Peter Frase

Recently The Atlantic published a piece about how "a generation of file-sharers is ruining the future of entertainment". The piece is pretty silly, since it conflates "the future of entertainment" with "the profitability of the major entertainment corporations", and in particular the record industry. Marc Weidenbaum has a nice explanation of how absurd that is. But even if you believe that the profitability of these companies is somehow necessary for us to have culture, the concern for their health seems to me wildly disingenuous and misplaced. Their troubles are not a function of "freeloaders" or the evils of the Internet. They are a result of greed and an unwillingness to part with an obsolete business model--an unwillingness that has been encouraged and abetted by the state and its approach to intellectual property law.

Here's my solution for the record companies. All they need to do is offer a service that provides:

• Unlimited downloads of a huge selection of music from both recent years and past decades...
• In a high-quality format...
• With absolutely no copy protection or other Digital Rights Management...
• For no more than $5 per month.

Why do I think this might be a success? Because it already exists. The SoulSeek network is a file-sharing service that contains a huge selection--at least for the kinds of music I tend to like. And though it's free to use, for a $5 donation you get a month of "privileges", which essentially put you at the front of the line when downloading from other users, which makes the whole experience much faster.

I've given a lot of money to SoulSeek over the past couple of years--nearly $5 a month, as it turns out. And I would have happily given that money to a similar service that gave full legal access to copyrighted downloads, and passed some of that money on to the artists. But it doesn't exist, because the record companies still believe they can force us to pay for $12 CDs and $1 iTunes song downloads. They don't cling to that model because it's the only one possible, but because they're too greedy and short-sighted to try anything else.

Of course, the record companies and their apologists would immediately claim that the model I've described isn't economically viable, and they could never make enough money from it to do all the good work they supposedly do to find and develop young artists. But even at $5 a month, there's a lot of money to be made here. If unlimited downloads at a monthly rate caught on, it could come to be something like cable TV that a large percentage of households pay for as a matter of routine. I don't think this is all that implausible: people like music almost as much as they like TV, and what I'm proposing would be an order of magnitude cheaper than cable.

According to the cable providers' trade assocation, there are 62.1 million basic cable subscriptions in the United States. This number of online music subscriptions, at $5 per month, would bring in around $3.7 billion of revenue. In 2005, total revenue from the sale of recorded music in the U.S. was about $4.8 billion. When you consider how much cheaper digital distribution is than manufacturing and shipping physical media, the unlimited-downloads model looks pretty competitive with traditional sales.

Now, maybe this model wouldn't catch on in the way I've suggested. But if people continue to prefer buying their music a la carte, there's no reason a subscription-based service couldn't coexist with iTunes style pay-per-download. Unfortunately, there's not a whole lot of incentive for the big copyright cartels to move toward the system I've sketched out here, because the Obama administration seems intent on using the repressive power of the state to force people into consuming media in the way the media conglomerates would prefer. Atrocities like the ACTA treaty are moving us toward a world of pervasive surveillance in which our cultural wealth is kept under lock and key for the benefit of a few wealthy copyright-holders.

In light of all this, the correct response to anyone who decries the moral perfidy of file-sharers is derisive laughter. The media companies have chosen to transition into a form of rentier capitalism that requires them to wage war on their own consumers. In that environment, it can hardly be surprising that the consumers fight back.

April 1 is "Census Day", the day on which you're supposed to have turned in your response to the 2010 census. Of course, lots of people haven't returned their form, and the Census Bureau even has a map where you can see how the response rates look in different parts of the country.

Lately, there's been a lot of talk about the possibility that conservatives are refusing to fill out the census as a form of protest. This behavior has been encouraged by the anti-census rhetoric of elected officials such as Representatives Michelle Bachman (R-MN) and Ron Paul (R-TX).  In March, the Houston Chronicle website reported that response rates in Texas were down, especially in some highly Republican areas. And conservative Republican Patrick McHenry (R-NC) was so concerned about this possible refusal--which could lead conservative areas to lose federal funding and even congressional representatives--that he went on the right-wing site redstate.com to encourage conservatives to fill out the census.

Thus far, though, we've only heard anecdotal evidence that right-wing census refusal is a real phenomenon. Below I try to apply more data to the question.

The Census Bureau provides response rates by county in a downloadable file on their website.  The data in this post were downloaded on April 1. To get an idea of how conservative a county is, we can use the results of the 2008 Presidential election, and specifically Republican share of the two-party vote--that is, the percentage of people in a county who voted for John McCain, with third-party votes excluded. The results look like this:

It certainly doesn't look like there's any overall trend toward lower participation in highly Republican counties, and indeed the correlation between these two variables is only -0.01. In fact, the highest participation seems to be in counties that are neither highly Democratic nor highly Republican, as shown by the trend line.

So, myth: busted? Not quite. There are some other factors that we should take into account that might hide a pattern of conservative census resistance. Most importantly, many demographic groups that tend to lean Democratic, such as the poor and non-whites, are also less likely to respond to the census. So even if hostility to government were holding down Republican response rates, they still might not appear to be lower than Democratic response rates overall.

Fortunately, the Census Bureau has a measure of how likely people in a given area are to be non-respondents to the census, which they call the "Hard to Count score". This combines information on multiple demographic factors including income, English proficiency, housing status, education, and other factors that may make people hard to contact. My colleagues Steve Romalewski and Dave Burgoon have designed an excellent mapping tool that shows the distribution of these hard-to-count areas around the county, and produced a report on the early trends in census response around the country.

We can test the conservative census resistance hypothesis using a regression model that predicts 2010 census response in a county using the 2008 McCain vote share, the county Hard to Count score, and the response rate to the 2000 census. Including the 2000 rate will help us further isolate any Republican backlash to the census, since it's a phenomenon that has supposedly arisen only within the last few years. Since different counties can have wildly differing population densities, the data is weighted according to population.* The resulting model explains about 70% of the variation in census response across counties, and the equation for predicting the response looks like this:

The coefficient of 0.06 for the Republican vote share variable means that when we control for the 2000 response rate and the county HTC score, Republican areas actually have higher response rates, although the effect is pretty small.  If two counties have identical HTC scores and 2000 response rates but one of them had a 10% higher McCain vote in 2008, we would expect the more Republican county to have a 0.6% higher census 2010 response rate. **

Now, recall that the original news article that started this discussion was about Texas. Maybe Texas is different? We can test that by fitting a multi-level model in which we allow the effect of Republican vote share on census response to vary between states. The result is that rather than a single coefficient for the Republican vote share (the 0.06 in the model above), we get 50 different coefficients:

Or, if you prefer to see your inferences in map form:

The reddish states are places where having more Republicans in a county is associated with a lower response rate to the census, and blue states are places where more Republican counties are associated with higher response rates.

We see that there are a few states where Republicans seem to have lower response rates than Democratic ones, such as South Carolina and Nebraska. Even here, though, the confidence intervals are crossing zero or close to it. And Texas doesn't look particularly special, the more Republican areas there seem to have better response rates (when controlling for the other variables), just like most other places.

So given all that, how can we explain the accounts of low response rates in Republican areas? The original Houston Chronicle news article says that:

In Texas, some of the counties with the lowest census return rates are among the state's most Republican, including Briscoe County in the Panhandle, 8 percent; King County, near Lubbock, 5 percent; Culberson County, near El Paso, 11 percent; and Newton County, in deep East Texas, 18 percent.

OK, so let's look at those counties in particular. Here's a comparison of the response rate to the 2000 census, the response this year, and the response that would be predicted by the model above. (These response rates are higher than the ones quoted in the article, because they are measured at a later date.)

The first thing I notice is that the Chronicle was fudging a bit when it called these "among the state's most Republican" counties. Culberson county doesn't look very Republican at all! The others, however, fit the bill. And for all three, the model does substantially over-predict census response.  (Culberson county has no data for the 2000 response rate, so we can't get a prediction there.) What's going on here? It looks like maybe there's something going on in these counties that our model didn't capture.

To understand what's going on, let's take a look at the ten counties where the model made the biggest over-predictions of census response:

I have a hard time believing that the response rate in Duchesne county, Utah is really 0%, so that's probably some kind of error. But as for the rest, most of these counties are heavily Republican too, which suggests that maybe there is some phenomenon going on here that we just aren't capturing. But now look at the counties where the model made the biggest under-prediction--where it thought response rates would be much lower than they actually were:

Most of these are Republican areas too!

So what's going on? It's hard to say, but my best guess is that part of it has to do with the fact that most of these are fairly low-population counties. With a smaller population, these places are going to show more random variability in their average response rates than the really big counties. Smaller counties tend to be rural counties, and rural areas tend to be more conservative. Thus, it's not surprising that the places with the most surprising shortfalls in census response are heavily Republican--and that the places with the most surprising high response rates are heavily Republican too.

At this point, I have to conclude that there really isn't any firm evidence of Republican census resistance. That's not to say it doesn't exist. I'm sure it does, even if it's not on a large enough scale to be noticeable in the statistics.  It's also possible that the Republican voting variable I used isn't precise enough--the sort of people who are most receptive to anti-census arguments are probably a particular slice of far-right Republican. And it's always difficult to make any firm conclusions about the behavior of individuals based on aggregates like county-level averages, without slipping into the ecological fallacy. Nonetheless, these results do suggest the strong possibility that the media have been led astray by a plausible narrative and a few cherry-picked pieces of data.

* Using unweighted models doesn't change the main conclusions, although it does bring some of the Republican vote share coefficients closer to zero--meaning that it's harder to conclude that there is any relationship between Republican voting and census response, either positive or negative.

** All of these coefficients are statistically significant at a 95% confidence level.

In light of recent events and the ambivalence expressed in the Health Care Reform thread I started at the Activist, it seemed appropriate to resurrect the graphic from this post:

As a teenager in Minnesota, I attended my first Democratic Party caucus, where we sat in a church basement while a prospective candidate for office appealed for our support. At one point, a member of the audience asked the candidate for his position on the means-testing of public programs. When the candidate responded by asking which programs, in particular, ought to be means-tested, the questioner replied "any that conceivably could be means-tested".

At the time I didn't yet understand what "means testing" meant, but I still found this response a bit peculiar. It suggested that "means testing" was some kind of general point of principle rather than some technical point about implementing specific programs, which is what it sounded like.

I later found out that means testing refers to the practice of making public benefits conditional on one's demonstrated need for them, and on one's financial means of obtaining equivalent services in the private market. Policies that are specifically targeted at the poor, such as food stamps and Medicaid in the United States, are therefore means-tested programs. People like the man at the caucus meeting are in favor of extending this structure to programs which are not currently means-tested, like Social Security. They argue that cash support for the aged should be provided only to those who do not have sufficient income to get along without it.

This position has a superficial plausibility that makes it attractive not only to conservatives, but even to people on the left who are concerned about equality and social justice. It seems unnecessary, even unjust, to provide public benefits to those who are already affluent, particularly when doing so uses up finite public funds that could otherwise be redirected to those more deserving. However, I have come around to the position that means-testing of public benefits is something that the left should essentially never support.

The first justification for this position is entirely political in nature. In short, I do not believe it is possible to sustain the public consensus necessary to defend a generous welfare state regime, if the benefits of that regime are perceived as being directed to a privileged subset of the population. Setting up benefits in this way inevitably breeds resentment among those segments of the working class who pay taxes and do not receive substantial benefits, who then become open to the argument that the poor are parasitic on their hard work. This tendency is accentuated by the fact that the beneficiaries of means-tested programs will tend to be people who are already subject to social stigma and bigotry, such as women and members of racial minorities. The paradigmatic example of this in the United States is the dismantling of "welfare as we know it" in the 1990's. In that struggle, the barely-coded racist imagery of "welfare queens" highlighted a perception that the recipients of welfare were undeserving and opportunistic Others rather than people who could have, with a bit of bad luck, been any of us.

Not all elements of the welfare state suffer the same fate as welfare, however, not even in the United States. Consider, for example, the resilience of Social Security and Medicare in the face of decades of persistent conservative and neo-liberal attacks, culminating most recently in George W. Bush's abortive attempt to privatize Social Security. Those programs remain extremely popular with a broad cross-section of the public, to the point that Republicans will demagogue against Democratic health care proposals by posing as defenders of Medicare.

The difference between Medicare and Welfare, of course, is that Medicare is for everybody. You receive it when you turn 65, with no ifs, ands or buts. It therefore has the character of a social right, an entitlement of citizenship, rather than a special benefit or privilege. If a means test were to be imposed, however, it would convert Medicare into a program like Welfare--or indeed, a program like Medicaid, which, though ostensibly available nationwide, tends to be provided in a quite paltry form in poorer and more conservative states.

I therefore conclude that means testing of public benefits is little more than a trap set for progressives by those whose ultimate goal is the total destruction of these programs. Universal social rights are politically defensible, while particularist benefits are not. This lesson is, I think, supported by the work of Political Scientist Paul Pierson; as Joshua Tucker explains at the Monkey Cage, Pierson "explained how difficult it would be for governments to consolidate or retrench existing social policy programs, because these policies (pensions being the best example) create their own support coalition that reaches far beyond the left-wing electorate."

There is, however, an additional reason to support universalistic rather than targeted public programs, and this is a matter of principle rather than politics. The problem with means-tested benefits is not only that they are politically untenable, but that they inevitably put the state in the business of judging the worth and deservingness of applicants--and thus, by extension, judging the way in which they lead their lives. If, for example, welfare benefits are made contingent on performing work of some kind, then the state must decide what counts as a legitimate form of work. Does, for example, a mother's time spent raising a child count? Does getting a college education count? If it does, are all majors equally acceptable?

The fact that the state must adjudicate these issues--and must do so continually over time, since a person's status is constantly subject to change--means that benefit recipients are constantly subject to arbitrary bureaucratic domination. Universal benefits, on the other hand, require relatively little meddling in people's lives: in a country with universal health care, the only consideration for the state is whether or not you are a citizen. One should not, of course, understate the extremely fraught and contentious politics of citizenship itself, which may turn out to be the Achilles' heel of social democracy in the 21st century. Nevertheless, I regard it as a major step forward if we are arguing over who has the rights of citizenship rather than attempting to judge what makes a person deserving of some particular benefit.  I think that ultimately, means tested benefits tend to make the poor less free and less autonomous than the affluent. This is precisely the opposite of the goal we should be aiming at in thinking about the welfare state, which should be about enhancing human freedom and facilitating human flourishing.

This line of argument is, in a certain sense, in sympathy with critiques of the welfare state that have been offered from libertarian, anarchist, and Foucauldian perspectives. Unfortunately, discussion of these arguments tends to become bogged down in a narrow debate over whether one is "for" or "against" the welfare state. By now, however, we should all understand that there is not one welfare state but many, and that different institutional configurations can have very different implications for people's lives. Thus my goal as a writer and researcher is to promote a vision of the welfare state that enables individual autonomy and freedom by guaranteeing a basic standard of living as a human right, while simutaneously critiquing the idea that public benefits are special supports provided only to the deserving poor, and only in those instances where the private capitalist marketplace has "failed".

[Cross-posted from The Activist]

Serious debate about our visions for the future is always welcome, so it's nice to see Jason Schulman and David Schweickart debating "market socialism" and related things on this site. I don't have a lot more to add about formal models of the socialist economy, because frankly I'm not all that interested in them. Schemes for socialist economies--whether market or planned or whatever--tend to come off as a a bit of an exercise in what Marx derisively referred to as  "writing recipes for the kitchens of the future". Trying to predict exactly what socialism will look like is foolhardy--and moreover anti-democratic, since it pre-empts the actions and decisions of the actual masses who will have to make a post-capitalist world happen. So while these thought experiments about alternative economic models can be useful in clarifying our principles, I don't think we need to take the details all that seriously.

Rather than trying to draw up a detailed blueprint of a socialist economy, I prefer to think in terms of what Andre Gorz called "non-reformist reforms": changes to the system that can be implemented under capitalism, but which set the stage for further radical transformations. And I want to highlight one particular such reform that's associated with Gorz, and which commenter R. Burke brings up in the comments of Jason's recent post: the guaranteed minimum income, or "Universal Basic Income" as it's sometimes called.

This is just what it sounds like, an income that every citizen would be entitled to, independent of work. And I find it compelling because it directly addresses one of the most fundamental objectionable things about capitalism, namely the fact that it makes almost everyone dependent on performing wage labor in order to survive. This is despite the fact that we live in a society that is more physically productive than any other that has ever existed. Eighty years ago, John Maynard Keynes was predicting that the greatest problem his grandchildren would face was what to do with their abundant leisure time.  Instead, we are all working more than ever.

A guaranteed income could begin to reverse this state of affairs by giving people the option of opting out of the labor market, which today is only possible for a wealthy few. It would therefore address a goal that Pat Devine mentions in a passage Jason quoted: reducing the amount of unpleasant labor that people are forced to perform. As I already noted, I think this goal is of such paramount importance that I'm baffled by any theory of a socialist economy that doesn't make it absolutely central.

Which brings me to one thing I found quite unappealing about the vision David Schweickart presents. His description of economic life seems to assume that the ideal way to live is to have some job that you go off to for 40 hours a week for the rest of your life. If labor is unpleasant, the solution is to give workers more control, rather than giving them the option of opting out of work--"voice" rather than "exit", to use Albert Hirschman's lovely phrase. Now maybe this makes sense to people who grew up in the mid-20th century, when the labor market was less volatile and careers were more stable. But it doesn't make any sense to me. Even if full employment is possible, why would it be desirable? If there's not enough work to go around, why would you go and create more? And maybe it's true that if we make the workplace democratic, then work will be fulfilling and people won't mind it. But in that case, why force them?

It's at this point that you're supposed to start talking about "material incentives", to take Schweickart's choice of jargon. It usually starts with some troll objecting that socialism is impossible because nobody will do any work without the fear of starvation. The socialist then comes back with some argument about how socialism is going to motivate everyone to go out there and work hard. For Schweickart's system, the answer is that "one’s income is directly tied to the success of one’s firm", and so you work hard for the material reward. Jason doesn't explicitly address this issue, but I'm sure he could come up with a response.

But approaching the problem this way gets the whole issue backwards, by proposing solutions before we have understood what the actual problem is.  If you just talk in general terms about giving people "incentives to work", you're neglecting the reality that while some work would have to get done in any kind of desirable society, other kinds of work should actually be dis-incentivized. Broadly, I'd say that paid work in capitalism falls into at least the following categories:

1. Things that people want done, but which nobody particularly wants to do.
2. Things that people would do voluntarily provided they have enough time, even if they weren't paid.
3. Things that are useless or destructive, and happen only because they facilitate capital accumulation and people need jobs.
4. Things that people may want done and/or may want to do, but which have destructive effects on other people or the environment.

The discussions about material incentives are relevant to things in category 1. But much of the labor in modern capitalist societies falls into the other categories--more of it than we think, I suspect. I'd argue that a lot of artistic and knowledge work falls into category 2. So does child care, although just who does it voluntarily is another matter, which is why feminism is a core part of socialist analysis. Financial engineering, telemarketing, and basically anything that happens at a private health insurance company fall into category 3. So does much of the estimated 25% of U.S. employment that's taken up by what economists Sam Bowles and Arjun Jayadev call "guard labor": supervising workers, running the prison-industrial complex, providing private security, and other stuff that is mostly about preserving current power relations and maintaining inequality, rather than making anything useful. Driving a car or burning coal for electricity may fall into category 4.

Even though I can sketch out examples like this, in general it's pretty hard to differentiate these different kinds of labor in capitalism. That's because capitalism creates a situation where all work is "good" because it provides jobs, which people need in order to survive. However, these different kinds of labor wouldn't get differentiated in Schweickart's version of market socialism either, since he still assumes that everyone is forced to work--moreover, the idea of government as "employer of last resort" implies that we'd be actively creating useless category 3 work for people.  Devine's alternative, meanwhile, would attempt to use a convoluted planning process to differentiate between desirable and undesirable uses of labor. That may be necessary in some cases, but I don't think it should be our first solution--attempting to comprehensively micromanage every aspect of production strikes me as undesirably bureaucratic.

More importantly, I don't think it's necessary to go down this road at all. Rather than starting with these complicated issues of economic planning, we should start with the thing that's actually most desirable: making people less dependent on wage labor. Social Democracy has already gone part of the way in this direction, by removing things like health care and education from the market. But to really attack wage labor at its root, you need something like the guaranteed minimum income--perhaps in combination with reductions in the length of the work-week. 

At this point we get back to the incentives business again, with the critics screaming "but nobody would do any work!" At one level, I think this is just silly. For one thing, at least in the short run, most people would want to make more than the guaranteed minimum, and so would continue to work. For another thing, it's clear that people do various jobs for lots of different reasons that don't have to do with money, and some kinds of work would get more popular if people didn't have to worry about having the money to meet their basic needs. Some jobs really are enjoyable, in other words, and people would do them for free if they could. Other kinds of work give their returns by conferring status--for example, for all but the most famous artists, making art is more about gaining recognition than making money.  One appealing aspect of a basic income is that it would start to sort out the distinctions between the different kinds of labor outlined above. If some jobs start being things people do as hobbies, then great! If some jobs disappear, and we don't miss them, then great! If you have to pay people more to make them take crappy jobs, great!

Which isn't to say that basic income is a one-shot magic solution to all the problems of capitalism (although for the argument that it could be, check out a weird and provocative article called "The Capitalist Road to Communism"). Indeed, he best thing about a guaranteed income is that it stands a pretty good chance of provoking major economic disruption and social crisis--that's what makes it a "non-reformist reform."  In a world with a guaranteed income, it could very well turn out that there are some things that just aren't getting done. It's not clear that you'd be able to find enough people to clean office bathrooms or work the night shift at 7-11 if they had access to a basic income, no matter what you paid them.

Some people invoke the above scenario as an argument against the basic income, but let me emphasize that this is a problem I would love to have. Once it becomes clear what kind of work is both desired and undersupplied, we can have a political struggle about how that work will get done. By offering special rewards (i.e. "material incentives")? By creating some kind of national service requirement in exchange for the basic income (you have to go clean toilets or work the night shift once a month, say)? By finding clever new ways to automate these jobs? Or by deciding we can really do without some things we thought we "needed"?

I can't predict in advance what the solution would be. And I don't have to. That's really the most important point I want to make here.  I think the lesson of history is that momentous social change never happens because someone came up with a detailed plan for the future, won people over to it, and then implemented it. The chaos of real people making their own history always overwhelms such neat plans.

And I want to suggest that socialists, armed with an analysis of capitalism and a set of basic principles for the future, shouldn't be afraid of a politics that aims to provoke a crisis without knowing exactly where it will lead. The idea of a basic income that breaks our dependence on wage labor is a proposal for pushing toward that productive crisis, and for that reason I find it far more compelling than all the sterile blueprints for economic democracies and democratic plans and Parecons and what have you.

Leaving aside the economics, is a guaranteed income politically feasible? It's certainly a long shot--but then, so is any kind of radical economic change. It at least has the virtue of being straightforward and easy to explain. As I noted above, in some ways it's really just a an extension and completion of the historical project of Social Democracy: conferring a "social right" to the necessities of life and reducing the dependence of individuals on the labor market. And oddly enough, some on the right--like Milton Friedman and  the notorious Charles Murray--have endorsed versions of guaranteed income (although with some important differences from the leftist variants). Moreover, if it could be won it would be very difficult for the capitalist class to undo, because truly universal social programs are generally quite popular and nearly impossible to roll back.

Regardless, I think it's something worth talking about and agitating for. And who knows--if the current predictions of a long, high-unemployment "recovery" are borne out, perhaps people will begin to look more favorably on the idea of separating income from employment.

Today Matt Yglesias revisits a favorite topic of mine, the distinction between U.S. manufacturing employment and manufacturing production. It has become increasingly common to hear liberals complain about the "decline" in American manufacturing, and lament that America doesn't "make things" anymore:

Harold Meyerson had a typical riff on this recently:

Reviving American manufacturing may be an economic and strategic necessity, without which our trade deficit will continue to climb, our credit-based economy will produce and consume even more debt, and our already-rickety ladders of economic mobility, up which generations of immigrants have climbed, may splinter altogether.

. . .

The epochal shift that's overtaken the American economy over the past 30 years  . . .  finance, which has compelled manufacturers to move offshore in search of higher profit margins . . .  retailers, who have compelled manufacturers to move offshore in search of lower prices for consumers and higher profits for themselves

. . .

Creating the better paid, less debt-ridden work force that would emerge from a shift to an economy with more manufacturing and a higher rate of unionization would reduce the huge revenue streams flowing to the Bentonvilles (Wal-Mart's home town) and the banks . . . . The campaign contributions from the financial sector to Democrats and Republicans alike now dwarf those from manufacturing -- a major reason why our government's adherence to free-trade orthodoxy in what is otherwise a mercantilist world is likely to persist.

. . .

[Sen. Sherrod] Brown . . . acknowledges that as manufacturing employs a steadily smaller share of the American work force, "younger people probably don't think about it as much" as their elders . . . . Politically, American manufacturing is in a race against time: As manufacturing becomes more alien to a growing number of Americans, its support may dwindle, even as the social, economic, and strategic need to bolster it becomes more acute. That makes push for a national industrial policy -- to become again a nation that makes things instead of debt, to build again our house upon a rock -- even more urgent.

I don't dispute that manufacturing has become "more alien" to the bulk of American working people. But I question Meyerson's explanation for why this has happened, and I wonder whether we should really be so horrified by it. The evidence suggests that the decline in manufacturing employment in this country has been driven not primarily by offshoring (as Meyerson would have it), but by a dramatic increase in productivity. Yglesias provides one graphical illustration of this; here is my home-brewed alternative, going back to World War II:

This picture leaves some unanswered questions, to be sure. First, one would want to know what kind of manufacturing has grown in the U.S., for one thing; however, my cursory examination of the data suggests that U.S. output is still more heavily oriented toward consumer goods over defense and aerospace production, despite what one might think. Second, it's possible that the globally integrated system of production is "hiding" labor in other parts of the supply chain, in China and other countries with low labor costs.

But I don't think the general story of rapidly increasing productivity can be easily ignored. To really reverse the decline in manufacturing employment, we would need to have something like a ban on labor-saving technologies, in order to return the U.S. economy to the low-productivity equilibrium of forty or fifty years ago. Of course, that would also require either reducing American wages to Chinese levels or imposing a level of autarchy in trade policy beyond what any left-protectionist advocates.

Needless to say, I think this modest proposal is totally undesirable, and I raise it only to suggest the folly of "rebuilding manufacturing" as a slogan for the left. As Yglesias observes in the linked post, manufacturing now seems to be going through a transition like the one that agriculture experienced in the last century: farming went from being the major activity of most people to being a niche of the economy that employs very few people. Yet of course food hasn't ceased to be one of the fundamental necessities of human life, and we produce more of it than ever.

And yet I understand the real problem that motivates the pro-manufacturing instinct among liberals. The decline in manufacturing has coincided with a massive increase in income inequality and a decline in the prospects for low-skill workers. Moreover, the decline of manufacturing has coincided with the decline of organized labor, and it is unclear whether traditional workplace-based labor union organizing can ever really succeed in a post-industrial economy.  But the nostalgia for a manufacturing-centered economy is an attempt to universalize a very specific period in the history of capitalism, one which is unlikely to recur.

The obsession with manufacturing jobs is, I think, a symptom of a larger weakness of liberal thought: the preoccupation with a certain kind of full-employment Keynesianism, predicated on the assumption that a good society is one in which everyone is engaged in full-time waged employment. But this sells short the real potential of higher productivity: less work for all. As Keynes himself observed:

For the moment the very rapidity of these changes is hurting us and bringing difficult problems to solve. Those countries are suffering relatively which are not in the vanguard of progress. We are being afflicted with a new disease of which some readers may not yet have heard the name, but of which they will hear a great deal in the years to come-‑namely, technological unemployment. This means unemployment due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour.

But this is only a temporary phase of maladjustment. All this means in the long run that mankind is solving its economic problem. I would predict that the standard of life in progressive countries one hundred years hence will be between four and eight times as high as it is to‑day. There would be nothing surprising in this even in the light of our present knowledge. It would not be foolish to contemplate the possibility of afar greater progress still.

. . .

Thus for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent prob­lem‑how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.

Productivity has continued to increase, just as Keynes predicted. Yet the long weekend of permanent leisure never arrives. This--and not deindustrialization--is the cruel joke played on working class. The answer is not to force people into deadening make-work jobs, but rather to acknowledge our tremendous social wealth and ensure that those who do not have access to paid work still have access to at least the basic necessities of life--through something like a guaranteed minimum income.

Geeky addendum: I thought the plot I made for this post was kind of nice and it took some figuring out to make it, so below is the R code required to reproduce it. It queries the data sources (A couple of Federal Reserve sites) directly, so no saving of files is required, and it should automatically use the most recent available data.

manemp <- read.table("http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/data/MANEMP.txt",
   skip=19,header=TRUE)
names(manemp) <- tolower(names(manemp))
manemp$date <- as.Date(manemp$date, format="%Y-%m-%d")
 
curdate <- format(as.Date(substr(as.character(Sys.time()),1,10)),"%m/%d/%Y")
 
outputurl <- url(paste(
   'http://www.federalreserve.gov/datadownload/Output.aspx?rel=G17&amp;series=063c8e96205b9dd107f74061a32d9dd9&amp;lastObs=&amp;from=01/01/1939&amp;to=',
   curdate,
   '&amp;filetype=csv&amp;label=omit&amp;layout=seriescolumn',sep=''))
 
manout <- read.csv(outputurl,
   as.is=TRUE,skip=1,col.names=c("date","value"))
manout$date <- as.Date(paste(manout$date,"01",sep="-"), format="%Y-%m-%d") par(mar=c(2,2,2,2)) plot(manemp$date[manemp$date&gt;="1939-01-01"],
   manemp$value[manemp$date&gt;="1939-01-01"],
type="l", col="blue", lwd=2,
xlab="",ylab="",axes=FALSE, xaxs="i")
axis(side=1,
   at=as.Date(paste(seq(1940,2015,10),"01","01",sep="-")),
   labels=seq(1940,2015,10))
text(as.Date("1955-01-01"),17500,
   "Manufacturing employment (millions)",col="blue")
axis(side=2,col="blue")
 
par(new=TRUE)
plot(manout$date,manout$value,
   type="l", col="red",axes=FALSE,xlab="",ylab="",lwd=2,xaxs="i")
text(as.Date("1975-01-01"),20,
   "Manfacturing output (% of output in 2002)", col="red")
axis(side=4,col="red")

The New Left Review, which I write about here often, is my favorite left political publication. They got a lot of crap a few years back when they relaunched their journal with a new, seemingly more apolitical orientation, but in retrospect that choice seems strongly justified--and it resulted in a fairly unique publication. NLR now approaches the world analytically, rather than polemically, in a way that is genuinely geared toward increasing the reader's understanding of the conjuncture rather than propagandizing for a position. And yet its point of view is still recognizably from the left, to a degree that can be jarring when one is used to reading the organs of establishment liberal and conservative thought.

NLR's virtues are particularly evident in its extensive international coverage.  The articles it publishes about the non-Western world read like they are attempting to understand other countries from the inside, and convey to a Western reader what they are like for the people who live there. That this is so remarkable is a damning indictment of other publications. But as John Judis recently noted, the mainstream press in the United States seems incapable of reporting international events in terms of anything other than domestic political concerns. And even in supposedly "left" publications,  international analysis is typically a thinly-veiled intervention in some parochial domestic political debate.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in the case of Dissent, a magazine which seems to believe that the world only exists as an aspect of American domestic politics, and moreover that U.S. "humanitarian" warmongering against the rest of the world is the key to human emancipation. Recently, for example, they published a review of Mahmood Mamdani's Savior's and Survivors which, while raising some legitimate issues of scholarship, was far more concerned with smearing Mamdani and defending the ridiculous doctrines of "humanitarian intervention" than in understanding what is happening in the Sudan.

I thought of this again as I was reading the most recent NLR, which contains an excellent article on Myanmar by the historian and area specialist Mary Callahan. It's an overview of the country's politics, which describes the current system of military rule as the legacy of the country's colonial history, in which Britain destroyed traditional systems of social control and left behind an ethnically fragmented and divided society. Callahan gives good reasons to believe that, despite the wishful thinking of Western and exile activists, the junta is unlikely to be driven from power in the immediate future.

After reading the peace, I wondered what, if anything, Dissent had published on Myanmar recently. Given their history, I didn't expect good things, but I was prepared to be suprised--they do sometimes publish very good things, even on international affairs.

What I found, however, was even worse than I imagined. The first three hits from the print publication were: an interview with Anthony Giddens in which Myanmar is used as a throwaway line to underscore the inevitable superiority of liberal capitalism; a windbaggy piece about "democratization" which again refers to Myanmar in passing (as a "Fascist Disneyland"); and a Clifford Geertz essay on decolonization in which the country only appears in laundry lists of diverse ex-colonial states.

The result from the web archive was even more absurd: a piece from Michael Walzer on "Ten Foreign Policy Changes if Obama is Elected". Given the author, the content was predictable. Even so, this reads like a parody of liberal imperialist thinking:

5) A stronger (rhetorically stronger or stronger in practice?) commitment to “the responsibility to protect” in places like Darfur and Myanmar, though the new administration is not going to send American troops into any countries where we are not already engaged. Are there other countries ready to send troops? If they are ready, the U.S. under Obama would probably be willing to support, help pay for, equip, and transport the troops. More than that: Obama has talked about creating a no-fly zone over Darfur—a good thing to do, certainly, but even then I doubt that the UN’s 20,000 African troops would be sufficient to stop the killing without some reinforcement from better trained and more disciplined armies.

Hm, yes, that place Myanmar, I hear they're having some trouble with human rights, or cyclones, or something. Better send in the troops, old chap! (No Africans, though, they're no good.)

The way Walzer can cavalierly throw around this kind of warmongering is bad enough. But for Dissent to publish this kind of irresponsible call for blood in a country it has not deemed worthy of a single article? It underscores the despicable and immoral quality of the "liberal hawks", who seem more interested in finding excuses for military action than in considering its consequences.

Have you seen this man?

[Cross-posted from The Activist]

The talk of blog-land this week is Ryan Lizza's long New Yorker profile of Obama administration economist-guru Larry Summers. It's an interesting and useful piece, although I think it's far too forgiving of Summers and the Obama administration for all the reasons Dean Baker provides here. I would only add that it's shameful to write a discussion of Summers' years at Harvard without mentioning the Andrei Shleifer affair, an episode of raw gangsterism in which Summers connived to protect a man who had enriched himself by immiserating the Russian people and wrecking their country.

However, what I want to focus on in the Lizza piece is the curious case of one Jared Bernstein. Formerly an economist at the very progressive Economic Policy Institute, Bernstein is now the chief economic adviser to Vice President Biden. More importantly, he is the only high-ranking economist in the Obama White House whom one could plausibly describe as "on the left." And in the photo that accompanies the Lizza profile, he appears alongside Summers, Tim Geithner, Christina Romer and Peter Orszag, a group that is described in a caption as "the advisers who meet with the President daily to discuss the economy".

In the actual article, however, he only appears three times in passing. The first is in December 2008, when the Obama economic team meets in Chicago to discuss their response to the economic crisis. Although we are given an extensive description of the contributions from Romer, Orszag and others in this conversation, we do not hear what, if anything, Bernstein had to say. More significantly, Lizza reports that at the end of the meeting, "Summers, Romer, Geithner, Orszag, Emanuel, and Jason Furman huddled in the corner to lock down" the amount of the stimulus package. Bernstein, apparently, was politely dismissed before this little summit.

Bernstein reappears in a discussion of Summers' alleged conversion from gung-ho deregulator to chastened Keynesian, averring that "I was reading Larry’s articles in the Financial Times over the past couple of years, and thought, Wow, it’s all too rare that you see the thinking of such a prominent economist move like that." But here he's being brought in as an outside commentator whose job is to burnish Summers' lefty cred (and give Lizza an excuse to repeat the often-told fact that Bernstein used to be some kind of hippie musician). The fact that he works in the White House is essentially irrelevant. His only other appearance in the piece is at the end, where Lizza reports that there is "a half-hour meeting each morning, in which Obama is briefed by the top members of his economic team: Summers, Geithner, Romer, Orszag, and Bernstein." From Obama's policies and Lizza's reporting, it's not hard to conclude that one of these five is pulling significantly less weight with the President than the other four.

I bring up all of this not just because I like Jared Bernstein and wish he had more influence than Larry Summers, but to raise a larger point about the relationship between the Obama administration and the left. Thus far, it seems to me that in every case where a solid progressive has entered the administration, they would have been better off staying outside. Bernstein, I suspect, would be more effective if he could do what Dean Baker and Robert Reich are doing: criticize the administration's economic policy from the left. Instead, he's in a position where he can't honestly speak his mind because of his official post, and yet he still seems to have minimal impact on policy-making. A similar case, I think, can be made about Van Jones, whose Glenn Beck-inspired defenestration from the White House may turn out to be a blessing if it frees him up to be a consistent and outspoken progressive about environmental justice issues. And the list goes on: Hilda Solis, for example, seems to have vanished without a trace.

There's long been a debate among leftists in this country about the relative merits of "inside" and "outside" strategies for moving the state and the Democratic party to the left. I believe, as do many in DSA, that a successful strategy has to incorporate both. But the case of Jared Bernstein is, I think, a cautionary tale: being "inside" a Democratic administration means nothing if you don't have a voice there. In that case, it amounts to nothing more than a co-opting of progressive voices by a fundamentally conservative political project.

Lots of interesting stuff in the most recent New Left Review. Last night I went through Gopal Balakrishnan's latest, in which he argues that the capitalist world system is not in for a return to rapid growth any time soon, but is instead headed toward the stagnant "stationary state" that characterized pre-industrial civilizations:

Note that this is subtly different from the "catastrophist" predictions which leftists have historically made, and which have a terrible track record. Balakrishnan is not arguing that capitalism is on the verge of collapsing and giving way to something else, because there is no oppositional movement powerful enough to bring about this outcome. He opens his essay with a quote from Gramsci, speaking about the potential for a "crisis that lasts many decades"; the passage evokes a more famous remark Gramsci's that "the old is dying, and the new cannot yet be born".

Balakrishnan gives four reasons for his prognosis: "demographic disproportion, ecological deterioration, politico-ideological de-legitimation and geo-political maladaptation". These refer to:

• The aging of Western societies, leading to a situation in which there are fewer productive workers supporting the retirement benefits of a growing elderly population. The growing cost of health care and the weak prospects for productivity growth in the service sector will lead to serious fiscal pressure on the state.
• The effects of climate change and other man-made disasters. While a transition to a "green capitalism" may theoretically be possible, at present it seems as though neither the bourgeoisie nor the political elite have the will to see this through.
• Neoliberalism has been discredited by the crisis, but the Keynesianism of the postwar era seems equally incapable of restoring growth, and instead can only prop the system up with a series of desperate bailouts and fiscal stimulus measures. Meanwhile, there remains no credible ideological challenge from the left. The consequence is escalating depoliticization and cynicism across the world polity.
• Finally, no clear successor to the American hegemon presents itself: China's economy is still too weak to shoulder the burden, Europe lacks the unified state capacity to do it, and no ad-hoc alliance of world powers seems capable of truly restructuring the system and moving it to a new stage.

The piece is speculative, without much in the way of empirical evidence, but it's nonetheless useful. As to these four explanations, some strike me as more plausible than others.

The ageing of Western societies is a real phenomenon, of course, but I am skeptical that it will have quite the impact that Balakrishnan suggests. For one thing, there is no reason to suppose that the current retirement age will remain fixed--indeed, we have already seen some efforts to push it up. Since fewer jobs today require intensive manual labor, it is feasible for people to remain at work longer. Of course, increasing the retirement age would be a reversal of one of the great gains made by the working class in the twentieth century, and it would have highly inequitable consequences for those who do still work in manual occupations. But we are speaking here only of possible resolutions of the crisis, not desirable ones.

Balakrishnan is also too quick to accept at face value the argument that health expenditures will continue to accelerate rapidly while the service sector will experience no productivity gains, based on what appears to be a variant of Baumol's cost disease theory.  The argument about health care betrays some ignorance about health care economics. Much of the cost of care in the United States is driven by the perverse structure of the market for health services, and the comparison of modern welfare states shows that the state is quite capable of restraining cost growth. As for the rest of the service sector, the issue of slow productivity growth is a real one, but I would not discount the possibility of realizing substantial efficiency gains. Think of the growth in self-checkout machines at grocery stores, which could do to grocery employment what ATM's did for bank tellers. Or, even more dramatic, consider the innovations in online education which could completely upend the existing system of higher learning. I suspect, in fact, that increased productivity in services has been held back by the appallingly low wages at the bottom of the American labor market, which have disincentivized employers from economizing on labor.

As for ecology, I am unfortunately afraid that Balakrishnan is right. The way the climate change debate has unfolded in the United States and elsewhere certainly suggests that the capitalist class is incapable of putting their long-term interests ahead of short-term profits and ideological antipathy to state solutions such as carbon taxes or even cap-and-trade. (Although the recent defections from the chamber of commerce are perhaps hopeful signs.) At the same time, it's still difficult to imagine that China will really consent to restrain their emissions in a way that the earlier industrializers never had to, all in order to ameliorate a problem that they themselves did not create.

While the consequences of climate change for humanity will be terrible, however, I do wonder whether they will really be as bad as all that for capital accumulation. On the one hand, ecological chaos would lead to a widespread destruction and devaluation of capital, allowing a new round of accumulation to proceed. On the other hand, there' s no reason in principle that adapting to and cleaning up after climate change-induced mayhem can't be highly profitable, even if its human consequences are terrible. The relevant maxim here, it seems to me, is that the reason capitalism never collapses is that there always turns out to be a way of resolving the crisis at the expense of the working class.

The issue of ideological drift and delegitimization of political institutions is, to me, the strongest of the arguments Balakrishnan musters--though oddly, it is the one he gives in the least detail. The bankruptcy of neoliberalism and the insufficiency of mainstream Keynesian solutions are plain enough.  As is the depoliticization and demobilization of the demos, the supposed mass base of bourgeois democracy. But what is even more ominous is the way in which bourgeois political institutions seem increasingly incapable of competently managing capitalism, even from a narrowly capitalist standpoint. Years of tax revolts and racist pandering from the right have lead to a situation in which it is always possible to appropriate new funds for new programs (at least if they take the form of giveaways to business or the rich), but never possible to raise the tax revenue to pay for them.  The end state of this trajectory is California, where Proposition 13, a 2/3 majority requirement for legislative tax increases, and a fanatical Republican minority have rendered the state an ungovernable wreck.

This situation appears intolerable, yet there remains no ideology on the horizon that seems capable of challenging it--certainly not Barack Obama's technocratic center-rightism, which appears to be interested only in the restoration of postmodern finance capitalism's status quo. And as Fredric Jameson points out, “the mass of people . . . do not themselves have to believe in any hegemonic ideology of the system, but only to be convinced of its permanence”.

The final of the four arguments, about geo-politics, is the most difficult to assess. As to the present moment, it certainly seems correct. American power is already over-extended, and the fiscal dilemmas outlined above may, eventually and hopefully, actually make cuts in defense spending thinkable in this country. I'm less pessimistic than Balakrishnan about the future of a united Europe, but it certainly doesn't seem like any rapid further consolidation is likely in the near term. As for China, it may yet rise to take its place in a Sinocentric world system, as Giovanni Arrighi and other World Systems theorists predicted long ago. But in the meantime, it does seem as though we are in for a period of uncertainty and chaos.

It is never wise to discount capitalism's ability to reinvent itself. We may yet see the launch of a new regime of accumulation in the coming years. Or, we may see another speculative bubble, putting off the crisis for another decade before culminating in an even worse crash. But if Balakrishnan is right, and we're in for a slow, grinding stagnation, then the political order of the day will be the Gramscian "war of position", as the left struggles to reorganize itself and raise the banners of "a better world in birth".

But what is that world, and what will be inscribed on our banners? That is, what are the principles that would underpin an alternative to capitalism today? That, alas, is a topic for another day.

The new issue of City and Community has an article by Peter Dreier and John Atlas about a show that captivates many an urban sociologist, The Wire. Their piece extends comments they made last year in Dissent, in a symposium about the show. In both pieces, they repeat the common accusation that the show is nihilistic, because it presents urban problems but doesn't show any solutions to them. To bolster the point, they dredge up a quotation from an interview, in which Simon proclaims that meaningful change is impossible "within the current political structure".

As a corrective to what they see as The Wire's shortcomings, Dreier and Atlas catalogue some of the real community activists who have struggled against injustice in Baltimore, and won some small victories. And these are indeed inspiring and courageous people, who have managed to win some real improvements in people's lives. But by bringing them up and presenting them as the solution to all the problems The Wire portrays, I think Dreier and Atlas miss the point of what David Simon and Ed Burns are doing with the show.

It's misleading to say that The Wire is nihilistic. It's true that the problems it portrays appear, within the context of the narrative, to be insoluble. And it may even seem, initially, as though the show is sympathetic to a conservative position: the poor will always be with us, government intervention always makes things worse, so we might as well just give up and try to make things better in our own small, individualist way. But this would be a profound misreading, because the show suggests, not that there are no solutions, but something far more complex. We come to understand, as the seasons unfold, that each of the dysfunctional institutions we see is embedded in a larger system that goes far beyond the scale of Baltimore. There is, as Stringer Bell puts it in season 3, "a game beyond the game". We therefore have to conclude, not that there are no solutions, but that there may be no solutions at the scale of a single city.

The police find themselves hamstrung by their need to deal with national agencies like the FBI, which has been caught up in the mania of the "war on terror". The dockworkers find their way of life destroyed by the automation and the transformation of the global shipping industry. The mayor is at the mercy of Maryland state politics because he needs funding. The local newspaper struggles, and fails, to adjust to a world of profit-driven news and competition from new media. Even the drug dealers are at the mercy of their out-of-town "connect".

None of this implies that Baltimore's doom is inevitable. Neither imperialism, nor neoliberalism, nor Republican domination of state politics, nor the tabloidization of all journalism are inevitable. If they seem that way on the show, it is because of the careful and clever way in which the story is framed: these larger-scale institutions, the ones where the real agency lies, are always kept off screen and held beyond the reach of the characters. Thus the world the characters inhabit appears to them to be one where nothing can be changed. That doesn't mean that the world of the show, that we viewers can sense, is actually so tragic.

But is true that none of these problems can be solved in a single city, and most of them require a long-term, and fairly radical project of social transformation. This may present difficulties for liberals who would prefer that social problems have incremental, non-threatening solutions. But by presenting small-scale local activism as an adequate response, Dreier and Atlas do a disservice both to the problems they address, and to the activists themselves.

Perhaps, however, their real political objective is somewhat different from simply promoting the importance of urban collective action. The giveaway comes at the end of the City and Community version of their essay:

Perhaps, a year or two from now, Simon or another writer will propose a new series to TV networks about the inner workings of the White House and an idealistic young president, a former community organizer, who uses his bully pulpit to mobilize the American people around their better instincts.

This president would challenge the influence of big business and its political allies, to build a movement, a New Deal for the 21st century, to revitalize an economy brought to its knees by Wall Street greed, address the nation's health care and environmental problems, provide adequate funding for inner-city schools, reduce poverty and homelessness, and strengthen the power of unions and community groups.

A show like that would certainly be a nice bit of wish-fulfilment for liberals who like to imagine a "great man" riding in and fulfilling all their fantasies. But it's unclear what has to do with our world, in which an ambitious young politician used his charisma and the wishful thinking of his base to ride to power, and then proceeded to cater to the needs of bankers and insurance companies while sinking America ever deeper into an intractable war in Afghanistan. Faced with that reality, the world of The Wire doesn't look so nihilistic or unrealistic after all.