Time to fly my Neoliberal Freak Flag again! I see this very differently than … Dani Rodrik … The problem is not that Europe has too little democracy. The problem is that it has the wrong kind. Issues of fiscal stance are technocratic issues of economic governance. … Harry Dexter White and John Maynard Keynes were good democrats. Neither would say that Europe’s economic problems now are the result of a deficiency of democracy. They would say that it is the fault of their IMF–that their IMF should have blown the whistle, declared a fundamental disequilibrium, and required one of:
- the shrinkage of the eurozone and the depreciation of the peso and the drachma back in 2010
- a wipeout of Greek and Spanish external debts, and a fiscal transfer program from the German government to Greece and Spain and to German banks if German authorities wished to avoid such a shrinking of the eurozone.
We did not have such an IMF back in 2010. But that we did not have such an IMF is not the result of a deficiency of democracy in Europe. Or so I think: I could be wrong here.
On Wednesday, I gave a talk about the Internet of Things in relation to ‘smart cities’, inequality, and high modernism. As a topic, it sounds a bit like the addressing system Mongolia has just decided to implement, where three random nouns – apple.truck.envelope – are used to represent a place instead of, say, a street-name, townland or unmemorable grid reference. (But actually, there is a there, there in my talk. Combining three parts from another naming system is the clue: ‘James’, ‘C’ and ‘Scott’.) In the Q&A, there was a question about how the platforms we design for good are used for evil. How/should we deal with that?
My answer was a hostage to fortune. I said we needed to chill the hell out about bad things happening and understand that the Internet reflects or even amplifies what is still, basically, human nature. That’s the kind of thing you can say between bad things happening, when the horror is ebbing just a little and the next awfulness hasn’t yet occurred. I still think it’s the right answer, but I’d give a lot to erase the hands-upturned shrug I did at the end.
How do we make our peace with the fact that yesterday an MP was savagely assassinated outside her constituency clinic? It would be hard at the best of times, but at a historical moment when violent ill-feeling is being stoked by right-wing politicians and newspapers, we can’t just shrug, as I did, and say this is a regrettable and awful cost of doing democratic business. [click to continue…]
[UPDATE March 21, 2021]: Looking for the latest On Beyond Zarathustra? It’s here. I’m updating old posts with outdated links.Â
(Everything in the rest of the post was directing you to places that no longer exist. So I’ve done you the favor of deleting it.)