Planet of the Humans: A De-Growth Manifesto

Planet of the Humans, directed by Jeff Gibbs but featuring Michael Moore as its “presenter”, has been viewed by almost five and a half million people since it popped up on YouTube last month.  In case you haven’t heard, it’s quite a provocation, and the response from almost every quarter of the environmental movement has been outrage.  It traffics in disinformation and scurrilous personal attacks, they say, and I can’t argue.  Two big problems: it falsely claims that more carbon is emitted over the lifespan of a photovoltaic cell than by generating the same energy through fossil fuels, and it uses dishonest editing techniques to portray activist Bill McKibben as having sold out to billionaire ecological exploiters.  You can read about the misrepresentations elsewhere; my point is that, whatever else it is, the film is a logically consistent statement of the de-growth position.

Alas, much of the “left” has concluded that the chief obstacle to meeting our climate and other environmental challenges is the “capitalist” faith in economic growth.  Capitalism requires growth, they say, and growth is destroying the earth, therefore we must abolish capitalism and embrace de-growth.  Anything less is a sellout.

This philosophy is central to Planet; twice (at least) Gibbs proclaims, “You can’t have endless growth on a finite planet.”  He shows charts depicting human population and consumption growth that portray us as a metastasizing cancer.  Early in the film, when he’s setting the tone for what’s to come, he asks, “Is it possible for machines made by industrial civilization to save us from industrial civilization?”

But movies are not just words; they make their arguments visually as well.  Planet has horrific scenes of mining and logging, as well as speeded up, frenzied shots of manufacturing, warehousing and shipping.  It ends with heartbreaking footage of doomed orangutans amid a wasteland of deforestation.  The message is clear: human use of nature is a travesty, and any activity that imposes a cost on Mother Earth is immoral.

There are two fundamental problems with this worldview.  The first is that it is based on the mistaken idea that all economic value derives from the despoliation of nature, the second that it can’t be implemented by a viable program.  Let’s look at each.

While Gibbs is the director and narrator of the film, its guru is one Ozzie Zehner, not only interviewed on camera as an expert but also, remarkably, its producer as well.  Zehner is the author of a book entitled Green Illusions, and he has drunk deeply from the de-growth Kool Aid.  In an article he wrote a year after his book, he announces

The cost of manufactured goods ultimately boils down to two things: natural resource extraction, and profit. Extraction is largely based on fossil-fuel inputs. Profit, in this broad stroke, is essentially a promise to extract more in the future. Generally speaking, if a supposedly green machine costs more than its conventional rival, then more resources had to be claimed to make it possible.

There it is, quite directly: economic value equals resource use.  Truly, this can only be called an anti-labor theory of value.  If I see two chairs in a store, one for $60 and the other for $600, the second has to consume about ten times the resources of the first—as if human skill, knowledge and care have nothing to do with it.  Crazy, but that’s what you have to believe if you think that the only way to reduce our burden on nature is to de-grow consumption.  (The alternative, of course, is to replace the degradation of the natural world by an expansion of the application of human skill, knowledge and care.)

Meanwhile, the attack on renewable energy, anti-factual as it is, is of a piece with this deep-seated hostility to “industrial civilization”.  If economic production is the enemy, then how can green energy technologies, which embody this production in themselves and allow us to continue consuming energy-using products, be OK?  There has to be something wrong with them, and mere evidence can’t be allowed to get in the way.  Imagine trying to make a movie along the general lines of Planet without these attacks on wind and solar installations.  Can’t be done.

The other problem is that, aside from economic catastrophes like the 2008 financial crisis and the current coronavirus shutdown, there isn’t a way to implement the de-growth “program”.  And that’s what we see in the movie, too.  At the end, as we stare at those soulful orangutans, we feel a load of guilt but no sense of what we can do about it.  If the underlying problem is too many people, who among us should be chosen for extermination?  Or if it’s too much consumption, who will be made to cut back and what will they have to give up?  Or is there no program at all but just a mood, apologetic for who we are and how we live?

The worst thing that can happen to an irrational idea is for it to be taken seriously and followed to its conclusions.  That’s the fate of de-growtherism and Planet of the Humans.

Donald Trump Goes Absolutely Bonkers Over China

Yesterday President Trump erupted with a series of demands and threat against China, focusing on various claims about its role in the current pandemic.  I have here noted some issues with China's conduct, but Trump makes it completely impossible that there will be any of the much-needed cooperation between the US and China to overcome this virus.  He has gone absolutely bonkers.

He has now threatened to remove China's sovereign immunity so people can sue it, with a former lawyer of his organization, George Sorial  now of Berman and Associates, cooking up a class action suit against China; a threat to stop paying interest on US bonds held by China, which he probably will not do because it occurs to him that this default on the US national debt might "damage the sacred standing of the dollar" duh; and finally to impose yet more tariffs on China, a threat that promptly sent the stock market plunging after several days of rising, although we know he really likes putting tariffs on China. Probably the first of these would be the least harmful and the most likely he will do, very noisy but not amounting to too muc in the end as China will just ignore it.

I note that in this press conference he claimed that he has seen intelligence showing a "high probability" that the virus came out of a Wuhan lab.  So far no other sources have said that, although by all reports that possibility has not been ruled out.  But by this almost certain lie Trump has almost certainly killed any remaining chance that China might cooperate with the US on really determining the ultimate origin of the virus, something that would be scientifically and medically useful. It may be that this origin will be discovered, but it will not be through such cooperation.  It is completely reasonable that China will resist something they perceive as possibly leading to them being denounced and sued.

My own theory as to what triggered yesteeday's outburst is that he reportedly blew up at his campaign chied, Brad Parscal, onWedneday when Parscale reportedly showed him serious polls showing him losing to Biden in most of the swing states. He apparently was yelling and using the "f word."  of course public polling has been showing this for a long time, but Trump has apparenly up until Wednesday simply ignored or written off such polls.  In any case, this going after China big time and hard looks to me to be his response to these bad polls, a desperate attempt to regain an electoral edge by an aggressive foreign policy, one that is potentially very dangerous and damaging in this current situation, which apparently some of his economic advisers understand.  But he is reportedly now leaning to his national security hardliners like SecState Mike Pompeo.  This is not at all good news.

Barkley Rossr

PS: Happy May Day everybody!

RIP Robert May

Robert May died on April 28 at age 84 of unreported causes.  He has been described as "the grandfather of chaos theory," which I think exaggerates, but he was the second person to adopt the term after James Yorke first applied to a porticular type of irregular nonlinear dynamics subject to the "butterfly effect" of sensitive dependence on initial conditions (butterfy effect having been coined by the late Edward Lorenz to climate modeld, a reason we cannot make weather forecasts beyond a week or so usually), well ahead of May's work.  But May was one one of the most influential people working on chaos theory as well as many other important dynamical issues in a variety of disciplines, including ecology, medicine (he modeled pandemics), as well as economics and finance.

From Australia originally, he ended up in Britain where he served as Chief Science Adviser 1995-2000, which got him knighted in 1997, then made Baron of Oxford in 2000, and then an Order of Merit in 2001.  He has been pretty much universally admired, and his work has long been influential on mine as well as on that of many others, even predating my interest in chaos theory when I read his work on dynamics in ecosystems, which has been highly influential and original.

Probably his most famous paper, in which he was the first to suggest that chaos theory might be applicable to economics, along with many other disciplines, was "Simple mathematical models with very complicated dynamics," Nature, 1976, 261, 471-477.  May he rest in peace.

Barkley Rosser

Which Nations Have Most Rapid Rate Of Increase In Deaths Per Million from SARS-Cov-2?

As of earlier tody, 4/29/20,. according to "Our World in Data" ourworldindata.org/coronavirus, there are currently nine nations that based on looking at the three-day rolling average, have rates of increase of more than 5 per million per day.  They are in order with their rates:

Belgium 15.97
Ireland 10.73
UK 9.2
Spain 9.01
Sweden 8.38
Italy 7.82
France 7.32
USA 6.2
Netherlands 6.13.

For what it is worth, many of these are declining, although source only showed this over time for a sub-sample of these (not including Sweden, but including Canada, whose rate of increase is accelerating)..

Barkley Rosser

An Update on Shadow Government

Not only is the current level of testing for the coronavirus insufficient, the tests themselves are flawed.  Read this summary by infectious disease specialist Michael Osterholm and a coauthor for particulars.  Their key policy conclusion is

A blue-ribbon panel of public health, laboratory and medical experts, ethicists, legal scholars and elected officials should be convened immediately to set out a road map with realistic goals for testing and contact-tracing.

If we had a reliable government, it would get this done, but we don’t.  Concretely, one of the main jobs of a shadow government organized by Democrats would be to assemble this group and give it a regular, high profile platform.

The Wide Open Origin Question Regarding SAR-Cov-2

More than a century later, we still do not  know the origin of the Spanish flu, with at least three currently scientifically supported origins out there: North America (possibly Kansas), China, and British soldiers in France. This will not be resolved.  I suspect that this may become the outcome of the current debate over the origin of our current pandemic.  While mostly this seems to have become a matter of random infection from animals versus an accident in a lab in Wuhan, upon further study this seems more complicated on all sides of this, with crucial data missing forever.  I fear the outcome of this debate will be no more resolved a centuury from now than the matter of the Spanish flu origin is now.

I also note before proceeding further that this discussion has become highly politically charged, with some regular readers here having strong views on this.  I want to be as csreful and clear in my further discussion here as possible, withoug getting dragged into the hot politics that indeed are adhering to this matter. 

Upfront I shall take off from two columns in the Washington Post, 4/24/20, one by David Ignatius and the other, just below it, by Josh Rogin, both on this issue.  Given firewalls and all that, I shall indulge by quoting extensively from both of their columns:

Ignatius's is titled, "China puts even the truth on lockdown." I follow wih selected quotes:

"Top scientists I contacted over the past week were skeptical about theories that are spinning about deliberate Chinese attempts to engineer the toxic virus. But many said it's possible that a pathogen that was being studied by researchers in Wuhan could have leaked accidentally of two virology labs  there, setting off the chain of infection."

"Chinese researchers did some careful research in January and February, when the virus was spreading. But research was subsequently tightly controlled, and in at least one case with scientists in Guangzhou, suppresed."

"The recent commotion about conspiracy theories comes partly from an unpublished paper by several maverick European scientists that was privately circulated last week. The authors argued that covid-19 was a 'purposefully manipulated' virus created partly through 'gain of function' research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. A 2015 paper by Chinese and American scientists had described such an effort to enhance the potential infectivity of the bat coronoviruses so they could be studied  and treated better.

Both U.S. and British intelligence analysts are skeptical that covid-18 resulted from deliberate human engineering. The claims about 'engineered origins' in the paper were 'not substantiated' by British government scientists, a British official told me. U.S. intelligence analysts are also confident that the virus wasn't created in a laboratory, but they haven't ruled out the possibility that a natural organic virus that was enhanced for scientific reasons may have leaked accidentally in Wuhan."

Just below Ignatius's column is the one by Josh Rogin entitled, "The risks of collaberation with China." Following are selected quotations from it:

"The Chinese government won't share actual virus samples from the earliest cases. The Shanghai lab first released the coronaviurs genome was shut down for 'rectification.' All research on the virus origin in China is now restricted. Critics have disappeared."

"Jonna Mazet , professor of epidemiology at the University of Californial at Davis, was director of the U.S. Agency for International Development's $200 million Predict program, which spent 10 years trying to anticipate the next viral pandemic, before the Trump adminstration cut almost all of its funding last September. Shi [lead scientist at Wuhan Virology Institute handling bat coronovirus reseach] was Predict's principal investigator in China.

Mazet told me she did not believe it was likely the coronavirus escaped the Wuhan lab, but she acknowledged, 'Absolutely, accidents can happen.'"

So there we have the argument that it might have come from a lab in Wuhan, of which there are two, the other being the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention. with most of the  claims of an accidental source for the world coming from the other lab, WIV.

The main alternative to the above (which absolutely does not include any claim that it was bioweapon consciously cooked by the Chinese govt as some, such as  Sen. Cotton have claimed, a view now accepted by nodody outside the US) is that it came from animals directly to humans, not from a lab.

I am not an expert on the underlining science of this, but there are several serious possible sources for an ultimately animal  rather than accidental lab, source of this pandemic.  There are several possible alternatives here, and while now most think an animal source is it, the disagreement and uncertainty over just which of these is ir is striking.  I see at least three theories, of all which have problems,

1) It came from snakes, either as the original source or as an intermediate transmitter from bats in Yunnan, a southwestern province of China, several hundred miles from Wuhan, with at least two Chinese candiates out there, the kral an cobra.. Something supporting this theory is that snakes may have been sold at the Hunan Seafood Market in Wuhan, the definite site  of  the major original outburst  of the virus in late 2019.As of now this theory does not have much support, but...

2) It came from pangolins, not bats or snakes.The snake theory dates back to January, but the pangolin theory has more recent academic support, if not yet accepted in a peer-reviewed journal, science-clert.com/more-evidence-suggests-pangolins-may-have-passed-coronavirus-from-bats-to-humans. Sorry, that is not a functioning link as I have put it, but that on google will get it for you. While that was a fairly recent serious scientific report, it has convinced near nobody among serious scients. This theoy has not been generally accepted among most relevsnt scientist, although it is possible that either snakes or pangolins might have been intermediate species from bats. For the possible theory that pangolins were not the originators but the transmitters  from bats, it is an unresolved debate over whether or not pangolins were sold in the Hunan wet market of Wuhan, with the weight of current eviidence leaning to they were not.

3) That it ultimately came from horseshoe bats in caves in Yunnan province, several hundred miles south of Wuhan, is probably the most widely accepted theory. It is accepted that bats were not sold im the wet market of Wuhan. So if the mutation that created this virus happened in those bats rather than in one of the labs in Wuhan only 300 yards from the notorious wet market, shut down and scrubbed on Jan. 1 it had to come through an intermediate animal, which happened wih SARS going through civets and with MERS that went through dromedary camels.

4)   It may not have come out of the wet market in Wuhan. Of the first 41 identified cases, 13 of them were not from there, with exactly where the earliest officially recognized case on Nov. 17 was precisely from remains a state secret of the the Peoples' Republic of China.

5) Both Ignatius and Rogin, and a vast number of others  think that what should happen is that the US and China should stop playing games with each other and be fully  open about relevant information, which they should share with the whole world.

Barkley Rosser

We Need a Shadow Government

Republican rule in the US is a horror show.  We get incoherent ramblings from our president on injecting bleach into our veins, calls for the states to file for bankruptcy from the Senate majority leader, a veto of modest IMF support for developing countries hammered financially by the virus, and a complete absence of guidance on the most crucial aspects of public health.

We already know this.

The greater tragedy is that the Democrats are barely better.  Their program, to the extent it makes sense to speak of one, is protecting the immediate interests of their key constituents.  This begins with the financial sector, and since the Republicans share the same commitment, their multi-trillion dollar bailout zipped right through.  Small business is also important to both parties, if not quite as much, and upwards of a billion will wend its way to them—via the banks, of course.  Lots of health sector money flows to the Democrats, and Pelosi and Schumer found a way to bail them out too.  Beyond this it has been hit or miss.  The unemployed will get greater wage replacement, even above 100% for the bottom end of the labor market.  There may be future money for the states.  A few billion for testing, and that’s about it.

What all this adds up to is top-heavy interest group protection.  It’s not a plan.

The irony is that informed opinion has largely converged in the two key areas of public policy.  To overcome the pandemic we need four things:

• A rapid increase in the production and dissemination of personal protective equipment, first to the health care sector and then to other workers who can’t avoid social contact.  This should be mandated and organized by the government through established emergency powers.

• Mandatory use of face masks in public by everyone—no exceptions.  Masks, even simple homemade cloth coverings, are highly effective in reducing transmission.  (No, they don’t do much to shield the wearer from ambient exposures; yes they eliminate most transmission by the wearer.)

• The government should make an immense expansion of testing capability its top priority.  No resources should be spared.  In addition, all available R&D capability should be directed toward improving the specificity and sensitivity of testing methods.

• Measures should be taken immediately to establish a network of local and regional contact tracing systems.  Doing this in a manner that minimizes broader loss of privacy risks should be a primary concern.  Between vastly expanded testing and contact tracing, we have a pathway out of economic lockdown without inviting an even more devastating second wave of infections and deaths.

Economically, we need three broad initiatives:

• A payments moratorium, with no accrued interest.  No rents, mortgages, premiums or other payments for essential services.  This means stopping the clock for the duration of unavoidable economic restrictions.

• Universal income maintenance.  Income streams disrupted by the response to the pandemic should be sustained at public expense, with some percent reduction to reflect reduced spending opportunities—especially if a payments moratorium is also in effect.\

• Liberal use of the Fed’s asset book to finance public services and sustain incomes.  We should have unrestricted ability to borrow to achieve all of the above, and the Fed should be authorized to purchase all such loan instruments.  Money should never be a constraint on policy, only real constraints like people, skills, resources and productive capacity.

My reading of the policy chatter is that, while emphases differ, in broad terms both agendas have overwhelming professional support.  What they lack is a political vehicle.

In a better world, that vehicle would be the Democratic Party, which would establish a shadow government to refine these proposals and push for their adoption.  It would assemble committees for particular policy areas, conduct regular—even daily—press briefings, organize petition campaigns, and in general act as though it had responsibility for progress in this country in economics and public health.  In their absence, which is the world we actually live in, no one is assuming this responsibility, and policy is in chaos.

Note that this is separate from the debate over how progressive the Democrats should be—whether they should campaign for Medicare for All, free public higher education and other reforms.  The need for leadership on matters of basic governance is prior and does not depend on resolving political disagreements over the future of the country once the pandemic has passed.

Where Are People Dying Most Intensively Now of SARS-Cov-2?

I am putting this up because I have been hearing seeing people making claims about this that do not agree with what I have just seen at Statista for today, the 50th anniversary of the first Earth Day, for deaths per million according to the pandemic virus. I am not going to comment on the list further, although I am tempted, but the situation is changing so fast.

Belgium
Spain
Italy
France
United Kingdom
Netherlands
Switzerland
Sweden
Ireland
USA

Oh, I suppose I should provide the same list for infections per capita, a less definite number due to testing variations, than the former.  Best I could do was a three day old list from Statista, but here it is.

Spain
Belgium
Ireland
Italy
Switzerland
USA
France
Portugal
Netherlands
UK

Addendum after 4 comments:  Here are top 15 in terms of testing rates per capita

Switzerland
Portugal
Italy
Germany
Austria
Spain
Ireland
Canada
Russia
Belgium
USA
Netherlands
Turkey
UK
France

Barkley Rosser

Happy Sesquicentennial Birthday, Vladimir Lenin! (Oh, And Happy Half Century Earth Day)

A half century ago today was the first Earth Day, which I paerticipated in while at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  Although I did not know him well, I even met the founder of the event, then Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin.  While it is easy to be discouraged by the ongoing failure to deal with the global warming issue as well as the large amount of rollbacks of reasonable environmental regulations in the US by Donald Trump, with several happening very recently under cover of the SARS-Cov-2 pandemic, much has also been achieved, with vastly reduced air and water pollution of many types over the last half century in most nations.

It is easy to forget that in 1970 there was no Enviromental Protection Agency and that most of the most basic laws regulating most air and water pollutants were not in place almost anywhere in the world. I remember seeing the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland in 1965, a year it caught fire, when it not only stank but had an unpleasant pinkish hue to it. Today it looks like regular water and fern bars and restaurants stand beside it where in good weather (and no pandemics) people sit outside to eat and drink beside it.

Which gets to the irony of my title for this post.  I am remembering an odd sideshow at the time of the first Earth Day, which came only a few weeks prior to the killing of four students in anti-Vietnam War protests at Kent Sate, which would be followed by the largest and most widespread of such protests across the US.  This was probably the culminating point (punctuated at the end of the summer by the bombing in Madison of the Army Math Research Center) of the revolutionary socialist New Left movement in the US among students.  On the Madison campus, one of the leading strongholds of the movement, where we had at  least three different Trotskyist groups competing with each other, not to mention with Maoists and various other radical left groups, there was fairly harsh criticism of that first Earth Day be many from someof these groups.

One particular point noted by more than one critic was that this event somehow happened to occur on the centennial of the birth of Vladimir Lenin in 1870, admiration of whom was something that the usually feuding Maoists and Trotskyist factions could agree on, even if they disagreed about Stalin and Mao.  So this event was according to some cooked up by the right wing, ultimately Richard Nixon who was indeed beginning to support environmentalism somewhat and would indeed oversee the founding of the EPA and the passage of some important environmental laws (a sharp contrast with today's Trump).  It was cooked up to distract the revolutionary workers and students from focusing both on the anti-Vietnam War movement as well as the broader revolutionary socialist movement, with proper socialist revolutionaries needing to be focused on Lenin and the centennial of his birth rather than going all gaga over reducing automobile emissions, as one pamphlet I saw then put it.

All of this seems moot if not quite absurd in the context of today's politics.  Anti-environmental conservatives criticize environmentalists as being "watermelons," green on the outside but red on in the inside (or they did 20 years ago before red became the color of the US Republican Party).  But in 1970 "brown Marxism" was dominant on the left.  In the USSR and China the rulers focused on meeting production quotas and did not worry about pollution, a view that led Marshall Goldman a few years later to write about "the convergence" between capitalism and socialism on pollution.  The strong emphasis on controlling population that was very strong in the 1970 Earth Day as symbolized by a leading role for Paul Ehrlich who was getting much attention for his book, The Population Bomb, also fed into skepticism by those on the radical left who saw the hand of reactionary racist and imperialist Malthusianism in the celebration, with Marx himself having criticized Malthus as the ultimate reactionary, not without reason.

And while most of this has long gone by the wayside and still-Communist China now at least officially is striving to combat global warming (in contrast to the US officially under Donald Trump), we see vague echoes of that old link between conservation and conservatism, and the even deeper link between ecology and even fascism, as advocates of a purification based on "blood and soil" in Germany that followed Hitler included students of students of Ernst Haeckel, the man who coined the word "ecology" in the late 19th century.  Today we have neo-ecofascists on the far right among those who rail against immigrants "polluting" our society.

No, I do not think these elements will come to dominate the modern green movement, which is predominantly progressive. But my ironic title for this post is to remind that some of these older ideas are out there trying reappear.  Let us move on to make sure the green movement is progressive.  Right now with our president moving so sharply against the environment on so many fronts, this should not be too hard to do.

Anyway, happy half century Earth Day, everybody (and if you like, the sesquicentennial of Lenin's birthday, although whatever happened to all those Trotskyist factions anyway?).

Barkley Rosser

Negative Oil Prices

Yes, earlier this afternoon, very briefly, western Canadian oil was selling for $ -0.15.  At least I saw a report of this.  The price may have been there for only three seconds, but it is the first time I have ever heard of there being negative oil or energy prices ever.  Negative interest rates, which are now quite common are one thing, but negative oil prices?

OTOH, some energy related assets have had negative prices before. I am thinking of abandoned coal mines and some highly polluting energy production facilities in certain locations with strict environmental laws that mandate that the owner of the asset pay for cleaning up the pollution coming out of it.  One location and period when and where I heard numerous reports of negative price sales of such asets was in the former East Germany after unification with privatization by the Treuhandstalt.

Addendum, 4:40 PM: So I jusr saw a Reuters story claiming that at some point this afternoon, the price for May West Texas Intermediate crude, one of the world's two main oil benchmarks (Brent crude is the other) hit a price  $-36.73 per barrel.  If true, this is quite  astounding.  Apparently they have run out of storage for all the surplus WTI (and west Canadian) crude.  I note that at 4 PM the sopt price for WTI was  $1.50, just barely positive.  Meantime, Brent has held at around $26.  Frankly I do not know where this is going, but it is definitely unprecedented.

The only story I have seen is that this is Putin in Russia and MbS in Saudi Arabia working to really thoroughly bust the US fraking industry, which faces much higher variable costs than conventional oil drilling, which tends to have higher fixed costs.  This is certainly possible, although I am not sure how they are able to target WTI without it hitting Brent.  In any case, this certainlyi makes absud Trump's parading around and bragging about how he cooked up a deal between him and the other two, with AMLO from Mexico on board as well as implicitly the rest of OPEC beyond KSA, to cut world oil production by as much as 20 mbpd to stabilize the price.  This deal, if it was ever really there, looks to be in complete tatters like so many other diplomatic initiatives Trump has engaged in and bragged about, only to lead to vacuous if not negative results.

Barkley Rosser

Does Google’s Search Algorithm Protect the New York Times?

Yesterday morning, after reading the Sunday New York Times, I posted two pieces on EconoSpeak within a few minutes of each other.  One was a short, cute little item (a visual grab from the paper) entitled “The Art of Juxtaposition”; the other was a longer, more substantial takedown of a deficit hysteria “analysis” I called “The Usual Deficit Blather from the New York Times”.

As usual, I monitored the posts through the day to see if they were being picked up anywhere.  This has become largely an exercise in nostalgia, since with the fading of the economics blogosphere there isn’t much to track.  What happened next was interesting, however.

Before long, Google had indexed “The Art of Juxtaposition” and returned it on my search, but the “Blather” piece was nowhere to be found.  Curious.  Then this morning I awoke to discover that Angry Bear had reposted “Blather” but not “Juxtaposition”.  That’s fine, since the one they used actually has some content.  But now, when I go back to Google search, “Blather” turns up from Angry Bear but still not EconoSpeak.

What I suspect is that, in a misguided attempt to slow the spread of fake news, Google’s algorithm blocks criticism of the Times and other “reputable” media unless it issues from sites with sufficiently high traffic.  Angry Bear made the cut but not EconoSpeak.

This is just a hypothesis, and I’m not invested in it.  I’d be happy to hear some other explanation—have one?

UPDATE: 24 hours later, I've done a Google search for "Does Google’s Search Algorithm Protect the New York Times?"  The result: no link to this post.

Stairway to Serfdom

I posted the above chart four days ago in "From Social Distance to Social Justice" to illustrate Arthur Dahlberg's argument about the eventual consequences of a declining labor share of income. Dahlberg was inspired by Stephen Leacock's The Unsolved Riddle of Social Justice and both Leacock and Dahlberg were influenced by Thorsten Veblen.

The chart also illuminates arguments made by Moishe Postone about Marx's theory of capitalist production. I happen to agree substantially with Postone's interpretation of Marx even though I find his presentation repetitive and difficult to follow. That is, I think I agree with what I think he was trying to say in Time, Labor and Social Domination. 

What the chart shows is that in spite of a more than threefold increase in productivity over roughly the last half-century, the per capita hours of work increased in a series of steps with each successive business cycle culminating in a higher level of hours per capita. "Because total value created is a function only of abstract labor time expenditure." Postone wrote, "increased productivity yields a greater amount of material wealth but results only in short-term increases in value yielded per unit time." Postone later remarks that one consequence of this dynamic "is the accelerating destruction of the natural environment."

The object of capitalist production is not the material wealth that it yields in increasing quantities. The object is the expanded accumulation of capital through the production of surplus value. At one point Postone asserts that "labor is actually the object of production" and elsewhere that "value operates as a socially constituted form of abstract domination." This may sound like "the man who mistook his wife for a hat" but I think it is absolutely correct and extremely important, if difficult to parse. 

Let me try. Value is abstract, as is surplus value. Material wealth is concrete but it doesn't increase proportionately to value. Labor is also concrete but, in contrast to material wealth, increases in abstract labor time are, ultimately, proportionate to increases in value. Social domination is what ties labor to abstract labor time.

The difficulty here is that Postone -- and Marx -- are referring to a contradictory process. Literally. Explicitly. "Capital itself is the moving contradiction," Marx wrote in the Grundrisse, "[in] that it presses to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth." Here we have an explanation for the oscillations in the red line in the chart above. Productivity gains propel the economic recovery, which enlists more labor and more labor time, which creates a drag on productivity. Statistically, this is a tautology since hours of work is the denominator in the productivity equation.

Why is each successive peak higher than the last one through five business cycles? I suspect that this is not a characteristic feature of "market capitalism" but is an unintended consequence of managed capital. One could call it "inflation" if that term hadn't already been thoroughly colonized by the apologists for capital. "Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon," proclaimed Milton Friedman, thereby foreclosing once and for all consideration of any alternative analysis.

Hours inflation is a type of inflation -- just as asset bubble inflation is a type of inflation. But pay no attention to the man behind the screen. "Inflation is a process by which the presumed nexus between signifier (monetary value) and signified (material commodity), representation and 'reality,' becomes strained or even broken altogether," wrote Sarah L. Lincoln. There is that word, "value" again and it is instructive to shuffle through the phases: value, surplus value, labor time, abstract domination.

The presumed nexus between monetary value and the material commodity is that a certain quantity of labor time was expended in production of the quantity. But this is a presumption that becomes more and more strained with the development of modern industry. "On the one side, then, it [capital] calls to life all the powers of science and of nature, as of social combination and of social intercourse, in order to make the creation of wealth independent (relatively) of the labour time employed on it," Marx wrote in the Grundriss. "On the other side, it wants to use labour time as the measuring rod for the giant social forces thereby created, and to confine them within the limits required to maintain the already created value as value."

Clearly, in Marx's analysis labor time is not the power behind the creation of wealth. Instead it is the yardstick, imposed by capital, for measuring the worth of all that creation. Why? To maintain the already created value as value. The danger is that properly acknowledging the powers of science, nature, social combination and social intercourse in the creation of wealth would devalue the massively inflated assets, which presumably entitle the capitalist to a large and increasing share of material wealth. Those assets become "stranded assets," which is a nice way of saying liabilities. 

Marx's argument here is that the more labor time is rendered superfluous by modern industry, the more desperately does capital cling to it as the measure of value. Capital "diminishes labour time in the necessary form so as to increase it in the superfluous form; hence posits the superfluous in growing measure as a condition – question of life or death – for the necessary." The relentless ascent, decade after decade, of hours worked per capita documents the increasing superfluity of that labor time. The less labor time is needed the more of it is needed! This is the very definition of contradiction.

In the last four weeks, 22 million Americans filed new claims for unemployment insurance. What will it take to "get them back to work"? Those 22 million -- along with another 22 or 44 million -- were already redundant before the coronavirus lockdowns were imposed. What if creating those 40 or 60 million jobs requires destroying 30 to 50 trillion dollars worth of imaginary asset value? Anybody wanna buy a barrel of Western Canada Select? A bargain at minus fifteen cents a barrel.

The Art of Juxtaposition

Seen in today's New York Times in Print:

The Usual Deficit Blather from the New York Times

The Times today ran a truly execrable article warning us that, once the virus has passed, we will suffer dire consequences from the runup of government debt.  As most readers know, this argument is theoretically illiterate, derived from the false comparison between household and government debt.  We've been through this many times before, and I have nothing to add.

I do want to focus on one sentence, however, to illustrate how intellectual blinders can lead to absurd conclusions.

To quote the author, Carl Hulse, "In other words, the bill will come due, as it always does."

Does it?  Check out total Federal debt measured as a percent of GDP:

As you can see, it skyrocketed during the 1940s, when the US went to war against Germany, Italy and Japan.  By the time the war was over it was at an all-time high.  Yes, we had to borrow to produce all the war materiel and send millions of troops around the world; no one doubts that.  But after V-E and V-J, how were public finances affected?

For the answer, take a look at the federal budget surplus or deficit as a percent of GDP:

Well, we ran a surplus for a few years after the war, hardly of the same caliber as the wartime deficits, and then it was business as usual: mostly modest deficits with the occasional surplus or breakeven year.  So when did we "pay off" all those war bonds?  Never.  We just rolled them over and regularly added more debt along the way.  Nominal growth took care of it.

So no, the bill will not come due, as it didn't before.

Trump Defunds WHO and USPS: Will Motherhood and Apple Pie Be Next?

Yes, Trump is out to cut the roughly half a billion $ US contribution to the $6 billion budget of the World Hea viruslth Organization (WHO).  It seems that he now sees his path to reelection to be based on blaming China for the coronavirus and the WHO for supposedly supporting China in their supposedly nefarious conduct, alloeing hin to wallow in  fit of xenophobia as well as accusations against Joe Biden for being "soft on China."  Certainly China was slow to act against the virus, although not as slow as Trump and his team here in the US, and the WHO may well have been too soliciitous of China and its interests. But the WHo remains the central organization for  coordination the global response to thie situation.  This is simply stupid in terms of fighting the virus.

And then we have him going out of his way to demand that funds for the nearly bankrupt US Postal Service (USPS) be removed from the recent stimulus bill. GOPs in Congress have burdened them with having to fund future pensions at a level no other entity in the nation has to do, and, of course their business is in long term decline.  But apparently the USPS is the single most popular federal agencyy there is, with a 90% popularity rating, putting it ahead of even NASA and the National Park Service.  That the government should support it is written into the Constitution. But, hey, it delivers packages for Amazon, whose owner owns the Washington Post, which says bad things about him, not to mention if USPS can be shut  down, then all these Dem proposals to have people mail in their votes can be quashed, and as we have seen in Wisconsin, making it hard for people to submit ballots by mail is really popular.

Anyway, at this rate, I expect Trump's next move to be to defund entities supporting motherhood and apple pie.

Barkley Rosser