I'm gratified that from what I can tell, we weren't wildly unfair in our Nozick episode, and in particular that Metcalf's participation apparently didn't irredeemably taint our coverage, what with his being an already established opponent of the text.
As is typical when we cover and largely pan a work related to a movement that people are invested in, we get more requests to cover different texts that would make the case more effectively (in this case, a couple of people have brought up Michael Huemer. I would encourage such people to go create a Not School group right now to talk about it, as no further forays into this area are scheduled or anticipated. If you start a group and record your discussion, I will eventually get around to doing another Not School highlights episode, meaning that at least the beginning of your discussion will get shared with the full PEL listenership.
Our next planned steps in sort-of political philosophy are in economics, covering Smith first, then probably a Keynes-Hayek combined episode. We'll also definitely get to an anarchism episode, i.e. Proudhon/Bakunin. That's all I can safely predict at this point, though your suggestions are always welcome and will certainly be considered (especially if we hear the same suggestion from enough different people).
So that leaves us where we often are given our "great books"-based approach: we've considered the main representative of a view according to the philosophical canon, but arguably haven't grasped with the issue itself. Disgruntled libertarians can join the Marxists and and atheists and theists and people who think we read the wrong Merleau-Ponty text or haven't yet received proper guidance on Lacan.
So our opinions about libertarianism as a wider social position beyond Nozick's book will for the foreseeable future instead be a product of lots of third-hand gossip and encounters with irritating dorm-mates or things we heard in the media or whatever, i.e. how people normally get their opinions who don't make a concerted scholarly effort to grapple with a view. So I invite libertarian-leaning listeners to engage us here to help us understand what we may be missing.
To me, the rationality behind someone's libertarianism has everything to do with what kinds of nasty government actions they have in mind when they say that government action is in general, or outside of specified narrow limits, unjustified. When Thoreau was complaining about government, he had in mind the stupid wars of his day and the enforcement of slavery, which are pretty damned good things to complain about. If your problem with the federal government today is foreign wars and drones, I'm with you, though I also recognize that I don't actually know much about foreign affairs, and just about nothing about strategic defense of American interests. As we discussed as far back as our first episode and more recently on our Oppenheimer episode, we necessarily rely to a very large degree on expert opinions, and so when it comes to fighting terrorism or the like, the best I feel I can do is try to gauge whether the people we put in charge of such things are corrupt or not, i.e. whether they're going to be doing primarily the bidding of their campaign contributors or whether they actually have the public interest in mind. I tend to think that most people in public service, given that public service doesn't pay as much as the private sector, are at least trying to do the right thing.
What's my rationale for that opinion? It's a "bullshitty" one, to quote myself re. Thoreau. I work with some people with some government power (mostly in the transportation sector), and have thought and researched enough about the relationship between jobs and human nature to feel confident that people don't want to live wasted, shitty, corrupt lives. While a low-level government job may attract many a person in search of a sinecure (this is one of my favorite words; look it up if you don't know it!), if you're actually going to work at something, you want it to matter. I have less understanding of real-world instances of the raw motivation toward power that characterizes public servants in our media, but, as with money, think it obvious that such a hunger would be much more easily satisfied in the private sector than in our checks-and-balances system.
Inevitably, any attempt to generalize about the psychology of libertarians is going to be highly inapplicable to many of them, but if we're dealing in anecdote and near-groundless generalization, as semi-philosophical essays about the social apparently must according to Wes, then here goes:
Libertarians like Thoreau tend to be both highly cynical, contra my assessment of public servants above, and maybe also think that there's something about government power in particular that corrupts more than other kinds of power, probably because of the whole monopoly on force thing. Someone high up an a corporate, or academic, or nonprofit political organization may well be an ass and promote policies that exploit others, but he can't have his underlings and constituents arrested or killed.
The problem here is how to provide a tempered response to a real problem. I had a musician friend once who was so paranoid about being robbed that he would always keep his blinds closed so that no one passing would so much as see his equipment and start hatching plans to steal it. Some people are so worried about driving or flying that they simply won't do these things. What makes for a rational response to a real risk is a matter of judgment, and so people with different sensibilities are going to put more or less emphasis on particular threats.
I actually found David Brin to be pretty persuasive on this: we shouldn't discount any of our concerns about the power of any elites, private or public, but should recognize that it's not the level of power someone has that matters (and we can't do much about this anyway), but what's done with the power. I'm not concerned with arguing that in principle, some elites need to be restrained from any possible bad moves, but am concerned with there being accountability for and checks on all elites.
Another point of what I'd call personality-engendered disagreement is how you view the possibility of social change and our personal and collective responsibility for bringing that about. I'm a liberal, of course, in the sense that I see many of the world's evils as capable of being addressed... maybe not cured, but greatly greatly lessened. There's no reason given our level of overall world wealth why we should still have poverty. There's no reason why we have to keep wrecking our environment. We can't remove natural disasters, but we can develop more effective ways of responding to them to mitigate long-term damage. We can't stop disease and death, but we can invest a lot in medical research and more in propagating preventive care and other medical resources that we already have. We can't get rid of religious strife and power struggles and general human dickishness, but we can change aspects of the culture through more communication and better guidance. (Would you have believed when you were a kid that bullying would actually be getting real treatment as a problem in the way it has been of late?)
So there's a lot that I think needs to be done to address these problems, and I don't really give a crap who does it. If a corporation can address one of these needs, great, and if they get rich in the process, fine. But as we know, corporations aren't designed to serve the public interest (well, some are), so it becomes the task of government to defend those who don't have the resources to defend themselves. This, I think, is the position of the very centrist Democratic party of today: We just want things to work, dammit. We want effectiveness, we want long-term planning, we want deep thought about a vision of the future but don't want to sacrifice any incremental gains that might actually be politically achievable in the name of some principle that not enough people will understand or be on board with to allow it to result in new laws.
Given my mindset, I have little patience for someone who gets hung up on some bias against government action (or against private ownership, or again religious organizations, or against international aid, etc., etc.). You might argue that one can't legislate change: that real change comes from within, from changing people's hearts and minds in the war of ideas. This ignores one of Marx's fundamental insights, which is that people adapt to their material circumstances, and typically our ideas express the status quo or the teleology inherent in the system in which we live. So, for example, you can't legislate that people stop being racist, but you can use laws to discourage discrimination and positively give opportunities to minorities. In the short term, this creates tension, in that, for example, whites suspect that any minority in a position of power was only there because of affirmative action. But as a long-term proposition, the result is more minorities in positions of power, and people obeying that power as they generally must, and so what was most terrible about old, racist society largely dissipates.
I sometimes romanticize my time in school, because it's an example of where most of us lived under a different kind of governing structure, and in my case (in my affluent Chicago suburb that to this day always votes "yes" on referenda to shower the high school with new and improved facilities), the result was very positive. No, I'm not advocating for a paternalistic society that determines our main activities, but what worked for me was that there was of course the main activity (classes) which was at least designed with our human capacities and interests in mind (yay, New Work), and then there were all these extracurricular opportunities (sports teams, drama, etc.) that only only gave us something to sink our ambitions into, but there was a culture that was amenable to fostering friendships and consequently cooperative efforts not sponsored by the school, like, say, starting a rock band or running an underground magazine.
I'm more than aware that lots of people had very different experiences of school, and am not urging that model on society as a whole, but it tells us something about the possible relationship between intentionally designed, institutional community and human thriving. College provides another set of models we can learn from, as do many civic, church, and business communities. To rule out government action on grounds of principle is as foolish as ruling out any role for technology in conquering our problems.
But any such openness to central (or highly decentralized!) planning, and any admission that there are problems that are "ours" as a larger collective instead of belonging to each of us as individuals or maybe at best families, already runs against what I've witnessed as the sensibilities of many a libertarian. Some are pessimists and/or cynics: the problems of the world are bad enough that admitting the world or even the whole nation to our circle of care will simply ensure that nothing gets solved... they'll just drag us down, whether through their orneriness or laziness or simply because they've got it too bad for us to add their problems to our plate. Some deny the connection between human hardship and happiness, taking Freud to mean that we're pretty much going to be unhappy however we structure things, so why worry about it? It's hard enough dealing with your own shit. Some simply don't give a shit at all about other people as a species, and deny on principle that we are fundamentally social beings.
In our Nozick discussion, this came up in our confusion/disagreement re. whether Nozick had anything to say about ethics proper. You could (as I interpret Nozick) take him to be arguing against any government duty towards positive ethical action (specifically, arguing that any attempt to follow such a duty would violate a moral side constraint) while accepting that as human beings, we do have duties towards each other. Seth maintained instead that Nozick's position that individuals can't have such positive duties either. Clearly, Thoreau was not only against government charity, but against charity altogether. Or you could believe that government shouldn't try to help, but we still as individuals and voluntary agencies should. I take neither position to be well justified, but at least the latter isn't obviously misanthropic.
Most often, I hear the accusation that we naive liberals just don't understand economics, that we fail to recognize how somehow any action by government screws up the not-perfect-but-the-best-we-can-do action of free markets. This challenge I do take seriously, which is why we need to do a short survey of economic theory. My initial hypothesis is that economics is our modern theology, and that it's just as bullshitty as old-time theology was. Collecting more data and examining historical patterns does not predict the future, and the disagreement among major economists (left- vs. right-wingers) as well as their failure under any administration to effectively address real-world economic problems (or tell us with with any confidence what the economy would look like if some actions had been taken or not) makes me think it's all a high-priced guessing game, used, then, by this class of libertarian to justify their political opinions which are actually based on sentiment, i.e. bullshit.
By all means, I encourage our listeners to tell me what I'm missing here, and that means actually telling us here, not just pointing me at some 300 page text that for sure none of us will read. Thanks as always for your patience in reading my bullshit.
Best, -Mark
Hi Mark,
Two points on the relationship between Libertarianism, Political Philosophy, and Economics.
Point 1:
In the Nozick episode you discussed “philosophical” libertarianism. This viewpoint takes property rights as a given and uses it to argue against taxation and government coercion.
The other group of people that generally advocate for a smaller government have consequentialist concerns. Specifically, they argue that many government programs actually have negative side effects.
Here are some reasons why government programs might have negative consequences (in theory):
– Taxation (most of the time) imposes a loss of efficiency because it alters production, labor supply, and pricing decisions.
– Government programs that help the poor often create the possibility of moral hazard.
– Bureaucracies tend to be influenced by powerful interests that alter policies in their own favor. Agricultural subsidies are a classic example, but there are many others. Note, this reasoning does not require corrupt officials, it could just be due to “cognitive capture.”
– Bureaucracies tend to grow, regardless of the need for their growth.
The above reasons are all theoretical. Whether they outweigh the potential benefits of government action in practice is an empirical question that varies by policy. Here is where the field empirical microeconomics proves to be useful. This field evaluates policy interventions by combining experiments, statistics, and economic theory. There is often disagreement in empirical micro, but I would not say this form of analysis is “theology.” Note, macroeconomic policy (i.e. general fiscal stimulus or monetary policy) is much more complicated and harder to study. Therefore, there is much more disagreement in macroeconomics. See this survey of top economists for an idea on which issues there is consensus and what type of evidence is brought to bear: http://www.igmchicago.org/igm-economic-experts-panel
A couple of points about your rant in the last paragraph:
“Collecting more data and examining historical patterns does not predict the future.”
– Economists run experiments quite frequently these days. It’s also a pretty extreme viewpoint to say that historical data is useless for understanding how the world works and counterfactual outcomes.
“as well as their failure under any administration to effectively address real-world economic problems.”
– Really? No administration has ever effectively addressed “real-world” problems? We live in the most prosperous time in human history and the US is the richest country in the world. I am not saying that this is caused by government policy, but your claim requires overwhelming evidence. Lastly, economists aren’t typically the ones that have power in government, so blaming them for any successes or failures of policy is also unfair.
Point 2:
Let’s say you take a particular philosophical position, i.e. utilitarianism, Rawlsianism, or other systems. How does a philosophical position translate to a particular policy? Here, economists have built the tools to combine theory with data to evaluate the effects of a policy. Obviously this approach requires many assumptions, but at least those assumptions are mathematically stated in economics whereas in philosophy there are often obscured.
For example, one of the most important economic justifications for government is as a form of insurance. Now, someone might argue, why doesn’t the free market provide insurance? There are actually deep arguments for why some insurance markets may not arise out of free market competition. Let’s say that you believe those arguments, then what is the right level of government insurance? In order to evaluate such questions economists try to understand the effects (both positive and negative) of government insurance. Then, based on their philosophical positions, they can evaluate a particular policy. This process is not perfect, but it is much better than relying on ideology alone.
I appreciate the reasoned response to this blog post. I suspect Linsenmayer, when suggesting connections between theology and economics, is referring to the mass-media presentation of economic theory, which reduces political macro economics to the dichotomy between more or less taxation. Certainly we are exposed to economic/political pundits on both sides of this dichotomy on TV, and they often do come across as dogmatic on either side, much like dogmatic atheist/theist debates. Do you disagree that this economic dichotomy exists? Or is it that most economists do not think in these simplistic terms, but that, those who do, preach the loudest on TV? If so, why aren’t the moderates more vocal in getting the important issues out?
Kudos to Mark for throwing down the gauntlet! Not bad for someone Against Debate.
Thanks to all who replied, particularly Aneconomist (Seth B., is that you?). Yes, I was exaggerating intentially in my “hypothesis,” because I’m going to save the actual work for when we read this stuff.
Economists have been described (before me) as like theologians because of the way they are revered in society (per the Oppenheimer episode), not necessarily because everything they say is bullshit. I can say that I don’t believe at this point that economics is a science, but that doesn’t mean of course that there aren’t better and worse ways of running money policy etc. etc. etc.
I think the fetishism of meaningless numbers is evident even in the comparative economist site you linked to, where we get these bar graphs with 54% of the very very small number of respondents agree with such and such claim, as if this translates to it being 54% likely that such a claim is true. In analyzing the economic actions of a large group, you’re taking very complex phenomena and trying to make sense out of them, which is fine, but to pretend that there’s any real precision in it seems foolish, given that the units that you’re trying to predict, i.e. people, are just too complex in a too complex environment. It’s uncertain in the manner of predicting the weather, if you added the complication that the water and air and other molecules you’re worried about all have free will and can communicate in an open-ended symbolic system.
Re. a couple of the considerations you raise:
“– Government programs that help the poor often create the possibility of moral hazard.”
So the virtuous poor are the hard-working ones that feed their lives into the machine. Nice. And I suppose we wouldn’t want to say that excessive incomes to the wealthy create moral hazard, because no matter how worthless and lazy and idle a rich person becomes, his money is still feeding the machine, through capital investment and buying luxuries.
“– Taxation (most of the time) imposes a loss of efficiency because it alters production, labor supply, and pricing decisions.”
So this is a version of utilitarianism, where efficiency translates to greatest happiness because we get more benefit (more wealth) out of less cost (less effort, less money), right? So as soon as we accept this paradigm, then material wealth = happiness, and virtue = maximizing efficiency, which is maximizing material wealth, just as for Nozick, wealth = time, i.e. the labor theory of value. Unless as Jeremy Rifkin does you factor in environmental decay, which changes the equation so that more productivity beyond a certain point = the Lorax caps you in the ass. Or if you take Thoreau’s angle and weigh such gains against human costs. And though I know in an economic model you CAN try to assign numbers to such costs, doing so (according to folks like Sandel) is itself detrimental.
Don’t get me wrong; I’m not dismissing the machine of happiness model. Per Rawls, everybody wants more of whatever will enable them to pursue what they want, and money has more than a little to do with that. And I’m not a reactionary per Thoreau or even Nietzsche, who scoffed at this stuff as so much life-hating English tomfoolery. So I take the picture seriously and look forward to figuring out exactly why it makes me want to vomit.
Marc and Mark,
Before I address your points, I want to mention that reading Adam Smith to understand modern economics is a terrible idea. It would be like reading Newton to learn modern physics. Almost no graduate student in economics that I know has ever read Adam Smith. I would instead consider this article (which addresses optimal taxation) or something like it: http://www.people.hbs.edu/mweinzierl/paper/Optimal%20taxation%20in%20theory%20and%20practice%20JEP%202009.pdf
Alternatively, you are better off reading an introductory economics textbook and ascertaining its philosophical content. There is also an entire field of philosophy of economics that studies the epistemology of economics (check out Kevin Hoover, for example).
1) Why is there so much economics debate on tv and why does it seem so mindless? Where are the moderates?
I think it’s a combination of several things.
– TV is infotainment and not debate. (with the exception of something like Charlie Rose)
– The issues debated on TV are poorly defined and oftentimes very macro (where there truly is very little agreement).
– Most practicing economists refuse to go on TV for issues outside of their narrowly defined research specialties.
– Predicting the stock market is a common topic of discussion on TV but most economists don’t even believe that the stock market can be predicted. So the ones that are willing to go on such shows typically just want attention. Most economists don’t even take any finance related classes in graduate school (although this has changed a bit recently).
What then do most policy oriented economists do on a day to day basis? They study precisely formulated policy questions, like how do people respond to unemployment insurance or what is the effect of education on earnings? In theory, the results of this work should make it into policy but they don’t always.
Two of the best practitioners of this style, in my opinion, are:
Raj Chetty: http://www.rajchetty.com/
Some of his good papers study:
– the effect of good teachers on lifetime outcomes.
– the effect of different types of incentives for retirement savings on people’s behavior.
– the costs and benefits of unemployment insurance.
James Heckman: http://heckman.uchicago.edu/
He almost single-handedly brought the issue of pre-k education to the forefront of american education policy. This was done with very careful econometric study of the effects of these programs.
2) Mark, your responses reflect:
a) data nihilism. Because there is some uncertainty, you feel like your unconsidered opinions are just as valid as the experts’.
b) The lack of acknowledgement that incentives matter. The policy space for helping poor people is HUGE. Are we not supposed to take incentives into account when designing government programs and thinking about the optimal size of government?
c) Taxation. You bring up taxes on pollution. Every economist I am aware of supports these. But let’s think about 95% of the other taxes in the economy. Let’s say you tax apples. Then suppliers have to charge a higher price for those apples. And consumers will be able to afford fewer of those apples. Therefore, consumers will be worse off. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadweight_loss)
Lastly, nothing about the above discussion assumes naive utilitarianism. If you want to be a Rawlsian, you just choose the Rawlsian social welfare function and evaluate appropriately. Even under that scenario, taxation will have an efficiency cost.
Thanks, again.
Fair point re. data nihilism. Yes, of course I do want incentives, and I want to figure out what will be most effective. My frustration against Hayek-type dismissals of all intervention in the magic economy is getting sprayed about too far.
I take your point re. what to read, and get that we’ll have to do more than the Smith and then Keynes-Hayek eps that we have planned in order to get this right. So it might take a while!
If I can have your indulgence, I’m am trying to get a short paper written (mostly not by me, given my lack of knowledge here) on New Work economic theory, i.e. I do want to engage actual economists on the things Frithjof had to say (not the stupid details like exactly how much of the world is in poverty, but the suggested diagnoses re. what’s wrong and how to fix it).
So tell me what you can about these claims. If I need to read a book or two to communicate effectively about this, that’s fine. First the diagnosis ones:
According to traditional economic theory, human need is insatiable, so there will always be more jobs. The entire manufacturing industry gets automated? People will still need services. Most of that gets automated? New needs will arise, and standards will increase, so there will always be more jobs.
According to New Work, there is no reason to think this is the case. Automation means that more productivity does not require more workers. The fact that throughout the world, industrial farming has resulted in the majority of the population who used to work on farms now can no longer do so and have moved to cities, where there is nowhere near enough work. Globalization means that jobs that used to be available here are now spread among that much much larger pool of workers.
Proposed solutions to this situation include:
1. Reducing work hours across the board (through legislation) so that the number of available jobs can stretch across more workers.
2. Purposefully driving the price down on some necessities so that people can live with less money. (E.g. the way we already do with water.)
3. Connecting the poor with technologies that will enable them to provide for more of their needs through community production without having to rely on the traditional economy.
4. Redistributive taxation to enable #1-3; other possible measures funded through this include a universal minimum income and/or a shadow income to enable unemployed people to engage in public service/volunteer activities (a Jeremy Rifkin suggestion), funding for entrepreneurial activities, and counseling to help people discover options for meaningful work outside the job system.
(I’m not interested at this point with which of the measures mentioned in #4 are actually a good idea, merely whether there’s any economic reason why they should be ruled out, or whether an economics-friendly justification could be made for them.)
I know that economist Jeremy Rifkin at least is down with a lot of this, but he may just be a nut.
Regarding tech + jobs, read this:
http://economics.mit.edu/files/9835
The biggest fallacy in your line of thinking is that there is some finite amount of jobs to be done, and that this amount is unresponsive to incentives. There is a wikipedia page on why this is wrong:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy
1. Reducing work hours across the board (through legislation) so that the number of available jobs can stretch across more workers.
– Why don’t businesses already do this? Presumably because not everyone is equally productive and because those that are productive work more. Working long hours is an upper-class problem in the US. It’s really hard to break jobs into smaller sub-jobs that can be done by many people. Lots of other issues with this proposal.
2. Purposefully driving the price down on some necessities so that people can live with less money. (E.g. the way we already do with water.)
Basic economic theory says that this is a really ineffective way to help poor people as opposed to lump-sub transfers, and that it has many costly consequences. Many economists think that water price controls are already a huge disaster. See:
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/10/californias-water-shortage.html
3. Connecting the poor with technologies that will enable them to provide for more of their needs through community production without having to rely on the traditional economy.
Regarding teaching poor people skills and technology:
Development economists have been trying to do this forever. Usually with little success. Also, see the literature on government training programs. They are expensive and ineffective. Lots of these studies are experiments, so the evidence is pretty high quality.
Regarding avoiding the “traditional economy” through subsistence farming:
The reason why modern society is wealthy is because of specialization and trade. Subsistence farming is like going back to the dark ages.
4. Redistributive taxation to enable #1-3; other possible measures funded through this include a universal minimum income and/or a shadow income to enable unemployed people to engage in public service/volunteer activities (a Jeremy Rifkin suggestion), funding for entrepreneurial activities, and counseling to help people discover options for meaningful work outside the job system.
– Most people believe in redistributive taxation. Most experts also believe that a universal basic income is actually too expensive to afford without huge increases in taxation. And huge increases in taxation have huge costs. The US currently has a pretty extensive safety net, although not as generous as some European countries. The US already funds people for entrepreneurial activities. I am not sure what “meaningful work” outside of the job system means, but it sounds an awful lot like pursuing hobbies on taxpayer money. Counseling is provided by most unemployment insurance systems and by many non-profits. My sense is that it’s pretty useless in actually helping people find jobs.
Lastly, Jeremy Rifkin is not an economist. I’ve never heard of him and on his wiki it says he has no econ phd. It says he wrote a book called “The End of Work” in 1995. 20 years later, worldwide employment per capita has, if anything, increased.
“Purposefully driving the price down on some necessities so that people can live with less money. (E.g. the way we already do with water.)
Basic economic theory says that this is a really ineffective way to help poor people as opposed to lump-sub transfers, and that it has many costly consequences.”
What piece of basic economic theory is that?
Thanks again Eco,
To zoom in on a couple of your points:
Re. the lump of labor fallacy, thanks for the reference. While I know this was not your intention, you’ve pointed me at some helpful sources like http://hussonet.free.fr/lumplab.pdf that support the opposite of what you’re arguing. Apparently even the Google CEO is arguing for reduced hours in light of innovation-driven job reductions: http://www.informationweek.com/strategic-cio/executive-insights-and-innovation/google-ceo-fight-unemployment-with-job-sharing/a/d-id/1279217. The conclusion of the wiki page states:
Historically, the gigantic increase in labour productivity induced by technological progress since the industrial revolution has resulted in the dominance of the scale effect, bringing about both a massive increase in real wages and a decrease in labour time. There is no reason to expect that this same process cannot be continued in the future.
…So what I’m asking you as an economist is what market interference measures you would recommend if you were advising a government that had already decided that New Work is right, i.e. that human well-being would be enhanced if people worked fewer hours, that national productivity is high enough that we should encourage such arrangements, and that insofar as current economic trends or our own actions in encouraging this ended up reducing employment, we’d handle getting those folks set up OK (supported comfortably while avoiding moral hazard) via means that you needn’t worry about for the purpose of this thought experiment?
If you feel too much in Hayek’s debt to want to venture an answer here, I’ll understand. Thanks. -ML
Also, I’ve now taken your advice to start making my way through an econ course (on iTunes U).
So I can answer the question re. why artificially lowering prices is supposed to be bad: according to the law of supply and demand, when prices go down, quantities produced go down, and quantities consumed go up, so you get a shortage.
The way out of this, of course, is to socialize the whole product or perhaps subsidize to ensure that quantity produced still remains adequate, and you could also potentially regulate purchases so that, e.g. the price is very low for individuals but higher if you purchase more than X units (so for water, have different pricing for water lines running to homes vs. running to farms). But still, if you make water essentially free, then people waste it. You can try to fight this (as we do) with cultural or legal measures: so during summer months, you can only water your lawn on Mon Wed or Fri if your house has an even numbered address or something like that. But it’s still much easier to encourage behavior through price mechanisms, i.e. make the water cost something substantial so people conserve it. Then you could still offer subsidies up to a certain amount for some portion of the population if you wanted, if you came up with a mechanism to pay for that.
I stand by the essence of my earlier comments: macroeconomics (very much following Smith) uses GDP as a dumbly simplified measure of utility. We (well, Wes, anyway) object to people like Sam Harris trying to make moral goodness into something scientific, but economists have already been operating on this assumption: in general, a higher economic standard of living is going to be a boon for people (who’s going to argue with that? money = power = comfort at the very least), and so the group welfare = maximum economic growth.
In the course I’m listening to, there is a slide that says of course this leaves out a whole lot of goods, and the Sandel interview was all about that. So there’s an acknowledgement that this is a simplification, but still, some measure is better than no measure, right? So let’s direct all of our policies to maximizing growth and only use government to [fill in your desired state of intervention here; the guy I’ve been listening to seems only to want it involved in enforcing contracts so that transactions are not slowed by the constant threat of fraud, though competition itself does most of that work].
And consequently, we want to maximize economic efficiency, which means ideally all machines going full blast all the time and all workers producing to their full potential all the time. If you want to work less, or channel your energies into efforts that are not rewarded by the market, then you’re not pulling your weight and contributing to group happiness, according to this ideology.
An obvious fallacy here is that more goods does not have a linear relation to more satisfaction. Up to a certain point, more goods greatly raises satisfaction, but contra the explicit assumption of economists, human desire is not inexhaustible, or at least satisfaction does not proceed in a linear way the more you have. This has been demonstrated at an individual level: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/jobs/12search.html?_r=0. The goal of an economy should be not simply to maximize wealth, but to maximize happiness.
The counter-argument, I assume, is that we have no way to do this and that any measures we take to address the happiness problem more directly end up screwing up the greater economy, which is surely bad.
I’m not yet at all convinced of this, and think it desirable to de-commodify necessities as far as possible while letting luxuries get handled by the market, which leaves plenty of incentives in place without requiring economics to dominate our lives with toil and worry. What strategies do or don’t work is an empirical question, and I’m certainly grateful that there is a “science” that looks at historical efforts and attempts to predict the effects of new policy actions, even if coming up with any kind of definite prediction requires making all sorts of over-simplifying assumptions. What I’m not interested in is such practitioners telling us what we should or shouldn’t value as a society and squashing philosophical debate about ethics and the good life in the name of a half-assed utilitarianism.
This is an omnibus reply to several points made in this thread (and I will not be making more responses because it’s too time consuming):
1) Lump-of-labor: Sorry for not reading the references in that wiki article. It’s kind of amazing that the wiki doesn’t cite a single mainstream empirical study on work hours regulation but instead links to an extreme-left wing critique.
There are three types of objections to mandatory government regulated large-scale work hours reductions (i.e. more than a few hours). Each of which, in my opinion are convincing and not adequately addressed in the article that you state (which mostly argues that extreme leftists don’t completely believe in the lump-of-labor fallacy):
– The economic theory argument. Economic theory states, that at least in modern economies, working hours are the way they are mostly for reasons of efficiency and the preferences of workers.
– The empirical arguments.
Serious evaluations of work hours laws have failed to show any positive effect and frequently show a negative effect. (i.e. Crepon and Kramarz (2002), Journal of Political Economy and subsequent citations).
In rich countries, the rich work the longest hours and they are not at all coerced. Therefore, the main leftist arguments about people coerced into working hours that are “too long” don’t apply. Do you really want even fewer doctors in the US?
– Conservative (Hayekian) critiques. Our society exists in an institutional equilibrium. Large scale forced reductions in work hours are a huge institutional change. How do you set up such a program? Which people are forced to work less against their will? What are the unintended consequences?
2. Regarding this:
“Historically, the gigantic increase in labour productivity induced by technological progress since the industrial revolution has resulted in the dominance of the scale effect, bringing about both a massive increase in real wages and a decrease in labour time. There is no reason to expect that this same process cannot be continued in the future.”
I think this is really important, economic growth (without mandatory working hours caps in the US), reduced working hours (for men) and increased leisure time. What you are asking about is a heavy-handed government intervention.
3. Regarding “New Work”. Sorry to sound rude but I tried to listen to the episode once, but it was too painful. The New Work proposal was vague, claims were made without evidence, there was a complete lack of awareness about the history of economic policy to help the poor, and also a lack of awareness of economics in general. If you bring a fringe figure into a discussion, you need to have a mainstream figure to at least give the proper arguments against the fringe figure.
4. “Frithjof’s primary concern is how as a practical manner we can handle situations in the poverty stricken areas you’re talking about. He’s not arguing against capitalism per se, but merely against the present way that we expect this to work in such areas, which is to hope (and lure by tax incentives and cheap labor) that industries swoop in and create jobs for people. This strategy is not working, and if you ask people in those countries, they’ll tell you that.”
– We are living in an unprecedented era of global prosperity, so I don’t see how the strategy is not working (or at least you have to be more specific about what is not working). Second, you state it as if no one had thought of helping poor countries or people before. Which is why you don’t think it’s necessary to justify how what you are proposing is any different than what other people have tried to do (and mostly failed). If you actually care about what fairly mainstream scholars in development think about development policy, I urge you to read the following (both of which are not technical):
– “Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty”
– “The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good”
5. Regarding subsidies to “staples”. You say, “according to the law of supply and demand, when prices go down, quantities produced go down, and quantities consumed go up, so you get a shortage.” That’s not even the best reason. The government can subsidize goods without shortages (i.e corn). The basic reason economists think subsidies are an ineffective way of helping poor people is that we respect people’s choices. I.e. we think that a poor person can typically make better decisions about what is good for them than the government. In that case, when faced with two policies: a subsidy to a particular good or a monetary transfer, economists favor the monetary transfer. The reason is that it allows poor people to use the money as they please. On the other hand, our current corn subsidies make it very cheap for poor people to buy cereal but don’t necessarily help them in other (potentially more important ways). Lastly, subsidies to corn distort production decisions in other ways (see the use of ethanol as fuel) and also happen to hurt African farmers.
6. Regarding GDP and economists.
– Basic mistake. GDP (which measures production) and Utilitarian Welfare (which measures utility) are not the same concept. And if you read an economic theory paper, this would be evident.
– You make it seem like most economists, in practice, only care about GDP and don’t care about redistribution. Have you read the following widely known economists: Larry Summers, Daron Acemoglu, Paul Krugman, Ben Bernanke, or Thomas Piketty (a classical trained economist)? All of them believe in redistribution and all of them understand that GDP is an imperfect (but informative) measure of economic performance. That said, economists do differ from many other commentators because they at least do care about efficiency.
Anyways, this has been fun and I hope you’re more informed as a result.
Eco makes a good point about Frithjof not engaging with, at least not on the PodCast or on the New Work website, past attempts at economic policy and interventions to help the poor. At least talking about a popular figure like Jeffery Sachs would have been helpful. New Work needs to differentiate itself from past attempts. I know Mark and Frithjof highlight the new technologies that arrived in the past 10 years that enable community production, but citing technological advancement is a weak differentiater of a movement, and certainly not a motivator for me to jump on board.
“So I can answer the question re. why artificially lowering prices is supposed to be bad: according to the law of supply and demand, when prices go down, quantities produced go down, and quantities consumed go up, so you get a shortage.”
I’m sorry but this makes no sense to me, why would the quantities produced go down when the prices go down? Isn’t the prices controlled by supply and demand and not the other way around. Low prices does not guarantee high demand for goods.
“The basic reason economists think subsidies are an ineffective way of helping poor people is that we respect people’s choices.”
Respecting peoples choices is a fine thing but it seems a stretch to call it a “basic economic theory” that says that “this is a really ineffective way to help poor people as opposed to lump-sub transfers”
Hey Mark and AnEconomist:
Just saw this. AnEconomist, thanks so much for making these points. These are almost the same ones I would have made. If anyone wants to read about how economics can be used to help the very poor, “Poor Economics” brought up by AnEconomist is a great place to start.
This is a beautiful rebuttal to Mark’s comments. I think it’s quite apparent that Mark needs to learn more about economics.
From a consequentialist point of view, the goal is to increase human flourishing or wellbeing and thus, economic growth/efficiency is only one variable to consider, among many.
So even if some New Work proposals are inefficient in economic terms, if they enable many people to avoid a stressful job market where they compete for ever scarcer jobs, jobs which are unsatisfying in terms of psychological wellbeing and if they put a limit on the amount of useless dreck produced to keep the economy growing, dreck which pollutes the atmosphere, the sea, the earth, then New Work will have a net positive effect, even if the GNP grows a point less each year.
From a consequentialist point of view, one would have to balance the positive effect on human flourishing of the New Work measures against their probable negative effect on economic efficiency and that is an empirical question which has to be studied in the practice.
In the real world, New Work measures probably could not be implemented in their ideal text-book form (almost nothing gets implemented in its ideal text-book form), because of the above-mentioned economic factors and political constraints (one can imagine that lots people for lots of reasons would not be in favor of New Work), but that is not a good reason to write them off completely insofar as they can contribute to human flourishing.
I listened to the two episodes with Frithjof Bergmann but I honestly didn’t understand what New Work was about. It seemed to be vaguely about job retraining or counseling, but I’m not sure. Do the managers of New Work pay people to do their hobbies? I understand that a lot of people aren’t satisfied with their job but I think it’s a luxury to be deeply satisfied with what you do. We have to remember that millions and millions of people are in unfathomable poverty around the world and what has reliably lifted them out of it is economic growth. Look at China and India. Sure, the people are in factories that don’t bring them to the top of Maslow’s hierarchy but their situation is much better than what they had back in the hinterland. Economic growth is very important, hence why it’s discussed so much. Many countries are still poor and they need to keep growing. Economics helps determine the best way these countries can grow. Political science is also important in this respect because good government matters to economic growth. We’re not “feeding the machine” by working. We’re making people’s lives better little by little so that eventually everyone can be relatively prosperous.
Thanks, Jake,
Frithjof’s primary concern is how as a practical manner we can handle situations in the poverty stricken areas you’re talking about. He’s not arguing against capitalism per se, but merely against the present way that we expect this to work in such areas, which is to hope (and lure by tax incentives and cheap labor) that industries swoop in and create jobs for people. This strategy is not working, and if you ask people in those countries, they’ll tell you that.
Instead, the idea is to enable them to be self-sufficient by hooking them up with practices and technologies that for the most part were not available even 20 years ago (and to directly facilitate development of these technologies). You can see some examples at http://newworknewculture.org/new-work-technologies/. (I’m now involved in this website, and we’re looking to greatly boost the amount of info there over the next several months.) This amounts to enabling economic activity: you give people tools and training to enabling them to do more without relying on outside corporations, and also help them use these tools to develop new entrepreneurial enterprises.
Jake,
I just don’t see the world as you do.
The contemporary capitalist economic is not aimed at ending global poverty, but at increasing the profits of
banks and huge corporations. Workers in 3rd World countries receive very low wages and work horribly long hours to produce low cost products, much of it being junk which only serves to increase pollution. Admittedly, they are slightly better off in economic terms than their parents were, but that is no justifcation for the kind of exploitation which occurs.
I come from Chile, a middle income country, with a per capita income around 20 thousand dollars a year
due to rapid economic growth during the last 25 years, but the wealth distribution is so unequal that even I, who am middle-class in Chilean terms, earn less than 20 thousand dollars a year and the poor much less. What’s more, lots of our economic growth comes from mining, which as it is done now, destroys glaciars, poisons the water, produces desertification etc.,
So we have to think a bit about what economic growth is for. To benefit the rich and to throw a few crumbs at the wage slaves? To pollute the environment?
I don’t have any pat solutions, but New Work seems worth considering as an alternative to the current mess. Actually, I think that all of us, who want to end global poverty, who want to preserve free societies and who don’t want to spend most of our waking hours in jobs we hate doing tasks we consider to be meaningless, need to sit down and talk about this kind of thing.
I think a large part of the debate and Mark’s contention is if prosperity/flourishing should be measured purely in economic terms. You’re making a big assumption that economic gains in Countries always lead to a flourishing citizenry.
You can google “Chomsky on free trade agreements” and bring up a bunch articles where he discusses the negative impacts on communities due to economic prosperity. Simple example being the NAFTA which bankrupted most rural farmers in Mexico while spouting economic gains which were realized by the already prosperous.
Hi Mark,
This project sounds like it could help people. It looks like a sort of techy charity. I’m sure many poor people could benefit from this. However, I agree with AnEconomist that specialization of labor, the opposite of self-sufficiency, makes the world better off. People have comparative advantages that allow them to produce goods and services with lower opportunity costs and therefore trade for goods and services that others can produce more efficiently. This is why the world is so vastly richer since the advent of the Industrial Revolution. I think advocating for safe working conditions for the poor in the developing world is a good cause and that maybe charities should even assist companies in ameliorating working conditions by giving them the needed capital to do the job, since the companies may be financially restrained due to high competition. Investing in education and job training is very important so if New Work is doing that, that’s great. I don’t know how scalable the New Work model is or how competitive it is with other modes of economic development but it seems like a good idea.
s. wallerstein,
I just read that the poverty rate was cut in half in Chile since the 80s. That’s remarkable. Also, the World Bank now classifies Chile as a high income country. Working conditions are relatively poor in the developing world still but you have to remember that where these people come from was probably even worse. Subsistence farming is arduous work and it says something that a lot of these farmers left for the cities to work in these “exploitive” factories. The farming life was likely more “exploitive,” if you want to put it that way. I think inequality is an important issue but that we have to acknowledge the trade-offs of new, potential redistribution policies, such as the misallocation of scarce resources. Capitalism inevitably creates inequality, which is good to an extent but bad with too much, so I do believe government needs to redistribute wealth. Capitalism doesn’t have an aim. It’s a system of creating wealth. Yes, people at the top tend to benefit the most but everyone else does, too. I must say that I recently had the sort of attitude toward capitalism that you and Mark seem to have, but my perspective changed after learning more about economics. I kind of thought economists were unfeeling people who fetishized efficiency at the expense of considering the plight of the poor, but after listening to many Great Courses lectures on economics and economics podcasts, and reading about economics more, I realized that most economists care deeply about the poor and probably went into economics to figure out how they can best be helped. The world has undoubtedly become a much better place because of capitalism. We don’t need to throw it out. Just fix stuff here and there. To get to your last point, capitalism’s effect on the environment is an important issue. The developed world has the luxury of going green so we should do this where we can agree the cost-benefit analysis comes out positive. On the other hand, the developing world is in a different situation. More pollutive energy resources are still more cost-effective than green energy right now so the poor countries are going to be more pollutive in their efforts to industrialize. It’s hard to be moralistic about this. We went through the Industrial Revolution without giving a rat’s ass about the environment so I think poor countries should have more leeway in their right to pollute. Sorry if that was rambling and beside the point. Those were just my thoughts.
Jake,
Just a couple of points about Chile.
Chile suffered complete economic collapse in 1982-83, so any statistics which begin in the early 80’s will show remarkable reduction in poverty. However, poverty has disminished greatly since the 80’s, in absolute terms, there is no doubt about that. What has not diminished is income and wealth inequality. Chile has one of the most unequal income distributions in Latin America, which is a region marked by huge inequalities of income. Here is a list of countries by Gini Co-efficient, which measures inequality.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_equality
You’ll really have to work harder to convince me that letting the rich get ever richer is the only way to reduce poverty in absolute terms. If you consult the above list of income equality or even just glance at the color chart, you can see that the Nordic countries and Germany have very little income inequality in comparative terms and obviously very very little poverty in absolute terms.
So it seems that sharing the wealth a bit makes for healthier societies, as is seen in the case of the Nordic countries and Germany, which not only assure quality healthcare for all, independent of ability to pay and decent free public education including higher education, but also have low levels of violence crime and other social disorders.
There is a book, the Spirit Level, which shows the link between income inequality and lots of social problems, including violence, drug abuse, mental health, obesity and teenage pregnancy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spirit_Level:_Why_More_Equal_Societies_Almost_Always_Do_Better
I’m very much enjoying this thread. I want to offer, as a friendly gesture, that economics (especially macroeconomics) is arguably a difficult subject matter to debate in moral terms, as the trade-offs are almost always expressed in dry, abstract mathematical terms, and – because of the admittedly utilitarian ends of the discipline – it just does not reach the self-actualizing heights that maybe our philosophical souls (and New Work?) would have us finally achieve.
Indeed, and not to be pat or cute myself, there is a reason Economics is called The Dismal Science. It is an academic endeavor that is seemingly always making tough choices between unenviable outcomes. There certainly are values embedded in those choices and assumptions (and philosophical ones, at that), but I challenge anyone to flag up unambiguously-good policy options in the microeconomic realm.
Having said that – I can hear someone already, and in the near future, whispering to me about the long-term. We can go consult Mr. Keynes about that, perhaps. in the meantime, I look forward to following this continuing exchange on (the intersection between?) New Work ambitions and contemporary, laissez faire economics.
I’m very much enjoying this thread. I want to offer, as a friendly gesture, that economics (especially macroeconomics) is arguably a difficult subject matter to debate in moral terms, as the trade-offs are almost always expressed in dry, abstract mathematical terms, and – because of the admittedly utilitarian ends of the discipline – it just does not reach the self-actualizing heights that maybe our philosophical souls (and New Work?) would have us finally achieve.
Indeed, and not to be pat or cute myself, there is a reason economics is called The Dismal Science. It is an academic endeavor that is seemingly always making tough choices between unenviable outcomes. There certainly are values embedded in those choices and assumptions (and philosophical ones, at that), but I challenge anyone to flag up unambiguously-good policy options in the macroeconomic realm.
Having said that – I can hear someone already, and in the near future, whispering to me about the long-term. We can go consult Mr. Keynes about that, perhaps. in the meantime, I look forward to following this continuing exchange on (the intersection between?) New Work ambitions and contemporary, laissez-faire economics.
Not necessarily so. Many economists align more closely with Mark than with the economics set out by AnEconomist. See crookedtimber.org ; Cosma Shalizi (who is not an economist but is a very sophisticated statistician and political economic thinker): http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/cat_the_dismal_science.html ; the extensive works of Amartya Sen and Ha-Joon Chang ; and Dani Rodrik (https://www.sss.ias.edu/faculty/rodrik) who uses neoclassical economics but points out that many/most policy prescriptions supposedly pulling on this body of theory fails to satisfy or adequately deal with the complexities and caveats therein.
It just seems so obvious to me that the welfare state has been a force for good all over the world: ensuring education for everyone, getting everyone vaccinated, providing decent healthcare regardless of ability to pay (not in the U.S.), making sure that everyone has an oldage pension that they can survive on, creating systems of public transportation, assuring that the medications we take and the food we eat are not egregiously poisonous, regulating what William Blake called “dark satanic mills” (factories which pollute) etc, that to me libertarianism seems like a rationalization of middle class, upper middle class and wealthy people who don’t care about the poor and near poor and above all, don’t want to pay higher taxes.
There are flip sides to most of the things you bring up:
Mandatory schooling (which, btw, is different from education) keeps in school at great cost and little to no benefit countless disinterested and academically poorly achieving young people who could be put to better use doing other things.
Overzealous drug and health care regulation actually kills countless people yearly by severely raising the cost of drugs and health care, stifling development of new drugs and preventing demonstrably safe and effective drugs from reaching patients.
In most western pension schemes, the money paid in isn’t saved but used to pay existing retirees, thus requiring an infinite increase in people paying into the system in order for it not to collapse.
The interstate highway system in the US is a giant subsidy for the automobile and fossil fuel industry, and it disincentivizes investment in more environmentally friendly means of transport like rail.
Large polluters like BP regularly get away with a slap on the wrist. The government itself is one of the biggest polluters, with a long history of dumping toxic and nuclear waste with little regard for public safety.
etc etc
That is the impression I got too. It seems that when considering whether or not taxation or government coercion can be good, it is usually considered from the standpoint of someone who is wealthy and powerful, rather than from the perspective of most people who aren’t those things.
I think of it in the complete opposite way. Special interests like big corporations are subsidized by taxes levied on the poor, regulations that stifle innovation and outlaw smaller competitors etc etc.
Also, thinking only in terms of intra-national groups and taxes gives a very incomplete and inaccurate picture. Libertarians and panarchists alike want the *really* poor, i.e. people in third world countries desperate for a better life to be able to move, trade etc freely. Progressives however prefer they remain to suffer in the third world out of fear they would “lower the minimum wage” etc. (though most economists agree they wouldn’t)
I’m more of a panarchist than a libertarian. I find myself generally very sympathetic to your goals, but stunned at how fundamentally misguided your preferred means to reach them seem, and how conveniently myopic you seem when focussing mainly on the good that government allegedly does.
It’s nice to think of government and taxes as Alice and Bob willingly giving money to Steve so he can organize a better outcome for everyone. This is good and something hardly anyone would take issue with, not even libertarians.
But the reality is more like Steve taking Alice and Bob’s money irrespective of consent, using about half of it to send John to kill Abdul, some for paying Paul to keep Jose out and putting Alice in a cage for possession of a plant, still some simply for giving to himself and his friends just for kicks. Whatever’s left Steve uses the way Alice and Bob actually asked him to in order to fool them into thinking they have a say and making them vote for him again. Steve also micromanages their lives in general.
Admittedly, this is a rant, but is it really that far from the truth? Again, there is *nothing* wrong with planning for the good of society, social and economic altruism etc, but is that really in fact what is going on? Does Steve really have the right to do all this? And does everybody else really have to play along?
For a brief taste of Huemer, check out these:
The Illusion of Authority
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlTyOC32-vs#t=20
Is there a right to immigrate?
http://openborders.info/starving-marvin/
I totally sympathize with your “rant”. The only thing I would add is that technically we picked Steve to do all of this. Granted, Steve was only an option because he agreed to take money Charles and Dave so he can “organize a better outcome” for them, rather than one for Alice and Bob. In the end, it turns out Steve was only picked because he sucked less than the other Steve, and so now Alice is in jail for plant possession and so on.
“We”?
Who decides there should be a vote in the first place? Who decides what’s to be voted on? Who decides what the options are? Who decides who gets to vote? Who designs the voting system? And how can forcibly imposing the outcome irrespective of participation and consent be justified?
Abdul and Jose weren’t even allowed a say, despite arguably suffering the most from the outcome. (Abdul paid the ultimate price, and Jose is relegated to a life of suffering in a third world country despite there being people in the first world willing to house and employ him etc etc)
While Alice was at least allowed a say, maybe she didn’t participate. etc etc
To illustrate, imagine some of your friends want to eat out with you. For whatever reason, you decline. Ah, but there will be a vote. And the vote is on whether you come or not, the options are aye or naye or abstain, that all of the friends (and you) get to make their case, and one vote each, and the option with the most votes win. etc etc
Clearly, irrespective of all this, regardless of the outcome, your friends don’t actually have any authority to coerce you into coming, and you have no obligation to go.
Again, admittedly this is a very simplified version of how things work, but is it really that far from the truth? There is nothing wrong with consensus based decision-making, indeed, in many cases it’s the best option. But it doesn’t appear to justify a lot of the things people usually take for granted it does.
I agree with you, and I think I failed to illustrate my point within the Alice, Bob, and Steve framework. I was trying to say that Dave and Charles, through their strong political influence (i.e. campaign contributions) unfairly control the process where Steve is “elected” so that while Alice and Bob have a choice (however helpless they are to determine it), the choice was already predetermined in a sense by Charles and Dave. Also, I’m speaking from the perspective of an American, where the democratic process is largely controlled by which side has more money.
I know this doesn’t really address what you’ve said (because I took the democratic process as a given in this situation, which seems to be the contentious issue in your post). I’m just trying to articulate what I was trying to say earlier.
Yeah, I understand, I just wanted to problematize further =) what you’re talking about could be illustrated with restaurant owners bribing the group of friends into voting aye on whether you eat out with them. But even in the absence of that, i.e. even if there is no bribing and everything is fair etc, the group of friends still don’t have any legitimate authority to coerce you into coming, and you still don’t have any obligation to go.
I’m surprised max stirner hasn’t been taken up yet. The ego and his own is a classic text written as an anarchic response to both hegel,marx, and Bakunin.
Also, Fredy Perlman is great for arguing that the problem is civilization itself and not merely the state and capitalism.
It wasn’t a reply to Marx or Bakunin. Marx was mostly irrelevant at the time and Bakunin wasn’t very active, at the time. It was a response to Proudhon and the Young Hegelians, mainly focusing on Feuerbach, but also attacking others like Bauer and Hess (who did, admittedly, influence Marx). It can be used to critique Marx and Bakunin, certainly, but it wasn’t intended that way.
Of the young hegelians, marx and then Engels were arguably the most influential. It was an attack on marx in the same way it was an attack on feuerbach. It brought to the fore marx’ obsession with social universals.
Marx was only the most influential in hindsight. At the time, he wasn’t really all that important. I mean, we very well can use Stirner against Marx, but that’s not how Stirner himself would view what he was doing. He doesn’t even mention Marx in his book, even though he brings up very specific critiques of Feuerbach and Proudhon, to give two examples, and mentions them by name.
http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/emma-goldman-anarchism-and-other-essays
http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/renzo-novatore-toward-the-creative-nothing
I’d be curious to know – from folks that swim in these currents – what purchase Nozick’s, and other libertarian philosophy, has in the developed world outside of the United States. While not for a minute claiming to be an expert here, I gather that libertarianism has a particularly (and maybe exclusive?) American character to it, and that its principles and assumptions may just strike a lot of folks as odd or foreign, in other parts of (let’s say, at least) the Western world.
Would anyone care to bite on that? It’s Election Day across the U.S. today, and all the familiar narrative tropes of this traditional democratic exercise are making their rounds. Among them, the debate about whether, for instance, voting should be mandatory here as it is in other, like countries.
We can predict how libertarians might answer this question, but compulsory voting – for those of age – is seemingly accepted as orthodoxy in other parts of the democratic world (in my personal experience, when I lived briefly in Australia). Would Nozick treat the notion (that is, voting enforced by penalty of law) as part of his argument that humans are still slaves, even in the most nominally-empowering of governmental structures (i.e. popular democracies)? Or is there a compelling argument for the conceit in social contract theory?
In listening to the Nozick podcast and reading the related blog-posts and comments, I gather some intellectual fellow-travelers (to libertarianism) may hail from 19th and 20th century Austria (e.g. Hayek). And maybe readers will want to shoehorn Locke in there, as well. Can we therefore find libertarianism’s conception in the British Isles or Continental Europe and, if so, why does the philosophy / ideology seemingly not hold the stock there that it maintains vigorously here across The Pond?
In libertarian circles Nozick is mainly known for having made a plausible case for how states could come about, and even be justified, even when starting from stateless premises and following the NAP. This is considered important e.g. because Rothbardianism is fundamentally opposed to all states on deontological grounds. It is worth noting however that many non-libertarians substantially overstate the significance and impact of Rand, Nozick, Rothbard et al on contemporary prominent libertarians like Friedman, Caplan, Huemer and others. None of them are deontological libertarians, none of them are “Austrian economists” etc etc.
Most people are simply shaped by local laws and customs without thinking much about it, including compulsory voting. I doubt many Australians could make any real case for compulsory voting, other than simply regurgitating the standard propaganda they’ve been told.
In most democracies, at least the voters have the option of opting out. This is what I do- I’ve never voted and I never will. I have many reasons for this, but an important fundamental philosophical one is that I belive if you vote, that means you consent to the outcome and you have no right to complain. Compulsory voting however means you *must* “consent”, thus rendering *everyones* “consent” invalid, kind of the same way a bunch of slaves getting to choose their master would be.
Greetings, Fred. I am much obliged for your reply. The point you make in your first paragraph on differentiating between types of libertarians is well-taken, and – although I’m not yet literate enough on their variations to offer a quick repost – it is my earnest hope that these subtleties might be teased out in future PEL commerce, with or without intentionally or directly tackling the ideological subject matter (which I gather Mark et al have sworn off for the time being). If and when our honorable hosts take up anarcho-capitalism, however, can we be optimistic that some of this nuance will be given some dressing?
Regarding the piece on compulsory voting, I am largely accepting of your argument here, as it is one I personally held for a long time. I wonder, though, if there is some respectful hair-splitting to be done regarding the same. Is it fair to say that, by abstaining from the democratic voting process, you are registering a protest to the governmental system? And, if that is an acceptable premise, might one be able to equally effect that protest (on anarchist, libertarian, or other ideological grounds) under a system of compulsory voting, as the requirement is merely to go through the mechanical process, and not rather a compulsion on which way one directs their political will / volition.
In other words, can I survive cognitive dissonance by embracing the need for compulsory voting as a necessary part of a credible, popular democratic regime, and yet at the same time communicate my philosophical disagreement (with this status quo system) by nominally honoring the letter of the law, and just writing-in the likes of Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse, and so on?
In this way I am still engaged in the political process (vice the alternative, passive-agressively refusing to participate) and yet registering my disdain, disagreement, etc. by selecting implausible candidates ‘off the menu.’ Can we say this is a responsible way to register one’s principled objection to the system, or is it merely being too-clever-by-half? If it is a responsible and principled way to act, might I enhance the credibility and visibility of my argument / desired outcome by rallying like-minded others to act similarly?
While I enjoyed the episodes on Rand and Nozick (both of whom I find very bad, especially Rand) it doesn’t seem like there’s any interest from the hosts to do anything on e.g. Huemer and Caplan, which is regrettable because I think they would find them a lot more challenging.
In Australia at least, you must actually make a legitimate vote. This can only be enforced to the extent that you must show up, have your name marked, receive a ballot paper and take it into a voting booth. (voter privacy means the last steps of making a legitimate vote and placing it in the ballot box are unenforcable, but it is a crime not to do so)
I think by voting you’re consenting to and legitimizing the system and the outcome, even if you vote for mock candidates. Even in the case of compulsory voting, while it’s justified to go through the enforcable steps in order to avoid being punished, I think you still have a duty not to put your ballot in the box.
This is similar to how, if you’re selected for jury “duty”, it’s justified cooperate in order to avoid being punished, but you still have a duty to acquit the defendant, even if you believe the defendant is guilty of the charges, if you believe the law and/or punishment is unjust. (jury nullification)
I don’t see how any of this is “passive-aggressive”. In any case, I don’t really care much about protesting or engaging in any kind of political process. Using agorist means for change is much more effective, requires much less resources and gives immidiate results. (compare e.g. trying to end mass surveillance through political means vs simply using encryption, or trying to change the financial system vs simply using cryptocurrency etc etc)
Luke T,
You ask about the view of libertarianism in countries other than the U.S.
I come from Chile.
First of all, I want to clarify some terms. In Chile a “libertario” is someone on the left, with a philosophy close to that of Chomsky: there are many of those among university students. A “liberal” in Chile is closer to a U.S. libertarian, that is, a person in favor of increasing free markets, identified with the political right and having nothing to do with a U.S. liberal.
Chilean liberals are not as extreme as Nozick, in general. I don’t rule out that in this globalized world, you’ll find a Nozick society in Chile, but Nozick-type liberals are not a major force in Chilean politics.
Since Pinochet carried out revolutionary free-market liberal reforms in the Chilean economy, liberalism (again, in the Chilean sense) is associated with Pinochet’s dictatorship and that in itself makes it unattractive to many, including myself. In addition, it is widely perceived that the free market reforms made the rich much richer and the poor marginally less poor, which means that the poor and near poor, the majority of the population, reject them as favoring the wealthy.
For example, Pinochet privatized the pension system, but given that the pension system based on individual savings accounts pays very small pensions to the majority of retired people, the state has had to subsidize those pensions out of general tax revenues so that retired people can eat and pay for the medications and medical care that they need, etc.
What’s more, the hostility to government in general (cowboy mentality?) found in U.S. libertarians just doesn’t seem to be a major force in Chilean or Latin American society in general.
That’s an interesting perspective, S Wallerstein. I wonder if the free-market liberalism you speak to, in Chile, might also have a significant American character to it, though, not simply because of the (American-led) neo-liberal economic norms that have prevailed globally since the end of the Cold War, but maybe rather also because Chile’s economic reorganization, under Pinochet, was quite substantially-inspired by the University of Chicago school of economics, among its other leading lights – at that time – Milton Friedman.
This next bit might dovetail with Fred’s response to my post, but we can say with confidence that Milton Friedman was a libertarian, and that his policy prescriptions definitely had the bent. Will the Chilean liberal, therefore, simply be the progeny of his/her North American parent?
Luke T,
As you point out, Chilean ultra-free market reforms were carried out by local disciples of Milton Friedman, known as the “Chicago boys”, and they produced all the negative externalities of any ideology imposed from above, without democratic process and without roots, as you also point out, in the national traditional of how things are done or not done. Opposition to the free market reforms was brutally repressed by the Pinochet dictatorship, the goal of which was to destroy union leadership, parties on the left, progressive intellectuals and anything which had to do with the democratically elected socialist government of Salvador Allende, which was overthrown by Pinochet’s coup in 1973, backed by Chilean elites, foreign investors in Chile and the Nixon administration. A basically accurate, although at times simplistic, account of that process can be found in Naomi Klein’s book, The Shock Doctrine.
The negotiated transition to democracy in 1990 meant that the reforms of the Chicago boys were not touched by the newly elected democratic government, in order to assure a friendly climate for foreign and domestic investment and approval from the U.S. government, the so-called Washington Consensus (free markets, free elections and free trade agreements) of the Bush 1 and Clinton years.
Chile grew economically very rapidly in the 1990’s and poverty declined in absolute terms, although inequality in wealth distribution remained very high, even by Latin American standards.
The first real mass questioning of the model imposed by the Chicago Boys begins in 2011, with huge student protests in favor of free public education for all, including university students, with the idea that education is a human right, not a market good. Michelle Bachelet’s election last year is a response to the student movement, as she promises to reverse some of the Chicago Boys reforms: she appears to be doing that now, with all the usual problems and imperfections that real-world politics, unlike text-book politics, involves.
Yes, very good S Wallerstein; thanks for that follow-up. I have some more territory I may want to plumb here with you, but hopefully we can hear back first from Fred, on my reply to his reply. For now, very respectfully.
Readers who are following this thread might also be interested in broader question of why Ayn Rand, and Libertarian, and Austrian economics are getting so much attention in the USA when, from a philosophical point of view, the arguments are so poor.
Basically, the story appears to be that business interests have simply paid for scholarship. None of us would be paying attention to Nozick et. al. anymore if it weren’t for ALEC, the CATO Institute, American Enterprise, American Heritage, etc, etc. Not to mention a few university departments which get quite a bit of private funding. I wouldn’t name names, but they are in Stanford and Chicago and Chapel Hill.
This is an accusation which should not offered or taken lightly. There is quite a bit of journalism and historiography on the subject, going back to the Lewis Powell memo of 1971, which is preserved in his official archives at:
Powell Archives, Washington and Lee University School of Law: http://law.wlu.edu/powellarchives/
An academic historical study: Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan. New York: W.W. Norton, 2009
A journalistic study by Hedrick Smith: http://www.randomhouse.com/book/208774/who-stole-the-american-dream-by-hedrick-smith
Or just plain Bill Moyers: http://billmoyers.com/content/the-powell-memo-a-call-to-arms-for-corporations/
Ayn Rand, Libertarianism, and Austrian “economics” are all laughable but so are e.g. Rawls, progressivism and mainstream economics. The former being sponsored by corporatists is no different or stranger than the latter being sponsored by the government.
http://bitcoinmagazine.com/18000/bitcoin-is-teaching-realism-to-libertarians-an-interview-with-old-school-cypherpunk-vinay-gupta/
Hey, all, I welcome your feedback on this New Work FAQ I wrote up: http://newworknewculture.org/new-work-faq/. I’ll pitch it to the larger group via a new blog post when I feel like it’s done and Frithjof has approved of what I’ve written.
I appreciate the references to other, past poverty-fighting measures and will look into some of those books.
Per my recent post up on the New Work New Culture blog (http://newworknewculture.org/alternet-covers-nwnc-2014-conference-is-new-work-an-economic-theory/) and our orientation on the PEL episode, I remain convinced (contra Frithjof, really) that the important point for us is that first step in recognizing jobs as problematic and not just an inevitable law of cruel nature. I’m willing to go farther in figuring out more details about the economics and policy involved, but I think it odd that anyone interested in philosophy would be so hung up on policy details that he can’t hear the clarion call of the existential challenge involved, which was already pretty clear even in Thoreau.
That working at a regular job (I exclude working on projects that one choses) sucks was obvious to Aristotle, who thought it only fit for slaves.
I would imagine that New Work would receive lots of negative feedback, because there are lots of people who benefit economically and psychologically (in terms of self-image, self-esteem and simple inertia against changing the way things are) from the current job system. Lots of people competing for scarce jobs drives down wages, which suits companies just fine: if people find other meaning in life besides working and buying, sales will go down and profits too, which will make some people very unhappy.
In any case, best of luck with New Work.
>I think it odd that anyone interested in philosophy would be so hung up on policy details that he can’t hear the clarion call of the existential challenge involved
This is precisely where I am with New Work. I am not a fan of the sorts of policy proposals that get mentioned around New Work, but I am completely on board with its vision of our relation to our jobs. Work ought to be fulfilling, it ought to engage us creatively, but it seems most of our jobs, even the “creative” higher paying jobs, fall into two categories, over work or filling hours.
I would love a culture in which people are truly fascinated by the work they are doing, culture where people creatively explore ideas, where inquiry is common place. But I must admit, I’m more pessimistic than I’d like to be.
So, while I’d love to embrace the full vision of New Work, there are too many things I’m unsure about with it. But those issues can be answered in time, perhaps in New Works favor, or perhaps not. That isn’t why I’m making this post.
I’m curious in doing more with New Work, but I have something particular in mind. Has there been any intersection with New Work and the software development world? It seems like a place where it may get a rather sympathetic hearing; the open source culture and New Work have a fair bit in common.
If there has been any intersection there, I’d love to get more involved in that area.
Thanks for your great posts and work on PEL.
“My initial hypothesis is that economics is our modern theology, and that it’s just as bullshitty as old-time theology was.”
http://www.theguardian.com/science/audio/2014/sep/15/sapiens-brief-history-humankind-yuval-noah-harari-podcast
The thing that I never get with libertarianism is the obsession with government. When I think of what makes the world an unpleasant place, government comes low on the pecking order. I agree there are terrible governments but there are good ones too and they come in all kinds of varieties (the good and the bad). However, there are many other evils that seem in greater need of remediation that seem more interesting to focus on. I must say, that growing up in post-war welfare state Britain, the intrusive state seemed my friend – it educated me, cared for me when I was sick, made the workplace safe, gave our family a chance to escape crushing poverty and unemployment (in the 1930s), won the war, and kept the peace. We could have done better economically, but it was a very nice place to live and work. The state itself was rarely seen in a negative light. From a subjective POV it felt very nice. The folk memory of free enterprise Britain (especially in South Wales where I came from) was enough to scare anyone away from letting the state back off from. Even the free-market conservatives in the 1980s only really messed around the edges. It was just to dam benign to worry about.
I’d love to see you guys tackle some of the contemporary works touching on these issues, in particular the work of Amartya Sen, who draws on Rawls but expands the ideas significantly.
Having read a couple of his works, the most pertinent one might be “Inequality Re-examined”, which is not necessarily a philosophy book, but it makes the sterling point that “equality” in ANY axis likely necessarily reduces some other form of equality. That is: all forms of equality cannot be simultaneously maximized; there is no a priori reason to prioritize one form of equality over another (it requires deeper examination); and classical economics/libertarianism tend to implicitly or explicitly assume many forms of equality are functionally orthogonal: that maximizing one does not functionally reduce another (“My wealth does not result in or affect your poverty.”)
Mark,
a couple of things
there are about 3 frameworks that libertarians fall into, some shift between them, but the most typical kind of internet libertarian (in my experience) seems to be a ‘natural rights’ one, and that is also where their moral certainty comes from which makes them especially self-righteous and annoying, there is little compromising with these sorts. the consequentialist libertarians are less cultish and get less emotional/psychotic when you disagree with them.
http://mattbruenig.com/2011/12/20/the-three-big-conservative-philosophical-frameworks/
fundamentally, natural right-libertarianism is a very strict theory of property rights – this right to one’s property takes precedence over any other ethical claim you could make. so that is where the meat of the debate lies, “freedom” is a bit of a distraction, ultimately it’s the near absolute right to one’s property that is the issue at stake. to violate that right is just evil, no negotiation – regardless of if you could benefit society or not by doing so.
this approach whereby they think they are in possession of the one true ethical system leads to very absolutist and uncompromising thinking and otherwise attracts people who are very absolutist in their mindsets. these guys are the most fun (sarcasm) to debate with and have a cultish character to them as you will discover if you haven’t already.
anyway, the way to address these guys isn’t to get locked into consequentialist-style debates about whether government policy can actually be beneficial or not, that’s a bit of a distraction as they are already committed to the idea that government is ethically wrong in principle so they will always find a way to rationalize. rather, the most substantive way to tackle these guys is to dismantle their natural rights justifications specifically. that is the core of their belief system.
now, as far as economics concerned, it’s certainly not a theology – while having the limitations of having to study very complicated systems as a social science mainstream economics does pretty well and it’s developing nicely.
i think we need to separate out economics as a science from a lot of the proponents of economic arguments (especially on the internet) that take it as a kind of religion. these cranks give economics a bad name, unfortunately.
a lot of the internet libertarians you meet will be proponents of the “austrian school” of economics which is a borderline pseudo-science and not something mainstream economists tend to take seriously – but it nevertheless has a wide and cultish following on the internet (surprise surprise), so you’ll tend to come against these types who are simply trying to push this school of thought (and its associated ethics) but do not represent the methods of mainstream economics in general. in other words, don’t confuse the two and think that just because libertarians use economic sounding arguments that what they are saying represents mainstream economic opinion and methods – many of them are not proponents of mainstream economics and they tend to let their ethics lead their economic reasoning so rather than treating economics as a science, they use it as a way to rationalize their already settled ethics which biases their analysis.
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Fun:Austrian_school
my point is just that *real economics* is actually a rather solid science, as far as the social sciences are concerned. don’t let internet libertarians you meet mislead you into thinking otherwise.
I am a a cultish moron who is incapable of reason, so do not read any further unless you wish to engage in psychoanalysis. Austrian economics is not based upon an value judgments. It is entirely based upon the “wertfrei” analysis of the nature of means-ends behavior, methodological individualism, and marginalism (and its critique of aggregate models and measurements). It is not based upon natural rights. Mises, for example, did not believe in natural rights. His only ethical assertion was utilitarian and in hypothetical form: if people want general prosperity, they must choose free markets. It is true that many libertarians are natural rights libertarians, but there is no necessary connection of this to Austrian economics. Even Rothbard, who believed in natural rights made this distinction.