Tag Archives: capitalism

What role for reason?

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There’s an interesting review by Molly Worthen of a new book by George Marsden, [amazon_link id=”B00IHGVPG2″ target=”_blank” ]The Twilight of the American Enlightenment: The 1950s and the Crisis of Liberal Belief[/amazon_link]. I suspect the review is more interesting than its subject – at least, I’m not really tempted to read a book aiming to persuade me that faith-based arguments ought to have the same status in public policy debate as reason-based arguments.

I’m more interested in the Walter Lippmann book mentioned in Prof Worthen’s review, [amazon_link id=”B00E3255JW” target=”_blank” ]Essays in the Public Philosophy[/amazon_link], having read his [amazon_link id=”1440047510″ target=”_blank” ]Liberty and the News[/amazon_link] relatively recently. It sounds like it prefigures Daniel Bell’s [amazon_link id=”B00BR5IEZ0″ target=”_blank” ]Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism[/amazon_link]. Does the individualist, market system undermine the social norms and values that make it work? How does the application of reason to public policy questions sit with the role of emotion and belief in our modern democracies? And – a new question as we learn more and more from cognitive science – are we kidding ourselves about the role of reason anyway?

[amazon_image id=”B00IHGVPG2″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Twilight of the American Enlightenment: The 1950s and the Crisis of Liberal Belief[/amazon_image]

[amazon_image id=”B00BR5IEZ0″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Cultural Contradictions Of Capitalism: 20th Anniversary Edition by Bell, Daniel Anniversary Edition [Paperback(1996)][/amazon_image]

In related reading, Richard Marshall of 3AM Magazine has an interview with philosopher Jeremy Sheamur about Popper and Hayek. I was intrigued by the suggestion that Hayek thought of markets as institutions, albeit organic rather than designed – very far from the received wisdom of markets as a free-for-all, a view of course often attributed to Hayek.

The book of the interviews, [amazon_link id=”0199969531″ target=”_blank” ]Philosophy at 3am[/amazon_link], is due out soon. One to look forward to.

[amazon_image id=”0199969531″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Philosophy at 3:AM: Questions and Answers with 25 Top Philosophers[/amazon_image]

21st century capitalism – discontents but no defenders

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Thomas Piketty’s [amazon_link id=”067443000X” target=”_blank” ]Capital in the 21st Century[/amazon_link] is all over the blogs and magazines in the US but Amazon UK is tantalising me by sending successive emails saying the shipping date over here has been delayed. It now won’t reach Enlightenment Towers until mid-April.

[amazon_image id=”067443000X” link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Capital in the Twenty-First Century[/amazon_image]

Meanwhile, there are other serious attacks on 21st century capitalism to divert the reader so inclined. I see that David Harvey’s [amazon_link id=”B00IOLFGBK” target=”_blank” ]Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism[/amazon_link] is available now. I just read George Packer’s [amazon_link id=”0571251293″ target=”_blank” ]The Unwinding[/amazon_link], an epic account of the devastation of the American working class. And I’ve started Greg Clark’s [amazon_link id=”0691162549″ target=”_blank” ]The Son Also Rises[/amazon_link], whose introduction got the hairs on the back of my neck to rise because of its radical implications for how we think about social mobility – we’ll see if the rest of the book delivers on that promise.

[amazon_image id=”B00IOLFGBK” link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism[/amazon_image]   [amazon_image id=”0571251293″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Unwinding: Thirty Years of American Decline[/amazon_image]   [amazon_image id=”0691162549″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World)[/amazon_image]

All of which raises the question – who, if anybody, is writing convincingly and interestingly in defence of 21st century capitalism? At the moment I can’t bring any books that would serve this purpose to mind, even in the technology literature where you’d most expect to find them. There are of course some optimists, like Charles Kenny in [amazon_link id=”0465064736″ target=”_blank” ]The Upside of Down[/amazon_link], but that’s not quite the same thing as a rousing defence of the system. Any nominations?

Can the Unwinding be unwound?

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George Packer’s [amazon_link id=”B00C4GT040″ target=”_blank” ]The Unwinding: thirty years of American decline[/amazon_link] is out in paperback so I’ve caught up with it at last on my travels this week. It’s an absolutely wonderful book, evoking that widespread sense – everywhere in fact, not just in the US – that the system has gone awry, things are misaligned, and no individual can do anything about it.

[amazon_image id=”B00C4GT040″ link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Unwinding[/amazon_image]

The book traces the 30 years through a braid of several individuals’ stories, recounting their ups and downs through the Clinton years, the Bush years and into the Obama years. Some of the characters are well-known – Newt Gingrich features, as does Peter Thiel. The main threads, though, are unknowns whose stories encapsulate important parts of the nation’s story during its ‘unwinding’ – the unwinding of “the coil that held America together in its secure and sometimes stifling grip.”

Although this is not a technocratic analysis, Packer has an ability to drop in sentences that crisply capture a sharp point. The views of a new (and I turned out, one term) Democratic congressman, Tom Perriello, are summed up thus: “the elites in America didn’t have answers for the problems of the working and middle class any more. Elites thought that everyone needed to become a computer programmer or a financial engineer, that there would be no jobs between eight dollars an hour and six figures. Perriello believed that the new ideas for making things in America again would come from unknown people in obscure places.”

One of his other characters, a longtime Democrat functionary who crosses over into lobbying, is enticed back to work for a senator during the Obama administration. Seeing Rubin, Summers, Geithner getting their posts, and all attempts to bring finance to heel failing, he reflects: “The establishment could fail and fail and still survive, even thrive. It was rigged to win, like a casino, and once you were on the inside you had to do something dramatic to lose your standing, like write a scathing op-ed.” A short chapter about Bob Rubin in the book is absolutely devastating.

A lot of this, we know. But this book rekindles one’s outrage by attaching people and their emotions and stories to a clear X-ray vision of the underlying economic and social changes. I thought it was a terrific read. But also depressing. Can the Unwinding be unwound? Obviously not. In optimistic moods, I’m with congressman Perriello in holding out hope for the obscure people weaving a new social fabric. It’s just not always easy to stay optimistic.

Freedom and virtue

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On the Eurostar to and from the OECD yesterday, I read [amazon_link id=”B0079EW3ZK” target=”_blank” ]The Needs of Strangers[/amazon_link] by Michael Ignatieff, an old book first published in 1984, with my 2nd hand paperback even more mauled by the fact that the dog got to the post before I did that day.

[amazon_image id=”B0079EW3ZK” link=”true” target=”_blank” size=”medium” ]The Needs of Strangers[ THE NEEDS OF STRANGERS ] By Ignatieff, Michael ( Author )Sep-05-2000 Paperback[/amazon_image]

I wish I’d read it before attending the recent Christ Church, Oxford symposium on [amazon_link id=”0241953898″ target=”_blank” ]How Much Is Enough?[/amazon_link] by Edward and Robert Skidelsky. It’s on the same territory. Ignatieff makes very clear the possibly irreconcilable tension between freedom to choose and a shared agreement on the constituents of ‘the good life’. The book starts with a reflection on the welfare state. It assumes everyone is equal, and reasonably so, but in uniformity of treatment is unable to respond to individuals’ specific needs. Hence the seeming lack of care in the way welfare is sometimes delivered to people. He writes: “We think of ourselves not as human beings first, but as sons and daughters, fathers and mothers, tribesmen and neighbours. It is this dense web of relations and the meanings which they give to life that satisfies the needs which really matter to us.” Hence the utopian aspect of Rousseau’s writing or Marx’s – freedom and happiness have to be reconciled by everybody making choices anchored in equality and fraternity.

The book goes on to explore the tension between communitarian visions of moral agreement about necessities of the good life and the restlessness of commercial society, as reflected by Smith and Hume. “How is moral virtue possible in a society which is constantly pushing back the limits of need?” The Skidelskys claim that needs were satisfied by 1974, but that seems absurd to me. Since then we’ve had everything digital, vastly improved medical treatments, longer life expectancy, lower infant mortality, central heating in most homes in the UK, and so on. Rousseau would have been happy to ban machines and trade – virtuous stasis came above freedom in his eyes.

Ignatieff doesn’t answer the dilemma of course, but the book is a very interesting exploration of how it continues to be relevant to modern societies.

Would Keynes see Fox News as progress?

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The economics profession has a less than stellar reputation for its forecasting ability, so asking some economists to make predictions for a hundred years from now is a bold move. Yet that’s what Ignacio Palacios-Huerta did for[amazon_link id=”0262026910″ target=”_blank” ] In 100 Years: Leading Economists Predict the Future.[/amazon_link]

One of the inspirations that led him to invite mainly US-based, highly eminent economists such as Daron Acemoglu, Robert Shiller and Robert Solow to think so far ahead was the famous 1930 Keynes Essay, [amazon_link id=”B00HRDZL5C” target=”_blank” ]Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren[/amazon_link], and it is a starting point for several of the contributions. So, not surprisingly, a common theme is the likelihood of continuing technology-driven improvements in living standards, health and longevity in the long term – despite the clear short-term challenges. But another common theme to many of the essays is one not on Keynes’s horizon, namely the unknown but potentially catastrophic risks posed by climate change. I think many people who dismiss economics as not taking environmental issues seriously might be surprised about how many of these contributors address the question.

Overall, the tone of the essays is generally positive – Andreu Mas-Collel argues that economics should be called, not the ‘dismal science’ but the ‘cautiously optimistic science’. However, none of the economists ignores the reasons for pessimism. Apart from climate change and environmental pressures, they differ more in their pessimism than in their optimism. Daron Acemoglu focuses on ‘counter-Enlightenment’ fundamentalisms or other anti-modernist movements as a political force that will run counter to continuing progress.

In the most interesting essay in the book Ed Glaeser – an economist who has always worked creatively in the areas where economics borders the other social sciences – raises the possibility of social fragmentation in what he calls the ‘self-protection’ society. In addition to the fragilities that come with global interconnectedness – pandemics, terrorism and so on – he writes: “One recurring fear is that this prosperity will produce a self-protective society, more interested in keeping what it has than in creating change. Human kind has become wealthier precisely because we have taken risks.”

He also in this essay brings us the eye-opening fact that on average Americans spend almost as much time watching TV (2.83 hours a day) as working (3.2 hours a day) – as he comments wryly: “It seems quite possible that the recent technological change that has created the most benefit is the proliferation of cable channels.” Whether this is progress or not is another question. What would Keynes have made of Fox News or HBO?