Escape from Muddle Land

Let’s get the up-or-down part of this review over with quickly: Escape from Model Land: How Mathematical Models Can Lead Us Astray and What We Can Do About It by Erica Thompson is a poorly written, mostly vacuous rumination on mathematical modeling, and you would do well to ignore it.

Now that that’s done, we can get on with the interesting aspect of this book, its adaptation of trendy radical subjectivism for the world of modeling and empirical analysis.  The framework I’m referring to goes something like this: Each of us exists in our own bubble, a product of our experiences and perspectives.  Our thoughts express this subjective world, and they are true in relation to it but false beyond its boundaries.  This means no one has the right to speak for nor criticize anyone else.  In some versions, bubbles can be shared among people with the same set of identities, but, as before, not across them.  In some unspecified way, we will be happy and productive if we embrace the diversity of our incommensurable worlds and their corresponding truths.  Oppression occurs when some privileged people think their bubbles are universal, the doctrine of false objectivity.  We must be re-educated out of such a delusion.

This of course is a cartoon version, but I think it expresses the core of the cognitive bubble framework.  Its adherents think it is very radical and liberating, and self-evidently correct.  I won’t belabor the obvious contradiction between the no-objective-criteria-across-bubbles hypothesis and the claim that the cognitive bubble world is the one we all live in.  The only other point I’ll make is that, true to their belief that each cognitive world is impervious to criticism from another, adherents never, and I mean never, acknowledge, much less grapple with, serious criticism of their worldview.  Instead, they argue by authority: Author X, who is much admired by people like us, says thusly, and so we can use this insight as a basis for further analysis.  “Argument” in this context tends to take the form of exemplary analogy: here is a good way to think about the topic at hand because something like it works in a situation that is analogous to it in some respects.  Argument by analogy fits a subjectivist framework, since its salience derives from aha-ness, not the sort of reasoning or empirical evidence that depend on objective criteria.

So how can this framework be extended to the world of information sciences and mathematical modeling?  Thompson’s insight is that each model can be thought of as existing within its own cognitive bubble, composed of the assumptions that structure it and the purposes it’s designed to serve.  Each model is true within its own bubble, but we need to step outside them, into the world of social and cognitive diversity, to see their limitations and escape their claims to any broader truth or objectivity.  And that’s sort of it.  While (as you can see) Thompson didn’t persuade me of any of this, I think there’s a chance her book will be successful on its own terms: future writers of the radical subjectivist persuasion may cite her as the reason why we should all think about models in this way.

My own view is probably clear from the way I describe hers, but just to be complete, here is its own cartoon version: There really are better and worse models, based on criteria that apply across different social and intellectual divides.  Our self-knowledge is imperfect, and others often understand things about us we don’t see.  We benefit from their criticism.  They can also represent us, sometimes better and sometimes worse than we would represent ourselves.  Arguments that evade engagement with counterargument are generally weak and unreliable.  Arguments based on reasoning and evidence are better than those based on some version of grokking, and those are the criteria we’ll need to use if we’re serious about positive social change.  How much we share with one another, cognitively and otherwise, is not a matter for ex cathedra generalizations; it’s something we discover through interacting with others—or better, something we can create by building on what already connects us.

Economic Insomnia? A Review of "The Guest Lecture" by Martin Riker.

It’s a rare day when an economist plays the key role in a novel, and even rarer when one of the supporting players is John Maynard Keynes himself.  So, spurred on by enthusiastic reviews, I sailed through Martin Riker’s The Guest Lecture this week, a novel in which a woman, just denied tenure by the all-male economics department at her university, lies awake at night in a hotel room, rehearsing a lecture she’ll be giving the next day while re-evaluating the twists and turns of her life’s trajectory.  Maybe it’s a risk to read insomnia fiction at bedtime, but I definitely enjoyed myself, laughing out loud several times and rereading especially zingy paragraphs.

Yet I was disappointed, and I’ll use this post to explore how and why.  The first part of the disappointment is obvious and straightforward: this is supposed to be an expression of the inner thoughts of an economist, but it shows close to zero understanding of the world of academic economics.  Yes, there is some name-dropping, and yes the great Keynes shows up to guide Abby, the unsleeping economist, through her long night of the Deep CV.  Superficially it’s all there; in substance not.

First, why is Abby an economist?  Where does she fit in that world?  The only explanation we’re given is that she found herself to be “good at math”, and she took a course in experimental economics as an undergrad from a female professor who served as a role model.  Well, OK, that may be part of it, but did she think that being an economist would be a way to change the world for the better, or to understand a complex and puzzling aspect of it, or what?  Other than the paycheck, what did she think she would be getting?  Without that piece, it’s difficult to relate her deep struggles of self-meaning to her career crisis.

Second, so what did she write her dissertation on?  The novel parades scenes from her academic coming of age—her undergrad course with her mentor, following her to grad school, her departure from the expected path of a junior professor when she wrote about about Keynes and the rhetoric of economics a few years in—but there is a blank space in between where the core formation-of-an-economist ought to be.  Grad school in econ is very demanding and, except for a few renegade departments, strongly pushes a market-centered view of the world; how did that go down with Abby?  And a dissertation is the culmination of this process, where the economist-to-be both draws on and finds breathing room from the methodological onslaught to which they’ve been subjected.  This is a very big gap in the record.

Third, while Martin Riker is an academic himself (with a degree in English, no surprise), he misunderstands the tenure expectations for junior faculty to a degree that Abby wouldn’t.  We’re told she was hired by an R1(ish) research university, where it’s considered enough to publish one article a year in second-tier journals.  No way!  Six articles won’t get you tenure unless, just perhaps, most are in top-ranked outlets (AER, QJE, etc.).  Moreover, books don’t count.  Economists regard book-writing as a sort of indulgence, best saved until the choice morsels of science have been parceled out in article form.  The Journal of Economic Literature, the main review outlet in the profession, has steadily reduced the number of books for which it publishes reviews; the latest quarterly issue reviewed just two books.  I’m sure many economists make an entire career in the field without reading a single economics book post grad school.

And, to get tenure at an R1, the candidate’s research has to use formal modeling, either theoretical (as in game theory) or empirical (econometrics).  There is no ambiguity about this.  If Abby spends half her tenure period on a book without a single equation, she should be looking for another job sooner rather than later.  I’m not saying this is justified—quite the contrary—but it’s central to the culture of the discipline.  Making it all seem like an unexpected shock and personal crisis when Abby is denied tenure leaves someone like me wondering whether she had much reality contact all along.

Finally, there just isn’t any economics thinking of any sort in Abby’s nighttime ruminations.  She is steeped in rhetoric, its history and current relationship to philosophy and critical theory, but no thoughts from the economic realm arise to make sense of her predicament.  For instance, she thinks a lot about ideology, but economists for whom this concept matters use it to connect belief systems to social structures and the incentives they produce; they think of ideological beliefs as in the economy, not as forces lying outside it.  On a couple of occasions, in listing the horrors of the modern world, Abby mentions the menace of “endless growth”, a term that has entered the canon of at least part of the left, but rubs nearly all economists, including those on the left end of the spectrum, the wrong way.  Economists inclined to criticize capitalism usually see it as a system that places the gain of the few ahead of the well-being of the many, an important part of which is the repeated demand of the rich for tight money and austerity—not growth.  (The classic statement of this position is by Michael Kalecki in 1943, “Political Aspects of Full Employment”.  This may be the most cited paper by a left wing economist, ever.)  Obviously, anyone who admired Keynes would be reluctant to criticize economic growth in a general way.  Even the word “endless” would annoy economists who think of the world as a tangle of differential equations, not as a rigid arrow forever trending in the same direction.  To be blunt: a mindless reference to the evils of “endless” economic growth, to an economist, simply looks like ignorance.

Even putting aside all those complaints, I didn’t see anything illuminating about Abby’s analysis of Keynes’ essay on the “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren”.  Of course, the value of this essay doesn’t depend on whether the people of today, or those of 100 years from now, inhabit a world in which economic necessity has disappeared.  I’ve heard many discussions of it, and none of them have been about its timing.  So what is Abby adding to the mix?  Maybe it’s just me, but I couldn’t find anything new.

Granted, it’s not easy making an economist, much less an economist’s nighttime brain, an engaging subject for fiction.  I’m not saying Riker’s job was easy, only that I wish it had actually given us someone with human depth and complexity who also manages to be an economist.  With few exceptions, novels on academic themes are about literature professors; there’s an obvious reason for that.  I’ve enjoyed them, but I was hoping for something different this time, and not a lit prof who wandered into the economics department by accident.

ps: One more thought occurred to me.  In the book, Abby is concerned that her insight about Keynes and rhetoric was anticipated by Deirdre McCloskey, although she (Abby) came to it independently.  This greatly understates the importance of what McCloskey did.  It is no great insight that Keynes, the author of Essays in Persuasion, was a rhetorician.  Showing that would make no one’s career.  What McCloskey argued, however, is not just that the language of economics follows rhetorical tropes, but that the math does too.  This is an immensely important point.  To establish, apply or simply argue in parallel with it, you have to deconstruct the architecture of modeling in theoretical and empirical economics.  A great example of this is the joint work of McCloskey and Ziliak on statistical significance as rhetoric (and its corresponding scientific shortcomings).  If Abby is on the same plane, she should be writing and talking about the role of “mathiness” in economics, not on the rhetorical status of a narrative essay.  Maybe you need to have actually grappled with mathematical models in order to appreciate what this entails.

This Is What Happens When Progressives Look the Other Way

Recent events in Florida—the “Stop WOKE” Act, the rejection of AP African American Studies, the hostile takeover of New College—and the publication of an excellent op-ed about Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) in the Chronicle of Higher Education have me returning to a topic I blogged on several years ago, but in a new light.

It was obvious, and I mean Emperor’s New Clothes obvious, right from the outset that DEI ideology was predicated on the flimsiest of foundations.  The confusion of inequality and privilege, the epistemological mess known as standpoint theory, and the positive affect theory of human rights (all people, or at least people from historically oppressed groups, have a right to be free of psychic discomfort) are individually indefensible and collectively toxic.  Above all, they rest on an individualized, one-consciousness-at-a-time conception of social change that obscures any role for collective action, turning “the personal is political” into “the political is personal”.

My hope was that others who value genuine, on-the-ground egalitarianism would have the courage to face down this intrinsically reactionary and authoritarian—not to mention ignorant—“movement”.

No such luck.  With few exceptions, progressive people who shared my outlook looked away, at most grumbling quietly to each other.  We didn’t like it, but we figured it was not worth the nastiness it would stir up.

Well, it turns out that the culture-warrior Right has no such qualms and is happy to feast on the banquet DEI-ism has served them.  In most instances, the practices and ideologies they denounce are just as absurd and destructive as they say they are, but the attack comes from forces whose goal is to establish conservative political control over higher education, crushing progressive thinking wherever they find it.  Our side took a pass and now it’s not up to us any more.

This is a disaster of our own making.  I’m not saying people like DeSantis aren’t the dishonest opportunists they are, but billionaire donors will always find politicians like that.  (They will run on whatever polls best and then cut the taxes and pad the profits of the rich.)  It’s our fault for making it so easy for them.

The Unbearable Tightness of Peaking

Sandwichman came across a fascinating and disconcerting new dissertation, titled "Carbon Purgatory: The Dysfunctional Political Economy of Oil During the Renewable Energy Transition" by Gabe Eckhouse. An adaptation of one of the chapters, dealing with fracking, was published in Geoforum in 2021

As some of you may know, the specter of Peak Oil was allegedly "vanquished" by the invention of methods for extracting "unconventional oil" from shale formations (or "tight oil"), bitumen sands, and deep ocean drilling. A large part of that story was artificially low interest rates in response to the stock market crash of 2008 and subsequent recession. 

What Eckhouse's dissertation and article explain is the flexibility advantage that fracking provides because the investment required for a well is two orders of magnitude less than for exploiting a conventional field and the payback time is much shorter. The downside is that the cost per barrel of the oil is much higher. Until now loose monetary policy has buffered that cost differential.

The strategic advantage of fracking, combined with the volatility of oil prices over the past two decades and uncertainty about possible future government decarbonization policies (what oil industry figures are ironically calling "peak oil demand") are making large, long-term investments in conventional oil extraction -- investments of the order of, say, $20 trillion over the next quarter century -- less attractive. 

Although the latter might sound like a good thing, what it implies is a full-blown energy crisis occurring much earlier than any purported transition to renewable non-carbon energy sources. I wouldn't be surprised to see reactionary politicians and media agitate a "populist" movement to scapegoat "climate-woke" activists and scientists as saboteurs responsible for "cancelling" long-term investment in a cheap oil economy.

I had forgotten the oil price rise of 2007-08 when a barrel of West Texas Intermediate crude rose from $85 in January 2007 to $125 in November to $156 in April 2008 to $190 in June. Now I remember my sense of awe at the time and dread that something really, really bad was soon going to happen to "the economy." But then nothing happened. Nothing, that is, but the collapse of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, a stock market crash, emergency bank bailouts, and subsequent central bank monetary policy of low, low interest rates. But "the fundamentals were sound."

It scrambles my brain trying to distinguish cause from effect. Did the ultra-low post 2008 crash low interest rates incidentally drive the subsequent fracking boom? Or was specifically a fracking boom one of the core objectives of the low interest rate regime?

Whither "peak oil"? According to Laherrère, Hall, and Bentley in How much oil remains for the world to produce? (2022) "the end of cheap oil" did not go away when the oil can was kicked down the road:

Our results suggest that global production of conventional oil, which has been at a resource-limited plateau since 2005, is now in decline, or will decline soon. This switch from production plateau to decline is expected to place increasing strains on the global economy, exacerbated by the generally lower energy returns of the non-conventional oils and other liquids on which the global economy is increasingly dependent.

If we add to conventional oil production that of light-tight (‘fracked’) oil, our analysis suggests that the corresponding resource-limited production peak will occur soon, between perhaps 2022 to 2025.

Including "all liquids" pushes that horizon out to 2040. In short, we overshot peak oil by a couple decades with the aid of loose money and tight oil, with a little additional help from the Covid pandemic. Those of us with a memory longer than the news cycle may recall that the current round of interest rate hikes by the Fed was initiated in response to inflation, which reached a 40-year high in June of last year due to record gasoline prices. Lower demand for gasoline brings down gas prices while higher interest rates may discourage new investment in fracking posing the specter of an oil supply crunch a couple of years down the road.

The cartoon below illustrates the loose money/tight oil -- tight money/peak oil dilemma:

No More Noma

Eating is a necessity and can be a great pleasure.  It also has a symbolic dimension in every culture.  In the long history of European civilization, going back at least to the Romans, it has been a form of status distinction, allowing the elites at the top to display their separation from the masses below.

For many centuries elite food was set apart by its ingredients, like caviar, choice cuts of meat, difficult to procure spices and rich dairy products.  Restaurants in times past would announce their status appeal not only through their prices, but also menus that advertised rarity and bounty.

Today this emphasis on ingredients is not enough.  A general increase in prosperity and the rise of a large middle-to-upper class that can afford them means that status distinction must now rest on much greater inputs of human labor, both the highly skilled labor of innovator-chefs and the line labor of dozens of underlings who precisely execute each minute twist of preparation or presentation.  Add to this the aura of world-transforming inventiveness claimed by the tech industry, and you have Noma and restaurants like it.

There has always been a tension between elite appeal and nourishment in cuisine.  The excessively rich foods of the uppermost stratum are unhealthy, which may be one reason the humbler fare of the peasantry was sometimes gussied up and given a place on the menus of the rich, like gustatory Eliza Doolittle’s.  We will see whether the chem lab restaurant ethos can find a middle ground by absorbing some of the foods people used to eat before eating was “disrupted”.

Extending Capital to Nature, Reducing Nature to Capital

The Biden administration has announced it is inaugurating a program to incorporate the value of natural resources and ecological services into national income accounts.  The New York Times article reporting this development predictably portrays the response as divided between two camps: on the one side are environmentalists, who think this will lead to more informed decision-making, and on the other Republicans and business interests who fear it is just a stalking horse for more regulation.

For the record, here is one environmentalist (me) who thinks it’s a bad idea—not completely, but mostly.

Are the quality of our environment and the availability of natural resources crucial to our well-being?  Certainly.  Can these effects be captured by economic measurement?  Mostly no.  The monetary economy is, almost by definition, the realm of the fungible.  Money is what allows us to have more of one thing at the cost of less of another, and then to change our minds and switch back to what we had before.  Pizzas can be bought and sold for money.  School buildings can built for money.  So as a society we face a choice between different consumption categories, one that is reversible if attitudes shift.

What is fundamental about most natural resources is that they are not fungible.  If you destroy an old growth forest and use the proceeds to construct a highway—not to mention a high-end housing development in Sun Valley—you can’t turn around and liquidate the road to get the forest back.  And ecological services, critical as they are (they are often have literal life and death consequences), are not produced or consumed for money, which means they are outside the chain of exchange that generates the fungibility of the goods inside it.  The monetary value attached to them by economists is strictly notional, and it matters that no one will actually pay for their provision or receive income from it.

The wiser approach is to have parallel accounts, many of them, and measure the impacts on our well-being in units meaningful to them.  Let the fungible money economy be recorded as is, and keep close track of resource depletion, the loss of ecological services and pollution in easily understood metrics of their own.  Reducing nature to measures of monetary gains and losses drains it of what makes it different and intrinsically valuable. 

PS: I’ve written two books that develop this argument in different contexts, Markets and Mortality: Economics, Dangerous Work and the Value of Human Life (1996) and Alligators in the Arctic and How to Avoid Them: Science, Economics and the Challenge of Catastrophic Climate Change (2022).

Herb and then Barkley: we will try to sing your song right

 They are falling all around me

They are falling all around me
They are falling all around me
The strongest leaves of my tree

Every paper brings the news that
Every paper brings the news that
Every paper brings the news that
The teachers of my sound are movin’ on

Death it comes and rests so heavy
Death it comes and rests so heavy
Death comes and rests so heavy
Your face I’ll never see no more

But you’re not really going to leave me
You’re not really going to leave me
You’re not really going to leave me

It is your path I walk
It is your song I sing
It is your load I take on
It is your air that I breathe
It’s the record you set
That makes me go on
It’s your strength that helps me stand
You’re not really
You’re not really going to leave me

And I have tried to sing my song right
I have tried to sing my song right
I will try to sing my song right
Be sure to let me hear from you

--Bernice Johnson Regan

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AX3l2mrkP5U

Barkley Rosser, 1948-2023

I've just learned that Barkley Rosser, the mainstay of this blog, died yesterday.  I'd crossed paths with him in Madison, WI in the early 70s and then reconnected in the late 1980s, even coauthoring a paper with his wife Marina in 1990 (I think).

Barkley and I would get together for a meal most years during the economics meetings.  He was a human tornado, quick and vociferous, backed up by a vault of reading, study and thinking.  He was uncommonly wide-ranging: although his reputation rested primarily on his work in complexity theory and nonlinear dynamics, he was a textbook coauthor in comparative systems and served as editor of the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization.  Of course, if you read his blog posts here, you would know how wide his horizons were.

Bark had a great sense of humor, loved to laugh, and was optimistic despite his cynicism.  He went out of his way to help others.  Given his never-ending intensity, I'm glad his heart held out for this long.

One of the sadder parts of aging is having to say final goodbye's to so many people who have meant so much.  Bye Bark.

Memo to Janet Yellen

 Mint the Coin!

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/debt-ceiling-hostage-update

Herb Gintis, 1940-2023

My dissertation chair, Herb Gintis, died yesterday in Northampton, Mass.  We didn’t stay in touch after I graduated—our interests and perspectives diverged—but I will always appreciate what he gave of himself at a difficult time in my life.

After my first dissertation went awry (don’t ask!), Herb, who had been on my committee, stepped in and helped me identify a new topic.  I had to learn a new set of tools, and he was patient as I stumbled through what I now recognize as elementary technical hurdles.  He even watched my kid on a couple of occasions, so I could have a few hours of freedom.  I’ve heard dissertation advisors don’t always do this!

I confess that our final session together was rocky.  At my dissertation defense I attacked my own work, and it was Herb who defended it.  He even had to convince me to publish the game theoretic modeling in a journal—I had become so embarrassed by it.  It was a terrible closure to a relationship for which I remain deeply grateful.  In recent years I had thought about contacting him again just to let him know how much his generosity meant to me, but I delayed....and now it’s too late.

So I’m taking this opportunity to say that, although Herb could be crusty—he had a reputation for this—he was also a true mensch.  He had an open mind and bottomless curiosity.  He rose to the top ranks in a field, evolutionary game theory, he didn’t take up seriously until middle age.  His intellectual partnership with Sam Bowles resulted in one of the most productive twosomes in the history of economics.  (Can you name any others?)

Here is Herb’s Wikipedia entry, and here is his website.  An impressive guy.

Why the Battle over Electing a House Speaker

I don’t know how this will turn out, and maybe what I’m about to say will be disproved by events, but here goes:

I think the Republicans face a difficulty in electing a Speaker that the Democrats wouldn’t have, and it will be hard to overcome.  Democrats may disagree intensely, but they all have legislative agendas to pursue, and in the end they are likely to compromise in order to get at least some of what they want.  Republicans have little to no agenda.  In the last presidential election they didn’t even have a party platform.  Thus there is no incentive to compromise.  If you’re a Republican congressman eager to cement your brand as a “patriot” who won’t settle for RINO’s like Kevin McCarthy, what would motivate you to vote for him?

True, representatives, even very right wing ones, still want federal money for their districts and to win favors for friends and donors.  But these things usually take the form of riders to bills for other purposes or fine print in legislative language.  The whole point of the process is that it occurs out of public purview and is therefore difficult to use to break highly visible logjams like the speakership.  The IRA compromise among the Dems did involve side payments to West Virginia but primarily took the form of substantial trims to programs most Democratic senators supported.

What will a compromise that assembles a working Republican majority in the House look like?

A New Wellbeing Rankings Study

 David G. Blanchflower of Dartmouth and Alex Bryson of University College in London have just published a paper at NBER 30759 "Wellbeing Rankings," which provides some provocative ideas and data on various possible measures of well-being in societies. This reflects dissatisfaction with the tendency to use a single measure, "life satisfaction" on finds in the happiness literature, with ranks of nations widely publicized based on these. Traditionally Nordic nations such as Finland and Denmark come out on top of these.

This study argues one should consider not just a positive measure, but consider negatives that detract from well being as well.  So, drawing Gallup and some other organizations that actually daily track people in many nations, they look at four positive affects: life satisfaction, enjoyment, smiling, and feeling well-rested along with four negative affects: pain, sadness, worry, and anger. Clearly there are major cultural differences across nations regarding some of these, such as smiling, but these are what they go with.

They also consider individual US states as "political units" and throw them into the mix. This leads to one of the larger unanswered question mbekiarks for this study. When they rank entities on their net well beings, US states generally do well, in fact provide 9 out of the top 10 entries, with only Taiwan at 8th not one, and in the top 20, only Austria, the Netherlands, and Iceland manage to get in as well.  But somehow the US as a nation performs much more poorly, at 150th lower than the lowest state, West Virginia at 122. The lack of explanation of this is a serious problem.

There is much not to expect in all this. China is 30th, Denmark 38th, Finland 51st, Russia 87th, UK 111th, US 150th Ukraine 185th. The top 10 are Hawaii, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Taiwan, Alaska, and Wisconsin. The bottom three are Palestine, South Sudan, and Iraq at 215 (Iran is at 205).

Something that happens is that some places do well on the positives but not on the negatives and vice versa. Thus Bhutan is 9th on overall positives, but lots of pain there and it ends up 99th overall.  The top four just on positives are Paraguay, Indonesia, Laos, Hawaii. The top four on negatives (least harm) are Taiwan, Somaliland, Uzbekistan, China, 

So, what is putting China and Taiwan so high on reducing negatives? China is 8th on avoiding pain and 2nd on avoiding sadness. Who is ahead of it on avoiding sadness? Taiwan. Hong Kong is well behind both of them at 79th. 

And Russia? It has traditionally done poorly on positives on these, with mid-range life satisfaction, they are 160th in smiling (which they tend to sneer at publicly doing). But like China it does well on two negatives, coming in at 11th on worrying and 8th on anger. This raises the question of whether correspondents in authoritarian nations are willing to be honest about certain questions.

There is much to chew over this, and I think we shall be hearing more about this study in the future, despite its flaws.

Barkley Rosser

Goodbye 117th Congress

 Merry Christmas, you all.

So, the 117th Congress is done, and Nancy Pelosi is ending her historic run as Speaker of the House.  It passed more legislation than we have seen happen in a congress in a very long time.  While Joe Biden did not get all he wanted, much less the progressive caucus, a great deal as passed, some of it, like the infrastructure bill, that has been languishing for decades. At the tail end we got the right to marry confirmed, reform of the electoral act to prevent a VP from messing with countng votes, the CHIPs act and the Inflation Reduction Act, with inflation actually declining right now, if not due to that act particularly.

Also managed to get a spending bill passed under the wire to cover the next nine months, and the J6 comm released its report and Ways and Means got Trump's taxes.

What did not get through? An immigration bill. It looked that a modest one that would please large numbers of people on both sides was put forward by Synema and Tillis, legalising the DACA dreamers while increasing security at the border. But in the end it just could not get through. Politicians love to browbeat this issue too much to actually do anything useful about it.

The other biggie is no debt ceiling increase. I read that this would take "too much time," although I do not see why. But it did not pass, so this will become a chief playting for the GOP in the House this coming year.

There is also the problem that the green stuff in the IRA is very protectionist, violating WTO rules, and really angering European allies of the US. But I guess Biden just has Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin on his mind.

Barkley Rosser

This Life: faith, work, and free time, part two

At the beginning of this year, I posted a response to Martin Hägglund's This Life: Secular faith and spiritual freedom. In October I learned of a conference next May in Belgium at which Hägglund will be one of the keynote speakers. So I submitted an abstract to present a paper.

When it came time to start working on a draft for the conference, I remembered my blog post and it formed the core for the rest of the draft. In that earlier post, I wrote about Marx's identification in the Grundrisse of the inversion between necessary labour time and superfluous labour time. During editing of a first draft of the conference presentation I took a break and went for a walk. There it struck me that the inversion of necessary and superfluous labour time was a parallel to the inversion of this life and the supernatural that Ludwig Feuerbach had criticized. The following is an excerpt from my draft:

The Political Economy of Effective Altruism

 Back in the day, I used to give talks on child labor.  I would always begin by saying that boycotts and shaming of corporations, while understandable as an emotional response, were unlikely to do much for the world’s children.  This was because very little child labor is employed in making internationally tradeable products.  Moreover, simple prohibitions don’t get at the root causes, which need to be identified and addressed with national and international policies.  Most of the talk would be about those causes, and I would end with a call for people in the audience to get involved politically, so that US policy would at least not reinforce the conditions that impose poverty and insecurity on much of the world’s population.  I would give a list of specific demands.

Feeling like I had communicated a complex topic persuasively and provided a motivating political spin at the end, I would ask for questions.  Inevitably, the first would be some variation on “What should(n’t) I buy?”  People were so enclosed in a worldview in which only individuals could take action, and “collective action” meant lots of individuals were doing the same thing, that my argument simply couldn’t get through.

Effective altruism is a variation on the same theme, only substitute philanthropy for shopping.  If “what should I buy?” springs from the consumption portion of income, “how should I give?” pertains to  the portion not dedicated to current or future consumption.  The first question would be asked by a citizen of the 99%, the second by a one-percenter.

But it’s worse than that.  Conscious consumerism’s only fault is that it occupies the ethical place that should be the seat of politics; conscious philanthropy adds the additional problem that the surplus income it channels is itself the consequence of choices that can make the world a better or worse place.  To put it bluntly, effective altruism allows people to exploit or even defraud others to become rich, so long as they expiate themselves by giving away the surplus portion of their riches in accordance with an approved set of criteria.  Its ideological function is cemented by the criteria themselves, which call for discrete interventions with measurable outcomes; these can be applied to philanthropic donations but not to the more systemic interventions addressable by politics.

So we come to the fact that Samuel Bankman-Fried gave enormous sums of money to politicians, think tanks and other receptacles whose purpose was to enable him to make yet more money, for instance by expanding the pool of potential investors in his crypto exchange to pension funds.  He gave more or less equally to Democrats and Republicans.  (The official donations to the Dems were slightly greater, but by his own admission Bankman-Fried channeled more of the dark money to Republicans.)  The favored Dems were, not surprisingly, corporate-friendly third-wayists, like the Center for American Progress.  Objectively, no matter how brilliantly he might divide his philanthropy between malaria bednets and techie projects to avert an AI singularity, his contribution to world betterment was more than offset by shoring up the global order via the political arm of his investments.  Effective Altruism exists to foreground the first and obscure the second.

The prominence of both consumerist and philanthropic strategies to fix what’s wrong with the world are reflections of an immense political vacuum.  Somehow, and quickly, politics needs to be rebuilt from the ground up: a vision of genuine change that can grapple with the extreme challenges that face us, political movements organized around elements of that vision, and a few victories along the way to give us strength and spirit.  The goal would be to live in a world in which “what should I buy?” and “how should I give?” were no longer regarded as important political questions.