Friday, January 25, 2019

Techies, trade, and skill-biased productivity | VOX, CEPR Policy Portal

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https://voxeu.org/article/techies-trade-and-skill-biased-productivity#.XEsjCnA29mY.gmail

Techies, trade, and skill-biased productivity

James Harrigan, Ariell Reshef, Farid Toubal 23 January 2019

Since 1980, three trends have characterised the global economy: rising wage inequality, globalisation, and the growth of information and communication technology (ICT). Economists have been studying the nexus between these trends for decades, with Helpman (2018) and Acemoglu and Autor (2011) offering insightful surveys of this research. Theory and anecdote suggest that some combination of technology and globalisation has raised the relative demand for more skilled and educated workers, thus leading to rising wage inequality, but quantifying the relative importance of these forces has proved challenging. There is a consensus among researchers that technological change is 'skill-biased', which is to say that it raises the relative demand for more skilled workers, but direct firm-level evidence on the drivers of skill-biased technological change is remarkably sparse. In a recent paper (Harrigan et al. 2018), we are the first to estimate the separate firm-level effects of research and development (R&D), ICT adoption, exporting and importing on productivity and its bias towards skilled workers. Using employer-employee matched data from France between 2009 and 2013, we find large effects of importing, ICT and R&D on the relative demand for skill through their effects on productivity.

Measurement of ICT and R&D at the firm level

In order to identify the effects of ICT and R&D on firm-level productivity we use data on workers in technology-related occupations. We call these workers 'techies'. We view techies – engineers and technicians with skills and experience in science, technology, engineering, and maths – as essential to productivity growth, by creating new products and processes as well as by mediating technology. For example, consider ICT managers and support staff in a firm. These techies are central in creating, planning, installing, and maintaining ICT, as well as in training and assisting other workers in the use of ICT. Techies (for example, engineers in manufacturing firms) are also involved in R&D. They design new products and lead R&D teams, and ensure the transfer of new knowledge to other workers in the firm. 

We measure techies by their share of hours worked. This measure of firm-level technological sophistication can be compared to R&D expenditures, a common metric for technology adoption in the literature. Firm-level R&D is a useful measure, but it excludes much of the ongoing expenditure and managerial attention that firms devote to technology adoption and ICT use. In fact, reported R&D is not even a necessary condition for technology adoption and innovation, and firms employ many scientists and engineers in non-R&D occupations. Conversely, R&D is likely to be impossible without the employment of techies, who are needed to install, maintain and manage the ICT used in R&D departments. Thus, the techie share is a more comprehensive measure of firm-level effort devoted to technology adoption than R&D expenditure. In our data, ICT and R&D techies together account for 3.6% of hours worked and 5.2% of the aggregate wage bill. About 44% of techies are in ICT-related occupations.

Causes of skill-biased technological change at the firm level

In our paper, we apply and extend new econometric techniques for the estimation of production functions and inferring productivity at the firm level. Our methodology allows us to separately identify two dimensions of productivity. The first dimension raises the productivity of all of a firm's inputs (capital, materials, and all types of labour) equally. In addition to this 'Hicks-neutral' measure of technology, we also identify an element of technological progress that directly raises the productivity of the firm's more skilled and educated workers. This 'skill augmenting' technology measure turns out to be central to our findings. In the final step of our methodology, we open up the black box of productivity and estimate the causal effects of firms' investment in ICT and R&D and of importing and exporting decisions on firm productivity. 

We find that compared to firms that don't employ techies, firms with a lot of techies (in the 75th percentile) have skill-augmenting productivity which is 60% higher. We do not find that techies have a statistically significant effect on Hicks-neutral productivity. Turning to the effects of trade, we find that firms that import have skill-augmenting productivity which is 120% higher, and Hicks-neutral productivity which is 50% higher, compared to firms that do not import. The effect of importing on skill-augmenting productivity is mainly due to imports of intermediate inputs, which is consistent with the view that offshoring raises the productivity of skilled workers. We find no effect of exporting on productivity (i.e. no 'learning by exporting' effect), which is not surprising in the French context.

Putting all the pieces together, we are able to quantify the impact of these factors on the demand for skilled and unskilled labour. Again, compared to firms that don't employ techies, firms with a lot of techies have employment of skilled labour that is 60% higher, employment of unskilled labour that is 15% higher, and skill intensity that is 40% higher. The effects of importing are even larger. Firms that import have employment of skilled labour that is 115% higher, employment of unskilled labour that is 25% higher, and skill intensity that is 70% higher, compared to firms that do not import. When we aggregate across firms, we find that estimates can account for much of the overall increase in skill intensity in our sample from 2009 to 2013.

These results on the employment effects of technological change (mediated by techies) and trade are crucial to public policy debates. They show that unskilled workers are right to be wary of technology and trade, which we find do indeed favour employment of skilled workers. But this is a relative effect –  because of the powerful productivity effects of technological change and trade, both skilled and unskilled workers see labour demand rise when the firms where they work hire techies and/or engage in offshoring. The reason is that both forces cause strong competitive effects that prompt firms engaging in these activities to expand. Another policy implication of our analysis is the importance of techies for productivity growth, both through R&D and ICT adoption.

Concluding remarks

All the results we find in our paper are within-firm effects of firm-level decisions. We do not consider why firms choose to employ techies or import, nor do we consider the effects of these firm-level decisions on industry- or economy-wide wages. These are limitations of the scope of our paper but do not impinge on the credibility of our research strategy. Furthermore, any credible analysis of the effects of technology adoption and globalisation on labour markets must be built on an understanding of what goes on within firms. This is where our contribution lies.

References

Acemoglu, D and D Autor (2011), "Skills, tasks and technologies: Implications for employment and earnings", in Ashenfelter, O and D Card (eds.), Handbook of Labour Economics, Volume 4b, Amsterdam: North Holland.

Harrigan, J, A Reshef and F Toubal (2018), "Techies, trade, and skill-biased productivity", NBER working paper 25295.

Helpman, E (2018), Globalization and inequality, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

The Fierce Urgency of Now [feedly]

The Fierce Urgency of Now
https://aflcio.org/2019/1/22/fierce-urgency-now

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Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Tax Hike Idea Is Not About Soaking the Rich


Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's Tax Hike Idea Is Not About Soaking the Rich

It's about curtailing inequality and saving democracy.

By Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman

Mr. Saez and Mr. Zucman are economics professors at the University of California, Berkeley,


Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has kick-started a much-needed debate about taxes. But the debate, so far, has been misplaced. It's obvious that the affluent — who've seen their earnings boom since 1980 while their taxes fell — can contribute more to the public coffers. And given the revenue needs of the country, it is necessary.

But that's not the fundamental reason higher top marginal income tax rates are desirable. Their root justification is not about collecting revenue. It is about regulating inequality and the market economy. It is also about safeguarding democracy against oligarchy.

It has always been about that. Look at the history of the United States. From 1930 to 1980, the top marginal income tax rate averaged 78 percent; it exceeded 90 percent from 1951 to 1963. What's important to realize is that these rates applied to extraordinarily high incomes only, the equivalent of more than several million dollars today. Only the ultrarich were subjected to them. In 1960, for example, the top marginal tax rate of 91 percentstarted biting above a threshold that was nearly 100 times the average national income per adult, the equivalent of $6.7 million in annual income today. The merely rich — the high-earning professionals, the medium-size company executives, people with incomes in the hundreds of thousands in today's dollars — were taxed at marginal rates in a range of 25 percent to 50 percent, in line with what's typical nowadays (for instance, in states like California and New York, including state income taxes).

That few people faced the 90 percent top tax rates was not a bug; it was the feature that caused sky-high incomes to largely disappear. The point of high top marginal income tax rates is to constrain the immoderate, and especially unmerited, accumulation of riches. From the 1930s to the 1980s, the United States came as close as any democratic country ever did to imposing a legal maximum income. The inequality of pretax income shrank dramatically.


The view that excessive income concentration corrodes the social contract has deep roots in America — a country founded, in part, in reaction against the highly unequal, aristocratic Europe of the 18th century. Sharply progressive taxation is an American invention: The United States was the first country in the world, in 1917 — four years after the creation of the income tax — to impose tax rates as high as 67 percent on the highest incomes. When Representative Ocasio-Cortez proposes a 70 percent rate for incomes above $10 million, she is reconnecting with this American tradition. She's reviving an ethos that Ronald Reagan successfully repressed, but that prevailed during most of the 20th century.

And she's doing so at a time when there is an emergency. For just as we have a climate crisis, we have an inequality crisis. Over more than a generation, the lower half of income distribution has been shut out from economic growth: Its income per adult was $16,000 in 1980 (adjusted for inflation), and it still is around $16,000 today. At the same time, the income of a tiny minority has skyrocketed. For the highest 0.1 percent of earners, incomes have grown more than 300 percent; for the top 0.01 percent, incomes have grown by as much as 450 percent. And for the tippy-top 0.001 percent — the 2,300 richest Americans — incomes have grown by more than 600 percent.

Just as the point of taxing carbon is not to raise revenue but to reduce carbon emissions, high tax rates for sky-high incomes do not aim at funding Medicare for All. They aim at preventing an oligarchic drift that, if left unaddressed, will continue undermining the social compact and risk killing democracy.

Of course, there are many policies — from the enforcement of antitrust laws to a broader access to education; from the regulation of intellectual property to better corporate governance — that can contribute to curbing inequality in the years to come. And government transfers, whether in the form of income support for families or public health insurance, have a critical role to play.


But redistribution alone will not be enough to address the inequality challenge of the 21st century. All societies that have successfully tamed inequality have done so mostly by curbing the concentration of pretax income — the inequality generated by the markets — for the simple reason that extreme market inequality undermines the very possibility of redistribution. Tolerating extreme inequality means accepting that it's not a gross policy failure, not a serious danger to our democratic and meritocratic ideals — but that it's fair and just and natural. It produces its own self-justifying ideology. It vindicates the "winners" of world markets. But vindicated winners, sure of their own legitimacy, seldom share much of their "just deserts" with the rest of society.

An extreme concentration of wealth means an extreme concentration of economic and political power. Although many policies can help address it, progressive income taxation is the fairest and most potent of them all, because it restrains all exorbitant incomes equally, whether they derive from exploiting monopoly power, new financial products, sheer luck or anything else.

A common objection to elevated top marginal income tax rates is that they hurt economic growth. But let's look at the empirical evidence. The United States grew more strongly — and much more equitably — from 1946 to 1980 than it has ever since. But maybe in those years the United States, as the hegemon of the post-World War II decades, could afford "bad" tax policy? Let's look then at Japan in 1945, a poor and war-devastated country. The United States, which occupied Japan after the war, imposed democracy and a top marginal tax rate of 85 percent on it (almost the same rate as at home — 86 percent in 1947). The goal was obviously not to generate much revenue. It was to prevent, from that tabula rasa, the formation of a new oligarchy. This policy was applied for decades: In 1982, the top rate was still 75 percent. Yet between 1950 and 1982, Japan grew at one of the fastest rates ever recorded (5.1 percent a year per adult on average), one of the most striking economic success stories of all time.

Contrast Japan in 1945 with Russia in 1991. When Communism fell, Russia was also a poor country, with income and life expectancy well below that of Western economies. In lieu of 85 percent top rates, however, Russians got fast privatization and a top tax rate of 30 percent — again modeled on what was prevailing in the United States at the time (31 percent in 1991). That rate was replaced in 2001 by an even lower flat rate of 13 percent. That shock therapy created a new oligarchy, led to negative income growth for the bottom half of the population, fostered a general discontent with democracy and produced a drift toward authoritarianism.

Progressive income taxation cannot solve all our injustices. But if history is any guide, it can help stir the country in the right direction, closer to Japan and farther from Putin's Russia. Democracy or plutocracy: That is, fundamentally, what top tax rates are about.

Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman are professors of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, and the authors of a forthcoming book about tax justice.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on FacebookTwitter (@NYTopinion)and Instagram.

--
John Case
Harpers Ferry, WV
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The Fierce Urgency of Now [feedly]

The Fierce Urgency of Now
https://aflcio.org/2019/1/22/fierce-urgency-now

AFL-CIO

Hundreds of labor and social justice activists descended on the nation's capital this weekend for the 2019 AFL‑CIO Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Civil and Human Rights Conference. AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka kicked off the gathering by tellingparticipants that this is our moment for action: "We're living in the fierce urgency of now. This is a time to take risks. This is a time to get uncomfortable. That's when real progress is made."

The MLK Conference also featured a number of panels on Friday evening, including a town hall conversation with Andrew Gillum, 2018 nominee for governor of Florida.

He told participants: "Nobody understands 'the fierce urgency of now' better than labor. Dr. King...was laboring to build a better environment. That if you do an honest day's work, you ought to be paid an honest day's wage.... You ought to have access to health care, a wage you can live on, and your race, your gender and whom you love should not dictate how you get treated at work."

You can watch his entire conversation with Melanie L. Campbell, president and CEO of the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation, here.

Hundreds of participants kicked off Saturday morning by rallying at the AFL-CIO headquarters in solidarity with the federal employees affected by the government shutdown. They then took to the streets to join with thousands more activists from across the country to march for workers' and women's rights.

Sunday's awards gala honored fighters like the late Augusta Thomas, national vice president for women and fair practices emeritus, AFGE. You can see a roundup of awardees here.

Monday was a day of community service throughout Washington, D.C. Activists visited patients in nursing homes, cleaned up and painted walls and murals at area schools.

Kenneth Quinnell Tue, 01/22/2019 - 13:34
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Our Increasingly Fascist Public Discourse [feedly]

Our Increasingly Fascist Public Discourse
https://www.project-syndicate.org/onpoint/our-increasingly-fascist-public-discourse-by-jason-stanley-2019-01

Jan 25, 2019 
Though "fascism" generally evokes images of jack-booted thugs and mass rallies, fascist movements first politicize language. And, judging by the arguments and vocabulary now regularly used by mainstream politicians and thinkers in the US and Europe, their strategy is bearing fruit.

NEW HAVEN – "Populism" is an innocuous-sounding description for the xenophobic nationalism that is now sweeping much of the world. But is there something even more sinister at work?

In The Language of the Third Reich, Victor Klemperer, a Jewish scholar who miraculously survived World War II in Germany, describes how Nazism "permeated the flesh and blood of the people through single words, idioms, and sentence structures which were imposed on them in a million repetitions and taken on board mechanically and unconsciously." As a result of this inculcation, Klemperer observed, "language does not simply write and think for me, it also increasingly dictates my feelings and governs my entire spiritual being the more unquestioningly and unconsciously I abandon myself to it."

A similar phenomenon exists today in countries where a far-right politics has achieved success, be it Britain in the age of Brexit, Poland under Jarosław Kaczyński, or the United States under President Donald Trump. In recent weeks, politicians with such ideologies in these countries have increasingly found themselves painted into a corner, and have resorted to ever more outlandish lies. While the Brexiteers remain insistent that crashing out of the European Union would not be devastating for the UK economy, Kaczyński has been busy trying to blame the murder of Gdańsk mayor Paweł Adamowicz on the opposition, instead of his own party's rhetoric. Trump, for his part, has continued to manufacture a crisis on the Mexican border to justify his demands for a wall.

Yet for all of the focus on these leaders' lies and violent rhetoric, not nearly enough attention has been devoted to the subtler applications of far-right rhetoric in recent years. History shows that illiberal movements can advance their agendas not just through elections, but also by infiltrating the common parlance of political debate. And as we'll see, the evidence today suggests that far-right "populists," authoritarians, and, indeed, fascists have been self-consciously waging a battle of words in order to win the war of ideas.

THE ART OF SEMANTIC WARFARE

How did Trump manage to wrest control of the Republican Party away from the conservative establishment in the US? Part of the story is his supposed "authenticity," which is really another way of referring to his rhetorical style and diction. In his tweets, White House pool sprays, and campaign-style rallies, Trump's use of language has proven effective for advancing his brand of us-versus-them politics, at least among a core base of ardent supporters.

Trump's rhetoric did not come out of nowhere. In 1990, Newt Gingrich, then a Republican member of the US House of Representatives from Georgia, wrote a memo for the party training organization GOPAC that bears directly on US politics today. In "Language: A Key Mechanism of Control," Gingrich compiled two lists, one of "Optimistic Positive Governing Words," the other of "Contrasting Words."

In the first list, Republicans are instructed to use the following terms to define their "vision of public service": "conflict," "courage," "debate," "listen," "mobilize," "pro-flag," "pro-children," "pro-environment," "pro-reform," "strength," "tough," "unique," and "we/us." And in the second list, they are given labels to apply to their opponents: "corrupt," "corruption," "decay," "destroy," "destructive," "greed," "hypocrisy," "ideological," "liberal," "lie," "permissive attitude," "sick," "threaten," "traitors," "unionized bureaucracy," "welfare," and "they/them."

Gingrich's memo is very similar to the "Metapolitical Dictionaries" used by the European far right. For example, in the French ethno-nationalist Guillaume Faye's 2001 book, Why We Fight: Manifesto of the European Resistance, and the Swedish fascist leader Daniel Friberg's 2015 manifesto, The Real Right Returns: A Handbook for the True Opposition, the reader is introduced to a compendium of specific terms that are meant to steer political debate. The lists include words such as "globalism," "populist," "alien," "cosmopolitanism," and "anti-racism," defined in ways that are now familiar from the political right.

Historically, fascist movements have characteristically been very highly attuned to the importance of semantic warfare and the ways in which speech practices shape and form habits of thought. Just as Hitler, in Mein Kampf,expressed grudging admiration of the Western Allies' World War I propaganda tactics, so should we recognize the sophistication of contemporary fascists' use of language. Only then can we push back against it.

FASCISM YOU CAN TAKE HOME TO YOUR MOTHER

Consider, first, the term "alt-right," the coinage of which is often attributed to the American white nationalist Richard Spencer, though an early appearance in print seems to have been in a December 2008 article by the historian Paul Gottfried. Spencer is proud of his coinage, and fiercely competitive with others – including Gottfried – who claim also to have contributed to the term's popularity.

"The beauty of the Alt Right brand," the white nationalist publisher Greg Johnson writes, "is that it signaled dissidence from the mainstream Right, without committing oneself to such stigmatized ideas as White Nationalism and National Socialism." This is not to say that Johnson himself is uncommitted to those "stigmatized ideas." As the author of the book The White Nationalist Manifesto, he openly acknowledges that the "alt-right" was originally "heavily influenced" by white nationalism, and eventually merged with it.


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Johnson applauds the introduction of the "alt-right" label, then, because it masks the movement's anti-democratic nature. For this reason alone, those who do not count themselves among the alt- right should not use the expression at all. There are already more accurate terms for the same ideology, namely "fascist," which captures the historical connotations that "alt- right" is intended to strip away.

The obscurantist application of "alt-right" is in keeping with one of the overarching goals of fascist movements: achieving respectability. As the son of the founder of Stormfront, a leading white-nationalist website, explains in a 2017 New York Timescommentary, "My dad often gave me the advice that white nationalists are not looking to recruit people on the fringes of American culture, but rather the people who start a sentence by saying, 'I'm not racist, but …'" Likewise, Johnson, in his inside history of the alt-right, notes that the movement's early exponents "cultivated an earnest tone of middle-class respectability, avoiding racial slurs and discussing race and the Jewish question in terms of biology and evolutionary psychology."

Meanwhile, contemporary European fascist movements have gone even further in articulating the goal of respectability. European far-right literature is replete with practical advice on how to make oneself look respectable by comparison to others. Friberg, for example, denounces "political violence" and "revolution" in no uncertain terms.

But this is a calculated ploy. In reality, there is a mutually reinforcing relationship between fascist street violence and fascist political movements, for the simple reason that fascist parties need violence in order to make themselves look peaceful. Without some fascists engaging in violence, fascist parties lack a foil with which to differentiate themselves as the lesser of extremes, or even to position themselves as guarantors of "order."

The quest for respectability is also at the heart of fascist metapolitical dictionaries, which offer language for making once-extreme ideas seem mainstream. In The Language of the Third Reich, Klemperer notes that, "Words can be like tiny doses of arsenic: they are swallowed unnoticed, appear to have no effect, and then after a little time the toxic reaction sets in after all." Fascist metapolitical dictionaries are best understood as vials of poison, to be administered slowly into the vocabulary of the body politic.

US OR THEM

Once fascists achieve a requisite level of respectability, fascism itself can start to plant roots. At its core, fascism is based on a particular understanding of social Darwinian struggle – hence the title of Hitler's autobiography, Mein Kampf (My Struggle). And social Darwinism, in turn, is the common bond linking neoliberalism (or economic libertarianism) and fascism. This is why it is no surprise to hear Trump talk constantly of "winning" in business, regularly signaling his disdain for "losers." Now that he is in the White House, this facile ideology is being translated into a project of national struggle against other countries.

A similar dynamic is also playing out in Europe. In Germany, many of the original members of the neo-fascist Alternative fĂ¼r Deutschland (AfD) previously belonged to the center-right Free Democratic Party. The FDP, more than any other German political party, champions a neoliberal governing ideology, and has presented itself as unabashedly "globalist," favoring lower taxes and more free trade. Understanding how fascism can emerge from economic libertarianism is essential for comprehending the danger Western democracies face today.

Economic libertarianism – which should not be conflated with democracy – is a philosophy in which individual struggle is valorized, and success is the determinant of individual worth. Fascism, by contrast, is based on groupworth as the product of group struggle. Fascism thus replaces individuals with groups as the subject and object of analysis. It is a clearly distinct position from libertarianism. But recent history shows there are problematic assumptions that allow one to slip from one view into the other, without noticing. For example, those who believe they belong to a group with superior work habits and a greater capacity for struggle can derive individual worth through mere membership in, and solidarity with, that group.

People who think in this way tend to regard the international market as a battlefield where individual "nations" are locked in combat; when they look beyond the nation, they see a "world of enemies." But for fascist politics to take root, it is sufficient merely to think that there is a battle between national groups within a country. Either way, the myth of in-group superiority is a valuable weapon. As Faye writes in Why We Fight (emphasis his):

"Whether it's 'objectively' true or false doesn't matter: ethnocentrism is the psychological condition necessary for a people's (or nation's) survival. History is not a field in which intellectually objective principles are worked out, but one conditioned by the will to power, competition, and selection. Scholastic disputes about a people's superiority or inferiority are beside the point. In the struggle for survival, the feeling of being superior and right is indispensable to acting and succeeding."

In urging the need for a myth of national superiority, it is characteristic of fascists to accentuate impending catastrophes, which will always be sufficiently extreme to require not just individual grit and remorselessness, but groups of individuals aligned as nations. The disasters of the future will wreak so much havoc and require so much competition for scarce resources that there will be no place whatsoever for compassion. Fascist ideology thus catastrophizes the future as a means of asserting its own necessity in the present.

ESCHATOLOGIES, REAL AND IMAGINED

It is nice to think that Western democracies are less vulnerable to the temptations of fascist thinking than they were in the past. And yet, unlike in the past, today's fascist movements are responding to eminently plausible catastrophic threats. That means there can be no room for complacency.

For Hitler, the motivating catastrophe was an impending global food shortage, which never did make much sense. But when Faye writes about a looming environmental catastrophe, it is not so easy to dismiss him out of hand. As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change made clear in a special reportthis past October, catastrophic global warming could well define humanity's future in the next few decades.

Moreover, as Black reminds us, the US has a long history of ethno-nationalist and fascist thinking. Benjamin Rush, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, believed that the struggle between nations made it necessary to instill in US citizens a myth of American nationhood. And, judging by a recent profile in The Atlantic, Gingrich today espouses an ideology that is more or less the same as that found in Faye's and Friberg's books.

Indeed, Gingrich is fixated on evolutionary biology, and seems to believe that humankind's evolutionary heritage is best represented by the brutality and ugliness of human politics. According to The Atlantic, he thinks we should "see the animal kingdom from which we evolved for what it really is: 'A very competitive, challenging world, at every level.'" In other words, what some might see as "viciousness," Gingrich sees as a "natural" life-or-death struggle.

LIBERTY, EQUALITY, FRATERNITY, SUPERIORITY

At the same time that fascist ideology propagates national superiority as a necessary myth, it also necessarily embodies that myth. Hence, in Mein Kampf, Hitler declares that

"… all that we admire on this earth – science, art, technical skill and invention – is the creative product of only a small number of nations … All this culture depends on them for its very existence … If we divide the human race into three categories – founders, maintainers, and destroyers of culture – the Aryan stock alone can be considered as representing the first category."

In a similar vein, Faye insists that, "The contribution European civilization (including its American prodigal) has made to the history of humanity surpasses, in every domain, that of every other people." Nowadays, one can find gentler versions of this idea being promoted by European far-right politicians who have long since gained respectability. Such is the nature of semantic warfare.

Consider the concept of "European Enlightenment," which has no singular philosophical meaning. As a taxonomical category, it could include philosophers as fundamentally opposed as Hume and Kant. Some of its figures, not least Kant, were the chief proponents of concepts that fascists roundly reject (namely, universal human dignity).

Nonetheless, European far-right politicians have subtly adopted talk of the Enlightenment as a way to smuggle in more bald-faced claims of European superiority. For example, Antwerp mayor Bart De Wever, an outspoken Flemish nationalist, recently started referring to the Enlightenment as "the software" of "the grand narrative of the European culture." Borrowing from British philosopher Roger Scruton, he argues that "the European Enlightenment" and nationalism are complementary, rather than opposed. In De Wever, one finds significant overlap with Faye. For example, both condemn liberalism and socialism as leading to "open borders," "safe spaces," "laws that protect feelings," and the dissolution of parental authority.

By contrast, consider the case of Steve King, a Republican member of the US House of Representatives from Iowa, who recently caused a controversy by asking how language like "white nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization" had "become offensive." King apparently did not get the memo about striving for respectability. But the rest of his party did. Following a public outcry, congressional Republicans stripped King of his positions on the House Judiciary and Agriculture Committees. Though he had made similarly offensive statements in the past, the Republican Party saw an opportunity to assert its relative respectability. And so, King was thrown to the wolves for expressing views that many of his fellow party Republicans – beginning with its 2016 presidential nominee – no doubt share.

LINGUISTIC LEGERDEMAIN

From an American perspective, European fascists like Faye and, to a lesser extent, Friberg might seem too exotic to pose any real danger. Their simultaneous invocation of the Enlightenment and renunciation of its ideals is a strategy that is foreign to America's own civic traditions, and their hysteria about race-mixing remains completely impermissible in the US (and, indeed, across much of Western Europe). One does not hear many American politicians – or even members of the so-called intellectual dark web – touting Nietzsche.

And yet, reading European fascists' metapolitical dictionaries is deeply disconcerting, because one finds that much of the language – and the concomitant ways ofthinking – has already achieved mainstream status.

Faye, for example, denounces anti-racism as a doctrine that "encourages discrimination in favor of aliens, the dissolution of European identity, the multiracialization of European society, and, at root, paradoxically, racism itself." When that was written in 2001, it seemed ridiculous. To say that anti-racism is racism is a classic fascist inversion of ideals (war is peace, corruption is anti-corruption, authority is freedom). But now consider what has happened in the intervening years. The concept of "reverse racism" has become mainstream.

When Faye asserts that anti-racism is the "[t]ouchstone of the self-righteous" and "the most advanced expression of postmodern totalitarian ideology," his diatribe becomes obviously unhinged. But aside from the level of hyperbole, is his argument really so different than the brilliant Columbia University linguist John McWhorter's description of "Antiracism" as "a new and increasingly dominant religion?"

Or, consider the issue of "political correctness," defined by Friberg as "a pejorative normally used for a set of values and opinions from which individuals are not allowed to deviate without falling victim to social and/or media sanctions." In the two excerpts below, both from Friberg's work, it is genuinely hard to tell whether the author is Friberg or one of any number of US-based "classical liberals" decrying the latest trends on college campuses:

"The latest innovation [of the far left] is the ridiculous pseudoscience of 'gender studies'…which, under the cover of 'justice' and 'equality' aims to create an atrophied human being … dependent upon … academics for his or her value system."

"Anti-racism supports ethnic self-assertion by minorities, as long as the minority in question is not European. This is justified by reference to largely imaginary, reified concepts such as 'White Privilege.'"

To take a final example, attacks against so-called cultural Marxism seem to have become mainstream within academia. But, as Yale University's Samuel Moyn recently pointed out, the term itself is a recycled anti-Semitic trope that has been bouncing around on fascist message boards for years.

In reading Faye and Friberg and seeing the many overlaps with contemporary political discourse, it is difficult to avoid the thought that the fascists are winning the semantic war. To be sure, many of the American and European liberals wringing their hands about the "far left" and gender studies would reject Nietzsche and be called, by the far right, "globalists." These are not fascists. And yet, we should not forget how easy it has been for some thinkers and politicians – Germany's FDP is our era's Exhibit A – to drift there from neoliberalism.

THE FASCIST SINGULARITY

Similar slippages can occur in other areas. For example, some anti-nationalist public intellectuals are increasingly pressing for a debate about IQ differences between racial groups, if only to signal their own commitment to the truth. And others are urging us to recognize the Enlightenment as the signal achievement of civilization, as if it was the Europeans who invented reason and bestowed it on the rest of humankind. As Gingrich understood when he included terms like "debate" and "listen" on the positive side of his ledger, appeals to reason can serve almost any end. Hence, Friberg assures us that reason is on the side of limited immigration.

Likewise, fascist ideologues constantly hold up and defend meritocracy as an ideal. But so, too, do all of the "globalists," as well as the libertarians in Silicon Valley. In the event of an environmental catastrophe, it is not difficult to imagine free marketeers opting for ultra-nationalism as the best survival strategy, or tech billionaires deciding that society should be run by the "winners" – that is, people like them.

In its original usage, the term "alt-right" encapsulated somewhat distinct anti-democratic ideologies, among them the philosopher Nick Land's "Dark Enlightenment." According to Land, democracy is inevitably corrupting, and democratic states thus should be replaced by "Gov-Corps" that are run as corporations and managed by a CEO. The guiding principle would be "No voice, free exit," meaning that citizens would have no say in policymaking, but could leave whenever they wanted (as if self-exile – one of the harshest punishments throughout antiquity – is cost-free). According to Quartz's Olivia Goldhill, the Dark Enlightenment has attracted a number of prominent supporters in Silicon Valley, including, apparently, the venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who has been channeling some of its tenets in his speeches.

Scholars who write about the Dark Enlightenment have employed the term "fascism" to describe it. The danger now is that distinct far-right anti-democratic movements, from European and American ethno-nationalism to techno-corporatist strains like the Dark Enlightenment, are converging, albeit with supporters who have been drawn in for different reasons.

IF IT TALKS LIKE A FASCIST…

As we have seen, the objective of fascist metapolitical dictionaries like those by Faye and Friberg is to insinuate innocent-sounding terms into public discourse in order to make once-unacceptable anti-democratic ideologies seem benign, thereby lessening public opposition to, if not licensing, anti-democratic action. When the fundamental democratic principle of equal respect is recast as "political correctness," it is no surprise that people would become more accepting of politicians calling entire immigrant groups "rapists" and "snakes." When politicians start calling immigrants and refugees "illegal aliens," it is no surprise that people become more accepting of treating them like they are less than human, snatching their children and consigning them to cages and squalid camps.

I am a philosopher of language and a linguist by training, as well as an epistemologist and a cognitive scientist. I know a lot about what is known about language and thought, and have a good sense of what remains unknown. As matters stand, we can see when certain ways of talking and thinking are gaining a wider purchase, but we have no obvious way of calculating the effects on individuals and society.

Moreover, we do not know if it is possible to adopt the language of hysteria about leftists, unions, Marxism, gender, and immigrants without also adopting other parts of the fascist package. We do not know if fascism is a holistic language game. Here, the best guides come from our own history. Intellectuals from Klemperer to James Baldwin have warned us about the costs of defeat in the semantic war, which we lose by adopting the vocabulary of our enemies.

I am deeply worried that our changing linguistic use is paving the road to anti-democratic outcomes, including modern-day versions of fascism, which will not mirror precisely the forms we have known in the past. Given this danger, it is vitally important not to shy away from labeling the danger for what it is.


JASON STANLEY

1 Commentary

Jason Stanley is Professor of Philosophy at Yale University and the author of How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them.

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Dani Rodrik: Trump’s Trade Game [feedly]

Trump's Trade Game
https://www.project-syndicate.org/onpoint/trump-s-trade-game-by-dani-rodrik-2019-01

Trump's Trade Game

Jan 16, 2019 

In 2018, US President Donald Trump finally followed through on his "America first" trade strategy. Yet it is already clear that his policies will have little impact on trade growth, and even less effect on China's behavior.

CAMBRIDGE – US President Donald Trump's "America first" trade policy came into full bloom in 2018, and it was an ugly sight to behold. In addition to tariffs on steel and aluminum from Europe and other countries, Trump imposed levies on $250 billion worth of imports from China. By the end of the year, he had raised tariffs on 12% of total US imports, causing trade partners to retaliate with levies on 8% of total US exports.


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Trump's trade-policy unilateralism is unprecedented in the post-war period, which is why it caught many by surprise. I, for one, did not expect Trump to act on most of his threats, given the influence that commercial and financial interests have over US trade policy. But when the target is China, the situation changes. The Trump administration's tough approach is supported by a broad coalition of US groups with distinct grievances. These include not just traditionally protectionist lobbies, but also large corporations that bemoan China's industrial policies and a national-security establishment that frets over China's growing geopolitical footprint.

Trump's stated objective is to pressure China to end "unfair" trade practices, such as its subsidies for new technologies and its requirement that foreign companies entering the domestic market transfer proprietary technology to Chinese firms. So far, he has had little success, and that isn't likely to change. Understandably, the Chinese government will not be deterred from pursuing its own objectives of industrial upgrading and technological development.

Still, Trump did clinch one superficial victory in 2018, by concluding the renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico. Trump has heralded the revised NAFTA – renamed the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) – as "historic," "the most advanced trade deal in the world," and "a new model for US trade relations." In reality, the changes to the deal are relatively minor, and amount to a mixed bag of pluses and minuses. Above all, they expose the fundamental incoherence of Trump's larger trade agenda.

On the positive side, the new agreement strengthens environmental and labor standards somewhat, and limits foreign investors' standing to sue host governments in international tribunals. But the impact of these revisions is unclear. For example, investors can still bring claims under the original NAFTA rules for up to three years after the USMCA has gone into force. As one pro-investor website puts it, "United States investors in Mexico and in Canada who have a potential claim should seriously consider availing themselves of NAFTA protections while they still can."

While Trump has nominally reduced protections for US corporations in one area, he has increased them in others. For starters, the new deal has much more restrictive rules of origin, meaning that a larger share of automotive inputs will have to be manufactured in North America to qualify for tariff exemptions. Also, a first-ever wage floor has been imposed: by 2023, 40-45% of car and truck components will have to be produced by workers earning at least $16 per hour. This provision effectively prices a large chunk of supply chains out of Mexico, where wages are a small fraction of the floor.


Less noticed are the novel protections that pharmaceutical and technology companies have received under the guise of modernizing the agreement. Under the USMCA, both Canada and Mexico will have to make patent terms – including data-protection terms in biologics – more restrictive in order to align with the US. And governments are barred from requiring digital firms to localize computing facilities, as well as from interfering in the cross-border transfer of data and personal information.

Though Trump's unilateralism and mercantilism are bad for the world economy, one should not exaggerate the adverse effects of his administration's approach. If other countries do not overreact – and, so far, they have not – the consequences for world trade will remain manageable. After all, the global trade slowdown predates Trump, and is rooted in ongoing structural and technological trends: the shift in global demand from goods to (less tradable) services; the increased skill-intensity of manufacturing, which weakens offshoring incentives; automation and the consequent reshoring of supply chains; and China's transition from export-led to domestic-demand-led growth. Collectively, these developments are likely to have a larger impact on trade than Trump's bluster ever could.

The deeper – and arguably bigger – cost of Trump's trade policies is that they will distract us from addressing real flaws in the global trade regime. As is always the case with Trump, the challenge is not to lose sight of the genuine grievances that he has tapped. The more outrageous Trump's actions, the greater the risk that mainstream policy elites will rally behind the flawed ancien rĂ©gime.

Recall that when Trump was elected in November 2016, trade technocrats and international bureaucrats responded by acknowledging that hyper-globalization had left many people behind. There was genuine soul-searching about the need for more robust compensatory mechanisms and other remedies. But such talk has since all but disappeared. These days, one hears all about the virtues of the liberal, multilateral trading system, and almost nothing about the severe imbalances it has created.

And yet we desperately need a new vision for world trade. Existing rules are not up to the challenge of accommodating countries like China, where economic practices are very different from those of the US or Europe. Moreover, the current system provides neither safeguards for maintaining high labor standards in advanced economies, nor adequate measures to prevent regulatory and tax arbitrage.

Trump's antics present us with a false choice between supporting his approach and defending the old rules. If we are genuinely committed to ensuring that globalization benefits all, we must not play his game.


Dani Rodrik is Professor of International Political Economy at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. He is the author of The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy, Economics Rules: The Rights and Wrongs of the Dismal Science, and, most recently, Straight Talk on Trade: Ideas for a

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