11.20.09
The Left, The Right, and Advertising
I’ve edited this post slightly to make it tighter, and to incorporate an aspect of Giles’s comment below the original.
There are two adverts currently doing the rounds that really get on my nerves.
The first is for Clover, or Utterly Butterly, or one of those other butter-substitute spread things. You’ll have seen it, the posters are everywhere. They have a picture of some twit in a van holding a crumpet, and the words “Now With 70% Less Fat*” emblazoned in giant letters above him.
The things is, if you follow the asterisk and read the tiny print at the bottom of the poster, you will see that it says “When compared to ordinary butter”. I don’t think you’d be a fool for assuming that the claim of a 70% reduction related to the fat content of the same product but as formerly produced, not to ordinary butter generally. But then, you’d be wrong. Personally, I think this is misleading to the point of near-absurdity.
The other advert (or series of adverts) that irritates me is the T-Mobile “what would you do with free texts for life?” nonsense. Specifically, I’m annoyed by the bloke who is allegedly starting a “superband” now that he’s got free texts for life. Maybe I’m missing something, but I’m fairly sure that what was stopping him from forming a superband was never the cost of sending inane chatter to people he knew (he’d surely heard of Twitter).
The whole T-Mobile advertising campaign is simply daft. Right? Then again, T-Mobile must have done extensive market and advertising research before ploughing huge sums of money into this campaign. So they must think it will work. Which leads me to wonder: are people really so stupid that this sort of campaign, rather than causing them to scoff at the ridiculous premise, will actually encourage them to switch phone companies?
Perhaps many people are that dumb. Or perhaps advertising makes them that way. That and the cold, cynical manipulation of Simon Cowell et al.
Which leads me to my substantive point. I hate advertising. A quick summary of why: it inculcates pointless desires in people, encouraging them to buy crap they don’t need (cf. JK Galbraith’s The Affluent Society). This in itself would probably be no great disadvantage (indeed, it does lead to useful economic activity and create demand in the economy, so right now could have lots of advantages). But for me advertising becomes troubling when you take note of the status-anxiety and unhappiness that is fostered in people (especially women, heavily targeted by e.g. cosmetics advertising) who come to believe that they cannot live happy or fulfilled lives without the junk that advertising shoves down our throats all day every day.
Furthermore, because so much advertising is based on distortion, misrepresentation and outright lying, the general effect is the successful and pervasive dissemination of bullshit, dishonesty and manipulation. And I think we are significantly the worse for that.
And this is a point where I think people on “the left” can broadly be said to part company with “the right”. The former will tend to think there is something both intrinsically dubious in the practices of modern advertising, and undesirable in its effects. The latter will tend to think this is a bit silly: advertising is (on one conception) simply the process of rational economic actors seeking to maximise their utility by making other rational economic actors aware, or desirous, of their products. It thus prompts mutually beneficial exchanges, with create likewise beneficial effects for wider society. Or (on a related but different conception), that advertising is just something that human beings left to their own devices as free individuals will end up engaged in, and not something to be unduly concerned about – or at least, not so concerned as to think people’s lives are negatively impacted to the extent that the civil and market freedoms of advertisers ought to be curtailed in the name of any individual or social good.
If that’s right, an interesting consequence seems to follow. Insofar as the strength of hostility towards modern advertising does roughly track left-right divisions, this implies that being on “the left” is about more than simply having a preference for greater equality within societies (which tends to be how it’s delineated). Instead, thoughts about what kinds of practices we should be concerned about, and how those practices influence people’s psychology and well-being (and whether they have significant influences at all) seem pertinent too.
The first is for Clover, or Utterly Butterly, or one of those other butter-substitute spread things. You’ll have seen it, the posters are everywhere. They have a picture of some twit in a van holding a crumpet, and the words “Now With 70% Less Fat*” emblazoned in giant letters above him.
The things is, if you follow the asterisk and read the tiny print at the bottom of the poster, you will see that it says “When compared to ordinary butter”. I don’t think you’d be a fool for assuming that the claim of a 70% reduction related to the fat content of the same product but as formerly produced, not to ordinary butter generally. But then, you’d be wrong. Personally, I think this is misleading to the point of near-absurdity.
The other advert (or series of adverts) that irritates me is the T-Mobile “what would you do with free texts for life?” nonsense. Specifically, I’m annoyed by the bloke who is allegedly starting a “superband” now that he’s got free texts for life. Maybe I’m missing something, but I’m fairly sure that what was stopping him from forming a superband was never the cost of sending inane chatter to people he knew (he’d surely heard of Twitter).
The whole T-Mobile advertising campaign is simply daft. Right? Then again, T-Mobile must have done extensive market and advertising research before ploughing huge sums of money into this campaign. So they must think it will work. Which leads me to wonder: are people really so stupid that this sort of campaign, rather than causing them to scoff at the ridiculous premise, will actually encourage them to switch phone companies?
Perhaps many people are that dumb. Or perhaps advertising makes them that way. That and the cold, cynical manipulation of Simon Cowell et al.
Which leads me to my substantive point. I hate advertising. A quick summary of why: it inculcates pointless desires in people, encouraging them to buy crap they don’t need (cf. JK Galbraith’s The Affluent Society). This in itself would probably be no great disadvantage (indeed, it does lead to useful economic activity and create demand in the economy, so right now could have lots of advantages). But for me advertising becomes troubling when you take note of the status-anxiety and unhappiness that is fostered in people (especially women, heavily targeted by e.g. cosmetics advertising) who come to believe that they cannot live happy or fulfilled lives without the junk that advertising shoves down our throats all day every day.
Furthermore, because so much advertising is based on distortion, misrepresentation and outright lying, the general effect is the successful and pervasive dissemination of bullshit, dishonesty and manipulation. And I think we are significantly the worse for that.
And this is a point where I think people on “the left” can broadly be said to part company with “the right”. The former will tend to think there is something both intrinsically dubious in the practices of modern advertising, and undesirable in its effects. The latter will tend to think this is a bit silly: advertising is (on one conception) simply the process of rational economic actors seeking to maximise their utility by making other rational economic actors aware, or desirous, of their products. It thus prompts mutually beneficial exchanges, with create likewise beneficial effects for wider society. Or (on a related but different conception), that advertising is just something that human beings left to their own devices as free individuals will end up engaged in, and not something to be unduly concerned about – or at least, not so concerned as to think people’s lives are negatively impacted to the extent that the civil and market freedoms of advertisers ought to be curtailed in the name of any individual or social good.
If that’s right, an interesting consequence seems to follow. Insofar as the strength of hostility towards modern advertising does roughly track left-right divisions, this implies that being on “the left” is about more than simply having a preference for greater equality within societies (which tends to be how it’s delineated). Instead, thoughts about what kinds of practices we should be concerned about, and how those practices influence people’s psychology and well-being (and whether they have significant influences at all) seem pertinent too.
11.19.09
Regarding the PCC and Blogs
On Tuesday I asked people to (e-)sign a letter directed to the Press Complaints Commission regarding the proposal to include blogs in its remit of (so-called) “regulation”.
Rob Jubb of Consider Phlebas left the following interesting comment, which raises points that need to be addressed:
I’m really not sure that, as a political tactic, writing to an organisation that’s thinking about regulating you telling it that it’s shit at regulating what it already regulates and so you think you’re better off without it is very sensible. It seems likely to antagonise the organisation and hardly, given that presumably it knows that what it does already, likely to change its mind. Presumably, since the PCC is a voluntary organisation, the sensible thing to do would be publicly advise bloggers not to sign up to it. If it’s thought that there’s a risk of government requiring PCC membership, then the government, not the PCC, are the people to write to. Actually, this seems to me typical of Unity’s somewhat twitchily passive-aggressive style, but eh, let many flowers bloom and all that.
Here’s where I stand.
It’s true that Unity’s letter to the PCC is likely to antagonise it. Is that a sensible political tactic? I think maybe it is.
The PCC is a voluntary body which supposedly self-regulates the media industry. There are two main ways to interpret the grumblings about regulating blogs. The first is to see this as vacuous politicised nonesense; regulating blogs in practice would be virtually impossible, bloggers would have to have “representatives” on the PCC for this to make sense and that seems fairly unworkable, and ultimately the PCC is a joke which doesn’t enforce order in its own house, so has little prospect of achieving anything outside of that.
If this turns out to be the case, I think it’s still worthwhile sending an antagonistic letter. For the simple reason that an antagonistic letter signed by hundreds of bloggers is likely to get picked up by some parts of the press, and in turn can be used to highlight the gross failings of the PCC, and the comparative virtues of much of the (genuinely self-regulating) “blogosphere”. And that’s a good thing, as far as I’m concerned.
There’s another interpretation though, and it’s the one I allude to in my suggested ammendment at comment [7] under Unity’s original lette: that this be viewed as a potential PCC land-grab, whereby vested interests in the so-called Main Stream Media stake an early claim to be able to “regulate” independent blogs. Which effectively cashes-out in terms of having the power to shut blogs down. Think this is paranoid? Well, Rupert Murdoch is going to war with Google and the BBC, because he sees them as undercutting News International. In time, I think some blogs will come to challenge the predominance of important sections of the MSM (Huffington Post in the United States is arguably halfway there already). When that happens, the MSM outlets will react to the competition violently. If the precedent has been established that the PCC can regulate blogs…well it doesn’t take a genius to imagine how the MSM interests in the PCC will operate. Even if the PCC has some nominal representatives from “bloggers”, I doubt this would be an off-set to the vested interests in a PCC which might suddenly discover it has teeth.
If this is the case, then I think an antagonistic response from bloggers is fairly appropriate. Being nicey-nicey towards the PCC seems to me rather pointless. Better to be vocally and unambiguously opposed from day one.
As for Rob’s point that this should be a matter directed towards the government, I think pointing out that Unity’s letter will be CC’d to Ben Bradshaw MP, Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport and John Whittingdale MP, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, pretty much covers it.
And there’s also the matter of principle, frankly. After all, who do the PCC think they are, threatening to regulate blogs when their own house is such a horrible mess?
So whilst I think Rob makes good points that need to be addressed, my inclination is that belligerence is the best default position to take on this issue. Frankly I don’t see what’s to gain by being nicey-nicey with a PCC which is either proposing something vacuous or unworkable, or laying the grounds for a land-grab.
11.17.09
Sign up
Quick request for everybody to head over to Liberal Conspiracy and sign Unity’s letter to the Press Complaints Commission, objecting to its proposed regulation of UK blogs.
Unity sets out some solid reasons why this is a very unwelcome proposal. I add my further thoughts at comment 7, asking for these to be incorporated into the letter.
If you blog, and haven’t yet signed the letter, please do so now.
11.16.09
On EDMs
A lot of really silly things go on in the British Parliament. There are corridors you can’t walk down unless you’re an MP. Many (male) members of staff have to wear stockings and bow-ties as though they’ve just stepped out of a BBC period drama. There are systems of etiquette by which it is acceptable for grown adults to bay, scream and jab their fingers at other grown adults whilst they are attempting not simply to speak, but to debate our national legislation.
One of the silliest, however, is the continued existence of the Early Day Motion (EDM). What’s an EDM? This is a fair summary: a pointless and ineffectual statement by a group of MPs, pronouncing judgement upon some event, or calling for some course of action, which other MPs are invited to add their signatures to.
EDMs achieve absolutely nothing. They are vitually never debated on the House floor or in committee, and they do not lead to legislation being drafted, or even influenced.
So why do they continue to exist?
Well, if you’re an MP in a marginal constituency, and you get a lot of people writing in to demand that “something must be done about [insert personal hobby horse / mass-orchestrated campaign by pressure group]!” you can swiftly reply: “I completely agree! That’s why I have signed EDM Number 1245!” (or whichever), safe in the knowledge that this commits you to absolutely nothing of substance, whilst making it appear that you have done something worthwhile.
Trebles all round, eh?
It’s for this reason that MPs in safe seats generally tend not to bother signing EDMs at all. They know it achieves nothing, and they know they don’t need to massage the constituency vote. So EDMs are pointless to them, and viewed as a waste of time.
But what’s the harm, I hear you ask? Well, because Parliament is an anachronistic madhouse, all EDMs in every Parliamentary session are printed out, with vast numbers of copies scattered around the Parliamentary estate so that MPs, Lords and their staff can peruse them at leisure. Except, every time somebody adds their signature to an EDM, the entire EDM list has to be printed out again, and all the old copies thrown away. And that means a lot of copies being printed out and thrown away.
According to the Parliament website, the estimated average cost of each EDM in the 2005-6 session was £290. Sounds a tad expensive? It gets a lot worse when it’s recalled that in the 2007-8 session, there were a whopping 2727 EDMs.
Now I know these figures are for different years, but neither year was exceptional. So for a ballpark estimate: £290 x 2727 = £790,830.
I make that over three-quarter of a million quid spent on something which is completely pointless. (I don’t count helping marginal seat MPs pretend they are doing something when they aren’t as constituting a worthwhile use of tax money). And that’s not even factoring-in all the trees that have to be turned into EDM paper, the ink that’s wasted, and the electricity used in the whole process of reprinting the damn things every day. (And I don’t even want to think about the total of wasted paper, ink and electricity in a Parliament where every piece of official documentation, from what I could tell when working there, is printed out every single day, and updated EDM-style for every tiny alteration and change).
This is absurd. In the 21st Century, everything can and should be available electronically, with only exceptional cases needing to be printed off as a mater of course. With current technology there is simply no reason why EDMs need to be printed off at all. Everything can be put online, accessed by computer, iPhone and Blackberry. (Or for the older, less-techy and more exploitative Members, unpaid intern).
Even dark-age Tories are starting to wake up to the fact that as a society we need to change the way we live; sustainability, cost-cutting and waste reduction are the future. The least that Parliament could do is to set a good example.
Who knows, maybe the Tories could champion the “Paperless Parliament” to distract attention from the troglodyte misogynists littering their back benches?
11.15.09
Depth on Screen
Just a quick blog, partly to move my somewhat confused (and confusing) thoughts about Jon Cruddas’ communitarianism further down the home page.
Last night I watched Blade Runner for the umpteenth time. Now, I’ve long suspected that this film manages to capture and explore some pretty profound themes, in a way that escapes all but the greatest literature and stage drama. Most people would scoff at that, but I really think their wrong.
In particular, the character Roy Batty’s final lines (which I think can almost be considered as soliloquy) always strike me as not only deeply moving, but as relaying something truly significant and insightful about the nature of life and death:
“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe.
Attack ships on fire off the Shoulder of Orion
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate.
All those moments will be lost in time. Like tears in rain.
Time to die.”
Rendering this to text alone loses a great deal from the actual delivery by Rutger Hauer. So you really should watch it for yourselves (and not just on YouTube; you won’t understand the full impact unless you’ve watched the whole film first).
However, until last night I could never put my thoughts together about why Blade Runner managed to achieve something quite special, or how to explain that it constitutes so much more than “just a film”. Then I remembered Stephen Mulhall did an excellent podcast about the philosophy of Blade Runner, so I went a-Googling to see if he’d written anything more substantive about it.
And it turns out he has. This is compulsory reading, not just for anybody who actually wants to understand why Blade Runner is up there with the greatest literature and drama, but for anybody who would like to find better ways to think about what it is to be human, and what it is to live and die.
To bad you won’t live. But then again, who does?
11.14.09
Cruddas’ Communitarianism
Jon Cruddas MP put in an appearance at today’s Compass AGM. Say what you like about Cruddas (and I prefer to say that I like), he’s a damn good public speaker who exhibits rare qualities in a modern politician: heart-felt commitment, passionate belief, and a healthy disregard for spin, sanitisation and calculated presentation.
But I don’t agree with everything he says, and aspects of his leftwing communitarianism make me uncomfortable.
Cruddas relayed an anecdote-cum-metaphor, describing an old lady he’d met whilst canvasing one of his wards. 86 and living alone, this old lady didn’t get out much and her view onto the outside world was restricted – physically, but in large measure conceptually – to the street outside her front door. The man living opposite her had, however, dumped a mattress in his front garden which has been festering away for weeks. This rotting mattress came to dominate the old lady’s view of everything; as Cruddas put it, her whole world became filtered “through the prism of the mattress”.
This symbol of decay and degeneration was put to good use by Cruddas as a metaphor for wider political crisis and general feelings of helplessness – and they’re solution. He recounted how he and his colleagues had asked the man responsible for the mattress to remove it, but the man refused and ignored them (despite their offering a number to call which would mean the council taking it away for free). Spurred on by this, Cruddas and Co. organised a “No Eye Sore” campaign for the ward, and established petitions so that residents who felt neighbours were bringing down the aesthetic of the neighbourhood could campaign to request nuisance litterers to stop, and if they didn’t stop (despite being offered free council help), the council could step in and fine them the equivalent of the cost of sorting out the mess.
Cruddas hailed this as a great success. Not only did the ward start to become much nicer looking, but this effect reverberated into the political; because people were taking pride in their environment and feeling better about it, they felt enfranchised, connected and like they were making their lives better. Furthermore, by working together to achieve a common goal, a sense of solidarity and achievement was fostered which was genuinely good for the residents who before had felt atomised, cut-off, powerless and surrounded by decay. Cruddas generalised this metaphor to wider society: that we need to create a spirit of collective endeavour, fraternal solidarity, and community empowerment to end the “atomisation” of much of present society (especially amongst the poor working classes).
So what’s my problem with this explicitly communitarian view of people coming together and reclaiming a public space (or a public thing, a Res Publica, maybe?), working together and experiencing a rejuvenation of the political through communal action?
Well it’s not a stereotypical (and naive) “liberal” thought that people should have unfettered rights (spheres of non-interference, if you like) to dump things in their front gardens (i’m here going to focus on Cruddas’ micro example as a way of building up to macro points). I think that front gardens, and their disuse and lack of upkeep, can sufficiently be considered public spaces to the extent that other people have rights over them too, even if they don’t own them. That is, whilst Joe Bloggs has a right to dump things in his (privately owned) front garden, the rest of the individuals in the street may well have rights not to have parts of their environment turned into a wasteheap, which makes them depressed, apathetic, disconnected and frustrated. (And I don’t think that’s an exaggeration; the aesthetics of one’s environment have a significant impact upon one’s happiness and well-being, hence people should surely have rights over their environment and how it looks). So i’m not against a group of residents launching a “No Eye Sore” campaign and pitting their rights to live in a nice environment against the rights of some individuals to ruin their little chunks of that environment, when ruining those chunks impact upon the lives of others.
So I can back a Cruddas-style campaign.
What bothered me, however, was Cruddas’ reaction to a question from the floor. A very insightful and articulate man behind me asked Cruddas what happened to the bloke who wouldn’t get rid of his mattress. Cruddas laughed and joked that it was “only a metaphor”, but when pressed on this issue he came out with: “look, that guy, he was a bad man. He’s gone now. We don’t need to worry about him.” And that’s the point that set my alarm bells ringing.
Although Cruddas was partly joking, the fact that he thought this was just a joke is instructive, I think. On Cruddas’ conception of the political, there is the community, those who want to work as part of it to achieve common goals, and those who stand in the way and must be defeated. Now I can buy all of that. Politics is about conflict, as we should all know by now. But where I differ from Cruddas is that I am not prepared to just dismiss the outsider, the troublemaker, the recalcitrant mattress-dumper as a bad man, even as an off-the-cuff joke. I want to say he’s a man with rights, albeit rights which in this case we are going to over-rule in the name of the rights of others. I want to admit that there is an important value conflict here, and confess that this is important and difficult, and its resolution may in some ways be unpleasant. I do not want to dismiss the recalcitrant as merely bad men, as though that closed the issue and uncomfortable ethical questions about how we use power over people in political society are thereby disolved into the ether of community.
It’s that dissolution of ethical conflict which I find troubling about Cruddas’ communitarianism, and which i’ve picked up on before, but never been able to discern as clearly as I did today. Community and civic engagement is important, yes: but other things matter too, and if you want to attack “neoliberalism” for its atomisation, there’s a real danger of throwing some ethical babies out with the conceptual bathwater.
However that’s not the end of the story. Cruddas is, in general, offering a left-wing communitarian critique of what he sees as the failings of a modern, capitalist-driven, atomised broadly liberal society. Personally, I believe that the best way to critique that society is from a broadly liberal perspective that pays more attention to things like equality of income, wealth and opportunity than simple non-interference and freedom for the market, but which also allows for the kind of community-driven fraternal political “actualisation” that Cruddas favours within the context of recognising the limits of communities and the rights people need to have (even if ultimately over-ruled) vis-a-vis those communities.
Thus, I don’t see my views as necessarily completely incompatible with Cruddas’, even though aspects of his communitarianism trouble me. And I can tell you one thing for definite: I sure as hell would prefer a world where Cruddas’ style communitarian leftism was driving the agenda (hopefully tempered by thoughts from my camp) than the world of David Cameron, his Old Etonian set, and the Thatcherite anti-societal market liberalism that lurks behind the respectable facade painted for the nasty party.
This is important. The left is almost defined by historical faction and schism; by bickering over unimportant and insignificant differences in ideology or practice, whilst the right takes and holds power. So I agreed with Neal Lawson, Compass chair, that the left (I refuse to use the stupid “progressive” word) needs to put aside its differences and find common ground to both counteract the political right, and find new strategies and ideals in a post-New Labour world. Compass, for example, needs to be prepared to back not just Labour, but where appropriate, the Lib Dems and the Greens too, as well as smaller factions, parties, NGOs and civil society groups. Labour has no monopoly on wisdom, and it’s foolish in the extreme to freeze people out simply because they don’t carry rose-adorned cards.
So I’m going to take Lawson’s thoughts, and defy the history of the broad tribe to which I attach myself: Jon Cruddas, there are things about your communitarianism I don’t like, but at the end of the day we’re on the same side. I’ll work with you, if you’ll work with me*.
–
* Metaphorically…unless you want to help me write a half-sensible thesis proposal about David Hume’s theory of obligation, which I am conspicuously failing to do a good job of by myself.
11.11.09
Politics by other means
My first reaction to the Jacqui Janes story was withering: who is this woman who cares more about The Sun’s silver than her son’s death; who would criticise a half-blind prime minister for bad handwriting and spelling mistakes? I assumed she must be horrible, money-grabbing and cynical.
More fool me. On Newsnight it became clear that things are rather different. Ms Janes is clearly genuinely bereaved and devastated at the loss of her son. And she clearly believes that by publicly shaming Gordon Brown she might be able to make things better for others. But, it has to be said that Ms Janes does not appear to be particularly bright. And she is – by her own admission – on a considerable dose of sedatives. Apparently it was the idea of ‘her friend’ to record Gordon Brown’s phone call.
Which brings us to The Sun. It seems abundantly clear that the ‘newspaper’ not only exploited the death of a young man for blatantly partisan ends, but looks almost certainly to have expolited the extreme grief – and good inentions – of a bereaved mother.
Nothing new there then. And I agree with Sunny at Liberal Conspiracy, and as I’ve written before, Labour should fight back against the Murdoch empire.
But with that said, I can’t deny how hard I was struck by Ms Janes’ moving plea for British troops to be better equipped after describing the horrific injuries her son sustained. It’s a cliche, but it really brought the war home for me, if only for a moment. It made me angry at the Government for underinvestment, and caused me to question what young British men are dying for in the sands of Afghanistan.
So there’s something especially tragic about The Sun’s manipulation. What should be a chance for reflection on the horrors of war, and questioning the justifications for this one, has been turned into a media storm about the Prime Minister’s personal failings, a cynical newspaper, and the political machinations between the two.
War; politics by other means.
11.10.09
Let’s Come Clean: The Left is Economically Illiterate and (Almost Totally) Devoid of Ideas
People who read this blog tell me it’s angry. Normally I don’t realise. Today I do.
Yesterday on Liberal Conspiracy there was a post by Adam Lent entitled “Where is the left’s new economic map?” Now Adam, I have nothing against you (whoever you are). But I’m afraid you are in the wrong place at the wrong time, and are going to kop it accordingly. For I am sick to death of the left’s endless economic illiteracy, its spouting of grand-sounding rhetoric with no underlying substance, and its almost complete lack of any concrete proposals what-so-ever.
Let’s start with Lent’s piece. He wants to run an analogy whereby “neoliberalism” (whatever that might be) is compared to a “road map” printed 40 years ago which has caused us to drive our car into a ditch. Ignoring the obvious point that any driver who only follows a road map and doesn’t look where they’re going deserves to end up in a ditch, I’m affraid I have to be rude: such an analogy could only be advanced by somebody who either knows nothing about economics, or has decided to popularise the discussion to such a base level that it becomes devoid of intellectual worth.
“Neoliberalism” was not erected – a set in stone monolith – 40 years ago, to be left unchanged ever since. Economic theory and practice is evolving and changing all the time. The general paradigm might be something we term “neoliberal” (whatever that might actually mean) but the idea that economic theory and practice – note, theory and practice, i.e. something rather unlike a simple map – can be reduced to such a banal metaphor is indicative of the level of discourse being employed.
Second point: the article gestures at some big name (apparently) leftist economists and claims they’ve “had an impact”, but offers no concrete proposals about what to do at all. Rather, the piece consists of two things: a bad metaphor, and a cry that Something Must Be Done!
Now, in itself there’s nothing wrong with calling that something must be done. I’ve engaged in that myself. But it becomes a problem when that is all that is ever being offered. Sorry, Adam, for picking on your piece. There are thousands of effectively identical ones littered across the internet: leftist blogs and newspaper columns hand-waving about evil “neoliberalism” and crying for somebody to do something.
Do what, exactly?
There’s a good reason I do most of my economic reading on non-leftist blogs. It’s because the vast majority of people who understand economics, and have anything concrete whatsoever to say about recovery and paradigm shift, just aren’t on the left. It’s those bloggers that have academic and working knowledge of economic theory and practice. It’s those bloggers who, for example, are aware of basic truths about our collective economic history. For example that Keynes offered his General Theory not as a leftist alternative to the right (whatever that is supposed to mean), but was in fact intended to rescue liberal capitalist democracy from the twin threats of communism and fascism during a period of economic havoc when capitalism looked like it was about to kick the bucket. And that’s exactly what it did: Keynesianism saved capitalism. That it later became bound-up with welfarism and a suspect narrative about a centrist/leftist “Keynesian consensus” is an altogether different – and stranger – story.
Yet this problem of intellectual economic shortfall on the left is not confined to the “blogosphere” by any means. Although I greatly enjoyed the Fabian Society conference on Saturday, this problem of the left’s just having no coherent or concrete proposals about what to do regarding the great big economic mess was prominently on display there as well.
In the afternoon debate, entitled “Progressive Economy: How to Get There”, the panelists spent about an hour switching between sensible discussion of how to think about climate change, and rather less substantive gesturing about economics. There was lots of “we mustn’t let a good crisis go to waste!” and “we must meet people where they are, not where we want them to be!” and “we must be willing to consider radical solutions!”. But how we might avoid letting the crisis go to waste, where we want to take people once we’ve met them, and what the radical solutions might be was all left conspicuously unsaid.
So I raised this point, and probably did it a little too angrily (I tried to apologise to the panelists afterwards, but missed some of them). My basic problem was that the debate was supposed to be about how the left (or “progressives” to use that silly word) can offer alternatives to a system perceived to have failed. Yet no concrete proposals what-so-ever had actually been made – and it seemed very much to be because nobody had any.
With my frustration being helpfully refined by another member of the audience, the panelists were asked to offer the 1 concrete proposal they thought was most important. Eugenie Harvey, director of climate change action group 10:10, offered a very sensible idea about personal carbon allowances . But unfortunately this simply re-inforced the problem that throughout the debate the issues of preventing climate change and finding alternative leftist economic strategies were consistently run together as though they are identical. (Hint: they may not be. Imagine a dictator who ends climate change by enslaving the entire world population and preventing all carbon use accordingly).
Richard Millar of ActionAid said some very sensible and extremely commendable things about how reform of tax systems – domestically and abroad – can actualise important social change in favour of equality, and end developing world dependency on foreign aid. Unfortunately, he prefaced it with a response to me that we need to find “alternative models of growth” without saying what on earth those models might be.
However, there was something to be very positive about. Finishing things off, Anthony Painter offered a genuine concrete proposal – albeit an embryonic one – as to how we can reconceptualize economic organisation. The idea is what has been referred to by others as the “John Lewis Approach”: giving individual workers direct stakes in the companies and – so as to cover the public sector – institutions they work for. There seems to be some evidence (e.g. John Lewis) that firms which are employee-owned not only act more responsibly and look after their staff well (who are themselves often happier), they are also stable and successful economic actors. This possibility is very exciting. As Anthony Painter stressed, it is not “socialism”, which posits collective ownership through the proxy of the state (i.e. the state owns things in our names). Rather, this “John Lewis” approach posits collective ownership in an altogether more direct way: firms and institutions owned by the people who work for and run them. So I guess you could call it socialism, Jim, but certainly not as we know it.
I find that exciting, and something I can get my teeth into. When I have the time, this is where my reading will be directed. So the left – it turns out – does have an idea. And it’s a potentially big one, even if right now it’s only a glint in the ideologues’ eye. But we need to start chasing it up, finding out more of the messy details, and seeing if it can really work. Simultaneously, we need to stop writing and shouting vacuous, ill-informed, economically-illiterate but self-congratulatory nonsense about “grasping the moment of change” and “overturning the neo-liberal consensus”.
It’s time to get educated. Whilst I go and read about “John Lewis” approaches, why don’t some of you young bucks go and get economics degress? Then, in a few years time, we’ll have a fighting chance of change.
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Appendix
Why do noticably few people on the left understand economics beyond a crude A-Level standard? Here’s my grand theory of explanation, which is probably wrong.
The dominant approach of the last 30-40 years which can probably safely be described as a combination of “neoclassicalism” and “monetarism” (which usually gets crudely described as “neoliberalism”, which in fact is properly understood as a political programme as well as an economic one) has been characterised by two things.
Firstly, the dominance of mathematics and the belief that economic principles can be reduced to a science. Secondly, the predominance of rightist economists (Friedman being your obvious example). Those who are not extremely competent at mathematics cannot progress in the discipline (e.g. me). Of those that remain, relatively few will be overtly political, one way or the other (they will mostly be interested in, erm, maths). As a result, the vast majority of economists that emerge trained from the academy are either rightists to begin with, or are turned that way by the tendency towards rightwing orthodoxy latent within the modern discipline. This is because economics tends to exaggerate the pre-occupations of the Chicago school thinkers who initially brought forth the Keynesian-replacing neoclassical/monetarist approaches, whilst simultaneously keeping up the pretension that the discipline is a non-ideological science which just reports the facts as they are found in the world. Net result: very few left-wing economists trained within the last 30 years, and even fewer who are competent within the discipline, and even fewer again who (due to institutional biases) succeed in raising to a position of influence or public prominence.
And this matters. The left is not going to shift any paradigms if nobody on the left knows what the paradigms are or how they work.
“Oh mother, tell my sister/ Not to do what I have done/ Don’t drop economics to piss around in philosophy/ If you want, to change, the world”.
11.09.09
Children of the Fall
Most of the comment this week is going to be taken up by people reflecting on the 20th Anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The vast majority of that will come from people who have experience of life in the eras both before and after the wall came down, and for obvious reasons.
So here’s something different. Here’s a reflection on the fall of the Berlin wall from the perspective of somebody who doesn’t remember it, because they were 3 years old in 1989.
My generation lives, for all intense and purposes, without ideology. This is not because Francis Fukuyama was right that the end of history has been achieved in the form of Western liberal democracy. The reasons that was a rather silly thing to say are well-rehearsed already (though I suspect Fukuyama always knew it was silly, and just spotted a quick buck).
There’s plenty of ideology knocking about in the world (as we all know from the daily death count in Afghanistan) but there’s not much of it here in Britain amongst the under 25s. It’s a platitude that political parties have seen declining membership for years now, and that apathy and disillusionment with politics has been steadily on the rise for a while. But it doesn’t follow that people of my generation are completely uninterested in politics per se. Most – I imagine – would tell you that Gordon Brown is a crap prime minister and needs to go. And most say the recession is a bad thing, and needs to be sorted out. Many – possibly most – will have other concerns: opposition to university tuition fees, the spectre of global warming, and so on.
The thing is though, whilst there remain political beliefs and issues that the young are still interested in, it’s very rare to find a young person who sees all these issues and beliefs (should they be interested in more than a couple) as unified by any under-lying and coherent worldview. Rather, issues and beliefs are presented and held as broadly freestanding political preferences, which may connect with other preferences in some respects, but are essentially self-sufficient. In short: politics without ideology.
And I include myself in that analysis. For what is my ideology? I don’t want to call myself a socialist, or even a social democrat, because I’m unsure of what those terms even mean or imply in 21st Century Britain. I tend to stick with “liberal egalitarian”, but that rests on an extremely technical understanding derived from esoteric political theory, much of which I’m actually pretty unsure about whether I find to be an adequate account of the political. Truth is, I spend half my life talking and thinking about politics, and yet struggle to identify where it is I take myself to stand.
I see this pattern reflected amongst the young of the political left especially; the right may have fewer problems here. Dispositional conservatives have always been “a-ideological”; in large measure, conservatism is precisely a disposition (against change) and explicitly not an ideology. As for those who self-identify markedly as “libertarian”, I tend to suspect that ascribing to a fairly far-out, enormously rigorous and counter-intuitive set of political principles is indicative of some underlying need for strong, worldview-defining set of beliefs which are not readily available elsewhere. And anyway, libertarians have always been a tiny minority, and still are.
Of course, this end of ideology may quite possibly be the inevitable consequence of the last 20 years. Part of the reason the left finds it so hard to self-identify is precisely because of the collapse of the systems of government that fell after the Berlin Wall. Communism and state socialism are utterly discredited now – and a damn good thing too, given how many graves lay east of Checkpoint Charlie. Yet in the vacuum of the collapse of organised socialism – and following the triangulated third way of Blair, Clinton and all those on the “left” that accepted a fundamentally market-orientated, right-wing conception of how the world is and should be – those who feel that there must be a better way to do things find themselves disoriented and directionless.
Mine is the generation which has never seen any other way than the centre-ground squabbling of post-Thatcher managerialism, and finds the grand ideas of the past discredited and implausible. We are left with nothing but vague fluff about “progress”, and a gut-feeling that there are no big ideas, there is no direction, and even if there was we’re all going to be underwater before the century’s out anyway.
The fall of the wall? Well, to a child of that fall, it means this: the historical demarcation point (arbitrary and inaccurate, as any fixed dividing point must be) between an age of grand ideas and worldviews which I have never known, and the world of free-standing political preferences, directionless political programmes, and suspicion that everything is pretty much in vain anyhow (so the lack of grand ideas is not only appropriate but probably justified).
Am I appealing to a golden age that never was? Almost certainly. But this week I received a special copy of Balliol College Record, recalling the period from 1968-75, when the Oxford College suddenly became radicalised by its student population in the general spirit of the age. Compare that to my time at the college, when the majority of my fellow students were more preoccupied with having the right to officially dress up in bow ties for dinner, go to formal balls wearing tuxedos, and be willing participants in a cheap stunt by The Sun newspaper which until my final year had been the target of a rather principled embargo for 3 decades. (Then again, I got the embargo re-instated so that’s 2-1 to me, Rupert).
Switching back to the macro level, I’ll finish with this. The general hegemony of market capitalism is a price worth paying for the end of communist dictatorship and the threat of assured mutual destruction. But it seems to me that it is certainly a price, and not simply a victory.
11.08.09
Reap what you sow
Busy busy busy.
But I do have time to observe the following: if you take Ancient Rome as the model for your national institutions, giving yourself a Senate on the Capitol, and in the great founding text of your constitution it is argued that you are establishing a republic and explicitly not a democracy (i.e. you are emulating Rome not Athens), then don’t be suprised if a few hundred years down the line your generals start getting political and meddling with the elected leaders’ plans.
Eh?
