Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – September 25, 2022

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – September 25, 2022

by Tony Wikrent

The Making Of "LINCOLN" Behind The Scenes

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[TW: A enthralling discussion of how they strove to make the film as authentic as possible. The clock ticking heard in the background of some scenes, for example, was a recording made of a watch Lincoln had actually owned. And Daniel Day Lewis describing how he researched and came to love Lincoln as a person is simply marvelous. ]

Light Under a Bushel: Eric Foner, interviewed by Nawal Arjini

[The New York Review of Books, September 17, 2022]

My father, Jack Foner, lost his job at the City University of New York because of the legislative investigation of “Communist influence” on the school. This was in the early 1940s, before McCarthy. My mother, who was a high school art teacher and an artist in her own right, was also named and was going to be fired from the city educational system, but the principal of her school allowed her to retire on a medical disability instead so that she could get a pension. My family lived on my mother’s pension while I was growing up. Much later, in the late 1960s, my father was able to get a teaching job for the remainder of his career.

Blacklisting had a devastating impact on the teaching of history. Some of the very best scholars were thrown out of the profession. But I eventually realized that that experience was very educational. I learned something a lot of my college classmates didn’t know and had to learn during the 1960s: the rhetoric of freedom, liberty, and progress in our country does not comport with reality. A person losing his livelihood because someone called him a Communist—what does that tell us about freedom of speech, academic freedom in this country? The principles the country claimed to stand for and the practices it instituted were contradictory, which many young people came to discover in other ways, through the Vietnam War and the way the government lied or the civil rights revolution and the idea that we lived in equality….

“We can’t accept the principle that the way to judge a course of study is by how much money you will make. It’s important to study history if you want to be an intelligent citizen in a democracy…

The Complicity of the Textbooks

Eric Foner [The New York Review of Books, September 22, 2022]

In Teaching White Supremacy, Donald Yacovone traces how the writing of American history, from Reconstruction on, has falsified and illuminated our racial past…..

Like most works of history, W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America concludes with a bibliography listing primary and other sources consulted by the author. Most of the groupings are unexceptional—for example, monographs, government reports, and biographies. But Du Bois’s first and largest category comes as a shock to the modern reader: it consists of books by historians who believe African Americans to be “sub-human and congenitally unfitted for citizenship and the suffrage.” Just before the bibliography, Du Bois includes a chapter, “The Propaganda of History,” that indicts the profession for abandoning scholarly objectivity in the service of “that bizarre doctrine of race that makes most men inferior to the few.” This was the state of historical scholarship in the United States when Black Reconstruction was published, in 1935.

US is becoming a ‘developing country’ on global rankings that measure democracy, inequality 

[The Conversation, via Naked Capitalism 9-21-2022]

In its global rankings, the United Nations Office of Sustainable Development dropped the U.S. to 41st worldwide, down from its previous ranking of 32nd. Under this methodology – an expansive model of 17 categories, or “goals,” many of them focused on the environment and equity – the U.S. ranks between Cuba and Bulgaria. Both are widely regarded as developing countries.

The U.S. is also now considered a “flawed democracy,” according to The Economist’s democracy index.

As a political historian who studies U.S. institutional development, I recognize these dismal ratings as the inevitable result of two problems. Racism has cheated many Americans out of the health care, education, economic security and environment they deserve. At the same time, as threats to democracy become more serious, a devotion to “American exceptionalism” keeps the country from candid appraisals and course corrections.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – September 18, 2022

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – September 18, 2022

by Tony Wikrent

Economics as cultural warfare

Our Ancestors Thought We’d Build an Economic Paradise. Instead We Got 2022 

Brad DeLong [Time, via Naked Capitalism 9-11-2022]

Adapted from DeLong’s new book, Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century, published by Basic Books….

...the first half of the Big Story of twentieth-century economic history is a triumphant one. Friedrich von Hayek was a genius. He saw clearly that the market economy, when coupled with industrial research labs, modern corporations, and globalization, was the key to unlocking the cage keeping humanity desperately poor. He thus preached the gospel: “The market giveth, the market taketh away: blessed be the name of the market.” We should, he thought, be satisfied with the fact that there was a large-enough pie, count our blessings, and ignore the problems of slicing and tasting it properly.

[TW: DeLong’s positive mention of von Hayek is a clear warning sign. As Corey Robin explained in his May 2013 article, “Nietzsche’s Marginal Children: On Friedrich Hayek,”

But to understand that text and its influence, it’s necessary to turn away from contemporary America to fin de siècle Vienna. The seedbed of Hayek’s arguments is the half-century between the “marginal revolution,” which changed the field of economics in the late nineteenth century, and the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy in 1918. It is by now a commonplace of European cultural history that a dying Austro-Hungarian Empire gave birth to modernism, psychoanalysis and fascism. Yet from the vortex of Vienna came not only Wittgenstein, Freud and Hitler but also Hayek, who was born and educated in the city, and the Austrian school of economics…. 

Throughout his writing life, Nietzsche was plagued by the vision of workers massing on the public stage—whether in trade unions, socialist parties or communist leagues. Almost immediately upon his arrival in Basel, the First International descended on the city to hold its fourth congress. Nietzsche was petrified. “There is nothing more terrible,” he wrote in The Birth of Tragedy, “than a class of barbaric slaves who have learned to regard their existence as an injustice, and now prepare to avenge, not only themselves, but all generations.” Several years after the International had left Basel, Nietzsche convinced himself that it was slouching toward Bayreuth in order to ruin Wagner’s festival there. And just weeks before he went mad in 1888 and disappeared forever into his own head, he wrote, “The cause of every stupidity today…lies in the existence of a labour question at all. About certain things one does not ask questions.”

[TW continued: Robin’s article stirred up vitriolic responses from conservatives and libertarians—and they completely missed the crucial point that since he was a product of an oligarchical society, von Hayek’s economics was based on oligarchical disdain and hostility for working people and their capacity for self government. As Irish socialist James Connolly wrote in 1910:

A people poisoned by the adulation of royalty can never attain social freedom. The mind accustomed to political kings can easily be reconciled to social kings – capitalist kings of the workshop, the mill, the railway, the ships and the docks.

[TW continued: So it’s no surprise that DeLong is a self-professed “Davos Man… a card-carrying neoliberal, a believer in globalization and free trade.” In his new book, DeLong attributes humanity’s 1870s-1880s escape from the grip of Malthusian scarcity to the rise of “industrial research labs, deployed at scale by modern corporations,” while completely ignoring the dirgistic program of neo-mercantalist nation-building enabled by first Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton’s design of the USA economy (including, crucially, the Constitutional mandate that economic activity should “promote the General Welfare” and that the national government is not limited to the powers enumerated in the Constitution, but has implied powers to undertake whatever is needed to fulfill that mandate). Rather than the Marxist model of the means of production determining the political superstructure, what actually happens under Hamilton’s system is government support for new science and technology creates new means of production, forcing and fostering technological phase shifts in the economy. The machine tools and machining techniques developed at the Springfield Armory after the War of 1812, became the basis for the manufacture of interchangeable parts, laying the foundation for industrial assembly lines and mass production. It was the explorations and surveys by the Army Corps of Topographical Engineers that identified and mapped the westward routes followed by the overland pioneers and the railroads. In 1843, Congress directly funded Samuel B. Morris’s development of the telegraph. In the Civil War era, it was US Navy research that applied scientific methodology to steam engine design, creating the science of thermodynamics AND the profession of mechanical engineering. The creation of the Department of Agriculture in May 1862 formalized direct government efforts in fighting agricultural pests and animal diseases, and finding and developing new breeds and strains of plants and animals better suited for conditions of the Great Plains and other areas. The Morrill Land-Grant Act of 1862 created an entire system of state colleges and universities that educated and trained the men and women, without whom DeLong’s “industrial research labs, deployed at scale by modern corporations” would have been crippled and barren.

By discussing only the von Hayek’s conservative / libertarian “free enterprise” aspect of economic development, DeLong is engaging in some very insidious and misleading propaganda to help maintain the historically inaccurate anti-statist myths of neoliberalism. ]

Governance for a Healthy Economy 

Dani Rodrik [Project Syndicate, via Naked Capitalism 9-11-2022]

There is near-universal skepticism about governments’ ability to lead and achieve positive change…. Moreover, a longer-standing concern about government is that it has neither sufficient information nor the capabilities necessary to achieve positive structural change in the economy. Give governments too much power, the argument goes, and they will direct resources toward the wrong places and become captive tools of special interests. This argument lies at the heart of neoliberalism, and it will have to be overcome for any successor paradigm – like productivism – to succeed…. 

Just look around, and you can find failures of public governance almost everywhere – locally, nationally, and globally. But, in fact, as Columbia Law School’s Charles Sabel and David Victor of the University of California, San Diego, show in a new book, effective governance models do exist and have already made a big difference…. Sabel and Victor build their argument on the example of the 1987 Montreal Protocol, which has succeeded in curbing ozone-depleting substances (ODS) to the point where the ozone layer is now on course to full recovery. 

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – September 11, 2022

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – September 11, 2022

by Tony Wikrent

Chile rejects new “progressive” constitution

Chile votes overwhelmingly to reject new, progressive constitution 

Guardian, via Naked Capitalism 9-6-2022]

Chilean voters resoundingly reject a new ‘ecological’ constitution 

[Science, via Naked Capitalism 9-8-2022]

Lambert Strether: Here is the very first sentence from WaPo’s Editorial Board, urging rejection. “Lithium is a key input in batteries that run millions of laptops and upon which the United States is basing its electrified automotive future.” Clarifying!

The Egalitarian Rift Which Doomed The New Chilean Constitution

Ian Welsh, September 6, 2022

….Let’s bring this back to Chile: indigenous people’s have been badly treated and deserve restitution, but to give them permanent rights that others in Chile don’t have based on their ancestry means that some people have rights that they didn’t earn legitimately from an egalitarian point of view….

For this to work it would have to be a legitimate way for people without the ancestry to gain the status, and a legitimate way for people wit the status to lose it.

If it was based on ancestry combined with “you’ve been treated badly”, then the harm would have to be quantified, and the status lost when the harm has been rectified. “The harm has been made substantially whole.” People could join the status by proving similar harm had been done to their ancestors and/or them and was still effecting them.

If, on the other hand, the status is justified by “indigenous people are better stewards of the land” then a duty would have to be set up to take better care of the land, and those who did not do so would lose the status, while those who are willing to do so (and to learn indigenous methods) would be allowed to gain the status.

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – September 4, 2022

Week-end Wrap – Political Economy – September 4, 2022

by Tony Wikrent

Strategic Political Economy

US Life Expectancy Continues To Plunge Below China's

[ZeroHedge, 9-1-2022]

Life expectancy in the US has fallen for the second consecutive year as Covid-19 and overdoses increased mortality rates. An empire's death may start with its people, and as the world shifts, China, an emerging power, has a life expectancy that is above the US and widening.

According to new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Americans' life expectancy fell .9 years to 76.1 years in 2021 - the lowest since 1996.

The year prior, life expectancy dropped by 1.8 years. The combined figures were the largest two-year decline since the 1920s.

EU can’t let Putin set energy costs – Austria

[azerbaycan24.com, via Mike Norman Economics 8-28-2022]

"Electricity prices across Europe are tied to the price of gas, which now costs around ten times what it did last year. However, while some EU countries are heavily dependent on Russian gas for heating and industry, they use alternate fuels to generate electricity. Austria, for example, generates more than three quarters of its electricity from renewables, per 2020 figures from the International Energy Agency. [Austrian Chancellor Karl] Nehammer argued that decoupling electricity and gas prices would result in a fairer bill for consumers that more accurately reflects electricity production costs."

The Real Student Debt Debate 

Zachary D. Carter [In The Long Run, via Naked Capitalism 9-1-2022]

In the United States, a college degree is about much more than securing a higher wage. People without college degrees aren't just excluded from a lot of jobs that pay well. They're more likely to be laid off and less likely to be hired during recessions. They're less likely to have health insurance, and more likely to have a disability (the causal arrow there probably points both ways, but the combination is particularly cruel). People who do not graduate from college even have shorter life expectancies than people who do. Higher education is perhaps the single most important factor in determining who has access to a financially secure lifestyle and the leisure to pursue intellectually interesting activities. A college degree confers respect and prestige.

In a better world, the simple fact of being human would command equal respect for everyone. That is not our world, but we can imagine such a place and work toward realizing it. Prestige, by contrast, is inherently exclusive….

After World War II, millions of new college students arrived on campuses around the country to receive an education funded by the G.I. Bill. Suddenly, an experience that had once been restricted almost exclusively to the very rich became open to infantrymen. And though the vast majority of colleges and universities continued to exclude Black students, millions of white people who had never dreamed of going to college eventually earned degrees. For many prior graduates, this step toward democratization was threatening. Their credential was being diluted….

Student debt allows a certain kind of prestige-hoarder to pay lip service to the ideal of universal education, while also looking down on some graduates as, well, not quite the real thing. "Technically, you have a degree, but we all know you don't truly belong up here, dear." Erase that debt, and this distinction disappears. College graduates are all just college graduates again. A little bit more equality has entered the picture, and a little bit of prestige has departed.

I suspect this is what most people really mean when they say student debt relief is "unfair."

[TW: As I excerpted last week from Forrest A. Nabors’ book, From Oligarchy to Republicanism: The Great Task of Reconstruction, quoting West Virginia Senator during the Civil War, Waltman Willey, explaining why the South had no system of free public education: “Sir, the true reason of this hostility to popular education is hostility to democratic institutions.” ]

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Historian Nicole Hemmer’s latest book "Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s" focuses on the conservatives who remade U.S. politics in the 1990s. Hemmer speaks with Walter Isaacson about how that decade's politics paved the way for Donald Trump’s presidency.

From the transcript:

You grow up believing … the thing that everyone believes… Democracy as a form of government. What you begin to see over the course of the 1990s is a real questioning of that... Not just of whether democracy is the best form of government,  but whether everyone in the U.S is actually fit for democracy…. In the 1960s, when the United States really opened up in terms of voting rights, in terms of immigration, and by the 1990s you have books like The Bell Curve, that argue for genetic differences in intelligence based on race; books like Alien Nation that say that only white people should be allowed to immigrate to the United States because only they are fit for democracy...