Who's fault?

[shiny!]

Re: Who's fault?

Sorry to hear about your medical issues, Shiny.

Thanks, but it's really no big deal. Once every year or so it flares up, consequence of being young and stupid and falling off horses...

[jk]

Re: Who's fault?

u.s. life expectancy down 3rd year in a row. the last time that happened was the spanish flu epidemic of 1916-1918.
it reminds me of what happened in russia after the soviet union fell apart - life expectancies declined there 2o to alcohol use.
here it's opiate od's, suicide and alcohol.

[dcarrigg]

Re: Who's fault?

u.s. life expectancy down 3rd year in a row. the last time that happened was the spanish flu epidemic of 1916-1918.
it reminds me of what happened in russia after the soviet union fell apart - life expectancies declined there 2o to alcohol use.
here it's opiate od's, suicide and alcohol.

No hope.

To be fair to my friends on the right, this is just what Von Mises predicted. A market based society that makes the nobility fabulously wealthy but also where national identity dies and where the "Hindus and coolies" do better but the Western middle class stagnates into third world irrelevance.

[dcarrigg]

Re: Who's fault?

No hope.

To be fair to my friends on the right, this is just what Von Mises predicted. A market based society that makes the nobility fabulously wealthy but also where national identity dies and where the "Hindus and coolies" do better but the Western middle class stagnates into third world irrelevance.

Point being, just like laissez faire, this was planned.

[jk]

Re: Who's fault?

dc, who/what do think planned it? i think of it as an emergent property, intrinsic in the system. the outcomes certainly reflect the willful decisions, interests and desires of those with influence and power, but i don't think of it as systemically planned. do you think bohemian grove attendees, bilderbergs, and so on sat down together and strategized global outcomes? were any chinese in attendance?

i ask this question seriously, as i have great respect for your knowledge and opinions.

[dcarrigg]

Re: Who's fault?

dc, who/what do think planned it? i think of it as an emergent property, intrinsic in the system. the outcomes certainly reflect the willful decisions, interests and desires of those with influence and power, but i don't think of it as systemically planned. do you think bohemian grove attendees, bilderbergs, and so on sat down together and strategized global outcomes? were any chinese in attendance?

i ask this question seriously, as i have great respect for your knowledge and opinions.

In a nation of laws, no question of social order or material distribution is emergent. Politics is a struggle about who gets what, when, and how. There are those who would like you to believe that economies and markets are natural rather than socially and legally constructed phenomena. But they are just obfuscating, either that or they are true believers. The rise of neoliberalsm depended on these conceits, though. The point is that the major designers of the international framework for modern capital transactions and commerce even when they were dreaming up the GATT, long before the WTO, realized that free movement of capital meant beta convergence through offshoring and other means and a reduction in labor's share and labor power along with increased returns to capital. In fact, they thought of it as a feature rather than a bug, even a century ago. They foresaw the demise of the middle class in the developed world coupled with an improved lot for major international capital players and the some material gains for the very poor in the developing world as the predictable outcome of implementing their policy suggestions. They simply didn't care. They in this case being the Mt. Pelerin Society and their ilk.

The reality, of course, is that free trade and capital movement is far from free or natural. It takes the biggest and most expensive military the world has ever seen to enforce it. Trillions don't cross the Pacific every year with almost no piracy without naval carrier groups and air patrols. Laws that give corporate execs exclusive fiduciary duty to shareholders don't just pop up in hundreds of counties all the same in the 1970s and 80s organically. Nor does a worldwide system of bond markets and floating currency exchange etc. Even the ACH system and other electronic ways to frictionlessly wire money have to be constructed. They are not like apples just emerging from a tree that had been there long before man came along. Then there is the fact thank IP law became almost universal. Every county just about decided that the copyright terms ought to age with Mickey Mouse. Doesn't sound very natural. Ditto with trademarks and patents. But you know what laws didn't spread across the world uniformly? Labor standards. Not minimum wages. Not overtime law. Not the right to unionize. Not sick time. Not vacation time. Not the 40 hour week. Not child labor protections. None of it. Would be very strange if capital laws just emerged as internationally uniform while labor laws emerged as internationally completely disparate, wouldn't it? Seems more likely that a lot of planning and money and effort went into making one set of policies uniform, but not the other...

[jk]

Re: Who's fault?

of course the mickey mouse copyright duration is a construct. but take this statement:

Nor does a worldwide system of bond markets and floating currency exchange etc.

after wwii bretton woods made sense as the u.s. had the only major intact economy in the world, and was by far the largest part of the global economy.
of course, the u.s. then abused its exorbitant privilege of having the global reserve currency, as politics will tend to lead to overspending and, if possible, undertaxing.
then, too, it was inevitable that eventually some country- in this case degaulle's france- would call the u.s. bluff, and that the u.s would in turn close the gold window.
THAT is what led to our current regime of floating currencies.
i just don't believe all those moves were plotted out in advance, as opposed to evolving into being one at a time.

[Mega]

Re: Who's fault?

[dcarrigg]

Re: Who's fault?

of course the mickey mouse copyright duration is a construct. but take this statement:


after wwii bretton woods made sense as the u.s. had the only major intact economy in the world, and was by far the largest part of the global economy.
of course, the u.s. then abused its exorbitant privilege of having the global reserve currency, as politics will tend to lead to overspending and, if possible, undertaxing.
then, too, it was inevitable that eventually some country- in this case degaulle's france- would call the u.s. bluff, and that the u.s would in turn close the gold window.
THAT is what led to our current regime of floating currencies.
i just don't believe all those moves were plotted out in advance, as opposed to evolving into being one at a time.[/COLOR]

Before one can begin to construct the legal framework and institutions, one must construct the ideas. Nothing just evolves. Even biological evolution requires active reproduction. Institutional evolution requires ideational creation. People need to create and define concepts before they can operationalize them.

The folks who went and fought WWII didn't have any of those concepts you're using. Those were planned and designed. The terms were coined carefully. And the concepts were defined around them.




On the other hand, they did have other ideas already.



You know psych better than I. Of course you know of Albert Ellis. Ever hear/read what he had to say about Nathaniel Branden and the concept of Self-Esteem? There's one they made in the psych field. A truly weaponized concept with selfishness at its very core. Of course, it came from Ayn Rand's live-in concubine who was the author of "The Virtue of Selfishness," so go figure. Greenspan was kicking around that circle too, long before he captured the reins of the Central Bank or self-esteem became a regular MTV trope while Atlas Shrugged was assigned in High Schools. It might seem like natural evolution, I guess. But really, a whole lot of money and effort went into creating, popularizing, and operationalizing those ideas in the real world. Thing is, people don't generally have the bandwidth to keep track of where ideas come from. And if you tell the average US Democratic Party Member that self-esteem is a BS concept created by Ayn Rand's cuck-buddy to make you think of human beings as things with market value and promote selfishness as a virtue, they'll just look at you cross-ways and say, "Nah uh, Self-Esteem's real and important." Doesn't matter how much research says otherwise, or how much these people say they care about scientific research when the topic turns to climate change or something.

And it doesn't stop there. California instituted the State Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem and Personal and Social Responsibility in 1986, just 17 years after Branden's book "The Psychology of Self Esteem" came out. But all the while him and Rand's group were working toward those ends. And that Task Force worked for 4 years and developed a report. Its recommendations include a public media campaign promoting self-esteem and personal responsibility, teaching self-esteem to children in every school district in the state, a zero tolerance policy for juvenile crime, and limitations and cutbacks to AFDC (which Clinton finally killed in the 1996 welfare reform, and we know what happened with the crime bill). And now, even after the idea's main promotors are dead and gone, and the media campaigns and school activities have wound down, we're left with a population that grew up believing in the concept. An entire generation of American children were fed it at the schools and in the prisons and in the courts and doctor's offices. But it didn't just happen by chance or necessity. It was not Calvin's predestined will of the Lord that brought us the concept of Self-Esteem. It was a man. A man who was so obsessed with Ayn Rand and objectivism he not only cheated on his wife with her and started an institute to promote her work, he also literally changed his name to include the word "rand" in it at her request, from "Nathaniel Blumenthal" to "Nathaniel Branden." Talk about a sucker with no self esteem. The point is that the very birth and development of the idea were planned activities with political goals in mind. Many of the policy implications were obvious from the get-go.

Now, if one determined, however strange, man can pull all that off with the backing of a small group of influential concept creators, imagine what the guys who cooked up "spontaneous order," "neoliberalism," and "scientism" amongst a bunch of other concepts could have pulled off with financial backing from the Bank of England and members including the US Secretary of State and Chairman of the Federal Reserve? Of course, they're the ones doing the work of translating concepts into policy. Other men were tasked with popularizing the ideas, and not just through think tanks either, but in the media. And once they all started meeting together regularly, of course the State Department funded the think tanks spreading the ideas internationally. And so it went, until today, when all these ideas and concepts seem normal, predestined, and necessary. But it took a lot of work and effort and money to create, design, operationalize, and disseminate these ideas. And they had a clear goal in mind. Hell, you can read it in their own words. Now, this isn't some conspiratorial illuminati type of thing. It's just a little group of men who meet together for the purposes of developing and advancing an ideology. In this case, they were quite successful.

The vast majority of their ideas have been matter-of-factly accepted as true, whether or not they stand up to empirical scrutiny. In most people's minds, just like self-esteem, the concepts are obviously real and important and you can't convince them otherwise. More than that, the policies implied by the acceptance of their concepts have largely been implemented. The proof's in the pudding. Even the ideas of "the economy" and "the market" are new, far newer than most people realize. Guess who cooked them up and popularized the concepts in this sort of weird, deified, almost anthropomorphized way? Can you think of why? Incidentally, the term "cold war" also comes from members of MPS. So did 8 Sveriges Riksbank Prizes in Economic Sciences "in memory of Alfred Nobel," which are erroneously referred to in popular culture as "Nobel Prizes." 8! Just from this one little group. That's something like 10%+ of all of them. Of course, unlike the real Nobel Prizes started in 1895 by Alfred Nobel, these were funded and started by the Swedish Central Bank in 1968. They were started then also with political motives in mind. And guess what happens when they start naming the award winners and giving out huge prizes? The press picks up on it. The field picks up on it. Citation rates go through the roof. The Swedish Central Bank spits out a few million bucks, a winner is selected, and whoever it is now has a bullhorn popularizing their concepts. Ever wonder why so many winners are Americans? Ever wonder why something like 30% to 40% of winners come from the University of Chicago? It's not a conspiracy. The prize itself was born to serve a political purpose. Hell, it practically created the freshwater/saltwater split in the US. And all it took was a couple million bucks per year from the royal bank of Sweden.

I've already been writing too long. And I'm well aware that it's worth it to be careful and not ascribe cause where there is none. So I'll stop writing here for now. But I hope the main idea is clear. So in case I buried the lede, here it is again: Neoliberalism was planned. No, they didn't have a seat in the Oval Office directly, nor could they have accounted for every random event history set in motion. But the concepts and ideas and language needed to create it were debated and agreed upon in these meetings, and then they set forth to popularize and operationalize the ideas. We're using their words and concepts right now. None of this was by chance or accident. It was not natural evolution either. It was a purposeful and planned effort. Just one with deep resources that happened to work very well.

PS: As to the worldwide system of floating currency exchange, think beyond the US. Nearly the whole non-communist world and every single country either pegged to the dollar or floated. It didn't happen instantly with the Nixon Shock. It took until 1983 to get them all in line. Even longer if you count the ones who only came in line after the fall of the USSR. And it's questionable still what exactly China does. But just about everywhere did it. All 200+ nations. Seems unlikely they all independently arrived at that conclusion, no?

[dcarrigg]

Re: Who's fault?

Just so I'm not being obtuse, here were some actual Von Mises lines from the early 20th century when speaking about the globalized world market he imagined:

"A nation is not an independent unit..." the new vision would require that "the interdependence of all countries in the economic domain." Of course, this meant that "English and German workers may have to descend to the lowly standard of life of the Hindus and the coolies to compete with them." And it also meant that "[T]hen one sees a tendency prevail over the entire earth toward an equalization of the rate of return on capital and of the wage of labor." And this would be possible because democracy can be suspended when required by "the market." This new era he imagined called for "the real de-politicization of the economic." Meaning economic questions had to be pulled into a space beyond democratic political input or citizen control for the vision to come to fruition.

The early 21st century looks much more like the world he imagined in the early 20th century than the 1940s-1970s mid-century period. But it wasn't a foregone conclusion. Much effort and capital went into making it so.

Also, to be very clear, this is not just simply a nationalist vs. internationalist argument/conversation, although one might view it that way justifiably. I just want to point out that there were and are many competing views of internationalism, international labor and union movements are some real-world examples, albeit fledgling. The IWW was founded in Chicago in 1905 to that effect. So was the International Labor Organization in 1919, which got folded into the UN. Much of the UN is a good example too, especially with the universal declaration of human rights, something Von Mises would have hated fiercely, particularly articles 22-30. Hell, on the far left there's even trotskyism was an example--the whole socialist/communist international thing too. The thing is that none of these ideas won, right? We do have a bunch of people policing the world for international patent and copyright violations, look what happened to Kim Dotcom. But we do not have anyone policing the world for international labor violations. Sweatshops are simply a "fact of life." Lots of institutions and resources go to fight and prevent piracy and protect property (even state-invented intellectual property). Far fewer go toward promoting human rights and advancing worldwide labor standards. And internationalism for capital without internationalism for labor is Von Mises' vision. Spectacular returns to capital; beta convergence for labor; and a decreasing labor share in countries with higher wages. It's all going according to (a very old) plan.

This is why we have consistent decades of stagnating wages in the developed world coupled with the world's first trillion dollar company in Apple subcontracting all the manufacturing to a Chinese factory town that actually had to install nets to prevent workers from successfully committing suicide. Everyone acts like it's normal or inevitable. But a just as possible outcome might have been an iPhone that cost $899 instead of $699 and no dead workers. Or one that cost $799 instead of $699 with no dead workers and no trillion dollar market cap. There are all sorts of other possibilities or configurations you can imagine. There was no god named "The Market" pre-determining the results we got from on high. There were just men making decisions and ideas and laws. But international laws preventing factory towns and employee beatings and all that with actual good funding and enforcement might have made a difference too. In the international order we constructed, they'll raise tariffs on you if you sell steel too cheap, but not if you beat, maim, and kill all your steelworkers. Then there are no international consequences. Impede the free flow of capital and the hammer comes down. But there will never be a corresponding free flow of labor, nor even basic universal standards. Oh well, the good news is now the state of Indiana is paying them billions to make a plant there. Good luck, Hoosiers. You're going to need it.

[jk]

Re: Who's fault?

the whole neoconservative/neoliberal project, i agree, goes back at least as far as vonMises. the self-esteem movement is based on bs but, you're right, fits the neo model.

otoh re floating currencies
https://books.google.com/ngrams/grap...encies%3B%2Cc0

don't know why the graph doesn't show, but the link above will show that that idea took off in 1965, and reached half its peak with nixon's closing of the gold window.

so, mostly i agree with you, but i think you've been a little overgeneralized. just a quibble, i guess. there's no doubt that the project is to harvest, via the global labor arbitrage, what wealth and income has still been held by the developed world's middle classes.

[dcarrigg]

Re: Who's fault?

Damn I've been verbose lately. You put it well.