Tony Blair and the Media
it is the height of stupidity, on Blair’s part, to think that it might be an idea to start regulating the blogosphere
I would much rather have cyberspace regulated by public scorn than by Tony Blair
God save the media
Oh for heaven’s sake, can someone please tiptoe up behind our poor prating ex-Prime Minister to be and tell him that the show is over? Come on, Cherie, Alastair, Peter – whoever still composes the depleted Praetorian Guard – tell the old boy to put a sock in it before he does himself a serious embarrassment.
I think it would be fair to say that we have heard some self-serving twaddle from Tony Blair in the past 10 years, and yet his “I blame the media” speech was not only hypocritical and sinister: it was downright insulting to the intelligence of the British public.
There he goes, sobbing about his treatment at the hands of “feral beasts” of the press, with all the plangency of Earl Spencer denouncing the paparazzi, when he and his Government set out from the very inception of their rule to distort and corrupt the process by which information comes into the public domain.
Act One, Scene One, Alastair Campbell systematically purged Whitehall of its official press officers – good men and women, not paid very much, who could be relied on to tell you the facts as they understood them. Instead, he and Tony installed a cadre of trusties, mainly from the Mirror, who blatantly pushed the Labour line and gave a Blair-favouring “spin” to events.
Important announcements – the timing of elections, even the contents of the Hutton report – were leaked to certain newspapers in the hope of keeping them on side, and MPs were pathetically obliged to comment on whatever Pravda (the Sun) or Tass (the Mirror) was authorised to announce, rather than hearing the news from the Dispatch Box.
It was Blair, far more than overmighty journalists, who marginalised Parliament in the past decade. And when spin didn’t work, Blair and his team would simply lie: they would assert that black was white, and garnish their assertions with brutal Anglo-Saxon participles.
They tried to deceive the public over little things, such as the way the Prime Minister had inserted himself at the forefront of the Queen Mother’s funeral ceremony; and they deceived the public over matters of colossal international importance, such as the exact balance of probability given by British intelligence to the question of whether or not Saddam Hussein indeed possessed nuclear, biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction.
It wasn’t the press that undermined confidence in government: it was the horror of discovering that the Prime Minister’s spokesman – Alastair Campbell – could in effect order the intelligence services to buff up the evidence, to change the mood of verbs from the conditional to the indicative, in order to make Saddam’s weaponry sound more scary and the case for war more convincing.
It is the government deceit that is resented – at least by most people – and not the “feral beasts” of the media who uncovered it.
That is why Blair’s speech to the Reuters Institute was so hypocritical; and it was insulting to the intelligence of the public because he really seems to believe that everybody reads the press in the way that politicians read the press.
We politicians can be sometimes so consumed with vanity that our very existence, our self-definition, our self-esteem depend on how we think we are portrayed in the media.
Blair complains that journalists are locked in a ghastly contest for “impact”, when his own Home Secretary had that very day announced a tabloid-grabbing plan to “castrate paedophiles”, which turned out, on inspection, to involve giving them Prozac on a voluntary basis.
Who is really addicted to “impact”? The journalists with their lust for bylines, or the politicians with their lust for bossy, interfering and often expensive initiatives which serve no other purpose but to get their mugs in the paper?
The public is equally cynical about both, and I think Blair misunderstands the way people now assess and interpret the news. It is true that people on the whole dislike tabloid excesses: the monstering, the door-stepping, the lying, the intrusions, and so on.
But we live in an amazingly media-literate age, and in my experience people can almost always see behind the hysteria and the hyperbole, and work out what is really going on.
What they want is for their politicians to be hard-working and true to their consciences, and they have by now read so much rubbish that they find it relatively easy to blow the froth off a story and get to the nub; and if the nub of it is that the Prime Minister has wittingly or unwittingly deceived the nation, and taken us to war on a false prospectus, then, yes, that will be damaging; and the wonder of the Blair premiership is not that his reputation has been torn to bits by a feral media, but that, in spite of everything he has done, he manages to leave office with his reputation as high as it is.
It would be a real disaster if he were to parlay any of his waning authority into some new restrictions on the press, and it is the height of stupidity, on Blair’s part, to think that it might be an idea to start regulating the blogosphere.
I have now been writing columns in this newspaper for almost 20 years, and in the past couple of years the game has completely changed. We fat-cat columnists face a new and terrifying threat. It is called consumerism. It is called democracy.
For the first time we must come face to face with our readers – hordes of lynx-eyed brainboxes out there in cyberspace – and no sooner do our words appear on the website than they can be abusively peer-reviewed and fact-checked.
Our judgments are mocked, our non sequiturs are skewered. Journalists – these feral characters that Blair claims to fear – are increasingly accountable, increasingly vulnerable to the pithy rejoinders of the man or woman on the net.
And this is the key point: it is not so much that politics and journalism are increasingly tawdry or despised. It is the growing media literacy of the public – the understanding of soundbites and vox pops and two-ways and blogs – that allows everyone to participate in activities once reserved for the journalistico-political complex.
That is a wonderful thing, and I would much rather have cyberspace regulated by public scorn than by Tony Blair, who should depart as soon as possible to complete his farewell tour in an open-top submarine.
175 Comments
Good, we agree. Crusoe is absolutely free, but his F may vary. So F is not a measure of freedom. (bgp)
Well, we agree that in Hayekian and Marxian terms that Crusoe is free. But in agreeing on this, we have also agreed that there are a number of different types of freedom. Or definitions of freedom. Hayek has four of them, and the Marxian one makes up five. All this means is that the word ‘freedom’ is elastic enough to encompass a wide range of definitions of freedom. Objects may have ‘degrees of freedom’ of motion, with one degree of freeom meaning an ability to move back and forth along a line, two degrees of freedom to move across an area, and so forth. It is possible to define all sorts of kinds of freedom. So there is surely room to include F as another kind of freedom. I see no reason not to.
F is what we already call ‘free time’, or ‘leisure’. This form of freedom is clearly not the same as Hayek’s freedom from coercion, nor his political freedom, nor his metaphysical freedom, nor his freedom of choice. Neither is it a Marxian freedom from want.
And indeed, you reflect this notion of freedom when you describe Smith as “a gentleman of leisure (F=1)”, which is the same as saying that he was a man with a great deal of free time. (I would dispute that such people ever actually have F=1: Smith would still have had to perform some essential self-maintenance activities, like eating and so forth. Perhaps F–>1 , or F approaches 1, would be be more accurate.)
‘Free time’ implies some kind of freedom, but one that most particularly has duration in time, rather than extent or number. A wide range of choices implies some number of choices, but not necessarily the time in which to choose. A supermarket may offer a wide range of different goods for sale, but a hurried customer may not have the time to inspect them all, and instead simply grab the first thing he sets his eyes upon. F is, I would suggest, a measure of a temporal freedom of action. And it is this temporal freedom that seems to be missing from Hayek’s various forms of freedom, and from the Marxian notion of freedom.
As for the other things you mention, such as F as a measure of security and mortality: it is on the scale of 0 to 1, that F less than 0 represents death, and Crusoe is is safer from death the higher his value of F above it, much like someone keeping well away from the edge of a precipice. Crusoe is, first and foremost, simply trying to stay alive.He must at very least remain alive if is he is to enjoy any of the aforementioned freedoms in any measure at all.
You may have noticed that I have extended F to apply to all living things, plant or animal, as well as human. Crusoe could be a small beetle, but he’d still have some value of F. Whatever we call F, we are dealing with something that is fairly fundamental to all forms of life, and not simply human life with its even more specifically human notions of freedom.
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I am a non-smoker, but now I am tempted to start weaning myself onto the weed. I shall chew nicotine gum by the dozen and slap hundreds of patches over my skin in readiness for lst July. Then I will be well and truly conditioned into smoking mode without too many side effects, like suddenly becoming incapable of running a few metres for the bus, and losing the skill of climbing a few stairs without panting my pants off. I shall puff away and wait for the smoking wardens to arrive and issue a ticket and a fine. I shall not pay the fine, of course, and I shall be sent to prison, but I shall go on the run and they will never find me and I will continue to smoke wherever I choose.
Labour\\\’s beating Tory in the polls, today Boris. Pull your finger out of your ear and DO SOMETHING
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Hayek smoked a pipe. Not sure if Adam Smith did.
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you still need to show how you get off the island (i.e. make this applicable to more circumstances than just the very limited and unreal one considered so far)
You’re asking Crusoe to rejoin human society. But why should we suppose that there is any human society beyond Crusoe’s island? Perhaps there are just lots of Crusoes on their own islands, living perfectly happy lives. We already know that Crusoe is absolutely free from coercion, and is politically free. Why should Crusoe want to get mixed up in coercive, hierarchical human society? He’s better off where he is.
So how might have human societies have ever formed from a bunch of autonomous Crusoes?
Let’s shift to a slightly different circumstance. This time Crusoe is living on a plain, and instead of having to find and eat one fruit, he has to get six different items each day, which are each to be found at geographically separate locations. In fact they are found at the vertices of a regular hexagon, each of whose sides is several miles long. Crusoe’s daily task is to walk around the perimeter of the hexagon, collecting and consuming each item in turn. Let’s suppose that it takes Crusoe 2 hours to walk from one vertex to the other, and another hour to consume or use the item he finds at that vertex. Given 6 vertices, it takes 6 x (2+1) or 18 hours to return to where he began. So Crusoe’s F is 1 – 18/24, or 0.25.
And let us suppose that this time Crusoe is not alone. There are in total of 12 Crusoes walking around the perimeter of the hexagon, quite independently of each other, collecting and consuming the same 6 things. They occasionally encounter each other – because some go round clockwise, others anti-clockwise – and gradually get to know each other, and learn to communicate in simple ways, using hand gestures and grunts. Apart from this, they have nothing to do with each other.
Now, let’s suppose that one day the annual rains begin, and the plain turns into gradually thickening mud. Instead of it taking 2 hours to walk around the hexagon, it takes a little longer each day. After a while it is taking them 20 hrs to get around the circuit, and then 22 hrs. F has fallen to .0833. If it gets much worse, F will fall through 0, and all of them will die.
In this increasingly desperate situation, one of them has an idea, which gets communicated around the perimeter to the others. And the idea is that each individual should pick up two of whatever things are at whatever vertex he’s at, one in each hand, and take it to the centre of the hexagon, leave them there, and then go back to the same vertex, and get another two, and bring them back to the centre, and so on, again and again.
If it’s currently taking 2.75 hours to walk from one vertex to the next. In this new scheme of things, assuming one individual is performing in this manner from each vertex, two of each item arrive at the centre of the hexagon every 2.75 hours, and 6 in 8.25 hours. Once 6 of the each of these things has been brought to the centre of the hexagon, the 6 people who have been bringing them each consume one of each of them, over 6 hours. And so, acting in concert, they take 14.25 to meet their needs, and F=0.41. If anyone is still walking around the perimeter, consuming items one by one, their F isnow 0.06. If the mud gets much thicker, their F will fall through 0, and that will be the end of them. But the cooperating 6 (or 12) individuals, will survive. And perhaps survive the rainy season.
This is one account of the formation of a human society. It is formed out of necessity. Cooperative human societies, with divisions of labour, have higher F than autonomous individuals, and so they survive where autonomous individuals cannot – like when the rain comes. If autonomous individuals had higher F values than found in cooperative societies, these societies would disintegrate. But once people become mutually dependent on each other, life has become rather more complicated. Somebody has to decide who does what, and people have to perform the task assigned to them.
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idlex,
You remember your comment about language and darts on the dartboard? I don’t think we’re even throwing our darts at the same board, or if we are, you have a completely different scoring system to me.
For example, I understand the words (your words, remember) “absolutely free” as meaning “completely free” or “free without reservation”. You understand it as meaning “free in Hayekian and Marxian terms”. I admit, we have not defined “absolutely” so far, but, at risk of being accused of being pedantic or playing with semantics, I suggest that your definition of “absolutely” is an unusual one. It can be difficult to communicate meaningfully if one departs too far from accepted usage.
Returning, with a heavy heart, to definitions of freedom (wish I’d never raised the bloody subject, though Christ knows how people can occupy a Tory blog, claim to be offended on liberal grounds by government limitations of personal freedom, and yet still feel the need to contest the proposition that freedom is a prerequisite for growth in prosperity), Hayek’s book (whose first chapter I tried to abbreviate), doesn’t simply offer a menu of definitions and say, “pick one, or if you don’t like any of them, invent your own”. The whole point was to examine different usages with a view to understanding which one represented “that ideal of freedom which inspired modern Western civilization and whose partial realization made possible the achievements of that civilization”. He provided clear explanations of why the other usages, though valid in certain contexts, lead one up a blind alley (in fact, often into dictatorship and curtailment of liberty) if used as the basis of a liberal political and economic philosophy. You seem to be treating it as an all-you-can-eat-buffet, to which you have brought your own sandwich.
This whole discursion, which is shedding far more noise than light, started with your assertion that economic plenty leads to political freedom. I contested that view, saying that cause and effect are in the opposite direction – political freedom leads to economic plenty (I used the word “prosperity” as shorthand, but it was clearly meant with reference to your proposition and terms). You and others then pointed out, fairly (though the same could have been said for others), that I hadn’t defined my terms, so I offered Hayek’s definition of freedom (he had only one, by the way – the others were considered by him for the sake of discarding for his purposes, a point I thought I had brought out, but perhaps I paraphrased badly). You then proposed an alternative, physical definition of freedom. Since then, I think we have been talking at cross-purposes. You have been focused on developing your physical formula of freedom. I have been focused on the sense of freedom used in my proposition that freedom leads to prosperity. I have been contesting your use of F as a measure of freedom because it would not fit in with my proposition. But it doesn’t have to. If you want to use F to measure freedom in a sense that you understand it, there’s no point me arguing with that unless you progress from there to some broader point with which I don’t agree. Until that point, it’s just semantics. I’ll be interested to see where your formula leads, but I’m going to give up arguing whether it is a measure of one thing or another.
Actually, the most useful thing about this exchange is that it demonstrates the point at the start of this thread (Blair’s point, in fact) – that instant communications reduce the quality of debate and analysis. This is the sort of fundamental issue that should be considered at leisure, with careful study of the existing literature. Examining the issue through frequent blog comments is more likely to obfuscate than to illuminate. I think we’ve proved that perfectly.
As did his recently-deceased disciple, Lord (Ralph) Harris of High Cross. Very subversive and non-conformist, these liberals. (That’s an excellent article you link, by the way.)
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Actually, the most useful thing about this exchange is that it demonstrates the point at the start of this thread (Blair’s point, in fact) – that instant communications reduce the quality of debate and analysis. This is the sort of fundamental issue that should be considered at leisure, with careful study of the existing literature.
I’m sorry that you feel this way. I’ve felt the complete opposite. It’s made a rather delightful change to consider some fairly fundamental matters, which seldom in my experience, get much of an airing. I can’t, for example, remember the last time Blair himself expressed any opinion about the nature of freedom or prosperity. I find it difficult to imagine him even beginning to do so. Hardly anybody does.
This is the sort of fundamental issue that should be considered at leisure, with careful study of the existing literature.
Well, this discussion has been running for something like a week now, which seems rather leisurely to me. I’m not sure about careful study of the existing literature though. May one not think for oneself?
You seem to be treating it as an all-you-can-eat-buffet, to which you have brought your own sandwich.
I suppose that the answer given there is: no, you may not. If one wishes to discuss freedom or prosperity, your view would seem to be that one has to read Hayek, and probably about a few dozen other philosophers, before one can even begin to address such weighty matters.
Yes, I brought my own sandwich. I don’t see why I should eat somebody else’s half-century old sandwiches. I don’t see why my thinking should always be second hand. I think it’s useful to read philosophy, but only as a spur to thought, never as holy writ. And I hope and presume Hayek was doing his own thinking, and not copying something somebody else had said years before him.
As far as I can see, you’re uncomfortable with F because it’s not in Hayek’s book, from which you’ve quoted fairly extensively. I’m not sure why Hayek (and Mises) have come to occupy what appears to be such a prominent position in your thinking. If you had been a Marxist, for example, I would have been treated to several dollops of Capital by now.
Christ knows how people can occupy a Tory blog, claim to be offended on liberal grounds by government limitations of personal freedom, and yet still feel the need to contest the proposition that freedom is a prerequisite for growth in prosperity
Do you mean the smoking ban? Do you think that my freedom to smoke is one of the prerequisites for growth in prosperity? I’m not in the least bit concerned whether it is or isn’t. My concern about smoking is purely a concern for my freedom, and that of millions of other smokers, and not with my financial or economic prosperity. It seems to me that it is such prosperity that has allowed me to smoke in the first place, by allowing me to buy tobacco. The prosperity, if anything, gave me the freedom.
I suppose if anything I see freedom and prosperity (these vague, ill-defined words) as being intimately bound up with one another. If no freedom, then no prosperity, as the freedom to smoke and innovate and invent are curtailed. But if no prosperity, no modicum of leisure and literacy and technology, then no freedom to innovate and invent, and smoke.
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I felt that at first, too, but we’ve been going round in circles for some time now. I attribute that to lack of time to stay focused and to give proper consideration to what others are trying to say. The issues remain interesting, but we were starting to suffer from the law of diminishing returns.
During which time, I have posted 26 times (27, counting this one), and you have posted 42 times. I assume that you, like me, have a job and other things in your life that limit the proportion of your time that can be spent on this blog. Barbara Cartland would have struggled to keep up that pace. We’d need to be geniuses to be producing unremitting quality at that rate. I have a feeling we’re not that good.
You find other people’s thoughts, particularly those of intelligent people who have given the issue a great deal of consideration, an impediment to having one’s own thoughts? You may see yourself as an intellectual giant with no need of reference to the thoughts of others, but if Bernard of Chartres and Isaac Newton felt themselves to be dwarves standing on the shoulders of giants, the best I can hope to be is an ant standing on the head of the dwarf that is standing on the shoulders of the giant, and I’ve got a lot of clambering to do to get up there.
Yours is the Nietzschean perspective – that the dwarves will bring the views of giants down to their level, and that we must rely on occasional giants (or Üaut;bermenschen) to push ideas forward. Though even Nietzsche’s giants had to communicate with each other. Anyway, I don’t much like the bastard – it may not be his fault that he was adopted by the Nazis, but I think his apologists are giving him too easy a ride in not looking for what it was that the Nazis so liked, and whether that was a creditable direction for him to have travelled. And have you tried to read his works? There’s an author you usefully could avoid. Though even in his case, it is probably better to have tested his merits for yourself, than simply to ignore him.
Perhaps one should try it the French way, and elevate knowledge of literature to a social virtue, while trying to get away with reading as little as possible. I guess we could be worse.
No, but I think you should read and try to understand him before you dismiss him or misinterpret him. Same for other philosophers who have written on the subject. There are probably hundreds that I haven’t read, but if someone says to me, “read this, it’s got an interesting take”, I’ll feel that my perspective is incomplete until I’ve tried to judge that for myself.
Of course, we’ll never be able to read it all, but we can narrow it down partly through others’ recommendations, and partly through induction. I haven’t read all or even most of Nietzsche, but I’ve read enough to think that I’m probably not missing out on the rest of it. Could be wrong, but one has to have some sort of filtering mechanism. And if someone says to me that Twilight of the Idols (which I haven’t read) is a great book that is relevant to something I’m discussing, I’ll reconsider my partial opinion of him, pending the chance to test the recommendation.
Ideas don’t go out of date. They may be more or less relevant to the current situation, and expressed in language that has more or less resonance. But they stand or fall on their merits, not their age.
My point about the buffet and the sandwich is a good example of how our wires are crossed. From the point-of-view of reaching a definition of freedom that would serve the proposal “freedom -> prosperity”, it serves no purpose to go through Hayek’s list, ticking them off as he crossed them out, and then adding your own for good measure. One needs to arrive at a preferred definition for those purposes. But your purpose, of course, was entirely different – it was to test the degree to which your definition (F) matched or contrasted with other definitions. Your sandwich is a perfectly legitimate addition to the buffet, but it doesn’t make any difference to my choice.
Did I suggest it was holy writ? But I would suggest that part of the thought that ought to be spurred by reading philosophy is consideration of whether the arguments seem right or wrong to you. If they are persuasive to you, they become a useful shorthand for your opinion on the subject. I can say “I adopt Hayek’s definition of freedom for these purposes” and it encompasses the full range of his argument without having to set out that argument (which ran to 500 pages) all over again and less well.
There is a difference between copying and considering. One can do one’s own thinking while paying due deference to those whose thoughts have influenced that thinking. The opposite, where authors have tried to claim originality for ideas that were never theirs, or worse still, have misrepresented others’ arguments in order to enhance the apparent originality of their own, is both common and very much less desirable than acknowledging influence.
This comment may be a snide reference to my abbreviation of Hayek’s definitions, which I never disguised as anything else. I never wanted to waste my time precis’ing text for you. But as you pronounced, without reference to any specific attempts, that
and then showed a disinclination to test this generalization by reference to those who had made such attempts (setting off instead on your own detour in response to this unproved assumption), it seemed to me that, if you didn’t have the time to read these texts (and who does?), it might help to bring arguably one of the most important of them into consideration by condensing it as far as possible. You did, after all, ask me to precis the argument in Theory and History for you. I understand now that it was a waste of time, and that it was not because of the inaccessibility of the ideas that you were not addressing them.
As it happens, Hayek began The Constitution of Liberty with the subject of old ideas and new. Following a quote that he “copied” from Pericles, he began his introduction with:
Old ideas adapted and rephrased to modern conditions. Old and new thinking. These are not incompatible, but intimately linked. It seems to me that you are repeating that greatest of twentieth-century mistakes – to imagine that something is good simply because it is original, or bad simply because it is old. And before you accuse me of thinking the opposite (old is good, new is bad), let me stress that I am a (classical) liberal, not a conservative (assuming you read the paper on Hayek to which you provided the link, you will have seen the reference there to the article “Why I Am Not a Conservative”, which is the context for that comment – I’ll assume I don’t need to summarize it for you, shall I?). I want neither to throw out the baby nor to keep the bathwater.
I’ve given up commenting on F until it leads to something more significant than an algebraic expression of the fairly obvious statements that one has to consume enough food and drink to survive and that the more time one has to spend gathering sufficient food and drink, the less time one has available to spend on other things. I’m not uncomfortable with it, I’m unimpressed by it.
Horses for courses. The common thread in what was being discussed was liberty and liberalism – freedom of the press, freedom of speech, freedom to smoke, etc. These two guys wrote more extensively and more influentially on the subject, from a classical liberal perspective, than most in the last hundred years. They seemed relevant to me, particularly in the context of a swing in the Conservative (and Republican) philosophy away from this sort of view. It seems to me important that we restate and fight for the principles that underlie small-government conservativism (as Americans might call it) or classical liberalism (as I would prefer). It is hard to do that without reference to them. And I haven’t even mentioned Mises’ Liberalism!
And if you had been a Marxist and done so, I would have been delighted to debate the merits (such as they are) of that book.
I think that the same mentality that bans smoking bans many other things. And that the mentality that thinks it knows what is best for us and forces us to do its bidding will take away our autonomy and personal responsibility in many other ways. And that the cumulative effect of all this banning and nannying undermines our prosperity. For example, the provision of a generous welfare safety-net reduces people’s incentive to save and increases their inclination to borrow, which artificially inflates the broad money supply, which leads to unsustainable growth, malinvestment and a bubble that is waiting to burst. So yes, I do believe that.
The difference between us may be that I am a non-smoker and you are a smoker (I don’t know that, it is just a surmise from some of your comments). As I have said before, I hate smoke. I am only interested in your freedom to smoke because of the broader principle. It may be that you are interested in your freedom to smoke mainly because you want to have a regular fag (preferably not in the rain), and that broader principles are therefore not as important. That is just a surmise, and probably unfair. But if you are interested in the principle, then I would say it is hard to maintain that it is a narrow “freedom to smoke”, rather than part of a broader “freedom from coercion”. And interesting things, more significant than the smoking question, follow from that broad freedom.
And the prosperity taketh it away. You are undoubtedly more prosperous than billions of Asians, but very soon you will find that you have less freedom to smoke than they do.
You may argue that it is governments, not prosperity, that take away this freedom. But what leads them to take it away? How many governments of poor countries do you see banning smoking? Obsession with and exaggeration of hidden risks is a typical middle-class characteristic. The poor don’t have time to worry about passive smoking and global warming – they are too busy trying to survive and prosper. It is only when people have confidence that their material needs will be met that they start looking for other threats. And when they do that and decide that these other threats are problems of externalities or collective action (i.e. involve other people), they expect their governments to act to protect them. And so the cycle continues.
There is no inevitability about it. Affluent people could take a rational view of their risks. It depends partly on their own intellectual powers (which will depend on the quality of their education at home and school), and partly on the information and analysis provided to them by the “professional second-hand dealers in ideas”. As intellectuals in the Hayekian sense (sorry), we need to promote a sensible valuation of risks, and sell the idea that liberal principles are in the broadest interests of society at large. The smoking issue is just a footsoldier in that battle.
Indeed. Or, as I put it way back when… “I agree with your connection of freedom and prosperity. And I agree that freedom is threatened whenever prosperity is threatened.”
Perhaps. I am trying to think of an example where there has been so little prosperity that there was no modicum of leisure, literacy or technology. In reality, we tend to live in a world of more or less prosperity, not absolute prosperity or no prosperity. Even at the point that he stepped down from the trees and onto the plain, man had sufficient opportunity (leisure?) and incentive to innovate. Otherwise, how would we ever have evolved in the way we have? Literacy (or, first, the ability to communicate) and technology, being the products of innovation, cannot have been a necessary requirement for innovation, but let’s say that very quickly they became so. After that point, was there ever again a time when human society did not possess them to some degree?
If we agree that prosperity is a question of degree rather than absolutes, and that there was therefore always some amount of leisure, literacy and technology, which meant that there was some possibility of innovation, can one maintain that lesser prosperity meant less innovation? Necessity, not opportunity, is the mother of invention, remember. If this were the case (that innovation were proportionate to prosperity), it would be hard to see why civilizations rise and fall and economies go through cycles. We should enjoy or suffer unending virtuous or vicious circles of growth or decline. It is the inclination of those who have had enough of decline or poverty to look for ways to improve their lot, and of those who have grown fat and indolent with prosperity to take their good fortune for granted, that causes the ebb and flow in the tide of human affairs.
I cannot look at our world and find support for your view that prosperity leads to freedom. It was not the great economic success of the Soviet Bloc that led to the eventual rejection of the communist shackles. Was it prosperity or the lack of it that led to Estonia’s high regard for freedom? Did they become rich and then free, or did they become free and are now becoming rich? China did not get rich and then start allowing its citizens certain freedoms. It conceded the freedoms, and they started getting rich. Conversely, we have seen in Zimbabwe what happens to an economy when you infringe ever more on people’s freedoms. Mugabe’s oppression was not made necessary by a collapse of the economy. It was his oppression that caused the economy to collapse. There has certainly been a vicious circle, but it is clear where the initial fault lay. And it is clear that the first part of the solution is not somehow to fix the economy in the absence of changes in the treatment of its citizens, but to restore freedoms and the rule of law so that the economy can start to recover.
Again, there is no inevitability about this. We do not have to be satisfied with our lot, just because we are as comfortable as mankind has ever been. We don’t have to get fat and lazy. No doubt, when Jefferson said that “the price of freedom is eternal vigilance”, he meant vigilance particularly against external aggressors, but he was also acutely aware of the threats from internal political, economic and societal decline, and from compromise with the principles of freedom that he and his contemporaries understood so much better than most of our politicians today. Any society compromising on these principles is risking a period of decline that may become a vicious circle. This is the circumstance that I think you have in mind when suggesting that cause and effect (freedom < -> prosperity) can be in both directions, and in those circumstances, I would agree. But the key is always freedom. To stop the rot in a vicious cycle, or to encourage the progress in a virtuous cycle, we must always look to restore, preserve or enhance political freedom – the mimimization of coercion within the rule of law.
I don’t see any mainstream political parties standing for this nowadays (and I don’t just mean in Britain). It makes me very pessimistic about the future. It’s no good saying what you think you need to say to get elected, if what you said does not give you the mandate to make the changes needed. It’s not enough to be “not the Government”. That’s the Ted Heath approach. Being liked or found amusing doesn’t cut it, if you have to leave your liberal principles (if indeed those are your principles) at home to achieve that popularity. You have to take the philosophical fight to the country, explain why freedom and less government (and not just a relocation of powers from Westminster to local government) is good for people. I don’t hear that from Boris, or Dave, or most of the current cabal (I’ll make special exception for DD and JR, but they are outnumbered and out-spun). All I hear is that they will do roughly the same as the Government, but will manage it better. If I want managerialists, I will vote for NuLab.
That’s why the argument that you shouldn’t undermine DC or you will end up with Gordo just doesn’t wash. I am not tribal. I am interested in the policies, not the party. I don’t care which of them I end up with if they are standing for similar interventionist principles with subtly different implementations. If anything, Gordo would be the more honest, and probably more capable, managerialist – you’d be getting exactly what it said on the tin. It is more important to have an opposition espousing and explaining liberal principles than for the Tories to win the next election on a mandate to nowhere. Unless they start selling these liberal principles, I will regard a defeat at the next election as the optimal outcome, and act accordingly.
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Trying to be too clever. By Üaut;bermenschen, I meant, of course, Übermenschen, or if that’s still too clever, Uebermenschen.
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You find other people’s thoughts, particularly those of intelligent people who have given the issue a great deal of consideration, an impediment to having one’s own thoughts?
I had no interest at all in philosophy of any sort for until I was in my late twenties. I would occasionally pick up some book of philosophy, read for a few pages, and put it down rather baffled. Why were they thinking about these things? And why write so much about it? It was really only when I had my own idea, which grew out of my science education, that it suddenly all got very interesting, and I started cramming down as much economic and moral and political philosophy as I could manage, as if I had been starved of it all my life. Which, in a great many senses, I had been. But I was mostly reading to see if I could find my own idea somewhere in the history of philosophy – which is what I mostly read. I was at university at the time, and had the run of several libraries, which I used to the fullest extent. It was during that time that I first encountered Mises. And of course, a great many others.
What is true of philosophy is also true of art. I was really only able to appreciate art to the extent that I could myself already draw and paint. I could only appreciate English and poetry to the extent that I’d written a little myself. If, for example, I know little about music, it is because I’ve hardly ever tried to make any myself, beyond humming a simple tune, or tapping a few piano keys.
I never found my idea – F – in the the history of philosophy. But I did find out why I hadn’t found it. And the explanation lay in the gulf between the sciences and the humanities. I was attempting something that was regarded as illegitimate by both sides of this division. Scientists very often say that they study what is the case, not what ought to be the case, and when they do so they are referring to an objection by Hume that he did not see how one could start from an ‘is’ and arrive at an ‘ought’. In unwittingly crossing – or believing I had crossed – this closed border, I had become an illegal immigrant – perhaps even a prisoner of war -, speaking the language of science in the country of the humanities. After a while I realized that once that great fence, or front line, had been erected between science and the humanities, one was no more likely to find scientists in the humanities than one would find German soldiers wandering around behind British trenches in Flanders.
Our discussion has been between, as it were, a 1918 English captain and a German soldier, who has, in one of Hindenburg’s offensives, somehow managed to walk through the entire British front line undetected, lugging one of the very latest light machine guns, deep behind the British front line. I have slept in hedges and ditches, and stolen apples and potatoes. You speak some German, and I speak halting English. I have been, as it were, arguing the Kaiser’s idealistic Hegelian cause, and you the common sense English cause of .Locke, and Mill, and Burke. We were bound to be talking at cross purposes from the moment I said, “Guten morgen, kamerad,” and you replied, “Hullo, old chap. Didn’t quite catch your drift.” Our cross-purposed discussion is the same dispute that we can both hear in the distant thunder of our cross-purposed armies. I had suspected that this would be the case. I had a similar problem with a French farmer a few miles back, except he barely understand I word I said.
Yes, I know about Nietzsche. Eternal recurrence and all that. “I teach you the Übermensch. Man is something to be surpassed.” But did Nietzsche manage it? Nope. He was insane for the last 10 years of his life.
Cold reason will triumph in the end. You’ll see. The Americans will never arrive in time. They are no good at war anyway, having fought only native Indians or each other. You think that I should surrender to you, but really it is you who should surrender to me. Tomorrow, I have no doubt that our newly-formed storm forces will finally catch up with me. Paris will soon be in our hands. Meanwhile, let me show you a photo of my liebe frau, Gretl. Here. Isn’t she pretty?
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For a real Nazi philosopher try Heiddigger and stop picking on Freddy, he was certainly to the right but hardly a fascist. Fred said that only ‘walking thoughts’ were of any use and that ‘sitting’ ones were useless. I don’t think he made any comment on those arrived at whilst tree climbing. His madness is sometimes validated by descriptions of him leaping onto tables and ranting and raging at senior academics. The problem I have with this is that such behaviour appears quite rational to me.
I’m afraid that I’ve never read Heyek and have no intention of doing so at present, but there are bits of Das Kapital that might be of benefit to both of you (and I’m not exactly a fan of that Karl-baby, far too much beard for my liking, and the same goes for Freud … I did say ‘bits’)[And if 'freedom' is going to be considered in a social context it would probably be worth considering the psychologists as well as the philosophers]. The assumed link between prosperity and freedom would seem very iffy unless some level of egalitarian distribution is also assumed (and I don’t mean an absolute equality or anything like it by this). The French Revolution would seem to illustrate that wealth creates freedom, a middle class that had gained wealth but was denied political power decided to do something about it (and, as usual, were led by lawyers!).
This whole debate does demonstrate the danger of letting natural scientists loose on the social sciences. What use is a formula that tells us the obvious? However, there is research that indicates that the analytical processes of the sciences and the liberal arts are nowhere near as apart as is often assumed.
On the other hand a formula like that may appeal to McBroon, and there are believed to be cabinet posts available.
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This whole debate does demonstrate the danger of letting natural scientists loose on the social sciences. What use is a formula that tells us the obvious? (AP)
I don’t think this debate has demonstrated anything like that at all. It’s principally been an inconclusive discussion between the humanities (ably represented by bgp) and science (represented by me). It’s been an encounter between subjectivity and objectivity. If bgp and I were to look up at the sky, he’d say it was blue with clouds in it, and I’d say that the blueness came from scattering of light fom dust in the atmosphere, and the clouds were condensed water vapour. Both are true. But they consider the sky in fundamentally different ways.
It’s not even that I much disagree with Hayek. I have read the Road to Serfdom, and I think I took it to heart. I kept it, leastways. The fate of books I don’t much like is usually to be disposed of fairly rapidly. But I did not think that Hayek’s was a tremendously profound book.
And a formula that tells us the obvious at least makes a promising start. It could be said that the laws of motion and of gravity also tell us the obvious – that a bullet fired from a rifle will fall to earth. It would be distressing if it said otherwise, because it would be contrary to our experience. But when these same laws of motion tell us that if the bullet has sufficent velocity, it will keep on going round and round the earth indefinitely, it tells us something that isn’t obvious, something that isn’t part of our everyday experience.
For a real Nazi philosopher try Heiddigger
Heidegger was infamously a Nazi supporter, rather than a Nazi philosopher. I have a book by him too somewhere maybe. I’ve never made head or tail of any of it. Nietzsche was at least readable and provocative. Heidegger is neither. Freddy wins on that count, at least. Both were probably equally barmy, however.
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It seems to me that you are repeating that greatest of twentieth-century mistakes – to imagine that something is good simply because it is original, or bad simply because it is old. (bgp)
I hope I’m not doing that. I agree that ideas don’t go out of date. But the way they are presented does go out of date, and fairly rapidly. And it is regularly people who present them.
I sometimes think that I have spent much of my life under the oppressive weight of Darwin, Marx, and Freud – to name the most prominent.
Freud’s influence has mercifully declined considerably over my lifetime. And in recent decades, perhaps with the demise of the Soviet Union, so also has Marx’s more long-lasting influence. Darwin, however, remains as oppressively influential as ever – in the person of Richard Dawkins, if nothing else.
All of them, oddly, claimed to be scientists, or had such claims made about them. Freud’s was a science of mind, Marx’s a science of society – hence ‘Scientific Socialism’. Darwin’s was a science of the natural world of plants and animals. None of them, in my view, were what I think of as scientists – Kepler, Newton, etc -. They were instead gurus of the various movements to which their names are invariably attached – Darwinism, Marxism, and Freudianism.
All of them have been, at one time or other, set up as idols to be worshipped. This sort of thing doesn’t happen in science. Perhaps it happened a bit to Newton in his own day, but for the most part scientists only become minor celebrities, rather than idols to worship. And I think that this is because in science, ideas are readily separable from their authors. Indeed, the authors tend to entirely vanish. And this is because the laws of motion and gravity do not rest upon the authority of Newton, but upon a rationality that is independent of Newton. Newton is famous because of his rational equations, rather his equations famous because of his authority. As a result, we don’t have Newtonism, or Einsteinism.
Indeed, if we have Darwinism, Marxism, and Freudianism, it suggests to me that their ideas were in some way inseparable from them, and therefore not entirely rational. Darwin, Freud, and Marx are all part of the packages which are peddled in their name.
So it’s not so much that I object to ideas, but to the idolisation of the people who thought them, or who in some way managed to appropriate these ideas to themselves. I object to them as authority figures, and instinctively want to be rid of them. I do not, in some sense, need to know what Maoism or Trotskyism actually means to know that I will object to them. Give me anyone’s name, with ‘-ism’ appended to it, and I will be instantly agin it. Present their ideas, unadorned by their name, as some sort of rationality, and I might accept them.
Hayek doesn’t seem to be one of these sorts of people. But he has underpinned another credo of which I instinctively disapprove – Thatcherism.
Of all the isms that I have mentioned, I suppose the one whose downfall I long for the most is the pernicious cult of Darwinism. If anyone we have mentioned today deserves to be associated with Nazism, it is probably Darwin.
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Heiddigger’s wife was a party member, he taught in German universities throughout while other credible academics fled or suffered the consequences. There are a few interesting points in his work, but it also reeks of Teutonic Knight style pseudo-mysticism masquerading as philosophy. It’s no accident that the US post-modernists refer to him in an attempt to counter modernism. The French at least seem to be smarter than that.
If by the ‘isms’ you mean those followers that cash in, then we concur. If you mean the written works themselves, then we are diametrically opposed. Our very thoughts are preconditioned by the work of Freud, Jung, Marx, Nietzsche, and Darwin, and the influence of these thinkers on society at large. It goes right the way through all of the arts and gave birth to social science. Don’t blame the instigators because lesser souls steal their names and elements of their work (how often have you heard a Marxist admit that Marx believed that eventually the state would wither away to be replaced by some rather fuzzy anarchy?) in an attempt to bolster their own failings and earn a living. Although there’s no ‘Einsteinism’ (both maths and physics being somewhat established sciences when he emerged), he is probably equally important in the formation of contemporary consciousness.
Social Darwinism moves in a neo-fascist direction, but not the work on evolution itself. As I stated earlier, Kropotkin is very good on this. I’ve persuaded several natural scientists to read his work, and although they say they would state it differently (not surprising given over 100 years time gap) none disputed what he had to say.
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No doubt, when Jefferson said that “the price of freedom is eternal vigilance”, he meant vigilance particularly against external aggressors, but he was also acutely aware of the threats from internal political, economic and societal decline, and from compromise with the principles of freedom that he and his contemporaries understood so much better than most of our politicians today. Any society compromising on these principles is risking a period of decline that may become a vicious circle. (bgp)
Setting all theory aside, I entirely agree. If I’m not thinking very abstractly about F, as mostly I’m not, then I am often to be found at my local pub, sitting with a pint, smoking a cigarette, and gazing meditatively into space. This will become illegal next week, and it appalls and terrifies me.
It is not merely that I personally will lose this rather meditational pleasure, but that at the same instant, a million like me also will. What is terrifying is that so few people are contesting this diminution of freedom, which has been brought in using political deception (breaking a manifesto pledge) and medical dishonesty (exaggerating the risks of passive smoking). What comes next? Or rather, what goes next?
The smoking ban isn’t something that the British people have wanted. I don’t know of any anti-smoking demonstrations, for example. It is something that is being imposed by the government upon the people. No political party, apart from UKIP, opposes it. The whole relation of the people to the state, in a parliamentary democracy appears to have been turned upside down.
The erosion of freedoms has also proceeded apace in other matters. Using the supposed threat of terrorism, any number of draconian laws I have been brought in. Somehow these weren’t needed when really were facing a considerable threat from the IRA, but are needed now against what appears to me to be a far lesser threat, despite a spectacular 9/11. In addition we have multiplying surveillance cameras, and our roads are increasingly cluttered with signs telling us how to drive our cars.
All this has been done by our own government, not by the EU. And yet tonight I’ve just heard that the EU have approved a constitution that is one that is, to all intents and purposes, the same one as its electorates have rejected. It appears that their electorates are going to get this constitution whether they like it or not. Once again, it appears to be the politicians who are imposing their will upon the people.
We appear to be moving towards a situation where instead of government being accountable to people, people are accountable to government. And it is all happening by stealth.
I’m personally not particularly bothered by where central government resides. But I am deeply concerned that wherever it resides, democracy in any real sense seems to be simply evaporating.
But I’m speaking subjectively and practically. None of this has much to do with F, which is a theoretical notion, and presently as abstract as theoretical physics. However, it may not always be.
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If you mean the written works themselves, then we are diametrically opposed. Our very thoughts are preconditioned by the work of Freud, Jung, Marx, Nietzsche, and Darwin, and the influence of these thinkers on society at large. (AP)
‘Preconditioned’ suggests that we cannot think for ourselves, but only within the categories such people have offered us. If we are ‘preconditioned’, how was it that they – Darwin, Marx, etc – were not, but were somehow able to come up with their own views. ‘Influenced’ would be a more accurate word. And we are not just influenced by such people, but by everyone we ever meet, and everything that happens in our lives.
And the influence of the written works depends, in part, in the way that they are written. I had great difficulty reading Marx. It is written, I think, in some German or European style which seems clunkingly clumsy. By contrast, I have no difficulty reading Darwin, who writes an English that is immediately understandable 150 years later. But it seems that Marx regarded Darwin’s Origin as being written in a ‘clumsy English style’. It appears that Marx wanted Darwin’s imprimatur for Capital, but Darwin never read it. But I suspect that Darwin took one look at it, and ground to a halt after reading a couple of lines.
I think if Darwin has informed so much Ango-Saxon thinking, it is because they can understand him. And Darwin wrote extremely well, and extremely subtly. As does his modern disciple, Richard Dawkins. If Marx never quite enjoyed the same success, it was because Anglo-Saxons don’t really understand him. Or Heidegger. Or Hegel. Or Kant.
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I meant ‘preconditioned’ in the way we perceive, in the same way that the Enlightenment changed and modified European perception, not in the sense of free will. Call it ‘influence’ if you like, but it’s a weak attempt to describe the reality. These writers are part of the specifics of our circumstance, they are part of our consciousness, they help frame it. In a similar way to Shakespeare being embedded in our language, these intellectual giants are embedded in modern consciousness, and all the gibbering of the post-modernist comedians can’t diminish them. If not, we might as well surrender to Islam, it’s not that different to pre-Enlightenment Christianity. (OK, granted, it was a progression that probably started with the Renaissance).
The Angles and Saxons in Germany seem to have no problem in understanding, neither do a load of UK Marxists. Obviously you do, but I think I said previously that I have little time for the dialectic of history, Marx is however an essential tool for social analysis, even if society has become more complex and we need to modify him somewhat. Kant is crystal clear, his simplicity of expression for complex ideas is one of the reasons that I do like him. Heiddigger isn’t that difficult once the mysticism is seen for what it is, but probably isn’t worth the effort. Hegel? Ummmm … so, so … I have to admit that I only ever scanned him, but he does have his fans. Freddy is great fun, but does make logical errors.
Marx is most entertaining when he’s fiery, this is said to have been when his gout was playing him up. I agree over the idolisation issue, all worthwhile ideas should be subjected to critique. But Idlex, you almost sound racist, or is it just a ‘little England’ mentality?
I tend to pass books on, other than art books and antique books with interesting prints. Hence the lack of reference sometimes.
With you all the way over this stealth treaty and the denial of a referendum though.
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I meant ‘preconditioned’ in the way we perceive, in the same way that the Enlightenment changed and modified European perception, not in the sense of free will. Call it ‘influence’ if you like, but it’s a weak attempt to describe the reality. These writers are part of the specifics of our circumstance, they are part of our consciousness, they help frame it. In a similar way to Shakespeare being embedded in our language, these intellectual giants are embedded in modern consciousness, and all the gibbering of the post-modernist comedians can’t diminish them. If not, we might as well surrender to Islam, it’s not that different to pre-Enlightenment Christianity. (OK, granted, it was a progression that probably started with the Renaissance).
The Angles and Saxons in Germany seem to have no problem in understanding, neither do a load of UK Marxists. Obviously you do, but I think I said previously that I have little time for the dialectic of history, Marx is however an essential tool for social analysis, even if society has become more complex and we need to modify him somewhat. Kant is crystal clear, his simplicity of expression for complex ideas is one of the reasons that I do like him. Heiddigger isn’t that difficult once the mysticism is seen for what it is, but probably isn’t worth the effort. Hegel? Ummmm … so, so … I have to admit that I only ever scanned him, but he does have his fans. Freddy is great fun, but does make logical errors.
Marx is most entertaining when he’s fiery, this is said to have been when his gout was playing him up. I agree over the idolisation issue, all worthwhile ideas should be subjected to critique. But Idlex, you almost sound racist, or is it just a ‘little England’ mentality?
I tend to pass books on, other than art books and antique books with interesting prints. Hence the lack of reference sometimes.
With you all the way over this stealth treaty and the denial of a referendum though.
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Sorry about that, it led me to believe that it had failed to post the comment, hence the double post.
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But Idlex, you almost sound racist, or is it just a ‘little England’ mentality?
No. The people I admire are Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, and so on. They came from all over Europe. So I can hardly be a ‘little Englander’.
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Incidentally, Hayek was, I believe Austrian, and fled the Nazis to Britain and the USA. Yet The Road to Serfdom is a very easily readable book. I don’t remember having any trouble at all understanding what he was talking about. So it can’t be the fact that Hayek was Austrian that was problematical.
How come it was easy to read Hayek, but not Marx? Part of the answer, I suspect (but I’m not sure), is that Hayek wrote in English, while Marx wrote in German. So I suspect that I read Hayek in his original English, and Marx in translation. Maybe that’s where what seems to me the clunkiness of Marx comes from.
I used to be rather intoxicated by Argentinian fiction writer Jorges Luis Borges. But I only ever read him in English translations. These days, when I can read Spanish a bit, I now have a copy of one of his books in its original Spanish. The prose is extremely dense, and too hard for me, but I can see that the English translations I read attempted to stay true to that density. The prose was dense because Borges would compress a whole book into a short story, and the translations I had read fairly accurately reflected this.
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I’ll reply to the rest of this when I get time, but there’s such an obvious answer to this that I just had to get it off, though AP won’t like it. Because Marx was talking bollocks and Hayek wasn’t, is why. I’ll explain why I think that later, but let me offer a little hint – any takers for the labour theory of value?
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any takers for the labour theory of value?
Not me. But I’d have to use F to show why.
Marx was a classical economic thinker. Adam Smith gives expression to the labour theory of value. So does Marx. But the neoclassical economic theorists did away with it, around about the time that Marx was writing. Personally, I don’t think too much of their theory of value either.
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Adam Smith’s expression of what is called the Labour Theory of Value is to be found in the early chapters of the Wealth of Nations.
Obvious, innit? By ‘value’ is meant what we nowadays call ‘price’. It’s the ‘Labour Theory of Price’, and it says that the price of any good is determined by the amount of labour it takes to make it.
Quite how we measure the amount of labour isn’t stated, but it is quite plausibly measured in hours, or in physical units of work – Joules.
Either way, Marx came up with an interesting consequence of this theory, which – in my view – is good enough to merit his inclusion among those economists who weren’t talking bollocks.
It’s called the Theory of Surplus Value. If you ask any Marxist to explain this theory, they usually blanch and find an excuse to leave. Perhaps AP would like to explain the Theory of Surplus Value?
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Sorry … No. It was over 30 years ago when I read him and I was never a ‘Marxist’ (they like me even less than Tories and NuLab do!). It’s social analysis that I said he was invaluable for, not economic. We all use his tools for analysing society, even if some of us don’t realise it. I’ll leave economic theory to those that revel in such things. There was me trying to recall ‘A Critique of Hegel’s Critique of Rights’ (the first Marx I ever did read) and you go and bring this up.
A great many serious writers are ‘dense’ to read. After tackling Bourdieu I commented, “It’s alright reading it, but you wouldn’t want to do it twice.” Perhaps academics need a course in literary style.
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The Theory of Surplus Value was an explanation of the origin of profit, and one that grows out of the Labour Theory of Value.
If the owner of a large factory employs 100 men to work 16 hours a day to make 100 goods each day, at what price do they sell? According to the Labour Theory of Value, they should each sell at a price of 16 man-hours.
But, said Marx, by the same token the price of labour must also be the production costs of labour, and those are whatever it takes to keep a man alive and working for another day – a loaf of bread, a bucket of water, and a floor to sleep on. If it takes one man-hour per day to produce these minimum needs, then each worker gets paid 1 man-hour per day for his labour.
And, Marx went on to say, this meant that the factory owner would receive 16 man-hours for every good he sold, but only pay out 1 man-hour per day to each worker. So he would enjoy a surplus of 15 man-hours of day for each good he sold. This is what Marx called surplus value, and what we call profit. And since he sells 100 goods per day, that amounts to 1500 man-hours a day that he trousers from his factory to spend as he wishes.
The factory owner can then use his large income to build a huge mansion and fill it with works of art, and live a life of luxury attended by butlers and chefs and flunkeys – while his workers go home to their hovels to fall asleep on straw beds, exhauted after their 16 hour day. And, indeed, this was pretty much the condition of the working classes in England beneath their capitalist factory owners.
And so Marx called for the workers to rise up and overthrow their masters, and end the exploitative capitalist system, and usher in a society in which wealth was shared equally, rather than enjoyed by only a few.
Which seems perfectly reasonable.
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Bit different now idlex, now instead of working a 16 hour day, the worker could just get pregnant, get a free house, work a 16 hour week and claim tax credits.
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idlex (3:01PM),
These exchanges just race ahead, don’t they? I’m leaving behind lots of interesting earlier comments in dealing with the latest posts first, and hope to come back to the earlier ones later (if you see what I mean). Probably won’t manage it. Again, the speed of communications and the scarcity of my resources is preventing sufficient attention to detail.
Go on then. That would make F a lot more interesting.
Indeed, although I’m not sure that makes Marx a classical economist. Marx refined Adam Smith’s biggest mistake, and made it the central plank in his scheme. He also discarded much of the rest of what Smith had got right. I’d say that makes him a student and partial inheritor of the classical tradition, but I’m not sure it makes him a classical economist, any more than Freud was a physiologist because he was influenced by Brücke.
Incidentally, you might want to have a look at Brücke. I have to admit, I had never heard of him, when I came across him as I was looking for an analogy for the relationship between Smith and Marx. But he seems to have been a scientist of great influence, and not just on Freud. He published in 1874 “a book setting out the view that all living organisms, including the human one, are essentially energy-systems to which, no less than to inanimate objects, the principle of the conservation of energy applies”. Sound Familiar? And just to make this even more circular, Brücke founded an Austrian school of physiology at Vienna University, where Carl Menger founded an Austrian school of economics, of which Mises and Hayek were adherents. The influence of both schools extended well beyond the boundaries of Austria. Menger published his Principles of Economics, the book that (along with works by Jevons and Walras) laid the foundations of the Marginalist Revolution that overthrew classical economics, in 1871, only three years before Brücke’s book above, though the latter was the senior. I can find no sign that they influenced each other, but there seems to have been something in the water in Vienna at the time.
I take it that by “neoclassical” you mean the schools that followed the discovery by Menger, Jevons and Walras of the marginal approach to economics (and not just the Marshallian school and its descendants, to which the term is also often applied). Taking that broader sense of “neoclassical”, I’m not sure it’s fair to talk of “their theory of value” as though they had only one theory between them. Yes, it tended to be (but was not always) based on marginal utility, but there is quite a big difference between the Austrians’ emphasis on [alert: dangerous word ahead] subjective utility, and the attempts of most of the other schools to treat utility as a quantifiable, mathematical entity. Could you clarify what you mean by “their theory of value”, and what theory of value you believe to be correct?
As you know, I’m a “subjective utility” man myself – something’s value to you is whatever you think its utility is to you at the time, measured subjectively relative to the utility to you at the time of other goods (e.g. goods whose purchae you have to forsake in order to purchase the good in question, and goods you have to surrender in order to be able to purchase the good in question). Money, of course, usually acts as an intermediary good in this comparison, so that we end up defining the value of things in terms of the money we have to surrender and the money-value of alternative goods. But in reality, money also has a value to us only in terms of its utility (i.e. in money’s case, what you can buy with it, and complications like how well you expect it to hold its value), which can only be measured relative to the utility of other goods.
The only generalisation necessary or valid beyond that is the marginal bit, which I take to be ordinal, not cardinal, and not capable of interpersonal or intertemporal comparison (i.e. any marginal scale of utility applies only to an individual at a point in time, and not comparably to several individuals, or to the same individual across time). Given those provisos, the classic illustration of a subjective, ordinal, marginal scale of utility (as per Rothbard, though I think he borrowed it from someone else) would be, taking eggs as an example, in order of descending utility, and without implying any ratio of value by the ranking (other than that items higher in the list are worth more than items lower in the list):
4 eggs
3 eggs
2 eggs
1 egg
2nd egg
3rd egg
4th egg
So we can say that 4 eggs are worth more than 3 eggs for both you and me, but we can’t say for sure that 4 eggs are worth more to me than 3 eggs are worth to you (because we can’t make interpersonal comparisons), and we can’t say for sure that 4 eggs now are worth more to me than 3 eggs later (because we can’t make intertemporal comparisons).
This isn’t terribly controversial (or apparently enlightening) stuff, but it’s amazing how much one can deduce from a limited set of basic principles like this one. How do you go about defining value?
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I’m sorry that my post-chemo brain can’t maintain enough focus for this level of intellectual debate bgp, but there was certainly something in the water or in the air in Vienna at that time, consider the revolution in visual art and music that also took place. However, if we want a precursor to Freud’s psychology wouldn’t it be more profitable to look towards James?
Whilst it’s certainly the case that Marx regarded economics as the single most important defining factor, it might be worth remembering that he planned to write two other works following ‘Das Kapital’ in which he intended to consider the influences of such things as ideology and culture on social structures. This is something else that Marxists never seem to mention.
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PS: I may be wrong, but I don’t think Marx or Engles (or Lenin or Trotsky for that matter) ever called for ‘wealth to be shared equally’, they did call for a much more equitable distribution. They weren’t Levellers (and although not a period I’ve ever studied, I think the Levellers only talked in terms of land not wealth).
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These exchanges just race ahead, don’t they?
My fault entirely.
I’m not sure that makes Marx a classical economist.
He’s usually classed as that. Though obviously there were some differences from the others – such as being a revolutionary.
Brücke founded an Austrian school of physiology at Vienna University, where Carl Menger founded an Austrian school of economics, of which Mises and Hayek were adherents. The influence of both schools extended well beyond the boundaries of Austria. Menger published his Principles of Economics, the book that (along with works by Jevons and Walras) laid the foundations of the Marginalist Revolution that overthrew classical economics, in 1871
I’ve not heard of Brucke. But I certainly know of Menger, Jevons, and Walras.
I take it that by “neoclassical” you mean the schools that followed the discovery by Menger, Jevons and Walras of the marginal approach to economics (and not just the Marshallian school and its descendants, to which the term is also often applied).
Yes, that’s what I mean. I have the impression, from memory, that various different people started thinking along the same lines at the same time, and their ideas coalesced into neoclassical economic theory, of whom Marshall was a later exponent. In writing of Marx, I had been thinking of adding that, while Marx drew his own conclusions – of the necessity of revolution, etc. – anyone else who had seen his Theory of Surplus Value might have instead begun to wonder whether there might not be something wrong with the Labour Theory of Value, and gone back to question that. That certainly seems to be what Menger, Jevons, Walras, and co. seem to have been doing.
but there is quite a big difference between the Austrians’ emphasis on [alert: dangerous word ahead] subjective utility, and the attempts of most of the other schools to treat utility as a quantifiable, mathematical entity.
I’m well aware of the tendency to treat utility as quantifiable.But I think that they all regarded utility as subjective. Utility, as its name suggests, is derived from Utilitarianism, and utility was happiness, or pleasure, or well-being. And these are subjective terms. I’ve generally understood marginal utility in the sense that, given a box of chocolates, the first chocolate is very pleasurable, and the second slightly less so, and so on, until by the 18th chocolate, you really don’t want another, and the 19th fills you with mild revulsion.
Anyway, the main point was that the neoclassical theorists started to think about the use-value of goods as determining the price of goods, and not their cost of production. If people wanted something a lot, then its price would tend to rise. If they ceased to want it, its price would fall. So the price of anything would tend to float around, moving up and down.
Now, as I came at it all, clutching F, it seemed to me that what was being said made perfect sense if it was applied to things that were intended to be subjectively enjoyable, like chocolates, or music, or art, indeed a great many consumer goods. But it didn’t apply to various other goods. For example, I get no pleasure from filling up the tank of my car with petrol. It seemed to me that there was a set of goods of one sort, and a set of goods of the other. The first I saw as luxuries, and the others as necessities.
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I should now explain how I saw value – that is, use-value – using F. The last time I was kicking F around, it was to create an interdependent society of people with a division of labour, collecting needed food items from the vertices of a hexagon, and bringing them to a central ‘camp’. They operated at a higher F, 0.41, than the people going round the hexagon on their own. If you recall, they could only carry two items at a time, one in each hand.
Now, let’s suppose that one of them thinks of making a bag in which to carry these items. In his free time, he experiments with weaving together a bag using the supple stems of plants, and after a fair bit of experimenting he manages to make a bag which will hold 4 items, twice what he can carry with his bare hands. Since most of the time when he’s busy, he is just going and collecting items to bring back to the central camp, two at a time, and he’s now able to to collect 4 at a time, it means he can do all his collecting in half the time it took before. So if F = 0.4, then he used to be busy 0.6 of the time, but now, using his bag, he’s now busy only 0.3 of the time, so F has risen to 1 – 0.3, or 0.7. So he has quite a lot more free time than the rest of society, who, without bags, remain with F=0.4. However, after 5 days of using his bag, it bursts one day, and his F returns to 0.4. Now, as I saw it, the cost of the bag was the time it took for him to forego his leisure to weave it together, and value to him of using the bag was the amount of leisure time it provided him in return. And the amount of leisure it provided was the increase in F – his measure of leisuredness – he enjoyed while using it. And his since his increase in F was 0.7 – 0.4, or 0.3, then the amount of leisure the bag provided him was 0.3 x 5, or 1.5 days. If it took him a day to make the bag, he’d lose 1 day of leisure making it, but gain 1.5 days in using it over its lifetime, a net gain in leisure time of 0.5 days.
Now this isn’t a subjective valuation. It’s a measurable amount of time. He takes no pleasure in either making or using the bag. Its utility to him simply lies in the amount of time it saves him doing his everyday chores of collecting things and bringing them back to camp. And since cost and value are both measured in time, they can be directly compared with each other.
Now, to race on, let us suppose that, after a while, his companions notice that he seems to be living a rather more leisurely life than them. They would like to live more leisured lives too. Let’s suppose he offers to make them bags as well, but only if they pay for them by doing some work for him. At what price should a bag exchange? It’s cost or its value? If it is exchanged at its cost, he gains one day of labour for each day of bagmaking work he does, and gains nothing from the transaction, while the buyer gains 0.5 days. Conversely, if he sells a bag at its value, the opposite happens, and he gains 0.5 days from each transaction, and the buyer gains nothing. But if the price is set somewhere between cost and value, then both buyer and seller gain from the transaction. So the price will always fall somewhere between value and cost. And he will always make a profit when he sells a bag. The buyer will also make a profit, but not monetarily. And instead of using bags himself, he will become the bagmaker for his entire society, and spend most of his time making bags for the use of his companions, and as a result all will live more leisured lives.
Now, to return to neoclassical economic theory, the above valuation only applies to useful, leisure-providing bags. It doesn’t apply to leisure-using amusements and luxuries. If, for example, someone makes a chess set, the value of this chess set lies in the pleasure it provides its users. With chess sets, footballs, music, and the like, we have to adopt something like the neoclassical subjective approach to valuation.
So really I’m saying that there are two sorts of goods. One sort – the bag being the example – generates leisure, and the other sort disposes of leisure. And these two sorts of goods can’t be valued in the same way. The first sort, useful tools, can have their value objectively measured. The second sort, which are amusements or luxuries, are enjoyed for themselves, and are valued subjectively.
My criticism of neoclassical economics is that it’s fine as far as goes, in making subjective valuations. But it misses out half the economic problem. Worse, it misses out the important half. Neoclassical economics has no notion of how we come by leisure, but only how we dispose of it. It takes leisure as granted, when it’s not. So it’s half an economic theory. And half an economic theory is as good as no economic theory at all. Yes, they didn’t make the mistake that Smith and Marx made. Instead they made an entirely new mistake.
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To summarise:
1) Human beings do not live lives of perfect leisure. All they have is F, which can range between 0 and 1. It is only in their F leisure time that they can do as they wish rather than as they must. All the good things in life are only done in F. So humans are always trying to increase F to the maximum, through cooperation, moral codes, and time-saving technology.
2) I define the cost of a tool like a bag as the amount of leisure time that is used in making it, and the use-value of such a tool as the amount of leisure time that it provides. For a tool to be actually useful in providing leisure, its value has to be higher than its cost.
This is a new definition of use-value. But it is not one that negates subjective neoclassical notions of value, as applied to non-tools – i.e. amusements and pastimes and luxuries.
3) The price of a tool will fall somewhere between its cost and its value, because only in this range will both buyer and seller gain from the transaction.
4) Because the price of a tool will generally always be higher than its cost, its seller will always make a profit.
And this is a new explanation of profit, quite different from Marx’s.
5) Neoclassical subjective valuations only apply to luxuries and amusements that dispose of leisure time. But the real economic problem is that of how to come by the leisure time that is then neoclassically disposed of.
Sorry if I’ve crammed too much in there. These almost certainly aren’t ideas with which you are familiar. So feel free to take your time about replying, if you wish.
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So what about Gordon Brown’s ‘Theory of Surplus Earnings’?
Our dynamic capitalist economy allows me to sell my labour at way above the level of basic subsistence, even allowing me, horror of horror, to sacrafice luxuries I can afford in order to save money. According to Brown’s Theory of Surplus Earnings, money is gathered at an increasing rate in the form of tax from those that have surplus earnings, and are likely to save those surplus earnings for the future, and redistributed to people who qualify (i.e. pass a ‘means’ test). My suplus earnings are far better off in the hands of the feckless as they are more likely to spend it in the consumer economy, especially on alcohol, tobacco and gambling, thus both increasing taxation and keeping alive the boast of ‘record economic growth’. By removing surplus earnings from those people that have exhibited responsible behaviour, and handing it directly to those people who expect everyone else to financially support their children, Brown ensures that all surplus earnings are spent as quickly as they are acquired and ensures a greater dependency among the population on his own economic and social policies.
Personally I’m sick to the back teeth of this tax credit lark. Every job I have I end up paying taxes so that he can just hand them straight over to someone who spends them on designer trainers and expensive games consoles for little Jonnie. Most of these people aren’t even ‘single’ Mother’s either, they just declare that they are.
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Putting it another way, bgp, what F does is to chop an economy in half, and say that whatever goods produce leisure time belong on one side, and whatever goods consume leisure time belong on the other side. The first are what we call ‘needs’, and the latter ‘wants’.
Neoclassical economic theory provides a fairly plausible account of how people dispose of their leisure, eating chocolates and playing chess, fulfilling wants. But it doesn’t tell us how we came by that leisure in the first place, nor how much of it we have.
I suspect that I’m rather bundling Hayek in with what I think of as the neoclassical theorists. But, having read the Road to Serfdom, I had come to regard Hayek as a political philosopher rather than an economic philosopher. Although one has to wonder where the borders between these disciplines – including moral and legal philosophy – actually lie. In some senses, as soon as you do any economics, you are automatically doing politics and ethics and law as well, because they are all bound up together. I sometimes wonder why the humanities were carved up this way into these petty kingdoms. Divide and rule?
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While bgp is plotting a riposte, it would seem that I am free to expound further upon F.
Neoclassical economics only sees half the picture. Both it and its classical precursore regard humans as fundamentally at leisure – a leisure that is forgone in creating ‘wealth’ in the form of pleasant, enjoyable consumer goods. It is these goods which are regarded as embodying wealth. So the wealth of any society is regarded as being measured by how many goods are created, and how hard people are working manufacturing these goods. Given this notion of ‘wealth’, the political goals of society are accordingly those of “full employment in wealth creation”.
However, the primary and real measure of the success of an economy is F – how much leisure people have. After all, the secondary neoclassical consumer-good generating ‘ecoonomy’ can only operate to the extent that there is the leisure time that can be foregone in work to make the toys and amusements and luxuries that it regards as ‘wealth’. For since F measures the amount of leisure time any society has, F measures the ability of the economy to produce luxuries and amusements. If no F, then no luxuries.
Really, economists ought to be measuring F, rather than GDP or anything else, to find how well an economy is doing. A chancellor of the exchequer ought to report the current average value of F, and announce his proposals to increase F, so making life easier for everyone. A society is successful to the extent that its people are free and leisured, and unsuccessful to the degree that they busy and hard-working.
There are really two entirely different sets of economic activities operating side by side, two different economies. One generates leisure, measured by F, and the other uses this leisure to produce toys and amusements and luxuries and holidays and games. The primary leisure-generating economy should be the subject of the most serious and rigorous concern. The secondary luxury-generating economy should be unserious and playful. In their leisure time people should be allowed to do whatever they wish, except those things that reduce F.
Thie division of an economy into a serious leisure-generating primary economy, and a playful amusement-generating secondary neoclassical economy is very much analogous to the separation of a household’s fresh water supply from its waste water disposal. A supply of clean fresh water is the primary requisite, and what is done thereafter with this water – drinking, cooking, washing, cleaning, and the thousand other uses of water – are secondary and unimportant next to the primary requirement of a supply of fresh water upon which they depend.
I’m rather playfully enjoying this exposition.
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So it’s all about creating more ‘commodity fetishism’ as Karl-baby would have put it, though I think ‘life-style marketing’ is the term more often used today? As those who constantly ‘upgrade’ find, the capital goods do not bring them contentment, there’s always something else to desire. Interesting that simpler societies often seem to have more contented and less neurotic people. So is F a sign of how effed-up it all is?
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So is F a sign of how effed-up it all is? (AP)
No. Quite the converse.
F measures the leisure time which can be disposed of in making pleasurable consumer goods. But there isn’t (or shouldn’t be) any necessity for these to be made. People should make them if they want them, and not make them if they don’t.
But both classical and neoclassical economic theory could be said to fetishize commodities, however, because they regard (and measure) wealth in largely material terms, rather than as leisure, as I propose.
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Efficiency in supply of food and water would indeed be a virtue. But it’s not a very good measure of how well an economy is doing. Compare two theoretical economies with equal aggregate F: one (A) where very little in the way of goods and services is available for consumption during people’s “leisure” (1-F) time; and one (B) where these goods and services are available in abundance. A is like a Soviet economy, where production is focused on what people need (or at least what the head honcho decides that people need), and very little consideration is given to what people want. B is like a market economy, where consideration is given to all those things that people want, including their needs. They have equal Fs. But they are not equally good economies to live in. You can define aggregate F as a measure of economic performance if you like, but it is not a measure that tells us much that is worth knowing about economies that have progressed beyond subsistence.
Where F is relevant is in very undeveloped economies. It matters, for instance, that many people in Africa have to walk for hours each day to fetch water. In this situation, you are right that F is a significant measure of economic welfare and potential. I don’t feel that I need F in order to understand that a significant priority for people in this situation would be to get a water-purification and distribution system installed. But if it helps you, that’s fine.
There is an interesting ramification of the two hypothetical economies above. In A, where few “leisure” (i.e. non-survival) goods and services are produced, there will be little employment outside the production of those goods required to satisfy people’s needs. We will have to spread the labour across this production, otherwise either some people will be slogging so that others can do nothing (if we redistribute) or those who do nothing will not survive (if we don’t redistribute) because they won’t have the means to pay for the goods they need to survive. Everyone, regardless of aptitude, will have to be trained in one of the limited set of skills needed to produce food and water, and employed in one of the limited number of tasks involved in their production. I have assumed that F is equal for both, but of course B will have more opportunities to reduce F through specialization.
The vibrancy of the “leisure” market is a key factor in the maximization of F, through division of labour into more categories than just those needed to survive, and also through providing the incentive to want to increase F (the attraction of leisure time is significantly reduced if there are few goods and services of which one can avail oneself during that time). Once that is conceded, the production of “leisure” goods and services becomes a part of the “essential” economy, because the wages earnt from the production of those goods and services are necessary to the survival of those that produce them. And if the production of those goods and services is part of the “essential” economy, so is their consumption, because there will be no value to their production without demand for their consumption, and if there is no value, people will not be able to earn their living producing them. It turns out, surprise, surprise, that everything that is produced and consumed is part of the “essential” economy. In which case, F encompasses not just the production of food and water, but all goods and services. Your arbitrary dividing line is a logical absurdity.
This is only one of many reasons why your approach is wrong, but it will do for now.
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Compare two theoretical economies with equal aggregate F: one (A) where very little in the way of goods and services is available for consumption during people’s “leisure” (1-F) time; and one (B) where these goods and services are available in abundance… They have equal Fs. But they are not equally good economies to live in. (bgp)
Minor point: leisure is F, rather than 1-F. And those (presumably luxury consumer) good and services will only be as abundant as there people prepared to make and trade them using F. If F is small, then there’ll be very few of them.
I’d only agree that one is better than the other if that is what people want. I don’t see any general law that says that people will always forego leisure to acquire as many consumer goods as possible. Some people want a life with more leisure and consequently a smaller choice of consumer goods, others the converse.
In modern Western market economies, people largely have little choice over their working hours as employees, and so can’t actually decide for themselves how they’d like to allocate their time. This has resulted in growing complaints about the so-called ‘work-life balance’ being skewed against life. Usually they want more ‘life’ or leisure, although sometimes they want less.
Once that is conceded, the production of “leisure” goods and services becomes a part of the “essential” economy, because the wages earnt from the production of those goods and services are necessary to the survival of those that produce them.
Point not conceded. A case in point is prostitution, which may offer the only means of survival in societies where F is highly unequally distributed, and some people have large incomes, and others none at all. Indeed this seems to be a general problem of Western market economies, that people are being obliged to work to provide luxury services of this kind because of such inequalities. I’d call this a Hayekian form of coercion.
I should remark here that it seems to me that F should be as far as possible equally distributed – the above case being one reason why. But I see no reason why the same should apply to luxuries and amusements.
And I don’t think you’ve nullified my distinction between two separate economies any more than you’ve nullified my distinction between clean and waste water. Yes, they all too often get mixed up with each other, but that’s what we call the kind of bad hygiene which diminishes public health.
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Oh good. They’ve turned Comments back on. For a few blissful hours, I thought we could leave this behind.
Let’s try again. Let’s say that I make my living selling sweets. Sweets are not an essential of life. So this activity falls into the “leisure” part of the economy, right? But I don’t grow my own food and fetch my own water. The selling of sweets is my way of surviving. If I don’t sell sweets, I starve. So this activity falls into the “essential” part of the economy, right? And if the sale of sweets is essential to my survival, the purchase of those sweets is also essential to my survival. So the activities that others carry out in order to be able to buy my sweets are essential to my survival, regardless of whether those activities themselves provide essential goods. So now we have people working in the “leisure” part of the economy to earn money to buy “leisure” goods from other people – all “leisure” transactions, and yet still essential to survival….
Under a system of division of labour, “leisure” goods are as essential to survival as “essential” goods, because the people who supply the “leisure” goods use some of the proceeds in order to purchase “essential” goods. And even that part of the proceeds that goes to the purchase of “leisure” goods is essential, because the people who produce those “leisure” goods also need to sell their produce in order to be able to buy the essentials of life. And so on, and so on, ad infinitum. This is both necessary and desirable. Your division of the economy into two sectors – “essential” and “leisure” – is logically unsustainable.
And that’s not even getting into the tricky question of defining which goods and services are “essential” and which are not.
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Just to reinforce the point, I forgot to trace things in the other direction. A lot of the money I earn from selling sweets goes not directly to buying food and water, but to the purchase of more sweets to sell. This is still essential, because without sweets to sell, I can’t sell sweets, and if I can’t sell sweets, I can’t buy the essentials of life. So the sweet-producer’s products, although “leisure” products are also essential to my survival, and to his, because if he doesn’t sell them, he can’t buy the essentials of life either. So now the sweets leaving the factory are “essential” goods, as well as “leisure” goods, because neither of us can survive without them. Then there are the sweet-producer’s employees and his suppliers, both of capital goods (e.g. sweet-making machinery) and of consumables (e.g. sugar and colouring). All these people are doing non-essential jobs producing non-essential goods, and yet the jobs and goods are absolutely essential to their survival.
Then there’s my wife, who takes some of the money left over from selling sweets, having deducted the cost of buying more sweets and buying the essentials of life, and buys a handbag, even though she already has several. Definitely non-essential. But the handbag-maker doesn’t think so. Without customers like my wife, he’s out of a job and starving. But so long as people buy his handbags, he can not only buy the necessary food and drink, but he can occasionally also buy sweets. Not essential, but it keeps me in food and drink.
You can reduce this down to only essential goods. But you will be in Communist Russia, or modern North Korea. As soon as you allow for non-essential goods, you have to allow for the producers of those non-essential goods selling their products in order to be able to survive. To deny this is the most ridiculous case of self-deception I have ever seen.
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Jumping back to an interesting point in the thread, to which I had started drafting a reply, before matters stormed ahead again:
AP (27/6 10:25AM),
Post-chemo or just tired and/or busy, I don’t think any of us can keep up this pace, fascinating as it is. But could you expand just a little on the visual arts and music point? Are you thinking of Brahms and Klimt? Or were there others? Otto Wagner? I’m not well up on the history of the arts, and I’m not at all convinced that artistic, scientific and philosophical blossomings are related, but parallels are interesting.
Exactly. James may, for all I know, have been a more significant influence on Freud’s thinking. But Freud studied under Brücke and borrowed and extended an idea of his as the basis of the development of ideas on the human mind that bore little relation to Brücke’s work. My point was that we wouldn’t describe Freud as a physiologist for this reason, and we shouldn’t describe Marx as a classical economist because he studied Smith and borrowed and extended one of his ideas. If James was Freud’s real precursor (I don’t know much about James, so I couldn’t comment), I would suggest that the equivalent role for Marx was played by Auguste Comte, not Adam Smith. Your point about Marx’s plans to write about “the influences of such things as ideology and culture on social structures” reinforces this connection with the founder of sociology. This is not to deny the significant influence of others (e.g. Hegel, Owen, and, yes, Smith) in Marx’s confused thinking.
I can’t find anything to contradict you, though I haven’t done a thorough search. But this usefully drags the thread back to one of the important points that got left behind – your suggestion (25/6 10:12AM) that “the link between freedom and prosperity would seem very iffy unless some level of egalitarian distribution is also assumed”. How does one define equitability, and how does one know what is the right level of redistribution? How will you know when everyone is equal enough? Do you think everyone will agree what that level is? It’s a question to which “majority opinion” is a very bad answer, given the ease with which the majority can exploit the minority, and their historical inclination to do so (as noted by Jefferson, Adams and Franklin), whether you view that as the bourgeoisie exploiting the workers, the indolent exploiting the industrious, or whatever.
This brings us to the question of distributive justice. And here I have to admit that I have barely made a dent in Rawls and none at all in Nozick. Perhaps when I get a chance to go through A Theory of Justice (which sits patiently outside my bathroom, but usually yields to more entertaining fare), the scales will fall from my eyes, and I will understand both why and how one would redistribute for egalitarian purposes. But at the moment, I’m afraid I don’t see any sense in it. It seems like a problem to which only woolly solutions have been proposed because they are answers to a badly-framed question. We could go into the theoretical arguments for different forms of distributive justice, but for me, it is enough to observe that the poor in mature capitalist economies are richer than the rich in mature communist economies. It is clear, both theoretically and empirically, that free markets are the most effective means to coordinate social cooperation in the division of labour to allocate scarce resources to the satisfaction of people’s wants. (And that includes their needs, idlex. Please don’t imagine that that debate is useful here.) I don’t deny that inequalities tend to increase in free markets, but so long as the poor are better off under free markets than under collectivist economies, I don’t care if the rich are even richer. On this basis, it seems to me that free markets are preferable from a welfare as well as an efficiency point-of-view.
Redistribution is a way of making free markets less free, efficient and effective. It encourages short-termism and discourages prudence. It encourages consumption and discourages saving. It reduces the reward for hard-work and innovation, and increases the reward for indolence. It distorts valuations and incentives, encouraging the over-production of some (typically low-quality, disposable) goods and under-production of other (typically higher-quality, more long-lasting) goods.
Rather than redistribution, I go for Winston’s safety net, on a moral basis, and leave it at that. Of course, I still have to make a judgment then about what level of provision should be made for the needy, but at least I am trying to judge that on the basis of cost-of-living, rather than the more elusive notion of fairness or equity.
And as a tempter to further debate, I argue that:
(a) the best way to provide that safety net, to minimise distortions to the market and bureaucratic inefficiency and cruelty, is through a Basic Income, and
(b) having provided that safety net through a Basic Income, further redistribution through progressive taxation is unnecessary and undesirable, and should be replaced with flat (and, as far as possible, harmonised) taxation rates.
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I was thinking more in terms of Schonberg, Berg et al in music. Certainly Klimt in art, but also the decorative arts of the Secessionists, Weiner Keramik, Wiener Werkstatte and furniture designs by Josef Hoffmann and others. Although most of this is slightly later, its roots are in the late C19th. I would agree that there isn’t always a cross-over relationship, but it often seems to be present, consider the influence of the Russian avant guarde on the early revolution and Mayakovski’s suicide when Stalin came to power leading to the voluntary exile of the foremost Soviet artists, or the links between the German expressionists, the theatre of Brecht, Hindemith’s music, Hartfield’s photo-montages, and the German Communist Party. There were fairly close ties between the social-realist authors and radical politics in the USA at the beginning of C20th.
I’m not that much in disagreement with your taxation economics, and if I say very much I suspect that we’ll be at cross purposes, but I think there is cause to widen wealth so that we’re more akin to Germany and Scandinavia [it seems obscene to me that in the modern world 10% should own 90% of the wealth and, as I love pointing out, exactly the same figures as for those who controlled wealth in the Soviet Union. In Germany/Scandinavia a third of the population own 90% of the wealth. In the UK the same 10% own 80% of the land if we remove the land average sized houses are built on from the calculation. Plato regarded the kind of distribution we have as producing an unstable society]. Isn’t this part of what Thatcher attempted to do with wider share ownership and sale of council houses, even if her scheme failed because people cashed shares in for the quick profit? Hence I don’t go with a simple flat rate and give some support to progressive taxes, but not quite in the way NuLab see it. I don’t want to increase the tax burden on most of the middle and lower middle classes, or on skilled workers. I agree over the minimum wage, I was in Australia when it was introduced there and, despite the dire warnings from the Liberal Party right-wing, it made no significant difference. I have no time for the argument that there are companies that will be forced out of business, if companies can’t pay a decent living wage they deserve to be forced out of business, the vacuum will soon be filled by more efficient ones that can. I have the same attitude to the importation of cheap labour to the detriment of our own lumpen proletariat and working class. We’d soon have heard the screams if the highly skilled and computer literate Hong Kong Chinese had been given entry and had been allowed to reduce middle class wages and conditions.
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Let’s say that I make my living selling sweets. Sweets are not an essential of life. So this activity falls into the “leisure” part of the economy, right? But I don’t grow my own food and fetch my own water. The selling of sweets is my way of surviving. If I don’t sell sweets, I starve. So this activity falls into the “essential” part of the economy, right? …Your division of the economy into two sectors – “essential” and “leisure” – is logically unsustainable. (bgp)
I perfectly understood your point the first time you made it.
But when you say start off with “Let’s say…” you beg a lot of questions. The first of which is, “Why are you selling sweets to earn a living?” And the first thing I’d tell you is that if you’re doing that, then you’re living in a highly inegalitarian economic system which has obliged you to do it. To achieve equality in the simple theoretical economies I’ve begun to describe, it’s possible to show that if prices are set such that P2 = C2 – ( P1 – C1 ) . L2/L1, where C, P, L are costs prices and lifetimes of tools 1 and 2 in the ‘essential economy’, and the same relation applies to tools 3, 4, 5, etc, then F comes out exactly equal for everybody. There’s a whole range of solutions for this relation, but just one of them is the case where Pn = Cn, which is price set at cost. In a properly functioning competitive market, with different producers selling the same good, prices will tend to be driven down towards costs. So another thing I can tell about you as sweetseller is that you’re not working in a properly functioning competitive market. You’ve maybe got some monopolists in your economy who are pushing prices up towards value, and maybe higher. If the monopoly problem in your badly-functioning economy could be fixed, you wouldn’t have to sell sweets for a living. But you could still make and sell sweets if you wanted to it. You just wouldn’t have to.
I’m not going to explain how I know this, but it’s something that drops out of slowly building up an understanding of how economic systems work in the way that I have been, building up step by step from first principles.
So I’d still say that the ‘essential’ and ‘leisure’ sectors of the economy can be kept separate, in the sense of not interfering with each other. Yes, of course there would be trade between the two sectors, but it doesn’t have to be one in which people have to sell sweets or sex to earn a living, but because they freely choose to do that.
And that’s not even getting into the tricky question of defining which goods and services are “essential” and which are not.
That’s quite easy actually. Goods are ‘essential’ goods if they increase F, and ‘leisure’ goods if they don’t.
But the deeper issue is really one of how to look at economic systems. And it seems to me that there are essentially two approaches. One of those is the line that I have adopted, whereby you build up from simple situations, gradually making things more complex, until you have something that is a good approximation of the real world, and then you make decisions about how to change it based on the knowledge. This is the theoretical physics approach. And as I have approached economics, it’s as a branch of theoretical physics.
The other approach is to start with the whole real shebang, sweetsellers and all, and get to learn empirically how it all behaves, as prices move around, etc, so that you build up a nice set of empirically derived equations derived from the raw data. I think this is called econometrics.
In reality, both are needed, just like with theoretical physics. But, in the end, we’ll only understand how economies really work when have both a good theoretical and empirical knowledge of how they work, and be able with confidence to correct problems that arise in them.
But I suspect that you’re not even going to agree about this.
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P.S. If the thread stopped and then restarted around lunchtime, it’s entirely thanks to Melissa, after I asked her to restart it, which she graciously did. These threads usually get switched off after a while, but I thought there was still a bit more mileage in this very fascinating one.
I have the feeling that my own contributions will probably wind down. It has indeed been very fast moving at times. If nothing else, it’s had me dig out my old copy of the Road to Serfdom, and re-read bits of it, and rediscover it to be as readable as I remembered it to be.
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idlex,
Oh, I see. So if I’m selling sweets in your version of my world, it’s because I have to. But if people are selling sweets in your world, it’s their choice. I get it, comrade. No need to explain further. In fact, please don’t.
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AP,
The extension of the period to the early twentieth-century is not unreasonable. But if developments in culture, science and philosophy were related geographically, I’d find your examples quite worrying. From my perspective (I’d be interested to know if you feel the same, as someone who obviously knows a lot more than me about the modern arts), the music of Schoenberg and Berg, though undoubtedly innovative, is a wrong turn. Music began to lose its humanity, and became more of a pure intellectual exercise at that point. I realise that it was always intellectual, but it was more than that – art is the harnessing of those skills to something that creates a subjective response, and I’m not sure “yuk!” or “eh?” are the highest of the responses that one could provoke. There seems to me, from an uninformed perspective, a parallel between classical music and modern visual art, and their paths from vaguely incomprehensible but at least innovative at the turn of the last century, to neither interesting nor comprehensible at the turn of this century. Or, to put it another way, from my perspective, the arts disappeared (with some exceptions, obviously) up their own fundament during the twentieth century. I think one can track similar patterns in many other areas of thought during that period, but I had other developments than Austrian economics in mind. Hopefully, they are no more connected than being products of fertile conditions for intellectual experimentation.
On the subject of taxation and wealth, one of the interesting things – as your example of the Soviet Union, or the modern example of ten years of Labour government demonstrate – is that direct efforts to rebalance wealth-distribution often have little, no or even sometimes a perverse effect. I agree with you that a world in which the top 10% own 90% of the wealth seems wrong, but from a slightly different perspective. If those 10% (or their ancestors) genuinely earned their wealth through merit and prudence in an unbiased system, then I wouldn’t have a moral problem with it. I don’t have a problem with inequity or huge wealth, however extreme, per se. But I doubt that abilities are so unequally divided that this would be the result of an unbiased system (I would be less certain about prudence, which seems to be one of the defining factors that differentiates rich from poor, often over many generations). So I look at that unequal distribution as prima facie evidence that the rules that govern our prospects are biased. And when I look at those rules, I think I find many examples of bias. My response is not to think that that bias is inevitable and so redistribute to take account of it, but to look to improve the rules to eliminate the bias. If, having done so, there is still huge inequity between rich and poor, I will feel that such inequity is nevertheless just.
I should be clear that, by “biased”, I mean “different rules for different people or circumstances”. I don’t mean “failing to correct misfortune or disadvantage”.
Personal taxation and welfare is a classic – perhaps the most important – example of a biased system. What matters to household income and incentives is not the nominal rate of personal taxation, but the effective rate – the balance left after deducting all taxes and adding all welfare payments. Income depends on the net effective rate (household net income after taxes and benefits relative to household earned income before tax), and incentives depend on the marginal effective rate (how much an extra pound of income will increase the household’s disposable income). On the basis of these effective rates of personal taxation, Basic Income and Flat Tax (BIFT) provides a more progressive tax and welfare system, than does the current approach of progressive taxation and means-tested welfare (PTMTW).
It is well-known (I hope) that our current system of means-tested welfare produces very high levels of marginal effective rates of personal taxation on low-earners – often over 90%. For every extra pound that you earn, the loss of benefits means that the net effect is only to keep a few pennies. Who would look for (additional) work under those conditions? No wonder we have a growing underclass. It is generosity of welfare-provision, combined with budgetary necessity and calvinist distaste for supporting the undeserving, which produces this result. Perversely, it is the attempts to target support at those in need that places an ever-stronger stranglehold on many who might otherwise be able to work their way out of poverty. There is no way of avoiding this effect with a PTMTW system. The more generous you try to be, not only does taxation have to rise to cover the cost (with Laffer-curve consequences to tax-revenue adding to the burden), but also so does either the withdrawal rate (which further increases the marginal effective rate of taxation and therefore the disincentive to work), or the number of people dragged into means-testing, and therefore captured by these disincentives. It’s like golf (or at least, how I remember golf) – the harder you try to hit the ball, the worse it goes. Needless to say, Gordon has been trying to hit the ball out of the park.
BIFT, through eliminating means-tested withdrawal of benefits, greatly reduces the marginal effective rate of taxation on low earners. Let’s say that individual (not household) BI were £4,500 and the FT rate were 43%. (Notice that, unlike most flat-taxers, I do not assume that a flat tax is necessarily a low tax, though I would like it to be as low as is consistent with providing those things that the state ought to provide. This is a starter for ten assuming no efficiencies had been made in government budgets, in order to compare like with like.) The net and marginal effective rates on high-earners would be pretty similar to what they are today. On £100,000, they would be 38.5% net and 43% marginal under a BIFT, compared to around 35.5% net and 41% marginal under the current system (it’s not possible to be precise about the current system because of the number of rules that depend on circumstance, but one consistent factor is that these calculations are including employee’s NI as well as income tax). But for someone on £5,000 (e.g. a part-timer), they would be -47% net (negative = receive more from than pay to the state) and 43% marginal under a BIFT, compared to -33% net and over 90% marginal under the current system. I know under which system someone is more likely to try to work a few more hours to increase their take-home. And under which system people are punished less if they are not able to increase those hours.
I could provide acres of even-more-tedious examples to demonstrate the point. But the generality is, though it may seem counter-intuitive, that a BIFT can be designed to be both fairer and more progressive than the current PTMTW system, or indeed any other system you are likely to be able to devise that includes progressive taxation and benefits that are not universal. And yet it provides only a safety-net, and not an income-related redistribution. A policy that is liberal in both the classical and the progressive senses. Strange, but true.
There is fault on two sides (government and “proletariat”) of the triangle in this (the cheap labour, for whom I have only admiration, being the third side). The “proletariat” often do not help themselves, but the primary responsibility must lie with government, partly because they are in a position to change things, and partly because it is their policies that make the “proletariat” less inclined or able to help themselves. One of the benefits of a BI, I believe, is that it could be linked to citizenship, so automatic to all existing nationals, but made conditional on payment of taxes for a sustained period of time by those coming to the country. That would tackle the usually-false accusations that “they” are stealing “our” benefits. And it would give nationals a head-start in competition for jobs; they start (say) £4,500 better-off than the foreigners, so ought to be able to out-compete them for jobs if they are equally suitable. Only the really useless should be unable to compete for low-paid jobs under those circumstances.
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In my world, it is possible for people to be obliged to sell sweets, or to freely choose to sell sweets – much in the same way that men can either be conscripted into armies, or volunteer to join them.
Enough!
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Whilst there will always be an intellectual component, art must surely strike straight to the emotions without the need for analytical mediation. I tend to divide the modern movement into art I like and art I find interesting (there should probably be a third category, art I reject as irrelevant, but this is my subjective view). Schoenberg (if you prefer the English spelling) is art I find interesting. Experimenters often break the ground for others to follow. Stockhausen is significant because of his revolutionary influence, and although I listen to him every now and then, I don’t think I could really say I like him, but he is interesting. In a similar way I’m never quite sure that ‘like’ is an appropriate word for Albert Ayler or Sun Ra in jazz, but I wouldn’t be without them.
I’m no great fan of contemporary conceptualism and have no intention of defending it, though I have close friends who most certainly would. To me it’s at best wry amusement, we can laugh at Damien Hirst’s automatic masturbating BMW, but it can’t possibly have the shock value of Duchamp. Duchamp changed the way we look at art, though I would cite Van Gough’s ‘Chair’ and ‘Boots’ as also significant in this direction, as were the painters who smashed the idyllic myth and portrayed rural labour as it really was. In the modern age art ceased to be merely bourgeois entertainment and became confrontational (or some of it did). This is obvious if we look to the designs of the Bauhaus, even though Mies tried to keep the Bauhaus out of politics (it influenced most modern design and particularly typeface and graphic style that can still be seen in advertising). Consider how boring and predictable the daubs beloved of the Nazis and Stalinists were. Ultimately contemporary conceptualism is safe despite all its posturing, it would hardly appeal to the likes of Saatchi were it not so. Someone like Beuys on the other hand, is most certainly not ‘safe’. Walking through a gallery of his fat is not pleasant, but then it’s not intended to be. I didn’t find walking round a concentration camp pleasant, nor going into the underground trenches at Hellfire Corner, I find Beuys a bit like that, I don’t want to go back, but I’m glad I’ve been.
I think it’s worth remembering that much art and music that’s now considered mainstream was revolutionary and caused outrage when first performed. I doubt if anyone with any taste would seriously object to Stravinsky or the Ballet Russe today. Whilst art is certainly multi-faceted and virtually impossible to define, I regard this shock value as an essential part of it. It drags us kicking and screaming into a new reality, other works serve to confirm what we are and what we know (and it does many other thing besides). Art needs to be experienced in the flesh, I though Picasso was good from illustrations, when I spent some time with his work I quickly grew to love him and rate him as the greatest since the Renaissance (but again my subjective view, though I could certainly argue the case). I could never understand the fuss over Rothko until I stood surrounded by those immense canvasses and felt the impact. It would seem that modernism simply ran out of steam and the post-modernist influenced contemporary conceptualists are all we’re left with for the present. I can’t stand Gilbert and George, I find them glib, glossy, and fatuous. I was saying this to a friend who works at the Tate, he is a keen fan of conceptualism, before I could finish he cut in and said, “Of course not, they’re gay fascists.” He may be right. I’m not that keen on Glass’s music, but I recognise that he’s important and sometimes give him an ear, I’ve even enjoyed him at times, I think that’s a matter of mood coinciding.
I don’t think it’s a matter of location per se, it’s social milieu that creates the cross-fertilisation. Vienesse society must have been fairly small, if they didn’t know each other they’d have known people in common. In 1930s Germany the artists, led by Piscator, would take a state opera house for a season of radical productions. The only one I know of that was actually a communist was Eisler, the rest were fellow travellers, but I think you should remember the social conditions pertaining at the time for the majority before you reject this out of hand. As Gross said, “Better a canvass than a workers’ cottage”, when a bullet fired in a riot penetrated a classic work. When there’s no other vehicle for social change and conditions are bad with no chance of improvement, we shouldn’t be surprised if people adopt the extermes of revolution or fascism.
You’re starting to convince me somewhat over the taxation issue, I’ve never been really at ease with the NuLab approach. I do have a problem in that neither has appeared to work on previous occasions, but I’m afraid I can’t offer any other solution. Such economic debates aren’t really my forte, I prefer to be advised; although not someone I quote very often (unless as a piece of shock rhetoric), I quite like Bakunin when he was asked about the role of experts: “If I need a new pair of boots I ask around and find out who the best bootmaker in the area is. I let that man explain to me about quality of leather, stitching, the best soles and heels and such like, but I don’t let him decide what style of boots I wear.” I agree with you completely over the incentive issue, if we wish to break this dependency culture it seems the only way to go about it to me. Apart from the percentage ownership already mentioned, I don’t really have a problem with wealth itself. I think there are concerns where wealth and business combine to allow undue influence and power, as exemplified by the likes of Gates and Murdoch, but that problem is probably best resolved in another way entirely.
No dispute whatsoever over immigrant labour, I’ve used similar arguments to the local lads here when they’ve been expressing resentment … ‘Don’t blame the people who come, were we they we’d do the same. Blame the government that’s allowed it to happen in this way.’
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And you’ve enlightened me on the art front. Sadly, I don’t think I have it in me to appreciate all this properly (at least, not yet). The best examples to me are Picasso and Prokofiev. If you’ve seen the classical perfection of Picasso’s childhood paintings in the museum in Barcelona, or heard the classical perfection of Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony, you know these guys could produce perfection on the old-fashioned model if they wanted to, but they didn’t want to. Clearly, they had a genius that went beyond the conventional, and beyond what people like me can understand. Because, when I stand in front of most of Picasso’s art or listen to most of Prokofiev’s music, it does nothing for me. I take that as a deficiency in me, not them. Not a deficiency that I’m very worried about, though – each to their own in culture, I reckon, even if one’s own is pretty low-brow or old-fashioned. And whilst acknowledging that there is probably stuff going on in modern art that I simply can’t see, I wonder if there is a wider problem with accessibility and elitism? In the sense of intellectual inaccessibility, not physical inaccessibility. Art and music from earlier periods was often also considered dangerous and revolutionary and was only appreciated initially by the elites. But the innovations would gradually enter the mainstream over time. I’m not sure it’s possible to say that about modern art and music – particularly music. I think you need to appreciate this stuff in a completely different way, and I’m not sure most people can or want to appreciate the arts in that way. Not that there’s necessarily anything wrong or invalid about elitism. To the extent that it’s elitism of quality or innovation, rather than of snobbery, quite the contrary. But it’s probably not healthy that the elite and the popular are two separate streams, rather than one being the vanguard for the other.
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