Simple government (17 Aug 2011)

Mike Konczal wrote a critique of Mitt Romney's plan to convert unemployment insurance into something that more closely resembles a 401(k) -- the idea being that everyone should have the "freedom" to manage their own unemployment insurance in accordance to how they assess their own personal risk. Of course, as Konczal notes, it would also help erode the idea that government exists in part to provide a general social safety net and aggregate social risk efficiently in order to defray it -- conservative thinking is that individuals should bear all of life's risks themselves. The private-account gambit is one of the quintessential neoliberal policy moves, ostensibly ending government "interference" in the labor market by making sure workers are as insecure as possible.

Conservatives favor these sort of arrangements, Konczal suggests, because "people will look at private savings accounts and think that the government isn’t doing anything." This furthers their arguments for dismantling the services government provides to all straightforwardly while protecting the "submerged" benefits that the rich, savvy, and well connected are better positioned to exploit through knowing how to take advantage of tax loopholes -- a phenomenon explored in this American Prospect essay by Suzanne Mettler and elaborated here by Henry Farrell. It reminds me also of arguments Dean Baker makes in The Conservative Nanny State (pdf) and Jamie Galbraith makes in The Predator State (excerpt here). They argue that the rich have figured out the government exists to be looted, and the key political question is how to perpetuate and mask that process at the same time. One good way of doing that is through expanding the "submerged state" and generating policies that confront people with decisions that they are not sophisticated enough to make on their own and make them into more vulnerable prey. Private retirement accounts, for example, are far more lootable by financial advisors, etc., than the guaranteed-benefit pensions they have supplanted. (In the mean time, conservatives have succeeded in convincing many of us that our Social Security benefits are insecure and that the U.S. government is perfectly capable of simply reneging on its debts.)

If neoliberal reform is intended to let markets govern more and more of our everyday lives, then it's not surprising that the tactics of exploitation rife in market exchange -- things akin to price discrimination and exploiting asymmetrical information and implementing hidden fees through confusing contracts -- will also come into play. Markets are often good at incentivizing complexity, which produces the ignorance they need as an alibi. Cell-phone service providers, mortgage originators, used-car salespeople, the travel industry (hotels, rental cars, airlines) are the classic exemplars of these tactics, but they are endemic in a consumer economy whose firms frequently depend on stratifying customers to maximize profits. But when applied to the distribution of tax obligations and government services, these tactics become the legitimized means for reproducing and expanding existing disparities between classes while making it seem as though that is the fault of the disadvantaged -- it's their fault for being ignorant, too "lazy" to master the tax code, or to drive hard bargains of their own.

In his response to Konzal's post, Corey Robin notes the needless complexity of the arrangement, "all the time and energy we as individuals now have to devote to doing the things that the state used to do for us" thanks to neoliberalism and privatization. Robin adds, "The right thinks of that as freedom—they hear the words 'state is doing for you' and they imagine patients etherized on a table—but I think of it as tyranny." Peter Frase concurs in this response, pointing out that "in a highly unequal society, greater complexity in the institutions of the state will generally favor the interests of the rich." He concludes that "the right has gotten a lot of mileage of out of the demand for small government. Maybe it’s time for the left to make a bigger deal out of simple government." That seems like a pretty good idea to me, though the logic may lead to supporting policies like the flat tax. Also, our tendency to overrate our pleasure in making decisions for ourselves (and underestimate the problem of ego depletion) makes us vulnerable to believing that it is generally simpler for us to do things ourselves and assume total responsibility for them. The celebration of individualism in American society is such that there is already ideological momentum behind the idea that self-managing everything is somehow always convenient, even in the face of frustrating experiences to the contrary, which are seen as isolated exceptions.

Defining Neoliberalism (24 June 2011)

Forgive me if this post becomes excessively pedantic (a warning I should probably affix to all of them), but I mainly want to try to clarify some stuff for myself here. I tend to use a mishmash of terms -- neoliberalism, post-Fordism, affective labor, immaterial labor, general intellect, etc. -- without as much consistency as I'd like, and I want to do better. (Or perhaps I am trying to bore whatever readership I have into nonexistence, if that hasn't already happened.)

Neoliberalism is a term I didn't know in the 1990s, when I first started reading leftist political theory -- instead the totalizing terms in vogue as far as I could tell were late capitalism, or globalization, or the New Economy, or consumer society. In the past decade, though, neoliberalism has emerged as the go-to term on the left to describe the way capitalism (particularly "post-Fordist" capitalism; that is, "postindustrial" relations of production that are dominated not by factory-organized manufacturing but by services, brands, etc.) has been administered politically more or less since the 1970s. It's potentially confusing to those used to associating anything with the word liberal in it with the left, as neoliberalism is "liberal" in the sense of protecting the "free" functioning of markets, not necessarily extending the liberty of people or guaranteeing them equal opportunities.

It seems that "neoliberalism" gains it currency from Foucault's use of it in a series of lectures for courses he gave in the late 1970s, which only recently have been translated into English and published. That seems as good a place as any to get the bottom of it. In his February 14, 1979, lecture (collected in The Birth of Biopolitics -- not a helpful title, as it dumps another confusing term into the mix), Foucault develops the point that neoliberalism is not a matter of limiting government intervention in society; it is a matter of intervening heavily to protect a particular vision of how markets should work in order to be "fair." Foucault sums up this position this way: "One must govern for the market, rather than because of the market."

The market as we know it is not some natural phenomenon; it is produced through the state's approach to governing. Neoliberal governance regulates markets to make competitiveness their essential feature.

Neoliberal governmental intervention is no less dense, frequent, active, and continuous than in any other system. But what is important is to see what the point of application of these governmental interventions is now. Since this is a liberal regime, it is understood that government must not intervene on effects of the market. Nor must neoliberalism, or neoliberal government, correct the destructive effects of the market on society, and it is this that differentiates it from, let's say, welfare or suchlike policies that we have seen [from the twenties to the sixties]. Government must not form a counterpoint or a screen, as it were, between society and economic processes. It has to intervene on society as such, in its fabric and depth. Basically, it has to intervene on society so that competitive mechanisms can play a regulatory role at every moment and every point in society and by intervening in this way its objective will become possible, that is to say, a general regulation of society by the market.

This seems important to the question of why politicians don't care about achieving full employment. So-called welfare policies impede the ideological imperative of letting (constructed) markets legislate everything -- of legitimizing markets so conceived. This in turn legitimates the state. (Jodi Dean highlights this thesis in her summary of these lectures: "The economy produces legitimacy for the state that is its guarantor.")

When neoliberal politicians make demagogic claims about getting government out of people's lives, what they really mean is that they want to implement a social policy of saddling the individual with bearing as much risk as possible so that markets can have pristine price signals. "To the same extent that governmental intervention must be light at the level of economic processes themselves, so must it be heavy when it is a matter of this set of technical, scientific, legal, geographic, let's say, broadly, social factors which now increasingly become the object of governmental intervention," Foucault explains. Controlling social factors "involves an individualization of social policy and individualization through social policy, instead of collectivization and socialization by and in social policy. In short, it does not involve providing individuals with a social cover for risks, but according everyone a sort of economic space within which they can take on and confront risks." Government actively shapes society to posit individualism through the risks we all personally must bear: we know ourselves as discrete individuals because we intimately know how vulnerable we are; then it becomes incumbent upon us to make the best of it, take an entrepreneurial attitude toward that risk in the ostensibly level economic playing field. Another way of putting that: government attempts to craft the subjectivity of its subjects along entrepreneurial lines through various institutional interventions. The way the state wants markets to function, Foucault suggests, determines how we function -- how we are able to conceive of ourselves, our problems and how they can be solved. I don't know, maybe that is sort of self-evident.

Moreover, inequality is not an accident of this system but its deliberate creation. In the following passage (which gives a good flavor of the cumbersomeness of these lectures), Foucault summarizes the logic of the "ordoliberals" -- German neoliberals of the 1930s who Foucault represents as sort of the anti-Frankfurt school -- in rejecting social-democratic principles or even socialized consumption.

In particular, relative equalization, the evening out of access to consumer goods cannot in any case be an objective. It cannot be an objective in a system where economic regulation, that is to say, the price mechanism, is not obtained through phenomena of equalization but through a game of differentiations which is characteristic of every mechanism of competition and which is established through fluctuations that only perform their function and only produce their regulatory effects On condition that they are left to work, and left to work through differences. In broad terms, for regulations to take effect there must be those who work and those who don't, there must be big salaries and small salaries and also prices must rise and fall. Consequently, a social policy with the objective of even a relative equalization, even a relative evening out, can only be anti-economic. Social policy cannot have equality as its objective. On the contrary, it must let inequality function and, I no longer recall who it was, I think it was Röpke, who said that people complain of inequality, but what does it mean? "Inequality," he said, "is the same for all." This formula may seem enigmatic, but it can be understood when we consider that for the ordoliberals the economic game, along with the unequal effects it entails, is a kind of general regulator of society that nearly everyone has to accept and abide by.

That pretty much sums up the neoliberal attitude: Inequality is the same for all, since the market doesn't discriminate -- it produces its inequalities with the same logic that applies to all the players. All the players, in turn, must adopt "neoliberal subjectivity" -- a kind of entrepreneurial desperation that looks for any possible way to mitigate personal risk and gain an individual economic edge that may be necessary for survival.

The main thing for me is this: Neoliberal society is not consumer society. Neoliberalism doesn't posit us all as passive, conformist consumers in thrall to mass culture and doomed to consume the surplus of mass-produced junk. Instead, as Foucault puts it,

The society regulated by reference to the market that the neo-liberals are thinking about is a society in which the regulatory principle should not be so much the exchange of commodities as the mechanisms of competition.... This means that what is sought is not a society subject to the commodity effect, but a society subject to the dynamic of competition. Not a supermarket society, but an enterprise society. The homo economicus sought after is not the man of exchange or man the consumer; he is the man of enterprise and production.

Neoliberalism makes consuming into an personal, private enterprise. We are obliged to view it as everybody's business, because it is essentially our own.

Anyway I'm reading an essay (pdf) by Thomas Lemke on these lectures now; may have more to add later.

UPDATE: This passage from Lemke's essay restates what I see as the crucial point of Foucault's analysis, that homo economicus -- the human governed entirely by incentives, human nature as posited by Freakonomics -- is fostered by state power. "neoliberalism admittedly ties the rationality of the government to the rational action of individuals; however, its point of reference is no longer some pre-given human nature, but an artificially created form of behavior. Neo-liberalism no longer locates the rational principle for regulating and limiting the action of government in a natural freedom that we should all
respect, but instead it posits an artificially arranged liberty: in the entrepreneurial and competitive behavior of economic-rational individuals." Neoliberalism creates its own notion of freedom -- freedom of competition -- and disseminates it; subjects internalize it and regulate themselves in accordance with it. It is a state-sanctioned principle around which one can form an identity seemingly in accordance with the society one must live in. Transforming oneself into a personal brand can then appear to be an autonomous rational choice of the individual given the "reality" of the world.

Non-Time and Hauntology (5 May 2011)

I went to a talk last night at NYU by Mark Fisher about "hauntology," which refers to a kind of intermediate space-time between places palpably shaped by organic time and nonplaces (shopping malls, etc. -- see Marc Augé), which are wrenched out of time and posit an unending nontime, the end of history, an undisruptable retailing present that perpetually recurs. I didn't really get what hauntology was all about: it seemed to have to do with cultural productions that are aware of the nonplace/nontime crisis -- the way neoliberalism has foisted non-space/time on us, along with a subjectivity without depth that must flaunt its requisite flexibility by shuffling the deck of floating signifiers -- and are "reflexive" and "critical" and "negative" about this condition. Fisher made this point with music: British pop music now is blithely appropriational of the past without foregrounding that in any particular way; retro has ceased to be a meaningful descriptor. So music made now would not be at all disruptive, he argues, if someone living in 1979 heard it. There would be no retroactive future shock. It doesn't sound like the future; the future that should be occurring now has been thwarted, lost, effaced. The sense of cultural teleology is gone, vanished, perhaps, in the now pervasive relativism that regards all culture product as potentially valuable.

There are lots of plausible and interrelated explanations for why the pop-culture future can no longer occur, including:

(1) The demise of a hegemonic culture industry (and the rise of digitization and peer-to-peer distribution) brought the end of a shared sense of the cultural moment. We're not all watching the same TV show at the same time and hearing the same records on the radio. Instead we have access to all culture all at once, on demand -- whether it's, say, Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, the complete works of Margaret Cavendish, yesterday's episode of Survivor, or all of them at once. This AV Club article by Steven Hyden about Def Leppard's Hysteria gets at the idea:

As everything changes rapidly around us, we as music fans in many ways still think we’re living in a Def Leppard world, where winning a Grammy means you’ve arrived, and going to No. 1 on the charts makes you a pop star. In reality, we live in a culture where the terms “mainstream” and “underground” have become virtually meaningless, as practically every song by every band ever is equally accessible, frequently at no cost, to anyone with an Internet connection and the interest to seek it out ... It’s clear that music rarely unites us under the banner of mass-accepted artists anymore; even in a concert audience, we’re all just a bunch of individuals, with little connecting us to one another beyond a shared interest in the artist onstage—one artist among hundreds on our abundantly stocked iPods. Sounds lonely, doesn’t it? Sometimes I yearn for the old world, the one I grew up in, a place where dinosaurs like Hysteria stomped around pop culture for months, if not years, leaving sizable impressions in the hearts of a generation, whether they liked it or not.

The availability of everything means that particular works of pop music lose "symbolic efficiency" to use (and possibly misuse) a term from Žižek. Nothing successfully connotes the zeitgeist; everything invokes a desire to one-up with a better reference or a new meme or detournement of the contemporary. We are too knowing and skeptical to accept anything as unproblematically representative of the now.

(2) Neoliberalism/post-fordism/late capitalism has projected itself as the end of history, normalized nontime, and generalized the reception of conditions of ontological insecurity as freedom. We lack a subjectivity that can experience or recognize historicity.

Fisher links the idea of a "missing future" with the disappearance of negativity and criticality in contemporary pop culture, which (as I interpret it) has no space for anything oppositional or which transforms oppositional gestures into postures that circulate only as signifiers of personal identity. It reminds me of Douglas Haddow's "Hipsters are the dead-end of Western culture" argument:

An artificial appropriation of different styles from different eras, the hipster represents the end of Western civilization – a culture lost in the superficiality of its past and unable to create any new meaning. Not only is it unsustainable, it is suicidal. While previous youth movements have challenged the dysfunction and decadence of their elders, today we have the "hipster" – a youth subculture that mirrors the doomed shallowness of mainstream society.

Hipsters don't experience non-time negatively, as a loss, as melancholic, as indicative of deep alienation. Instead they seem to be thoroughly subjectivized by neoliberalism to the extent that they regard it as opportunity to show off how creative they can be in their cycle of appropriations. That last thing they want is to be reminded of how their personality is conditioned by the times they live in; in nontime, one can feel transcendent and immortal, one can permanently defer adulthood.

Hauntological music (like Burial) tries to at least evoke the feeling of loss, tries to register the missing future as a kind of catastrophe, Fisher argues, though it can't actually instantiate this missing future. It tries to at least restore meaning to the concept of retro, foregrounding the appropriations of the past by sounding like a scratchy record, and so on. (I don't know; all electronic music literally sounds the same to me.) I wasn't persuaded that a work's reflexivity about how symptomatic it is itself of the impossibility of escaping non-time made it viable as a mode of resistance. I'm probably too skeptical of reflexivity to ever regard it as resistance; I see reflexivity as the quintessential mode of neoliberalist subjectivity -- a calculating self-consciousness that can't be escaped, that forces us to be considering our identity as an alienated thing to be developed and invested entrepreneurially. (The following is highly provisional and may ultimately prove embarrassing): Whatever is reflexive needs to become collective. The problem of non-spacetime is that of an isolated individual subject who admits of no possibility for intersubjectivity, which is perhaps the primary way we experience history, through how our relations with others subjectivize us in particular, contingent ways. Reflexivity about our loss of that intersubjectivity seems to still cling to the individuation, to see and secretly cherish one's isolated uniqueness and incontingency in the recognition of it as a loss.

In my view, social media have become the extension of non-spacetime, where nothing, no identity or incident, is necessarily contingent or organic, and one is doomed to the "freedom" of endless ontological insecurity, the forever search for a grounding authenticity that can only generate more memes. Social media are where we go to protect our experience of nontime, which is threatened by the Real, by historicity, by death. Facebook is the ultimate nonplace. Being on it is to enter non-time, to maintain a continual pseudo-presence.

The non-spacetime crisis, I think, is a crisis of presence. When we exist in non-spacetime, presence becomes impossible -- or it is known by its absence, in a kind of negative theology. To put that less cryptically (or maybe not): technology has basically dissolved the unity of the subject in a particular place in time. Smart phones, etc., let us be in many places at once, conducting any number of conversations and self-presentations asynchronously. This casts an air of provisionality over everything we do; our lack of total commitment to a that place at that moment is always implied, always understood. No one is even bothered anymore when someone they are talking to looks at their phone. There is no ethical requirement to be fully present, and without that, there is no genuine (I know, how can you even ever define "genuine") intersubjectivity. The refusal to be fully present is a restatement of the refusal to permit our identity to be socially contingent or to be palpably collective. The smart phone reserves our right to check out of any collective identity formation at any time. This is the essence of contemporary "convenience," which I have long interpreted as being able to avoid interaction with other humans and being forced to empathize with them and recognize their existence as other. (We can only tolerate other people when we regard them as extra in our movie.)

Fisher referred to Jameson's distinction between psychological nostalgia and formal nostalgia, between the ability to evoke a real lost past and being trapped in pastiche. What I took from this is that the postmodern/neoliberal subject cannot access psychological nostalgia, but can only simulate it through pastiche, as this sort of subject has only existed in nontime as opposed to historical time. My sense is that this subject doesn't yearn for historical time at all but worries about historical time erupting into nontime via some sort of terrible Event. When something that threatens to be an Event happens, subjects rush to assimilate it to nontime by mediatizing it, "sharing" it in social media, or meme-ifying it. I'm not sure if this holds, but it may be possible to interpret the ad hoc celebrations of Osama bin Laden's execution this way -- an effort to experience a historical moment in a way that dehistoricizes it -- puts the partyers back at the center of their personal hermetic history, claims the Event as just an event in their individual story.

Because we have no access anymore to psychological nosalgia, we end up nostalgic for the capability for nostalgia, we feel homesickness for a home we never had. These leads to a compensatory attraction to childhood kitsch, to moribund objects (joining a typewriter club is an extreme manifestation of this), to anachronism, atavism, whatever seems genuinely and indelibly marked by a past. This perpetuates the cycle that denies the creation of a distinctive future, guarantees that the future is a more attenuated and annotated reconfiguration of detritus from the past.

(Malcolm Harris has more thoughts inspired by the talk here.)

Middle class stagnation (20 April 2011)

Chrystia Freeland (who wrote the Atlantic story about the "new global elite" a few months ago) wrote about a recent paper (pdf) from the Council on Foreign Relations by economist Michael Spence and researcher Sandile Hlatshwayo. Her takeaway is that "Global capitalism isn’t working for the American middle class" and that this isn't the consequence of any market anomaly but of globalized markets working precisely as expected.

Spence says that as he was doing his research, he was often asked what “market failure” was responsible for these outcomes: Where were the skewed incentives, flawed regulations or missing information that led to this poor result? That question, Spence says, misses the point. “Multinational companies,” he said, “are doing exactly what one would expect them to do. The resulting efficiency of the global system is high and rising. So there is no market failure.”

If that's so, that means the justificatory economic arguments for pro-globalization policy must be pitched at hiding the consequences of who benefits and who doesn't. Globalization has helped capital and impoverished workers in developing economies, but has hurt every one else in the U.S. Maybe U.S. voters are egalitarian and internationalist in their outlook and would happily stagnate so that China could build a middle class of its own. But it may be that if voters knew that, as Spence puts it (and these quotes come from Freeland's article), "many of the middle-income group ... are seeing employment options narrow and incomes stagnate" thanks to neoliberalism, perhaps they would demand a different sort of policy. Spence writes, "One possible response to these trends would be to assert that market outcomes, especially efficient ones, always make everyone better off in the long run. That seems clearly incorrect and is supported by neither theory nor experience.” In other words, there are winners and losers, and one doesn't need to spend too much time studying the income distribution in the U.S. to figure out who is winning here.

Steven Pearlstein, in a Washington Post piece about the same paper, regards it as a prescription for the return of industrial policy. But I was intrigued by the implications of something Freeland mentioned. She paraphrases something AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson said at a CFR talk: "Stephenson enthused that the technology revolution was the most transformative shift in the world economy since the invention of the combustion engine and electrification, leading to a huge increase in 'the velocity of commerce' and therefore in productivity." I would need to have someone explain to me why productivity is linked to the "velocity of commerce" -- I see why faster commerce would lead to more things being exchanged, but not how it would lead to more being made with less. What Stephenson is saying implies that mere circulation of goods leads to their "valorization" -- leads value to be created -- or in other words, exchange itself is a form of production.

It makes sense that a communications company CEO would suggest that is true. Their consumers make the end product by exchanging language among themselves, and of course the more people talk, the more they need to say to clarify what they actually mean, and so on to infinity. (See, Derrida has important economic implications!) Will Davies has several good essays that get at the way telecoms try to prompt us to increase the amount of communication we engage in. "As the scarcity of Everything gradually wanes, the companies are becoming bolder in their branding of the infinite... Infinite opportunity to say, share, broadcast everything all the time anywhere has to be sold as a positive achievement, with a tangible result" -- though he argues it only leads mainly to restless anxiety, a twitchy subjectivity. (I also like how he updates Žižek's definition of neoliberalism -- "'you can do whatever you like, as long as it involves shopping" to "you can do whatever you like, as long as it involves an iPhone." Is it our destiny to turn shopping and self-fashioning and communicating about it constantly into the fulfillment of our species being?)

Anyway, Davies writes about the importance of an "ethic of inconvenience": slowing down the pace of commerce that is facilitated by communications technology, since this acceleration tends to push people toward a kind of one-dimensionality -- fixated on quantity and not quality, etc. This becomes a potentially more compelling idea in the macro context provided by the Spence paper, which suggests that increasing the "velocity of commerce" initiates a chain of consequences that ends with middle-class stagnation.

Deeper Into Commodification (29 March 2011)

Reihan Salam has some criticism of the ideas in a few of my recent posts here, in which he points out that as insecure and isolating conditions may be under new capitalism, they were worse before, in the Fordist era. He highlights particularly the "dramatic advances made by women in educational attainment and market production" under the neoliberal order. He suspects that I might be nostalgic for the old order of things (odd that a post at the National Review would seem to imply that I am too conservative!) and argues that Fordist conditions were a historical anomaly rather than a useful point of comparison.

I think I definitely mislaid my emphasis if I come across as though I am advocating a return to 1950s social conditions. Obviously I have reservations about how social relations are being shaped by conditions today, but I don't think we can or should try to turn back the clock. I think Salam is right that in many ways what is happening with the "proliferation of small-units, e.g., small firms and cultural niches" is a re-emergence of some of capitalism's early dynamism, providing opportunities that many experience as wholly beneficial. But whereas Salam writes that he would argue "that the collectivity and security we’ve lost is being replaced by new forms of collectivity and security that are preferable in many important respects," I think those new forms are destabilizing and subtly coercive. I don't think the old forms are preferable; I guess I keep writing about these ideas because I believe that there are new forms that aren't being realized, that may be interdicted by the necessities of a capitalist organization of the economy. That is, the new forms of social relations offer certain freedoms at the cost of having to commodify oneself at a deeper level than wage slavery required, with more of everyday life subsumed into capitalism, made business like, subject to its procedures of rational calculation. Some of what stems from that is good: At times work is more harmonious with one's overall life, at times it feels good to have the market assess the quality and extent of one's sociality, at times the flexibility increasingly expected of us prompts us to be and feel more creative, at times our self-consciousness leads to a rewarding consideration of what other people are thinking, and not just what they are thinking of us.

But the negative aspects are inseparable from those positive aspects. Richard Sennett outlines some of those negative aspects in The Culture of New Capitalism, which I wrote about here. I think social media exacerbates both the positive and negative aspects, which is a pretty nebulous position, I know, but I try to disguise it by writing mainly about the negative things. I think that social media seems to promise to be a respite from the pressures of life under neoliberalism, but it ends up serving mainly as a vector for those same pressures. That suggests a missed opportunity to have structured an emerging phenomenon differently.

Salam suggests that I am someone whom he "disagree[s] with as completely and comprehensively as one can disagree with another human," but it seems we probably agree that economist Albert Hirschman is very much worth reading. Salam links to his paper "Rival Interpretations of Market Society: Civilizing, Destructive, or Feeble?" (sadly a gated link) which I also highly recommend and which amply illustrates that there's nothing new in disagreeing about the predominant social and psychological effects of markets, whether they are civilizing, integrative, alienating, etc. Hirschman writes,

For capitalism to be both self-reinforcing and self-undermining is not any more "contradictory" than for a business firm to have income and outgo at the same time! Insofar as social cohesion is concerned, for example, the constant practice of commercial transactions generates feelings of trust, empathy for others, and similar doux feelings; but on the other hand, as Montesquieu already knew, such practice permeates all spheres of life with the element of calculation and of instrumental reason. Once this view is adopted, the moral basis of capitalist society will be seen as being constantly depleted and replenished at the same time.

That seems right to me. Social media represents new threats to and possibilities for the perceived moral basis of capitalism. I emphasize the threats because I tend to think that undermining the moral basis for capitalism might lead to a better economic system (as I think the downside of omnipresent instrumental reason outweighs the gains from doux commerce), though I am wary too about lapsing into a sort of "heighten the contradictions" approach. I think social media and personal branding and so on reveal what has been true of capitalism all along but in muted, and possibly more tolerable forms. If capitalist ideology assimilates social media, another opportunity for fundamental change will be lost and capitalistic subjectivity will have been retrenched at an even more intimate level and with our social lives more thoroughly organized along capitalistic lines, there will be fewer places from within everyday life where it is possible to imagine an alternative.

Self-Service and Self-Serving (24 March 2011)

Tyler Cowen linked to this paper (pdf) from the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation about the many blessings it claims that information technology bestows -- enhancing productivity, tempering the business cycle, making markets more efficient, improving the quality of goods, allowing us to defeat time and space and live forever, and so on. IT, it seems, enables employers to get more productive work per employee by eliminating the jobs of those whose work has been automated out of existence and by "letting" those who remain "do more things at the same time" -- that is, blurring the boundaries between work and nonwork, surreptitiously expanding the working day, and accelerating work processes through multitasking with little regard for the increased stress and irritability this imposes on workers.

What bothered me most is the paper's paean to technology-enabled self-service. Yes, I know, everyone loves checking themselves out at the grocery store and talking to robots on the phone instead of human customer service agents. We all recognize how companies have our best interests in mind when they get us consumers to do things they once had to pay an employee to do. Aware that some of us remain reluctant to rhapsodize over self-service, the paper explores the issue in a dedicated sidebar, which includes this tendentious passage:

Unfortunately, self-service sometimes gets a bad rap. The media routinely portrays the efforts of companies to implement self-service options as creating work for the consumer solely for the benefit of the company. In reality, most self-serve applications don’t cost the consumer more time, they just involve one person (the consumer) doing the work, not two (the consumer and the employee). Granted while some self-service applications (e.g., “press 2 if you are interested in opening an account”) can be maddening and cost consumers more time, overall self-service technologies usually cut overall labor time (for both the worker and consumer). And in some cases, they can save consumers time and add convenience. Even where personal service provides consumers with more value (a chauffeur-driven car is seen as a luxury), it usually costs more (which is why usually why only wealthy people have chauffeurs). Other kinds of personal service are the same. They cost more money to provide than does self-service. However, in the type of competitive markets more companies are facing, savings from self-service are passed back to consumers through lower prices, at least over the moderate to long term. As a result, standards of living go up.

Yes, while quality of living goes down. Notice how the concept of "prosumerism" -- where consumers get to be productive "co-creators" or "innovators" alongside their favorite brand buddies -- is here revealed in its true guise. The company just presumes that the consumer is already an employee, no different from the cashier or stocker. Post-Fordist, immaterial labor and consumption as production is not necessarily about getting to join in with creative-class while they shape social meanings and recast our shared material culture; it's about getting consumers to forgo some of the services they were once accustomed to assume are included and do those things themselves, which add value to the enterprise. When shopping becomes "productive," that means it has become a job you do for them, not yourself. Self-service means "serve the company."

To wash this down, consumers are sold on "convenience" or the ability to skirt human contact that might disrupt their solipsism -- indeed, the paper suggests the idea of personal service is a decadent luxury, not something the firm has implicitly promised in selling services to us ("Only wealthy people have a chauffeur) -- and we are promised that we'll ultimately save money, which after all is the only relevant value in a consumer society. "Standards of living" in this context means exclusively the ability to buy and have more stuff, not to have better experiences or enjoy humanized exchanges in an economy palpably made up of people doing things for one another. Instead we are encouraged to live in a fantasy world where everything is made for our money alone, and naturally we have no choice but to help ourselves to it.

More on the Future of Work (23 March 2011)

Following up on the themes of my previous post (and untold dozens of others -- maybe I should start using a tagging system?): the P2P Foundation blog linked to a write-up (pdf) of a round table symposium put on by the Aspen Institute on the future of work. Among the participants were analysts from McKinsey and Deloitte and executives from Microsoft, IBM and Infosys, along with a bunch of other Silicon Valley think-tank types. It delineates how business elites would like to put across increasing precarity for workers as "freedom" and details some of the ideological resistance they expect to encounter.

The participants identify the emergence of the "post-Sloanist" worker (that is, the worker who exceeds the constraints of 20th century "scientific management" and organization engineering):

Every worker will have to become a continuous learner, he said, and will likely hold multiple jobs over the course of his or her lifetime, if not multiple careers. Many workers will need to work at part-time jobs and perhaps hold down multiple jobs simultaneously, he added. The ability to multitask and deal with interruptions to work will become mandatory skills.

And eventually, ADD will cease to be regarded as a disorder and will instead be an institutionalized educational outcome. The report continues, "a great deal of work is likely to become less routine and more exception-based, especially in knowledge-based jobs." It will be reactive; workers will perform triage as information pours in rather than initiate work processes.

Lots of the round table's conclusions are similar to ideas I've been harping about in previous posts about how changes in how we regard work augment the mounting stressfulness of neoliberal subjectivity. To list some of the changes: that work organization is becoming less directed and hierarchical and more a matter of "crowdsourcing" and post hoc capture; that the fixed workplace is being dispersed into a "social factory"; that firms are being supplanted by "platforms" (think Facebook); that work and leisure are becoming indistinguishable; that identity construction is merging with work, that consumption skills are increasingly regarded as productive and innovative in their own right and are being incorporated into manufacturing processes; that what constitutes work skills is also becoming more nebulous and hazily linked to education. Now, some of the participants suggested, the importance of discrete skills is being supplanted by the significance of "disposition" -- a rough analogue for what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called habitus.

Employers must recognize that they are not just hiring a set of skills, they are hiring people based on their personal temperaments. “In a world of continual and rapid change, maybe the most important things are dispositions that allow you to embrace change,” said John Seely Brown, Independent Co-Chairman of the Deloitte Center for the Edge.... “You can’t teach dispositions,” said Brown. “You cultivate them.” Employers cannot simply communicate information to workers; they must provide a hospitable, immersive environment for workers to satisfy their dispositions and talents.

So we are enjoined to always be cultivating an identity that will justify our worth to employers, and this perpetual process of becoming our better selves is expected to constantly throw off value. The disposition becomes our job; producing ourselves becomes mandatory, and linked to our economic survival. As a result, being "yourself" has never been more stressful. "Workers will regard their work lives as an experience, a lifestyle and an identity—not just a paycheck," the report suggests, and that is supposed to be a good thing: For some in the creative-class vanguard, work seems to be increasingly unalienated (these people are entrepreneurs of their personal brand and reaping a livelihood from it) and indistinguishable from the process of just living life. And this may be the model of the workplace of the future generally. But this sort of "freedom" comes at the expense of other forms, mainly the freedom from having to capitalize on every aspect of one's selfhood.

To paraphrase from Baudrillard's The Consumer Society, which repeatedly makes the point that our needs are not autonomous and not our own invention, the need to engage in conspicuous self-fashioning has become systemic; it's no longer the product of what individuals actually want, if it ever was so. Identity has been made productive in and of itself, and thus has been subsumed, integrated into the capitalist system. Again, to recast Baudrillard, the strenuously defended right to a unique self actually betokens the loss of such lived uniqueness, its transition to an exchangeable commodity, a form of abstracted labor.

The shift away from specific job skills to dispositions raises many other issues as well: If a disposition for creativity and symbolic-meaning making is the new valuable skill set, can it be differentiated from social and cultural capital that stems from class? Can a person be taught how to make distinction (in Bourdieu's sense of the word) if one lacks the proper class distinctions to begin with, or would the fact that you needed to learn them automatically disqualify you? How do you teach flexibility and a willingness to bend rules as well as follow them, depending on the situation? How do you teach an instinct for design and cultural trends? Can there be a school that teaches hipsterism? And how much hipsterism can the economy support? (Will Davies says not as much as many aspiring bohemians would like; he advises they drop aesthetic consumption for political organizing -- good luck with that!)

Ideology and the Left Blogosphere (19 Jan 2011)

This post by Freddie deBoer about the rightward drift of ostensibly left-wing bloggers names names and has generated a lot of responses. DeBoer writes that "almost anything resembling an actual left wing has been systematically written out of the conversation within the political blogosphere, both intentionally and not, while those writing within it congratulate themselves for having answered all left-wing criticism." That's not to say you can't find socialists and the like blogging here and there; it's just that the conversation-defining pundits online don't read them or respond to them. Instead there is a Potemkin left wing made up of moderates. "The nominal left of the blogosphere is almost exclusively neoliberal," deBoer argues. It subscribes to "the general paternalistic neoliberal policy platform, where labor rights are undercut everywhere for the creation of economic growth (that 21st century deity), and then, if things go to plan, wealth is redistributed from the top to those whose earnings and quality of life have been devastated by the attack on labor." Some of the prominent moderates may have begun further left, but career incentives have driven them to the neoliberal line, which secures "professional entitlement" in punditry circles.

The gist of his critique is that unless you are willing to assent to the broad tenets of neoliberalism (antiunion, anti-regulation, pro-neoclassical economic interpretations, etc.) you are not regarded as an "adult" in American political discourse. "The neoliberal economic platform is enforced by the attitude that anyone embracing a left-wing critique of that platform is a Stalinist or a misbehaving adolescent," he writes. And sure enough, deBoer himself had his maturity questioned. DeBoer cites a few examples in his postscript, and today at Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen, after referring to deBoer target Matt Yglesias by his first name only (an annoying trait of the consensus-sphere; as if we are all chums and should all automatically know who is being referring to) writes somewhat condescendingly:

Freddie deBoer seems to be very smart. I had never heard of him before, which I suppose means he is not extremely famous as a blogger. So let's see how he evolves when it comes to his critique that "labor rights are undercut everywhere for the creation of economic growth" in an ongoing debate with some people who know more about it than he does. he shows a much better rhetorical skill than he does an understanding of labor economics.

Whether or not you agree with that marketplace-of-ideas approach to credibility, it's worth considering whether it's appropriate to dismiss rhetorical skill so quickly. Part of what deBoer claims is that left-wing argument is dismissed out of hand as mere rhetoric as opposed to the more "pragmatic" arguments of neoliberals. Left-wingers spout ideology while neoliberals have "real" policy discussions. But "real policy" is constrained by the rhetorical climate that is allowed to prosper; empiricism doesn't occur in a ideological vacuum. Instead ideology dictates to some degree the terms of the "ongoing debate" Cowen mentions, and deBoer is pointing out how restrictive that ideology has been. Mike Konczal puts this well in his response:

deBoer thinks that policy wonks create solutions within the context of a neoliberal capitalism, solutions that reify the naturalness of the current economic order, and that ignore the real problems. These solutions broadly fight for scraps that are left over from what the elites divide up, and don’t address more fundamental problems existing within our economic order.

To overcome that "reified naturalness" requires explicitly ideological effort of the sort that conservatives have never been embarrassed to engage in, at various levels of Straussian deception and bad faith. Ideological vigor (preferably of the good faith, nondeceptive variety) is not the only thing the left needs, but it needs it to some degree, and that means allowing views further to the Left than Gerald Ford into the "adult" conversation.

It's interesting to compare that Cowen passage with one from a recent post by Steve Waldman, whose has been arguing against complacent technocracy for several months now.

The empirical evidence is clear. Ideology is malleable, over years and decades rather than generations and centuries. If you have to choose one — smart policy and indifference to ideology or sloppy policy and careful ideological work — you are better off choosing the latter.

Waldman makes the claim that ideology is "path-dependent" -- that is, what's currently hegemonic affects the scope of what can become ideologically persuasive in the future. After some game-theoretical analysis he concludes that the side that focuses on "rhetorical skill" will be able to shape the "ecosystem of constraints" that dictates future policy more than the side that regards ideological work as unnecessary or somehow disreputable. In a fitting piece of rhetorical jujitsu, Waldman accuses the tepid moderates and technocrats of immaturity:

It is childish, and wrong, to imagine that acknowledging the ideological aspects of one's work and self makes one less trustworthy or more dangerous than those whose work is equally ideological, but who mistake their ideology for objectivity or truth and who therefore deny any role for ideology. Many of history’s most dangerous ideologues have been “true believers”, and others have pretended a “scientific” perspective while advancing claims we now recognize as ideological. Being acted upon by, and acting upon, prevailing ideology are part of what it means to be human. It is not just the province of economists or policymakers, or a fabrication of Svengalis in the propaganda ministry. Nevertheless, politicians and economists and other “opinion leaders” probably do have disproportionate influence over ideological change. As far as I’m concerned, they (we) ought to be doing a better, more careful, and more conscious, job of it.

Doing policy or doing ideological propaganda is not an either-or proposition. To be effective, one arguably must do both, with as much rhetorical skill as possible. But the existing crypto-left instead seems to sacrifice ideology to get along career-wise in the neoliberal media world as it already stands, rather than take advantage of the internet's potential to build an alternative forum to subvert it.

The carefree society (14 Dec 2010)

I attended this lecture at the New School yesterday given by economist Nancy Folbre about how capitalism has transformed patriarchy and how this has helped bring on the employment crisis. It wasn't a discussion so much of the much-reported mancession of 2008-09 as it was a broader look at how the domestic and affective work long performed by women for nothing has increasingly become waged work, and also how such work continues to be performed by women who are also working other jobs. Women have gained "self-ownership" thanks in some part to the logic of capitalist individualism -- they have been granted the opportunity to sell their labor power and hold property. This increased agency threatens the way capitalist societies have relied on women to do the work of social reproduction outside of the markets that are assumed to be natural to and rule all other forms of production and exchange. As women gain self-ownership, their view of the domestic work they perform becomes more capitalistic -- they want to be paid for it, or rather pay other women to do it. The wages for such work is low, because the work itself is easily commodifiable and requires no formal education and can be performed by members of the underclasses.

In neoliberal ideology, it's regarded as better to privatize welfare than use the state to pool risks associated with social reproduction. American society in particular has fostered an every-family-for-itself environment that intensified risks for everyone -- if your parents lose the Alzheimer's lottery, and you have to put them in a home, well, tough break for you. Don't expect your neighbor's tax dollars to help you out. If your company pulls out of the U.S. and lays everyone off, don't expect anyone else to help put food in your kids' mouths until you can't find new work. Instead, you are presumably supposed to think about what gave you the right to have kids in the first place, if you couldn't guarantee you could afford them.

As capitalism internalizes or subsumes more and more of everyday experience -- as more and more of the traditionally unpaid work of social reproduction becomes reconceived as commodified, exploitable wage work -- there's less reason to want to do any of that for other ideological reasons (because it is fulfilling in one's social role; because it's morally satisfying; because it is pleases God; etc.). But someone's got to do it, or else the system as we know it will inevitably end. The key question is who does this work, and for what reasons, for what sort of recognition. Capitalism -- flying in the face of patriarchy, to some extent -- tells us that money is the only form of recognition that matters.

In the neoliberal world, where the costs of social reproduction are not defrayed by the state but instead show up as costs carried unequally by every family (unless they can outsource it to cheap workers), affective labor -- caring for children, the elderly, spouses, etc.; anyone other than yourself -- becomes a sucker's game unless you get some sort of payment for it. It represents an opportunity cost, especially since connectivity makes it so that we always can be working: domestic work is performed at the expense of the more lucrative work that is available to women with more-marketable skills. So the logic implies that the more mothering you do -- the more time you spend parenting instead of something else -- the poorer you will be. And birth rates drop. It's easy to extrapolate these trends to a global capitalist world in which no one wants to be a mother and we all become inadvertent Shakers.

Of course, we may also try to get by with as little of this caring work as possible -- to have a society where "caring" is automated in social networks as sharing self-broadcasts and pseudo-connection, but we spend as little time as possible actually caring for others in person. The friction of everyday life, ordinarily smoothed over by care work, could just ramp up and up, particularly if the online mediation of our productive lives sufficiently isolates us so that the friction doesn't impede productivity. That is to say, there is no absolute amount of caring required to make capitalist society; it can always be squeezed, reduced, rationed with the price mechanism. As more care work becomes paid work and becomes priced, the more incentive we all have to economize on it. If caring is work -- as capitalism's logic encourages us to see it -- then we have too much incentive to end it, and bring about a society in which no one cares about anything except themselves.

Convenience and Neoliberalism (13 Aug 2010)

Jodi Dean makes an interesting point in this post about "neoliberal appetites." At issue is the question of whether the neoliberal regime we are all familiar with now -- deregulated markets and post-Fordist production processes and so on -- allows individuals to assume more responsibility and have more flexibility with regard to how they fit into economic relations. Bosses are less domineering, workers are more autonomous and collaborative, and self-regulation dictates the terms of self-exploitation. This is sometimes discussed in terms of "bioproduction" and "governmentality" -- terms from Foucault's later work. Occasionally, left-leaning types will celebrate this development as empowering a deterritorialized "multitude" that is paving the way for a postcapitalist world.

But the aggressive brand of individualism promoted by neoliberalism -- the sorts of subjects it requires -- doesn't allow for personal development so much as it indoctrinates us into a myopic insatiability. Dean argues:

The very incentive structure that would be necessary for competition to replace something like normalization is missing. The internet, pay for view, video on demand, DVR, instant messaging -- our entire media habitat conditions us to immediate gratification rather than self-discipline, self-control, self-governance. Fast food and convenience -- again, we focus on what we want now, not what we might need or use later. The neoliberal attitude is that markets and competition induce certain behaviors (laws of supply and demand) and that this is sufficient for self-governance on its own. It isn't--as Hegel and Adam Smith already knew.

The way I interpret this situation is that neoliberalism necessarily promotes convenience and expediency as its values to accelerate the circulation of commodities, the consumption of goods and services, as a consumerism-based economy requires. Repressive desublimation, to use Marcuse's phrase, characterizes neoliberal subjectivity more than any sort of internalized self-control. Consumers work better for the system when they have outsourced self-control, seek it in further acts of consumption -- buying diet books and exercise books, subscribing to magazines that preach simplifying your life, etc. Dean notes that "the culture of immediacy, of communicative capitalism, dissolves these sorts of mechanisms [of self-governance] and instead provides instant tidbits (lichettes) that entrap us in circuits of drive." My translation: the emphasis on real-time applications and technology short-circuits the possibility of reflexivity; we become too focused instead on updating and refreshing the content available to us instead of governing our own output and intake. As a result, we become to incompetent to be trusted with power, and democracy, as Dean points out, begins to seem impossible.

Conservative communitarianism (2 April 2010)

Will Wilkinson quotes himself being quoted in Newsweek. He is explaining the bright side of the atomistic society:

Will Wilkinson, a research fellow at the Cato Institute who has been analyzing the numbers, says the reason for it hinges on what we need to survive: “According to University of Michigan political scientist Ronald Inglehart, the head of the World Values Survey, under conditions of relative scarcity and insecurity, individuals tend to develop values oriented toward survival,” he said. “In such conditions, the family is like a little mutual insurance society, and adherence to traditional family values is high. Respect for authority and conformity is also high. As economic prosperity advances, individuals naturally begin to worry less about how to simply get by and to worry more about making life meaningful. Wealth tends to produce a syndrome of ’self-expressive’ or ‘emancipative’ values that includes a stronger sense of individuality and greater tolerance for diversity.”

His use of the word syndrome introduces an appropriate modicum of tension in what might otherwise be read as a straightforward celebration of the progressive liberation of humankind in an affluent society. Clearly, not having to worry constantly about bare survival has its upsides; one can notice/invent a meaning deficit for oneself to create a new scarcity crisis to dictate behavior. (Alternatively, one can recognize an attention deficit brought on by a surplus of distractions.) We become preoccupied with self-fashioning, with curatorial consumption amidst the surfeit of goods; this can be understood as the freedom to be who we really are, or at least the freedom to always be int eh process of becoming more authentically ourselves, and more important, be recognized as such. This kind of narcissism seems to produce a kind of indifferent tolerance for what everyone else does. One's stake in another's behavior doesn't seem so high. We are free to ignore one another if we so choose.

That seems an awesome freedom. But then we realize that it means we are being ignored. The disintegrating tendencies of individualism thus yields anomie and an exhibitionism by which we try to secure the recognition that once came from serving a discrete, established social role and from following the rules, for better or worse. The circuit of meaning was that self-sacrifice yielded a more stable community, which yielded a nativist pride that went a long way toward validating the self, not as a unique flower necessarily, but as something with a clear, strong identification.

I don't endorse that nostalgic vision. It's more or less an account of the impression left on me by Phillip Blond's "Rise of the Red Tories" piece about communitarian conservatism in Prospect. Blond elaborates an attack on neoliberalism's deleterious effects of society and champions a return to Burke:

It was Edmund Burke who famously spoke of conservative radicalism being founded on the little platoons of family and civic association. “To love the little platoon we belong to in society is the first principle of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country and to mankind.”

Leaving aside the strange oxymoron of "conservative radicalism," it's worth asking whether filial affections really work this way. Does it move beyond the little platoon to a love of mankind? Or does it become a society of little platoons in perpetual civil war?

In championing the tolerance that emerges from laissez-faire principles, Wilkinson is drawing from the liberal tradition that Blond denigrates. "This left-libertarianism repudiated all ties of kith and kin and, though it was utopian in aspiration, its true legacy has been the dystopia of divided families, unparented children and the lazy moral relativism of the liberal professional elite." (That's not fair. My moral relativism is rigorous!) Blond's argument is that there is no inherent self to liberate from social repression; the society constitutes the self.

The most extreme form of liberal autonomy requires the repudiation of society—for human community influences and shapes the individual before any sovereign capacity to choose has taken shape. The liberal idea of man is then, first of all, an idea of nothing: not family, not ethnicity, not society or nation. But real people are formed by the society of others. For liberals, autonomy must precede everything else, but such a “self” is a fiction. A society so constituted would be one that required a powerful central authority to manage the perpetual conflict between self-interested individuals.

The laissez-faire neoliberal society, Blond suggests, constitutes individuals as a void. So emptied, we must continue make those futile gestures at meaning, trying to consume our way to a sense of self. (I think this is Blond's most persuasive argument. In order to combat that line of thinking, usually a form of biologism or evolutionary psychology gets deployed to suggest that there is an inherent self that demands a specific form of society to allow for its full and proper expression.)

This leads then to a Hobbesean war of all against all because everyone will be out for themselves. (I'm less persuaded by that.) Since no one is obliged to share values and are arguably encouraged instead to invent unique ones for themselves to be distinctive, society disappears until the chaos calls forth a totalitarian state.

I am more inclined to think that a repressive state has become unnecessary because atomistic individuals have proved easier to control -- self-involvement is not a revolutionary frame of mind. Whether or not it is a positive development that dissent has been stifled by increased narcissism says a lot about one's politics.

Part-time smokers (12 Jan 2010)

The Awl noted a WSJ article by Melinda Beck about "part-time smokers" -- "a growing group of intermittent and secret smokers who seem to smoke as much for psychological and emotional reasons as nicotine addiction." That's sort of weird, defensive way of phrasing it -- "psychological and emotional reasons". Why not put forward the possibility that people choose to smoke every so often because they like it? I haven't been the subject of any studies, but I am guessing that I have "psychological and emotional reasons" for everything I do voluntarily. Later Beck notes that "some intermittent smokers can go for days without a fix" -- the idea that smoking can be anything other than a drug addiction seems impossible for her to imagine. But we may now be reaching a point at which smoking can be regarded generally as something other than a habit. It might return to being seen as a pastime, a social activity.

This all could be rationalization, I suppose. I am one of these part-time smokers nowadays; generally I'll smoke when I am on vacation or our drinking. I used to smoke a half a pack or so a day when in my 20s, but then I quit altogether for about seven years. In that period, smoking bans and restrictions came into force that paradoxically made it easier for me to resume smoking without the danger of becoming a habitual smoker again. There were too many barriers; it's worth the trouble to smoke only when the rest of my routine is already disrupted. And there tends to be a social payoff: the built-in pauses and rhythms of smoking rituals help facilitate conversation.

The emergence of part-time smoking suggests how the social infrastructure can shape how we use things, how we conceive of their place in our lives. With our culture's obsession with personal responsibility and addiction, norms and mores tend to get short shrift when it comes to explaining behavior. Not that smoking isn't addictive, but the way we use cigarettes isn't simply a matter of how addicted we've become to them. And as beneficial as it is to quit smoking entirely, partaking every now and then in tobacco is probably not the worst social practice in the world, and it wouldn't seem to mandate the sort of zealotry on display in the article, which treats part-time smoking as some insidious disease rather than as a re-emergence of a small pleasure in proper perspective.

New frugality as old cultural war (8 Oct 2009)

I was thinking more about a line in the last paragraph of James Surowiecki's New Yorker column about consumer spending.

But the evidence for a radical shift in the way we consume seems more like the product of wishful thinking (there’s a palpable longing among pundits for Americans to become more frugal) than anything else.

It's what is in the parenthesis that interests me, that "palpable longing" that most likely refers to David Brooks, who pined for "economic self-restraint" in this recent New York Timesop-ed. Since I tend to think of cheerleaders for the consumer society as being situated ideologically on the pro-business right, I regarded this kind of rhetoric as a move by Brooks toward the crunchy left, with its preoccupation with environmental responsibility and conservation and recycling and the like. But an old Joan Didion piece about the Washington press corps during the Clinton years (aptly titled "Vichy Washington"), reminded me of the obvious point that Brooks is reaching back to an older tradition of conservative intolerance personified back then by Robert Bork:

Bork is worth some study, since it is to him that we owe the most forthright statements of what might be required to effect "a moral and spiritual regeneration," the necessity for which has since entered the talk show and op-ed ether. Such a regeneration, Bork speculated in Slouching Towards Gomorrah, by one of four events: "a religious revival, the revival of public discourse about morality, a cataclysmic war, or a deep economic depression."

This puts a religious-bigot spin on the The Shock Doctrine thesis: rather than use crisis to implement a neoliberal program of economic deregulation, conservatives should seize the opportunity presented by widespread economic misery to push through a variety of behavioral proscriptions. Didion quotes Bork's outrageous dictum that "moral outrage is a sufficient ground for prohibitory legislation. Knowledge that an activity is taking place is a harm to those who find it profoundly immoral."

This tradition makes it more understandable why pundits are "palpably longing" for a more frugal America and why they overlook the evidence that Americans have been spending more largely because the cost of housing, medical care and education have risen precipitously (thanks in part to the flood of credit inflating asset values). The new frugality seems malleable enough a concept to serve as fresh code for an old battle, that of restricting individual freedoms to preserve religious authority in society. Religious institutions once had a monopoly on meaning and doled it out in return for obedience. Consumerism, and the identity fashioning it enabled at the individual rather than community level, usurped that power, demanding only an obedience that often felt like liberty -- the restriction of self-expression to choosing among a plethora of goods in the consumer marketplace. The longing for a more frugal America is one of way of renewing the call for a more "spiritual" America, which is a way of demanding the legislation of morality in the name of values presumed to be universal and incontestable.

Right to rampant risk-taking (7 Sept 2009)

Yesterday I was wondering about whether it makes since to curtail individual freedom in order to achieve a larger efficiency that no one individual will experience as directly beneficial. In particular, it's possible that we like to think we can outwit everyone else when we can't, but that fantasy is more beneficial to us than a smoother-running system.

Steenbarger, a guest poster at Barry Ritholtz's Big Picture blog, calls attention to the research that suggests that certain traders are addicted to playing the market recklessly.

It turns out that a large body of psychological research finds that people who are sensation seekers tend to also be risk takers. Indeed, many hapless traders are attracted to markets precisely because of the stimulation of risk and reward. At the extreme, this makes trading an addiction, not a disciplined quest to exploit market inefficiencies.

Obviously this means market players are not all contributing useful information, and markets themselves are not automatically efficient in that sense. It may instead provide opportunities to express irrationality, to defy reason and take defiant chances. Markets are just another social medium in which individuals can try to leave their distinctive mark, even if it requires acting insanely. And markets may then conduct misleading information to other participants, compounding the confusion and generating unexpected or suboptimal outcomes.

Does that mean such individuals' participation in markets should be curtailed in the name of perfecting markets? Of course we shouldn't, but I wonder though if all the talk about the unfortunate reality of inefficient markets will at some point lead to attempts to perfect them by force and prohibition. A perfect market, as Albert Hirschman pointed out in his "Rival Interpretations of Market Society," requires that participants not be connected by any ties other than commercial ones, ties that might affect their economic-rational judgment: "Involving large numbers of price-taking anonymous buyers and sellers supplied with perfect information, such markets function without any prolonged human or social contact among or between the parties." Perhaps the isolating aspects of capitalist society are self-reinforcing, or at least are reinforced by economistic technocrats who wish to conjure their perfect market, which would reinforce the plausibility of their predictions and enhance their credibility and power. The more that traditional ties are broken, denied, or prevented from forming, the more "perfect" markets can be become; efforts to promote "rational thinking" over emotional or altruistic thinking may work to further our way toward such perfection, until we are all perfectly anonymous in our solipsistic individuality.

Class and classism and the meritocratic fantasy (19 Aug 2009)

Most people would not agree that it's okay to cross the street if you are spooked by the race of someone approaching. But fewer people, I suspect, would feel the same way if you cross because you think the person coming toward you is a lot poorer than you are. In that case, you can ascribe a socially sanctified line of reasoning to the situation -- rationally, that person has a pretty obvious reason to assault you for your money, thus it makes sense to try to avoid them, and if they feel bad about it, well, they should try harder not to be poor.

The idea is that classism is often tolerated where racism (and sexism and bigotry against gays and so on) is not, because prevailing neoliberalism makes it seem okay to ascribe "rational" incentives to other people and discriminate accordingly. After all cynicism about other people's motives is a positive common-sense virtue in a society ruled in all aspects by a free market. An ability to think in terms of costs and benefits and find the applicable way of applying such an analysis to any scenario is the mark of a mind thinking at its clearest. At the same time, when we discriminate along those lines and not along the old racist, sexist, etc. lines, we can congratulate ourselves for how far we have come, regard our existing social order as progressive, and assure ourselves that our own advantages are merited, and not the product necessarily of racism. Eschewing bigotry and promoting diversity strengthens our ideological faith in the meritocracy that hardly exists in reality, as Walter Benn Michaels argues in this LRB book review of a collection called Who Cares about the White Working Class?.

My point is not that anti-racism and anti-sexism are not good things. It is rather that they currently have nothing to do with left-wing politics, and that, insofar as they function as a substitute for it, can be a bad thing. American universities are exemplary here: they are less racist and sexist than they were 40 years ago and at the same time more elitist. The one serves as an alibi for the other: when you ask them for more equality, what they give you is more diversity. The neoliberal heart leaps up at the sound of glass ceilings shattering and at the sight of doctors, lawyers and professors of colour taking their place in the upper middle class. Whence the many corporations which pursue diversity almost as enthusiastically as they pursue profits, and proclaim over and over again not only that the two are compatible but that they have a causal connection – that diversity is good for business. But a diversified elite is not made any the less elite by its diversity.

This is an argument spelled out in his book The Trouble With Diversity. In the LRB piece, he pushes the book's argument further, detecting a similar mechanism in the worries about classism manifest in Who Cares About the White Working Class?:

It’s thus a relevant fact about Who Cares about the White Working Class? that Ferdinand Mount, who once advised Thatcher, is twice cited and praised here for condemning the middle class’s bad behaviour in displaying its open contempt for ‘working-class cultures’. He represents an improvement over those who seek to blame the poor for their poverty and who regard the culture of poverty rather than the structure of capitalism as the problem. That is the view of what we might call right-wing neoliberalism and, from the standpoint of what we might call left-wing neoliberalism, it’s nothing but the expression of class prejudice. What left neoliberals want is to offer some ‘positive affirmation for the working classes’. They want us to go beyond race to class, but to do so by treating class as if it were race and to start treating the white working class with the same respect we would, say, the Somalis – giving ‘positive value and meaning to both “workingclassness” and ethnic diversity’. Where right neoliberals want us to condemn the culture of the poor, left neoliberals want us to appreciate it.
The great virtue of this debate is that on both sides inequality gets turned into a stigma. That is, once you start redefining the problem of class difference as the problem of class prejudice – once you complete the transformation of race, gender and class into racism, sexism and classism – you no longer have to worry about the redistribution of wealth. You can just fight over whether poor people should be treated with contempt or respect. And while, in human terms, respect seems the right way to go, politically it’s just as empty as contempt.

Michaels wants the left to worry more about income inequality and fight for the eradication of the income differences that make for social classes. (I wonder what Will Wilkinson would make of that.)

Built into the idea of meritocracy -- an ideal often conflated with the American Dream -- is the corollary that the poor deserve contempt. It's easy to see how people could overrate their own hard work and its relevance to their own success (such as it is) and believe that hating poor people is a way of providing crucial tough love. We can jumble up the causal links and think that hating hte poor will help make the meritocratic dream more real. It serves as a way of voicing our belief in the meritocratic ideal.

The craven creative class (18 Feb 2009)

If you are familiar with Richard Florida, much of his engaging essay in the new Atlantic, "How the Crash Will Reshape America," will not surprise you -- those in cities lucky enough to be populated by the creative class will only be mildly discomfitted by the recession, while those Rust Belt unfortunates are basically doomed. As Florida points out, "innovation, in the long run, is what keeps cities vital and relevant," and New York will continue to innovate in the vital fields represented by these creatives: "fashion designers, musicians, film directors, artists, and—yes—psychiatrists."

My reaction to this is similar to Arnold Kling's: "I don't think that the arts are all that important. To me, creative innovation that matters is somebody in a lab at MIT coming up with a more efficient battery or solar cell. It is somebody at Stanford coming up with a way to make computers smarter or cancer more preventable. I just can't get excited about some frou-frou fashion designers and the magazines that feature their creations."

Even though it makes me a bit of a hypocrite, I tend to adopt that same skeptical sneer for pseudo-innovations of the fashion cycle, for casual abuse of the word innovative and creative. When Florida writes about cities incubating "idea-driven creative industries" I wonder what he means specifically. Obviously he doesn't mean the swell financial innovation conjured up by the creative class of Wall Street bankers that helped put us into this recession that, as Florida rightly notes, will dump misery mainly in other parts of the country. But I can never grasp in my noncreative mind what is so beneficial about ideas as ideas, regardless of whether they are good or bad; about innovation for its own sake. Florida is undoubtedly right that cities allow ambitious people with money to find more easily other ambitious people full of conviction in their own ideas; they can then socialize in such a way that they can puff each other up with that right amount of trust and nepotistic networking confidence that's necessary to launch implausible startups. They can be intimate enough to truly believe each other's bullshit and craft an excellent marketing plan for it. And they can fashion a richer culture of social signifiers (the art world, etc.) that can alienate and put at a disadvantage those not fortunate enough to breathe in that rarefied air.

But when Florida writes of people "in the intangible sector—what I call the 'creative class' of scientists, engineers, managers, and professionals," it's hard not to wonder, what are they engineering? What are they managing? Isn't their creative success ultimately contingent on the poor rubes doing the dirty work under them? Doesn't their white-collar creativity at some point touch something tangible, a level at which actual human needs are being fulfilled through socially necessary labor? Felix Salmon remonstrates Kling with the implied point that libertarian economist types can't go around judging businesses in moral terms, as long as they are generating jobs and income. But it seems a fair question to ask whether the fashion industry's "value added" is more socially useful than a Las Vegas construction worker's. Florida argues that the Sun Belt building boom, frighteningly efficient and innovative and "highly metabolic" as it was during the bubble, was built on a kind of lie, but I wonder if the same isn't true of the dubious innovation coming from the media and fashion industries favored by the creative class. It all seems vulnerable to a more rigorous accounting of what is truly socially necessary.

Florida's core argument is this:

The economy is different now. It no longer revolves around simply making and moving things. Instead, it depends on generating and transporting ideas. The places that thrive today are those with the highest velocity of ideas, the highest density of talented and creative people, the highest rate of metabolism.

But what are ideas about if not things? Ultimately, any idea must find tangible expression in human labor reworking some piece of material in a way that deemed socially necessary. Otherwise it never gets realized; it never enters the economy. Is haute couture any more necessary than McMansion developments in Mesa, Arizona?

Maybe there is a way for the ideas not to yield things, but an overarching ideology that's not tangible but is nonetheless very valuable for those it protects. The ideas that are generated by that density of creative people working with fast-moving ideas are perhaps merely those that establish the hierarchy by which they seek to be judged, and the means for putting it over on the people who would otherwise prefer to play by different rules. The velocity is a matter of keeping the fashion cycle one step ahead of the populace they seek to dominate. As long as they succeed it putting this cycle over on outsiders, they "thrive," because they then get to manufacture the ideas that make them gatekeepers to modern identity.

So much of the New York creative class may amount to no more than an entrenched group of ideological workers, manufacturing tokens of prestige to preserve the class structure while those in the noncreative classes suffer without recompense. So no wonder it won't be such hard times for us here. The class structure is likely to need more propping up than ever. But I think this dooms Florida's prediction that creative-class cities will assimilate the economy's losers; these cities may thrive precisely by preventing those people out from peeking behind the curtain.

The brotherhood of hobos (10 Dec 2008)

Social services in America are probably sufficient to prevent a noticeable outburst of nouveau hoboism, no matter how long the recession lasts. We probably won't again see lean, bearded men riding the rails from agricultural day-laboring gig to gig, pleading for an honest day's wage for an honest day's work. Socially necessary labor isn't as fungible anymore, and the newly unemployed are not manual laborers so much as information processors who would be useless on a farm or in a factory anyway. And unemployment benefits are probably sufficient to prevent people from having to abandon their families and migrate aimlessly in search of employment.

But if we did have a return of the itinerant worker (who was not a Mexican immigrant), it might put to rest the myth of the hobo brotherhood that tends to crop up in Hollywood depictions. I have in mind one particular hobo trope, which I suspect is highly overrepresented: the way in which hobos carved fence posts with special symbols to share with other hobos important information about who lived there. This most recently popped up in Mad Men, where young Donald Draper has an encounter with a hobo who marks his family as evil.

Interestingly, the NSA, of all institutions, has a page detailing the history of this phenomenon.

The origin of the signs, like the Hobo name, is lost to history, but some of the symbols and their meanings have been documented. Carl Liungman’s Dictionary of Symbols makes a connection between the hobo signs in the U.S. with those in England and the gypsy signs used in Sweden. A few of the symbols are the same. Several look the same, but have a different meaning. And still more are completely different, even if the information being relayed is similar. Like any language, written or spoken, over time it develops independently to meet the needs of those using it.
What’s interesting to note, as Liungman points out, is that the system developed at all. Hobos, in general, travel alone and enjoy their independence. And yet, they still congregate in hobo jungles or travel with an occasional partner only to split when they decide to go a different way. Despite this preference for solitude, they still feel a certain camaraderie with their fellow hobos, an obligation to assist their brethren – thus, the creation of the signs and symbols.

I guess I am too cynical to believe in this mysterious camaraderie among the hobo brethren, or at least believe it was as widespread as you'd think from the movies. Hollywood producers and writers must find this romantic image of hobo communication irresistible; it perfectly captures the idea of their leading a secret life of adventure and all working together to subvert square, straight life. It makes it seem as though hobos have a code of honor, like knights errant or repo men. It almost encourages us to regard hoboism as something one volunteers for rather than something one is driven to by economic misery, anomie, or the stultifying conditions of everyday life.

Still, you wouldn't think drifters would be so cooperative. Their incentive to help other drifters doesn't seem particularly high, as the more drifters there are, the more they will be regarded negatively. Marking a fence post to indicate that the getting is good would probably alienate those who have helped hobos before, once they are inundated with new ones. And you'd think the choice to drift would indicate an inability to cooperate with social norms, with the ethic of cooperation that getting along with world requires. These are people who can't integrate -- I know that we are supposed to regard this as proof of their purity, their inability to get along in a corrupt system and deal with all the plasticity and checking out of the rat race. Kind of like how the crazy people are the ones who are really sane.

Consuming and the safety net (8 Dec 200)

As part of my ongoing preoccupation with Chinese consumer demand, I felt obliged to link to this editorial from today's FT. The editors raise a claim frequently asserted in evaluating China's consumer behavior, that "China's citizens save because they fear nobody will look after them in bad times -- and bad times are coming." You'd think that the People's Republic would have a more robust safety net in place for the people. It may be that one needs cash on hand to distribute the bribes and make the black-market purchases to get something of a standard that we can find straightforwardly on the market (though affording it is becoming more and more of a problem).

Anyway, the rationale implied here is that in Western countries the state supplies extends much-greater security to its citizens; in effect, it saves for them and covers their emergency needs. This the populace can go out and spend as much as it would like on luxuries much more comfortably. So a good way to stimulate the economy would be to strengthen the social safety net -- more unemployment benefits, affordable health insurance, more generous social security benefits, and so on. Under such a regime, we would work to earn the money for the frivolous stuff that we use to define ourselves and shape our identity -- the markers of distinction that have preoccupied us throughout the consumerist boom. But the state would assure that our subsistence needs are met.

This seems the implicit promise of consumer capitalism -- that society is so prosperous that we can concentrate all our efforts on self-fashioning (even if these ultimately make us insecure and existentially angsty). But of course "we" means "middle class and up"; there remains the strata of lower class workers who have little margin for error with money, for whom identity creation in the hipster mode remains unthinkably. These are the people our society chooses to motivate with blunter incentives -- starvation, homelessness, etc. And safety-net improvements will most likely not be made for lower-income people in practice (except incidentally), since in helping them, no extra cash is freed up to buy baubles and prop up demand. Some might even argue that allowing the lower-income people to play at homeownership through subprime mortgages caused the crisis in the first place -- a distortion that puts the cart before the horse. Financial engineers needed loans to work with to manufacture more exciting securities; unthinkable loans were then extended to meet this need (not the "need" of poor people to own McMansions).

I wonder whether the degree to which the middle class must rely on the state safety net is the degree to which it must be withdrawn from the lower classes from whom the middle class must remain distinct. They can't be standing in the same welfare line -- that would be a scandal. Better not to extend welfare to the lower classes at all.

Flexible labor utopia (14 August 2007)

In its most recent issue, BusinessWeek has a package of articles on the future of work, and not surprisingly, these mostly adopt the viewpoint of management, regarding labor as a data stream of productivity and costs. This is a common euphemistic practice, to conceal the pain of workers behind dehumanizing terminology -- empowered workers become "a tight labor market" that's responsible not for a improved standard of living for workers (for that all credit must go to management's brilliant efforts to extract more productivity from said labor market without increasing costs) but only inflationary pressure and macroeconomic danger. This damned tight labor market is keeping the Fed from cutting interest rates and giving the stock market a boost; if only more workers would be laid off and the reserve army of the unemployed were beefed up a little bit, then we'd have ripe conditions for the good kind of growth -- get more of the fruits of economic growth in the hands of passive investors rather than the workers producing it.

It's enough to make one want to dream of a world without a parasitic management stratum, and interestingly enough, the BusinessWeek package offers a hint of one form such a world might take. One article described Amazon's Mechanical Turk program, which seeks to match people with free time with simple jobs that can be done on computers but only with human guidance. The name Mechanical Turk is a reference to the famed hoax where a little chess genius hid inside a cabinet and pretended to be a machine. In other words, one got from the Mechanical Turk human expertise in the guise of a machine. So Amazon calls it artificial artificial intelligence -- it allows corporations to use computer networks to harness uniquely human skill sets. But the crux of Amazon's program is to liberate work from the managerial structures in which it is customarily contained -- rather than show up at an appointed time and labor for a set number of hours for a by and large inflexible wage on the same tasks over and over again, the Mechanical Turk system portends relations of production in which workers would elect to work only as much as they chose to on tasks and for wages they basically select from a menu that takes into account their particular skills. This is how Amazon describes it (and I apologize in advance for the surfeit of business-ese in this excerpt):

Humans are much more effective than computers at solving some types of problems, like finding specific objects in pictures, evaluating beauty, or translating text. The Amazon Mechanical Turk web service gives developers a programmable interface to a network of humans to solve these kinds of problems and incorporate this human intelligence into their applications.
For businesses and entrepreneurs who want tasks completed, the Amazon Mechanical Turk web service solves the problem of getting work done in a cost-effective manner by people who have the skill to do the work. The service provides access to a vast network of human intelligence with the efficiencies and cost-effectiveness of computers. Oftentimes, the cost of establishing a network of skilled people to do the work outweighs the value of completing it. By turning the fixed costs into variable costs that scale with business needs, the Amazon Mechanical Turk web service eliminates this barrier and allows work to be completed that before was not economical.
For people who want to earn money in their spare time, the Amazon Mechanical Turk web site solves the problem of finding work that they can do wherever and whenever they want.

I bolded what seems to me the key notion here, that capital can thrive by getting rid of the overhead costs of committing to maintaining a workforce. That sounds like a bad thing unless you are enamored of the utopian possibility that this will mean much more flexibility for labor as well as producers. If you are sufficiently optimistic, you can see in work distributed over the internet an end to the sites of exploitation, the factories and offices where surplus value is extorted. And with surplus value remaining with the worker, we effortlessly move out of the era of capitalist relations into something new.

Needless to say, there is reason to be skeptical of this revolution-free path to greater egalitarianism and better quality of life for workers. Turning the internet into a giant worldwide labor market is likely to cause massive amounts of "dislocation" Currently, a class divide exists between those who have access to a feel comfortable in the internet environment, and those who are afraid of breaking the entire computer by pressing the wrong button and erasing everything. The divide is in part generational but is also a matter of income and autonomy -- the income to have access to the latest technological innovation, and the autonomy to teach oneself how to use it successfully. That autonomy may come from higher education, or it may be part of the apparatus that comes with a bourgeois upbringing. At any rate, the technological dispersal of work will only benefit those equipped to navigate the system, and the amount of work to be dispersed in this way will likely remain a scarce commodity, as a larger and larger bulk of jobs in the future will consist of face-to-face services -- care for the elderly, processing food, nursing, etc.

Still, it's pleasant to dream about being able to log on for a few hours to replenish your account doing whatever task that's available that looks intriguing and then spending the rest of your time furthering your own projects, perhaps generating tasks you'd be willing to pay someone else for help with. We could all be middle managers, grunt workers and entrepreneurs all at once, depending on the time of day and the energy we're inclined to invest.