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.

What Is The Bielefeld School Of Economics?

 This is about a paper I have just written for a special issue to appear in a journal I used to edit about the late economist, Peter Flaschal. Who most of you are probably thinking, although maybe not all of you? He was a heterodox macroeconomist located for his entire career at Bielefeld University in Germany.  He coauthored a lot with a group of economists who either were on the faculty there, at least for some time, or visited there frequently. Some of the other members of this group are the also now late Carl Chiarella of the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia, Willi Semmler of the New School in New York, Peter Skott of U-Mass Amherst, Toichiro Asada of Chuo University in Tokyo, Reiner Franke of Bremen University in Germany. They have tended to work on fairly mathematical nonlinear dynamics models that can show both growth and endogenous cycles, including complex ones such as chaotic, so, unsurprisingly, up my alley. 

Their most important influence was models of this sort by the late Richard Goodwin, who had a Marx-influenced predator-orey model of class struggle syclical fluations. Their early models were labeled as Kynes-Wicksell-Goodwin (KWG) models, But then they picked up invnentory adjustment models from Metzler, leading them to label their models Keynes-Metzler (KMG) models.  Around 2009 Flaschel in particular, sort of following Goodwin on this, put more emphasis on both Marx and Schumpeter, relabeling their models as Keynes-Marx-Schumpeter (KMS) models. Their models differ both from the New Keynesian models that assume rational expectations and dominate much of academic macroeconomics nnd are paid attention to by central bankers, and also Post Keynesian models, that tend to be less mathematical, although both have also been influenced by Kalecki and Kaldor. Partly because they have had trouble publishing in to journals and have never created any of their own like the Post Keynesians have, they have done a lot of book writing, with Flaschel an author of coauthor on 17, not counting even more he edited or coedited, mostly with people named above.

Flaschel and several of them also advocating somewhat leftish policies for government intervention in economies to stabilize the endogenous fluctuations their models show to be prevalent, with these largely driven by real effects involving wage-price dynamics and inventory adjustments rather than financieal fluctuations, although they have well-developed financial sectors in their models, and some of them have done a lot of financial modeling, notably the late Chiarella, who wss a coeditor of the Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control for a while. 

Anyway, the policy angle that Flaschel especially came to advocate, along with Proano and Asada has been flexicurity, an approach inspired by policy in Denmark. It combines having a flexible labor market on both sides, free hirigin and firing with strong labor organizing, and a strong social safety net with government serving as an "employer of first resort." They have also advocated educational reforms to enhance all this as well as the use of pension funds for financing real capital investment, again with an idea to help smooth out business cycles. This approach has many supporters in the EU, where Flashel's writings on this have gotten some attention, although critics have called them "naive."

Anyway, I gave them this label of "Bielefeld School" in a Foreword I wrote for one of their books in 2995, Foundations for a Disequilibrium Theory of the Business Cycle: Qualitative Analysis and Quantittative Assessment, by Chiarella, Flaschel, and Franke our of Cambridge University Press. The label has not caught on much, and they have not gotten as much attention as I think they deserve. My paper compares them in more detail to Post Keynesians, who are perhaps more combative about their heterodox relations with mainstream economics and only barely aware of these people, who sometimes put them down for their sometimes lack of mathematical rigor. I suggest that their common admiration for Kalecki and Kaldor and Goodwin whose models can generate complex dynamics is a possible opening for them to communicate and support each other, especially given that they are generally in the same neck of the ideological and policy woods, with the modern monetary theorists full emploiyment ideas looking somewhat like those of this flexicurity approach that does not get talke about in the US.

Barkley Rosser

Mourning The Late Jiang Zemin?

Former Chinese leader Jiang Zemin died at age 96 on Nov. 30, curiously just as the worst outbreak of demonstrations to happen in China since 1989 happened, probably now come to an end, as China both suppresses them, arresting some people based on phones and visual surveillance, as well as some loosening in certain locations of the zero covid policy. Jiang came to power initially in the immediate wake of Tienanman Square in 1989, reportedly pulled up the ranks by retired elders, the unofficial but powerful "Sitting Committee" of the Politburo. Someone with a record as a somewhat opportunistic technocrat, it was initially thought he would be weak, but he remained in power until 2002, and continued to hold the Chairmanship of the Military Commission until 2004, while somewhat weaker Hu Jintao had become General Secretary of the Party and also President. 

Indeed, in his efforts to centralize power totally on himself, the networks of those linked to other powerful figures he needed to put down were probably more allied to Jiang than to Hu. If there was a serious alternative to Xi, it was probably Jiang more than Hu, although obviously Jiang had become very old and ill. 

But his death does pose a difficult moment for Xi. Apparently the state funeral will be this coming Tuesday, Dec. 6. There has been a history of political trouble following the deaths of former leaders, with the Tienanman Square uprising following the death of former leader Hu Yubang. It is not that Jiang was all that liberal, indeed was probably less so than his successor, Hu. But many are indeed making unfavorable comparisons between him and Xi, with his regime being remembered for being more open and free and tied to the rest of the world, with China joining the WTO during his time, as well at the period experiencing solid and unbroken economic growth. China has become very isolated, even more so with the covid locdowns that have become the focus of recent demonstrations.

Probably Xi will be able to get through this without too much upheaval, especially with the demonstrations against the lockdowns apparently shut down.  Nevertheless, it is reported that this funeral has many people talking more openly about unhappiness with the current regime.

Barkley Rosser

Economic Policy After The Midterm Elecions

 Will economic policy change much aa a result of the midterm elecrtions? After all, the GOP has taken the House of Representatives, if only narrowly, with inflation and the economy supposedly the top issue, especially for those supporting the GOP. Will this reappearance of "divided government" have an impact on economic policy? My bottom line is probably not too much, although there is the serious possibility of some major drama and damage happening during this coming year.

On the matter of having "divided government," I must note that we already have been having that, if not in the way this is usually posed. While Dems nominally controlled both the White House and Congress, although only partially so in the Senate given the need for 60 votes to win on any issue not tied to the budget and thus able to managed by reconciliation (and even on those not necessarily, given two Dem senators not always supporting Dem budget-related proposals), what has been left out of such discussions has been the Supreme Court. It has been dominated strongly the past two years by serious conservatives appointed by GOP presidents who have taken an aggressive stance on overturning policies accepted by past presidents and Congresses dominated by both parties. An egregious example of this regarding economic policy has been the restricting of the EPA's ability to regulate pollution, a serious matter.

Of course a major reason the change of control of the House will not have all that much effect on inflationary policy is that the Fed is the lead entity on that, and I do not see the Fed changing its policy that much in response to the election, whatever one thinks of the Fed's policy. As it is they have been fairly sharply raising interest rates recently, with the value of the US dollar being quite strong, with this in fact beginning to show some signs of inflation beginning to slow down, if still much higher than most people would like it to be. And we now have hints from Powell that while the Fed is still intent on further interest rate increases, those may also begin to slow down somewhat, maybe only 50 basis points up in December rather than 75. Again, these considerations look disconnected from the election outcome.

Obviously where the House may be able to change economic policy somewhat involves fiscal policy, given the House role in budgetary policy. And they may in fact make efforts to reduce or eliminate funding for certain Biden admin initiatives, particularly some in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). As it is much of Biden's fiscal policy will not be affected. The probably somewhat inflatoinary ARPA is largely over, although there is still some disbursement of funds from it still happening. Also, the infrastructure and CHIPS acts seem to have some GOP support, so will probably be largely left alone.

What seems to be the top target in the IRA is funding for increasing the number of auditors in the IRS, with the GOP having put out all kinds of phony scare stories about these agents to be hired showing up armed at the doors of all kinds of middle class people. As it is, many of those to be hired are supposed to help out with such things as answering telephones, which most of the time now does not happen, with this sort of thing having become a problem due to many funding cuts in recent years for the IRS pushed by the GOP in Congress. In terms of enforcement the new agents are supposed to focus on higher income scofflaws as well as corporate ones, not middle or lower class ones. In any case, if the GOP-run House does succeed in cutting this funding, this will be inflationary due to reducing tax revenues. 

Another fiscal policy matter they might well push, although this is more likely to get blocked by the Senate or Biden veto is again cutting tax rates for higher income and wealthier people. This would also be inflationary if it gets implemented.

Arguably anti-inflationary would be cuts to Social Security and Medicare, although these are less likely to get passed, with I suspect some GOPs in Congress not wanting to get on board such cuts. But in fact cuts to Medicare might lead to higher costs rather than lower ones for recipients, and any changes to Social Security, if they were to happen, would probably take the form of raising the retirement age, only affecting Social Security outlays sometime in the future, not anytime soon.

Probably the only possibly anti-inflationary policy they would push might be for various policies to increase fossil fuel production in the US. These are likely to be blocked by veto if not the Senate, and would only have a fairly small impact some time in the future, given that as of now oil companies are sitting on lots of unused permits for drilling on public land. And one of the items the GOP loves to talk about a lot, the XL pipeline from Canada, would have zero impact on oil production in the US, and probably near zero even on production in Canada, as most of that oil gets out by other means anyway.

What the GOP in the House seems mostly obsessed with is having lots of hearings, with almost none of these having anything to do with economics, much less inflation in particular. Their top priority seems to be to expose the salacious contents of Hunter Biden's laptop, which like the 8 in a row Benghazi hearings will find nothing because there is apparently actually nothing on there about Joe Biden involving anything that actually happened, although that will provide lots of opportunities for GOP Reps to get on Fox News and its crazier cousins to promise that the next day will bring that witness that will surely show how bad Biden was. Hearings on Afghanistan, Fauci, and much else will also be similarly irrelevant to economic policy, although if they have hearings on trying to reduce immigration, well, like cutting funding for the IRS, this will likely be inflationary, not the opposite.

The possibility for drama involves the old saw matter of the debt ceiling, which the newly crazy GOPs in the House may well be willing to resist raising while making unacceptable demands to the point of triggering a default, which could indeed bring crashing financial markets and a global recession, with at least some degree of recession having non-trivial probability of happening anyway this coming year due both to Fed tightening as well as economic slowing in the rest of the world coming from China and the effects of the war in Ukraine. This suggests that a high priority for the Dems in Congress in the remainder of the lame duck session should be to use reconciliation to either substantially raise the debt ceiling or, better yet, just eliminate the darned thing that has been a damaging anachronism since almost the time it was instituted over a century ago, the only such thing on the planet. 

But, unfortunately, it seems that neither Biden nor any leading Dem in Congress, not even Bernie Sanders, seems at all interested in doing anything about this. Why they are so complacent on this I really do not know, although it seems they are all scared of some boogeyman of being viewed as "fiscally irresponsible."  But, as far as I am concerned, it looks to be utterly fiscally irresponsible to allow these incoming lunatics in the House the ability to wreak havoc on this matter. Deals were cut in the past in similar situations, as in 2011, and some Dems may think that the GOP will get blamed for any bad outcome on this.  But blaming GOP for a temporary government partial shutdown is one thing. Blaming them for a major recession is quite another, with blame for that, if it gets really bad and spills into 2024, much more likely to end up on the doorstep of the White House. What are they thinking?

Barkley Rosser

So Much For The Iran Nuclear Deal

 Sorry you have not seen me here for awhile. My laptop on which I am able to post here was out of commission, but now has been fixed.

Well, it was not the US beating Iran in the World Cup. It is that the Europeans, especially the British, French, and Germans, have had it with Iran over the combination of their bloody attempts to suppress the ongoing demonstrations over the law that women must wear the hijab, as well as Iran's overt supplying of Russia with drones to attack Ukraine. They have now come to oppose further negotiations with Iran over the JCPOA nuclear deal.  I do not see this changing barring major changes in the current situation.

Frankly, I think the leaders in Iran could just bend on this hijab law. Heck, it is not something in the Qur'an. But an Iranian friend of mine says they view this as a slippery slope situation. If they give on that, then they will just lose total control.

I think Biden could have just gone back in to the deal when he first got in to office, although there were some details that needed to be straightened out, given that the Iranians had also eventually gotten out of compliance. But I think it could have been done, with Biden being too cautious and looking over his shoulder at Congress. Once they got in to dragged out negotiations it just all went to heck, never could pin it down.

Of course, the underlying problem goes back to Trump withdrawing from the deal when Iran was adhering to it. He claimed he would get a better one, but, of course, did not do so.  The upshot was the replacement of the more moderate government with the current hardliners who are convinced they cannot get rid of their silly hijab law.  Bah!

Barkley Rosser

The Anti-Racism of Fools

Antisemitism has long been intermingled with movements against injustice and elite control.  This is because the most widespread image in the mind of antisemites is the existence of a secretive cabal of Jews who control global finance and promote liberal-sounding ideas only because it serves their nefarious goals.  Hatred of Jews therefore deflects radical inclinations that might otherwise fuel movements against real domination.  This understanding was summed up in the expression that “antisemitism is the socialism of fools”, often voiced in socialist circles in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Now that class is no longer regarded as the ur-oppression from which all others stem, new reservoirs of fools can be tapped to keep antisemitism in business.  This is apparent in the ongoing wave of anti-Jewish bigotry that masks itself as anti-racism.  Ye and Kyrie Irving are relatively easy examples to point to, since their foolishness is on display.  But even a much cleverer Dave Chappelle illustrates the anti-racism of fools trope.  Watch his recent SNL monologue closely, and you can see all the elements there—not only the winking references to Jewish collusion and control, but also the way sly attacks on Jews become a substitute for identifying and challenging the control of cultural institutions, and most of the rest of America, by the ultra-rich, who, for historical reasons, are nearly entirely white.  Like, why should the livelihood of any artist, which of course includes satirists, depend on patronage by corporate moguls?  The fool part is thinking you’ve pinpointed the problem by fantasizing about a conspiracy of Jewish moguls.

Being smart is not a defense against being stupid, and bigotry is always stupid.

The Right Journalist to Cover the FTX/SBF Story Is No Longer with Us

 Hunter S. Thompson

The Audition Commodity

Richard Serra and Carlotta Fay Schoolman produced the video, "Television Delivers People" in 1973. It manifests a critique of television mass media that was subsequently defined by communications scholar, Dallas Smythe as the "audience commodity" but the outline of which had already been presented by him in 1951 in the Quarterly of Film, Radio and Television:

The troublesome fact is that under our uneasy institutional compromise by which the stations are publicly licensed and commercially operated, the effective, if not the legal, responsibility is divided. And the voice which speaks most often to the consumer is that of the advertiser. Is it any wonder that the consumer is confused and inarticulate in trying to express his judgment as to how these media should conduct themselves? Is it any wonder that our traditional view of our cultural values, including freedom of speech and freedom of the press, may be reshaped increasingly into the likeness of the cultural values of the advertisers?

Smythe's point was not that advertisements occupied the majority of the air time but the it was the advertiser who dictated what kind of programming was most conducive to attracting an audience that would respond positively to its commercial message. Advertisers would not settle for just any audience, but sought an audience of consumers -- consumers of its products. The exchange value of an audience would thus be determined by its propensity to consume the products advertised.

I'm not really interested in subsequent criticisms and defenses of Smythe's formulation because they are mostly concerned with minutiae over whether or not Smythe carried his analogy between audiences and workers too far (which he did, in my opinion, but that doesn't discredit the larger picture). In a 1977 paper, Smythe asked, rhetorically, "Am I correct in assuming that all non-sleeping time under capitalism is work time?" My answer to that would be no, but because it was a rhetorical question, there really would be no point in answering.

I briefly mentioned Smythe's audience commodity in talks I gave in the summer of 2021. I would like to go further now to articulate what the 21st century version of that audience commodity looks like. While there is still a traditional mass media component, a new element of media has emerged since the mid-1960s that has a "do-it-yourself" flavor of "pseudo-activity" -- to use Adorno's terms. The most recent iteration of this activity is so-called social media.

The sourcing of content is the most obvious feature of social media. Millions of amateurs crank out content for twitter, tik-tok, instagram, etc. daily in the hope of going viral and potentially monetizing their social media presence. The prospects of success in this effort are mediated by algorithms that are oblivious to the artistic or intellectual quality of the content that is promoted.

Although social media emerged in the period following the Indian Ocean Tsunami of December 26, 2004, its features evolved over the previous four decades and are discernable in, for example, motivational training, multi-level marketing, and academic publishing and conferencing. In all of these enterprises, participants perform work and/or produce content for no compensation other than the prospect of self promotion. Often they pay fees or costs to participate.

Like television broadcasters, social media platforms sell an audience to advertisers. Unlike television broadcasters, they do not produce content to attract that audience but instead provide an outlet for some portion of that audience to produce its own content, the bulk of which disappears into the virtual void. Alongside and augmenting the audience commodity is what I call an "audition commodity" of content producers throwing content against the wall in the hopes that something sticks.

In contrast to Smythe's audience commodity, the audition commodity does perform work albeit largely of the socially unnecessary kind. A small percentage of Twitter accounts are responsible for a large proportion of tweets and consequently of media views and advertising revenues. In 2019, Pew Research reported that 10% of tweeters are responsible for 80% of tweets. Nevertheless, it is the banter -- retweeting, quote tweeting, and commenting -- that lends an interactive patina to the medium.

Eighty-four percent of Google Scholar articles since 2021 mentioning audience commodity also mentioned social media, although those mentioning audience commodity constitute less than a quarter of a percent of articles that mention social media. Over three times that many articles pair social media and town square and over six times as many pair social media with marketplace of ideas and 50 times as many pair it with public space, albeit sometimes ironically or critically.

To recycle a paragraph from that year-old post about the marketplace of ideas:

Social media has created the illusion that anybody can become a celebrity in a viral heartbeat, as if the circuits of social media amplification were not as dominated by advertising, propaganda, and entertainment as any television network. What the competition of the market tests, though, is not the "truth" of ideas but their marketability. That is to say, their superfluity relative to truth.

The Humiliation Of Hu Jintao

 The recently completed onec-every-five-years Party Congress in China, which confirmed Xi Jinping for a third term as General Secretary of the party, punctuated his apparent assumption of essentially total power by humiliating his predecessor, Hu Jintao, in its final session. At the beginning, he was forced to leave the session, with two men clearly pulling on his clothing in a widely seen video to make him get up and go. It is unclear how much of this was reported to the Chinese public, but the English language Chinese media insisted that he left the meeting for health reasons.  Apparently his health is not all that great, but he was not obviously immediately ill when made to leave, and he was most clearly made to leave.

So, why this humiliation? The general view is that indeed it was Xi asserting his total control very clearly to everybody in the room and more widely.  Later that session pretty much all remaining allies of Hu in either the 24 member Politburo or its 7 member Standing Committee were removed and replaced by loyalists of Xi's, with this reportedly going further and deeper than expected, although it was expected.

Reports have tried to argue that rule by Xi is a great improvement over that by Hu, with this supposedly justifying this humiliation heaped upon him. Of course, China now has a higher GDP and larger military, with deep poverty eliminated in the last decade, and many scientific achievements occurring, along with a space program happening. But pretty much all of this probably would have happened if Hu had been in power over the past decade. Growth was rapid under his rule in 2002-2012, indeed more rapid than under Xi given the slowdown in growh in the last few years. Most of these activities and trends were already well in place and ongoing under Hu.  It is not clear Xi has added anything at all to any of it himself, aside from perhaps a greater acceleration of military buildup.

The latter has been accompanied by something not at all admirable, a more aggressive and hostile approach to neighboring countries.  This is supposed to justify Xi's assumption of total power and imposition of massive surveillance on citizens in a way unseen anywhere in the world ever. Fights are being picked with India, although there have been wars with India decades ago, all of which China won. The policy of expanding into the South China Sea, which international courts have ruled China does not own, was happening under Hu, but has been accelerated under Xi. Xi has also taken more direct control of Hong Kong, with the prospect that this economic golden egg is going to be severely damaged and stop producing what it did in the past, with the suppression of human rights now going on there, leafing to many fleeing.  And, of course, we have seen heightened threats against Taiwan, a place that is superior in every single regard in per capita terms to the Peoples' Republic, which seeks to control it and to it what it is now doing to Hong Kong.

All this is being emphasized further by Xi's first action after the Congress, to go to the Yan'an cave, a founding place of significance to the Communist Party. Xi there emphasized "arduous strruggle" as he did in his long speech at the Congress. But why should a nation not at war with neighbors and enjoying a still rapid growth into solidly middle income status, and moving into its higher levels, have to engage in "arducous struggle"? Why cannot people achieving a higher standard of living enjoy it? This is what goes on in democratic nations with high incomes. They do not threaten their neighbors and go around shutting down cities while super surveilling people.  China is increasingly going on a dark path as its leader becomes a totalitarian dictator whose bad decisions will not be countered by any checks or balances by anybody.  This is the phenomenon of degnerate autocracy, whose path and model is that set by Xi's pal, V.V. Putin in Russia, with his now clearly disastrous invasion of Ukraine.

I shall note two items that have been put forward in the media with little comment or questioning as supporting the claim that Xi is somehow some improved leader over Hu. One has to do with corruption and the other has to do with income inequality.  Supposedly Hu was very bad on both of these, Xi is a great improvement and a hard charging reformer on both. There is some basis for this, but it is seriously exaggerated.

The stronger case is on the matter of corruption. The pro-market and essentially capitalist reforms set in motion by Deng Xioaping did lead to the emergence of a wealthy elite, with this emergence accompanying an apparent increase in corruption. The trend to this was in place when Hu took power, and he did little to combat it. Xi very publicly engaged in an anti-corruption campaign when he took office. It has indeed led to some improvement in China's international ranking on this matter, with China moving from being the 80th to the 66th most corrupt nation in the world according to Transparency International, over the past decade. A major problem with this campaign is that it appears to have been heavily directed at critics of Xi, thus with this campaign also being part of his consolidation of personal power. These days one must be one of his cronies to get away with being corrupt, with there still being plenty of that around.

The matter of income inequality is less clear, with a not so good story involved.  When Hu took power in 2002, income inequality was rapidly increasing. He came in with a call to turn that around, and in fact he succeeded. He especially focused on the regional inequality and also the gap between the urban and rural populations.  He made moves to reduce taxes on farmers, and he also introduced in 2005 and old age pension program. Richard Easterlin has documented that citizens had been becoming less happy in China up to about 2005, with this turning around then and going the other way, coinciding with these reforms implemented by Hu. As it was it still took until 2008 for aggregate inequlality to peak with a Gini coefficient around .49. It then began to decline and did so quite noticeably to about a .47 level by 2012. This decline continued for three more years after Xi replace Hu to 2015, when it bottomed out at around .45. But since then it has returned to creeping upward, getting back up to about .46 most recently. So, Xi can claim to have a lower Gini than when he started, but this masks an unfortunate turnaround with a return to a gradually increasing income inequality under his rule.

It should be noted that while Hong Kong has much greater income inequality than mainland PRC, Taiwan has much greater equality, with a Gini in the low 30s.

A final matter that cuts in several directions, has been Xi's crackdown on high flying CEOs of major corporations. Arguably this is a move to increase income and wealth equality, although as noted already, income inequality is actually increasing again. It may also be directed at possible corruption, although it is not clear that all of those Xi is attacking are all that corrupt. It seems more that he wants to squash them as possible alternative power centers, and indeed a curious fact about the most recent Party Congress was the much greater absence of any executives from major private companies in China. The Party is clearly emphasizing a return to more of a command and state-centered mode of operation in the economy. This may not pay off so well, as many of these CEOs are leaders of the highest tech companies in the nation. Going after them may aggravate the clear slowdown in economic growth that is happening, with this also being driven by ongoing lockdowns that increase social control, as well as the collapse of the real estate sector in China. Xi Jinping's assumption of total power for an unclear time in the future may in fact lead to economic and social stagnation in China, with all this to be distracted from by calls for "arduous struggle" and aggressive actions towards neighboring powers. This is a sad and disturbing outcome.

Frankly, Hu Jintao looks to have been a more humanitarian and in many ways more effective leader than his successor. He did not deserve the humiliation he received.

Barkley Rosser

Are North Korean Workers Going To Annexed Portions Of Ukraine?

 Maybe. An October 21 report in NK Daily says so, with further speculation on this matter on blogs that cover North Korea. Supposedly Kim Jong Un agreed to this with V.V. Putin in their most recent meeting, with the number supposedly to be around 800-1,000, with the NK Daily report saying that they have actually been selected, and with Russia, China, and North Korea somehow agreeing that having these workers work in Russian-occupied annexed portions of Ukraine would not violate sanctions.  

I do not know what these workers will supposedly be doing. However, supposedly they will be going in November specifically to the Donbas area. I guess we shall see more about this, a curious development.

Barkley Rosser