On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

If someone had designed a work regime perfectly suited to maintaining the power of finance capital, it's hard to see how they could have done a better job. Real, productive workers are relentlessly squeezed and exploited. The remainder are divided between a terrorised stratum of the, universally reviled, unemployed and a larger stratum who are basically paid to do nothing, in positions designed to make them identify with the perspectives and sensibilities of the ruling class (managers, administrators, etc.)—and particularly its financial avatars—but, at the same time, foster a simmering resentment against anyone whose work has clear and undeniable social value.

Capitalism and Perfectionism

The Dangerous Downsides of Perfectionism, by Amanda Ruggeri

“As many as two in five kids and adolescents are perfectionists,” says Katie Rasmussen, who researches child development and perfectionism at West Virginia University. “We’re starting to talk about how it’s heading toward an epidemic and public health issue.” . . .

Perfectionism, after all, is an ultimately self-defeating way to move through the world. It is built on an excruciating irony: making, and admitting, mistakes is a necessary part of growing and learning and being human. It also makes you better at your career and relationships and life in general. By avoiding mistakes at any cost, a perfectionist can make it harder to reach their own lofty goals. . . .

Perfectionism . . . isn’t defined by working hard or setting high goals. It’s that critical inner voice.

Take the student who works hard and gets a poor mark. If she tells herself: “I’m disappointed, but it’s okay; I’m still a good person overall,” that’s healthy. If the message is: “I’m a failure. I’m not good enough,” that’s perfectionism. . . .

[F]or perfectionists, performance is intertwined with their sense of self. When they don’t succeed, they don’t just feel disappointment about how they did. They feel shame about who they are. Ironically, perfectionism then becomes a defence tactic to keep shame at bay: if you’re perfect, you never fail, and if you never fail, there’s no shame.

As a result, the pursuit of perfection becomes a vicious cycle – and, because it’s impossible to be perfect, a fruitless one.

The author points squarely at capitalism as a cause, arguing that we live in a society that demands perfectionism. A society...

Where we are so literally valued for the quality and extent of our accomplishments that those achievements often correlate, directly, to our ability to pay rent or put food on the table. Where complete strangers weigh these on-paper values to determine everything from whether we can rent that flat or buy that car or receive that loan. Where we then signal our access to those resources with our appearance – these shoes, that physique – and other people weigh that, in turn, to see if we’re the right person for a job interview or dinner invitation.

[Social scientists Thomas] Curran and [Andrew] Hill have a similar hunch. “Failure is so severe in a market-based society,” points out Curran, adding that that has been intensified as governments have chipped away at social safety nets. Competition even has been embedded in schools: take standardised testing and high-pressure university entrances. As a result, Curran says, it’s no wonder that parents are putting more pressure on themselves – and on their children – to achieve more and more.

“If the focus is on achievement, then kids become very averse to mistakes,” Curran says. “If children come to internalise that – the idea that we only can define ourselves in strict, narrow terms of achievement – then you see perfectionistic tendencies start to come in.” One longitudinal study, for example, found that a focus on academic achievement predicts a later increase in perfectionism.

Similarly, the gold-star method of parenting and schooling may have had an effect. If you get praised whenever you do something well and not praised when you don’t, you can learn that you’re only really worth something when you’ve had others’ approval.

If other strategies, like making children feel guilty for making a mistake, come in, it can get even more problematic. Research has found that these types of parental tactics make children more likely to be perfectionists – and, later, to develop depression.

Fear of failure is getting magnified in other ways, too. Take social media: make a mistake today and your fear that it might be broadcast, even globally, is hardly irrational. At the same time, all of those glossy feeds reinforce unrealistic standards.

Three Hard Truths

Three Hard Truths About American Collapse by Umair Haque

The superficial criticism of communism

Museum Pieces

focusing attention exclusively on the failings of "Communism" is a great way to allow people of a certain mindset to walk out thinking, "See? Communism sucked!" without prompting any kind of reflection about the system we live in now. Because aside from the obvious gap in ability to make cheap shit to fill store shelves, every criticism in the entire museum was as applicable to modern capitalism as to Soviet-style communism.

Oh, under communism lots of people were imprisoned? People didn't feel free? Government was corrupt and unresponsive? Wow interesting tell me more. Through that lens even the line of argument that capitalism is awesome for consumption looks a little wobbly; "Most people couldn't get the things they wanted or needed" sounds an awful lot like "Most people can't afford the things they want or need" and the difference is semantic [sic]. I guess if the reason people end up under-provided for is the most important thing to you, that argument is worth having. In practice it isn't.

The secret shame of middle-class americans

The Secret Shame of Middle-Class Americans by Neal Gabler

Since 2013, the federal reserve board has conducted a survey to “monitor the financial and economic status of American consumers.” Most of the data in the latest survey, frankly, are less than earth-shattering: 49 percent of part-time workers would prefer to work more hours at their current wage; 29 percent of Americans expect to earn a higher income in the coming year; 43 percent of homeowners who have owned their home for at least a year believe its value has increased. But the answer to one question was astonishing. The Fed asked respondents how they would pay for a $400 emergency. The answer: 47 percent of respondents said that either they would cover the expense by borrowing or selling something, or they would not be able to come up with the $400 at all. Four hundred dollars! Who knew?

Well, I knew. I knew because I am in that 47 percent.

A spoonful of stupidity

The first problem with Saurabh Jha's essay, "A Spoonful of Inequality Helps the Medicine Go Down," is the title. If we really had a spoonful of inequality, he might be talking about something meaningful; however, we presently face inequality in industrial quantities. And the comparison is deeply confused: the original metaphor is "a spoonful of sugar..." Inequality is sugar? Economic growth is the bitter medicine? Jha's title makes no sense.

Jha begins his essay by blatantly poisoning the well: people worried about inequality are "pro-Hillary, morally conscious, happy bunnies who pretend to specially enjoy French wine, and opera"; they treat economists as religious figures" "Pope St. John Paul Piketty" and "Bishop Paul Krugman." Clearly, anyone thinking about inequality must be shallow and irrational, right? We don't have to engage their arguments, just show that the whole concept of worrying about inequality

Jha attempts to rebut worries about inequality by masterfully demolishing an obvious straw man, using a "thought experiment" of breathtaking inanity. In his eople starving during the Bengali famine were all equal — equally starving — but Capitalism (and presumably only capitalism), personified by Mukesh Ambani (presumably referring to this man) will swoop in and save the day. Never mind that India, including Bengal, was already capitalist, a possession of the arch-capitalist British Empire, hardly the epitome of egalitarianism. And never mind that Ambani's company, Reliance Industries Limited, has a Wikipedia page devoted to the company's corruption and The Economist calls Reliance "a rotten role model for corporate India . . . not a national champion but an embarrassment." No, the real problem is that no one argues for equality of starvation. No one argues for a Harrison Bergeron caricature of equality. No one argues that we want absolute equality of everything, and that a world of equal suffering is preferable to a world with the smallest inequality but abundance and prosperity. The (left capitalist) argument is that we have too much inequality, and we have the wrong kind of inequality. But Jha cannot be bothered to engage to know even what the argument actually is. No, to Jha, all arguments about inequality are just the vacuous religious platitudes of latte-sipping moochers.

Jha tries to enlist science to his argument, citing The Association Between Income and Life Expectancy in the United States, 2001-2014* (2016) by Raj Chetty et al. According to Jha, the authors "found that the life expectancy of the poor depended on where the poor lived, not the degree of income inequality per se." Well, no. Jha cannot employ basic logic. The first part is correct: Chetty et al. (2016) do find that poor people who live in high income areas (e.g. New York) live longer than poor people in low income areas (e.g. Detroit). But the second part is not correct: holding income constant (comparing poor people against poor people) means that we are ignoring variation in income; it absolutely does not mean that the authors find variation in income is not correlated with variation in mortality, holding location constant. According to Chetty et al. (2016), there is, for example, a 4.5 to 5.0 difference in mean life expectancy between the richest and poorest quartiles in New York, the wealthiest area in the study. Yes, where you live affects how long you live, but it is also true that even holding location constant, how much income you have affects how long you live. Indeed Jha actually admits this fact: "he richest 1 % men live, on average, 15 years longer than the poorest 1 %" but there is a "difference in life expectancy for men of 5 years" between the richest and poorest areas. Fifteen minus five is ten, which is not zero.

*What an awesome study. 1.5 billion tax records? I would kill for that kind of data.

Jha claims that the study "finds that life expectancy doesn’t correlate with amount of medical care. Which means that the poor aren’t dying sooner, en masse, because they can’t access the emergency rooms on time, or because they lack insurance. Sorry Obamacare." Even the first part is suspect, because the primary data that makes

Technically correct, but Jha overstates this conclusions. First, the "Sorry Obamacare" dig is utterly specious: The PPACA has been in effect only since 2010; it is far to early to asses its impact.

Second, there's a huge problem with the external validity of the study: it is probably an accurate picture of the United States from the mid-twentieth century to the early twenty-first, but the United States is a highly developed nation, and there are differences between the United States and other countries that affect the relationship between access to medical care and mortality rates. This study (awesome and valuable as it is) tells us literally nothing at all about the impact of and means to alleviate global inequality. Jha is clearly talking about global inequality — otherwise why mention Bengal — but Chetty et al. (2016) are talking about inequality in the United States.

Jha lists "a few things which won’t help the poor: hospitals, bicycle helmets, screening, millennials fretting about names associated with historical wrongdoing, and occupying Wall Street. Sorry social justice warriors – all of that righteous rage may be for naught." Jha does not even try to justify this statement; it certainly doesn't follow at all from Chetty et al. (2016). And really nothing on Jha's list except occupying Wall Street has anything to do with inequality. These items are (to take the quotation egregiously out of context) just Jha's "personal prejudice[s]."

I kind of agree with Jha on one point: the poor need "schools with top quality teachers who care. They need public parks. They need the government to invest in public works to revive jobs." Fair enough. Who is going to provide those things? The rich? Well, we've been waiting, a long time. Indeed, we've been waiting too long. The rich are not going to provide schools, parks, public works, jobs out of charity or altruism. The rich are "segregated in enclaves where they self-flagellate about inequality drinking Dom Perignon" for a reason: they don't want to actually help the poor, or even see them, but they don't want to feel bad about not helping them. And that's just the few rich people who will hang out with a religious apologist propagandist like Jha. Most of the rich are just "segregated in enclaves . . . drinking Dom Perignon," without the self-flagellation: they don't care about the poor at all. Why should they? They're not poor. No, we don't want to wait on the capitalist class to grow a heart. If we want to stop dying young, being oppressed and exploited, so that the rich can drink their Dom Perignon and spit on us, the working class will have to take back what the rich have stolen. I nominate Jha for first donor.

Sexual assault and the legal system

In sexual assault accusations and the left, Fredrik deBoer cautions that we should not eliminate nor relax legal standards regarding the burden of proof and presumption of innocence in the prosecution of allegations of sexual abuse. deBoer notes that even with these standards, abuses of the legal process can, as in the satanic ritual abuse hysteria of the 1980s and 1990s, result in verdicts that would be comical if not for their profound, tragic human toll. deBoer claims that some on the left are ignoring the value of these skeptical standards with regard to rape and sexual abuse allegations. While it's true that a certain degree of skepticism is always necessary, deBoer is mostly full of shit. All of the sources he actually cites: Late British Prime Minister Edward Heath Accused of Raping 12-Year-Old, Zerlina Maxwell's No matter what Jackie said, we should generally believe rape claims, and Jessica Valenti's Choosing Comfort Over Truth: What It Means to Defend Woody Allen, have nothing to do with the legal system. deBoer writes that "the conventional progressive wisdom has become that anything other thank [sic] blanket presumption of guilt is actively offensive and misogynist. You can read arguments from people like Zerlina Maxwell and Jessica Valenti if you think that’s an exaggeration." But, as noted above, none of the issues above have anything to do with legal standards. Indeed, Zerlina Maxwell explicitly states, "This is not a legal argument about what standards we should use in the courts; it’s a moral one, about what happens outside the legal system." To make his argument at all compelling, deBoer really needs to address this disclaimer, showing evidence it is disingenuous, or that the legal system's evidentiary standards really should prevail in general discourse. He does not do so, nor does he really show that the real miscarriages of justice he cites at the beginning really were due to abandonment of legal standards of burden of proof and presumption of innocence.

But I'm not really here to criticize deBoer's piece. deBoer is brilliant when he's right, a complete prick when he's wrong, and you just have to deal with that if you're going to read him. And I think he's worth reading: even when he's being a willfully obtuse prick, he's always interesting, and unlike a lot of writers, even his atrocious arguments are worth refuting.

Instead, I want to talk about what the legal system is and is not, and argue that it's a terrible idea to adopt legal thinking at any level about sexual assault and misogyny.

The capitalist legal system, consisting of legislatures, police, courts, jails, and prisons, exists to reproduce capitalism. The legal system's primary function is to create and maintain the criminal class that, apparently, capitalism desperately needs. (Why capitalism needs a criminal class is beyond the scope of this post, but if capitalism did not need a criminal class, we would not spend so much time and effort creating one.) The legal system both creates individual criminals, and forms those individuals into a social/economic class in the Marxist sense.

If we want to create and maintain a class of people who are criminal sex offenders, then yes, absolutely, that's what the legal system is for.

To a certain extent, yes, we want to "create" sex offenders, i.e. we want people who are treating women in a particular way that is presently considered normal and acceptable to become criminals. But that's not the kind of criminals the legal system creates. The legal system exists to take people who have done nothing morally wrong (besides being poor or black) and transform them from honest citizens to career criminals. I don't think that anyone (aside from a few lunatics) wants to turn honest men who want to treat women with respect into sex offenders.

The way that capitalism destroys something is not by making it illegal and putting people in jail. They way capitalism destroys something is by making it unprofitable. The issue is not whether Bill Cosby, for example, should or should not go to jail. The real issue is that Bill Cosby's career, enormously profitable to himself and many hangers-on, should absolutely have been nuked from orbit the minute we had reasonable suspicion — not legal proof — that he was a serial rapist.

We don't need to make sexual assault more criminal. We need to make not only sexual assault but mere misogyny unprofitable, even economically ruinous.

The lesson of Greece

I won't go into the details: go read the alternative press's account of Greece's abject defeat at the hands of Germany the "troika" (European Commission, European Central Bank, International Monetary Fund). The upshot is that Germany has stripped Greece of its national sovereignty, and, after six years of poverty, unemployment, and general immiseration, has imposed even harsher poverty, unemployment, and immiseration.

Germany, France, and the rest of the Eurozone core countries, by destroying Greece's economy, have no chance of getting their money back. They know they'll never get their money back. They don't want their money back. What they want is what they have achieved: destroying social democracy, the social safety net, welfare capitalism, and what little democracy the democratic republican form of government provides. The European Union and Eurozone is and has always been anti-democratic, explicitly and intentionally. Indeed, neoliberalism itself is anti-democratic. Any suffering the Greek people go through is necessary to destroy its democracy, and make it explicitly a slave colony to the Eurozone core.

The lesson is that social democracy is doomed. I think social democracy is a Good Idea. I've never been against social democracy and welfare capitalism on its own terms. I just don't think it can work. Not, however, because because I think it's a bad system on its own terms. If we talk about overall standards of living, social democracy improves the lives of not just the working and middle classes, but also the capitalist class. The problem is that the capitalist class does not want to improve its own material standard of living. The very structure of capitalism entails that the majority of people who become very rich capitalists are power-hungry sociopaths. Even the relatively nice people who become very rich capitalists have to act sociopathically in self-defense. Power is a zero-sum game, and social democracy means stripping political power from the rich. Social democracy is possible only if workers and professionals have actual political and economic power either directly, through unions, or indirectly through elections and state power. The capitalist class, however, sees this loss as an intolerable loss of their core identity. The capitalist class would rather rule in hell than serve in heaven.

I don't fault the capitalists themselves. I have considerable sympathy for Milton's Satan. But, fundamentally, this kind of sociopathic struggle for absolute power is an inherent, ineluctable part of capitalism. No social institutions can for very long moderate this struggle. It might be the case that this sociopathic struggle for absolute power is inherent to humanity itself; if so, all of our political philosophy is not just an illusion but a lie; there is no other option but for each person to struggle for as much military power as possible, with the successful becoming the slave-owners and the rest becoming slaves. Perhaps Orwell is correct: the future of humanity is a boot smashing a face, forever, and the only struggle is who wears the boot.

I am not so pessimistic. I do not believe that sociopathy is the norm and empathy and cooperation is the delusional aberration. I'm not an objectivist: the universe forbids neither the tyranny of the individual nor the collective, nor peaceful cooperation and happiness. I simply believe that human beings can create any kind of society we choose, good or bad. Although we can create any kind of society, the actual implementation is constrained by reality, both objective reality and the historical, contingent social reality of a given time and place.

And it is crystal clear that if we want the things that social democracy provides, and I think we do, we cannot have them and have a capitalist class of any kind. The capitalist class will do anything, and struggle for as long as it takes, to destroy social democracy, to strip all power from any individual, class, or social group that the capitalists do not absolutely control. Not because capitalists are bad people, but capitalism is the struggle for absolute power, and this struggle constructs the social reality of people who become successful capitalists.

Germany The troika has revealed the true heart of capitalism: slavery or death. The only choice now is whether we will accept slavery or struggle for freedom, no matter what it takes.

([ETA] It occurs to me that the arguments against social democracy are almost identical to arguments against "moderate" religion.)

Educating inequality

Why American Colleges Are Becoming a Force for Inequality

We like to view higher education as the "great equalizer" that leads to social mobility. But selective colleges have long been accused of perpetuating class divides, rather than blurring them.

A recent landmark study by Stanford's Caroline Hoxby and Harvard's Christopher Avery lent further empirical evidence to this accusation, finding that high-achieving low-income students do not have access to selective schools. The study showed that the mismatch is due to a lack of knowledge, not quality. . . . Yet while the information gaps are real and need to be addressed, there is a much deeper structural problem. If most top colleges wanted to be truly equitable, they could not be with their current business model. There is not a golden pot of low-income applicants that schools want but are failing to reach. Instead, many schools don't want more low-income students because they won't be able to pay for them without a major overhaul of school funding practices. Outside of the handful of super-elite universities with fortress endowments, colleges' finances are currently designed around enrolling a disproportionately high number of high-income students. These schools could not afford to support more low-income or middle-income students absent either a huge increase in tuition, a commensurate reduction in spending, or a dramatic change in public funding.

How economists conceptualize economics

Classical economists conceptualize the economy as an ecology. It can be studied, carefully, and gently, but it cannot be actively managed. To a classical economist, the best way to take care of an economy is the same way an ecologist would advise taking care of an ecosystem: the primary goal is to keep it pristine, to keep outside forces from fucking it up. An economy, like an ecology, changes over time, but those changes are internal, "organic," and usually slow. Even when changes are not slow, the best advice is just to let the economy (like an ecosystem after a forest fire) work itself out internally. Indeed, the forest fire analogy is very apt: as best I understand ecology (which is not that well), we do the ecosystem a disservice by preventing forest fires; even catastrophic change is baked into the structure of the ecosystem. Similarly, we do the economy a disservice by preventing depressions, crashes, bubbles, etc. We lose Schumpeter's "creative destruction" by a too-stable economy.

Keynesian economists conceptualize the economy as a city full of people. A city is kinda like an ecology, but not really: no one can "control" a city, but it requires active intervention to stay alive. Individuals will work a lot of things out on there own, but there are too many areas that cannot simply work out individually. There's no magic Keynesian bullet: an economist has to really look at individual cases and situations to see when intervention or regulation is needed. But, unlike a classical economist, a Keynesian will say that we can make a case for intervention and regulation more than just those necessary to enable markets and keep the ecosystem from getting fucked up.

Central-planning communists see the socialist economy like a spacecraft. It has to be intentionally and specifically built, by experts, with all the bureaucratic management seen in any very large corporation. Just as the free market would never have got us to the Moon*, the free market is never going to get us to a socialist economy. Typical people cannot vote on how the economy works any more than they can vote on the design of a rocket engine.

*Sorry, Bob, but it just wasn't going to happen.

To be slightly less charitable, some central-planning communists see the socialist economy like an army. As bureaucratized and inefficient as all national armies are, no free-market army has ever effectively fought a war, much less run one. Similarly, although it might seem bureaucratized and inefficient, an economy run along the lines of an army should, in central-planning theory, outperform a free-market economy just as a centrally commanded, rigidly hierarchical army always outperforms an individualistic, free-market army. There are, of course, a lot of different ways to run an army, and army-paradigm communists have a lot to disagree with among themselves, but the debate there is not whether, but what kind.

All these economists say they have scientific disagreements, but the differences are primarily moral. Ecosystems are as rigidly hierarchical as any engineering bureaucracy or any army. Scientifically, physically, we can see the economy as an ecosystem, a city, an engineering project, or an army. These distinctions are not imposed by nature; they are human choices, and choices have to be seen in a moral context, not a descriptively scientific context. (Of course, a scientific understanding of psychology and sociology can tell us something about the kinds of choices people want to make, and we need an ordinary scientific understanding of the physical world to effectively implement our choices.)

Thus, whether to view the world as a classical economist, Keynesian economist, or central-planning communist economist is a choice, a moral decision, and reflective of the preferences of the economist. Hence my view that economics is an essentially normative endeavor, whose central project is explicitly or implicitly promoting one philosophical view of the economy. For example, the idea that economics should be entirely descriptive implicitly promotes the classical view of economics as an ecosystem that can be studied but not managed, which is itself a normative choice. Because I see both ecosystems and bureaucracies as rigidly hierarchical, I conclude that people choose to see economics as classical or centrally planned are those who prefer hierarchies, either because they are at the top, or because they believe they would be at the top of a new hierarchy. These preferences may be consciously suppressed (or advocates just might not understand the implications), but I think they really are there.

I see myself economically, in broad outlines, as a Keynesian. I prefer the Keynesian "economy as a city" paradigm. We can run the economy as a pure ecosystem, but I don't like the results of that: the cutthroat competition, the incessant narrowing of niches, and the relations of dominance and subordination. We can run the economy as an engineering bureaucracy, but thirty years as an engineer have taught me the limits of what an engineering bureaucracy can do, and I want to do more. And I have no interest whatsoever in anything that even looks like a military.*

*Which is not to disparage my friends who are or have been in the military. As a part of society (and leaving aside the uses to which the capitalist system puts the military, military-style organizations are fine for those who like them. I just don't want the whole economy run like an army.

However, I see myself politically as a democratic communist. Keynes notwithstanding, I believe that Keynesianism is incompatible with private ownership of the means of production, i.e. a distinct capitalist class. It's quite ironic: the capitalist class has never forgiven Keynesian economics for saving capitalism from itself. Without Keynes and Roosevelt, Western capitalism would have fallen, probably to central-planning communism, in the 1930s.

Capitalists hate Keynes because Keynesianism undermines the central capitalist premise of capitalist power over and subordination of the working class. The capitalist class is not and has never been about consumption. Even though they have built a system that is a thousand times more productive than feudalism and monarchism, most capitalists consume less in absolute terms (compare Versailles and the Hearst Castle), and therefore far less in relative terms. Capitalism has been about the inherent value of subordinating the working class to the will of the capitalist class. Keynesianism fundamentally undermines that subordination, by politically allocating economic demand to the working class, and places not the capitalist class but the professional-managerial class as the fundamental ruling class.

We know from the late 1940s to the 1970s that when the working class has a lot of economic demand, the economy performs extremely well; the problem is not that economically independent workers won't work; they will work, and work hard. The problem is that economically independent workers cannot be subordinated. Economically independent black people cannot be discriminated against. Economically independent women cannot be sexually and socially subordinated. People with economic independence demand rights: autonomy, dignity, and respect. The economically independent cannot be controlled and subordinated to the will of the capitalist class. And that's what capitalism is really about: the power of capitalists to subordinate the working class to their own will.

Something else must be found. The capitalist class has decisively wrested control away from the professional-managerial middle class. They now face only the forces of inertia is dismantling the Keynesian political allocation of economic demand. However, as we are seeing even now, when they finally manage to do so, they will face the problem of the falling rate of profit and capitalist over-accumulation. With nuclear weapons, they can no longer rely on war to address over-accumulation. As we have seen in both Russia and China, it doesn't take all that much time to revolutionize even the most authoritarian-submissive population. Ironically, as capitalists increase the subordination of the working class, they will make the working class more susceptible to revolution, by making them more disciplined and accepting of authority in general. A revolution is inevitable; capitalism is snatching defeat from the jaws of the victory the Keynesians handed them.

There's no predicting the outcome of a revolution. The best I can do is put myself into a position where, if a lot of things break my way, I can be of some use to the winners of the revolution. I hope that's enough.

Wealth inequality in the United States

(via PZ Myers)

The insanity of the capitalist system

We have three economic problems right now in the industrialized, developed world. First, we have very high unemployment, especially youth unemployment. Second, we are worried in general about automation causing job losses. Third, we face a productivity crisis as the developed world's workforce ages and retires, and we have to support more people with fewer working people.

That all three crises exist is insanity, pure and simple: we have both too many workers and too few workers.

It reminds me of my crazy (and apocryphal) aunt: "I don't have enough money to live on!"

"Why not?" I ask. "You have a good-paying job."

"I have to save all my money, otherwise I won't have enough to live on."

Sigh.

One does not have to have a Ph.D. in economics to see the obvious answer: put people to work, which will increase productivity. We can increase productivity directly by producing more goods and services right now with existing capital. We can indirectly improve productivity by creating more capital (factories, stores, trains, airplanes, etc.), and by improving technological and human-capital productivity with education and training. It's blatantly obvious that we can dramatically increase productivity. If we could not, then it would be true that we are already not only operating our economy at full capacity, but that we are increasing productivity as fast as possible. We are doing neither.

The reason we are in this insane situation is simply this: a prosperous society cannot be controlled, subjugated, and dominated. The capitalist system was created to wrest political power from the feudal, land-owning monarchy. It has stayed in power by keeping the working class dependent and impoverished. The prosperity and improvement of the working class in the late 20th century was due to the temporary ascendance of the professional-managerial class, formerly the middle class under capitalism. But the professional-managerial class has been defeated by the capitalists. The capitalist class objects in principle to a prosperous society: prosperous workers believe that they deserve prosperity, autonomy, dignity, and life itself; prosperous workers believe that they have the right to a good life. The capitalist class believes that life itself is a gift given to the working class, that the working class does not live by right, but by the sufferance, sacrifice, and nobility of the capitalist class. Capitalists are happy enough, I suppose, to give the workers life, but it is insufferable ingratitude and presumption for the working class to demand a gift as a right.

We are not in a real economic crisis. In a real crisis, we would be facing some difficult trade-off imposed by physical circumstances: either trading off consumption now for investment to create consumption later, or trading off consumption by some for consumption by others. But shutting down factories, putting people out of work, and then saying we don't have enough for everyone is insane and immoral. And this is precisely what the capitalist class is doing right now.

We are not in an ordinary political crisis. In an ordinary political crisis, well-intentioned people have sharply differing opinions on public policy.

We are in an ideological crisis. The capitalist class has not only shown itself incapable of creating general prosperity, it has shown itself actively hostile to general prosperity. They are bent on creating conditions of general immiseration, because only a miserable population will be truly grateful to the capitalist class for giving them their lives, however "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" those lives might be.

It is time for something better.

The power of selling out

(via Lambert Strether at naked capitalism)

Why is Dalkey Press doing this?

The pool of candidates for positions will be primarily derived from unpaid interns in the first phase of this process, although one or two people may be appointed with short-term paid contracts. . . .

The Press is looking for promising candidates . . . [who] do not have any other commitments (personal or professional) that will interfere with their work at the Press (family obligations, writing, involvement with other organizations, degrees to be finished, holidays to be taken, weddings to attend in Rio, etc.) . . .

Any of the following will be grounds for immediate dismissal during the probationary period: coming in late or leaving early without prior permission; being unavailable at night or on the weekends; failing to meet any goals; giving unsolicited advice about how to run things; taking personal phone calls during work hours; gossiping; misusing company property, including surfing the internet while at work; submission of poorly written materials; creating an atmosphere of complaint or argument; failing to respond to emails in a timely way; not showing an interest in other aspects of publishing beyond editorial; making repeated mistakes; violating company policies. DO NOT APPLY if you have a work history containing any of the above.

I don't think it's just because they're exceptionally assholy. They're doing this because they can. All of the neoliberal policies of the last 30-40 years, as Corey Robin has made a career of describing, have increased the near-absolute power employers can wield over their employees.

(via PZ Myers)

Britain's child slaves

Britain's child slaves:

The tunnel was narrow, and a mere 16in high in places. The workers could barely kneel in it, let alone stand. Thick,choking coal dust filled their lungs as they crawled through the darkness, their knees scraping on the rough surface and their muscles contracting with pain.

A single 'hurrier' pulled the heavy cart of coal, weighing as much as 500lb, attached by a chain to a belt worn around the waist, while one or more 'thrusters' pushed from behind. Acrid water dripped from the tunnel ceiling, soaking their ragged clothes.

Many would die from lung cancer and other diseases before they reached 25. For, shockingly, these human beasts of burden were children, some only five years old.

19th century Britain was hardly a backward country; it was at the time the acme of capitalism. Is it any wonder that Marx believed we could do better?

Defining Prosperity Down

Paul Krugman worries we're Defining Prosperity Down:

Yes, growth is slowing, and the odds are that unemployment will rise, not fall, in the months ahead. That’s bad. But what’s worse is the growing evidence that our governing elite just doesn’t care — that a once-unthinkable level of economic distress is in the process of becoming the new normal. ...

I’d like to imagine that public outrage will prevent this outcome. But while Americans are indeed angry, their anger is unfocused. And so I worry that our governing elite, which just isn’t all that into the unemployed, will allow the jobs slump to go on and on and on.

The crisis of middle-class America

The crisis of middle-class America

(via Brad DeLong)

Crises of capitalism

(via Maxine Udall)

Dirty Medicine

Dirty Medicine:

How medical supply behemoths stick it to the little guy, making America’s health care system more dangerous and expensive.

(via Yves Smith)

Commentary on Galbraith

No honest person who has even a layman's understanding of macroeconomics can doubt that James K. Galbraith's testimony is in its entirety accurate and perspicacious. He is not just correct, he is obviously correct. There are only three reasons to deny the truth of his statement — ignorance, delusion or mendacity — and only one honest reason to oppose his position: fundamental moral opposition to liberal capitalism.

As a communist, I myself am in a sense morally opposed to liberal capitalism, because I don't believe it is good enough; I do, however, believe that liberal capitalism is immeasurably more moral than laissez faire capitalism. My fundamental objection to liberal capitalism is precisely that it is defeatable by laissez faire capitalism.

Dagood has an interesting post on indirect and dishonest arguments for keeping "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance. Just like the pledge, the direct argument for immediate deficit reduction and fiscal austerity is simply impossible to make. A direct argument would entail the claim that it is inherently good for the vast majority of people around the world — especially those presently enjoying a standard of living above bare subsistence — to become poorer, for a substantial number of people to fall to bare subsistence, and for many to literally starve and die. Arguments for fiscal austerity must therefore be indirect: without fiscal austerity the economy will collapse further; we cannot regain what we had; we can act now only to prevent further impoverishment.

And, like the arguments against changing (yet again) the Pledge, even the indirect arguments are fundamentally dishonest. I do not doubt that many, perhaps even most, advocates of fiscal austerity are sincere (and delusional). But neither do I doubt that some important, influential advocates know they are lying through their teeth — and are doing so to further their own interests.

But what interests are they furthering? One critical passage from Galbraith's testimony:

[W]hat does the present level of long-term interest rates tell us? As I write, thirty year Treasury bonds are yielding just over four percent -- or just a little more than half their yield a decade back. On the argument just given, this must be an extraordinary success of virtuous policy. It seems that Wall Street has made a strong vote of confidence in the fiscal probity of our current policies. This vote is unqualified, backed by money, contingent on nothing. It therefore represents a categorical rejection, by Wall Street itself, of the CBO's doomsday scenarios and all other deficit-scare stories.

It is crystal clear that the capitalist ruling class, when they are voting with real money, are voting for increased government borrowing. On the other hand, those selfsame parties are exerting political pressure (which requires only chump change) for less government borrowing.

Delusion cannot explain this apparent contradiction: if they were delusional, they would not be eagerly lending the government money at rock-bottom interest rates.

Another critical point from Galbraith's testimony: The Deficit Commission's secrecy breeds the suspicion that its purpose "is to defer public discussion of cuts in Social Security and Medicare until after the 2010 elections." Galbraith raises this suspicion to a near certainty by remarking that "the Commission has taken up the questions of the alleged "insolvency" of the Social Security system and of Medicare. If true, this is far outside any mandate of the Commission."

Since its inception, a faction of the capitalist ruling class has shown a profound and explicit antipathy and exercised vigorous opposition to Social Security and Medicare. Their efforts, both directly and indirectly (to take state power) have had as one of their explicit goals to eliminate Social Security.

I'm reluctant to invoke actual evil as a motivation. I do not believe that the Randian faction of the capitalist ruling class would actually take pleasure and satisfaction from the impoverishment and starvation of the elderly and disabled. (They do, however, openly show what a humanist would call depraved indifference.)

We cannot explain this antipathy on the basis of immediate material interests. Social Security does not even affect the capitalist ruling class or the upper levels of the professional-managerial middle class: Social Security taxes come from the working class and the lower and intermediate ranks of the middle class. Bill Gates pays no more Social Security tax than a first-year associate at a big law firm. Social Security taxes do not even affect the market for labor power; you work or starve until you're 65. (It's implausible to believe the capitalist ruling class wishes to use saving for one's retirement as an actual incentive for workers.)

We cannot even explain this antipathy to Social Security — nor the push for fiscal austerity — on the basis of long-term material interests. The capitalist ruling class as a whole would gain nothing material at any level from either the elimination of Social Security nor the long period of high unemployment that would result from fiscal austerity.

When you see a large group of people (too many to invoke literal insanity as an explanation) apparently acting contrary to their own interest, you have misunderstood their interest.

The immediate interest of the capitalist ruling class is intra-class competition. Within-class selection pressures ruthlessly and decisively eliminate or marginalize members of the capitalist class who lack the highest level of competitive spirit and the desire to win at any cost.

How would you — an ordinary working- or middle-class reader — feel if the government reserved and exercised the power to confiscate — for good use — your alarm clock at any time? It's a small, inexpensive thing, easily replaced by a minimally inconvenient trip to the store. You certainly pay many orders of magnitude more in time and money in ordinary taxes. If it's really for a good use, you're happy to pay for another alarm clock, but that particular alarm clock is by damn yours. And if the government can barge in and take your alarm clock today, why not take your computer tomorrow, and your car the next day. Personal property really is important, emotionally and materially, and there's a natural tendency to preserve the principle in even small things. Indeed, a principle that we don't protect in small things is no principle at all, which is why we have trials in court for traffic tickets.

When your entire being is focused on competition — and no one remains long in the capitalist ruling class whose entire being is not focused on competition — there is a natural tendency to regard what you win as yours. The New Orleans Saints would, I think, object to sharing the Vince Lombardi trophy with the St. Louis Rams, even though in a very real sense the Saints could not have won the trophy without the Rams... someone has to come in last.

The capitalist ruling class competes over ownership of the surplus labor of the working class. They regard this surplus labor as their property. To be told — and coerced — that even a little bit of this surplus labor — transferred from workers to the elderly and disabled — is not theirs is, in their view, to fundamentally undermine and erode not just their material interest but their fundamental raison d'etre.

One common misunderstanding is that dialectical (historical) materialism entails that members of a class always act to further their class's economic interests. If, for example, the capitalist ruling class opposes Social Security, or politically opposes fiscal stimulus in a zero lower-bound limited recession resulting in higher unemployment, it must be because they believe these actions to be in their material interest. The truth, however, seems more subtle than that.

Moral and ethical beliefs are in a dialectical relationship with economic relations. (And both are in a dialectical relationship with the physical means of production.) Entities in a dialectical relationship affect each other. Some economic relations materially change (by selection pressures) a distribution of ethical beliefs in each class, and these ethical beliefs produce (by the actions of those who hold them) materially change the economic relations. There is no objective ideal "optimum" towards which people strive: the "optimal" economic relations are in a sense defined by the ethical beliefs of the actors, and the ethical beliefs of the actors are in a sense defined by the economic relations.

What makes life (and economics) interesting is that this feedback system is not always convergent: particular economic relations can produce particular ethical beliefs that radically change the economic relations, which radically change the ethical beliefs. Sometimes this process is stable and convergent, sometimes stably chaotic and sometimes leads to catastrophic failure. And, of course, every now and again physical reality throws a monkey wrench into the works (or economic activity drastically changes reality), changing everything.