J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 314
August 27, 2018
Laura McGann: John McCain's Legacy: Sarah Palin, and the ...
Laura McGann: John McCain's Legacy: Sarah Palin, and the Rise of Reality TV Politics: "McCain empowered a demagogue who put the Republican Party on the path to Donald Trump. The party of Donald Trump began almost 10 years ago to the day, when John McCain tapped Sarah Palin to join his ticket...
...It���s one of the most important moments of McCain���s career. He proved willing to empower a demagogue when he thought doing so would improve his political fortunes, exactly the sin so many of his colleagues in the Republican Party have committed since Trump won their party���s nomination. ���She���s not from these parts and she���s not from Washington, but when you get to know her, you���re going to be as impressed as I am,��� McCain said when he announced his decision. ���She���s got the grit, integrity, the good sense and fierce devotion to the common good that is exactly what we need in Washington today.��� Palin���s big moment in front of a national audience was the first live vice presidential debate with Joe Biden. Her big opener was to ask the crowd: ���What���s the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull?��� Her answer: ���Lipstick.��� Things went downhill from there. She dodged questions, offering no real or substantive answers. And still, the event drew 70 million viewers���the largest audience for a vice presidential debate in history. She dazzled conservatives.
National Review editor Rich Lowry described her as ���so sparkling it was almost mesmerizing, [sending] little starbursts through the screen and ricocheting around the living rooms of America.��� Palin���s run solidified the Republican Party���s comfort with a candidate who would say absurdities. When Katie Couric wanted to know what newspapers she read, Palin answered, ���Um, all of them, any of them that have been in front of me over all these years.��� Even though McCain and Palin were bested by Barack Obama and Joe Biden, Palin inspired a slew of copycats, unleashing a political style and a values system that animated the Tea Party movement and laid the groundwork for a Trump presidency. McCain, who passed away at age 81, is remembered as a maverick, a man who crossed the aisle and built relationships with Democrats. But he also betrayed his own values hoping to win a presidential election, and sent the Republican Party down the path to Trump...
#shouldread
Comment of the Day: Graydon: Jacob Levy: I don���t think ...
Comment of the Day: Graydon: Jacob Levy: I don���t think there���s anything���anything���on which I���ve gotten so much disbelief-that-becomes-near-anger as when I contradict the post-2014 Fox narrative about campus life...: "The campus narrative is a way to assign moral wrong because they can't assign factual wrong back to the institutions and processes which are assigning factual error to them...
...That's necessary because lots of people can't cope with any or all of the factual wrong, the implied responsibility, or the effort of change....
#shouldread
Some Fairly-Recent Must- and Should-Reads...
This is, I think, both right and wrong. China has an... interesting property-rights system���your property is secure not through title deeds and such but through networks that link you to party and government officials. It's hard to argue that it does not work. It is easy to argue that it shouldn't work. But it does work, and this does, I think, have something to do with China's stabilization policy success. China has Keynesian demand management���and is willing to use it. China has interest rate tools, but they are in general effective at boosting only exports and construction. And China has effective financial repression, with which it appears to do a lot to manage banking and investment and thus the flow of aggregate demand. I have not seen a good analysis of how China's credit-based stabilization policy really works. I would like to see one. But fiscal policy and monetary policy ought���away from the zero lower bound at least, be powerful enough tools to do the job, and in all likelihood better tools to do the job: Noah Smith: China Invents a Different Way to Run an Economy: "The nation has avoided a recession for a quarter-century. Few countries��can make the same claim...
Comment of the Day: Graydon: Josh Marshall: We Know Trump Is Guilty. We���re Having a Hard Time Admitting It: "The problem isn't Trump's manifest guilt; the problem is that, in a two party system, the majority-of-power party is guilty...
Comment of the Day: Tracy Lightcap: Jacob Levy: I don���t think there���s anything���anything���on which I���ve gotten so much disbelief-that-becomes-near-anger as when I contradict the post-2014 Fox narrative about campus life...: "This is it, but I think the process is a bit more complicated. People who have made up their minds on a topic and committed themselves to it are still susceptible to arguments that work through repetition to undermine authority figures...
Comment of the Day: Kaleberg: Noah Smith: China Invents a Different Way to Run an Economy: "Maybe communism just needed better central planners. Chinese policy has been heavily influenced by the teachings of Qian Xuesen...
On Removing My Tweed Jacket at the Start of Lecture...
Rob Beschizza: President Trump colors U.S. flag wrongly in classroom photo opg: "Maybe Trump should kneel before it a while, so he at least knows what it looks like. I've created a useful graphic of the Trumpamerica Flag...
Some Fairly-Recent Links:
Matthew Yglesias: Elizabeth Warren���s Accountable Capitalism Act, explained : "As much as Warren���s proposal is about ending inequality, it���s also about saving capitalism.... The conceit tying together Warren���s ideas is that if corporations are going to have the legal rights of persons, they should be expected to act like decent citizens who uphold their fair share of the social contract and not act like sociopaths.... Require any corporation with revenue over $1 billion... to obtain a federal charter of corporate citizenship. The charter tells company directors to consider the interests of all relevant stakeholders ��� shareholders, but also customers, employees, and the communities in which the company operates ��� when making decisions..."
Alexander Hamilton: Draft of a Constitution, 17 September 1787
Wikipedia: Jean-Charles Pichegru
Jessica Evans: Alcibiades��� Trump Card: The Political Masquerades of Masculinity
Adam Gopnik: How Charles de Gaulle Rescued France : "His life shows that right-wing politics needn���t bend toward absolutism...
Nils Gilpin: The Twin Insurgency : "The postmodern state is under siege from plutocrats and criminals who unknowingly compound each other���s insidiousness...
Emily Stewart: Elon Musk���s plan to own investors betting against Tesla��stock backfires : "Investors shorting Tesla���s stock have made $1.2 billion since Musk���s privatization tweet...
Jason Smith: A Random Physicist Takes on Economics
Claudia Goldin (2014): "A Grand Gender Convergence: Its Last Chapter", AMERICAN ECONOMIC REVIEW 104:4 (April), pp. 1091-1119 https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.104.4.1091
Wikipedia: Johannes Trithemius
Wall of Shame:
Morgan Gstalter: McConnell: Midterms could be 'a Category 3, 4 or 5' storm for GOP: "'We know the wind is going to be in our face. We don���t know whether it���s going to be a Category 3, 4 or 5'...
Matthew Yglesias: "The highbrow intellectual leaders of the modern conservative movement explicitly conceptualized it as a white nationalist undertaking. Trump is true to this legacy and his intra-movement critics are the innovators...
Eight years of Governor Sam Brownback has seen Kansas lose 8% of its jobs relative to the national average. Now Kansas is Ground Zero for Trump's trade war. Joshua Green: Chinese Sorghum Tariffs Will Hit Hard in Trump-friendly Kansas: "Trump���s Trade War Hits Another Red State: What���s the matter with Kansas? It���ll be hardest hit by new Chinese tariffs...
Will Wilkinson: The DACA and immigration debates are about whether Latinos are ���real Americans���: "Challenging the idea that Latino Americans can be truly American undercuts the very idea of America...
Just when you think the mainstream media could not sink any lower into misogyny and stupidity, it's the Atlantic Monthly!: Scott Lemieux: Are you provoked yet?: "Both James Bennet and Fred Hiatt have been asked to hold David Bradley���s beer...
Ezra Klein: @ezraklein on Twitter: "I don���t know what the [New York] Times should���ve done with Thrush. But I watched the efforts to plant oppo and smear @lkmcgann in the aftermath of her reporting. Anyone who thinks coming forward with these experiences is easy, even now, is wrong. I am beyond proud to be her colleague..."
Yes, this is as bad a violation of academic standards as it looks: Henry Farrell: The public choice of public choice: "Now this... 'financial ties to the Charles Koch Foundation... [but] George Mason University has cited its academic independence.
The Brexiters never had a plan for what they would do if they won the referendum. And they still do not have a plan. I do not see a road other than "transitional" arrangements that keep things as they are without the UK having any voice in Brussels���"transitional" arrangements that will keep getting indefinitely extended: Robert Hutton: Stuck In the Middle: These Are Theresa May's Four Brexit Options: "Her inner Brexit Cabinet has rejected her proposed customs relationship with the European Union...
Gabrielle Coppola: Trump���s TPP Pullout May Have Cost Missouri Its Harley Factory: "Harley-Davidson Inc.���s chief executive officer said he may have kept a plant open in Missouri if the U.S. had stayed in the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the free-trade agreement that President Donald Trump withdrew from last year...
WTF happened to Brendan Nyhan? The braineater has eaten his brain: Josh Marshall: "There are several problems with this logic.: The first is that you are applying jury trial standards to what are political questions. You are also applying statutory standards where they do not exist. As a factual matter the obstruction question is not in doubt...
August 26, 2018
MOAR Problems with Twitter...
There are more problems with Twitter than the Nazis, the shrillness, the out-of-context mobs, the unhinged rants, the Nazi shrillness, the out-of-context Nazi mobs, the unhinged Nazi rants, the shrill out-of-contezt mobs, the unhinged shrill rants, the out-of-context unhinged rants, the shrill Nazi out-ofcontext mobs, the shrill Nazi unhinged rants, the unhinged rants by Nazi out-of-context mobs, the shrill out-of-context unhinged ranting mobs, and the Nazi shrill unhinged rants by out-of-context mobs.
When something good happens on Twitter, it has no positive externalities: it is too compressed and allusive to be of use to anybody not immediately and directly plugged in���and often it is not even of use to many who are engaged but who cannot follow the compressed and coded 280-character discourse. Back in THE DAY, debates between weblogs produced things of value to a large watching audience, and had large positive externalities.
For example, this day. Great for me and for a few others. But any good for a larger audience?:
Suresh Naidu: @CoreyRobin clarifies the s-word:
Corey Robin: The New Socialists: Socialists hear ���the market��� and think of the anxious parent... the insurance representative... decree[inig] that the policy... doesn���t cover her child���s appendectomy.... We bow and scrape, flatter and flirt, or worse���just to get that raise or make sure we don���t get fired.... Socialists want to... establish freedom from rule by the boss, from the need to smile for the sake of a sale, from the obligation to sell for the sake of survival.... The biggest boundary today���s socialists are willing to cross is the two-party system.... Democrats are also complicit in the rot of American life. And here the socialism of our moment meets up with the deepest currents of the American past.... It was said that liberalism was freedom plus groceries. The socialist, by contrast, believes that making things free makes people free.... Socialism is not journalists, intellectuals or politicians armed with a policy agenda.... It is workers who get us there, who decide what and where ���there��� is. That, too, is a kind of freedom. Socialist freedom.
Rakesh Bhandari: You mean the s-d compound word, right? And it's a pretty weak s-d too insomuch as the promise here seems to be that universal health insurance would make it easier for some employees to escape more-than-ordinarily abusive bosses. Not really the socialist critique of capitalism! It's pretty much the end of ideology where the leftist Jacobin and the Nobel economist both agree that capitalism can be fixed by universal health insurance that makes it easier to leave extraordinarily abusive bosses and restrictions on arbitrary sacks. Yet catastrophes await
Brad DeLong: Steering by the Socialist Idols in the Heavens Leads Us to Sail Not Towards but Away from the Shores of Utopia: (Early) Monday Corey Robin Smackdown: Robin writes of "the anxious parent, desperate not to offend the insurance representative on the phone, lest he decree that the policy she paid for doesn���t cover her child���s appendectomy". But that is not a problem with "the market": that is a problem with bureaucracy. National health systems face the same problems and make the same kinds of decisions with respect to "medical appropriateness" as do private insurers. Robin writes of freedom from "the need to smile for the sake of a sale". But that is not a problem with "the market": that is a problem with the need we have for a complex division of labor in order to be a rich society, in the context of the very human fact that people will not be eager to deal with you as a cooperative partner if you are a misanthropic grouch. The market provides a partial way around the unfreedoms generated by institutions of bureaucratic organization and social cooperation.... [But] the market pays attention to the wealthy and only the wealthy. But the problem then is one of poverty���that we have managed to arrange a very wealthy society in such a way that it has a lot of not-wealthy people in it. Contrary to what Robin claims, utopia is indeed the liberal dream of freedom plus groceries���with "groceries" standing in for enough wealth to route yourself around the unfreedoms created by bureaucracy and by your own misanthropic nature when they bind too tightly...
Cosma Shalizi: In Soviet Union, Optimization Problem Solves You: Capitalism, the market... bureaucracy... democratic polity... can be... cold monster[s].... We... live among these alien powers... try to direct them to human ends... find the specific ways in which these powers we have conjured up are hurting us, and use them to check each other.... Sometimes... more... market mechanisms, sometimes... removing... goods and services from market allocation.... Sometimes... expanding... democratic decision-making... and sometime... narrowing its scope.... Leaving some tasks to experts... recognizing claims of expertise to be mere assertions of authority... complex problems, full of messy compromises. Attaining even second-best solutions is going to demand ���bold, persistent experimentation���, coupled with a frank recognition that many experiments will just fail, and that even long-settled compromises can, with the passage of time, become confining obstacles...
Suresh Naidu: The Shalizi and Robin essays are complements not substitutes. Borrowing your language: Corey is showing the undemocratic nature of negishi weighted swfs; Cosma is saying all feasibly computed swf are inefficient (criticizing both planning and markets).
Brad DeLong: Touch��... Except that Corey's examples are flaws of bureaucracy and of the modes of sociability ("smile for a sale"), not flaws of market���which are externality, moral hazard, monopoly, negishi values, etc. Getting rid of markets won't tame bureaucracy or change modes of sociability.
Ilyana Kuziemko: Suresh to borrow our fave example of powerlessness and ���nonfreedom,��� I wonder if there is more joyless, dutiful laughing at the bad jokes of superiors in capitalism or socialism...
Brad DeLong: Now that is genuinely funny...
Ilyana Kuziemko: There is a hell a lot of it under capitalism! :)
Steven Klein: Freedom as non-domination-Pettit is in the background. I think just saying "its bureaucracy" underestimates the difference between a for-profit companies bureaucracy and government health care subject to public accountability, however attenuated. And what about this core example: "we���re forced to submit to the boss"? There's an interesting debate about whether freedom as non-domination���being free not just from external restraints but from subordination���is furthered or hindered by the market: https://t.co/goUG5FkwRF. Robert Taylor defends market freedom: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/exit-left-9780198798736?cc=us&lang=en&. Gourevitch argues basically you need full workplace democracy to realize freedom: https://t.co/hWZJCE4QEg. And I advance basically a left-wing social democratic critique of Pettit and Taylor (although Pettit would say he is closer to my position than I think he is): https://t.co/Q720I6724Q.
Suresh Naidu: I find that Taylor book interesting, in that he basically rests his case on an ideal of perfect competition/complete contracts. If real world markets are rife with deviations from that (e.g. monopsony and efficiency wages), I think the neo-republican case for markets falls apart.
Rakesh Bhandari: I think the language Robin is reaching for to describe his annoyingly vague sense of freedom can be found in Sen's and Nussbaum's capability approach. I think you need that before you can coherently critique welfare functions
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Steven Klein: It's freedom as non-domination-Pettit is in the background. I think just saying "its bureaucracy" underestimates the difference between a for-profit companies bureaucracy and government health care subject to public accountability, however attenuated.
Brad DeLong**: There are failures of insurance that are market failures���the inability to purchase insurance because of moral hazard is a big one. But "bureaucracy" ain't one. To pretend getting rid of markets will cure bureaucracy takes you in a very bad direction...
Steven Klein: Right, but I think the difference is between decisions on treatment being opaque and nebulous and them being made through some public procedure. Yes, public health systems ration - they key is in how the rationing is done.
Suresh Naidu: There are real limits to the traditional neo-republican notion of freedom when it comes to big impersonal institutions. i.e. the problem is the discretion/caprice available to the bureaucrat/boss, not the institutional logic being implemented by the bureaucrat/boss.
Brad DeLong: But the institutional logic can be as alienating and as large a source of unfreedom as the caprice of the boss... Cf.: Ursula K. LeGuin: The Dispossessed, passim...
Suresh Naidu: "Freedom as non-domination". Absolutely.
Rakesh Bhandari: Eduardo Porter gave the disturbing example of old age homes that go private overprescribing medications that rob the elderly of many of their remaining conscious hours so that they require fewer staff members to take care of them.
Steven Klein: when it comes to health care, I'd take a government quisling terrified of breaking the rules over some precarious worker incentivized to find ways to deny claims or limit payments
Suresh Naidu: Right, assuming the bureaucrat doesn't have any discretion, and is just implementing the agenda of his employer, it matters whether her employer is a democratic government or a profit-maximizing firm. But you can imagine both democratic or market failures that could go either way.
Scotrt Ashworth: This is where I declare Brad a better empirical political scientist than Steven.
Steven Klein: Give me my political theory idealizations :)
Scott Ashworth: If your defense of Corey here is that BS-ish but inspirational talk is politically valuable and the NYT is for politics not intellectualism, I will concede defeat. ����
Suresh Naidu: Why is it BS-ish? I think it's putting in public an academic conversation about freedom and markets that has been happening for awhile.
Suresh Naidu: Scott, is it because there is no distinctive market/nonmarket solution to bureaucratic agency problems, so scope for arbitrary whims remain constant?
Pseudoerasmus: I'm sympathetic to the healthcare example but I wonder how much of the ���smiling for the boss��� stuff is really about having to deal with tyrannical employers who can threaten your livelihood, rather than just middle-class intellectuals��� distaste for hustling to acquire luxuries...
Brad DeLong: But the health care example is a problem with bureaucracy! Not with the market! We know where socialists who destroy the markets in an attempt to deal with the evils of bureaucracy wind up, and it is not a good place!'
Pseudoerasmus: I totally agree with that! Socialism does not eliminate people���s subjections to other people���s whims; but the guy thinks ���democracy��� will, I guess.
Brad DeLong: But "democracy" subjects all minorities to the whims of the demos. The demos serves you a hemlock cocktail, you drink a hemlock cocktail...
Suresh Naidu: The neo-repubs have a broader definition of democracy than majoritarianism....in including robust checks and balances/civil rights
Ilyana Kuziemko: As we were discussing, I think the freedom argument is a clever argument in that it neutralizes a common defense of capitalism but isn���t an effective central theme for socialism...
Brad DeLong: Say, rather, that power is minimized by having multiple societal organizing mechanisms���wealth and market, direct democratic, representative democratic, by lot, technocratic, cultural, ideological affinity. The key is to keep one from subsuming all the others, as one or the other is wont to do...
Suresh Naidu: Yes I like this.... It's a variant of Walzer's spheres of justice..but in means putting up barricades against "markets in everything"...
Ilyana Kuziemko: Wasnt that Uncle Milton���s argument? That economic inequality helped check government tyranny by creating a separate power center? But then we got Citizens United.
Brad DeLong: Yep. And indeed...
Brad DeLong: Yes. Immense barricades...
Ilyana Kuziemko: Like confiscatory marginal tax rates on income over some very small multiple of one million or what?
Brad DeLong: Yup... But, as I said, Corey���s implicit claim that bureaucratic and mode-of-societal-cooperation forms of domination would melt away if not for "the market" strikes me as false and jejune. As I said: needed editorial attention... Read Cosma Shalizi instead...
Steven Greenhouse: Why so many young Americans are attracted to Socialism, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Rakesh Bhandari: Except it's wrong. Clinton whom these new socialists (sic) hate proposed wildly progressive income taxes, stricter regulations on shadow banking than the putative socialist Sanders, and a massive green infrastructure program. They did everything to alienate the left from her.
Manu Saadia: More on the @CoreyRobin article and @de1ong rejoinder. To PK "socialism with American characteristics" is Western European social democracy���
Paul Krugman: Corey Robin and... Neil Irwin... get at a lot of what���s wrong with the neoliberal ideology... [of] low taxes and minimal regulation... that free markets translate into personal freedom.... In fact, the daily experience of tens of millions of Americans ��� especially but not only those who don���t make a lot of money ��� is one of constant dependence on the good will of employers and other more powerful economic players.... And it���s even more na��ve now than it was a few decades ago, because, as Irwin points out, large economic players are dominating more and more of the economy.... What can be done about it? Corey Robin says ���socialism��� ��� but as far as I can tell he really means social democracy: Denmark, not Venezuela. Government-mandated employee protections may restrict the ability of corporations to hire and fire, but they also shield workers from some very real forms of abuse. Unions do somewhat limit workers��� options, but they also offer an important counterweight against corporate monopsony power. Oh, and social safety net programs can do more than limit misery: they can be liberating. I���ve known many people who stuck with jobs they disliked for fear of losing health coverage; Obamacare, flawed as it is, has noticeably reduced that kind of ���lock in���, and a full guarantee of health coverage would make our society visibly freer.... Seriously, do the real differences between New York and Florida make New Yorkers less free?... If you���re a highly paid professional, it probably doesn���t make much difference. But my guess is that most workers feel at least somewhat freer in New York than they do in FL. Now, there are no perfect answers to the inevitable sacrifice of some freedom that comes with living in a complex society; utopia is not on the menu. But the advocates of unrestricted corporate power and minimal worker protection have been getting away for far too long with pretending that they���re the defenders of freedom���which is not, in fact, just another word for nothing left to lose...
Steering by the Socialist Idols in the Heavens Leads Us to Sail Not Towards but Away from the Shores of Utopia: (Early) Monday Corey Robin Smackdown
I find Corey Robin smart most of the time. I find him annoyingly and profoundly stupid some of the time. Why? Because of occasional but stubborn blindnesses to very important parts of recent history and, indeed, very important parts of the world in which he lives���what seems to me a willful, trollish blindnesses.
For example, his piece in the New York Times last week. It really could have used some proper editorial attention it did not get: The examples presented of what is wrong with "the market" are simply... not examples...
Robin writes of "the anxious parent, desperate not to offend the insurance representative on the phone, lest he decree that the policy she paid for doesn���t cover her child���s appendectomy". But that is not a problem with "the market": that is a problem with bureaucracy. National health systems face the same problems and make the same kinds of decisions with respect to "medical appropriateness" as do private insurers.
Robin writes of freedom from "the need to smile for the sake of a sale". But that is not a problem with "the market": that is a problem with the need we have for a complex division of labor in order to be a rich society, in the context of the very human fact that people will not be eager to deal with you as a cooperative partner if you are a misanthropic grouch.
The market provides a partial way around the unfreedoms generated by institutions of bureaucratic organization and social cooperation. The market���if and only if you have wealth���allows you to be a misanthropic grouch and still get people to cooperate with you. The market���if and only if you have wealth���allows you to avoid having to work to make the gear-wheels of bureaucracy turn and yet still gain access to resources. It is certainly the case that if people are poor then the market does them no good at all. It cannot, then, be a way around bureaucracy or norms of social agreeableness. The market pays attention to the wealthy and only the wealthy. But the problem then is one of poverty���that we have managed to arrange a very wealthy society in such a way that it has a lot of not-wealthy people in it.
Contrary to what Robin claims, utopia is indeed the liberal dream of freedom plus groceries���with "groceries" standing in for enough wealth to route yourself around the unfreedoms created by bureaucracy and by your own misanthropic nature when they bind too tightly. The problem is not "the market" or "capitalism": Corey Robin: The New Socialists: "Under capitalism, we���re forced to enter the market just to live...
...Socialists hear ���the market��� and think of the anxious parent, desperate not to offend the insurance representative on the phone, lest he decree that the policy she paid for doesn���t cover her child���s appendectomy. Under capitalism, we���re forced to submit to the boss. Terrified of getting on his bad side, we bow and scrape, flatter and flirt, or worse���just to get that raise or make sure we don���t get fired. The socialist argument against capitalism isn���t that it makes us poor. It���s that it makes us unfree. When my well-being depends upon your whim, when the basic needs of life compel submission to the market and subjugation at work, we live not in freedom but in domination. Socialists want to end that domination: to establish freedom from rule by the boss, from the need to smile for the sake of a sale, from the obligation to sell for the sake of survival...
The biggest boundary today���s socialists are willing to cross is the two-party system. In their campaigns, the message is clear: It���s not enough to criticize Donald Trump or the Republicans; the Democrats are also complicit in the rot of American life. And here the socialism of our moment meets up with the deepest currents of the American past.... The great realigners understood that any transformation of society requires a confrontation not just with the opposition but also with the political economy that underpins both parties. That���s why realigners so often opt for a language that neither party speaks.... For leftists in the 2010s, confronting the Republicans and the Democrats, it���s socialism.... Even if liberals come to support single-payer health care, free college, more unions and higher wages, the divide between the two will remain. For liberals, these are policies to alleviate economic misery. For socialists, these are measures of emancipation, liberating men and women from the tyranny of the market and autocracy.... It was said that liberalism was freedom plus groceries. The socialist, by contrast, believes that making things free makes people free...
Vastly, vastly superior, at least IMHO, is Carnegie Mellon's Cosma Shalizi's piece that Tim O'Reilly was raving about at dinner last week: Cosma Shalizi: In Soviet Union, Optimization Problem Solves You: "There is a fundamental level at which Marx���s nightmare vision is right: capitalism, the market... each and every one of us confronts it as an autonomous and deeply alien force...
....Its ends, to the limited and debatable extent that it can even be understood as having them, are simply inhuman. The ideology of the market tell us that we face not something inhuman but superhuman, tells us to embrace our inner zombie cyborg and loose ourselves in the dance. One doesn���t know whether to laugh or cry or running screaming. But, and this is I think something Marx did not sufficiently appreciate, human beings confront all the structures which emerge from our massed interactions in this way. A bureaucracy... a thoroughly democratic polity... can feel, can be, just as much of a cold monster as the market. We have no choice but to live among these alien powers which we create, and to try to direct them to human ends. It is beyond us, it is even beyond all of us, to find ���a human measure, intelligible to all, chosen by all���, which says how everyone should go.
What we can do is try to find the specific ways in which these powers we have conjured up are hurting us, and use them to check each other, or deflect them into better paths. Sometimes this will mean more use of market mechanisms, sometimes it will mean removing some goods and services from market allocation, either through public provision7 or through other institutional arrangements8. Sometimes it will mean expanding the scope of democratic decision-making (for instance, into the insides of firms), and sometimes it will mean narrowing its scope (for instance, not allowing the demos to censor speech it finds objectionable). Sometimes it will mean leaving some tasks to experts, deferring to the internal norms of their professions, and sometimes it will mean recognizing claims of expertise to be mere assertions of authority, to be resisted or countered.
These are all going to be complex problems, full of messy compromises. Attaining even second best solutions is going to demand ���bold, persistent experimentation���, coupled with a frank recognition that many experiments will just fail, and that even long-settled compromises can, with the passage of time, become confining obstacles. We will not be able to turn everything over to the wise academicians, or even to their computers, but we may, if we are lucky and smart, be able, bit by bit, make a world fit for human beings to live in...
By contrast to this, Corey Robin's "socialis[m]... that making things free makes people free..." is grossly inadequate and, indeed, as Uncle Vlad would say, "an infantile disorder". To the extent that making things free succeeds in moving us toward utopia it is because making things free has made people wealthy���has made all the things affordable. Otherwise, "making things free"���getting rid of "the market" is highly counterproductive. That is demonstrated by the really sorry, long, and tragic history of really-existing socialism has demonstrated that getting rid of the market really does not help you at all: bureaucracies, party ideologies, and all the other apparat surrounding "making things free" produces big and little Stalins. Without a market, there is then no way for anyone to root around them���which is one reason why the black market of corruption and influence, the so-called "second economy", became so important for plan fulfillment in spite of its relatively small size in really-existing socialist economies.
It was more than half a century ago that Robert A. Heinlein's character Wyoming Knott set out the Fifth International framework:
Private where private belongs
Public where it is needed
Circumstances alter cases
The call for the replacement of "the market" by something called "socialism " and "making things free" belongs to the infancy of the analysis of complex post-industrial societies. The adult perspective is, again, Shalizi's:
Capitalism, the market... bureaucracy... democratic polity... can be... cold monster[s].... We... live among these alien powers... try to direct them to human ends... find the specific ways in which these powers we have conjured up are hurting us, and use them to check each other.... Sometimes... more... market mechanisms, sometimes... removing... goods and services from market allocation.... Sometimes... expanding... democratic decision-making... and sometime... narrowing its scope.... Leaving some tasks to experts... recognizing claims of expertise to be mere assertions of authority... complex problems, full of messy compromises. Attaining even second-best solutions is going to demand ���bold, persistent experimentation���, coupled with a frank recognition that many experiments will just fail, and that even long-settled compromises can, with the passage of time, become confining obstacles...
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