I feel obliged to point out that making 100x as much money is not really of any use if food and housing also cost 100x as much. Also that there's a lot of noise (in the form of Gini coefficient) between GDP per capita and percentage of people with decent income.
The Third World *has* actually improved on the statistics that matter; I'm just pointing out that GDP per capita is one of the classically dubious ones and that you should probably avoid it if you're trying to bridge the gap with leftists.
The ones originally linked were nominal, although they were adjusted for inflation (and the graph for PPP was available if you looked around the sidebars). It is still mean, not median, though.
As I said, not criticising the contention that the Third World has gotten better - it has. I'm just pointing out that the statistics Jack used are ones that aren't going to convince anyone of that.
As the review from Michael Thompson I linked above says:
"Neoliberalism, as Harvey tells us, quoting Paul Treanor in the process, ‘values market exchange as “an ethic in itself, capable of acting as a guide to all human action, and substituting for all previously held ethical beliefs,” it emphasises the significance of contractual relations in the marketplace. It holds that the social good will be maximised by maximising the reach and frequency of market transactions, and it seeks to bring all human action into the domain of the market.’ "
"Neoliberalism is not simply an ethic in abstracto, however. Rather, the locus for its influence has become the ‘neoliberal state’, which collapses the notion of freedom into freedom for economic elites. ‘The freedoms it embodies reflect the interests of private property owners, businesses, multinational corporations and financial capital.’ (p. 7) The neoliberal state defends the new reach and depth of capital’s interests and is defined against the ‘embedded liberalism’ of the several decades following World War II when ‘market processes and entrepreneurial and corporate activities were surrounded by a web of social and political constraints and a regulatory environment that sometimes restrained but in other instances led the way in economic and industrial strategy.’"
Do you know how the identities work? That is necessarily a result of Africa having positive net exports to the west. Same thing happens with other countries, you may or may not remember when it was a big deal that “China owns trillions of US debt.” Yeah, they have dollars laying around because we bought their stuff. They invest it because they prefer it to buying our exports. You’ll also note that interest and dividends will flow back to Africa because of this.
I know of at least one example where neoliberalism seems to be more to blame than colonialism : EU gives significant subsidies to its agriculture. This includes growing chicken. The worst chicken parts (this involves a fad for fillets as diet food), thanks to free trade, are sent to sub-Saharan Africa (they often arrive in dubious sanitary state). This wrecks the income of villagers that before could count on selling the chickens that they raised.
Nothing involving the results of the EU's Common Agricultural Policy is "neoliberal". Agricultural protectionism and subsidies are perfectly the opposite of neoliberalism, which is, after all, the "neo-" revival of classical liberal economic policy, which goes back to Adam Smith pointing out that the government could adopt polices to support a Scottish wine industry, but that would be wasteful and stupid.
What you describe with the chicken is, in fact, exactly the sort of mercantilism that was used to justify imperialism in order to seize captive markets to support the homeland's domestic producers.
Fair point, but in that case there's no such thing as a country with a neoliberal policy ?
Globalization and free trade are clearly neoliberal policies. The chicken issue is unlikely to be a specifically thought out mercantile policy, it's just the consequence of chicken producers trying to find a market for unwanted chicken parts. It might even have happened without subsidies, though the consequences probably wouldn't have been as bad ?
(Also, "forced" globalization and "forced" free trade being "imperialist neoliberal tools of domination" is a recurrent criticism from the left, and I don't think that by this they are specifically criticizing "dominating" countries exporting to "subordinate" countries, since the opposite situation is often criticized too ?)
life expectancy. qalys if you're not around teh shrill crowd who thinks acknowledging that health is good is ableist. maybe gdp per capita adjusted somehow for gini coefficient
Another thing to consider is the strength of the dollar. The dollar weakened considerably over that timeframe, I’m not entirely sure how that appears in a metric that measures foreign GDP in current US dollars.
From 1990-2000 we tripled the capacity of the global container fleet and then roughly tripled it again from 2000-2010.
It is almost impossible to describe how much more effective and easy it's gotten to ship cargo over the past 30 years. Sure, containerization was already popular, but computer-assisted technologies, logistical improvements and "smart" port systems have made shipping goods by sea easier, cheaper and faster. They've also allowed for larger and faster ships to be created, which spills back into increased capacity.
So the chart shows high ~constant growth from 1980 to 2010 and a slow after that. How would that be evidence for it being the cause of increasingly rapid economic growth since the 2002s?
I think it's worth mentioning that the growth Africa experienced after 2000 is one of the major seasons that GDP has been de emphasized as a metric in development. As Peter Lewis notes in Growth Without Prosperity, (written in 2008 so right before his case got much stronger) this gdp growth was not accompanied with any real rise in life expectancy standard of living, or even in poverty.
There's an argument to be made that the only real game changing thing to happen in africa since 2000 (at least in the good sense) has been the South Africa's government decision to flout international IP laws and produce generic versions of HIV drugs, not a very neoliberal development.
Why should we attribute that growth to neoliberalism? Why should we think the cause is policies adopted decades previously that failed to show (what I think were promised) short term results rather than something else closer in time to the actual noticed change?
In the first use, I was trying to link unions to budgetary issues - IIUC, it's mostly public sector unions who affect government budgets, and who are directly under threat because of government shortfalls.
In the second use, I talked about the government confronting unions, which I think makes more sense in terms of public sector unions like PATCO. The government set the terms for private company - private union confrontation, but AFAIK was less important in confronting them directly.
Is there a reason you think I should change this to refer to unions more generally?
Yes. The wage price spirals of the 70’s were driven in large part by union contract COLA provisions.
I’m also not familiar with the idea that the government set the terms for private sector union/employer confrontation in the US.
It’s also unfortunate that the author didn’t mention the “guns and butter” reality of the Bretton Woods failure. It was the cumulative impact of the cost of the Vietnam War.
1) Wow, there are still people who believe in Keneysian inflationary theory after the last forty years?
2) What, exactly, do you think the entire National Labor Relations Act, as subsequently amended, is? Unions in the US aren't random private associations of workers, they're government-recognized collective bargaining agents certified by government-supervised elections, with the terms of dealings between them and businesses set by a huge book of regulations promulgated and enforced by the National Labor Relations Board.
And corporations aren’t random associations of capital either. They exist within an extensive legal framework. They are definitely not something that exists in a true free market.
Um, okay, so you're vehemently agreeing that, in fact, it's blatantly obvious to anyone who considers the idea for five seconds that "the government sets the terms for private sector union/employer confrontation in the US", in spite of your previous claim of non-familiarity with the idea?
Whoa, This was a Scott Alexander book review, not a guest review as part of the Book Review Contest? The whole time I was thinking it was a good attempt at an impression of Scott, but I wasn't buying it.
Reminds me of one of my favorite Science Fiction short stories by Isaac Asimov, where a scientist invents time travel, fetches Shakespeare, and enrolls him in the Shakespeare class taught by one of his friends, only for good ol' Will to flunk the class.
Reminds me of the story in the Talmud of God time-travelling Moses forward in time to listen to a lesson by the future Rabbi Akiva. He couldn't understand the lesson at all, but when the students asked what was being taught Rabbi Akiva said it was passed down from Moses at Sinai (to his comfort).
Now I'm hoping you put one of your own book reviews in the book review contest, and see how it does. Obviously if it wins, you would discount your entry, and give the prize to the next participant, but it'd be a good way to see how others guage your writing without your brand attached.
I thought the same thing, in part because it's so TL;DR. I feel like reviews should summarize and not make me read substantial portions of the actual book.
I'd bet it's a mixture, in order 2 -> 3 -> 4 -> 1.
But 2 in the sense that people in the contest, disproportionately read Scott, like his writing style, and have absorbed it. And 3 in the sense that if all the instructions you get are "book review", you might use Scott's as reference of what's expected and liked by both Scott and the audience.
I also thought it was a non-Scott review! But also, toward the end, I was thinking "this is the best one so far - it actually tries to dissect what's right, what's wrong, what the historic context of the book is, and attempts to illuminate the book from several sides" and then the comment section made me realise I'd been bamboozled. :D
I normally find Scott's reviews quite helpful, but this one is...off. I don't know how to say it w/o risking offense, but I don't think you have the conceptual background to write this review.
To other readers, I'd recommend https://www.dissentmagazine.org/wp-content/files_mf/1390342754d3Thompson1.pdf as a critical review of this book, that ends up making some of the same objections Scott does — especially about the predictions Harvey made that didn't come to pass — but with much more specific, detailed, and nuanced descriptions of what Harvey thinks neoliberalism is, its relationship to state and nonstate actors, where his orthodox Marxism blinds him to trends in contemporary fusion politics, and where this book sits in the arc of his academic career.
I think — and Scott, I realize it is perhaps a little cruel to review you, reviewing — what surprised me here was the review seemed to almost mirror Harvey's worst tendencies towards a highly stylized class struggle, but with Harvey as the enemy. I get this; I often felt this way when I hateread things in grad school, and sometimes reviewed things this way too.
The reason why this surprised me is I usually recommend Scott's reviews as a great example of where someone tries to steelman as much as possible, to laboriously try to take an author, even one with whom he disagrees, on his own terms, and get inside it, and then show where it doesn't hold together, but also appreciate where it does. None of that generosity or appreciation was in this review.
Scott does sort of say this outright up top by framing the theses uncharitably. I just found it disappointing, because even where I disagree with Harvey, I do think we have much more to take from him than this review provides, which is why I linked the other above.
In the review posted, Petey, the author repeatedly makes claims along these lines, "Soon, Harvey believes, it will become evident that all of economic life and institutions are solely for the benefit of a single, small social class." Given that the last few decades have seen more people escape poverty more quickly than ever before in history, dirges about neoliberalism that fail to acknowledge the extraordinary improvement in the standard of living for billions strike me as a form of moral obtuseness that it is hard to take seriously. Stiglitz has acknowledged that increased reliance on market forces led to growth in China and Sen has done the same for India. The entire academic anti-neoliberalism industry, of which Harvey is chief cheerleader, strikes me as profoundly anti-poor. Africa urgently needs greater economic freedom so that Africans can also begin to escape near universal grinding poverty. Increased inequality a problem? Tell that to the Chinese who have seen something like a 10x increase in urban wages in the past few decades even as inequality has skyrocketed. Africans would love to see an increase in inequality if it also led to a 10x increase in wages. Both Thompson (the review you posted) and Harvey live in a bizarre twilight zone in which Marxist tropes about "capital" and nefarious elites supercede the plain facts of astonishing human progress. Have bad things also happened? For sure! Many due to "capital" and nefarious elites. But to ignore one of the greatest moral achievements in human history while singing these dirges is bizarre, even if all too common in academia.
Global poverty has only declined in the "last few decades" if you're using the World Bank international poverty line as your measure. You can look into how this poverty line is determined, but it's severely lacking by any reasonable definition of the term 'poverty'.
In short, the poverty line is an average of the poverty lines of the 15 poorest countries in the world from 2005, then converted into PPP dollars as determined by the 2011 metric of PPP. The result is a poverty line of $1.90/day (PPP). This is a transparently terrible metric. An average of the poverty lines set by the governments of the 15 poorest countries on the planet? Really? There are all sorts of factors I need not get into here which make it clear that this is an unreasonable way to measure poverty.
The World Bank has also refused the recommendation issued by its own Poverty Commission that they change their metrics. I wonder why? Food for thought!
The poverty rate determination also excludes most participants in the informal economy, which in most of these countries forms a majority of the economy (India's economy, for example, accounts for 80-90% of its workforce).
When more reasonable definitions of poverty are applied, it becomes clear that global poverty has receded quite minimally over the last 25 years, and that almost all of that recession is due to growing incomes in China. Hardly one of the "greatest moral achievements in human history".
The Chinese growth model, while certainly market-based, is not particularily neoliberal. For instance, a key tenet of neoliberalism is greatly lessening political control of the economy; while there is certainly less of that in China than before the Deng-era reforms, the Chinese authorities still direct their economy to a greater extent than in Western countries (they still have five-year plans, as an example).
A relevant comparison is Russian shock therapy in the 90s, a far more typically neoliberal reform. Rapid privatization and headlong market reforms with a much lessened role for politics and the state quickly created a social disaster, decimating both society and the economy, setting the stage for the more authoritarian (though still pretty neoliberal) Putin era.
While both countries were Communist command economies, they took very different approaches to market reforms, and the less neoliberal route seems to have worked much better. There were of course significant differences between the two countries, so it's not a one to one comparison, but as natural experiments go one could certainly do worse.
While one can certainly make a distinction between IMF/World Bank "Washington Consensus" neoliberalism, on the one hand, and the combination of rural privatization and astounding SEZ free markets, on the other, David Harvey does not. Harvey, and the vast majority of academic writers on "neoliberalism" are Marxist anti-capitalists. I'd love to see a list of critics of "neoliberalism" in the Washington Consensus sense who elsewhere praise the wild west SEZ free markets with no labor protections that played a key role in creating Chinese growth and prosperity. Can you name one? Is there one single opponent of neoliberalism who raves about the success of the SEZs?
And the quibbling about decreased poverty? See link below for a Brookings analysis of the "Elephant chart,"
It shows the income growth across income percentiles from 1988 to 2008. The discussion shows the state of the art disputes about the chart as of 2018.
But what is most stunning about the chart is that at every level, except at the 80th percentile (roughly developed world working class), everyone else gained. One could have a "glass half empty" perspective and note that the poorest only saw their income go up less than 20%. But from a "glass pretty darn full" perspective, a good chunk of the global population saw gains from between 40-80%. We're talking 6 or 7 billion people seeing significant gains. The punchline:
"Poorer countries, and the lower income groups within those countries, have grown most rapidly in the past 20 years."
I know Jason Hickel, like David Harvey, is working as hard as he can to keep the global poor impoverished so he can continue to hate capitalism, but at what point can we all say, "Gosh, most of the world's people being better off is kind of a great outcome?" and "Thank god the insane Marxist babble that was taken seriously from the 40s to the 70s is no longer taken seriously?"
It's not terribly hard, in 2020, to find pro-China communists who will defend the SEZs and all other aspects of Chinese "neoliberalism" trolling the internet. Many aren't even Chinese!
Though, as far as non-Chinese academic theorists are concerned - I can't think of any. Though they're not hard to find in the Chinese academic sphere.
There is a book coming out soon, " How China Escaped Shock Therapy ", by Isabella M. Weber (a Western academic who is partly educated in China) which investigates the non-Washington Consensus reforms in China.. I am looking forward to reading it. The author seems to be fairly left-wing, but seems to acknowledge that the reform path taken by China has had real benefits.
I don't think Weber places particular emphasis on the SEZs (and it is not clear to me that SEZs are the magic ingredient for Chinese growth; after all, many countries have established SEZs), but she does seem to be an opponent of neoliberalism generally who recognizes that the Chinese growth model and market reforms has been a stunning success. However, until I have read her book I find it hard to give an accurate rendition of her viewpoints.
I had a similar reaction - I initially thought this was a contest entry and felt that Scott was slipping up by letting this low quality one in. Realizing, in the comment section, that it was written by Scott was quite a surprise.
If people have to have read extensively about and adopted a particular conceptual framework in order to properly evaluate a book or set of arguments contained within it, it's probably just a bad book.
To me, this point seems flawed. You only want books written with the same conceptual framework? I can see where you're coming from - it's a lot of mental work to acclimate yourself to a different approach, especially if they rely on a set of thinkers and assumptions that you're unfamiliar with. But to do everything with the same conceptual framework seems like a recipe for intellectual stagnation.
I'm reminded of Hofstadter's 'jootsing' here - if you only critique from within the system, you miss alternative systems.
No, that's not what I meant. I would say rather that authors ought to, as a matter of course, adequately explain the framework they're writing/thinking/arguing within, so that a person of reasonable intelligence could pick it up and follow along. If we all have to read five other books in order to understand your priors and grasp your line of reasoning, you're doing yourself and potential readers a disservice, because what percentage of readers will have actually read all those books? (I suppose there are certain technical subjects where this wouldn't apply, like, say, theoretical physics, but this particular book is clearly not in one of those genres).
The uncharitable way to look at this is that if you've written a book that can only be comprehended by a certain audience and seems weird, wrong, or inscrutable to the uninitiated, you're probably just preaching to the choir. IE, you've written a bad book.
This makes sense if you think that the point of writing a book is always to reach "the general public". But if you think that a book can have a target audience, and can say something new to that target audience, then this misses the point.
A book that makes a claim about the history of neoliberalism, that is intended for a target audience that already dislikes neoliberalism, can be useful and meaningful, if the target audience isn't already assumed to agree with the central thesis about the history of neoliberalism.
I guess this is a matter of judgment or taste, maybe, because I think a book that isn't convincing or even comprehensible to people who don't already agree with you is pretty low value by definition.
If you think that the only value of a book is a binary bit of converting a person who doesn't agree with something to agreeing with that thing, then it would be low value.
But if a book can inform people who are already knowledgeable about one thing, to also know about something else, then that seems to me like a very different sort of value that it can have.
Another value can be to state clearly a set of arguments or views so that someone else can later show why they're wrong.
I don't know if this book itself succeeds at either of those, but neither of them requires a book to be accessible to a wider audience.
Many of those who disagree with Marxian approaches are nonetheless familiar with them. Marxian scholars tend to disagree with mainstream economics, history and political science, yet comprehend and engage with it just fine.
If the book required some prerequisite understanding of the author or Marxism or Neo liberalism or whatever, isn't that on the author to either mention that at the start or provide the necessary background in the text? Or is this book known to be part of a series and it was Scott's error to not read it in sequence? Like, I will grant that one could have background knowledge that gives them a different understanding of the book than what Scott got. But if that background is truly necessary to understand the book, then that seems like a failure of the author, not the reader, for not providing that background. If a book is misunderstood by readers because the book fails to include the information required for understanding it, it seems fair to me to just call that a bad book.
I think the problem here is that Scott thought this book would be an introduction to neoliberalism from a conceptual background/framework he had, and instead, he picked up an introduction to neoliberalism by a Marxist, who — because he is writing for other Marxists, or at least people sympathetic to Marxism — is not unpacking and explaining all of his priors.
I mean, I do think the book could probably make that a bit more explicit, but considering Harvey has been one of the most prominent and influential Marxists writing for the last forty years, he probably felt like he didn't need to?
This is one of my puzzlements with this review, because it's not clear to me if Scott knew what he was getting into or not.
"Also, I wonder if any movement could survive this level of critique. Some progressives formed anti-inequality think tanks after the Great Recession? Guess progressivism is a sham astroturf movement that merely used the Great Recession as an excuse to push their class war agenda!"
This seems like a weird take; it's just not symmetrical. Business owners acting to further their class interests is bad (according to pretty much everyone, hence why they pretend to have other justifications); normal workers acting in the same way is good.
It is not the case that business owners acting to further their class interests is bad and especially not the case that pretty much everyone thinks so. Millions of americans are business owners* and in favor of business ownership. Many of the Americans who aren't business owners would like to be business owners**, and plenty of candidates for city and state and federal government run on platforms of being friendly to businesses.
This seems like a left wing bubble take. According to Gallup, 31% of Americans support organized labor "a great deal" or "quite a lot". 22% don't trust it. 45% are ambivalent.
Meanwhile, 75% support small business a great deal or quite a lot. That is the highest of any class or institution in the country. More than any government agency, office, or institution. 38% support the banks. It's true only 19% support big business. However, I think that "Americans support the banks more than the unions and small businesspeople more than anyone else" points in the opposite direction of your claim.
Perhaps, but I don't know that people would say they support the interest of business owners as *a class*. At most they'd support the interests of small business owners as a class, and even then, the focus is on (real or imagined) positive effects- e.g. job creation. The interests of business owners, explicitly considered in isolation from those of workers, is a much dicier thing to support.
And how does this thesis hold up to trusting unions, organizations explicitly meant to conduct class politics on behalf of the working class, less than the banks?
Well I think that there are a lot of people who, even if they haven't been convinced that the execution is very good *in principle* think there is something more honorable about defending the interests of workers (poorer, more numerous) than defending the interests of business owners (richer, less numerous) when those clash. I.e. it's not a matter of class politics vs other politics, is a matter of how numerous and sympathetic the class in question is.
That sounds like literally exactly a matter of class politics to me. If you want better working conditions, decreasing the number of employers bidding on their labor by making it harder to be a business owner seems counterproductive. If you would protect workers, make life easier for business owners.
Sorry lol, just wanted to demonstrate that it's possible to invent the exact opposite argument. This is indeed what almost half the country thinks, or at least, they would wave a flag for someone else articulating it.
I don't mean to sound pedantic, but you're conflating the Gallup poll for "confidence in an institution" which Gallup actually measure in this poll with "support for the institution" which Gallup didn't. (source 1)
This might seem like a semantic difference, but it isn't. A different poll run by Gallup in 2020 found that America's overall approval of labor Unions is around 65% (source 2). This indicates that more people have favorable opinions about labor unions than have high confidence in them.
This is just me speculating, but I think that when measuring confidence, you might be getting a mixture of people's support for the institutions along with their perception of how stable those institutions are. Thus, seemingly bedrock institutions like banks will have inflated scores relative to organizations that people like, but seem precarious.
What poll are you referring to? According to this Gallup poll [1], labor union approval has been between 53% and 65% for the last 5 years. (Of course, some of this comes from the way you ask the question.)
I think we differ because you're assuming that "further their class interests" is the natural way to look at this.
The alternative hypothesis here is that lots of people were upset that the country was stagnating economically, and pursued neoliberal policies as a way to get the economy working again. Proving that one neoliberal talked to another neoliberal and said "we should support neoliberalism together" doesn't prove that this is wrong. This is how all politics works. I don't know what would convince someone who thinks this way that nothing sinister is going on. Would they have to learn that no two neoliberals had ever communicated, and they all just supported neoliberalism independently on each other, like Leibnitz's pre-established harmony?
Although not as sinister as the conspiratorial "further their class interests" implies, I think you're perhaps overlooking the potential sinisterness of "upset the country was stagnating".
If the common man led a safe and happy life thanks to the social security net, albeit at the cost of abstract nation-wider "growth", then arguably an attempt by the wealthy to try to kickstart new growth at the expense of that security is a case of the wealthy pursuing their own vaguely alien goals at the expense of what the majority of citizens want out of life.
I'm not sure this is what Harvey believes, but I think that is what a lot of leftists talk about when referring to conflicts in class interests. There's no hidden conspiracy to be uncovered, but the whole mindset of looking at growth/GDP as trumping the birth-to-grave security of ordinary individuals is itself viewed as an idisoyncrasy of the plutocrats, at odds with the interest of the people.
When I say "stagnating", this is polite speak for what the book describes as eg: "[Government] supporters were in open revolt, and public sector workers initiated a series of crippling strikes in the 'winter of discontent' of 1978. Hospital workers went out, and medical care had to be severely rationed. Striking gravediggers refused to bury the dead. The truck drivers were on strike too. Only shop stewards had the right to let trucks bearing "essential supplies" cross picket lines. British rail put out a terse notice "There are no trains today"...striking unions seemed about the bring the whole nation to a halt."
The problem wasn't that everyone was happy but GDP was 1 point lower, the problem was that everyone had a sense that the system was falling apart and needed to be saved.
Oh *I* quite understand that; I am merely trying to guess at what far-left thinkers who go on and on about apparent sinister conspiracies to "further class interests" might be talking about; a sort of… semi-steelmanning, where I try to reconstruct a *coherent* worldview that would make their views seem non-crazy, albeit one not necessarily backed by the empirical data.
I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm saying that you're describing such a different world than the one I've experienced that it just doesn't sound real. I was born in the 1990s and I fundamentally can't imagine a world this regularly disrupted. It would be like if you were describing a system very like America, but within one generation of mine everyone wore clown noses on Thursdays.
For people living through this time, did it actually feel this bad? Was this kind of behavior normalized? Or did it not really have that much of an impact on day-to-day living?
The 1980's under Thatcher were pretty awful too. We had two major recessions, sky-high inflation, massive unemployment, and whole industries falling apart.
"I was born in the 1990s and I fundamentally can't imagine a world this regularly disrupted." Right, because neoliberalism won and is actually, demonstrably better. The proof of the pudding is in the eating.
It was very much like this. I’m looking at the people your age and younger all metaphorically curling up and going comatose because they think we’re on a heretoforth frontier of scary, irrecoverable badness, and I’m thinking “man, this is... pretty normal in the scheme of things, and in many ways it’s better.”
I was born in the same decade, and do not have an experience like this, same as you. And as for disruption of daily life by unions specifically, I do not have a good experience to relate, but whenever I ask my elders about it, they never fail to remark that we are a lot better off these days, despite what people may say. The following are some inconveniences, major and minor, that I have learned about.
-Long lines and rationing at gas stations in the 70s.
-Car ownership being rare in the 60s, especially more than one per household.
-Air conditioning in homes nonexistent until the late 70s.
-Common household chores such as dish cleaning, food preparation, and laundry taking much more time than today due to lack of mechanical assistance and pre cooked food supply chains.
-Air so polluted you could safely look directly at the sun.
-Performing calculations required marking up punch cards by hand and scheduling an appointment at the computation center.
-Women could not own homes or have bank accounts until the 70s.
-Frequent, casual racist slurs being spat everywhere.
-People were in general meaner. More domestic abuse, more repressed emotions, more plotting and murder and fights and enmity, less empathy and general niceness.
-Everyone smoked, everywhere.
-Coordinating over distances was difficult, you either had to hope the person you wanted to talk to was next to the phone when you rang it, if you even had a phone, or you had to have an agreed upon meeting time from the last time you met.
-Everyone feared in the back of their minds that nuclear destruction was fairly imminent.
-You could just be drafted and sent to war if you were a male.
This is from a US perspective. TL,DR, the past sucked in many ways, it does not surprise that it sucked in even more ways.
I do not believe that "women could not own homes or have bank accounts" accurately describes the United States in the 1960s. It likely was true that a woman who wanted a credit card or a mortgage in her own name would be quoted a higher interest rate than an otherwise-equivalent man or a married woman with a joint account, but that's a much weaker claim.
"The alternative hypothesis here is that lots of people were upset that the country was stagnating economically, and pursued neoliberal policies as a way to get the economy working again."
But then the question becomes why were these specific set of policies chosen and not, say, communism. The answer is simple, these policies appeal to a certain class which has a specific ideology. Who does the economy work for in the first place? These are basic questions that Marxists always ask themselves.
"But then the question becomes why were these specific set of policies chosen and not, say, communism."
Communism was stagnating badly by this point. North Korea had fallen behind the South, China had fallen behind Thailand, and West Germany was well ahead of East Germany.
Economic policies are not something that are freely decided by politicians - they have very specific party ideologies. My point is that only certain economic policies were ever on the table to begin with.
The question also becomes - "stagnating how" - a stagnant economy is not necessarily a bad thing for communists. If a planned economy must shrink then that's not necessarily a bad thing.
I hate to be so uncharitable, but I don't understand how you expect to be taken seriously with the name 'marxbro1917,' let alone the, yes, pro-famine takes.
> But then the question becomes why were these specific set of policies chosen and not, say, communism.
Presumably because they didn't expect them to work on net. At least, that's why I support neoliberal policies -- seems to be the best way to help the poor.
I have to say, marxbro, the mainstream economists with their textbooks and studies have much persuasive answers than any socialist I've read for questions like "how does the economy work", "what will this change in policy do", "who does the economy work for", etc. I get that you're a conflict theorist and all, so you probably think I'm lying and am just trying to further my class interests, but I really do just think you're wrong on the objective facts about the material consequences of various policy changes.
Having rising inflation along with economic stagnation was a major shock to the system's credibility. I'm not surprised that it created a big opening for alternative views, including more pro-business ones.
"lots of people were upset that the country was stagnating economically, and pursued neoliberal policies as a way to get the economy working again" seems like, at best, a naively charitable way of describing the motives of folks like Milton Friedman or organizations like the Chamber of Commerce. Do you really think they pursued the policies they pursued with head-shaking regret for what Harvey calls embedded liberalism? Their behavior sounds more like enthusiastic opportunism. The 1970s crisis was their chance to introduce polices they had wanted for a long time. This is, of course, was no different from the behavior of US liberals during FDR's administration. Neither group was "just trying to make things better." Both had very specific policies they wanted in place, good times or bad. This doesn't make either group evil or conspiratorial in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion sense. But let's not try to turn either side into innocent naifs.
I do not understand what your point is. Who has been made out as an innocent naif here? Is it more the intellectuals who (no one disputes) had been talking and advocating for decades about the policies that were weakly implemented after the 1970 blip, or their alleged victims, who could do naught but knuckle under to de facto coups and such? I think it's much more the latter.
+1
Naomi Klein the Shock Doctrine
Critics of neoliberalism would say that using income growth to measure "things are better" is proving them right!
I feel obliged to point out that making 100x as much money is not really of any use if food and housing also cost 100x as much. Also that there's a lot of noise (in the form of Gini coefficient) between GDP per capita and percentage of people with decent income.
The Third World *has* actually improved on the statistics that matter; I'm just pointing out that GDP per capita is one of the classically dubious ones and that you should probably avoid it if you're trying to bridge the gap with leftists.
Are these figures not adjusted for inflation and/or purchasing power parity?
The ones originally linked were nominal, although they were adjusted for inflation (and the graph for PPP was available if you looked around the sidebars). It is still mean, not median, though.
As I said, not criticising the contention that the Third World has gotten better - it has. I'm just pointing out that the statistics Jack used are ones that aren't going to convince anyone of that.
As the review from Michael Thompson I linked above says:
"Neoliberalism, as Harvey tells us, quoting Paul Treanor in the process, ‘values market exchange as “an ethic in itself, capable of acting as a guide to all human action, and substituting for all previously held ethical beliefs,” it emphasises the significance of contractual relations in the marketplace. It holds that the social good will be maximised by maximising the reach and frequency of market transactions, and it seeks to bring all human action into the domain of the market.’ "
"Neoliberalism is not simply an ethic in abstracto, however. Rather, the locus for its influence has become the ‘neoliberal state’, which collapses the notion of freedom into freedom for economic elites. ‘The freedoms it embodies reflect the interests of private property owners, businesses, multinational corporations and financial capital.’ (p. 7) The neoliberal state defends the new reach and depth of capital’s interests and is defined against the ‘embedded liberalism’ of the several decades following World War II when ‘market processes and entrepreneurial and corporate activities were surrounded by a web of social and political constraints and a regulatory environment that sometimes restrained but in other instances led the way in economic and industrial strategy.’"
You do know that, currently, today, there is a net outflow of capital from the African continent to the west, right?
So what? This isn't necessarily in contradiction to anything the above user said, or to an "a rising tide lifts all boats" take.
Do you know how the identities work? That is necessarily a result of Africa having positive net exports to the west. Same thing happens with other countries, you may or may not remember when it was a big deal that “China owns trillions of US debt.” Yeah, they have dollars laying around because we bought their stuff. They invest it because they prefer it to buying our exports. You’ll also note that interest and dividends will flow back to Africa because of this.
I know of at least one example where neoliberalism seems to be more to blame than colonialism : EU gives significant subsidies to its agriculture. This includes growing chicken. The worst chicken parts (this involves a fad for fillets as diet food), thanks to free trade, are sent to sub-Saharan Africa (they often arrive in dubious sanitary state). This wrecks the income of villagers that before could count on selling the chickens that they raised.
Nothing involving the results of the EU's Common Agricultural Policy is "neoliberal". Agricultural protectionism and subsidies are perfectly the opposite of neoliberalism, which is, after all, the "neo-" revival of classical liberal economic policy, which goes back to Adam Smith pointing out that the government could adopt polices to support a Scottish wine industry, but that would be wasteful and stupid.
What you describe with the chicken is, in fact, exactly the sort of mercantilism that was used to justify imperialism in order to seize captive markets to support the homeland's domestic producers.
Fair point, but in that case there's no such thing as a country with a neoliberal policy ?
Globalization and free trade are clearly neoliberal policies. The chicken issue is unlikely to be a specifically thought out mercantile policy, it's just the consequence of chicken producers trying to find a market for unwanted chicken parts. It might even have happened without subsidies, though the consequences probably wouldn't have been as bad ?
(Also, "forced" globalization and "forced" free trade being "imperialist neoliberal tools of domination" is a recurrent criticism from the left, and I don't think that by this they are specifically criticizing "dominating" countries exporting to "subordinate" countries, since the opposite situation is often criticized too ?)
That critique seems to be the sort of thing Lant Pritchett is critiquing here:
https://lantpritchett.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Development-Delivers_firstdraft.pdf
What would be the non-neoliberal way to measure whether things are better?
life expectancy. qalys if you're not around teh shrill crowd who thinks acknowledging that health is good is ableist. maybe gdp per capita adjusted somehow for gini coefficient
Do you have a good sense of what (if anything) changed in 2002?
The rise of China, the rise of telecommunications, and improvement in African institutions.
Another thing to consider is the strength of the dollar. The dollar weakened considerably over that timeframe, I’m not entirely sure how that appears in a metric that measures foreign GDP in current US dollars.
In my opinion, this is the best chart to understand what happened: https://www.statista.com/statistics/267603/capacity-of-container-ships-in-the-global-seaborne-trade/
From 1990-2000 we tripled the capacity of the global container fleet and then roughly tripled it again from 2000-2010.
It is almost impossible to describe how much more effective and easy it's gotten to ship cargo over the past 30 years. Sure, containerization was already popular, but computer-assisted technologies, logistical improvements and "smart" port systems have made shipping goods by sea easier, cheaper and faster. They've also allowed for larger and faster ships to be created, which spills back into increased capacity.
So the chart shows high ~constant growth from 1980 to 2010 and a slow after that. How would that be evidence for it being the cause of increasingly rapid economic growth since the 2002s?
(Also, horrible time axis!)
I think it's worth mentioning that the growth Africa experienced after 2000 is one of the major seasons that GDP has been de emphasized as a metric in development. As Peter Lewis notes in Growth Without Prosperity, (written in 2008 so right before his case got much stronger) this gdp growth was not accompanied with any real rise in life expectancy standard of living, or even in poverty.
There's an argument to be made that the only real game changing thing to happen in africa since 2000 (at least in the good sense) has been the South Africa's government decision to flout international IP laws and produce generic versions of HIV drugs, not a very neoliberal development.
Growth without prosperity (very good read) https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236788155_Growth_Without_Prosperity_in_Africa
Why should we attribute that growth to neoliberalism? Why should we think the cause is policies adopted decades previously that failed to show (what I think were promised) short term results rather than something else closer in time to the actual noticed change?
You could distinguish the countries that adopted neoliberal policies from those that didn't.
Sure, but I don't see that argument, or all of the necessary information to evaluate it, being put forward here.
“ concessions to public sector unions.... confronted public sector unions”
You use the term public sector unions when you mean, or should have meant, unions in general. I’m not sure why you’re doing this.
In the first use, I was trying to link unions to budgetary issues - IIUC, it's mostly public sector unions who affect government budgets, and who are directly under threat because of government shortfalls.
In the second use, I talked about the government confronting unions, which I think makes more sense in terms of public sector unions like PATCO. The government set the terms for private company - private union confrontation, but AFAIK was less important in confronting them directly.
Is there a reason you think I should change this to refer to unions more generally?
Yes. The wage price spirals of the 70’s were driven in large part by union contract COLA provisions.
I’m also not familiar with the idea that the government set the terms for private sector union/employer confrontation in the US.
It’s also unfortunate that the author didn’t mention the “guns and butter” reality of the Bretton Woods failure. It was the cumulative impact of the cost of the Vietnam War.
1) Wow, there are still people who believe in Keneysian inflationary theory after the last forty years?
2) What, exactly, do you think the entire National Labor Relations Act, as subsequently amended, is? Unions in the US aren't random private associations of workers, they're government-recognized collective bargaining agents certified by government-supervised elections, with the terms of dealings between them and businesses set by a huge book of regulations promulgated and enforced by the National Labor Relations Board.
And corporations aren’t random associations of capital either. They exist within an extensive legal framework. They are definitely not something that exists in a true free market.
Um, okay, so you're vehemently agreeing that, in fact, it's blatantly obvious to anyone who considers the idea for five seconds that "the government sets the terms for private sector union/employer confrontation in the US", in spite of your previous claim of non-familiarity with the idea?
Obviously not.
"The wage price spirals of the 70’s were driven in large part by union contract COLA provisions."
No. This stuff does not cause permanent shifts in the velocity of money.
Whoa, This was a Scott Alexander book review, not a guest review as part of the Book Review Contest? The whole time I was thinking it was a good attempt at an impression of Scott, but I wasn't buying it.
I see Petey and FBV above had the same reaction.
They say Charlie Chaplin once entered a Charlie Chaplin lookalike contest, and did mediocre.
Reminds me of one of my favorite Science Fiction short stories by Isaac Asimov, where a scientist invents time travel, fetches Shakespeare, and enrolls him in the Shakespeare class taught by one of his friends, only for good ol' Will to flunk the class.
Reminds me of the story in the Talmud of God time-travelling Moses forward in time to listen to a lesson by the future Rabbi Akiva. He couldn't understand the lesson at all, but when the students asked what was being taught Rabbi Akiva said it was passed down from Moses at Sinai (to his comfort).
http://blog.yalebooks.com/2017/03/27/the-talmud-and-rabbi-akiva/
Come to think of it, it wouldn't surprise me if Asimov knew of this story himself when writing the Shakespeare one.
Now I'm hoping you put one of your own book reviews in the book review contest, and see how it does. Obviously if it wins, you would discount your entry, and give the prize to the next participant, but it'd be a good way to see how others guage your writing without your brand attached.
Good suggestion. A useful control in the experiment if nothing else. And if it were to rank low, a useful prior for future readers' judgements.
If you'll allow me to be a killjoy, no evidence has ever been found of that event happening.
"I never heard about it."
"Well, of course you wouldn't."
Dolly Parton says this happened to her: https://www.womansworld.com/posts/entertainment/dolly-parton-lookalike-164680
I also thought it was a guest review.
I thought the same thing, in part because it's so TL;DR. I feel like reviews should summarize and not make me read substantial portions of the actual book.
The Contest review of The Wizard and the Prophet read like it had been written by Scott, or thereabouts. I wondered:
1/ Is this just the way rationalists write (no, Eliezer is stylistically very different, Julia Galef is vaguely similar)
2/ Does the contest attract people who happen to write like Scott?
3/ Are the contestants deliberately trying to write like Scott?
4/ Does Scott pick ones (consciously or not) that are similar to his style?
This could form the basis of a side contest.
I'd bet it's a mixture, in order 2 -> 3 -> 4 -> 1.
But 2 in the sense that people in the contest, disproportionately read Scott, like his writing style, and have absorbed it. And 3 in the sense that if all the instructions you get are "book review", you might use Scott's as reference of what's expected and liked by both Scott and the audience.
can these reviews be subtitled 'Scott review' or 'not a contest review' until the book review contest is done?
+1
I also thought it was a non-Scott review! But also, toward the end, I was thinking "this is the best one so far - it actually tries to dissect what's right, what's wrong, what the historic context of the book is, and attempts to illuminate the book from several sides" and then the comment section made me realise I'd been bamboozled. :D
Thatcher's on the cover, but only mentioned once here; were her policies (and Britain's situation at the time more generally) not a focus of Harvey's?
He was born in Britain, but moved to the US in the early 70s.
I normally find Scott's reviews quite helpful, but this one is...off. I don't know how to say it w/o risking offense, but I don't think you have the conceptual background to write this review.
To other readers, I'd recommend https://www.dissentmagazine.org/wp-content/files_mf/1390342754d3Thompson1.pdf as a critical review of this book, that ends up making some of the same objections Scott does — especially about the predictions Harvey made that didn't come to pass — but with much more specific, detailed, and nuanced descriptions of what Harvey thinks neoliberalism is, its relationship to state and nonstate actors, where his orthodox Marxism blinds him to trends in contemporary fusion politics, and where this book sits in the arc of his academic career.
I think — and Scott, I realize it is perhaps a little cruel to review you, reviewing — what surprised me here was the review seemed to almost mirror Harvey's worst tendencies towards a highly stylized class struggle, but with Harvey as the enemy. I get this; I often felt this way when I hateread things in grad school, and sometimes reviewed things this way too.
The reason why this surprised me is I usually recommend Scott's reviews as a great example of where someone tries to steelman as much as possible, to laboriously try to take an author, even one with whom he disagrees, on his own terms, and get inside it, and then show where it doesn't hold together, but also appreciate where it does. None of that generosity or appreciation was in this review.
Scott does sort of say this outright up top by framing the theses uncharitably. I just found it disappointing, because even where I disagree with Harvey, I do think we have much more to take from him than this review provides, which is why I linked the other above.
In the review posted, Petey, the author repeatedly makes claims along these lines, "Soon, Harvey believes, it will become evident that all of economic life and institutions are solely for the benefit of a single, small social class." Given that the last few decades have seen more people escape poverty more quickly than ever before in history, dirges about neoliberalism that fail to acknowledge the extraordinary improvement in the standard of living for billions strike me as a form of moral obtuseness that it is hard to take seriously. Stiglitz has acknowledged that increased reliance on market forces led to growth in China and Sen has done the same for India. The entire academic anti-neoliberalism industry, of which Harvey is chief cheerleader, strikes me as profoundly anti-poor. Africa urgently needs greater economic freedom so that Africans can also begin to escape near universal grinding poverty. Increased inequality a problem? Tell that to the Chinese who have seen something like a 10x increase in urban wages in the past few decades even as inequality has skyrocketed. Africans would love to see an increase in inequality if it also led to a 10x increase in wages. Both Thompson (the review you posted) and Harvey live in a bizarre twilight zone in which Marxist tropes about "capital" and nefarious elites supercede the plain facts of astonishing human progress. Have bad things also happened? For sure! Many due to "capital" and nefarious elites. But to ignore one of the greatest moral achievements in human history while singing these dirges is bizarre, even if all too common in academia.
Global poverty has only declined in the "last few decades" if you're using the World Bank international poverty line as your measure. You can look into how this poverty line is determined, but it's severely lacking by any reasonable definition of the term 'poverty'.
In short, the poverty line is an average of the poverty lines of the 15 poorest countries in the world from 2005, then converted into PPP dollars as determined by the 2011 metric of PPP. The result is a poverty line of $1.90/day (PPP). This is a transparently terrible metric. An average of the poverty lines set by the governments of the 15 poorest countries on the planet? Really? There are all sorts of factors I need not get into here which make it clear that this is an unreasonable way to measure poverty.
The World Bank has also refused the recommendation issued by its own Poverty Commission that they change their metrics. I wonder why? Food for thought!
The poverty rate determination also excludes most participants in the informal economy, which in most of these countries forms a majority of the economy (India's economy, for example, accounts for 80-90% of its workforce).
When more reasonable definitions of poverty are applied, it becomes clear that global poverty has receded quite minimally over the last 25 years, and that almost all of that recession is due to growing incomes in China. Hardly one of the "greatest moral achievements in human history".
The Chinese growth model, while certainly market-based, is not particularily neoliberal. For instance, a key tenet of neoliberalism is greatly lessening political control of the economy; while there is certainly less of that in China than before the Deng-era reforms, the Chinese authorities still direct their economy to a greater extent than in Western countries (they still have five-year plans, as an example).
A relevant comparison is Russian shock therapy in the 90s, a far more typically neoliberal reform. Rapid privatization and headlong market reforms with a much lessened role for politics and the state quickly created a social disaster, decimating both society and the economy, setting the stage for the more authoritarian (though still pretty neoliberal) Putin era.
While both countries were Communist command economies, they took very different approaches to market reforms, and the less neoliberal route seems to have worked much better. There were of course significant differences between the two countries, so it's not a one to one comparison, but as natural experiments go one could certainly do worse.
While one can certainly make a distinction between IMF/World Bank "Washington Consensus" neoliberalism, on the one hand, and the combination of rural privatization and astounding SEZ free markets, on the other, David Harvey does not. Harvey, and the vast majority of academic writers on "neoliberalism" are Marxist anti-capitalists. I'd love to see a list of critics of "neoliberalism" in the Washington Consensus sense who elsewhere praise the wild west SEZ free markets with no labor protections that played a key role in creating Chinese growth and prosperity. Can you name one? Is there one single opponent of neoliberalism who raves about the success of the SEZs?
And the quibbling about decreased poverty? See link below for a Brookings analysis of the "Elephant chart,"
https://www.brookings.edu/research/whats-happening-to-the-world-income-distribution-the-elephant-chart-revisited/
It shows the income growth across income percentiles from 1988 to 2008. The discussion shows the state of the art disputes about the chart as of 2018.
But what is most stunning about the chart is that at every level, except at the 80th percentile (roughly developed world working class), everyone else gained. One could have a "glass half empty" perspective and note that the poorest only saw their income go up less than 20%. But from a "glass pretty darn full" perspective, a good chunk of the global population saw gains from between 40-80%. We're talking 6 or 7 billion people seeing significant gains. The punchline:
"Poorer countries, and the lower income groups within those countries, have grown most rapidly in the past 20 years."
I know Jason Hickel, like David Harvey, is working as hard as he can to keep the global poor impoverished so he can continue to hate capitalism, but at what point can we all say, "Gosh, most of the world's people being better off is kind of a great outcome?" and "Thank god the insane Marxist babble that was taken seriously from the 40s to the 70s is no longer taken seriously?"
It's not terribly hard, in 2020, to find pro-China communists who will defend the SEZs and all other aspects of Chinese "neoliberalism" trolling the internet. Many aren't even Chinese!
Though, as far as non-Chinese academic theorists are concerned - I can't think of any. Though they're not hard to find in the Chinese academic sphere.
There is a book coming out soon, " How China Escaped Shock Therapy ", by Isabella M. Weber (a Western academic who is partly educated in China) which investigates the non-Washington Consensus reforms in China.. I am looking forward to reading it. The author seems to be fairly left-wing, but seems to acknowledge that the reform path taken by China has had real benefits.
I don't think Weber places particular emphasis on the SEZs (and it is not clear to me that SEZs are the magic ingredient for Chinese growth; after all, many countries have established SEZs), but she does seem to be an opponent of neoliberalism generally who recognizes that the Chinese growth model and market reforms has been a stunning success. However, until I have read her book I find it hard to give an accurate rendition of her viewpoints.
I had a similar reaction - I initially thought this was a contest entry and felt that Scott was slipping up by letting this low quality one in. Realizing, in the comment section, that it was written by Scott was quite a surprise.
If people have to have read extensively about and adopted a particular conceptual framework in order to properly evaluate a book or set of arguments contained within it, it's probably just a bad book.
To me, this point seems flawed. You only want books written with the same conceptual framework? I can see where you're coming from - it's a lot of mental work to acclimate yourself to a different approach, especially if they rely on a set of thinkers and assumptions that you're unfamiliar with. But to do everything with the same conceptual framework seems like a recipe for intellectual stagnation.
I'm reminded of Hofstadter's 'jootsing' here - if you only critique from within the system, you miss alternative systems.
No, that's not what I meant. I would say rather that authors ought to, as a matter of course, adequately explain the framework they're writing/thinking/arguing within, so that a person of reasonable intelligence could pick it up and follow along. If we all have to read five other books in order to understand your priors and grasp your line of reasoning, you're doing yourself and potential readers a disservice, because what percentage of readers will have actually read all those books? (I suppose there are certain technical subjects where this wouldn't apply, like, say, theoretical physics, but this particular book is clearly not in one of those genres).
The uncharitable way to look at this is that if you've written a book that can only be comprehended by a certain audience and seems weird, wrong, or inscrutable to the uninitiated, you're probably just preaching to the choir. IE, you've written a bad book.
This makes sense if you think that the point of writing a book is always to reach "the general public". But if you think that a book can have a target audience, and can say something new to that target audience, then this misses the point.
A book that makes a claim about the history of neoliberalism, that is intended for a target audience that already dislikes neoliberalism, can be useful and meaningful, if the target audience isn't already assumed to agree with the central thesis about the history of neoliberalism.
I guess this is a matter of judgment or taste, maybe, because I think a book that isn't convincing or even comprehensible to people who don't already agree with you is pretty low value by definition.
If you think that the only value of a book is a binary bit of converting a person who doesn't agree with something to agreeing with that thing, then it would be low value.
But if a book can inform people who are already knowledgeable about one thing, to also know about something else, then that seems to me like a very different sort of value that it can have.
Another value can be to state clearly a set of arguments or views so that someone else can later show why they're wrong.
I don't know if this book itself succeeds at either of those, but neither of them requires a book to be accessible to a wider audience.
Many of those who disagree with Marxian approaches are nonetheless familiar with them. Marxian scholars tend to disagree with mainstream economics, history and political science, yet comprehend and engage with it just fine.
The question isn't agreement, just familiarity.
If the book required some prerequisite understanding of the author or Marxism or Neo liberalism or whatever, isn't that on the author to either mention that at the start or provide the necessary background in the text? Or is this book known to be part of a series and it was Scott's error to not read it in sequence? Like, I will grant that one could have background knowledge that gives them a different understanding of the book than what Scott got. But if that background is truly necessary to understand the book, then that seems like a failure of the author, not the reader, for not providing that background. If a book is misunderstood by readers because the book fails to include the information required for understanding it, it seems fair to me to just call that a bad book.
I would call that bad marketing, more than a bad book.
I think the problem here is that Scott thought this book would be an introduction to neoliberalism from a conceptual background/framework he had, and instead, he picked up an introduction to neoliberalism by a Marxist, who — because he is writing for other Marxists, or at least people sympathetic to Marxism — is not unpacking and explaining all of his priors.
I mean, I do think the book could probably make that a bit more explicit, but considering Harvey has been one of the most prominent and influential Marxists writing for the last forty years, he probably felt like he didn't need to?
This is one of my puzzlements with this review, because it's not clear to me if Scott knew what he was getting into or not.
"Also, I wonder if any movement could survive this level of critique. Some progressives formed anti-inequality think tanks after the Great Recession? Guess progressivism is a sham astroturf movement that merely used the Great Recession as an excuse to push their class war agenda!"
This seems like a weird take; it's just not symmetrical. Business owners acting to further their class interests is bad (according to pretty much everyone, hence why they pretend to have other justifications); normal workers acting in the same way is good.
It is not the case that business owners acting to further their class interests is bad and especially not the case that pretty much everyone thinks so. Millions of americans are business owners* and in favor of business ownership. Many of the Americans who aren't business owners would like to be business owners**, and plenty of candidates for city and state and federal government run on platforms of being friendly to businesses.
*https://www.statista.com/statistics/315556/established-business-ownership-rate-in-north-america/
**https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2019/05/06/1817222/0/en/Half-of-Americans-Prefer-Opening-a-Small-Business-to-Retirement-According-to-The-UPS-Store-Survey.html
This seems like a left wing bubble take. According to Gallup, 31% of Americans support organized labor "a great deal" or "quite a lot". 22% don't trust it. 45% are ambivalent.
Meanwhile, 75% support small business a great deal or quite a lot. That is the highest of any class or institution in the country. More than any government agency, office, or institution. 38% support the banks. It's true only 19% support big business. However, I think that "Americans support the banks more than the unions and small businesspeople more than anyone else" points in the opposite direction of your claim.
Perhaps, but I don't know that people would say they support the interest of business owners as *a class*. At most they'd support the interests of small business owners as a class, and even then, the focus is on (real or imagined) positive effects- e.g. job creation. The interests of business owners, explicitly considered in isolation from those of workers, is a much dicier thing to support.
And how does this thesis hold up to trusting unions, organizations explicitly meant to conduct class politics on behalf of the working class, less than the banks?
Well I think that there are a lot of people who, even if they haven't been convinced that the execution is very good *in principle* think there is something more honorable about defending the interests of workers (poorer, more numerous) than defending the interests of business owners (richer, less numerous) when those clash. I.e. it's not a matter of class politics vs other politics, is a matter of how numerous and sympathetic the class in question is.
That sounds like literally exactly a matter of class politics to me. If you want better working conditions, decreasing the number of employers bidding on their labor by making it harder to be a business owner seems counterproductive. If you would protect workers, make life easier for business owners.
Sorry lol, just wanted to demonstrate that it's possible to invent the exact opposite argument. This is indeed what almost half the country thinks, or at least, they would wave a flag for someone else articulating it.
I don't mean to sound pedantic, but you're conflating the Gallup poll for "confidence in an institution" which Gallup actually measure in this poll with "support for the institution" which Gallup didn't. (source 1)
This might seem like a semantic difference, but it isn't. A different poll run by Gallup in 2020 found that America's overall approval of labor Unions is around 65% (source 2). This indicates that more people have favorable opinions about labor unions than have high confidence in them.
This is just me speculating, but I think that when measuring confidence, you might be getting a mixture of people's support for the institutions along with their perception of how stable those institutions are. Thus, seemingly bedrock institutions like banks will have inflated scores relative to organizations that people like, but seem precarious.
1 - https://news.gallup.com/poll/1597/confidence-institutions.aspx
2 - https://news.gallup.com/poll/318980/approval-labor-unions-remains-high.aspx
What poll are you referring to? According to this Gallup poll [1], labor union approval has been between 53% and 65% for the last 5 years. (Of course, some of this comes from the way you ask the question.)
[1]: https://news.gallup.com/poll/12751/labor-unions.aspx
I think we differ because you're assuming that "further their class interests" is the natural way to look at this.
The alternative hypothesis here is that lots of people were upset that the country was stagnating economically, and pursued neoliberal policies as a way to get the economy working again. Proving that one neoliberal talked to another neoliberal and said "we should support neoliberalism together" doesn't prove that this is wrong. This is how all politics works. I don't know what would convince someone who thinks this way that nothing sinister is going on. Would they have to learn that no two neoliberals had ever communicated, and they all just supported neoliberalism independently on each other, like Leibnitz's pre-established harmony?
Although not as sinister as the conspiratorial "further their class interests" implies, I think you're perhaps overlooking the potential sinisterness of "upset the country was stagnating".
If the common man led a safe and happy life thanks to the social security net, albeit at the cost of abstract nation-wider "growth", then arguably an attempt by the wealthy to try to kickstart new growth at the expense of that security is a case of the wealthy pursuing their own vaguely alien goals at the expense of what the majority of citizens want out of life.
I'm not sure this is what Harvey believes, but I think that is what a lot of leftists talk about when referring to conflicts in class interests. There's no hidden conspiracy to be uncovered, but the whole mindset of looking at growth/GDP as trumping the birth-to-grave security of ordinary individuals is itself viewed as an idisoyncrasy of the plutocrats, at odds with the interest of the people.
When I say "stagnating", this is polite speak for what the book describes as eg: "[Government] supporters were in open revolt, and public sector workers initiated a series of crippling strikes in the 'winter of discontent' of 1978. Hospital workers went out, and medical care had to be severely rationed. Striking gravediggers refused to bury the dead. The truck drivers were on strike too. Only shop stewards had the right to let trucks bearing "essential supplies" cross picket lines. British rail put out a terse notice "There are no trains today"...striking unions seemed about the bring the whole nation to a halt."
The problem wasn't that everyone was happy but GDP was 1 point lower, the problem was that everyone had a sense that the system was falling apart and needed to be saved.
Oh *I* quite understand that; I am merely trying to guess at what far-left thinkers who go on and on about apparent sinister conspiracies to "further class interests" might be talking about; a sort of… semi-steelmanning, where I try to reconstruct a *coherent* worldview that would make their views seem non-crazy, albeit one not necessarily backed by the empirical data.
This sounds fake to me.
I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm saying that you're describing such a different world than the one I've experienced that it just doesn't sound real. I was born in the 1990s and I fundamentally can't imagine a world this regularly disrupted. It would be like if you were describing a system very like America, but within one generation of mine everyone wore clown noses on Thursdays.
For people living through this time, did it actually feel this bad? Was this kind of behavior normalized? Or did it not really have that much of an impact on day-to-day living?
"I fundamentally can't imagine a world this regularly disrupted"
You weren't in America/China/most of Europe a year ago?
"For people living through this time, did it actually feel this bad?"
Yes.
The 1980's under Thatcher were pretty awful too. We had two major recessions, sky-high inflation, massive unemployment, and whole industries falling apart.
"I was born in the 1990s and I fundamentally can't imagine a world this regularly disrupted." Right, because neoliberalism won and is actually, demonstrably better. The proof of the pudding is in the eating.
It was very much like this. I’m looking at the people your age and younger all metaphorically curling up and going comatose because they think we’re on a heretoforth frontier of scary, irrecoverable badness, and I’m thinking “man, this is... pretty normal in the scheme of things, and in many ways it’s better.”
I was born in the same decade, and do not have an experience like this, same as you. And as for disruption of daily life by unions specifically, I do not have a good experience to relate, but whenever I ask my elders about it, they never fail to remark that we are a lot better off these days, despite what people may say. The following are some inconveniences, major and minor, that I have learned about.
-Long lines and rationing at gas stations in the 70s.
-Car ownership being rare in the 60s, especially more than one per household.
-Air conditioning in homes nonexistent until the late 70s.
-Common household chores such as dish cleaning, food preparation, and laundry taking much more time than today due to lack of mechanical assistance and pre cooked food supply chains.
-Air so polluted you could safely look directly at the sun.
-Performing calculations required marking up punch cards by hand and scheduling an appointment at the computation center.
-Women could not own homes or have bank accounts until the 70s.
-Frequent, casual racist slurs being spat everywhere.
-People were in general meaner. More domestic abuse, more repressed emotions, more plotting and murder and fights and enmity, less empathy and general niceness.
-Everyone smoked, everywhere.
-Coordinating over distances was difficult, you either had to hope the person you wanted to talk to was next to the phone when you rang it, if you even had a phone, or you had to have an agreed upon meeting time from the last time you met.
-Everyone feared in the back of their minds that nuclear destruction was fairly imminent.
-You could just be drafted and sent to war if you were a male.
This is from a US perspective. TL,DR, the past sucked in many ways, it does not surprise that it sucked in even more ways.
I do not believe that "women could not own homes or have bank accounts" accurately describes the United States in the 1960s. It likely was true that a woman who wanted a credit card or a mortgage in her own name would be quoted a higher interest rate than an otherwise-equivalent man or a married woman with a joint account, but that's a much weaker claim.
"The alternative hypothesis here is that lots of people were upset that the country was stagnating economically, and pursued neoliberal policies as a way to get the economy working again."
But then the question becomes why were these specific set of policies chosen and not, say, communism. The answer is simple, these policies appeal to a certain class which has a specific ideology. Who does the economy work for in the first place? These are basic questions that Marxists always ask themselves.
"But then the question becomes why were these specific set of policies chosen and not, say, communism."
Communism was stagnating badly by this point. North Korea had fallen behind the South, China had fallen behind Thailand, and West Germany was well ahead of East Germany.
Economic policies are not something that are freely decided by politicians - they have very specific party ideologies. My point is that only certain economic policies were ever on the table to begin with.
The question also becomes - "stagnating how" - a stagnant economy is not necessarily a bad thing for communists. If a planned economy must shrink then that's not necessarily a bad thing.
Hence the famines.
Interesting
I hate to be so uncharitable, but I don't understand how you expect to be taken seriously with the name 'marxbro1917,' let alone the, yes, pro-famine takes.
Well, 1917 is pro-famine already, might just as well.
> But then the question becomes why were these specific set of policies chosen and not, say, communism.
Presumably because they didn't expect them to work on net. At least, that's why I support neoliberal policies -- seems to be the best way to help the poor.
I have to say, marxbro, the mainstream economists with their textbooks and studies have much persuasive answers than any socialist I've read for questions like "how does the economy work", "what will this change in policy do", "who does the economy work for", etc. I get that you're a conflict theorist and all, so you probably think I'm lying and am just trying to further my class interests, but I really do just think you're wrong on the objective facts about the material consequences of various policy changes.
Having rising inflation along with economic stagnation was a major shock to the system's credibility. I'm not surprised that it created a big opening for alternative views, including more pro-business ones.
Yep. We could have lived with one or the other, perhaps, but both at the same time was incredibly demoralizing.
"lots of people were upset that the country was stagnating economically, and pursued neoliberal policies as a way to get the economy working again" seems like, at best, a naively charitable way of describing the motives of folks like Milton Friedman or organizations like the Chamber of Commerce. Do you really think they pursued the policies they pursued with head-shaking regret for what Harvey calls embedded liberalism? Their behavior sounds more like enthusiastic opportunism. The 1970s crisis was their chance to introduce polices they had wanted for a long time. This is, of course, was no different from the behavior of US liberals during FDR's administration. Neither group was "just trying to make things better." Both had very specific policies they wanted in place, good times or bad. This doesn't make either group evil or conspiratorial in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion sense. But let's not try to turn either side into innocent naifs.
I do not understand what your point is. Who has been made out as an innocent naif here? Is it more the intellectuals who (no one disputes) had been talking and advocating for decades about the policies that were weakly implemented after the 1970 blip, or their alleged victims, who could do naught but knuckle under to de facto coups and such? I think it's much more the latter.
I was quoting SA's description of the neoliberals. I think my point is clear enough.