Category: Economic issues

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Free and Equal: What Would a Fair Society Look Like? Daniel Chandler. Penguin Random House, 2023. 404 pages.

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As the jacket blurb says, this book about the philosophy of John Rawls aims at “dragging his theory of justice down from Harvard’s ivory towers and into the streets with the people.”

For those already familiar with Rawls (unfortunately not many people), this book will be redundant. But Chandler does lay out Rawls’ theory of “justice as fairness” in lay language rather than in the dense language of moral and political philosophy. Chandler includes real-world examples of where some of Rawls’ ideas actually have been put to the test, and he proposes ways of bringing justice as fairness into the theory and practice of good politics.

Chandler is an economist and philosopher at the London School of Economics.

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A Boeing 737 Max: Why isn’t there a mass movement to refuse to fly on them? Source: Wikimedia Commons.

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This morning in the news, we learned that a front wheel fell off of a Boeing 757 as the jet was preparing to take off from Atlanta for Bogotá. The FAA is investigating. Also this morning in the news, we learned that the CEO of Alaska Airlines is angry after loose bolts were found on “many” of the airline’s Boeing 737 Max 9 jets.

Since photographs showed the the big hole in the fuselage after a door blew out of an Alaska Airlines jet (and the missing door was later found in someone’s backyard), and since the wheel that fell off the Boeing jet in Atlanta was seen rolling down a hill, it would be hard even for Fox News’ expertise in lying to gaslight us on such plain facts. But there’s still a lot of disinformation and propaganda to be milked out of such plain facts. The right-wing media have milked it to the max.

The problem with Boeing, the right-wing media say, is workforce diversity! If your blood pressure can take it, here’s an article from the Guardian, “Worried about airline safety? Blame diversity, say deranged rightwingers.” Elon Musk, of course, has endorsed and amplified that idea.

In the real world, the understanding of what happened at Boeing is very different. Boeing was once a company run by engineers. Brilliant design and careful manufacturing were the highest values. But Wall Street and rich stockholders see Boeing only as a money machine, and the theology of neoliberalism blessed a takeover. Keep in mind that, though ordinary Americans hold modest shares of stock, the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans own 89 percent of all American stocks. Once upon a time, McDonnell Douglas and Boeing were competitors. But in 1997, McDonnell Douglas took over Boeing and — knowingly and intentionally — made Boeing’s engineers subordinate to the money people.

The other factor in Boeing’s ruin was self-regulation, as a consequence of neoliberalism’s glorification of the market and demonization of government. Internal Boeing emails that came to light after two 737 Max crashes show that people inside of Boeing understood what was going on, but that they had no power to do anything about it. In one such email, an employee wrote: “This airplane is designed by clowns who in turn are supervised by monkeys.” Another employee wrote, describing the incompetence of regulators who were watching a Boeing presentation, that the regulators were “like dogs watching TV,” because they couldn’t understand the presentation. I can only imagine the bitterness and hostility that must now define Boeing’s company culture. And, of course, many engineers left and took their expertise with them.

Why is it always ordinary people, crammed into Boeing jets like cattle, who’re on board when these things happen? In 2022, there were 10,000 to 15,000 flights of private jets every day. According to this article, “Just 1% of air travelers account for 50% of global aviation emissions.” And yet how often do we read about billionaires’ jets going down? The private-jet industry claims that private jets are safer than commercial jets. If that’s true, it’s not hard to understand why.

Once again, I’d like to argue that Boeing is just one case of a great many in the global struggle that is behind almost every important thing happening in the world today. It’s the super-rich against the rest of us. Ninety percent of us are nothing more than just another natural resource to be exploited, lied to, and kept divided so that the 90 percent can’t organize the power to challenge the 10 percent. One of the things that blows my mind is that they’ve figured out how to make even their disinformation profitable. Fox News has net income of about $1.25 billion a year. The propaganda is so effective that society’s worst losers can be passionately and angrily convinced that what’s good for billionaires and dictators is good for them.

Minority rule can’t be easy, nor can it be stable. This is the overarching political struggle of our time — taking back wealth and power from a tiny minority who already own almost everything but who want everything, including unchallengeable power.

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Not long ago, I made the claim here that all conservative discourse is derp and always has been derp. You’ll always find a fallacy in conservative discourse. Sometimes the fallacies are the unintentional errors of defective conservative minds, and sometimes they’re sly attempts to deceive us. This is one of the reasons why conservative propaganda is so effective on so many people. Many people just don’t know enough to reason out the fallacies or detect the falsehoods.

Emma Duncan is a columnist for the Times of London who used to work for The Economist. Her column today has the headline “We should cheer the decline of humanities degrees.” (Unfortunately all Times of London content is behind a paywall.) This is provocative. It’s also semi-obnoxious, intended to irk those who value the humanities. But, worse, a claim she makes to defend what she’s saying is wrong, no doubt knowingly wrong. She just thought that most people wouldn’t notice.

She’s certainly right about a few things — that today’s young people have to pay far too much for their educations; that, if they can get a job at all they are paid too little; and that housing costs too much. But — like a true conservative or radical centrist — rather than aiming her fire at unfairness, injustice, and exploitation, she instead celebrates the decline of humanities degrees. That’s the work of a defective mind.

In her fourth paragraph, she writes:

“I suspect that this is a sign of what the historican Peter Turchin calls elite overproduction, the tendency of societies to produce more potential members of the elite than the power structure can absorb…. We are overproducing big time. A degree from a decent university is regarded as the entry ticket to the elite in this country, and numbers have rocketed.”

College students are not elites. They are not even “potential members of the elite,” at least, not for a long time, and not unless they were born rich or are extremely lucky. Turchin’s book was released only two days ago. My copy arrived the day it was released, and I have barely started reading it. But Duncan’s attempt at deception was immediately obvious.

Turchin starts this book by defining what elites are. Elites, he writes, on the first page, are power holders. We live in societies in which money equals power. An American, Turchin writes, with a net worth of $1 million to $2 million is in the lowest ranks of the elite. This means only that their lives are not precarious. They can turn down crummy jobs, and they won’t be bankrupted by a medical emergency. One’s net worth would have to be much higher than a measly $2 million to truly be a member of the elite.

Duncan writes that we are overproducing “big time,” and she puts that in the context of young people with college degrees. That is flat out false and is nothing like what Peter Turchin is saying. By overproduction, Turchin means the overproduction of wealth. One of the examples he cites is the American Civil War and the period that followed. Most of the gains from a growing economy went to elites, not to workers (or slaves). The interests of rich industrialists came into conflict with another elite — Southern slaveholders. And yet Duncan lays the blame for elite overproduction not on extreme inequality and unfairness but on poor, in-debt college students who can’t get a start in life!

The term Turchin uses is “popular immiseration.” The problem of college students today is not that they are frustrated elites. Rather, it’s that they are a just one caste in our society that is being immiserated by a system that fleeces the 90 percent at the bottom of society to pump money to the top.

People like Emma Duncan are part of that system.

I will have a review of this book later on.

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Update: Sam Mace, on Substack, delivers a seriously good whippin’ to Emma Duncan, calling her article “execrable.”

https://theorymatters.substack.com/p/why-we-need-humanities-a-response

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A Brief History of Equality. Thomas Piketty, Harvard University Press, April 19, 2022. 274 pages.

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Is much of the world better off now than it was, say, 200 years ago? Yes, undoubtedly, says Thomas Piketty. He does not use the words “the arc of justice,” but I would. The transcendentalist theologian Theodore Parker was quite right when, around 1840, he perceived the arc of justice. The great moral emergency of Parker’s time was slavery. And the exploitations of colonialism were just getting started in Parker’s time.

To see this progress in perspective, it’s necessary to be aware of just how terrible things have been for most people for most of history. That’s what the first half of Piketty’s book is about. The title of this book could as easily be “A Brief History of Inequality.” If we failed to learn about historical inequality in school, it may not be entirely the fault of our educations. There is a great deal of new research on inequality. For example, Piketty several times refers to inheritance archives from 19th Century France. The bottom 50 percent of the population, even today, inherit nothing and own almost nothing. In fact they may be deeply in debt. At this stage of history, those who have benefited most from a reduction in inequality are the 40 percent between the bottom 50 percent and the top 10 percent — the middle class.

The top 10 percent, and especially the top 1 percent, are obscenely rich, as always. The gains of the middle class are quite new, with most of that progress owed to the type of reforms that Franklin Roosevelt introduced in the U.S. after the Great Depression. There has been some backsliding since 1980, as the age of Reaganism, Thatcherism, and neoliberalism gained control. Piketty writes that neoliberalism is now discredited, especially after the financial crisis of 2008. But little progress has been made beyond neoliberalism because of political gridlock. It was, of course, the political struggles of organized progressives, going back for more than 200 years, that have made possible the gains in equality and social justice.

It is sometimes hard for caring human beings to believe that there actually are people — lots of them — who hate the idea of equality, democracy, and justice, and who fight for a jackboot world that is unequal, undemocratic, unfair, and unjust. It’s easier now, post-Trump. We know who they are, we know what they want, and we’ve had a glimpse of just how they would use power to keep people down. The ironic thing is that many of the bottom-rung infantry in the fight against justice don’t have a pot to piss in, but through the magic of fascism they buy into a politics that benefits only the top 10 percent.

In the second half of this book, Piketty outlines his thoughts on what must be done if progress is to continue. Progressive taxation, with heavy taxes on the filthy rich, is essential, as is investment in education and health care. But Piketty describes many other ideas still to be invented — for example, a universal inheritance, in which the wealth of the super-rich is taxed to provide a modest “inheritance” even for the poorest, to be paid at the age of 25, so that everyone has the means of getting a start in life.

Piketty’s ideas, I believe, provide an important and pragmatic piece of a pretty much complete theory of politics and activism. That politics, acknowledging the advances of the Enlightenment, would be heavily based on John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice. The next step is to consider William A. Edmundson’s argument that only democratic socialism can meet the requirements of A Theory of Justice. From there forward, Piketty provides not only a historical base that justifies the need for a new kind of economics, but also the outlines of a blueprint on how to continue that work.

It is not polite to quote an author’s last paragraph. But in this case I’m going to do it, because it captures so well why I think it is important to read this book:

This … will also require active citizens. The social sciences can contribute to this, but it goes without saying that they will not suffice. Only powerful social mobilizations, supported by collective movements and organizations, will allow us to define common objectives and transform power relationships. By what we ask of our friends, our networks, our elected officials, our preferred media, our labor union representatives, and by our own actions and participation in collective deliberation and social movements each of us can make socioeconomic phenomena more comprehensible and help grasp the changes that are occurring. Economic questions are too important to be left to others. Citizens’ reappropriation of this knowledge is an essential stage in the battle for equality. If this book has given readers new weapons for this battle, my goal will have been fully realized.

It’s true that Piketty’s densely academic style is not easy to read. But this book, unlike Piketty’s massive previous books, is only 274 pages.

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There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century. Fiona Hill, Mariner Books. 432 pages.

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I rarely read political memoirs, but I made an exception for Fiona Hill. She made a strong impression on millions of people during the House impeachment hearings of 2019. She was a visible example of the kind of people who, during Trump’s term in the White House, saved the American government from being completely corrupted by political hacks who did everything they could to turn the United States into Russia. Political hacks refer to this kind of people as the “Deep State,” by which the hacks mean: principled professionals who could not be corrupted or easily taken down, people who stood in the way of the Putinization of America.

Hill is a Russia expert. Trump called her “the Russia bitch.” Because she was born down and worked her way up, she did not go down easily. Principle, professionalism, and truth were her secret weapons.

Even from where I sit in the provinces it was clear that the Trumpist intent was — and is — to turn the U.S. into Russia. When someone like Fiona Hill confirms this, we ought to pay attention. She spent her career studying Russia, from the cold and grit of decaying Siberian cities to Moscow dinners sitting beside Putin. She worked in the White House and saw up close how the Trump White House operated. Her many hours of testimony to the House Intelligence committee are on the historical record. Most Republicans will never admit what happened or how close we came to an authoritarian coup, and the Republican cover-up continues. But one of the things that I find comforting, no matter where we end up a few years from now, is that historians are going to know the full story of what happened.

If you heard Hill’s testimony (it’s still available from CSPAN and on YouTube), you know that she is from the north of England. Hill’s perspective on the past thirty years allowed her to see connections that most of us are unable to see. Most important, of course, are the similarities between the Putinization of Russia and the Trumpization of America. She grew up very poor, in impoverished coal country. She is able to see how the policies of the Reagan-Thatcher era destroyed provincial economies but did nothing to mitigate the damage (though Hill also acknowledges that Thatcher was faced with trends and forces beyond her control). During the 1990s, Hill was on the ground in Russia, witnessing how efforts to create a Russian democracy failed and how oligarchs and so-called “populists,” who feed on grievance and disorder, took control. And then came Trump, riding the same whirlwind.

Hill writes that her training and her work have been nonpartisan. But, as Paul Krugman likes to say, reality has a distinctly liberal bias. This entire book, whether Hill intended it or not, is a powerful and urgent case for the enactment of the progressive agenda and a damning historical indictment of where Reaganism, neoliberalism, and so-called populism have led.

The book is in four parts. First, her deprived childhood in County Durham in the northeast of England. Second, how she found her way out, first to the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, and then to Harvard. Third, she writes about her time in the White House and what she saw there. And fourth, she does her best to offer ideas on what it will take for the United States to avoid Russia’s fate. The key to that is investing in people in the places that have been left behind.

One of the reasons I love this book is that I identify with Fiona Hill. My circumstances were never as harsh as hers, and my achievements were far less. Yet when she writes, for example, about “code switching,” I completely understand. She writes in the book about how she was often humiliated for her provincial accent, in particular when she interviewed at Oxford (and decided to go to St. Andrews instead). Some disadvantaged Brits, she writes, actually take elocution lessons to lose their provincial accents and learn “received pronunciation,” or what we used to call the BBC accent. Margaret Thatcher, for example, took voice lessons in the 1970s. I grew up with the Southern Appalachian dialect. But even in the provincial city of Winston-Salem, where I got my first job, that would not do. Because I had a good ear and an aptitude for languages, I was able to learn to “code switch.” People in San Francisco always told me that they could not detect a Southern accent. “Prove it,” someone once said. “Say something in Southern Appalachian.” I did, and the involuntary look of disgust on his face surprised even me, as though he had found a roach in his soup. Fiona Hill had similar experiences, and I greatly respect her for not trying to change her accent. She moved to America for greater opportunity, just as I moved to San Francisco for greater opportunity.

The subtitle of this book is about finding opportunity. How people talk is only one of many things that keep them down. Lack of education, lack of social support (meaning that there is no one there to help them), racism, classism, and the economic decay of rural and post-industrial regions are the biggies that keep people down.

Conservatives and even today’s so-called “centrists” have no solutions. In fact, conservatives do everything possible to block progress and push societies toward inequality and authoritarianism.

In a way, I regret that I have to say that this book is a powerful argument for the progressive agenda, because I don’t think that was Fiona Hill’s intention. But (like reality) a rational, historical, pragmatic, and nonpartisan outlook has a distinctly liberal bias. Conservatives dismiss Hill as a subversive and a George Soros mole in the White House. But what is clear to me is that the progressive view, and the progressive prescription for our problems, are not just a bias. It’s just a sensible, informed, and pragmatic way of looking at the world today. If I have a bias, it’s this: the progressive view and the progressive prescription for our problems are the only sensible, informed, and pragmatic way of looking at the world today.

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Scheduled air traffic, 2009. Wikipedia.

I owe a great deal to Nouriel Roubini. I had been a liberal prepper since 9/11. I was preparing for retirement as the Bush-Cheney financial bubble grew — and grew and grew. If you believed the horsewash and the noise in the media, it was a fine time to borrow money against your house and live it up — new cars, dream vacations, and granite countertops bought with borrowed money. I did not believe the horsewash, and I did the opposite. I got out of the stock market before it blew up. I carefully moved my retirement money out of tax-sheltered accounts, duly paid the taxes on it, and converted most of my assets into usable land and a paid-for house. I actually benefited from the financial crash, because I built Acorn Abbey during the trough of a recession, when materials prices were low and when people were hungry for work and bid low.

But my point is not just that we should be contrarians. Rather, it’s about the importance of beating the bushes for reliable information, especially in uncertain times. Much of the noise in the media comes from people who have lots of opinions, but not a lot of information. And, these days, the Republican Party and its propaganda organs just make up whatever information suits their agenda. Many people haven’t caught on to how their politics and religion can be used to take advantage of them.

But back to Nouriel Roubini. The fact that he was right about the financial crash of 2008 (and that his model was predicting it before 2006) does not necessarily mean that his current predictions will be accurate. But it does mean that he has a good model, and it does mean that we’d be wise to take his predictions seriously. His predictions are very, very scary — a global depression, a period of inflation, and even food riots.

Here’s a link to an interview in New York Magazine: Why Our Economy May Be Headed for a Decade of Depression.

One of the things we need to be trying to model right now is how this pandemic is going to permanently change the way we live. We need to be on the lookout for reliable information about what people are starting to do differently. And we need to pay attention to people like Nouriel Roubini, whose views are based on actual data and whose models are constantly updated. Data from the economic shock from Covid-19 obviously required that Roubini update his economic model. The New York Magazine piece, as far as I know, is the first piece available to the public on Roubini’s post-pandemic model.

Note the comparison to Germany in the New York Magazine piece. More than ever, we need competent government to get through what we’re probably facing.