Niall Ferguson On Why The Kids Are Crazy Not To Want To Melt Down Their Grandparents For Soylent Green

The few lines he quotes from Zizek are perfectly reasonable, and plainly fail to support the reading Ferguson offers for them. Then his half-assed drive-by version of the usual warning about Medicare and Social Security is enough to convince you he’s wrong about everything else, by definition.

For extra bitter flavor, the Beast illustrates the piece with a photo of a protester in which the protester’s sign isn’t readable. (Really, the mere fact he’s protesting is proof enough of his absurdity!) Googling the scattered words, though, suggests he’s being cogent too.

The only rational response to this sort of thing is.

Dear upset person,

I’m sorry that phantom hippies upset you so much, and that you do not understand economics. May I suggest a therapist for the first, and a professor or two for the second? I humbly suggest that those solutions may be more effective than ranting on the intertubes.

Yours.

I always find the Confucian maxim:

“When dealing with Fergusonian witter, believe the opposite, for that shall be the truth”

the best way to tackle Niall’s neo-con, slightly too tight trousered for an academic his age belches.

Damn you, John H! I always get sucked in by links like that. Here I was thinking “So, if I only I could draw that superhero movement thing right, those guys in Sweden would see what a super-great economist I really am”

Just a bit of pot-stirring by Ferguson. But there’s a kind of basic incongruity between Ferguson’s argument and the proposals/rhetoric of OWS that nicely illustrates the gap in perspective between the OWS movement (which seems composed primarily of non-working college students) and those who have been in the job market for some time now.

That is, the OWS movement isn’t at all concerned about the tax implications of a looming entitlement crisis for themselves because they’re not concerned at all about the idea (yet) that they’d pay high taxes. They haven’t been in the job market long enough – or at all in a large number of instances I’d bet – to have felt the sting of seeing progressively larger amounts of one’s earned money taxed. They’ve yet to look at the difference between their gross pay and their net pay and see just how much of an impact that difference makes in their lives.

Nor is the OWS movement particularly concerned about the immediate impact of certain of the proposals floated from their ranks – they’re too detached from the job market, and from the day-to-day flow of business and bills generally, for those concerns to seem palpable.

This works to OWS’s advantage in that it allows them more imaginative scope in their proposals, and there’s something to be said for grander thinking. But, curiously, it has the effect of making abstract ideological principles seem more real and relevant to the OWS crowd, and rendering loans, bills and taxes much more academic for them.

Ferguson is both dreamy-looking and humble.
Zizek has poorly-fitting teeth, a Krugman beard, dandruff and mange.

Game over. And that’s before you even get to their arguments. “The headline ‘Goldman Sachs Under Control of Hip Teenage Revolutionaries’ would be the last straw for an already fragile economic recovery.” So true. So very true.
I think I speak for everyone in the UK when I say how proud we are that Niall Ferguson strikes such a commanding figure on the world stage. Only the much deserved success of Piers Morgan pleases us more.
In no way is he openly mocked as a ludicrous swollen tit by just about everyone .

Andrew F. 10.14.11 at 11:00 am

” Just a bit of pot-stirring by Ferguson. But there’s a kind of basic incongruity between Ferguson’s argument and the proposals/rhetoric of OWS that nicely illustrates the gap in perspective between the OWS movement (which seems composed primarily of non-working college students) and those who have been in the job market for some time now.”

Do Not Feed the Lying Troll

To take Ferguson seriously for just a second, here’s the core of his argument: entitlements are the problem, for which “the answer is to occupy the Tea Party—and wrest it from the grumpy old men who currently run it.”
This is an acknowledgement of the fact that the famous “get your government hands off my Medicare” line isn’t a gotcha quote but is actually pretty close to the core of the Tea Party.
Politicians come unstuck when they misunderstand this. That’s something Paul Ryan discovered recently. So there’s a happy conclusion from this piece. Either Ferguson gets ignored (most likely), or he gets traction for an argument that will split and dissipate the Tea Party and turn its diehards against him.

“to have felt the sting of seeing progressively larger amounts of one’s earned money taxed. ”

??????

Average tax rates have been falling for some time, and average wages have been flat. Writing this labels yourself as a dumb plutocrat.

The posted rebuttal of Ferguson is wrong. Social Security and Medicaid obligations aren’t debt because Congress can reduce them at will. He’s talking about entitlements which aren’t in the graphs attached. Nevertheless he’s very wrong: Social Security can be saved by actually running it as a pension scheme, and Medicare Part D can be fixed by negotiating drug prices.

the OWS movement (which seems composed primarily of non-working college students)

Better trolls, please.

Please note that if taxes on the top 1% are going down, and more and more income is going to the top 1%, the average tax rate can be going down and the average wage-earner’s tax rate going up.

Meredith 10.14.11 at 5:59 am

” Thanks for the Chris Sims link! (As for Niall Ferguson, are we sure he’s not an illegal alien?)”

Don’t know – however, since he’s a neocon Iraq War supporter (AFAIK unrepentant), ‘ve now have vayz of finding out’.

I’ll keep calling you Shirley as long as you keep jesting and giving Ferguson any airplay. Useless snark and not even very good. The Daily Wheezer is more like it.

‘It is a testament to my deep dislike for Zizek …’

Apologies John as I don’t want to derail this thread – but have you done a post setting out your dislike of Zizek in detail? I’d be intrigued to read it.

ajay @13: Yes, certainly most students in the US today will have very little experience of loans and bills!

Fair enough, but payments on student loans are usually deferred until a certain period after attendance at a school’s program has terminated (whether by graduation or otherwise). So while many of them certainly have debt, that doesn’t mean they have any experience of what it’s like to service that debt over any significant period of time. Hell, this lack of experience is part of the reason students were interesting customers for credit card products.

As to the contrast between Ferguson’s argument (leaving aside any merit it has) and the various proposals suggested by the OWS, just look at some of the specifics from the latter. With a handful of exceptions, the latter are incredibly general (“end political corruption”) or silly (“end corporate personality”).

Ferguson’s argument would have some concern to those already working, who pay a significant amount of taxes and who worry about the care of their parents.

In any event, this is just my impression and I’m not particularly wedded to it. Other views can reasonably differ.

Barry and Kvetch: I don’t think respectfully disagreeing, or presenting a different viewpoint, is the same as trolling. I give my views in good faith, and assume the same of everyone else. If the comment threads are intended to include discussion of only certain viewpoints, I’ll certainly stop reading and commenting in them when mine vary outside that range.

Replace ‘seems’ with ‘is’ and I agree.

Why do folks in this thread seem to think nurses are uninformed or regressive?

What on earth are you referring to?

John, what’s your beef with Zizek? I’m not a philosopher and know next to nothing about him. This said, I saw him once on TV and he seemed to be going all over the place. I found him very unfocused.

Henri, by political corruption do they mean political corruption in a legal sense?

No, they don’t, obviously.

What measures do they support for ending political corruption?

They want to end political corruption, the disproportionate influence of corporations and wealthy individuals in the political process. What’s so complicated here? The protests are the measures.

The problem seems to lie in trusting people over 30 and under 60!

Sorry, John, I didn’t see your 42 before scribbling my 43. I beg pardon for any derailment of the thread, but I find Zizek more fun than Ferguson, who simply raises my blood pressure, which at my age, is not something to be endured with no prospect of any reward at the end.

Yes, I understood your point, and a good one it was too. But…. We are living in an age when everything old shall be new again — at least in the wider public arena. What I love about the Web is the fact of access. That is, the stuff that used to be hidden away in the groves of academe, or in smoke-filled rooms, or in foreign newspapers or State Department cables, is now where everyone can get at it. And we do get at it, indeed we do — even if it’s often old-hat to the people whose business we’re meddling in. Democracy in Action, I thinks we calls that. (I try not to abuse the privilege, but sometimes I just can’t help myself.)

We can not discuss them together because Zizek is a Stalinist and Ferguson is an old style British imperialist. In other words Ferguson’s ideology has been completely rejected by the various intellectual establishments in the world. For instance the idea of reestablishing or rehabilitating British imperialism has no support in most former British colonies. There is no restore the Gold Coast movement. In contrast Stalin has lots and lots of followers. He has lots of supporters in areas he used to rule like Russia and Central Asia and he has lots of supporters in American academic circles. Also the people nostalgic for British rule essentially deny the crimes of the empire. While the Stalinists today do not deny any of Stalin’s crimes, but rather support him specifically because of his crimes against peoples like the Volga and other Russian-Germans, Chechens, Crimean Tatars, Latvians, Estonians, etc. In fact many of these people lament that Stalin was too soft and let too many people from these “treasonous” nations survive.

But what’s going on on the left now, in case people haven’t noticed, is a total rejection of leftist discipline and cadres and vanguardism, as well as liberal technocracy.

Yeah, and it’s been going on for over forty years now, if the hours and hours I spent on folding chairs in basements in 1968 are anything to go by. Are we there yet?

A friendly historical correction. The New Left activitists tended to be more straight-laced than their compatriots who were into drugs, (supposedly) promiscuous sex, “eastern philosophies,” and all that got labelled DFH. By which I mean New Lefty types might do a little weed on a Friday night but weren’t into dropping acid. Most stayed in school (if they hadn’t already graduated) and did well as students, and they had or hoped to have a girlfriend or boyfriend (of the opposite sex — being gay wasn’t yet all that okay with most anyone). Even most DFH’s hoped for, if they didn’t already enjoy, the long-term romance. There could be a sense of comradeship between the two general “groups” (too strong a word, but it will have to do), especially when they were contrasting themselves with gung-ho pro-war, anti-civil-rights types, but also a lot of tension. It was the gung-ho “reactionaries” who lumped earnest political activists in with “hippies,” in much the way MSM but especially Fox News, Ann Coulter, Eric Erickson, et al. seek to dismiss OWS by disdaining the occupiers’ (alleged) hygiene.
It occurs to me. In those days, nothing like the prospect of being drafted into a stupid, unholy war to focu the attention of the young. Today, nothing like the prospect of being jobless.

Well, well. If I’d waited a bit, I could have just said what Meredith said, but since I don’t believe anything ever gets truly wasted, I don’t suppose it hurts to have both of us weigh in.

A very good point, Walt. Or, to put it another way, a pox on all their isms. Still, as Bruce Wilder has been very eloquently pointing out in the percentiles thread, before we settle down with Paul Krugman, Jared Bernstein and Brad DeLong’s administrators-of-the-good, we ought to ask ourselves what they’ve done for us lately. Seriously….

The New Left was many things, and just because the right likes to label everyone a DFH doesn’t mean that we have to reflexively deny that there was a lot going on at the time that isn’t going on now. But I really don’t see the historical continuity, any more than I see a historical continuity between the IWW and the New Left. It’s all very well to say that all left anti-authoritarian movements have certain similarities, but that is much more questionable when it is used to imply that a cycle is taking place — the “merry-go-round” that you refer to that people have been on a ride on more than once. I don’t think it’s really useful to shoehorn people into a historical narrative if what you basically believe is that they are too anti-authoritarian for their own good.

What do you accept as a defining characteristic of the New Left? If it started with the Port Huron statement in the U.S., does it matter that people now are ideologically statementless?

Well, Rich, suffice it to say that I don’t see history as you apparently see it. A detailed teasing apart of the differences would be more likely to derail the thread than anything I’ve said so far. Maybe it would be enough to assert that, young as we were back in the day, we were very conscious of being the inheritors of a grand, if at the time much-maligned tradition — and I still have my little red Wobbly membership card to prove it. ;-)

Meredith@63. We did live in the age of the wonk. But that age ended 29 days ago. Right now, people are changing what is possible. Wonks only have their day once what is possible becomes settled.

David and Timothy, I hope it all never becomes “settled” (nor do you, I am sure — I don’t mean to pick at your specifically targeted choice of words, Timothy!). And of course, it won’t. But settled enough for us all to agree that we have to get down to business on the real problems we all now share (even that 1%, who “know not what they do”). I am considering that trek to the city (which one? NYC = my heart-of-hearts “the city”? Boston? a child of mine in each). My wonk won’t be immediately useful — tonight, I have been worrying about Hesiod. And wondering if common music is needed — the drums that a bit tediously reverberate in many NYC parks nearly all the time somehow can’t do it, I think. Have occupiers thought about using music more effectively?

Andrew, They need to settle down, pick something specific though connected to a broader sentiment, and organize beyond urban camp-outs.

But that would be going backwards. Mass protests indicate that settling down and picking something specific doesn’t work. And if protests don’t work either, then you should expect riots and violence. This is how things progress. Asking protesters to go home and write letters to the king seems kinda comical, for that’s precisely why they are on the streets: less radical attempts don’t work, or at least there is a perception that they don’t work.

Re Niall Ferguson: it is very sad when Harvard professors think it wise to copy Ann Coulter’s spiteful tactics rather than provide serious analysis… http://bit.ly/oJGN9a

Andrew F. @61:

They need to settle down, pick something specific though connected to a broader sentiment, and organize beyond urban camp-outs. There are a few specific policy proposals floating around which would work.

Should they get a haircut while they’re at it? Perhaps a job, too… oh, wait.

The protesters 1) aren’t just disgruntled students (a quick perusal of the New York Times photos over the last few weeks will put that little Right Wing talking point in the shredder) and 2)many of the protesters tried writing their congress person, their representative, and the president with specific complaints, proposals and suggestions. And they were ignored. Roundly, repeatedly and at length. Protests are the next stage in the political process. whether it goes on to become an organized movement or a bloody mess is up to how the politicians respond. They can blithely dismiss them as the Right has been trying to do, or they can engage them in dialogue. Expecting them to have a coherent, bullet point list of policy demands is absurd.

I’m not entirely sure that Andrew F is correct when he writes –

“That is, the OWS movement isn’t at all concerned about the tax implications of a looming entitlement crisis for themselves because they’re not concerned at all about the idea (yet) that they’d pay high taxes. They haven’t been in the job market long enough – or at all in a large number of instances I’d bet – to have felt the sting of seeing progressively larger amounts of one’s earned money taxed. They’ve yet to look at the difference between their gross pay and their net pay and see just how much of an impact that difference makes in their lives.”

I’m old. I started working part-time aged 16 in 1962, in England. Then the standard rate of income tax was 41.25%. There was also a flat-rate National Insurance contribution of (the equivalent of) 73p when the average wage was about £16 per week. Now that’s high taxation. It stayed that high, higher in the case of NI contributions, for over 12 years, long after I started full-time work. And yet I didn’t feel oppressed by this high taxation, there wasn’t a huge political movement to lower them. Perhaps this was because a lot more of the population actually had to pay them and couldn’t so easily evade?

“I’m trying to come up with a word for the assumption that everyone who supports a protest supposedly on behalf of the economically disenfranchised can afford Wi-Fi and a laptop. “Ironic” isn’t cutting it. Any suggestions?”

How about “factually false”. The people at the local Occupy in the small city where I am have no laptops at all. Elsewhere could be different, of course, but the Occupy movement in general is not very technological at all.

That said, I’d guess that most of the people who post here have a laptop, and the remark was addressed to people here.

Wait, the first time Ferguson heard the word “Zizek” was last week? I don’t go out of my way to avoid reading Zizek but he’s not easy to avoid.

Concern troll Andrew F. is concerned.

Steve LaBonne 10.18.11 at 2:51 pm

” Concern troll Andrew F. is concerned.”

I’m concerned that he’s concerned.

chris @79: This seems a rather misleading sentence given that the organizational structure of the Tea Party was and is astroturf. Whether there was a genuinely popular movement for about 10 seconds before someone coopted it is arguable, but the role of well-funded right-wing professional opinion shapers in taking over and guiding the Tea Party is well documented.

Well, it certainly connected with existing money and organizations, and produced campaigns, candidates, and political power. The result has been a largely negative impact on politics and policy, but it’s been an impact that in my view largely reflects the sentiment of that movement – so I’m not sure “co-opted” is really the right term either.

There are already signs that the OWS movement will do something similar, perhaps in connection with various union organizations.

Henri @83: I don’t think it’s meaningful to characterize spontaneous violence as a mistake of the perpetrators. What it is, is a failure of the political system. The whole point of a ‘representative democracy’ is to provide a reliable feedback mechanism, as a way to avoid open confrontation, revolutions, riots, and such. Including mass protests that block traffic. If these things do happen, the political system has failed.

You’ve introduced a new adjective with “spontaneous.” But, look, sometimes protesters don’t get their way (that happens in a representative democracy). I don’t understand why you would view any and every instance of “spontaneous violence” on the part of protesters as the fault of the political system. As I said though, the vast majority of protesters taking part in OWS understand that violence would be self-defeating, and I don’t see them allowing any violent elements to use their protests as concealment.

Andrew, people come out to protest because they are pissed off. Myself, to come out and join a protest, I would have to be extremely pissed off at something. If you have a large number of highly pissed off people in your society, then something’s gone wrong in your political system. Now the political system can compromise, suppress the unrest, or ignore it. But if it fails to successfully compromise or suppress, some of the pissed off people will turn to violence; this is just the law of nature.

It is, in fact, true that much of the impact of the ‘baggers was through electoral politics, specifically in the Republican primaries – they did actually set out to impose a test of sufficient teabaggership on anyone who wanted to be a Republican congressman, and they did manage to create a sizeable new radical-right caucus in Congress.

If there’s an OWS caucus in the House or Senate in a couple of years’ time, I think both the United States and the world would be significantly better. Axiomatically, there will be some Democrats who are elected next time round. If you can impose the requirement that they be OWS-acceptable or better, self-identifying as OWS, there will be such a group.

“Never in the history of intergenerational transfers has one generation left such a mountain of IOUs to another as the baby boomers are leaving to their grandchildren.”

Except, maybe, the Greatest Generation?

Oh wait – I forgot. You don’t measure indebtedness by the actual government debt as a percent of GDP. You measure indebtedness by taking the total worst-case costs of future social safety net spending over the next 50 years and call that debt, and presume that the only possible method of reducing that debt is by cutting the safety net, because higher taxes or inflation would mean the end of the world.

John

The quote is from Furguson in the original article. Sorry, I should have stated as much.

Dirk at 7 links another skewering of the whole “IOU” issue, but based on the rest of the article I think Furguson was not limiting the “IOU” to actual debt, but including SS/Medicare as part of the IOU (the whole “SS/Medicare is a 50-trillion unfunded liability” nonsense).

John