Saturday, April 27, 2019

Notre Dame Cathedral and Questions from a Worker Who Reads (after Bertolt Brecht) [feedly]

Notre Dame Cathedral and Questions from a Worker Who Reads (after Bertolt Brecht)
https://workingclassstudies.wordpress.com/2019/04/22/notre-dame-cathedral-and-questions-from-a-worker-who-reads-after-bertolt-brecht/

When Notre Dame Cathedral caught fire in Paris on April 15, 400 firefighters were deployed to tackle the blaze. One of those workers was seriously injured, and two police officers were also hurt. Emergency workers risked their lives to remove artefacts from the burning cathedral, but most reports emphasized  the value of the artefacts and artworks rather than the people who saved them. Media coverage of the global reaction to the fire focused on the great sadness many people feel at the potential loss of an iconic building. Catholics have understandably been particularly upset at the loss of the church. In France, the president, Emmanuel Macron, has promised that the Cathedral will be rebuilt, and two French billionaires have pledged millions of dollars towards the repairs. Experts have explained how technology can assist in the reconstruction of the destroyed parts of the building and there has been much commentary on the cultural significance of the cathedral.

As this was all unfolding, I kept thinking about Bertolt Brecht's 1935 'Questions from a Worker Who Reads'. In the poem, the worker asks questions about the people who are missing from stories about famous monuments and historical events – the labourers who 'haul(ed) up the lumps of rock'; cooks who prepared the feasts for kings; the masses of workers who built, fought, and died for all these important historical figures.

And this is what kept coming back: who built Notre Dame? How many of those workers were injured or died during the construction? Who has been maintaining the cathedral – fixing lights, unblocking toilets, keeping it neat and tidy, answering the phones, serving in the gift shop? What will happen to these workers while the building still smoulders? No doubt, an army of tradespeople will be employed in the rebuilding: will they be paid decent wages and will they be safe at work?

Questions lead to more questions, such as how the reporting on the Notre Dame fire reflects cultural biases based on class and race. Responses to the fire show how certain buildings or places can be attributed more value than others. Some have compared responses to Notre Dame with reactions to the June 2017 fire at Grenfell Tower, which housed working class low-income people, where 72 people lost their lives. The fight for affected families to be rehoused and for dangerous flammable cladding to be removed from other social housing blocks continues, but have working-class residents of social housing been treated as less important than artefacts in a famous cathedral?

Destruction of other significant religious or cultural buildings around the world have not received the same attention as Notre Dame, such as the loss of Black churches in Louisiana in April to arson by a white supremacist. While the churches might not be as old as Notre Dame, they are extremely important to the local community, and their destruction as the result of a hate crime is deeply significant. Was there less of an outcry because the affected community are people of colour? The Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem also experienced an accidental fire on the same day at Notre Dame, but the fire was not reported on by Western media despite the religious significance of this site, which points to the devaluing of sites outside of the west, as well as the ongoing suspicion of anything Muslim.

For many, Notre Dame is an iconic symbol of the Catholic Church, but for others, it is a symbol of French colonial and imperial power. The outpouring of grief for the lost building has been seen as symptomatic of the lack of concern for the rights of people under colonial rule and the continued impact of French colonialism in terms of racism and discrimination faced by African and Muslim immigrants in France today. Meanwhile, some right-wing outlets were very quick to try attribute blame to Islamic terrorists.

Responses to the Notre Dame fire often emphasize the Cathedral's age, but in Australia, people seemed less bothered by the potential loss of sacred trees that are just as old. Indigenous activists in Victoria have been fighting to protect 800-year-old sacred trees, including a birthing tree where countless generations of Djap Wurrung people have been born, from a highway expansion. Indigenous people in Australia have experienced many such fights, as their land and sacred sites have been destroyed to make way for roads, mines, and building developments. Some public figures here have suggested that Australia should assist with the cost of rebuilding Notre Dame – an idea that seems particularly galling in the light of Indigenous disadvantage and the continuing gaps in life expectancy and educational outcomes between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.

Wider suggestions that the cathedral 'belongs' to the world (and therefore the world should contribute to the repair fund) insult the millions suffering under austerity measures or experiencing racism due to the rise of right-wing rhetoric (particularly when this hateful rhetoric has a religious basis), or living without adequate housing, nutrition, education, or health care around the world.

I visited Paris as a working-class teenager in the 1980s (after saving for months) and I remember going in to Notre Dame cathedral and admiring the skill of the workers who created the stained-glass windows, the beautiful stone work, the intricate wood carvings. To see the fruits of their labour destroyed is a great shame. But what is the chance that the focus of any rebuilding will be on the workers? More likely, we will hear stories about the value of the artefacts, the use of technology to recreate lost sections, the importance of the building to French history, and the willingness of the powers-that-be to make sure everything is restored.

As we listen to those stories, we should remember that reports on historical places and events are always classed and raced. As Brecht's worker says at the end of the poem, 'So many reports/ So many questions'.

Sarah Attfield, University of Technology Sydney, editor Journal of Working-Class Studies


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Thursday, April 25, 2019

The Captain Swing Riots; Workers and Threshing Machines in the 1830s [feedly]

The Captain Swing Riots; Workers and Threshing Machines in the 1830s
http://conversableeconomist.blogspot.com/2019/04/the-captain-swing-riots-workers-and.html

"Between the summer of 1830 and the summer of 1832, riots swept through the English countryside. Over no more than two years, 3,000 riots broke out – by far the largest case of popular unrest in England since 1700. During the riots, rural laborers burned down farmhouses, expelled overseers of the poor and sent threatening letters to landlords and farmers signed by the mythical character known as Captain Swing. Most of all, workers attacked and destroyed threshing machines."

 Bruno Caprettini and  Joachim Voth provide a readable overview of their research on the riots in "Rage against the machines New technology and violent unrest in industrializing England," written as a Policy Brief for the UBS International Center of Economics in Society (2018, #2). They write:
"Threshing machines were used to thresh grain, especially wheat. Until the end of the 1700s, threshing grain was done manually and it was the principal form of employment in the countryside during the winter months. Starting from the Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815), threshing machines spread across England, replacing workers. Horse-driven or water-powered threshers could finish in a matter of weeks a task that would have normally kept workers busy for months. Their use arguably depressed the wages of rural workers." 
Here's a figure showing locations of the Captain Swing riots: 

The authors collect evidence about where threshing machines were being adopted based on newspaper advertisements for the sale of farms--which listed threshing machines at the farm as well as other property included with the sale. They show a correlation between the presence of more threshing machines and rioting. But as always, correlation doesn't necessarily  mean causation. For example, perhaps areas where local workers were already more rebellious and uncooperative were more likely to adopt threshing machines, and the riots that followed only show why local farmers didn't want to deal with their local workers. 

Thus, the authors also collect evidence on what areas were especially good soil for wheat, which makes using a thresher more likely, and what areas had water-power available to run threshers. it turns out that these areas are also where the threshers were more likely to be adopted. So a more plausible explanation seems to be that the new technology was adopted where it was most likely to be effective, not because of pre-existing local stroppiness. 

The Captain Swing riots are thus one more example, an especially vivid one, that new technologies which cause a lot of people to lose a way of earning income can be highly disruptive. The authors write: "The results suggest that in one of the most dramatic cases of labor unrest in recent history, labor-saving technology played a key role. While the past may not be an accurate guide to future upheavals, evidence from the days of Captain Swing serve as a reminder of how disruptive new, labor-saving technologies can be in economic, social and political terms."

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Wednesday, April 24, 2019

Following up on economics.enlightenradio.org

Hi there,

I wanted to check in with you one last time regarding my previous email and our guide about helping single women obtain the mortgage they deserve. I think this resource would be a great addition to this page of your site:

http://economics.enlightenradio.org/2016/05/ryan-cooper-why-bernie-sanders-is-most.html

I’ve included our guide here:

https://www.creditcards.com/credit-card-news/single-womans-guide-to-mortgage-ready-credit.php

Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions.

Gratefully,

Ryan Noonan
Communications Specialist
CreditCards.com
9600 N. Mopac, Stonebridge Plaza II, Suite 500
Austin, TX  78759

On Thu, Apr 18, 2019 at 9:39 PM, Ryan Noonan <ryan.noonan@creditcards.com> wrote:

Hi there,

I hope you’re enjoying your Thursday.

I wanted to reach out to see if you had a chance to read my previous email.

We created a guide that explains the best strategies for single women to build a strong credit profile and obtain a mortgage. It also describes the best practices for preparing and protecting ones credit throughout the home-buying process.

I thought you might want to include it on your page here:

http://economics.enlightenradio.org/2016/05/ryan-cooper-why-bernie-sanders-is-most.html

Here’s the link:

https://www.creditcards.com/credit-card-news/single-womans-guide-to-mortgage-ready-credit.php

Please let me know if you can add our guide to your page.

Best,

Ryan Noonan
Communications Specialist
CreditCards.com
9600 N. Mopac, Stonebridge Plaza II, Suite 500
Austin, TX  78759

On Thu, Apr 4, 2019 at 9:01 PM, Ryan Noonan <ryan.noonan@creditcards.com> wrote:

Hi there,

I hope you’re well!

I noticed you mention cbpp.org’s A Guide to Statistics on Historical Trends in Income Inequality on this page of your site:

http://economics.enlightenradio.org/2016/05/ryan-cooper-why-bernie-sanders-is-most.html

I thought you might also want to link to our guide that empowers single women to rise above financial inequality and build their credit in order to obtain a mortgage.

Despite making up almost one-fifth of the home buying market, single women are more likely to be denied mortgage loans than any other group. We created a guide that breaks down the best strategies for positively managing credit throughout the home-buying process and how to utilize a strong credit profile to combat gender bias.

I have included a link to our guide here:

https://www.creditcards.com/credit-card-news/single-womans-guide-to-mortgage-ready-credit.php

Would you consider adding a link to our guide on your page above?

Gratefully,

Ryan Noonan
Communications Specialist
CreditCards.com
9600 N. Mopac, Stonebridge Plaza II, Suite 500
Austin, TX  78759




Don't want emails from us anymore? Reply to this email with the word "UNSUBSCRIBE" in the subject line.
CreditCards.com, 9430 Research Blvd Bldg 4, Austin Texas, 78759, United States

Friday, April 19, 2019

Capitalism’s Great Reckoning [feedly]

Capitalism's Great Reckoning
https://www.project-syndicate.org/onpoint/capitalism-s-great-reckoning-by-james-k--galbraith-2019-04

As the maladies of modern capitalism have multiplied, fundamental questions about the future of the world's dominant economic model have become impossible to ignore. But in the absence of viable alternatives, the question is how to reform a system that is increasingly at odds with democracy.

VISIT WEBSITE

 -- via my feedly newsfeed

Thursday, April 18, 2019

Question for economics.enlightenradio.org

Hi there,

I hope you’re enjoying your Thursday.

I wanted to reach out to see if you had a chance to read my previous email.

We created a guide that explains the best strategies for single women to build a strong credit profile and obtain a mortgage. It also describes the best practices for preparing and protecting ones credit throughout the home-buying process.

I thought you might want to include it on your page here:

http://economics.enlightenradio.org/2016/05/ryan-cooper-why-bernie-sanders-is-most.html

Here’s the link:

https://www.creditcards.com/credit-card-news/single-womans-guide-to-mortgage-ready-credit.php

Please let me know if you can add our guide to your page.

Best,

Ryan Noonan
Communications Specialist
CreditCards.com
9600 N. Mopac, Stonebridge Plaza II, Suite 500
Austin, TX  78759

On Thu, Apr 4, 2019 at 9:01 PM, Ryan Noonan <ryan.noonan@creditcards.com> wrote:

Hi there,

I hope you’re well!

I noticed you mention cbpp.org’s A Guide to Statistics on Historical Trends in Income Inequality on this page of your site:

http://economics.enlightenradio.org/2016/05/ryan-cooper-why-bernie-sanders-is-most.html

I thought you might also want to link to our guide that empowers single women to rise above financial inequality and build their credit in order to obtain a mortgage.

Despite making up almost one-fifth of the home buying market, single women are more likely to be denied mortgage loans than any other group. We created a guide that breaks down the best strategies for positively managing credit throughout the home-buying process and how to utilize a strong credit profile to combat gender bias.

I have included a link to our guide here:

https://www.creditcards.com/credit-card-news/single-womans-guide-to-mortgage-ready-credit.php

Would you consider adding a link to our guide on your page above?

Gratefully,

Ryan Noonan
Communications Specialist
CreditCards.com
9600 N. Mopac, Stonebridge Plaza II, Suite 500
Austin, TX  78759




Don't want emails from us anymore? Reply to this email with the word "UNSUBSCRIBE" in the subject line.
CreditCards.com, 9430 Research Blvd Bldg 4, Austin Texas, 78759, United States

Embedded Internationalism: The Only Way to Fight the Global Oligarchy [feedly]

Embedded Internationalism: The Only Way to Fight the Global Oligarchy
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/04/embedded-internationalism-the-only-way-to-fight-the-global-oligarchy.html

A Very provocative essay on what constitutes internationalism. Also provocative, Dani Rodrik's Peaceful Coexistence 2.0

Embedded Internationalism: The Only Way to Fight the Global Oligarchy

Posted on April 18, 2019 by 

Yves here This post may seen a bit abstract, but it attempts to map out how to increase democratic accountability and counter the influence powerful private sector interests have over major international institutions. While another response has been to try to bolster national sovereignity, that can't go very far in a world where economies smaller than the US and China (or ones that are or have been forced to autarkies, like India, Russia, and Iran) operate through regional trade blocs.

The shortcoming of nationalism as a response to how the global wealthy have succeeded in using their ability to arbitrage markets to foment a race to the bottom in environmental, regulatory, and labor standards is that it often winds up being dominated by right wing interests that play upon xenophobia and by design don't address the problems of mobile capital and long supply chains. So "embedded internationalism" isn't quite a solution, it at least helps clarify the nature of the problem and where some approaches might lie.

By David Adler (@davidrkadler), a political researcher. Originally published at openDemocracy

Progressives must urgently develop a new vision for international institutions, or they will be reshaped in the image of our opponents.

This article is part of a series by openDemocracy and the Bretton Woods Project on the crisis of multilateralism. The views expressed are those of the author's only, and are not necessarily representative of either organisation.

A coup is underway at the World Bank, and no one is watching. On Friday, 5 April, the executive directors of the world's most powerful multilateral bank voted unanimously to appoint David Malpass — a staunch supporter of Donald Trump and fierce critic of "globalism" — as its new president.

The decision honoured the 'gentleman's agreement' that allows the US president to install an ally at the helm of the bank — despite a hard-fought campaign to allow for an open selection. The direction of the bank will now be set by a man who believes that multilateralism has "gone substantially too far" to obstruct the America First agenda.

But beyond the pages of the Financial Times, these proceedings have barely dented public discourse. Malpass will begin his five-year term without a single street protest or a single press statement by a major political party.

The silence is puzzling. The World Bank, like its partner the IMF, has huge costs. The United States alone contributes $155 billion of taxpayer money to the bank — more than double what it spends on food stamps each year. These institutions also have huge consequences. As the Bretton Woods Project has revealed, the World Bank and the IMF continue to demand austerity and drive privatization across the global south. The scale and scope of these institutions suggests that their management should invite serious public scrutiny.

But they do not — and this is not an accident. International institutions are intentionally insulated from democratic demands. A very generous reading would suggest that this is because international institutions must be protected from the vagaries of the electoral cycle. Their democratic deficit is, according to this view, a virtue. International institutions could never withstand grassroots intervention.

But this strategy has now — clearly and dramatically — backfired. By closing themselves off from public view, these institutions made themselves easy targets for political entrepreneurs seeking a scapegoat for their domestic crises. The European Union, the United Nations, NATO — international institutions have become the bogeymen of populist movements around the world. There are important reasons to revile these institutions, but they are rarely those cited by the blustering Brexiteers or MAGA chuds.

In other words, if democracy once appeared as the great danger to the integrity of international institutions, technocracy has revealed itself as their true existential threat.

It is time, then, to bring the politics back in — not only as a strategy for building a new internationalism, but also as a necessary defence against the alt-globalist agenda that is climbing its way to the very top of our international institutions, one quiet coup at a time.

II.

But what, exactly, does this mean? How should we make sense of the struggle to reclaim international institutions? And what are the strategies to get there?

To answer these questions, it is helpful to set out the terrain.

I map the political economy of this struggle across two axes. The first is embeddedness: the extent to which markets are anchored in society. At one end is laissez faire capitalism, a free market unconstrained by moral considerations and economic regulations. Everything here is a commodity, including human life and the earth itself. The axis therefore moves upward toward decommodification, enshrining protections that limit the exploitation of resources like labour and land.

The first axis could also be described by its more modern inverse, financialisation: the extent to which elements of society present themselves as opportunities for financial speculation. To disembed is to financialise. To re-embed is to definancialise.

The second axis is scale: the level at which political activity is organized, from the nationalto the global.

Figure 1: The Axes of Internationalism

The map tells the story of a century of political conflict.

In its first half, the primary conflict occurred along the axis of embeddedness at the national level. A Gilded Age of capitalism witnessed the emergence of a consolidated national bourgeoisie, which built new institutions — peak associations, political machines — to disembed the economy. New workers' movements then organized their own institutions at the national level — trade unions, political parties — in order to demand that governments combat inequality, provide decent jobs, and enshrine new rights to services like healthcare and goods like housing. Social democracy was born.

The latter half of the century activated the second axis. Having been tamed at the national level, capital went global, chasing opportunities in countries where the economy was far less constrained by embedding regulations. Of course, they did not encounter those countries in a natural state of disembeddedness. Rather, this process required the construction and mobilization of institutions that would clear the way for international investors.

The World Bank and the IMF, dangling the carrot of development resources, were refashioned to play this role. Promoting their 'Washington Consensus,' these institutions acted as vehicles for a global disembedding of the economy — both directly, in the cases of countries that agreed to the terms of structural adjustment; and indirectly, in the cases of countries who were forced to compete with them, applying pressure to undo the progress of the social democratic arrangement.

In other words, capital and labour have been caught in a game of cat and mouse across the quadrants of this map. Capital first scurried to enshrine its interests at the national level, then labour caught up and contested. Capital scurried to reconstruct the global economy in its image — but no social movement has emerged to contest it at that scale.

Indeed, in the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2008, new political movements tended to point toward more familiar quadrants of the map. Right-wing populists from Nigel Farage to Donald Trump heralded a new model of national neoliberalism: shifting back on the axis of scale while demanding a deeply disembedded economy — Singapore-on-Thames, or the Trump tax cuts. Their left-wing opponents similarly called to reassert the primacy of the nation, but with much stronger social protections. Globalization, both agreed, had gone too far.

But in calling to return to the nation, the new social democrats failed to learn the lessons of the past. Capital, now globalized, has the upper hand against individual nations that hope to contest it. It can slither between borders, and hide out in havens. The mouse is out of the bag — now we must train the cat to find it.

In other words, our task is to push into the missing quadrant — to re-embed the institutions that govern the global economy: an embedded internationalism.

Figure 2: Strategies for Embedded Internationalism

But how, exactly, do we get there?

The map provides some ideas. In particular, it suggests two lines of strategic attack that we must pursue simultaneously.

The first is contestation: igniting a transnational debate that links social movements around the world in a single conversation about our international institutions — scaling up along the x-axis. The last half-century of globalization has made our national debates increasingly alike in content, focused on transnational issues like trade and finance in a global economy. But they remain fragmented in form: few social movements or political parties coordinate their platforms across borders. Scaling up means integrating these national debates to match the scale of their issues.

In a word, we need to get international institutions back on the ballot, calling on progressive politicians to outline their own vision for institutions like the World Bank, IMF, ILO, and the UN.

The second is democratization: demanding reforms that shift power away from the technocrats and toward regular people — re-embedding along the y-axis. We might start by killing the 'gentleman's agreement' that allows the US and the EU to install their allies at the head of the World Bank and IMF, respectively. But we should also call to introduce democratic representation at the heart of these institutions, allowing countries to elect members of their governing council.

These may sound like pipedreams. But the perverse power structure of our international institutions means that a progressive president in the White House or prime minister at Number 10 could radically shift the momentum in favour of these proposals. After all, countries like the US and the UK hold key purse strings. If contestation can push their governments to table serious democratization reforms — to raise the voices of small countries around the world — these proposals will get a hearing.

Of course, not every institution can be salvaged in the process of re-embedding the global economy. Consider the International Finance Corporation (IFC), a wing of the World Bank Group that oversees private sector investment in developing countries. The IFC today acts as little more than an engine for financialisation, turning public wealth into financial products that can be traded across the financial sector. A bold agenda for global re-embedding would simply abolish the IFC full stop.

But new institutions can be proposed in its place. Progressives around the world are crying out to coordinate their demands and fight together to constrain the global oligarchy. All it takes is one progressive government with the courage — and the imagination — to propose new institutions to do so: worker ownership funds, green transition institutions, tax justice authorities. Even proposals that are introduced unilaterally will soon attract international participation. If the US builds it, in particular, they will certainly come.

Critics like Adam Tooze suggest that efforts to reclaim and transform the international institutional order are "quixotic," because the global economy is too fluid, too volatile to be ordered in this way.

But laissez faire was planned, and globalization was, too — and now David Malpass is preparing to remould them. Progressives should take a page from the playbook of their opponents and develop a plan to roll out new institutions for the re-embedding of the economy, rather than simply relying on ad-hoc interventions to roll back the mistakes of the past.

III.

On the eve of Trump's inauguration, the United States was poised to retreat from its role as the driver of global disembedding. The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) was dead. America First was alive. And virtually every international institution had earned the ire of the incoming president. "If the word 'isolationist' has any meaning, [Trump] qualifies as one," the FT reported.

But now we can see that the right-wing populist project is more dangerous than it first appeared. Far from rejecting international institutions — scaling back from the global level to the national one — Trump and his allies are mounting their take-over. The objection to the Washington Consensus, it turns out, was not that it did not serve their interests. It was that it did not serve them well enough. This is what David Malpass means when he says that multilateralism has gone "too far."

It is all too easy for progressives to dismiss international institutions as the machinery of global capital, and to focus where power appears closer at hand.

But we cannot afford to play peek-a-boo politics: just because we don't talk about the World Bank and the IMF doesn't mean that they are not still there. As the mess of Brexit has definitively demonstrated, power at the international level is a prerequisite for sovereignty much lower down, particularly in countries that lack the geopolitical weight to set the international agenda. We must therefore develop our own vision of international institutional change, or else they will be reshaped by our opponents.

The first steps of this strategy are now clear. We must contest globally, reminding people and parties around the world that international institutions are theirs for the taking. And we must demand democracy, reigniting our imagination about how to transform them.

But the prospects for such a transformation are far better than they may appear. The unanimous appointment of an anti-globalist like David Malpass at the helm of a hyper-globalizing institution like the World Bank should be an inspiration to all of us — that radical change may be around the corner.

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This entry was posted in Banana republicEconomic fundamentalsFree markets and their discontentsGlobalizationGuest PostIncome disparityPoliticsRegulations and regulatorsThe destruction of the middle class on April 18, 2019 by .

13 COMMENTS

  1. Sound of the SuburbsApril 18, 2019 at 4:07 am

    Let's work out what's wrong with their half-baked neoliberal ideology and its underlying economics, neoclassical economics.

    "Everything is getting better and better look at the stock market" the 1920's sucker that believed in free markets

    "Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau." Irving Fisher 1929.

    The 1920's neoclassical economist that believed in free markets knew this was a stable equilibrium.

    Better shelve this for a few decades until everyone has forgotten.

    Now everyone has forgotten we can use it for globalisation.

    I don't know who the architects of globalisation were, but I do know they weren't very bright.

    Just because people have forgotten what's wrong with neoclassical economics, it's still got all its old problems.

    Running an economy on neoclassical economics.

    The 1920s roared with debt based consumption and speculation until it all tipped over into the debt deflation of the Great Depression.

    No one realised the problems that were building up in the economy as they used an economics that doesn't look at private debt, neoclassical economics.

    What's the problem?
    1) The belief in the markets gets everyone thinking you are creating real wealth by inflating asset prices.
    2) Bank credit pours into inflating asset prices rather than creating real wealth (as measured by GDP) as no one is looking at the debt building up.

    Let's have another go.

    https://cdn.opendemocracy.net/neweconomics/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2017/04/Screen-Shot-2017-04-21-at-13.52.41.png

    Whoops!

    1929 and 2008 look so similar because they are; it's the same economics and thinking.

    The global economy never stood a chance.


 -- via my feedly newsfeed

DeLong: How Big a Problem Is the Malapportionment of the Senate? [feedly]

DeLong has not entirely defected from the "Clintonite/Rubinite" club, but he is seeing that the time of some new Utopianism {his term] of the Left may be arriving. The center, in his view, is not holding because there are no Republican partners anymore.

How Big a Problem Is the Malapportionment of the Senate?
https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/04/council-on-foreign-relations-_the-future-of-democracy-symposiumhttpswwwcfrorgeventfuture-democracy-symposium_.html

It's a big problem. But it could be turned into small problem, even an advantage, if we had normal politics. Here's what I said about it at the CFR Future of Democracy Symposium:


Council on Foreign RelationsThe Future of Democracy Symposium: Session Two: Economics, Identity, and the Democratic Recession: You might well sayz—take a look at the thirty-five states that will elect seventy senators and yet have a decreasing share of the population. These are overwhelming communities and states that are being left behind by the economic engine of American world-globalizing-value-chain-whatsit. That for a political logic to overrepresent those people to offset the fact that the economic logic is grossly underrepresenting them—that might be something that is not totally unfair. It could well not be a big problem. If we had normal politics—normal interest-group Theodore Lowi-polyarchy politics—it could be fine.

But this requires normal politics. This requires that the senator from Nebraska, say, actually be interested in policies that tend to bring money and wealth into the state of Nebraska rather than the senator from Nebraska cheering the nominations of Herman Caen and Steve Moore to the Federal Reserve Board on the grounds that it "owns the establishment". In our identity-politics world in which Ben Sasse wins reelection by "owning the establishment", then it will be a serious problem.


Let me expand on the current senators from Nebraska. Deb Fischer, calling for the "possible elimination" of the Environmental Protection Agency. There is Ben Sasse, who strongly supports the nomination of Republican political hack Stephen Moore to the Federal Reserve Board because https://www.wsj.com/articles/stephen-moore-says-feds-pivot-validates-criticism-of-interest-rate-increases-11553544172:

Steve's nomination has thrown the card-carrying members of the Beltway Establishment into a tizzy, and that says little about Steve and his belief in American ingenuity, but a lot about central planners' devotion to groupthink!...

The Establishment opponents of Moore's nomination—James Pethokoukis of AEI "disruptive—and not in a good way" https://theweek.com/articles/833016/dont-let-trump-blow-fed, Ross Douthat of the New York Times "consensus... that Moore is an enormous hack" https://twitter.com/DouthatNYT/status/1110546479343681537, and Greg Mankiw of Harvard "shockingly unsuitable... a propagandist... flimsy arguments" https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/11/business/mankiw-moore-cain-federal-reserve.html—are not groupthinking central planners, but rather people who (rightly) believes the Federal Reserve does an OK job at a necessary and impossibly difficult task and needs to be staffed by competent people. But, for Ben Sasse, their fear that Steve Moore on the Fed would harm America is the primary reason to nominate him.

One is tempted to quote Alfred from Batman: "some people just want to see the world burn".

Argument and education need to change the hearts and minds of the citizens of Nebraska so that they elect better senators, or at least so that the senators they have believe they have to show voters that they can enact policies that are good and so moderate their tongues and their votes.

That is one reason the baton needs to be passed for the next lap to those to the left of my Neoliberal Clintonite Rubinite faction. Let them run with the baton. They may not be able to change hearts and minds in Nebraska by highlighting their vision of utopia. But they may.

Certainly there is nothing we Neoliberal Clintonite Rubinites seeking common cause with nonexistent "moderate Republicans" could ever do to flip the vote of either of these senators from Nebraska.


 -- via my feedly newsfeed