Crooked Timber

Corey Robin’s new book The Reactionary Mind has attracted plenty of attention both favorable and otherwise. I don’t want to offer a full-scale review, but to respond to the central thesis. As I read Robin, his central claim is that the current situation in which people who call themselves “conservative” are in fact radical reactionaries is not an aberration, but the norm, and that this has been the case ever since the first self-conscioulsy conservative thinker, Edmund Burke.

I’d put this more broadly – conservatism (and, it’s opposites, progressivism radicalism) are, in essence ideas about process, but the most people active in politics are more concerned about pursuing particular goals than about the way they get there.

To illustrate the point consider the standard claim about conservatism put forward by Michael Oakeshott in 1956  (also cited by Robin)

“To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.”

Now consider how someone who actually held these views in the Britain of 1956 ought to have regarded trade unions. Of all British institutions, they were surely amongst the most familiar and factual, embodying the preference for actual present benefits over utopian projects. Yet that was not, as far as I can tell Oakeshott’s position at all (though his refusal of an honour from the Thatcher government may suggest some reconsideration later in life).

Robin’s thesis is that claims like Oakeshott’s about conservatism (and also, those of Hayek about classical liberalism) are nothing more than a mask for attempts to resist, and where possible, roll back the claims of the working class against their rulers.

I think this is broadly correct. Although there are people with the conservative disposition described above (and also, people who are attracted by radicalism as such), there is no inherent correlation between conservatism as a disposition and support for the political views commonly associated with conservatism. 

There is an accidental association reflecting the fact that, taking the last two or three centuries as a whole, the ruling class has mostly been losing ground. First, the aristocracy was forced to share power with the bourgeoisie, and, then for most of the 20th century, the working class gained ground against the power of capital. Under such circumstances, people of conservative disposition will generally be found in opposition to the progressive demands being put forward by workers and their supporters.

The crucial test comes in periods such as the Bourbon restoration, or the neoliberal resurgence of the last thirty years or so, when the direction of change is reversed. Genuine conservatives in these circumstances seek to preserve those advances that have been embedded in the way society works (such as the New Deal in the US).  Conservative politics on the other hand, is dominated by reactionaries seeking to restore (an idealised version) of the status quo ante, and gains the support of those with a radical disposition (Newt Gingrich is an ideal example).  It’s certainly possible to find examples of the first kind (the “Wets” who resisted Thatcher for example) but they are clearly in the minority.

Long ago, I planned a book based on Raymond Williams Keywords, and blogged entries on topics including conservative, progressive and reform, which made some of these points. Corey Robin has done a much better job, and his book is well worth reading.

 

 

On the home front, the year opened with the inexplicable rupture of a whole-house water filter on January 2, a mishap that left four inches of water in the basement, ruining a bunch of Jamie’s books and DVDs; it closes as I return from visiting my father, who is intubated and unconscious after triple-bypass heart surgery.  We didn’t know he would be unconscious for my entire visit—I learned that via a phone call from my sister only after Nick, Jamie and I had gotten halfway through a seven-hour drive.  Our assumption was that at some point he would be conscious but unable to communicate, which is why I did what any dutiful son would do, namely, bring a copy of A Year on Ice, Gerald Eskanazi’s chronicle of the New York Rangers’ 1969-70 season, to read to him at his bedside.  When that plan fell through, we videotaped a bunch of messages for him (including my rendition of the final game of the Rangers’ regular season, April 5, 1970, which was the most exciting thing a nine-year-old kid could possibly hope to see—thanks for taking me, Dad!) and I’ll go back when he’s back home, which should be in a few weeks.

And oh yes, in March Lucy the Dog died after thirteen and a half years of faithfully guarding the house, playing with Nick, tending to Janet whenever she had migraines, and talking to Jamie when no one else would understand him.

But there was one good thing about 2011, and it was a world-historical event.  I refer, of course, to our family’s decision to topple Qaddafi and plunder Libya a milestone we had been anticipating for approximately twenty years:

And they pronounced his name correctly!

At least since 1994 I have promised Jamie I would cry at this event.  At least since 2003 he has responded to this promise with great exasperation and annoyance (“Michael! You will not cry”).  And in the end, he was right—I did not cry, largely because it was all I could do to operate the zoom at maximum zoom-power and keep my focus on the right kid.

The year is almost behind us.  Jamie has completed his first semester at LifeLink PSU, in which he took courses in meteorology, dinosaurs, and Martin Luther King, Jr.  He also declared himself the Assistant Director of Penn State’s Institute for the Arts and Humanities, on the grounds that he does in fact assist me.  Everyone in the immediate household is well, and my father is improving.  As of six weeks ago we have a new dog, a rescued six-year-old Jack Russell/beagle mix.  So, dear readers, here’s hoping your 2012 is much better than your 2011, wherever and whoever you may be.

It wasn’t too many years ago that I was suicidally depressed. Because this is a public forum, I won’t go into what finally got me to a psychiatrist (I’d seen psychotherapists for years, but hadn’t been diagnosed with clinical depression) and onto medication, and I had to try several different pills before I found something that worked. Recently I’ve switched meds again, and I’m really having a great holiday season.

But for a lot of people the holidays suck. Sometimes that’s temporary, but often it’s not. Please take twelve minutes to watch the video below, and please take the time in real life to listen to the people you love. I think one of the profoundest difficulties we have as human beings, despite all our ways of communicating, is that ultimately it’s horribly easy to hear someone say they’re unhappy but not really understand that they are deeply in trouble, especially if the things they seem unhappy about seem small or temporary or like minor fillips in a pretty great life.

It’s impossible to know how someone with depression feels if you haven’t been there. And if you are there, it’s impossible to realize that it really doesn’t have to be that bad. If you think you need help, please ask for it. And if you think someone you know needs help, please listen—because when you’re way down that well, it can be almost impossible even to whisper.

Science has an article behind its paywall (but available in liberated form here) that likely merits discussion.

At first glance, Robert Kirshner took the e-mail message for a scam. An astronomer at King Abdulaziz University (KAU) in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, was offering him a contract for an adjunct professorship that would pay $72,000 a year. Kirshner, an astrophysicist at Harvard University, would be expected to supervise a research group at KAU and spend a week or two a year on KAU’s campus, but that requirement was flexible, the person making the offer wrote in the e-mail. What Kirshner would be required to do, however, was add King Abdulaziz University as a second affiliation to his name on the Institute for Scientific Information’s (ISI’s) list of highly cited researchers. … “I thought it was a joke,” says Kirshner, who forwarded the e-mail to his department chair, noting in jest that the money was a lot more attractive than the 2% annual raise professors typically get. Then he discovered that a highly cited colleague at another U.S. institution had accepted KAU’s offer, adding KAU as a second affiliation on ISIhighlycited.com. Kirshner’s colleague is not alone. I have learned of more than 60 top-ranked researchers from different scientific disciplines—all on ISI’s highly cited list—who have recently signed a part-time employment arrangement with the university that is structured along the lines of what Kirshner was offered. Meanwhile, a bigger, more prominent Saudi institution—King Saud University in Riyadh—has climbed several hundred places in international rankings in the past 4 years largely through initiatives specifically targeted toward attaching KSU’s name to research publications, regardless of whether the work involved any meaningful collaboration with KSU researchers. … Academics who have accepted KAU’s offer represent a wide variety of faculty from elite institutions in the United States, Canada, Europe, Asia, and Australia. All are men. Some are emeritus professors who have recently retired from their home institutions. All have changed their affiliation on ISI’s highly cited list—as required by KAU’s contract—and some have added KAU as an affiliation on research papers. Other requirements in the contract include devoting “the whole of your time, attention, skill and abilities to the performance of your duties” and doing “work equivalent to a total of 4 months per contract period.”

Understandably, the regular faculty at the affected university are quite upset. I wonder how many researchers turned this offer down? (I’d hope that most did, but I’d be unsurprised to be disappointed)

Do you know what’s more boring than the insularity of academia? Bold Rebels Who Take Stands Against the Insularity of Academia by using minor players/subfields as weapons to bash someone who is mistakenly thought to be Really Important because he has a Column in the New York Times.

I so do not miss this kind of wankery. I had spent a few minutes feeling mildly wistful about lacking a reason to go up to Seattle this year, since I like and miss Seattle and would have enjoyed having drinks with some old friends and acquaintances, but dear god do I prefer sitting on my couch in 70-degree December weather thinking about taking a walk to the grocery store to having to listen to people preen themselves on their superior cynicism. If I’d stayed in academia I’m afraid my eyeballs would have gotten stuck staring at the ceiling and I’d be unable to walk anywhere.

Via David Moles, Winston Churchill’s Grasshopper-Lies-Heavyesque exercise in the genre of alternative history within an alternative history deserves a wider readership. I give you the counter-counter-historical bit of “If Lee had not won the battle of Gettysburg.”

If Lee after his triumphal entry into Washington had merely been the soldier, his achievements would have ended on the battlefield. It was his august declaration that the victorious Confederacy would pursue no policy toward the African negroes which was not in harmony with the moral conceptions of western Europe that opened the highroads along which we are now marching so prosperously But even this famous gesture might have failed if it had not been caught up and implemented by the practical genius and trained parliamentary aptitudes of Gladstone. There is practically no doubt at this stage that the basic principle upon which the color question in the Southern States of America has been so happily settled owed its origin mainly to Gladstonian ingenuity and to the long statecraft of Britain in dealing with alien and more primitive populations. There was not only the need to declare the new fundamental relationship between master and servant, but the creation for the liberated slaves of institutions suited to their own cultural development and capable of affording them a different yet honorable status in a commonwealth, destined eventually to become almost world wide. Let us only think what would have happened supposing the liberation of the slaves had been followed by some idiotic assertion of racial equality, and even by attempts to graft white democratic institutions upon the simple, docile, gifted African race belonging to a much earlier chapter in human history. We might have seen the whole of the Southern States invaded by gangs of carpetbagging politicians exploiting the ignorant and untutored colored vote against the white inhabitants and bringing the time-honored forms of parliamentary government into unmerited disrepute. We might have seen the sorry force of black legislators attempting to govern their former masters. Upon the rebound from this there must inevitably have been a strong reassertion of local white supremacy. By one device or another the franchises accorded to the negroes would have been taken from them. The constitutional principles of the Republic would have been proclaimed, only to be evaded or subverted; and many a warm-hearted philanthropist would have found his sojourn in the South no better than “A Fool’s Errand.”

Since the JSTOR version is apparently a straight reprint of Churchill’s original 1930 essay, I’m presuming it’s not in copyright any more, and have put it up here,

There’s a very interesting interview with Brian Leiter over at 3:AM Magazine. Read the whole thing, as they say. Interesting and entertaining though Brian’s thoughts are, I reacted somewhat negatively to his promotion of “realism” over “moralism” and to the somewhat dismissive (though sugar-coated) remarks he makes about Jerry Cohen. Jerry actually did have some “realist” things to say about society and politics, most notably in parts of Self-Ownership, Freedom and Equality and in chapter 11 of Karl Marx’s Theory of History, but his work can speak for itself. More worrying, I think, is Brian’s apparent desire to abolish large parts of philosophy altogether when he write approvingly of:

those who think the aim of philosophy should be to get as clear as possible about the way things really are, that is, about the actual causal structure of the natural and human world, how societies and economies work, what motivates politicians and ordinary people to do what they do ….

My question here is: why’s that an aim of philosophy ? The people investigating the actual causal structure of the natural world are natural scientists, not philosophers; the people investigating the actual causal structure of the human world are social scientists, not philosophers.

Update: Brian assures me that he has no desire that the moralists be “purged” (my work was “abolished”). I’m happy to hear that, but it remains that he thinks that we moralists are pursuing an agenda that is other than he believes the aim of philosophy ought to be.

I almost hesitate to make this recommendation, as my taste has cloven to the mainest of main streams since I became an army wife. A recent intervention has more or less cured me of a short but embarrassing episode of James Blunt fandom. I did, however, spend the whole of Christmas in two comfortable but flattering Boden dresses which I suspect are just a bit smart for the many coffee mornings I now attend. (I was shocked to discover I’m the only one who bakes for them. Everyone else brings biscuits from upper echelon supermarkets.)

‘Wherever You Are’, the lovely song sung by the Military Wives Choir led by Gareth Malone, is at least worth a hunt through Youtube, along with footage of how it came about. The song’s release follows a TV series about choirmaster Gareth Malone turning a group of women into a proper choir while their military husbands were away in Afghanistan. The women’s letters to their husbands were gleaned for touching – though admittedly a bit saccharine – lyrics to a song written for them. Eventually the men came home, and the choir sang beautifully in the Royal Albert Hall on Remembrance Sunday. There were many tears along the way, not least those of viewers. The song was number 1 in the UK at Christmas and has now been released in the US. The proceeds are going to charities that support ex-service men and women. It is certainly worth a listen and even ordering from Amazon US (whenever they get around to re-stocking it).

The real reason I hesitate just a little bit in recommending this sweet song is a niggling worry about sentiment. We all live in a post-Diana world where the stiff upper lip has given way to increasingly orchestrated and maudlin displays of public emotion. A leader who can’t emote, especially on television, is no good. As soldiers don’t have a choice about which wars they fight, it’s a good thing that citizens of democracies don’t, as a rule, pillory service men and women. But I can’t help thinking all these TV programmes about soldiers and their feelings, army wives singing and crying, and kindly townspeople meeting hearses; they give the rest of us a deliciously tender moment to feel in sympathy, rather than think hard about the reality of an all-volunteer force fighting largely wars of choice.

Seventy years ago, George Orwell wrote that the British ‘common people’ have always distrusted a standing army (a view long-shared by the state, according to Alan Mallinson). Publicans had, in Orwell’s recent memory, often refused to serve men in uniform, and the goose step never took off here because Britain was the rare country where people were unfearful enough to laugh at it. Officers had, for at least a hundred years, changed immediately into normal clothes when they finished work. Today, at least in part because of the need to blend in in Northern Ireland, British soldiers spurn the dramatic and unnecessary buzz cuts of the US military, and quite happily look like civilians when they’re off duty.

In spite of Britain’s historic and rather healthy distrust of soldiers and soldiering, we see a creeping sentimentality in public perceptions of the military. The very good publicity and fundraising on soldiers’ disability and rehabilitation done by Help for Heroes has the unintended consequence of associating the military, in the public mind, with continued pleas for sympathy and support. As the World War II generation dies out, Poppy Day nonetheless goes from strength to strength. Its dissociation from the Great War is almost complete, and the day is now a month-long exercise of the thought police. Ironically enough, the Labour creation of Armed Forces Day – another obligatory show of respect– is seen by many serving as simply more drilling for yet another march down High Street on a weekend you’d rather have to yourself or your family.

All this pomp and sentiment is simply a form of distancing. Mass media omnipresence and fly on the wall coverage of the military has the opposite effects to either honest empathy or critical understanding. It puts the soldiers on a pedestal of sentiment that implicitly says ‘I could never do that’, under-cutting the typical military refrain that they are just ordinary people doing an extraordinary job. It also keeps the idea of soldiering at arm’s length. Our boys are puking with fear before venturing out of the patrol base, but they do it anyway. They’re seldom depicted asking themselves – as they often do and as we should ask ourselves – what are we really doing there, and is there anything more at stake than a face-saving retreat on our own timetable?

Wherever You Go; with its slightly ropy solo, sentimental lyrics and Disney-esque melody, always makes me cry. When my husband deploys next year, I will probably indulge in a few bus journeys into town looking out the misty top window to hide my tears as I loop it on repeat to ease out my emotions in manageable doses. But at least I know this is an indulgence, and not something to be cultivated.

Thanks to everyone who has made comments on the drafts of the new chapter of Zombie Economics, on Expansionary Austerity, for the forthcoming paperback edition.  I’m now editing in response, and adding a section on Further Reading. I’d welcome any suggestions for this chapter, as well as any useful references that weren’t in the hardback edition.

If I were smarter, I’d have written this before Christmas so that you’d have an excuse to buy the book I’m going to tell you about. That said, maybe you don’t need an excuse to buy good books, so if you are inclined to like comics, humor, feminist scienceish geekery, and/or all of the above—or if you know someone who is, and in particular if that someone is a young person—I recommend the totally awesome Complete Narbonic Perfect Collection , only recently published.

The real reason I’m writing this after Christmas instead of before is that I got the collection for my Pseudonymous Kid as a present (signed and all, and if you look you’ll see his name in the acknowledgments/supporters section, because I kicked in some $ to help it get into print). I wasn’t familiar with the comic when I did this; I’d seen a link to its Kickstarter page, did a little googling, read a few of the comics online, and decided it would probably be something PK would like so what the hey.

As it turned out, he decided to be a materialistic little ass this year, and when I put it and a couple of other wrapped things under the tree, he fondled the packages, realized they were all (at that point) books, and declared that he DID NOT WANT BOOKS because after all, I’ve made a deal with him that I will buy him any book he wants as long as he will read it (which by the way is a promise inspired by my having read something Sherman Alexie wrote saying he’d made it to his own kid), so he doesn’t need books for Christmas because he can get them any time he wants. And when he was unwrapping his pile of booty, he totally put all the books to one side, accordingly.

HOWEVER. At some point he paused in the midst of the carnage, picked it up and flipped through, which is of course one of the great things about comics: kids can’t resist at least having a peek. He started reading, even with a few presents still unwrapped. Since we unwrap on Christmas eve (Christmas morning is reserved for Santa), he ended up taking it to bed with him and reading far too late into the night. Which sucked at the time (“is he asleep yet so I can fill the damn stocking and go to bed?!?”) but meant blissful sleeping-in on The Actual Day. Anyway, on Christmas itself he spent most of the afternoon curled up on the sofa in his jammies, Narbonic: Book I in hand. By Boxing Day he’d finished both volumes.

By now he’s re-read parts of it and insisted that I start from the beginning, too. It’s definitely the gift he’s spent the most time with and enjoyed the most. We’ve discussed his reactions to it, I’ve heard him discourse on the character development, we’ve read each other bits of our favorite lines. He’s explained to me alternative plot developments from his imagination. We’ve talked about his initial reaction that the end was “depressing”, worked our way through an assessment that he “likes stories that mix funny and sad” and considered alternate interpretations of the conclusion. He’s decided that maybe it’s not sad, after all.

In short: Narbonic is a feminist comic about a woman scientist that contains elements that one really wants in literature for young people (and for oneself). My actual eleven-year-old kid loves it.* It’s got a mischievous sense of humor that’ll appeal to conventional “boy” sensibilities and supplies a sense of naughty fun that’s too often missing in books “for” girls. It’s got explosions and doomsday machines and cute gerbils and kittens. It’s sophisticated enough for readers who are ready to think about different interpretive frameworks or the kinds of questions that come up in, say, Don Quixote and Star Wars (“in a mad world, is the mad person actually saner than everyone else?” “who is the bigger fool, the fool or the fool that follows him?”). Like many comics collections, it’s great for kids who are interested in comics art (or who tend to perfectionism) because they can see how the art itself develops over time (PK: “the later drawings are a lot better than the earlier ones”; me: “yep, most artists get better the more they do something”). Definitely worth keeping in mind for a clever niece or nephew, son or daughter.

*If PK’s initial sense that the end was “depressing” worries you, you should know that he is incredibly sensitive, not to say weird, about certain kinds of endings. So, for instance, at the end of the Steve Martin version of Little Shop of Horrors, when the camera pans back from Seymour’s and Audrey’s cottage and you see that omg there is a baby plant in the flower border!, he was hugely upset, though he’d loved the movie right up to that point. The end of Narbonic, imho, is way less ambiguous than that, even, but if you’re concerned, you can see it (and read through the entire collection, with or without authorial annotation) here.)

As an Australian, I’m not much accustomed to think of political leaders in heroic terms[1], something that reflects the fact that nothing our political leaders do matters that much to anybody except us, and even then most of the decisions that really mattered have always been made elsewhere. So, I’m fascinated by the US activity of ranking presidents and other political leaders, and eager to try my hand.

What has brought this to mind is running across George Will’s campaign against Woodrow Wilson, who always seemed to be presented in hagiographic terms until relatively recently. Much as it goes against the grain to agree with Will on anything, he surely has the goods on Wilson: a consistent racist, who lied America into the Great War, and used Sedition acts and similar devices to suppress opposition. His positive record appears to consist of a variety of “Progressive” measures (in the early C20 sense of the term) many of which were inherited from Teddy Roosevelt, and few of which were particularly progressive from a left viewpoint[2], and his proposal for the League of Nations, where he comprehensively screwed up the domestic politics, leading the US to stay out of the League.

Now that I’ve got started, what is it with the adulation of Clay, Calhoun and Webster? Sure, they were the leading figures in the US in the decades leading up to the Civil War, but isn’t that like saying that Clemenceau, Hindenburg and Chamberlain played comparable roles between 1919 and 1939?[3]

And how about Thomas Jefferson? He was good in theoretical terms, but he was a slaveowner who (unlike Washington) could not even manage to free his slaves on his death. And except for the ban on the transatlantic slave trade, he did nothing to retard the growth of slavery and plenty, most importantly the extension of slavery to the Louisiana purchase, to expand it. He seems to bear as much responsibility for the Civil War as anyone.

I should say right off the bat that I’m not claiming anything about the way these figures are viewed by actual professional historians – I don’t know and would be interested to hear. But in general discussion, they seem always to be referred to in a kind of tone that suggests the inappropriateness of any criticism.

fn1. Like most on the left side of Oz politics, I’m an admirer of our wartime Prime Ministers Curtin and Chifley, as well as the leading reformers of my own younger days, Gough Whitlam and Don Dunstan. But good as they were, they all made some big mistakes, and certainly no one would think of naming political philosophies for them (except perhaps pejoratively in the case of Whitlam).

Update Over at Lawyers, Guns and Money, Robert Farley posts a very qualified defence of Henry Clay, while Erik Loomis is much more critical of my dismissal of Daniel Webster. In objecting to my comparisons of Clay and Webster to interwar European politicians including Neville Chamberlain, Loomis makes the observation one huge thing in favor of the Compromise of 1850 is that the Union would have had much more difficulty defeating the Confederacy in 1850 than a decade later. But this is precisely the argument made by Chamberlain’s defenders, who suggest that Britain couldn’t have fought Germany successfully in 1938. Still, you don’t have accept the Guilty Men caricature of Chamberlain to conclude that, in the only test that really mattered, he failed disastrously.

fn2. The rightwing animus against him appears to relate to the establishment of such bodies as the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Reserve. I don’t have any real thoughts about the FTC and, while I suppose a central banks is a necessary part of a modern economy, it’s not exactly a force for progress.

fn3. Those comparisons (except perhaps with Hindenburg) are flattering to Calhoun, who was a figure of unmitigated evil, a warhawk, slaver and secessionist.

This is the final draft section of the new chapter of my Zombie Economics book, on Expansionary Austerity. 

As before comments are welcome. That includes everything from typos and suggestions for better phrasing to substantive critiques of the argument.  If I can get organized, I will try to post the edited version of the entire chapter and invite another round of comments.

As an aside, I just got an email link to the Journal of Economic Literature (behind a login screen), which contains Stephen Williamson’s review of my book, including his claims that both the Efficient Markets Hypothesis and DSGE macro are devoid of any implications. I bet that if I had submitted an article to any publication of the American Economic Association making such claims, it would have been shot down in flames by the referees. But, now it’s been published – anyone keen on a radical critique of mainstream economics can now cite the JEL to the effect that the whole enterprise (at least as applied to finance and macroeconomics) is irrelevant to reality.

Expansionary Austerity – After the Zombies

failure of expansionary austerity is already evident. Predictions that, once the state got out of the way, the private sector would come roaring back, have proved laughably false. After more than a year of austerity in the US and Europe, there is no sign of any recovery. Rather, the risk of another crash looms larger than ever. 

Expansionary austerity is not simply a zombie economic idea. It forms the basis of a political strategy of class war, undertaken by the financial and political elite (the “1 per cent”) to hold on to the wealth and power they accumulated during the decades of market liberalism, and to shift the costs of their own failure on to the rest of the population. An effective response must similarly combine an economic analysis with a policy program and a political movement to mobilise resistance to the push for austerity.

In economic terms, the primary need is to relearn the basic lessons of Keynesian economics. Government intervention can help to stabilise aggregate demand and, when monetary policy is ineffectual because of a liquidity trap, expansionary fiscal policy is the optimal choice.

This lesson has been reinforced in both positive and negative ways since the beginning of the crisis. Fiscal stimulus was successful, most clearly in countries like Australia and China, where governments had advance warning of an externally-generated shock.  But even in the US and Europe, notably including Germany, fiscal policy softened the impact of the crisis.

That lesson, sadly, was not learned. Instead, we are receiving a much harsher lesson that goes the other way. Just as expansionary fiscal policy works to stimulate economic activity, contractionary fiscal policy (that is, austerity) works to depress it.  

Experience has discredited the zombie idea of expansionary austerity, but the lessons of the slump go much further. According to the claims of classical economics (new old) and of Real Business Cycle theory, a long slump like the one that has been going on since 2008 should not happen, except as a result of a failure in labor markets. Although there have been some (fairly desperate) attempts to find such a failure [such as Casey Mulligan’s theory, discussed in Chapter 3, that it was all caused by fear of Obama] none of them can explain a simultaneous slump in the US, Europe and the UK, countries with radically different labor market institutions.

In policy terms, the required response is reasonably clear. Instead of fiscal austerity, what is needed is a return to expansionary fiscal policy to promote economic growth. Only then can the vicious cycle of debt and deflation be broken.

Both for political and economic reasons, it is important to emphasise both sides of the Keynesian policy prescription: stimulatory budget deficits in recessions, matched by stabilising budget surpluses under normal, and especially boom, conditions.  This means that expansionary fiscal measures should be temporary, and accompanied by longer term policies to improve fiscal sustainability.

If the EU agreement signed in December 2011 were interpreted in the light of a sound Keynesian analysis, it would in fact be consistent with this approach. The agreement calls on EU governments to limit the ‘structural’ deficit to 0.5 per cent of GDP. The term ‘structural’ is not well-defined, but is generally taken to refer to the component of the budget that is determined by long-term revenue and expenditure policies rather than by short term macroeconomic fluctuations. If this interpretation is taken to allow for short run fiscal stimulus during recessions, then the structural budget should indeed be required to be in, or near balance.

An expansionary fiscal policy is essential to stimulate demand, but monetary policy must also be remodelled in the light of the crisis. The minimal requirement is a more expansionary policy in which a temporary increase in inflation would be accepted as part of the price of cleaning up the massive debts inherited from the crisis.

But  deepter changes are needed. The monetary policy regime of the past two decades, in which central banks were entirely independent of government, and the maintenance of low inflation was the sole (or, at least, pre-eminent) goal of monetary policy, has been a catastrophic failure. 

The failed system of inflation targeting should be replaced, in the first instance, by a target that takes explicit account of the need to maintain economic activity at a level consistent with full employment. The most popular candidate here is the proposal to target, instead, the level of nominal gross domestic product (GDP).

The idea would be to combine a target rate of inflation (say 2-3 per cent) with an estimate of the long-term rate of real economic growth required to maintain full employment (again 2-3 per cent is a plausible estimate). The aim would then be to keep the value of GDP, expressed in current dollars, on a growth path consistent with these targets (that is, at an average annual rate somewhere between 4 and 6 per cent).

 

This change would have several effects. First, it would restore the balance that used to prevail in monetary policy before the 1990s, when central banks were explicitly required to pursue full employment as well as price stability.  At a minimum, this would force central banks to admit that their current policies are failing, a key requirement for any progress.
Second, because the target would apply to the level of nominal GDP, its adoption would require central banks to catch up the ground lost over the last few years of depressed growth and generally low inflation. That would permit a temporary increase in inflation, which is necessary if growth is to be restarted against a crushing burden of debt.

Last but not least, a nominal GDP target would create room for fiscal policy as well as monetary policy. What is needed now is the abandonment of counterproductive austerity policies and their replacement with a combination of short-term fiscal stimulus and long-run measures aimed at a sustainable budget balance. 

The abandonment of inflation targeting would, of course, be an admission of failure. But central banks have failed, disastrously, and admitting this would be the first step towards a sustainable recovery. A system of nominal GDP targeting would maintain or enhance the transparency associated with a system based on stated targets, while restoring the balance missing from a monetary policy based solely on the goal of price stability.

An effective system of nominal GDP targeting central banks co-operate with pro-growth fiscal policy, instead of seeking to counteract it in the name of inflation targets. This in turn would entail a change in the nature of central bank independence. As in the Keynesian era, central banks would still be independent in the sense that they would not be subject to day-to-day political control of their policy decisions. That is, they would have the same kind of independence as other regulatory bodies put in place to manage aspects of economic policy where direct political control is unhelpful. On the other hand, they would no longer be empowered to act as if they were an economic Supreme Court, not merely independent of, but superior to, governments.

Alternative policy programs are all very well, but they are useless in the absence of a  political movement capable of resisting the push for austerity, and of demanding a progressive alternative. Until recently, there has been little sign of such a movement. But 2011 has been a year a political ferment throughout the world. The ‘Arab Spring’ arose in a very different context from that of the developed market economies, but the revolts were driven in large measure by the fact that people were no longer willing to accept a system where the benefits of economic progress were creamed off by a tiny elite, leaving the population as a whole to struggle.

The example of the Arab Spring has been inspirational. Resistance to austerity has emerged, first in Europe and then, more surprisingly, in the US, where the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ movement has upended many political preconceptions. 

So far, these movements have been notable more for their effects in raising consciousness than for concrete political achievements. But there are promising signs. In the US, the Obama Administration has finally been pushed into taking some positive steps, though it remains to be seen how much of this is mere electoral positioning.  Similarly, European social democrats, now in opposition in nearly all countries, are shifting away from their previously uncritical acceptance of market liberalism. The “European Growth and Jobs Pact” tabled by the Socialists and Democrats (the social-democratic grouping in the European Parliament) represents a step in the direction of resistance to austerity, though still a small one.

Meanwhile, even as the parties of the political right push ever harder for pro-rich austerity policies, their incoherence is becoming more evident.  Given the state of the US economy, and the failure of the Obama Administration to do much about it, the Republicans ought to be guaranteed of a sweeping victory in the 2012 elections. In reality, the process of nominating an alternative candidate has descended into farce, and the Congressional Republicans have plumbed unheard of depths of (un)popularity. In large measure, this reflects the total separation between ideology and reality now required of Republicans

Meanwhile, in Europe, the dominant rightwing power bloc, consisting of the conservative German and French governments, the European Central Bank and the European Commission, is trying ever more desperate expedients in its attempt to maintain the market liberal order. The imposition of “technocratic” governments in Greece (headed by a former member of the ECB Board) and Italy (headed by a former chairman of the European Commission) represents a substantial abridgement of democracy.  It is not clear how this will end, but very hard to see it ending well, at least in the absence of a radical change in policy.

The struggle against the politics of austerity will be a long one, and often dispiriting.  As the experience of the 1920s and 1930s showed, the forces pushing for austerity are powerful. Nonetheless, they were defeated in the end, by the New Deal in the US, the Attlee Labour government in the UK, and the success of social democratic movements and policies in Europe.

This time around, we are fighting the idea in a zombie form, already multiply discredited by experience.  Keynes’ critique of ‘Treasury view’ has been developed into a coherent alternative to classical economics. While far from being the last word, Keynesian economics has repeatedly demonstrated its capacity to explain a crisis that, according to the views of market liberals, should never have happened at all, and, if it did, should have been followed by a rapid recovery.

The revolts of the past year have shown how the power of ideas, when pushed forward by an active protest movement can be amplified by the power of modern communications technology. There is every reason to hope that the inevitable downfall of the zombie economics of austerity will come sooner rather than later.

 

Now that Obama has signalled that he will sign the National Defense Authorization Act, US citizens have no legal rights that can’t be over-ridden by miltary or presidential fiat. Anyone accused of being a terrorist linked to Al Qaeda can be arrested, shipped overseas and held indefinitely without trial, or alternatively tried by military commissions.[1] And, if arrest isn’t feasible or convenient then (at least outside the US), they can be hunted down and assassinated, with or without warning.

On the face of it, that makes the US a scary place to live. But, as a matter of everyday reality, most Americans aren’t scared at all.[2] Should they be? 

There is a problem of cognitive dissonance here. The powers claimed by the Bush and Obama Administrations have only been used against US citizens on a handful of occasions and always against people who were, at least, supporters of Islamist terror groups. As far as everyday experience is concerned, the ratification of those powers by Congress makes no difference.

 

Is this situation stable, or is the US on a slippery slope? If the law remains unchanged, expansion of its scope is virtually inevitable. The Republicans have long demanded the end of ordinary criminal trials for those accused of involvement in Islamist terrorism and, sooner or later, they will be in a position to enforce that demand. As with Guantanamo Bay, that’s a step that will prove virtually impossible to reverse.

 

As Glenn Greenwald has pointed out, the system as applied so far has a multi-tiered approach to a guaranteed outcome. If the evidence against a suspect is adequate and legally admissible suspects, can be tried and convicted in civilian courts. If it’s dubious but enough to pass muster in a military tribunal they can be tried and convicted there. If there’s no admissible evidence at all, they can can be held without trial. Whichever route is chosen, suspects, once arrested, need never be released.

 

 

The next steps would probably involve:

 

* removing (or reading down to insignificance) the requirement for a link to the 2001 attacks, and using the detention power for broader groups that might be classed as terrorist. It’s easy to imagine the right using this against leftwing protest groups. On the other hand, once the new laws are fully accepted, it’s worth observing that there are quite a few actual terrorists on the political right, and plenty more people who might be accused of giving them material . A particularly alarming possibility, since it would massively expand the potential target group is the application of the law to alleged ‘narcoterrorists’, some of whom are supposedly linked to Hezbollar.

 

* abandoning any pretense of adhering to rules of evidence, and allowing convictions based on hearsay, entrapment and so on. Existing practice has already gone a fair way in this direction

 

After that, the road is open to the unfettered use of these powers. Even if the numbers actually detained were relatively modest (in the thousands, say) the threat would be available in all sorts of contexts, going well beyond law enforcement. 

 

The process would presumably move more slowly if the Dems retained power. On the other hand, the longer the laws remain on the books with bipartisan support, the harder it will be to challenge their inevitable use.

 

Is there any prospect of a reversal of this trend? Based on past experience, this won’t happen simply because of principled objections, so any reaction will only come when these powers are actually abused. And given the abuses to which the US public (and even more the US elite) are already inured, it would take something quite extreme – either mass detention of people who are clearly innocent or the use of the law against members of the elite, leading the rest to take alarm.

 

Perhaps I’m being overdramatic here. There have, after all, only been a handful of cases where these powers have been asserted, and I don’t detect a lot of enthusiasm for a police state among ordinary Americans. So, anyone who would like to cheer up my festivities is welcome to show me I’m wrong about this.

 

 

fn1. I’m aware that the part of the legislation making detention mandatory includes anexemption for US citizens, and that the part relating to Al Qaeda linked terrorism purports merely to endorse the status quo, which is left undefined. But the fact that Congress rejected amendments that would have explicitly excluded US citizens, and that the Bush Administration succeeded in holding US citizens in military custody for years make it quite unlikely that the courts would intervene to free alleged terrorists from military detention claimed as necessary by the President.

fn2. As a  now-departed visiting non-citizen  the change of rules makes no difference to me – the US has long claimed an absolute right to seize or kill anyone, other than a US citizen, anywhere in the world, and US courts have repeatedly denied redress to those claiming wrongful detention and torture following seizure in the US or elsewhere.  That didn’t stop me coming to the US, nor has the loss of any marginal protection I might gain from being in the US deterred me from going home. And, while in the US, I haven’t worried about what I said or who I talked to, despite the absence of any legal protections. So, I have just the same cognitive dissonance as everyone else.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My husband sent me this fascinating chart of atrocities throughout history, from the NYT. It’s an excellent chart as chart (Tufte would be proud), and despite the appalling subject it’s really engaging. It’s a nice visual representation of something a couple of us referenced yesterday in comments, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s ongoing posts about the civil war as the end of a great tragedy, rather than a tragedy in its own right. And it’s also incredibly, incredibly humbling: the only one of the most deadly events of human history I really know much about is WWII, and many of the others I’ve never even heard of. Clearly my education has been revoltingly Eurocentric; I think I had one half of one semester in high school devoted to the history of Asia, and the only thing I really remember is that we memorized a brief dialogue in Mandarin and I cheated on the test by writing the names and Mandarin characters of the major dynasties on my pencil. Poor Doc Langan; he had a PhD in Chinese (Asian?) history, and he had to deal with ignorant little jackasses like me. I owe him restitution in the form of learning something. Anyone care to recommend a couple of decent histories of Asia (or regions thereof) for the general reader?

 

Following up my previous post, here are some free PDFs. Enjoy (or not). I’ve tried to optimize these for the iPad. I would be interested to hear about any problems/unsatisfactorinesses, perhaps due to the fact that you are using a Kindle or whatever.

First, two Dickens Christmas books:

“The Chimes: A Goblin Story of Some Bells that Rang an Old Year Out and a New Year In” (PDF, 35 megs)

“The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain” (PDF, 11 megs)

I included the original illustrations but made them larger in two ways. First, the illustrations are mostly full-bleed. That is, they go to the edge of the page. This is not how they appeared originally and it looks a bit strange if you view the PDF on the computer screen. But it looks fine on the iPad because the device itself is a bit like a picture frame. Pictures want to go right up to the edge. On the other hand, text still needs a white border. I omitted header and footer stuff, since the device shows you page numbers and title if you tap it.

Second, you can zoom the illustrations to take in the detail. I encoded them at 600 dpi for “The Chimes”, 300 for “The Haunted Man” (that’s why the former is three times as big. Does anyone care whether eBook files are large? 34 megs is still pretty small, right?) I think the 600 dpi option is quite noticeably better. But I care about 19th Century illustrated books, so maybe it’s just me.

Also, the files have nice tables of contents, and pages listing illustrations and illustrators, with links.

Next up, an experiment that was sort of a waste of my time, honestly, but now it’s done, and I learned a thing or two. The Internet Archive has complete scans of all six volumes of a nice, Walter Crane illustrated edition of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. (Sort of an expensive set of books if you want to lay hands on paper.) Anyway, the scans are pretty good, as random scanned stuff you find on the internet tends to go. So I made a cleaned up edition of the first volume, in three parts. Part I, Part II, Part III (all PDF).

Now, the first problem here is that, frankly, it’s Edmund Spenser. For a lot of people, that’s a deal breaker. But I like the Walter Crane illustrations and I’m not going to argue with you about poetry just right now. The second problem is that the scans just weren’t quite good enough. (At least 600 dpi, people. 1200 dpi, if there’s fine detail.) It takes too much time, if you can’t do it right in the end. But I have a bunch of nice, 19th Century illustrated books sitting here beside me. I’m thinking it might be nice to make some clean, facsimile editions, optimized for iPad. Do the scanning right. Give ‘em away. Still, it’s time consuming to do this stuff (although I can listen to audiobooks while I’m doing it.)

Scanning issues aside, I think it’s still a pretty ok and basically readable iPad edition of Spenser I’ve made. Again, note how the layout is weird, if you view these pdf’s on your computer screen. I basically punched iPad screen-sized chunks out of original pages – which were, I think, 8.5” x 11” or so. Per my previous post, maybe people ought to resize material for the iPad more often, if they intend the PDF’s they make to be viewed on these devices, not printed (probably). People think PDF’s are bad for tablet readers because PDF’s aren’t formatted for them, but they easily can be.

Last but not least, just as I was building myself this whole ‘PDF’s are great for iPad!’ bandwagon, for my lonely self, I stumbled on a nice little site that lets comics creators, illustrators and such folk, sell their stuff as PDF’s: The Illustrated Section. So I re-formatted some past stuff – last year’s “Mama In Her Kerchief and I In My Madness”, and good ol’ “Squid and Owl” – for iPad and submitted it. So you can get my stuff for a couple bucks. Here are some free samples:

“Mama In Her Kerchief and I In My Madness” (PDF)

“Squid and Owl” (PDF)

I’m reading comics on my iPad these days and generally liking the experience. The slightly greater screen resolution of the iPad makes a huge difference, I find. I’m quite happy with the way my stuff looks now. I don’t expect to make much money this way, needless to say. But I hope the Illustrated Section succeeds. Or something like it.

One reason I’m worrying my head about all this stuff is I’m winding up to make a fresh edition of my Plato book, which I have reserved the e-rights to, and which I would like to do up in a suitably bang-up e-way. That’s a subject for another day.

Hope some of you like Dickens and/or Spenser and own iPads and/or similar devices.

I’d like the survey the CT commentariat about their ebook reading habits, and toss out a few ideas. I’ve made the shift this year. I now read more new books on my iPad than on paper. I also read a lot of comics on the iPad, mostly courtesy of the Comixology app. But let’s start with plain old mostly word productions.

At the present time Epub (or EPUB or EPub, or however you capitalize it) and Kindle (mobipocket) are notably sucky formats. Epub 3 is rolling out, and I’m sure the future will get better and better. But for now we have these beautiful devices; yet the books I’m reading on them look plug ugly. Terrible layout. Limited fonts. In their guts, these HTML-based ebook formats are websites pretending to be books. They don’t have pages, strictly. They jostle images in thoughtless ways. The gestalt is very web circa 1997. This is by design (in a negative sort of way). You can’t be sure what size screen you are dealing with, so every appearance of every bit of every ebook on every device is its own custom-poured page, courtesy of these flow-y formats. But the results are, to repeat, bad. Suppose you had a choice between getting a basically quite nice ‘standard’ garment off the rack, or having an brain-damaged, blind tailor make you a suit – just for you! cut by the poor, mad fellow, just to your measure! on the spot! There’s a lot to be said for not the ‘bespoke’ option, in this case.

So how about: just make a PDF so it looks good on the iPad. (Until 2014, when Epub finally catches up.) Why the iPad? Because I’ve got one, so I can see what I’m doing. No, seriously: how will it look on other devices? Unless you are trying to read it on your phone – which, admittedly, some people want to do – it will look fine. Why PDF? Everything can read PDF, and will continue to be able to do so. If the screen is fatter or thinner on some Nook or Kindle or whatever next year’s flavor may be, there will either be a slightly fatter top or side margin. But slightly fat margins are minor sins compared to the barbarities routinely perpetrated, in passing, by ePub and Kindle. PDF can look great. You pick the font! The pictures are in the right place!

And will Epub catch up? Technically, I’m very ignorant. I don’t code. I sort of know HTML and barely grasp CSS. I make books with InDesign. Maybe that makes me biased in favor of (relatively) old-fashioned laying out of pages. But I have nagging doubts as whether this whole websites-pretending-to-be-books, custom-poured page business really is the future of the book. I’m concerned it is, to some degree, a solution in search of a problem. [UPDATE: gross overstatement. Obviously cross-platform compatibility is a real problem, but I wonder whether the problem isn’t being over-solved, with perfect flexibility becoming an ideal to which some good design values are being sacrificed, when modest flexibility might be better.] Consider this very admirable effort, Bibliotype, by Craig Mod, who is always worth reading on these subjects. By all means, let this sort of thing go forward. We’ll see. But consider: if you want to play Angry Birds, you orient your iPad to landscape, for maximum width (the action is left-right). If you want to play Tetris, portrait is better. Up to you, of course, how you want to play at breakfast or in bed or wherever. But the point is this: no one would say game designers should work to design games that are omni equi-playable in portrait or landscape mode, at arms’ length, one inch from your nose, so forth. Likewise, I don’t see why eBook designers should necessarily be bending over every which way to ensure that, no matter what device, and how you are holding your device, you are getting as good a reading experience as you are getting any other way you hold it. Flexibility is a virtue. But there are others. Maybe it would be better to design something that looks great one standard way, even if that means it doesn’t look so good some other way. We still have pages. They aren’t inherent in the e-nature of the eBook beast. But they are inherent in the readers we read on. The iPad is a page, even if the things on it don’t have pages. Maybe the way to go, ultimately, is back to deliberate page layout. Maybe there is no other way to get the best results.

But that’s a big maybe, and I don’t want to stand in the way of folks like Craig Mod trying whatever stuff they think might be great.

In the meantime, as things stand, PDF’s are almost never formatted for an iPad screen, so it doesn’t readily occur to us that we might look in this direction for the optimal solution. I read a lot of PDFs, academic stuff. It’s all formatted for my printer, not my iPad, so the pages are mostly too big, and if you shrink them to fit, the print is cramped. I would suggest that, going forward, folks might start sizing and shaping PDF pages for these devices. The rules are a bit different. But that’s enough for one post. I’m curious to hear what your recent ebook experiences have been. Do ugly ebooks bother you? Do you crave the ebook analog of the Protean easy chair, from Melville’s Confidence-Man?

“My Protean easy-chair is a chair so all over bejointed, behinged, and bepadded, everyway so elastic, springy, and docile to the airiest touch, that in some one of its endlessly-changeable accommodations of back, seat, footboard, and arms, the most restless body, the body most racked, nay, I had almost added the most tormented conscience must, somehow and somewhere, find rest. Believing that I owed it to suffering humanity to make known such a chair to the utmost, I scraped together my little means and off to the World’s Fair with it.”

In a follow-up post [UPDATE: now posted] I’ll give out some freebie PDF eBooks I’ve optimized for the iPad, and note how slightly different rules apply. Nothing fancy. (How fancy could PDF be, after all?) But nice, I hope.