November 30, 2010
Windbag
Nick Clegg appears to be descending into a world of fantasy and illusion.
Last week he delivered a seriously confused lecture on how raising university fees and slashing higher education budgets – as well as abolishing the Education Maintenance Allowance – will boost social mobility.
He also had the audacity to suggest that opponents to the Browne review haven’t understood it, because if they did they’d know supporting Browne’s proposals is unquestionably right. Call me elitist, but I can’t help thinking Cambridge professor Stefan Collini possess the analytic acumen to analyse the Browne proposals and come to a valid – hostile – conclusion. Ditto the numerous distinguished academics recently condemning the report in a letter to The Telegraph.
Yet Clegg is already back up on his patronising high horse, insinuating that student protestors themselves are a threat to more equal university access:
“However, I also believe that all of us involved in this debate have a greater responsibility to ensure that we do not let our genuinely held disagreements over policy mean that we sabotage an aim that we all share – to encourage people from poorer backgrounds to go to university.”
Put aside Clegg’s apparent inability to grasp the causal relationship between the policies he’s supporting and the substance of the opposition they’re arousing. Ignore the rather insulting implication that poor students are so stupid they’ll just rule-out university because they saw some protests on the telly.
Focus instead on what connects today’s statement with earlier ones: Clegg’s repeated insistence that everything that’s going wrong is everybody else’s fault, and that if they just listened to him they’d see the light.
Now also recall his response to the Institute For Fiscal studies condemnation of the Comprehensive Spending Review as deeply regressive. Namely, to accuse the independent and highly respected IFS of using the wrong (i.e. non-Cleggist) understanding of regressivity in the tax and benefit system.
A pattern, it seems, is emerging. One that has precedent.
By the end of Tony Blair’s time in power – particularly after the full nightmare of Iraq was under way – he had clearly descended into a world of fantasy. One in which the Mesopotamian Adventure had been a triumphant success. Where Britain was safer – despite the heightened risk of domestic terrorism. Where the Middle East was stabilised – despite increased Iranian bellicosity and justified regional paranoia. Removing Saddam was A Good Thing; those who didn’t agree were moral hypocrites merely using Iraq as a beating stick.
For Blair, this was clearly a psychological coping mechanism. Living in his world of fantasy, he remained the champion of Goodness and Light. Outside that world he was the man responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths.
Nick Clegg appears to be treading a strikingly similar path. The problem, he insists, is students and an unreasonable public. He correspondingly shut-outs the fact he has systematically betrayed his party grassroots and (former) principles. He ignores the fact he’s reneged on core, vote-winning promises with the likely result of electoral decimation and a return to the political wilderness for his party.
He pretends he’s not the man enabling the most viciously right-wing and socially-destructive government in Western Europe; a Government now launching a drastic programme of enormous, ideologically-motivated cuts far removed from liberal democratic principles. Cuts which Lib Dem voters expressly did not vote for.
What perhaps differentiates Blair and Clegg’s trajectories is the sheer speed with which the latter has descended into fantasy and blame-gaming. But, ultimately, they both come out as pathetic – if increasingly damaging – political figures. These are men who, as Max Weber put it so well, lack the true calling for politics; a calling which depends upon taking self-reflective responsibility for one’s actions. They parse the maxims:
“ ‘The world is stupid and base, not I’, ‘The responsibility for the consequences does not fall upon me but upon the others whom I serve and whose stupidity and baseness I shall eradicate’. ”
They are “windbags who do not fully realize what they take upon themselves but who intoxicate themselves with romantic sensation”.
November 29, 2010
The Revolution Will Be Tweeted
Until very recently I was deeply sceptical about the role of “social media” in real-world activism. If anything, I thought the option of typing self-indulgently into Twitter, Facebook or WordPress was likely to be harmful to activist causes. Because by shouting into the web, people experienced the sensation of involvement and action without achieving anything of substance.
The past week has changed my mind completely, as I’ve watched social media play an enormous part in organising, sustaining and strengthening student protest against Government cuts and education fee rises.
Last Thursday, a thousand-strong march took place in Cambridge alone, organised mostly via Facebook. With relatively little effort and expenditure on behalf of those spreading the word, lecturers, graduates, undergraduates, sixth-formers and sympathetic members of the public converged to voice collective discontent.
On Friday, a small group of Cambridge students occupied the 500-year old Senate House building, the nerve-centre of the University administration. Although the original occupation was begun by around just 20 people, within hours dozens more arrived after being contacted or alerted via Facebook, Twitter, text and email. Over the past three nights, at least 60-80 students have self-organised to occupy Senate House continuously, whilst numbers in the daytime are steady between 150-200.
Blogging platforms have allowed students in the occupation to set-up instant bases of information and communication. Email petitions and mailing lists were up and running within hours. Facebook is an easy-access source of information, communication and encouragement, as everybody participating logs-on to spread the word.
Indeed encouragement is key. Rather than feeling isolated, the Cambridge occupation has been able to communicate easily with demonstrations taking place in universities all across the country. As well as messages of solidarity, information is exchanged on how to co-ordinate occupations and keep them going, as well as to offering advice, experience and legal tips. The sense of being connected to a national – even global – movement is a huge boost to everybody involved. Indeed, the ease of modern communication enables occupiers to even bring in performing artists and bands, turning occupations into a protest-cum-parties, with spirits kept high and positive.
Via Twitter, email and Facebook, the Cambridge Occupation was rapidly endorsed by over 150 academics at the University, adding their support in a co-ordinated letter in a matter of hours. The letter is today being presented to the Vice Chancellor of the University. Similarly, an international petition was quickly set-up which attracted over 350 signatures. The morale-boost of hearing that Noam Chomsky had pledged his support was (unsurprisingly) considerable.
Email and Facebook have enabled occupiers to bring-in visiting lecturers and speakers. Use of Skype meant the occupation could host a discussion with Dr. Priyamvada Gopal (who has organised the academic support) even though she is currently away from Cambridge. Twitter kept people around the country updated on what was happening, whilst YouTube enabled recordings of lectures to be shared instantly.
Of course, social media will never replace feet on the ground; it can only be a means to an end. But this past week has shown that it can be a very effective means indeed. Whilst earlier predictions of “Twitter revolutions” in non-democratic states have patently failed to materialise (mostly because repressive state authorities quickly exploit the mine of information freely supplied by dissenters), the story is very different in western countries. For my generation and the next, the use of the internet is second nature. As the Coalition’s cuts politicise ever more young people, the role of social media in organising their resistance will become ever more prominent.
November 26, 2010
Netroots UK
Netroots UK: A one day event to network and inspire progressive activists working on the web. Saturday 8 January, Congress House, Central London, WC1B 3LS.
Bloggers, tweeters and online campaigners from around the UK will be coming together face to face in London on Saturday 8 January for Netroots UK, a day of strategy, training and networking for grassroots activists.
The event comes as leading left wing bloggers look to be winning the popularity war with the more established right wing blogs, and as pressure grows across the progressive movement in response to the government’s programme of harsh spending cuts.
Five hundred online activists will attend a day of workshops and presentations, ranging from hands-on training in digital communications, to sharing good practice from other campaigns, as well as wider debates on the best strategies for progressive digital activism.
Sessions will cover topics such as building campaigns against local spending cuts, engaging effectively online with MPs, producing videos for the web, and using satire to spread campaign messages.
Linking together activists from the worlds of progressive politics, economic justice, international development, trade unions, community groups and more, the event is a first step towards a more connected and effective progressive movement online, echoing the groundbreaking work of the annual Netroots Nation conference in the US.
Start Date: Jan 08, 2011
Start Time: 09:00 AM
End Time: 17:00 AM
Price: £5.00 — Tickets to the event will include refreshments during the day, and a brown bag lunch.
November 25, 2010
Cambridge Demo: Policeman Punches Student in Face
Yesterday afternoon a spokesman for the prime minister said:
“Our position is that people have a right to engage in lawful and peaceful protest, but there is no place for violence or intimidation.”
No doubt the PM sincerely believes this, as regards the actions of protestors. More troubling is the extent to which “violence or intimidation” is employed overtly by the police.
Yesterday I took part in the anti-cuts protest in Cambridge. Starting with a demo and city-centre march, the protests began in good spirits with a calm and pleasant atmosphere. At least a thousand people attended the march, and a considerable number of them were from local sixth form colleges protesting against the abolition of the Education Maintenance Allowance. Most of the rest were students at Cambridge University. There were also a handful of lecturers in attendance. And best of all, school children in uniform with their teachers.
After the main march, about 500 students climbed over railings and occupied the grounds of the Senate House building on the King’s Parade road. Occupations, of course, are a long-standing method by which students attempt to force university authorities to pay attention to their demands. Occupations are also completely legitimate, because they are effectively the only way for students to realistically guarantee that university authorities will pay attention to their views and concerns (especially as the aim is not to cause damage, but simply to disrupt).
After discussion, students decided to attempt to occupy the inside of the Senate House building. As students walked slowly en masse to attempt to gain entry, the police blocked their approach and drew batons. From there the situation rapidly deteriorated. Baton-strikes were very quickly made by the police. But this simply had the effect of heightening tensions dramatically.
Of course, the situation is difficult and we should try to see both sides. The police were seriously outnumbered at first, and it was clear that some of them were very scared. Others, however, obviously relished the confrontational nature of the situation, and were taking delight in striking students whilst shouting “Fuck off”, “Get fucking back” and “Fuck you”.
Unsurprisingly, this did not make the situation calmer. Rather a fight mentality quickly descended, as angered students pushed harder to gain entrance to the building. Given how tense the situation rapidly became, it was quite impressive that most students continued to shout “stay peaceful” and did not give-in to the temptation to hit back at the police. The same cannot be said, however, for those officers who allowed the situation to escalate further by (for example) shouting “I’m going to get you” at students near the front, and in some instances closed-fist punching them. Don’t believe me? Watch the final frames of this video [unfortunately you'll need a Facebook log-in to watch; hopefully this will be sorted out in due course and I'll embed directly here].
Ultimately, dealing with protests is a very difficult and delicate operation. From the perspective of the police on the front line, protestors can appear intimidating and aggressive. And given that few members of Cambridgeshire Police can have much experience of dealing with protest, inexperience on their part no doubt was a factor in making things worse. But yesterday it was quite clear that sections of the force deployed to control an initially peaceful student demonstration were overly-eager to use “violence and intimidation”. It was, effectively, the same situation (on a smaller scale) to that which I witnessed in London in 2009.
The media talks a lot about “hardcore anarchist” groups “infiltrating” peaceful protests and “hi-jacking” them to start violence. It does not talk anywhere near enough – if at all – about the role of the police in creating confrontational and aggressive situations. The way police handle protest in this country is simply wrong-headed: it escalates and exacerbates tension and confrontation, when it should be doing the exact opposite. As a basic start on the road to improvement, perhaps the authorities could in future teach their officers not to punch people in the face.
November 23, 2010
Pointless or Damaging, and Depressingly Boring
The Coalition has announced an immigration cap of 21,700 skilled non-EU workers to be allowed into Britain. Yet from an economic point of view, this looks like a very suspicious policy indeed. Consider:
“Last year 50,000 visas were issued for tier one (highly skilled) and tier two (skilled) workers from outside the European Economic Area (the EU plus Iceland, Norway and Liechtenstein).”
Given that this is skilled workers we’re specifically talking about, these are not people coming here to “exploit” the British benefit system (which is anyway one of the stingiest in Western Europe). These 50,000 came last year seeking work. And presumably there was work, or else they wouldn’t have come in the first place (skilled workers who’ve obtained visas tend to arrive in foreign countries with jobs lined-up already).
Now, if that work has in fact all disappeared since last year, then the market signal for these skilled workers will cease. These skilled workers will therefore stop coming to Britain, of their own accord, making an immigration cap redundant.
So the Coalition’s cap is apparently either pointless or economically damaging. It’s pointless if the skilled jobs have already gone. It’s damaging if the cap represents a reduction of available workers for which there is in fact market demand. Because that means fewer skilled workers in Britain contributing to economic productivity, paying taxes, and spending money on British goods and services.
Of course, because the Coalition cannot cap EU-based immigration, it may simply be that some of the skilled jobs are taken by foreign workers from EU countries instead. Or that because of loopholes favouring corporations, the cap is in fact a facade because skilled foreigners will be let in through the back door (as some critics are already suggesting). But if so, the cap is simply back to pointlessness.
So what is the Coalition up to, with its pointless-or-damaging cap?
One likely solution is that this has nothing to do with economics, and everything to do with politics. The Tories have long cultivated an electoral strategy based on appealing to (vicious) anti-immigration sentiment, successfully out-flanking even a very immigration-hostile New Labour. Having so long talked the talk, the Tories must now walk the walk.
The fact that most anti-immigration sentiment is not in practice aimed at highly-mobile, high-earning, skilled foreign labour – but at poor ethnic minority communities in inner cities, or “flocking” Eastern Europeans – is rather besides the point. What the Tories need is a concrete policy they can tout as being a restriction on immigration. That the actual consequences of the policy may be pointless or damaging isn’t relevant. What matters is precisely that there is an anti-immigration policy to be touted.*
And, ultimately, I’ve little interest in the sort of outraged commentary that now typically follows from sections of the left. The sort that denounces the Tories as risking Britain’s economic well-being by introducing a policy whose purpose is to placate and please an (essentially) racist anti-immigration constituency. Of course, that is all true. And it is, no doubt, rather distasteful. But it’s also utterly unsurprising, because basically this is just what happens in politics: economics (or whatever) is twisted to the purposes of the party in power.
What I find slightly more interesting is that Labour currently finds itself largely stumped in terms of articulating any kind of effective response. And that’s primarily because it has spent a lot of time cultivating the same (essentially) racist anti-immigration constituency the Tories are now pandering to. So even though New Labour is now officially over, we’ve yet to see how the party is going to move out from the shadow of Tony, Gordon, Peter and Alastair on this most divise and difficult of issues.
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* One could of course expend some words regarding the Lib Dems too, but then what really is the point?
CFP
*** CALL FOR PAPERS ***
Politics, Order, Law:
2011 Cambridge Graduate Conference in Political Thought and Intellectual History
University of Cambridge
21-22 March 2011
Paper proposals are invited for the fourth Cambridge Graduate Conference in Political Thought and Intellectual History, to be held on 21-22 March 2011 at the University of Cambridge. The theme of the 2011 conference will be “Politics, Order, Law”, and papers dealing with any period and tradition in the history of political thought from antiquity to the present will be considered. Papers which bring an historical perspective to bear on problems of contemporary political theory are welcome. A keynote address will be given by a senior member of the Cambridge Faculty of History. In previous years keynote addresses have been delivered by Quentin Skinner, Raymond Geuss and Gareth Stedman Jones.
The conference theme should be interpreted broadly, to cover the various senses of “law”—including civil, natural and scientific—as well as differing conceptions of order in politics. Up to eight papers will be accepted. Panels will be led by a discussant from Cambridge, who will offer comments on each paper before general discussion with Cambridge faculty and conference participants. The aim of the conference is to provide an opportunity for outstanding graduate students to present and discuss their work in a collegial and supportive atmosphere. Accommodation will be provided for speakers from outside Cambridge.
Abstracts of up to 500 words are requested by 6 December 2010, with accepted papers to follow in full by 7 March 2011. Please submit abstracts, along with your name and a brief C.V., to ptihconf@hermes.cam.ac.uk.
Registration will close on 25 February 2011; those wishing to attend the conference without presenting a paper should write to the above address with their name and institutional affiliation before that date.
2011 Conference committee:
Teresa Bejan
Dom O’Mahony
Tom Parry-Jones
Paul Sagar
Diana Siclovan
Sophie Smith
Waseem Yaqoob
November 22, 2010
“Jaw-Droppingly Rude”
Book Review: Chasing Rainbows – How the Green Agenda Defeats its Aims by Tim Worstall
Tim Worstall – scourge of leftist bloggers, and bane of all those he takes to be stupid (which in practice means: almost everyone he disagrees with) – has written a book. Or has he? For Chasing Rainbows: How The Green Agenda Defeats its Aims (Stacey International, £8.99) is above all the paper version of timworstall.com. And the effect, unfortunately, is frequently unsatisfying. Flippant sentences which might work as part of a 200-word blog entry often read as convoluted and clumsy in the midst of a chapter running to several thousand words. Paragraphs of assertion, or wink-wink allusion, are much less workable when there’s no hyperlink to enlarge the issue.
But attempting to put aside the big niggle – “is this actually a researched and long-pondered book I’m reading, or a collection of brief musings dashed to the printers”? – it’s helpful to consider Worstall’s core strategy. Namely, to apply a set of basic economic concepts (of the sort known to any competent A-Level student) – like opportunity cost, comparative advantage, specialisation, growth, cost-benefit analysis, etc – to a set of issues raised by the environmentalist movement. Or as the book’s title puts it, by the (far more sinister-sounding) “green agenda”. An “agenda” that Worstall does not deny is important, but simply claims to be misguided because of its lack of basic economic understanding.
At times the strategy works remarkably well, paying-off in conceptual clarity and useful illustration. Worstall’s chapter on recycling, for example, is very good. It is a clear exposition of how to think logically and sensibly about a given problem. And his solution is an eminently sensible one: that if the aim is to get more stuff recycled (and Worstall is quite right that the “if” in this situation is a live one, because recycling may not always be the most sensible thing to do), then paying professionals to sort out the stuff in question is likely to yield better results than expecting households to do it in their own leisure time. Hence, if the “green agenda” is serious about recycling, it should take a cost-benefit analysis seriously, and adhere to its outcomes.
Similarly, Worstall’s discussion of population growth is sharp. He (correctly) points out that not only is economic growth properly understood a good thing insofar as it drastically improves the lives of the worst off, he also explains clearly why (paradoxically) improving living standards and increasing life expectancy in developing countries leads to population control over time. (Quickly: because if you and your kids are more likely to survive, it’s less of a gamble raising sprogs, so you can have fewer of them, invest heavily in them, and not offset the chances they’ll die by having more to act as potential replacements). Unfortunately however – and this is a recurring problem in the book – Worstall fails to draw the explicit connection between why controlling population growth through raising living standards is something the “green agenda” misunderstands, thus “defeats” its own “aims”. Rather, the discussion of population growth becomes a self-contained unit, sharply addressing that particular issue but not linking-up to the book’s implied promise of skewering self-defeating greens.
I say implied, because this has to be pretty much imputed from the front cover alone. Worstall’s “introduction” is really just chapter 1, and there’s no serious attempt to lay-out what it is the “green agenda” thinks, and to explain systematically why it is “self defeating”. Rather, separate chapters treat separate topics, which (one either assumes, or knows from experience) have something to do with various claims made by environmentalists. Worstall then applies his basic economics to these topics, in order to show how he thinks about them and believes we should too. Sometimes (as with recycling) the pay-off is fairly clear. Other times, however, it’s hard to see why exactly Worstall thinks he’s exposed something “self-defeating”. The lack of a serious attempt to connect chapters together (and there’s no conclusion to the book at all, just the end of the final self-contained chapter on tax, and cap-and-trade) reinforces this problem – as well as the impression that one is reading a series of collected blog posts, not a book.
Worstall’s effort is, however, downright frustrating at times. Take, for example, his discussion of economic growth. The basic strategy here is to explain – again, correctly – that economic growth need not be predicated upon a necessity of resource consumption. Accordingly, environmentalists are making a mistake if they construe growth and resource-consumption as a necessary relationship, and in turn are mistaken if they think growth is necessarily the antithesis of environmental sustainability. We can in many instances achieve economic growth without chewing up the planet, so growth can be good from an environmental point of view – especially if it leads to (say) improved standards of living, lower child mortality, and thereby population control (which environmentalists allegedly want to see). This from Worstall is all fine (although I’ve drawn the argument more explicitly than he does in his chapter, and that’s not to his credit, as the point of his growth-can-be-compatible-with-environmentalism claim is largely lost accordingly). What’s not fine is acting as though the action stops there. Because clearly it doesn’t.
We can all agree that growth and environmental protection need not necessarily be in opposition. But the point environmentalists make is that at present they are, and that it seems like they will be for the foreseeable future, and hence this could have disastrous consequences. That is where the action is – and Worstall even acknowledges this to be the case at the outset of a later chapter – but the action is basically left un-addressed. Which is a problem, because Worstall has sketched the beginning of an argument, not the conclusion of one.
A similar problem occurs at the outset of the book, and I’ll dwell on it to illustrate the wider problem at play. Worstall deploys the concept of opportunity cost – i.e. whatever option was foregone so that what was actually chosen could be had – to ridicule environmentalists who tout the higher-levels of job creation associated with renewable energy production as a benefit. Worstall argues that this is wrong-headed; that having to employ more people is a cost not a benefit of a scheme, because if we have to employ 20 people to get X amount of energy, that’s 20 people not producing anything else. If only 2 people are needed, then the other 18 can go off and produce other things, making everyone better-off as we get more out of limited resources (in this case, labour). More people employed on one thing is thus a bad outcome, not a good one.
Now this is all fine as things stand; in a basic situation like the one Worstall illustrates his criticisms with job-creation is a cost not a benefit. But things get much trickier when we translate up to the national political level where the “green jobs” argument is typically being made in actuality. For there, we may not have the full employment background assumption that allows Worstall to run his ridiculing line. For imagine that there are, as at present, 2.5million people sitting on the dole. In this case, an energy-production method that employed a million people more than other alternatives might look like it provided a very real benefit – not just jobs, but jobs for a million people who would otherwise be doing nothing else with their labour at all (thus there is no opportunity cost problem of the sort Worstall’s simplistic model brings out). Indeed, things get more interesting if one brings in macroeconomic thoughts derived from Keynes. Let’s say we have 2.5million unemployed because the national economy is in the midst of a recession. Keynes-friendly economists will greet the job-creation scheme as very welcome if it has the effect of stimulating demand and thus kick-starting the economy. In turn, politicians – and the environmentalists that Worstall attacks over job-creation claims typically are politicians – are in a specific situation whereby there are all sorts of political advantages to touting job-creation as a benefit of renewable energy schemes. Suddenly, things look a lot more complicated than Worstall’s “yah-boo aren’t they all so thick because they don’t understand opportunity cost” shtick. Not least because by touting job-creation as a political move (rather than a narrow economic one of the sort Worstall myopically focuses on) then the “green agenda” does not “defeat” its aims but may well in a political context advance them quite considerably. That this is against the economic truth as seen by Worstall really is quite besides the point, if the aim of the book is supposed to be about how environmentalism is self-defeating.
My point here – and I should stress this clearly – is not that Worstall cannot reply to the above arguments. I’m absolutely sure that he can and would. As somebody who rejects Keynesian economics (for example), Worstall will have all sorts of reasons for dismissing much of the above as fatuous and false. My point here is to draw attention to the fact that he doesn’t bother to make any of the difficult arguments in his book, or to treat his opponents as anything other than simpletons who haven’t grasped economics 101. This occurs again and again, with the partial exception of the final chapter where a more sophisticated argument regarding Pigou taxes is considered – though as usual serious intellectual replies are basically absent from any discussion.
Now this tendency to resort to basic economic concepts and exposition might not be terribly objectionable in and of itself. If Worstall’s sole aim was to delineate some basic economic concepts for the good of the masses, then there could be little cause for complaint that he doesn’t engage with the more complicated side of economic reply, mixed-up with the complexities of real-world-distorting politics, next to which all real economic decisions end up being made. Similarly, if he reserved his ire for genuine economic maniacs and imbeciles like the new economics foundation alone, his lashing tongue could be fairly easily forgiven. What rapidly becomes tiring is Worstall’s scorn and caprice being directed at very clever people who cannot reasonably be lambasted for failing to grasp economics 101.
Whatever Worstall thinks of Alistair Darling (and the answer is clearly “not much”), it is fatuous and facile to treat the former Chancellor of the Exchequer as a simpleton who does not understand the basic concept of opportunity cost, and as though he was not making his economic decisions and pronouncements in the middle of extremely difficult and sensitive political contexts. I have no particular love for (say) Caroline Lucas or even George Monbiot, both of whom receive Worstall ire a-plenty, but it’s quite a different thing to casually dismiss Karl Marx’s ideas as “barking mad”. Whatever one thinks of the Labour Theory of Value – and it is true that few now hold it to be tenable – it is tedious to find Worstall lambasting one of the greatest and most innovative minds of the past several hundred years as though he were a garden-variety nincompoop. Marx may have got his labour theory wrong (derived as it was from a complex reading of Adam Smith and Ricardo, as well as drawing upon long-standing themes regarding exploitation and justice stretching way back into the pre-Smithean natural law tradition), but there’s something particularly unpleasant about Worstall’s sneering in a book that is itself so utterly superficial in much of its analysis.
Indeed, just to reinforce that point, Worstall deploys the snark against politicians of all stripes ad nauseam by reiterating how stupid and destructive he thinks they all are. Whilst this may be true of some particular cases (John Prescott isn’t the sharpest tool in the shed, and Nicholas Soames is clearly a pratt), Worstall shows no sensitivity to the difficulties of institutional decision-making in constrained representative democracies against the background of interest-managing, wherein politics can never be the straightforward application of basic economic logic (least of all, economic logic solely as Worstall conceives it). The result is a tired, boring and uninsightful mantra of how awful and thick politicians are – as presumably contrasted with the wise author, who sees things so much more clearly than the stupids he is constantly insulting in his long-established play to the gallery.
You may think that the above is all, therefore, a very long-winded way of complaining that Worstall has written a book that isn’t for me, or for people like me. After all, the book is pursuing what has proven to be a very successful strategy elsewhere. Timworstall.com makes, by all accounts, a decent sum for its author, and has led to many opportunities (not least this book). Clearly there is a demand for what Worstall does, and Worstall admittedly does it very well. If the book is therefore a success amidst its target audience, can I reasonably be complaining about anything other than that I didn’t get a book for me?
I think I can, because I see this book as a frustrating missed opportunity. Part of the reason Worstall is hated by so much of the left is precisely because he is sharp. He sees how arguments fit together, he spots other people’s fallacies, and he points them out in devastating ways (and whilst the rudeness is a source of considerable friction, it is made infuriating precisely by the fact there’s often an actual intellectual point being made too). What I was hoping for from this book, however, was the next level: Worstall taking himself seriously as a thinker and constructing something that goes beyond the “yah boo sucks you’re all stoopid” formula of his website. I wanted to see what Worstall really had to show. Instead, we’ve been given a book that clearly isn’t about serious engagement. If it was, it wouldn’t be published by a group that is clearly in the business of climate “scepticism”*, and written in an obnoxious self-congratulatory tone that is guaranteed to irritate most environmentalists beyond the point where meaningful interaction will be possible.
Tim Worstall has written a book that will please his target audience – the people who read timworstall.com already. Worstall has thus elected to stay in his comfort zone, and stick to what he knows. His book thus has very little to say to those of us who sincerely want to push things further.Or who want to see if Worstall is as clever as he keeps telling us he is; as clever as he ultimately needs to be if he’s to get away with being (as one reviewer on the dust-jacket puts it) so “jaw-droppingly rude”.
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*Other titles from other authors include The Hockey Stick Illusion, The Wind Farm Scam and Climate: the Great Delusion all published under the indicative banner “Independent Minds”
November 19, 2010
Tuition Fees, Social Justice and Social Mobility
Long-winded attempt to articulate some thoughts that have been kicking around my head for a while. Apologies for the lengthy post – but this one is complicated, and so needs the more detailed treatment.
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There’s a lurking problem in much of the opposition to increased university tuition fees, and it’s a deep one.
Most student campaigners oppose increased tuition fees at least partly on grounds of social justice (i.e. in addition to worries about the wholesale restructuring of academia as a private rather than a public good, plus wider concerns about the Coalition cuts to wider society more generally). Specifically, campaigners typically claim increased fees will deter the poor from applying to university. (Some early evidence seems to support them.) This outcome is taken to be morally bad and unfair in itself, as well as carrying the further and significant negative consequence of reducing social mobility between class and income groups.
At a certain level I am (heavily) sympathetic to opposition of this form, because I agree that reforms which disadvantage the poor and reduce social mobility are undesirable. But focusing on this level alone risks missing deeper and more serious issues.
It is broadly speaking true that university education significantly increases earning potential. So a straightforward thought goes: if more poor kids go to university, then we should see more poor citizens moving up to higher income and class brackets. (In practice of course this didn’t really work, because New Labour increased the absolute number of people going to university, and thereby inadvertently triggered what we might term “degree inflation”. Employers who previously differentiated between “degree/no degree” increasingly now differentiate between “good degree/less good degree/no degree”. Thus, the income stratifications that are at least partly a function of people’s educational differences continue.)
Given the socio-economic structure of our society, there will always be jobs that pay more than others (though how much more is an interesting question; Martin O’Neill reminds us that things weren’t always as extreme as they are now). Further, it’s a brute fact of existence that some people will always be cleverer than others. Given the structure of late capitalism, it tends to be the case that the cleverer get better paid jobs than the poorer. (Things are obviously complicated by the fact some people are cleverer because they were better off to begin with, i.e. had the benefits of bed-time reading, domestic stability, and access to higher quality primary education which all make a dramatic difference in early childhood development. But let’s ignore those complicating factors today).
Now, much opposition to fee increases broadly centres on social mobility claims: that fee increases must be opposed because university-access is a key mechanism whereby some members of the poorest demographics can leapfrog out of their class into the higher echelons of society. But the flip-side of this position is that other people have to travel downwards, and take the places of those who have leapfrogged them. Focusing on social mobility arguments alone therefore neglects to pay attention to the underlying fact of inequality between socio-economic income groups that makes the “trading-places” approach to social justice possible in the first place.
Of course, that socio-economic inequality between classes might in principle be something we can identify, accept, and decide to tolerate. This might be the case if, for example, such income and class inequality is sufficiently restricted and/or corrected for because (say) income differentials between top and the bottom are fairly circumscribed, perhaps due to established redistributive measures put in place to reduce the gap between the haves and the have-nots.
Yet this is manifestly not the situation in Britain at present (at least from the perspective of most leftist social justice campaigners and egalitarians). In Britain, the gap between the top and the bottom has grown enormously over the past 30 years – and is set to get even bigger thanks to the regressive measures of the current government.
Ironically, by focusing on the detrimental impacts to social mobility that fee-increases will elicit, student campaign groups do not pay much attention to what is arguably the more fundamental and pressing social justice issue at play: that the enormous wealth and income differentials between socio-economic classes experienced at present are what underpin the social mobility view which takes a university degree to be a golden ticket for leapfrogging out of the lower classes into the higher echelons (or in many cases, to stay put and avoid trading downwards or being leapfrogged). In the process, questions about who is left behind in the great game of leapfrogging (because there are, after all, a finite number of golden tickets to be had), and why there is such a gap between classes to begin with (and why the gap is continuously tolerated), are quickly obscured from view.
Now, I certainly don’t blame student campaigners for this situation – it’s clearly a profound, society-wide phenomenon that’s been in effect since before I was born. And in particular, student campaign groups have to pick winnable battles, both in terms of ambition and of what will resonate with the public and with policy-makers. Given the times we live in, campaigning on grounds of social mobility certainly seems more likely to succeed than challenging the fundamental inequalities characterising our society (and which anyway go far beyond issues specific to higher education).
But here come two final ironies. Firstly, by working within the “paradigm” of social justice as a model of individuals leapfrogging between classes – rather than reducing the differentials found between classes themselves – anti-fee campaigners focus on what is surely a relatively superficial aspect of a deeper social justice problem: the existence of significant class and income differences to begin with. In turn, campaigners inadvertently allow that deeper problem to continue going unaddressed and unconsidered in wider debates, even though it generates the social justice issue that they take themselves to be preoccupied with. The rub, of course, being that it’s hard to see how campaigners could do anything else, at least at present.
Secondly, social mobility campaigners somewhat unwittingly accept and perpetuate the “discourse” within which university education is increasingly seen as an instrumental economic good (e.g. one that facilities inter-class mobility). Yet the cumulative effective of this is presumably that it makes it ever harder to argue for the value of higher education as something worthwhile in itself. Correspondingly, this makes it more difficult to defend (in particular) the arts and humanities when the politicians come a-cutting: by over-investing in the language of social mobility, opponents of higher education reform find themselves increasingly locked-in to the instrumentalist economic views that motivate much of the current reform programme itself.
The road to hell, as they say, is paved with good intentions.
November 16, 2010
Domination and Welfare Reform
Over the past two decades, philosopher Phillip Pettit and historian Quentin Skinner have led a revival of interest in how freedom can be compromised when people lose their independence. Rather than freedom being lost only when a person’s actions are interfered with, Pettit and Skinner argue that freedom can also be lost if one is “dominated”, i.e. if one lives under the arbitrary power of another. As Stuart White helpfully put it:
“It is about not being subject to another’s power to intervene in one’s life at their discretion. Freedom is, in this sense, independence – the power to refuse dependency on others and their uncertain goodwill.”
Although Skinner and Pettit have tried to present this conception as a radical (and now somewhat lost) alternative to a “liberal” view of freedom, the historical story is rather complicated. In particular, theorists in the 18th century were very much alive to the threat that arbitrary domination posed to freedom – in the form of the power of rulers over subjects. Thus, Montesquieu made as a central pillar of his weighty treatise The Spirit of the Laws the claim that the state must be ordered by legal structures which constrained the actions of rulers just as much as of subjects, precisely to ensure the freedom of the latter from the dominating despotic ambitions of the former. (This vision has now come to be known as that of a “Rechtsstaat” – the state as ordered by law, not the whims of political rulers).
This view of liberty in modern mass-society was developed by French liberal Benjamin Constant, with his famous distinction between the liberty of the “ancients” (living in small, militarised, republican city-states) and that of the “moderns” who must appreciate the new and previously unknown conditions within which freedom could be practically and conceptually realised. Like Montesquieu, Constant saw legal structures as paramount: “[modern liberty] is the right to be subject only to the laws, such that one cannot be arrested, detained, executed, or mistreated in any way by virtue of the arbitrary will of one or more individuals”.
Indeed contemporary theorists are likewise alive to the changed conditions of freedom for “moderns”. Chris Brooke has specifically urged Pettit and Skinner to realise this point:
“[I]nsofar as we are egalitarian citizens today, or consider that perhaps we have a serious prospect of becoming such…this may owe a great deal to the “awesome” power (that is, quite straightforwardly, the power to keep us in awe) of the more or less Hobbesian social institutions that we have constructed for ourselves since Hobbes’s time; in particular, to the bureaucratic welfare state that is able, among other things, to humble the proud, to enforce the law, and to deliver a uniform mass education.”
But equally, we must remember that the “bureaucratic welfare state” may offer not only the potential for escaping or ameliorating domination, but also become a source of domination in its own right. And given the literally awesome power of the modern state, that domination can be profound and extremely serious – even if actualised in what may appear to be petty and minor ways.
Which brings me to my point. Amidst the new “get tough” reforms to welfare being pushed through by the coalition, there’s something that’s been widely overlooked:
“But unemployed people who persistently fail to turn up, or turned down and refused to apply for jobs, will lose their £65-a-week job seeker’s allowance for up to three years.
The allowance will be removed for three months on a first offence, six months the second time and three years on the third breach of the new rules – with no right of appeal.”
If that final caveat – that there will be no right of appeal – for those who have their benefits withdrawn is true, it is very worrying. Such reforms will put an enormous amount of arbitrary power into the hands of (presumably) administrators at Job Centres. As somebody who has had (albeit mercifully brief) experience of claiming unemployment benefit, the prospect of being made dependent upon the whim – and just as importantly, the mistakes – of Job Centre staff would fill me with dread.
For amongst the hard-working and well-intentioned, there are also the petty tyrants, the plain vindictive, and those who see everybody sat in the chair in front of them as a work-shy scrounging layabout – as well as the plain incompetent. To put the power of what is almost literally life and death – for what else is withdrawing the final safety net of meagre state support? – into the hands of individual petty bureaucrats, and not even enshrine a right of appeal, is a dangerous and profoundly troubling move. Not just for the welfare of individual claimants, but for their freedom from the arbitrary abuses of power by those placed over them, and their freedom in the independence they receive from having the guarantee of even the meagre bare minimum currently provided by the state.
The potential for individuals to become subject to domination is precisely what the modern welfare state should be trying to eradicate. The coalition is moving in exactly the wrong direction.
November 15, 2010
The Joys of Work?
In recent discussions of benefits reform, I detect two main strands of thought from advocates of getting the “workshy” – i.e. long-term unemployed – into jobs.
The first is a straightforward claim about desert: that the long-term unemployed are free-riding on the efforts of others. That it isn’t fair for the taxes of those who work to be used to support those who don’t. And at some level this is an eminently sensible thought. Yet I’m not going to explore it here, except to warn against the potential power of ressentiment.
The second strand I detect is that the “workshy” must be helped (of if necessary, coerced) into work for their own good. Andrew Rawnsley is an exponent:
“It helps that few question that Mr Duncan Smith is a serious-minded man genuinely moved to try to release people from the welfare dependency which impoverishes those trapped in it and their country…
…[IDS] has also received a generally warm reception because there has been a growing, but until now rather covert, cross-party consensus that welfare dependency is a terrible social and economic sickness.”
It’s OK to shunt people into work (perhaps forcibly) because work is good for them. Not only is it fair to lever people off benefits and into jobs – we’re doing them a favour too.
Sharper commentators have already pointed out that a far bigger problem in Britain than out-of-work poverty is actually in-work poverty. That millions cannot properly make ends meet even if they have a job. That low wages and inadequate state support mean 1.7 million children are growing up in poverty, despite hailing from working households.
But I suspect much of the belief that working is good for people rests not on a thought about higher remuneration at all, but about the benefits of work itself. Take Rawnsley’s piece again, where he acknowledges that UK out-of-work benefits are “quite stingy by western European standards”. Yet he immediately opines that: “The trouble is that too many people are on benefits.” It’s not lack of money that’s the problem, it’s lack of work itself.
A powerful (but unacknowledged) assumption here is that earning a crust is somehow inherently dignified and psychologically fulfilling. That it raises a person above the indecency of vegetating into the sofa prostrate before re-runs of Jeremy Kyle. Call this the unreflective assumption of a protestant ethic in the spirit of capitalism, if you like.
But this belief in both the inherent and the instrumental dignity of work is plain wrong when applied to many of the so-called “work-shy”. Because for the long-term and persistently unemployed, assuming (as is likely) that they are extremely low-skilled and can therefore hope for no more than minimum-wage labour, the prospect of work is a rather bleak and unfulfilling one.
It is the prospect of a mundane 8-10 hours on the tills at Tesco, or stacking the shelves at Asda. It is back-breaking early mornings mopping floors, or cleaning shit off the inside of toilet bowls. It is standing around bored stiff on a shop floor, waiting only for the day to end. It is hours in the din of a call centre, being insulted by faceless clients. And mixed into all that is the reality of much every day labour for many ordinary workers: the petty tyranny of the line-manager; the bitching and gossiping of bored colleagues; the sheer futility and boredom of it all for the meagre reward of £5.93 an hour.
Work, for most people, is not enjoyable. Low-paid work, as a general rule, is even less enjoyable than most. Now you may reply: “that’s not the point, fairness dictates that the long-term unemployed pull their weight and stop living off our taxes”. And that may be a perfectly respectable position to hold. The right conclusion may indeed be that the long-term unemployed must be forced to work, whether they like it or not.
What I find far more suspicious, however, is the pious insistence that we will be doing the low-skilled, long-term unemployed a deep existential favour by introducing them to the unbounded joys of labour. Given the prevalence of in-work poverty, and the sheer nastiness of much actual low-paid work, that strikes me as patently self-serving nonsense.
