Social democrats in the twin-peaked world

What are people supposed to be voting for? They can’t get structural change by voting even if they wanted it.

The suspicion is growing that his won’t end well, but how it will end seems to be anybody’s guess. Paul Krugman would like it to be 1960, but is smart enough to keep the lights off when he looks ahead for confirmation. The geopoliticians-in-charge would like to convince us that it’s 1947, but will press ahead regardless. More thoughtful analysts seem to fear that it might be 1914. Sellers of apocalypse are laying out their wares in chain letters, church basements, and splinter parties everywhere. Sometimes, in moments of ignorance, one has to wait for further evidence. January 2015 seems to be one of those moments.

This is in part because of ordinary people withdrawing from political parties – the membership of mass parties has collapsed over the last few decades. However, it is also because the elites of parties don’t rely on mass membership to provide resources – instead they rely on resources from the state and networks where they are firmly embedded with other elites.

This vaguely reminds me of Colin Crouch’s Post-Democracy, which I’m pretty sure I first checked out on your recommendation, and which was excellent. Mair is now on the reading list. Thanks!

Jacques Bidet, A Key to the Critical Companion to Contemporary
Marxism, 2001

“Marx focused analysis on demonstrating that underlying the appearances
of wage-labour exchange is concealed exploitation. But he also disclosed that
this is not realised by the simple relationship between wage-earners and own-
ers of the means of production. For it always assumes the intervention of the
other pole of the dominant class – that of the manager, the organiser, who
directs, having supposedly been chosen for his competence. The power of
‘competence’ (supposed, professed, qualified) is of a different kind from that
of ownership and extends far beyond private production, since it is equally
deployed in the public sphere of administration and culture and, in truth,
throughout society.

Marx was unable to complete a study of modern class structure, of which
he nevertheless set out the main elements. If we wish to take up his outline
today, we must in particular appreciate that the dominant class comprises
two poles, one based on the market and on ownership, the other on organisa-
tion and ‘competence’ – two poles that are at once complementary and com-
paratively antagonistic. Like ownership, competence too is socially defined
and recognised by means of specific titles (degrees, etc.). This bipolarity gov-
erns the existence of two distinct poles of hegemony, to which we can relate
the pair of ‘Right’ (more on the side of ownership and the market) and ‘Left’
(more on the side of organisations and their competences) – a pair whose
content varies enormously from one capitalist society to another (republi-
cans and democrats here, conservatives and social democrats elsewhere), is
always fluid and problematic, and preserves itself only by misrepresenting
itself, with each pole being hegemonic only to the extent that it can in some
way represent the other within itself and thus pass itself off as guarantor of
the general interest.”

A little more from Jacques Bidet, cite above in 8

“Along with the former Third World, it
affects all developed capitalist countries, particularly those of Europe, whose
institutions of a socialist orientation, constructed in the course of a century
and once so powerful and resonant – and sometimes going well beyond the
‘social state’, especially in their economic dimension – are gradually being
dismantled, in a process that nothing seems capable of checking.

The obvious question facing Marxists is why things are thus. According to
the type of hypothesis offered by ‘historical materialism’, such a reverse can-
not be explained exclusively by political developments – by the implementa-
tion of the neoliberal project, conceived as a machination or conspiracy on the
part of capitalist élites. The old adage according to which, at a certain point, the
development of the ‘productive forces’ calls into question the existing ‘social
relations’, is especially pertinent here. ”

Uhh maybe, “politics local, capital global?”

Trotsky was right, Bernstein and Sheri Berman tragically wrong.

In the now-dying thread on consequentialist arguments for deontological claims, we seem to be circling the American-liberal loss of righteousness, which is surely another aspect of the same phenomenon. In the U.S., the left does not seem able to muster a convincing case against torture — at least not one that involves prison for anyone, but whistleblowers. Krugman talks about “soaring inequality”, without any apparent awareness of economic predation; for Krugman, in retrospect the GFC was a well-understood (by economists) bank-run, not the crescendo of fraud, followed by the coda of predation. Obama turned his Treasury department over to the giant banks; he did next to nothing for people in trouble on their home mortgages, though he had vast resources to do so.

All of the righteous conviction and aggression seems, oddly, to be on the Right. If Greece has the effrontery to elect a popular government in the Syriza coalition, the Greeks can expect to be on the receiving end of some extensive cruelty. Syriza, on paper, has a remarkably conservative program. Whether Syriza are an example or counter-example of the phenomenon Henry identifies, I could not say on my knowledge. It would certainly seem a plausible hypothesis that the extended suffering of Greece has revived at least the potential of mass support for a party of the left. Maybe, some case can be made regarding the Five Star movement in Italy as well.

What I want to draw attention to though, is Bruce’s maxim: conservatives make revolutions. It’s the pre-emptive counter-revolution that sets the house afire. And, maybe, we are about to see that in Greece, which seems on track to give Syriza a majority, as PASOK splinters. Not because Syriza offers anything programmatically, or has much in the way of leverage to act effectively, even if it does gain office, but because the Empire Strikes Back.

Thanks Henry, very useful piece. Hence, in part at least, the likes of UKIP. One difficulty, though, is that the project of “reconnecting” with the base, pursued by some within Labour (the example with which I’m most familiar) identifies that base with what it was 40+ years ago (or what they imagine it was). Hence the literally insular politics of Blue Labour and the obsession of people like Danczuk with the “white working class”. The trouble is, that working class is gone or going, its institutions are weak and it is numerically diminished. So social democracy needs a new base to connect to.

(I’ve been reading Gorz’s Farewell over the past few days, a book marred by the fact that it has to engage with the presumptions of the French Marxist intelligensia of the early 1980s, but there’s a lot that he got right. Maybe a CT post to come.)

A look at the career of Gro Harlem Brundtland might be interesting. She saved tens or hundreds of millions of lives through activities such as organizing the response to SARS and through organizing the movement to reduce cigarette smoking. She was one of the founding creators of the concept of sustainable development. But her major triumphs were technocratic and global in nature: her multiple terms as Prime Minister of Norway don’t seem to have accomplished anything remotely as influential nationally.

The original European Community was purposely designed to be supra-national (and in that sense undemocratic) to get over the original sin of nationalism which had devastated the country twice in fifty years. But in those days there was a European political class which had survived the war, had often been in the Resistance, and in general had a politically responsible attitude, and a broadly social democratic and economically interventionist mindset. I think the founding fathers of Europe would have been horrified to see what its political class has now become, with all its corruption, careerism and cynicism, and its ideology of staring-eyed neoliberalism.. In addition, of course, Europe institutions have now grown to a size, and degree of intrusiveness, that few originally envisaged.
But the real failure is not in Europe but nationally. Parties of the supposed Left abandoned their economic agenda because it was too difficult and controversial, and because their own elites were increasingly drawn from groups that actually benefited from neoliberal economic policies. For want of anything better, they substituted a social-liberal agenda (gay marriage being the prototypical example) with which they tried to differentiate themselves from a Right whose economic ideas they largely shared. But such initiatives gained very few new votes, whilst often alienating their traditional supporters. It has therefore been easy for parties of the radical right to outflank the parties of the Left from the left. If those parties of the Left disintegrate in the face of the National Front, UKIP and their analogues, they will have only themselves to blame.

mcmanus, your crack would be funnier if the Pegida morons weren’t chanting “Wir sind das Volk” this very week.

Wer is das Volk? is the relevant question. Pegida isn’t the answer, even if BW is right about conservatives being the real revolutionaries. First, there must be, will be blood. Nur dann kommt die (neue) Moral.

Call me cynical, but whenever vox populi raises its ugly head it seems to shout something along the lines of “kick out the foreigners (and other selected deviants), they’re taking our jobs, make children all day and their cultural practices are icky”. Of course, if we want to be nice about it, we could say with some justification that this is simply a projection of the existential fears of vulnerable economic groups onto another, even weaker one. But I think what’s mostly at play here is just deep seated, good old fashioned racism and general hatred of “the other” – it’s proven very popular time and again and the rightwing parties are happy as pie to feed these base instincts.

So in the face of resurging xenophobic populism and nationalism, I am actually very grateful that the much maligned “EU elites” are keeping both the plebs and national governments at bay – god help us if the EU became truly democratic. The longterm solution is to dismantle the European nation states and find an equilibrium between supra-national and regional power structures.

@Henry
You’re at GW, right?
Why not take the debate out of fantasyland? The snow is beautiful and it’s not that cold. Why not put on your boots and spend 30 minutes walking over to the Capitol? Raul Grijalva and the rest of the Congressional Progresive Caucus got back in to town yesterday and it’s unlikely John Boehner will have anything for them to do. You could simply ask them why “The Better Off Budget” they proposed seeks to reduce the National Debt to 65.5% of GDP? That seems like a low number. Is it because they are dissociated from their constituents?

It really wouldn’t hurt to ask.

#21 Thornton Wilder

The sad irony is that Krugman, just like all the Freshwater crowd, continues to insist that there is no other way. Either a priori or (in Krugman’s case) a forteriori, they have all concluded that the current methodoly is the best possible.

Somehow when I first read that I read “monopoly” for “methodoly”. I don’t know why. They don’t look that similar on the surface.

I wouldn’t be so hard on the vox populi. Some of us were born listening to it. All the evidence is that purely hard-line anti-foreigner and anti-immigrant parties attract only a small proportion of the electorate to their views. The issue here is “foreigners” only insofar as ordinary people, the unwashed plebs that European elites so dislike, are those who actually suffer from the negative effects of globalisation, job exportation, immigration and European “competition” policy. It may be inelegant and oversimplified to mix all this up as “foreigners”, but it’s how a lot of people think. The Left, which used to be the party of the common people now holds them in contempt, not least because its leaders benefit personally from these very same factors. It has carried out the first part of Brecht’s recipe, and has dismissed the people. Unfortunately, it can’t find another one.

“But I think what’s mostly at play here is just deep seated, good old fashioned racism and general hatred of “the other” – it’s proven very popular time and again and the rightwing parties are happy as pie to feed these base instincts.”

Even granting this premise, unless your “EU elites” are actually prepared to address these concerns in a substantive way this xenophobic power base will only continue to grow as more and more people become impoverished in order to give free money to European bankers.

But sure, go ahead and continue to sneer. That’ll bring them around to your way of thinking.

There’s a nice story in Le Monde this morning about the resignation of the head of the CGT syndicat, who refused to put CGT’s face on the anti-austerity movement. One of the things that brought him down was the revelation concerning the expenses on his house and office. These people really live and think like CEOs, now. The CEO-ization of upper management – be it of charities, universities, parties, unions, etc. – is not, perhaps, the cause of the collapse of the left’s defense of social democratic economics, but it is certainly the symptom. http://www.lemonde.fr/economie/article/2014/11/25/le-bureau-de-thierry-lepaon-renove-aux-frais-de-la-cgt-selon-le-canard-enchaine_4529229_3234.html#meter_toaster

(Not the David who made the Syriza comment).
To the Lepaon example (and “paon” means “peacock” in French, how interesting) I’d add that French trades unions have been pretty ineffective at protecting their members’ wages and working conditions, so they too are losing support. Whilst a large working class exists in most western countries, it’s made up largely of people who have a middle-class mindset. In reality, a call-centre operator today may have a less secure and relatively less well-paid job than the factory worker who was his or her grandfather. But whereas it was relatively easy to organise five hundred factory workers who lived in the same town and walked or took the bus to work, it’s far harder to organise the same number of people on temporary contracts who drive half an hour to work from different directions. The destruction of communities, one of the proudest achievements of neoliberalism, has effectively made organised mass political parties impossible, or at least very difficult.

This discussion is way over-engineered. Historically European social democrats faced the accusation, which they never properly refuted, that their program was just a watered-down version of Soviet communism. With the failure of Soviet communism they retreated to watered-down neoliberalism. They convinced themselves that Thatcher was right – There is No Alternative.

Never underestimate the desire of center-left politicians to be seen as being responsible.

Well, Tabasco, you can’t properly refute the truth. Perhaps a lot of European social democrats themselves thought of their program as watered down Soviet communism, and lost heart when it was proven to them that the pure quill really didn’t work. It would be nice to think of them as actually learning from experience.

Of course, all political elites attempt to insulate themselves from the need for support from the base, and having succeeded, treat the base to what the elites think they ought to get, and ignore what the base wants. That’s the oldest story around: Somebody gets power claiming they want to help you, and once they have it, use it for their own ends. All hierarchies degenerate in that fashion if remaining in a position of power isn’t directly tied to making the people underneath happy, and no elite are ever going to refrain from trying to cut that tie.

The sad fact is, power attracts people who shouldn’t have it, and once they get it, they don’t mean to part with it, or use it as somebody else would like.

You don’t think some fraction of European social democrats couldn’t have been Marxists, just trying for incremental progress in the direction of their ultimate goal? Seems reasonable to me, not every European communist would have thought openly pushing for a direct jump to communism was a smart tactic.

Heck, I’m an anarcho-capitalist. I just think constitutional government and the rule of law are a step in that direction from where we are now, and see no practical way to immediately get rid of government. But I still know where I want to go, even if I can’t see a way yet to get there. I find it very easy to believe that a lot of democratic socialists would have been similarly situated communists.

Thanks for the recommendation of Mair, sounds really interesting.

I have been interested in the connection between electoral dis-proportionality and the decline of the Left. Both the UK and France have highly disproportional system (compared to the rest of Europe). Contrast to Germany which despite having most of its proletariat base sealed off in the East still had fairly robust soc-dem politics in the post War period largely I am assuming because of a more proportional electoral system.

In short, the quality of the political democracy helps determine the robustness and longevity working class anchored social democracy. It’s the ability of voters to discipline the representatives in multi-party contest that makes representative democracy have the possibility of really being accountable to the base (the Anthony Downs argument). I don’t think it makes sense to generalize about the Left in Britain (let alone the US) where the 2.5 party system helped the Left fritter away it’s huge demographic advantages with the small more purely parliamentary (and more purely social democratic) states such as the Scandinavians etc. Of course, the decline of the social democratic tradition in those places is crucial to understand as well.

(Henry – this comment is awaiting moderation as I mistyped my email address – if you could please delete the one in moderation it would be appreciated)

In defense of the current French government (about which I am not well educated overall) I heard at a conference last year that they set up a new nationalised bank worth several billions the funds of which are intended to support sustainability, social enterprises, and technology development . Since in Australia our past Labor governments dismayingly privatized our State and Commonwealth nationalised banks some decades ago I think this is a commendable thing.

There being so many mentions of Brecht is interesting – last year one of the leading urban planning professors at uni published a paper called Coming Through the Slaughter (after a Michael Ondaatjie book) about the past few decades of growth – and it was bookended by quotes if Brecht which makes me think of it here.

Now I think of it the essay also points to a well known failing of Krugman in terms of him not engaging very well (AFAICT) with material and ecological limits and the temporal nature of things. The move away from a temporal understanding was pointed to ages ago by the Marxist scholars of postmodernism where if I remember rightly the argument was that space started to be the basis of understanding rather than time. I will copy some passages from the essay below , it is based on his book The Urban Condition (2014)

I do not think past solutions are going to be able to be replicated now given the depletion of resources, poor state of the ecologies and living species diversity and numbers and climate and ocean systems, and high numbers of people globally as well as other cultural factors.

“I, Bertolt Brecht, came out of the black forests.
My mother moved me into the cities as I lay
Inside her body.And the coldness of the forests
Will be inside me till my dying day.
– Bertolt Brecht ”

The bloodiest century in history gives way to an era of urban opportunity, but in a world unsettled by planetary scale threats to natural and human orders. Ulrich Beck (2009) speaks of a ‘dialectics of moder- nity’, underlining the simultaneity of triumph and crisis in a world pervasively and continuously remade by capitalist modernisation. Beck casts us in an age of unprecedented global risk marked by an auto-genesis of threat that seems integral to capitalism itself: of world global society wracked by the agonies “…self- dissolution, self-endangerment and self-transformation” (2009:163).

The terrible and terrifying dialectic of modernisation was revealed continuously through the twentieth- century, as the scale of the paradox reached ever upwards to the twin heights of accomplishment and extinction. In 1961, through the heavy pall of the atomic age, John F. Kennedy, recognised,“The world is very different now. Man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life” (in Watson 2012:12). It was a moment of revelation that was both appalling and enthralling. Other moments of species insight were to follow: the dawn of a Silent Spring (Carson 1962) that masked the poisoning of Earth’s ecology, the first view from space of a finite world and The Limits to Growth (Meadows et al. 1972). Later, recognition that centuries of carbon capitalism had squandered the planet’s ability to support life, potentially all of it.

The modern conversation has fixed progressively on this great contradiction of human development. Nar- ratives collide. Triumph is reread as calamity, and progress retold as regress. There were foretellings. Long before President Kennedy’s declaration, Marx and Engels scorned the boasts of the industrial bourgeois who “like the sorcerer…is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells (Marx & Engels 1985[1848 ]:85-6).

…

The new world we re-inherit will be, in the words of the late Australian musician David McComb, a beautiful waste. We should not fear it terribly. Our extraordinary capacity for making convivial things, including from ruined cities and spoiled landscapes, will remain undiminished.

To eyes that can see, this miraculous power is already quietly at work in the world’s metropolitan ruins and ‘doomed peripheries’. In Detroit, slaughtered industrial behemoth, a community farming initiative estab- lishes agriculture in urban badlands in quest for better health, justice and renewal of human purpose. Rebel Cities in the Global South refuse the wasteland destinations charted by neo-liberal urbanism (Harvey 2012). These urban natalities witness to species optimism and courage in dark times.

…

We ate the fruit of knowledge. We cannot undo its work. We cannot go back to the first light of purity. There is only the way ahead. Eden must be renewed in our own cultivations. Homo urbanis should find its good home in the city not in a new age of enchantment. The miracle of modern recovery that awaits us is, as Arendt explained, our inborn ability to endlessly produce the new…against the odds. The Promethean dream is reaching its improvident end. We wake in a time of vast possibilities. Something awful is being born, but also something new. The odds, if we take them, are in our favour. In the next world we can be monarchs of the beautiful waste.

In the earthquakes to come, I very much hope
I shall keep my cigar alight, embittered or no
I, Bertolt Brecht, carried off to the asphalt cities
From the black forests inside my mother long ago.
– Bertolt Brecht ”

Brendan Gleeson , 2014, Coming Through the Slaughter: Ecology of the Urban Age
http://www.sustainable.unimelb.edu.au/files/mssi/MSSI-IssuesPaper-3_Gleeson_2014_0.pdf

I’m my mind has been dulled from hearing the same drumbeat during the most recent iteration of the euro crisis… so in political terms, all I can understand is:

After years and years of democratic deficits (a topic of some discussion since at least the early days of the monetary union), the only answer to the accumulated democratic debt is quite clearly democratic austerity. Eventually these austerity measures will replenish the coffers of civic and political engagement, allowing for confidence and faith in the system to be restored and for political investment and political credit to return to normal levels after a period of adjustment.

There are a few steps in the plan (only three or four are really crucial steps, and the rest are just very important) yet to be finalized among the concerned governments, supranational institutions, and assorted interest parties, but no doubt coordination will occur in due time.

That’s all tongue in cheek – I don’t have a firm view yet on European prospects for this year, but I’m starting to incline towards making a more optimistic call than some.

The other party to watch is Podemos in Spain. Their leader seems to get it:

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/12/pablo-iglesias-podemos-left-speech/

@Randy McDonald

If anything, the current European Union is a watered-down vision of what it was “supposed” to be. Before the current crisis, I remember hearing complaints about how admitting a bunch of new, poorer European countries prevented the EU from becoming the tighter organization it would supposedly be if it was only the rich European countries.

In the mean-time, there is a European Parliament that is democratically elected and that has legal powers, if anyone bothers to organize and put them to use against the non-democratic institutions in the EU.

The most left wing, pro- worker if you like, states in the world, perhaps even in all world history, are in the contemporary European Union. Sweden and Denmark for example (are their politics hollowed out?), but others too, each with their own particular features of course. Much of what the EU does “constrain” has little to do with the politics of redistribution between classes. Similarly, much of the contemporary question of social democratic crisis comes down to more specifically to the Euro. The Euro does indeed appear to have been a very stupid idea, too similar to the Gold Standard, as many people warned when it was being proposed. If there was a general weakness to social democrats (both party officials and affiliated technocrats/thinkers) in Europe in the 1980s and 1990s, it is that they were willing to cluelessly sign up to half-baked EU-wide single currency proposals.

”Get your head out of the sand and stop repeating the eternal verities about Marxism and class: they don’t give you either a plausible programme for how to change society or a plausible vision of a future one.”

There is certainly no creditable center-left vision re: how to change society, or even, seemingly, how to prevent it from getting worse. We could do without self-satisfied left-liberal Anti-Marxism, thank you.

“We could do without self-satisfied left-liberal Anti-Marxism, thank you.”

If I say “your plan won’t work”, that’s true (or not) independently of whether I have one that will. It isn’t a pissing contest. (I’m glad to see that you think it obvious that my own aspirations are “centre-left”.) Your wishing that classical Marxism will provide us with workable solutions won’t make that so; your invocation of classical Marxist views as a purity test simply shuts down debates we need to have if we are to find a viable path to a more just society. Ditto for mcmanus et al.

So @David, I write:

“I’m glad to see that you think it obvious that my own aspirations are “centre-left””

and you reply:

“The problem being that the only ”debate” to be had with the Center-Left usually involves the degree to which they are willing to accede to the economic priorities of the Right. Full stop.”

(In my experience there is no useful conversation to be had with a person who already knows what you think, quite independently of what you have expressed.)

“What has changed is that old chestnut, ‘class consciousness’.”

I don’t know if it has changed; perhaps it’s just been successfully neutralized. Professionally, scientifically.

Here’s a quote from the piece I read recently, by Steven Mann, American diplomat: “As hackers have shown, the most aggressive way to alter software is with a “virus,” and what is ideology but another name for a human software virus?” Nice, eh?

david #49 – do you have any links/ books about the response of the rank and file to the corporatist policies?

There is a policy that points the way forward, simple transparent redistribution (i.e. basic income or as I prefer to call it national dividend). But the old left (because it identifies with labour) cannot embrace it. We should be prepared to accept that labour may never more have the leverage it once had. Leverage in the modern world requires purchasing power – give it to people.

So yes, we may need a need a new left to achieve that. I had great hopes for the pirate party in Germany, who seemed to be saying some of the right things, but then they lost their way (perhaps because they were an amalgam of libertarians, anarchists and socialists, but perhaps also because they had no patience with the mechanics of seeking power).

”There is a policy that points the way forward, simple transparent redistribution (i.e. basic income or as I prefer to call it national dividend). But the old left (because it identifies with labour) cannot embrace it.”

Meh. I think the Old Left could quite easily get behind the cause of Basic Income. It would require some politicians actually advocating it with regularity to change the system as it currently exists, however.

Might be related: Oh, dear!. It’s from BBC’s Adam Curtiss, so not a nutter vid, at least not obviously so. But who knows?

From the clip:

[…]a strategy of power that keeps any opposition constantly confused.

Tcherneva and Wray (pdf) have been arguing against the Basic Income (and for a Job Guarantee) for probably decades. I oppose BI.

But what brought me back was encountering the name Philippe Van Parijs in MaxSpeaks comments. Won’t add another link, so from Wiki:

“Philippe Van Parijs (French: [filip vɑ̃ paʁɛjs]; born 23 May 1951) is a left-libertarian Belgian philosopher and political economist, mainly known as a proponent and main defender of the basic income concept[1] and for the first systematic treatment of linguistic justice.[2]”

Where had I seen that name recently? The list of Analytical Marxists.

J. Parnell Thomas @71
From memory the arguments made there are mainly US centric political arguments, not arguments about the basic concept. I’m allowed to disagree with him, we can chew gum and walk at the same time.

#72 bob mcmanus

Tcherneva and Wray (pdf) have been arguing against the Basic Income (and for a Job Guarantee) for probably decades. I oppose BI.

How come? In terms of physical stuff we could support the whole population at a level of around, say, $20,000/year each without much trouble. Oil is currently the limiting factor, and housing. We build ancient-style houses that are hard to heat wherever there are currently new jobs, and then when the jobs move elsewhere the houses sit there. Rent is very high where there are jobs and low elsewhere. It’s a system that would be ripe for reform except that upper-middle-class people can invest in rental housing as a sort of cottage industry, and the banks want it the way it is.

There’s the issue that if people weren’t terrified of poverty then they might not work desperately at jobs they hate. But that’s a psychological issue that could be dealt with other ways.

“Tcherneva and Wray (pdf) have been arguing against the Basic Income (and for a Job Guarantee) for probably decades.”

Bob Black, The Abolition of Work. People are going to go around and around saying “but guaranteed income causes hyperinflation” and “but enforced make-work for everyone is not what we really want” until they accept that we really need a lot less productive work.

Well, left liberals usually can’t and won’t state what you just said openly, Ronan, largely because they feel entitled to votes from farther to their left. The posture they adapt then is to pretend to be more authentically leftist than the actual left so as to deflect criticism while, in actuality, shamelessly shifting right.

Of course, most people do sort of (emotionally) prefer leaders and policy makers with actual, detectable preferences and ideas beyond self seeking and politicking.

Bob McManus @77
“BI is complicated and off-topic” yes as a policy is it off topic, but as politics not at all. Why hasn’t the left moved in this way. Why are they afraid to promote naked redistribution (and with a policy promoted originally by Milton Friedman)? I think it is is because they still see their role as tied to promoting the interests of “the working class” and not to promoting the interests of the poorer sections of the community. That is the real hold – and promoting union power is going EXACTLY in the wrong direction if you look at it that way.

Henry, it’s an interesting thesis.

It looks to me like this is the overall path that both Europe and the US traveled, over several decades:

1) Acceptance of the tenets of the welfare state.
2) Diminution of working-class political activity, as its welfare needs were met.
3) Diversion of its potential leaders into government stewards with perqs.
4) Sociological filtering of the field of economics into technocratic management, dialed down to bullet points amounting to neoliberalism, avoiding any serious challenge to vested interests, and even now, politely dancing around the politics of questioning the financial subsystem.

(Thus, when Krugman writes, “The problem with these conventional leaders, I’d argue, is that they’re afraid to challenge elite priorities, in particular the obsession with budget deficits, for fear of being considered irresponsible,” — he might have noted that it is HIS VERY OWN FIELD which has instituted this fear and anointed it as truth, and almost all of them are still doing it, to this day.)

5) Thus, for the whole population, a general constitution of nescience, prevailing over limited time-budgets for cognition — in an era of increasing complexities; and coming after an era when most people in the Atlantic economies were partially satisfied with the status quo.

It could be thatEurope has thrown another wrench into things with monetary union. But this might also force a new structural solution. After all, they are not going to jettison the welfare state. And however dispirited they are, they observe that the United States already exhibits the embarrassing moral degradations of pursuing neoliberalism. So, although the paths had been parallel up to now, in some ways the people of Europe may benefit from the example of the United States, which shows the next steps to avoid.

FIRST MUSINGS OVER WHAT TO DO NEXT — WITH FIRST AMENDMENT PROTECTED COMMERCIAL ASSOCIATION:

I just read in Which Side Are You On that the Warren Court killed the Norris-LaGuardia Act’s clear stated intent to ban federal injunctions against strikes (including wild-cats, sit-downs, even if there is a no-strike clause in the contract) …
… which still left 48 states to do what they pleased. (Congress can set the jurisdiction of federal court.)

Imagine (as John Lennon would say [now looking down?]) a federal court ruling (far West states likely) or better a US Supreme Court ruling finding collective bargaining to be a fundamental First Amendment right. All such rulings would probably fall.

50 states have the right to regulate contracts. Federal law may dominate labor law under the present regime. Under protecting freedom of association states would seem to have a lot more leeway (maybe they could even do it now) to setup union recognition rules (I’m talking American style majority, exclusive representation unions; there is a move afoot to organize some minority unions too — universal practice in “right-to-work” Europe — even under today’s federal setup, but out of style for so, so long).

Imagine (John Lennon) Washington State, Oregon, California and Nevada setting up centralized bargaining schemes (could work for retail workers, not for airlines probably).

Point is, once you get ruling anywhere recognizing free association labor rights, the damn should burst everywhere. All the states that bar their employees from organizing would get hauled into many courts. Crackpot laws like Illinois’ just passed requirement that public school teachers must have 75% to strike (they did) should drop.

All the Koch brothers can do cannot keep one lawyer from going to court and sending all these many dominoes cascading in an avalanche of labor organizing.

Me: ” until they accept that we really need a lot less productive work.”

Looking back, I see that I wrote an unintentional ambiguity: I didn’t mean that work should be less productive per hour worked than it is now, but that society needs far fewer hours of productive work than we work now. A whole lot of this crisis of “we need jobs for everyone, where can we find them?” occurs because higher productivity per hour means that we really don’t need most people to have jobs. The right wing solution is to keep the 99% desperate and turn productivity into paper wealth that can be funneled off to the 1%, but left wing solutions about having everyone be workers really aren’t much better. The heritage of Marxism generally harms the left because of this.

P.P.S my comment @87
I’m not so much suggesting that my PERSONAL interests are all that concern me, I should have included that I want to live in a basically egalitarian middle class world. Which is basically what I grew up with in the 1960s in Australia. I think there has been class warfare since the 1980s – of the 1% against everybody else, not of capitalists versus workers.

Andrew F. 01.07.15 at 2:15 am
“I’m my mind has been dulled from hearing the same drumbeat during the most recent iteration of the euro crisis… so in political terms, all I can understand is:

After years and years of democratic deficits (a topic of some discussion since at least the early days of the monetary union), the only answer to the accumulated democratic debt is quite clearly democratic austerity. Eventually these austerity measures will replenish the coffers of civic and political engagement, allowing for confidence and faith in the system to be restored and for political investment and political credit to return to normal levels after a period of adjustment.

There are a few steps in the plan (only three or four are really crucial steps, and the rest are just very important) yet to be finalized among the concerned governments, supranational institutions, and assorted interest parties, but no doubt coordination will occur in due time.

That’s all tongue in cheek – I don’t have a firm view yet on European prospects for this year, but I’m starting to incline towards making a more optimistic call than some.”

Would you please explain WTF you are asserting?

Scott P
With respect, it seems you haven’t read the thread.

#88 Rich Puchalsky

I didn’t mean that work should be less productive per hour worked than it is now, but that society needs far fewer hours of productive work than we work now. A whole lot of this crisis of “we need jobs for everyone, where can we find them?” occurs because higher productivity per hour means that we really don’t need most people to have jobs.

Agreed! And I want to hypothesize that in recent decades one of the big drivers for increasing employment in large corporations was Parkinson’s Law. Big corporations developed a layer of private bureaucracy. Managers got more status by having more people under them. When there were more people in the bureaucracy they created more work for each other.

It kept going like that for awhile and then we got the push to downsize. “Never mind what you need, the stockholders want the price to go up and the stock market will have more confidence in us if we fire a bunch of people.” Managers found they could still push product out the door with fewer people. The remaining workers didn’t necessarily have to work harder, they could just leave out some of the stuff that didn’t need to be done. Fine for everybody except the people who were fired.

I try to imagine a nation with BI. It’s easy to provide everybody’s needs. But then what do people with money do? I’d expect them to wear expensive clothes that wear out fast, that fit the latest fashions. They would eat exotic food that you can’t buy with Basic dollars. They would buy this year’s computers, while most people could only afford last-year’s computers. The latest software would be for them because they’re the market, it trickles down to the masses next year.

It’s cheap to produce necessities. It’s expensive to advertise variant products to show that people who buy them are the elite, the special ones who deserve the special best treatment. You can’t do that for everybody.

So it would get us nothing like equality. It would still be worth doing, if we can’t do better.

WT @97
What can I win from that expression of nihilism? Do you have a platform that will improve things, or will abandoning Liberalism (rather than pointing to a path for reform) result in the world getting better or worse? Being a grumpy old man may be gratifying, but it is pretty useless.

@64

Oh, more disease (“‘communication’ also has a meaning in epidemiology, you know”) metaphors, please!

Plus it isn’t. 64 is 100R16. More coffee for me.

“Do you have a platform that will improve things, or will abandoning Liberalism ”

One doesn’t need any platform to point out that capitalism-liberalism is in a deep crisis.

55 – yes, the old working class centered on manufacturing has been relocated. But I don’t see the irrelevance of Marxism here. I think Edward Wolff has used the notion of non-productive labor, which Marx elaborates in the second book of capital – what I would call circulation work – to good effect in analyzing the recomposition of what we can now call the wage class in the US – in Growth, Accumulation, and Unproductive Activity: An Analysis of the Post-War U.S. Economy, reissued in 2006. Plus, of course, Marx’s long ago prediction that certain guild professions – doctors, lawyers – will in the course of time be proletarianized seems to finally make more sense. In the US, guilds – jobs in which the state has to licence the worker – are much more powerful than unions. And it is to the world of guilds that the focus has shifted. Uber is a great example of the probable end of a guild force. Here’s a paper by Krueger about it: https://www.princeton.edu/ceps/workingpapers/174krueger.pdf

This of course complicates the story of how the countervailing force of labor operates, in the EU as well as the US. Certainly the most prominent guild to be put under attack in recent years is that of teachers – from the elementary schools to the professors. There is an astonishing lack of awareness of the place of guilds – or “licenced occupations”, to use Kruegers term – in the developed economies.
Don’t throw out your Marx is my advice.

“Scott P
With respect, it seems you haven’t read the thread.”

I’ve read the entire thread. Perhaps you could point out what I missed. There was one person calling for a basic income, which did not seem to win much support. What else?

Take, for example, Luke above:
“We need to look at unfashionable questions of ideology, social discipline, and organisation, and how these relate to global markets.”

That’s not a platform. That’s a suggestion for some analysis that might perhaps lead to a platform down the line.

This comment thread has convinced me that the only political ideology that will matter going forward into the future is Chinese Transhumanism.

In the long run, no one will be required to work, due to the fact that machines will be able to perform all tasks.

I think that this is mostly correct. I am much less sanguine about how the rest will play out. At a minimum I very much doubt that everyone will speak 10 languages and contribute to the sciences and/or arts. The world continues to lose minority languages and the main international languages continue to gain in dominance. It is far from certain that drugs can increase plasticity and creativity to the point that everyone learns many languages and composes music just on a lark — though that would be great if it does happen. I would guess that most people in a post-work world would not leave notable contributions to art or science but just enjoy themselves however they like. And that’s perfectly fine. “Socialite” is already a respectable status for someone who doesn’t need to work; insisting that everyone will produce science and art when they no longer toil for food and shelter seems like a thin veneer over an outdated idea about the inherent virtue of work.

In the worst case, the automation of everything (including guard labor) means that ruthless people who already have a large stock of self-reproducing machinery can simply eliminate the people they don’t want to share anything with. In the second worst case there is war between would-be eliminationists and their enemies.

In a much better case there is no increase in large scale warfare or genocide, but the occasional homicidal maniac can still build pretty much any weapon he can procure blueprints for, barring pervasive surveillance and other prevention measures, since building them will no longer require specialized human skills. You could build a simple cruise missile in a single barn, if you had a decent selection of tools and all the specialized skills for making explosives and machining and assembling parts. The tools are going to become ubiquitous and the skills no longer required. The potential threats include pretty much any weapon that was available to national armed forces in 1944, plus computer guidance upgrades.

111: I think it’s pretty clear what’s going to happen.

Not clear to me.

Peter Frase has expanded his classic “Four Futures” article into a book released several places several formats right around now. Googling is easy.

Egalitarianism and Abundance: Communism
Hierarchy and Abundance: Rentism
Egalitarianism and Scarcity: Socialism
Hierarchy and Scarcity: Exterminism

After thinking about those, go back and re-read the original post. And maybe read about the First Gilded Age, and understand that the oligarchs have studied it more than you. They’d rather have servants, but not if they make trouble.

Bob McManus: “After thinking about those, go back and re-read the original post.”

I won’t bother. Right-wingerism is an intellectual and emotional debility, and it will be crowded-out and usurped.

Yes, it is far from certain that drugs can increase plasticity. There is a wide gap between basic biological knowledge and usable pharmaceutical interventions. In the early 2000s shortly after Gleevec was approved and the Human Genome Project had declared success, I attended a very optimistic lecture by one of the scientists behind Gleevec explaining how the explosion of biological knowledge and rational drug design were going to revolutionize pharmaceuticals and health in general. More than a decade later that early excitement has proven over-optimistic. Cancer survival rates have not improved faster than in the 1990s. Many billions of dollars have gone into attempts at Alzheimer’s therapies with zero success. The only effective anorectic or basal-metabolism-boosting drugs for weight loss are still old ones, known from the 1970s or before, all carrying serious risks of adverse side effects. There is no guarantee that just because you can identify a biological mechanism that you can also develop a drug to manipulate that mechanism with acceptable efficacy and specificity.

116: I meant Farrell’s at the top of the page, the one about Euro technocratic elites being disassociated from their base. I am very interested in the original topic, and what Farrell et al have in mind to fix it. I even consider the topic important, and the left-liberal self-analysis perhaps even more important. Certain aspects are discussed in my Marxian and anti–neoliberalism sources, oh from Gramsci to Dumenil and Levy Hardt and Negri many more. It just seems apparent that a lot of the language is alien to the political science crowd. But’s that’s ok.

I am even sympathetic to Bertram’s search for a new base and wish him luck, most of his allies and causes are mine also. I am just not sure that even if he cobbles a new social justice majority that they won’t need some of the tools he has abandoned to be able resist the forces of reaction while still maintaining egalitarianism. So far, not so good.

I started talking about Weimar ten years ago. It really wasn’t the Right that worried me.

Right-wingerism is an intellectual and emotional debility, and it will be crowded-out and usurped.

This will be a great comfort to those worried about Pegido, UKIP and the other neo-fascists. Marxist have often considered this kind of optimism, inevitabalism, reformism to practically translate into opportunism.

“In the long run, no one will be required to work, due to the fact that machines will be able to perform all tasks.”

Since there’s an existing security state apparatus, hire everyone into it and program 30% of the robots to be thieves.

#121 ZM

Automation if things people can do is a very annoying waste of resources and diminish meant of employment in my view.

I once met a woman who worked during WWII in a factory that made crackers. She lined up the rail-things that perforated the crackers, and the ones that perforated some lines deeper so the crackers would break along those lines before packaging. She did an excellent job, she was the best in the factory at doing that. Her wastage (mostly from having the lines crooked) was very low, less than 0.3%.

After the war they kept her even though she was a woman. But in 1950, after eight years on the job, they fired her. Somebody had created a machine that did her work. Its waste was essentially zero. It was much cheaper to run the machine than to pay her.

Would you prefer to give that job back to a person? Day after day, put the lines on crackers so they will crack along the lines? Would you like to work at that job for 45 years and then get a pension? Knowing all along that a machine could do your work cheaper and better?

Well, but that’s manufacturing. What about management? Say you’re supposed to decide what to do about something. If in fact you know what to do in every circumstance, then an expert system will do your job better than you can. But maybe what you do is to find new and better solutions, and test them to find out which are really better, and reprogram the expert system? That’s a high-level expert job and it should be worth considerable money, particularly if you actually make important improvements in the bottom line. But just learning the flowchart so you will know what to do without being told? Not worth much.

One thing that humans are valuable for that machines can’t do at all, is negotiating with human workers. But the fewer human workers we have the fewer negotiators we need to handle them.

Another thing that humans are far better at is sales. The human touch. How often do you buy from a recorded phone call? Compare that to the number of times you buy from human telemarketers. There will always be job opportunities for human beings to do cold-calls and try to sell you stuff.

Henry I apologize and I realize that we are far afield from the problems for social democracy in the aftermath of European monetary integration, but I question the value of continuous naysaying without examination of all the possibilities. Particularly when one of the things that gets people on board with political change is simply optimism, because politics is an emotional process. Thus:
______________________

@ Matt #119: What is your argument: that something cannot happen, or that it may not happen, or that it is happening, but not fast enough to do any good? Medicine is at the very beginning of having the right tools for the job, after millennia of haphazard results. Biotech, genomics, nanotech, imagining, and mass computation are combining into a big process, and the rate of discovery appears to be accelerating exponentially. I would like to know what you think would prevent this. Is there some sort of epistemological or metaphysical limitation?

And what is “plasticity”? Last June, researchers at University College London found the molecular pathway that salamanders use to regenerate limbs. Last November, researchers at Houston Methodist succeeding in reprogramming human scar tissue for new blood vessel growth. Just the subfield of stem cell research is exploding. It is no longer necessary to destroy embryos and the cells can be cultured on synthetic carbon nanotubes. Do you think all of this sort of stuff is not headed toward practical results?
______________________

Bob #120: “This will be a great comfort to those worried about Pegido, UKIP and the other neo-fascists.”

I specifically wrote in my comment #111 that in the short-term the right would resurge. We have a fight on our hands.

By the way, a British comedian named Stewart Lee may be the best comic alive, and here is a bit on UKIP:
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x23yv5y_stewart-lee-on-immigration-paul-nuttall-and-ukip_fun
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ZM #121: “This is not very likely because you are forgetting that material resources are finite and stocks are dwindling…”

I absolutely agree that we have to end pollution and that there are specific problems with some forms of energy use. But there is no demonstrated linear relation between the use of material resources and growth, that would necessitate destroying the biosphere. Things can be done cheaper, lighter, with less entropy. The combinatorial possibilities in the periodic table of the elements still unexplored are almost endless, and we are beginning to get inklings that discoveries at the quantum level will afford us useful materials. I think the question here is not whether we can make the transition to a soft future of material abundance for everyone, but whether we can get out of current patterns quickly enough to avoid collapse.
______________________

William #123: Sorry, I am definitely not a libertarian. And I’m also straining to understand where I might have intimated that life would be perfect. To avoid further misinterpretation, let me try to put it another way: Despite the best efforts of the most dogged Ayn Randian capitalists, in the future they are going become irrelevant, and it is technological automation which will do it to them. You can’t make money if you’ve put all the workers out of work, so the workers don’t have the incomes to buy your products. Thus, capitalism might simply be transcended (a possibility which I believe was considered by Marx). In the meantime, events already somewhat reflect what that might entail — growth of the welfare state; and now some serious economists are broaching the issue of permanent “helicopter” money.
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Dan #125: “we will keep filling up our lives with work at least so long as capitalist and classical liberal habits of thought, innovation, capitalization and social organization prevail.”

This is precisely the contention with which I take issue. I don’t think those are eternal human verities, I think they are psychological malfunctions and their convenience is coming to an historical end. It wouldn’t surprise me to find that half the people in the Euro area already feel the same way.

[The end of mass employment] is not very likely because you are forgetting that material resources are finite and stocks are dwindling and there is very high numbers of people in the world.

Dwindling material resources are unlikely to stave off automation. Suppose that fossil fuels and nuclear fuels have run out. People and cargo can still be moved much faster than in the 18th century via electrified rail transport. The least resource intensive way keep trains running is with renewable electricity derived from water, wind, or sun. Growing plants and using them as fuel for combustion engines is much less efficient. Growing plants and feeding them to human laborers who will turn the generators with muscle power is much less efficient still. The best combustion engines are more than twice as efficient as muscles at turning chemical energy into mechanical work, and combustion plants can use anything flammable, not just the small portion of plant matter that humans can eat.

The only thing that can halt automation’s encroachment on labor IMO is a general collapse of infrastructure/knowledge, not resource constraints alone. The “iron law of wages” for machines reaches a lower level than that for human laborers. Idle machines do not require food. They can be locked in a warehouse for years without ill effect. They are not killed by summer heat or winter cold. If human laborers are competing against machine labor in a resource constrained world ruled by market logic, the human laborers will not command high enough wages to avoid starvation.

Either humans will go extinct or they will manage a circular economy eventually. There is nothing conceptually special about humans over machines when it comes to recycling materials. The second law of thermodynamics (which I suspect you meant rather than the third law) applies to all physical systems, living or not. As long as there is an external energy source to drive processes, like sunshine, high-entropy materials can always be turned back into low-entropy materials. The only elements that are irreversibly “used up” by humans are nuclear fuels like uranium.

Lee A. Arnold @ 126

You may not be a libertarian, but those busy young beavers bringing us the technological solutions you foresee, and apparently favor certainly are. To catch something of the flavor of their world view, and the origins of my skepticism, have a look at this article in the latest issue of Harper’s Magazine. It’s unfortunately behind a paywall on the Web, but there’s gotta be an issue lying around somewhere near you.

Brett #129: We are not going to need nuclear anyway. In December Australian researchers announced photovoltaic-to-electrical conversion of 40%.
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William #129: The fact that some of the busy young beavers, who are bringing us technological solutions, are libertarians, i.e. are economically and emotionally infantile, is immaterial to my argument. My point is their ability to influence events will be circumscribed by other events, and there is nothing they will be able to do about it. And some of those busy young beavers are beginning to understand what is going on; see for example Martin Ford’s book, The Lights in the Tunnel, available for a while for free, here:
https://econfuture.wordpress.com/about/

@#126

This is precisely the contention with which I take issue. I don’t think those are eternal human verities, I think they are psychological malfunctions and their convenience is coming to an historical end. It wouldn’t surprise me to find that half the people in the Euro area already feel the same way.

I don’t really disagree with you J. But if it is a psychological malfunction, it is a malfunction that is deeply entrenched in Anglo-American culture – especially American. The prevalence of the anarchist strain in the left response to 2008 and the libertarian strain in the right response makes me think that the default emotional response in the American psychology to the manifest social failure brought on by the explosion of unbridled individualism and acquisitiveness is to unleash the individual even further, and to continue destroying functional governmental institutions, civilized standards and restraining moral norms even more. American popular culture seems positively barbarous these days; more infantile, shallow, violent and avaricious by the day. There is something in the contemporary American character that seems to find even the most modest social obligations and civilized restraints to be an intolerable intrusion on our greedy, unhinged egos.

I agree that the European mindset seems different.

“Would you prefer to give that job back to a person? Day after day, put the lines on crackers so they will crack along the lines? Would you like to work at that job for 45 years and then get a pension? Knowing all along that a machine could do your work cheaper and better?”

I did not say about whether I would enjoy a factory job – I said about limitations of diminishing material resources and so much unemployment, underemployment and informal economies meaning your scenario is unlikely to come true.

If no one at all likes to work in biscuit factories, biscuits are not a necessity of life so then you can just cancel out biscuit making as a field of production. We have local small scale biscuit and pudding businesses though and some people seem to like making biscuits and puddings fine at this small scale level. Else wise people can just cook their own biscuits at home which is a simple enough task as even children can cook biscuits.

If the alternative to working in a biscuit factory was poverty, I probably would very much like making biscuits. If the alternative was spending more time at home with my partner and our pets… Well that is another story all together.

#137 ZM

#121 Automation if things people can do is a very annoying waste of resources and diminish meant of employment in my view.

I probably misunderstood what you were saying here.

If no one at all likes to work in biscuit factories, biscuits are not a necessity of life so then you can just cancel out biscuit making as a field of production. We have local small scale biscuit and pudding businesses though and some people seem to like making biscuits and puddings fine at this small scale level.

Is there something wrong with making crackers or biscuits in automated factories? If transportation is fast and cheap, you might get better crackers that are cheaper. So people don’t have to work harder to get less.

I like the idea of working less to get more stuff. That’s kind of what productivity means. Except if somebody else gets all the extra stuff, and I only get as much as somebody else decides my work is worth, and they decide I work less so I get less, that sucks.

More stuff created with less work. Obviously good.

We can if we want make things we couldn’t otherwise make, because we could work the same amount and make extra stuff. Obviously good.

It takes less work to make everything somebody else wants made, and he pays only for the hours worked so people get less stuff. He gets all the extra. Not good.

So why does he get to decide how much stuff to make and how much to pay people? Because he’s the boss. You can’t build your own largely-automated factory to compete with him, because if you do then prices drop to the variable cost — very low — and stay there until somebody runs out of money and has to drop out. Only monopoly works unless big buyers demand a second source, then it’s a duopoly. High fixed cost, low variable cost is a trap for competitive markets. Doesn’t work.

But one automated monopoly can outcompete anything that isn’t automated. Nothing really wrong with that except that people who depend on jobs for a living will starve.

Any economic argument on a blog is inevitably oversimplified. But what’s the gotcha I missed?

“I’d rather have an unconditional income than being assigned a costume and role at Ye Olde Biscuit Factory Theme Parke. “They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work” is not a state of affairs to be hoped for.”

Agreed. And I enjoyed the ye olde biscuit factory line. :-)

It just occurred to me, did I miss the connection between this thread and the TV show Twin Peaks?

Political parties trying to maintain a superficial air of respectability while underneath they have weird relationships and hidden agendas?

Why imagine that there is a “neoliberal fear of printing money to finance the deficits”?

#146 Bruce Wilder

Why imagine that there is a “neoliberal fear of printing money to finance the deficits”?

I haven’t pinned it down, but somebody above posted a link to a criticism of BI that claimed it couldn’t work because if the government spent $3 trillion/year on basic income, it would have to print the money and we would have hyperinflation and the whole thing would collapse.

They said it sounded like a good idea at first but it must inevitably fail because of the hyperinflation. Too bad.

#149 Bob McManus

I don’t care if you give everyone a million dollars, without pricing power, capital will just eat it up.

Agreed. But currently with automation you have high fixed costs and very low variable costs. You don’t get competition because when you do, everybody who’s stuck competing loses his shirt.

There’s probably room for some pricing power somewhere in there.

If we could lower the fixed costs a lot, government could supply the fixed costs and let competition provide cheap commodities. The BI commodities don’t have to be all the same, but the customer-ordered variations would be within limits that don’t drive up the price much. Meanwhile sell true custom stuff to people who’re willing to pay high prices for it.

There’s room for something workable.

What’s there to really discuss? The EU drifts along on bureaucratic inertia, because most of the EU’s population is still comfortable enough with the status quo so as to not seriously disrupt it. Hell, even the Greeks don’t want to dump the Euro quite yet despite five years of misery that could have been blunted if they’d dumped the Euro in 2009 and then devalued the Neo-Drachma.

And it’s not like there aren’t democratically accountable channels that could be used to put real pressure on the EU change. Aside from the national governments, there’s the EU Parliament and the powers that it does have, few as they may be.

@bob mcmanus

Ten people competing for 9 apartments at $100 a month. Second month the tenth person has enough money to bid $200 (or $110). Landlord increases rent for all 9; gov’t increases BIG; carry on.

Unless another landlord moves in and builds housing at the $100/month rate. Or the tenth person moves away to somewhere where there is housing available at that or a lower rate.

As for the BIG in general, I prefer it because it’s less obviously corruptible than a guaranteed-job program. The latter gets you either a ton of people doing various kinds of tedious make-work in public jobs, a ton of people “publicly” employed who are essentially contracted out to private companies with the government acting like a colossal temp firm, or a private-sector job subsidy program – all with all manner of extra spending and administration to try and run the thing, and resolve the inevitable complaints over bad placement and the work.

#145 Lee Arnold
I think you are right that the drugs will exist, I just think it is unlikely that they will be made available to everyone without a fight. That is one of the great unseen disasters of the last 30 years, that science has reduced the work it does for everyman and has increased the work it does for the global elite.

So the on-topic point is that the left seems to have lost its way because it no longer seems to have a clear goal. It needs to rediscover that goal – in moving towards a more egalitarian society. The emphasis on representing the interests of “working people” is a wrong direction, because it let them be manipulated by corporatists who note that
1. Most people work for corporations
2. If companies are doing well they may well employ more people.

Break the political bondage, by breaking the tie that “employment” has over the striving for egalitarianism.

What I mean by dividing the possible future into long term, medium term, and short term scenarios, and then developing optimistic arguments to get from here to there, is something like this: not to advocate for the basic guaranteed income, but advocate to print money to cover VERY specific needs, right now. As follows:

Let’s hypothesize that, in the long-term, secular stagnation will continue to spread, due to globalization and automation. Even many advanced intellectual tasks will eventually become rote machine tasks, as Silicon Valley now realizes. If so, then the world population inexorably divides into 0.001% who own most of the assets, and 99.999% who are each other’s baristas and personal trainers. That is, 99.999% will be doing things which are fun and feel good, and mowing the lawn, but are not necessities and are not subject to productivity increases that cause incomes growth. But that means there is a dividing-line where the 99.999% has to buy the physical necessaries, e.g. the machines and some of the food, from the 0.001% who end up owning them. And because the 99.999% don’t have incomes growth they cannot pay for them. It finally becomes totally obvious to everybody what is happening, and so, either the 0.001% go out of business, or they turn entirely to extracting rents from real estate, and are expropriated.

(Real estate, because it is one of the few things that doesn’t need productivity increases yet still grows in value because there are some locations where everyone would prefer to live, and we want to preserve other locations for ecosystems and natural wildlife. So real estate is like gold, except that people need a place to live, but don’t need gold to live.)

Sort of like the 19th century scenarios by Marx etc., and adopting things from economists through to Schumpeter, but instead of the confusing 19th-century attempts to describe it in terms of use-value vs. labor’s exchange-value, we just say, that money HAD BEEN constituted as a circular system, rather neatly expressing the approximate value of goods by the mechanism of supply and demand, and rather neatly including the additional change in value by innovation to be continuously more productive. But, workers are slowly cut-out of the processes of innovation, therefore cut-out of the processes of incomes growth; they don’t have the money to make the demand for the goods. Thus long-term, increasing demand stagnation.

And this process has become newly apparent to us with the financial crash, because before it, the world wars destroyed so much wealth that it temporarily leveled the incomes disparity, and fooled most everybody into believing the hypothesis that capitalism eventually makes everyone more equal, while the illusion was increasingly supported by household credit expansion.

Now, the response to this argument is usually along the lines of, “The number of things to do is endless, and people will always find things to do!” But this is NOT the argument.

The argument is that the things remaining for people to do, that machines and computers cannot do, or that we don’t want them to do, are not things which have innovative productivity growth, and therefore incomes growth. (Because how many lattes can you personally handcraft?) So this is the source of the dividing line between the 0.0001% and the 99.9999%: continuous innovation for increased productivity.

And of course, real innovation is necessary to the private financial system, because innovation is the sole source of returns to financial investment, unless real estate grows in quantity or value, for non-innovative reasons.

— Okay, most everybody here knows this argument so far, because people here do a lot of thinking, and the argument has been building since at least the 19th century.

So let’s look at the medium- and short-term, in view of where the long-term is heading: If people are slowly, naturally being priced-out of the demand side, it might look like what is going on now: globalization, dislocated labor, and increasing division of incomes into a two-part distribution. This would not be nefarious, it would be step in the direction of WHAT WE ALL WANT. But because we have not gotten to total automation yet, the remaining productive jobs are not covering the needs, and this lack is growing.

And we are caught in a psychological bind. We don’t want to destroy self-interest as a productivity engine, but we’ve got social spending problems. We don’t know how to solve these deficits, and part of that is psychological.

So my proposal is to make the optimistic case. Let’s print the money continuously to cover the part of the deficits that pay for goods and services which meet certain market failure characteristics, ONLY. This has gotten way too long, so I will telegraph the rest:

1. Government should continuously print money and pay directly for the portions of education, healthcare, infrastructure, environment and retirement which are in deficits. 2. It must be on items which cannot increase moral hazard in recipients. 3. It need not cause inflation, if it is variously geared to the specific market failures in each needy sector, and to the growth or diminution of demand, within these sectors. 4. We need better politicians, and voters’ understanding to monitor and safeguard against government capture by business and the financial system. 5. It must be on items which do not provide normal returns to investment to private investors, for the various reasons given in studies of public finance. 6. If tax cuts are to be dynamically scored, then government spending should be dynamically scored, including the positive public externalities which private investment cannot financially internalize. 7. In addition, there is no theoretical reason why the various kinds of return to investment in “human capital” need to be cost-benefitted in the same numeraire. So you can take the previous dynamic scoring, and stick it up your butt. 8. There is no reason why the simple expansion of all money in the economy must be linked to the private return on investment, or the private creation of bank deposits, and the (presumed) increase of productive efficiency which creates that return. There could be, for example, TWO sources of money. 9. The private financial system does not have the human resources to manage enough investments to make our own current system work, and relies instead upon easily-traded debt and its derivatives (based 70% on barely-innovative real estate, you may have already noticed), plus extraordinary government capture, in order to make its profits. 10. The private financial system has expanded to such a large percentage-share of the GDP that its own need for profit is choking the non-financial “real” economy via falling natural rate of interest, and causing a continuous Minsky condition. 11. The private financial system is NOT more transparent than government, and it may be less so. At the very least, if they are Too Big to Fail, i.e. under government guarantee, they should be busted down to government salaries. 12. As we began this: automatization and computers are beginning to make so many workers unnecessary to economic production that the private sector has begun to generate permanently insufficient incomes (called “secular stagnation”) to buy the goods and services, and new entrepreneurial start-ups are laudable but will never suffice. So therefore printing money ab nihilo to pay directly for the necessary goods and services which are in deficits, is the ONLY way to avoid increased taxation on the wealthiest incomes. Q.E.D.

Lee A. Arnold @158
I just thought it fair to point out, that actual policy is a bit off topic, because the topic is about politics not policy. But I also don’t think I agree fully with you, and I really don’t see how you sell an idea like that (look how long it took you to expound it.

I can’t say I read it all too closely, but your last sentence left me just puzzled:
” So therefore printing money ab nihilo to pay directly for the necessary goods and services which are in deficits, is the ONLY way to avoid increased taxation on the wealthiest incomes.”
OK – but why do I want to avoid increased taxation on the wealthiest incomes (talking here as “the left”)?

Reason, 1. Politics is ultimately about policies. Espousing them is how you make a party and win, and enacting them is what you do after you win.

2. The final phrase is not about you, it is about whether the WEALTHIEST want to avoid increased taxation. Because there are only two peaceful ways to go, here.

If the answer is “yes”, they do want to avoid increased taxation, and I presume it is, then I just tried to make the argument that the ONLY peaceful alternative is to print money for a very specific circumstance, or what economists call “direct monetary financing of deficits” for social needs.

And it will actually increase wealthy incomes, due to the dynamic scoring of an economy with bigger participation.

I don’t think this should matter to the Left, one way or the other, because it gets us all to the same place in the long term.

I don’t think it should even matter to the Right, but they are intellectually more short-sighted, and locked emotionally into this “self-interest” thing, by which you ascend a material hierarchy by personal merit, which they think is an eternal human verity of conspicuous consumption and greed, instead of being what it really is: a social cognitive bias that emerged in the 18th century. (See Arthur O. Lovejoy.)

Of course the Left has its own emotional needs, often on display here, so maybe it does matter to them, which way it happens.

William Timberman,

“It seems to me that the global poor are doing much better needs to be looked at with a little more skepticism”

I think Henry accidentally was inaccurate there – because the twin peaks Krugman is talking about are the global very very wealthy, and the developing world’a rising middle classes (especially China’s and India’s)

“What Mr. Milanovic shows is that income growth since the fall of the Berlin Wall has been a “twin peaks” story. Incomes have, of course, soared at the top, as the world’s elite becomes ever richer. But there have also been huge gains for what we might call the global middle — largely consisting of the rising middle classes of China and India”

He notes it is positive the alleviation of some poverty in the developing world . But
says then this leaves the developed world working class in “the valley of despond” as their incomes stagnate.

I think printing money hand over fist is not a good idea since Germany did that and look where it got them – wheelbarrows of money. And this is what Krugman says is a problem – the working classes are not having their desires met by normal political parties – and if you look at the first GFC (ie the depression) – this too happened and ended up with nasty parties in power in various countries and then the war then the economies recovered.

The obvious best option for social democratic parties is to work out a war-time-mobilization-style economy without having to have a war at the same time and to respond to our environmental challenges and maldistribution issues, and thus lead people out of the valley of despond and away from nasty political parties.

ZM: printing monet didn’t lead to hyperinflation. Hyperinflation, caused by war reparations, broken trade patterns and franco-belgian occupation of the Ruhr lead to printing money.

J Thomas #163: 1. I don’t think that the private financial sector is inadequate, exactly. It’s almost unbelievably crooked, but that’s an unrelated story. But it is not in the business of creating money without getting a return on that new credit, or on that new investment.

I would argue that the financial system is over-adequate, because the rate of interest has been falling for decades. It has more money than it needs to invest in real goods and services, so the competition among the money lenders is driving the price of money down. The private bankers usually complain, “Oh, it’s the central banks keeping the rates low,” but that is more misdirection; Wall Street could just refuse to buy Treasuries, and send the rates up. They do not, because they have no place else to park their surplus money. (As DeLong puts it, there is a global shortage of safe bonds to invest in.)

2. I don’t see how it could cause inflation, if it follows certain criteria: restricted to spending that is currently in deficit; restricted to spending directly on social needs that do not increase moral hazard (e.g. education, retirement); restricted to spending with certain market irregularities such as finite demand (e.g. basic healthcare, wildlife protection); restricted to spending with low or very long-term rates of return that usually require government participation and payback guarantees to private investors anyway (infrastructure).

There’s a lot of books on other details in each of those sectors for policy design, so there’s no need to take this part of the discussion further here. Note that it means that on the supply-side in those sectors, providers will expect to have income ceilings unless they themselves find ways to innovate, which is ALREADY pretty much the case (e.g. Medicare service providers, park rangers, etc.)

Lee A. Arnold: I don’t think that the private financial sector is inadequate, exactly. It’s almost unbelievably crooked, but that’s an unrelated story.

Wow.

J Thomas #171: But you don’t have so many dollars circulating. What’s happening now is that some of the money is just going into the value of pricey real estate: some of it is not circulating.

#172 Lee A Arnold

J Thomas #171: But you don’t have so many dollars circulating. What’s happening now is that some of the money is just going into the value of pricey real estate: some of it is not circulating.

I don’t get that. If the US government prints money and spends it, that money circulates unless somebody keeps it under his mattress or holds it in his hot little hand and doesn’t spend it.

If he does spend it for pricey real estate then whoever sold him the real estate will spend it, and it circulates.

If he buys pricey real estate and the result is that the “value” of all the other real estate goes up and everybody pretends they have more money, that doesn’t make the money circulate faster. Not unless they get loans with that real estate for collateral and then spend the money. But the pretend-money due to the value of the real estate is not the money that the US government prints and spends.

What keeps the printed money from circulating?

Bruce #167: I think it certainly would cause hyperinflation unless the money-financed spending is restricted to goods and services in long-term deficits, and with certain characteristics (i.e. finite demand, no moral hazard, and a few other things as I tried to describe). I don’t think the MMT people specify that, although I haven’t read any of them.

Igor Belanov,

“Increase production in a society where waste and pollution are already rampant?”

No I think overall production needs to be reduced to a sustainable amount and therefore current patterns of maldistribution and wastefulness like packaging materials need to be addressed – so I think some sort of rationing is a simple way of achieving this aim in the near term. Computers are very advanced now and there are lots of people who already work in global and national logistics so they are well ready to move into developing a good rationing and distribution method.

I am dubious it would be possible to nationalise the whole economy in the near term – but since we need to act in the near term then the parliament should be like a war-style-cabinet with all parties and the war-style-cabinet would then need to mobilise both labour and capital to make a sustainable society and stay within at the most 2 degrees of warming etc and keep biodiversity and replenish fish stocks and stop ocean acidification etc –

I heard about participatory-public-private-partnerships in Brazil working well since they are more transparent and include public participation not like our PPPs so maybe something like this could be used.

Taxes can be higher and only a certain amount of shares in businesses allowed to be legally owned by the one person or the one family so as to not have to nationalise everything but also preclude too high concentrations of ownership in particular individuals or families

Lee A. Arnold @ 176: goods and services in long-term deficits

I admit I’m having trouble wrapping my head around what you mean about goods or services being “in deficit”.

J Thomas @ 171: you have so many dollars circulating

The hydraulic view motivated some elegant algebra, but was always wrong. Money is not some viscous fluid, circulating like oil lubricating an engine. It’s how we keep score, and it is how we make deals with the future. Our expectations about the future are often disappointed, and adjustments must be made, and into those black holes of expectations dashed, “circulating” money can disappear as into the vortex.

Money wants to earn a return, and if it earns a return by reducing the net disposable income of labor, by charging more for health care, or education, or credit or payday loans, or lottery tickets or rent on an apartment . . . oh well. Says’ Law anticipated that people would bring goods or services to The Market to get the Money needed to demand goods and services, creating a balance in which demand created supply and vice versa. But, the modern financier can squeeze money out of the vulture capitalism of dismantling a business, stealing a pension, making a payday loan, charging for the use of a “privatized” prison or courthouse, etc. It adds up into the macroeconomics of “secular stagnation”.

And, in the Larry Summers version of secular stagnation, am I to overlook the role of the man himself as a policymaker?

It is not moral indignation, per se, that I think is missing, so as much as a notion of the public good as a conviction and guiding principle. Justice is the public good on which all other concepts of a public good are founded. For leaders and followers, the concept of a public good arises from the sense of cooperating in a common enterprise on which all depend and from which all derive benefit — their conflicting interests resolved fairly and effectively, in a shared, public interest.

If leaders no longer feed their dependence on followers and followers no longer feel themselves members of a commonwealth, that isn’t just sad, it heralds breakdown into dysfunction for political economy.

Making everything into a laundry list of technical policy proposals or meaningless policy dichotomies (e.g. carbon tax v. cap-n-trade), without the conviction to be a reliable arbiter when the details must be resolved, is not an effective left politics. At least not effective for the public welfare; it might be quite effective in reconciling the sheep to the slaughter for the benefit of the global wolf pack.

Surprising that the thread has gone this far without mentioning that the sort of policies that would cushion the living standards western working classes – protectionism, limits to delocalisation and the enforcement of existing global hukou arrangements – are most vocally advocated by the racist-right parties.
Also (@ZM), if these graph-makers use “middle class” in the same way as theEconomist when speaking of developing countries, it means anywhere between 2 and 20 dollars a day, i.e.: really working class. Truly rich Chinese (or the rich overseas Chinese who most benefited from China’s growth) are few enough and rich enough to count as inthe right-hand peak.

Bruce #182: You’ll have to tell me how Summers’ account differs enough to be a version, because I don’t know. And if you are waiting for people in policy or politics who don’t make mistakes, then you are going to be complaining for eternity.

Well in that case, why don’t you just go for the Godwin’s Law confirmation, and be done with it. You know you want to!

Henry,

If you are keeping an eye on the comments – I am sorry to be a bother but as far as I can tell the OP needs two corrections

1. As I mentioned in a comment above Krugman’s piece identifies the twin peaks as the wealthy and then the growing Asian – primarily Chinese and Indian – middle classes

2. Robespierre asked for more details so I looked at Krugman’s graph but I couldn’t read it very well so I went to his source which is a CUNY paper here –

https://www.gc.cuny.edu/CUNY_GC/media/CUNY-Graduate-Center/PDF/Centers/LIS/Milanovic/papers/2013/WPS6719.pdf

But AFAICT this paper has the opposite conclusion actually – in 1988 there were twin peaks and now there is just *one peak* due to growth in Asia , stagnation or lowering in developed world working class, and deterioration in sub-Saharan Africa

“The shape of the global income distribution has also changed during the 20 years considered here (referring to the baseline scenario without adjusting for missing top incomes). In 1988, the global income distribution displayed a twin-peak shape which has since disappeared mostly thanks to the high growth of China whose deciles have “filled up” the area between $PPP 2,000 and $PPP 6,000 that was relatively “hollow” in 1988. The period has also witnessed a remarkable increase in what may be called a “global median class”, with incomes ranging from $PPP 2 per capita per day to $PPP 16 per capita per day: the share of the global population belonging to that group has increased from some 23% to 40%”

So as you can see the paper and its graph shows the demise of the twin peaked world of 1988 – not its rise.

If I am not mistaken I think this error best be corrected right away. Krugman should correct it on his blog too hopefully.

I was at the VT state capitol today, joining in the protest against Gov. Shumlin’s betrayal on health care. (He was re-elected today, 110 to 69!). We were in the foyer in front of the legislative chamber, singing our protest songs. The police made sure we left a corridor for people to move through, and though we thought they would enter through the back way, it turned out that the parade of dignitaries for the ceremony would enter through the front and march up the center aisle. Last of all came Gov. Shumlin, and while he waited, he reached over to shake my hand. “I’m john halasz,” I said. Then a few steps down he shook Brian T.’s hand, who he dimly seemed to recognize, (a long time radical environmental activist). Then he proceeded into the chamber. He’s a pure politician; it’s just an instinctive reflex for him.

http://vtdigger.org/2015/01/07/analysis-shumlin-built-lead-airplane-single-payer/

I think I should point people at this:
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/22/a-note-on-the-political-economy-of-populism/?_r=0
Robin Hood is still popular. The real issue is why it isn’t the platform of the left.

I would like to hear from Henry on what he thinks about the relative weights of his structural argument vs. the comprehensibility of the issues. I think it is true that as Bob McManus writes in #195, some people are “somehow satisfied, or at least preoccupied, by leaning out the window and yelling.” But those kinds are always around. I think that an allied problem, perhaps the fundamental problem, is that the real macro issues are too complicated for regular voters to learn, whether through lack of time or resources, and even the so-called experts (such as economists) don’t agree, and argue among themselves, and so the plutocracy finds it easy to thwart the public conversation by hiring a few minions to cite the standard old canards, and then buying the next election.

Ecosystems theorists have been saying this for 40 years, and the Jan. 2014 Krugman article linked by Reason at #194 says the exactly the same thing, though in nicer language. Krugman ends by recommending that President Obama focus on inequality (the column preceded the 2014 State of the Union), an issue of popular agreement. Now, Krugman’s new column linked by Henry in the OP, points out that Obama is mumbling on the issue.

The question I have for Henry is this: the structural argument might imply that the Euro’s macro issues are comprehensible to social democratic parties, and the only real difficulty is disconnection between the leaders and the base. Do you think that this is the case?

Gah, forgot to say that depending on the system (and as we look across the developed work there are many different electoral systems) the technologies of electioneering have developed to preserve certain facets of stable competition between the big players. A lot of this is related to the costs of the “electioneering technologies” and the need to court donors… The media also play a big role in supporting stable equilbria by writing off outsiders.

ZM @ 190, thanks for going back to the original paper and turning that up.

bob mcmanus @ 195, what you write is instantly familiar but not quite right. I don’t think that anything has changed in terms of how much or how often people complain. (Although the Internet does transmit complaints further so that instead of a few neighbors hearing them a much larger group of people potentially does.) What’s changed is the willingness of elites to let complaint force action. We live in the era of the unhidden secret, where e.g. it can be proven that an administration faked evidence to get us into an aggressive war, but when they brazen it out nothing can be done about it. Or that spy agencies are surveilling everyone, but nothing happens in response. Or with the banksters and the absence of legal action around the recent bubble, etc.

There comes a point when I’ve expressed what I mean better through poetry than through anything else, in keeping with the fundamentally dreamlike nature of our politics, but I’ll stop linking to yet more of it. There are a whole constellation of sayings or ideas around truth: “the truth will set you free”, “speaking truth to power”, the Orwell quote about how “telling the truth is a revolutionary act”, “exit, voice, loyalty”, ideas about crusading journalism or brave hackers uncovering secrets, the Freudian idea that liberation from the effects of unconscious material is achieved through bringing it into the conscious mind. All of these saying or beliefs about truth are false, since elites don’t really care whether secrets are uncovered, and having the truth known gives no leverage in doing anything about a situation.

Why verbal resistance can’t be converted into political action is another topic, but the presence of verbal resistance itself doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re “fascinated” by it in the sense that it’s preventing us from taking action. It’s just a kind of relic.

“1. Would you agree or disagree that a policy of increasing marginal tax rates (say back to Clinton levels) combined with a universal dividend equal to all the money raised would be a net benefit to most of the population?”

I am for raising the tax rates. Less sure about the universal dividend. I would rather see that money go into a huge infrastructure program and, if I am pretending I am american, setting up a Universal Health Care system.

“2. Would you support it, as the way the Left should try and position itself for the future?”
I think the left needs to talk more about the “insurance” part of social insurance. We are all fragile creatures. I could get hit by a bus tomorrow or have a child in a year with major disabilities. The average person is not equipped to self insure for these kind of contingencies. There is a need for social insurance of all kinds to provide support and help to those special cases. And if we were truly honest and rational we would understand that any of us could be one of those “special cases”.

“3. Can you explain why the none of the main centre left parties in the western world are proposing this?”
I think it is a combination of factors.
A) An elite corporate owned press which completely buys into market fundamentalism
B) The lack of effective left wing leaders from outside the top 1%(B is linked to A)
C) A break down in community among average people.

/Great questions reason.

MPAVictoria
Thanks for responding – but in a way you show what the problem is. It is not clear that you sell your priorities – but we could sell straight redistribution (and your priorities are just redistribution in kind.) But notice you didn’t answer question 1 or question 2 (they were yes/no questions) and I’m not sure of your answer to question 3.

My feeling is that the old social democratic parties everywhere are still psychologically bound to the idea (as most people in a sense are) that we “earn” our income and so see their job as supporting “employment” which to some extent stops them being able to support redistribution (which it is becoming more and more obvious is what we need). The central left needs to stop running away from the word redistribution. Embrace it, transparently.

#200 Rich Puchalsky

What’s changed is the willingness of elites to let complaint force action.

Yes. I think.

We live in the era of the unhidden secret, where e.g. it can be proven that an administration faked evidence to get us into an aggressive war, but when they brazen it out nothing can be done about it.

I don’t have that much personal experience with this sort of thing. The oldest example I remember is Nixon. The government lied to get us into Vietnam, and Nixon ran on a campaign that he would get us out of the war with our honor intact. Which looking back on it sounds a lot like getting out of a cheating adulterous affair with your virginity intact….

Johnson had spent 5 years fighting Vietnam. Nixon spent 7 years getting us out of Vietnam. My Lai came while he was getting elected the first time, and the Pentagon Papers were published 4 years before the last US unit left.

A lot of people were outraged about Vietnam, but what got Nixon to resign was more than anything that the investigation into Watergate revealed tapes of him using very bad language, which got a lot of citizens to believe he should not be President.

I think maybe it was mostly before my time that the elites let complaint force action.

I look to forward to a world in which the centre left and centre right argue transparently about how much to redistribution rather than whether to do it all.

Another way to put @207
You are letting the perfect be an obstacle to the good. I see no way of moving to UBI without phasing it in over a considerable period of time. And once people start getting regular checks (most efficiently of course through their own registered account – including a public option) they won’t like anyone who stops it.

reason: “I look to forward to a world in which the centre left and centre right argue transparently about how much to redistribute rather than whether to do it all.”

But of course they do that now. European social democracies, and to a lesser extent the U.S., do have progressive taxation combined with some kinds of universal social support that equate to some level of redistribution.

I think that at a fundamental level you’re not acknowledging that the major left theories never really supported what you think it supported. As another thread here recently went over, Marx specifically opposed the idea of redistribution (e.g. in “Critique of the Gotha Program”). Mom-Marxist socialism was still defined in terms of the state owning the commanding heights of the means of production, not by the state as redistributor. And the anarchist left finds a fundamental problem in this being a state function at all, as opposed to a societal one.

So the idea of pretty much keeping society as it is but of redistributing the profits is fundamentally a left-liberal one. At such, it’s technocratic, and that’s why so many of the arguments about it are technocratic ones about hyperinflation and make-work and the proper design of a system to be administered by the government. But technocracy — as we’ve also gone over here quite a bit — is one of the fundamental things associated with, as cause or effect, the disempowerment of the mass left. I don’t see any way to start with a technocratic position and then get the mass support that you’d need to actually implement it against elite opposition.

J Thomas: “A lot of people were outraged about Vietnam, but what got Nixon to resign was more than anything that the investigation into Watergate revealed tapes of him using very bad language, which got a lot of citizens to believe he should not be President.”

No, not really. Without taking a position on whether Nixon’s resignation really meant much in some larger sense, what got Nixon to resign was the intervention of a few elites, critically including those from both major American political parties, who determined that it wasn’t going to be acceptable for him to go on. Otherwise he simply would have brazened it out as later politicians did.

Reason #201: ” Would you agree or disagree that a policy of increasing marginal tax rates (say back to Clinton levels) combined with a universal dividend equal to all the money raised would be a net benefit to most of the population?”

Here is a good illustration of the complexity in the issue that will destroy any agreement on it:

1. Let’s say I agree.
2. But marginal tax rates on the wealthiest are ALREADY back to Clinton levels; you are therefore talking about raising the marginal tax rates back to Clinton levels on everybody else.
3. The middle and lower-middle classes might agree to have their taxes raised back to Clinton levels, once the economy gets going again.
4. But that still isn’t enough money to solve the entirety of the long-term deficits, only a portion of them.
5. Therefore, after raising all marginal rates back to Clinton levels and redistributing it as a universal dividend, the deficits remain.
6. Therefore, most people are going to ask: Aren’t you asking us to pay even more taxes in the future, above the Clinton rates, to take care of the deficits that we didn’t help to pay down?
7. And indeed, a very large number of people might insist that the quid pro quo for raising all marginal rates back to Clinton levels, is protection of Medicare and Social Security as they are now, because they are back under assault from the Republicans since the day after they took over Congress.

So Reason, the answer to your “3. Can you explain why the none of the main centre left parties in the western world are proposing this?” is because it is so easy to complicate a discussion of the immediate outcomes of the policy that most people shake their heads in incomprehension and disgust, and walk away from the issue.

Try this on any of your neighbors.

And so, to avoid the technical issues and confusiion, people call for a politics of the “notion of the public good as a conviction and guiding principle” (Bruce Wilder #183).

And the problem with THIS response is that it is too easily countered by the politics of preserving self-interest, of the Horatio Alger story. Which is very easy for people, even on the center-left, to swallow. (see: the Democratic Party).

So after that, we hear the argument about motives and mistakes and all the underlying nefarious evil, after the rhetorical manner of traditional left-wing parties. And, since most people don’t like negativity as personal choice or as politics, and that’s the end of that.

So then we hear, from Henry and many other academics, the attempts to give it a structural explanation. I think that’s putting the cart before the horse. But I would like to hear more, and in particular I would like to hear about to what extent the people of Europe have swallowed the self-interest, Horatio Alger story, because it seems to be implicit in their treatment of Greece, etc., if you discount the strong possibility of intellectual confusion.

reason: Why are [the Left] afraid to promote naked redistribution (and with a policy promoted originally by Milton Friedman)? I think it is is because they still see their role as tied to promoting the interests of “the working class” and not to promoting the interests of the poorer sections of the community. That is the real hold – and promoting union power is going EXACTLY in the wrong direction if you look at it that way.

Milton Friedman? Shouldn’t that be a clue for you? Think hard about who Milton Friedman was and why Milton Friedman was proposing a basic income as a policy.

Milton Friedman was promoting atomistic individualism, the myth of consumer sovereignty through the fabled Market, the volunteer military and so on. He was looking at the world FDR’s New Deal had built, an economic world carefully managed and structured, and he was re-interpreting it as a result of spontaneous emergence. He conceded “market failure” only grudgingly, arguing that every government intervention carried costs that could well exceed the distortions of a less-regulated “market”. He was making the world safe for the policy of deregulation that would undermine labor unions and destroy savings and loans and community banking.

I’m not saying that a UBI is a bad idea. It was arguably a good idea, but it was being proposed by a con artist with an agenda of destroying the spirit of social democracy — the “social” and the “democracy”. Akin to a love poem recited by a pimp.

Leaving the structure of the political economy to take care of itself, while the left hand struggles with the right hand about which pocket to put society’s spare change — that’s not a rebirth for the Left, that’s a funeral. And, it was designed to be such.

Lee A. Arnold @ 216 has a decent enough summary of the problem of sales pitches. He’s certainly correct that angry critics are not electable. And, he’s also correct that it is very easy, to “complicate” any discussion, to confuse people and exhaust their attention spans with even a slight gesture in the direction of dispute. J Thomas, several times, has made the point that disputes make it much harder to determine the truth, even when the truth may be fairly obvious, making it much harder to get consensus.

The politics of, “here’s a good idea, can’t we all agree?” has its applications, especially in a society that is already pretty healthy, because a sensible, decent politics (I won’t say, a good left politics, because left is relative) has already had a good run of it, a good run of improving society and the quality of its politics. The politics of let’s leave the political economy to be structured by the most amoral capitalist dominators and fraudsters, and then, after the dust settles, we’ll transparently (re!)distribute the surplus — that’s wrong and self-defeating on so many levels, it should not require extended explication.

One economic, not political, objection, which ought to be highlighted, is that there won’t be much of a surplus. To use an extreme to sketch the nation, the rich can be mega-rich in a slave society, but a slave society, however glittering the main house and fragrant the magnolias, will be a poor, weak society in the main, lacking the institutional structures of a more just and efficient social cooperation as well as the felt political solidarity that ensures a responsible leadership and trust in that leadership from the society as a whole.

My perception is that the states of Europe and the European Union are very much mixed, in regard to how they came to be where they are, in terms of building the complex web of institutions that underlay a social welfare state. The supranational institutions of the European were intended by their architects and supporters to strengthen a progress toward stronger, more efficient, and more just institutions across these countries, to strengthen the hand of a good politics.

With the Euro, the good intentions have soured into a neoliberal fraud. And, the Left has not been effective in countering this line of degeneracy.

It is surely not an accident that the “victims” of the Euro have been the Mediterranean states with the weakest institutions and social welfare states (plus Ireland), nor that the neoliberal proponents of the Euro argue for the sale of state enterprises and “liberalization”, while the social democratic parties find themselves with neither policy options (Hollande) nor rhetoric (Miliband) with which to oppose right-wing austerity and restructuring.

@reason – actually my thoughts explain the Australian upper house (which in turn explain a lot more of Australian policy than people generally describe) very well indeed.

The German realignment you point to is also less kind to your aggressive response than you appear to understand. The FDP has finally dropped out of prominence, but only many years after the SDP self-destructed ideologically. Indeed, the key question for this debate is rather “How did we end up the G. Schroeder?” And thus even in Germany, technologies and sociologies of electioneering have something to explain to us about the answer.

#218 Bruce Wilder

The politics of let’s leave the political economy to be structured by the most amoral capitalist dominators and fraudsters, and then, after the dust settles, we’ll transparently (re!)distribute the surplus — that’s wrong and self-defeating on so many levels, it should not require extended explication.

OK, let’s make up something else.

How about this for a start: We need innovation and risk and all that stuff in industries that are improving fast. We don’t need them so much in mature industries.

So about the time that a consumer industry settles down and gets kind of predictable, let’s nationalize it. We can create a predictable amount of stuff for consumers, we can price it reasonably, and after awhile it will turn moribund as the needs it serves get met by some fast-improving new technology. That’s fine, at that point we shut it down and wait for some other technology to get mature enough to nationalize.

We don’t actually have to confiscate anybody’s business. If enough corporations are willing to sell out for a reasonable price, then fine. Otherwise build fresh and compete with them. The government businesses make an adequate product with no advertising cost and very low price. If the others can compete on style and pizazz and sell the sizzle then that’s just fine for them.

So, like, you might want three or four pairs of shoes a year. You scan your feet flexed all the ways your feet and ankles go, and the automated shoe-design program designs a shoe for you that’s a variation on their basic design, and if you don’t like it you can give them your own variant design. Very cheap, and if you want special fancy rhinestone shoes with 5″ stiletto heels you can buy them from anybody who makes them. The basic shoes don’t need a lot of innovation except as we find ways to make them cheaper and better, and ideas along those lines would be tried on a reasonably small scale first and then scaled up gradually, sometimes as the machinery wears out and needs to be replaced.

If we get a cottage industry in shoe repair and alteration, no harm done.

It’s (optimisticly) plausible that as you get more experience making a product that has lots of users, you’ll get better at it. The people who make a bewildering variety of stylish products won’t get better, except they’ll get better at advertising their styles.

Mature industries don’t need the expense and waste of capitalism — the planned obsolescence, the zero-sum competition, the advertising to persuade customers that the next model in the design process is a quantum leap ahead, the frantic attempts to control the distribution chain, etc. Leave that to the places it can pay off.

How many people would buy the cheap products? Everybody who can’t afford more expensive stuff, which includes everybody who isn’t independently wealthy and can’t get jobs that pay well. Plus everybody who likes the products and wants to save their money for something else.

Could most consumer goods be done that way? It depends. Things that are franticly evolving to fit our climate change goals probably couldn’t. A lot of military equipment could. Lots of it doesn’t really get obsolete that fast, the competition isn’t that stiff. The USA just likes to spend a lot of money hoping for tech improvements that will give us a temporary military edge.

Would CEOs really mind all that much if we did this? The low-end low-profit market for cheap people who don’t have much money isn’t usually where they want to shine.

Could it work technically, if the politics allowed it?

Whether Krugman’s column is right or wrong, the pattern where a country stays industrialized for a short time and then declines, as manufacturing moves to where labor is cheaper, is obviously both good for the world, and bad for political parties that count on both votes from the industrial working class, and ideas that assume an industrial economy is forever.

Making it worse, ideas that assume the industrial economy has been over for a long time (we’re “postindustrial,” in “late capitalism”), are where the action has been for quite a while. We’re just coasting off past achievements, apparently (as the countries now moving into industrialism will do in another hundred years). If the left and working class parties didn’t buy into that, they’d stagnate, I guess.

ZM,

I’ll grant you that PK perhaps got the ‘twin peaks’ reference from the article wrong. But the fact that the middle classes in China etc. are doing even better (making the income distribution graph single peaked) really doesn’t seem to affect PK’s point about how the traditional center-left parties in Europe and North America are failing their traditional constituencies. How would it?

Forgot to add in my last comment that part of the ‘single peak’ phenomenon appears to be the working classes in the developed world, global north, etc., doing even worse over the 1998-2008 period. Which only seems to reinforce Krugman’s point. (In other words, add the following after “China etc. are doing even better” in my last comment: and the working/middle classes in the developed world are doing even worse.)

Wait, the point is that you can, theoretically, bring up the developed working class part of the ‘valley’ (or whatever, that bit of the middle) by bringing down part of the super rich end of the spectrum on the very right. I mean, PK not arguing against rising standards in the global south; he’s worried about inequality in the internal economies of Europe and North America. I don’t exactly understand what you think the problem is here, honestly. (I’m not talking about internal political difficulties, just at a theoretical level you seem to find something objectionable in Krugman’s complaint about center-left parties that I don’t get.)

That all may be right (I honestly don’t know), but does this have anything to do with what you were saying @190? I mean, as far as I can see, Krugman and Henry are taking about a genuine, deep problem about center-left parties in the developed world—how they’ve lost touch with their traditional constituencies—and while what you’re pointing to now is a real problem, I don’t see how it’s an argument against the former.

@J Thomas

So about the time that a consumer industry settles down and gets kind of predictable, let’s nationalize it. We can create a predictable amount of stuff for consumers, we can price it reasonably, and after awhile it will turn moribund as the needs it serves get met by some fast-improving new technology. That’s fine, at that point we shut it down and wait for some other technology to get mature enough to nationalize.

That becomes a problem if the new technology has the potential to drastically change the older, nationalized one. It’s much harder to change an oligopoly or monopoly than it is to change a firm that has to hustle in a more competitive market – just look at how the ISPs here in the US dragged their feet on increasing speeds and access to broadband until Mobile Wireless and new competitors (like Google Fiber) started threatening to eat their lunch.

Take self-driving cars, for example. Suppose we decide that the car business is a “mature, predictable industry” and nationalize the whole thing. Then at some point someone figures out how to do self-driving cars – are they allowed to start up their own car business to sell self-driving cars pending liability and safety issues, or do they have to go try and convince “US Motors” that this is a good idea?

The low-end low-profit market for cheap people who don’t have much money isn’t usually where they want to shine.

But that’s where they seem to go, eventually. Luxuries that can be mass-produced filter downwards as long as they don’t have high labor costs, and so forth. It even applies with the financial sector – the rise of securitization and stuff like mutual funds was all part of allowing for smaller pieces of access to be sold to a larger market, with (hopefully but not always truthfully) more safety.

The poor may only have pennies compared to the rich, but there are a lot more poor people.

Self-driving cars are a) not really practicable and b) a profoundly stupid and basically capitalist idea. The same computer technology that would render them possible,- 20 or 30 years from now- could just as well be applied now to developing highly differentiated and personalized urban mass transit systems, powered by renewable electricity, at vastly lower cost, both in terms of finance and in terms of natural resource utilization. Though that, of course, would require public planning and investment, “political will”.

The less said about structured securitization as some sort of salutary “financial innovation”, the better.

john c. halasz @238
I think you are very wrong. Self-driving WILL have a profound impact but not as private items but as a public utility (they will to some extent eliminate the privately owned car – at least for the middle class). It will get its foot in the door though, because of an aging population. I don’t know how many accidents I read about locally here (they happen regularly) because some 80 year old has put his foot on the accelerator instead of the brake and driven through a window or a wall.

And sorry, but I don’t have much time for the Marxists who are basically saying “we don’t need incremental changes we need complete revolution”. Well good luck with that program.

J Thomas
Yes I agree a distributed carbon tax is a good idea.

reason 01.12.15 at 10:38 am @ 242
‘And sorry, but I don’t have much time for the Marxists who are basically saying “we don’t need incremental changes we need complete revolution”. Well good luck with that program.’

What if it’s true? Right now, if you want to have Basic Income or any other social democratic policy, what you have to do is convince the ruling class and their hangers-on that they will be better off if that policy is put in place (or, have that revolution). However, much of the discussion here has been about how to stir the proles up about social-democratic politics, which is different, and will not have a lot to do with policies, since at heart it’s more of the same.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_referendums,_2015

There, provided you manage to overcome opposition’s propaganda, a majority of the voters might get you something. In the US, a majority of the voters plus 9 bucks will get you a pack of Marlboros.

reason @ 240:

SO what exactly is your idea of efficiency?

With today’s already existent technologies, it is perfectly possible to construct highly personalized and differentiated mass transit systems in urban areas with sufficient population densities, (yes, as public utilities), regulated and stabilized by computer control systems. You’d just swipe your card and punch in your request, and within a few minutes, the required vehicle would be at your service, (2 seat? 4 seat? luggage space? etc.). If you want to save some money, a jitney cab type service would be available. Or, if you want to go really cheap, conventional mass transit with local and express lines. But there would be no need to squeeze everybody into a box like sardines. And there would neither be any traffic accidents, nor any traffic jams, since the routes and flow of traffic speeds would be computer-optimized. Nor would there be any need for expensive and redundant electric battery technologies, (which don’t really as yet exist). Of course, it would take time to build up such systems in a fully integrated and operationalized way, while removing all the potential glitches, but there is no reason why they couldn’t be completed within a couple of decades. The problem is far more a matter of politics and policy than technical feasibility.

On the other hand, self-driving automobiles would take decades to “perfect”, since training computers, (which don’t function at all like brains), to recognize and respond appropriately to all the myriad contingencies of urban traffic is virtually an insuperable task. (Not to mention in the U.S. at least, problems with legal liabilities). Further, in the U.S. the average automobile is used just 75 minutes per day, and the embedded energy in it manufacture is 270 bn joules. Currently 16.7 mn automobiles are sold per year. If 12 million were eliminated, that would reduce the energy requirement by 3 quadrillion BTUs, not to mention all the other natural resources involved, including those involved in battery storage, (since electrification is already 3 times as energy efficient as gas powered ICEs).

The self-driving auto concept is a capitalist boondoggle, intended to maintain wasteful capitalist overproduction for the sake of capitalist profit-seeking. The strategy is obvious, even if the ostensible “goal” is impossible. Advances in computer control can be transferred piece-meal onto luxury auto sales, even as a whole new market in batteries is created (Musk). It only appeals to those who can’t see 2 inches beyond there noses.

BTW though you’re generally a reasonable and well-informed fellow, the appropriation of “reason” as your handle is a bit presumptuous, since you don’t evince much awareness of how problematic the term is and it obviously isn’t your unique possession or qualification.

@251:

Where is it possible? In any urban area with settled, predictable traffic patterns and flows. Where does it currently exist? Nowhere exactly, though I’d imagine there are lot of cities, (not in the U.S.), with elements of such a system. It’s different from driverless taxis in that it would be a fixed light rail system, which would eliminate redundant requirements for individual computer guidance and battery storage. The energy and resource savings/efficiencies would be immense compared to current urban transport systems, but, of course, in capitalist terms, such savings would be registered as a loss of demand. Basically, the street level would be for pedestrians, bicyclists, gardeners, buskers and the like, while the actual transport needs of people would be accommodated within the structure of urban life. (Increased concentration in cities, as opposed to suburban/exurban sprawl, would have to take hold, which would interfere with current economic rents, “property values”, which is one source of opposition, but how long can we afford to cater to an exclusive “middle class” as a political priority?) I’m no engineer, but I don’t see why such a system would be technically impossible and couldn’t be realized in full within a generation, (which is about all the time we have left to adapt).

Ze 5: A “populist anti-EU Left” is not new phenomenon. It just doesn’t fit the media narrative but until not so long ago, the role of Europe-Skeptic was filled mostly by left populists.

J Thomas @215, reason @ a few places

I’ve seen an increasing number of relatively mainstream outlets discussing the ways a carbon tax might be harnessed to some sort of redistribution. For what it’s worth (not much), I’m all for it. A few have even mentioned the possibility of some sort of basic income (or citizen’s dividend, or minimum income). Here and there, the connection is two-way, with there being some sort of “incentivization” to reduce consumption as prices for carbon-dependent goods/services rise. I remember reading one that proposed some sort of BI-like prebate, provided to partially offset the higher prices, set at the amount someone would end up paying in carbon taxes if they were consuming whatever was agreed upon as a responsible amount to consume. In my fantasy world, I wondered if this amount would be enough to support the suitably low-consumption lifestyle of someone who decided s/he would let others burn their share of carbon in exchange for eating beans/rice and spending days reading library books and lying on the beach…
I just looked for it online, but couldn’t find it, although there were a couple with the word “prebate” in them.
Overall, I’m cautiously optimistic that people who wouldn’t have entertained such ideas a few years ago are at least considering the possibility that these might be possibilities worth considering.