Are we trying to avoid the wrong World War?
And other things I found on the web this week
Are we trying to avoid the wrong World War?
A brief tweet thread of mine — on which, as you’ll see, I’d appreciate your view — in the comments thread and/or by return email.
The Other Invisible Hand: It’s cooperation (and competition) all the way down
I’m one of the few economists I can think of who thinks that the world is a nested ecology of competition and cooperation — or, to use the metaphor used here, a set of Russian dolls. I worked this out thinking about human life. So did William James when he wrote:
A social organism of any sort whatever, whether large or small, is what it is because each member proceeds to his own duty with a trust that the other members will simultaneously do theirs. Wherever a desired result is achieved by the co-operation of many independent persons, its existence as a fact is a pure consequence of the … faith in one another of those immediately concerned. A government, an army, a commercial system, a ship, a college, an athletic team, all exist on this condition, without which not only is nothing achieved, but nothing is even attempted.
My friend Reuben Finighan came to the same conclusion and is illustrating it with biology, as does this article.
It may surprise many non-biologists to learn that evolution isn’t only about red-in-tooth-and-claw competitive selfishness — it’s also “ruthlessly cooperative.” And protecting life-supporting cooperation requires suppressing certain kinds of selfishness. … Life necessarily operates a Russian doll-like nested hierarchy of cooperation, where selfishness-suppressing enforcement operates at every level. We might call this “coop-cop policing.” …
Every so-called selfish gene also cooperates with the other genes in its genome. … Every complex cell is powered by cooperation (their power plant subcomponents, chloroplasts or mitochondria, result from symbiosis). Every multi-cellular organism is a collaborative “society of cells.” Group-living species form varying degrees of super-organisms where survival is influenced by the fitness of group mates (social groups become a looser, but often no less necessary, form of extended survival vehicle). And cross-species collaborations abound (symbiosis isn’t rare — it’s the rule). Indeed, as David Haskell, a biologist and writer, notes, a tree is “a community of cells” from many species: “fungus, bacteria, protist, alga, nematode and plant.” And often “the smallest viable genetic unit [is] … the networked community.”
Revolution Betrayed
Great piece reviewing a major history of conservative thought in America as the prelude to where it finds itself.
For anyone vaguely acquainted with the story of the Grand Old Party, this latest sordid chapter of Republicanism—the subversion of American democracy and the diminishment of American leadership in the world—can be strange and bewildering. For anyone invested in this uniquely American tradition of political thought, it has been nothing short of devastating. Nevertheless, it’s the natural upshot of the fatigue and exhaustion gripping the Republican Party combined with the noxious prejudices of its new base under the influence of its present standard-bearer. Despite his 2020 defeat, and his brazen anti-democratic acts that followed it, Trump retains a firm hold on that party, and remains its most probable candidate in the next presidential contest. Whatever the electoral prospects of a Republican Party actuated by the needs and urges of one man, the imprint of conservatism properly understood is unlikely to be felt again anytime soon. Until Trump is unhonored and unsung in the Right Nation, conservatism will continue to be sullied by the association, and deservedly so.
The French philosopher Montesquieu wrote that history was governed not by chance, but by underlying causes. If one lost battle could bring a state to ruin, he argued, “some general cause made it necessary for that state to perish from a single battle.” The same is true of the American Right which has scarcely come to ruin in one fell swoop. The hundred-year war for American conservatism has taken a mighty long time to be so lavishly betrayed, and so decisively lost.
Mental illness doesn’t make you special
Why do neurodiversity activists claim suffering is beautiful?
Another cry from the heart from Freddie deBoer. A great piece, even if it could have been edited back by 20-30 percent.
Once enough people insist on mental illnesses as upbeat and fashionable lifestyle brands, then any of us who oppose it are guilty of the most grave sin of all, the sin of perpetuating stigma. It’s stigma to call autism a disorder, despite the fact that it renders some completely nonverbal and unable to care for themselves; it’s stigma to suggest that someone with ADHD bears any responsibility at all for problems at school or work; it’s stigma to speak the plain fact that people with psychotic disorders sometimes commit acts of violence under the influence of their conditions. It’s stigma, in other words, to treat those of us with mental illnesses as anything else than wayward children.
Stigma, that cartoon monster, has never been in the top 100 of my problems in 20 years of managing a psychotic disorder, but never mind; stigma is the ox to be gored in contemporary pop culture, and so we must fixate on it to the point that we sideline the health, safety and treatment of those with mental disorders.
What I find tragic about those who buy into the neurodivergence narrative is that they become their illnesses. And yes, there are alternatives. Eloise and people like her seem never to consider one of the possible ways that they could have dealt with their myriad disorders: to suffer. Only to suffer. To suffer, and to feel no pressure to make suffering an identity, to not feel compelled to wrap suffering up in an Instagram-friendly manner. To accept that there is no sense in which her pain makes her deeper or more real or more beautiful than others, that in fact the pain of mental illness reliably makes us more selfish, more self-pitying, more destructive, and more pathetic. To understand that and to accept it and to quietly go about life trying to maintain peace and dignity is, I think, the best possible path for those with mental illness to walk.
And from Freddie’s reply to critics
The whole point of my perspective is that the people who are most hurt by this infantilizing insistence that mental illness makes you beautiful and deep are the very people who buy into that ideology. They are the ones I write for. Not to mock them, but to impress on them: this isn’t going to work. It isn’t going to last. The benefits you think are accruing to you from treating your mental illness as some benevolent conveyor of meaning are illusory, and in time you will be left all too aware that this shit just hurts. You’re not always going to be a photogenic 22-year-old, showcasing your disorder on Instagram. If you’re really afflicted, someday you’ll be a 43-year-old working on your second divorce, estranged from many of the people who once meant the most to you, 30 pounds overweight from meds, unemployed, and broke. And none of this shit, none of it, will comfort you in the slightest. I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news. But I’ve been in a half-dozen psychiatric facilities in my life, and the people in them aren’t self-actualized and being their best selves. They’re in profound pain. Many of them have ruined lives. The romanticism that would obscure this basic, tragic reality is what I am absolutely committed to opposing. And I invite you to go ahead and tell someone whose life has been irreparably damaged by their mental illness that they should be grateful for it, a notion that crops up again and again in these spaces.
Apology
The image above is from last week’s newsletter. I’ve since listened to the podcast and wish to apologise. In response to the question of what the West should actually do if Russia started using nukes, the interviewee’s body language held up for a paragraph or two before she disappeared into a black hole:
I think the United States has been very clear that it would respond very sharply. The President's been clear that the United States itself would not be responsible for nuclear escalation. The United States does have many response tools and has been clear. It would use them in the cyber realm and potentially in the conventional realm.
But I think it's important also to note, again, the kind of moral criticism that the Russian Federation would come in for. The United States has, or in the responsibility for the use of nuclear weapons in wartime — the only use in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. This moral responsibility would shift squarely to the Russian Federation.
In the case of a use in this conflict in Ukraine, and Russia would go forward with that kind of stain and burden. Russia is a pariah state at the moment, but it would be signalling it's readiness to be in that state for a long time to come.
So there you have it. If cyberwar and conventional weapons don’t stop nukes, will the Russians really be able to look at themselves in the mirror — especially as they realise just how disappointed are at how mean they’ve been? (To say nothing of how much more disappointed we’ll be at Vladimir who started all this!)
Guy Rundle on the election campaign
During the 1974 election campaign, some wag — I think an advisor to Gough Whitlam said “whoever wins should bags opposition”. It turned out they were right. I’d say this is another such poisoned chalice.
Labor will — may — get into power just as a decade of global cheap money is ending, with debt, wage pressure and so on to deal with, and instead of responding to that by unleashing a cooperative state-private productivity and infrastructure revolution, it will retreat into austerity budgeting and “wage discipline” enforcement.
The lies we get caught up in …
The story I was responding to was a compelling one, marred by the author’s preoccupation with settling scores.
A great tweet from the great Chris Dillow
New Zealand labour law
Another good column by the always interesting and informative Sarah O’Connor.
The New Zealand government’s “fair pay agreements” regime aims to get employers and unions to negotiate agreements which would set a minimum floor for pay and conditions across whole sectors or occupations. If a tenth of workers who would be covered or 1,000 of them (whichever is fewer) say they want an FPA, union and employer representatives will negotiate one and put it to a vote. If there is ultimate stalemate, the Employment Relations Authority will decide the terms …
A detailed OECD study in 2019 concluded that sectoral collective bargaining systems can lead to better employment, productivity and wages than systems where agreements are only made at the individual company level. But the devil is in the detail: inflexible sectoral agreements can harm productivity while the best ones (more common in Scandinavian countries) provide broad frameworks which also leave “considerable scope for bargaining at the firm level”. …
The UK’s Labour party has already promised to implement a similar policy. … Whether or not fair pay agreements are the right answer, New Zealand is at least asking the right question: how do we make sure the changing world of work does not leave some people behind in gruelling jobs? … Any attempt to shape the future of work must focus on carers just as much as coders.
Dani Rodrik on a Better Globalization?
Hyper-globalization crumbled under its many contradictions. First, there was … the interventionist policies of the most successful economies, notably China, and the “liberal” principles enshrined in the world trading system. Second, hyper-globalization exacerbated distributional problems in many economies. … Third, hyper-globalization undermined the accountability of public officials to their electorates. … Fourth, … with China’s rise as a geopolitical rival to the United States, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, [the zero or negative sum game of'] strategic competition has reasserted itself over [the positive sum game of economic competition].
The first step [to a better globalisation] is for policymakers to mend the damage done to economies and societies by hyper-globalization, along with other market-first policies. This will require reviving the spirit of the Bretton Woods era, when the global economy served domestic economic and social goals – full employment, prosperity, and equity – rather than the other way around. Under hyper-globalization, policymakers inverted this logic, with the global economy becoming the end and domestic society the means. International integration then led to domestic disintegration.
A second important prerequisite … is that countries do not turn a legitimate quest for national security into aggression against others. … For great powers, and the US in particular, this means acknowledging multipolarity and abandoning the quest for global supremacy.
In short, our future world need not be one where geopolitics trumps everything else and countries (or regional blocs) minimize their economic interactions with one another. If that dystopian scenario does materialize, it will not be due to systemic forces outside our control. As with hyper-globalization, it will be because we made the wrong choices.
Care: A tweet thread on an important column
An excellent column from Laura Tingle
Amid all the shouting in the election campaign, the caring economy is stuck in a perilous limbo land
It's a very deep issue raising at least these questions …
A) Can one have accountability up to those in charge without some accountability in the other direct and if the answer is 'no',
B) Why are our accountability mechanisms so lopsided in favour of those at the top and
C) What can be done about it?
I discussed these issues in this piece.
D) Does the standard neoliberal framing of delivery of care under contracts for outputs work?
E) If not why not? and
F) What might improve on it?
I explored these things here
G) What are the mechanisms that support our remaining stuck in this low-grade equilibrium and
H) What might be done to get out of this mess?
I explored these things here:
Grey rhinos and the RBA: Chris Joye gets out his pen (which is mightier than his sword)
You know those things that it was really obvious were going to happen and then they happen and everyone’s surprised. You know like that interest rates would rise with rising inflation. And so the bank increased rates and … everyone was shocked. Some enterprising writer realised that we need a name for such things. He didn’t come up with a good name, but the world is not fair and so his name will probably stick: Grey Rhino. Anyway, here’s Chris Joye lamenting the way in which people don’t seem to be able to properly factor the obvious into their thinking:
In the AFR today, I write that since late last year we’ve had several contrarian views. First, US markets needed to price in the Federal Reserve lifting its cash rate to 2.5-3.0 per cent. At the time, markets were pricing in a tiny 1.5 per cent terminal Fed cash rate. They’ve now lifted that to around 2.9 per cent.
A second forecast was that the US 10-year government bond yield needed to rise above 3.2 per cent. Markets strongly disagreed, pricing in just a 1.3 per cent yield. Yet four months later, the US 10-year yield is now above 3 per cent.
A third expectation was that US equities would mean-revert back to normal, cyclically-adjusted, price/earnings multiples. This required a 30-60 per cent draw-down in US stocks. Since that time, the S&P500 has fallen about 14 per cent while the NASDAQ is off 24 per cent. We estimate that the S&P500 has another 20-35 per cent to go. The NASDAQ should fall much further.
A fourth view was that while Aussie house prices would continue climbing for a while, they would have to correct 15-25 per cent after the first 100 basis points of cash rate hikes, which we thought would commence in mid 2022. …
It is not just that the RBA’s forecasts have been pathetically poor. It is that the RBA has then lurched into huge, multi-year policy pre-commitments on the basis of these specious perspectives.
Ukraine
Slavoj Žižek and the dissonance of our wishes
I think the passage I quote immediately below is very telling. Immediately afterward Žižek raises his observation to the level of FTPH (French Theory of Pronounced Heaviosity) via Lacan’s notion of the ne explétif (no I didn’t know about it either). That seems gratuitous to me, and probably wrong. But then once you’ve entered the world in which ‘X’ really means ‘not X’ what would I know?
To prevent a wider war – to establish any kind of deterrence – we, too, must draw clear lines. So far, the West has done the opposite. When Putin was still only preparing to launch his “special operation” in Ukraine, US President Joe Biden said his administration would have to wait and see if the Kremlin would pursue a “minor incursion” or a full occupation. The implication, of course, was that a “minor” act of aggression would be tolerable.
The recent shift in outlook reveals a deep, dark truth about the Western position. While we previously expressed fears that Ukraine would be quickly crushed, our real fear was exactly the opposite: that the invasion would lead to a war with no end in sight. It would have been much more convenient if Ukraine had fallen immediately, allowing us to express outrage, mourn the loss, and then return to business as usual. What should have been good news – a smaller country unexpectedly and heroically resisting a large power’s brutal aggression – has become a source of shame, a problem we don’t quite know what to do with. …
The piece concludes thus:
We should, of course, resist the temptation to glorify war as an authentic experience to lift us out of our complacent consumerist hedonism. The alternative is not simply to muddle through. Rather, it is to mobilize in ways that will benefit us long after the war is over. Given the dangers we face, military passion is a cowardly escape from reality. But so, too, is comfortable, non-heroic complacency.
Sewing the whirlwind: a tweet thread
