potlatch

'Not in my name'

Writing about the Chilcott inquiry last month, Jonathan Freedland gave this insightful analysis of the Iraq War:

Observers of the future will surely conclude that it was the Iraq war that broke the bond of trust between this government and the nation. True, Labour won the election of 2005, but it did so with a meagre 35.3% of the vote in a verdict that was more about the unelectability of the Tories than enthusiasm for Labour.

The damage extends far beyond one party. It was the widespread belief that Britons had been led falsely to war that planted the seeds of distrust which grew to full bloom in the expenses affair. After Iraq, voters believe the very worst about their ­politicians. There is no graver responsibility than sending men and women to face enemy fire: if our leaders can lie about that, they can surely lie about anything.

At the risk of implying somewhat simplistic cause and effect, I was reminded of this when I saw this graph in The Economist, reflecting on the latest British Social Attitudes survey:

Bearing in mind that the years along the bottom are when the survey was conducted, not published, it seems reasonably clear that something changed in the British political psyche in 2003. Was it the fact that Brown had just started to throw money around with real abandon, and that was 'enough'? Or was there something more profound about the interplay between fiscal policy and democracy, linked to what Freedland says above? The 18th century revolutionary slogan 'No taxation without representation' highlights the fact that when democracy breaks, so does fiscal possibility. Which makes me wonder if the 21st century protestors' slogan 'Not in my name' applies not only to neo-conservative wars, but to social democratic goods as well.

winding up economists: a research methodology

Fabian Muniesa has published a working paper 'The Problem with Economics: Naturalism, Critique and Performativity', that he also gave at a Goldsmiths conference I co-organised a few years back.

It introduces a new methodology for economic sociology, known as the 'breaching thought experiment', which in layman's terms means trying (hypothetically) to annoy people, in this instance economists. If one fails to annoy them, then finding ways to laugh at them is a good alternative. I predict that this field will grow rapidly over the coming years.

Adherents to this method need to identify lines of questioning, which lead the interviewee down culdesacs of their own making. Fabian's paper offers five experiments to run, each of which attempts to demonstrate that the relationship between economic knowledge and object is not adequately thought through. Here's one that I designed myself, which can be played on all economists of above average intelligence:

Q: What is a market?
A: it's an institution
Q: who owns it?
A: often nobody, sometimes a private company
Q: so is it a private asset or not?
A: not really. Even if it is owned, it has considerable positive externalities. It's what we call a 'public good'.
Q: what is a 'public good'?
A: It's one of the four varieties of 'market failure'.
Q: So you're telling me that a well-functioning market is a 'market failure'.

Once you've stopped laughing, however long that may take, it's worth considering that somewhere buried within my smart-arse riddle may be everything that's wrong with contemporary political perspectives on the economy, but can't be articulated. On the other hand, if your response to the final line is 'well, yes, obviously', then you are probably an economist, and might want to lie down in a dark room for a few hours and have a think about things.

learning from neo-liberalism

There's a new special issue of Renewal out - I'm reliably informed that a fully functioning website is imminent where a few articles will be posted. I've contributed a review essay of two excellent histories of neo-liberal thought and mobilisation, The Road from Mont Pelerin, edited by Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe, and Invisible Hands by Kim Phillips-Fein. You can download a pdf of my essay here.

The purpose of the edition is to ask what lessons the rise of the neo-liberal right might hold for the left today, given the economic crisis (we're also doing an event on this at the ippr on Thursday). My conclusions in the piece are these:

The first thing to reflect on is... that neo-liberalism was the product of two crises, separated by almost half a century. It may be that this is a more typical model for the development of economic paradigms than that of Keynes, whose ideas moved swiftly from the academy into government during the course of one long crisis.

Looking beyond the present crisis, it may be that fiscal pressures and the declining competitiveness of Western producers leads to an even harsher, less equitable version of neo-liberalism over the coming years. If so, this will be the period in which the left needs to think seriously about alternative economic models, based on mutuality and a new, ecologically oriented concept of value that moves beyond the implied consumerism of neo-classical economics. This paradigm can be constructed from a position of exile, but it may take another crisis before it can be politically actualised.

Less obviously, there may be discarded parts of the neo-liberal programme that the left needs to adopt as its own. The principled, ‘liberal’ version of neo-liberalism that was manifest in the Freiburg School, which helped forge the German social market economy, represented a potentially radical critique of concentrated economic power. The critique of capitalism can be made as an egalitarian defence of markets, as the historian Fernand Braudel recognised and communitarians such as Phillip Blond have recently argued. Once the Chicago School defence of financial capital, hierarchy and monopoly becomes viewed as an act of nationalistic American lobbying, its intellectual coherence starts to fade. In its place, a version of neo-liberalism built upon a substantive, political vision of human freedom might be worth fighting for. Already there is work by the likes of Amartya Sen, Stuart White and Philip Pettit which points the way towards this more egalitarian version of economic liberalism...

The first step taken by any critic of neo-liberalism must be to disentangle the ‘economic’ from the ‘political’ once more, to resuscitate the Aristotelian sense that public discourse is a superior human capacity to private consumption. But there is risk attached to this, especially now that economic language has so successfully infiltrated public life (think of New Labour’s ‘consumers’ of public services). Neo-liberalism is a vicious circle of cynicism, whereby economistic depictions of politics breed hopeless, self-serving behaviour. Somehow the vicious circle must be broken, which, as Hayek knew, requires the assertion of a new intellectual paradigm altogether.

the knowledge non-economy

Here's an alternative way of representing Britain's shift from a manufacturing economy into the weightless, knowledge economy. Compare orange and turquoise:

Seminar, Oxford, tomorrow

Our next seminar at InSIS is tomorrow afternoon with Jean-Pascal Gond, who also spoke at the Performance conference I co-organised last year. I'm going to be responding to him. Do come along!

Jean-Pascal's work looks at the scientific and epistemological efforts that are made to bring CSR metrics and business performance metrics into allignment with one another. I think it's fascinating, especially having previously worked in organisations that traded on the notion that ethics was the only path to competitiveness.

I guess, to take a more expansive view of this, it's a symptom of liberal economic philosophy that dates back to Adam Smith. At the heart of this liberalism is the paradox known as 'rule utilitarianism', the challenge of designing a set of moral norms that are utility-maximising. The original liberal mantra is that individual freedom will make us all rich, but this agonising project of making an economic case for ethics, or an ethical case for wealth-maximisation, is on-going. See how important it is for Robert Putnam that thriving communities are also prosperous, for Richard Florida that liberal-minded people are also entrepreneurial, and the endless 'not only but alsos' that litter every New Labour policy announcement.

It should be a good session. If you're interested, just turn up. 

tweeting

I am experimenting with twitter to see if it's necessary or useful for me, as an enthusiastic gatherer of the world's knowledge.

But I don't get it. If the council were to dump one lorry-load of manure per day on my doorstep, I could see the value in occasionally taking ten minutes to go through it in search of a stray diamond. But if the council decides to re-route London's sewage system straight into my letterbox, what am I meant to do about that, other than find some sort of letter-box-shaped diamond-sieving device? (No offence to the dear friends I'm following, obviously).

All I mean is that, where an RSS reader respects the fact that most adults have to aportion their time for specific activities, and can't just lie back in some Bergsonian hippy trance letting the world wash over them, twitter appears to require me to be there more or less constantly. Obviously I'm being mean about the ratio of poo to diamonds, but either way, it doesn't take away from the fact that if someone posted something truly valuable yesterday, there is a very high chance that I won't see it. I'm tempted to just add twitter feeds to my RSS reader. Am I missing the point? Or just failing to use it properly, for instance the 'list' function?

The problem is that, if I'm right, twitter first introduces an anxiety that I'm missing out on some information, and then exacerbates it. It's like accepting invites to three parties on the same night, and then spending the majority of the evening in a taxi. Twitter takes the principle of social filtration of the web, and then dares you to delimit the filter. Why follow only 100 people? Why check it only once an hour? Eventually the filter is so big that it undermines its initial value, which is to cut the crap, so to speak.

I can see that I may be viewing it too much as a new version of blogging, rather than a new version of email. But in that case I'm merely guilty of being genuinely interested in what people say and discover, to the point where I am happy not to reply. As for the more common complaint that it's narcissistic and conducive to ADHD, well, yes, obviously. But I'm too busy googling the words 'Will Davies' while watching the news to care. I shall soldier on for the time being.

'smart investment'!

Continuing on the theme of how to flog a higher education, initiated here, I saw another very provocative advert on the tube this evening, this time for University of East London:

You can probably see where this is going to end up. Far be it from me to neglect my curmudgeonly responsibilities, but I'm almost tempted to skip the pain-staking analysis of neo-liberal economic culture on this occasion. Or maybe I can just publish it as a recipe: take Gary Becker's metaphor of 'human capital', stir in Foucault's lectures on the Chicago School, sprinkle something about how the fiscal crisis is going to exacerbate consumerist pressures, then connect to Mandelson's recent pronouncements about universities. Bake for 20 minutes. Mmm... delicious! [Cue celebrity chef's friends all turning up to enjoy the meal]

No, the utterly delightful thing about this poster is the awful, glaring, beautiful irony that is slap bang in the middle of it. 'It makes sense to study where there's smart investment, don't you think?' Very helpful of them to point out the O2 Dome... but they neglected to identify the industry clustered in the skyscrapers just to the right of it.

research projects for Gordon Brown

Gordon Brown writes in The Guardian today, in advance of his Fabian conference speech:

Fairness and aspiration are not polar opposites, in fact they go hand in hand. That insight – that all people have the chance to rise as far as their ­talents take them – remains the driving force behind New Labour today... I want to set out how in the coming decade we can unleash the biggest wave of social mobility since the second world war – to spread opportunity across society and to realise the aspirations of all those on middle and modest incomes. Social mobility is not an alternative to social justice – it is modern social justice.

So New Labour plods on, banging its head on the wall known as 'cultural capital', like the closing scene of The Pledge (why was this never mentioned in the films of the noughties???) in which a derranged Jack Nicholson sits rocking on a bench, muttering about the serial killer he believes is still out there. You want to do this 'in the coming decade?' What was wrong with the last decade?

If this rhetoric and idealism is to continue, may I suggest a few empirical research projects, to either inject credibility or to demolish it once and for all:

- What is talent? No seriously, what is it? And see if you can answer this question without referencing sport, as hard as that may seem. Or Susan Boyle. Banks believe that bonuses are necessary to retain the 'T' word. Is that what you mean? Then there is the ever more muddled evidence on nature or nurture. Sadly science will never provide politicians with the sort of evidence they really want, which might cleanly disentangle the two. Or if it did, the evidence would be so politically unhelpful (for instance, that advantages in linguistic ability and self-confidence emerge within months of birth) as to be disregarded. So maybe a bit of ontological clarity might help. Don't worry if psychologists and economists don't agree. Just drop the doey eyed references to your love of rugby, drop the anecdotes about 'last week I met a young man who had achieved his dreams by blah blah', steer clear of Seb Coe, and please don't mention the frigging Olympics. You are a smart man, Mr. Brown: what do you understand by the word talent, and can you give a single example of someone who lacks it?

- The politics of downward mobility: The 'biggest wave of social mobility since the second world war' is certainly a bold ambition, not least because it would damage some of the very people who swing elections. It's all very well targetting a few toffs, but they've been marginalised for a while now (give or take the Conservative front bench). Who is to move downwards? Liberal economics is based on the notion that capitalism is a positive sum game, growing the size of the cake, so less people need move down than up. Neo-liberal politics offers the assumption that 'a rising tide lifts all boats', though this is only occasionally true thanks to considerable government intervention such as income supplements (aka tax credits). But neither of these quite goes as far as promising social mobility, which must surely involve the fundamental competition for power, authority and cultural status that the upper middle classes have expertly resisted for 150 years.

- The distribution of aspiration: What happens if someone has no aspiration? Are they wrong, and to be corrected? Or does this make them probably talentless? Because aspiration is not evenly distributed across society. Unlike in American society, here it congregates in cultures and classes in which aspiration seems realistic. This, as Barbara Ehrenreich now argues, may be our virtue, not our defect. Someone who does not aspire may actually have a more credible sociological perspective on British society than the management guru or policy maker who commands them to do so. Any credible research on social mobility - and its absence - must surely take this into account, in addition to the meritocrat preoccupations with testable intelligence and parenting.

- The next 'middle class': Brown's quote above does not mention those on 'low incomes', but only 'middle and modest' incomes. Lets specify who these people might be. The median income in the UK is around £28k a year, so a 'modest' income might be around £18k a year, which leaves out a sizeable segment of the population below this. At least this exclusion is marginally more honest than the meritocratic rhetoric that imagines society as some version of the national lottery. Can we be clear about who you want to rise upwards, and how far? Lets assume that these middle and modest income people (roughly 30% of the UK working age population) aspire, quite reasonably, for their children to own their own homes. In current economic circumstances, this means that they would have to go into jobs earning them at least £50k a year (unless the housing market slumps significantly), thereby moving them into the top 5% of the working population. You've got your work cut out.

If any of the above seems too tricky, then maybe have a read of this instead.

reigning cats and dogs

There was one telling feature of the BBC's online coverage of the Haitian disaster on Wednesday: the 'Most read' story, as of around 10am that day, reported on a dog that was learning Polish.

I've long wondered about animals and the internet. The most read stories on the BBC regularly feature dogs that have adopted kittens, sheep that have had sex with goats, cats that can water-ski. There was one story that frequently recurred in the top five, of a man who was forced to marry a farm animal that he'd been caught having sex with. Then there are those annoying 'I can haz' cat pictures that I've never understood. 

Why is this? Maybe this is just a variant on pornography. The animals are, after all, usually naked. Simon Critchley argues that the existential substrate of humour (as opposed to comedy) is the blurring of the distinction between human and animal. We all laugh when a human does something animalistic, or an animal does something human. His book on the topic offers a definitive case of a joke involving a man having sex with a bear, which is surely destined for the BBC's 'most read' list. 

There is universality in this, but it is the inverse of that promised by Enlightenment cosmopolitanism. To appreciate this, read Kant's Idea for a Universal History, whose third thesis runs: 

Nature has willed that man should, by himself, produce everything that goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence, and that he should partake of no other happiness or perfection than that which he himself, independently of instinct, has created by his own reason.

Kant's account of history sees the human species gradually heading towards a single, global civil society, in which discourse is rational and elevated above the animal and the parochial. Humanity's telos is to globalise, rationalise, de-nationalise and de-naturalise its condition. The anti-Enlightenment sneer of Nietzsche and his followers - especially John Gray today - stresses the gut over the head, the friend over the enemy, the irrational custom over the civilised debate, desire over rationality. Animality doesn't just rattle reason, but gobbles it up.

The Haitian disaster is both shockingly counter-Enlightenment - almost counter-civilisation - and potentially a condition of greater Enlightenment. The grizzly reports refer to the living amongst piled up corpses, and the dying left to die without care, let alone modern medicine. It's not just that humanity is overwhelmed by a natural disaster, or that humans are on the verge of sub-human conditions and behaviour, but that modern science, technology and politics are virtually helpless at present. The Lisbon earthquake had a profound effect on the formation of European Enlightenment, famously leading Voltaire to abandon his theological optimism. An earthquake reveals how thin the veneer of modernity ever is, though perhaps equally how much thicker we have to make it.

I heard Douglas Alexander on the radio yesterday morning declaring that nobody knew the number of dead. I kept wondering why this number was so important - was it just morbid fascination on an epic scale? - until he used the phrase "so we can't get our arms around the scale of the problem", and then realised that, as puny and as silly as they are, numbers are one of the main tools that contemporary humans use to try and save themselves. As the Latourians would tell you disparagingly, they're one of our best sticks for fending off nature and keeping it at bay. So, fair enough, Douglas Alexander - I'll let you off this time. When nature was this rampant, cavemen would employ every tool available to them.

Meanwhile, another million people have watched the clip of the dog being taught Polish. As a space of communication, the internet hovers uncertainly between the promised global civil society that Kant believed would eventually arrive, and the sort of horror show that Nietzsche and Gray believe we are biologically wired to gawp at. The 'most read' section on the BBC website is a sort of barometer of the human condition, neither as elevated as the 'global civil society', nor as grotesque as nature's full awfulness. The watching world can't cope with Haiti from an Enlightenment perspective, for it can't get its 'arms around the scale of the problem' (which is not a bad definition of the Kantian sublime). But thankfully it can't cope with it from a Nietzschean perspective either, for some forms of awfulness are too much even for animals as sick as us. So we watch a dog learning Polish instead.

Pets sit mid-way between a global civil society and a global horror show. As Critchley indicates, human beings can't all partake in a single rational discourse about the nature of scientific progress, but they can all laugh at a cat that plays the clarinet. I saw the film of Disgrace at the weekend, and if there's one way that the film actually supplements the book, its with the constant canine imagery. I suspect that this is Coetzee's point, that between the sexual animal violence of the wild and the judicial order of the city lies the intermediary of the pet dog, representing both our connection to nature, and our miniscule distance from it. A cat or a dog turns out to be the most comforting thing to look at, for beings that can't work out if they're animals or not.

Seminar series in Oxford

Colleagues and I have been working on a seminar series for this term, with the title 'Markets: infrastructures, devices, governance'. Full details are here, and the dates and speakers are below

All welcome, and no doubt there will be opportunity for a drink afterwards.

Tuesday 19 January 2010 - 4:00-5:30pm
Yuval Millo, Department of Accounting, London School of Economics
“Accounting for liquidity supply: The constitution of the options market maker”

Tuesday 26 January 2010 - 4:00-5:30pm
Jean-Pascal Gond, Nottingham University Business School
"The social construction of corporate social responsibility metrics: Making CSR calculable, legitimating responsible investment"

Tuesday 2 February 2010 - 4:00-5:30pm
Dariusz Wojcik, Department of Geography, University of Oxford
"Securitisation and its footprint: an economic geography of financial markets"

Tuesday 9 February 2010 - 4:00-5:30pm
Peter Karnøe, Copenhagen Business School
TBC

Tuesday 16 February 2010 - 4:00-5:30pm
Barbara Harriss-White, Department of International Development, University of Oxford
“Rural capitalism in a democratically elected communist state: how to study markets for basic wage goods – the case of food in West Bengal”

Tuesday 23 February 2010 - 4:00-5:30pm
Gisa Weszkalnys, Department of Sociology and Philosophy, University of Exeter
"More cure than curse? Ethnographic perspectives on an economic experiment in West Africa"

Tuesday 2 March 2010 - 4:00-5:30pm
Eve Chiapello, HEC, Paris
“Accounting at the heart of the performativity of Economics”

Tuesday 9 March 2010 - 4:00-5:30pm
Jonathan Michie, Department of Continuing Education, University of Oxford
“Markets and corporate ownership structures”