The watershed of the decline of social democracy

A working hypothesis of NYU Political Economy:

Why did the "social democratic project" start to peter out in the 70s?

• Not so much working/class middle class divide.
• Instead: Internalization of "managerial" outlook on capitalist economy by party leadership, combined with failure to meet the economic crisis.

To be more specific, the economic and political "conjuncture" of the late-70s was that of center-left parties facing a decade of economic stagnation. In principle, business continued to support Keynesian macroeconomic policy, it just wasn't working any more. In this situation, one clear response would be to attempt to free the hand of capital, on the hope that greater economic flexibility (especially in employment) would spur additional investment, and thus growth and jobs. This was the neoliberal tack taken by almost all advanced industrial economies in the 80s and 90s, either over the objections of social democrats or, indeed often eventually if not immediately, with their support.

The alternative response, proposed by left-wing factions within many of the European social-democratic/labor parties, would be for the state to take a much more active role in investment decisions, in effect to attempt to plan their way out of economic stagnation, or at least to meet social goals such a improvement of living standards. However, this would almost certainly have brought about an intense backlash from business, up to and including a capital strike. Recognizing this, and realizing that their organizations (the parties themselves but also the unions) were no longer oriented towards the kind of mass mobilization that would be needed to overcome such a counter-attack (and probably themselves disinclined to that sort of strategy just by virtue of their successful integration through long-term electoral success into the management of the economy), the leadership of the parties rejected this alternative, in some cases throwing the left wing factions out of the parties.

This contrasts with a more common explanation of the loss of ground of the social democratic parties, which centers on the shift in the employment structure away from blue-collar industrial labor and towards services, etc. This portrays social democratic decline as an inevitable consequence of long-term social trends. Instead, the hypothesis above insists on the role of organizations as a mediating factor between social groups (classes) and politics; it is, indeed, the "balance of class forces" mediated through political organizations (including parties and unions) that determined the "the political space." The "inevitablist" view tends to make too much of the contrast between white-collar and blue-collar workers; they are from a class perspective both labor, even if it is historically the case that industrial blue-collar workers have been better organized by the labor movement and thus integrated into the social democratic parties. This, however, is a question of strategy, not fundamental class interests. Another way to put this is, what is the necessary cause of the loss of ground by the social democratic parties? Would it have happened because of the changing employment structure even if there hadn't been the economic crisis of the 1970s? Or, would the crisis have forced the same choice (with the same probable response, all else equal), even if the total share of blue collar industrial workers in the workforce had not been declining?

This is not to say that there weren't deep processes leading to both the crisis of the 70s and the response of the parties. In the first place, capitalism is crisis-prone; at some point there will always be a period of depressed profits, and thus anemic investment and employment growth. In the second, the loss of mobilizing capacity--and the marginalization of militants--in the labor movement was not an accident, but a direct result of the institutionalization (as part of, and in effect participants in, the capitalist economy) and bureaucratization of the unions and the social democratic parties, making any other decision by the party/union leadership in the 70s difficult to imagine.

If an alternative was possible--or will be possible in the future--it will be a function of having built (or, in the future, building) a different kind of organization that did not encourage, or even require, the gradual decay of moblizing potential and structural bias against militancy. In principle, this is a question of political strategy, but no one knows, as of now, what kind of strategy and what kind of organization could fulfill that role.

To put it a bit more strongly: The left lost out not because it was "outmaneuvered" by the right, or because its natural base was eroded by economic trends, but because the organizations it had built in its period of growth were incapable of responding radically to economic crisis.

The middle is the worst political category

Ok, I don't care for liberal hand-wringing about conservative aversion to science, etc.

The latest instance, in a post by Krugman, is noteworthy for including a graph that tells a somewhat different story than he wants to extract from it. It fits in with cliched political narratives that conservatives would trust science less than liberals, but why on earth until recently did moderates trust it substantially less than either?

Surprisingly good

In general, I'm not big on music that combines relatively conventional forms with weird melodic and harmonic content or instrumentation, but an organ concerto with an "orchestra" made up of piano, celeste, and a whole bunch of percussion is just so far out there it works surprisingly well. The 1st movement is (I think) more or less sonata-allegro, the 3rd movement is something like a theme-and-variations slow movement , and the finale is close enough to a rondo.

Also. Is all of the music on youtube now? I think this is a pretty obscure piece, and a quick search popped up at least 2 versions.

Oh, I take it back, the other piece I heard tonight (a setting of 2 James Joyce poems) isn't there. Shame on you, internet.

Slightly unfortunate

It is slightly unfortunate that "electronics" in a musical program usually means "macbook(s)."



John Cage can be criticized for relying on cleverness, or to put it another way, cleverness is too often his only virtue, so that "experimentation" often reduces to merely a clever idea. But his successors seem to amount to little more than mildly inventive noisiness, not even attaining the sublimely overwhelming, architectonic noisiness of a certain style of experimental rock.



Occasioned by this. They did in fact do several of the pieces simultaneously, even having the audience "perform" from a "score" during much of the middle of the concert.

"Truth can be reduced to the smallest step; what is true is what is nearest, not what is farthest"

That is Adorno's characterization of pragmatism, in the context of an essay on the critical consciousness of Veblen. Adorno's objection to this is that it consigns the individual to eternal "adjustment" to existing conditions, because it rejects any concept of the (suppressed) potentiality immanent in the totality of a situation (basically, in his discussion, the elimination of scarcity). The difference, he notes, is a "nuance" ("like every distinction in philosophy"--wonderful!), but its consequence is that the "seriousness" of Veblen's pragmatism is "the seriousness of death."

I've always been a bit sympathetic to pragmatism, and accordingly skeptical of the dialectical "concept" that Adorno accuses it of lacking. However, it occurred to me for the first time just now that this describes how I go about approaching problems in my life, as well. If I'm feeling overwhelmed (i.e. more or less always), I list out the issues I'm dealing with, and I sort them into 3 categories: first, things I can't do much about, which I do my best to ignore; second, things I can break into steps I can put onto my calendar for the following few weeks; and third, long term problems and projects, which I tend push into the background, assuring myself that with the bite-sized steps I've scheduled for myself, I'm "being productive" and "making progress." In other words, I focus exclusively on what is "nearest," which can be tackled immediately, trusting that as a result I'm moving towards a good outcome in the distance, but with only the vaguest sense of how I'm going to get there from here, or even what "there" is going to be (whether, as it were, there will be any "there" there). This also creates a problem in that I end up doing things somewhat half-assedly, just so that I can "put it to sleep" and move on to the next step.

So concludes today's weird hybrid of philosophy and insecurity.

Sigh

An Economist blog again:

Now to the tension we discussed. Economists in general and, I think it's safe to say, Mr Acemoglu and his co-author James Robinson, would characterise labour unions as extractive institutions. It's easy to paint unions with too broad a brush, but labour unions—and guilds and professional associations—are fundamentally rent-seeking. Their aim is to create labour-market barriers to entry in order to capture a larger share of the surplus generated by production. In doing so, they frustrate labour mobility. Quite often in economic history, such associations have also worked to impede innovation and creative destruction. By helping to shut out people and ideas that might upset the existing order, unions place themselves firmly in the extractive category, and thereby contribute to reduced societal wealth.

Only that is not the beginning and the end of union involvement in political economy. As institutions of civil society unions have often leaned against other extractive forces. Unions have been an instrument for extending the franchise, making political systems more pluralistic and thereby making it more difficult for a narrow group of elites to build extractive political institutions that cement their own authority. Within the more inclusive political institutions unions have occasionally helped to foster, trade groups have also supported policies—like social insurance or more progressive taxation—that further prevent the concentration of economic and political power at the very top of the income spectrum.

If we take institutional economics seriously, and I think we should, then one has to wrestle with the utility of "countervailing institutions". That makes economics a much messier and unpleasant thing to try and understand. But a clean dismal science that misses important features of the real world may not be particularly useful. I have occasionally written here that economists should be more open to things like progressive taxation and trade-adjustment assistance than the models might indicate is appropriate, because support for a liberal economic order will erode if the perception grows that it primarily functions to enrich a narrow elite. Perhaps it's appropriate to take things one step further: if a liberal order can't persist without policies that ensure the gains from growth are broad-based, then maybe a liberal order can't persist without the institutions that provide the political muscle to ensure such policies are adopted and sustained—and that may include strong labour unions. I'll admit, that's an idea that makes me deeply uncomfortable. That doesn't mean it's wrong.

Would the writer be willing to concede that business-owners are also "fundamentally rent-seeking"? (Do I have to cite Adam Smith?) Why does the notion that there needs to be organizations to concentrate the capacity for collective action of the working population to counterbalance the already-concentrated power of wealthy elites make this writer "deeply uncomfortable"--while, implicitly, that previous concentration (surely the result of generations of thrift <cough>) is no cause for concern?

Oh, and of course our main concern is maintaining "support for the liberal economic order" and not the improvement of the lives of the majority of the population as an end in itself.

Somehow the fact that it ends up on more or less the right side politically makes it worse. It's enough to make one think that yes, really, the correct response to something like this would be: "Up against the wall!"

Relativism is cheap

My favorite bourgeois intellectual again:

It is at bottom a question of original authority: with what conviction — basic orthodoxy — about where truth and illumination are to be found do you begin? Once that question is answered satisfactorily for you (by revelation, education or conversion), you cannot test the answer by bringing it before the bar of some independent arbiter, for your answer now is the arbiter (and measure) of everything that comes before you. Your answer delivers the world to you and delivers with it mechanisms for distinguishing good evidence from bad or beside-the-point evidence and good reasons from reasons that just don’t cut it.

The occasion for this was some smug discussion about religion and global warming denial by Richard Dawkins et al on an msnbc discussion show. A rather silly comment by Dawkins gave Fish an opening to make this declaration, which amounts to the claim that on an epistemological level, there's no principled difference between scientific knowledge and religious dogma: both depend ultimately on an arbitrary answer to the "question of original authority," which then provides the basis for judging the truth-value of individual propositions.

Phrased in this way--in terms of the the foundations for epistemological judgment--there is indeed no way to rule the possibility of radical relativism: that two subjects could have incommensurable epistemological foundations. The historical and social importance of science, however, is not that it is an epistemological system (pace the claims of some of its champions) but instead a set of social institutions that organize inquiry. Science is not a way of thinking; the sciences are communities defined by norms for the investigation of questions and the resolution of disputing claims. A key feature of these norms is that they are represented as referring not to any fixed authority or revelation but instead to universally accessible reality. Of course, as Fish (somewhat clumsily--he never quite manages to give a good example of this) indicates, this is always, strictly speaking, a false representation: scientific communities have rather high barriers for participation and at any given time proceed on the basis of limited, quasi-arbitrary "paradigms" that define what constitutes a "real" problem for the field and an acceptable solution to it.

In principle, it would be possible for an individual to do what Weber at one point calls making the intellectual sacrifice of claiming that religious authority trumps in principle the appeal to empirical inquiry and debate. But, my sense is that the ranks of those willing to willing embrace this "sacrifice" are actually quite thin in the contemporary u.s. This is suggested by the fact that the various "deniers" feel obligated to produce pseudo-science and to allege conspiracies of suppression within the relevant disciplines. Alternatively, the bulk of global warming denialism (which is the specific example Fish mentions) is anchored not on religious conviction but instead in the principles of an alternative academic discipline, namely neo-classical economics. Now, as far as disciplines living up to scientific aspirations for universality, neo-classical economics scores poorly to put it mildly, but still even its most dogmatic representatives would be careful to defer to the practices of inquiry of, at least, the "hard" sciences.

What's more, the scientific pretension to universality and objectivity is not something that should be discarded lightly. A scientific discipline cannot dismiss criticism out of hand, even if coming from the "wrong" type of critic or even if it is in bad intellectual faith (as much criticism of global warming, and anti-darwinist pseudo-science are, though for different reasons), precisely because the current state of knowledge in any field is in some way flawed, and it is only by the insistence that scientific knowledge ought to be subjected to rigorous, public, and objective confirmation--even if this ideal is in practice never met for any individual finding or theory--that those flaws can be gradually overcome. This has important political dimensions because there have been many cases of knowledge claiming scientific justification has been employed in repressive or exclusionary policies.

There is, as it happens, a curious genre of French "critical" intellectuals unexpectedly waxing poetic about the norms of rational debate. There's a late essay by Foucault along this lines, but I've forgotten where I saw it. In any event, here's Bourdieu (arguably being sufficiently dialectical):

However, under the cover of saying what a thing really is, what it is
in reality, one is always liable to say what it should be in order to be
really what it is, and so to slide from the descriptive to the normative,
from 'is' to 'ought-to-be'. We have to acknowledge the universality
of the official recognition granted to the imperatives ofuniversality,
a kind of 'spiritual point of honour' of humanity - the imperatives
of cognitive universality which require the negation of the subjective,
the personal, in favour of the transpersonal and the objective; imperatives
of ethical universality which require the negation of egoism
and particular interest in favour of disinterestedness and generosity.
But we must also acknowledge the universality of the actual transgression
of these norms. And analysis of essence has to give way to
historical analysis, the only kind that is capable of describing the very
process of which analysis of essence unwittingly records the result,
that is to say, the movement whereby the 'ought-to-be' advances
through the emergence of universes capable of practically imposing
the norms of ethical and cognitive universality and really obtaining
the sublimated behaviours corresponding to the logical and moral
ideal.
    If the universal does advance, this is because there are social microcosms
which, in spite of their intrinsic ambiguity, linked to their
enclosure in the privilege and satisfied egoism of a separation by
status, are the site of struggles in which the prize is the universal and
in which agents who, to differing degrees depending on their position
and trajectory, have a particular interest in the universal, in reason,
truth, virtue, engage themselves with weapons which are nothing
other than the most universal conquests of the previous struggles.

Down a rabbit hole

I've decided I need to come to a decision, but I haven't decided what are the choices I'm deciding between, and I decidedly don't want to discuss it, which means I can only guess at some of the decisive factors.

More European-Japanese Feudalism Comparisons: Vassalage and the Estates System

Another point from Taming the Samurai. Ikegami repeats an oft-made observation that an important contrast between Japanese and European feudalism is that in Europe, the reciprocal rights and duties of lords and vassals came to be formalized and, ultimately, enforced in legal institutions that often retained some independence from the the crown.

Vassalage is, in principle, an exchange: the vassal contributes manpower or other resources to the political and military projects of the liege-lord, and submits to the latter's command in the field and authority more generally, and in return the vassal shares in the benefits of the liege-lord's concentrated political and military power. These benefits can include the guarantee of the vassal's current territory and its defense against external threats and internal rebellion as well as the acquisition of additional territory (or other resources) as spoils of war or as reward for service. The key question raised by this sort of relationship is about the balance of power: to what extent does the vassal need to submit to the arbitrary authority of the liege-lord, which is closely tied to the question of how secure, in practice, is the vassal's independent control of territory, manpower, and material resources. The ultimate check on both sides is violence: the threat against a problematic vassal is forcible removal and replacement following capture, expulsion, or death, while a dissatisfied vassal can threaten to attack the liege-lord, or even ally with other vassals or even the lord's foreign enemies.

What's distinctive about European feudalism was the extent to which the balance of power between (specifically) the nobility and the monarchies solidified into a set of traditional laws, enforced by institutions representing the privileged "estates" of the realm. In some cases (notably England and in Eastern Europe), there were even "charters" that the nobility extracted from the crown, enumerating their specific legal rights. No such formalized rights existed for the vassal samurai of medieval, let alone Tokugawa-era Japan.

There's an argument sometimes made that these formalized rights and the institutions built up around them were the first seeds of the "rule of law" and "representative (or constitutional) government" in Europe. There is a certain plausibility to this: these were ways in which the rulers were constrained by fixed rules and a segment of a ruler's subjects claimed the right to influence elements of state policy, notably taxation. It is even possible to identify specific continuities: e.g. in the extension of elements of the magna carta to the entire population and the institutional development of parliament in England, the birth of a sovereign national assembly out of the calling of the Estates General in France in 1789.

But overall, I'm dubious. The key question, as I see it, is this: to what extent did this process of formalization actually modify the relations between monarchy and nobility? Accusations against individual nobles leading to imprisonment, exile, or execution, and rebellion by segments of the nobility remained recurrent events through at least the 17th c in France--and they were ended not by the guarantee of noble rights (these were indeed undercut by the creation of ever new royal offices) but instead by their increased subordination to the crown. Indeed, as is often the case with traditional limits on rulers' authority, there were often loopholes. Take the requirement that any royal decree, in order to become law, needed to be "registered" by the parlements, which were composed of the judicial officials of a particular region. This would seem to put a clear constraint on the "legality" of royal actions, and yet, the king could compel the parlements to accept the "legality" of his decrees if only he showed up in person. (Even so, in the 16th and 17th centuries, as well as in the run-up to the Revolution, it occasionally became necessary to arrest or exile uncooperative parlementaires.)

The point, is that looking at European history prior to the revolutions--in England in the 17th centuries and in France, with repercussions across the continent, after 1789--despite an elaborate array of legal and representative institutions, the ultimate arbiter of political disputes was force majeur, and this "ultimate" level was never all that far away.

The flipside is that although Japanese vassals--the samurai--had in principle no legal rights, they were not without leverage. During the medieval period, they could and did defect from one liege to another. Even when this was impossible in the Tokugawa era, lords could be constrained by the traditional hierarchy of the vassal band, by the general tenor of opinion within it, and in some cases even by the shogunate (the overlord of the lords) to which dissatisfied factions of samurai could appeal in the name of protecting "traditional practices."

Mental and physical space, or lack thereof

Spending the last 2 days surrounded by my family practically all the time, I've become intensely aware of how much being alone with my thoughts is a core piece of my everyday experience. Not only because of the particular stressful situation we're dealing with right now, but also simply as a result of the fact that my family has been constantly, physically, present, it's like my entire thought process can't proceed in the way it usually does.

The thing is, I think I like my usual feeling of solitary mental space. I also think I'm usually half in denial about that.

I'm going to refrain from taking this line of thought any farther. (Which is only partially a surrender to the exhaustion arising from the aforementioned stressful situation.)

The revenge of 's'

Fantastic.

The McKinsey report looked at the world’s 30 largest companies between 1995 and 2005, and found that their return on human capital more than doubled, from an average of $35,000 profit per employee to $83,000, leading to this rather frank and nauseating conclusion:

“If a company’s capital intensity doesn’t increase, profit per employee is a pretty good proxy for the return on intangibles. The hallmark of financial performance in today’s digital age is an expanded ability to earn ‘rents’ from intangibles. Profit per employee is one measure of those rents. If a company boosts its profit per employee without increasing its capital intensity, management will increase its rents.”

Of course, when Ames presents this as some recent and new, horrible twist to capitalism, he's missing the key point that it was always this way, just farther below the surface for much of the 20th century.

During the second period of the labour-process, that in which his labour is no longer necessary labour, the workman, it is true, labours, expends labour-power; but his labour, being no longer necessary labour, he creates no value for himself. He creates surplus-value which, for the capitalist, has all the charms of a creation out of nothing. This portion of the working-day, I name surplus labour-time, and to the labour expended during that time, I give the name of surplus-labour. It is every bit as important, for a correct understanding of surplus-value, to conceive it as a mere congelation of surplus labour-time, as nothing but materialised surplus-labour, as it is, for a proper comprehension of value, to conceive it as a mere congelation of so many hours of labour, as nothing but materialised labour. The essential difference between the various economic forms of society, between, for instance, a society based on slave-labour, and one based on wage-labour, lies only in the mode in which this surplus-labour is in each case extracted from the actual producer, the labourer.

Since, on the one hand, the values of the variable capital and of the labour-power purchased by that capital are equal, and the value of this labour-power determines the necessary portion of the working-day; and since, on the other hand, the surplus-value is determined by the surplus portion of the working-day, it follows that surplus-value bears the same ratio to variable capital, that surplus-labour does to necessary labour, or in other words, the rate of surplus-value, s/v = (surplus labour)/(necessary labour). Both ratios, s/v and (surplus labour)/(necessary labour), express the same thing in different ways; in the one case by reference to materialised, incorporated labour, in the other by reference to living, fluent labour.

Bourgeois individualism

Eiko Ikegami argues in the conclusion of Taming the Samurai that although it's true that Japanese culture never developed the form of bourgeois individualism that is often seen as characteristic of capitalist modernity in Western Europe, there did exist in Japan an analogous, if subordinated, ethic of "honorific individualism." Indeed, she points to arguments (made by others) that a similar concept of individualism, based on aristocratic honor, persisted and played an important role in England in the period in which capitalism was first expanding there.

Nonetheless, she more or less accepts the idea that in the long run (i.e. by the time of the Enlightenment and certainly in the 19th century and since) individualism has occupied a key place in Western European political philosophy, and this is bound up with the social structure of capitalism. For the purposes of her argument, which is just to say that there was (despite some claims to the contrary) a principle of oppositional and innovative behavior in Japanese culture, this makes perfect sense.

Yet, as she does sometime seem to hint, however conventional this depiction of the tradition of western political thought it, there are all kinds of problems with it. In the first place, if there's a principle of innovation in what is usually seen as a conformist japanese culture, there's also a very strong principle of control and conformity in the supposed individualism in the west. So, though Hobbes (who Ikegami explicitly mentions) methodologically begins with the interests of the individual, from this starting point he reasons that individuals must in principle forfeit their free power of decision-making to a sovereign. Rousseau, likewise, argues that since society is impossible without some constraint on each individual, the only guarantee of complete freedom is total submersion of the individual in the collective will of the community--or, to put it another way, that the general will should actually come to replace the individual will. Even such an apparently extreme individualist as Bentham can be caught devising means to control all those individuals (as much as it's not fair to tar the guy for a sketch of a prison he once drew . . .). And that doesn't even mention the dissenters, like Burke, or the thinkers of the early 19th century (e.g. Hegel, Comte) who were above all concerned with identifying some way to reconcile the conflicts of individuals into a social whole.

But there's a second problem, which is that even granting a distinctive strand of "individualism" of western thought, the attribution of the emergence of this tendency to the rise of capitalism is dubious at best. In particular, if one wants to rope in the French Enlightenment with this tendency, culminating with the Declaration of the Rights of Man, one has to make sense of the fact that all this arose from a society, and more specifically from a group within that society, that was anything but capitalist.

All this is probably a symptom of the immense difficulty--perhaps practical impossibility--of the kind of cultural comparison that Ikegami's trying to do. On the one hand: cultures, discourses, intellectual traditions, whatever you want to use as your object of analysis can't really be packaged into easily labeled boxes. Instead (and actually, Ikegami gets this exactly right in the body of her analysis), they are dynamic (indeed competitive) fields of social action. That is to say, they are (I'm going to go out on a limb here) universally characterized by multiple, overlapping positions, which individuals have some flexibility in appealing to in making sense of and in making claims in the context of, their day-to-day interactions with one another. Individual artifacts of a culture (whether self-conscious attempts to state principles or values, or texts that are produced in the process of social life) or defined sets of such artifacts can of course be characterized as displaying certain patterns (e.g. an emphasis on "filial piety"), which can be contrasted with the patterns characterizing a set of artifacts from another time and place (e.g. "bourgeois individualism"), but each of those patterns actually exists in a network of relations with other patterns in its own social context, so the fact that "filial piety" can be identified as a pattern in culture A and "bourgeois individualism" can be identified in culture B is of indeterminate significance; since on the one hand there's semi-concealed tension about who exactly one's supposed to be filial to, and on the other, there's something called "bourgeois propriety" as well.

On the other hand, the whole point of such cultural comparisons is to be able to show the dynamic relation of different cultures to different institutional or structural set-ups. Yet, in practice, the comparison ends up relying on already-established interpretations, as in Ikegami's case the connection between individualism and capitalism. So, in the end, nothing really rides on the comparison: on the one side, a superficial stereotype is invoked, and on the other the meat of the argument offered for the interpretation of the culture in question is presented independently of the comparison. (Indeed, typically the comparison is hived off into the introduction and conclusion.) The comparison is just trotted out either to say "Look, this line of argument is analogous to this piece of conventional wisdom," or else to beat up on some stupid piece of eurocentric prejudice--as in Ikegami's case, she reminds us once again that Ruth Benedict's The Chrysanthemum and the Sword is a total mess.



OK, well that's a total mess, but two morals:

• There's a mystique of comparison in historical sociology, which often relies on stereotyped or overly simplistic images of one the cases being used in the comparison, usually taken as somehow the canonical case that the case the author is actually providing original analysis of is a variant or a contrast.
• Cultural systems cannot be easily be broken down and characterized in terms of "values" on "variables." This is in fact in contrast to elements of the material structures of a society (e.g. economic relations, political institutions, and demographic patterns) that can fruitfully be analyzed in this way. This is just another way of saying that it requires, instead, "thick" description.

This is an admission of something

I am now a subscriber of the New Left Review.

If you think about it, it is kind of freakish how much rides on the whims of Anthony Kennedy

"Justice Kennedy, who more often joins the court’s conservative wing in ideologically divided cases, was in this case in a coalition with the court’s four more liberal members. That alignment has sometimes arisen in recent years in cases that seemed to offend Justice Kennedy’s sense of fair play."

Presumably, because of these decisions, some fraction of defendants will get shorter sentences than otherwise, and perhaps some will even be acquitted when they would not otherwise have been. Multiply the number of defendants effected by the length of time each avoids in prison, and you'd be able to say that the Kennedy's "sense of fair play" putting him on one side rather than another in these two cases, determined--purely arbitrarily--x person-days of incarceration. I obviously have no way of guessing what the value of x would be in this case, but given how massive the U.S. justice system is, and the prevalence of plea-bargaining in the context of woefully inadequate resources for public defenders, even if the rate is relatively low, the absolute totals could easily be mind-bogglingly massive.

It is strange to contemplate the last remnants of truly substantial, arbitrary, individual power in the contemporary world. Of course, in some ways that's making a comeback, now that it's the official policy of the U.S. that the President can order the death-by-remote-control of more or less anyone, anywhere, and that individual billionaires can bankroll political campaigns without restriction.

All econobloggers should use French history analogies

Noahpinion: "Like the wars of Louis XIV, the push for a rehabilitation of Old Keynesianism resulted in a lot of sound and fury, but only modest territorial gains."

Despite this, his argument is that actually on a deeper level, in terms of the face of macroeconomics in the public sphere, what he calls "the Krugman insurgency" has had the consequence of once and for all puncturing the image of unity and certainty among economists. Economics no longer speaks at the rest of the public sphere with a single, authoritative voice  ("one thing is for sure - we're not going back to talking about how abortion affects crime rates") but is instead openly a politically volatile field of debate.

And yet, the political bloc that is so often described as being associated with the intellectual hegemony of neoclassical economics--namely, the roll-back of the welfare state or its replacement with market-facilitating policies--is as strong as it's even been, if not stronger. From this perspective, the great service that "the Krugman insurgency" might perform is to demonstrate beyond a doubt that the intellectual products of economists aren't a driving force politically. Indeed, it is possible from within the theoretical presuppositions of mainstream economics to make arguments for the welfare state, for market regulation, etc; if policymakers have ignored those potential arguments, it's a result of their politics and not some feature of the theories they use, or at least cite in their public justifications.

If the circle of students surrounding a couple of professors on my program were to produce a list of "working principles", this would be one of them: "In general, politically well-connected intellectuals are selected on the basis of the balance of social forces, and this produces the affinity between predominant intellectual discourses and the interests of politically dominant groups. Thus, at least as a rule of thumb, the structure of discourse of the most influential intellectuals does not so much cause the biases of political debate and action as vice versa."

A well-earned '(!)'

Double-blind trials in development economics:

In a new paper,  Erwin Bulte of Wageningen University and his colleagues conduct a double-blind (!) test of an agricultural intervention—that is, the treated don’t know whether they are receiving the treatment or the placebo. The treatment is a modern seed of cowpeas, the placebo is the traditional seed. As a second experiment in a different set of villages, they do a normal RCT where the treated know that they are receiving the modern seed. Comparing the results of both experiments reveals some striking results. When the farmers don’t know which seed they are planting, there is no difference between the modern and the traditional seed in terms of yield. When they do know that they are being treated, the modern seeds yield considerably more. What the authors call the “pseudo-placebo effect” therefore accounts for the whole effect that a typical RCT would have found.

The larger lesson is actually probably that there are real limits to the kinds of productivity improvements that can be achieved without reorganizing cultivation to enable capital intensification. In situ improvements like better seeds or more fertilizer have diminishing returns.

Seriously?

The planet podcast is equal parts useful perspectives on current economic conditions, mindless parroting of what economists say, and meaningless triviality tangentially related to the economy.

They've outdone themselves on the 3rd option this time.

Willow Tufano is a 14-year-old girl who recently bought a house in Florida for $12,000.
Willow and her mom split the cost of the house, which they're now renting out. Willow saved up money by selling stuff from foreclosed homes on Craigslist; she plans to buy out her mom's share in the next few years.
We did a radio story about Willow earlier this month. The story took off. Since it aired, Willow has been on Ellen, CNN and ABC News.
On today's show, we hear the original radio story. And we hear more from the neighborhood where Willow lives. It's a place where people who bought at the top of the bubble — including Willow's family — live next to people who bought identical homes at a fraction of the price.
And we discuss whether a 14-year-old girl buying a house is a sign that that housing market has finally bottomed.

Sometimes I get to thinking about death

. . . and it's frankly overwhelming. It feels like a pit in my chest, and I can hardly think of anything else. What seems amazing at those moments, is that I'm ever able to go about happily not thinking about it, even as I know that this feeling will, as it always does, pass before long.

What's funny is that I vaguely remember this happening occasionally as a teenager and in college, but it feels like in the years since then, I've avoided it until the last few months. I'm not sure what that says about where I am in my life right now.

I remember though, from those times before, that the best way to get a hold of myself was to think through, and to try to put into words, what I was feeling. I think, in fact, that that was the original instance of a much more general pattern for me, that my worries somehow became less powerful if I fixed them as words. Once I can get myself thinking about my process of thinking about something, it distracts me from thinking and worrying about it. By turning my worries into objects of analysis, I gain distance from them.

This is surely an admirable tactic to break out of feeling overwhelmed by the idea of death, because as far as that goes the only option is to not think about it. But for other things, for worries about work and relationships, there is perhaps reason for concern, because it would be better to confront and respond to them, instead of merely finding a way to not worry about them.

This post, of course, is an instance of what it is describing . . . I think I'm getting dizzy from the reflexivity.

IV. the collapse of the ancien regime

A Sketch of the Capitalist Revolution in Europe (IV)

The French Revolution broke the equilibrium decisively. Had the revolution not occurred, many of the same changes would still have happened in 19th c Europe, but it is difficult to imagine them being implanted as quickly or as decisively in the German and Italian principalities as they in fact were on the point of the Revolutionary and Imperial sword.

Yet, only in a very limited way can it be called a "bourgeois revolution." The tensions that led to the breakdown of the royal state were not directly related to any conflict between capitalist economic relations and absolutist political institutions. Instead, the stage was set for the revolution when a fiscal crisis became a political crisis setting the monarchy against the office-holding nobility, which sought to defend and expand its capacity to shape royal policy. This was continuation of the recurrent political struggle of royal absolutism, but when the king called the Estates General, it metastasized into a far deeper crisis of the connection between noble status and access to the political power (and economic resources) of the state. The revolutionary protagonists were not capitalists but instead legal functionaries of the ancien regime who more often than not reacted to rather than led the actions of the smallholding peasantry and the urban "little people."

Nonetheless, the pressure of popular demands, combined with the exigencies of re-establishing the institutions of rule in the absence of the absolute monarchical authority that had been the central pivot of relative political power of elites, as well as the problems of financing a Continental war, compelled the various Revolutionary regimes to do away with almost all of the forms of privately appropriated political power that had been the sine qua non of the position of pre-Revolutionary elites.

conventionally radical

Let's call it 'radical common sense'

Beyond the narcissism, this is where the lies come from, and where the belief comes from that a lie is true, must be. The truth is not enough, these people think; I have to tell the story that will get results, results that will testify to their deeper truth.

But the deeper problem, I think, is that telling stories is the only way these people can conceptualize getting results. And because appealing to the public sphere to be scandalized and to demand reforms is the only kind of result they can envision – because this is how they imagine justice works – the story will inevitably become what it needs to be to appeal to that kind of conscience, whatever will appeal to that sense of the public’s fickle taste. No one in the West will care about the reality of Syrian repression, thinks Tom MacMaster; I need to invent an Angelic White Victim to speak in place of those whose stories are not, as such, sufficiently compelling to compel action can only speak and be unheard.
[. . .]
It’s hard to imagine a future without militaries or a world without capitalist production, because we don’t live in that world, or that future; everything we do know about the range of possibilities we inhabit is derived from the economic and political conditions of it, of our knowable world. And since we live in a world that produces capitalist exploitation as reliably and as organically as militaries produce conflict and police produce criminals, we will always have difficulty in imagining what a system that didn’t organically do so would look like; we will tend to be confined to the solutions which that system produces for itself, which the world we live in makes thinkable, possible. In short: we can imagine killing Kony, or fining or shunning Apple only because doing so would do nothing to disable the systemic forces that make Kony possible in the first place, would do nothing to change the system that makes it economically “necessary” to treat workers the way Foxconn does.

The limitations of the politics of telling stories to scandalize the public sphere. The limitations on imagination imposed by social structure. Yes, of course, well said.

But somehow it feels as if it's by rote, both the essay itself and my "of course" reaction. That says as much about me as about the essay, that I've passively absorbed enough intellectualized radicalism that I've developed an "of course" reaction. Yet that also means that intellectualized radicalism is enough of a codified genre that it's possible to pick up its cues passively over a few years. I suppose there's nothing wrong with being a genre, establishing its conventions as common-sense for the genre's practitioners and audience.

I feel like there's a point I've not quite gotten to yet, but maybe I'll return to this later.

Vintage advertisements

"Inspired by 'Mad Men'"

The makeup ad is the best: "Shake. Stir. Seduce." Because that show does nothing if not depict an era that women would want to recover by their choice of lipstick.

Also, how nice of Newsweek to demonstrate so thoroughly how low it's fallen. (Well, not that it really fell from that high, but still.)

A twist too far?

Consider:

Thus an individual not only becomes captive to the legal system through the cop’s noticing and profiling but, in being constrained to absolute obedience, can be criminalized and subjected to arrest in fact for defense of his/her dignity, self-respect, or sense of justice. Defense of one’s humanity or self-respect can also be construed as an actual assault on the law if the officer decides to assault that self-respect violently. This goes beyond the mere criminalization of behavior that it relies on; it constitutes the ability to criminalize a person’s personhood and sense of justice itself.

Thus, profiling and its attendant aggressiveness imply that the police have arrogated to themselves the power to determine who will be human, whose self-respect will be respected, whose autonomy and independence will go unpunished, and whose not. While the overt nature of this self-arrogation of power is a demand for obedience, its overall political import is a demand for obeisence. Obeisence differs from obedience in the same way profiling differs from law enforcement. In obedience, one stands as a person in relation to that which one obeys; in obeisence, one abandons one’s standing as a person to the transcendent meaning of an icon or concept to which one must abject oneself. In disobedience, one only criminalizes oneself; non-obeisence becomes a criminalized status imposed gratuitously by the institution that demands obeisence.

This returns us to the question of impunity. “Impunity” is not simply a result of police departments offering internal solidarity to those officers who act with brutality or criminalize people. It names the hyper-political context in which the police not only stands above both police regulations and legal prohibitions against torture or murder, but become a law unto themselves, to which they can demand obeisence.

This passage is from a sobering discussion of the kind of power the police have to arbitrarily target individuals. Yet, I can't help but feel that it goes off the rails a little bit in these paragraphs. The point being made, that a cop can for all practical purposes manipulate a person into being in a position to be legally labeled criminal, despite having done nothing illegal before the cop decided to target them, is extremely powerful in its own right. The writer here, however, tries to develop that into "the ability to criminalize a person’s personhood and sense of justice itself." What is ostensibly a means for the cop to manufacture cause to arrest whoever they choose--namely to put the "suspect" into a position in which any reasonable person would resist--becomes an end, or perhaps at least a strategy to criminalize the having-of-human-qualities that leads individuals to "criminally" resist the cops. This strikes me as wrapping up in far too complicated verbiage something that is quite comprehensible without it.

But perhaps what seems to me to be a more straightforwardly comprehensible formulation fails to capture the full depth of the issue as actually experienced by its victims.

Irrational rationalization in marketing

A few weeks old, but I finally read the article that features Target's ability to tell a customer is a pregnant woman just by what she buys.

I was surprised to discover that half of the article was actually about the "science of habit formation," which amounts to a kind of gussied up behavioralism in which the usual schema of stimulus-response is expanded to "cue, routine, reward." As is the wont of gee-whiz science journalism, the author seems to have an inflated view of the insightfulness of this formula. Take this passage:

“With the pregnancy products, though, we learned that some women react badly,” the executive said. “Then we started mixing in all these ads for things we knew pregnant women would never buy, so the baby ads looked random. We’d put an ad for a lawn mower next to diapers. We’d put a coupon for wineglasses next to infant clothes. That way, it looked like all the products were chosen by chance.

“And we found out that as long as a pregnant woman thinks she hasn’t been spied on, she’ll use the coupons. She just assumes that everyone else on her block got the same mailer for diapers and cribs. As long as we don’t spook her, it works.”

In other words, if Target piggybacked on existing habits — the same cues and rewards they already knew got customers to buy cleaning supplies or socks — then they could insert a new routine: buying baby products, as well. There’s a cue (“Oh, a coupon for something I need!”) a routine (“Buy! Buy! Buy!”) and a reward (“I can take that off my list”). And once the shopper is inside the store, Target will hit her with cues and rewards to entice her to purchase everything she normally buys somewhere else. As long as Target camouflaged how much it knew, as long as the habit felt familiar, the new behavior took hold.

What's remarkable here is that the "in other words" of the final paragraph doesn't clarify what's being expressed in the quotes from the previous two, but instead makes it needlessly more complicated. The Target executive is talking, quite straightforwardly about the targeted customers getting offended about the idea that the company was deducing that they were pregnant from their purchasing behavior. It has nothing to do with whether "the habit felt familiar" or not, and nothing to do with cues, routines, or rewards. Instead, it's about the customers' sense of privacy, and as long as Target avoided making customers feel like that had been violated, it could nudge buying behavior. In fact, I'm pretty sure I saw this same passage quoted elsewhere, to make the point about privacy, completely annoying the extraneous stuff about habits.

Anyways, on to the non-silly parts of the article. I suppose there's a lot that could be said about the "technology" of marketing and statistical analysis used by Target and Procter & Gamble, and about the manipulation of individuals' behavior through it. Were I better socialized in the norms of my academic discipline, I probably would write about that. But instead, what I take away from this is the utter irrationality, in a typically capitalist fashion, of what these companies are described as doing. Leaving aside the utterly classic "manufacture of wants" by P&G, Target's data analysis is a truly astonishing example of immense effort and technical sophistication going into an activity that has a social utility of exactly zero. Target's marketers try to find out when its customers are moving or having a child in order to get them to shop at Target as opposed to somewhere else. They wouldn't have had any trouble getting the product elsewhere, if the Target coupon hadn't conveniently arrive when it did, and though they might save a bit of money on the product in question, the whole premise of the operation is that that will be outweighed by the non-discounted products they'll buy at Target when they're there just because it's more convenient. On the whole, competition in capitalism is the engine that produces ongoing economic growth: in order to offer a product slightly cheaper than the competition, and thus expand market share, a firm improves its productivity, and when competitors match the leader's improved productivity, the price charged to consumers falls accordingly, freeing up money that can be used for other goods and services, and thus marginally expanding the material wealth of society. However, the production or distribution of goods is not a whit more efficient because Target has managed to statistically pinpoint its marketing; the only benefit goes to Target at the expense of other retailers. And don't even get me started on how this puts the lie to the idea that the price system is what transmits information about supply and demand: both the P&G and Target cases in the story show clearly that far from passively observing the information in prices, capitalist firms routinely go out and actively investigate (not to mention try to manipulate) what consumers will buy.

File under "problems I didn't know we had"

"To restore ecosystems’ acoustic health, researchers must learn, to the last raindrop, what compositions nature would play without us."

Where else other than the nyt magazine?

Correlation potpourri!

"caregivers, subsistence food producers, water and fuelwood collections, and reproducers of human life" . . . ?!

The 2nd sentence belongs in the Social Science Abstract Hall of Fame.

Women’s Status and Carbon Dioxide Emissions: A Quantitative Cross-National Analysis

from ScienceDirect Publication: Social Science Research

Publication year: 2012
Source:Social Science Research
Christina Ergas, Richard York
Global climate change is one of the most severe problems facing societies around the world. Very few assessments of the social forces that influence greenhouse gas emissions have examined gender inequality. Empirical research suggests that women are more likely than men to support environmental protection. Various strands of feminist theory suggest that this is due to women’s traditional roles as caregivers, subsistence food producers, water and fuelwood collectors, and reproducers of human life. Other theorists argue that women’s status and environmental protection are linked because the exploitation of women and the exploitation of nature are interconnected processes. For these theoretical and empirical reasons, we hypothesize that in societies with greater gender equality there will be relatively lower impacts on the environment, controlling for other factors. We test this hypothesis using quantitative analysis of cross-national data, focusing on the connection between women’s political status and CO2 emissions per capita. We find that CO2 emissions per capita are lower in nations where women have higher political status, controlling for GDP per capita, urbanization, industrialization, militarization, world-system position, foreign direct investment, the age dependency ratio, and level of democracy. This finding suggests that efforts to improve gender equality around the world may work synergistically with efforts to curtail global climate change and environmental degradation more generally.

Hear no politics, see no politics, speak no politics

Apparently, Swiss voters have just rejected a referendum that would have raised the minimum vacation time from 4 to 6 weeks. Which lead Scott Sumner to say this:

I see two possible interpretations for this vote.  First, it may be the case that all Europeans prefer 4 weeks vacations, but other governments don’t give them the chance to vote on the issue.  (By analogy, many Europeans supported the death penalty when their governments abolished the practice.)  But my hunch is that a referendum on moving back from 6 to 4 weeks would fail in many Western European countries.  In my view a more plausible argument is that the Swiss vote reflects the lower income tax rates in Switzerland, as compared to other Western European countries.  Thus is a tax sense, Switzerland resembles the US more than France.  A third explanation might be cultural, but my gut instinct tells me that a 2 to 1 vote against 6 weeks of vacation represents more than cultural differences.  That’s a pretty overwhelming vote.

[As an aside, I anticipate many commenters putting way more weight on cultural factors than they actually deserve.  When US MTRs on the rich were very high in the 1950s, wives of well-paid men rarely worked.  When MTRs fell sharply between the 1960s and 1980s, wives of well-paid men became much more likely to work.  Just the opposite happened to the labor force participation rate of poorer women, as their implicit MTRs rose a lot between the 1950s and 1980s.  But the effect of MTRs seems "invisible" to most people, hence both liberals and conservatives are likely to see these changes in cultural terms.  Liberals see more well-educated women working as being the result of feminism, and conservatives see less poor women working as representing cultural regress away from Victorian values.  Also note that when French tax rates were similar to US rates in the 1960s, they worked similar hours.]

It is an odd conceit of discussion of things like labor regulation among mainstream economists that they must be phrased in terms of individual preferences. Thus, someone like Krugman will point out that lower per capita production in say, France, is in large part the result of the French working less, and that this is at least plausibly rational as the result of a trade-off between work and leisure. I think this is what Sumner is referring to when he rejects a "cultural" explanation in favor of an emphasis on the individual return-to-work, i.e. marginal tax rates.

What is so odd about this is that it insists on looking at the issue entirely in terms of individual preferences for work, whether resulting from "cultural" preferences or marginal incentives. This, out of no reason except for pure ignorance, pretty much rejects the entire literature on comparative political economy, which sees the main explanatory factor as the legacy of institution formation as the result of the political balance among organized social groups. From this perspective, the most important fact in the news story that Sumner is quoting from is one that he omits: ". . . but business groups warned about the cost to the economy." Business groups say this about all labor market interventions, and whether or not they such interventions are put in place is largely a product of the organization of the labor movements and the strength of left or labor parties (which has secondary effects via the adaptive response of center-right parties).

The problem facing the individual is not merely the collective action issues of the trade-off between work and leisure (i.e., that employers expect a certain minimum of time spent at work, and it's often impossible to negotiate even a proportional reduction of both work and pay), which is the only issue the economists admit, but also the problem of judging the claims are the business class. The "cost to the economy" is a real concern for even the poorest members of society. If increased vacation reduces productivity and thus profits enough to restrict economic growth, than everyone really does suffer in the form of lower employment and constrained wage growth. Thus, they have good reason to take the warnings of business groups seriously, and overcoming these concerns requires political organization on the other side. This is more or less what politics has been about under capitalism, and economists are willfully ignoring it when they talk exclusively in terms of individual incentives and preferences.

About the parenthetical: even from a narrow economist's perspective, this is exceptionally daft, because it assumes out of existence the gender-wage gap--to put it in language that Sumner could understand, it's kind of like a high marginal tax rate (30% even today!) on being female. I don't know whether the correlations he's identifying hold, but at the very least he's describing trends that operated roughly simultaneously (I also couldn't find evidence that the labor participation rate of poor women decreased . . .). Notice again that he's thinking in terms of personal rather than social factors, thus feminism => increased desire among well-educated women to work => increased labor participation rate, as opposed to feminism => reduced barriers to entering high-status professions/reduced wage gap => increased labor participation.

Note of course that other than in the U.S., the highest female labor participation rates are in the northern european social democracies (another standard stylized fact of comparative political economy). Oh, and what about when there was not even an income tax that would have cut into wages received by "the wives of well-paid men"? It's like he's hardly even trying.

Oh no

There's really nothing else to be said about this right now. I'll try to read it at some point and we'll see whether I'm so overcome with rage that I need to vent.

The Tale of Two Obamas

from Qualitative Sociology

Abstract 

In this paper I trace the tensions between structure and agency, the racial and the postracial, as they intersect and clash in the body of Barack Obama, and the US Presidency more broadly. These tensions are examined in the context of contemporary neoliberal political economy and its hyper-extenuated condition, neo-neoliberalism. Finally, the condition of postraciality is read through a critical analysis of the writings of Shelby Steele on Obama and a conceptualization of Obama the Person and Obama the Phenom.

• Content Type Journal Article
• Category Essay
• Pages 1-12
• DOI 10.1007/s11133-012-9222-8
• Authors
  • David Theo Goldberg, Humanities Research Institute, University of California, Irvine, CA, USA

• Journal Qualitative Sociology

• Online ISSN 1573-7837

• Print ISSN 0162-0436

A failed attempt at humanist history

Still working though Harootunian's Toward Restoration. I've been trying to make sense of what it is he's trying to do, and I think the right term for it is "humanist history." The model I have in mind is Edmund Wilson's To the Finland Station, which as the subtitle, "A Study in the Writing and Acting of History"--which could just as well be attached to Harootunian's work as well. The thing is, I think Toward Restoration fails where To the Finland Station succeeds to at least some extent.

Both books are organized into a series of studies of individual writers, in which the idiosyncratic development of each subject's work is intertwined with an overarching narrative of successive attempts to confront the problem of, as the subtitle says, "writing and acting" history. The difficulty of this procedure, as I see it, is that it relies on a basic irony: the author locates each of his subjects' attempts to understand and act in history within a historical narrative that the subjects themselves do not, and probably could not grasp. This is a delicate balancing act, between on the one hand merely showing how each thinker discussed was wrong and, on the other, refusing to bring each thinker's ideas about history into a critical confrontation with the actual course of history as the author understands it.

I should note that I think that both of these extremes can in fact serve as the basis for legitimate forms of historical scholarship. The former, taken to its logical conclusion, views the particularities are intellectuals' arguments and the programmatic statements of political leaders as, if not themselves mere expressions of personal or class interest, then in effect as random deviations around the basic configuration of political and economic forces. The deviations cancel out on average and so in terms of understanding historical development in a given time and place, the work of intellectuals and political ideologues can be treated as instrumental to the conflict among groups with concrete interests defined by the structure of social relations and institutions. This is, in fact, more or less the kind of history (let's call it "social") that I want to write. The latter I take to reflect the predominant approach of the academic humanities disciplines, in which texts are interpreted and analyzed as part of ongoing traditions of thought. History provides context, but ultimately the "action" as it were is in the continuity and change among texts themselves.

The kind of humanist history that Harootunian is trying to write rejects both of these options. He doesn't say so explicitly (though his 1990 preface says something like this in opaque post-structuralist terminology), but his objection to social history is that it doesn't take historical actors' work of interpreting the world seriously and to the academic humanities that, ultimately, why should we care about the thought of, say, Yoshida Shoin except insofar as it can be seen as an attempt to grapple with real historical problems that we also feel the salience of?

I call the attempt a failure because he is unable to muster the necessary irony. He falls into a mere restatement of the doctrines of the thinkers he discusses; indeed, he could even be said to be inflating them by rewording them into his own terms. His subjects are ultimately spared the reckoning with history. To put this another way, Harootunian never critically assesses how his subjects' ideas interacted with social actions and relations in practice. He's constantly talking about how they "created spaces" or "conceived of action" with their thought, but there's no discussion of what the "political space" of the 1850s-60s, or even of the Meiji era, actually looked like, or of what kinds of actions had a decisive impact on the history of this period. This is a problem because (and Harootunian doesn't hide this fact, he just fails to work out its implications) the ways these writer developed their thought had only the barest relationship to how things actually developed. Expulsionism was an utter failure by the mid-1860s and the "restoration" of imperial rule was in practice merely the cover for the formation of an authoritarian central state run by a small clique of former samurai, which in the course of 1870s ejected from government, alienated, and suppress with military force many of the staunchest advocates of the ideology that had ostensibly moved the restoration movement in the previous decade. What is more, insofar as many of the ideas of the imperial loyalists lived on, their legacy was in the virulent militarism and ultranationalism of the later meiji era and, even more so, the 1920s-30s.

Yet, you would know none of this from Harootunian's analysis. The result reduces to the standard text-centric methodology of the academic humanities dressed up with pretensions of providing insight on grand generalities like "history" and "action" and "political space."

I read Daniel Larison for passages like this

I guess you could call him my favorite paleoconservative . . .

It is an exaggeration to say that the “third way” was buried in 2008. Let’s remember that the eventual 2008 Democratic nominee ran a fairly cautious campaign that put him to the right of both Clinton and Edwards, and it is difficult to see how Obama has actually governed as a left-populist. He pandered to anti-NAFTA sentiment as a candidate, but in office he has been a less-than-enthusiastic but reliable supporter of free trade agreements. Indeed, on virtually every issue Obama has arguably been less liberal than Bill Clinton as these things are conventionally defined, and even on health care the legislation that Obama signed was far less ambitious than anything Bill Clinton proposed, and for that reason it remains unsatisfying to many progressives. It must be mystifying to those progressives how anyone on the other side of the spectrum can see Obama as a left-wing ideologue, just as it was baffling to many of us on the right how Bush could be perceived as a big right-winger. The more insufferably “centrist” an administration is, the more its partisan opponents feel compelled to portray it as radical.

Of course, we call Bush a radical right-winger because we define the right wing as imperialist and hard-line defense of capitalists, which he was. Of course, by this definition the "third way" was the name given for the formerly left-of-center party signing on with the policies of what had been the far right wing of American (and British) politics through the 80s, which the right then took as an authorization to really go for broke. Of course, the "right wing" by comparison to which Larison wants to call Bush not-right-wing is just no more a purely imaginary political force than the "left" by comparison to which Obama is not-left-wing. The difference, though, is that although it has little or no force in contemporary politics, the left in this sense, has historically been a powerful force; unlike Larison's conservatism which I'm inclined to think has always been a pious mirage of a certain brand of disaffected intellectuals.

Do no harm

Sometimes Juan Cole can be kind of annoying:

The world community has failed Syria, just as it failed Rwanda and the Congo, though the human toll in Syria is a fraction of those killed in the African events. Russia and China have used their veto to block any effective United Nations Security Council resolution that might lead to regime change. India has also, unlike the Arab League, opposed any call for President Bashar al-Assad, the Butcher of Homs, to step down.

Those on the left and in the libertarian movement who stridently condemned Arab League and NATO intervention in Libya (which forestalled massacres like the one we just saw in the Baba Amr district of Homs) have been silent about al-Assad’s predations and clueless as to what to do practically. Perhaps they do not care if indigenous dictators massacre indigenous protesters, as long as there is no *gasp* international intervention.

Perhaps being "clueless as to what to do practically" is actually the realistic response? After all, as Cole seems to acknowledge later, in pure military terms Assad's grip on power is much stronger than Gaddafi's was, and so it's highly unlikely that a little logistical and air support is going to be enough to unseat him, as it was in Libya--and even there it was a close thing. So what exactly should the "world community" [ha] be doing? Sanctions? Because those have worked so well everywhere else they've been tried (Cuba, Iraq, Iran . . . ). Forceful statements of displeasure? His random mention of India implies Cole wants more of that. I suppose that would make us all feel better (and avoid accusations of not caring) but it's not going to make a whit of practical difference on the ground.

Yes, one bourgeois prejudice per paragraph is the proper rate for a blog on the Economist's website

The first offends my professional judgement, though the second is the more politically virulent by far.

I WANT to elaborate on one particular aspect of the institutional arguments in "Why Nations Fail". In the book, Mssrs Acemoglu and Robinson tell the story of a sad gentleman named William Lee. Lee was an English priest who invented a knitting machine in 1589 that promised to make the production of knitted garments dramatically faster and easier. Unfortunately for him, Britain had not yet evolved the institutions that would support extensive private enterprise. Queen Elizabeth essentially told him where to put his machine, and it would be two centuries more before significant automation came to the knitting industry.

I was thinking of that while reading through Alex Tabarrok's ebook "Launching the Innovation Renaissance". Mr Tabarrok notes that innovation is a critical source of sustainable economic growth, but he argues that barriers have arisen to innovation and entrepreneurship in several critical areas. Teachers unions are one example; a more educated workforce is needed to develop new technologies, but interests opposed to reform of America's school system make it difficult to invest appropriately in human capital.

This is backwards

This essay is an interesting take on the problem of graduate education in the U.S., but it also exemplifies an annoying tic of the humanities [bold added]:

[An academic discipline] is a self-governing and largely closed community of practitioners who have an almost absolute power to determine the standards for entry, promotion, and dismissal in their fields. [. . . ]The return to the disciplines for this method of organizing themselves is social authority: the product is guaranteed by the expertise the system is designed to create. Incompetent practitioners are not admitted to practice, and incompetent scholarship is not disseminated.


Since it is the system that ratifies the product—ipso facto, no one outside the community of experts is qualified to rate the value of the work produced within it—the most important function of the system is not the production of knowledge. It is the reproduction of the system. To put it another way, the most important function of the system, both for purposes of its continued survival and for purposes of controlling the market for its products, is the production of the producers. The academic disciplines effectively monopolize (or attempt to monopolize) the production of knowledge in their fields, and they monopolize the production of knowledge producers as well. This is why, for example, you cannot take a course in the law (apart from legal history) outside a law school. In fact, law schools urge applicants to major in areas outside the law. They say that this makes lawyers well-rounded, but it also helps to ensure that future lawyers will be trained only by other lawyers. It helps lawyers retain a monopoly on knowledge of the law.
[. . .]
Disciplines are self-regulating in this way for good academic freedom reasons. The system of credentialing and specialization maintains quality and protects people within the field from being interfered with by external forces. The system has enormous benefits, but only for the professionals. The weakest professional, because he or she is backed by the collective authority of the group, has an almost unassailable advantage over the strongest non-professional (the so-called independent scholar) operating alone, since the non-professional must build a reputation by his or her own toil, while the professional’s credibility is given by the institution. That is one of the reasons that people are willing to pay the enormous price in time and income forgone it takes to get the degree: the credential gives them access to the resources of scholarship and to the networks of scholars that circulate their work around the world. The non-academic writer or scholar is largely deprived of those things. This double motive—ensuring quality by restricting access—is reflected in the argument all professions offer as their justification: in order to serve the needs of others properly, professions must be accountable only to themselves.

What annoys me about this is that it gets everything upside down: it talks about the institutional organization of the discipline as being all about the monopolization of knowledge, while completely disregarding the fact that the actual carrots and sticks held by the discipline depend on its control of the material resources without which knowledge production is possible. The "unassailable advantage" of the "professional" academic is not that they have a PhD but that they receive a salary for producing academic work. Indeed, a very large proportion of professional academics (professors at lower-tier state schools and adjuncts everywhere, many of whom do in fact have PhDs) produce very little academic work at all, because they aren't paid to do research at all but instead to cover a heavy teaching load. The reason "people are willing to pay the enormous price in time and income forgone" for a PhD is that the alternative is to read thousands of pages of scholarship in one's spare time--i.e., not terribly realistic.

The example of law is awkward for his case, because legal scholarship is a side-show. "Future lawyers will be trained only by other lawyers" not because of the organization of the discipline of the law but because of requirements of being licensed to practice law, which are built into the very judicial system in the u.s.

So, it's not that social authority follows from an exclusive disciplinary organization, but instead it is the ability of a discipline to monopolize resources that enables it (or, really, even gives it a reason to) create an exclusionary structure. It is true, as the essay does mention, that as resources become scarce, the natural reaction of the discipline is to make its entry procedures ever more exclusive, and, as the essay argues, this might lead to irrational results, including an excessive conformity in the discipline. There might even be something to the essay's conclusion that it might make sense to make the whole degree-granting process less restrictive, but that would do nothing for the fundamental problem that the "pie" of resources for scholarship in the humanities and social sciences is just not all that large. People go into debt to get MDs and JDs, because they are professional degrees that promise a desirable and lucrative career path. Who would do that for a 3-year PhD? After all, "the many students who, after completing college, yearn for deeper immersion in academic inquiry, but who cannot envision spending six years or more struggling through a graduate program and then finding themselves virtually disqualified for anything but a teaching career that they cannot count on having" already do have a post-grad option: getting an MA. The MA is a joke in the academic world precisely because it is insane: students have to pay for it, and it leads into a career neither in academia nor anywhere else.

Sociologists are annoying

Gross, Neil and Ethan Fosse. 2012. "Why are professors liberal?" Theory and Society 41(2): 127-168.

In short, self selection. I.e., once a profession (particularly one with such high entrance barriers as the academy, though the authors don't emphasize this point) develops both a reputation for and an internal institutional culture around a particular political orientation, individuals self-select into that profession (and, surely, so some extent the incumbents select candidates, though again the authors minimize this for no apparent reason) so as to reproduce the political orientation. Oh, and by the way, this article gives almost no positive evidence for this hypothesis, but instead do a statistical analysis that shows that other hypothesized explanatory factors are ok but not great predictors.

So, basically, it boils down to this: "There's been a lot of writing on this topic over the years, and all the theories advanced have had poor empirical basis or don't really resolve the question. We demonstrate this once again with great thoroughness and then offer our own speculation on the question." One way this is annoying is in the sense of, "This shit got published in Theory and Society?"

But the deeper annoying part is that not only do they not offer evidence for their "theory," they don't even actually offer an answer to the question but instead merely move it back in time: Why are professors liberal (i.e. left-of-center) in opinion polls? Because left-of-center types were more likely than others to become professors in 20th c America. So, why were left-of-center types more likely than others to become professors in 20th c America? Who knows? They give this question exactly one paragraph in a 40-page article:

How might the American professoriate have acquired its reputation for liberalism, becoming politically typed? This is a complex historical question tied to a variety of macro- and meso-level developments that we do not have space to broach, but we argue that the answer has much to do with “public dramas” (Gusfield 1984) over secularization and academic freedom that accompanied the birth of the American research university and that reflected on the ground processes by which long-term dynamics such as institutional differentiation played themselves out (Parsons and Platt 1973); with the diffusion to the United States of social-critical notions of intellectualism that had their origins in Dreyfus-era France (Eyerman 1994); with the fact that higher education was a crucial micromobilization context for a number of left social movements in the 1960s and 1970s, which further enhanced the institution’s liberal reputation; with concerted cultural efforts by American conservatives, especially from the 1950s on, to build a collective identity for their movement around differentiation from various categories of “liberal elites,” not least liberal professors; with restricted opportunities for Americans on the far left to enter other institutional spheres; and with self-reinforcing processes by which self-selection into the academic profession by liberals resulted in a more liberal professoriate whose reputation for liberalism was thereby maintained or enhanced.

These are all vaguely plausible, but half of them beg the question of where the initial reputation for left-liberalism came from and the other half seem to suggest a return to the very universalistic explanations (about the critical outlook, secularism, etc, of intellectuals) that the authors rejected to get here in the first place.

In the end, it's plainly obvious the authors completely lack even a rudimentary theory of political formation: what are the origins of competing political viewpoints in society, and what determines the distribution of individuals among them? Instead, their "explanation" of professorial left-liberalism goes back only to the prior facts that there were such things as leftism, left-liberalism, and conservatism, which happened to play out in practice such that the 1st two were much more common in the academy than the 3rd, which instead took to using the academy as a rhetorical punching bag from the 1950s at the latest.

My favorite bourgeois intellectual

Tyler Cowen may be my favorite bourgeois economist, but title of my favorite bourgeois intellectual goes not to him but instead to Stanley Fish. The reason is that he wholly embraces the value fragmentation of modern society that has always been a central concern of bourgeois thought. He refuses to paper over that fragmentation with liberal platitudes, nor does he offer a way to transcend it. He instead asserts it as an insurmountable fact of life, in a seemingly radical move that is actually an apology for political cynicism.

This is usually most visible in his discussions of the academy--specifically, the humanities--in which he pleads guilty on behalf of the whole intellectual enterprise to the charge that it has no justification for its existence aside from being intrinsically interesting. This week, though, he displays a different twist, by resisting the convention of political debate in which one aside highlights something offensive said by a member of the other side, and then that side accuses the first of a double standard for not raising a fuss when one of their members had said something similar previously. The occasion was the Limbaugh shit from this past week, and this is where he ends up:

If we think about the Rush Limbaugh dust-up from the non-liberal — that is, non-formal — perspective, the similarity between what he did and what Schultz and Maher did disappears. Schultz and Maher are the good guys; they are on the side of truth and justice. Limbaugh is the bad guy; he is on the side of every nefarious force that threatens our democracy. Why should he get an even break?

There is no answer to that question once you step outside of the liberal calculus in which all persons, no matter what their moral status as you see it, are weighed in an equal balance. Rather than relaxing or soft-pedaling your convictions about what is right and wrong, stay with them, and treat people you see as morally different differently. Condemn Limbaugh and say that Schultz and Maher may have gone a bit too far but that they’re basically O.K. If you do that you will not be displaying a double standard; you will be affirming a single standard, and moreover it will be a moral one because you will be going with what you think is good rather than what you think is fair. “Fair” is a weak virtue; it is not even a virtue at all because it insists on a withdrawal from moral judgment.

I know the objections to what I have said here. It amounts to an apology for identity politics. It elevates tribal obligations over the universal obligations we owe to each other as citizens. It licenses differential and discriminatory treatment on the basis of contested points of view. It substitutes for the rule “don’t do it to them if you don’t want it done to you” the rule “be sure to do it to them first and more effectively.” It implies finally that might makes right. I can live with that.

The final two sentences are truly exemplary. Instead of playing along with the make-believe of liberal intellectuals that there is such a thing as a potentially neutral political sphere, he not only denies its existence but also refuses to concede that that is some sort of tragedy. "Might makes right, but I can live with that." What choice do we have!

"Partisan polarization"

One of most annoying memes of centrist commentariat is the idea that the major political problem in the contemporary U.S. is an exacerbation of "polarization" between the democrats and republicans. Via the economist, here's Ezra Klein:

Take any issue that you’ve actually heard a lot about. The headline clashes. The big-ticket bills. They’ve all got money on both sides. They’ve all got platoons of lobbyists swarming onto Capitol Hill. They’ve all got activists and interest groups and even ordinary Americans pestering their congressmen. And they all go the same way: the Democrats vote with the Democrats, and the Republicans vote with the Republicans.

That’s true even when the big money lines up in favor of another outcome. In 2011, the Chamber of Commerce and the AFL-CIO joined together to call for a major reinvestment in American infrastructure. None passed. In 2010, most of the health care industry was either supportive or neutral on the Affordable Care Act, and if any one of them could have swung the votes of even a few Republican senators or congressmen, the desperate Democrats would have let them write almost anything they wanted into the bill. But not one Republican budged. In 2009, the Chamber of Commerce endorsed the stimulus bill as a necessary boost to the economy. Not one House Republican voted for it. Almost every major business group has been calling for tax reform and a big, Simpson-Bowles-like deficit reduction package for years now. But Congress remains deadlocked.

Klein is arguing that the political influence of wealthy interests, through contributions and the entire lobbying apparatus of "access," is greatly exaggerated. But notice the language of his supposed counter-evidence: "joined together to call for", "either supportive or neutral", "endorsed", "has been calling for." These all describe the public stances of various groups, but the hypothesis he is arguing against is precisely that the mechanism through which such groups exerts power is not their public pronouncements but their in-the-trenches lobbying efforts. The question is whether any of these groups actually mobilized their resources behind any of these initiatives: after all, politicians have an incentive to respond to the suggestions of even their most powerful supporters only insofar as there would be potential consequences--even intangible, in terms of "relationships"--if they don't. This doesn't disprove Klein's claims, it merely shows that his supposed evidence has no bearing on the claims he's challenging

What does put pressure more directly on Klein's view is that he's being very selective in the cases he's mentioning. The pattern he describes is indeed nearly universal during Obama's presidency. The scorched-earth policy of the republican party in the past 3 years is a curious phenomenon, and probably does require an explanation, but it is also relatively unique to this most recent period. Thinking back the past 20 years or so, most "big ticket bills" were completely bi-partisan affairs: welfare reform, financial deregulation, the bush tax cuts, "no child left behind", medicare drug coverage, and so on. Other than Obama's health care reform (which, it should be noted, despite being passed only on a narrow partisan basis in the end, was more or less written to be maximally appealing and profitable to the health care industry), these were all far more politically important than the fights Klein mentions.

The final issue in the passage I quoted from Klein is also noteworthy, for a slightly different reason. It is true that there is a big campaign for "deficit reduction." Klein's presentation would make it seem like one side was supporting the prevalent plans, while another was not, but this is not really true. Most politicians in both parties would endorse a "Simpson-Bowles-like deficit reduction package." It is true that any particular proposal ends up splitting on party lines and so no action is taken. Yet, and this is admittedly just speculation, the core of all such plans is so-called "entitlement reform," and it's a fair guess that insofar as there's any actual support from business groups it's focused on that one issue. In short, they want Social Security and Medicare stuffed and mounted on the wall. Tax reform, quite frankly, is almost certainly a side issue: after all, corporations have done quite well for themselves in the current, patchwork system, and even if they admit in principle that it's a ridiculous tangle, it not a high priority for anyone.

And so, what to make of the fact that both parties make noises in favor of "entitlement reform" but seem to gridlock on the issue of taxes? Maybe Klein is right that the "partisan polarization" is the real causal force, but I can't help but wonder: are reductions in medicare and social security benefits really politically viable? It's all well and good to talk about the need for "entitlement reform" in the abstract but to actually propose and fight for a specific reduction is something else entirely, and as basically the only universal social programs in the U.S., quite possibly one of the few issues that are truly electorally radioactive. In such a situation, it's better for everyone involved if competing plans essentially go nowhere legislatively, because it frees politicians from having to choose between explicitly opposing the plan (thus alienating all of the interests lined up in favor of it) or voting for it (making reelection essentially impossible).