Weak beer

Question: “Are Schools the Great Equalizer?" ASR 2004

Answer: Yes. “Although the gap does not close in school, it does not widen as fast as it otherwise might.”

Riiiight.

It's the 19th century all over again

Two Views of Social Justice: A Catholic/Georgist Dialogue

from American Journal of Economics and Sociology by KENNETH R. LORD

Abstract

Sixteen scholars have come together in this issue to examine eight social-justice themes from the perspectives of Catholic Social Thought and the philosophy of Henry George. The themes they address are natural law, human nature, the nature of work, the nineteenth-century papal encyclical Rerum novarum, causes of war, immigration, development, and wealth, and neighborhood revitalization. While they sometimes wrangle with each other, their common aspiration is the same as their nineteenth-century predecessors: to find solutions to the human suffering caused by injustice.

WTF academic navel-gazing

This is so wrong.

Social Forces at 90

Arne L. Kalleberg

This volume of Social Forces marks the 90th anniversary since it was founded in 1922 by sociologist Howard W. Odum. He served as editor until 1954; a full list of editors is provided in the front matter of this and every issue of Social Forces. The first article to appear in the journal was by Franklin H. Giddings, on the topic of “The Measurement of Social Forces.”
During the years since its founding, Social Forces has been recognized as a top journal of social research nationally and internationally. It has always sought to highlight the best in sociological inquiry while at the same time exploring the realms shared with social psychology, anthropology, political science, history and economics.

Reflecting on the Past

To celebrate this milestone anniversary, we highlight some of the articles published in the journal during the past five decades that have been especially significant statements on important topics. When deciding which articles to emphasize, I was guided by two main considerations: first, I’ve selected articles that have been especially influential as measured by citation counts and other usage statistics. Second, the articles chosen cover a range of topics that have been well represented in Social Forces through the years.
I asked the authors of these articles to write a short piece in which they reflect on questions such as: What do you know now that you wish you had known when you first wrote the article? How have your views on the topic changed since you wrote the article? How has the article influenced subsequent research on this topic? And, what is your (brief) assessment of the current state of research on this topic? I am grateful to the authors of these articles, all of whom responded enthusiastically to my invitation to write their reflections.
The articles represent a varied mix of the types of high-quality social science research and theorizing that has been published in Social Forces over the years: theoretical statements on subjects such as social movement organizations, delinquency and trust; discussions of measurement issues involved in studying topics such as tie strength in social networks, residential segregation and religion; and empirical analyses of economic stratification, family structure and child well-being and the gender division of household labor. All of these articles [End Page 1] have held up remarkably well over time and still have much to say about the topics that they address.
Reflections on these articles are printed in this issue of Social Forces. In addition, Oxford University Press is producing a virtual online issue that will include the reflections along with links to the original articles. This virtual issue will be made freely available to everyone.

The Varieties of Capitalism

At present, every advanced industrialization economy in the world is capitalist--production and employment are primarily carried out through the private investment decisions of profit-seeking firms and individuals. Yet, the institutional organizations of these economies vary immensely, with significantly divergent consequences for macro-economic outcomes. Broadly, these institutional variations encompass employer-labor relations and the provision of benefits outside the labor market through the welfare state. From the perspective of the analysis of capitalist class interests, restrictions on their relationship with employees and institutions that cushion current or potential employees from the competitive rigor of the labor market should seem to be anathema to capitalists, and yet institutions that do precisely that have survived, despite strains, for several decades in Europe.

Does this mean there are in fact situations in which employers' have a positive interest in institutions that improve the bargaining position for workers if they also increase productivity?

Einstein on the Beach

Robert Wilson, original director of the opera

I went to the revival at BAM some years ago, and I was there for the opening, and then I went back a week later, and walked down the aisle. There was an empty seat, and I sat down, in the empty seat on the aisle, and Arthur Miller was sitting next to me. And after about 20 minutes he turned to me, and he didn't know who I was, and he said, "What do you think about this?" I said, "I don't know, what do you think? And he said, "You know, I don't get it." I said, "You know, I don't get it either."

I am shocked. Shocked.

“You Fold Like a Little Girl:” (Hetero)Gender Framing and Competitive Strategies of Men and Women in No Limit Texas Hold Em Poker Games

from Qualitative Sociology

Abstract  

The formal rules, structure and practice of most sports in contemporary society prohibit men and women from competing on a “level playing field” and diminish women’s ability to launch a legitimate challenge to the masculine superiority embedded in sports competition. This study examines a relatively unique case—No Limit Texas Hold Em poker games in which men and women compete directly against one another under the same rules—to explore how the conditions under which men and women compete enable or impede the development of more gender egalitarian interactions and ideological frameworks. Drawing on ethnographic data, this examination reveals that, even in a more gender-neutral context, men and women learn to use heterogender frames to conceptualize poker. In doing so, they develop competitive strategies and interactions that predominately fit into, rather than subvert, gender hierarchy.

• Content Type Journal Article
• Pages 1-20
• DOI 10.1007/s11133-012-9235-3
• Authors
  • Michelle Wolkomir, Centenary College, Shreveport, LA, USA

• Journal Qualitative Sociology
• Online ISSN 1573-7837
• Print ISSN 0162-0436

Perception != reality

Faced with the appearance of two very partisan candidates, it is understandable that voters are registering their preferences earlier this year. The choices are clear—even if neither candidate is perceived as particularly close to the more centrist views of most American voters.

Aside from the problem that journalistic "centrism" in fact has little to do with the "views of most American voters," the fact is that the presidential contest (like most elections in the U.S.) is actually between a full-throated proponent of elite centrism and a slightly more resolutely right-wing practitioner of the same. The choice is not clear, in the sense that anything more than marginal differences in tax rates and regulatory enthusiasm and foreign policy would be the consequences of one side winning versus the other. 

Yes, just the same

"As usual the markets figured all this out long before I did.  The 2.6% yield on 30 year bonds is basically a forecast of future premature tightening by the Fed.  What I don’t understand is how markets can be so damn smart when they are composed on individuals who are individually quite stupid.  I suppose for the same reason that Albert Einstein’s brain was quite smart, despite being composed of neurons that are individually quite stupid."

Significant drawbacks, indeed

Who knew that serfdom was actually an institution of "contract enforcement."

Tracy Denison, "Contract Enforcement in Russian Serf Society," Economic History Review (2012)

This article examines questions about contract enforcement in the absence of formal legal institutions, using archival evidence for one particular rural society in pre-emancipation Russia. The evidence presented indicates that enforcement services provided by the local landlord made it possible for Russians from different socioeconomic and legal strata to engage in a wide variety of contractual transactions. However, this system had significant drawbacks in that the poorest serfs could not afford these services and no serf had recourse beyond his local estate.

Despite the unfortunate wording, there's something to this. It makes sense for lords to provide some "public goods," such as adjudication and enforcement of private agreements among subjects. That's both because its value as a "concession" of sorts is probably above the actual cost of providing it, and because it's preferable to make "investments" to preserve some kind of political monopoly rather than letting people get too independent (or letting some other institution come in and provide the service instead).

misdiagnosis

Jack Goldstone:

Yet enormous and daunting as these problems are, these executives saw them as opportunities – opportunities to gain in reputation, to cultivate future customers and workers, even to save lives by supporting everything from emergency services and health care to augmenting food production and moving food and energy to where they are most needed.   Moreover, each of these outstanding executives already had projects at their companies that were addressing these problems; the real need was to scale them up, sustain them, and make them core elements of their overall corporate strategy.

All of us recognized that these problems were so large, so pervasive, and so woven into the operations of firms that government alone could not solve them; government alone does not have all the resources or the knowledge required to do the job.  Yet everyone also deplored the degree to which business and government have become at loggerheads today.   It is going to take public-private partnerships, as well as corporate initiatives, to develop solutions to these global problems that will be effective, sustainable, and efficient. The current atmosphere of mutual distrust and enmity between business and government has itself become a problem that needs to be resolved for America to move forward.   It is dreadful that the Democratic/Republican partisanship that is paralyzing our government is now paralleled by a government/business partisanship that is a drag on our economy and an obstacle to solving major social problems.

Still, I came away confident that the private sector is up to the challenges.  If these executives represent the future of private initiatives, and continue to have the backing of their boards and CEOs, America will have good reason to say “God Bless the Private Sector.”

Because public/private partnerships work so well. Because the U.S. government has been so willing to go against or without the cooperation of the "private sector." Because "Corporate Social Responsibility executives" aren't kept on the payroll essentially as a PR exercise.

Also: "Historically, America has flourished with limited government because businesses and business leaders have done much more than their European counterparts to support the communities and broader society in which they work." Which is cause, which is effect?

Cf. cynicism masquerading as a political strategy. Though I guess Goldstone isn't even trying to masquerade as anything he's not.

"a utility optimist and a revenue pessimist"

Tyler Cowen attaches that epithet to himself (specifically in the context of a story about Japanese baseball, of all things). The position on capitalism this implies is extremely interesting: it amounts to accepting the unavoidably crisis-prone character of the system, indeed its probable stagnation in the near future, while insisting that this will not be reflected in much concrete harm. In other words, we might be more anxious about our economic situations, we might feel less affluent, but in real terms our standards of living will continue to improve steadily.

That would be nice. I'm not sure it's born out by the experience of the U.S. and Europe in the past 4 years, though Japan is more arguable.

Marginal Revolution in full-on troll mode

Yikes:

If you think that the freedom to quit is without value bear in mind that under feudalism and into the early 19th century in the U.S. and a bit later in Britain employers and even potential employers could prevent workers from quitting and from moving. The freedom to quit was hard won. We should not disparage the liberation brought by a free market in labor.
* * *
A job is an exchange with mutual consent and benefits on both sides of the bargain. The freedom is in the right to exchange not in the price at which the exchange occurs. A worker who is paid for 8 hours of work is not a serf 1/3rd of the day. We all sell our labor and we would all like to sell at a higher price but that does not make any of us serfs. From the minimum wage waiter to the highly-paid sports superstar there is dignity in work freely chosen.

To understand freedom and true coercion let us remember that American workers have the freedom to bargain and exchange with American employers, a freedom that gun, barbed wire and electrified fence deny to many millions of less fortunate workers from around the world.

Yes, feudalism and current immigration policy are bad. Your point? Though, it is worth pointing out that both this post and Cowen's response before really harp on the quantitative trade-off dimension (i.e. that workers bargain for both wage and working conditions). The post they're criticizing takes a much more qualitative approach based on freedoms and rights; it does lead one to wonder whether ceding the quantitative ground (i.e. the position that employment contracts are bargained on a level field) is a good idea. Though it's probably these 2 economists' faults for not recognizing immediately that working conditions are often public goods.

More cynicism masquerading as a political strategy

An nyt op-ed asks, "How liberals win," and the answer is apparently, "By losing to corporations 2/3 of what they were originally seeking."

This is not really untrue. "Progressive" elected officials have immense difficulty accomplishing anything against the wishes of the business class. I like, by the way, how the author waves away everything accomplished by FDR in the "Second New Deal" over the implacable opposition of capital on the back of a huge labor upsurge.

Roosevelt may be remembered for his combativeness toward corporations; he famously said, “I welcome their hatred.” But he said that in 1936, only after key New Deal legislation had passed with the help of the United States Chamber of Commerce and the American Bankers Association.

The thing is, NIRA wasn't really all that "key" in the long run: it failed to end the Depression and its labor provisions were essentially a dead letter. Maybe they helped to feed the strike wave that set the environment for the passage (and survival under challenges) of the NLRA. (Also, Johnson's signal achievements were a tax cut, some environment regulations, and the department of transportation? Riiiiight...)

So yes, absent that, it's immensely difficult to get anything done that corporations are intent on opposing relatively vigorously and unanimously. This doesn't actually mean that "working with" them, as Obama did, generated better outcomes. The criticism of Obama from the "progressive" wing of the Democratic party is not that he makes concessions, it's that he makes them pre-emptively and excessively. Sorry, but the stimulus and obamacare were not the New Deal. There's a difference between giving up a few things to get the big stuff through and giving up everything in return for a symbolic win.

This is a better response:

You see, giving corporations total control of politics does come with certain difficulties. Corporations are accustomed to getting their way on everything, but the problem with that is that they aren’t always good at compromising with each other. So what happens when one corporate interest comes into conflict with another? What happens when every corporation can’t win on every issue every time? It doesn’t happen often, of course, but occasionally it does happen. Here is where we still need the semblance of a government by and for and of the people: to cast the tie-breaking vote and figure out which corporate sector will get to have everything they desire. The health insurance industry wanted a health care law requiring citizens to buy its products, but the Chamber of Commerce represented businesses that didn’t want to take away from workers’ life and death dependence on their employers for health care. It was quite a pickle! Luckily, the helpful hand of the US government was able to step in and negotiate a compromise.
* * *
But despite this utterly reasonable state of affairs, there is one minor fly in the ointment: because things we want are simply not possible to achieve, we run into the problem that the word “win” threatens to fall out of common usage. Once we’ve accepted permanent defeat, what would that word be used to indicate? Luckily Scher has the answer: we’ll just change its meaning. We will use the word “win” to describe “whatever it is our side manages to do.”

Cynicism masquerading as a political strategy

Alan Scott, "Development Theory and the Constitution of Market Society: A Polanyian View" Comparative Sociology.

In its latter capacity [as "market modifier"] the state is, and indeed must be, the legitimate and prime target of claims making with respect to the defence of society, social groups and communities against self-regulating markets.

The dilemma for radical approaches is thus twofold: the non-appearance of its targeted addressees on the one hand, and the rejection of policy bodies and policy makers as potential addressees on the other. The result is that much of the left has evacuated the field of policy debate. This leaves us in a situation where we find, on the one side, a frequently Panglossian discourse of “good governance” and, on the other, self-marginalizing critique. The “neo-liberal” project has had a smooth ride through the middle. And yet, even those institutions and individuals charged with governing the latest wave of deregulation and the free flow of real and fictitious commodities have become increasingly aware of the adverse effects. So, the policy debate goes on, but it does so on a terrain on which a broadly Polanyian approach provides the best hope for defending communities and “social assets” against markets, and for supporting regulation. The price to pay for participating in such debates is a lowering of expectations: with no post-capitalist option in prospect and no realistic opt out from the international system at the national level, hopes must rest on a partial defence against the effects of markets; a partial reembedding of the economy. This is the context, rather than the brute fact of the current global financial crisis referred to at the start of the paper, that makes Polanyi’s analysis once more relevant: his position is closer to those (progressive) voices which do get heard in policy circles.

No political movement--whether based on class or nationalism--is to be realistically expected, and so if there is to be any blunting of neoliberalism, it is only going to be achieved by "participating in [policy] debates." When, where, and with whom is not entirely clear, but the implication is officials of states and other institutions "charged with governing the latest wave of deregulation and the free flow of real and fictitious commodities," which presumably includes the IMF and the World Bank, as well as aid agencies and major donors. In other words, moderate your demands and you'll have a shot at convincing elites of the necessity of "a partial defence against the effects of markets; a partial reembedding of the economy."

It's true that there don't appear to be more radical alternatives on the immediate horizon, but the author seems to be taking this as evidence that trying to convince officials has a chance of working. Saying that officials of international organizations are "increasingly aware of the adverse effects" of unrestrained markets is perhaps an understatement, but it is true that the neoliberal language of the World Bank (for instance) was seriously toned down beginning in the late 90s. However, it's not like the underlying ideology has changed, it's just expressed with more caution. Is there really an opening for a "Polanyian approach"? Has neoliberalism been ascendant for lack of convincing ideological competitors?

Considering the continued dominance of supposedly market-perfecting "structural reform" as the political agenda, for instance in Europe during its ongoing crisis, despite the repeated financial blowups of the past couple decades, one has to suspect that the policies keep getting put forward because despite their costs for most people, they've been working quite well for someone. Or perhaps, it'd be more accurate to say something--perhaps financial capital, perhaps transnational capital, perhaps nothing more complicated than each individual country's elites. If it's working fine for them, and if "defense" would entail at least constraining their interests, it going to be hard to convince the bureaucrats and intellectuals who have made careers giving them what they want that a new approach is needed. This is of course what social movements are for: the mechanism by which the injury to the interests of non-elite social groups is transmuted into a cost to the elites, giving them a compelling reason to accept the lasting but predictable costs of concessions.

The Political Process of Tokugawa-era Japan, in 2000 words

The Tokugawa house established itself as the hegemonic military power in Japan in 1600, and it formally received the title of feudal monarch (sei-i tai-shōgun) from the (essentially powerless) emperor in 1603. The authority of the Tokugawa rested, first, on its ruling by far the single largest domain, representing about a quarter of Japan’s agricultural productive capacity in the seventeenth century and, second, on the formal subordination of all other lords to it as vassals. The around 270 magnate lords held their domains as fiefs and were subject to the monarchy’s regulations, which focused on lords’ military capacity, their relations with each other, and the management of their personal households. Nonetheless, in practice the monarchy intervened relatively little in the lords’ rule of their domains. The Tokugawa periodically exercised the right to demand service from the lords—during the long period in which there was no need for military mobilization, this was primarily for various construction projects—but the monarchy did not tax the lords’ subjects directly.

The magnate lords—and the feudal monarchy in the territories it directly ruled—had the power to make and enforce laws and to impose and collect taxes in their domains. For this purpose, each domain had its own administrative and coercive apparatus, staffed by the lord’s hereditary vassal samurai. As late as the sixteenth century, the samurai had been a genuine class of self-equipped knights, holding fiefs from their lords and owing military service in return. However, over the course of the solidification of the Tokugawa-era political order, by the latter half of the seventeenth century the samurai had largely been converted into urban rentiers and civil officials. They lived in the capitals of their lords, and the vast majority received a fixed share of domain tax revenues rather than directly managing their own fiefs. There was a steep hierarchy of income and status among the samurai, with more powerful or prestigious offices restricted to men of a specific wealth and status level. Moreover, the number of samurai attached to each lord was fixed in line with the large armies of the late sixteenth century, and so there were far more candidates than positions in the domain administrations, leaving a large number of men in the relatively lower ranks of the samurai unemployed. Nonetheless, the samurai as a whole were clearly marked off from the population of commoners, who were excluded from service in domain administrations and military forces.

A side effect of pulling the samurai off the land into the castle-towns was that villages (and urban communities) were granted a great deal of day-to-day autonomy as long as they broadly followed the rulers' laws and (for villages) paid their taxes. This situation had the surface appearance of homogeneous peasant population clearly demarcated from a "warrior" stratum who lived by extracting the peasantry's surplus. In reality, the demarcation of the samurai from the "peasantry" in the 16th and 17th centuries left a stratum of small-scale landlords, who had been borderline "warriors" in the preceding era, in the villages. These gentry were formally "peasants," and they were effectively de-militarized by the solidification of the new political order, but they typically lived off the labor of tenants and dependent servants, in some cases retained certain symbolic privileges otherwise restricted to samurai (such as having a surname or carrying a sword), and were nearly universally named as village officials by the domain administrations. Their position was ambiguous, since on the one hand they were responsible for the collection and payment of taxes, which were assessed by the state on the village as a whole, and for ensuring that the peasants obeyed the lords' laws. They could be--and often were--punished by the lords for failure to do these things. Yet, they also paid taxes, and the domain administrations provided them with little in the way of resources to coerce the peasantry. Thus, at the same time as they were the bottom rung of the exploitative apparatus--and themselves exploiters of peasant labor--they both shared interests with the rest of the peasantry and were forced to bow to some extent to the will of the village community and to act as its representatives against the lords.

The fundamental purpose of these political institutions, which are typically known as the bakuhan system (referring to the combination of feudal monarchy = bakufu and domains = han), was to eliminate the tendencies towards destructive conflict within the ruling class that had characterized the centuries preceding the "unification" of the end of the 16th century. By establishing clearly the lines of authority and the distinct powers of different levels within the elite, the ruling class as a whole would be able to focus on living the good life on resources extracted from the productive classes, especially the peasantry. Indeed, on this criteria, it worked incredibly well, providing over two centuries without any serious, armed conflict within the class of lords.

Yet, it was not exempt from the crisis dynamics of a pre-capitalist social formation. For the first century or so, until the early 18th century, both the Japanese economy and the revenues of the ruling class grew comfortably. This was accomplished by an expanding area of arable land, filled by a growing population, paying proportionately increasing taxes. By the early 18th century, however, the availability of additional land for agricultural expansion had been mostly used up. The lords and their vassals, however, found it difficult to curtail their spending to match the newly constrained fiscal situation, and as a result debt (especially to the merchants who handled the transport and sale of tax-rice) expanded throughout the ruling class and some lords began the practice (that would become nearly universal) of cutting into the revenues of their vassals to fill holes in their own budgets.

The response of the lordly class, exemplified by the shogunate's "kyoho reforms" of the 1720s-30s, was to attempt to increase tax revenue, to constrain spending, and to hold down prices for consumer goods and luxuries both by fiat and by restricting commoner consumption. The results of these policies were mixed in the short run, but in the medium to long-term they could not be maintained and had deep unintended consequences. The increase in taxation came just as the reduced availability of new land was encouraging the fragmentation of land-holdings and reducing the margin of subsistence among the peasantry. In this context, protest against higher taxes could only be expected. Indeed, these protests were often led by the wealthy stratum of landowning gentry who were recognized as local village authorities by the domain administrations, since they too paid taxes to the lords.

However, the higher taxes had another, invidious effect on the peasantry. Through the early eighteenth century, the official policy of the shogunate and the magnate lords' domains was usually to encourage the establishment of peasants on independent, household-based subsistence plots in favor of the large gentry estates worked by dependent labor that had been common in the preceding period. This policy never removed inequality within the peasantry, but it did have visible consequences in the distribution of landownership. Yet, the imperative to increase tax revenue came into contradiction with this policy, since the lords' fiscal administrations lacked the capacity to specifically target higher taxes at the wealthiest rural residents--not least because this same gentry stratum typically controlled the distribution and collection of taxes within the villages as officials who simultaneously functioned as the conduit for lords' orders to peasants and represented the peasant communities to the lords. At best, tax increases would be distributed proportionately to landholdings--even though peasants with holdings barely sufficient to support their families in good years could much less afford to pay more--and often (if the recurrent complaints made by poor peasants are believed) the gentry foisted a disproportionate share of the tax burden on their poorer neighbors. Either way, the result was that the poorer and less lucky among the peasantry increasingly found themselves unable to pay their taxes in relatively poor years. In such a situation--unless it was bad enough that the entire village could be mobilized to demand a temporary reducing in the tax burden--the peasants' only option was to ask one their villages' wealthier families to fill the gap with a loan. These loans were typically secured by a fraction of the borrowers' landholdings. But, the interest on such a loan only made the peasants' situation that much more precarious, and it was quite common for such mortgaged land to become the property of the lender and the borrower a rent-paying tenant on his own land. The shogunate and the magnate lords' domains issued orders prohibiting such transactions and the concentration of land that resulted, but they were unwilling or unable to enforce them. The shogunate's prohibition on foreclosure was rescinded two years after it was issued. The lords would not challenge the position of the gentry, who they had in effect deputized to maintain rural order.

The second unintended consequences of the early-18th century "reforms" was that increasing competition for reduced lordly demand increased the impetus for the merchants and artisans of the great cities to seek out cheaper sources of raw materials or regionally produced goods in rural areas. Often, this entailed naming members of the gentry as purchasing agents, thereby linking these wealthy landholders into the Japan-wide commercial network that had grown up to fulfill the lordly demand that the bakuhan system concentrated in the various magnate lords' castle-towns and, above all, Edo. Over time, however, these gentry, even as landlordship and usury remained their primary (and most stable) sources of income, increasingly sought to break out of the subordinate position in which the urban merchants sought to keep them. These rural merchants accomplished this by developing their own expanded commercial networks, increasing the number of buyers with which they dealt or cutting out the middlemen to sell directly to the retailers of Edo, and by promoting proto-industrial by-employments like spinning and weaving among the peasantry. Since the peasants could accept lower wages precisely because they worked in handicrafts only as a side-line to agriculture, gentry proto-industrialists found they could easily undercut the established urban merchants and artisans.

The competition between the established merchants and the provincial and rural upstarts came to represent a signal fiscal opportunity for the lordly class. In return for assistance in assuring relatively open access to the consumer demand concentrated in Edo, rural merchants could be induced to pay back some of their profits to their lords. Conversely, the established merchants of Osaka and Edo would likewise be willing to pay the shogunate for protection of their privileged position in Japan's commercial network. However, these two fiscal strategies were contradictory: if individual domains were going to promote their own producers and merchants, that would have to come at the expense of the established merchants and producers. If the shogunate was to enforce the privileges of the merchants of Osaka, that would entail effectively restricting the activity of merchants and producers in the various domains. This contradiction was the root of the political conflict that accompanied the ascendancy of the shogunate official Tanuma Okitsugu in the latter half of the 18th century and ultimately led to his replacement by Matsudaira Sadanobu. Tanuma sought to assert the shogunate's primacy in fiscal and economic policy; the opposition of the magnate lords ultimately brought him down. Sadanobu's "Kansei reforms" adopted elements from and claimed the mantle of his grandfather the Shogun Yoshimune's Kyoho reforms, but to describe his policy as simply a "conservative reaction" is to miss the point of the conflicts within the ruling class. He removed Tanuma's commercial policies, but he himself as lord implemented policies to promote rural commerce in his own domain and did nothing to prevent other lords' doing the same. He wrote down samurai debt, but he also for the first time organized a merchant-financed and -administered emergency fund for the city of Edo.

From the end of the 18th century onwards, then, the various domains were given a largely free hand to experiment with commercial and economic policies in order to buttress their precarious fiscal positions. In order to formulate and administer these plans, the domains increasingly began to promote relatively low-ranking members of their vassal bands into positions of authority. For the first time since the formative period of the era, something like social mobility among the samurai became possible again, but in addition the trend of experimental commercial policies promoted an expansion of horizontal ties among the middle and lower strata samurai across domains. This arose directly from the orientation of the new policies to the national commercial network but also from the increasing circulation of students studying outside their domains and experts brought in to try to establish some new industry. The middle- and lower-ranked samurai who were appointed as reformists to influential offices were promoted because of their "ability," and this above all meant education, and the academic world of the latter half of the Tokugawa era cut across the boundaries of domain and vassal band.

In addition, what was new about the new commercial policies was not so much that they tried to draw fiscal benefits from cash crops and handicrafts; various domains had been doing that since the beginning of the era if not before. Instead, as an overall tendency, they entailed an even closer relation of cooperation between the domain administrations and the gentry. It was the latter who typically coordinated the introduction of new crops or industries in their localities, who administered programs for inspection or financial support, and, after all, who frequently were the merchants whose activity the domains were trying to encourage. If the lordly class had shied away from challenging the gentry in the first half of the 18th century, from the end of that century onwards they transformed and strengthened their alliance with that stratum. On paper, most domains still officially prohibited the alienation of peasants' lands and many discouraged (or even prohibited) peasants from cultivating crops other than rice or doing non-agricultural work, but in their actual practice they had broadly adapted to the new semi-commercialized economy.

All, however, was not well in the domains. For one thing, the basic problems of small holdings, a heavy tax burden, and debt leading to tenancy continued to plague the peasantry. If anything, the reconstituted alliance between the lords and the gentry only made matters worse, and increasingly, instead of being led in relatively formalized protests against taxes by village officials (i.e. the gentry), peasants attacked not just the domain administrations but also the merchants and landlords who exploited them in debt and tenancy. It is possible to discern especially in the 19th century a growing sense of unease at the threat of popular unrest throughout the elite, including not just samurai officials and intellectuals but also the gentry.

In addition, the fiscal situation of the domains was in many cases improved but far from good. The practice of "borrowing" from samurai stipends remained nearly universal, and periods of relatively healthy revenues and constrained expenses were typically followed by reversions to laxity and burgeoning debt. Politically, the possibility for promotion among relatively low-ranked vassals gave rise to the formation of factions that competed for office. Since appointment to office still depended ultimately on the arbitrary will of the lord, what the different factions competed for was his favor. Since, moreover, the tendency to appoint less elite vassals to office only modified but did not replace the entrenched influence of the lord's highest-ranked vassals--who of course had a vested interest in minimizing disruption to the status quo--their discontent with the policies of a particular clique in office was often sufficient to win its ouster and replacement by competitors. The result was a pattern of periodic reshuffling of the domain administrations, preventing the consistent implementation of reform programs (especially when those reforms challenged the interests of highest-ranked vassals).

I've come to really dislike Juan Cole

His Middle East commentary used to be interesting, but he's really turned out to be a partisan Democrat with some liberal interventionist leanings.

Supreme Court declines to take US Health Care in direction of Sub-Saharan Africa

"Stabilizing prices is immoral"

Part of the continuing series "Steve Waldman's idiosyncratic theories of U.S. political economy."

Stabilizing prices is immoral:

In the real world, of course, we usually see something between a policy of pure price restraint and a symmetrical price targeting regime. And usually, price stabilization is implemented via monetary policy. We assiduously provide insurance to creditors and the securely employed, but haphazardly reward debtors and the marginally employed when they least need help. Price stabilization is social insurance we provide to the most secure members of our society, while the bill is paid in lost purchasing power and increased risk by the least secure. Further, the benefits of price stabilization accrue disproportionately to the largest creditors and to holders of high-salary secure jobs. Preserving the purchasing power of a billion dollar stash is a lot more valuable than preserving the value of fifty bucks in a bank account. Price stabilization is an incredibly regressive form of social insurance, a program whose distributional ghastliness would be abhorrent to most people if it were not conveniently submerged. But the transfers engendered by price stabilization are politically invisible, obscured by the money veil. Since they benefit the most influential and harm the most marginal in our society, this ghastly policy is politically untouchable.

The point, broadly speaking, is that contrary to what economists on both the left and right seem to assume in their arguments, the point of (neoliberal) monetary policy in practice is not "macroeconomic stabilization," but instead the maintenance of economic conditions conducive to the interests of a specific political and economic bloc.

For future reference

Feudalism!

幕藩体制の眼目である農民支配と収奪については、家康の信任をうけて天領の農民収奪体系の基礎をつくった本多正信が、「百姓は天下の根本なり。これを治るに法あり、まず一人一人の田地の境目をよくたて、さて一年の入用・作食をつもらせ、その余を年貢に収むべし。百姓は財の余らぬように、不足なきように収むること、道なり」 (p. 265 in Inoue Kiyoshi. 1963. History of Japan, Volume I. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten.)

"Hotta Masanobu, who was entrusted by Ieyasu to build the foundation of the extractive apparatus for the shogunate's domains, wrote of the rule and exploitation of the peasantry, which was the core of the bakuhan political system, 'The peasants are the roots of the realm. There is a law for the rule of them: first, establish well the boundaries of each individual's holdings; then, each year, while allowing them to retain enough for their needs, tax off the rest. The proper way is that the peasants should have left neither any surfeit nor dearth.'"

Everything old is new again

The extent to which the basic political configuration in the U.S. today reproduces that of the 1920s and early 30s is sometimes breath-taking.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-06-26/how-wall-street-lobbyists-created-the-socialist-smear.html

Unusual Angles on History

Scott Sumner:

Younger blog readers who rely heavily on the NYT for  information might be under the impression that the 1980s tax cuts for the rich were enacted due to the evil Republicans.  Actually, almost every single developed country cut its top MTR during the 1980s and 1990s.  And liberal Democrats in America also supported the cuts.  The past is another country—you had to be there to understand.

This is called not getting the memo. Public opinion is at best deeply split on the reduced progressivity of the tax code, and so it is deemed necessary to pretend the Democrats provide an alternative. Pointing out that they're not only goes to show that they haven't been a representative of the Left in decades. Of course, this has nothing to do with "trying to help the country," but it's Sumner's job to pretend it is, so whatever.

Come to think of it, Sumner's schtick is precisely to not get the memo, as it were. That's the source of his aura of right-wing principled independence, which verges on a kind of technocratic political incoherence.

Pure WTF

This is not correct:

Today then, to be against socialism and remotely realistic about how to generate economic growth, one must be a Keynesian and call for an unbalanced budget. To fall on the other side and call for total austerity will merely get you booted out of office and pave the way for Big Government socialists to destroy the private sector through increasing government spending and taxation.

Will the conservatives realise this before it is too late? Fat chance. The conservative class have become extremely myopic in the past thirty or forty years. They have invested themselves in dogmatic and unpragmatic free-market ideologies that have always been fantasies and in doing so have completely blinded themselves to the bigger picture. Their own idiocy will destroy them – and in their foolishness they will pave the way for their own expropriation.

This is a particularly poorly executed example of the old center-left bluff of "listen to us or what comes along will be far worse." It's a bluff. They know it's a bluff. And above all they find it funny that you think that their policy platform is "myopic" following "dogmatic and unpragmatic free-market ideologies" that is no better than "idiocy" and "foolishness."

If the ruling classes in the era of their most unchallenged ideological and political hegemony (not to mention exclusive economic prosperity) seem to you to be idiots and fools, perhaps you're the one who has "blinded themselves to the bigger picture."

Old school

The final paragraph (emphasis added) of Raju J. Das, "Reconceptualizing Capitalism: Forms of
Subsumption of Labor, Class Struggle, and Uneven Development," Review of Radical Political Economics 44(2).

Finally, whether or not capitalism exists is not a matter of academic squabbling. The concept of what is present determines what needs to be absented (to use the terminology of the radical philosopher Roy Bhaskar). To say that a social formation is decidedly capitalist has a different political implication than the contrary view that it is not capitalist (enough), or that it is capitalist here and there but not everywhere. If a country is dominantly semi-feudal or not capitalist enough, then the radical strategy is seen by many as one which is to be directed against semi-feudal exploiters or at the promotion of advanced capitalism. This strategy licenses an indefinite wait for the fight for socialism (abolition of class relations) to start. But if what is present is already capitalism, albeit one that is not very progressive and that is unlikely to be very progressive for a very long time, the nature of class politics must be seen in a radically different manner.

This is almost nostalgic; it was the core of the debate on the nature of Japanese capitalism between the "lecture" and "farmer-labor" schools of Japanese Marxists in the 20s-30s, over the seemingly ephemeral distinction between whether what resulted from the Meiji Restoration was a capitalist state characterized by economic underdeveloped and authoritarianism or else an "absolutist" (i.e. essentially feudal) state that was promoting limited capitalist industrialization. Toyama Shigeki, writing in the 50s and 60s, pointed out that really the analytical distance between the two positions was not that great. It was so intense because it was at heart a political argument: over whether what was needed was to "complete" the establishment of liberal bourgeois democracy or else to begin mobilizing for socialism directly. The subtext of Toyama's reassessment and synthesis was that since the political debate was essentially moot, it was possible to look at the intellectual question with a more objective eye. What's so old school about this passage is that the author seems to be still operating with the same political categories that motivated the debate over Japanese capitalism. The article is oddly thin on discussion of the why he adopts the definition of capitalism he does and why the cases he considers conforms to it. In the end, I think the real motivation is the issue raised in this paragraph: it is necessary to define whatever is there as capitalism in order to justify struggling against it and not for the establishment of capitalism. But this is a non-sequitur: if there is an alternative way to organize economic development to the establishment of capitalism, then let's hear it. On the other hand, the fundamental problem to which "establish capitalism" is supposed to be a solution is that in a non-dynamic agrarian economy there isn't much social surplus to fight over; higher wages and lower wages make a difference, but in the long-run only productivity improvements will seriously change the standard of living. And he gives no response to this, and in fact, though he seems to want to suggest that it is successful demands for higher wages and lower rents that compels greater investment in machinery, his examples don't really show that very consistently.

The reason to prefer a theory of capitalist that includes productivity improvements as a necessary consequence or at least strong tendency is that this is something that historically clearly marks out the capitalist epoch. Lots of other things are much more universal: tenancy, usury, wage labor, exploitation, market exchange, inequality, and so on. A concept of capitalism that is based on elements like those would cover a wider swath of space and time in human society, but it would be consequently less interesting because it would simply push the question of economic dynamism one step back--what kind of capitalist economy displays the characteristic patterns of economic development?

Depressing facts of academic life

Fukase-Indergaard, Fumiko or Michael Indergaard. 2008. “Religious Nationalism and the Making of the Japanese State.” Theory and Society 37: 343-374.

This article explores the role of religious nationalism in the making of the modern Japanese State. We describe a process of adaptation featuring bricolage, as an alternative to imitation accounts of non-Western State formation that privilege Western culture. The Meiji State, finding it could not impose Shintô as a State religion, selectively drew from religio-nationalist currents and Western models for over two decades before institutionalizing State Shintô. Although we see some similarities to Europe, distinctive features of the Japanese case suggest a different path to modernity: a lack of Separation between State and religion, an emphasis on ritual and a late (and historically Condensed) development of popular religious nationalism, which was anchored by State Shintô disciplinary devices including school rituals and shrines deifying the war dead.

This could be the abstract of an entirely respectable, if somewhat niche, history article. But it's not. Instead it just summarizes well-known (and frankly, mostly out of date) secondary sources on Tokugawa-era religion and the Meiji state and its religious policies. There are some vague attempts to differentiate the argument, but frankly from the thinness of the research and evidence I'd bet on the authors they criticize being right. Despite nods to negotiation, the story in the end is all about state initiatives, which hit obstacles at first but eventually settled into hegemony. Why? Who knows? Is it supposed to be our job to figure that out? And despite claiming to be comparative, there's not actually any specific contrast between the development of "religious nationalism" or its manifestation in "ritual" elsewhere--Peasants into Frenchmen, anyone? Tacked onto this is an unfocused 7-page literature review that seems to amount to an attempt to ride Philip Gorski's coattails (when it's not just reproducing arguments made by Ikegami without any attempt to differentiate that I can see whatsoever). I am perfectly happy to add blame for this onto his ledger.

Omnibus citation

The melange in this note is nothing short of vertigo-inducing:

Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Formation of the Public Sphere . . . ; among many other influential works, see Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge . . . ; Clifford Geertz, "Thick Description . . . " in The Interpretation of Culture . . .

Marxist intellectual projects

1. Production of knowledge of direct relevance for political strategy
2. Illumination of issues in political economy more generally
3. Defense of the political-economic perspective in the academy
4. Vindication of even the idea of "materialism"

Yet, whatever one's specialized work, one has an obligation to be capable of analysis of the political and economic conjuncture and able to think critically about strategy.

An analysis of the political conjuncture

(Paraphrased from a talk by Vivek Chibber)

We are in the midst of what is probably the greatest economic crisis of capitalism since the 1930s, and yet the political project of neoliberalism remains ascendant. If anything, the fiscal dimensions of the crisis are being mobilized to push forward with the restructuring of state institutions. There have been pockets of mobilization and resistance, but insofar as they become organized political forces at all, they have been absorbed by the legacy institutions of 20th century social democracy--i.e. the parties and unions. Yet these institutions of the "center left" no less than the their counterparts on the right have long since become committed champions of neoliberalism and, in the current situation, austerity.

The move by the social democratic parties to commit themselves as above all good managers of the capitalist economy has only confirmed a sort of political and above all electoral "confusion"--as large segments of the population become disengaged from the political process or even express outright hostility by voting for far-right parties. Yet this abdication on the part of social democracy on its role as representative of popular interests has not yielded any increased relevance of the self-described radical left. The radical, revolutionary left has clung to its rejection of the "incremental" road to social transformation that is still associated with (although in practice abandoned by) social democracy. However, the "insurrectionary road" that they proclaim as an alternative has no possible of political traction, let alone success.

The irony is that both the mainstream social democratic institutions and the revolutionary factions arrayed on their left flank are children of the Second International. This shared legacy, in fact, plays a large role in the shared ineffectiveness. The organizational inheritance of the Second International is the disciplined, vertically consolidated party and union. However, once an organization is integrated with the bourgeois state, top-down control necessarily produces demobilization and both encourages and enables the marginalization of militants by the leadership.

While it is understandable that marginalized militants would respond by rejecting integration with the the institutions of the capitalist state, in favor of the hope of insurrection and revolution, barring an act of god no advanced capitalist state is going to fall to insurrection. The welfare state, whatever its attenuation in recent decades, has changes the political landscape fundamentally. As a result, even if any future left mobilization would need to start-out with "extra-parliamentary" and even illegal tactics, sooner rather than later it would need to orient itself to the state. The state is simply too closely bound up with the the well-being of every individual in society to be ignored.

Utterly inadequate citation

"On the concept of hegemony, see Antonio Gramsci, The Prison Notebooks: Selections . . . pp. 12-13."

Because Gramsci's use of 'hegemony' is perfectly transparent and uncontroversial.

Deep, deep confusion

Mark Thoma, commenting on an observation by Acemoglu and Robinson that putting up an institutional break against one kind of rent-extraction often only means elites will find some other lever to pull:

Tax cuts seem to be the major extractive tool presently. Despite pledges from Obama and others to stand up to this and undo some of the extraction, it continues. When it comes to raising taxes on the wealthy or cutting benefits for the not so well off to balance the budget, its pretty clear whose interests are likely to prevail.

Not entirely false, but tax cuts aren't an "extractive tool." Tax policy just happens to be the horizon of Thoma's political consciousness. Less-progressive taxation is a problem only because the economy itself is in a certain sense "extractive." Progressive taxation is counterweight to that.

Well put

At the end of a URL: LDdKJZ3Wiscrewy1NQko3g

TED Talks

Random output of the internet: "And it's what bothers me about the prospect/fact of TED attendees currently representing the lefternmost flank of the discourse at the moment. The prospect of a discourse in which vicious billionaire libertarian crumbums who also hate gays are one pole and fatuous techno-futurist libertarians who don't hate gay people are the other is really not a very appetizing prospect."

Greed, or something more?

Krugman has another installment in his never-ending series in defense of the post-war social contract. On this occasion, the issue is whether there was a jolt of economic dynamism beginning in the 1980s, resulting from a stagnant corporate being shook up by the shareholder value revolution and related rise of activist investors, private equity, leveraged buyouts, and so on. This is something that's out there. See, for instance the usually astute Noah Smith taking for granted that there's clear distinction between dynamic u.s. corporations and hide-bound Japanese firms, which is directly related to the impenetrable defenses of corporate ownership in Japan.

Anyways, unsurprisingly, Krugman says this is nonsense and that, no, the only thing financialization achieved was increasing the wealth and income at the top, which he notes is an adequate explanation of why elite discourse all but assumes it was a good thing. In the process, he gives an interesting chart: (jump)

I feel an irrational relief when transparently terrible movies in fact do terribly at the box office

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/20/battleship-pulls-up-lame-at-box-office/?hp

Honesty is a virtue

Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas President Richard Fisher said the Fed’s recent moves are giving lawmakers an excuse to avoid making hard choices on fiscal policy, the Associated Press reported Tuesday.

“The more we offer accommodative monetary policy, the less incentive they have to pull their socks up and do what’s right for the American people,” Fisher told the news service in an interview.

The U.S. economy is “almost on a knife’s edge” and could end up tripping into “negative territory,” he added, saying that there aren’t enough jobs being created.

However, Fisher said, there is “enormous potential” for job creation despite the recent stagnation. Businesses have “driven cost reduction to the max, and the biggest cost factor’s labor,” he told the AP. “So a lot of them are going to be unable to expand when final sales finally start to pick up without hiring people. And I think that ramp-up could occur rather rapidly.”

Fisher, a self-professed “inflation hawk,” also said he isn’t worried about the current level of inflation. “I’d like to see it a bit lower, but I don’t want to see deflation,” he told the news service.

Like a shark that smells blood in the water. Translation of 1st 2 paragraphs: "All we need to do is push up interest rates a little and social security is ours." Thanks for making that explicit.

The 4th paragraph is funny for a different reason. It's nice to hear that finally the erosion of labor has maxed out, and we're due for the much-promised broad-based economic growth any time now. Question: with employment reduction driven to the max (and especially if he gets his way and tightens monetary policy), where the hell is the expansion in final sales supposed to come from?

Gloating

The authors of this new estimate of GDP growth in Korea during the colonial period are clearly South Korean

Per capita output growth in colonial Korea, 2.3% p.a. from 1911 to 1940, was considerably slower than that occurring in South Korea, 7.9% p.a. from 1960 to 1990. Nevertheless, colonial Korea surpassed the rest of the world in growth performance as did South Korea: Angus Maddison's estimated that the world average per capita output grew 0.93% per year during 1913–1940 and 2.3% per year 1950–1990. In contrast, not only did growth ground to a halt in North Korea, but also the country began to suffer worsening living standards from around 1990, repeating the performance as delivered by late dynastic Korea. The superior performance of northern relatively to southern Korea under Japanese rule indicates that North Korea has only itself to blame for its economic failure.

One policy choice to reverse the fortunes of the two Koreas appeared to concern whether colonial system was allowed to continue to function. Colonial institutions were designed to stimulate investment, rather than to facilitate extraction, the most important example being well-defined land property as introduced by the Cadastral Survey. Replacing such useful institutions with a system of command in North Korea had disastrous consequences, while in the absence of a regime shift South Korea was able to continue to achieve high growth, as Taiwan and Japan were.

This is a starkly revisionist account. Apparently the accepted historical interpretation (at least until relatively recently) was that Korea was experience indigenous economic growth until the Japanese came and ruined it. As this passage implies, recent quantitative reassessments have shown that the exact opposite is true: Korea was in a rather nasty malthusian B phase in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, but from the late 19th c onward (after the Japanese forced the country open to commerce and then colonized it), it experienced rather impressive economic growth both in aggregate and per capita. The magnitude of these results is actually pretty surprising, since Japan only began modern grown a few decades before and didn't achieve a growth rate much higher than that estimated here. After all, colonialism surely cause had some negative economic impact, because if not, why bother with imperial domination at all?

Of course, this only poses as a puzzle what the 2nd paragraph above answers all to blithely: what happened to get this rather sudden transition? Clear title to land probably helps, but it hardly seems to be sufficient, either.

Fred Block settles for fairy tales

Unfortunate.

Krugman effectively demolishes this right-wing version of structuralism. But people naturally gravitate to explanations of great events that invoke some kind of big and powerful causal mechanism. By treating the initial crisis as an anomaly caused by irresponsible financial behavior, Krugman fails to deliver such an explanation and leaves the Right’s story untouched. Without an alternative narrative about what went wrong, their “too-much-borrowing” fairytale will remain hegemonic.

But we do have an alternative big story—and we need Krugman’s megaphone to help get it out. One piece is the argument that Occupy Wall Street has made: when the 1 percent grabs most of the gains from economic growth, as they have over recent years, bad things happen. The 99 percent have to either limit their consumption or increase their borrowing and go further into debt. Either way, effective demand in the economy will ultimately be restricted. At the same time, multi-millionaires think nothing of putting big sums into extremely risky investments that promise high returns because they already have more dollars than they or their children will ever need. But unlike polo or auto racing, this dangerous hobby of the rich can actually blow up the global economy. Thanks to JPMorgan Chase’s huge losses last week, we know that the biggest banks still can’t resist playing this treacherous game, especially when they’re trying to keep up with the richest kids (the hedge funds).

This runaway speculation is a sign of how our financial system has failed to direct capital in productive directions. As environmentalists have been arguing for forty years, an economic growth path based on cheap oil and coal and urban sprawl is no longer sustainable. But entrenched interests and a dysfunctional financial system have blocked the huge public and private investments in resource-conserving technologies—renewable energy, mass-transit systems, and less wasteful patterns of land use—that would generate durable and sustainable growth.

Comments:

1. The resilience of right-wing descriptions and prescriptions for the crisis is just that people "naturally" like a "big and powerful" story? So we need an "alternative big story"--or fairy tale, as it were?
2. To wit: underconsumptionism plus idle wealth => financial speculation => instability. In other words, financialization is like "polo and auto racing." Every step of that story is dubious.
3. And how do you get to that from environmentalism? What basis is there for assuming that resource conversation "generate durable and sustainable growth"? It would certainly produce a more sustainable economy, in an environmental sense, which is probably a good in itself. To promise that this would yield the kind growth that's been lacking in recent history is just too much.

Mark Thoma makes progress

Someone should throw the guy a party. It would be a party where everyone drank weak beer, but still. It's not really like anyone else has much of an idea of what sort of institutional "countervailing power" could be built, once they've realized it's necessary. The secret, of course, is that's it's not just about the unemployed, but instead about the working and living conditions of the majority of the population, which, if they haven't deteriorated (though in some ways they arguably have), absolutely haven't enjoyed the benefits of improved productivity in the economy as a whole.

The Need for Countervailing Power:

Like Brad DeLong, before the recession started I could not have imagined that policymakers would fail to put the unemployed first and foremost in all policy decisions. I was sure the unemployed would come before inflation, before banks, before debt reduction and contrived fights over the debt ceiling. How could we possibly turn our backs on millions of struggling households, especially when doing so creates so many additional long-run problems for individual households and for the economy as a whole? Nothing else would be more important than putting people back to work, and we would, of course, come together and mobilize in a national war against high unemployment.

But I forgot something. With the decline in unions in recent decades, the working class has lost both economic and political power. And at the same time, those at the top end of the income scale have gained power both relatively and absolutely. So why would I have ever thought that the unemployed would come first when they have so little organized political power? Is it any surprise that policy has paid most attention to the issues that just happen to be the things those with the most political power care the most about? What was I thinking?

I suppose I was thinking that politicians were honorable, that money wouldn't trump principle. Silly me. In any case, the question is how to change the balance of power. We could get the money out of politics, but that will never be fully possible. Even with the best of effort, loopholes, bypasses, and the like will always be sought out, found, and exploited too circumvent the rules. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try -- whatever constraints can be imposed are helpful -- but this probably isn't the full answer. We could hope for better politicians, people who represent everyone equally, including the powerless, but I'm certainly not going to count on that either. Finally, we could try to provide (or at least not discourage) a countervailing force, something that replaces the role that unions played for the working class. I'm not completely sure what form this institution should take, workers lack both economic power in wage negotiations and political power to shape legislation in their favor, or how it could happen short of fed up workers finally demanding change. But workers need to have their interests better represented, and the need for a new institution of some sort is clear.

Spanish weirdness

This is just strange. The economic crisis in Spain is much more like that in U.S. than what happened to Greece--the bursting of a housing bubble left an immense black hole on the balance sheets of banks, leading to contracting of lending, thus investment, and of consumption because of the burden of underwater loans on borrowers, exacerbated by unemployment--with the key difference that the bond market isn't letting the government cover the losses for free as it is in the U.S. There's an additional wrinkle to the story that the Spanish government failed to actually get all of the garbage off of bank balance sheets, and the banks have been limping along in part pretending the assets are still good when they're not. To cover their losses, the banks (when they haven't been bailed out) have apparently been borrowing from the ECB and (as in the U.S.) buying up Spanish government debt. The idea is that the income stream from government paper is a relatively sure thing, and so if (as with the recent ECB lending program) the bank is guaranteed funding for a set period at a certain rate (3 years, I think in this case), as long as that rate is lower than the return on bonds, it's a guaranteed income stream. One problem, though. Unlike treasuries, spanish government debt is not exactly a safe asset these days. This has set up the delightful situation (described in the link above) of Spanish banks owning an increasingly large share of Spanish government debt, such that if the Spanish government tried to reschedule those debts, it would pretty much kill the banks outright, requiring a bailout, which the government couldn't afford.

Successfully insulated from critical evaluation

Apparently Hamid Dabashi has written a book on the Arab Spring. If this excerpt is any indication, he has succeeded in writing so unclearly it's impossible to determine whether there's anything to criticize in it.

The spectre of that emerging state will keep the democratic muscles of these revolutionary uprisings flexing - for a very long time, and for a very simple reason. The world we have inherited is mystified (Marx's term) by the force fields of power that have at once held it together and distorted it. Fighting the military and economic might of counter-revolutionaries goes hand in hand with deciphering the transformed consciousness that must promise and deliver the emerging world. The colonial subject (now revolting beyond the mirage of the postcolonial state) was formed, forced, and framed as the object of European imperial domination, with multivariate modes of governmentality that extended from the heart of "the West" to the edges of "the Rest". Europe colonised the Arab and Muslim world from one end to the other precisely according to the model of power by which it was itself being colonised by the self-fetishising logic of capital. It was, by way of partaking in the making of the fetishised commodity, being alienated from itself as it was forcing that massive alienation on the colonial world. Postcolonialism was instrumental in conceptually fetishising colonialism as something other than the abuse of labour by capital writ large. It is not, and never has been.

The postcolonial subject, which was none other than the colonial subject multiplied by the illusion of emancipation, was thus released into the force field of that very same colonial history on a wild goose chase of ideological certainty before and after political convictions. For more than two hundred years - the 19th and 20th centuries - colonialism begat postcolonial ideological formations: socialism, nationalism, nativism (Islamism); one metanarrative after another, ostensibly to combat, but effectively to embrace and exacerbate, its consequences. As these postcolonial ideological formations began epistemically to exhaust themselves, the position of "subalternity" travelled from South Asia and became a North American academic fanfare, before it was politically neutered and soon turned into the literary trope of a "native informant". Thus colonialism and postcoloniality combined to place the Arab and the Muslim (as its supreme and absolute other) outside the self-universalising tropes of European metaphysics, where the non-Western (thus branded) was never in the purview of full subjection, of full historical agency.

Where to even begin?

1. Is it really necessary to paranthetically note 'mystified' as "Marx's term"?
2. "Multivariate modes of governmentality". I see.
3. I appreciate the attempt to link the logic of capitalism to colonial domination, but equating colonialism with "the abuse of labour by capital writ large" seems a bit overambitious. Also I don't think commodity fetishism is a sufficiently sturdy concept to bear quite that much weight.
4. How exactly is a 'subject' 'multiplied' by an 'illusion'?
5. As for the last 2 or 3 sentences, it's actually possible I agree with them (what passes for radicalism in "post-colonial" and "subaltern" is decidedly not, which is what he might be saying here), but I just can't be sure.

Reading failure

I just can't do it. I can't make myself read John A. Hall's Powers and Liberties. No one gives a shit about his "philosophical history" anymore, if they ever did. Maybe this is more of a thing among British sociologists (I think it might be, I feel like these I've caught whiffs of this kind of pseudo-universality before), but I've certainly never felt any pressure to engage with it from teachers or based on citations in the work I read. His acknowledgements and preface reveal that this work was gestating in the same milieu as Michael Mann's History of Social Power--and it shows. Both share the same just-so story about congenital European dynamism--which is just utterly false. I think it might be because I'm inclined towards theoretical approaches that are often accused of Eurocentrism that I have a severe allergic reaction to the real thing.

Jack Goldstone is delusional

In response to JP Morgan's announcement that it lost $2B recently.

Let’s not fool ourselves that any rules will be a perfect solution — traders will always be looking for new instruments and methods to increase their profits.  But at least we should start with the presumption that certain rules for the safety of bankers and their clients are in everyone’s interests, and we need to find sensible bargains on rules.  Without that presumption — if the starting point is that no rules at all are best — we will swing from one extreme to the other, from inadequate regulation that leads to crises to over-reactions that burden companies with too much regulation and red tape.

We are in that over-reaction phase now, with Sarbanes-Oxley (in reaction to Enron’s fraud and collapse) and the Volker rule (in reaction to the Lehman collapse) burdening or threatening corporate action.  Yet the reaction of the business community has been to push all the way back to the “no regulation is best” and decry “job-killing regulations.”   Actually, it is the absence of regulation that is job-killing in the same manner that running an Indy 500 with no rules or caution flags, or a championship football match with no referees, would lead to efforts to win that result in people being killed – or in financial markets, in major companies going bust.

Because obviously all the years S-O has been in place have been a time of excessive financial conservatism. Oh, wait, no.

But here's the thing, if it really was better for "bankers and their clients" that there be clear guidelines on financial, why aren't either the former or the latter (including institutional investors and major corporations who don't lack the resources to influence law- and rule-making) pushing for them? The contemporary finance industry isn't an alien colony: it has grown into its current form in the political-economic environment of the past few decades, and so it is probably a best initial hypothesis that it is in some way adapted to that environment. If that form is crisis-prone, it shouldn't be taken for granted that this is not a necessary condition of its adaptation.

A slightly more comprehensive interpretation of the crisis in Europe

This includes centrality of bank solvency to fiscal crisis (esp. in Spain and Ireland, though it only mentions the former), as well as the long-term background of the way in which German labor market "reforms" in the 2000s substantially relied on relative price rises in its Eurozone trading partners. By the way, other than its success at price competition, why is it that Germany has become the new chief representative for neoliberalism? If they get what they want, are we going to be talking about a "Berlin consensus"?

So, here we have it: Spain is being screwed into the ground so as to, supposedly, impress upon it the ‘precarious state of its public finances’. What claptrap! Spain had a surplus in its budget in 2008 and has had a debt-to-GDP rate less than Germany’s. Behind Mr Weidmann’s subterfuge hides an unfathomable truth: Having gutted the rest of the eurozone for years, by squeezing German price and wage inflation below agreed limits, German policy makers are misrepresenting the cause of the Periphery’s woes. Rather than acknowledging the need to europeanise banking supervision, and a part of the eurozone’s public debt, they are offering trinkets in the form of an above average inflation rate. Why trinkets? Because, in view of the deflation that is coming to the deficit countries, having German inflation rise above average is as inevitable as it is useless.

Cultural turn checklist

An abstract from the Journal of Historical Sociology.

• Meaningless wordplay (roots? routes?) - CHECK
• Non sequitors posing as definitions ("shared (i.e., social)") - CHECK
• Not so much about historical events as about their representation (or the "experience" of them) - CHECK
• Totally implausible (or else trivially obvious) claim for relevance ("potential for explosive conflicts") - CHECK

All it's missing is a heavy does of jargon and neologisms (though bonus points for the obscure noun form 'traumata'). This is not my historical sociology.

This contribution focuses on the Indian experience of the Partition. The personal and shared (i.e., social) memories regarding the history of India and Pakistan will inform the examination of the temporal dimension of the Partition, i.e., its “roots”. Tracing the re-established and new interconnections in terms of trade, travel, transportation, and communication between India and Pakistan along historical lines gives insight into the spatial dimension of the Partition's aftermath, i.e. its “routes”. The main argument of this analysis is that the traumata resulting from the Partition are still not overcome and contain the potential for explosive conflicts in the future.

Everything is history

Not even French in general, but from Normandy in particular.

DEPICTIONS OF BRAZILIANS ON FRENCH MAPS, 1542–1555

SUREKHA DAVIES

 Birkbeck, University of London

ABSTRACT

This article explores the impulse behind the outpouring of extraordinarily ornate maps representing the inhabitants of Brazil that emanated from Normandy in the mid-sixteenth century. It aims to understand the reasons behind the iconography of Brazil, a region of particular commercial interest for the French. Whereas maps produced elsewhere in this period emphasize the presence of fierce cannibals in Brazil, Norman examples highlight peaceful relations, particularly the dyewood trade. By analysing the maps in comparison with extant maps from other centres of production (particularly Portugal and the German lands), travel accounts, and wider visual culture, this article explores their relationship to possible sources and considers the extent to which their iconography had a basis in experience. By investigating the use of these maps as gifts to French kings, it suggests that the mapmakers’ selective use of trading imagery also played a persuasive role in the Norman maritime world's disputes with the Portuguese crown over the extent of Portugal's Atlantic empire.

conservative fatalism * inclusive neoliberalism = ?????

The econoblogosphere is abuzz with a resurgence of "what we need is not short-term stimulus but instead long-term reform," predictably pissing of the Keynesian and being warmly praised by their opponents. Peter Frase reads two specimens of the species and observes:

Philosophically, the Brooks and Rajan essays are interesting for the way they awkwardly combine an old-fashioned style of conservatism (the poor will always be with us, accept your lot) with a more modern form of inclusive neoliberalism (accept deregulation, and you too can be rich!) By itself, the first style of argument is simply intolerable to modern sensibilities, but the crisis has rendered the second increasingly implausible. Together, however, the two arguments add up to nonsense.

Sure, it's nonsense, but I don't think it's particularly distinctive nonsense. That is to say, neoliberalism has always combined both elements: criticism of the "rigidity" of labor market controls and welfare state protections that are pushing against the necessary tide of market competition, and the promise of increased prosperity in the long-term from the efficiency promoted by the market. If there's a relatively recent twist, it's a slight muting of the promise by reference to secular changes in the economy (Rajan cites Tyler Cowen's Great Stagnation), which only serves to highlight the ostensible hard realism of the claim that we need to accept the costs of adjustment.

The question is, adjustment to what? Sure, the Germans and Northern European "flexsecurity" welfare states crammed down their wage costs in the 2000s and began to eat everyone else's lunch in the export market. Will this really look like such a promising model when everyone else lowers their wages to match? As Frase says, it's somewhat galling that these people have appropriated for themselves the label 'structural,' as in "structural unemployment" or "structural reform."

Paper writing

An idea always seems most beautiful in the moment before it is written out.

An alternative, more pretentious title: A Model of the Composition of the Public Sphere in U.S. Late Capitalism

This post at Gin and Tacos is titled "Red Meat," which is straightforward, if uninventive. Leaving out the parts about the particular piece of trash posted on a blog at the Chronicle for Higher Education, which does not deserve to be any further discussed:

. . .

I am increasingly annoyed by the extent to which no-name hack writers and peripheral media personalities have taken to relying on shock value to draw attention to themselves and advance their careers to some level beyond complete obscurity. We see the anonymous guests on Fox News trying to say the most ridiculously outlandish things they can imagine – "Maybe I'll be the next Glenn Beck!" – and legions of fourth-rate Free Republic commenters filling blogs with as much vitriol as possible to attract attention. Basically anyone who can figure out how to use Blogger is trying to one-up the herd. There are Regnery book deals to be had, after all. And the situation is only exacerbated by highly trafficked, even mainstream media outlets giving a platform to these voices due to the same need to stand out and get attention.
. . .
There are two ways to make it as a writer, and one of them – having some combination of talent, creativity, or intellectual merit – is unavailable to this author. So she does what every other unknown, unaccomplished hack toiling away in obscurity realizes is his or her only chance to be noticed. She sits down and basically writes a 500 word version of "HAHAHA NIGGERS AMIRITE? LOL!" and waits for the call to appear as a guest on O'Reilly. Maybe she'll even get booted from the Chronicle and become the latest right wing martyr to get a speaking tour and book deal. "I was ostracized by the Liberal Establishment!"

I am going to puke blood the next time I have to watch, listen to, or read these blatant attempts by failures to throw a bunch of red meat into the public sphere and kick back and wait for that call from Fox or the Daily Caller. In truth she and her drivel are hardly worth our attention – and the Chronicle goddamn well knows it – yet here we are. Congratulations, Naomi. You've got our attention now. Too bad writers like you (i.e., shitty ones) are a dime a dozen, or else your plan might have worked.

Basically, there are institutions for material support for writers from certain perspectives. There are far more people who want to make a living as an "intellectual" than there are sufficient space in the ecosystem, if you will. The result is an intense competition that selects for not just orthodoxy but even fanaticism. How much output of journalism and commentary would this model account for?

Bismarck and Roosevelt?

Jack Goldstone:

The successful capitalism of Bismarck and Roosevelt remembered that it had to provide for workers too, and limit the excessive accumulation of the rich; they therefore engaged in building social support, unions, and enough regulation to ensure vigorous competition but without companies overrunning workers.

Today, it seems that capitalists have forgotten that they cannot extract unlimited wealth from economies whose ordinary workers are suffering long-term stagnation, unemployment, and loss of their savings and assets, and expect the workers to accept it for very long.

With house values, salary, and unemployment now ticking along at recession-levels for the fifth year in most countries, patience with austerity programs or giving more to the rich in the hope that they would lift others is running out.

Watch out, conservative parties and wealthy elites:  far right wing populists as well as left-socialists are out to bring you down to earth.  Either support policies that quickly give some benefits and relief to ordinary workers, or they will turn on you and the capitalist system that they believe is benefiting you, and only you.

Three points: first, this is the good old center-left argument-from-threat-of-radicalism. This is going to convince no "conservative parties and wealthy elites," because they've learned to call the bluff. Second, "successful capitalism of Bismarck and Roosevelt"? Ok, New Deal, fine, but paternalistic welfare programs and repression of the Social Democrats, even if ultimately futile? Also, Roosevelt didn't so much "remember" this as have it forced upon him by probably the largest wave of mobilization in U.S. history. Third, are "far right wing populists" really out to bring capital down to earth? Last time around, they adopted some anti-capitalist rhetoric while out in the wilderness but dropped it post-haste when they had a shot at power. On a much smaller scale the whole Tea Party thing showed a similar pattern.

By virtue of the transitive property . . .

If a = b and a = c, then b = c. Unintentionally truthful words from the nyt:

. . . Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York, whose name is all but synonymous with Wall Street clout and nonpartisan politics.

Why Tyler Cowen is my favorite bourgeois economist

It actually surprising how hard it is to describe why something like this tickles me so much at the same time as it annoys me. Here's an attempt: it's the way we musters rhetorical turns of self-conscious sophistication--"multiple equilibria," "quality of institutions," "rebuilding trust," "classes beyond 101," "empirics of public choice"--that are more typical of critics of neoclassical economics in order to argue for mostly orthodox (even, as Marx would say, vulgar) neo-liberal positions. He is like a walking disproof of the types who think the way to argue against economists' policy positions is to attack their oversimplifications of social life and human behavior. It doesn't hurt that his criticisms of left-of-center bourgeois economists are not entirely off-the-mark: there very well might not be a politically neutral, technical solution; that is to say, employment and income might not be pushed into self-sustaining growth simply by adding more aggregate demand, no matter where it comes from.

Yet here again, Cowen's sophistication is in the service of vulgarity, because it enables him to simply ignore the systemic irrationality that Keynesianism claims to provide a technical solution for. That is this: there seems simultaneously to be over 10% of the American population that wants to work but is unable to find employment and an immense quantity of money that should in principle be available for investment piling up on corporate balance sheets and in the financial system (as seen, for instance, in rising stock prices and rock-bottom interest rates on U.S. treasuries). If the two could somehow be brought together, then the overall level of economic activity would be higher and everyone would be better off. The Keynesian (and in a different vein, the monetarist) position is that this "failure of markets to clear" can be overcome by preventing large drops (or even extended stagnation) in the overall quantity of spending in the economy.

The problem with this argument is that it is far from clear that the models on which it is based are actually sufficiently accurate descriptions of the economy to make strong predictions. Instead, it often seems like models are chosen because they can possibly express some stylized fact such as the failure of labor markets to clear, regardless of whether or not the mechanism they use to get that (empirically real) result reflect the causes at work in the economy. Such for instance is the talk of sticky wages: labor markets fail to clear because the prevailing wage is too high, and everyone is reluctant to bid down the nominal rate of wages. The absurdity comes out when the left-of-center Keynesian immediately denies the obvious conclusion to cram wages down on the basis of some vague hand-waving.

The hand-waving is necessary because the conclusion is so clearly perverse to the left-of-center Keynesian: businesses are wary about investing so everyone else needs to take a pay-cut. Cowen's genius is that he embraces the perversity. So, as he liked to say for a while, it's probably the case that some significant proportion of the unemployed workforce is "zero marginal product" (ZMP). ZMP workers cannot, in any job, contribute more to the economy than it would cost to pay the overheard costs and their wages. On one level, this is trivially true in any decent model of the capitalist economy: if employing them could yield additional net revenue to any existing business, they would probably be hired by it. But this is precisely the perversity: they shouldn't (and even in our degraded age, can't really) be "fired" from the society as a whole. Just because they can't generate any marginal product profit for a capitalist firm, why shouldn't they be allowed to contribute whatever they can to economic life? After all, it's not like there isn't enough food, shelter, clothing, entertainment, and so on to provide decent lives for them.

Admittedly, the argument is more complicated than this, but Cowen doesn't address it at all. He doesn't have to. To paraphrase the introductory monologue of The Big Lebowksi, "Sometimes there's a man--I won't say a hero, 'cause what's a hero?--sometimes there's a man who, well, he's the man for his time and place, he fits right in there--and that's Tyler Cowen in the twilight of neoliberalism." He doesn't have to address the argument because he lives--we all live--in a political world in which there is no force that demands it be addressed, that can say in response to the idea that wages are too high or that the "marginal product" of employing the unemployed is less than zero that, no, it's the "wages" earned by the bosses that are too high and it's the owners whose existence doesn't contribute anything to society.

Ironically, sometimes left-of-center bourgeois economists will nostalgically warn that if their advice is ignored, such a force will reappear, and its arguments will be much less civil than those of the economists. The economistic right wing--of which Cowen is a preeminent member, not least because his impeccable sophistication separates him from so much of the rest of it--exists to eternally call their bluff, and so far they've been right.

However, to turn the wheel one last time, it's not just that the threat of political unrest is a bluff. It cannot be taken for granted that even if the threat were real--or if the bluff was fallen for--that everything would go as promised. So far in the history of capitalism, there have been four periods of prolonged economic depression, and none of them have been solved by a waving of the aggregate-demand wand to produce full employment and rising wages. The first, in the 1870s, falls suspiciously at the opening of a period of international competition among the industrial states, which carved up the world into empires and ended only in the fire of the Great War. The second, in the 1930s, continued until WWII, in which the U.S. economy was converted to a war machine and the the industrial base--along with a significant chunk of the population--was all but totally destroyed in Europe and Japan. It is true that this was also the period of the birth of the institutions that shaped the broad-based prosperity of the postwar era, in which a stable income and "middle class lifestyle" could be enjoyed by most of the working population. However, this does not mean that the institutions that enabled that trajectory of development in the context of an overall boom that was set off by and for the reconstruction of the civilian economy were themselves contributors to that boom, or even necessary conditions for it. Indeed, those very institutions were perfectly consistent--and at the very least were blamed for--the onset of the third great period of depressed growth, in the 1970s. This time, many of the post-war era's constraints on business activity and the labor market were sacrificed on the altar of "reform" meant to restore profit, and hence the incentive to invest and from that, growth. Over three decades later, probably 4/5ths of us have nothing to show for this, and now we seem to be back in another depression. The left-of-center bourgeois economists would have us believe that there is, this time, a way to restore growth and the broad-based prosperity that has been missing for decades.

Among radicals, one of the deadliest accusations has, historically, been "reformist!" This amounts to the charge of "getting in bed" with the center-left promise of a mutually fruitful capitalism. Yet, the implication of the weight of this accusation is that there is a strange intellectual infinity between the radical left and the staunchly bourgeois right. The two agree in dismissing the promises of the center-left as wishful thinking in the world as it exists; the capitalist economy is, they would both say, a harsh mistress. The left-of-center economists' vision of a rationally managed capitalism is a distraction from what the other two see as the real question: is the harshness (and the irrationality, and the perversity) part of that "realm of the necessary" that human beings have no choice but to adapt themselves to? As has been so often pointed out, this was once--at least into the middle of the twentieth century--a question of active debate, so much so that even a figure like John Stuart Mill felt obligated to concede, for instance, the principle that property rights were a construct of social convenience. Yet, now, outside academic departments--philosophy, sociology, perhaps anthropology and political science, rarely economics--it is no live question at all, so much so that a movement of at most a few tens of thousands that succeeded only in putting the mere fact of economic inequality briefly back into the newspapers and the fulminations of intellectuals and pundits is hailed as an historic achievement.

In a world like this, who can begrudge Tyler Cowen his smugly sophisticated vulgarity?

From the comments, on downturns, fiscal policy, and multiple equilibria:
From Tall Dave:

We were less wealthy than we thought we were.

Call me an AD-denier, but I still think the basic issue here is that you can’t consume more than you produce. Production exists to satisfy demand, but at the same time demand is limited by production. We had a long boom built on the notion we could boost demand and thus supply and thus demand again in a virtuous cycle, and now we are seeing the cycle work in reverse as demand/supply seek their natural levels.

One way to justify this model is in terms of multiple equilibria, and that we have been walking (bouncing our heads?) back down the escalator.  Arguably for the United States this downward bouncing is over.  Along the way we are sending signals about the quality of our institutions and thus shaping the course of the future.

In this model there is still a useful role for fiscal policy.  For one thing, fiscal policy can smooth that ride down the escalator, by spreading the losses out over time, at the cost of future debt of course.  This may be needed if only to make the political economy of decline less bitter; see Spain and Greece.   Nonetheless fiscal policy cannot make up for the output losses at will.  We are not standing in an IS-LM diagram where the difference between “what we have” and “what we could have” is thwarted only by some supposed Austerians who won’t shift the proper curve and yet somehow have taken over some of the biggest spending social democratic, insider-leaning governments in world history.  The IS-LM approach fits in nicely with the view that policy improvement is all about yakking about the obstructionists.  Instead, policy is also about rebuilding trust, not just maintaining ngdp on a decent keel.

There is another possible role for fiscal policy, as there usually is in models of multiple equilibria.  If you ran some super-duper fiscal policy, and invented the flying car, a cure for cancer, and other marvels, the market might suddenly latch its expectations on to a much more positive scenario.  There could be a significant upward bounce to a much higher equilibrium of output and employment.  In any case, the quality of fiscal policy matters, and Keynesian ditch digging probably doesn’t do much for inferences about institutional quality and for the selection of multiple equilibria.  “Spend the money, anywhere” is in my view a deeply pernicious attitude, somewhat akin to thinking you can create a good NBA team, with a strong ethic for quality and work, by tanking for better draft picks at the end of every season.  But no, the internal ethic matters and cannot be first destroyed and then recreated at will.  Good teams don’t usually work that way, and neither do good fiscal policies.

Right now we Americans are building back up to better equilibria, slowly, by showing that our economic institutions are not totally crummy.  This process can take a good while, but in fact our recovery is going better than many people believe.  The eurozone is far — very far — from being on that kind of rebuilding track.

There is plenty of talk about various commentators don’t understand the lessons of Econ 101.  There is a reason why we teach classes beyond 101, and why we spend so much time studying institutions and the theory and empirics of public choice.