August 10, 2011
Riot of a Time
Very quick thoughts on the recent riots.
1. Clearly it is true that poverty, alienation, deepdisgruntlement with the police and lack of opportunity are important background facts that any serious attempt at understanding will have to take into account.
2. But these alone cannot explain what was clearly, in many cases, opportunistic theft and glee in destruction.
3. So where do we go from there?
4. I take these to be true and important components of any description of modern British politics and society: that it promotes self-interested greed, materialism, the possession of ostensive goods for status, immediate gratification, and a toleration (even encouragement) of ruthless competitiveness with a deep disregard for the welfare of others. (Call this the “no-such-thing-as-society society”, if you like.)
5. Putting 1 and 2 together with 4, and adding in conditions of spontaneity, anticipated impunity and evident opportunity, a basic yet broadly sufficient explanation appears to emerge.
6. Note that the things described in 4 above constitute the core tenets of the political ideology broadly known as ‘Thatcherism’ (or if you want to bring things up to date post-1997, ‘neo-liberalism’).
7. Also note that the conditions described in 1. have been massively and continuously exacerbated by Thatcherism (or ‘neo-liberalism’), especially if enormous inequality and its debilitating effects on individual well-being and self-respect are included too.
8. So actually this may not be such a mystery after all. If you constantly tell people to be selfish, ruthless, competitive, greedy and disregarding of the welfare of others, then you can’t really be surprised when they behave as they are told they fundamentally are and must be (even if they forget about the bits to do with obeying the law).
9. However, if you happen to be the prime minister just invoke some vacuous covering fluff about ‘moral responsibility’. Continue to condemn loudly, and then get back to promoting the elements in 4. on a daily basis. Without wondering about which ways the knife may cut.
June 5, 2011
Telly Don University
So Telly Don University – or the New College of Humanities – has been unveiled. Professor A.C. Grayling is the mastermind, and apparently the head honcho too. “Top” academics have been recruited to the cause. Proper academics, predictably, don’t like it.
Now don’t get me wrong, TDU definitely suggests some unpleasant prospects. As Chris Bertram has pointed out to me, an institution charging £18K a year will give other university Vice Chancellors a pre-text to both bust open the new £9K fee cap, and maybe even privatise in a bid to “compete”.
Personally, however, I see TDU as being – at most – a catalyst. My sense is that the flood gates are open on fees (not least as the maths was done so badly that the Treasury is going to have to fork out loads under the current regime anyway), and that universities not receiving significant state support may opt to privatise anyway. After all, why put up with the constant government interference if you’re not even getting the money any more?
In any case, what’s happening to British higher education looks like part of a much bigger process. Namely, the systematic marketisation of publicly provided services, coupled with a belief that in the brave new world this is the only option. Meaning that assaults on state-provided services are seen as both status quo, and as inevitable developments, by the politicians carrying them out. Thus drastically reducing any room for alternatives to find a voice, or for policies to be reconsidered and reversed.
In sum, I think that British higher education is undergoing a sea change that started (at least) with New Labour when it bought the basically pro-market vision of politics which reduces the state to the fawning provider of safe-habitats for business,whilst abandoning anything that can’t make a profit to die in the cold. I don’t know what will happen to Britain’s university system over the next 20 years, and I’m not optimistic. But I doubt Telly Don University alone is going to make that much of a difference.
Accordingly, we might like to do a spot of pointing and laughing to cheer ourselves up. TDU bills itself as attempting to rival Oxbridge (a boast Mary Beard has already queried). Its main claim to this appears to be two-fold: 1) that Famous People will do some teaching, and 2) students won’t just do arts subjects they will also have “science literacy” and business-type awareness programmes to boot.
Both of these things make me chortle. Let’s first consider some of the Famous People who will allegedly be teaching at TDU:
- Richard Dawkins: loud-mouthed pop-biologist, who writes exceptionally bad books about religion and who would fail any decent undergraduate philosophy first year course.
- Steven Pinker: pop-psychologist, generally not taken seriously by large sections of the psychology research community because he allegedly ignores and manipulates data that doesn’t fit his story-book narratives. [If anyone genuinely qualified on this subject could say one way or the other, it would be good to hear from you - this is just reporting what I've heard from people in the field.]
- Niall Ferguson: telly-don extraordinaire, who will apparently be teaching economics, even though he is not an economist. He is in fact a pop historian (who hasn’t done any serious work for donkey’s years), who has appointed himself a finance expert following his success in the oh-so-tricky world of making money in hedge funds. (Amusingly, rival telly don Tristram Hunt claims that Ferguson’s successful book on the history of money and finance – later a TV series, of course – manages to hardly mention Marx and Engels at all. So a rounded education can no doubt be expected from a man who is certainly anything but a right-wing ideologue.)
- A.C. Grayling: telly-don philosopher, who is mostly famous for writing a lot of books. The reason he writes so many books, so quickly, is of course that none of them are any good.
- Ronald Dworkin: actually a serious academic with an incredibly illustrious publishing history, who had an enormous impact upon both political and legal philosophy over the past 50 years. But still notorious at Oxford – about 30 years after he left – for being the laziest and most unhelpful supervisor imaginable (I was warned not to expect any contact with Dworkin at all if I went to NYU for a masters degree, whatever it said on their website.)
Also a huge hypocrite, given that he spent most of his career writing about egalitarianism, and is now a flagship academic at an institution which is anything but.
You get the picture. Big famous names are not the same as good, serious educators of university minds. If you go to TDU thinking you’ll get a good education just because some famous people are there, you’re a fool. As anyone who’s actually been taught well at university level knows, the best teachers are not the big public names (even if they are famous within the academy). But given that TDU will charge £18K a year, you’re a rich fool if you go there. So more fool you, as at least hopefully this will free up some places for serious young thinkers at Britains’ other, proper, universities. Who can hopefully be drawn from the state sector thanks to some reduction in competition from brats who just want a primer course for the City.
As for the second alleged benefit – science literacy and business awareness – this is highly amusing. If you want “science literacy” you can read Ben Goldacr’s book Bad Science, and then bother with some of Stephen Jay Gould’s wonderful output. If you want more than mere science “literacy”, then you have to do a science degree and become a scientist. Sorry about that, but the human mind is limited and specialization is required if you want to acquire a serious understanding of any contemporary field. TDU can’t undo the complexities and advances of modern day academic divisions of labour, whatever else it may claim.
Regarding “business awareness”, or whatever, this is also silly. You don’t get good at “real world” thinking by “studying the real world”. You get it by training your brain to think sharply and analytically, applying these skills elsewhere as and when it is fit to do so. Some people never learn to transfer these skills, and some people have them without being any good at academia. Either way, it actually turns out that the best education for business is not a business education. (You may be surprised to learn this, but apparently it’s actually philosophy.) So you’d be just fine at normal, proper university.
So overall I’m inclined to laugh at Telly Dons University. It looks like a big con, taking the money of rich people silly enough to think they can buy a proper education, at premium rates, simply because there’s some Famous People on the tin.
But, sadly, that’s not the end of the story. Because TDU is plainly responding to a certain sort of demand, and a wider and ever more entrenched expectation of what universities should be, and what they should provide. And if TDU is successful – which it may very well be – it’s exactly what Vice Chancellors and politicians will point to as the model for the rest to adopt.
Hence, we should laugh and be merry this evening, for in the morrow the hangover is coming. And it’s going to be a nasty one indeed. Even if TDU is only one small part of the bigger mess.
UPDATE: I see that Peter Singer and Simon Blackburn are also members of the Telly Don 14.
Peter Singer: Philosophical charlatan par excellence. A disseminater of complete nonsense, from a man who couldn’t think his way out of a wet paper bag. Even if he did do exceedingly well for himself by generally just being controversial and annoying.
Simon Blackburn: Actually one of the most distinguished and sharp-thinking philosophers of the past 30 years. A seriously impressive mind (even if he’s spent the last decade saying the same thing over and over again). However, by all accounts a close rival to Dworkin for Laziest and Least Helpful Teacher On Offer. At least judging by the reports of his supervisees. Whose testimony can be effectively summarised as: “He doesn’t read your work. Even if you’re his PhD student”.
What a stellar teching line up the TDU has on offer!
August 3, 2010
On Plagiarism
Norm thinks plagiarism is wrong. He’s right (obviously). The “moral-legal” point accepted, however, I’d like to return to the “sociology of belief” Norm puts to one side.
Apparently the “number who [believe] that copying from the Web constitutes ‘serious cheating’ is declining”. The New York Times reports:
“Now we have a whole generation of students who’ve grown up with information that just seems to be hanging out there in cyberspace and doesn’t seem to have an author,” said Teresa Fishman, director of the Center for Academic Integrity at Clemson University. “It’s possible to believe this information is just out there for anyone to take.”
Hmm.
There’s no doubt that cheats have always been around; plagiarism is as old as the hills. And it isn’t just undergraduate students that indulge. I have a strong hunch that an article in a well-respected Cambridge University Press compendium is heavily plagiarised. But let’s nonetheless focus on students, where the bulk of cases can be found.
Imagine a world in which the dominant ethos of undergraduate study was as follows. Students understand that they must work hard, consistently and conscientiously or they will not develop their own ideas, their own arguments and ultimately their own minds. Coursework, dissertations and exams are viewed not as battles with evil examiners but as opportunities for learning and self-development. “Do the work, and do it well” is every student’s motto because it is understood that university is not just about receiving a qualification, but about personal self-improvement.
Would there by plagiarism in such a world? Undoubtedly. Cheats will always exist, and sometimes people plagiarise out of desperation not just simple cynicism. But it seems reasonable to suppose that there would be rather less plagiarism than in the following possible world.
Here university is predominantly seen as a series of hoops to jump through so as to pick-up a qualification. This qualification is increasingly socially expected and is a pre-requisite to acquiring reasonably well-remunerated employment. However the university experience also comes with lots of cheap cash. This means the opportunity to consume copious amounts of alcohol and drugs, to sleep with similarly inebriated people, to upload the photos onto Facebook, and generally have a cracking good time. The educational hoops still have to be jumped through, of course. But because they’re just hoops surely there’s no harm in finding ways to pull the wool over the hoop-examiners’ eyes?
It would hardly be surprising if plagiarism was increasingly a problem in such a world. No prizes for identifying which one is closer to the world we actually live in.
In Britain increasing numbers of students view a university degree as something they are entitled to simply because they are paying for it. They are the consumers and they expect suppliers to reciprocate. And in a way you can’t blame them; when you go to McDonalds you don’t expect your burger to be conditional upon your working hard. Viewed this way around, plagiarism appears not only excusable but virtually acceptable. If the customer is always king why can’t he cheat if that’s what he feels like?
Sadly many universities are effectively complicit. It’s astonishingly hard to get kicked out of most institutions even for egregious cases of plagiarism. A friend of mine teaches at a Russell Group university, where a girl made a complaint(!) because she’d copied her friend’s essay but received a lower mark. Was she kicked out? Don’t be silly. Universities can’t get a reputation for academic exclusion, or the consumers will go to the competition – and government funding will quickly follow. The same underlying factors ensured that another academic acquaintance saw piles of failed and 3rd-class essays returned by the department, repeatedly, until they were given the 2:2 grades management desired.
In a world where both students and univeristies are complicit in quietly tolerating plagiarism (however unwillingly in the cases of most academics), attempts to excuse the practice by blaming external factors should be entirely unsurprising. That way hard questions about the worrying trajectory of higher education can be conveniently avoided. It surely won’t be long before we hear cries of “blame the internet!” on these shores too.
August 2, 2010
Choice and Empowerment
Embarrassing for Michael Gove:
“Michael Gove faced fresh accusations of exaggerating the level of interest in his education reforms yesterday after it emerged there had been just 62 applications for his “free schools” policy.
Before the election the education secretary said he wanted hundreds of parent-and-teacher groups to open their own schools. Once in government he told parliament there had been 700 expressions of interest to the New Schools Network (NSN), a charitable organisation helping to set up the scheme.”
I’ve previously made my dislike of Ed Balls known, but he’s got a point:
“The vast majority of parents just want a well-funded good local school and do not have the time or the wherewithal to set up their own.”
Quite.
When I was working in Parliament last year, a group of Lib Dem MPs were convinced that a top priority should be allowing NHS patients to own their medical records on portable USB sticks. The rationale was that this would allow patients to change GP surgeries and hospitals at whim, rather than being tied to one. This would allegedly increase “choice” and be “empowering”, and was accordingly a “liberal” policy.
But what appears “empowering” to busy MPs regularly commuting between Westminster and their constituencies might look rather different to others. To those struggling to hold down day-jobs, bring up the kids and pay the bills, owning medical records on little USB sticks might be rather lower on the list of health priorities.
By contrast having a safe, reliable and free health service is likely to be very “empowering” indeed. Such a thing frees people from the stress and worry of providing in times of ill-health. It allows them to devote time, energy and resources to more enjoyable or rewarding activities – secure in the knowledge of a guaranteed safety-net should things go wrong.
Concentrating on improving the provision of guaranteed health-care to the point where people don’t have to think about it at all thus appears far more “empowering” than pouring billions into IT systems that would allow people to own their medical records on data pens.
The same goes for schools. The “choice” that parents want when it comes to schools is apparently not that of setting up and running the damn things themselves. By contrast what would “empower” most British families would arguably be a society in which whatever school parents chose for their kids, sufficient funding and provision would guarantee high-quality education.
Unsurprisingly, therefore, “choice” and “empowerment” are complicated ideas, as all interesting concepts are. Different perspective on what “choice” and “empowerment” mean, or which senses of “choice” and “empowerment” should be deemed most important, can thus directly affect policy-making.
Yet for at least the past 20 years British politics has been dominated by a rather narrow, short-termist view of choice and empowerment which effectively treats citizens as economic consumers. Citizen needs and requirements have become increasingly viewed as equivalent to the tastes and preferences of rational economic consumers demanding goods and services from suppliers.
Out of this attitude has quite naturally grown a view by which the important “choices” are the ones that resemble market transactions. So the “choice” assumed to matter to citizens when it comes to education and health is that of picking competing hospitals or schools (perhaps even helpfully ranked in official league tables). Correspondingly the view of choice outlined above – the wider view pertaining to what is made possible when basic quality of things like education and health are guaranteed – increasingly drops-out of the picture. Similarly “empowerment” is assumed to be whatever policy promotes short-term consumer-style choice in service provision, rather than what citizens are enabled to do when living in a society where the worry and stress of (for example) health and education provision are taken care of.
“Choice” and “empowerment” are two of the watchwords of modern British politics; they dominate policy-making, debate and thinking. Yet the dominant understanding of both these concepts is clearly not their only possible interpretation. This matters.
In a parallel world where consumer-style understandings of “choice” and “empowerment” were laughed out of the room, Michael Gove’s free schools would never have made it past the focus groups (not least because politics in such a world might not tolerate focus groups either).
Of course that world might also have significant problems. The state can be a clunking, heartless and overly-bureaucratic provider, and there are good arguments for checking those tendencies too. But the point, as I’ve argued before, is that in politics ideas matter precisely because it’s ideas that shape the decisions we make.
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Hardcore enthusiasts can enjoy some further reading of my views on the issue of “choice” in politics here and here.
July 30, 2010
When Reality and Presentation Diverge
Boris Johnson’s (or rather Barclays’) London cycle hire scheme goes live today. Personally I’m not convinced of the virtues of having 6,000 Japanese and American tourists atop wheels thrown into the chaotic mix of London traffic.
But that’s not what interests me today.
Responding to (and anticipating) criticisms that the new hire-bikes have no cycle lanes to be used on, Johnson’s administration has recently been unveiling so-called “Cycle Super Highways”. Or – to you and me – large strips of (Barclay’s) blue paint, plonked on the sides of existing roads.
So far only two such “super highways” are open. One runs from Barking to Tower Gateway, the other from Merton into the City. Note that these are not exactly tourist-heavy routes, so any benefits they bring will be for existing cyclists – not least because the hire-bikes are all located in central London anyway.
But I’m an existing cyclist, so that should suit me. Except I tried out the latter of these two “super highways” the other week, and was distinctly disappointed.
If I was building a “cycle super highway” I’d seek to do one very important thing: ensure that only bicycles can use the cycle lanes. An obvious way of achieving this is to put a substantial curb in between cycle route and main road (like they do in much of Europe).
But Boris’ CSHs lack this essential feature. As a result you can look forward to sharing your blue strip of paint with motorbikes, lazy taxi- and white van-drivers, and last (but certainly not least) buses. Because there are bus stops in the middle of the cycle super highways. And as any Londoner who cycles will tell you, buses are The Number One Way To Die. Still, the blue will make for artistic contrasts with Cyclists’ Super Insides.
Yet it would be spurious to launch an attack on Johnson. Ken Livingstone was a big proponent of these cycling schemes (though Bo-Jo has typically stolen the glory). And given the money, space and logistical constraints, I’m not convinced Ken would have done things any differently.
The cycle super highways illustrate an important fact about politics: that often relatively crappy outcomes are the (apparently) inevitable outcome of politicians having to navigate competing interests and demands, yet also having to talk-up an end product even when it’s actually a bit naff.
I think, however, that there’s also a comparison with markets. Or more precisely, with marketing.
Environmental sustainability and global warming are much higher in consumer’s priorities than even 5 or 10 years ago. There is thus a selling-point and marketing imperative for many companies to promote their products as environmentally friendly and sustainable.
The problem, however, is that there can be a big disjunct between marketing as being sustainable and environmentally friendly and actually being so. What’s imperative to firms is to make consumers think they are buying green – even if that’s not strictly true.* Think of Honda’s adverts extolling the glory of their “clean” petrol engines a few years back. Or of Sainsbury’s own-brand bog-rolls, whose packaging proudly declares that by buying them you have helped save forests. Dubious claims, to say the least.
I’ve argued before that market solutions must be at the heart of finding answers to questions of environmental sustainability. But the disjunct between consumer belief and reality worries me. It takes a lot of effort to consistently expose dishonest or misleading corporate activities to the point where they stick in consumers’ minds. Plus big multinationals assiduously protect their reputations, lobbying hard to keep inconvenient truths hidden.
Which gives the lie to the naive free market fairystory that naughty firms just pretending to be sustainable will be swiftly abandoned by consistently conscientious consumers. Indeed (focusing more widely than consumer behaviour) you may have noted that BP’s share price recently rose. Which indicates that even being a certified planet-wrecker is no guarantee of abandonment by the forces of capitalism. (Though see Tim).
With democratic politics the structural situation that creates the oft-observed crapiness of decision-making outcomes (for further illustrations see The Wire, Season 3) also contains its own (partial) solution. When elected leaders produce decisions that go too far down the road of rubbishness, we can kick them out and thus keep crapiness within reasonably tolerable bounds.
It’s not entirely clear that any comparably neat solution lends itself to the problem of marketing dishonesty. And as the planet warms, forests shrink, and resources run out, that may turn out to be a very serious problem indeed.
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*Hence as with politics situations can arise where something is presented as being one thing, but in reality is substantially less good, or at least significantly different.
July 12, 2010
Conservative Wisdom
The Nanny State. With its army of bureaucrats, its forests of red tape, its suffocating reams of cotton wool heralding the world of ‘Elf and Safety Gone Mad! Down with the Nanny State!
Hurrah for Andrew Lansley! Champion of individual responsibility and grown up society!
Who needs a “Food Standards Agency” anyway? At last, adults will be treated like adults. The oppressive tyranny of colour-coded food packaging will be overthrown. No longer will the Nanny State bully people into eating healthily with its ominous and intrusive red, orange and green labelling guide.
Instead, responsible members of the Big Society will have to help themselves, taking the time to calculate percentage intakes of fat, sugar and salt and deciding whether a product is a sensible healthy option or not. Whereas before the life-interfering PC brigade forced people to be healthy with their red traffic lights, meaningful freedom has now been restored.
Whatismore, Sir Lansley (if I may pre-empt the rightfully inevitable) has struck a blow in favour of the other core ideals of freedom: competition and independent production. Rather than the interfering state obstructing the activities of private enterprises with its paternalistic cynicism, companies will now compete freely in the market, securing efficiency and ensuring that rational, responsible consumers can exercise their full freedom of choice.
And with this blessed increase in freedom rational and responsible consumers can look forward to many pleasures.
With the removal of regulation, British meat production can get back to its halcyon days. When companies circumvented restrictions on animal rearing to beat the competition, and fed dead cows to living cows leading to a mass outbreak of BSE. Which was then lied about and covered-up.
Rational and responsible consumers of the big society will be empowered to choose whether or not to eat beef, knowing it might kill them or their families! British farmers will be empowered to decide whether or not to commit suicide following the collapse of their herds and income-sources, as they are abandoned by the companies that earlier demanded they rear cattle in such a disastrous way. As the EU imposes a ban on British beef exports, the entire country can bask in the good economic consequences sure to follow. In a mark of independent self-reliance, Andrew Lansley will no doubt feed a possibly infected beef burger to his daughter in the sort of gruesome propaganda stunt pioneered by his predecessor John Gummer.
In the meantime, parents on low incomes in stressful circumstances will be empowered to make independent decisions when buying food for their children. As there is no such thing as “pester power” – the food industry spends billions worldwide on marketing for absolutely no reason at all – parents can only win.
Restrictions on advertising are nothing but manifestations of an evil, all-controlling Big State Gone Mad. They should be dispensed with forthwith. This will allow the rational consumers of tomorrow to make informed personal choices, via the medium of their parents wallets, enlightened by the merely informational qualities of multi-national advertising techniques.
The Nanny State’s egregious interference – the aforementioned traffic-light package guides – will surely soon be removed forever. And what loss could there possibly be? Lobby groups certainly spent £830million in a successful bid to prevent the traffic light system being introduced EU-wide. But that was just because being such fantastically successful, enterprising, innovating and dynamic corporations they needed something to do for a laugh. No harm can come of such activities, especially as the tyrannous traffic lights were just evil state interference anyway.
With the death of the FSA – saving an enormous £135million in these times of fiscal austerity – the overbearing state will be rolled back. Britain’s independent citizens will once again stand shoulder to shoulder with Nestle, Unilever, Kellog, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, McDonalds, Mars and Burger King.
Freedom will be restored to this benighted isle. Thank the gods for Conservative Wisdom.
January 30, 2010
China: A Very Bad Example
There’s a worrying tendency emerging in some sections of the left. I noticed it in this blog post. Today I saw it writ large. The willingness of some leftists to cite China as a positive example for the UK.
At the appalingly-titled “Progressive London” conference, Ken Livingstone gave a speech in which he declared that the proof that government investment ends recessions lies in China’s staggering rates of state spending, and enormous correlate levels of growth. (He also claimed that British kids should have fewer holidays, so that they can receive the structured educations that will make them good British citizens who are competitive with Chinese children studying “from 7am to 6 at night”. They don’t call him Red Ken for nowt, eh?).
Later, John Ross of Socialist Economic Bulletin (and Ken’s former economic adviser) took some time out from claiming that Britain’s national debt didn’t need to be repaid, that the triple-A rating is meaningless, and that all spending cuts are completely a choice and not imposed by brute economic circumstances, to cite China as proof-positive that government-led investment ends recessions. He waxed lyrical about China’s 9% growth in the last quarter, and how the Chinese government simply told banks to lend and – hey presto – they lent.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for keeping government spending as high as possible to protect the tentative recovery. But citing China as a model for UK growth is idiotic, and deeply troubling.
Firstly, it relies upon deliberate economic simplification. Why might China be experiencing such high rates of growth? The fact it possess enormous and largely untapped natural resources, which it is beginning to put to use, has something to do with it. That China is still in a stage of rapid industrialisation from what was effectively a peasant society, ravaged by the Cultural Revolution, helps too. Britain is incomparable on both these metrics.
Likewise, Chinese growth is in large measure driven by enormous government-led infrastructure projects (as a component of rapid industrialisation). It also has as an enormous manufacturing base, fuelling western demand for cheap consumer goods. Britain, by contrast, relies heavily on its financial and service sectors. The two economies are thus radically different.
So pointing at China and simplistically saying “look, they have lots of government spending and lots of growth, QED” is stupid. You might as well point to Angola and its 12%+ oil-driven growth, and it would tell you as much about the UK’s situation (we, after all, still possess some reserves of North Sea Oil). Indeed, if one wants proof that government spending leads to economic recovery, why not turn to history and take the case of America’s New Deal? That at least tells you something about relatively comparable economies and circumstances – though again one would need to adjust for situation and the complex nature of macroeconomic recovery. (h/t)
But more importantly than all that, let’s remember a key method by which China achieves its phenomenal growth: by systematically denying the civil and economic rights of its domestic population.
Chinese workers have no meaningful rights whatsoever (their right to unionize, for example, means a right to join the union which reports to the Communist Party). They are paid pitifully low wages (averaging around $0.50 an hour in 2006), and have no hope of securing anything better. That’s a key way in which China’s export-manufacturing sector booms: low wages equal low costs, after all.
Another way China grows is by doing what I observed last summer: going to places like 1000-year old Yancheng, raising it to the ground, and erecting a city the size of Chicago in its place. And what do you think happened to the people living in Yancheng who didn’t want to have their homes demolished. Do you think they were consulted nicely and offered new places to live with guaranteed legal redress? Or do you reckon they were forcibly re-located as is the Communist Party’s preferred approach?
China may have very high growth rates. But it has no democracy, no civil rights, and no effective rule of law. It is a totalitarian dictatorship, achieving “economic miracles” at a cost no desirable society would ever contemplate.
Yet when John Ross was pointedly asked why Iceland and Ireland don’t simply adopt the “Chinese approach”, he simply claimed that the political consensus in those countries wouldn’t tolerate a more state-centred economy. He made it perfectly clear that he thought this a mistake: that China was leading the way, and should be followed.
We have been here before on the left. From the 1930s to the 1980s there were many who persistently claimed that Soviet Russia was a workers’ paradise, a successful alternative to capitalism. They were wrong, and millions of graves testify against them.
The left must not repeat the mistakes of history. China is an example of what we must always be against, not what we must aspire to. We forget that at our peril.
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End Note:
The irony, of course, is that the nutty left are usually the ones blithely decrying “neo-liberalism”. If “neo-liberalism” is anything, it is usually claimed to be an economic approach which privileges growth and profit above the welfare of ordinary people.
For reasons I cannot comprehend, some of those rabidly decrying “neo-liberalism” suddenly forget those concerns about growth über alles when it comes to hailing the totalitarian dystopia of modern China.
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UPDATE
John Ross’ views on China are well laid-out at this Guardian article. You will notice that NOT ONCE does he mention China’s horrific record on human rights, or the fact of its totalitarian dictatorship.
The comments beneath his piece are almost universally spot-on in calling him out on this matter.
Also, Nick Cohen (and you know it’s bad when Nick can successfully call you out on your shit) made the following observations of this nasty neo-Soviet Apologist two years ago:
“John Ross, Livingstone’s economic adviser on £121,000, is typical. He is so lacking in economic knowledge that he decided that the Russian Communist party was a force for the future in 1991, two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. His economic advice at the time was for the ruling class to learn ‘that they will be killed if they do not allow a takeover by the working class’.”
January 18, 2010
The Environment Is Not The Economy
A few months ago I blogged about the left’s prevailing economic illiteracy, to quite a lot of uproar. I observed that there’s a lot of talk about “new models of growth”, but very little by way of solid proposals. I also noted that there’s a frustrating tendency to equate economic recovery with environmentalism, as though the two automatically go hand-in-hand.
Although for the most part Saturday’s Fabian New Year Conference was a great success, the inability of large sections of the popular left to keep economics and environment conceptually separated was firmly on display.
The conference closed with a light-hearted yet seriously-intentioned “Democracy Den”, imitating the BBC’s “Dragon’s Den” but with people pitching ideas for how to beat the Tories at election. The “dragons” were Ken Livingstone, Mehdi Hassan and Deborah Mattison. Their job was to scrutinise 5 pitches, which were successively put to the audience who were invited to make speeches for and against, before a mass vote.
My personal favourite was the “Make the election about George Osborne: have his face in every voters’ mind” pitch. I also tried to help out Sunny Hundal when he ran out of time, and made a passionate plea for Class War (but now as we know it).
But the most interesting pitch – for all the wrong reasons – came from a lady saying the election should be fought on green issues. She only had 1 minute to make the case, but she successfully managed to conflate economics with the environment within that 60 seconds. Indeed, Deborah Mattison picked her up on it straight away remarking that “you were talking about jobs, but what’s that got to do with the environment?”
Quite. We hear a lot of prattle about “green jobs”. But what are they? Working in wind farm factories? Paying people to pick plastic out of landfill sites? We don’t really know.
But I’ll tell you what, with unemployment nudging just below 3 million, here’s a list of definitely real kinds of employment. Jobs in the oil, coal and gas industries. Jobs making airplanes, staffing airlines, in airports and for companies organising cheap holidays abroad. Jobs making, selling and maintaining cars. Jobs with electricity companies. Jobs building new roads and expanding motorways.
Unfortunately, none of them are green. But they all definitely exist.
Ken Livingstone made the very important point that no matter how important green issues are – and after all, what’s more important than saving the planet? – they don’t win elections. One of the reasons he lost the mayoralty to Boris Johnson was that people were turned-off by Livingstone’s green messages and liked Boris’ proposed scrapping of the Congestion Charge. Mehdi Hassan pointed out that environmentalism isn’t a vote-winner, noting that every time the New Statesman puts the environment on its front cover, sales plummet. It was pointed out that some polls put popular belief in the existence of man-made global warming as low as 39%.
Did the audience take notice, and concede that the environment was not something to campaign on to beat the Tories? Did they hell.
When the debate was opened to the floor, time and time again people spoke passionately in favour of campaigning on green issues. Often this consisted in a straightforward ignoring of the fact that environmentalism doesn’t win votes, and simply moving from “green issues are very important” to “therefore we must campaign on green issues”.
The idea that you campaign on something else that is more likely to help you win and then just do the green stuff seemed lost on many. As did the fact that Labour has had 13 years to do something about the environment, and all it’s got to show is the failure of Copenhagen. Why would voters start seeing Labour as the party of the environment now, because of a bit of pre-election bullshit?
But worse were those who kept speaking about a “green new deal” and “green jobs for the future”. There was lots of inspirational rhetoric about saving the earth and the economy – but details were few and far between. There’s always vague fluff about “insulating people’s houses” on this topic, as though that’s going to prevent global climate catastrophe (although I’ll admit promising to do it for free might win votes). But actual policy proposals that stimulate growth and prevent us consuming all the earth’s resources and burning our atmosphere in the process? No, none of those.
Indeed, I’m starting to suspect there probably aren’t any of those because, er, having high employment and high living standards means using lots of resources which means, er, burning the planet. And this is not some fluke or simple policy choice be teh evil neolibruls. It’s a product of centuries of decentralised, spontaneous evolution for how to best allocate resources and make human life dramatically more worth living than it was a 1000 years ago. Or come to think of it, drastically more worth living that it was 60 years ago in the USSR.
Perhaps this nasty necessity of the situation is why we can all play (and lose) the game “spot the concrete proposal” on the “core principles” section of nothing-organisation the Green New Deal Group’s website.* They haven’t got any substantive concrete proposals because the problem of the environment being destroyed is a problem that goes to the heart not of some abstract monolith called “global capitalism” but to basic facts about how our societies are fundamentally organised and have been for centuries, arrived at via a process of useful innovation and evolution. No blabbing about a “new economics” and a “green new deal” is going to change that. It’s just going to waste time and lose elections.
Of course, a few people spoke dramatically in terms of how we need to make voters see that being green doesn’t mean giving up high standards of living. One young guy rather sweetly pronounced that this was true, because he was both a cyclist and a vegetarian and hence living proof that environmentalism doesn’t mean lower living standards.
I’d hate to break it to him personally, but when the petrol rationing, the limits on car use, the abolition of cheap flights, the electricity curbing and the food restrictions kick-in, no amount of lettuce-eating and peddling around will disguise the fact that if we’re to avoid catastrophe, we’re going to need to make sacrifices. And I reckon many voters get their heads around this. They will be very suspicious of anyone who promises them caviar, whilst proposing to kill all the sturgeons.
Before moving to the public vote, the lady making the initial pitch was asked to defend herself from charges that environmentalism doesn’t win elections. And what did she do? She leapt straight into economics. Building the jobs of the future, green investment, securing a new economy. The usual.
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. Saving the environment is not necessarily the same as saving the economy. Imagine: I take over the world, make you all my slaves and in the process we go carbon-zero. Planet: saved. Economy: totally ruined. (But who cares; you’re all my slaves).
The point is, not all things we care about come together in one neat unified package. Hard choices and sacrifices need to be made. It’s not good enough to wave hands in the air and spout off about a “green new deal” as though by simply incanting the words we’ll make it reality.
Macroeconomics is not just some abstract “models” chosen by evil people from Chicago, but possibly being reclaimed by that nice man Mr Keynes. It’s a complex interface of thousands of interacting influences, the vast majority spontaneously arising and not directed by any consciously-centralised administration. And for this we ought to be grateful; centrally planned economies were an almost unqualified disaster, as 70million dead Soviets would attest.**
I certainly believe that governments can make positive and beneficial changes to the workings of (international) market capitalism. Just as they can really mess things up when they get it wrong. But “economics” is not something that can just be replaced overnight like a faulty light bulb. It’s a damn sight more complicated than that.
Yes, climate change is important. Yes, we need to do something about it. Yes, economics is at the heart of that necessity. But working out what is required is very complex, and making it happen is likely to be even more difficult. Part of the complications and difficulties lie precisely in the fact that the environment is not the economy, even if the two are related in myriad ways. We have many values invested in both. But it isn’t true that all our values come together all the time.
The left needs to wake up and smell the coffee.
Firstly, on the immediate issue, if Labour goes to the country with the environment as its main campaigning pledge, the Tories will ease to victory.
Secondly, and with a more long-term perspective, serious changes do need to be made to the systems of mass-production, transport, communication and energy-supply that contribute so much to man-made global warming. That requires economic reform, for sure. But we need concrete proposals for how to bring that about, and to face the reality that it may necessitate great sacrifice. Bleating vaguely about a “green new deal” isn’t what we need. That’s just fiddling whilst Rome burns, no matter how well-intentioned the fiddling.
And believe me, the left has a problem here. I was in the tiny minority who voted against this pitch, which was later chosen as the over-all winner of the day. One of the purest examples of the victory of idealism over both strategy and reality I’ve ever seen. You can be sure this is a mistake the Conservatives will not be making.
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* Seriously, take this complete crock of nothingness from The Green New Deal Group:
“Jobs, more jobs and secure jobs. And, it’s about the skills and training to create and sustain them: in a time of recession, with unemployment already rocketing in the US, and growing here, shifting to green energy will produce countless new jobs, and create many more pound-for-pound of investment, than propping up the current system.”
Not even an attempt to argue the case or provide reasons. Just a bare assertion. Unbelievable.
** The only case I can think of for saying that state planned economies didn’t prove to be a total disaster is that the USSR won the Second World War and thus prevented Hitler taking over the world. Without state planning Russia would have still been at the level of a 12th Century peasant economy. It was state-directed factories building tanks and planes on five-year-plan production schedules, and the mass-oppression of human rights, that stopped Hitler. Not plucky Brits in spitfires, or late-to-the-party Yanks, but Commies.
December 15, 2009
How not to create a better society
The insufferable New Economics Foundation yesterday issued some idiocy of the highest order, declaring that bankers are economically “worth less” to society than cleaners. The appalling NEF methodological fallacies have already been enumerated by Giles Wilkes here.
Indeed, Giles reckons that the NEF “sets back the task of finding a truly just way out of this fiscal mess”. He’s right.
Sensible economic bloggers like Chris Dillow, Duncan, and Giles have been pointing out for months that a big part of the “banker problem” is to do with incentives. In the boom years banks and financial actors were incentivised to buy and re-sell debt whose true risks they didn’t know, or to issue NINJA loans, because during the bubble this worked. Profit was made, big time. Reform that will prevent future disaster, and foster a productive banking sector that doesn’t fuel social inequality, requires a careful restructuring of incentives.
Bankers and their bonuses fall into this wider picture. Investment banks pay their staff bonuses because so far this has worked for banks. A culture of high-risk, high-remuneration saw staggering profits up until 2007-8, with a return to the good times in 2009. Bankers themselves demand high bonuses because not only do they know they can get them, but in a banking environment where firms compete for staff by offering huge remuneration packets it makes sense for individual bankers to be greedy.
So part of the story for dealing with financial reform is incentive restructuring, which must be undertaken in a dispassionate, objective, level-headed manner. The NEF “report”, by contrast, amounts to little more than adolescent screeching and petulant antagonism. It adds nothing constructive.
But incentives alone musn’t be the whole story for the left. Before he passed away last summer, the brilliant political theorist Jerry Cohen explored the importance of collective social ethos in any society which aims to be just. Cohen believed there would be severe problems for any society in which individual agents lacked an “ethos of justice”, who simply bargained for what they could get given their market position, irrespective of any negative socio-economic impacts. Crucially, institutional arrangements alone would not suffice to secure justice. What efficacy a windfall tax on bonuses, if the bankers lack a social ethos that it is wrong to avoid the tax, and hence do so? How can a society be just if bankers take themselves to be masters of the universe, and employ their lobbying power to secure lower taxes and less regulation to the detriment of others?
Cohen was a Marxist, but non-Marxists on the left can form common cause here. In recent years there have been moves towards left “republicanism”, which calls (to caricature horribly) for an emphasis on social solidarity through collective civic action, to empower citizens by rediscovering the ties that bind. This is opposed to the hegemony of “liberalism”, which has grown to prominence since the 19th Century, and treats individuals as self-sufficient agents for whom the state must simply provide a “sphere of non-interference”. For although liberalism has brought much good – unrivalled liberty and tolerance for individuals, the growth of democratic society, and the (decidedly mixed) blessings of capitalism – it has also fostered a social “atomism”.
Y’know, the sort of society in which bankers view themselves as sufficiently isolated that they fully believe they are entitled to obscene bonuses, having just crashed the global system, plunged millions of people into dire straights, and following a year when thick chimps could have made money.*
The left would do well to concentrate on building a collective ethos of justice, fostering a society in which the social stigma against heinously selfish actions are internalised by economic agents, and thereby cut-off at root. No doubt a project of restructuring institutional incentives will help promote this end. Institutions, after all, profoundly influence all our lives and world-views.
But one thing that is certainly not going to help is bad economics, dishonest methodolgy and a response to profound crisis which is the equivalent of screaming “We don’t care what you think, because you’re rubbish anyway!”
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* Because with interest levels so low and the global system underwritten by taxpayers, banks could hardly have failed to do well this year.
Simon Cowell and the Difficulties of Democracy
Simon Cowell wants to do an X-Factor style politics show. Apparently he’d like to: “create a ‘bear pit’ atmosphere, with a live studio audience and viewers voting via telephone.”
Reactions to this look deceptively like they might fall simply into two types. Those who welcome the move and hail it as an extension of democracy by allowing “the people” to directly influence politicians,versus those who recoil at the prospect of skitish demagogues desperately restoring capital punishment and castrating pedophiles. Democrats versus anti-democrats, one might be tempted to say.
But it ain’t that simple. Let’s take a whistle-stop tour of intellectual history, to begin to see just how dark and messy actual democratic theory in the real world is, in stark contrast to the fluffy ideals I recently laid-out.
Let’s start with Thomas Hobbes in the mid-17th Century. Hobbes sought to justify unqualified absolutism, and wished to show that rational, self-interested agents would choose to put themselves under an absolute “Sovereign”. To this end Hobbes conducted a thought experiment in which he argued free agents seeking to escape the “nasty, brutish and short” life of the state of nature would mutually agree to put themselves into civil society by erecting an all-powerful, unchecked Sovereign. In Hobbes’ ideal thought experiment, free agents put themselves, directly and unanimously into civil society. Absolute Sovereigns may be the logically necessary under-pinning of civil society, but in idealised circumstances they were instantiated via pure, immediate democracy (in reality they conquered you, and you bloody well lived with it).
After Hobbes, John Locke softened things by providing that “tyrannical” sovereigns could be legitimately resisted. Sovereign right returned to the people who initially delegated legitimate power to rulers in the first place. In the good times the people “tacitly consented” to be ruled by whoever they found themselves under – with the condition that rebellion was permitted if rulers became tyrants.
In the mid-18th Century, Jean Jaques Rousseau penned his (in)famous Du Contrat Social in which he claimed a (city-)state was legitimate only if all its free citizens could assemble together each year to reveal the “General Will”, and agree to delegate the running of mundane administrative government to trusted officials, who themselves were merely servants (and explicitly not representatives).
Aside from the successive move away from Hobbesian absolutism, it’s worth noting that these theorists didn’t propose for “the people” to be “represented” by intermediaries making decisions on their behalf. Thoughts about “sovereign peoples” being represented by delegates whose task was to carry-forth the will of the people came later. And if we’re going to pick a date, it may as well be 1789.
The French Revolution threw up the need for a “people” to exercise democratic power in quite a spectacular way – but in a nation of over 25 million, Rousseau’s ideal of “the people together assembled” legislating directly was obviously a fantasy. Thus emerged justifications for the legitimacy of elected representatives, who would carry forth the people’s will and govern in their interests. The influential pamphlet What is the Third Estate? by Josef Sieyes is the classic text, in case you’re interested.
The ideal and idea of representative democracy spread throughout 19th Century Europe – but took on strange new forms. In a world of antagonistic class conflicts amidst rapid industrialisation, the series of reform bills extending the franchise in, say, Britain, were met with horror by some sections of the ruling class, but embraced by reformists like Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. Those in the utilitarian tradition, espousing “the greatest happiness for the greatest number” as the fundamental moral principle for ordering society, (arguably) joined their thinking up with Rousseau’s notions of the “general will”. They came to see representative democracy as a system for securing the best outcomes for the mass of a people, as well as providing a system of government which tended to produce leaders sensitive to the needs and interests of those electing them. Conservatives and Marxists disagreed, of course – but in the 19th Century, history went against them.
Mass industrialised societies in Western Europe steadily embraced the notion that increasing numbers of ordinary citizens ought to have a say in who ruled them, and by 1918 even some British women were given the franchise (so you may want to have a think about whether Britain has really been a “democracy” for even a hundred years yet…)
Of course, by the early 20th Century things looked decidedly more desperate for democracy. Witnessing the post-WWI collapse of the German-speaking lands, thinkers like Max Weber noted the increasing power of economic actors, the vast anti-democratic significance of mass bureaucracy, and the importance of leaders carried to power not simply off the back of votes but from their own “charismatic” authority over supporters. Darker voices succeeded him: Carl Schmitt (who we met last week), saw representative parliamentary democracy as in free-fall; dragged-down by the failures of liberalism, threatened by the anti-democratic surges from fascist Italy and Bolshevist Russia. From 1929-45, representative (liberal) democracy – and the capitalism it went hand-in-hand with – looked decidedly like it was going to kick the bucket.
But it didn’t. Representative liberal democracy – with a lot of help from Uncle Joe in the East, and Mr Keynes in Britain – beat Hitler and Mussolini on the battlefields and managed to resuscitate what looked like an economic corpse. It then settled down for a nice, long cold war – until in 1989 it suddenly found itself strangely alone and triumphant.
However, way back when capitalist representative democracy was still locked in a death-fight with fascism – and for a couple of years Bolshevism too – a certain Joseph Schumpeter wrote an interesting little book called Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, published in 1942. This book has some intriguing consequences regarding Mr Cowell’s hiatus from the destruction of western cultured civilisation and his foray into politics.
Schumpeter thought democracy itself could have no intrinsic value: it is simply a method of arriving at leaders and governments. Yet he also thought that the “Classical Doctrine of Democracy” – that there is a “general will” of “the people” that representatives are elected to uphold and pursue – was a myth. Instead, Schumpeter looked at the world and saw power-elites who vied for people’s votes whilst simultaneously seeking to manipulate the (ill-informed, ignorant and complacent) opinions of ordinary citizens in much the same way advertisers manipulate consumer preferences. Opinions could be manufactured. What Schumpeter saw was not an enlightened citizenry, rationally selecting representatives who would act in voters’ interests to serve the “will of the people”, but narrow selections of leaders who vie for popular votes every few years, which they simultaneously attempt to manipulate.
To gleefully annoy many contemporary political theorists, post-Schumpeterian democratic theory is essentially a fight between those who think Schumpeter broadly got it right, and those who think he mostly got it wrong, with a load of autistic economists thrown into the mix.
Schumpeter believed that implicit in democratic society is an agreement to a “political division of labour.” Voters agree to only engage in direct political action at fixed points – i.e. elections – and for the most part they let politicians get on with things, on the understanding they will be voted from office if they fail to meet expectations. Voters may criticise, bemoan and complain, of course – but actual political interference is tacitly understood to be off-limits:
“All that matters here is that successful democratic practice in great and complicated societies has invariably been hostile to political back-seat driving – to the point of resorting to secret diplomacy and lying about intentions and commitments – and that it takes a lot of self-control on the part of the citizen to refrain from it.”
Which yields a rather interesting conclusion. If you take a Schumpeterian view of democracy, and endorse his idea that voters and politicians agree to a division of labour in properly-functioning democracy, then what Simon Cowell is proposing could be read as decidedly undemocratic. By encouraging inter-election voter pressure to be brought upon politicians, Cowell is arguably subverting the democratic status quo of labour division within the political-governmental sphere.*
Of course – and to anticipate a point-missing reply – this only follows on a certain conception of democracy, one that is cynical about democratic mechanisms and the collective wisdoms and myths surrounding them. But the important point is precisely whose democracy is it anyway?
The above has tried to sketch that the (intellectual) history of representative democracy is long and complicated. What democracy in its representative form constitutes in the here and now is open to potentially dark interpretations.
So the next time some dinner-party bore** waves her copy of the Daily Mail at you and claims that Simon Cowell is striking a blow for popular democracy against ZaNuLiebor, don’t be too quick to agree. It’s all much messier than that sort of platitude can possibly allow for.
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* Yes, oh eagle-eyed observer: the same argument might be made regarding the ordinary media. Perhaps that is an argument for why Schumpeter’s conception fails. But I rather think it’s more complicated than that…
** I don’t actually go to dinner parties. I wish I did. In reality I mostly eat Chinese food in my underwear. Mostly alone. But this is the sort of rounding-off remark Ben Goldacre makes, and I’d like to pretend I’m more like him.
