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sociologyquotes · 7 years ago

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Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems

from the article Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems by George Monbiot

“Imagine if the people of the Soviet Union had never heard of communism. The ideology that dominates our lives has, for most of us, no name. Mention it in conversation and you’ll be rewarded with a shrug. Even if your listeners have heard the term before, they will struggle to define it. Neoliberalism: do you know what it is?

Its anonymity is both a symptom and cause of its power. It has played a major role in a remarkable variety of crises: the financial meltdown of 2007‑8, the offshoring of wealth and power, of which the Panama Papers offer us merely a glimpse, the slow collapse of public health and education, resurgent child poverty, the epidemic of loneliness, the collapse of ecosystems, the rise of Donald Trump. But we respond to these crises as if they emerge in isolation, apparently unaware that they have all been either catalysed or exacerbated by the same coherent philosophy; a philosophy that has – or had – a name. What greater power can there be than to operate namelessly?

So pervasive has neoliberalism become that we seldom even recognise it as an ideology. We appear to accept the proposition that this utopian, millenarian faith describes a neutral force; a kind of biological law, like Darwin’s theory of evolution. But the philosophy arose as a conscious attempt to reshape human life and shift the locus of power.

Neoliberalism sees competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. It redefines citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling, a process that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency. It maintains that “the market” delivers benefits that could never be achieved by planning.

Attempts to limit competition are treated as inimical to liberty. Tax and regulation should be minimised, public services should be privatised. The organisation of labour and collective bargaining by trade unions are portrayed as market distortions that impede the formation of a natural hierarchy of winners and losers. Inequality is recast as virtuous: a reward for utility and a generator of wealth, which trickles down to enrich everyone. Efforts to create a more equal society are both counterproductive and morally corrosive. The market ensures that everyone gets what they deserve.

We internalise and reproduce its creeds. The rich persuade themselves that they acquired their wealth through merit, ignoring the advantages – such as education, inheritance and class – that may have helped to secure it. The poor begin to blame themselves for their failures, even when they can do little to change their circumstances.

Never mind structural unemployment: if you don’t have a job it’s because you are unenterprising. Never mind the impossible costs of housing: if your credit card is maxed out, you’re feckless and improvident. Never mind that your children no longer have a school playing field: if they get fat, it’s your fault. In a world governed by competition, those who fall behind become defined and self-defined as losers.

Among the results, as Paul Verhaeghe documents in his book What About Me? are epidemics of self-harm, eating disorders, depression, loneliness, performance anxiety and social phobia. Perhaps it’s unsurprising that Britain, in which neoliberal ideology has been most rigorously applied, is the loneliness capital of Europe. We are all neoliberals now.

The term neoliberalism was coined at a meeting in Paris in 1938. Among the delegates were two men who came to define the ideology, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. Both exiles from Austria, they saw social democracy, exemplified by Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and the gradual development of Britain’s welfare state, as manifestations of a collectivism that occupied the same spectrum as nazism and communism.

In The Road to Serfdom, published in 1944, Hayek argued that government planning, by crushing individualism, would lead inexorably to totalitarian control. Like Mises’s book Bureaucracy, The Road to Serfdom was widely read. It came to the attention of some very wealthy people, who saw in the philosophy an opportunity to free themselves from regulation and tax. When, in 1947, Hayek founded the first organisation that would spread the doctrine of neoliberalism – the Mont Pelerin Society – it was supported financially by millionaires and their foundations.

With their help, he began to create what Daniel Stedman Jones describes in Masters of the Universe as “a kind of neoliberal international”: a transatlantic network of academics, businessmen, journalists and activists. The movement’s rich backers funded a series of thinktanks which would refine and promote the ideology. Among them were the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Centre for Policy Studies and the Adam Smith Institute. They also financed academic positions and departments, particularly at the universities of Chicago and Virginia.

As it evolved, neoliberalism became more strident. Hayek’s view that governments should regulate competition to prevent monopolies from forming gave way – among American apostles such as Milton Friedman – to the belief that monopoly power could be seen as a reward for efficiency.

Something else happened during this transition: the movement lost its name. In 1951, Friedman was happy to describe himself as a neoliberal. But soon after that, the term began to disappear. Stranger still, even as the ideology became crisper and the movement more coherent, the lost name was not replaced by any common alternative.

At first, despite its lavish funding, neoliberalism remained at the margins. The postwar consensus was almost universal: John Maynard Keynes’s economic prescriptions were widely applied, full employment and the relief of poverty were common goals in the US and much of western Europe, top rates of tax were high and governments sought social outcomes without embarrassment, developing new public services and safety nets.

But in the 1970s, when Keynesian policies began to fall apart and economic crises struck on both sides of the Atlantic, neoliberal ideas began to enter the mainstream. As Friedman remarked, “when the time came that you had to change ... there was an alternative ready there to be picked up”. With the help of sympathetic journalists and political advisers, elements of neoliberalism, especially its prescriptions for monetary policy, were adopted by Jimmy Carter’s administration in the US and Jim Callaghan’s government in Britain.

After Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan took power, the rest of the package soon followed: massive tax cuts for the rich, the crushing of trade unions, deregulation, privatisation, outsourcing and competition in public services. Through the IMF, the World Bank, the Maastricht treaty and the World Trade Organisation, neoliberal policies were imposed – often without democratic consent – on much of the world. Most remarkable was its adoption among parties that once belonged to the left: Labour and the Democrats, for example. As Stedman Jones notes, “it is hard to think of another utopia to have been as fully realised.”

It may seem strange that a doctrine promising choice and freedom should have been promoted with the slogan “there is no alternative”. But, as Hayek remarkedon a visit to Pinochet’s Chile – one of the first nations in which the programme was comprehensively applied – “my personal preference leans toward a liberal dictatorship rather than toward a democratic government devoid of liberalism”. The freedom that neoliberalism offers, which sounds so beguiling when expressed in general terms, turns out to mean freedom for the pike, not for the minnows.

As Naomi Klein documents in The Shock Doctrine, neoliberal theorists advocated the use of crises to impose unpopular policies while people were distracted: for example, in the aftermath of Pinochet’s coup, the Iraq war and Hurricane Katrina, which Friedman described as “an opportunity to radically reform the educational system” in New Orleans.

Where neoliberal policies cannot be imposed domestically, they are imposed internationally, through trade treaties incorporating “investor-state dispute settlement”: offshore tribunals in which corporations can press for the removal of social and environmental protections. When parliaments have voted to restrict sales of cigarettes, protect water supplies from mining companies, freeze energy bills or prevent pharmaceutical firms from ripping off the state, corporations have sued, often successfully. Democracy is reduced to theatre.

Another paradox of neoliberalism is that universal competition relies upon universal quantification and comparison. The result is that workers, job-seekers and public services of every kind are subject to a pettifogging, stifling regime of assessment and monitoring, designed to identify the winners and punish the losers. The doctrine that Von Mises proposed would free us from the bureaucratic nightmare of central planning has instead created one.

Neoliberalism was not conceived as a self-serving racket, but it rapidly became one. Economic growth has been markedly slower in the neoliberal era (since 1980 in Britain and the US) than it was in the preceding decades; but not for the very rich. Inequality in the distribution of both income and wealth, after 60 years of decline, rose rapidly in this era, due to the smashing of trade unions, tax reductions, rising rents, privatisation and deregulation.

The privatisation or marketisation of public services such as energy, water, trains, health, education, roads and prisons has enabled corporations to set up tollbooths in front of essential assets and charge rent, either to citizens or to government, for their use. Rent is another term for unearned income. When you pay an inflated price for a train ticket, only part of the fare compensates the operators for the money they spend on fuel, wages, rolling stock and other outlays. The rest reflects the fact that they have you over a barrel.

Those who own and run the UK’s privatised or semi-privatised services make stupendous fortunes by investing little and charging much. In Russia and India, oligarchs acquired state assets through firesales. In Mexico, Carlos Slim was granted control of almost all landline and mobile phone services and soon became the world’s richest man.

Financialisation, as Andrew Sayer notes in Why We Can’t Afford the Rich, has had a similar impact. “Like rent,” he argues, “interest is ... unearned income that accrues without any effort”. As the poor become poorer and the rich become richer, the rich acquire increasing control over another crucial asset: money. Interest payments, overwhelmingly, are a transfer of money from the poor to the rich. As property prices and the withdrawal of state funding load people with debt (think of the switch from student grants to student loans), the banks and their executives clean up.

Sayer argues that the past four decades have been characterised by a transfer of wealth not only from the poor to the rich, but within the ranks of the wealthy: from those who make their money by producing new goods or services to those who make their money by controlling existing assets and harvesting rent, interest or capital gains. Earned income has been supplanted by unearned income.

Neoliberal policies are everywhere beset by market failures. Not only are the banks too big to fail, but so are the corporations now charged with delivering public services. As Tony Judt pointed out in Ill Fares the Land, Hayek forgot that vital national services cannot be allowed to collapse, which means that competition cannot run its course. Business takes the profits, the state keeps the risk.

The greater the failure, the more extreme the ideology becomes. Governments use neoliberal crises as both excuse and opportunity to cut taxes, privatise remaining public services, rip holes in the social safety net, deregulate corporations and re-regulate citizens. The self-hating state now sinks its teeth into every organ of the public sector.

Perhaps the most dangerous impact of neoliberalism is not the economic crises it has caused, but the political crisis. As the domain of the state is reduced, our ability to change the course of our lives through voting also contracts. Instead, neoliberal theory asserts, people can exercise choice through spending. But some have more to spend than others: in the great consumer or shareholder democracy, votes are not equally distributed. The result is a disempowerment of the poor and middle. As parties of the right and former left adopt similar neoliberal policies, disempowerment turns to disenfranchisement. Large numbers of people have been shed from politics.

Chris Hedges remarks that “fascist movements build their base not from the politically active but the politically inactive, the ‘losers’ who feel, often correctly, they have no voice or role to play in the political establishment”. When political debate no longer speaks to us, people become responsive instead to slogans, symbols and sensation. To the admirers of Trump, for example, facts and arguments appear irrelevant.

Judt explained that when the thick mesh of interactions between people and the state has been reduced to nothing but authority and obedience, the only remaining force that binds us is state power. The totalitarianism Hayek feared is more likely to emerge when governments, having lost the moral authority that arises from the delivery of public services, are reduced to “cajoling, threatening and ultimately coercing people to obey them”.

Like communism, neoliberalism is the God that failed. But the zombie doctrine staggers on, and one of the reasons is its anonymity. Or rather, a cluster of anonymities.

The invisible doctrine of the invisible hand is promoted by invisible backers. Slowly, very slowly, we have begun to discover the names of a few of them. We find that the Institute of Economic Affairs, which has argued forcefully in the media against the further regulation of the tobacco industry, has been secretly funded by British American Tobacco since 1963. We discover that Charles and David Koch, two of the richest men in the world, founded the institute that set up the Tea Party movement. We find that Charles Koch, in establishing one of his thinktanks, noted that “in order to avoid undesirable criticism, how the organisation is controlled and directed should not be widely advertised”.

The words used by neoliberalism often conceal more than they elucidate. “The market” sounds like a natural system that might bear upon us equally, like gravity or atmospheric pressure. But it is fraught with power relations. What “the market wants” tends to mean what corporations and their bosses want. “Investment”, as Sayer notes, means two quite different things. One is the funding of productive and socially useful activities, the other is the purchase of existing assets to milk them for rent, interest, dividends and capital gains. Using the same word for different activities “camouflages the sources of wealth”, leading us to confuse wealth extraction with wealth creation.

A century ago, the nouveau riche were disparaged by those who had inherited their money. Entrepreneurs sought social acceptance by passing themselves off as rentiers. Today, the relationship has been reversed: the rentiers and inheritors style themselves entre preneurs. They claim to have earned their unearned income.

These anonymities and confusions mesh with the namelessness and placelessness of modern capitalism: the franchise model which ensures that workers do not know for whom they toil; the companies registered through a network of offshore secrecy regimes so complex that even the police cannot discover the beneficial owners; the tax arrangements that bamboozle governments; the financial products no one understands.

The anonymity of neoliberalism is fiercely guarded. Those who are influenced by Hayek, Mises and Friedman tend to reject the term, maintaining – with some justice – that it is used today only pejoratively. But they offer us no substitute. Some describe themselves as classical liberals or libertarians, but these descriptions are both misleading and curiously self-effacing, as they suggest that there is nothing novel about The Road to Serfdom, Bureaucracy or Friedman’s classic work, Capitalism and Freedom.

For all that, there is something admirable about the neoliberal project, at least in its early stages. It was a distinctive, innovative philosophy promoted by a coherent network of thinkers and activists with a clear plan of action. It was patient and persistent. The Road to Serfdom became the path to power.

Neoliberalism’s triumph also reflects the failure of the left. When laissez-faire economics led to catastrophe in 1929, Keynes devised a comprehensive economic theory to replace it. When Keynesian demand management hit the buffers in the 70s, there was an alternative ready. But when neoliberalism fell apart in 2008 there was ... nothing. This is why the zombie walks. The left and centre have produced no new general framework of economic thought for 80 years.

Every invocation of Lord Keynes is an admission of failure. To propose Keynesian solutions to the crises of the 21st century is to ignore three obvious problems. It is hard to mobilise people around old ideas; the flaws exposed in the 70s have not gone away; and, most importantly, they have nothing to say about our gravest predicament: the environmental crisis. Keynesianism works by stimulating consumer demand to promote economic growth. Consumer demand and economic growth are the motors of environmental destruction.

What the history of both Keynesianism and neoliberalism show is that it’s not enough to oppose a broken system. A coherent alternative has to be proposed. For Labour, the Democrats and the wider left, the central task should be to develop an economic Apollo programme, a conscious attempt to design a new system, tailored to the demands of the 21st century.”

#sociology #neoliberalism #neoliberal capitalism #capitalism #consumerism #inequality #united states #britain #ronald reagan #margaret thatcher #wealth inequality #wealthy #united kingdom #wealth gap

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teachanarchy · 8 years ago

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Imagine if the people of the Soviet Union had never heard of communism. The ideology that dominates our lives has, for most of us, no name. Mention it in conversation and you’ll be rewarded with a shrug. Even if your listeners have heard the term before, they will struggle to define it. Neoliberalism: do you know what it is?

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With their help, he began to create what Daniel Stedman Jones describes inMasters of the Universe as “a kind of neoliberal international”: a transatlantic network of academics, businessmen, journalists and activists. The movement’s rich backers funded a series of think tanks which would refine and promote the ideology. Among them were the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Centre for Policy Studies and the Adam Smith Institute. They also financed academic positions and departments, particularly at the universities of Chicago and Virginia.

As it evolved, neoliberalism became more strident. Hayek’s view that governments should regulate competition to prevent monopolies from forming gave way – among American apostles such as Milton Friedman– to the belief that monopoly power could be seen as a reward for efficiency.

But in the 1970s, when Keynesian policies began to fall apart and economic crises struck on both sides of the Atlantic, neoliberal ideas began to enter the mainstream. As Friedman remarked, “when the time came that you had to change … there was an alternative ready there to be picked up”. With the help of sympathetic journalists and political advisers, elements of neoliberalism, especially its prescriptions for monetary policy, were adopted by Jimmy Carter’s administration in the US and Jim Callaghan’s government in Britain.

***

It may seem strange that a doctrine promising choice and freedom should have been promoted with the slogan “there is no alternative”. But, as Hayek remarked on a visit to Pinochet’s Chile – one of the first nations in which the programme was comprehensively applied – “my personal preference leans toward a liberal dictatorship rather than toward a democratic government devoid of liberalism”. The freedom that neoliberalism offers, which sounds so beguiling when expressed in general terms, turns out to mean freedom for the pike, not for the minnows.

Financialisation, as Andrew Sayer notes in Why We Can’t Afford the Rich, has had a similar impact. “Like rent,” he argues, “interest is … unearned income that accrues without any effort”. As the poor become poorer and the rich become richer, the rich acquire increasing control over another crucial asset: money. Interest payments, overwhelmingly, are a transfer of money from the poor to the rich. As property prices and the withdrawal of state funding load people with debt (think of the switch from student grants to student loans), the banks and their executives clean up.

Get Evonomics in your inbox

***

Like communism, neoliberalism is the God that failed. But the zombie doctrine staggers on, and one of the reasons is its anonymity. Or rather, a cluster of anonymities.

The invisible doctrine of the invisible hand is promoted by invisible backers. Slowly, very slowly, we have begun to discover the names of a few of them. We find that the Institute of Economic Affairs, which has argued forcefully in the media against the further regulation of the tobacco industry, has been secretly funded by British American Tobacco since 1963. We discover that Charles and David Koch, two of the richest men in the world, founded the institute that set up the Tea Party movement. We find that Charles Koch, in establishing one of his think-tanks, noted that “in order to avoid undesirable criticism, how the organisation is controlled and directed should not be widely advertised”.

A century ago, the nouveau riche were disparaged by those who had inherited their money. Entrepreneurs sought social acceptance by passing themselves off as rentiers. Today, the relationship has been reversed: the rentiers and inheritors style themselves entrepreneurs. They claim to have earned their unearned income.

***

Neoliberalism’s triumph also reflects the failure of the left. When laissez-faire economics led to catastrophe in 1929, Keynes devised a comprehensive economic theory to replace it. When Keynesian demand management hit the buffers in the 70s, there was an alternative ready. But when neoliberalism fell apart in 2008 there was … nothing. This is why the zombie walks. The left and centre have produced no new general framework of economic thought for 80 years.

Originally published here.

#neoliberalism #capitalism #work

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cakandivali · 6 years ago

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Why tech CEOs are in love with doomsayers

Latest Updates - M. N. & Associates - By Nellie BowlesFuturist philosopher Yuval Noah Harari worries about a lot.He worries that Silicon Valley is undermining democracy and ushering in a dystopian hellscape in which voting is obsolete.He worries that by creating powerful influence machines to control billions of minds, the big tech companies are destroying the idea of a sovereign individual with free will.He worries that because the technological revolution’s work requires so few laborers, Silicon Valley is creating a tiny ruling class and a teeming, furious “useless class.”But lately, Harari is anxious about something much more personal. If this is his harrowing warning, then why do Silicon Valley CEOs love him so?“One possibility is that my message is not threatening to them, and so they embrace it?” a puzzled Harari said one afternoon in October. “For me, that’s more worrying. Maybe I’m missing something?”When Harari toured the Bay Area this fall to promote his latest book, the reception was incongruously joyful. Reed Hastings, chief executive of Netflix, threw him a dinner party. The leaders of X, Alphabet’s secretive research division, invited Harari over. Bill Gates reviewed the book (“Fascinating” and “such a stimulating writer”) in The New York Times.“I’m interested in how Silicon Valley can be so infatuated with Yuval, which they are — it’s insane he’s so popular, they’re all inviting him to campus — yet what Yuval is saying undermines the premise of the advertising- and engagement-based model of their products,” said Tristan Harris, Google’s former in-house design ethicist and a co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology.Part of the reason might be that Silicon Valley, at a certain level, is not optimistic on the future of democracy. The more of a mess Washington becomes, the more interested the tech world is in creating something else, and it might not look like elected representation. Rank-and-file coders have long been wary of regulation and curious about alternative forms of government. A separatist streak runs through the place: Venture capitalists periodically call for California to secede or shatter, or for the creation of corporate nation-states. And this summer, Mark Zuckerberg, who has recommended Harari to his book club, acknowledged a fixation with the autocrat Caesar Augustus. “Basically,” Zuckerberg told The New Yorker, “through a really harsh approach, he established 200 years of world peace.”Harari, thinking about all this, puts it this way: “Utopia and dystopia depends on your values.”Harari, who has a Ph.D. from Oxford, is a 42-year-old Israeli philosopher and a history professor at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The story of his current fame begins in 2011, when he published a book of notable ambition: to survey the whole of human existence. “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind,” first released in Hebrew, did not break new ground in terms of historical research. Nor did its premise — that humans are animals and our dominance is an accident — seem a likely commercial hit. But the casual tone and smooth way Harari tied together knowledge across fields made it a deeply pleasing read, even as the tome ended on the notion that the process of human evolution might be over. Translated into English in 2014, the book went on to sell more than 8 million copies and made Harari a celebrity intellectual.He followed up with “Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow,” which outlined his vision of what comes after human evolution. In it, he describes Dataism, a new faith based around the power of algorithms. Harari’s future is one in which big data is worshipped, artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence, and some humans develop Godlike abilities.Now, he has written a book about the present and how it could lead to that future: “21 Lessons for the 21st Century.” It is meant to be read as a series of warnings. His recent TED Talk was called “Why fascism is so tempting — and how your data could power it.”His prophecies might have made him a Cassandra in Silicon Valley, or at the very least an unwelcome presence. Instead, he has had to reconcile himself to the locals’ strange delight. “If you make people start thinking far more deeply and seriously about these issues,” he told me, sounding weary, “some of the things they will think about might not be what you want them to think about.”‘Brave New World’ as Aspirational ReadingHarari agreed to let me tag along for a few days on his travels through the Valley, and one afternoon in September, I waited for him outside X’s offices, in Mountain View, while he spoke to the Alphabet employees inside. After a while, he emerged: a shy, thin, bespectacled man with a dusting of dark hair. Harari has a sort of owlish demeanor, in that he looks wise and also does not move his body very much, even while glancing to the side. His face is not particularly expressive, with the exception of one rogue eyebrow. When you catch his eye, there is a wary look — like he wants to know if you, too, understand exactly how bad the world is about to get.At the Alphabet talk, Harari had been accompanied by his publisher. They said the younger employees had expressed concern about whether their work was contributing to a less-free society, while the executives generally thought their impact was positive.Some workers had tried to predict how well humans would adapt to large technological change based on how they have responded to small shifts, like a new version of Gmail. Harari told them to think more starkly: If there isn’t a major policy intervention, most humans probably will not adapt at all.It made him sad, he told me, to see people build things that destroy their own societies, but he works every day to maintain an academic distance and remind himself that humans are just animals. “Part of it is really coming from seeing humans as apes, that this is how they behave,” he said, adding, “They’re chimpanzees. They’re sapiens. This is what they do.”He was slouching a little. Socializing exhausts him.As we boarded the black gull-wing Tesla Harari had rented for his visit, he brought up Aldous Huxley. Generations have been horrified by his novel “Brave New World,” which depicts a regime of emotion control and painless consumption. Readers who encounter the book today, Harari said, often think it sounds great. “Everything is so nice, and in that way it is an intellectually disturbing book because you’re really hard-pressed to explain what’s wrong with it,” he said. “And you do get today a vision coming out of some people in Silicon Valley which goes in that direction.”An Alphabet media relations manager later reached out to Harari’s team to tell him to tell me that the visit to X was not allowed to be part of this story. The request confused and then amused Harari. It is interesting, he said, that unlike politicians, tech companies do not need a free press, since they already control the means of message distribution.He said he had resigned himself to tech executives’ global reign, pointing out how much worse the politicians are. “I’ve met a number of these high-tech giants, and generally they’re good people,” he said. “They’re not Attila the Hun. In the lottery of human leaders, you could get far worse.”Some of his tech fans, he thinks, come to him out of anxiety. “Some may be very frightened of the impact of what they are doing,” Harari said.Still, their enthusiastic embrace of his work makes him uncomfortable. “It’s just a rule of thumb in history that if you are so much coddled by the elites it must mean that you don’t want to frighten them,” Harari said. “They can absorb you. You can become the intellectual entertainment.”Dinner, With a Side of Medically Engineered ImmortalityCEO testimonials to Harari’s acumen are indeed not hard to come by. “I’m drawn to Yuval for his clarity of thought,” Jack Dorsey, the head of Twitter and Square, wrote in an email, going on to praise a particular chapter on meditation.And Hastings wrote: “Yuval’s the anti-Silicon Valley persona — he doesn’t carry a phone and he spends a lot of time contemplating while off the grid. We see in him who we wish we were.” He added, “His thinking on AI and biotech in his new book pushes our understanding of the dramas to unfold.”At the dinner Hastings co-hosted, academics and industry leaders debated the dangers of data collection, and to what degree longevity therapies will extend the human life span. (Harari has written that the ruling class will vastly outlive the useless.) “That evening was small, but could be magnified to symbolize his impact in the heart of Silicon Valley,” said Fei-Fei Li, an artificial intelligence expert who pushed internally at Google to keep secret the company’s efforts to process military drone footage for the Pentagon. “His book has that ability to bring these people together at a table, and that is his contribution.”A few nights earlier, Harari spoke to a sold-out theater of 3,500 in San Francisco. One ticket-holder walking in, an older man, told me it was brave and honest for Harari to use the term “useless class.”The author was paired for discussion with the prolific intellectual Sam Harris, who strode onstage in a gray suit and well-starched white button-down. Harari was less at ease, in a loose suit that crumpled around him, his hands clasped in his lap as he sat deep in his chair. But as he spoke about meditation — Harari spends two hours each day and two months each year in silence — he became commanding. In a region where self-optimization is paramount and meditation is a competitive sport, Harari’s devotion confers hero status.He told the audience that free will is an illusion, and that human rights are just a story we tell ourselves. Political parties, he said, might not make sense anymore. He went on to argue that the liberal world order has relied on fictions like “the customer is always right” and “follow your heart,” and that these ideas no longer work in the age of artificial intelligence, when hearts can be manipulated at scale.Everyone in Silicon Valley is focused on building the future, Harari continued, while most of the world’s people are not even needed enough to be exploited. “Now you increasingly feel that there are all these elites that just don’t need me,” he said. “And it’s much worse to be irrelevant than to be exploited.”The useless class he describes is uniquely vulnerable. “If a century ago you mounted a revolution against exploitation, you knew that when bad comes to worse, they can’t shoot all of us because they need us,” he said, citing army service and factory work.Now it is becoming less clear why the ruling elite would not just kill the new useless class. “You’re totally expendable,” he told the audience.This, Harari told me later, is why Silicon Valley is so excited about the concept of universal basic income, or stipends paid to people regardless of whether they work. The message is: “We don’t need you. But we are nice, so we’ll take care of you.”On Sept. 14, he published an essay in The Guardian assailing another old trope — that “the voter knows best.”“If humans are hackable animals, and if our choices and opinions don’t reflect our free will, what should the point of politics be?” he wrote. “How do you live when you realize ... that your heart might be a government agent, that your amygdala might be working for Putin, and that the next thought that emerges in your mind might well be the result of some algorithm that knows you better than you know yourself? These are the most interesting questions humanity now faces.”‘OK, So Maybe Humankind Is Going to Disappear’Harari and his husband, Itzik Yahav, who is also his manager, rented a small house in Mountain View for their visit, and one morning I found them there making oatmeal. Harari observed that as his celebrity in Silicon Valley has risen, tech fans have focused on his lifestyle.“Silicon Valley was already kind of a hotbed for meditation and yoga and all these things,” he said. “And one of the things that made me kind of more popular and palatable is that I also have this bedrock.” He was wearing an old sweatshirt and denim track pants. His voice was quiet, but he gestured widely, waving his hands, hitting a jar of spatulas.Harari grew up in Kiryat Ata, near Haifa, and his father worked in the arms industry. His mother, who worked in office administration, now volunteers for her son handling his mail; he gets about 1,000 messages a week. Yahav’s mother is their accountant.Most days, Harari doesn’t use an alarm clock, and wakes up between 6:30 and 8:30 a.m., then meditates and has a cup of tea. He works until 4 or 5 p.m., then does another hour of meditation, followed by an hourlong walk, maybe a swim, and then TV with Yahav.The two met 16 years ago through the dating site Check Me Out. “We are not big believers in falling in love,” Harari said. “It was more a rational choice.”“We met each other and we thought, ‘OK, we’re — OK, let’s move in with each other,’ ” Yahav said.Yahav became Harari’s manager. During the period when English-language publishers were cool on the commercial viability of “Sapiens” — thinking it too serious for the average reader and not serious enough for the scholars — Yahav persisted, eventually landing the Jerusalem-based agent Deborah Harris. One day when Harari was away meditating, Yahav and Harris finally sold it at auction to Random House in London.Today, they have a team of eight based in Tel Aviv working on Harari’s projects. Director Ridley Scott and documentarian Asif Kapadia are adapting “Sapiens” into a TV show, and Harari is working on children’s books to reach a broader audience.Yahav used to meditate, but has recently stopped. “It was too hectic,” he said while folding laundry. “I couldn’t get this kind of huge success and a regular practice.” Harari remains dedicated.“If it were only up to him, he would be a monk in a cave, writing things and never getting his hair cut,” Yahav said, looking at his husband. “Can I tell that story?”Harari said no.“On our first meeting,” Yahav said, “he had cut his hair by himself. And it was a very bad job.”The couple are vegan, and Harari is particularly sensitive to animals. He identified the sweatshirt he was wearing as one he got just before one of his dogs died. Yahav cut in to ask if he could tell another story; Harari seemed to know exactly what he meant, and said absolutely not.“In the middle of the night,” Yahav said, “when there is a mosquito, he will catch him and take him out.”Being gay, Harari said, has helped his work — it set him apart to study culture more clearly because it made him question the dominant stories of his own conservative Jewish society. “If society got this thing wrong, who guarantees it didn’t get everything else wrong as well?” he said.“If I was a superhuman, my superpower would be detachment,” Harari added. “OK, so maybe humankind is going to disappear — OK, let’s just observe.”For fun, the couple watches TV. It is their primary hobby and topic of conversation, and Yahav said it was the only thing from which Harari is not detached.They just finished “Dear White People,” and they loved the Australian series “Please Like Me.” That night, they had plans to either meet Facebook executives at company headquarters or watch the YouTube show “Cobra Kai.”Harari left Silicon Valley the next weekend. Soon, in December, he will enter an ashram outside Mumbai, India, for another 60 days of silence. Chartered Accountant For consultng. Contact Us: http://bit.ly/bombay-ca

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therichmondpapers · 6 years ago

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Why Liberalism over Socialism?

This is a harder question than Libertarianism or neo-Liberalism because I feel more able to clearly articulate the aims and strategies of Libertarianism and neoLiberalism because the words are defined a little more narrowly. Socialism is defined so broadly, by so many people, in so many different ways that it’s really very difficult to talk about as a whole. I’m therefore using this essay to break down my understanding of Socialist thought and the distinctions within it. Sadly that means this essay will, again, be a little bit of a self indulgent and pompous self referencial jargon-fest… sorry. So I’m going to start by breaking down Socialism into different blocks and giving an overview of my understanding of them. I don’t think I will manage to perfectly and accurately encapsulate them and I’m not going to suggest that I have the requisite knowledge to understand them all perfectly or as their proponents understand them. I also want to slot Socialism into my version of the political compass that I started talking about in ‘Why Liberalism over Libertarianism?’. So I’m going to deal with three broad categories: -The utopian version of Socialism and its relation to Marx’s notions of fully formed Communism but also non-Marxist understandings of Socialism. -Narrowly defined Socialism including, but not limited to, Marx’s lower form of Communism, i.e. Socialism -Broadly defined Socialism including Social Democracy and Social Liberalism. I’m going to start at the end and deal with that broad definition. Here Socialism seems to be basically anything that isn’t anarcho-capitalism or at least Libertarian or neo-Liberal Capitalism. Firstly I just want to say that I think this is an extraordinarily broad definition but it is used both by those on the right but also by people on the left, at least in English speaking countries, including people like Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jeremy Corbyn and the Owen Jones wing of the UK Labour party. This is a big enough topic, I think, for its own essay so I’ll save that for ‘Why Liberalism over Social Democracy?’ and limit myself here to defining the scope of what fits into this bracket of Socialism and what doesn’t. Here allowing private ownership of Capital, along with free markets, is compatible with Socialism so long as there is a strong welfare state, co-ops are allowed and the state is willing to regulate the market not merely to ensure strong competition but also for the good of citizens generally. This is clearly distinct from Laissez Faire capitalism and the usual doctrines of monetarism as it relates to neo-Liberalism. I would personally call these ‘mixed systems’ rather than Socialist ones but I do acknowledge that Socialism has a broader history beyond simple Marxism and doesn’t necessarily have to involve the ending of private ownership of Capital. Any more than that I’ll save for the other essay. A brief aside into Stalinism and Maoism. I appreciate that they come under the broad definition of Socialism due to state ownership of assets and indeed are the first thing people think of when they think of Socialism but I honestly believe they are just not at all representative of any of the philosophical underpinnings of any Socialist thinker. Just as the Nazi’s may have called themselves National Socialists but be wrong, I don’t buy the idea that Stalin or Mao were enacting Socialist ideals just because they say so. If anything better analogies would be other authoritarian regimes like old imperial China, Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy. Ok so now back to the first item on the list- utopian Socialism. I think it’s important to deal with this so as to get to grips with the ideology but it’s important to acknowledge that very few people are claiming that utopia is literally possible or at least possible in the current moment. That’s simply a misrepresentation. I want to compare and contrast it with anarcho-capitalism. I would argue small or zero state capitalists are either arguing that unregulated capitalism will result in a perfectly structured society where the “right” people will be at the top OR that capitalism unleashed from restraints will abolish hierarchy and lead to every individual being able to get anything they want (at least it will take equal effort for any individual to achieve any particular personal goal). Basically unlimited negative liberty will lead to unlimited positive Liberty, or at least as much positive liberty as can possibly be achieved. I obviously don’t think this is how it works in the real world and I’d argue almost everyone agrees on that. I think Utopian Socialism is the mirror of this on the left. In what I’m describing as Utopian Socialism (or what you might call Marxist Communism or Luxury Space Communism if you spend too much time on Tumblr) would be an ideology arguing that the dissolution of class boundaries (and probably private ownership of capital) along with society being run collectively by people for the benefit of all will automatically result in everyone achieving maximum fulfillment. This isn’t necessarily perfect negative Liberty (even when it’s stateless) because there is a some assumption that Society isn’t going to let you do something that might help yourself but reduce equality or the common good, but nonetheless there is something close to perfect positive Liberty because everyone can have what they want and be fully fulfilled. (Or as close to this as is possible.) I don’t believe this is any more possible than the utopian vision laid out by anarcho-capitalists. To achieve the perfect positive Liberty you need to allow more variation and inevitably what people want will conflict in ways that will require some “sacrifices for the common good” that will limit people from getting what they want. Marx himself points this out, arguing that perfect equality is impossible without restrictions on liberty and even then it is impossible in every dimension. If you set wages at an equal amount per hour then those who work more are wealthier, an inequality, but if you set wages equally per person then those who work longer hours are losing out in terms of leisure time. And what if someone has more dependants, like children? The point being that there are some practical limitations. The response to those practical limitations must be either a compromise where authoritarianism is used to bring people into line or else more variation is accepted. This is just as true of Liberalism. Ideally I would want absolute negative Liberty and absolute positive Liberty. The ability to be left alone when I want is simply more attractive to me than the social harmony utopian Socialism offers, but I am forced to accept that it isn’t possible to achieve perfect positive Liberty without some sacrifice of negative Liberty. Therefore Liberals must either accept the poverty, inequality and lack of opportunity of Libertarianism and neo-Liberalism or else accept more government action in order to correct for those problems. Socialists face a similar choice and that brings us to practical but narrowly defined Socialism. By practical and narrowly defined Socialism I mean the ideological space that is possible to achieve and fits with Socialist goals but is clearly distinct from other ideologies. So where Social Democracy is sometimes described as Socialism, it is also Capitalism. I want to look at the ideological space that is clearly not Capitalism, Conservatism, Liberalism or Authoritarianism. It is ONLY Socialism. I believe the best space for this is the mirror image of the ideological Capitalism I described in the last essay. I believe that it must be a space where private ownership of capital is either non-existent or extremely rare and capital allocation is done in some other way. It must also be distinct from Liberalism in that while Social Liberalism may recognise the importance of society in the lives of the individual, Socialism’s starting point is society and the common good. This doesn’t require the wholesale disregard of individual rights, that would get you back to the authoritarian doctrines of Stalin or Mao and almost inevitably brings back class distinctions, but it does require a social and community oriented mindset. I believe this can be done in broadly two ways- Democratic Socialism where what is acceptable/the best way to live for the happiness of the individual and the community is decided by simple majority and Liberal Socialism, where more than just basic minimum rights are guaranteed to every individual and there is an expectation that the community must allow a little more leeway for individual choice and action even while, because this is still Socialism and not Social Liberalism, the individual is expected to make concessions towards the community. Liberal Socialism is, to me, the Socialist counterpart of Liberal Capitalism, what we call neoLiberalism, I would argue they are both Liberal versions of their own ideologies but are not Liberalism itself. Essentially this splits narrowly defined Socialism into: one form of true Socialism that has more regard for positive liberty and one that only prioritises positive liberty in so far as basic minimum rights for all. So, to finally get to why I’d choose Liberalism over Socialism. There is an argument to be made that people are simply not able to be as happy under a Liberal individualist system and that every individual needs guidance from the community and from society. I recognise and understand that argument, however, while some people may genuinely be happier in a more community oriented society some will not and I simply believe that it is more effective to provide social and community outlets to those who want it under Social Liberalism while also providing more space and protection FROM community for those who want it. I do not believe that the narrowly defined Socialism I’ve laid out here is necessarily bad or evil but I do believe it falls into the trap of assuming that everyone (or at least most people) in Society deep down want broadly the same things as the proponents of Socialism. I don’t believe this is the case and I do believe that the wants and needs of individuals in terms of what they want from the society they live in require us to build a society with wide variations and options that allow us to fulfil the wants and needs (as best we can) of both the most ardent Socialists and the most committed Capitalists. While I acknowledge that neoliberalism does not and can not do this I believe that social and radical Liberalism can do this task better than any other system of thought or ideology. That’s why I believe in Liberalism over Socialism.

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nicholemhearn · 7 years ago

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Nativist Anti-“Open Borders” Rhetoric Is a Big Lie

Donald Trump ran on promises to restrict immigration and build a wall on the U.S.-Mexican border. During the first year of Trump’s presidency, immigration hawks have pivoted (as immigration doves predicted they would) from targeting illegal immigration to attacking central aspects of the status quo system of legal immigration—diversity visas and family reunification in particular—in favor of a much more restrictive points-based system. Populist nativists, such as Trump and his media champions at outlets like Breitbart and the Daily Caller, get a ton of rhetorical and political mileage from railing against the specter of “open borders,” and then constantly narrowing the definition of “open” to include any most every policy that allows the admission of any immigrants.

Brian Lonergan from the restrictionist Immigration Reform Law Institute, in a response to a mass killing carried out by a legal immigrant admitted on a diversity visa, provides a typical instance of anti-“open borders” rhetoric:

Open-border advocates in politics and the media vilify those who dare suggest that the laws be changed, and the status quo prevails. This tradition needs to end immediately.

Lonergan implies that “open borders” is the status quo American immigration policy, and that the diversity visa program is part of it. But that’s completely ridiculous! In 2016, 11.4 million people entered the lottery for 50,000 diversity visas. An authentically “open borders” version of the diversity visa program would admit 100 percent of those applicants, not less than one half of one percent. The mathematicians among us might note that 50,000 is 11.35 million closer to zero than 11.4 million. The restrictionist tradition of labeling those who favor the almost totally closed immigration policy status quo as “open-borders advocates” is grossly dishonest and “needs to end immediately.”

Perhaps more importantly, practical advocates of a more inclusive and permissive immigration system need to be much clearer about the fact that the real-world political debate takes place within an overwhelming international consensus favoring almost completely closed borders. The liberalizing side of the politically relevant immigration debate is, in fact, plumping for reforms that are slightly less restrictive than the draconian closed-borders status quo.

The United States is Near the Closed End of the Closed-to-Open Continuum

On a continuum running from completely closed to completely open borders, the most immigrant-friendly countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) are just a few steps away from “completely closed.”

In 2015, the United States admitted less than a half the OECD average of immigrants as a percentage of total population. The borders of the United States are impermeable relative to those of the U.K., Canada, Germany, Australia, Sweden, and New Zealand. Even then, the most permissive country in the family of wealthy liberal democracies isn’t very open at all. Setting aside tiny Luxembourg, which is about the size of greater Omaha, Nebraska, the OECD openness champ is Switzerland (but good luck getting citizenship!), which takes in just a bit more than 1.5 percent of its population in migrants per year. That isn’t very open at all.

Shifting from flows to stocks, the UN’s 2015 migration report says:

Between 2000 and 2015, the number of migrants grew in 167 countries or areas worldwide. In 63 of these, including France, Germany and the United States of America, the international migrant stock grew by less than 2 per cent per annum. In 104 countries or areas, however, the pace of growth during the period 2000-2015 was considerably faster, with 19 countries or areas recording an average annual growth rate of 6 per cent or more.

Got that? Between 2000 and 2015, 109 countries saw their immigrant population grow at a faster rate than that of the United States. Among countries with any net international in-migration, the U.S. is resolutely on the closed side of the continuum.

Now, nobody knows for sure what “completely open” borders would mean in terms of immigrant inflows to the United States. The estimate will vary wildly depending on our background assumptions. We’ll get one result if we imagine that completely free cross-border movement is unilaterally adopted by the U.S. and a much different result if we imagine that free movement is adopted multilaterally by a large number of countries with similarly attractive labor markets and human rights protections. The estimate also depends on the size of the wage bonus for moving to a higher-productivity labor market, which is generally declining with declining global inequality, as well as the typical strength of individual preferences to stick close to home. It’s worth noting that borders are completely open within the United States, yet the sizable productivity and wage differentials between lower and higher population density areas has not been enough in many regions to induce folks to move even a short distance to better opportunity. So it’s really, really hard to say what the rate of in-migration would be under “completely open” borders.

However, it is very easy to say is that the U.S. status quo is much closer to “completely closed” than “completely open” under even the most modest estimates of movement under the “completely open” counterfactual. If we move out of the OECD into the broader world, the current world champ in immigrant population is Qatar, which makes extensive use of guest workers, with about 22 migrants per 1000 people. If we use Qatar as the open end of the closed-to-open continuum, the United States’ 4 migrants per 1000 people is in comparison very, very close to “completely closed.”

The More Migration to the U.S. There Would Be under Open Borders, the Further We Are from Open Borders

Estimates of huge global productivity and welfare gains from free movement, such as the one produced by the Center for Global Development’s Michael Clemens, depend on the assumption of a fairly high degree of eagerness to move away from family and friends to earn higher wages. If this sort of estimate seems credible to you, you’re bound to conclude that even the most permissive really existing immigration system is very far from the open borders frontier.

When immigration restrictionists criticize actual idealistic proposals for true open borders, they typically argue that we would be “swamped,” and our distinctive liberal institutions ruined, by impoverished foreign hordes. Whatever the merits of this hypothesis, the more credence you lend to the idea that open borders would lead to swamping, the more you’re implicitly committed to the idea that the United States isn’t even close to open borders. The worse you think swamping problems would be, the closer you’re placing the United States toward the closed end of the close-to-open continuum.

Nevertheless, the immigration restrictionists who warn of swamping under open borders tend to be the same people who characterize the status quo as an “open borders” system. It’s obvious why they traffic in this sort of rank dishonesty. They want to further harden our already very hardened borders, and this is easier to justify if you can systematically mislead people about the fact that the American immigration system is relatively closed even when compared to other wealthy liberal democracies.

Immigration Policy after Utopia

As I’ve argued elsewhere, good public policy analysis requires giving up on “ideal theory.” This means, among other things, giving up on wild speculation about counterfactual social systems and adopting an empirically grounded comparative perspective. If you care about freedom or equality or whatever, you should look at the places where people are the freest or equalest or whateverest, and then try to nudge our system in that direction.

From this perspective, it’s pretty clear that anything resembling open borders isn’t remotely in the cards, and isn’t worth spending too much time speculating about. The humanitarian gains from reducing barriers to migration mainly flow from people leaving jurisdictions in which the productivity of their labor is low, and resettling in jurisdictions in which it is high. But the world’s highest-productivity labor markets are located in liberal democracies with large welfare states. Questions about equitable distribution and national identity loom large in these polities, and high barriers to immigration are constantly re-affirmed by their democratic bodies. It seems very likely that the political dynamics of the liberal-democratic institutions that sustain high-productivity labor markets also make it unlikely that more than a tiny fraction of outsiders will ever be granted access to those markets.

From the perspective of this or that brand of ideal theory, the closed-borders implications of the liberal-democratic welfare state may make the entire enterprise look like a huge mistake. But the liberal-democratic welfare state is also the best humanity has so far achieved. That’s why we need to take the convergence among history’s best regimes on relatively closed immigration policies very seriously. It’s also why we need to understand that the actual political debate over immigration policy within actual wealthy liberal democracies takes place within the nearly-but-not-entirely closed borders consensus.

Once we adjust our framing of the question to better accord with the actual practices of our best social systems, and the actual policy debate that takes place within them, it becomes obvious that liberalizing immigration reformers aren’t “open borders advocates” any more than advocates of more generous public nutritional assistance for poor children are “communists.” Communists and open borders advocates do exist, but they’ve got next to nothing to do with actual politics or policy. The liberalizing immigration reformers who do matter favor somewhat less thoroughly restrictive immigration policy that is consistent with the winning formula of the capitalist liberal-democratic welfare state. Their proposals, if enacted, would leave our system at a point on the closed-to-open continuum much nearer to the point that restrictionists recommend than to the point open-borders ideal theorists recommend.

So the question just isn’t “Should we have totally open borders?” and you shouldn’t let yourself get roped into that frame. The question is “Should we be more like Switzerland or Canada or more like Japan?” (It’s notable here that Japan has recently decided to be more like Switzerland or Canada.) Should America’s golden door, now just slightly ajar, be inched open a bit or shut further? That’s the debate we’re actually having.

The fact that restrictionists insist on flagrantly mischaracterizing the stingy immigration status quo suggests that they don’t think they can win the debate on the merits. Those of us who want to nudge the door open an inch or two should help ourselves by more vigorously and vocally refusing to conduct the debate within the nativists’ specious frame.

—

Will Wilkinson is the Niskanen Center’s Vice President for Policy

The post Nativist Anti-“Open Borders” Rhetoric Is a Big Lie appeared first on Niskanen Center.

from nicholemhearn digest https://niskanencenter.org/blog/nativist-anti-open-borders-rhetoric-big-lie/

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marmara · 7 years ago

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Photo: Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher at the White House. Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems

Financial meltdown, environmental disaster and even the rise of Donald Trump – neoliberalism has played its part in them all. Why has the left failed to come up with an alternative? George Monbiot

George Monbiot

Fri 15 Apr ‘16 12.00 BST Last modified on Wed 29 Nov ‘17 10.47 GMT

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Inequality is recast as virtuous. The market ensures that everyone gets what they deserve.

***

But in the 1970s, when Keynesian policies began to fall apart and economic crises struck on both sides of the Atlantic, neoliberal ideas began to enter the mainstream. As Friedman remarked, “when the time came that you had to change … there was an alternative ready there to be picked up”. With the help of sympathetic journalists and political advisers, elements of neoliberalism, especially its prescriptions for monetary policy, were adopted by Jimmy Carter’s administration in the US and Jim Callaghan’s government in Britain.

It may seem strange that a doctrine promising choice should have been promoted with the slogan ‘there is no alternative’

***

It may seem strange that a doctrine promising choice and freedom should have been promoted with the slogan “there is no alternative”. But, as Hayek remarked on a visit to Pinochet’s Chile – one of the first nations in which the programme was comprehensively applied – “my personal preference leans toward a liberal dictatorship rather than toward a democratic government devoid of liberalism”. The freedom that neoliberalism offers, which sounds so beguiling when expressed in general terms, turns out to mean freedom for the pike, not for the minnows.

Freedom from trade unions and collective bargaining means the freedom to suppress wages. Freedom from regulation means the freedom to poison rivers, endanger workers, charge iniquitous rates of interest and design exotic financial instruments. Freedom from tax means freedom from the distribution of wealth that lifts people out of poverty. Naomi Klein Naomi Klein documented that neoliberals advocated the use of crises to impose unpopular policies while people were distracted. Photograph: Anya Chibis for the Guardian

Neoliberalism was not conceived as a self-serving racket, but it rapidly became one

***

Like communism, neoliberalism is the God that failed. But the zombie doctrine staggers on, and one of the reasons is its anonymity. Or rather, a cluster of anonymities.

The nouveau riche were once disparaged by those who had inherited their money. Today, the relationship has been reversed

***

Neoliberalism’s triumph also reflects the failure of the left. When laissez-faire economics led to catastrophe in 1929, Keynes devised a comprehensive economic theory to replace it. When Keynesian demand management hit the buffers in the 70s, there was an alternative ready. But when neoliberalism fell apart in 2008 there was … nothing. This is why the zombie walks. The left and centre have produced no new general framework of economic thought for 80 years.

• George Monbiot’s How Did We Get into This Mess? is published this month by Verso. To order a copy for £12.99 (RRP £16.99) ) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99. promoted links from around the web Recommended by OutbrainAbout this Content

Canadian Crypto Mining Company Finds Way to Tel Aviv Stock Exchange Canadian Crypto Mining Company Finds Way to Tel Aviv Stock Exchange C-Tech About this Content comments (3964)

Gramercy 15 Apr 2016 15:29 15 16

Neoliberalism isn’t at fault. Paleoconservatism is the villain. greatapedescendant Gramercy 84 85

Neoliberalism itself isn’t at fault. Same way as a gun isn’t at fault. It’s the studied misuse, abuse and misapplication of neoliberalism for the benefit of the few that’s at fault. It doesn’t have to be that way. Conservatism is palaeo by definition. anotherspace Gramercy 297 298

Any ism that fails to regulate the worst excesses of human nature is destined to paint itself into a corner. I’ve met very few privileged people with insight into the personal advantage that privilege has conferred on them. As George says here, most of 'em think they did it all themselves. Put those guys in control and they can choose whatever ism they like. chrismc2 15 Apr 2016 15:29 66 67

given your clearly held views, George, would you not agree that for this system to end, the first stone must be cast? That is, for the UK to leave the EU, a supranational organisation with neoliberaism as its core remit.

greatapedescendant chrismc2 219 220

Why not read his book? Here’s how I see it … The application and manipulation of neoliberalist philosophy by the wealthy elite, the overprivileged and those who aspire to own and control the world, remains the root of all the woes of your average citizen in advanced Western democracies. Not to mention its devastating repercussions in other areas. The tool of ongoing class war. The world is living under a ruthless dictatorship. A financial one in which economics dictates to politics. Barring a revolution, this promises to be a slow, uphill struggle for those like the Corbyns and the Sanders who seek a more just wold. A much needed article to enlighten the ignorant and remind the forgetful. Another world order is possible. And, pending that, another Britain is possible. Curious to discover whether GM provides any insightful answers or constructive suggestions, I may even read this one. In 10 minutes in the bookshop.

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stormdoors78476 · 8 years ago

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High School Teachers Are Using Dystopian Books To Explore The State Of America Today

The adage about the trend has become as ubiquitous as the trend itself: dystopian books are everywhere, and their popularity doesn’t seem to be waning.

Shortly after Donald Trump was elected president, sales of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale spiked. The latter story is seeing a resurgence not only because its feminist themes resonate with the set of readers who partook in January’s Women’s March, but also because the story is getting a shiny, new TV adaptation, out this month from Hulu.

Stories like Suzanne Collins’ “The Hunger Games” and their ilk ― the “Divergent” series, the “Maze Runner” series, and “The 100” series ― are not only popular on screen, but in American classrooms, too.

Which isn’t to say the subgenre doesn’t have its decriers. In an interview with HuffPost, science-fiction author Ursula K. Le Guin shared her thoughts on the appeal of dystopias: “People are scared, so they want to read fiction where they can be scared without any real reason to be. To sort of play at being scared instead of being really scared. I don’t read that stuff.” She’s not alone; The Hunger Games was among the most-banned books of 2010, 2011 and 2013.

But educators Judith A. Hayn, co-author of Teaching Young Adult Literature Today, and Elizabeth Majerus, co-author of Can I Teach That?, both argue that dystopian stories are uniquely useful in high school settings, where the texts can serve as jumping-off points for broader political conversations, and where students are otherwise unlikely to see themselves represented in the characters they read about.

I think part of what resonates for younger readers is that it’s often a younger protagonist who’s facing the crises brought on by older generations. Elizabeth Majerus, author of "Can I Teach That?"

“I think part of what resonates for younger readers is that it’s often a younger protagonist who’s facing the crises brought on by older generations,” Majerus told HuffPost. “They’re facing these issues that they’ve inherited, and I think a lot of kids can really relate to that. It’s always exciting for a young person to read about a hero who’s also a young person, but particularly a hero that is faced with rectifying the social, environmental and political catastrophes that came about well before they were born.”

This year, Majerus is teaching a course at University High School in Illinois designed around utopian and dystopian societies in fiction. Her students read a bevy of essays about utopias and dystopias, then they ventured to create their own utopian classroom by electing which fiction titles they would read.

“Teaching a class that pretty much started a couple of weeks before the inauguration of Donald J. Trump definitely was a much more interesting, relevant, complicated ― but also exciting ― experience. It feels much more relevant,” Majerus said. “We’re at a point in American history where the things that we as a people do right now ― it feels like it does have an effect on the future, and whether we go down a road toward continuing democracy, and whether we go down a road that feels more dystopian.”

Hayn, who teaches teacher education at University of Arkansas at Little Rock, agreed. “I think that students feel that anger and frustration that they sense from outside the classroom, and they bring that with them,” she told HuffPost. “Even the very young have been very troubled, I think, by what is going on.”

Both Majerus and Hayn said that dystopian stories provide one avenue for discussing today’s political climate, without doing so in a contentious, head-on manner, and without engaging with their own personal viewpoints, which, they agreed, should be kept out of the classroom.

“I would hope that an English language arts teacher would be able to do that, say, ‘Do you see any contemporary issues in the world around you now?’ and lead the students to make some of those observations,” Hayn said. “I think we have an obligation to include the political, so that students understand why we got to where we are now.”

Majerus adds that reading stories that engage with political content, but through stories with individual characters and individual motivations, can add extra context to headlines that students are likely reading.

“When they get to really step inside the shoes of a person ― even if it’s a fictional person, but it’s a really well fleshed-out character ― they are more challenged to consider other perspectives, and to see the human stories behind the headlines,” Majerus said. “I think when a student reads a story that articulates an experience that they’re not familiar with, it can challenge some of their assumptions.”

The site for her class links to Margaret Atwood’s recent essay about her novel in the New York Times, in which the author wrestles with whether she considers the story a feminist one. (“If you mean a novel in which women are human beings — with all the variety of character and behavior that implies — and are also interesting and important, and what happens to them is crucial to the theme, structure and plot of the book, then yes. In that sense, many books are ‘feminist,’” the author writes, herself adding nuance to the conversation around the title.)

That said, both educators see the value in sharing stories from multiple mediums with their students, including not only fiction and news, but movies and TV shows, too ― whichever outlets kids are already getting their media from, so that they can think critically about what they’re already consuming. And, with dystopian books, there’s a wealth of cross-genre content available. Majerus is sharing a 1990 adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale with her class ― a film is easier to fit into the allotted time than a series, she said ― and hopes to compare the choices made by the author and the director.

“I think we have an obligation to include the political, so that students understand why we got to where we are now.” Judith Hayn, author of 'Teaching Young Adult Literature Today'

“I love watching a film after students have read a book, because you learn a lot about a book by analyzing the choices a filmmaker makes,” Majerus said. “What parts to include, how you bridge those gaps. Those choices are extremely rich for conversation about the book. Whether students agree or disagree with aspects the filmmaker focused on, how they feel about things that were left out.”

So, watching movies in English class can be much more than a fallback plan for underprepared teachers; it’s also a means of keeping the classroom relevant to the world beyond it.

To this end, Hayn thinks dystopian books are generally a better choice than the established canon, which, she points out, comprises mostly white male writers.

“We can go on and on about the value of that, and whether or not it’s a good thing, but students do not tend to see themselves in those pieces,” Hayn said. “They’re not there at all. And particularly if they belong to groups that have no power, that are underrepresented in society and certainly underrepresented in literature.”

A chapter of her book Teaching Young Adult Literature Today focuses on reaching disenfranchised groups of young readers, and she thinks contemporary YA stories ― dystopias included ― take a small step in the right direction as far as representation is concerned. True equality is yet to be achieved, but these stories instill the idea that change is possible.

“It’s also the comfort of seeing people succeed, overthrow and create a new world,” Hayn said. And that might be their greatest strength, and most alluring quality: dystopian books are, ultimately, about individual strength amid governmental havoc, and hope amid trying times.

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marmara · 7 years ago

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Foto: Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher at the White House. Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems

Financial meltdown, environmental disaster and even the rise of Donald Trump – neoliberalism has played its part in them all. Why has the left failed to come up with an alternative? George Monbiot

George Monbiot

Fri 15 Apr ‘16 12.00 BST Last modified on Wed 29 Nov ‘17 10.47 GMT

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Inequality is recast as virtuous. The market ensures that everyone gets what they deserve.

***

But in the 1970s, when Keynesian policies began to fall apart and economic crises struck on both sides of the Atlantic, neoliberal ideas began to enter the mainstream. As Friedman remarked, “when the time came that you had to change … there was an alternative ready there to be picked up”. With the help of sympathetic journalists and political advisers, elements of neoliberalism, especially its prescriptions for monetary policy, were adopted by Jimmy Carter’s administration in the US and Jim Callaghan’s government in Britain.

It may seem strange that a doctrine promising choice should have been promoted with the slogan ‘there is no alternative’

***

It may seem strange that a doctrine promising choice and freedom should have been promoted with the slogan “there is no alternative”. But, as Hayek remarked on a visit to Pinochet’s Chile – one of the first nations in which the programme was comprehensively applied – “my personal preference leans toward a liberal dictatorship rather than toward a democratic government devoid of liberalism”. The freedom that neoliberalism offers, which sounds so beguiling when expressed in general terms, turns out to mean freedom for the pike, not for the minnows.

Neoliberalism was not conceived as a self-serving racket, but it rapidly became one

***

Like communism, neoliberalism is the God that failed. But the zombie doctrine staggers on, and one of the reasons is its anonymity. Or rather, a cluster of anonymities.

The nouveau riche were once disparaged by those who had inherited their money. Today, the relationship has been reversed

***

Neoliberalism’s triumph also reflects the failure of the left. When laissez-faire economics led to catastrophe in 1929, Keynes devised a comprehensive economic theory to replace it. When Keynesian demand management hit the buffers in the 70s, there was an alternative ready. But when neoliberalism fell apart in 2008 there was … nothing. This is why the zombie walks. The left and centre have produced no new general framework of economic thought for 80 years.

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Gramercy 15 Apr 2016 15:29 15 16

Neoliberalism isn’t at fault. Paleoconservatism is the villain. greatapedescendant Gramercy 84 85

greatapedescendant chrismc2 219 220

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nicholemhearn · 7 years ago

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Public Policy after Utopia

People often ask me how the Niskanen Center’s philosophy differs from standard-issue libertarianism. Usually I say something substantive and policy-related like, “We think the welfare state and free markets work better together, and that hostility to ‘big government’ can actually be counterproductive and leave us with less freedom,” or something in that vein. That’s the sort of contrast people are generally looking for. But I’m never really happy leaving it at that.

Why not? Because this kind of answer is actually pretty superficial. It doesn’t get to the heart of the matter. For example, it doesn’t really get at what I take to be the nature of intellectual mistake involved in the standard libertarian rejection of the welfare state. There’s a deeper intellectual issue about how to theorize about politics, and it has nothing in particular to do with libertarianism. It has to do with the utility of something political philosophers call “ideal theory.”

Politics without a compass

Many political philosophers, and most adherents of radical political ideologies, tend to think that an ideal vision of the best social, economic, and political system serves a useful and necessary orienting function. The idea is that reformers need to know what to aim at if they are to make steady incremental progress toward the maximally good and just society. If you don’t know where you’re headed—if you don’t know what utopia looks like—how are you supposed to know which steps to take next?

The idea that a vision of an ideal society can serve as a moral and strategic star to steer by is both intuitive and appealing. But it turns out to be wrong. This sort of political ideal actually can’t help us find our way through the thicket of real-world politics into the clearing of justice. I’ve discussed the problems with ideal theory at length, in the context Gerald Gaus’ tremendous book The Tyranny of the Ideal, in a Vox column. This piece will be easier to understand if you read that first. Jacob Levy’s paper, “There’s No Such Thing as Ideal Theory,” is an outstanding complement. And, on the more technical side, the work of UCSD’s David Wiens is state of the art, and adds texture to Gaus’ critique.

A major paradigm shift in political theory is underway, and it’s all over but the shoutin’ for ideal theory. But it takes a while for the shoutin’ to peter out. New paradigms can take a generation or more to trickle down through the intellectual culture. So we’ve barely begun to grasp what it means to give up on ideal theory, especially in public policy. It’s a bit dramatic to say that the death of ideal theory changes everything, but it changes a lot. It definitely changes what it means to be an ideologically principled think tank.

If you agree with Gaus, as I do, then you will think that there’s a pretty major intellectual mistake lurking within the ideal-theoretic version of libertarianism that the most prominent institutions of the “freedom movement” were built to promote. Again, this has nothing to do with libertarianism, per se. Gaus’ argument is general. It doesn’t matter which normative standard you use to rank possible social systems. It could be the orthodox libertarian conception of freedom as non-coercion, John Rawls’ two principles of justice, or a radically egalitarian conception of material equality. It doesn’t matter. In order to say that any particular system is the best in terms of your chosen normative standard, you’ve got to be able to rank rival systems against that standard. Doing that ranking in a principled, non-arbitrary way, requires evidence of what the realization of your favorite possible social world would actually look like. Otherwise you can’t really say that it does better in terms of your chosen standard than competing systems.

Utopia is a guess

The fact that all our evidence about how social systems actually work comes from formerly or presently existing systems is a huge problem for anyone committed to a radically revisionary ideal of the morally best society. The further a possible system is from a historical system, and thus from our base of evidence about how social systems function, the more likely we are to be mistaken about how it would work if it were realized. And the more likely we are to be mistaken about how it would actually work, the more likely we are to be mistaken that it is the more free, or more equal, or more socially just, than other systems, possible or actual.

Indeed, there’s basically no way to rationally justify the belief that, say, “anarcho-capitalism” ranks better in terms of libertarian freedom than “Canada 2017,” or the belief that “economic democracy” ranks better in terms of socialist equality than “Canada 2017.”

You may think you can imagine how anarcho-capitalism or economic democracy would work, but you can’t. You’re really just guessing—extrapolating way beyond your evidence. You can’t just stipulate that it works the way you want it to work. Rationally speaking, you probably shouldn’t even suspect that your favorite system comes out better than an actual system. Rationally speaking, your favorite probably shouldn’t be your favorite. Utopia is a guess.

Again, this is a general problem. But it does hit especially hard for those who appreciate the unpredictability of complex systems and the inevitability of unintended consequences. It’s no coincidence that Gaus is a Hayekian. As my colleague Jeffrey Friedman argues, expert predictions about the the likely effects of changing a single policy tend to be pretty bad. I’ll use myself as an example. I’ve followed the academic literature about the minimum wage for almost twenty years, and I’m an experienced, professional policy analyst, so I’ve got a weak claim to expertise in the subject. What do I have to show for that? Not much, really. I’ve got strong intuitions about the likely effects of raising minimum wages in various contexts. But all I really know is that the context matters a great deal, that a lot of interrelated factors affect the dynamics of low-wage labor markets, and that I can’t say in advance which margin will adjust when the wage floor is raised. Indeed, whether we should expect increases in the minimum wage to hurt or help low-wage workers is a question Nobel Prize-winning economists disagree about. Labor markets are complicated! Well, the comprehensive political economies of nation-states are vastly more complicated. And that means that our predictions about the outcome of radically changing the entire system are unlikely to be better than random.

If your favorite system is quite a bit different from any system that has existed, then even if it were true that it would rank numero uno in terms of your favorite normative standard, you’re not in a position to rationally believe it. Clearly then, it’s not actually useful to aim toward a distant ideal when you don’t really have a good reason to believe that it’s better than actually existing systems in terms of liberty or equality or nationalist solidarity or whatever it is you care about

This is a hard lesson for ideologues to swallow. I still haven’t totally digested it. But a number of things have become much clearer after giving up on my sinful, ideal-theoretic ways.

Analysis after ideal theory: measurement and comparison

The death of ideal theory implies a non-ideological, empirical, comparative approach to political analysis. That doesn’t mean giving up on, say, the value of freedom. I think I’m more libertarian—more committed to value of liberty—than I’ve ever been. But that doesn’t mean being committed to an eschatology of liberty, a picture of an ideally free society, or a libertarian utopia. We’re not in a position to know what that looks like. The best we can do is to go ahead and try to rank social systems in terms of the values we care about, and then see what we can learn. The Cato Institute’s Human Freedom Index is one such useful measurement attempt. What do we see? Look:

Every highlighted country is some version of the liberal-democratic capitalist welfare state. Evidently, this general regime type is good for freedom. Indeed, it is likely the best we have ever done in terms of freedom.

Moreover, Denmark (#5), Finland (#9), and the Netherlands (#10) are among the world’s “biggest” governments, in terms of government spending as a percentage of GDP. The “economic freedom” side of the index, which embodies a distinctly libertarian conception of economic liberty, hurts their ratings pretty significantly. Still, according to a libertarian Human Freedom Index, some of the freest places in on Earth have some of the“biggest” governments. That’s unexpected.

This is why we need to try to rank social systems in terms of our prized political values. Our guesses about which systems lead to which consequences are likely to be pretty bad. Suppose we were to poll a bunch of American libertarians, and ask them to tell us which country enjoys more freedom, according the Cato Institute’s metrics. The United States or Sweden? The United States or Germany? The United States or Canada? The United States or Lithuania? I’m pretty sure almost all of them would get it wrong in each of these pairwise comparisons. Why? Because typical libertarians carry an ideal-theoretic picture of the “the free society” around in their heads, and (for some reason!) a minimum of taxation and redistribution is among the most salient aspects of that picture. And that means that Denmark, say, doesn’t seem very free relative to that picture. But there’s a great deal more to freedom than fiscal policy. And we see that, as a matter of fact, the country with the biggest-spending government in the world is among the freest countries in the world, and ranks first in personal freedom.

That is our basic data. It doesn’t necessarily imply that the United States ought to do more redistributive social spending. But when a freedom index, built from libertarian assumptions, shows that freedom thrives in many places with huge welfare states, it should lead us to downgrade our estimate of the probability that liberty and redistribution are antithetical, and upgrade our estimate of the probability that they are consistent, and possibly complementary. That’s the sort of consideration that mainly drives my current views, not ideal-theoretical qualms about neo-Lockean libertarian rights theories.

Though libertarianism is of personal interest to me, I want to emphasize again that my larger point has nothing to do with libertarianism. The same lesson applies to alt-right ethno-nationalists dazzled by a fanciful picture of a homogenous, solidaristic ethno-state. The same lesson applies progressives and socialists in the grip of utopian pictures of egalitarian social justice. Of course, nobody knows what an ideally equal society would look like. If we stick to the data we do have, and inspect the top ranks of the Social Progress Index, which is based on progressive assumptions about basic needs, the conditions for individual health and well-being, and opportunity, you’ll mostly find the same countries that populate the Freedom Index’s leaderboard. Here:

The overlap is striking. And this highlights some of the pathologies of ideal theory: irrational polarization and the narcissism of small differences.

Some pathologies of ideal theory, both personal and political

Ideal theory can drive political conflict by concealing overlapping consensus. Pretty much any way you slice it, Denmark is an actually-existing utopia. But so is Switzerland. So is New Zealand. The effective difference between the Nordic and Anglo-colonial models, in terms of “human freedom” and “social progress” is surpassingly slight. Yet passionate moral commitment to purist ideals of the justice can lead us to see past the fact that the liberal-democratic capitalist welfare state, in whatever iteration, is awesome, and worth defending, from the perspective of multiple, rival political values. We miss the fact that these values fit together more harmoniously than our theories lead us to imagine.

I suspect this has something to do with the fact that utopia-dwellers around the world seem to be losing faith in liberal democracy, and the fact that “neoliberalism” can’t get no love, despite the fact that they measurably deliver the goods like crazy. Yet ideologues interpret this loss of faith as evidence of objective failure, which they diagnose as a lack of satisfactory progress toward their version of utopia, and push ever more passionately for an agenda they have no rational reason to believe would actually leave anyone better off.

It is intellectually corrupt and corrupting to define liberty or equality or you-name-it in terms of an idealized, counter-factual social system that may or may not do especially well in delivering the goods. Commitment to a vision of the perfect society is more likely than not to lead you astray. Consider how unlikely it is for a typical libertarian to correctly predict more than a couple of the top-ten freest countries on the libertarian freedom index. The fact that ideological radicals are pretty unreliable at ranking existing social systems in terms of their favored values ought to make us skeptical of claims that highly counterfactual systems would rank first. And it ought to lead us to suspect that ideal-theoretical political theorizing leads us to see the actual world less clearly than we might, due to cherry-picking and confirmation bias.

If you’ve already irrationally ranked a fanciful social system tops in terms your favored value, you’ve effectively committed to the idea that the world works in a certain way without sufficient evidence that it actually does. This is almost always a commitment of identity and group membership rather than a judgment of reason. And it leads you to cast about for evidence that the world does work the way it would need to work in order to vindicate your ranking. You end up lending a great deal of credibility to comforting evidence, while ignoring and dismissing evidence that the world doesn’t work that way you’d like it to work. The result is that your ideal-theoretic commitment ends up driving your model of the world.

But if your ideal theory is likely to be wrong in the first place, using it as a filter for evaluating evidence is going to leave you with a disastrously distorted picture of the way the world actually works. And that means you’re going to make systematically terrible predictions about the likely consequences of this or that policy change. You may want to identify reforms most likely to promote or liberty or equality, or whatever, but you’ll end up really bad at this because your distorted ideological model of the world will leave you unable to evaluate evidence objectively.

Progress in policy requires idealistic moral passion without preconceived ideals

For me, the death of ideal theory has meant adopting a non-speculative, non-utopian perspective on freedom-enhancing institutions. If you know that you can’t know in advance what the freest social system looks will look like, you’re unlikely to see evidence that suggests that policy A (social insurance, e.g.) is freedom-enhancing, or that policy B (heroin legalization, e.g.) isn’t, as threats to your identity as a freedom lover. Uncertainty about the details of the freest feasible social scheme opens you up to looking at evidence in a genuinely curious, non-biased way. And it frees you from the anxiety that genuine experts, people with merited epistemic authority, will say things you don’t want to hear. This in turn frees you from the urge to wage quixotic campaigns against the authority of legitimate experts. You can start acting like a rational person! You can simply defer to the consensus of experts on empirical questions, or accept that you bear an extraordinary burden of proof when you disagree.

I think the reign of ideal theory in political philosophy turned lots of incredibly smart, principled, morally motivated people into unreliable, untrustworthy ideologues. This has left the field of rational policy analysis to utilitarian technocrats, who have their own serious problems. Long story short, we ended up with a sort of divide in public policy between morally passionate advocates trapped in epistemic bubbles and technicians capable of objective analysis but devoid of guiding vision.

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