The first of 5 lectures by Anwar Shaikh on his new book Capitalism (the other 4 can also be found on YouTube).
Month: December 2017
Inequality is not inevitable – but the US ‘experiment’ is a recipe for divergence
Facundo Alvaredo, Lucas Chancel, Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman in The Guardian:
The US has experienced a perfect storm of radical policy changes which have all contributed to this surge in inequality. The tax system, which used to be progressive, has become much less so over time. The federal minimum wage has collapsed, unions have been weakened and access to higher education has become increasingly unequal. At the same time, deregulation in the finance industry and overly protective patent laws have contributed to booms on Wall Street and in the healthcare sector, which now makes up 20% of national income.
These forces led to an upsurge in wage inequality in the 1980s and 90s which did, admittedly, stabilise at the beginning of this century. Since then, though, the growing importance of income derived from capital – and the growing concentration of wealth – have been key drivers of inequality. The rich are getting older, and a growing chunk of their income comes from passive capital ownership rather than active work. It’s a second Gilded Age.
The tax bill just passed by the US Senate will not only reinforce this trend, it will turbocharge inequality in America. Presented as a tax cut for workers and job-creating entrepreneurs, it is instead a giant cut for those with capital and inherited wealth. It’s a bill that rewards the past, not the future.
Critically, the bill massively cuts corporate income taxes, mainly by reducing the corporate tax rate from 35% to 20%. Whatever one believes about the long-term effects of cutting corporate taxes, it is clear that in the short and medium term, the cut overwhelmingly benefits shareholders who can reap their additional profits without any extra work.
More here.
Jonathan Haidt on The Age of Outrage: What It’s Doing to Our Universities, and Our Country
Haidt takes the stage at the 12:40 mark.
the complex inner life of denis johnson
Getting clean through AA marks the dividing line in Denis’s life. In his 2000 Paris Review essay “Hippies,” he describes his youth as a “criminal hedonist” followed by growth into “a citizen of life with a belief in eternity.” AA meetings provide ritual, prayer, and fellowship that includes the sharing of struggles, confession, and accountability. Denis, who regularly attended meetings as long as I knew him, told me that he hated small talk and that AA meetings spoiled him in this regard — people there only talked about real, personal issues.
He also read Alcoholics Anonymous, the program’s so-called “Big Book,” throughout his sober life. In it, alcoholics working the steps are encouraged to use whichever religious tradition, if any, works for them — “We think it no concern of ours what religious bodies our members identify themselves with as individuals” — while the foreword to the Second Edition (1955) claims that AA includes “Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Hindus, and a sprinkling of Muslims and Buddhists.”
I believe this perspective colored Denis’s thinking on religion. The last time I visited him, in 2015, something I said reminded him of an Emo Philips comedy bit that illustrates the absurdity of denominational hair-splitting, and he pulled it up on YouTube to share it with me.
more here.
Carl Jung’s fight to find psychological types
Jung’s proposal was a radical reorientation of human knowledge—in a commonly used intellectual metaphor, it was a kind of Copernican revolution. More than a century earlier, Immanuel Kant had made a similar move in philosophy, arguing that there was no stable center, that reality could not be perfectly, purely known; instead, what was knowable had to conform to our human ways of knowing. And in 1917, Freud described his own theories as a comparably dramatic shift, arguing in the eighteenth of his series of introductory lectures on psychoanalysis that his ideas offered a “great outrage against naive self-love”—the third one that humanity had been forced to undergo, after Copernicus’ discovery that our earth is not the center of the universe and Darwin’s finding that man is merely an evolved animal. This third and “most irritating insult flung at human megalomania” was, in Freud’s famous phrase, that the self is “not even master in his own home” but instead ruled by unconscious desires and forces. Jung, in a kind of combination of Kant and Freud, was proposing his own Copernican reorientation.
Jung continued to develop his ideas and in 1921 published Psychological Types, in which he proclaimed that every worldview “depends on a personal psychological premise.”
more here.
The allure of Hollywood author Clancy Sigal
I’d long had it in the back of my mind to write something about Clancy Sigal, which according to my notes I’d provisionally titled “The Man Who Fascinated Women (Writers).” Whatever it is in me that’s drawn to wounded men—and Clancy was a great one of the species—I suspect the fact that Doris Lessing got to this one first, branding him as her property, was no small part of the allure. Clancy and I spoke once on the phone, mostly about his thing with Lessing, but I never followed through. I guess he gave up waiting, since he went ahead and died in July, at age ninety. I don’t think he’d mind some irreverence about his departure.
Our acquaintance, such as it was, started in a peculiar way. A decade or so ago I was asked to participate in the test-drive of a software platform, funded by a big foundation, designed to revolutionize the concept of the book group. A bunch of other women writers and I were supposed to read Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, which had been scanned into this software, and type our comments in the margins of the book; then the reading public would join in, blogging about our comments, all of which would effectively transform TGN into an exciting interactive text. I think the master plan was that virtual book-reading collectives would soon erupt worldwide and literacy would flourish, though for reasons I never learned, none of this got past the beta stage.
more here.
Gene Editing Shows Promise for Alleviating Hearing Loss
Lydia Denworth in Scientific American:
Until the advent of gene editing, geneticists could catalogue mutations without being able to do much about them. “David Liu’s work is a wonderful development in a growing trend that after all these years of trying we have been able to do something clinically meaningful about disease-causing or disease-predisposing changes in the genome,” says Fyodor Urnov, associate director of the Altius Institute in Seattle, Washington and a pioneer in gene editing who wrote a commentary that accompanies the study, but wasn’t involved in the research. “This work is exciting because it provides the first but essential step in advancing an approach like this to the clinic for this genetic condition.”
More here.
A Mathematician Who Decodes the Patterns Stamped Out by Life
Joshua Sokol in Quanta:
Then suddenly, around a decade ago, it wasn’t so fun anymore. “I would still get a kick out of solving a problem,” she said. “The question is whether it was just kind of an ego kick.”
Facing a crisis of faith, Tarnita felt her future narrow to just a few paths. She had been offered a cushy “quant” job working for a bank. She could take time off. And then she found in the library an intriguing book with a colorful cover called Evolutionary Dynamics: Exploring the Equations of Life. The book’s author, the mathematical biologist Martin Nowak, was, conveniently, also at Harvard. The same week she had to decide on the job, she sent him an email asking to meet.
The meeting changed her life. Tarnita turned down the job and finished her doctorate with Nowak. (She completed her Ph.D. just a year after earning her master’s degree.) She began a project with him and the legendary biologist Edward O. Wilson that led to a 2010 Nature paper on the evolution of cooperative insects like ants and termites. Since 2013, she has continued to study biology using mathematical tools as a member of the faculty at Princeton University.
Since switching fields, Tarnita has focused her work on how living things orchestrate themselves itself into patterns on different scales.
More here.
Western liberalism is not the apex and terminus of human history, and it ought not to serve as the measure of Islam
Zaheer Kazmi in Aeon:
While Europe’s empires may have worn liberalism like a badge of civilisation, liberal values were often taken up more vigorously in the lands they colonised, including in the Muslim world. Debates about ‘liberal Islam’ are almost as old as the ideology of liberalism itself. From the Aligarh movement in 19th-century British India to the al-Nahda, or renaissance, in the Arab world, Muslims have sought to synthesise Islam and liberalism to advance Islam’s civilisational progress.
The ‘Christian’ West might have established liberal societies, but it has struggled to produce liberal citizens. The resurgent fascistic movements in Europe and North America today seeking to restrict the freedoms of others are distinctly Christian and Western identity movements. On the other hand – and for largely historical rather than metaphysical reasons – Muslims have struggled to establish liberal states. Yet, by and large, within the liberal societies of the West, Muslims have been exemplary citizens, claiming their rights and pursuing their interests rather than focusing on persecuting others. Why then can the projects of Muslim liberals – who see liberalism in Islam – seem so quixotic?
More here.
In Conversation: Robert Reich and Arlie Hochschild
We are familiar with the other but only in negative terms
Samira Shackle in New Humanist:
What was your motivation for writing this book?
I was observing these controversies – for instance, over Islamic veiling, which started in the 1980s – and had the feeling it was getting worse. Public debates weren’t helping overcome stereotypes. On the contrary the polarisation was getting bigger, so I wanted to understand if there was something different to what we were observing in the media. I wanted to see what was happening in the places where these controversies were emerging, because it always involves real people and physical places, cities. Secondly, more philosophical, maybe existential, was the question: is there a possibility to create a relationship between two different cultures? To use the popular language of today – is it really possible to “live together”, with a Muslim presence in Europe? Do these controversies mean a deep cultural fracture or clash? Or is there a possibility within the conflict of a process which makes us familiar and elaborates new norms and ways of living?
More here.
The great globalisation lie
Dani Rodrik in Prospect:
Not so long ago, the argument over globalisation was seen as done and dusted—by parties of the left as much as of the right.
Tony Blair’s 2005 Labour conference speech gives a flavour of the time. “I hear people say we have to stop and debate globalisation,” Blair told his party. “You might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer.” There would be disruptions and some might be left behind, but no matter: people needed to get on with it. Our “changing world” was, Blair continued, “replete with opportunities, but they only go to those swift to adapt” and “slow to complain.”
No competent politician today would be likely to urge their voters not to grumble in this way. The Davos set, the Blairs and the Clintons are all scratching their heads, asking themselves how on Earth a process they insisted was inexorable has spun into reverse. Trade has stopped growing in relation to output, cross-border financial flows have still not bounced back from the global crisis of a decade ago, and after long years of stasis in world trade talks, an American nationalist has ridden a populist wave to the White House, where he disavows all efforts at multilateralism. Those that were cheerleaders of hyper-globalisation at the turn of the century stand no chance of understanding where it has gone wrong without realising how little they understood the process they were championing.
Back in 2005, in that same Blair conference speech, there was scope for doubt, and “no mystery about what works: an open, liberal economy, prepared constantly to change to remain competitive.” What of social solidarity? Would globalisation sweep it away? Blair insisted it could survive, but only if it were repurposed. Communities could not be allowed to “resist the force of globalisation”; the role of progressive politics was merely to enable them “to prepare for it.” Globalisation was the foregone conclusion; the only question was whether society could adjust to the global competition.
More here.
playing the jawbone
In the African-influenced musics of Latin America one often hears a uniquely electrifying percussion instrument known as la quijada, the jawbone. Actually it goes by multiple names in several different Spanish-speaking countries, but quijada is the closest thing to standard nomenclature. The word, in a musical context, refers to the lower jawbone of an ass or, less commonly, a horse. When the animal dies, the instrument makers cut off the head and boil it, until all of the flesh is gone, then detach the jawbone, leaving the teeth intact. Or in certain places they bury the head first. This is thought to harden the bone somehow. Most often the whole lower bone of the animal’s jaw is used, such that the instrument is shaped like a giant wishbone. Other times the jawbone is (again, wishbone like) snapped in half, so that each side becomes a functional drumstick, and these sticks are then used to bang on another percussion instrument, of whatever kind. But a traditional quijada typically involves the whole jawbone.
There is a technical term for the kind of instrument it is, a wonderful word: idiophone. An idiophone is something that you hit to make a distinctive sound. That’s all there is to it. No strings, no flute-holes, just an object that you strike. A triangle would be the most obvious example. The root “idio” here means singularity or itself-ness or sole, as in, “alone.” Think idiosyncratic—not in sync with others, obeying its own rhythm. Or idiom—an expression that makes sense only in the language to which it belongs. Or idiot—one who can’t participate in the conversation.
more here.
a childhood in palestine
My father was a dark, skinny man. In the winter, when he would walk through the doors after work, his big nose was always red and watery. He was a country boy, born in Al-Jadeera, a small village near Jerusalem in Palestine. When he was, twenty-six years old, he left his family and his land full of rich olive and fig trees to come to America for job opportunities. When my siblings and I were young, growing up in Chicago, my father used to tell us he had planted pomegranate and citrus trees back in Palestine for us to enjoy anytime we decided to visit. The fig trees were for my mom—her favorite fruit. My father loved his figs and pomegranates. He told us his favorite part was picking them off of a tree he planted in his parents’ garden. When I started sixth grade, we moved back to Palestine. My father enrolled us in the village school. We couldn’t afford the private school in the city that tailored to English speaking students, educated in the United States. My father walked into the principal’s office and explained why holding us back a grade level would be extremely detrimental to our education. “They will try to keep up in Arabic with the rest of the kids. If they don’t by the end of the semester, we can talk. But they are smart girls; I know they will keep up.” My father knew the significance of keeping us in our grade level, even if all the classes in the village school were taught in Arabic. Thanks to him, we transitioned into our appropriate grade levels, and never missed a grade. He spent many hours helping us with our homework, translating from Arabic to English and vice versa. He assigned extra readings and asked us to transcribe long stories in Arabic to improve our grammar and writing.
more here.
Christmas Eve in the drunk tank
On Christmas Day the musician Shane MacGowan will turn sixty, an apparently unlikely outcome for someone as committed to vices liquid and miscellaneous. The young MacGowan, with his unkempt quiff, pronounced ears and mouth like a derelict building, seemed to be operating from within his own personal lock-in; fixed with a snarl and an implication of random violence, he emerged as a kind of Tom Waits of the Kilburn High Road. To think of him as only a boozer or iconoclast, however, is to miss much of his appeal and achievement. The depth and nuance of his talent developed over the course of three remarkable records in the mid 1980s, albums which made it clear that the man whose eye you’d avoid on the night bus was steadily producing a body of rich, sophisticated songs, with lyrics indebted to seventeenth-century poets and referencing Irish historical figures as diverse as Charles Stewart Parnell and John McCormack.
As the frontman of The Pogues, a band of gifted musicians, MacGowan dragged Irish music into the mainstream. He arranged traditional songs as well as composing his own, his melodies and lyrics built on the staples of old emigrant laments and the energies of fireside cèilidh sessions; mournful songs of exile and loss, superstitions and hauntings, bawdy drinking songs. The Pogues’ hardy perennial Christmas hit, “A Fairytale of New York”, is the best known of MacGowan’s originals but by no means his only, or even his most accomplished, ballad.
more here.
about the unconscious
John Bragh in The Guardian:
From Mesmer to Freud: Magnetic Sleep and the Roots of Psychological Healing by Adam Crabtree (1993)
It all starts with Freud, right? Except it didn’t. Here, Crabtree details the 120 years of psychologically based treatments of physical ailments that occurred before Freud, starting with Mesmer’s “magnetic healing” and leading eventually to the “talking cure” of Freud and Pierre Janet. This historical context shows that Freud’s work was the culmination of such efforts, rather than their starting point. Even in the late 19th century, many people believed that mental illness was caused by evil demons. Freud turned this supernatural explanation into a natural one by locating this “demon” inside the patient’s body as a separate “unconscious mind”.
2. Beyond Freedom and Dignity by BF Skinner (1971)
The book that got me started in psychology, a bestseller when I was taking a high-school psychology class. Skinner’s last-gasp appeal to the general public, following the “cognitive revolution” in psychology of the 60s, arguing that we had no actual freedom of will, that our conscious thoughts were not causal at all. But we so wanted to believe otherwise that we persisted in the illusion. However, Skinner was not entirely wrong. Subsequent research (on humans) showed that events in the outside world can indeed affect us directly and unconsciously – but only through activating internal cognitive mechanisms that he had long insisted were irrelevant.
More here.
Why Stopping Tax “Reform” Won’t Stop Inequality
Lance Taylor over at INET:
Over the past four decades, American household incomes have become strikingly more unequal, along an unsustainable path. But as of late 2017, prospects for attacking inequality are bleak, whether or not the Republican-controlled U.S. Congress manages to pass a tax cut favoring businesses and high-income households. Fundamental changes in income and wealth distribution will require equally fundamental changes in the way the economy generates and distributes pre-tax incomes.
What is required are policies that go beyond the tax code to shift the very balance of power between workers and employers. Doing so would allow real wages to catch up to productivity and capital gains to be more equitably shared among the population. It would shrink inequality for years to come.
This paper looks at several key topics that relate to our country’s growing inequality and the ways in which it can be remedied.
First, it’s worth examining the likely macroeconomic effects of the tax package. They will be visible but small. Republican efforts will push up the federal deficit as a means to transfer funds to business and rich households. Growth dynamics sketched below suggest that the deficit and incomes of the rich cannot rise indefinitely. This analysis also shows how, over time, rising income inequality creates greater concentration of wealth, which is almost certainly on the cards. For rich households, wealth accumulation is driven by high saving rates from high incomes, capital gains on existing assets, and receipts from initial public offerings which are highly visible but quantitatively not so important. Over the past few decades, capital gains have been a main driver for wealth concentration.
More here.
Farewell, neoliberalism: An interview with Wolfgang Streeck
Over at King's Review:
In your piece in Inference, you trace the recent ‘death of the centre left’, a political movement across the West in the 1990s that was marked by its faith in liberalised international markets. How has neoliberalism contributed to the collapse of the ‘centre-left’ in Europe (see your piece in Inference)? Is internationalisation – not only of markets but of governance – in for instance the form of the EU part of this demise?
At some point in the 1990s both the center-right and the center-left in Europe had concluded that future prosperity would depend on opening national economies to the world market, combined with “structural reforms” of national institutions to make them more “competitive”, i.e., attractive to free-wheeling international capital, especially finance capital. Internationalism and neoliberalism thus came hand in hand. In Europe there was agreement among governments that the EU should and could be converted from what had in the 1970s become a supranational welfare state-in-waiting, into an engine of coordinated liberalization. Using the EU for this had the advantage that it allowed national governments, left or right, to evade responsibility for the market pressures and institutional revisions they had unleashed on their peoples, by claiming that these had been imposed on them from above and that they were part and parcel of an internationalist “European idea” anyway. Very importantly, European Monetary Union, created in the 1990s under global pressures for fiscal consolidation – to reassure the “financial markets” of the solvency of increasingly indebted states – served as a vehicle for the constitutionalization of balanced budgets in national states, something that would have been much more difficult if not impossible if it would have had to be sold by democratically elected governments to their voters. In that sense, the demise of the center-left parties was self-inflicted: they had underestimated the capacity and resolve of their peoples ultimately to defend themselves, if need be by turning to new “populist” parties and movements.
On the other end of the political spectrum, you define the problem of the right as crucial. Not only are new radical rightwing parties formed, such as the AfD, they also manage to profit from the death of the left. You describe how members of the former communist party (SED) are now likely to vote radically right. Does ideology really not matter anymore? Are then perhaps the terms left and right not the right references to describe Western political landscapes?
SED membership did not mean much ideologically; we are talking about a communist state party. But it is true, not just in Germany but also elsewhere, especially in France, that a relevant share of left voters have turned to the right. The most important reason, I think, is that they no longer felt represented by their former center-left parties, who had joined the center-right by telling voters that they couldn’t help them anymore because of “globalization”, and they now had to fend for themselves: become “flexible”, get “retrained” etc.
More here.
Mohsin Hamid: ‘If you want to see what tribalism will do to the west, look at Pakistan’
Sune Engel Rasmussen in The Guardian:
In Pakistan, where he was born, the elected government caved in to a mob of extremist protesters by sacking a minister they accused, essentially, of being a bad Muslim. In a country created as a homeland for south Asia’s Muslims, the fight over who fits that bill means hardly anyone is safe from unfounded accusations of blasphemy. Students have been lynched arbitrarily and, in 2011, the governor, Salman Taseer, was shot for criticising the blasphemy laws. To Hamid, the stunning capitulation to the mob signals the breakdown of an uneasy coexistence between the government, the military and the courts, allowing “raw power” to rule.
“These are incredibly disheartening times. I feel more depressed than I have in a long time about the political direction of Pakistan,” says Hamid at his home in Lahore, where he now lives with his wife and two children. “Since Pakistan was founded in 1947, there has been a conflict between the notion that citizens are equal, and that certain people can ascribe to themselves the right to decide who is Muslim,” he says. “The question is: who is Muslim enough? And 70 years after creation, the answer is that nobody is Muslim enough.”
But Pakistan is not alone in narrowing definitions of who belongs. Hamid thinks western countries that tout principles of equality fail one group in particular: migrants.
More here.