Chris Bertram

Paul Krugman is worried that lots of jobs will be replaced by machines in the near future. What will all those people do!? Brad DeLong thinks there’ll still be plenty of jobs, but massive income inequality. Some of Brad’s commenters think that the reserve army of unemployed will take up prostitution on a large scale. Oh dear.

Allow me to suggest a third possibility. Instead of mass unemployment or horrendous inequality, technological improvement could reduce the time people spend working to meet their needs and give them more free time. Free time that they could use for other purposes (such as their all-round human development) . The Jerry Cohen video that I posted the other week centres on this very point. For more discussion see ch.11 of Karl Marx’s Theory of History , which, I now see, furnished much of the script for that talk. Of course, if you take “free markets”, extensive private property and the domination of the political system by money (so that you can’t do much about the first two) as givens, then the third possibility will appear impossible or utopian. So you’d have to be an incompetent idiot to mention it, wouldn’t you?

One of the weirder aspects of Arthur Ripstein’s recent book on Kant’s Political Philosophy, Force and Freedom, was the emphasis given to unwanted touching as a rights-violation. Now when a Canadian gives an exposition of a Prussian it isn’t altogether clear whose culturally-bounded norms might be infecting their normative intuitions. But I was immediately reminded of the discussion when I read Simon Kuper’s column in this weekend’s Financial Times. Kuper’s piece is based around Raymonde Carroll’s account of American and French cultural differences in her Cultural Misunderstandings . Well, read the whole thing , as they say.

Brad DeLong writes :

Karl Marx wrote that the “country that is more developed industrially… shows to the less developed the image of its own future…” Karl Marx was wrong.

Is it just me that thinks it is odd for DeLong to write this? It used to be a commonplace for people to say that Marx was wrong about this. But the people who said that he was wrong were typically leftists , and their reason for saying it was the claim that Marx had failed to anticipate imperialism, the “development of underdevelopment” and all that stuff. So for them, Marx was wrong, because he thought that capitalism would develop economies everywhere, whereas they thought Lenin had shown that it would force some societies into a permanent state of underdevelopment. But DeLong is, by his own repeated admission, a “card carrying neoliberal”. And surely “card carrying neoliberals” believe in a future of globalized markets, urbanization, universal prosperity and (the cynics amongst us would add) strip malls and McDonalds. So am I missing something here? How do “card-carrying neoliberals” disagree with Marx on this point?

Much as I’ve been loving Harry’s posts on Wisconsin, it seems odd that we haven’t said more here on CT about the more important struggle going on in Libya and about the Arab world more generally. It is difficult to get a sense of what is going on from the sporadic reports, but it looks very much as if Libya’s transition will be to the Arab awakening what Romania’s was to the end of Stalinism in eastern Europe. Gaddafi seems now to have lost his grip on reality if not yet completely on power. Let us hope that he suffers a similar fate to Ceacescu.

Anyone who does want to follow developments in the Arab world has one best option to do so: Al Jazeera . Vilified by the US under Bush (and its reporters almost certainly murdered by the US military on several occasions), Al Jazeera has been both the conduit of information and the catalyst for change and democratization.

The Emir of Qatar may be a despot, but for Al Jazeera alone he could be winning a Frederick the Great prize as the most enlightened one of recent decades. The democracies of the West, by contrast, have contributed nothing. If the Arab peoples do succeed in freeing themselves, they will have done so themselves and despite the actions and attitudes of the West and the United States with its policies of Israel-first and make-deals-for-oil. For that reason, and so unlike Eastern Europe, such influence the US has in the future will be a function of its power alone and not its moral authority, which is now non-existent. Anyone can back a democratic revolution when it is half won, or cavil at the most disgusting atrocities, but no-one is going to forget that the West backed many of the Arab dictators (especially Mubarak) until nearly the end and still supports some of the worst of them (such as the Saudis). Some might cite Iraq as the exception here but it isn’t really: Rumsfeld embraced Saddam until he went off-message just as Blair welcomed Gaddafi back into the fold when it seemed opportune to do so. Let us hope the Arab 1848 continues to more successful conclusions.

So, we are to have a referendum in the UK on the alternative vote system. Tempting though it might be, I suppose I shouldn’t decide my view on the basis of my desire to stick it to the vile Nick Clegg. The fact that AV (like the French two-ballot runoff system) requires MPs to secure (eventually) a majority in each constituency certainly has prima facie attractions, and it is troubling that most MPs are now elected on a minority vote. (In 1951 and 1955 only 39 and 37 seats in the Commons were held without a majority, so things have changed.) So on the plus side, there’d be more work work for candidates to do in more constituencies in order to secure election. On the other hand, AV can get you dramatically non-proportional outcomes (worse, in fact than FPTP). This will be familiar to Australians from (for example) the 1977 elections where the Liberals managed a majority of seats with considerably fewer first preferences than Labour and where the coalition of which the Liberals were part got two-thirds of the seats (a landslide) with only a minority of the vote.

I’m culling these facts from Vernon Bogdanor’s 1984 book What is Proportional Representation? Bogdanor (David Cameron’s tutor at at about that time, incidentally) believed the system would hurt the Tories on the grounds of the their geographical distribution. John Curtice, on the other hand, thinks that Labour would suffer. Any more reliable indications out there? Psephological guidance please.

Just when you think “he can’t possibly be saying that, there’s an obvious objection” – he anticipates, and replies … great stuff. From some time in the late 1980s.

Doug Saunders has a blog post about Branko Milanovic’s new book The Haves and the Have-nots . I haven’t read the book, but, according to Saunders, it denies that there is a convergence in living standards between Western workers and the Chinese. Here’s the reasoning:

“If the U.S. GDP per capita grows by 1 per cent, India’s will need to grow by 17 per cent, an almost impossible rate, and China’s by 8.6 per cent, just to keep absolute income differences from rising,” he observes. “As the saying goes, you have to run very, very fast just to stay in the same place. It is therefore not surprising that despite China’s (and India’s) remarkable success, the absolute income differences between the rich and poor countries have widened.”

And they have: Even as the Chinese worker has gone from $525 per year to $5,000 in two decades, the average American worker has gone from $25,000 to $43,200 – meaning that the income gap has widened from about $25,000 to $38,000, and, he notes, “of course so has the absolute gap in welfare between the average American and the average Chinese.”

Spot the non-sequitur. Even if the dollar income gap has widened in absolute terms there’s no reason to believe that the welfare gap has similarly widened, for the simple, and obvious reason of the declining marginal utility of income. On any plausible picture, the $525 to $5,000 transition is life-changing, whereas the $25,000 to $38,000 change is merely nice (especially if enough other people get the same increase and much of the increase goes on bidding up the price of inherently scarce goods).

Saunders continues:

You may think of the United States as a place of extremes of wealth and poverty, and it is. Nevertheless, at the moment, the very poorest people in America, the 5 per cent with the lowest incomes, have better lives and more purchasing power than the top 5 per cent of income earners in India and the top 10 per cent in China.

Well I won’t quibble with the “more purchasing power” point, but “better lives” is really pretty dubious, since we know that by many objective measures poor black men in the US do worse than even some poor people in India.

In the UK we are being treated to a rich and enjoyable series of programmes on Justice featuring Michael Sandel . No doubt there will be quibblers, but I think he’s done a great job so far. Last night’s episode discussed Bentham, Kant and Aristotle and, for my money, both utilitarians (in the shape of Peter Singer) and various German Kant-fans came across as slightly unhinged. The moment that most summed this up, however, was discussion of the German Constitutional Court’s Kant-inspired dismissal of a law that would allow the federal authorities to shoot down a hijacked airliner destined to crash into a city with catastrophic loss of life. Judgement here . According to these Kantians, even if the passengers are doomed to die in the next few minutes and shooting-down the plane will save many lives on the ground, to attack the airliner would show a lack of respect for their human diginity, purposiveness, endiness etc. and so is forbidden. For me, that looks like a reductio.

I’m almost reluctant to add to the hype, but the story is so unusual, and the pictures so good, that I think I’ll overcome that. In brief, then: Chicago is about to see the first exhibition of the photography of Vivian Maier, a recently-deceased, partly-French, nanny who seems to have neither sought nor received any exposure or recognition in her lifetime. Thousands of negatives were then bought by a real-estate agent at a flea market. Astonished at what he found, he’s now promoting her work, making a documentary film, putting a book together and so on. Well, I know, it all sounds too good to be true. But the pictures (at least the ones we’ve seen) are superb. I have some qualms about the ethics of developing unprocessed rolls of a photographer’s work. (Famously, Garry Winogrand had tons of these.) This is for the simple reason that the photographer may just have know that that roll contained crap. Unprinted negatives get you a bit closer to the finished article, but there too, there’s the matter of editing, selection, etc. So the world will never see the work the Maier would have chosen to represent herself, if she’d have wanted exhibiting at all. But, still, the pictures are wonderful.

Links: New York Times (great slideshow – view it full screen); Blog post at The Operable Window (with link to TV news item); Chicago exhibition details; John Maloof’s site (he’s the real-estate agent); details of the documentary film (and scroll down for many more links).

I’ll be catching up on my sleep over the next few weeks, having spent many an evening up late in front of the telly followed by rising at six to see the last few overs. A tremendous achievement , almost without blemish, with records broken and many wonderful individual moments. One Australian I was drinking with last night claimed that the Ashes never meant much to them, because they could never take the urn home. Well, the fox who tried so hard reach the grapes claimed they were sour anyway. Open thead.

As mentioned in comments to a post the other day, Kodachrome is coming to an end on Thursday. The New York Times has a nice article about it. Of course this isn’t the end for film, or even of slide film (there’s still Velvia and a few other options). Kodachrome was always an unusual and capital intensive process. I was struck by the following sentence from the article: “At the peak, there were about 25 labs worldwide that processed Kodachrome.” That’s a very very small number for the peak . There are probably still many thousands of labs that will develop colour print (C41) film and probably dozens even in the UK that will handle the more common transparency process (E6). Still, RIP.

UPDATE! – More from NYT , with pictures!

Brad DeLong has just posted a couple of links to articles that attack an article by David Owen in the New Yorker [subscription required]. Owen’s article relied heavily on the claim that increased energy efficiency doesn’t really deliver the hoped-for environmental benefits, because of something called the “rebound effect”. Here’s an explanation of that effect by James Barrett in one of the linked pieces:

In essence the rebound effect is the fact that as energy efficiency goes up, using energy consuming products becomes less expensive, which in turn leads us to consume more energy. Jevons’ claim was that this rebound effect would be so large that increasing energy efficiency would not decrease energy use….

Owen’s critics say that although the rebound effect is real, whether it is large enough to have the effects Owen claims is an empirical matter, and they are sceptical. Basically, they argue that the increase in energy consumption is not just down to lower prices but also to greater wealth, house size, etc. and so without greater efficiency, we might be consuming a whole lot more energy than we actually are. Basically: it all depends on the facts, and the jury’s out.

Ok, so now let’s do a little substitution in that sentence quoted earlier.
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The ever-ludicrous home of the British “decent left”, Harry’s Place , carries the motto on its banner “Liberty, if it means anything, is the right to tell people what they don’t want to hear.” No surprise then that they’ve devoted much of their recent coverage to increasingly hysterical guilt-by-association denunciations of Wikileaks. One of their marginally saner bloggers, “Gene”, has now posted a long comparison between Chinese Nobel-prizewinner Liu Xiaobo and his German predecessor Carl von Ossietzky. Von Ossietzky was convicted of high treason and espionage in 1931 for publishing details of German rearmament in contravention of the Versailles treaty, a verdict that was upheld in 1992 by Germany’s Federal Court of Justice. The 1992 ruling, according to Wikipedia , reads:

According to the case law of the Supreme Court of the German Reich, the illegality of covertly conducted actions did not cancel out the principle of secrecy. According to the opinion of the Supreme Court of the German Reich, every citizen owes his Fatherland a duty of allegiance regarding information, and endeavours towards the enforcement of existing laws may be implemented only through the utilization of responsible domestic state organs, and never by appealing to foreign governments.

Carl von Ossietzky, Bradley Manning, Julian Assange ….?

So, the vote to triple university tuition fees in the UK was won by the government, albeit with a reduced majority (21), thousands of young people demonstrated outside Parliament, and the Prince of Wales’s car got bricked as people chanted “off with their heads!” What now? People seem to be anticipating three things: more disorder on the streets as the coalition pushes though its cuts programme; the destruction of the Liberal Democrats; and a massive slump in popularity for the Coalition. Good news for the left then? I’m not so sure.
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