Well not content with his inaccurate digs at Henry, Brad DeLong is “having another go at me”:http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2011/07/chris-bertram-gets-a-wish-granted-and-is-very-unhappy-indeed.html . (It really does seem to be some kind of obsession with him.) He says my post “here”:https://crookedtimber.org/2011/05/22/the-fragmenting-coalition-of-the-left-some-musings/ advocated abandoning social-democracy to

rely instead on a combination of:

populist nationalism[:] culturally conservative, worried by immigration (and willing to indulge popular anxieties), anxious about the effects of markets on working-class community…

and zero-growth greenism.

And that “now”:https://crookedtimber.org/2011/07/19/out-of-the-blue-into-the-black/ I’m horrified by the consequences in the form of Maurice Glasman.

Well, unsurprisingly, *wrong*, though I guess I lack the talent to write so clearly as to avoid misunderstanding from someone as determined to misunderstand me as Brad DeLong is.

First, I didn’t say that the left should abandon social democracy as such, I said that it should break with the “technocratic quasi-neoliberal left as incarnated by the likes of Peter Mandelson.” And …. Brad Delong, I guess.

Second, I didn’t advocate an alliance with culturally conservative populist nationalism, rather I argued that the group of people currently attracted by such politics would “either move towards the eco-left or will drift towards xenophobic right-wing nationalism.” And so I argued – in a post which was trying to start a conversation rather that laying down a line – for trying to build alliances between the eco-left and the traditional working class, between communitarian social-democrats and people with a more environmentally informed politics. DeLong is entitled to think what he likes about that, but he really should stop the infantile caricatures which just get in the way of having a sensible discussion. Pathetic.

The “NYT story”:http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/19/reddit-co-founder-charged-with-data-theft/?ref=technology is here.

bq. Aaron Swartz, a 24-year-old programmer and online political activist, was indicted Tuesday in Boston on charges that he stole over four million documents from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and JSTOR, an archive of scientific journals and academic papers. (Read the full indictment.) The charges were filed by the United States Attorney for the District of Massachusetts, Carmen M. Ortiz, and could result in up to 35 years in prison and a $1 million fine. In a press release, Ms. Ortiz’s office said that Mr. Swartz broke into a restricted area of M.I.T. and entered a computer wiring closet. Mr. Swartz apparently then accessed the M.I.T. computer network and stole millions of documents from JSTOR.

The indictment is “here”:http://t.co/Bc9xaRe – a petition supporting Aaron can be found “here”:http://act.demandprogress.org/sign/support_aaron/. I can’t pretend to be at all impartial about the prospect that Aaron could serve serious jail time for this – he is a good friend, as well as an active member of the CT community. It looks as though he has some support from the library community – the petition page has a statement from James Jacobs, the Government Documents Librarian at Stanford University. Furthermore, it claims that the “alleged victim has settled any claims against Aaron, explained they’ve suffered no loss or damage, and asked the government not to prosecute.”

Matthew Yglesias waxes sarcastic about the lack of content of my critique of neo-liberalism, and (on Twitter) ‘underpant gnomes theories of social democracy.’ And in so doing, misses the point quite completely: [click to continue…]

Just when British Labour Ed Miliband leader is on a roll, along comes Maurice Glasman to spoil things. I’ve been willing to give Glasman the benefit of the doubt up to now, despite feeling somewhat uncomfortable at some of the things he’s had to say on immigration. After all, Labour lost the last election and we do need some proper discussions about how to connect with a somewhat alienated working-class base. Glasman, with his talk of community and his Polanyi-inspired scepticism about the capacity of the market to ensure genuine well-being seemed a voice worth hearing. Well the mask hasn’t just slipped, it has fallen off, and I think the “blue Labour” project has come to a halt with his latest pronouncements. Intra-left polemics have been marked by too much moralizing denunciation in the past, at the expense of genuine dialogue and understanding. But there is a time for denunciation, and it is now.

Today’s Daily Express “front page”:http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/259756 (Headline “Britain Must Ban Migrants”):

bq. Lord Glasman, Ed Miliband’s chief policy guru, wants a temporary halt to immigration to ensure British people are first in the queue for jobs. The Labour peer also urged the Government to renegotiate EU rules allowing the free movement of migrant workers in a decisive break with the open door policy of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. “The people who live here are the highest priority. We’ve got to listen and be with them. They’re in the right place – it’s us who are not,” he said.

UPDATE: Sir Andrew Green, who heads-up the rabidly anti-immigration group MigrationWatch, “describes”:http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2015979/Freeze-UK-immigration-British-people-says-Ed-Milibands-policy-guru.html Glasman’s latest pronouncements as “over the top. It is simply not practicable”. That’s pretty extraordinary.

Doug Henwood has a go at Matthew Yglesias.

Orthodox types – and I’m including Yglesias, who describes his political leanings as “neoliberal” on his Facebook profile page – usually prefer monetary to fiscal remedies. Why? Because they operate through the financial markets and don’t mess with labor or product markets or the class structure. A jobs program and other New Deal-ish stuff would mess with labor and product markets and the class structure, and so it’s mostly _verboten_ to talk that way. From an elite point of view, the primary problem with a jobs program – and with employment-boosting infrastructure projects – is that they would put a floor under employment, making workers more confident and less likely to do what the boss says, and less dependent on private employers for a paycheck. It would increase the power of labor relative to capital. I’m not sure that Yglesias understands that explicitly, but it’s undoubtedly part of his unexamined “common sense” as a semi-mainstream pundit.

This is wrong in the particulars – as a correspondent has pointed out to me, Yglesias has repeatedly called for employment-boosting infrastructure projects and the like. But – getting away from the polemics and the specific personalities – I think that Doug is onto something significant here. I’d frame it myself in a more wishy-washy way. There is a real phenomenon that you might describe as left neo-liberalism in the US – liberals who came out of the experience of the 1980s convinced that the internal interest group dynamics of the Democratic party were a problem. These people came up with some interesting arguments (but also: Mickey Kaus), but seem to me to have always lacked a good theory of politics.

To be more precise – Neo-liberals tend to favor a combination of market mechanisms and technocratic solutions to solve social problems. But these kinds of solutions tend to discount politics – and in particular political collective action, which requires strong collective actors such as trade unions. This means that vaguely-leftish versions of neo-liberalism often have weak theories of politics, and in particular of the politics of collective action. I see Doug and others as arguing that successful political change requires large scale organized collective action, and that this in turn requires the correction of major power imbalances (e.g. between labor and capital). They’re also arguing that neo-liberal policies at best tend not to help correct these imbalances, and they seem to me to have a pretty good case. Even if left-leaning neo-liberals are right to claim that technocratic solutions and market mechanisms can work to relieve disparities etc, it’s hard for me to see how left-leaning neo-liberalism can generate any self-sustaining politics. I’m sure that critics can point to political blind spots among lefties (e.g. the difficulties in figuring out what is a necessary compromise, and what is a blatant sell-out), but these don’t seem to me to be potentially crippling, in the way that the absence of a neo-liberal theory of politics (who are the organized interest groups and collective actors who will push consistently for technocratic efficiency?) is. Of course I may be wrong – and look forward to some pushback in comments …

Update: Brad DeLong writes a reply, largely replicating a comment below, which says that I believe things that I actually don’t believe at all. My response to the original claim can be found in comments below.

Via Chris, on Twitter (I hope I’m not preempting him here), an Open Letter from a Keynesian to a Marxist by Joan Robinson, and “Zombie Marx“, an essay by Mike Beggs. Here is Robinson, writing in 1953:

I was a student at a time when vulgar economics was in a particularly vulgar state. … There was Great Britain with never less than a million workers unemployed, and there was I with my supervisor teaching me that it is logically impossible to have unemployment because of Say’s Law. Now comes Keynes and proves that Say’s Law is nonsense (so did Marx, of course, but my supervisor never drew my attention to Marx’s views on the subject). … The thing I am going to say that will make you too numb or too hot (according to temperament) to understand the rest of my letter is this: I understand Marx far and away better than you do. (I shall give you an interesting historical explanation of why this is so in a minute, if you are not completely frozen stiff or boiling over before you get to that bit.) When I say I understand Marx better than you, I don’t mean to say that I know the text better than you do. If you start throwing quotations at me you will have me baffled in no time. In fact, I refuse to play before you begin. What I mean is that I have Marx in my bones and you have him in your mouth. … suppose we each want to recall some tricky point in Capital, for instance the schema at the end of Volume II. What do you do? You take down the volume and look it up. What do I do? I take the back of an envelope and work it out.

And here is Beggs:

There are generations of economists who would call themselves Marxists, or admit Marx as a major influence, who have … engaged with other strands of economic thought and folded them into their worldview, have worried little about dropping from their analyses those aspects of Marx’s argument they believed to be wrong or unhelpful, and have felt no need to pepper their writing with appeals to authority in the form of biblical quotations. But in each generation, there are others who have defended an “orthodox” Marxian economics as a separate and superior paradigm, which can only be contaminated by absorbing ideas from elsewhere. … If we are to engage in these ways with modern economics, what, if anything, makes our analysis distinctively Marxist? It is the two-fold project behind Capital as a critique of political economy: first to demonstrate the social preconditions that lie beneath the concepts of political economy, and especially their dependence on class relationships; and second, to demonstrate these social relations as historical, not eternal. These two strands of Marx’s thought are as valid as ever. The way to apply them today is … is to deal not only, not even mainly, with economic high theory, but also with the applied economics produced every day in the reports and statements of central banks, Treasuries, the IMF, etc., and ask, what are the implicit class relations here? Why are these the driving issues at this point in history? What are the deeper social contradictions lying behind them? The pursuit of a separate system of economics as something wholly other from mainstream economics isolates us from the political and ideological space where these things take place: better, instead, to fight from the inside, to make clear the social and political content of the categories. A side effect is that we learn to think for ourselves again about how capitalism works, to be able to answer the kinds of question DeLong raised against Harvey, no longer lost without the appropriate quotation.

The political impregnability of Rupert Murdoch and NewsCorp has always been one of those facts about the world that seemed regrettable but eternal. By contrast, the ability of the banks to emerge from their near-destruction of the world economy richer and more politically powerful than ever before certainly took me by surprise when it happened (partly motivating my change in title from “Dead Ideas” to “Zombie Economics”). John Emerson pointed out the other day that the head of risk management at Lehman Brothers, arguably the most egregious individual failure among the thousands of examples, was just appointed to a senior position at the World Bank.

But now it seems there is just a chance that the curtain might be swept away from even these wizards. The emerging theme in commentary is the corrupt culture of impunity represented by the press hacking scandal, MP expenses and the banks (here’s Ed Miliband pulling them all together).

If Labor could tie the Conservative-Liberal austerity package to the protection of the systemically corrupt banking system, they would have the chance to put Nu Labour behind them (I noticed Blair has already credited Brown with killing the brand). Instead of putting all the burden on the public at large, they could force those who benefited from the bubble to pay for the cleanup. The two main groups are the creditors who lent irresponsibly, counting on a bailout and should now take a long-overdue haircut and high-income earners who benefited, either directly or indirectly, from the huge inflation in financial sector income.

I know it seems hopelessly naive to think the banks could ever be brought to heel. But they were, for decades after the Depression. And as impregnable as they look today, Newscorp looked just as impregnable three weeks ago, as did the CPSU and the apartheid regime in South Africa thirty years ago.

Of course this spring moment won’t last long. But perhaps there is enough momentum that it won’t be exhausted by Murdoch alone.
[click to continue…]

Rupert does his first post-crisis interview, with “the Wall Street Journal”:http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304521304576446261304709284.html, naturally.

bq. In an interview, Mr. Murdoch said News Corp. has handled the crisis “extremely well in every way possible,” making just “minor mistakes.”

Indeed – News Corporation has done a quite wonderful job handling the mess – with a few, notably rare exceptions.

Should anyone be interested I did a “Bloggingheads”:http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/37406 yesterday with Felix Salmon on the Murdoch scandal and a few related topics (this in turn led to a couple of talking-heads type appearances on BBC channels today, but I really can’t think I said anything in my allotted 90 second slots that’s surprising enough to be worth hunting down).

I’ve been wondering when best to air some thoughts about the ongoing public protests in Spain and Greece. The moment never seems right, because there’s always some bigger crisis about to break in European politics. The markets have turned on Italy;  Ireland joins Portugal in the junk box, despite meeting all its targets; European leaders remain divided on what should happen; they may or may not hold yet another summit this week.

But as long as the countries that have been worst hit by crisis are required to impose continuous austerity policies in the present climate, something deeper may be happening to public opinion, to civil society, and to the framework of consent to be ruled in a particular way.

These are not fixed things of course. They shift and evolve in response to the balance of power, the dominant ideas, the credibility of pain- and gain-sharing plans, the institutionalization of compromises through particular policy commitments.

I was in Barcelona recently and saw some of the mass protests in the Plaça de Catalunya, which have been replicated this summer in cities across Spain. Not much was going on around the camp in the daytime, but the place came alive by night, with speeches, singing, dancing, lectures, films, and at the weekends, larger protests against the government’s policies.

This is not a trade union protest; these are not public sector employees. So who are the protesters, the ‘indignatos’ who have been occupying Spanish public spaces? The numbers out on the squares are going down a bit now, but their social networking links are expanding enormously. And in Greece, who are the people taking part in street protests, which now seem to take on an almost ritualized form, parallel to but not the same as public sector strikes? What does it all mean for our understanding of democracy in hard times?

[click to continue…]

With the news that the BSkyB bid has been withdrawn, a pretty amazing week in British politics (with ramifications beyond) seems to have come to a climax. Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, who had, frankly, looked pretty hopeless only a few days ago did a superb job on the Tories and the Murdoch empire, and kudos to people like Tom Watson and Chris Bryant who have had the courage to stand up to a threatening and vindictive organization and respect also to the great journalist who really cracked it, Nick Davies. Hard to know what the future holds, because so many of the assumptions recycled by Britain’s lazy commentariat depend on the fixed notion that Britain’s politicians have to accommodate themselves to Rupert Murdoch (that Overton Window thingy just changed its dimensions). Even the erstwhile victims of Stockholm Syndrome, like Peter Mandelson, are now declaring that they were always privately opposed. Well of course! Enjoy for now.

I’m now on the executive committee of SASE, the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics, which is a kind of professional organization for economic sociologists and hangers-on like me. The organization’s annual meeting was in Madrid this year, and will be in Boston (at MIT) next year. One of the more interesting features of SASE meetings is that you can propose ‘mini-conferences,’ where you propose a theme around which a number of linked panels can be arranged. Hence my desire to let CT readers know about the “request for proposals”:http://www.sase.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=322&Itemid=46. Proposals are due by September 1; the 2012 overall conference theme is “Global Shifts: Implications for Business, Government and Labour” which should, I imagine, intersect nicely with the interests of a lot of CT readers.

As a quick addendum to John’s post, it’s worth remembering that Alex Tabarrok got “quite upset”:http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2007/08/dani-rodrik-has.html a few years ago, when Dani Rodrik “suggested”:http://rodrik.typepad.com/dani_rodriks_weblog/2007/08/irreconcilable-.html that he and other libertarians were anti-government ideologues who had immunized themselves against countervailing evidence.

bq. Dani Rodrik responds here to my pointed remarks on his argument for industrial policy. Rodrik’s response, however, is along the same lines of his earlier – “I’m sophisticated, you’re simplistic” – post on why economists disagree. In this case, it’s ‘libertarians are ideologues who are immune to evidence.’ Rodrik, however, has painted himself into a corner because he cannot at the same time say that the “systematic empirical evidence” for market imperfections in education, health, social insurance and Keynesian stabilization policy is “sketchy, to say the least” (also “difficult to pin down” and ‘unsystematic’) and also claim that libertarians are ideologues who are immune to evidence. Say rather that libertarian economists are immune to sketchy, unsystematic, difficult to pin down evidence. Rodrik is thus right that he is “not as unconventional as I sometimes think I am. The real revolutionaries here are the libertarians.” The libertarian economists are revolutionaries, however, not because they are immune to evidence but because they respect evidence so much that they are unwilling to accept “conventional wisdom” simply because it is conventional.

I’m trying really, _really_ hard to reconcile the argument that Alex and his mates are not anti-government ideologues, and indeed have far greater respect for evidence than their opponents, with his more recent “claim”:http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/07/the-great-fiction.html that:

bq. As Bastiat said, “Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.” What Rampell et al. want to do is to make people believe in this great fiction.

It seems to me difficult to maintain the claim that government is necessarily a communal fraud (and that the people who you disagree with are trying to make people believe in this fraud) and at the same time argue that you and other libertarian economists are open-minded individuals happy to go wherever the evidence about politics and markets takes you. But then I’m not a “libertarian economist”:http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/253.html.

Alex Tabbarok has written an odd post, whose reasoning, were it sound, would seem to license the following inference. Since, as Bastiat says, “Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else,” John Cleese’s fatal mistake in this debate is to admit the existence of Roman aqueducts. (That really puts him on an ontological slippery slope to sanitation and education and all manner of entification.)

But seriously. I guess I can see arguing that tax credits aren’t, per se, social programs – but aren’t they social engineering, hmmm yes? (Wouldn’t it follow that they couldn’t be faulted for being the latter, if they can’t be credited with being the former?) But I find it hard to see how 529 plans could, strictly speaking, fail of bare existence. (If you think otherwise, I’ve got a Pentagon you might like to levitate.) Arguing that if something didn’t exist, the private sector could take up the slack is one thing. But arguing that because you could – oh, say, hire a private protection outfit – that therefore the police actually don’t exist … ?

Finally, I have a feeling that Tabarrok would not, if caught in another mood, express a preference for a tax code pockmarked with various and sundry breaks, giveaways and loopholes over one lacking these features, commonly regarded as unlovely by economists. But since Tabarrok’s stated position is now that such things are rightly regarded as precious islands of civil freedom, in a socialist sea of serfdom … oh I give up.

The ever-expanding scandal surrounding hacking, bribery, perjury and obstruction of justice by News Corporation in England has already brought about the closure of the venerable (at least in years) News of the World newspaper, but looks likely to go much further, with significant implications for the Murdoch press in Australia, where Murdoch started out in my hometown of Adelaide (I should mention that, despite being born here, Murdoch is not an Australian by either citizenship or residence. He took out US citizenshup citizenship quite a while ago to further his ambitions there) .

The scandal over hacking and other criminal behavior has now become an all-out revolt of UK politicians against Murdoch’s immense political power , which has had successive Prime Ministers dancing attendance on him, and rushing to confer lucrative favors on his News Corporation. Those, like Labour leader Ed Miliband, who are relative cleanskins, are making the running, while PM David Cameron, very close to the most corrupt elements of News, is scrambling to cover himself.

The hacking and bribery scandals appear (as far as we know) to be confined to the UK, but the greater scandal of Murdoch’s corruption of the political process and misuse of press power is even worse in Australia. The Australian and other Murdoch publications filled with lies and politically slanted reporting aimed at furthering both Murdoch’s political agenda and his commercial interests. Whereas there is still lively competition in the British Press, Murdoch has a print monopoly in major cities like Brisbane.

It seems likely that News International will be refused permission for its impending takeover of BSkyB on the grounds that it is not “fit and proper” for such a role. That would have important implications for Australia (and perhaps also for the US, though Australian regulators are more likely to be influenced by UK precedents).

Regardless of how the current scandal plays out, we need to remember that while the Australian productions of News Corporation may be papers, what they print is certainly not news.