Karl Marx in the Preface to vol. 1 of _Capital_ : “The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future. ”
Here’s “part of an interview from IHE”:http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/10/20/schrecker with Ellen Schrecker, author of _The Lost Soul of Higher Education: Corporatization, the Assault on Academic Freedom, and the End of the American University_ :
bq. Reduced support from state legislatures and the federal government’s decision to aid higher education through grants and loans to students rather than through the direct funding of individual institutions forced those institutions to look for other sources of income, while seeking to cut costs. In the process, academic administrators adapted themselves to the neoliberal ethos of the time. They reoriented their institutions toward the market at the expense of those elements of their educational missions that served no immediate economic function.
bq. As they came to rely ever more heavily on tuition payments, they diverted resources to whatever would attract and retain students — elaborate recreational facilities, gourmet dining halls, state-of-the-art computer centers, and winning football teams. At the same time, they slashed library budgets, deferred building maintenance, and – most deleteriously – replaced full-time tenure-track faculty members with part-time and temporary instructors who have no academic freedom and may be too stressed out by their inadequate salaries and poor working conditions to provide their students with the education they deserve. Meanwhile, rising tuitions are making a college degree increasingly unaffordable to the millions of potential students who most need that credential to make it into the middle class.
bq. Unfortunately, the competitive atmosphere produced by the academic community’s long-term obsession with status and its more recent devotion to the market makes it hard for its members to collaborate in solving its problems. Institutions compete for tuition-paying undergraduates and celebrity professors who can boost their institutions’ U.S. News & World Report ratings. Faculty members compete for tenure and research grants. And students compete for grades after having competed for admission to the highly ranked schools that will provide them with the credentials for a position within the American elite.
490,000 public sector jobs to go, and just wait for the multiplier effects.
“Here’s Joe Stiglitz”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/oct/19/no-confidence-fairy-for-austerity-britain :
bq. Thanks to the IMF, multiple experiments have been conducted – for instance, in east Asia in 1997-98 and a little later in Argentina – and almost all come to the same conclusion: the Keynesian prescription works. Austerity converts downturns into recessions, recessions into depressions. The confidence fairy that the austerity advocates claim will appear never does, partly perhaps because the downturns mean that the deficit reductions are always smaller than was hoped. Consumers and investors, knowing this and seeing the deteriorating competitive position, the depreciation of human capital and infrastructure, the country’s worsening balance sheet, increasing social tensions, and recognising the inevitability of future tax increases to make up for losses as the economy stagnates, may even cut back on their consumption and investment, worsening the downward spiral.
Cross-posted from the New Statesman Culture blog (original)
It is hard to escape the worry that the arts, humanities and, almost certainly, many of the social sciences face a bleaker future in British higher education if Lord Browne’s report – “Securing a sustainable future for higher education in England” – is implemented. Browne isn’t explicit about this, but on page 25 of the report we find a chilling sentence: “In our proposals, there will be scope for Government to withdraw public investment through HEFCE from many courses to contribute to wider reductions in public spending; there will remain a vital role for public investment to support priority courses and the wider benefits they create.” The priority courses are listed as medicine, science and engineering. The arts, humanities and social sciences are on their own, and will have to support themselves from student fee income, from research grants and from so-called “QR funding” – allocated by government on the basis of past research performance. [click to continue…]
I took a fair bit of flak from Yglesias and DeLong last week for welcoming Ed Miliband’s break with New Labour on inequality. But I think I was right in my view that New Labour (or, at least elements of it) had abandoned, in their normative commitments, a concern with distribution. In support of that view, I was interested to read this piece in today’s Observer by Tim Allan, written from a Blairite perspective and worrying about what Ed Miliband has had to say about pay at the top:
bq. … to my mind the most critical and damaging line in your speech was when you said that it is wrong, conference, that a banker [or presumably anybody else] can earn more in a day than a care worker can earn in a year. It is hard to exaggerate the political importance of this position as a break from New Labour. New Labour’s key insight was to recognise that helping the poorest in society could be done without setting limits on people’s aspirations. So it is a line with huge political and practical implications. If it ever moved from conference rhetoric to actual policies, it would raise some difficult practical questions: will a maximum wage really be set at 250 times the wage of a care worker? Why not 25 times, or 2.5 times and what is the rational basis for such distinctions? Would the maximum wage apply also to entrepreneurs earning money from successful companies they have created? Would they have to stop trying to build their business and create new jobs when they reach the threshold? You need quickly to counteract the dangerous perception that you are against success, against wealth creation, and want to dictate economic outcomes for the wealthiest rather than provide economic opportunities for all.
There’s an excellent reply to this from Sunder Katwala over at Next Left.
UPDATE: The original version of this post contained some speculation about the motives of DeLong and Yglesias, and Robert Waldmann commented critically on this. Since I think it is better to take any hint of personal invective out of this, I’ve edited the post to remove this speculation.
“Matt Yglesias”:http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2010/09/new-labour-and-inequality/ and “Brad DeLong”:http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/09/in-which-matthew-yglesias-observes-that-innumeracy-is-an-awful-thing.html have argued that this graph, from “Lane Kenworthy”:http://lanekenworthy.net/2009/06/01/did-blair-and-brown-fail-on-inequality/, shows that we shouldn’t be too critical of Labour’s performance with respect to inequality over their 12 years of government in Britain.
Both Matt and Brad are pushing back against “Chris’s post below”:https://crookedtimber.org/2010/09/30/its-about-the-distribution-stupid/, which argued that Labour had done very little about equality. (Although in his remark on my comment on his post, Brad now seems to suggest that his post was a pre-emptive strike against what Chris would go on to write in comments.) There’s a natural rejoinder on behalf of Chris, which has been well made in both Matt and Brad’s comments threads. Namely, if the graph really showed that things had gotten better, equality-wise, the Gini coefficient for the UK would have fallen. But in fact it rose, somewhat significantly, over Labour’s term. Indeed, the “IFS Report”:http://www.ifs.org.uk/publications/4524 that the graph is based on shows quite clearly that it rose markedly towards the end of Labour’s term.
So I got to thinking about how good a measure “Gini coefficients”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient are of equality. I think the upshot of what I’ll say below is that Chris’s point is right – if things were really going well, you’d expect Gini coefficients to fall. But it’s messy, particularly because Gini’s are much more sensitive to changes at the top than the bottom.
_The workers’ flag is palest pink, since Gaitskell dropped it in the sink, now Harold’s done the same as Hugh, the workers’ flag is brightest blue …._
My hopes for Ed Miliband’s leadership of the Labour Party are limitedly optimistic. One of the first things I did after the result was to lift my copy of _The State in Capitalist Society_ off the shelf, where his father wisely writes (p. 244):
bq. “social democratic leaders in government illustrate particularly clearly the limits of reform. For while they raise great hopes among their followers and many others while in opposition, the constrictions under which they labour when in government, allied to the ideological dispositions which lead… them to submit to these constrictions, leave them with little room to implement their policies.”
Indeed. Still, Ed Miliband represents a great improvement on New Labour in one crucial respect. Blair, Mandelson, Milburn and the rest of the gang not only failed to achieve Labour’s goals concerning inequality and social justice, they abandoned them, an abandonment summed up in Mandelson’s notorious statement that he was “intensely relaxed” about people at the top becoming “fithy rich”. New Labour, taking their cue from the Clinton Democrats, abandoned the distributive objectives of the left on the basis that the rising prosperity engendered by growth, markets and globalisation would benefit everyone. Well it hasn’t. Personally I think it was never going to, for “spirit-level” type reasons, among others. But anyway, that model ran into the wall of the banking crisis and we’ll shortly see the absolute standard of living of the poorest falling as the deficit gets clawed back at their expense. The aspirational middle classes, who Blair and Mandelson wooed will also be having a tough time of it: so I’m far from convinced that a renewed emphasis on distribution will cost Labour the centre ground. A continuation of New Labour would, though, certainly doom the party with its core constituency, many of whom would lapse (further) into apathy or would be tempted by the several varieties of right-wing populism (BNP, EDL) on offer.
I was thirteen at the time of Bloody Sunday, so I can remember it just about. It is hard to know what to think about today’s report. On the one hand, it is a kind of justice, however inadequate, for the relatives; on the other, it has taken nearly forty years. And the British government has spent £200 million to tell us what we all knew anyway: that British paratroopers murdered fourteen civilians in cold blood and that a subsequent “inquiry” (Widgery) was a whitewash. Still, it is one thing knowing the truth (as we already did) and it is another to have it publicly acknowledged. Will there be prosecutions? Doubtful.
I know, a second successive post linking to Stuart White at Next Left, but his analysis of “Orange Book” liberalism and its distance from egalitarian liberalism is deadly accurate, especially regarding David Laws (Chief Secretary to the Treasury and former VP at JP Morgan). Laws may not be a libertarian, but he may be the closest thing to it in the British political mainstream: certainly more Hayek than Hobhouse:
bq. Reading someone like David Laws, for example, there is at times a clear sense that the free market produces a distribution of income and wealth which is a kind of natural or moral baseline. It is departures from the baseline that have to be justified. Laws and other Orange Bookers are of course not libertarians, so they are prepared to allow that some departures – some tax-transfers/tax-service arrangements – can be justified. (This is the sense in which they remain social liberals, albeit not egalitarian ones.) But the presumption, for Laws, is clearly for ‘leaving money in people’s pockets’. This presumption runs completely counter to one of the basic claims of contemporary liberalism as developed in the work of such as Rawls, Dworkin and Ackerman.
White is quite right to say, of course, that egalitarian liberals also have serious difficulties with Labour on account of its dreadful record on civil liberties. But my sense is that quite a lot (though not all) of that record was the result of channeling the permanent agenda of the Home Office (note the way in which the Tories, in power advocated ID cards with Labour opposed, with the position reversing some time after 1997).
The Lib Dems (for it was their policy and not the Tories’) have axed the Child Trust Fund, which, as Stuart White points out over at Next Left, was one of those rare policies directly inspired by the egalitarian liberal theorizing of the past forty years. (h/t Virtual Stoa). (To discuss, head over to Next Left).
So we have a reasonable range of would-be Labour leaders to choose from now: two Milibands, Andy Burnham, Ed Balls, Diane Abbot and John McDonnell. For US readers I should explain McDonnell – deputy to Ken Livingstone in the old GLC days – has no chance and Abbot almost none. Which is a pity since at least she’s refusing the distasteful dog-whistling on immigration that is central to the Burnham and Balls campaigns. There’s a good piece on the issue in the Guardian by John Harris (h/t MoN). Harris goes a bit easy on Miliband E’s for my liking – and that’s even though I’m backing EM myself.
The Times has an “obituary for J.A.G. Griffith”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article7130873.ece , whose _The Politics of the Judiciary_ was required reading for a whole generation of students of politics and law. A sad loss, and especially at a time when there are renewed signs of judicial activism against the trade union movement in the UK.
British Tory-lite deputy-PM Nick Clegg, has announced a very limited programme of democratic and civil-libertarian reform in the following terms:
bq. I’m talking about the most significant programme of empowerment by a British government since the great reforms of the 19th Century. The biggest shake up of our democracy since 1832, when the Great Reform Act redrew the boundaries of British democracy, for the first time extending the franchise beyond the landed classes. Landmark legislation, from politicians who refused to sit back and do nothing while huge swathes of the population remained helpless against vested interests. Who stood up for the freedom of the many, not the privilege of the few.
Over at The Virtual Stoa, “Chris Brooke asks”:http://virtualstoa.net/2010/05/19/its-exam-season/
bq. If you were marking examination papers on nineteenth century British political history, what mark would you give someone who described the 1832 Reform Act in these terms?
Indeed. And see especially, Ted Vallance’s response in comments to Chris’s post.
The struggle of the suffragettes for female emancipation, the extension of the franchise after WW1, all are as nothing compared to Clegg’s plans to curb CCTV cameras and biometric passports ….. An elected second chamber, sounds good. Electoral reform – subject to a referendum in which the dominant party in the coalition will campaign for the status quo. Talk about overselling yourself.
“Matt Yglesias”:http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2010/09/new-labour-and-inequality/ and “Brad DeLong”:http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2010/09/in-which-matthew-yglesias-observes-that-innumeracy-is-an-awful-thing.html have argued that this graph, from “Lane Kenworthy”:http://lanekenworthy.net/2009/06/01/did-blair-and-brown-fail-on-inequality/, shows that we shouldn’t be too critical of Labour’s performance with respect to inequality over their 12 years of government in Britain.