A Looming Anniversary Passes

 Yesterday was the 30th anniversary of the end of the Soviet Union.  I previously posted here about this looming anniversary, arguing that the large troop buildup of Russian troops on the Ukrainian border along with the many strong demands being made by V.V. Putin of various parties reflected his high awareness of this looking anniversary, which has been only barely mentioned or noticed in the western media.  

As it is, the anniversary passed without an invasion. Not only that there are reports from such sources as NPR, France 24, The Hill, and some other sources, although not yet such places as the NY Times or the Washington Post, that Putin has ordered a withdrawal of something like 10,000 of those troops out of about 104,000 reportedly there. This certainly still leaves a large enough contingent to carry out a serious invasion, if he wished, and certainly to continue threatening one.  However, these same reports say that after an especially tense time this past Wednesday, Dec. 22, which included phone calls with German Chancellor Scholze and President Biden, Putin gave an end of year speech the following day that while still issuing various threats and demands, also indicated that there may be diplomatic discussions about all this in early January. It looks like a very dangerous moment has passed without a major war breaking out.

I get the earliest edition of WaPo, and today's said nothing about any of this, including even Putin's speech three days ago, and certainly nothing about the anniversary that just passed. It had two stories on Ukraine and Russia.  One was about how a war could easily happen navally in the Sea of Azov, where borders are ill-defined with both nations having ports on it, but Russia dominating it, and Ukraine basically having no navy.  The story recounted numerous incidents initiated by Russian naval vessels against various Ukrainian ships, most of them commercial vessels.

The other was about internal Ukrainian politics, particularly about how Ukrainian President Zelensky is apparently going after some oligarchs, something the article admitted is popular there.  But the tone of the article was basically that he is nuts to be doing this in the face of a possible Russian invasion. No mention of any pullbacks or warming by Putin. The story recounted as something quite astounding that apparently in Kyiv nobody is all that worried about a Russian invasion, something I noted in my earlier post. It may be these people are foolish, but so far it is looking like their lack of fear of an impending invasion seems justified.  I hope that continues to be the case, whatever else happens there.

Barkley Rosser

It's A Wonderful Life: Faux Populism

 Somewhere I never saw a full version of this classic, Its a Wonderful Life, but here it is on Christmas Eve, an official Christmas classic. I was always suspicious of it, from all I had heard, but it looks less worth than I had heard. I mean, really, local bank owner gets into real estate problems? And the well-intentioned owner is somehow some great hero? He is offered total control of local monopolies. Heck, today's WaPo noted that the real hero is the wife, played by Donna Reed, Indeed she saves the day in many ways, including the final money pile-on to save him.

OK, so now I have finally seen the whole thing, but, I think I got the bottom line already above. 

Merry Christmas, you all

Barkley Rosser

RIP Sharon L. O'Hare

 I know, I know, my part of this blog is increasingly resembling an obituary column. But, heck, people I know who are conneted to econ keep dying, although this one was not as well known as others. Sharon Lyn O'Hare was a former student of mine 40 years ago at James Madison University, and while she never finished her PhD at Boston College, she was a decade later a colleague of mine in our department for five years. After then she left academia and ended up holding a high position in the City of Richmond government, director of its Office of Economics and Management, before retiring early.

She moved back to her home, Staunton, VA, 25 miles southwest of here, where her mother, Nancy O'Hare, lived also an old friend and former Speech and Pathology prof at JMU as well as a former mayor of Staunton, with Nancy still alive.

Anyway, Sharon died last Friday at age 59 after falling in her home and fracturing her skull.  I am about to go attend her funeral in Staunton in a few minutes.  She was not just a former student and colleague but also a good friend.  I find this one hitting me harder personally than some of these.

Anyway, Merry Christmas, you all.

Barkley Rosser

Whole Lotka Shakin' Goin' On

In a 1967 festschrift for Maurice Dobb, Richard Goodwin published an influential paper, "A Growth Cycle" on the "class struggle" model of cycles in economic growth. I only became aware of this famous paper because it had occurred to me that the dynamics of relative surplus population, necessary labour time, and socially necessary labour time might resemble a Lotka-Volterra predator-prey model.

Painting by Richard M. Goodwin

Goodwin's model dealt ultimately with the relationship between wages and profits, which seems like a logical place to start. But I think it is wrong. In my view -- and interpretation of Marx -- a more fundamental disequilibrium exists between labour capacity and employed labour power. There is always a relative surplus population (industrial reserve army) in capital and fluctuations in its size regulates the supply and demand for labour power and thus the value of the aggregate "wages fund."

I suspect that profits (or surplus value?) could be brought into a labour capacity/socially necessary labour time model through something like a predator/prey/parasite analysis, with surplus value being "parasitic" rather than "predatory." The implication of my alternative model is unusual -- "class struggle" appears in it as endogenous to labour -- the counterpart to competition between firms.

I don't do mathematical modeling so if there is anyone who does and finds these comments of interest, I would love to see what you come up with.

George Floyd and Jesus

 I am commenting on:

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2021/12/16/controversial-artwork-twice-stolen-catholic-university?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=3df3839bde-DNU_2021_COPY_02&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-3df3839bde-197481033&mc_cid=3df3839bde&mc_eid=502bbb1a16

A painting at Catholic University depicting Mary holding Jesus, with the latter's face resembling that of George Floyd, has been stolen.  It aroused all kinds of controversy.  

When I was growing up, my father was teaching and pursuing his doctorate in physics at CUA. Many are the Saturdays I spent running around the sub-basement of the physics building while he was working.

My parents were Catholics and raised us as Catholics, too. But they, and we children as a consequence, were inspired by the activist church that emerged after Vatican ll and left the Church when all that faded. It was a heady time.  I remember in particular playing guitar at Mass and singing a song whose scriptural lyric, quoting Jesus, might well be heeded by those who find the painting in question offensive. 

"Whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers, that you do unto me."

A Looming Anniversary

 Sighhhh...

The possibility of a Russian invasion of Ukraine is now front page news, with little sign that Putin is going to move his massive military buildup by the border back anytime soon, even if he does not invade.  After the phone call this past week between him and Biden, supposedly lower level negotiations have started, but it is unlikely Putin is going to be given anything dramatic that he has been demanding, such as a written guarantee Ukraine will not join NATO, something that polls now say 58% of Ukrainians support in the face of the ongoing threats and invasions and annexations and other provocations that Putin keeps indulging himself in, with a loud stream of propaganda over the past year that involves simply questioning there being any legitimacy to a Ukrainian state separate from Russia at all.  What did Putin think all this noise would bring about in Ukraine? Is he actually deluded about popular opinion there?

Yes, there are almost still some areas under Ukrainian military and political control in eastern Ukraine where Russian speakers dominate and who might prefer to be under Russian control, either as part of a separatist republic like the current Russian-supported Luhansk and Donetsk republics, or as part of Russia itself as Crimea has become effectively since its annexation, although that remains unrecognized by most of the rest of the world.  Perhaps Putin will insist on invading some of those territories presumably adjacent to those currently existing republics, thus expanding the territory under his effective control before backing off.  But, perhaps he will prefer just to keep everybody on a long term state of high alert for various reasons. Presumably he is aware of which areas would be more willing to accept such control, given that clearly the vast majority of Ukraine would oppose it, which would make ruling such territory very difficult, even if he were to conquer it, which he probably could if he really pushed it, although this would surely bring a major economic cost in being shut out of the international SWIFT financial system, which would certainly make life difficult for his crony oligarch pals.

Probably the most dramatic expansion he could do and maybe even sort of get away with, although I think it would itself probably bring that expulsion from the SWIFT system, would be to conquer Kharkiv (Ukrainian name, "Kharkov" being the Russian name). This is the second largest city in Ukraine after the capital, Kyiv ("Kiev" Russian name), at about 1.5 million. This is a city with a majority Russian speakers, although I do not know current sentiment.  As it is, it nearly joined to become another separatist republic when Luhansk and Donetsk did. A "local" separatist group did briefly seize control of the city hall, what happened in Luhansk and Donetsk, but unlike in those cities, after a few days the local police, not the Ukrainian military, removed them, and that was that. It and its surrounding province and remained fully a part of Ukraine, without any of the fighting happening there since. But that would be a big prize for Putin.  As it is, the city of Donetsk, which is in the separatist territories, is officially the fifth largest city of Ukraine at about 900,000, a major center of heavy industry. 

So, why is he doing this now?  One reason, rarely mentioned in the media reports, is this looming anniversary, which I am sure is very much on his mind: Christmas Day.  It was 30 years ago on December 25, 1991, that the Soviet flag was lowered over the Kremlin in Moscow and the Russian flag was raised. Putin has on more than one occasion declared that event to be "the worst socio-political catastrophe in world history," or words to that effect, surely a completely absurd statement. But he seems to take it seriously, and many reports do note his desire to somehow undo "the end of the Cold War," even as these reports somehow fail to note this looming 3oth anniversary of that end.

A front page story in today's Washington Post by its main Moscow correspondent, Robyn Dixon, lists six reasons why Putin is making this push.  The first is effectively this "redo the end of the Cold War" one, even as she fails to notice this looming anniversary as probably a factor in that. 

The second is the ongoing claim reinforced by Putin's long June essay on the issue that Ukraine "is not even a state," that it is or should really be at most "a protectorate" of Russia, if it even should be independent at all.  This is clearly historically absurd even if it is true that prior to the 20th century there was at most only briefly anything resembling a separate and independent Ukrainian state. Of course when one goes back far enough in time to when there was first a unified Russian-Ukrainian state, it was ruled out of Kyiv, not out of Moscow or St. Petersburg, a detail Putin and his spokespeople prefer to ignore.  But even acknowledging several centuries of Russian rule over Ukraine, even in those periods there were parts of modern Ukraine that Russia never ruled, notably the highly nationalistic western part that was ruled alternately by Poland and Austria at different times. I think even Putin is not keen on trying to rule those unruly anti-Russians there.

The third is the "security buffer" argument. Of all of the ones in this list this may have some credibility.  But Putin's own aggressive actions against Ukraine have, as already noted, turned most of Ukrainian public opinion against Russia, with a full 72% viewing Russia as a "hostile power" and pushing toward exactly those outcomes Putin does not want: Ukraine joining both the EU (62% in favor) as well as NATO (58%). He has brought about exactly what he does not want, and no amount of phony claims that the current Ukrainian government is run by a bunch of Nazis will undo that.

The fourth is essentially the fuller more explicit version of what is in the first one, the "One Russia" argument, that Ukraine really is not or should not be a separate state, and that it and Belarus should be part of Russia, or at least that Ukraine should become as subordinate to Russia as Belarus currently is. This has at times, including in Putin's June essay, involved making clearly false claims that there is not even a separate Ukrainian language or culture. However, more precisely there is the other possibly justifiable argument of admitting that there are two languages (at least) and that Russia needs to protect Russian speakers who are supposedly discriminated against and oppressed by the Ukrainian government. This was the bottom line justification for the annexation of Crimea and the support for the current separatist republics.  Again, this might be used to justify conquering some more territory in the eastern region, but that argument will not extend very far.

Then we have the "exporting chaos" argument, one that clearly has zero justification. This is based on the lie that the Ukrainian government is a total mess and not functional, when in fact it is currently democratic and fighting local corruption, if not fully successfully.  This becomes its real threat to Putin, a neighboring example of such a state, democratically run with full civil freedoms, a looming contrast to what is going on in Russia, where conditions are poor with mismanagement of the pandemic leading to a newly intensified lockdown in much of the country, and reports of Putin's poll numbers reaching new lows as he kills off or imprisons any credible rival. Of course the fake claim that the Ukrainian government is run by Nazis is part of all this, fitting in with the security buffer argument ("the Great Patriotic War!!!), although there are certainly some neo-Nazi groups operating in Ukraine who have at times had influence on governments, although not on the current one. And, of course, a Great Patriotic War abroad is always a good way to distract citizens from local problems and unhappiness, although there are some indications this may not be as popular as this stuff was in the past.  

Finally there is the claim of "Echoes of Russia's Imperial History." This may sell in Russia, but it does not do so anywhere else.  Allowing nations to claim as theirs whatever they once ruled at some time in the past when they were at their greatest power peak of expansionary rule is a recipe for total global war, given how many of such claims are totally in conflict.

I shall close by noting another unpleasant point that pretty much everybody ignores.  It is that in fact both the US and UK promised to "defend the territorial integrity of Ukraine" in the 1994 Budapest Accord, the other parties to which were Russia and Ukraine. This was the agreement that went along with Ukraine giving up its nuclear weapons to Russia.  Neither the US nor UK followed up on that when Russia seized control of Crimea and then annexed it. As it is, based on that Accord, maybe NATO has no grounds for defending Ukraine against a Russian invasion, but both the US and UK are already derelict in failing to do so previously, and will be even more so if they do nothing if Russia further invades, although probably the only thing that will happen in that case will be an imposition of much more serious economic sanctions.  In any case, I hope there is no invasion, and I hope Putin can hold himself back from doing so without making too much more tension. Heck, one virtue of being an authoritarian leader is that one can change the narrative and policy at any time one wants to.  This whole aggressive move has his been his doing without any substantial provocation by outside parties.  He can just stop doing it if he chooses at any point without any threat to his rule, I think.  I hope he decides that. Although I am sure this is going to go on at least past this looming anniversary and probably into next year sometime on the best of possible outcomes.

Barkley Rosser

PS: I just noticed that spell check does not like the currently correct "Kharkiv" but seems to prefer the Russian "Kharkov."  Gag.

More Partsanization Of The Environment

 The Environmental Protection Agency was founded during the presidency of Republican Richard Nixon, if perhaps with some lack of enthusiasm. The first national cap and trade (or "tradable emissions permits") system, for SO2, was instituted during the presidency of Republican George H.W. Bush. In 2008, Republican John McCain had an alternative plan to that proposed by Democrat Barack Obama for dealing with global warming, not all that different, mostly perhaps in scale.  Likewise even in 2012, while he was less specific, Republican Mitt Romney still at least gave lip service to doing something about this matter.

While he is not outright denying that global warming is happening as the more extreme members of his party argue, incoming Republican Governor of Virginia, Glenn Youngkin, supposedly a moderate Republican, has nevertheless announced his intention to remove Virginia from its participation in the not widely publicized Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) of which Virginia has been the southernmost participating states, the others including most of those to its northeast. This is indeed a cap and trade system for greenhouse gases. This RGGI is probably more open to criticism by those who argue that it has been too weak, too ineffective in substantially reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the states participating in it. But at least it is pushing in the right direction and provides an institutional foundation for doing more.

So it really sticks out that incoming Governor Youngkin wants out of it. Why?  Oooh, he will save Virginia taxpayers money, actually people who pay for electricity.  The estimate he provided yesterday (as reported in today's Washington Post metro section) is about $52.44 per average customer per year in utility bills, with him complaining that the RGGI is not really doing anything.  He promises an alternative, but gives no hint of what that might be. As it is, this strictly short term possible monetary gain is likely to be offset, possibly more than fully offset, by other monetary costs that will probably increase, such as higher flood insurance for people living in the state, quite aside from the broader issue of global warming.

Anyway, this seems to be a further degradation of the Republican Party.  Here we have a supposedly moderate Republican, who clearly feels he must indulge the irresponsibility of the Trumpist/extremist wing of his party, in going against the long-running more responsible past of members of his party with respect to environmental policy.  It may be that Youngkin will not be able to do this by executive order, or may be delayed in doing so. But that he wants to and will probably try to is simply sad in my view.

Barkley Rosser

Disposable time as a common-pool resource IX -- Disposable time as a model for environmental governance

Not only could disposable time be regarded as a common-pool resource similar to other common-pool resources, but it could stand as the single most far-reaching and democratically vital model of a common-pool resource. Donald Stabile alluded to something in this vein when he noted that, "Human labor is also the primary constituent of the society whose values must be part of any criterion of social evaluation. The appropriate starting point in any policy directed at social costs is with those imposed on labor."

In "Accountants and the Price System: the Problem of Social Costs," Stabile focused on the perspective introduced by John Maurice Clark in his Studies in the Economics of Overhead Costs. Clark argued that labor should be considered as an overhead cost of doing business rather than as a variable cost of the employing firm because the cost of maintaining the worker and his or her family in good stead has to be borne by someone, whether or not that worker is employed. "If all industry were integrated and owned by workers…," Clark explained, "it would be clear to worker-owners that the real cost of labor could not be materially reduced by unemployment."

Commenting on the efforts by some accountants during the 1970s to change the way social costs were accounted for on the corporate account books, Stabile concluded that those accountants had not developed useful concepts for examining social costs. To explain why they had failed, Stabile relied on the perspective on social costs set forth by Clark and by K. William Kapp in which analysis of the social costs of labor is central to a process of social evaluation. Such an outlook was missing from the works of social cost accountants, "Market values are a weak thread from which to hang a whole system of value," Stabile argued, "but accountants cling to it doggedly. Without an alteration of this basic tenet of accounting, social cost accounting cannot develop into a criterion of social value." 

Returning to Clark's example of the hypothetical state where all industry is integrated and owned by workers, there is an instance of a non-market process of social evaluation whose results can be worked out with little hesitation, unemployment would be regarded as sheer waste rather than as an unfortunate but necessary measure for accumulating surplus value. Social accounting for unemployment would come to a very different assessment of economic "efficiency" than would a narrowly financial one from capital's perspective.

Simply regarding disposable time as a common-pool resource would not automatically result in managing work as a commons. It is instead an important preliminary step that offers a rich conceptual framework for guiding the development of concrete policy proposals, research agendas, strategies and experiments. Such strategies and proposals can borrow from and combine experience in the governance of resources such as fisheries, forests and watersheds alongside lessons from trade union movements of the past and present and from feminist struggles for recognition and valuing of caregiving work.

Innovations that result from synthesizing such diverse experiences may seem disturbingly unfamiliar from the traditional perspective of viewing labour as a commodity. That is why it is important to not only foster an understanding of disposable time as a common-pool resource but in the process to not lose sight of what the traditional perspective entails and what is the relationship between the two views. In some of the most visionary lines of the Grundrisse, Marx rhapsodized about a future beyond the social contradictions of capital in which wealth is measured by the quantity of alienated labour time that capital is able to accumulate. In contrast to grim scenario, Marx briefly outlined a society in which disposable time become the measure of wealth:

For real wealth is the developed productive power of all individuals. The measure of wealth is then not any longer, in any way, labour time, but rather disposable time. Labour time as the measure of value posits wealth itself as founded on poverty, and disposable time as existing in and because of the antithesis to surplus labour time; or, the positing of an individual's entire time as labour time, and his degradation therefore to mere worker, subsumption under labour.

The degradation of individual to "mere worker" has its counterpart in the degradation of the earth to "mere resources," to be extracted, refined, and manufactured as quickly and extensively as possible into commodities. Conceiving of disposable time as a common-pool resource establishes a framework for understanding and resisting both forms of degradations.

Disposable time as a common-pool resource VIII -- An ecological subject

In "Foundations for Environmental Political Economy," John Dryzek explored the prospects of an environmentalist economic subject, "Homo ecologicus," as an alternative to the traditional rational actor or economic man. Dryzek criticized previous efforts at positing an ethical, environmentalist subject, saying they were flawed by wishful thinking and reductionism. The alternative Dryzek proposed instead was based on his Ostrom's case study work on managing common-pool resources. 

The alternative political economy would be one that can account for instrumental rationality – even deploy it in its proper place – but that also can point to alternatives grounded in something firmer than wishful thinking. Dryzek's alternative doesn't rely exclusively on subjectivity but also considers inter-subjectivity and communicative rationality. In Ostrom's work, what distinguished the successful case studies was communication and interaction between individuals. Participants learned to identify whom to trust, discern the effects their actions will have on others and on the shared resource, behave more "straightforwardly" toward each other and build institutional arrangements for resolving conflicts. This alternative subject, then, is habitually inclined toward social cooperation rather than atomistic individualism.

Successful institutions of the type identified by Ostrom rarely come into being through explicit contracts. More often they evolve through long periods of informal, collective learning about what works and what doesn't. Another approach to these institutions would involve more deliberate experimentation with institutional innovations. For such institutional reconstruction to take place, however, it is essential, Dryzek cautioned, that participation "move beyond the narrow community of political economists and political theorists and into society at large." Evaluating disposable time as a common pool resource could be one such deliberate experiment.

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RIP Sir Geoffrey C. Harcourt

 Yes, Geoff Harcourt died yesterday at age 90, not sure what of. It seems I am writing too many of these recently, but his passing deserves notice.  He is most famous for his book from 1972 Some Cambridge Controversies in the Theory of Capital, which expanded on an earlier JEL paper on the topic. This has long been viewed as the clearest general discussion of that topic there is, although many people were involved in those controversies, from Piero Sraffa Joan Robinson through Paul Samuelson and Robert Solow, to quite a few others, including Don Harris, father of current US VP Kamala Harris, with even me getting in on it in some later stages with a few articles. But he wrote the definitive work, which may also have been so definitive because he explained the whole thing so well.

From Adelaide, Australia originally and to which he returned for the later years of his life, he spent much of his career at Cambridge University in UK, becoming for several years the President of Jesus College there. I first met him on a visit there in 1973, just after his most famous work was published, and I found him engaging and personable, a genuinely nice guy.  And I have never heard anybody dispute that judgment.  I saw him a number of times in later years, and had not reason to change my judgment on that matter, always very friendly and outgoing.  He was one of those rare economists who had some of his  children follow him the profession. Most of us are such cranky types our children want nothing to do with it.

He wrote on many topics regarding Post Keynesian economics (or post-Keynesian economics as he preferred to spell it), while his work on the Cambridge capital theory controversies was the most famous.  However, I would like to note a special element of his career.  I am not going to dredge through the gory details, but Post Keynesian economics has been rife with splits and controversies, some of these becoming both heated and personalized, with national characters involved.  

There have been as many as six different schools of it identified, with the Modern Monetary Theory a more recent addition.  But I note three older ones that split to some degree along national lines and where the arguments became very heated.  At the most extreme opposite ends were the Americans who following Paul Davidson have emphasized the idea of uncertainty coming from Keynes.  At its opposite end are the "neo-Ricardian" Sraffians based mostly in Italy, but also with many in Britain, incuding in the past at Cambridge, notably Sraffa himself from Italy at Cambridge. They emphasized comparing long-run equlibria, with an emphasis indeed on the capital theory controversies, making it look that Harcourt would be in their camp. But he may have been more in a more strictly based camp, the neo-Kaleckians. But the later leader of the neo-Ricardians was Pierangelo Garegnani from Italy.

Anyway, during the 1980s for quite a few years there was summer camp for Post Keynesians where many of these would show up in Trieste, Italy. I never attended one of these, but I heard about them. This is where these debates became open and heated and personalized, with Davidson and Garegnani especially duking it out. I was told that it came to pass that when a prominent person from one side would give a seminar, those from the other camp would go out to hang out on the beach.  In any case, apparently there at these camps, it was Geoff Harcourt, liked and admired by everybody, who made the greatest efforts to overcome these differences and make peace, if not adjudicate intellectual rights or wrongs. For better or worse, he was unable to overcome the personalistic feuding.  But some of us know that he tried with the best intentions, and it was something so very typical of him.

Of course he had reached a substantial age, but I know that he was still putting out a few papers from time to time up until very recently.  He will be missed.

Barkley Rosser

Disposable time as a common-pool resource VII -- Common-pool property rights

Two key features of Ostrom's analysis: the distinguishing of a spectrum of separable property rights rather than monolithic "ownership" and the use of a grid that classifies goods according to how difficult it is to restrict access to them and the extent to which one person's use of a good subtracts from what is left available for others. Schlager and Ostrom identified a bundle of property rights pertaining to natural resources that they defined as follows:

1. Access: "The right to enter a defined physical property."
2. Withdrawal: "The right to obtain the "products" of a resource (e.g., catch fish, appropriate water, etc.)."
3. Management: "The right to regulate internal use patterns and transform the resource by making improvements."
4. Exclusion: "The right to determine who will have an access right, and how that right may be transferred."
5.  Alienation: "The right to sell or lease either or both of the above collective-choice (management and exclusion) rights."

The labour-as-a-commodity view actually restricts the scope of the wage earner's property right to the right to sell all the other rights (alienation!), while a common-pool resource perspective could grant access and withdrawal while retaining the three collective-choice rights.

 
Ostrom's matrix of goods is illustrated in the following diagram:

I've added "disposable time" to Ostrom's examples of common-pool resources to reflect Hodgskin's observation that skilled workers are the product of many years of unpaid care work ("under the strong influence of natural affection and parental love"). It would be extremely difficult to exclude potential beneficiaries from the resulting "good" (skilled labourer). A similar "common-pool resource" designation follows from looking at income employment as the "good" from the perspective of the worker.

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A Racist Screed in the New York Times

Really bad, misguided, even malicious writing serves a purpose, showing in extreme form the faults that, more subtly expressed, can pass under the radar.  That’s my reaction to this execrable column from today’s New York Times on the violation the author felt when her front lawn mini-library was perused by a white couple.

In a nutshell: Erin Aubry Kaplan lives in a historic black neighborhood, Inglewood just outside LA, and wants to sustain it against the forces of gentrification.  She also loves books.  Uniting these passions, she places a small library-on-a-post in front of her house, the sort that passers-by can scan, add titles to or take titles from as they wish.  She hopes it would provide a sense of community among her black neighbors.  But then she sees two young whites stopping to check it out.  She wrote this article to express her horror that her offering, which she placed on her own property, was being “taken” by the forces of gentrification and whiteness, threatening the future of a neighborhood she values, but also her realization that the defense of black spaces requires much more than individual action.

The first problem with the piece, probably obvious to everyone except the woman who wrote it, is that, on the basis of the information she gives, there is no reason to assume that the white couple is any wealthier than she is.  Hell, she doesn’t even know their credit rating.  If the problem with gentrification is that working class people are pushed out of their homes and communities, it’s about money, not race.  Upper-income perusers of books who happen to be black could be vectors of the process just as readily as upper-income whites.

Deeper, however, is the problem of assuming a zero-sum relationship between the well-being of different groups, racial or otherwise.  (This is something I’ve written about earlier.)  If white people have the opportunity to live in a desirable neighborhood, like the Inglewood Kaplan is striving to build, ipso facto black people have less.  Those book-sniffing whites, by their very presence, will make the area inhospitable to black homeowners or at the least deplete their social capital.

Now of course, it is entirely possible that a particular white couple with plans for redeveloping Inglewood and the resources to carry them out, could be a mortal threat.  Or that whites hostile to the customs that have evolved over generations of black settlement could, if numerous and disrespectful enough, destroy the neighborliness Kaplan values.  But neither can be inferred from the sketchy story she tells, and the underlying assumption that more opportunity for some always has to signify less for others is pernicious.

Finally, there is an unspoken assumption that neighborhood improvements like mini-libraries cumulatively add up to gentrification, replacing long-time residents with better-healed newcomers.  If that were true, then it becomes an argument for resisting any such enhancement, whether it be more attractive landscaping around someone’s house, curbside swales, local bakeries with fresh bread, mini-parks and the like.  Is that the implication?

The problem with gentrification is not that neighborhoods get too many amenities; it’s that they are amenities that cater to the rich and drive up housing values beyond the reach of those who aren’t—in an economy bifurcated between those with too much money and those with too little.  (See this earlier discussion.)  Instead of even a smidgeon of clarity about these issues, what we get instead is a screed that truly justifies the label of reverse racism, a term usually invoked by those defending the existing racial order.  This, like the antisemitism of old, is the socialism of fools.

It is also revealing that such a dreadful essay would be published by the Times, which apparently considers it within the realm of reasonable debate.  That too is a statement.

Disposable time as a common-pool resource VI -- Withholding labour

Superficially, it might seem that the individual worker can deny access to an employer offering unsuitable terms. But it is here we need to factor in that peculiarity of labour-power noted by the silk weaver, William Longson, that a day's labour not sold on the day it is offered is "lost to the labourer and to the whole community." "If his capacity for labour remains unsold," Marx agreed, "the labourer derives no benefit from it, but rather he will feel it to be a cruel nature-imposed necessity that this capacity has cost for its production a definite amount of the means of subsistence and that it will continue to do so for its reproduction."

This contingency and urgency of employment effectively undermines the worker's option of refusing work. The option of refusing work at unsuitable wages or conditions is further undermined by competition from incrementally more desperate job seekers – a population Marx famously referred to as "an industrial reserve army," a more dramatic name for the relative surplus population he analysed in the Grundrisse.

The pervasiveness of unemployment from the paid labour force collaterally stigmatizes and marginalizes unpaid work. For example, "welfare to work" schemes require single parents of young children to take low-paid work that often forces them to depend on unsuitable childcare arrangements. Such rules discount the social value of parenting work but are enforced on the grounds that public assistance recipients are employable.

There are no barriers to entry to unpaid work and relatively few credentials awarded for doing it. Thus mobility from unpaid care work to paid employment is impeded. Work done outside the paid labour force rarely counts as work experience. Instead, the time away from paid labour depreciates accumulated skills and credentials.

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TimeWork Web

I have added a whole bunch of stuff to the restored TimeWork Web and it looks like I am going to have to launch a sustained marketing campaign to generate traffic to it. Please excuse the self-promotion, but I think it's a pretty formidable accomplishment to sustain a research project for 26 years without any direct institutional support  (although there have been a few indirect sources of funding over the years).

The 2021 bicentennial of the publication of The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties has served as the culmination of this research project. One day, perhaps, historians, Marxologist, ecological economists, degrowth advocates, shorter work time advocates, leisure scholars, and English Romantic literature scholars will come to realize why The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties really does need to be "rescued from its oblivion" once and for all.

If, as Moishe Postone wrote, Marx's analysis in the Grundisse is 'the key to interpreting his mature critique of political economy," then Marx's well-documented appreciation -- and occasional criticism -- of The Source and Remedy is the key to interpreting his analysis of the historical specificity of value in the Grundrisse.

Disposable time as a common-pool resource V -- Social costs and common-pool resources

 The basic idea behind common-pool resources also has a venerable place in the history of classical political economy and neoclassical economic thought. In the second edition of his Principles of Political Economy, Henry Sidgwick observed that "private enterprise may sometimes be socially uneconomical because the undertaker is able to appropriate not less but more than the whole net gain of his enterprise to the community." From the perspective of the profit-seeking firm, there is no difference between introducing a new, more efficient production process and simply shifting a portion of the costs or risks onto someone else, society or the environment. In fact, the opportunities for the latter may be more readily available.

One example Sidgwick used to illustrate this was "the case of certain fisheries, where it is clearly for the general interest that the fish should not be caught at certain times, or in certain places, or with certain instruments; because the increase of actual supply obtained by such captures is much overbalanced by the detriment it causes to prospective supply." Sidgwick admitted that many fishermen may voluntarily agree to limit their catch but even in this circumstance, "the larger the number that thus voluntarily abstain, the stronger inducement is offered to the remaining few to pursue their fishing in the objectionable times, places, and ways, so long as they are under no legal coercion to abstain."

Applying the same principle to the context of labour-power, "fishing in the objectionable times, places and ways" manifests itself in the standard practice of employers considering labour as a "variable cost." From the standpoint of society as a whole, unemployment is simply a way of shifting the overhead cost of labour onto society as a whole. John Maurice Clark discussed this cost-shifting aspect in the 1920s in his Studies in the Economics of Overhead Costs, especially his chapter on "labor as an overhead cost."

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