posted a comment on the site. I can’t reproduce my comment exactly, because it has now been deleted for “violation of community standards” but it read something like “What? ‘transgression’ hardly seems to be an appropriate word.” Other commenters have been deleted, again for “violation of community standards” merely for quoting Mr French’s exculpatory paragraph in extenso and say that it is “ludicrous”. The Guardian’s guidelines on “community standards” are here. They are not unreasonable and contain the assurance:

In short: – If you act with maturity and consideration for other users, you should have no problems.

It is hard, therefore, to see why politely objecting to Mr French’s words should provoke deletion. Apparently, the Guardian thinks otherwise.