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.
> Do you really think they pursued the policies they pursued with head-shaking regret for what Harvey calls embedded liberalism?
I don't really know what you mean by this; the claim is that they though neoliberalism would be better, not that they loved embedded liberalism despite its flaws.
Milton Freidman, for example, famously predicted the collapse of the Phillips curve and inflation-management techniques based on it in the late 60s. I don't think Friedman was like, "oh well, what a shame, I really loved that system but now we can't use it anymore", I think he was like "I TOLD you that the system was broken and about to collapse, now can we adopt some policies that actually make sense and won't leave everyone poor?"
Of course Friedman et al. didn't say "oh well, what a shame, etc."! But it's looks to me like SA's rhetoric is saying precisely that--that they were pursuing neoliberalism only in an innocent spirit of, "It's too bad about embedded liberalism. I guess we'll trying this new thing," instead of seizing an opportunity they had long wanted. I'm agreeing with you: Friedman et al. had always hated the previous system, and wanted to replace it with theirs. I'm not saying that's bad. It's not bad or good; it's just what ardent believers do. My point is what seems to me SA's disingenuous rhetoric.
I’ve read all your comments and still have no idea what you think is disingenuous. People noticed a problem, had ideas about how to fix the problem, and then implemented what they could so that the problem would be fixed. Where does the nefarious part come in?
I think SA's formulation, "lots of people were upset that the country was stagnating economically, and pursued neoliberal policies as a way to get the economy working again" is disingenuous. The formulation "People noticed a problem, had ideas about how to fix the problem, and then implemented what they could so that the problem would be fixed." is also disingenuous. The disingenuousness has to do with your wording. These were sophisticated, ambitious men who seized an opportunity they had been looking for. That does NOT--repeat, NOT--make them bad. It DOES mean there was more to them and what they were doing than just noticing a problem and trying to fix it. I'm concerned with the rights and wrongs of how we describe history and these particular historical actors, not with the rights and wrongs of neoliberalism as such.
> Of course Friedman et al. didn't say "oh well, what a shame, etc."! But it's looks to me like SA's rhetoric is saying precisely that
? I think you misunderstood my comment, sorry. I agree with Scott that neoliberals like Friedman "were upset that the country was stagnating economically, and pursued neoliberal policies as a way to get the economy working again". I, and presumably Scott, disagree with your accusation of what we believe — that they loved embedded liberalism and were sad to see it go. As far as I can tell Scott has only said the former; you are arguing against and accusing him of believing the latter. But they are different claims.
I don't know what you mean by opportunism; is everyone who advocates for political change an opportunist by definition? If not, what exactly are you accusing Milton Friedman et al of? (And if so, I still don't understand what you're trying to say or what's so wrong with Scott's formulation.)
Oh, dear--we seem to be understanding each other less than ever. The more we try to communicate, the less we seem to be actually communicating. I was critiquing SA's rhetoric. It's a fairly minor point, and not worth wasting further time over.
Real annual GDP growth over the period 1970 to 1979 averaged 3.5%. What was in fact happening is that the gains of growth were being shared equitably across the population. This is why some people are inclined to argue that the rich decided to use neoliberal policies to discipline the workers, resulting in the post-1970s wage stagnation we have observed.
Lets say I work for and hold shares in company X. In order to reduce operating costs, company X decides to let some employees go (including me). As a response, share prices in company X increase 10%.
Sure - the actions that the company took were good for the business owners but bad for me personally. Even if I benefit from the rise in stock prices, I'm disproportionally hurt by the actions the company took to get that share price increase.
My argument is that your average American with a 401k is more exposed to the downsides of companies pursuing an increase share price than they are to the upsides.
Your average American with a 401k is heavily exposed to the downside of a specific company canning him. He is also lightly exposed to the upsides of each individual company canning other people and therefore increasing their profits, which in aggregate give him positive expected value as businesses, as a whole, are generally profitable.
"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."
Can this really be presumed? Corporate stakeholders include employees, customers and shareholders. So "corporate interests" would at first blush to cover a wider swath of the public than labor interests alone.
Business owners =/= corporate stakeholders – and most business lobby groups and the like do not, in fact, represent 'corporate stakeholders' in the broad sense you've described.
Nevertheless, it is probably not true that "pretty much everyone" says "business owners acting to further their own class interests is bad."
"Business owners" (really what we're talking about is management, not owners qua owners) lobby for the interests of their business. What I'm saying is that the interests of a business often align with the interests of the stakeholders of the business, which is a bigger cross-section of the public than the interests of just labor.
Like the interests of a labor union can be at cross-sections with the interests of the consumers and shareholders of their employer. Or often shareholders, employees and consumers have an interest in, say, the business not going bankrupt (hence union and management support for the automaker bailouts in 2009). So surely the interests of business owners are not inherently bad.
Management are inherently predisposed to act in the interest of management and contractually required to act in the interest of shareholders; the sets of management and shareholders are generally not all that large compared to the set of employees.
The goals of management and shareholders can align with those of employees as far as company actions go, but when it comes to remuneration they are inherently diametrically opposed.
"The goals of management and shareholders can align with those of employees as far as company actions go, but when it comes to remuneration they are inherently diametrically opposed"
This is where I think the business vs labor framing falls apart for me. The above is true as far as it goes. Strictly speaking, a company wants to minimize labor costs as much as possible. But in equilibrium what causes wages is to increase is tight labor markets, which comes from a lot of companies doing well and needing to hire people. So there are certain margins where there is a a trade-off between business and labor (at least in the short run) but on many (most?) issues the pro-business positions is also pro-labor if only in the sense that profitable businesses expand and hire more people.
The problem is that in practice the wages are being kept down by on one hand illegal and "grey market" jobs often abusing immigrants with limited choices and legal recourse and on the other hand by just hollowing out the business until only the core of finance & sales departments remain and moving the rest to a country with less regulations and cheaper labor. In theory *eventually* this is going to stabilize too, but at what cost ?
Shareholders actually covers a very broad group of people given the presence of mutual funds and ETFs.
"but when it comes to remuneration they are inherently diametrically opposed."
They aren't going to be diametrically opposed to policy/actions that allows the pie to grow (or prevent the pie from shrinking). They will be opposed to how the pie is split up. Like, I'm pretty sure Boeing's employees are very much in favor of Boeing lobbying the government to sell more military equipment.
Pretty much everyone?? I don't know anyone who thinks that way. This seems like a weirdly isolated point of view that you might find in academia or in the bowels of a behemoth like Amazon or Google. Most Americans are employed by small business, know the owner very well (if they aren't the owner themselves) and have no problem at all with the business representing its own interests vigorously. Except they don't think of it as "the business" they think of it as ol' Joe the Boss, who is looking out for himself and for us, the guys in the shop who work for him.
Also no normal person thinks in terms of "class," like he's fresh out of a college seminar on Marxism. You ask normal people what "class" means and they say "Spanish 1?"
>Furthermore, if US interest rates rise (as at some point they must) then what happened to Mexico after the Volcker interest rate increase in 1979 starts to loom as a real problem.
The reason Mexico ran into trouble, as he points out in the book a few paragraphs up in your review, is that their debt was denominated in dollars. Fortunately, so is ours, but we also make dollars, so we can't possibly run into that specific issue.
A warning that in the future I will ban you for comments like this. I'm happy to have my mistakes pointed out, but you will need to actually point out my mistakes, not just be generically hostile. For example, if the debt wasn't denominated in dollars, tell me that.
Sorry, was there something in my review that was denying this, or inconsistent with this? Or are you arguing against Wizzy above (even though you addressed the comment to me)?
Note that my post was a direct quote of Scott's quote of the book. I was pointing out how inconsistent and flawed the author's argument was, as he made a comparison to wildly different circumstances that he had no excuse for, seeing as he talked about them in detail earlier in his book.
Good Lord it's always fun to see how many levels of indirection these discussions generate.
Scott takes exception to the argument of the author. Reader 1 take exception Scott's argument. Reader 2 disagrees with Reader 1... Reader n disagrees with Reader n - 1. Plus all the permutations of those that agree with multiple prior arguments.
Things get very meta in a hurry. I don't always have a dog in these fights, but they sure are entertaining.
This is semimythology. The richer the region within the U.S. you look at, the less growth there was between 1930 and 1970. The 1930s-early 1970s was mostly a process of poor regions catching up with the rich, not faster growth in the richest regions, which is what matters. There was rising inequality starting around 1980, though, but I don't think that's inherently wrong.
"workforces were so heavily unionized that companies were nervous about any changes that might upset employees."
Unionization was around 25% in the early 1970s, that means if you were a worker, there was a 75% chance you were not part of a union.
"but it kept starting and expanding programs like Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security"
Government transfer payments did rise very swiftly as a percentage of GDP between 1950 and 1975, but they have continued to rise since, though at a slower pace. It's certainly possible to go further in expanding them, but there is a limit - Vermont voters rejected a universal healthcare proposal in 2014.
"Starting a new business was considered some bizarre act of alchemy, like discovering a new form of matter; normal people worked for the same giant company their whole life and got a nice gold watch as a reward when they retired."
This wasn't true; new business formation went to all-time lows in the 2010s, and was much higher earlier:
"normal people worked for the same giant company their whole life and got a nice gold watch as a reward when they retired"
Large firm employment as a percentage of total employment is at a record high. This description much more closely matches the world of today than the world of the early 1970s:
Matthew Yglesias was recently pointing out how the very wealthiest Americans are now tech entrepreneurs, whereas in the past they got their money view inheritance or oil, but the economy as a whole has stagnated when measured using TFP. Unfortunately, he cleared out his older tweets recently, so I can't easily find where he wrote it (and if it was also at Slow Boring, I'm not paid subscriber).
Specifically, it was Matt Yglesias rebutting the Paul Graham essay. Not rebutting the central fact that billionaires these days tend to be self-made entrepreneurs, but pointing out that this change does not, in fact, seem to be correlated with broader dynamism in the economy. From the paywalled article:
> If you look at the tippy top of the economy, you see a lot fewer heirs in 2021 than you had in 1981 and a lot more tech founders — it seems like the economy has grown more dynamic. But if you look at the aggregate productivity statistics, you see a sharp slowdown in the mid-1970s that we never really recover from. So the change at the top of the Forbes rankings can’t be a cause or a consequence of the greater dynamism of the American economy, because the American economy has become less dynamic, not more.
The oil thing might have been partly tax-structuring. If you invested in Texas oil wells in the Postwar Period, you got a huge tax shelter on the profits (27.5% of the taxable income generated by a well). If the oil well failed to pan out, you got to deduct all the losses.
"not faster growth in the richest regions, which is what matters"
This is an, um, unusual take. Why do you say that? Most utilitarians would say that the biggest gains are enriching the poorest more. Even if you don't think inequality is a problem per se, further enriching the richest just doesn't sound all that beneficial. Do you just think that rich-regions not-growing indicates a lack of development/innovation/investment in a way that indirectly reflects the economy is not doing well and will likely stagnate soon?
"Even if you don't think inequality is a problem per se, further enriching the richest just doesn't sound all that beneficial."
Not correct; that's how the industrial revolution started. The regions catching up might be able to create new technologies, but they usually don't.
"Do you just think that rich-regions not-growing indicates a lack of development/innovation/investment in a way that indirectly reflects the economy is not doing well and will likely stagnate soon?"
But isn't this argument just that enriching the rich will later enrich the non-rich, and so admitting that enriching the non-rich is still what "really matters"? Or do you value the creation of new technologies in and of themselves, rather than the benefit they bring to the people in need?
And if only enriched regions are capable of producing the things you desire (new technology), then enriching the poorest ones allows them to start competing, right? (See China.)
The industrial Revolution did start with the rich getting richer. Which is what nearly killed it. The mass of people learned to like if not live capitalism when they got richer. That seems to have needed trade unionism.
>> "normal people worked for the same giant company their whole life and got a nice gold watch as a reward when they retired"
>Large firm employment as a percentage of total employment is at a record high. This description much more closely matches the world of today than the world of the early 1970s
There's no contradiction here - the claim is that large firm employment used to be something that lasted for decades, but now they hire and fire people over shorter time scales. That is perfectly compatible with more people being (temporarily) employed by large firms now.
Fascinating points, and they all seem legitimate to me. My question is where did the semimythology come from? Scott's narrative seemed pretty in line (what I understood as) the general consensus. If it is indeed as wrong as you point out, why is it so widespread (or maybe more precisely, why did Scott and I think it was so widespread)?
> The richer the region within the U.S. you look at, the less growth there was between 1930 and 1970. The 1930s-early 1970s was mostly a process of poor regions catching up with the rich, not faster growth in the richest regions, which is what matters.
Can you recommend any books or resources to dig deeper into this? Thank you.
The review was interesting, but I think largely misses the actual arguments of the book. Harvey does come across as pretty preachy (especially towards the end of the book if I remember correctly) but a lot of the larger points stand well. The argument is basically that the idea of free trade and markets would lead to better human outcomes was used by certain people to make a ton of money, probably at the expense of other people.
Harvey looks at the free markets / free trade idea over time and shows how it is a basic power politics bait and switch. The "neoliberal" groups talked big about free markets, but then did a lot of things that look exactly like the opposite of free markets. The playbook was basically to come in, create a market, and then manipulate it for profit. All while saying it is in the service of human freedom.
His suggestions for improvements to the system never struck me as particularly useful, but the overall framework has served me well when trying to understand economic and political news.
This was a keystone reading for one of my favorite professors in school, and a pretty useful book to understand late 20th century history. I ended up writing a paper for the class called "A Brief History of Neoliberalism in Turkey" which used Harvey's framework to look at the changes in labor and business power there.
Yes, I mentioned this and why it didn't impress me, see the part starting with "the second thesis is". Harvey could have done this well, but in fact did it badly.
Considering how badly you misrepresented Harvey in the first of your (self-admitted!) uncharitable theses there's no reason to believe that you got the other ones correct.
Question? In your review you mention that Harvey used the Bush tax cuts as an example of something the ruling class did that helped them despite it being against a Neoliberal framework, and accurately pointed out that tax cuts are a basic part of Neoliberalism. Did Harvey ever mention Corporate Welfare? That seems to be a better example of something the ruling class did that benefited themselves, despite being incoherent in a neoliberal framework. That said, my 5 second google search suggests that the term corporate welfare has been used since the 50s, so maybe even Harvey couldn't blame Neoliberalism for that?
> The argument is basically that the idea of free trade and markets would lead to better human outcomes was used by certain people to make a ton of money, probably at the expense of other people.
I always chuckle at the implication that someone getting rich means that someone else was exploited. It betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how value is created.
I'm not saying it is a good argument. But it is interesting.
What Harvey does is basically look at some various buckets of things associated with capital and labor and parse out what is actually happening (based on things like capital flows) compared to what people are saying.
So it raises questions like: Why do politicians and bankers and other corporate types always make this appeal to market supremacy?
Why is it that you can regularly read sentences like this: "President Kassi Brou said the electricity market would ensure an increase in investment, considering the existence of a free trade area and the free circulation of persons, goods and services in the region." when looking through news items of developing country financial news?
Then also why at the same time are unions getting broken up, labor power diminishing, and the governments selling off publicly-held assets?
To me those are interesting questions, but the review completely blows past most of this to focus on -ism vs -ism issues.
Wasn't going to say anything but that one disrupted flow for me to. I'm going to think of it as a kind of semantic typo. I hate when I make those sort of mistakes too.
Re: The moralism about left-wing terrorism in the 70's that often comes up around these conversations and in the link you give to Status 451. I'll admit the terrorist acts are not a good look for the left, and it does show pathologies in the left of the time, just like contemporary right-wing terrorism shows pathologies in the right wing of today, but using Wikipedia's numbers I count 62 deaths from terrorism in the 70's- from all sources. If these figures are right your annual probability of being killed by a left-wing terrorist was about one in 34 million. Even if the real figure was 10x that, it doesn't matter very much, although yes, I grant it was a symptom of deeper sickness. [And yes I acknowledge that people could use this same argument to defend the contemporary right against incrimination for their terrorism].
Might I suggest putting up a small notice at the top stating that this is *not* a book review contest entry. I assumed it was at first, and so did many other readers.
I'm not an economic historian, but I second those commentators who say that this doesn't read like you're trying to have a sympathetic, though probing, conversation with this book. I can't exactly say you're wrong, because of my lack of knowledge about economic history, but by the very standards you've encouraged in this community- charity, steelmanning etc.- this review reads... suspiciously.
Whenever I don't read and review books I disagree with, people tell me I'm being prejudiced and avoiding any information that might challenge me.
Whenever I do read and review books I disagree with, and say I still disagree with them, people tell me I'm being uncharitable and it's "suspicious".
I don't know what people want, other than for me to automatically agree with every book that expresses an opinion I don't like, no matter how bad its arguments are. Again, I am happy to read comments telling me where I went wrong, but "oh, you were critical of someone, must mean you're biased and unfair" is really useless.
It would be good if you could respond to this, because it's a very large problem in your thinking. Unfamiliarity with Marx's basic points makes you commit large errors when reading other Marxist works. For example in this review you framed Harvey's view as 'Embedded liberalism was great and completely sustainable'. Harvey is a Marxist, so this couldn't be further from the truth. You said this was 'uncharitable' - but then the question becomes, why put it in the review?
Can you find a single statement by Harvey that approaches "Embedded liberalism was great and completely sustainable". I'm looking for an actual quote from a primary source, not your vague feelings.
If you don't do this, the logical conclusion is that you are making a huge error and misreading the book.
Marx is directly relevant here (Harvey is a Marxist). Scott gets the very first thesis of the Harvey's book incorrect. Previously he has failed to be able to read Marx properly. At some point these mistakes will have to be addressed.
Towards the end of the review Scott laments that more and more people are agreeing with Harvey. With Scott's (self-admitted) uncharitable reviews laden with mistakes that never get corrected, is it any wonder that more and more people are being driven away from Scott's brand of liberalism and towards left-wing analysis.
Yeah - I'm with marxbro on this. This is absolutely the place to write these comments. It is very relevant to the review.
Marxbro, I'm a skeptic, who's willing to be convinced: To me it seems like lot's of actual implementations of socialism look pretty terrible. For you to be right either (a) there is a fixable flaw in previous implementations (b) I am misled by propaganda, and historic implementations are less bad than I believe. What do you think is the strongest evidence for either a or b?
Plenty of Marxists don't believe that the end of capitalism is nigh. Most of 20c Marxism is coming to terms with that ( and abandoning a lot Marx in the meanwhile). Therefore it's quite possible that Harvey thought that Embedded Liberalism was a sustainable from of capitalism - as opposed to the idea that it was doomed because of currency constraints, or the issues in the 70s, which I think Scott is making too much off. What has terrorism got to do with the economic system?
So, since you've brought up the "Embedded liberalism was great and completely sustainable" quote as an inaccurate portrayal a few times, I decided I'd do a ctrl-f through a pdf of of abhon.
Looking at every reference to the phrase "embedded liberalism" didn't reveal anything explicitly stating support for the economic system, but their was about a 60-40 split between strictly factual comments and comments lamenting the changes from embedded liberalism. There was one part acknowledging that embedded liberal America eventually failed (though to me the tone sounds like it wasn't embedded liberalisms fault), but I definitely got the impression that Harvey approves of embedded liberalism.
Since you asked for quotes, a few:
> Independent trade unions or
other social movements (such as the municipal socialism of the
Greater London Council type), which acquired considerable
power under embedded liberalism, have therefore to be disciplined, if not destroyed, and this in the name of the supposedly
sacrosanct individual liberty of the isolated labourer.
> As the state withdraws from welfare
provision and diminishes its role in arenas such as health care,
public education, and social services, which were once so fundamental to embedded liberalism, it leaves larger and larger segments
of the population exposed to impoverishment
> The state, once neoliberalized, becomes a
prime agent of redistributive policies, reversing the flow from
upper to lower classes that had occurred during the era of embedded liberalism
For fun I also search for "marx" to see how an ideology that he definitely approves of gets treated, even if it wasn't the focus of the book. It was mostly just had some unimportant quotes from marx so it wasn't very revealing. There was one bit at the end talking about how people should not work from necessity, which was about a similar level of endorsement as you got for embedded liberalism.
All in all I think that coming away from this book thinking "this guy likes embedded liberalism" is reasonable, if hyperbolically stated (I think obviously so, but maybe you disagree).
Those quotes seem pretty neutral to me and it seems more like you were psychologically primed by Scott Alexander's review rather than actually reading through the text and understanding Harvey's position.
I think a large amount of confusion here is resulting from the fact that people aren't really aware of David Harvey's full body of work. He's actually been writing for a very long time and we can go back to check his older work if we need to.
If we think Scott Alexander is correct here, it should be easy to go back to David Harvey's writings from the early 70s and find him talking about the sustainability and "idyllic" conditions of embedded liberalism.
If I'm correct, when we look back at Harvey's work from the early 70s we should find that he was actually very critical of the economic conditions and society back then too.
Now I don't think this is quite fair to me, to be honest. It's not a matter of critical versus non-critical, it's a question of approach. The kind of thing people are looking for in the very critical reviews is something like "I really tried to make the arguments in in this book work, I made Herculean efforts to find the rational kernel and something to agree with here, but ultimately I couldn't, and I think this tells us that..."
This review doesn't give that impression. You even start by framing Harvey's theses, in your own word "uncharitably".
Now you could argue this policy of making Herculean efforts to find something to agree with is itself misguided, and I'm tempted to agree, but this kind of approach is perceived as, in large part, *your legacy*, so when you don't stick to it, people get suss. Now you might say in response to this that you never intended that kind of approach to reading, and it's a vulgarization of your practices, but that the popular perception. In the blogospheric imagination the guy who almost never disagrees unreservedly without having done a bunch of legwork first, especially when it comes to political questions.
First, I'm here because I've really loved many things that you've written, and I value what you have to say about stuff. You, personally, are dope, and I care about how things I say make you feel, IRL, as a bag of flesh and organs, not just as some internet text-specter. I'm offering critiques here, but I want them to be helpful, not to win an argument.
That said, I think you should take seriously the general critique that you are strawmanning arguments against which you have an ideological bias. I think your review here is a fairly straightforward example: you present a sarcastic, uncharitable simplification of the book's theses, then analyze text to support those simplifications. Pointing out argumentative failures is fine, but methods are important. Using caricature can be rhetorically useful but is dangerous to do (imo) with material/arguments against which you have an existing bias, as it's likely to encourage you to continue painting with the same broad strokes and miss many useful/instructive details that the actual argument comprises.
This expresses pretty clearly in your analysis of the first 'thesis' imo. It's a perfectly valid criticism that Harvey doesn't examine how embedded liberalism led to the 1970s financial crises, and it seems like a fair characterization that, in this book, he is almost exclusively focused on the crises as excuse for plutocratic restructuring. But it doesn't follow at all that this lack of treatment must mean that he thinks "embedded liberalism was great and completely sustainable. The global economic system collapsing in 1971 was probably just coincidence..." I'm sure he speaks positively about many facets of the postwar economy (unionized labor, state welfare, etc.) throughout, but, without having read the book, this seems like a huge leap that you probably wouldn't make when examining a position/polemicist taking a more laissez faire position. At the very least, this is something that needs more textual justification than you've given.
I think there are similar problems with your treatment of the rest of the theses as well. I don't see how/whether Harvey actually advocates for a return to embedded liberalism from your explanation or quoted passage for thesis 4. From the long passage you quoted for thesis 3, it doesn't seem to me that Harvey describes "an idyllic New York being hit with a financial crisis for no reason" when he talks about the "explosive social unrest," impoverished city center, and the "urban crisis" in the embedded liberalism era of the 60s. Does he do a good job tracing complex causes of that unrest? Categorically, no (and I appreciate you including some commentary on the specifics of the strikes). But mischaracterizing comments like that ("idyllic New York") cast doubt over the review's credibility -- if you're glossing the quoted section unfairly, what about the other 198 pages? There are more examples but this is already getting long.
Overall, it gives the impression that you're more interested in attacking Harvey's ideology than in engaging with the specifics of his positions in a good faith effort to create a more accurate model of the world. Obviously, this is extremely difficult to do, especially when someone is as obviously ideologically motivated as Harvey, even more so when that ideology attacks your own with such vigor. But I think that is what people want -- not for you to agree with/praise books you disagree with but to present them accurately, on their own terms, then engage with them productively. I think this review has some of that, but it certainly also falls into some of the traps that people who read you aspire to avoid (largely thanks to things you've written! You did this! lol).
Damn, this was longer than I wanted. Hopefully somewhat helpful and not too pointed at least, though. I appreciate the time and effort you put into writing these things and into reading this too, if you do!
If some alt-right group did thousands of bombings per year, right now, but they did them mostly at night and deaths and injuries were quite low, would you be all "this is not a good look but mostly not a big deal"?
I'm pretty explicit in the comment above in noting that similar generosity could be extended to contemporary alt-right terrorism, so I've been as fair as possible in that comment. Would I be similarly fair if you approached me on the street and asked "Philosopher Bear, does the current wave of alt-right terrorism suggest that right wing ideology is fundamentally sick"? Well I hope so, because I am acquainted with the history of terrorism and know that it comes from all sides, but who knows, maybe I wouldn't be fair- how could one know? All I can say is that *in that particular comment above* I am equally generous to both sides and not inconsistent.
Wikipedia (the same source you use for your review of the harm caused by 1970s terrorism) lists 0 terrorist incidents in the United States in 2020. Seven incidents in 2019.
It's the fact that you listed a movement that does like maybe single-digits numbers of incidents per year as your big comparator with triple-digits number of incidents per year that makes me doubt your neutrality here. You considered "alt right terrorism" worthy of comment and holding up. Imagine that the alt right was doing an average of one bombing per night (much less five bombings per night), and killed a handful of people in the process of that. Are you really saying that in the face of more than two orders of magnitude more events you'd be dismissing it the same way you do now?
Should you? I mean, if you have the same response to something that does Thing X, and Thing X times 100, is that sane?
Okay, but even by body count, right-wing terrorism (or *all* non-Islamic terrorism) between 2010 and 2020 falls short of 60 deaths anyway, as well.
*Any* terrorism by body count is going to be a pretty low risk divided among the population, so I don't know what your "odds of getting killed" statistic up there is even trying to show except "terrorism in general 'doesn't matter very much'".
This is true, terrorism generally doesn't matter very much. This is part of why I suggest it's not that big a deal in assessing ideologies.
You're right about the number. I got 63 by first count and 54 by second count, I must have made a mistake in addition. Regardless they seem comparable, and not very high.
I don't agree, and I don't think you'd agree if there were bombs every night. I mean, certainly fatal bombings every night would be *worse*! But thousands of low-fatality bombings seems like it would be a big deal, even if it the overall bodycount were comparable to or lower than a vastly smaller number of incidents that were more lethal per incident.
If the subject is terrorism, the fundamental measure is how terrified people are. Which, admittedly, is harder to measure than counting bodies. But terrorists sometimes do things like set off bombs in the middle of the night and phone in warnings to make sure they don't accidentally kill a night watchman. Hijack airliners and hold the passengers hostage for a time but then let them all go. Some terrorist groups actively prefer doing this to killing people.
Whatever it is they are trying to accomplish, they believe they can accomplish it without killing people. And the rest of the world, often seems rather put out by this and tries to stop them. So I'm not at all impressed by your "OK, but they didn't *kill* all that many people, so meh, no big deal" analysis. When was the last time you were terrified, and how would you like to spend the next few years having that feeling artificially induced by someone who was careful to (probably) not actually kill you?
+2 at least to this. I think the point of comparison between left-wing terrorism in the 70s versus right-wing terrorism today is the level of terror. Firstly, and for the purposes of this comment, and based on the comments above, let's stipulate that the death toll of lefty and righty terror in the 70s and the new 10s is approximately equivalent. If I'm egregiously wrong about this, I'm happy to revise the below. I don't have a good sense, from the comments above or what I've read, about the relative frequency of incidents, which is probably pretty important, and I'd love some further info on it.
The point is made in multiple sources that the media's reaction to 70s lefty bombings was muted, which limited the terror (and which I am actually in favor of!, to a degree). But equally, given the (relative) paucity of sources, it's difficult now to construct an accurate history of how scared your average New Yorker or airline passenger was of having a bomb go off in their store or having their plane hijacked and diverted to Cuba. The sources of which I am aware indicate that it was mostly a shrug, which may well be true, but is difficult to credit entirely given the apparent incuriosity of those who claim to keep the record. The irony is that the incuriosity had both good effects (less actual terror) and bad effects (less reliable indicators of how much actual terror there was + less documentation of the frequency and severity of incidents), and yet I'm reasonably certain that the correct balance was not struck.
Almost the opposite is true of righty terror today. The curiosity of the media is extreme, which results in the documentation of every possible incident (even to the extent of false reporting/slow, stealth, non-prominent or non-existent corrections/doubling down, and to encouraging hoaxes), and the level of terror appears quite high. For example, take the incident from (I think, please correct me) just after Trump's election when there were entire classes of young children in minority districts who thought Trump was going to kill them.
At this point, I was going to launch into something that mirrors the above about the level of actual terror being in this case obscured by the panoply of media pieces on how bad righty terror is and how scared everyone is, but that isn't right. Instead, the frequency and tenor of these pieces does actually increase terror. That's bad, in that media is in some ways doing the work of the far right in this manner.
Regardless, and actually in mirror to the 70s, the media curiosity has both good (documentation of incidents is perhaps too good, even) and bad effects (extent/tenor of coverage + actual incidents=more scared people). Again, the right balance isn't being struck, and yet both coverage regimes have things to recommend in them.
Western Europe has had a sustained decline in terrorism since the 1970s, though there's been a bit of an uptick again in the last few years, returning to some of the numbers of the 1990s.
Summary and commentary on David Harvey's "A Brief History Of Neoliberalism"
Read →
Write a comment…
T J Elliott1 min ago
It's tough to steel oneself to read a very long review like this one when it starts so unpromisingly with the following mistakes:
"The post-WWII-but-pre-1970 economic world - the world of “embedded liberalism” - was a pleasant place."
For whom? I worked on a loading dock in 1970 and pleasant was not the vibe. But okay with that cherry picking
"There were corporations, but they didn't do anything garish like compete with each other."
Ford didn't compete against GM didn't compete against Chrysler? Bendix didn't compete? General Foods? Okay. It seemed they were competing but not something I can easily refute. But...
"....workforces were so heavily unionized that companies were nervous about any changes that might upset employees"
Most sources agree that union membership peaked around 1954 at somewhere between 33 and 36% of the workforce. Would that constitute as "heavily" even then? In 1970, 42% of the workers in Michigan were unionized but only 14% in Florida and Texas. California and New York were at 33 and 31% respectively. How is that heavily unionized?
I found these statistics in 5 minutes. A review that tries to make a point without laying the foundation of the proper facts is not worth reading
>For whom? I worked on a loading dock in 1970 and pleasant was not the vibe
This is like contesting "North Korea is not a pleasant place" with "nuh uh, it is for the Kim dynasty!", or "the Pinto was not a very good car" with "well *mine* worked great!"
>How is that heavily unionized?
A quick Google shows that union membership in the U.S. was still near all-time highs in 1970 and started precipitously dropping in 1980, so "heavily unionized before 1970" could be a fair take, it seems to me: if one in three employees is in a union, maybe somewhere more than one in two bosses has to deal with a lot of union workers (since there are fewer of the former than the latter)?
Perhaps "relatively heavily unionized" is a better way to say it, though, I grant you.
"Ford didn't compete against GM didn't compete against Chrysler?"
The big US automakers and their unions in fact did a sort of ritual dance every time the union contracts came up. The unions would pick one of the companies and strike against it, then settle with appropriate wage increases. Then the other auto companies would give their unions the same settlements and avoid a strike. This is pretty much the definition of non-competition among the auto makers.
They competed only on intangibles such as the image of each of their brands, and not in the actual content of the cars they sold. Also, of course, they did their best to keep Japanese and other foreign cars from being imported. It was a very sweet gig while it lasted.
I'd be interested in a history of non-Western humanism.
Garrett Jones might say that it is indeed sensible to trust many western NGOs above the governments of third world countries, in part due to "accountability" frequently incentivizing worse behavior.
Given that Humanism is a Western philosophy, I'm not certain that non-Western humanism makes sense. I suppose you could come up with attempts at integrating humanism into existing non-western cultures, but I don't know of any where that's happened to any significant degree.
This is a weirdly negative review. Even with that I would say that the book is correct. From 1945-1980 or so most everybody did well, in the US and Europe, and from then on things start to fall apart, slowly at first and then in acceleration. That’s the empirical fact. It might have been some other reason, ie not neo liberalism but because that’s something you would expect after 30-40 years of growth, or because after the year 1980 you would expect wages to stagnate, but it’s likely that neo liberalism and globalisation are the main reason.
Yes, all of that is (potentially) true and interesting, and what I read this book to learn more about. I feel like this book did not provide any of that knowledge, which is why I'm reviewing it poorly.
I would argue that the most important feature of 1945-1970 is that all of our major economic competitors had been ground to dust by WW2. In the seventies they started catching up.
I dunno if it's very fair to make 1945 your starting point. Can we bear in mind that in 1945 near the entirety of Europe and Japan were in shambles? That 100 million people were unsure if they would get enough to eat that winter? This seems a bit like observing that in 4Q 2020 the US economy grew phenomenally -- well, yeah, given what happened in the first part of the year!
Why is it inevitable that super growth of 30 years follows devastating war, is that historically the case? Can you think of histories where a devastating war leads to permanent decline?
Clearly policy matters. The growth after WWII was better than WWI, particularly in Germany (east and west) in part because there was no desire to punish Germany given the Cold War. That’s one policy that differs. There were many others.
It's hardly inevitable, but it's a very reasonable a priori expectation, for the same reason health increases spectactularly after a bout of disease that almost kills you. Nobody doubts policy matters -- one has only to compare the economic growth of South Korea versus North following the Korean War. But to suggest (if you are) that *only* policy matters, and the fact that you are starting from a pile of rubble and bartering for sufficient calories matters not at all, seems on balance the more implausible starting point.
Is it a reasonable priori expectation? Does the destruction of Carthage lead to greater things for them? Does the sackings of Rome lead to a new and glorious Rome? By and large mass destruction can be the end of a city, or a country.. Or recovery is slow.
In fact I would think it rare and possibly unique in history for a country to recover like the Germans did. Obviously it wasn't just policy, the era had to be a technological one.
I need to look up the details to confirm but I remember reading that Germany was back to its pre war levels within 10 years. Past that nothing can be explained as catch up and a better explanation is needed. Theres nothing like the post war period in history actually.
( Fun fact, East. Germany had higher growth in the early post war years than the US has had since 2008, and their GDP per capita growth was even greater as their population fell)
Probably the main reason for poor growth in the early 80's were the Volcker reforms, which were absolutely necessary and crucial to break inflation, but also inherently triggered a recession (one very rare case of doing that deliberately). Towards the end of the 80s, it was paying off, but it was the kind of necessary re-set that hurts at first.
True, but at least growth picked up - the rest is distribution, and is significantly a *political* issue that has little to do with cracking inflation. Plus that wage stagnation has finally started to end, hasn't it (at least it started to pre-epidemic)?
First, I'd echo what a few other commentators noted and say that this seems to be one of your weaker reviews - I think one of your strengths is that you are a generous and thorough reader of texts and I don't feel like this review was either comprehensive or charitable at all to Harvey's arguments. Lots of block quotes that I would say are by no means the totality of Harvey's arguments with short paragraphs refuting them or simply saying they are unconvincing.
I would say most importantly, you kind of fail to address what neoliberalism is to Harvey and to many theorists who use the term. As Thompson puts it in his review of the same book, "Neoliberalism is the intensification of the influence and dominance of capital; it is the elevation of capitalism, as a mode of production, into an ethic, a set of political imperatives, and a cultural logic."
And I really can't see what aspects of this you are refuting or even attempting to refute. Is your point that neoliberalism is good, or that history didn't happen as Harvey says it did?
To the first "thesis", I would not say the perpetual endurance or goodness of "embedded liberalism", a key piece of which is what Harvey terms Fordism elsewhere, is necessary to any critique of neoliberalism. I also don't think Harvey would agree with that at all - as an orthodox Marxist, I'm pretty sure he sees inherent contradictions in all ways in which capitalism operates. That economic growth stagnated, prices rose, supplies fell, at the end of a period of Fordism is, essentially, neither here nor there for a critique of neoliberalism.
To the second "thesis", I think a more cogent reframing would be that certain actors and entities worked for and succeeded in changing the political-economic system to reassert their class power, ushering in an era that emphasized the eminence of the market over the state. Whether the intent on the part of certain individuals was to benefit the population is immaterial to this thesis. Those funding them did not like, as you put it, an "anti-business environment".
Third "thesis", the idea behind critiques of structural adjustment, which is really what this is, is that lenders impose conditions tied to further loans and/or bailouts under the guise of general economic prescriptions that actually serve the interests of those lenders and the wealthy nations in which they originate. For instance, requirements to lower tariffs and open economies up to foreign investments which could benefit (certain) US firms and harm (certain) local firms. Requirements to cut safety nets and social systems etc. You seem to focus on one New York example and, I don't think, really get at the point Harvey is making. It isn't that NYC was some paradise before, it was that it was democratically accountable and had strong worker protections, and that financial elites remade it in a non-democratic way, weakening worker protections and, critically, commodifying culture/identity. I think this is one key point of Harvey and other scholars of neoliberalism that you don't address at all. Neoliberalism is, in essence, commodification of everything, including culture, which is a non-negligible part of what Harvey was getting at in that passage on New York. It also seems like you essentially ignore the beginning of that passage, which has Harvey's explanation of why New York was in debt in the first place - decreased federal funding.
And yes, a critique of human rights and a critique of NGOs are completely in line with far left and Marxist lines of thought - in that they both reinforce the supremacy of the individual as a unit/agent, are dictated by global elites, and supplant what should be state functions. The rise of NGOs would be considered by many to be a key part of neoliberal logic - replacing functions of the state and the democratic accountability embodied therein with either market mechanisms or an often-donor funded project with little to no accountability.
"To the first "thesis", I would not say the perpetual endurance or goodness of "embedded liberalism", a key piece of which is what Harvey terms Fordism elsewhere, is necessary to any critique of neoliberalism. I also don't think Harvey would agree with that at all - as an orthodox Marxist, I'm pretty sure he sees inherent contradictions in all ways in which capitalism operates."
And to this, specifically, I would extend your point that Harvey sees neoliberalism not as an out-of-nowhere conspiracy to ruin the immanent goodness of liberalism, as Scott's first restatement thesis suggests, but, rather, that neoliberalism, as worldview and the policy it produces, *was one of several possible responses* to the inevitable destabilization of embedded liberalism due to the inherent contradictions of capital, and it is the response we got because there was a struggle between the working class and the plutocrats, and the plutocrats won.
"The inherent contradictions of capital" is, for Marxists, and specifically for Harvey, what Scott has elsewhere caused a concept-handle: a kind of winking shorthand for a centuries-old set of arguments about how capitalism can be at once so dynamic/resilient and so wrongfooted/destabilized, what makes it seem simultaneously fragile and forever. Put (too) simply: what do we do about the fact that, in the long run, the surplus value of the worker is expropriated for profit, and at some point, the worker runs out of either money or patience with their expropriation? On the left, Harvey is perhaps the most influential and prominent living writer on these issues (see, e.g. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/277956219_Seventeen_Contradictions_and_the_End_of_Capitalism).
I can imagine that this book is not easy to read if one doesn't come to it with that kind of backpack. And that might, or might not, be a failure of the book as an introduction to these issues; I'm not sure what Harvey's goals were, or which audience he imagined. But there's a lot of this review — like Scott's formulation of the first thesis, or the surprise about the critique of NGOs — that suggests to me Scott really just doesn't understand where Harvey is coming from, wherever the fault for that lies.
I am struck by Michael Hudson's argument that there are really at least two kinds of capitalists: the old-school industrial capitalists who actually favored public services most of the time, and the new-school FIRE/rentier capitalists who dislike public services because they cut into the capitalists' bottom line.
Also note that both Marxists and that Epsilon Theory guy (who is a self-admitted petty rentier capitalist) have very similar arguments against MMT:
I guess - and this isn't about you, I've gotten this same feeling from other people defending this book, and from the book itself - it's unclear what specific knowledge you think the book imparts. You say that it's about Harvey's concept of neoliberalism as an attempt to assert class power. But it seems like Harvey (and the commenters here) basically define this as true.
Like, suppose you started out knowing the very basics - that the US switched from embedded liberalism to neoliberalism around 1970-something, that neoliberalism was more business-friendly than embedded liberalism, and that various capitalists and business leaders supported this. Is there some specific additional meaning of "...and also, neoliberalism was an attempt to reassert class power"? Is there some state of the world in which this is true, and some other state in which it isn't? What would it take to convince you that this wasn't true? Or is it even meaningful to posit that this might not be true?
The only way I can interpret the "attempt to assert class power" argument as trying to make a specific point is by opposing it to "neoliberalism was a well-intentioned attempt to respond to difficult economic conditions". But in order to have that argument, Harvey would have to explain the economic conditions and why neoliberalism didn't seem like a well-intentioned attempt to respond to them. The book doesn't really do that. Instead it just has (what seem to me to be) really dumb arguments like "sometimes seemingly neoliberal governments did non-neoliberal things", which seems inherent to the basic nature of governments as not consistent ideologues.
"Harvey would have to explain the economic conditions and why neoliberalism didn't seem like a well-intentioned attempt to respond to them. The book doesn't really do that."
"But it seems like Harvey (and the commenters here) basically define this as true."
I sort of tried to get to this in my comment below, but this is because Harvey approaches this through the lens of class struggle. I know you know this, because you said up top that he's an "extreme conflict theorist," linking back to your classic 2014 blog post on conflicts vs mistakes.
What genuinely confuses me — where I think you are making a mistake, and why I said above I thought you lacked the background here, which I didn't intend as an ad hom or anything like that — is that you seem to view this as a temperamental choice rather than a methodological one (granted, it can be both). But for classic/orthodox Marxists — for those who do dialectical materialism — the class struggle is part of the instrumentation of the analysis of economic history. "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles" is not (only) a claim about the substance of history; it is a claim about *the method of studying and explaining it.*
So when you say: "the commenters here assume it to be true," the answer is — well, yes! It's like assuming a microscope can make things appear larger. Sure, a microscope can also introduce distortions, and some things can't fit underneath it so it's not very useful for looking at an elephant. But we all know how to use a microscope *on the microscope's own terms*. So too with dialectical materialism, i.e. the method of analyzing history through the lens of class conflict.
So the point of this book is to say: okay, if we deploy this method, what does that allow us to see about the rise of this thing that we call neoliberalism? What does it do in society? Why is it here? How does it work? What does it do? Who does it advantage?
Hmmm. If I may butt in, this gets at a… question I have about Marxists. I'd call it an apparent motte-and-bailey, but being charitable, it may be a case of different schools of thought that both stem from Marx, but explicitly disagree with each other.
To wit: sometimes I see Marxists who treat capitalism like Scott Alexander's Moloch — a system complex and self-regulating enough that it can be thought of as an immaterial intelligence, not unlike evolution in the "blind idiot god" framing. If you take that framing, what you say above makes sense: "class struggle" describes socioeconomic trends that just happen whether anyone is actively pushing for them to be accomplished, therefore you can try to see how various events fit into those patterns without that framework being in itself an empirical claim that requires justification.
But other times, Marxists talk about class struggle as very literal entrenched warfare fought, over the span of generations, between the working class and their exploiters who, behind closed doors, very much do think of the working class as the enemy; who are actively, consciously trying to screw them over for their own gain. It's not that this claim is necessarily ridiculous, depending on context; but *that* is very much an empirical claim about what actual human beings had on their minds at specific times. You cannot simply assume *this* as a starting point and call it "merely a methodology".
So firstly: what's the deal?
Secondly: it seems clear to me from the extracts provided in the Book Review that Harvey is of the latter school (e.g. the bit where he speculates about who did or did not *consciously* have “further my class interests” on their mind when planning the New York bailout-slash-takeover), so how could the "it's just a methodological approach" excuse work for him?
"Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes."
I am not sure what this quote is meant to prove, in terms of answering my question.
Let me rephrase it: is this endless struggle a Molochian "the system is such that the 'patrician' camp somehow always ends up screwing over the 'plebeian' camp, even though any individual member of the oppressive camp may not realise that they are participating in a system of oppression"; or is the claim that in all eras of history the 'haves' *consciously* decide to screw over the 'have-nots' and keep them as 'have-nots'?
Is the endless fight a macro trend that people on both sides are drawn into without ever necessarily realising it; or is it a conscious and explicit enmity that the likes of my own self are idiots for having forgotten about in the last few generations, my g-…-grand-parents having failed at some point in the last century to pass on the "by the way the other camp is our sworn enemy" memo?
I think Marx would argue it is the former. In Kapital, he goes to some lengths to show that individual capitalists/business owners who try to do better by the working class put themselves at a competitive disadvantage against others, which is ultimately unsustainable.
Some people are conscious of it, some people aren't. I'm not sure why these two things are self-contradictory to you. In times of heightened struggle (say, an economic crisis) then class interests become more obvious to everyone.
So, this is a good question. One thing I would say — one part of what you are identifying — is that "Marxist" is an incredibly broad scope, and a contested one (Marx himself having famously said "I am not a Marxist," the carbuncular curmudgeon that he was).
The way I, personally, unite the to disparate threads you draw apart is that they are both true, but the first manifests through the second. One of the lessons I take from the-huge-incoherent-mass-of-things-called-Marxism is that structures matter; relationships matter.
For example: suppose I have the money from inheritance (capital) to buy a 2bed in Boston, and rent out a room at market rate to a grad student tenant. Because I own the house, I can take their rent as clear cash, and use it to reduce or eliminate my own working hours. It makes good, rational, economic, blind idiot moloch god sense to do so.
Now: interpersonally, I could be a horrible, mean, nasty, conniving landlord to my tenant, or I could be a kind, attentive, thoughtful landlord. This matters, to both me and to my tenant; it makes a difference. But it does not make a *material* difference in the (limited, orthodox, stylized) Marxist sense of material, because our *material relations* are still that of tenant and landlord, where, instead of working myself, I am simply expropriating the value from their labor.
Now, Marx did seem to believe that the *structural* relations between people does have a tendency to corrupt — or alienate, as he termed it — the *interpersonal* relations between them as well. This is where you get, in your example, the "very literal entrenched warfare." But animosity isn't the cause of the exploitation, in his account; rather the reverse.
To your second question: well, partially this is a false dichotomy as per above, but also partially this is a case where Scott quoted Harvey preaching to the choir, as it were, rather than trying to explain to people from first principles what class interests are, and why the method presumes "the furtherance of class interests" the way that classical physics presumes gravity, i.e. as a natural tendency of the system that doesn't require any particular individual agency as all.
(I hope this is helpful! I wouldn't consider myself a Marxist, although I would consider myself influenced by Marx and Marxist writers; nor is this a field I'm well-educated enough to teach, but something I'm trying to talk through as I understand it for others)
Thank you! This makes some things clearer in my mind. It does also convince me further that the stereotypical communist's hissing and seething about actively evil capitalists is a red herring. (…The red pun was unintentional, I swear.)
I can all too easily see why it's caught on as it has, of course; it's harder to push for reform if there isn't a personable enemy to punch. But perhaps communism would not still be dealing with the sulfurous reputation it has retained from the Stalin and Mao, if it rebranded as the movement that wants to overthrow Moloch, as opposed to growing ever more tribalistic and conflict-theorist about the rich being individually, personally horrible people (see: "Eat the rich", "All landlords are bastards" and other such catchy slogans).
And sure, all stereotypes are annoying in that respect, although I should point out again that it wasn't Marx or communists who invented "all landlords are bastards," it was *literally every major political economist before the 1970s* who hated landlords and thought they were all bastards. It was Marx who gave one of the most compelling and analytically specific accounts — after Adam Smith — of *why* they were bastards.
I do think you're right about the double bind — that it's easier to gin up conflict against the individual person or name, than the Moloch system itself. I would also point out that people who do say "it's all about the corrupt system, man" are usually criticized for being insufficiently specific and not very rigorous, probably stoners, etc. So, you know, it's hard.
If you're genuinely open-minded and interested in this, watching or listening to Harvey's 2007 podcasts from his class on Volume 1 of Marx's capital is a good place to start: http://davidharvey.org/reading-capital/#capital-v1-2007. They're just lectures of him trying to explain Marx to a group of undergrads and grad students as — by coincidence — the GFC is beginning. I often find myself returning to it for inspiration before I start any major research project because it always illuminates things for me.
Both are true at different times. Sometimes the organisation of capital (or labor, for that matter) acts like a conspiracy. Generally speaking it acts like a Moloch type thing. Complex and subtle intermediate blends are also possible.
The first implies the second. Moloch is not an outside force, it's just a sum of individuals acting in rational self-interest given the options they have. And when there happen to be groups of individuals with vastly opposite interests, they're going to oppose each other. This is not their random choice, "social being determines consciousness", people are a product of their circumstances. Still, they're conscious beings acting consciously.
I mean, I see what you're getting at, but isn't this just "The Whole City Is Center" with you acting as Sophisticus to Marxist Simplicios?
But that's the frustrating part of the book: it doesn't really answer any of those questions in a meaningful way. As best I could tell from the book (not just Scott's review), it sounds l assumes the world is zero sum and therefore once it has shown one group benefits, it feels no need to prove up that the benefit was at the expense of workers. But the world isn't zero sum, and some policy regimes are just better than others, for everyone or at least for most people. One need not accept that "neoliberalism" is such, but Harvey just seems to assume that there just isn't such a thing as a policy change that helps everyone.
This is like picking up a math textbook and being frustrated it doesn't explain the evolution of the platypus to you. You're not reading it on its terms.
That is, if you're not making an argument for why the way you're looking at this part of history provided some new insight or is otherwise worthwhile, but just saying "we're gonna look at this as a class struggle; turns out it was a class struggle!", you're just assuming your conclusion -- relaying some events with the added comment "and also this was because of the mean [bad people] oppressing the noble [good people]", or whatever.
If an argument isn't made for why this is the *right* way, or at least a *useful* way, to analyze the material, why bother reading it if you don't already agree? Perhaps I could say "my method of historical analysis is called Semitophobics, which looks at events as being caused by evil Jews." Someone objects that I've provided no evidence in my works, to which I respond "it's a *lens*: we assume it's true, and then look at what this tells us about the rise of [whatever] in society."
The questions you list, like "why is it here" or "who benefits", aren't actually answered by facts that can be observed, using this "method": the former is assumed (it's a manifestation of class struggle because that's how we've decided to look at it; or, it's a manifestation of international Jewry because that's how we've decided to look at it), and the latter is a fact that can be extracted without the "method" (and is also assumed anyway: the rich capitalists benefit and the poor workers lose, of course; or, the Jew benefits and the others lose, of course...).
"but just saying "we're gonna look at this as a class struggle; turns out it was a class struggle!", you're just assuming your conclusion"
No, it's saying "we're going to look at this *using* class struggle; turns out X results from that struggle." Class struggle isn't the *result he found,* it's the *method he used.* That's what I'm trying to help the people here with no background in Marxist analysis understand.
"If an argument isn't made for why this is the *right* way, or at least a *useful* way, to analyze the material, why bother reading it if you don't already agree? "
Because you responded with a flip example, here is mine: why read an advanced physics textbook that uses calculus if you are already assuming calculus to be true?
I think what's tripping people up is that this is an introduction to neoliberalism, from a Marxist using Marxist methods, and they keep expecting it to be an introduction to — and justification of — Marxism too. But that's not what the book is or was intended to be!
>No, it's saying "we're going to look at this *using* class struggle; turns out X results from that struggle."
What I'm saying is that there is no X. It is a description of stuff that happened with the added comment "...because of class struggle." See my Semitophobics example.
>why read an advanced physics textbook that uses calculus if you are already assuming calculus to be true?
Because the book is making an argument, using calculus, for why its conclusions are true, of course!
> So the point of this book is to say: okay, if we deploy this method, what does that allow us to see about the rise of this thing that we call neoliberalism? What does it do in society? Why is it here? How does it work? What does it do? Who does it advantage?
And most importantly - how would you know if it turns out not to fit under the microscope? You'll always be able to generate *some* thesis, but you need a source of external verification to demonstrate it isn't the wrong tool for the job. I think that's the key here: that the book's engagement with the facts on the ground seems sketchy and deceptive to force the frame to fit, while its predictions mostly fail to bear fruit.
A microscope *works*, though. Dialectical materialism is the equivalent of a coathanger being bent into a vague monocle shape, it can't analyze anything meaningfully. It's a garbage method. You need to start by explaining why you keep using the busted microscope that can't magnify anything and then making wild claims about what you saw in it.
I don't really get conflict theory, and I half get this claim here, and you seem to get it and write in a way I understand, so help me out.
> if we deploy this method, what does that allow us to see about
I 100% understand this. Though, to be strict, I would change "what does this allow to see about" to "what would this suggest about .., to the extent that the method works". So with your microscope example, people that write about their findings using the microscope have used it in a way that everyone agrees works to show reality. If this isn't the case, then the paper is about the method itself, or about the cool new effect they got by using the microscope which requires explanation. That is, there is such a thing as the microscope working well to show reality, or not being helpful in that. It's not "a method" that's just equally valid, requiring no justification, but whose conclusions can be trusted to apply to reality.
Now, I could totally understand a book that's meant for people that already buy into some model or theory and that isn't devoted to double checking if and how it works. That's totally fine. I would hate a world where those books didn't exist, given how different from each other we think about stuff. But that's not what I understand you are claiming.
Also, I feel like I'm thinking about it "from a mistake theory" point of view and if this is actually about conflict vs mistake, then this is not the approach.. but then, I don't know what.
No, this are very fair questions, and I have two answers.
One of them — as I just responded more fulsomely to someone upthread — is that I think part of the problem here is that Scott picked up an introduction to neoliberalism by one of the world's most prominent and influential Marxists, and seems to have been caught by surprise that the analytic framework would be Marxist, without spending time to explain or defend Marxism. I think this is a book meant to be an introduction to neoliberalism from a Marxist perspective. Maybe that's a failing of the book, maybe it's just what the book was trying to do, maybe it's ships passing in the night.
The second point is: as someone whose primary academic field is science-technology studies, it is actual a contested and subtle question whether what a microscope does is *show* you an "underlying reality," or whether what a microscope does is *construct* for you an *image* that we agree to treat as reality, because it is useful to do so for certain purposes. Also, while you are right that today people more or less agree how a microscope works, any new analytical instrument is always contested when it comes along, and as people calibrate how it should be used and when it will be agreed to represent "reality." While Marxists have a (more or less) well developed consensus viewpoint on how to apply these methods, of course people coming from different disciplines would not agree on how those should be used, or how they would be valid.
Basically, this is a book that can only inform about the real world to readers that come to it already convinced that "marxist methodology" works for this kinds of things. For other readers, it only serves to enlighten about how someone convinced that "marxist methodology" thinks about these topics. So a Scott should only pick up and read this book if he is curious about marxist heads, and not expecting to update his views on the topics covered.
I'm assuming that the first half of your second point is more of a philosophical side branch. But maybe it's the core of my misunderstanding, and that's why I'm talking about "marxist methodology" and you go for "marxist perspective"?
I think this is pretty close to what I am trying to say! It's not that this book is useless for people who are not already Marxists. It's that, in order to fully grok the arguments — and neither accept or dismiss them entirely and uncritically — you have to understand the kind of analysis that Harvey is doing, which requires, or at least benefits from, a background in Marxist methods of analysis.
I think a Scott should pick this book up to understand what Marxists think is going on with neoliberalism, and I think he should be able to update his views on whether he is interested in what Marxists have to say on the matter, or finds anything compelling about them, on their own terms. What is frustrating to me about this review is that it seems like Scott (mostly) didn't try to evaluate Harvey on his own terms.
Like, I don't see how someone reading this review, and reading the review I posted from Dissent (https://www.dissentmagazine.org/democratiya_article/a-brief-history-of-neoliberalism), could think they were reading similarly sophisticated books. And I think that's because the latter was written by someone who could see what Harvey was trying to do and evaluate him by how well or poorly he achieved that, whereas Scott pretty clearly couldn't understand what Harvey was trying to argue and so related his frustration and confusion. A frustration and confusion, by the way, that I think is totally understandable in context.
To your last graf: I think I'm using methodology and perspective a bit interchangeably here, which is perhaps sloppy, but not something I had intended to be meaningful.
This seems to be along the lines of "if all you have is a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail", and doesn't steelman Marxist literature that way that you think it does.
"Our basic uncontested premise is that science can be used to understand all motion, including that of baseballs" and "Our uncontested basic premise is that all of human endeavor is an attempt at social domination by the social and economic elite" are wildly different statements with very different levels of accuracy and applicability.
You're not comparing like with like. A Marxist would say: "our premise is that a materialist class struggle analysis can be used to understand the current distribution of wealth, the shape of cities, etc."
Re: your microscope analogy, this seems to reiterate Scott's point: How do you know you're not trying to look at an elephant through a Marxist microscope, or you're not looking at some other distortion that isn't better analyzed using a more appropriate tool? You can certainly use the tool, but how do you know the analysis is *imparting useful knowledge*? This is what Scott alleges is lacking from the book.
Yeah, I guess my concern is - I'm not sure what it allows us to see. If the book has a conclusion, the conclusion is "neoliberalism is a result of class struggle". But if that's its assumption, it can't be its conclusion very usefully. Which makes me wonder what the actual conclusion is, and I don't really see one.
I'm not sure how that wouldn't be "useful". Marxist analysis is often accused of being relevant to only the 19th century. If all that David Harvey did (and I'm not necessarily agreeing that this is his only conclusion) was to say 'actually, class struggle and Marxist categories also applies to this period of history' then that would still be a useful contribution.
So, the book is asking "Can we coerce the events of 1950-1980, i.e. the rise of neoliberalism, into a Marxist framework?", and serves as an existence proof that yes, such a coercion is possible?
That's marginally useful to someone who's dedicated to Marxism, but without arguments for why this is a better lens than others not good. That still amounts to an explicit, even _performative_instance of writing the bottom line first, and therefore is not useful to anyone truth-seeking.
Or framed another way: If this is considered bad Marxist scholarship, it only reflects badly on the author. if this is what passes for good Marxist scholarship, then it reflects badly on *all of Marxist scholarship*. If the field praises this kind of thing as scholarly, the field is intellectually bankrupt.
Well I wrote something and it deleted itself, let's try this again...
I did not mean to say (and don't think I said) the book as a whole is about "an attempt to assert class power" - that was only restating what you would call his second thesis. I would not say it is the most interesting nor insightful part of the book. Maybe some people who are more focused on how explicit class interests instantiate would find it more interesting. To me, it is too easy to get bogged down in a discussion of intent, when Marxists like Harvey are (or should be, IMO), more interested in material conditions and power relations. Intent is both a tricky object of analysis when also dealing with things like false consciousness and in the end is pretty irrelevant - just because someone is acting in a way that they believe to be altruistic or a good policy response doesn't change the class interests that policy response is advancing.
Essentially though, as I see it the argument is that wealthy individuals and businesses pushed for pro-business regulations, promoted think-tanks to do the same, promoted academics to argue the same, which culminated in a shift in policy to a more market-oriented approach. I think there are pretty clear links between the neoliberal movement in economic academia, think-tanks, policy, and business. And definitely, some to many to almost all of these people thought their policy prescriptions were beneficial. It is just that their policies also reasserted the class power of those with capital, which aligned with the class interests of many of their foundational supporters.
So to get back to your argument, your second paragraph here. It isn't really: "and also, neoliberalism was an attempt...". It is that it was more business friendly and that capitalists and business leaders supported it, thus it, necessarily, reasserted class power. I think Marxists are operating from the assumption that the bourgeoisie are operating in their own class interest and it would take strong evidence to the contrary to refute that. (I also don't think that "an attempt to reassert class power" does much work in Harvey's argument but that's besides the point).
I think in conclusion I would phrase part of his insight as "neoliberalism masqueraded as a well-intentioned attempt to respond to economic conditions, but was actually a means of reasserting class power". I think to counter this argument, you would have to counter what seems to be clear collusion by pro-business interests to create a more market friendly environment, ideally supplemented by something that shows how neoliberalism didn't reassert class power.
If there was no class interest or intention behind it: A. that's extremely unlikely to impossible from a Marxist perspective since nigh-everything is class interest, but more importantly; B. that doesn't really do anything to neoliberalism as a concept. It still functions in Harvey's eyes as a system in which the class power of business elites is reasserted vis-a-vis the working class, a system of increasing commodification and emphasis on the individual over the collective, a system that emphasizes personal responsibility and love of work as a virtue.
FWIW though I agree with you his arguments about neoliberal governments doing non-neoliberal things is not strong, but I mostly don't think it matters.
This seems to pretty strongly rely on the assumption that the economy is a zero-sum game. Just because reforms were market-friendly and benefited the capitalist class doesn't mean that they did so at the expense of everyone else, much less that they were intended to.
As Petey writes below, I think that is a pretty foundational aspect of Marxism, that class interests oppose one another, that enrichment of the wealthy relies on exploitation of the working classes. I'm not sure they would use the term zero-sum game but yes, I would say that in some ways that's the foundation upon which Harvey is building
My point was that your statement: "I think to counter this argument, you would have to counter what seems to be clear collusion by pro-business interests to create a more market friendly environment, ideally supplemented by something that shows how neoliberalism didn't reassert class power." is only true if we already grant the Marxist assumption that anything that helps the pro-business interests must necessarily hurt the working class.
Otherwise we can just argue that the "clear collusion by pro-business interests to create a more market friendly environment" *was* "a well-intentioned attempt to respond to economic conditions" because they honestly believed the reforms would help everyone, not just their own class.
"[T]hey honestly believed the reforms would help everyone, not just their own class"... which... was also accurate? I mean, this actually happened, the average person's life is much better and richer than it was in 1979 (and NYC itself is infinitely cleaner, less criminal, and all-round more pleasant), which seems to badly undermine any Marxist claim about the villainy of class interest. If this is what happens when the class interests of the bourgeoisie are indulged we clearly need to indulge them even more.
No, he called the arguments dumb. And he even qualified it with "seems to me". He called the arguments "dumb", and you then accused him of applying the adjective to the person instead of the arguments.
Smart people can make dumb arguments.
Smart people can *definitely* make arguments that "seem dumb" to people with different viewpoints.
You constantly demand rigor and citation from Scott regarding your preferred ideology. Yet here you try to play "gotcha" by suggesting that Scott engaged in ad hominem, because he clarified how an IDEA seemed to him, in response to specific critiques about his thought process in the review.
Calling ideas "dumb" while (self-admittedly) giving uncharitable readings of said ideas is not a particularly good way to learn things, and doesn't give me confidence that Scott Alexander has any interest in reading outgroup thinkers charitably.
I think I understand the basic conflict in the comments section. You're coming at the issue from a basic Rationalist viewpoint, in which the author has to qualify all the assumptions that he's making( namely that neoliberalism was a product of class struggle). Harvey, on the other hand, assumes that this is obviously true, because *everything* is a product of class struggle. In light of this, your review does appear to be much stronger than I initially thought, although it does seem to have a dismissive tone that I'm sure wasn't your intention. This review (and future reviews) would perhaps benefit from not containing as many dismissive and critical adjectives, although it could contain the very same points you're making. I of course should not pretend to give you any writing advice as you are hands down my favorite writer. I'm only expressing my initial reaction on reading the piece.
>'Instead it just has (what seem to me to be) really dumb arguments like "sometimes seemingly neoliberal governments did non-neoliberal things"...'
A version of that argument could work, if Harvey made a good effort to show that non-neoliberal things are consistently also in the direction of supporting ruling class power
The question I had while reading it was, if you don't think this book has any serious arguments or anything worth refuting, why did you review it in the first place?
In my view this is a product of a sort of Morton’s Fork for Scott in terms of engaging with those who disagree with him.
If he doesn’t publish reviews of books he disagrees with (or otherwise write about those disagreements), then people can ask “why aren’t you engaging with those you disagree with? Do you even understand their arguments?”
On the other hand, when he does review them, then (assuming he doesn’t actually get convinced) he’s left in the position of saying some variant of “this book doesn’t seem to actually make a good argument”, which can in turn prompt responses like yours, wondering why he’s engaging with something that he sees as not making a significant contribution.
You can read Harvey's book yourself if you don't find Scott's review very satisfying, it's a relatively short book. I personally found Harvey's earlier works more interesting (although I read them many years ago) but A Brief History of Neoliberalism is pretty decent.
No, all you did there was make showy claims that seem plausible only so long as you don't apply basic deductive logic. E.G 'essence of man is determined by a web of social interactions' + 'social interactions can be replaced wholesale' (such as replacing modern alienated labor with full after-the-revolution communism) = 'all parts of the essence of man can be changed', i.e. everything about human nature is perfectly malleable.
Where does Marx say anything like "all parts of the essence of man can be changed"? The evolution of some social interactions (such as economic activity) does not imply that all parts of the essence of man can be changed.
The quote from Thompson is already mushy rhetoric. How do you measure "the intensification of the influence and dominance of capital"? Capital is the means of production; in what sense does it influence anything other than making labor more productive? Or by capital does he mean the owners of capital? What does it mean to "elevate" capital, the means of production? To praise it? To build it? To adopt and use it? Do I elevate capital if I say I can move more earth with a bulldozer than a spoon? What is an economy that does not "elevate" capital as a mode of production? Does it use no capital? That would be a hunter-gatherer society. Same with "elevating" capital into an "ethic" or "set of political imperatives" or "cultural logic". Words that are really nothing more than name-calling. There's no meaning there. Neo-Marxist mush.
I don't see how the "commodification of culture" can have anything to do with any government's economic policy, or any critique of recent trends in culture. People have been selling their books, art and music since classical antiquity. Outside of some stalinist regime where government bureaucrats try to design the culture from the top down, that's the way it always has been and always will be.
Just my editorial/marketing $0.02, it might be better for the subscriber to break these posts up into smaller chunks. For people who are killing time between calls or procrastinating at work, they are a little too long to really engage with.
Try reading between calls, then, when a call comes in, place your finger on the word you were currently reading. You'll then know where the next "smaller chunk" begins. An added benefit to this method is that you'll find these resulting smaller chunks PERFECTLY coincide with your schedule.
I had never heard of it either, but it appears to be a term referring to the capitalist economic system that existed after WW2 but prior to the "neoliberal turn". I am unconvinced this is actually a coherent word for a political-economic system, since many of the pieces are cultural (long-term employment at the same massive corporation being the norm) rather than political (high levels of taxation).
Agreed. As someone mentioned above, also, the post war economic system had the advantage of a decimated Europe and Japan trying to rebuild to sell all manner of goods to. That wasn't something that would last forever, obviously.
I think the term intentionally captures these cultural components as well as what you term the political-economic system, as the term comes from, at least partially, Polyani's work on embedded and dis-embedded markets. The point of the term is that markets are embedded in non-market (political, cultural, social) phenomena.
As someone who wasn't aware of the term until today I wish to confirm that its meaning is coherent, clear and immediately obvious if you're familiar with Polanyi's conceptual framework.
>I’m not super sure what Harvey means by saying that the Bush tax cuts are antithetical to true free market ideology. But apparently he thinks this is true, and a sign that the government is trying to provoke a global financial crisis in order to “finally rid itself of any obligation whatsoever to provide for the welfare of its citizens”.
I think what he's saying is that the Bush administration, faced with a choice between helping people affected by the Great Recession ("sustaining capitalism") and helping out wealthy corporations ("securing the power of the ruling class"), decided to go with tax cuts for the rich. It seems odd to describe social welfare programs as "sustaining capitalism," but makes sense if you believe capitalism is unsustainable without a safety net.
And while it sounds conspiratorial to say "the government is trying to provoke a financial crisis to remove its obligation to provide for its citizens," the non-conspiracy version is the Republican "starve the beast" strategy. Economy is bad -> cut taxes in the name of stimulating the economy -> now that you don't have enough money to balance the budget, cut social programs.
From what I know of Harvey, this would be an accurate description of what he's saying (nb I haven't read this particular book). I think he is saying that a true free market ideology would have let the financial institutions go bankrupt, and those who had investments which turned out to be bad should lose them.
He couldn't have been talking about the Great Recession or the response to it because the book was written before then.
(Not to mention that to the best of my knowledge the Bush administration did not actually pass any tax cuts specifically in response to the Great Recession.)
Ah, thanks for the correction. Based on that article it still doesn't look like it really qualifies as "tax cuts for the rich" though, although it's pretty vague about what the "tax incentives to stimulate business investment" were and what percentage of the total expenditure was that compared to the tax rebates for lower income taxpayers.
Well, except that "free market ideology" calls that a false dichotomy. The assertion is that the very act of taking less money from the rich is the most efficient and effective way to help people affected by any recession. Because what does such a person need most of all? A welfare check? Or a steady job? And who can provide a steady job? A rich person, i.e. someone with capital and the urge to make it grow, which can only be done by starting (or investing) in a business, and hiring people.
Whether you agree that this is how it works or not is besides the point. What is clear here is that this is how free market ideologues think it works, so if you ask them "Why are you giving the capitalist class a tax cut?" there answer is going to be "Because we want them to go out and hire more people, since people need jobs right now."
But the economy was *good* just after the dot-com recession. That's why in addition to massively increasing all kinds of spending, Bush implemented massive tax cuts. I don't seem to be able to find the total numbers, but it seems like they have been an order of magnitude larger than the stimulus + bailouts for the 2008 crisis ?
...my understanding of macroeconomics is that a good economy is when you want to *raise* taxes, not lower them, although I'm not entirely sure whether this is related to the point at issue.
Well, that was seemingly Bush's justification - "the surplus is not the government's money. The surplus is the people's money." - not mine...
(My obvious question to this justification was - why hasn't he then used this money to decrease the debt and therefore future interest on debt instead ?)
Well, and it works that way from the other party, too. "The economy's on fire! Time to raise taxes because the rich can afford it and we need to fund all these glorious projects." "The economy's in the toilet! Time to raise taxes because the poor are suffering and we need to help them out, and besides the rich can afford it."
It almost seems as if the secret underlying position on one side is "all taxes are evil" and on the other "there's no reason 100% of your earnings shouldn't entirely flow to the state to redistribute in the interests of the greater good." If there's a genuinely moderate position -- i.e. not one adopted for temporary rhetorical or electoral convenience -- it's becoming increasingly hard to find.
Yeah. It's not worth listening to opinions about taxes which are substantiated with arguments that would support those ridiculous underlying positions you just states. I've heard democrats now justify raising them because "they should pay their fair share". It 'could' be the case that they honestly thought that certain relative distribution of taxation among people is unfair, and unfair taxes are worse than fair taxes regardless of the taxation level, so increasing taxes on some is better than not doing so. But then, they seem to have a secret underlying position about what fair is.
You have quoted this line word-for-word 3 times, to Scott's single use of it; I think you've made your point about disagreeing with this phrasing. Would you mind offering some constructive summaries (less than 200 pages long, i.e. shorter than the original book) of what you do believe David Harvey's thesis (or theses) to be? I would be really interested in content to the effect of "David Harvey actually says X, Y, Z" -- as opposed to what you're producing currently, which is of the form "Scott thinks that Harvey says A, B, C, and is completely wrong". Or is this impossible, because the ideas require at least 200 pages to get across?
David Harvey is a Marxist, and his point is not that "embedded liberalism was great and completely sustainable". There's a reason why Scott Alexander (nor anybody else) can find a single quote to support this blatant strawman.
Harvey's point is that capitalism has a series of internal contradictions or tension points, and that capitalists getting out of one crisis often lay the foundations for the next crisis. That is, that capitalism has a series of irrationalities built into the system and cannot be constructed in a wholly rational manner.
My responses here probably seem quite crotchety, but I've had problems in Rationalist circles making people understand the most basic elements of leftist philosophy. I have gone through one example here:
I cannot emphasise this strongly enough: Scott not only seems to misunderstand leftist philosophy/outlook, he doesn't seem to be comprehending the words that are in front of him on the page at a very basic level. This leads to incredible distortions in an author's work, completely unrecognisable compared to the original, such as summarising Harvey's thesis as "embedded liberalism was great and completely sustainable". At no point does Harvey say anything approaching this, and it would not pass an Ideological Turing Test. I think to some degree Scott knows that this is unfair, framing his own response to the book as "uncharitable". But then the question becomes, why is Scott publishing uncharitable takes on left-wing writings?
Just want to say, I appreciate your posting on this review. I find it surprisingly difficult to find explanations of leftist philosophy I understand (tried reading Marx and felt like he was speaking a different language, practically), so thanks for trying to bring that discussion to here.
Which text(s) did you read? The translations vary in quality, and I think his later work is generally much easier to read than his earlier work (as long as you do the groundwork and pay attention to his specific definitions of certain concepts).
Singer for example seems to focus on the early Marx (iirc) and I think it's pretty unfortunate both for readability and leads to an incomplete understanding of Marx.
Capital, that's what everyone I've encountered seems to say to. No idea which translation. Thanks for the recommendations in that other comment below, enough of my smart & politically active friends are some flavor of leftist that I've always wanted to give it a fairer shake.
I use Ben Fowkes' translation of Capital which is published by Penguin. I think it is mostly regarded as the best translation. The first few chapters of Capital are quite dry so looking at secondary material will help.
> Harvey's point is that capitalism has a series of internal contradictions or tension points, and that capitalists getting out of one crisis often lay the foundations for the next crisis. That is, that capitalism has a series of irrationalities built into the system and cannot be constructed in a wholly rational manner.
Can you distinguish this point from something like:
> [Imaginary person's] point is that humanity has a series of internal contradictions or tension points, and that humans getting out of one crisis often lay the foundations for the next crisis. That is, that humanity has a series of irrationalities built into the system and cannot be constructed in a wholly rational manner.
My read is that no society ever has eliminated internal contradictions or tension points. No society ever has managed to eliminate crises. Capitalism seems unremarkably non-unique on this point. Moreover, it seems frankly absurd to imagine that if we only got one little slice of the human experience right (the economic system), then it would magically resolve the internal contradictions, tension points, and repeated crises caused by *every other* facet of human society. Instead, I imagine we'd see a different set of crises on the output side of things, and we'd have no way of distinguishing. Actually pretty directly analogous to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observability">observability theory</a> .
What's the irrationality built into the "humanity" system? I'm not really sure what you're getting at in your hypothetical point where you substituted the word 'humanity' for 'capitalism.'
The human experience is vastly more complex than just the economic system. To take just two of the most obvious examples, political and legal philosophy. I don't think that even the most ardent capitalist would claim that if only we adopted capitalism properly, it will fix all of the problems in humanity and prevent all crises.
So, let's just say that I'm viewing the world through the lens that humanity has a series of internal contradictions which cause crises. And we observe crises, in all societies, regardless of economic system. What observable can I look at to decide that I should throw away that lens and instead adopt the lens that it is capitalism, specifically, that has internal contradictions which cause crises?
Marxists can point towards the tendency of the profit rate to fall and stuff like that regarding capitalist contradictions. I suggest looking at Andrew Kliman's work if you're interested in that.
I don't feel like I learned anything after reading the review. It's hard to tell if it's because book was so bad or because review strawmanned it too much.
It's not one of Harvey's best books, but Scott seems to have completely misread it. I would recommend The Limits To Capital maybe, but I think this one probably requires more of an understanding of Marx first.
I graduated from law school in June 1975. I had arranged a job with a"wall street" law firm. I moved to NYC and took the bar exam in July. I started to work in August 1975. The first thing I worked on was the legal consequences of a municipal bankruptcy. In 1979, I was working in midtown when the dollar went into free fall and gold shot up to $800/oz. I saw people lined up down 47th street to sell rings and jewelry.
I was raised as a Democrat. the law firm I went to work for had a very prominent Democrat on its mast head. My mother was a fund raiser for Jimmy Carter. And I voted for the male child of a female canid. By 1980, based on my experience living and working in NYC at a fairly high level and in contact with events of public consequence, I revised my political opinions and voted for Ronald Reagan. Je ne regrette rien.
Man, if ever there were an illustration of the tendency to use "neoliberal" to mean "everything the author doesn't like," it's:
"...a flood of tracts and books, with Nozick’s Anarchy State and Utopia perhaps the most widely read and appreciated, emerged espousing neoliberal values."
Whatever you may think about Anarchy, State, and Utopia, or about Nozick in general, "neoliberal" is not a reasonable descriptor.
Thank you, Scott. I thought the review was fair. There are many popular criticisms of Neoliberalism -- the problem is they tend to lack substance.
Sometimes it feels like 90% of published thought is argued poorly and from a strange and wrong set of common assumptions.
It would be a breath of fresh air to read pieces starting from the premise that unions are inefficient and bad for everyone, which then builds new interesting ideas on top.
Instead there's a long war to be fought with unsystematic thinkers bombarding us with fashionable ideas across all media sources.
But the "premise that unions are inefficient and bad for everyone" is clearly historically and geographically wrong, so a much more interesting question is what makes for inefficient/bad unions compared to efficient/good unions ?
I think there is a special case when unions are good which is when workers have no other options for choosing their employer. So like in a company town where everyone works in coal mining.
I'd love to hear another example where unions have been net beneficial.
My broader point stands that nearly every source either assumes unions are good or has no opinion. The diversity of thought is missing in precisely the areas I think are true.
I think the orthodox idea is that if there is only a single employer and many independent potential workers, then there is an imbalance of power in favor of the single employer; when there is a thick market of competing employers, and all workers are in a single union, then there is an imbalance of power in favor of the union; but it's less clear how to think about the situation when there is a small number of employers and/or a large number of workers in the union while others are independent.
In most parts of the United States, there are two high-speed internet providers - the phone company and the cable company. Everyone seems clear that this causes problems, and I would think that the same thing is true when there are only two or three employers in an industry (or who do the vast majority of hiring in an industry).
Supposedly unions are working pretty well in ordoliberal Germany (where I assume there is a significant range of options for workers ?), but it might be just a myth ?
The lack of works based on assumption X is only a problem is X isn't obviously false, and I'm afraid I think that while there are plenty of weaker anti-union claims whose falseness isn't obvious enough to safely assume, the bald statement "unions are inefficient and bad for everyone" goes too far to be worth taking seriously.
Unions capture value for their members from the rest of society. That's usually bad for everyone else, but pretty much invariably good for members. And while the net effect on GDP is probably negative, the net effect on utility of any unions who are disproportionately poor is very likely to be positive.
Working from first principles, unions **shouldn't** be positive. They should be inefficient and bad for everyone. This falls out of 101-level econ and is not changed by advanced versions. Starting from this assumption and working through the conditions that exist, and how they complicate the issue, and eventually arriving at an assessment of how unions as she are spoke affect the world, elaborating on which parts of the underlying badness are still there and which are overwhelmed by other factors, is the useful thing.
I'm a long time SSC/ACT reader, and have always appreciated the rigor and clarity of the reviews on here, but this one's got me questioning whether I was just wasn't reading closely enough in the past.
Scott says:
"Harvey’s picture of an idyllic New York getting hit with a financial crisis for no reason"
After quoting Harvey saying:
"Capitalist restructuring and deindustrialization had for several years been eroding the economic base of the city, and rapid suburbanization had left much of the central city impoverished. The result was explosive social unrest on the part of marginalized populations during the 1960s, defining what came to be known as ‘the urban crisis’ (similar problems emerged in many US cities). The expansion of public employment and public provision—facilitated in part by generous federal funding—was seen as the solution. But, faced with fiscal difficulties, President Nixon simply declared the urban crisis over in the early 1970s."
Scott's gloss is clearly meant to be a kind of sarcastic hyperbole, but its so so so far removed from what Harvey's actually saying as to be a gross mischaracterization. I've done my share of hatereading in the past, and realized later how going in with that lens deeply distorted my reading to the point of blunt misreading. This whole review is *glowing* with that vibe.
I've hoped for a long time that Scott would review this book. I didn't expect him to *agree* with it - or even like it - but this leaves me bummed out.
Here's him quoting Marx without understanding what the quotes mean. The longer you stick around SSC/ACT the more you will notice egregious mistakes like this.
Its kind of weird that people here just make funny posts instead of engaging with my very logical points. I get the impression that there's a lot more conflict theorists around here than the Rationalist community would like to admit.
Here's one: they are regular SSC readers, enjoy it, and largely agree with Scott's reviewing methods and worldview. Which is why Marxbro's incredible persistence is probably not productive. I too have noticed large mistakes in the book reviews - most notably Singer's book on Marx. Though I personally enjoyed it, I have also heard that the review for Seeing Like a State is off-base; the book is on my reading list.
> Here's one: they are regular SSC readers, enjoy it, and largely agree with Scott's reviewing methods and worldview.
Great hypothesis, now time to evaluate it: do many people who give Marxbro funny reponses meet these three critera? Do many people who meet these three criteria give Marxbro funny responses?
Perhaps some people are ideologically committed to ignoring Scott Alexander's obvious mistakes. Scott has also pointed out that some people are just irrational:
Great hypotheses, now time to evaluate them: do you see many people who give you funny responses falling into one of those categories? Do many people who fall into those categories give you funny responses?
I read Scott’s criticism as pointing to NY defaulting on its large debt, and how
the source of this debt or cause of the default aren’t really explained. Unless maybe “The expansion of public employment and public provision—facilitated in part by generous federal funding—was seen as the solution” is meant to imply that NY just started hiring tons of people with borrowed money with no plan for how to recoup the money? I agree with Scott that this is far from a helpful description of how the crisis happened.
I agree that Scott skipped too many steps to say, even in jest, "for no reason." I agree with Scott that Harvey fails to link "restructuring and deindustrialization" with the neoliberalism that follows. In Harvey's mind, it appears to all be a part of the "rich capitalists fighting for class dominance"-kind of approach, but Harvey is sloppy on linking those changes in the 1960s and 70s (when he says the old system is in place and presumably things are good) to the 1980s when neoliberalism is taking over. As Scott mentioned, things were really bad in obvious ways prior to neoliberalism. It makes a lot more sense (to me, and apparently to Scott) to consider neoliberalism a response to a failing system than an attempt to destabilize a working system.
To my mind, there's a continuous effect that can be followed, without the need to blame neoliberalism or capitalists for doing anything in particular. That is, the proposed reforms would have become popular and happened anyway, even if the details and dates changed.
WWII wiped out industry around the world, except in the US which had just expanded massively to supply the Allies (and then help rebuild the rest of the world). This massive build up made enough excess wealth in the US that everyone had it pretty easy economically in the 1950s into the 1960s (except racial minorities, but for different reasons and they were purposefully refused access to the wealth). When the rest of the world began to catch up with the US economically, and manufacturing became possible elsewhere in the world again, prices would naturally fall. Marginal production, for which high cost labor would be a significant issue, would outsource to poorer regions with lower wages. Early on this would be Japan, later moving to less affluent areas as Japan advanced. Harvey notes this trend, but then blames the capitalists for it, as if they intentionally hurt laborers in NYC, rather than seeing it as inevitable due to world conditions. Even high tariffs and a mercantilist approach would not have worked, because the boom of the 50-70s was as much about foreign markets as internal production. You block other countries and you lose your market as well. That system was not sustainable, and lots of people were looking for alternatives and getting angrier and angrier with the current situation, including a lot of blue collar laborers across the US. That's why middle class and working class people still think Carter was a bad president and happily gave Reagan some of the biggest electoral victories in US history.
I'll add in another note about that Status 451 blog you link to and speak very highly of. In it the author claims:
"Sustained political violence is dependent on the willing cooperation of admirers and accomplices. The Left has these. The Right does not."
After a decade in which right-wing terrorist against killed at least 63 people in the US alone (ironically, 1 more than was killed in the decade of the 70's according to Wikipedia's numbers), this is a disgraceful claim. I suppose they might quibble about the meaning of "sustained", but it simply reads like right-wing apologism.
We don't have to speculate about the possibility of a sustained rightwing campaign of violence in the 2010's and 2020's because there already has been one. The left's body count during the same period is minuscule. What the left did, it did 50 years ago or it did recently, but most likely didn't kill anyone. That's the underlying truth that the status 451 article article isn't acknowledging. At present, the left simply isn't as violent, in statistical terms, as the right. Certainly if we measure violence by body count it is not even close.
"Institutions are organizations the Left controls that operate for the benefit of the Left’s people. The Right doesn’t really have these. As an example, there are occasional hard right lawyers, but so far as I know there is no such thing as the Reactionary Lawyers’ Guild."
A majority of supreme court justices were selected in part for their involvement in the Federalist society, FFS. The federalist society is further to the right than the national lawyer's guild is to the left by world standards, and probably by American standards to. The fact that the federalist society hasn't been, to my knowledge, implicated in past terrorism doesn't change that. If the author wants to play the equivalent of the game I see on the left sometimes "it doesn't count as left-wing unless I like it", but for the right instead, fine, but that's not serious analysis. The right, including the Trumpist right, has plenty of institutions. Relative to the percentage of the population who would support the right if everyone voted, it has a very nice swathe of institutions indeed.
"Some of this could actually be constructive for campus civility. For instance, I’ve long argued that if a Righty speaker is disrupted on a college campus, then campus Righties should *disrupt every single Lefty speaker for the remainder of the school year.*"
I'll note that what this is proposing is A) escalation and B) escalation not necessarily against the people directly responsible for the first attack (it says "every single lefty speaker").
The 451 blog post is hack work. Interesting hack work in part, with valuable statistics and anecdotes, and well written, but ultimately right-wing apologia. I simply don't think you'd uncritically link to a similar blogpost on the left *nor would I expect you to*.
I've defended this blog in the past from the accusation of being a rightwing hub, and I took one of the virtues of this blog to be an attempt to rise above the fray- a genuine effort at analysis that isn't left or right, but is effortful. Praising something like this, I find disappointing.
I mean, ultimately your first point comes down to definitions of "right". There are several political axes and my read on the alt-right is that they're more concerned with culture and with personal liberty than they are with free markets.
It's not wrong to say that "do what benefits yourself" as an ideology is not very conducive to things like suicide bombings. On the other hand, it enables all sorts of crimes for profit - the most blatant examples are Minamata disease and the Sampoong collapse.
I use three for the modern West - economic left/right, societally libertine/authoritarian, and cultural conservative/SJ (culture has a lot of parts to it, but they tend to roughly correlate into one or two axes, and right here and right now that one axis mostly captures it).
The alt-right reads as fairly libertine to me, and they're *definitely* culturally conservative.
Weird. I first learned about the Bretton Woods system from a practice SAT test, where it was nestled as a footnote, and now it's being discussed as one of the the most important economic things ever in the past century. Is this 🦋 the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon?
Funny the effect should be named after the Baader-Meinhof group, who were of course heavily involved in the issues of the 1970s that are under discussion here!
My main association with the phrase "Bretton Woods" (and even more so of the name "Felix Rohatyn", who was mentioned once in this post, in passing) is the Lyndon LaRouche cult that recruited heavily on campuses in the early 2000s (and probably still do?) who have an .... idiosyncratic .... take on all of this. (Somehow the explanation involves Queen Elizabeth, Mikhail Gorbachev, and William Weld, conspiring with the Rothschilds and Felix Rohatyn, to pull the US out of Bretton Woods and collapse the world economy and assassinate Lyndon LaRouche himself .... all on behalf of the ancient Aristotelian conspiracy against the true Platonists. I've probably missed some steps.)
I feel like this would be a good pairing with Marc Levinson's <em>An Extraordinary Time</em> and Matt Stoller's <em>Goliath</em>. Levinson is basically talking about the same economic period and transition as Harvey, but with much more of an international comparison focus and less Conflict Theory. Stoller is all about the history of antitrust policy and efforts, and he'd probably argue that the 1950s and 1960s were a golden age of new business startups and commerce that was ruined by what came after the 1970s.
It sounds like Harvey (when discussing the NYC financial crisis) does that thing that <em>Jacobin</em> does as well, where they have to elide the causality of why some crisis occurred because it creates dissonance with their ideological priors. So they talk about NYC getting hit with a financial crisis, but not about how the city was brought to the point of vulnerability in a financial crisis by hefty city-level taxes, high social spending (nostalgically referred to as NYC's equivalent of "Red Vienna"), aggressive unions, rising crime, and businesses deciding they didn't want to deal with that stuff anymore and following people out to the suburbs and South.
It almost seems like a law of the universe in my experience that when a pernicious trend (declining union membership, social trust, rising Gini coefficients, etc.) is attributed to neoliberalism by a prominent academic (Turchin, Krugman, Applebaum, Putman, looking at you), a quick examination of the numbers will show that the trend clearly predated neoliberalism.
I think for most of us, neoliberalism is not so much the *cause* of declining union membership, social trust, rising inequality etc, rather neoliberalism *is* all of those things. When people use the phrase they're mostly not talking about the ideology of Friedman etc, they're talking about a series of social transformations that concentrated power in the hands of the rich.
But then if I'm not mistaken the Chicago school ideas of utility maximization, game theory, economic analysis of law impacts ; emphasizing markets, profit and government non-intervention all have been slowly percolating into the society since the 1950s (?) until becoming mainstream in the 1970s, but therefore already had some effects before the 1970s ?
That may be a useful way to look at it, but the implications are not good for the left. The old system was not sustainable, and people were more and more aware of it. If natural effects of people's decisions broke the unions because the alternatives seemed to them worse, then there was no hope for such a union-based system.
I think the timing is not good for supporters of the left's approach here, because these issues were happening long before the economic right had the power or organization to create the problems. By the 1980s the problems were fully apparent and they could easily capitalize on the people's anger and distrust of the old system. Even then, it wasn't until 1994 that Republicans took control of the House of Representatives, for the first time in over 40 years. By that point Bill Clinton was practically running as a conservative, for lack of support on the left.
Notice Scott doesn't actually quote anything in this section either. I searched the book for "savagely slash" and the only quote I can find is "savagely cutting" - i.e. Harvey used an adverb that Scott doesn't like but actually the verb that he _does_ like. One wonders why Harvey is being mocked for something he didn't say. Perhaps Scott is not really reading this book carefully and is just looking for excuses to dislike it?
Scott, from where do you get your story of how embedded liberalism met its demise? The Milton Friedman take is essentially that the phillips curve broke down because we had a supply shock (rather than wages driving inflation) hence stagflation. I’m not especially familiar with that timeframe, so I’d love to hear where the stuff about Medicare and Unions and the like originates.
Anyone who writes like this is probably not interested in finding the truth. To use vocabulary like that is to ignore that there are tradeoffs to any economic decision making. The fact that taxpayers have a lessoned bill and bondholders (that’s your 401k or pension, unless you have absolutely 0 plan for retirement) are made whole is irrelevant to the author. Either the author doesn’t understand how these tradeoffs work, or he doesn't care to acknowledge that there are tradeoffs in the first place. Given that he sounds like a Marxist, I’ll take #2–he doesn’t want to acknowledge the tradeoffs because the decision, let’s say, to “slash” benefits is purely morally wrong within a Marxist moral framework. It doesn’t explicitly advantage the working class vis-à-vis the bourgeoisie, therefore, it’s bad. No matter that the case could easily be made that this is in the long-run interests of everyone.
"nowadays economists (including the most left-leaning ones) are telling the government it should be less concerned about debt, not more."
Clearly you haven't read John Cochrane's blog (see e.g https://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2020/09/debt-matters.html) who is a well-known economist; certainly economists are not as a whole saying the government should be less concerned about debt. You're also missing the part of the picture which is that US debt is now being bought in large amounts by the Federal Reserve in what amounts to money printing to finance spending.
I think you are being too harsh on the debt prediction; after all there *was* an incident last year when a member of congress suggested defaulting on US debt to China ("nobody protested foreigners having too much debt").
Yeesh. I lived through the 70s and remember it well. None of this makes the slightest sense. The sea change in political and social mythology that came at the end of that decade was, from my ground-level view, driven from the bottom up. No politician started it, no secret cabal, no vast shadowy conspiracy of Rothschilds and Wall Street financiers. Half the politicians were taken by surprise and their fortunes went up in flames.
People were just freaking sick of brutal inflation and economic stagnation, the endless lecturing from academics and politicians about accepting a steadily diminishing quality of private life in the name of the greater good, or because of some vague universal limitations only they could truly understand (because we were all too stupid to get it), and being assured too many times that the chocolate ration was being raised to 20g/week.
People flung it all away and decided to give the statist do-gooders the boot, give untrammeled private greed and The Invisible Hand a try not because they were good students of Mieses or something, but simply because they were sick of the endless malaise and being lectured to, and some politicians (obviously particularly Reagan and Thatcher) were smart enough to see that nascent wave and ride it to victory.
The message I think people heard from people like Reagan was this: "Collective action is a dead end. It hasn't had a new idea in decades. Maybe your dad was a loyal FDR New Dealer, heck I was too, but it isn't the 30s any more and those ideas are played out, exhausted, not working. But listen: I believe in *you*, all you individuals. I think *you* have new ideas, that you can imagine new and better ways to run your private lives, and I bet if we just got all the dead weight of the collective organizations off your back -- the government, the big unions, the big banks, the big networks, the lawyers from one of the massive alphabet-soup agencies -- all the operations of 10,000 people run by people a thousand miles away from you -- if we can get them to back off, why, you'll come up with better ideas that will prove we don't need to accept a steadily declining quality of life, turn the heat down and wear a sweater."
I think people generally understood that was at least a little naive, perhaps a litle delusional, and they doubted it was so simple. But my God it was a breath of fresh air, to have the President saying "Hey, I trust *you* and you and you, all you regular schmoes, just as much or even more as the usual brainy aristocrats, and I think if you're let more alone to do whatever you think is best, we'll be just fine." People thought, what the hell, let's give it a try. And you can't overestimate the attraction of a politician saying "I trust the American people" and actually meaning it.
There was a great Doonesbury cartoon of the day I remember, in which Reagan is giving some statement or other to the press, and they ask a pointed question, and he replies as if he's addressing the public directly and Rick Redfern says "Hey no fair! He's going over our heads to the people...!" And it kind of felt that way, that Reagan was "going over the heads" of everyone who had been telling us how to think and act and breathe for 25 years, and tickled our fancies to think of ourseves as *being* over the heads of all the smart guys.
I think that's about it, that's all there was to it, from my bug's eye point of view. The rest just follows from the huge semi-emotional wave that crested at the time. The fact that it worked out OK, that the 80s were a boom decade -- who knows why *that* happened? Maybe Reagan was smarter than he looked, maybe there was brilliant tactical leadership further down, maybe it was all just dumb luck, maybe there were blind massive economic and social (or demographic) forces at work that would've made it work out had Mickey Mouse been President.
"I am not sure what Harvey means here about how under (non-neo) liberal practices lenders take the losses. In the 1960s, would bankers have loaned to Mexico and then, when Mexico couldn’t pay it back, just said “okay, whatever, keep the extra”?"
This why different interest rates exist. Riskier loans pay higher interest because of the greater chance of default. If everyone is forced to pay loans back regardless of ability to pay, the system makes no sense. Which is why imf forcing African countries to privatize their resources and impoverish citizenry through austerity measures to service a debt that was made 50 years ago and direct deposited into a dictators bank account and has been paid back many times over but thanks to the miracle of compounding interest is larger than ever- gives neoliberalism a bad name. Highly recommend Debt by david graeber, gripping account of money and debt through history.
How is the IMF forcing African countries to pay back loans, other than refusing to give them any more money if they don't? It's not like the IMF can send in an army. It doesn't even have the power to seize the country's assets abroad.
They can enact economic embargos which would cut off the country from the rest of the world, very few countries dare to defy the dollar. Also it don't act as an independent neutral entity, the imf is controlled by the us since the us provides the vast majority of funding. Not to mention there are quite a few examples from african history of progressive democratic presidents getting assassinated because they threatened to not pay their internation debts, like Sankara in 1987, those sorts of things helps keep countries compliant.
Just curious to get your opinion on an alternative solution.
Let's say that instead of assassinating the progressive president or cutting off all trade, that instead the IMF said "no new loans." The results would have been terrible for those countries, with no new money available. In my view, it would have been similar to a trade embargo, but through different means.
Would that have been better/acceptable? Do you think the IMF or other organizations should have continued to provide loans to countries that would sometimes just refuse to pay debts? The alternative of higher interest rates only works if there's still a chance of being repaid, but I'm also not sure if you would be content with a 50% interest rate (making this rate up for effect, presumably it would be very high if the alternatives are assassination and embargo) instead of no loans at all.
I think that would be wonderful. Abolish the IMF and forgive all debts. I think you are overestimating the good faith behind these debts in the first place. Would they have been made in the first place if the IMF weren't there to ensure compliance? Would you loan a million dollars to a dictator in a 3rd world country? They were made because they knew the country had the resources and human capital to draw on and they had the leverage to ensure these markets were neoliberalized aka opened to private foreign capital. If you look at how the people of the country actually benefited from these loans, it was very little to negative in the long term. The IMF is not the only source of money in the world, these countries would easily be able to find investors with more reasonable terms, but also lifting the debt burden would allow the countries resources to funnelled back into benefiting the people of the country (okay assuming a not totally corrupt govt--but at least funds would be less inclined to lend money to those types of govts without the guarantee of being rewarded)
"Would you loan a million dollars to a dictator in a 3rd world country?"
"The IMF is not the only source of money in the world, these countries would easily be able to find investors with more reasonable terms"
How do you reconcile these two statements?
The IMF is a lender of last resort. Nobody goes to the IMF if they can possibly get any money from private investors at reasonable rates. That's why African countries are increasingly turning to China instead of the IMF, despite not fully trusting China's intentions.
I think I agree with you on premises, but your conclusion seems very odd to me. As dionysus mentions, the IMF is a last resort option. I have no confidence (as you seem to agree) that these loans would have been made in the first place without the IMF. The reason is that these are unstable countries with corrupt governments. Nobody would lend to them without guarantees that could be enforced.
I also agree with you that the actual use of the money doesn't always help the population.
I think I see your point that the new government should not be held accountable for loans taken out in bad faith by a previous (dictator) government and used for enriching himself. I'm not sure how to reconcile that without taking away the lender of last resort and/or removing the options for the future leaders to get loans to actually improve the state of the nation.
I'm picturing a scenario where a future "democratic" (I'm not sure exactly how we tell the difference, or whether that's even a meaningful metric for giving loans) government wants to build useful infrastructure. The IMF says "we already loaned you $20 million, pay that back first or no new loan." So you're suggestion is for the IMF to ignore that debt, but also not to make a new loan? I'm not sure how that really helps the situation, as they still want to build the infrastructure, but now have no way to finance it.
Now, if you're complaint is that the IMF isn't always fair, then sure. That's a subjective argument and will depend on the merits of the case. Some cases are probably more or less fair than others, and maybe the IMF should take better care not to loan to a dictator that might get overthrown shortly thereafter, leaving a debt on the new government. It's going to be very hard to draw a bright line for when that's happening. A lot of "democratic" governments in corrupt countries are less than ideal, even if they're replacing an absolutely evil dictator and are obviously better than the previous government. A lot of dictators are in charge of countries for very long times, making a decision not to ever loan to them difficult to justify (especially with the difficulty in telling the difference between how good or bad successive governments are). Should they loan money to a government that won a contested election? How about a leader who is bad on some human rights issues but really good on improving the country? It seems your ideals are utopian rather than helpful in actually solving the complicated issues.
Yes you are right, I am coming from a very utopian pov. I don't like to see the powerful exploit the powerless, which is how I see the whole WB, WTO, IMF collaboration with the global south. I see poor countries suffering because of the debt burden they hold, and yet rich countries such as the US only benefit from more debt because we control the financial apparatus of the world. Is foreign debt necessary? Don't countries in the global south have natural resources and plenty of human capital? If you want practical solutions, beyond abolishing the IMF, I advocate giving individual human beings money in the form of UBI that would cover basic living expenses. This would need to be a global initiative with a global wealth tax and universal basic income so that the ultra rich can't hoard their money in permissive countries and exploit cheap labor in other countries. If you say that's not realistic because the humans in power are too greedy, you probably have a point. But it would be simple and super effective.
When has the IMF enacted an economic embargo? I searched on Google and can't even find anyone accusing the IMF of doing this, or having the power to do this. If you're saying the US is controlling the IMF and it's the US that imposes sanctions, when has the US sanctioned an African country for being unable to pay back debts?
Sankara was not assassinated by the US because he threatened to not pay international debts. Some in Burkina Faso believe he was assassinated by France, because: "On 15 October 1987, Sankara was killed by an armed group with twelve other officials in a coup d'état organized by his former colleague Blaise Compaoré. When accounting for his overthrow, Compaoré stated that Sankara jeopardized foreign relations with former colonial power France and neighbouring Ivory Coast, and accused his former comrade of plotting to assassinate opponents.[1]" (Wikipedia)
Burkina Faso's entire foreign debt in 1987 was $800 million, in today's dollars. That's a trivial amount of money for a country like France. If France did orchestrate the assassination, Cold War geopolitics was a far likelier motive, although I don't think the coup needs any other explanation than "Compaore wanted power and took it".
Yes I'm sorry for oversimplifying and maybe embargo isn't the right word. It is a vast complicated bureaucracy of the WB, WTO, IMF with the financial and military might of the US and other western powers behind it. The IMF merely insures that the debts be paid no matter what by getting countries to refinance and agree to austerity measures and opening up of natural resources to creditors. The US doesn't sanction African countries because they are paying their debts, painfully. Also they aren't powerful enough to be a threat to US dominance.
I choose the Sankara example because I thought France had confessed to aiding the coup but in fact activists have only petitioned the French govt to declassify docs pertaining to their involvement. Maybe it was only a coincidence that within a short time period of Sankara openly urging other African countries to stick together and not pay their debts that he was violently overthrown in a coup by a dictator that was coincidentally very accommodating to Western influence. Weird that none of those other African nations decided to default on their debts.
I don't think it's really a secret that the US has been periodically involved in reorganizing foreign govts either violently or through other means to bring in Western friendly heads of state. Also the US loves to embargo and sanction countries that don't comply with its objectives (Cuba? Iran? Venezuela?) It seems naive to think that there would be no fear of repercussions, politically or financially.
I guess I don't understand your position, do you think that IMF is a net good for these countries, kind of like a pay day lender for poor people who don't have other options and so they are grateful for the help?
Different stores charge different markups based on the level of shrinkage; this is already built into the price. I don't get how they decide they get to prosecute me for shoplifting.
uhhh that sounds like a completely different situation? But sure to go with your analogy: what if a relative bought the shirt in your name and you never agreed to it, but technically the debt was in your name and you've already paid for it many times over, should all your earnings go to the store for the rest of your life so that your legal obligations be met?
That book, "Debt: The First 5000 Years" was simultaneously immensely fascinating, but also so infuriating that it's probably the only book I've intentionally stopped reading. It helped me understand so much about the role of taxation in creating the value of fiat money, and gave me good ways of thinking about the origin of monetary units in denominating debt, long before actual currency existed, and also the role of reciprocal unpaid debts in solidifying friendships and family relations - and yet Graeber just rails on and on about how economists try to justify things with made-up just-so stories, without ever stopping to notice that he is doing exactly the same thing! But Graeber's personal response to the seminar on his work at Crooked Timber (https://crookedtimber.org/category/david-graeber-debt-seminar/) made me think he is just fundamentally a non-serious thinker, despite having some really gripping ideas. And the "Bullshit Jobs" book has cemented that thought for me.
well Graeber considers himself an anthropologist not an economist, so I guess he could be considered a storyteller about storytellers, and he is a bit hyperbolic, which I enjoy personally but I understand a lot of people don't. Do you consider Michael Hudson, the economist on which he bases his work, also non-serious?
Debt: the first 500 Years makes one (1) excellent point, about how the supposed barter economy is mostly just nonsense. It deserves very real praise for this.
The flip side of a higher interest rate is that it's harder for the borrowing country to pay off. Is there always an interest rate which compensates for the risk in the loan while still being possible for the target country to actually pay?
Aside from the many economic crises of the 1970s, there were also lots of structural factors that made pre-1970s liberalism unsustainable:
1. A declining unionization rate. Fewer people in unions means strikes, union security agreements, and the like, which benefit the unionized labor aristocracy at the expense of everyone else, become less popular.
2. An aging population. It's a lot easier to have generous welfare benefits when you have lots of working young people supporting a few elderly, than when the largest demographic group in your population is old people who need Social Security and Medicare.
3. The rise of the developing world, especially China. It's a lot harder to have ultra-high tax rates, ultra-high blue colar wages, and onerous regulations when companies can take their manufacturing elsewhere.
4. The failure of the communist countries to create any semblance of prosperity, which damaged the credibility of left-wing economic arguments.
Strange... I 'remember' the Winter of Discontent (UK) as being earlier in the decade, and I lived through it. My suspicion is that many books like this take the bones of an idea and then hang bits of cherry picked history on it.
A few stray remarks from someone who was there at the time.
Any ideology under pressure will tend to lash out at its opponents, often by presenting a very biased and exaggerated account of the past, or of alternative presents that may be proposed. You have to be over 60, I should think, to have any real memory of what life was like in the period 1945-75, and, taking advantage of this, neoliberals have developed over the decades an entire counter-history of the time. To the challenge "that's wrong!" about an assertion they will say something like "I suppose you think that period was a paradise then!" which effectively shuts down any further discussion. Of course it wasn't paradise, and there was no overarching ideology to be discredited anyway. There was just a realisation, by governments of all political persuasions, that there could be no return to the poverty and depression of the 1930s. The analogy I normally employ is that of driving a car: it helps to know where you want to go, where you are, to keep your eyes on the road and hold the steering wheel. That's pretty much all that the economic policies of different countries had in common. Increasingly from the 1970s, the car was under the control of those who thought you should close your eyes, take your hands off the wheel and fight with the other passengers about where the car was going to go.
The fact that this second group won out, increasingly since the 1970s, is primarily a matter of chance. I'd just mention three things. One was the inter-generational conflict after 1968, which was more significant than is often thought, but which, under more benign economic conditions, would have played out very differently, and indeed probably cemented the postwar consensus in place. The second was the political, but also economic, effects of the Vietnam war, including the US moving off the gold standard in 1972, which affected the whole world. The third was the toxic mix of inflation and deflation that followed the massive increase in oil prices after the 1973 Middle East War. This produced unemployment, for the first time since 1945, and trades union militancy as peoples' standards of living were hit. You'll see firstly that none of these things had anything to do with the economic policies of the 50s and 60s - all were extraneous shocks. You'll also see that there's some playing fast and loose with dates, as is usual in arguments of this sort, since the 70s were very different.
The British case is especially interesting (I was there). For a start, the rise of Thatcher was essentially an accident. The Tories went down to a humiliating defeat in 1974, and in the machiavellian manoeuvring that followed, Thatcher was put forward as a stalking horse to defeat the moderates; But the arithmetic was wrong, and she came out top, essentially as a protest vote. This was bizarre, since her politics were very much a minority in the party, and they were, indeed, a more radical version of those that had led to defeat in 1974. She could also easily have lost the 1979 election. Had the then Labour PM, Callaghan, called an election in October 1978 he might well have won, or at least ensured a Tory minority government. As it was, there was a particularly bad winter in 1978 (the famous "Winter of Discontent") and the Tories just scraped into power the following year. Although the media made a terrible fuss, the idea that Britain underwent some kind of ideological sea-change at that point is absolutely wrong. Indeed, the first few years of Thatcher were so catastrophic that it was only the fact that the Labour Party split into two and the halves fought each other that saved the Tories from being wiped out in the next election. The attempt to construct a narrative of inevitability around all this is quite dishonest: had it not been for some extraordinary luck, and some suicidal decisions by the Labour party, neoliberalism would have been dead by 1985. And what happened in Britain, remember, influenced greatly what happened elsewhere.
"... the US moving off the gold standard in 1972, which affected the whole world."
The collapse of fixed exchange rates between currencies was a major contributor to the end of the "postwar liberal consensus." I remember one country after another having to adjust the exchange rate versus the dollar in that period, often multiple times, and it was always front page news.
"some suicidal decisions by the Labour party"
One can usually count on those, can't one? But seriously, if Labour hadn't split, then it would have been a different Labour Party.
I agree that 1979 is too early to consider it inevitable, and that many details could have gone differently which would have had significant effects. On the other hand, I do see the writing on the wall even by the 70s that things needed to change, somehow. The neoliberals in the 80s were so successful in the long run (regardless of luck or how they got into power) that by the 90s there was no chance at all of going back. The people were happy with the new system, so Bill Clinton championed welfare reform and crime bills! The old left had all but collapsed by that point, along with the Soviet Union. The feeling in the US was that "we won" and had proved (we thought for all time, but nothing lasts forever) that communism/socialism were failures and that free markets were the best answer.
As with all things, lack of opposition makes an ideology sloppy and forget how to argue its own points. Given the 30 years since the collapse of communism, we took that victory for granted, and now younger kids are growing up with an entrenched system of free markets and fewer people remembering how or why to argue in favor of it.
Incidentally, in the past year or two (inspired by my thoughts in December 2019 about what the impacts of the ending decade had been) I've become more and more convinced that whatever we're living through at the moment (Arab Spring, BLM, Brexit, Trump, #metoo, cancel culture, TERFism, etc.) is the by-product of the boom of social media. Which made me wonder whether the culture wars of 1964-1975 was exactly the same by-product of the boom of television.
In the '80s and '90s there was plenty of discussion of culture war around "post-modernism" and "political correctness" and "yuppies" and "Ms." and "ebonics" and so on - but somehow at the time, it all still *felt* like echoes of 1968 (and now they all feel like pre-cursors of what was to really come in the social media era).
I'm not old enough to have lived through Kent State and Vietnam and all that, but it does seem like the period from 1980 to 2005 or so was (oddly) a break in the culture war, perhaps because the media environment of the television era was gradually settling down, and hadn't yet been disrupted by the new thing.
"Increasingly from the 1970s, the car was under the control of those who thought you should close your eyes, take your hands off the wheel and fight with the other passengers about where the car was going to go."
That's really the heart of the issue, I think, and not just economically. The concept that you don't need to plan further ahead than the next electoral cycle, that the market knows best; the abandonment of building utopia, which was still an aspiration in the postwar West (and of course in the USSR as well). Even in the modern progressive movement - Medicare for All is mainly a political/electoral project, a very difficult one but only for reasons of social reality, not physical reality (and to be executed by politicians rather than the masses). The Green New Deal is more than that, but ultimately it gets reduced to passing one bill through Congress, at some point in time. True, it's impossible to make longer-scale plans because the Republicans will stop anything the moment they gain the power to, but forgetting plans for a moment, what about dreams? The biggest goal of the US left seems to be just turning into Europe. Aside from Europe having its own problems - is that really the limit of your ambition? Can you imagine nothing better than Europe?
Though possibly some of this is me projecting social media negativity backwards. This comment section often treats 'utopianism' as a dirty word, but to some extent that's because it's a lot easier to criticize others' dreams than promote your own on the modern Internet. And there's also something to say, though at the moment I can't really think of what, about rationalism and the goals of immortality and AI safety, and the difficulties in making progress on either without a roadmap.
I'm really surprised that there are negative comments about this review. Before I was half way through I was thinking "This is what the book review contestants should compare themselves to (and aspire to). Interesting, thoughtful and thought-provoking - I'm not sure what else people could want.
A couple of personal nitpicks,though. I was disappointed that even with a picture of the Iron Lady on the 'front page' and it starting off with (in the second sentence) talk of the 'global economy', almost the entire review was about one country - America. In fact from talking about the global economy to the first mention of 'the government', it is not even specified which country is being talked about. I know Scott is American and so is the majority of the readership but I always find this irritating (it happens in a lot of the essays here). The Iron Lady was conspicuous by her absence and I was expecting a lot more of Milton Friedman - as the supposed guru behind Reagan and Thatcher.
However, I'm now going to read the review again - I really thought it was that good.
Oh, and if it doesn't say "Your Book Review" at the beginning, isn't it obviously by Scott?
There are negative comments because Scott says things like:
"Harvey's theses, framed uncharitably, are:
1. Embedded liberalism was great and completely sustainable."
Firstly, Scott Alexander is framing himself as being uncharitable, which is a hilarious admission of his own biases. Secondly, David Harvey is a Marxist and at no point would make the argument that liberalism is completely stable (Harey has multiple books about how it _isn't_ stable!). Scott Alexander is failing a Turing test here and this review seems like a simple exercise in misrepresenting the outgroup rather than a serious attempt to charitably read outgroup thinkers.
I have a challenge for Scott; find me a single David Harvey quote in this book that says anything close to "Embedded liberalism was great and completely sustainable". I suggest that he wont be able to do this, and will likely never reply to this post or even acknowledge his mistake.
You have quoted this line word-for-word 3 times, to Scott's single use of it; I think you've made your point about disagreeing with this phrasing. Would you mind offering some constructive summaries (less than 200 pages long, i.e. shorter than the original book) of what you do believe David Harvey's thesis (or theses) to be? I would be really interested in content to the effect of "David Harvey actually says X, Y, Z" -- as opposed to what you're producing currently, which is of the form "Scott thinks that Harvey says A, B, C, and is completely wrong". Or is this impossible, because the ideas require at least 200 pages to get across?
David Harvey is a Marxist, and his point is not that "embedded liberalism was great and completely sustainable". There's a reason why Scott Alexander (nor anybody else) can find a single quote to support this blatant strawman.
Harvey's point is that capitalism has a series of internal contradictions or tension points, and that capitalists getting out of one crisis often lay the foundations for the next crisis. That is, that capitalism has a series of irrationalities built into the system and cannot be constructed in a wholly rational manner.
My responses here probably seem quite crotchety, but I've had problems in Rationalist circles making people understand the most basic elements of leftist philosophy. I have gone through one example here:
I cannot emphasise this strongly enough: Scott not only seems to misunderstand leftist philosophy/outlook, he doesn't seem to be comprehending the words that are in front of him on the page at a very basic level. This leads to incredible distortions in an author's work, completely unrecognisable compared to the original, such as summarising Harvey's thesis as "embedded liberalism was great and completely sustainable". At no point does Harvey say anything approaching this, and it would not pass an Ideological Turing Test. I think to some degree Scott knows that this is unfair, framing his own response to the book as "uncharitable". But then the question becomes, why is Scott publishing uncharitable takes on left-wing writings?
There seems to be a pretty big hole in both the review (and the book ?) and these discussions about the material conditions behind the 1970s :
- US oil production reached a peak in 1971.
- While demand kept growing (causing some supply difficulties even in 1970).
- So US crude imports more than doubled between 1970 and 1973 (and before 1973, import quotas were in place).
- In April 1971, practically for the first time since WW2, the American trade balance was in the red.
- 4 months later Nixon ends the Bretton Woods gold standard : the convertibility between gold and dollars, leading to a strong devaluation of the dollar.
- At the same time OPEC quickly sensed the wind turning, and feeling powerful for the first time, threatened an embargo in January 1971. Western companies caved in to this price increase, only the first one of a long series of concessions... (And OPEC partially *have* to do it, as the dollars they are getting for the oil become devalued compared to gold, important in the Islmai hawala ! Not to mention that they're just following supply and demand, at least until the (semi-) embargo itself.)
- Oil companies got nationalized all over the world : Algeria, Venezuela, Iraq, Lybia...
- A transfer of shares from Western companies to Arab Gulf countries in their oil companies (like Aramco, which extractions doubled between 1970 and 1973 !) was negotiated.
- Speculative : about the "Christmas Eve Massacre" itself : according to the ex-minister of the Saudi oil, the Shah of Iran had told him that Kissinger wanted a higher price so that the Western oil companies could finance big new oil projects, now primarily offshore.- Between 1973 and 1974 the natural decline of American extractions was almost double the reduction of oil mandated by OPEC's political decisions.
- 1970 to 1973 was a transition from the oil market being ruled by demand to being governed by supply.
Source : *Oil, Power, and War: A Dark History* by Matthieu Auzanneau
Love the last sentence: "Overall it looks like Harvey was wrong about all of his specific beliefs, but right that increasingly many people would agree with him. This is probably a metaphor for life."
Also, nice dramaturgical twist in the first part of the review.
A supplementary fun fact, for those who enjoy political science:
It was not only Reagan/Thatcher who initiated the "neoliberal" change. Equally important was the Labour party in New Zealand. The main actor bringing about this internal ideological change in Labour was the finance minister Roger Douglas (his policies were later dubbed "Rogernomics").
Similar ideological changes took place within the Scandinavian social democratic parties, and the German social democratic party under Schroeder. The Social Democrats have often been in the driver's seat with regard to these allegedly "neoliberal" changes: enhance competition, do outsorcing of publicly financed services, introduce purchase-provider splits and so on. Arguably, such policies supplement older Social Democratic tropes such as ensure wage moderation in unions, and fiscal discipline (you don't mess with "our" public finances); so the degree of ideological shift should not be exaggerated.
The Conservatives have sometimes been more reluctant to embrace so-called neoliberalism than Social Democrats, in countries where Conservative parties are split between an old-fashioned conservative faction emphasising culture, tradition and gradualism; versus a liberal faction emphasising individual freedoms and never-argue-with-the market.
You got the same change in British Labour as well, under Tony Blair; however this change within Labour only happened in the aftermath of Thatcher, and may thus be regarded more as a consequence of her regime, than as a homegrown change within the party (as in New Zealand, the Scandinavian countries and Germany). Perhaps for this reason, the ideological shift/slight re-orientation within Social Democracy has not been sustained in British Labour (but things may be in the process of changing there again).
Be that as it may, who can ever forget Margaret Thatcher's reply when a journalist asked what was her main achievement: "New Labour".
Oh, also, Scott quotes two paragraphs about neoconservatism as the next stage and then concludes "As far as I can tell, neoconservatism reached its apex during the Bush administration, and since then everyone has backed away from it. It was not an inevitable next phase of capitalism"
But a lot of the aspects of neoconservatism Harvey describes did survive and got amplified by the Trump administration, right? (Of course, others didn't, and also I think different people were involved, so nobody calls it neoconservatism.)
What aspects of neoconservatism got amplified by Trump?
My impression has been that neoconservatism is the ideology that is most diametrically opposed to Trumpism - it's about international entanglements to produce secular democratic states while encouraging the free movement of peoples, and a more laissez-faire domestic economy. The Bush-era neocons made all sorts of compromises, aligning with Christian conservatives at home, and with repressive totalitarian regimes in the Middle East, because they thought they would help their goals in Iraq and Afghanistan (and maybe some day Iran). But it's only these things, that were understood as compromises by the neocons, that Trump seems to have obviously continued.
"...makes the anti-democratic tendencies of neoliberalism explicit through a turn into authoritarian, hierarchical, and even militaristic means of maintaining law and order"
And regarding the "ruling elites to restore, enhance, or, as in China and Russia, to construct an overwhelming class power", I recommend this:
I was a child during the 70s and vaguely remember the queues at petrol stations (gas stations in American) and of course, there always seemed to be a strike going on - I think I spent nearly as much time with the electricity off and the old reliable kerosene lamp going as I did with the electric lights on! The craziest one probably was the bank strike which nearly created an entire new economic system in the country https://hbr.org/2010/11/the-irish-banking-crisis-a-par (we had one preceding this in 1966 and one afterwards in 1976, but the 1970 one was the most notable).
But Ireland always lagged behind everyone else, so the really bad times didn't hit until the 80s, and the 80s were *bad*. While Britain started to recover under Thatcherism and the "loadsamoney" effects of that towards bringing a lot of working-class people up into the middle-class, we were still relying on the usual solution to Irish problems, namely, everyone emigrated to the countries that were doing better such as Britain, the USA, Canada and Australia. We being so heavily dependent on American investment for employment does explain why, if the American economy caught cold in the 70s, we ended up with the flu in the 80s.
“narcissistic exploration of self, sexuality, and identity” (does he mean gay people?)"
Not outstandingly so, *everyone* in the 70s (well, at least in the USA and maybe parts of Europe) was going for Sexual Liberation. If you ever see TV shows and movies from the time, it's very obvious (and you can perhaps also see why 70s feminism took off in response to the attitude towards women). All kinds of psychological and pseudo-psychological regimes and therapies were very popular, this article mentions just four (and I do remember hearing about est): https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2010-nov-15-la-he-psychology-fads-20101115-story.html
The Enneagram, Carlos Castaneda, Erich von Daniken and all the Ancient Astronauts and Advanced Ancient Civilisations stuff - this was a rich field to plough all through the 70s. It was the culmination of the 60s attitudes, where in the new decade the new generation was now starting to be in charge and all the changes were going to be made permanent and everyone was going to be rich, free, and enlightened through exploration of one's own unique identity, throwing off the shackles of the past, and using scientifically (ahem) based techniques of psychoanalysis melded with ancient native wisdom to restructure your personality the way you wanted it to be. This was going to be the decade of automation meaning the four-day work week and hence a lot of leisure (and money) to spend on self-improvement and narcissism; after all, having to gaze deeply and for a long while into the depths of one's psyche to find out where your parents and society had fucked you up, and stifled your talents and gifts, so that you could then apply the remedies of whatever guru caught your fancy, encouraged this kind of navel-gazing.
I don't think Harvey's take on this history of human rights as a concept is actually correct, at least not when applied to US foreign policy. The high-water mark there was probably under Carter in the late 70s, where it was taken seriously enough to lump a bunch of authoritarian regimes that were on our side of the Cold War with the communists. In 1980, we got Reagan, who was more concerned with ending communism, and rightly so.
I get confused by the seeing neoliberalism described as Regan-Thatcherism, and Scott calling himself a neoliberal, and Scott saying he voted for Elizabeth Warren in the primary. Is there a conflict here? Is Warren a neoliberal? Is modern neoliberalism not all that similar to what it used to mean in the days of Reganism? Are there just no neoliberal candidates to vote for so Warren becomes the next closest? Maybe the vote is purely on social politics considerations and despite economics?
And in general, what do modern neoliberals believe? The basic premise from the wikipedia article on it makes me think more of the Tea Party. Yet I don't think that seems to reflect things well (r/neoliberal is fervently in favor of Joe Biden, for example and he was kinda the original opposition to the Tea Party). The description Scott quoted years ago of "free markets are great at making wealth, but bad at distributing it" resonates with me but not, I think, with Regan. Do neoliberals these days believe in single-payer healthcare? UBI? Increasing corporate taxes in the US? Social safety nets? Breaking up Big Tech? The EU? I have little idea.
Neoliberalism means a lot of different things, especially when critics and proponents are fighting about it, but it's generally a philosophy that for the most part "markets work."
And I'm not speaking for Scott, but "being neoliberal" doesn't mean "must vote for most neoliberalest candidate" all the time.
Voting for Warren is just an example of Scott's statements that don't seem very much like Reganism to my limited understanding (another example: supporting UBI). So can we get any more concrete than "markets work"?
I think it's a comparison term, rather than an absolute term. Compared to communist leaders, any American president would be more neoliberal, but far more so after Reagan than before. Bill Clinton was neoliberal, but by the standards of the 1970s (Nixon creating the EPA, OSHA, etc.), even Obama was very neoliberal. If Warren agrees that free markets is the default, then even adding regulations and trying to temper them to perform better (meaning, more people share in the wealth created), that's still within the neoliberal framework. Contrast that with Maduro in Venezuela, and it's obvious. Even compared to Bernie Sanders it's pretty clearly a different approach, despite the two of them often being considered in the same "lane" during the primaries.
Neoliberalism historically hasn't had many champions who use it as a primary label, but it's definitely had its detractors - most notably over the 80's period this book reviews. The consequence is that it's typically defined by its enemies, and there's a feedback where that means there's little value in a politician embracing the label.
r/neoliberal is part of a more recent trend that I wouldn't be comfortable describing outside of a US context, but there it functions as a generally Left-aligned counterpart of Libertarianism. (Note the capital letters there.) On social matters, the theory is that individuals can be best served by limited government intervention preventing them from pursuing their interests. On economics, the key insight is that free markets are an unparalleled *generator* of wealth and prosperity, but that some level of redistribution is desirable to keep society at a point where everyone has the tools necessary to participate in a healthy way.
In terms of policy prescriptions, that might cash out as legalization of all but the hardest drugs, little-to-zero government involvement in marriage of any stripe, minimal tariffs and protectionism, minimal regulation of businesses, open borders and immigration, and a streamlined and robust social safety net. (Healthcare is a complicated mess, but that's just a fact on the ground.)
Important note - if you solicited a modern self-described neoliberal what they though of continuing Regan-Thatcherism in the current context, expect a decidedly lukewarm reply. Whether that's due to changing opinions or changing circumstances will vary on specifics, but there's definitely drift (like there would be with any living political coalition).
Self-described neoliberals *do* believe in many things like (though not necessarily any particular one of these, to any particular self-described neoliberal) single-payer healthcare, UBI, social safety nets, breaking up big tech, and the EU, because all of these things are interventions that are expected to help markets work more effectively. If your healthcare and basic ability to survive are tied to your employer, then you're not in a position to negotiate as an equal in the marketplace - entrepreneurship requires a safety net to catch you if you fall. If big tech consists of five gigantic companies that do most of the hiring and most of the product creation in everything ranging from smartphones to social media to online retail to search to browsers, then there's not going to be much competition among them to keep things working for the greater good. Greater international collaboration and cooperation to harmonize economic rules across larger areas of developed economies is one of the core ideas of self-described neoliberalism, to help expand markets and encourage greater competition, and expand the opportunities for individuals and companies to find new solutions to problems.
Critics of neoliberalism tend to identify it with Reagan and Thatcher, and anyone who focuses on divesting government ownership of systems and putting more things into the hands of crony capitalists.
The thing the two descriptions have in common is that they both generally say that markets should do more. But the self-described neoliberals say that we need a lot of government intervention to create functioning markets, while the other-described neoliberals fetishize private ownership, even in systems like transportation, healthcare, and education, where unified networks are more efficient support for markets in everything else.
That's a great description of the conflicts - 'the government should actively work to encourage free markets' is ideologically coherent, but the application in any given situation is going to be nuanced and contentious. Even political allies are going to have significant disagreements about the details, and there's plenty of room for isolated parts of a neoliberal agenda to be supported for unrelated (if not downright nefarious) reasons.
Neoconservativism has not backed away or gone away, unless the wars on Libya, Syria, Yemen, etc., the coups in Ukraine, Bolivia and Honduras didn't happen. Hell, look at the howls of outrage from the national security establishment when Trump made noises about leaving Syria, a country that has never harmed us in any way and in which we have no real interest.
Just that now, the wars are justified not by "the war on terror" but by some self-serving and hypocritical human rights talk.
It's down from its apogee in the Afghanistan-Iraq era. At least now there's a lot of caution about not having "boots on the ground" or occupying the country.
American casualties, but regardless whether we kill innocents by means of local death squads (Honduras and Ukraine) , via "targeted.air strikes" (Libya and Syria), via starvation (Yemen) or whatever, those innocents are still dead.
And then there's our basic strategy in Syria, which is to occupy a portion of the country and assist forces trying to overthrow the government, in hopes that the government will deliver us an excuse to make war on them by kicking the occupiers out.
Wait, I'm pretty familiar with Russian-operated and/or Russia-sympathetic death squads in Ukraine (starting with the one that caused the bloodbath that led to the 2014 revolution), but which were the USA ones ?
So it must be Russians that are organizing neo-Nazis paramilitaries on behalf of the Kiev regime? Hell, even The Atlantic Council acknowledges that Ukrane has a Nazi problem, I guess those Russians must be responsible.
I bet Russian death squads murdered Oles Buzyn in broad daylight in downtown Kiev as well.
So it must be... the American's organizing neo Nazio paramilitaries? What?
There needs to be a new political axis - how much agency you believe people have. On one end you have pure "pick yourself up by your bootstrappers" and on the other end you have "literally every bad thing in the world is being directly perpetuated by neolib bankers".
At times I might agree, but the participation of the United States in the coup in Ukraine and its aftermath is abundantly documented. As pointed out previously, no less than Stratfor (which is no friend of Russia) described it as "the most blatant coup in history".
Libya and Syria are the last solid examples of neoconservative activity, and those are a decade old. Bolivia is a strong case for a neoconservative intervention that is later than that, but it occurred in a much more attenuated form than the military ones. (And I haven't checked recently, but isn't it being undone?)
Calling Ukraine a neocon intervention is a controversial stance, since it seems to at least minimize the role of Russian intervention. Yemen seems to be primarily a Saudi-led thing, which doesn't have any of the neocon fig leaves. I'm not sure which event in Honduras you're referring to, but it seems like the coup is even more than a decade old.
Unless I am mistaken, Syria is still ongoing, and Libya has not exactly recovered from our tender mercies.
As far as Ukraine goes, Stratford (no friend of Russia) described it as "the most blatant coup in history." Those looking for neocons will note the prominence of John McCain and Victoria Nuland. Note that American troops are still there.
Yemen is a Saudi driven project, and the neocons have proven close to the Saudis.
Anyway, if you want an example of neocon activities closer to the present in time, look at Venezuela.
Are you saying that Obama is a neoconservative? Libya and Syria were during his administration. I think I can squint and see the perspective, but that would definitely not be considered a mainstream thought.
Serious question, why waste time reading books by hacks like this when there are so many good books to read? I got about half way through your review before I lost all respect for David Harvey as an objective observer.
You have quoted this line word-for-word 3 times, to Scott's single use of it; I think you've made your point about disagreeing with this phrasing. Would you mind offering some constructive summaries (less than 200 pages long, i.e. shorter than the original book) of what you do believe David Harvey's thesis (or theses) to be? I would be really interested in content to the effect of "David Harvey actually says X, Y, Z" -- as opposed to what you're producing currently, which is of the form "Scott thinks that Harvey says A, B, C, and is completely wrong". Or is this impossible, because the ideas require at least 200 pages to get across?
David Harvey is a Marxist, and his point is not that "embedded liberalism was great and completely sustainable". There's a reason why Scott Alexander (nor anybody else) can find a single quote to support this blatant strawman.
Harvey's point is that capitalism has a series of internal contradictions or tension points, and that capitalists getting out of one crisis often lay the foundations for the next crisis. That is, that capitalism has a series of irrationalities built into the system and cannot be constructed in a wholly rational manner.
My responses here probably seem quite crotchety, but I've had problems in Rationalist circles making people understand the most basic elements of leftist philosophy. I have gone through one example here:
I cannot emphasise this strongly enough: Scott not only seems to misunderstand leftist philosophy/outlook, he doesn't seem to be comprehending the words that are in front of him on the page at a very basic level. This leads to incredible distortions in an author's work, completely unrecognisable compared to the original, such as summarising Harvey's thesis as "embedded liberalism was great and completely sustainable". At no point does Harvey say anything approaching this, and it would not pass an Ideological Turing Test. I think to some degree Scott knows that this is unfair, framing his own response to the book as "uncharitable". But then the question becomes, why is Scott publishing uncharitable takes on left-wing writings?
(I will make two responses, because I have two different things to say.)
Is the following paraphrase approximately correct?
Scott claims that Harvey believes that embedded liberalism was sustainable. Harvey doesn't believe this, and has multiple books on the subject. He does believe that it was better than the neoliberalism that came after it, although that doesn't make it "great". Harvey seeks to trace out the details of how the (inevitable!) crisis of embedded liberalism led to the worse crisis of neoliberalism. It is not relevant to the narrative whether the people who promoted the neoliberal reforms were seeking to create a worse crisis or screw everyone else over for their own benefit; it is only relevant that this was the end result.
Do you think you could produce more details along these lines? Perhaps you can create your own four theses for the book, or at least point out what variant of Scott's four theses would be more correct?
(I will make two responses, because I have two different things to say.)
To your question of why Scott is publishing uncharitable takes on left-wing writings: I would guess that part of the reason is the same as what drives you to publish "crotchety" responses; I assume that common reason to be a desire to vent frustration with a piece of writing that doesn't live up to your expectations. In Scott's case, I would also expect that he would welcome responses that explain where he went wrong and how to go right; I'm less clear on what you expect to accomplish by repeatedly claiming that this community is wrong about leftist philosophy.
The platonic form of an engaging correctionary response is something like
"Scott says A. Actually, A is incorrect, because X. Instead, Y."
Your comments are instead often of the form "Scott says A, which is totally wrong" -- with little if any explanation of why A is incorrect, and no proposals of what is the correct Y. (The comment you link is a notable exception, though your gloss of it here is, approximately, "Scott must be a total idiot to say A" -- hardly a compelling invitation to engage in an intellectual discussion!)
I think if you're looking to educate and engage the Rationalist community on leftist ideas, which you say the community doesn't get, you will need to make an effort to write positive statements about what those ideas are, instead of merely asserting that the community's understanding of them is incorrect.
Note that doing this won't guarantee you a response by Scott (there's only a handful of responses by Scott in this entire discussion!), but I think it will make it much more likely that you will productively engage people.
I explained very thoroughly what Scott got wrong both in this review and with his approach to Marx more generally. I've made an immense effort, yet nobody has fixed their mistakes. I asked Scott to find something in David Harvey's book that even vaguely approaches the statement:
"embedded liberalism was great and completely sustainable"
Scott has been unable to do this. If you think that you are able to do it, then I invite you to do so.
You know, if you want leftists to make positive statements then you need to engage with written sources such as Marx or David Harvey. Writing (self-admitted!) uncharitable takes will lead to people treating Scott uncharitably in return.
I'm one of the most patient and persistent people you will ever meet, so I am an exception. Most people are not.
"(The comment you link is a notable exception, though your gloss of it here is, approximately, "Scott must be a total idiot to say A" -- hardly a compelling invitation to engage in an intellectual discussion!)"
How is that a 'gloss' of what I say? I explained very clearly that Marx never uses words like 'completely malleable'. He's talking about our descriptions of human nature very clearly being 'ensemble' - that is, generalities of vast swathes of people - not something inherent to each individual person. There's nothing even approaching "completely malleable" here. Scott is not a complete idiot and I don't say anything close to this. I say that he got it wrong; which he did.
If Scott (or you) want to argue this point, feel free. I suggest you could start by saying where this "completely malleable" comes from.
You say "he doesn't seem to be comprehending the words that are in front of him on the page at a very basic level". To me that reads less like "Scott got it wrong" and more like "Scott is an idiot". If you mean only "Scott got it wrong", it would help if you stuck to that phrasing, and didn't escalate to "laughably wrong" or "doesn't understand words".
You say you went to a heroic effort to explain: I count three positive statements in that linked comment: "[Marx] just says that the 'essence of man' is not inherent in every single person, but rather the essence of man is an ensemble of social relations." and "This is just saying that economists look at human interactions under capitalism and posit this as original and natural - that it has existed throughout history. He's saying that other economists are wrong about humans, not that there is "no such thing as human nature" and that "everything was completely malleable".". Everything else is saying that Scott was wrong, or wondering how he could possibly have been this wrong, or warning readers that he's wrong. Is "three sentences of explantation" really worthy of the name "heroic effort"? Or do you get to a different country if *positive statements that actually propose to say what leftists do think*? Because those are what's going to engage this community; complaining that the community is wrong just isn't that engaging.
>the neoliberal drive towards the construction of asymmetric market freedoms but makes the anti-democratic tendencies of neoliberalism explicit through a turn into authoritarian, hierarchical, and even militaristic means of maintaining law and order.
Not sure why you say this hasn't happened when police militarization is at an all time high, all over the world (not just in the US) civilian protests are crushed by militarized police, and less than 12 months ago the President of the United States WAS literally screaming about LAW AND ORDER.
I read this part as particularly prescient and was very surprised when you said "nope, nothing like this has happened"
Do you think that civilian protests are being *more* crushed by police now than they were a decade ago, or two decades ago, or three decades ago? They certainly aren't being more crushed now than they were four or five decades ago.
For the record, it was made completely clear that this wasn't a book review contest entry. Scott calls it "Your Book Review" whenever it's a contest entry, and just "Book Review" - like he always has! - when it's a regular post. Plus there's a 6ish-line disclaimer atop every contest entry.
It's amusing to me that people are calling for more clear signposting. It's not that hard to tell. It's obviously understandable if you got confused, but I think asking Scott to therefore preface posts on his blog with "no, this wasn't written by someone else" instead of just checking twice when reading the title, especially knowing there's currently a contest going on, (which is what I do) is a bit unnecessary?
Absolutely. I understand people will have an uncomfortable feeling when they realise they have made a false assumption about who wrote the review, but perhaps the lesson is simply to pay more attention to the clearly written words at the beginning of all the reviews.
Another agreement here. It's possible that a person whose reading comprehension doesn't extend to parsing words even when presented in a consistent, formalized way should recuse himself from evaluating others' writing.
Caveat (with the note that you aren't claiming otherwise, but someone might easily think you are): The people who were confused are not all calling for clearer signposting.
I for one was confused, because I've been reading extra book reviews lately (the ones in the docs) and so am in the contest mindset, and there wasn't anything that immediately said "no, this is Scott" here. But I noticed I was wrong, laughed, and accepted it was my mistake. I wouldn't *object* to an explicit marker, but I also don't think it's at all necessary.
I mean, if 5% of your readers are confused by something, and you can fix it with a four word phrase at the beginning ("Review by Scott Alexander"), then even if it's "unnecessary", it's probably a good idea for future reference.
Leftist critique of "human rights" is not "unique and original" with Harvey's book, goes back at least to the eighties; by the nineties there was already a pro-rights backlash and an anti-rights backbacklash. If there's any consensus it's that human rights aren't liberation and aren't going to further the kind of structural change Leftists think necessary--at best. I can see why in the context of USA politics conversations human rights looks like a "Left" thing, but this seems more because of recent culture wars politicization of human rights rather than because progressives think they're the biggest deal around.
In response to some of the comments about this review being unusually uncharitable, I feel compelled to point out that it wouldn't be much of a book review if Scott just went "here's what the book says, I don't think the arguments it makes are all that good, here's how I would support the same position."
Also, I don't think he has the necessary mental gears to steelman the economic-left's case, which is the very reason he keeps trying to engage with their literature (and keeps picking the wrong books, it seems to me). Holding this kind of review to the standards of a blog post is probably unfair.
I'm reminded of his review of MacIntyre's After Virtue, which basically just says "I don't get it", and was followed by some posts that engaged with the commenters' attempts to explain and/or steelman the book's position. Similarly, this one could really use a "highlights from comments" follow-up.
It was Marx himself who originally characterized 'human rights' as a bourgeois concern, which of course gave cover for the lack of concern for human rights typical of real-world Marxist governments. Harvey seems to be keeping as much of the party line as possible while also trying not to sound like a monster.
I liked this review. I think you did a good job, and it was enjoyable reading. Normally I wouldn't comment just for that, but when only angry people comment I imagine it can be disheartening.
It was a pretty weird experience reading some of the quotes from the book, honestly. He speaks negatively about "artistic freedom and artistic license", "opening up of the cultural field to all manner of diverse cosmopolitan currents", "the exploration of self, sexuality, and identity" (what's so narcissistic about that?), human rights, individualism, "civil society as a centre of opposition, if not an alternative, to the state", etc. All of those seem unambiguously good to me! Harvey and I have fundamentally different worldviews, I guess. Maybe the book elaborates in more detail why he thinks those are bad (beyond calling them neoliberal/imperialist/a weapon in a class struggle/other content-free verbiage); for the most part, the review gives the impression that he just takes their badness for granted.
In particular: to my mind, liberalism means living your life how you see fit, and democracy is for coming together to solve collective problems that require unselfish coordination. But it seems like Harvey (and many other leftist theorists) wants democratic decision-making to impact every facet of my life, which seems like a transparently awful idea to me. Whatever happened to live and let live?
When I was younger, I thought that (what I now call) liberalism was the foundation that everyone was starting from. Democratic or Republican or anything else, we all agreed on a particular set of foundational starting values and more-or-less what the ideal society looked like. The disagreements were about (1) how to get there, and (2) some of the small details of how exactly to weigh messy tradeoffs. I've since learned that this is a lot less true than I thought it was. (E.g.: when I watched Trump's campaign announcement speech, I felt in my *bones* that he would not come close to winning the Republican nomination. Just how low of an opinion did this man have of Republicans voters that he thought he'd get votes for *that*?) Oh well. Guess all I can do about all these socialists and nationalists is try and respect our differences keeping trying to persuade them.
Well, this is specifically one criticism of neoliberalism : that, like Thatcher said "There Is No Alternative". Well, this could only have lasted so far, even in the US, "alternatives" ended up by popping up, and the more repressed, the "madder" they got : Daesh, Q-Anon...
? Isn't this an argument *for* neoliberalism? Every proposed alternative ranges from "fails whenever tried" to "trivially insane". That was Thatcher's claim; not that there are literally no other ideas, but that they are all bad. There is no *serious* alternative, according to her.
(Also IDK why you are refering to Daesh as an alternative that popped up in the US?)
Yes, but nothing lasts forever, an ideological monoculture will always end up taking itself for granted and will end up being abused. As the 9/11 attacks have shown, there's no "end of history".
I assume that he's seeing them in a negative light because he's seeing them as "fake" emanations of the market, rather than coming from "real" human emancipation ?
Yeah, that's exactly the sort of thing that sounds like vague hand-waving to me. I don't even know what that's supposed to mean. Presumably leftists have a larger, more coherent worldview under which that sentence means something to them.
Like, replacing the word market with its definition, that sentence becomes "<insert various good things here> are 'fake' emanations of *people freely doing what they want with each other and with their stuff*, rather than coming from 'real' human freedom". Huh??
Obviously far leftists have a much more negative view towards markets, and presumably have a differently worded definition. I guess "their stuff" is probably the (a?) sticking point.
(To be clear, I understand and agree (to a point) with the more moderate leftist viewpoint: that markets can create inequalities that we can ameliorate, sacrificing some amounts of efficiency for the sake of equality (which makes sense in a utilitarian framework on account of diminishing marginal utility).)
I'm going to guess again - you have to remember that a capitalist market and money based society is a very specific form of society (and certainly not a "natural" one in the sense that it's very far from a hunter-gatherer society we've evolved in).
I *think* that Marxists assume that it's bad because they assume that it automatically leads to the domination of workers and the alienation of work (they kind of got a point there, but good luck doing better), that the "free market" doesn't really exist (ditto), and that a better world is not only possible, but inevitable (wishful thinking IMHO) ?
"The government is a blob of power that gets captured by different groups at different times and directed willy-nilly to one purpose or another; just because it does not perfectly follow a specific philosophy without deviation for fifty years doesn’t make that philosophy inherently fraudulent."
I think that this is strawmanning what I found to be one of Harvey's strongest points: that neoliberalism hasn't just occasionally failed to live up to its own Laissez-faire principles, but that it has consistently and predictably ignored those principles whenever they conflicted with the interests of capital.
What makes this criticism more salient towards neoliberalism than say conservatism or socialism, is that than most conservatives and socialists already understand there ideologies to be political ones. If you attacked a socialist with "you'll just do anything you need to to help the working class and redistribute wealth" they would probably respond with "duh".
Neoliberals truly invsisioned themselves as unmoored by the messy reality of partisanship and instead viewed their free market beliefs as ends unto themselves. Proving --as I think Harvy does quite compellingly -- that philosophical convictions have never gone so far as to let there be any real consequences for the wealthy (especially in regards to the financial industry) makes it hard to take these claims at face value. It reminds me of the famous Alan Greenspan bit where after every bank failure he would give unconditional bailouts and then say "This is a fluke and we will never have to do this again". Understanding the actions of people like Greenspan as "they were just really convinced about the efficiency of markets" makes no sense given any of the decisions they made in practice
Its worth noting that I read ABHoNL in an international development class (not a notably left area of academia), which is a field that at this point broadly accepts most of Harviess claims on this matter. No one really takes laissez fair economists at face value anymore and no one really thinks it's worth analysing the deregulation of the past 40 years as a philosophical movement that went a bit to far.
What is very amusing to me about this kind of Pinker VS Harvey dialogue you see in rationalist circles where people are arguing that free markets are either AMAZINGLY RATIONAL FREEDOM DELIVERY MECHANISMS or irrational but valuable things which need persistent and systemic intervention is not really reflecting any serious disagreement within academia (or even politics) at this point. Most people think the latter outside of very certain econ departments which are rapidly being marginalized.
I agree with the observation that leftist critique of "human rights" is not "unique and original" with Harvey's book. Being left wing is basically about collective ownership and decision-making; as the old clause IV of the Labour Party phrased it,
"To secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service".
There's nothing in there about human rights, which are often presented as the rights of an individual. A left-wing critique of sexism or racism or anti-LGBT would focus more on the collective struggle of the group against oppression rather than the rights of the individual.
Please note that I'm not advocating either position here; I'm just trying to explain the different approaches (as I understand them).
Part of the success of Blair's "New Labour" project, coming after Thatcher, was to ally traditional Labour voters with progress in civil rights, while rewriting clause 4 to remove the bits about collective ownership. In this way he formed an alliance between left-wingers and liberals. My impression that a similar shift happened in the USA. Progressives were unable to gain much in the economic sphere, while those who focussed on civil rights made more headway.
Since we're talking about that time period and forgetfulness, it's fascinating to me that until recently we had seemingly completely forgotten about the "Hong-Kong" flu of 1968 and 1969, which killed 1-4 million people worldwide (2-8 scaled to current population, COVID is at 3 million so far), and 33k-100k in the US alone (53k-160k scaled to current population, COVID is at 600k so far).
Everyone was predicting a financial crisis in 2008 - Adam Tooze lays it all out in great detail in his book Crashed. It's just that everyone was predicting a crisis caused by US bonds, not one caused by mortgages.
> As far as I can tell, neoconservatism reached its apex during the Bush administration, and since then everyone has backed away from it.
I don't know, the notion of domestic applications military power seems spot on. Not just the law and order rhetoric from Trump and other Republicans, but note how the US Capital is still host to thousands of troops. Democrats are also still crowing about the need for new laws to combat domestic threats, despite little evidence that such threats exist or that new laws are even needed to combat such threats.
I'm sympathetic to the notion that power corrupts, and that at one point, perhaps unions had too much power and neoliberalism was a response to abuses of power. The pendulum has almost certainly swung too far the other way though, and economic and political elites have been abusing their power for quite some time now.
If you want a stronger argument, I think you'd find Krugman's book 'The Conscience of a Liberal' much better. Ignore the title - it's actually a relatively dense book on US political economy dating back to around 1900. I think you would find it interesting for a few reasons:
1) Krugman was formerly much more neoliberal leaning (and of course is a top economist), so he's not blind to its advantages.
2) There's some statistical focus to sort through plausible narratives.
3) His school of thought is apparently influential in the current administration, so it could shed light on the current political dynamics even if you don't ultimately find it compelling.
I'd also consider his short essay "The Instability of Moderation".
I somehow thought this was an entry in the book review competition and not something SA wrote himself, and throughout the whole post kept thinking "this guy writes a lot like Scott, is he consciously aping the style in order to increase his chances of winning" and "this guy is pretty good I may have to think about voting for this one" haha
You really need to look at the pre war period to evaluate liberalism’s economic performance. Friedman, Sowell and Hayek argue/d at length that Keynesianism’s track record is appalling in comparison, especially when looking at inflation levels in the 70s and the causes of the Great Depression.
Also, consider the track record of similar liberal economies vs statist ones. Britain vs France, Estonia/Lithuania vs Portugal/Greece, US vs EU. Britain is a good example of the failure of Keynesianism - it was called the sick man of Europe until Thatcher came to power and they joined the EEC.
Because of horrific social-democratic economical policies that led to inflation and constant currency devaluations due to excessive wage increases and persistent budget deficits, Sweden had no - NO - real wage growth for 20 years in the period 1975 to 1995. Only "neoliberal" reforms finally made the economy functional again after a completely home-grown economic crisis pushed interest rates to 500% (!!). Since then, the economy has been consistently fine, even managing Great Recession very well, and real wages have risen dramatically while public debt has decreased massively. Even the Covid crisis only dented it.
I kind of agree with another person who said this review was a bit "off". I think I know something which felt wrong to me: that Scott isn't fairly characterizing the book in the passages he cites.
Let's look at Scott's summary of Harvey on the NYC situation:
"So Harvey’s picture of an idyllic New York getting hit with a financial crisis for no reason, being betrayed by greedy bankers, and then turning gritty and mean doesn’t really seem to check out."
A little above:
"Also, I think at least some of those pages are false: Wikipedia says that “the city [had] gained notoriety for high rates of crime and other social disorders” by 1970, five years before any of this happened. Also, here’s some more of the relevant article:"
But the passage of the book which Scott excerpt **starts off** with the "urban crisis" in NYC in the 1960s. Nowhere does it say that NYC was "idyllic" before the 1970s. The argument in the book is that the federal govt. (under Nixon) stopped federal aid by prematurely declaring the crisis over in 1970, and then (under Ford) refused aid in the negotiations in 1975. The federal govt. may have good reasons for its actions (though Harvey suggests that Ford's decision was driven by ideological advice), but the picture I get is very different from what Scott says.
Note: I have not read the book, nor do I have deep knowledge of any of the economics involved.
+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.
> Do you really think they pursued the policies they pursued with head-shaking regret for what Harvey calls embedded liberalism?
I don't really know what you mean by this; the claim is that they though neoliberalism would be better, not that they loved embedded liberalism despite its flaws.
Milton Freidman, for example, famously predicted the collapse of the Phillips curve and inflation-management techniques based on it in the late 60s. I don't think Friedman was like, "oh well, what a shame, I really loved that system but now we can't use it anymore", I think he was like "I TOLD you that the system was broken and about to collapse, now can we adopt some policies that actually make sense and won't leave everyone poor?"
Of course Friedman et al. didn't say "oh well, what a shame, etc."! But it's looks to me like SA's rhetoric is saying precisely that--that they were pursuing neoliberalism only in an innocent spirit of, "It's too bad about embedded liberalism. I guess we'll trying this new thing," instead of seizing an opportunity they had long wanted. I'm agreeing with you: Friedman et al. had always hated the previous system, and wanted to replace it with theirs. I'm not saying that's bad. It's not bad or good; it's just what ardent believers do. My point is what seems to me SA's disingenuous rhetoric.
I’ve read all your comments and still have no idea what you think is disingenuous. People noticed a problem, had ideas about how to fix the problem, and then implemented what they could so that the problem would be fixed. Where does the nefarious part come in?
I think SA's formulation, "lots of people were upset that the country was stagnating economically, and pursued neoliberal policies as a way to get the economy working again" is disingenuous. The formulation "People noticed a problem, had ideas about how to fix the problem, and then implemented what they could so that the problem would be fixed." is also disingenuous. The disingenuousness has to do with your wording. These were sophisticated, ambitious men who seized an opportunity they had been looking for. That does NOT--repeat, NOT--make them bad. It DOES mean there was more to them and what they were doing than just noticing a problem and trying to fix it. I'm concerned with the rights and wrongs of how we describe history and these particular historical actors, not with the rights and wrongs of neoliberalism as such.
> Of course Friedman et al. didn't say "oh well, what a shame, etc."! But it's looks to me like SA's rhetoric is saying precisely that
? I think you misunderstood my comment, sorry. I agree with Scott that neoliberals like Friedman "were upset that the country was stagnating economically, and pursued neoliberal policies as a way to get the economy working again". I, and presumably Scott, disagree with your accusation of what we believe — that they loved embedded liberalism and were sad to see it go. As far as I can tell Scott has only said the former; you are arguing against and accusing him of believing the latter. But they are different claims.
I don't know what you mean by opportunism; is everyone who advocates for political change an opportunist by definition? If not, what exactly are you accusing Milton Friedman et al of? (And if so, I still don't understand what you're trying to say or what's so wrong with Scott's formulation.)
Oh, dear--we seem to be understanding each other less than ever. The more we try to communicate, the less we seem to be actually communicating. I was critiquing SA's rhetoric. It's a fairly minor point, and not worth wasting further time over.
Real annual GDP growth over the period 1970 to 1979 averaged 3.5%. What was in fact happening is that the gains of growth were being shared equitably across the population. This is why some people are inclined to argue that the rich decided to use neoliberal policies to discipline the workers, resulting in the post-1970s wage stagnation we have observed.
Every american with a 401k is a business owner. I see no reason why business owners shouldn't pursue their own best interests
This would only be true if things that were good for business owners were equally good for the people with 401ks. They aren't, so it's not.
If you have a 401k you almost certainly own shares in businesses, that's essentially what a 401k is for. It's simple fact
Lets say I work for and hold shares in company X. In order to reduce operating costs, company X decides to let some employees go (including me). As a response, share prices in company X increase 10%.
Sure - the actions that the company took were good for the business owners but bad for me personally. Even if I benefit from the rise in stock prices, I'm disproportionally hurt by the actions the company took to get that share price increase.
My argument is that your average American with a 401k is more exposed to the downsides of companies pursuing an increase share price than they are to the upsides.
Your average American with a 401k is heavily exposed to the downside of a specific company canning him. He is also lightly exposed to the upsides of each individual company canning other people and therefore increasing their profits, which in aggregate give him positive expected value as businesses, as a whole, are generally profitable.
"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."
Can this really be presumed? Corporate stakeholders include employees, customers and shareholders. So "corporate interests" would at first blush to cover a wider swath of the public than labor interests alone.
Business owners =/= corporate stakeholders – and most business lobby groups and the like do not, in fact, represent 'corporate stakeholders' in the broad sense you've described.
Nevertheless, it is probably not true that "pretty much everyone" says "business owners acting to further their own class interests is bad."
"Business owners" (really what we're talking about is management, not owners qua owners) lobby for the interests of their business. What I'm saying is that the interests of a business often align with the interests of the stakeholders of the business, which is a bigger cross-section of the public than the interests of just labor.
Like the interests of a labor union can be at cross-sections with the interests of the consumers and shareholders of their employer. Or often shareholders, employees and consumers have an interest in, say, the business not going bankrupt (hence union and management support for the automaker bailouts in 2009). So surely the interests of business owners are not inherently bad.
Management are inherently predisposed to act in the interest of management and contractually required to act in the interest of shareholders; the sets of management and shareholders are generally not all that large compared to the set of employees.
The goals of management and shareholders can align with those of employees as far as company actions go, but when it comes to remuneration they are inherently diametrically opposed.
"The goals of management and shareholders can align with those of employees as far as company actions go, but when it comes to remuneration they are inherently diametrically opposed"
This is where I think the business vs labor framing falls apart for me. The above is true as far as it goes. Strictly speaking, a company wants to minimize labor costs as much as possible. But in equilibrium what causes wages is to increase is tight labor markets, which comes from a lot of companies doing well and needing to hire people. So there are certain margins where there is a a trade-off between business and labor (at least in the short run) but on many (most?) issues the pro-business positions is also pro-labor if only in the sense that profitable businesses expand and hire more people.
The problem is that in practice the wages are being kept down by on one hand illegal and "grey market" jobs often abusing immigrants with limited choices and legal recourse and on the other hand by just hollowing out the business until only the core of finance & sales departments remain and moving the rest to a country with less regulations and cheaper labor. In theory *eventually* this is going to stabilize too, but at what cost ?
Shareholders actually covers a very broad group of people given the presence of mutual funds and ETFs.
"but when it comes to remuneration they are inherently diametrically opposed."
They aren't going to be diametrically opposed to policy/actions that allows the pie to grow (or prevent the pie from shrinking). They will be opposed to how the pie is split up. Like, I'm pretty sure Boeing's employees are very much in favor of Boeing lobbying the government to sell more military equipment.
Pretty much everyone?? I don't know anyone who thinks that way. This seems like a weirdly isolated point of view that you might find in academia or in the bowels of a behemoth like Amazon or Google. Most Americans are employed by small business, know the owner very well (if they aren't the owner themselves) and have no problem at all with the business representing its own interests vigorously. Except they don't think of it as "the business" they think of it as ol' Joe the Boss, who is looking out for himself and for us, the guys in the shop who work for him.
Also no normal person thinks in terms of "class," like he's fresh out of a college seminar on Marxism. You ask normal people what "class" means and they say "Spanish 1?"
54% of American employees are employed by businesses with 250 or more employees: https://www.bls.gov/web/cewbd/table_f.txt
>Furthermore, if US interest rates rise (as at some point they must) then what happened to Mexico after the Volcker interest rate increase in 1979 starts to loom as a real problem.
The reason Mexico ran into trouble, as he points out in the book a few paragraphs up in your review, is that their debt was denominated in dollars. Fortunately, so is ours, but we also make dollars, so we can't possibly run into that specific issue.
“ is that their debt was denominated in dollars. Fortunately, so is ours, but we also make dollars”
Scott, why are you making these elemental mistakes in your analysis? Is it just a general unfamiliarity with the subject matter?
A warning that in the future I will ban you for comments like this. I'm happy to have my mistakes pointed out, but you will need to actually point out my mistakes, not just be generically hostile. For example, if the debt wasn't denominated in dollars, tell me that.
Understood. I really do sincerely apologize!
In terms of Mexico and debt crises in general, you should know that almost all debt crisis are driven by debt denominated in foreign currencies.
An example would be the Asian Financial Crisis:
https://www.frbsf.org/education/publications/doctor-econ/1998/april/asian-currency-crisis/
Or the Hungarian mortgage debt crisis:
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/14/business/hard-lessons-for-borrowers-in-hungary.html
Sorry, was there something in my review that was denying this, or inconsistent with this? Or are you arguing against Wizzy above (even though you addressed the comment to me)?
Note that my post was a direct quote of Scott's quote of the book. I was pointing out how inconsistent and flawed the author's argument was, as he made a comparison to wildly different circumstances that he had no excuse for, seeing as he talked about them in detail earlier in his book.
Sorry, I misread your comment.
Why did you make such elementary mistakes in your read? Was it unfamiliarity with the subject?
Good Lord it's always fun to see how many levels of indirection these discussions generate.
Scott takes exception to the argument of the author. Reader 1 take exception Scott's argument. Reader 2 disagrees with Reader 1... Reader n disagrees with Reader n - 1. Plus all the permutations of those that agree with multiple prior arguments.
Things get very meta in a hurry. I don't always have a dog in these fights, but they sure are entertaining.
I agree with you, meta-reader 1
I take issue with this comment
I see your point but don't quite agree with you taking issue with this comment
"Around 1970, something went wrong."
This is semimythology. The richer the region within the U.S. you look at, the less growth there was between 1930 and 1970. The 1930s-early 1970s was mostly a process of poor regions catching up with the rich, not faster growth in the richest regions, which is what matters. There was rising inequality starting around 1980, though, but I don't think that's inherently wrong.
"workforces were so heavily unionized that companies were nervous about any changes that might upset employees."
Unionization was around 25% in the early 1970s, that means if you were a worker, there was a 75% chance you were not part of a union.
"but it kept starting and expanding programs like Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security"
Government transfer payments did rise very swiftly as a percentage of GDP between 1950 and 1975, but they have continued to rise since, though at a slower pace. It's certainly possible to go further in expanding them, but there is a limit - Vermont voters rejected a universal healthcare proposal in 2014.
"Starting a new business was considered some bizarre act of alchemy, like discovering a new form of matter; normal people worked for the same giant company their whole life and got a nice gold watch as a reward when they retired."
This wasn't true; new business formation went to all-time lows in the 2010s, and was much higher earlier:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-05-05/the-rate-of-new-business-formation-has-fallen-by-almost-half-since-1978
"normal people worked for the same giant company their whole life and got a nice gold watch as a reward when they retired"
Large firm employment as a percentage of total employment is at a record high. This description much more closely matches the world of today than the world of the early 1970s:
https://www.bls.gov/web/cewbd/table_f.txt
Matthew Yglesias was recently pointing out how the very wealthiest Americans are now tech entrepreneurs, whereas in the past they got their money view inheritance or oil, but the economy as a whole has stagnated when measured using TFP. Unfortunately, he cleared out his older tweets recently, so I can't easily find where he wrote it (and if it was also at Slow Boring, I'm not paid subscriber).
That was, I believe, a Paul Graham essay you're referring to, not a Matt Y piece.
It was Yglesias writing about PG: https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-rise-of-self-made-billionaires
Thanks for finding it, though it's disappointing that it was indeed behind the paywall.
Specifically, it was Matt Yglesias rebutting the Paul Graham essay. Not rebutting the central fact that billionaires these days tend to be self-made entrepreneurs, but pointing out that this change does not, in fact, seem to be correlated with broader dynamism in the economy. From the paywalled article:
> If you look at the tippy top of the economy, you see a lot fewer heirs in 2021 than you had in 1981 and a lot more tech founders — it seems like the economy has grown more dynamic. But if you look at the aggregate productivity statistics, you see a sharp slowdown in the mid-1970s that we never really recover from. So the change at the top of the Forbes rankings can’t be a cause or a consequence of the greater dynamism of the American economy, because the American economy has become less dynamic, not more.
The oil thing might have been partly tax-structuring. If you invested in Texas oil wells in the Postwar Period, you got a huge tax shelter on the profits (27.5% of the taxable income generated by a well). If the oil well failed to pan out, you got to deduct all the losses.
Conventional oil is an insanely profitable business anyway.
"not faster growth in the richest regions, which is what matters"
This is an, um, unusual take. Why do you say that? Most utilitarians would say that the biggest gains are enriching the poorest more. Even if you don't think inequality is a problem per se, further enriching the richest just doesn't sound all that beneficial. Do you just think that rich-regions not-growing indicates a lack of development/innovation/investment in a way that indirectly reflects the economy is not doing well and will likely stagnate soon?
"Even if you don't think inequality is a problem per se, further enriching the richest just doesn't sound all that beneficial."
Not correct; that's how the industrial revolution started. The regions catching up might be able to create new technologies, but they usually don't.
"Do you just think that rich-regions not-growing indicates a lack of development/innovation/investment in a way that indirectly reflects the economy is not doing well and will likely stagnate soon?"
Sure.
But isn't this argument just that enriching the rich will later enrich the non-rich, and so admitting that enriching the non-rich is still what "really matters"? Or do you value the creation of new technologies in and of themselves, rather than the benefit they bring to the people in need?
And if only enriched regions are capable of producing the things you desire (new technology), then enriching the poorest ones allows them to start competing, right? (See China.)
The industrial Revolution did start with the rich getting richer. Which is what nearly killed it. The mass of people learned to like if not live capitalism when they got richer. That seems to have needed trade unionism.
>> "normal people worked for the same giant company their whole life and got a nice gold watch as a reward when they retired"
>Large firm employment as a percentage of total employment is at a record high. This description much more closely matches the world of today than the world of the early 1970s
There's no contradiction here - the claim is that large firm employment used to be something that lasted for decades, but now they hire and fire people over shorter time scales. That is perfectly compatible with more people being (temporarily) employed by large firms now.
r.e. large firm imployment, what does time-at-current-employer look like?
Fascinating points, and they all seem legitimate to me. My question is where did the semimythology come from? Scott's narrative seemed pretty in line (what I understood as) the general consensus. If it is indeed as wrong as you point out, why is it so widespread (or maybe more precisely, why did Scott and I think it was so widespread)?
> The richer the region within the U.S. you look at, the less growth there was between 1930 and 1970. The 1930s-early 1970s was mostly a process of poor regions catching up with the rich, not faster growth in the richest regions, which is what matters.
Can you recommend any books or resources to dig deeper into this? Thank you.
The review was interesting, but I think largely misses the actual arguments of the book. Harvey does come across as pretty preachy (especially towards the end of the book if I remember correctly) but a lot of the larger points stand well. The argument is basically that the idea of free trade and markets would lead to better human outcomes was used by certain people to make a ton of money, probably at the expense of other people.
Harvey looks at the free markets / free trade idea over time and shows how it is a basic power politics bait and switch. The "neoliberal" groups talked big about free markets, but then did a lot of things that look exactly like the opposite of free markets. The playbook was basically to come in, create a market, and then manipulate it for profit. All while saying it is in the service of human freedom.
His suggestions for improvements to the system never struck me as particularly useful, but the overall framework has served me well when trying to understand economic and political news.
This was a keystone reading for one of my favorite professors in school, and a pretty useful book to understand late 20th century history. I ended up writing a paper for the class called "A Brief History of Neoliberalism in Turkey" which used Harvey's framework to look at the changes in labor and business power there.
Yes, I mentioned this and why it didn't impress me, see the part starting with "the second thesis is". Harvey could have done this well, but in fact did it badly.
Considering how badly you misrepresented Harvey in the first of your (self-admitted!) uncharitable theses there's no reason to believe that you got the other ones correct.
Question? In your review you mention that Harvey used the Bush tax cuts as an example of something the ruling class did that helped them despite it being against a Neoliberal framework, and accurately pointed out that tax cuts are a basic part of Neoliberalism. Did Harvey ever mention Corporate Welfare? That seems to be a better example of something the ruling class did that benefited themselves, despite being incoherent in a neoliberal framework. That said, my 5 second google search suggests that the term corporate welfare has been used since the 50s, so maybe even Harvey couldn't blame Neoliberalism for that?
> The argument is basically that the idea of free trade and markets would lead to better human outcomes was used by certain people to make a ton of money, probably at the expense of other people.
I always chuckle at the implication that someone getting rich means that someone else was exploited. It betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how value is created.
God yes
"I'm literally laughing at you and your pathetic ignorance"... might not be the best way to engage in friendly discussion?
He's talking among people with IQs above 60, so I don't think he's laughing at any of us
> everyone that disagrees with me is stupid
thank you for for raising the level of conversation my man.
I'm not saying it is a good argument. But it is interesting.
What Harvey does is basically look at some various buckets of things associated with capital and labor and parse out what is actually happening (based on things like capital flows) compared to what people are saying.
So it raises questions like: Why do politicians and bankers and other corporate types always make this appeal to market supremacy?
Why is it that you can regularly read sentences like this: "President Kassi Brou said the electricity market would ensure an increase in investment, considering the existence of a free trade area and the free circulation of persons, goods and services in the region." when looking through news items of developing country financial news?
Then also why at the same time are unions getting broken up, labor power diminishing, and the governments selling off publicly-held assets?
To me those are interesting questions, but the review completely blows past most of this to focus on -ism vs -ism issues.
As an economist this is an excellent review that captures much of the frustration I have reading the neoliberalism literature.
Can you elaborate?
Maybe "[dramatic adverb] [dramatic verb]" instead of "[dramatic adverb] [dramatic adjective]"?
Wasn't going to say anything but that one disrupted flow for me to. I'm going to think of it as a kind of semantic typo. I hate when I make those sort of mistakes too.
I hate when I misspell the word 'too' too
It's a [dramatic adverb] [dramatic adjective] mistake, yep.
Re: The moralism about left-wing terrorism in the 70's that often comes up around these conversations and in the link you give to Status 451. I'll admit the terrorist acts are not a good look for the left, and it does show pathologies in the left of the time, just like contemporary right-wing terrorism shows pathologies in the right wing of today, but using Wikipedia's numbers I count 62 deaths from terrorism in the 70's- from all sources. If these figures are right your annual probability of being killed by a left-wing terrorist was about one in 34 million. Even if the real figure was 10x that, it doesn't matter very much, although yes, I grant it was a symptom of deeper sickness. [And yes I acknowledge that people could use this same argument to defend the contemporary right against incrimination for their terrorism].
Might I suggest putting up a small notice at the top stating that this is *not* a book review contest entry. I assumed it was at first, and so did many other readers.
I'm not an economic historian, but I second those commentators who say that this doesn't read like you're trying to have a sympathetic, though probing, conversation with this book. I can't exactly say you're wrong, because of my lack of knowledge about economic history, but by the very standards you've encouraged in this community- charity, steelmanning etc.- this review reads... suspiciously.
Whenever I don't read and review books I disagree with, people tell me I'm being prejudiced and avoiding any information that might challenge me.
Whenever I do read and review books I disagree with, and say I still disagree with them, people tell me I'm being uncharitable and it's "suspicious".
I don't know what people want, other than for me to automatically agree with every book that expresses an opinion I don't like, no matter how bad its arguments are. Again, I am happy to read comments telling me where I went wrong, but "oh, you were critical of someone, must mean you're biased and unfair" is really useless.
FWIW, I was also briefly confused as to whether this was your own review, or a book review contest entry.
Here is my basic outline of how you misread Marx.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-global-economic-history#comment-1795464
It would be good if you could respond to this, because it's a very large problem in your thinking. Unfamiliarity with Marx's basic points makes you commit large errors when reading other Marxist works. For example in this review you framed Harvey's view as 'Embedded liberalism was great and completely sustainable'. Harvey is a Marxist, so this couldn't be further from the truth. You said this was 'uncharitable' - but then the question becomes, why put it in the review?
Can you find a single statement by Harvey that approaches "Embedded liberalism was great and completely sustainable". I'm looking for an actual quote from a primary source, not your vague feelings.
If you don't do this, the logical conclusion is that you are making a huge error and misreading the book.
This is such an embarrassing look for you. MarxBro the sea lion http://wondermark.com/1k62/
Marx is directly relevant here (Harvey is a Marxist). Scott gets the very first thesis of the Harvey's book incorrect. Previously he has failed to be able to read Marx properly. At some point these mistakes will have to be addressed.
Towards the end of the review Scott laments that more and more people are agreeing with Harvey. With Scott's (self-admitted) uncharitable reviews laden with mistakes that never get corrected, is it any wonder that more and more people are being driven away from Scott's brand of liberalism and towards left-wing analysis.
As a reminder, you don't have to respond to it. You can just ignore it.
Really? People can ignore obvious mistakes that the Rationalist community is making? Do you actually disagree with the points I am making here?
Yeah - I'm with marxbro on this. This is absolutely the place to write these comments. It is very relevant to the review.
Marxbro, I'm a skeptic, who's willing to be convinced: To me it seems like lot's of actual implementations of socialism look pretty terrible. For you to be right either (a) there is a fixable flaw in previous implementations (b) I am misled by propaganda, and historic implementations are less bad than I believe. What do you think is the strongest evidence for either a or b?
Edward's reply wasn't to you, it was to jonzjonzz complaining about you.
Plenty of Marxists don't believe that the end of capitalism is nigh. Most of 20c Marxism is coming to terms with that ( and abandoning a lot Marx in the meanwhile). Therefore it's quite possible that Harvey thought that Embedded Liberalism was a sustainable from of capitalism - as opposed to the idea that it was doomed because of currency constraints, or the issues in the 70s, which I think Scott is making too much off. What has terrorism got to do with the economic system?
So, since you've brought up the "Embedded liberalism was great and completely sustainable" quote as an inaccurate portrayal a few times, I decided I'd do a ctrl-f through a pdf of of abhon.
Looking at every reference to the phrase "embedded liberalism" didn't reveal anything explicitly stating support for the economic system, but their was about a 60-40 split between strictly factual comments and comments lamenting the changes from embedded liberalism. There was one part acknowledging that embedded liberal America eventually failed (though to me the tone sounds like it wasn't embedded liberalisms fault), but I definitely got the impression that Harvey approves of embedded liberalism.
Since you asked for quotes, a few:
> Independent trade unions or
other social movements (such as the municipal socialism of the
Greater London Council type), which acquired considerable
power under embedded liberalism, have therefore to be disciplined, if not destroyed, and this in the name of the supposedly
sacrosanct individual liberty of the isolated labourer.
> As the state withdraws from welfare
provision and diminishes its role in arenas such as health care,
public education, and social services, which were once so fundamental to embedded liberalism, it leaves larger and larger segments
of the population exposed to impoverishment
> The state, once neoliberalized, becomes a
prime agent of redistributive policies, reversing the flow from
upper to lower classes that had occurred during the era of embedded liberalism
For fun I also search for "marx" to see how an ideology that he definitely approves of gets treated, even if it wasn't the focus of the book. It was mostly just had some unimportant quotes from marx so it wasn't very revealing. There was one bit at the end talking about how people should not work from necessity, which was about a similar level of endorsement as you got for embedded liberalism.
All in all I think that coming away from this book thinking "this guy likes embedded liberalism" is reasonable, if hyperbolically stated (I think obviously so, but maybe you disagree).
Those quotes seem pretty neutral to me and it seems more like you were psychologically primed by Scott Alexander's review rather than actually reading through the text and understanding Harvey's position.
I think a large amount of confusion here is resulting from the fact that people aren't really aware of David Harvey's full body of work. He's actually been writing for a very long time and we can go back to check his older work if we need to.
If we think Scott Alexander is correct here, it should be easy to go back to David Harvey's writings from the early 70s and find him talking about the sustainability and "idyllic" conditions of embedded liberalism.
If I'm correct, when we look back at Harvey's work from the early 70s we should find that he was actually very critical of the economic conditions and society back then too.
Now I don't think this is quite fair to me, to be honest. It's not a matter of critical versus non-critical, it's a question of approach. The kind of thing people are looking for in the very critical reviews is something like "I really tried to make the arguments in in this book work, I made Herculean efforts to find the rational kernel and something to agree with here, but ultimately I couldn't, and I think this tells us that..."
This review doesn't give that impression. You even start by framing Harvey's theses, in your own word "uncharitably".
Now you could argue this policy of making Herculean efforts to find something to agree with is itself misguided, and I'm tempted to agree, but this kind of approach is perceived as, in large part, *your legacy*, so when you don't stick to it, people get suss. Now you might say in response to this that you never intended that kind of approach to reading, and it's a vulgarization of your practices, but that the popular perception. In the blogospheric imagination the guy who almost never disagrees unreservedly without having done a bunch of legwork first, especially when it comes to political questions.
It should read: "In the blogospheric imagination *you are*...."
Totally agree. I wish to see a lot of steelmanning, which the internet lacks while Scott does brilliantly, which is the attactiveness of SSC.
Otherwise, if the book is *obviously* bad to readers with decent Econ/History background, it's unnecessary to point out/make fun of the obviousness.
If the book is not *obviously* bad to readers with insufficent background, this post also does a poor job of explaining in layman terms.
First, I'm here because I've really loved many things that you've written, and I value what you have to say about stuff. You, personally, are dope, and I care about how things I say make you feel, IRL, as a bag of flesh and organs, not just as some internet text-specter. I'm offering critiques here, but I want them to be helpful, not to win an argument.
That said, I think you should take seriously the general critique that you are strawmanning arguments against which you have an ideological bias. I think your review here is a fairly straightforward example: you present a sarcastic, uncharitable simplification of the book's theses, then analyze text to support those simplifications. Pointing out argumentative failures is fine, but methods are important. Using caricature can be rhetorically useful but is dangerous to do (imo) with material/arguments against which you have an existing bias, as it's likely to encourage you to continue painting with the same broad strokes and miss many useful/instructive details that the actual argument comprises.
This expresses pretty clearly in your analysis of the first 'thesis' imo. It's a perfectly valid criticism that Harvey doesn't examine how embedded liberalism led to the 1970s financial crises, and it seems like a fair characterization that, in this book, he is almost exclusively focused on the crises as excuse for plutocratic restructuring. But it doesn't follow at all that this lack of treatment must mean that he thinks "embedded liberalism was great and completely sustainable. The global economic system collapsing in 1971 was probably just coincidence..." I'm sure he speaks positively about many facets of the postwar economy (unionized labor, state welfare, etc.) throughout, but, without having read the book, this seems like a huge leap that you probably wouldn't make when examining a position/polemicist taking a more laissez faire position. At the very least, this is something that needs more textual justification than you've given.
I think there are similar problems with your treatment of the rest of the theses as well. I don't see how/whether Harvey actually advocates for a return to embedded liberalism from your explanation or quoted passage for thesis 4. From the long passage you quoted for thesis 3, it doesn't seem to me that Harvey describes "an idyllic New York being hit with a financial crisis for no reason" when he talks about the "explosive social unrest," impoverished city center, and the "urban crisis" in the embedded liberalism era of the 60s. Does he do a good job tracing complex causes of that unrest? Categorically, no (and I appreciate you including some commentary on the specifics of the strikes). But mischaracterizing comments like that ("idyllic New York") cast doubt over the review's credibility -- if you're glossing the quoted section unfairly, what about the other 198 pages? There are more examples but this is already getting long.
Overall, it gives the impression that you're more interested in attacking Harvey's ideology than in engaging with the specifics of his positions in a good faith effort to create a more accurate model of the world. Obviously, this is extremely difficult to do, especially when someone is as obviously ideologically motivated as Harvey, even more so when that ideology attacks your own with such vigor. But I think that is what people want -- not for you to agree with/praise books you disagree with but to present them accurately, on their own terms, then engage with them productively. I think this review has some of that, but it certainly also falls into some of the traps that people who read you aspire to avoid (largely thanks to things you've written! You did this! lol).
Damn, this was longer than I wanted. Hopefully somewhat helpful and not too pointed at least, though. I appreciate the time and effort you put into writing these things and into reading this too, if you do!
If some alt-right group did thousands of bombings per year, right now, but they did them mostly at night and deaths and injuries were quite low, would you be all "this is not a good look but mostly not a big deal"?
I'm pretty explicit in the comment above in noting that similar generosity could be extended to contemporary alt-right terrorism, so I've been as fair as possible in that comment. Would I be similarly fair if you approached me on the street and asked "Philosopher Bear, does the current wave of alt-right terrorism suggest that right wing ideology is fundamentally sick"? Well I hope so, because I am acquainted with the history of terrorism and know that it comes from all sides, but who knows, maybe I wouldn't be fair- how could one know? All I can say is that *in that particular comment above* I am equally generous to both sides and not inconsistent.
Wikipedia (the same source you use for your review of the harm caused by 1970s terrorism) lists 0 terrorist incidents in the United States in 2020. Seven incidents in 2019.
It's the fact that you listed a movement that does like maybe single-digits numbers of incidents per year as your big comparator with triple-digits number of incidents per year that makes me doubt your neutrality here. You considered "alt right terrorism" worthy of comment and holding up. Imagine that the alt right was doing an average of one bombing per night (much less five bombings per night), and killed a handful of people in the process of that. Are you really saying that in the face of more than two orders of magnitude more events you'd be dismissing it the same way you do now?
Should you? I mean, if you have the same response to something that does Thing X, and Thing X times 100, is that sane?
I think the fundamental measure here is body count, not numbers of incidents.
Okay, but even by body count, right-wing terrorism (or *all* non-Islamic terrorism) between 2010 and 2020 falls short of 60 deaths anyway, as well.
*Any* terrorism by body count is going to be a pretty low risk divided among the population, so I don't know what your "odds of getting killed" statistic up there is even trying to show except "terrorism in general 'doesn't matter very much'".
This is true, terrorism generally doesn't matter very much. This is part of why I suggest it's not that big a deal in assessing ideologies.
You're right about the number. I got 63 by first count and 54 by second count, I must have made a mistake in addition. Regardless they seem comparable, and not very high.
I don't agree, and I don't think you'd agree if there were bombs every night. I mean, certainly fatal bombings every night would be *worse*! But thousands of low-fatality bombings seems like it would be a big deal, even if it the overall bodycount were comparable to or lower than a vastly smaller number of incidents that were more lethal per incident.
If the subject is terrorism, the fundamental measure is how terrified people are. Which, admittedly, is harder to measure than counting bodies. But terrorists sometimes do things like set off bombs in the middle of the night and phone in warnings to make sure they don't accidentally kill a night watchman. Hijack airliners and hold the passengers hostage for a time but then let them all go. Some terrorist groups actively prefer doing this to killing people.
Whatever it is they are trying to accomplish, they believe they can accomplish it without killing people. And the rest of the world, often seems rather put out by this and tries to stop them. So I'm not at all impressed by your "OK, but they didn't *kill* all that many people, so meh, no big deal" analysis. When was the last time you were terrified, and how would you like to spend the next few years having that feeling artificially induced by someone who was careful to (probably) not actually kill you?
+2 at least to this. I think the point of comparison between left-wing terrorism in the 70s versus right-wing terrorism today is the level of terror. Firstly, and for the purposes of this comment, and based on the comments above, let's stipulate that the death toll of lefty and righty terror in the 70s and the new 10s is approximately equivalent. If I'm egregiously wrong about this, I'm happy to revise the below. I don't have a good sense, from the comments above or what I've read, about the relative frequency of incidents, which is probably pretty important, and I'd love some further info on it.
The point is made in multiple sources that the media's reaction to 70s lefty bombings was muted, which limited the terror (and which I am actually in favor of!, to a degree). But equally, given the (relative) paucity of sources, it's difficult now to construct an accurate history of how scared your average New Yorker or airline passenger was of having a bomb go off in their store or having their plane hijacked and diverted to Cuba. The sources of which I am aware indicate that it was mostly a shrug, which may well be true, but is difficult to credit entirely given the apparent incuriosity of those who claim to keep the record. The irony is that the incuriosity had both good effects (less actual terror) and bad effects (less reliable indicators of how much actual terror there was + less documentation of the frequency and severity of incidents), and yet I'm reasonably certain that the correct balance was not struck.
Almost the opposite is true of righty terror today. The curiosity of the media is extreme, which results in the documentation of every possible incident (even to the extent of false reporting/slow, stealth, non-prominent or non-existent corrections/doubling down, and to encouraging hoaxes), and the level of terror appears quite high. For example, take the incident from (I think, please correct me) just after Trump's election when there were entire classes of young children in minority districts who thought Trump was going to kill them.
At this point, I was going to launch into something that mirrors the above about the level of actual terror being in this case obscured by the panoply of media pieces on how bad righty terror is and how scared everyone is, but that isn't right. Instead, the frequency and tenor of these pieces does actually increase terror. That's bad, in that media is in some ways doing the work of the far right in this manner.
Regardless, and actually in mirror to the 70s, the media curiosity has both good (documentation of incidents is perhaps too good, even) and bad effects (extent/tenor of coverage + actual incidents=more scared people). Again, the right balance isn't being struck, and yet both coverage regimes have things to recommend in them.
Western Europe has had a sustained decline in terrorism since the 1970s, though there's been a bit of an uptick again in the last few years, returning to some of the numbers of the 1990s.
I think the 1970s there was a combination of left-wing political violence, as well as separatist nationalism in Ireland and the Basque country: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/world/a-history-of-terrorism-in-europe/
Book Review: A Brief History Of Neoliberalism
1 hr ago
7
44
Summary and commentary on David Harvey's "A Brief History Of Neoliberalism"
Read →
Write a comment…
T J Elliott1 min ago
It's tough to steel oneself to read a very long review like this one when it starts so unpromisingly with the following mistakes:
"The post-WWII-but-pre-1970 economic world - the world of “embedded liberalism” - was a pleasant place."
For whom? I worked on a loading dock in 1970 and pleasant was not the vibe. But okay with that cherry picking
"There were corporations, but they didn't do anything garish like compete with each other."
Ford didn't compete against GM didn't compete against Chrysler? Bendix didn't compete? General Foods? Okay. It seemed they were competing but not something I can easily refute. But...
"....workforces were so heavily unionized that companies were nervous about any changes that might upset employees"
Most sources agree that union membership peaked around 1954 at somewhere between 33 and 36% of the workforce. Would that constitute as "heavily" even then? In 1970, 42% of the workers in Michigan were unionized but only 14% in Florida and Texas. California and New York were at 33 and 31% respectively. How is that heavily unionized?
I found these statistics in 5 minutes. A review that tries to make a point without laying the foundation of the proper facts is not worth reading
>For whom? I worked on a loading dock in 1970 and pleasant was not the vibe
This is like contesting "North Korea is not a pleasant place" with "nuh uh, it is for the Kim dynasty!", or "the Pinto was not a very good car" with "well *mine* worked great!"
>How is that heavily unionized?
A quick Google shows that union membership in the U.S. was still near all-time highs in 1970 and started precipitously dropping in 1980, so "heavily unionized before 1970" could be a fair take, it seems to me: if one in three employees is in a union, maybe somewhere more than one in two bosses has to deal with a lot of union workers (since there are fewer of the former than the latter)?
Perhaps "relatively heavily unionized" is a better way to say it, though, I grant you.
Yes; Scott's description is absurd. IDK if Scott knows it's absurd.
"Ford didn't compete against GM didn't compete against Chrysler?"
The big US automakers and their unions in fact did a sort of ritual dance every time the union contracts came up. The unions would pick one of the companies and strike against it, then settle with appropriate wage increases. Then the other auto companies would give their unions the same settlements and avoid a strike. This is pretty much the definition of non-competition among the auto makers.
They competed only on intangibles such as the image of each of their brands, and not in the actual content of the cars they sold. Also, of course, they did their best to keep Japanese and other foreign cars from being imported. It was a very sweet gig while it lasted.
I think he's trying to paint the picture of what the author of the book believes, not what he himself believes. It comes off as pastiche to me.
I'd be interested in a history of non-Western humanism.
Garrett Jones might say that it is indeed sensible to trust many western NGOs above the governments of third world countries, in part due to "accountability" frequently incentivizing worse behavior.
Given that Humanism is a Western philosophy, I'm not certain that non-Western humanism makes sense. I suppose you could come up with attempts at integrating humanism into existing non-western cultures, but I don't know of any where that's happened to any significant degree.
Mohism is a Chinese philosophy which might be congenial to modern liberals. "Classical liberals" have found value in Daoism.
This is a weirdly negative review. Even with that I would say that the book is correct. From 1945-1980 or so most everybody did well, in the US and Europe, and from then on things start to fall apart, slowly at first and then in acceleration. That’s the empirical fact. It might have been some other reason, ie not neo liberalism but because that’s something you would expect after 30-40 years of growth, or because after the year 1980 you would expect wages to stagnate, but it’s likely that neo liberalism and globalisation are the main reason.
But if you read that Breton woods was crappy that’s wrong. For the reasons I mentioned. Western wages either tripled or quadrupled in that time.
I was surprised by just how negative the review was, but you seem to have elided how much things changed in 1970 rather than 1980.
Yes, all of that is (potentially) true and interesting, and what I read this book to learn more about. I feel like this book did not provide any of that knowledge, which is why I'm reviewing it poorly.
But you don't seem to understand the basic points of Harvey, who never says anything like "Embedded liberalism was great and completely sustainable"
If you think that's his point, you should be able to quote a primary source of his which says something along those lines.
I would argue that the most important feature of 1945-1970 is that all of our major economic competitors had been ground to dust by WW2. In the seventies they started catching up.
I dunno if it's very fair to make 1945 your starting point. Can we bear in mind that in 1945 near the entirety of Europe and Japan were in shambles? That 100 million people were unsure if they would get enough to eat that winter? This seems a bit like observing that in 4Q 2020 the US economy grew phenomenally -- well, yeah, given what happened in the first part of the year!
Why is it inevitable that super growth of 30 years follows devastating war, is that historically the case? Can you think of histories where a devastating war leads to permanent decline?
Clearly policy matters. The growth after WWII was better than WWI, particularly in Germany (east and west) in part because there was no desire to punish Germany given the Cold War. That’s one policy that differs. There were many others.
It's hardly inevitable, but it's a very reasonable a priori expectation, for the same reason health increases spectactularly after a bout of disease that almost kills you. Nobody doubts policy matters -- one has only to compare the economic growth of South Korea versus North following the Korean War. But to suggest (if you are) that *only* policy matters, and the fact that you are starting from a pile of rubble and bartering for sufficient calories matters not at all, seems on balance the more implausible starting point.
Is it a reasonable priori expectation? Does the destruction of Carthage lead to greater things for them? Does the sackings of Rome lead to a new and glorious Rome? By and large mass destruction can be the end of a city, or a country.. Or recovery is slow.
In fact I would think it rare and possibly unique in history for a country to recover like the Germans did. Obviously it wasn't just policy, the era had to be a technological one.
I need to look up the details to confirm but I remember reading that Germany was back to its pre war levels within 10 years. Past that nothing can be explained as catch up and a better explanation is needed. Theres nothing like the post war period in history actually.
( Fun fact, East. Germany had higher growth in the early post war years than the US has had since 2008, and their GDP per capita growth was even greater as their population fell)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_East_Germany#/media/File:Growth_GDP_per_capita_East_Germany.png
Probably the main reason for poor growth in the early 80's were the Volcker reforms, which were absolutely necessary and crucial to break inflation, but also inherently triggered a recession (one very rare case of doing that deliberately). Towards the end of the 80s, it was paying off, but it was the kind of necessary re-set that hurts at first.
The stagnation in median and low wages in the US has lasted a few generations
True, but at least growth picked up - the rest is distribution, and is significantly a *political* issue that has little to do with cracking inflation. Plus that wage stagnation has finally started to end, hasn't it (at least it started to pre-epidemic)?
First, I'd echo what a few other commentators noted and say that this seems to be one of your weaker reviews - I think one of your strengths is that you are a generous and thorough reader of texts and I don't feel like this review was either comprehensive or charitable at all to Harvey's arguments. Lots of block quotes that I would say are by no means the totality of Harvey's arguments with short paragraphs refuting them or simply saying they are unconvincing.
I would say most importantly, you kind of fail to address what neoliberalism is to Harvey and to many theorists who use the term. As Thompson puts it in his review of the same book, "Neoliberalism is the intensification of the influence and dominance of capital; it is the elevation of capitalism, as a mode of production, into an ethic, a set of political imperatives, and a cultural logic."
And I really can't see what aspects of this you are refuting or even attempting to refute. Is your point that neoliberalism is good, or that history didn't happen as Harvey says it did?
To the first "thesis", I would not say the perpetual endurance or goodness of "embedded liberalism", a key piece of which is what Harvey terms Fordism elsewhere, is necessary to any critique of neoliberalism. I also don't think Harvey would agree with that at all - as an orthodox Marxist, I'm pretty sure he sees inherent contradictions in all ways in which capitalism operates. That economic growth stagnated, prices rose, supplies fell, at the end of a period of Fordism is, essentially, neither here nor there for a critique of neoliberalism.
To the second "thesis", I think a more cogent reframing would be that certain actors and entities worked for and succeeded in changing the political-economic system to reassert their class power, ushering in an era that emphasized the eminence of the market over the state. Whether the intent on the part of certain individuals was to benefit the population is immaterial to this thesis. Those funding them did not like, as you put it, an "anti-business environment".
Third "thesis", the idea behind critiques of structural adjustment, which is really what this is, is that lenders impose conditions tied to further loans and/or bailouts under the guise of general economic prescriptions that actually serve the interests of those lenders and the wealthy nations in which they originate. For instance, requirements to lower tariffs and open economies up to foreign investments which could benefit (certain) US firms and harm (certain) local firms. Requirements to cut safety nets and social systems etc. You seem to focus on one New York example and, I don't think, really get at the point Harvey is making. It isn't that NYC was some paradise before, it was that it was democratically accountable and had strong worker protections, and that financial elites remade it in a non-democratic way, weakening worker protections and, critically, commodifying culture/identity. I think this is one key point of Harvey and other scholars of neoliberalism that you don't address at all. Neoliberalism is, in essence, commodification of everything, including culture, which is a non-negligible part of what Harvey was getting at in that passage on New York. It also seems like you essentially ignore the beginning of that passage, which has Harvey's explanation of why New York was in debt in the first place - decreased federal funding.
And yes, a critique of human rights and a critique of NGOs are completely in line with far left and Marxist lines of thought - in that they both reinforce the supremacy of the individual as a unit/agent, are dictated by global elites, and supplant what should be state functions. The rise of NGOs would be considered by many to be a key part of neoliberal logic - replacing functions of the state and the democratic accountability embodied therein with either market mechanisms or an often-donor funded project with little to no accountability.
Thank you; you engaged and produced where I gestured, tried to write, and stopped.
"To the first "thesis", I would not say the perpetual endurance or goodness of "embedded liberalism", a key piece of which is what Harvey terms Fordism elsewhere, is necessary to any critique of neoliberalism. I also don't think Harvey would agree with that at all - as an orthodox Marxist, I'm pretty sure he sees inherent contradictions in all ways in which capitalism operates."
And to this, specifically, I would extend your point that Harvey sees neoliberalism not as an out-of-nowhere conspiracy to ruin the immanent goodness of liberalism, as Scott's first restatement thesis suggests, but, rather, that neoliberalism, as worldview and the policy it produces, *was one of several possible responses* to the inevitable destabilization of embedded liberalism due to the inherent contradictions of capital, and it is the response we got because there was a struggle between the working class and the plutocrats, and the plutocrats won.
"The inherent contradictions of capital" is, for Marxists, and specifically for Harvey, what Scott has elsewhere caused a concept-handle: a kind of winking shorthand for a centuries-old set of arguments about how capitalism can be at once so dynamic/resilient and so wrongfooted/destabilized, what makes it seem simultaneously fragile and forever. Put (too) simply: what do we do about the fact that, in the long run, the surplus value of the worker is expropriated for profit, and at some point, the worker runs out of either money or patience with their expropriation? On the left, Harvey is perhaps the most influential and prominent living writer on these issues (see, e.g. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/277956219_Seventeen_Contradictions_and_the_End_of_Capitalism).
I can imagine that this book is not easy to read if one doesn't come to it with that kind of backpack. And that might, or might not, be a failure of the book as an introduction to these issues; I'm not sure what Harvey's goals were, or which audience he imagined. But there's a lot of this review — like Scott's formulation of the first thesis, or the surprise about the critique of NGOs — that suggests to me Scott really just doesn't understand where Harvey is coming from, wherever the fault for that lies.
For a very interesting critique of the actual US system using many of these old Marxist arguments, see <https://www.epsilontheory.com/a-song-of-ice-and-fire/>. Or pretty much any essay on that site.
I am struck by Michael Hudson's argument that there are really at least two kinds of capitalists: the old-school industrial capitalists who actually favored public services most of the time, and the new-school FIRE/rentier capitalists who dislike public services because they cut into the capitalists' bottom line.
Also note that both Marxists and that Epsilon Theory guy (who is a self-admitted petty rentier capitalist) have very similar arguments against MMT:
<https://www.marxist.com/marxism-vs-modern-monetary-theory-mmt.htm>
Strange bedfellows...
I guess - and this isn't about you, I've gotten this same feeling from other people defending this book, and from the book itself - it's unclear what specific knowledge you think the book imparts. You say that it's about Harvey's concept of neoliberalism as an attempt to assert class power. But it seems like Harvey (and the commenters here) basically define this as true.
Like, suppose you started out knowing the very basics - that the US switched from embedded liberalism to neoliberalism around 1970-something, that neoliberalism was more business-friendly than embedded liberalism, and that various capitalists and business leaders supported this. Is there some specific additional meaning of "...and also, neoliberalism was an attempt to reassert class power"? Is there some state of the world in which this is true, and some other state in which it isn't? What would it take to convince you that this wasn't true? Or is it even meaningful to posit that this might not be true?
The only way I can interpret the "attempt to assert class power" argument as trying to make a specific point is by opposing it to "neoliberalism was a well-intentioned attempt to respond to difficult economic conditions". But in order to have that argument, Harvey would have to explain the economic conditions and why neoliberalism didn't seem like a well-intentioned attempt to respond to them. The book doesn't really do that. Instead it just has (what seem to me to be) really dumb arguments like "sometimes seemingly neoliberal governments did non-neoliberal things", which seems inherent to the basic nature of governments as not consistent ideologues.
"Harvey would have to explain the economic conditions and why neoliberalism didn't seem like a well-intentioned attempt to respond to them. The book doesn't really do that."
"But it seems like Harvey (and the commenters here) basically define this as true."
I sort of tried to get to this in my comment below, but this is because Harvey approaches this through the lens of class struggle. I know you know this, because you said up top that he's an "extreme conflict theorist," linking back to your classic 2014 blog post on conflicts vs mistakes.
What genuinely confuses me — where I think you are making a mistake, and why I said above I thought you lacked the background here, which I didn't intend as an ad hom or anything like that — is that you seem to view this as a temperamental choice rather than a methodological one (granted, it can be both). But for classic/orthodox Marxists — for those who do dialectical materialism — the class struggle is part of the instrumentation of the analysis of economic history. "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles" is not (only) a claim about the substance of history; it is a claim about *the method of studying and explaining it.*
So when you say: "the commenters here assume it to be true," the answer is — well, yes! It's like assuming a microscope can make things appear larger. Sure, a microscope can also introduce distortions, and some things can't fit underneath it so it's not very useful for looking at an elephant. But we all know how to use a microscope *on the microscope's own terms*. So too with dialectical materialism, i.e. the method of analyzing history through the lens of class conflict.
So the point of this book is to say: okay, if we deploy this method, what does that allow us to see about the rise of this thing that we call neoliberalism? What does it do in society? Why is it here? How does it work? What does it do? Who does it advantage?
Hmmm. If I may butt in, this gets at a… question I have about Marxists. I'd call it an apparent motte-and-bailey, but being charitable, it may be a case of different schools of thought that both stem from Marx, but explicitly disagree with each other.
To wit: sometimes I see Marxists who treat capitalism like Scott Alexander's Moloch — a system complex and self-regulating enough that it can be thought of as an immaterial intelligence, not unlike evolution in the "blind idiot god" framing. If you take that framing, what you say above makes sense: "class struggle" describes socioeconomic trends that just happen whether anyone is actively pushing for them to be accomplished, therefore you can try to see how various events fit into those patterns without that framework being in itself an empirical claim that requires justification.
But other times, Marxists talk about class struggle as very literal entrenched warfare fought, over the span of generations, between the working class and their exploiters who, behind closed doors, very much do think of the working class as the enemy; who are actively, consciously trying to screw them over for their own gain. It's not that this claim is necessarily ridiculous, depending on context; but *that* is very much an empirical claim about what actual human beings had on their minds at specific times. You cannot simply assume *this* as a starting point and call it "merely a methodology".
So firstly: what's the deal?
Secondly: it seems clear to me from the extracts provided in the Book Review that Harvey is of the latter school (e.g. the bit where he speculates about who did or did not *consciously* have “further my class interests” on their mind when planning the New York bailout-slash-takeover), so how could the "it's just a methodological approach" excuse work for him?
"Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes."
I am not sure what this quote is meant to prove, in terms of answering my question.
Let me rephrase it: is this endless struggle a Molochian "the system is such that the 'patrician' camp somehow always ends up screwing over the 'plebeian' camp, even though any individual member of the oppressive camp may not realise that they are participating in a system of oppression"; or is the claim that in all eras of history the 'haves' *consciously* decide to screw over the 'have-nots' and keep them as 'have-nots'?
Is the endless fight a macro trend that people on both sides are drawn into without ever necessarily realising it; or is it a conscious and explicit enmity that the likes of my own self are idiots for having forgotten about in the last few generations, my g-…-grand-parents having failed at some point in the last century to pass on the "by the way the other camp is our sworn enemy" memo?
I think Marx would argue it is the former. In Kapital, he goes to some lengths to show that individual capitalists/business owners who try to do better by the working class put themselves at a competitive disadvantage against others, which is ultimately unsustainable.
Some people are conscious of it, some people aren't. I'm not sure why these two things are self-contradictory to you. In times of heightened struggle (say, an economic crisis) then class interests become more obvious to everyone.
The odd uprising aside, this is an historical nonsense.
So, this is a good question. One thing I would say — one part of what you are identifying — is that "Marxist" is an incredibly broad scope, and a contested one (Marx himself having famously said "I am not a Marxist," the carbuncular curmudgeon that he was).
The way I, personally, unite the to disparate threads you draw apart is that they are both true, but the first manifests through the second. One of the lessons I take from the-huge-incoherent-mass-of-things-called-Marxism is that structures matter; relationships matter.
For example: suppose I have the money from inheritance (capital) to buy a 2bed in Boston, and rent out a room at market rate to a grad student tenant. Because I own the house, I can take their rent as clear cash, and use it to reduce or eliminate my own working hours. It makes good, rational, economic, blind idiot moloch god sense to do so.
Now: interpersonally, I could be a horrible, mean, nasty, conniving landlord to my tenant, or I could be a kind, attentive, thoughtful landlord. This matters, to both me and to my tenant; it makes a difference. But it does not make a *material* difference in the (limited, orthodox, stylized) Marxist sense of material, because our *material relations* are still that of tenant and landlord, where, instead of working myself, I am simply expropriating the value from their labor.
(As an aside, given my example: this view of landlords in classical political economy was not unique to Marx. Adam Smith hated landlords, thought they economy-destroying parasites. For some of his zingers: https://old.reddit.com/r/adamsmith/comments/zche7/ysk_adam_smith_spoke_of_landlords_as_cruel/. )
Now, Marx did seem to believe that the *structural* relations between people does have a tendency to corrupt — or alienate, as he termed it — the *interpersonal* relations between them as well. This is where you get, in your example, the "very literal entrenched warfare." But animosity isn't the cause of the exploitation, in his account; rather the reverse.
To your second question: well, partially this is a false dichotomy as per above, but also partially this is a case where Scott quoted Harvey preaching to the choir, as it were, rather than trying to explain to people from first principles what class interests are, and why the method presumes "the furtherance of class interests" the way that classical physics presumes gravity, i.e. as a natural tendency of the system that doesn't require any particular individual agency as all.
(I hope this is helpful! I wouldn't consider myself a Marxist, although I would consider myself influenced by Marx and Marxist writers; nor is this a field I'm well-educated enough to teach, but something I'm trying to talk through as I understand it for others)
Thank you! This makes some things clearer in my mind. It does also convince me further that the stereotypical communist's hissing and seething about actively evil capitalists is a red herring. (…The red pun was unintentional, I swear.)
I can all too easily see why it's caught on as it has, of course; it's harder to push for reform if there isn't a personable enemy to punch. But perhaps communism would not still be dealing with the sulfurous reputation it has retained from the Stalin and Mao, if it rebranded as the movement that wants to overthrow Moloch, as opposed to growing ever more tribalistic and conflict-theorist about the rich being individually, personally horrible people (see: "Eat the rich", "All landlords are bastards" and other such catchy slogans).
An unintentional, but a good one.
And sure, all stereotypes are annoying in that respect, although I should point out again that it wasn't Marx or communists who invented "all landlords are bastards," it was *literally every major political economist before the 1970s* who hated landlords and thought they were all bastards. It was Marx who gave one of the most compelling and analytically specific accounts — after Adam Smith — of *why* they were bastards.
I do think you're right about the double bind — that it's easier to gin up conflict against the individual person or name, than the Moloch system itself. I would also point out that people who do say "it's all about the corrupt system, man" are usually criticized for being insufficiently specific and not very rigorous, probably stoners, etc. So, you know, it's hard.
If you're genuinely open-minded and interested in this, watching or listening to Harvey's 2007 podcasts from his class on Volume 1 of Marx's capital is a good place to start: http://davidharvey.org/reading-capital/#capital-v1-2007. They're just lectures of him trying to explain Marx to a group of undergrads and grad students as — by coincidence — the GFC is beginning. I often find myself returning to it for inspiration before I start any major research project because it always illuminates things for me.
About landlords, see also the recent https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-progress-and-poverty
Both are true at different times. Sometimes the organisation of capital (or labor, for that matter) acts like a conspiracy. Generally speaking it acts like a Moloch type thing. Complex and subtle intermediate blends are also possible.
The first implies the second. Moloch is not an outside force, it's just a sum of individuals acting in rational self-interest given the options they have. And when there happen to be groups of individuals with vastly opposite interests, they're going to oppose each other. This is not their random choice, "social being determines consciousness", people are a product of their circumstances. Still, they're conscious beings acting consciously.
I mean, I see what you're getting at, but isn't this just "The Whole City Is Center" with you acting as Sophisticus to Marxist Simplicios?
But that's the frustrating part of the book: it doesn't really answer any of those questions in a meaningful way. As best I could tell from the book (not just Scott's review), it sounds l assumes the world is zero sum and therefore once it has shown one group benefits, it feels no need to prove up that the benefit was at the expense of workers. But the world isn't zero sum, and some policy regimes are just better than others, for everyone or at least for most people. One need not accept that "neoliberalism" is such, but Harvey just seems to assume that there just isn't such a thing as a policy change that helps everyone.
This is like picking up a math textbook and being frustrated it doesn't explain the evolution of the platypus to you. You're not reading it on its terms.
That sounds sort of, well, worthless, to me...
That is, if you're not making an argument for why the way you're looking at this part of history provided some new insight or is otherwise worthwhile, but just saying "we're gonna look at this as a class struggle; turns out it was a class struggle!", you're just assuming your conclusion -- relaying some events with the added comment "and also this was because of the mean [bad people] oppressing the noble [good people]", or whatever.
If an argument isn't made for why this is the *right* way, or at least a *useful* way, to analyze the material, why bother reading it if you don't already agree? Perhaps I could say "my method of historical analysis is called Semitophobics, which looks at events as being caused by evil Jews." Someone objects that I've provided no evidence in my works, to which I respond "it's a *lens*: we assume it's true, and then look at what this tells us about the rise of [whatever] in society."
The questions you list, like "why is it here" or "who benefits", aren't actually answered by facts that can be observed, using this "method": the former is assumed (it's a manifestation of class struggle because that's how we've decided to look at it; or, it's a manifestation of international Jewry because that's how we've decided to look at it), and the latter is a fact that can be extracted without the "method" (and is also assumed anyway: the rich capitalists benefit and the poor workers lose, of course; or, the Jew benefits and the others lose, of course...).
"but just saying "we're gonna look at this as a class struggle; turns out it was a class struggle!", you're just assuming your conclusion"
No, it's saying "we're going to look at this *using* class struggle; turns out X results from that struggle." Class struggle isn't the *result he found,* it's the *method he used.* That's what I'm trying to help the people here with no background in Marxist analysis understand.
"If an argument isn't made for why this is the *right* way, or at least a *useful* way, to analyze the material, why bother reading it if you don't already agree? "
Because you responded with a flip example, here is mine: why read an advanced physics textbook that uses calculus if you are already assuming calculus to be true?
I think what's tripping people up is that this is an introduction to neoliberalism, from a Marxist using Marxist methods, and they keep expecting it to be an introduction to — and justification of — Marxism too. But that's not what the book is or was intended to be!
>No, it's saying "we're going to look at this *using* class struggle; turns out X results from that struggle."
What I'm saying is that there is no X. It is a description of stuff that happened with the added comment "...because of class struggle." See my Semitophobics example.
>why read an advanced physics textbook that uses calculus if you are already assuming calculus to be true?
Because the book is making an argument, using calculus, for why its conclusions are true, of course!
So, you're saying, a wizard did it?
> So the point of this book is to say: okay, if we deploy this method, what does that allow us to see about the rise of this thing that we call neoliberalism? What does it do in society? Why is it here? How does it work? What does it do? Who does it advantage?
And most importantly - how would you know if it turns out not to fit under the microscope? You'll always be able to generate *some* thesis, but you need a source of external verification to demonstrate it isn't the wrong tool for the job. I think that's the key here: that the book's engagement with the facts on the ground seems sketchy and deceptive to force the frame to fit, while its predictions mostly fail to bear fruit.
A microscope *works*, though. Dialectical materialism is the equivalent of a coathanger being bent into a vague monocle shape, it can't analyze anything meaningfully. It's a garbage method. You need to start by explaining why you keep using the busted microscope that can't magnify anything and then making wild claims about what you saw in it.
I don't really get conflict theory, and I half get this claim here, and you seem to get it and write in a way I understand, so help me out.
> if we deploy this method, what does that allow us to see about
I 100% understand this. Though, to be strict, I would change "what does this allow to see about" to "what would this suggest about .., to the extent that the method works". So with your microscope example, people that write about their findings using the microscope have used it in a way that everyone agrees works to show reality. If this isn't the case, then the paper is about the method itself, or about the cool new effect they got by using the microscope which requires explanation. That is, there is such a thing as the microscope working well to show reality, or not being helpful in that. It's not "a method" that's just equally valid, requiring no justification, but whose conclusions can be trusted to apply to reality.
Now, I could totally understand a book that's meant for people that already buy into some model or theory and that isn't devoted to double checking if and how it works. That's totally fine. I would hate a world where those books didn't exist, given how different from each other we think about stuff. But that's not what I understand you are claiming.
Also, I feel like I'm thinking about it "from a mistake theory" point of view and if this is actually about conflict vs mistake, then this is not the approach.. but then, I don't know what.
No, this are very fair questions, and I have two answers.
One of them — as I just responded more fulsomely to someone upthread — is that I think part of the problem here is that Scott picked up an introduction to neoliberalism by one of the world's most prominent and influential Marxists, and seems to have been caught by surprise that the analytic framework would be Marxist, without spending time to explain or defend Marxism. I think this is a book meant to be an introduction to neoliberalism from a Marxist perspective. Maybe that's a failing of the book, maybe it's just what the book was trying to do, maybe it's ships passing in the night.
The second point is: as someone whose primary academic field is science-technology studies, it is actual a contested and subtle question whether what a microscope does is *show* you an "underlying reality," or whether what a microscope does is *construct* for you an *image* that we agree to treat as reality, because it is useful to do so for certain purposes. Also, while you are right that today people more or less agree how a microscope works, any new analytical instrument is always contested when it comes along, and as people calibrate how it should be used and when it will be agreed to represent "reality." While Marxists have a (more or less) well developed consensus viewpoint on how to apply these methods, of course people coming from different disciplines would not agree on how those should be used, or how they would be valid.
Let me see if I understand you.
Basically, this is a book that can only inform about the real world to readers that come to it already convinced that "marxist methodology" works for this kinds of things. For other readers, it only serves to enlighten about how someone convinced that "marxist methodology" thinks about these topics. So a Scott should only pick up and read this book if he is curious about marxist heads, and not expecting to update his views on the topics covered.
I'm assuming that the first half of your second point is more of a philosophical side branch. But maybe it's the core of my misunderstanding, and that's why I'm talking about "marxist methodology" and you go for "marxist perspective"?
I think this is pretty close to what I am trying to say! It's not that this book is useless for people who are not already Marxists. It's that, in order to fully grok the arguments — and neither accept or dismiss them entirely and uncritically — you have to understand the kind of analysis that Harvey is doing, which requires, or at least benefits from, a background in Marxist methods of analysis.
I think a Scott should pick this book up to understand what Marxists think is going on with neoliberalism, and I think he should be able to update his views on whether he is interested in what Marxists have to say on the matter, or finds anything compelling about them, on their own terms. What is frustrating to me about this review is that it seems like Scott (mostly) didn't try to evaluate Harvey on his own terms.
Like, I don't see how someone reading this review, and reading the review I posted from Dissent (https://www.dissentmagazine.org/democratiya_article/a-brief-history-of-neoliberalism), could think they were reading similarly sophisticated books. And I think that's because the latter was written by someone who could see what Harvey was trying to do and evaluate him by how well or poorly he achieved that, whereas Scott pretty clearly couldn't understand what Harvey was trying to argue and so related his frustration and confusion. A frustration and confusion, by the way, that I think is totally understandable in context.
To your last graf: I think I'm using methodology and perspective a bit interchangeably here, which is perhaps sloppy, but not something I had intended to be meaningful.
This seems to be along the lines of "if all you have is a hammer, the whole world looks like a nail", and doesn't steelman Marxist literature that way that you think it does.
Would you say the same thing of a physicist using physics to describe baseball?
"Our basic uncontested premise is that science can be used to understand all motion, including that of baseballs" and "Our uncontested basic premise is that all of human endeavor is an attempt at social domination by the social and economic elite" are wildly different statements with very different levels of accuracy and applicability.
You're not comparing like with like. A Marxist would say: "our premise is that a materialist class struggle analysis can be used to understand the current distribution of wealth, the shape of cities, etc."
Re: your microscope analogy, this seems to reiterate Scott's point: How do you know you're not trying to look at an elephant through a Marxist microscope, or you're not looking at some other distortion that isn't better analyzed using a more appropriate tool? You can certainly use the tool, but how do you know the analysis is *imparting useful knowledge*? This is what Scott alleges is lacking from the book.
Yeah, I guess my concern is - I'm not sure what it allows us to see. If the book has a conclusion, the conclusion is "neoliberalism is a result of class struggle". But if that's its assumption, it can't be its conclusion very usefully. Which makes me wonder what the actual conclusion is, and I don't really see one.
I'm not sure how that wouldn't be "useful". Marxist analysis is often accused of being relevant to only the 19th century. If all that David Harvey did (and I'm not necessarily agreeing that this is his only conclusion) was to say 'actually, class struggle and Marxist categories also applies to this period of history' then that would still be a useful contribution.
So, the book is asking "Can we coerce the events of 1950-1980, i.e. the rise of neoliberalism, into a Marxist framework?", and serves as an existence proof that yes, such a coercion is possible?
That's marginally useful to someone who's dedicated to Marxism, but without arguments for why this is a better lens than others not good. That still amounts to an explicit, even _performative_instance of writing the bottom line first, and therefore is not useful to anyone truth-seeking.
Or framed another way: If this is considered bad Marxist scholarship, it only reflects badly on the author. if this is what passes for good Marxist scholarship, then it reflects badly on *all of Marxist scholarship*. If the field praises this kind of thing as scholarly, the field is intellectually bankrupt.
You can read all of Harvey's other works to see why Marxism is a better lens.
Well I wrote something and it deleted itself, let's try this again...
I did not mean to say (and don't think I said) the book as a whole is about "an attempt to assert class power" - that was only restating what you would call his second thesis. I would not say it is the most interesting nor insightful part of the book. Maybe some people who are more focused on how explicit class interests instantiate would find it more interesting. To me, it is too easy to get bogged down in a discussion of intent, when Marxists like Harvey are (or should be, IMO), more interested in material conditions and power relations. Intent is both a tricky object of analysis when also dealing with things like false consciousness and in the end is pretty irrelevant - just because someone is acting in a way that they believe to be altruistic or a good policy response doesn't change the class interests that policy response is advancing.
Essentially though, as I see it the argument is that wealthy individuals and businesses pushed for pro-business regulations, promoted think-tanks to do the same, promoted academics to argue the same, which culminated in a shift in policy to a more market-oriented approach. I think there are pretty clear links between the neoliberal movement in economic academia, think-tanks, policy, and business. And definitely, some to many to almost all of these people thought their policy prescriptions were beneficial. It is just that their policies also reasserted the class power of those with capital, which aligned with the class interests of many of their foundational supporters.
So to get back to your argument, your second paragraph here. It isn't really: "and also, neoliberalism was an attempt...". It is that it was more business friendly and that capitalists and business leaders supported it, thus it, necessarily, reasserted class power. I think Marxists are operating from the assumption that the bourgeoisie are operating in their own class interest and it would take strong evidence to the contrary to refute that. (I also don't think that "an attempt to reassert class power" does much work in Harvey's argument but that's besides the point).
I think in conclusion I would phrase part of his insight as "neoliberalism masqueraded as a well-intentioned attempt to respond to economic conditions, but was actually a means of reasserting class power". I think to counter this argument, you would have to counter what seems to be clear collusion by pro-business interests to create a more market friendly environment, ideally supplemented by something that shows how neoliberalism didn't reassert class power.
If there was no class interest or intention behind it: A. that's extremely unlikely to impossible from a Marxist perspective since nigh-everything is class interest, but more importantly; B. that doesn't really do anything to neoliberalism as a concept. It still functions in Harvey's eyes as a system in which the class power of business elites is reasserted vis-a-vis the working class, a system of increasing commodification and emphasis on the individual over the collective, a system that emphasizes personal responsibility and love of work as a virtue.
FWIW though I agree with you his arguments about neoliberal governments doing non-neoliberal things is not strong, but I mostly don't think it matters.
This seems to pretty strongly rely on the assumption that the economy is a zero-sum game. Just because reforms were market-friendly and benefited the capitalist class doesn't mean that they did so at the expense of everyone else, much less that they were intended to.
As Petey writes below, I think that is a pretty foundational aspect of Marxism, that class interests oppose one another, that enrichment of the wealthy relies on exploitation of the working classes. I'm not sure they would use the term zero-sum game but yes, I would say that in some ways that's the foundation upon which Harvey is building
My point was that your statement: "I think to counter this argument, you would have to counter what seems to be clear collusion by pro-business interests to create a more market friendly environment, ideally supplemented by something that shows how neoliberalism didn't reassert class power." is only true if we already grant the Marxist assumption that anything that helps the pro-business interests must necessarily hurt the working class.
Otherwise we can just argue that the "clear collusion by pro-business interests to create a more market friendly environment" *was* "a well-intentioned attempt to respond to economic conditions" because they honestly believed the reforms would help everyone, not just their own class.
"[T]hey honestly believed the reforms would help everyone, not just their own class"... which... was also accurate? I mean, this actually happened, the average person's life is much better and richer than it was in 1979 (and NYC itself is infinitely cleaner, less criminal, and all-round more pleasant), which seems to badly undermine any Marxist claim about the villainy of class interest. If this is what happens when the class interests of the bourgeoisie are indulged we clearly need to indulge them even more.
"Instead it just has (what seem to me to be) really dumb arguments"
Weren't you just complaining about Harvey using adverbs that you dislike? Now you're calling an outgroup thinker "dumb"?
No, he called the arguments dumb. And he even qualified it with "seems to me". He called the arguments "dumb", and you then accused him of applying the adjective to the person instead of the arguments.
Smart people can make dumb arguments.
Smart people can *definitely* make arguments that "seem dumb" to people with different viewpoints.
You constantly demand rigor and citation from Scott regarding your preferred ideology. Yet here you try to play "gotcha" by suggesting that Scott engaged in ad hominem, because he clarified how an IDEA seemed to him, in response to specific critiques about his thought process in the review.
Calling ideas "dumb" while (self-admittedly) giving uncharitable readings of said ideas is not a particularly good way to learn things, and doesn't give me confidence that Scott Alexander has any interest in reading outgroup thinkers charitably.
Yes, I do require citations from Scott.
I think I understand the basic conflict in the comments section. You're coming at the issue from a basic Rationalist viewpoint, in which the author has to qualify all the assumptions that he's making( namely that neoliberalism was a product of class struggle). Harvey, on the other hand, assumes that this is obviously true, because *everything* is a product of class struggle. In light of this, your review does appear to be much stronger than I initially thought, although it does seem to have a dismissive tone that I'm sure wasn't your intention. This review (and future reviews) would perhaps benefit from not containing as many dismissive and critical adjectives, although it could contain the very same points you're making. I of course should not pretend to give you any writing advice as you are hands down my favorite writer. I'm only expressing my initial reaction on reading the piece.
Note: The other commenters are perhaps comparing this review to https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/02/27/book-review-the-seven-principles-for-making-marriage-work/, in which you steelman the book very generously in the first few sections, and then proceed to annihilate it in the second half. That, in my opinion, was an unforgettable piece of writing.
>'Instead it just has (what seem to me to be) really dumb arguments like "sometimes seemingly neoliberal governments did non-neoliberal things"...'
A version of that argument could work, if Harvey made a good effort to show that non-neoliberal things are consistently also in the direction of supporting ruling class power
The question I had while reading it was, if you don't think this book has any serious arguments or anything worth refuting, why did you review it in the first place?
In my view this is a product of a sort of Morton’s Fork for Scott in terms of engaging with those who disagree with him.
If he doesn’t publish reviews of books he disagrees with (or otherwise write about those disagreements), then people can ask “why aren’t you engaging with those you disagree with? Do you even understand their arguments?”
On the other hand, when he does review them, then (assuming he doesn’t actually get convinced) he’s left in the position of saying some variant of “this book doesn’t seem to actually make a good argument”, which can in turn prompt responses like yours, wondering why he’s engaging with something that he sees as not making a significant contribution.
You can read Harvey's book yourself if you don't find Scott's review very satisfying, it's a relatively short book. I personally found Harvey's earlier works more interesting (although I read them many years ago) but A Brief History of Neoliberalism is pretty decent.
I've already proven that he doesn't understand the left's arguments. See here:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-global-economic-history#comment-1795464
No, all you did there was make showy claims that seem plausible only so long as you don't apply basic deductive logic. E.G 'essence of man is determined by a web of social interactions' + 'social interactions can be replaced wholesale' (such as replacing modern alienated labor with full after-the-revolution communism) = 'all parts of the essence of man can be changed', i.e. everything about human nature is perfectly malleable.
Where does Marx say anything like "all parts of the essence of man can be changed"? The evolution of some social interactions (such as economic activity) does not imply that all parts of the essence of man can be changed.
The quote from Thompson is already mushy rhetoric. How do you measure "the intensification of the influence and dominance of capital"? Capital is the means of production; in what sense does it influence anything other than making labor more productive? Or by capital does he mean the owners of capital? What does it mean to "elevate" capital, the means of production? To praise it? To build it? To adopt and use it? Do I elevate capital if I say I can move more earth with a bulldozer than a spoon? What is an economy that does not "elevate" capital as a mode of production? Does it use no capital? That would be a hunter-gatherer society. Same with "elevating" capital into an "ethic" or "set of political imperatives" or "cultural logic". Words that are really nothing more than name-calling. There's no meaning there. Neo-Marxist mush.
I don't see how the "commodification of culture" can have anything to do with any government's economic policy, or any critique of recent trends in culture. People have been selling their books, art and music since classical antiquity. Outside of some stalinist regime where government bureaucrats try to design the culture from the top down, that's the way it always has been and always will be.
Just my editorial/marketing $0.02, it might be better for the subscriber to break these posts up into smaller chunks. For people who are killing time between calls or procrastinating at work, they are a little too long to really engage with.
Just read part at a time...?
Scott usually does break his posts into Latin-numbered parts, but this wasn't the case this time for some reason ?
Try reading between calls, then, when a call comes in, place your finger on the word you were currently reading. You'll then know where the next "smaller chunk" begins. An added benefit to this method is that you'll find these resulting smaller chunks PERFECTLY coincide with your schedule.
Am I the only person here unfamiliar with the term "embedded liberalism?" I guess it just means FDR style liberalism?
I had never heard of it either, but it appears to be a term referring to the capitalist economic system that existed after WW2 but prior to the "neoliberal turn". I am unconvinced this is actually a coherent word for a political-economic system, since many of the pieces are cultural (long-term employment at the same massive corporation being the norm) rather than political (high levels of taxation).
Agreed. As someone mentioned above, also, the post war economic system had the advantage of a decimated Europe and Japan trying to rebuild to sell all manner of goods to. That wasn't something that would last forever, obviously.
I think the term intentionally captures these cultural components as well as what you term the political-economic system, as the term comes from, at least partially, Polyani's work on embedded and dis-embedded markets. The point of the term is that markets are embedded in non-market (political, cultural, social) phenomena.
As someone who wasn't aware of the term until today I wish to confirm that its meaning is coherent, clear and immediately obvious if you're familiar with Polanyi's conceptual framework.
You're not
>I’m not super sure what Harvey means by saying that the Bush tax cuts are antithetical to true free market ideology. But apparently he thinks this is true, and a sign that the government is trying to provoke a global financial crisis in order to “finally rid itself of any obligation whatsoever to provide for the welfare of its citizens”.
I think what he's saying is that the Bush administration, faced with a choice between helping people affected by the Great Recession ("sustaining capitalism") and helping out wealthy corporations ("securing the power of the ruling class"), decided to go with tax cuts for the rich. It seems odd to describe social welfare programs as "sustaining capitalism," but makes sense if you believe capitalism is unsustainable without a safety net.
And while it sounds conspiratorial to say "the government is trying to provoke a financial crisis to remove its obligation to provide for its citizens," the non-conspiracy version is the Republican "starve the beast" strategy. Economy is bad -> cut taxes in the name of stimulating the economy -> now that you don't have enough money to balance the budget, cut social programs.
From what I know of Harvey, this would be an accurate description of what he's saying (nb I haven't read this particular book). I think he is saying that a true free market ideology would have let the financial institutions go bankrupt, and those who had investments which turned out to be bad should lose them.
He couldn't have been talking about the Great Recession or the response to it because the book was written before then.
(Not to mention that to the best of my knowledge the Bush administration did not actually pass any tax cuts specifically in response to the Great Recession.)
"did not actually pass any tax cuts specifically in response to the Great Recession"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_Stimulus_Act_of_2008
Ah, thanks for the correction. Based on that article it still doesn't look like it really qualifies as "tax cuts for the rich" though, although it's pretty vague about what the "tax incentives to stimulate business investment" were and what percentage of the total expenditure was that compared to the tax rebates for lower income taxpayers.
Well, except that "free market ideology" calls that a false dichotomy. The assertion is that the very act of taking less money from the rich is the most efficient and effective way to help people affected by any recession. Because what does such a person need most of all? A welfare check? Or a steady job? And who can provide a steady job? A rich person, i.e. someone with capital and the urge to make it grow, which can only be done by starting (or investing) in a business, and hiring people.
Whether you agree that this is how it works or not is besides the point. What is clear here is that this is how free market ideologues think it works, so if you ask them "Why are you giving the capitalist class a tax cut?" there answer is going to be "Because we want them to go out and hire more people, since people need jobs right now."
But the economy was *good* just after the dot-com recession. That's why in addition to massively increasing all kinds of spending, Bush implemented massive tax cuts. I don't seem to be able to find the total numbers, but it seems like they have been an order of magnitude larger than the stimulus + bailouts for the 2008 crisis ?
...my understanding of macroeconomics is that a good economy is when you want to *raise* taxes, not lower them, although I'm not entirely sure whether this is related to the point at issue.
Well, that was seemingly Bush's justification - "the surplus is not the government's money. The surplus is the people's money." - not mine...
(My obvious question to this justification was - why hasn't he then used this money to decrease the debt and therefore future interest on debt instead ?)
If you are in the tax-cutting mood, every thing that happens is a reason to cut taxes. "Bad economy? Cut taxes. Good economy? Cut taxes."
Well, and it works that way from the other party, too. "The economy's on fire! Time to raise taxes because the rich can afford it and we need to fund all these glorious projects." "The economy's in the toilet! Time to raise taxes because the poor are suffering and we need to help them out, and besides the rich can afford it."
It almost seems as if the secret underlying position on one side is "all taxes are evil" and on the other "there's no reason 100% of your earnings shouldn't entirely flow to the state to redistribute in the interests of the greater good." If there's a genuinely moderate position -- i.e. not one adopted for temporary rhetorical or electoral convenience -- it's becoming increasingly hard to find.
Yeah. It's not worth listening to opinions about taxes which are substantiated with arguments that would support those ridiculous underlying positions you just states. I've heard democrats now justify raising them because "they should pay their fair share". It 'could' be the case that they honestly thought that certain relative distribution of taxation among people is unfair, and unfair taxes are worse than fair taxes regardless of the taxation level, so increasing taxes on some is better than not doing so. But then, they seem to have a secret underlying position about what fair is.
"Embedded liberalism was great and completely sustainable."
David Harvey is a Marxist, so this is a misrepresentation bordering on completely laughable Scott.
You have quoted this line word-for-word 3 times, to Scott's single use of it; I think you've made your point about disagreeing with this phrasing. Would you mind offering some constructive summaries (less than 200 pages long, i.e. shorter than the original book) of what you do believe David Harvey's thesis (or theses) to be? I would be really interested in content to the effect of "David Harvey actually says X, Y, Z" -- as opposed to what you're producing currently, which is of the form "Scott thinks that Harvey says A, B, C, and is completely wrong". Or is this impossible, because the ideas require at least 200 pages to get across?
David Harvey is a Marxist, and his point is not that "embedded liberalism was great and completely sustainable". There's a reason why Scott Alexander (nor anybody else) can find a single quote to support this blatant strawman.
Harvey's point is that capitalism has a series of internal contradictions or tension points, and that capitalists getting out of one crisis often lay the foundations for the next crisis. That is, that capitalism has a series of irrationalities built into the system and cannot be constructed in a wholly rational manner.
My responses here probably seem quite crotchety, but I've had problems in Rationalist circles making people understand the most basic elements of leftist philosophy. I have gone through one example here:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-global-economic-history#comment-1795464
I cannot emphasise this strongly enough: Scott not only seems to misunderstand leftist philosophy/outlook, he doesn't seem to be comprehending the words that are in front of him on the page at a very basic level. This leads to incredible distortions in an author's work, completely unrecognisable compared to the original, such as summarising Harvey's thesis as "embedded liberalism was great and completely sustainable". At no point does Harvey say anything approaching this, and it would not pass an Ideological Turing Test. I think to some degree Scott knows that this is unfair, framing his own response to the book as "uncharitable". But then the question becomes, why is Scott publishing uncharitable takes on left-wing writings?
Just want to say, I appreciate your posting on this review. I find it surprisingly difficult to find explanations of leftist philosophy I understand (tried reading Marx and felt like he was speaking a different language, practically), so thanks for trying to bring that discussion to here.
Which text(s) did you read? The translations vary in quality, and I think his later work is generally much easier to read than his earlier work (as long as you do the groundwork and pay attention to his specific definitions of certain concepts).
Singer for example seems to focus on the early Marx (iirc) and I think it's pretty unfortunate both for readability and leads to an incomplete understanding of Marx.
Could you recommend a good introductory text? In most fields, that wouldn't be a primary source, that would be somebody else's gloss of it.
Alfredo Saad-Fiho and Ben Fine's "Marx's Capital" is pretty good and short. You might also want to check out David Harvey's lecture series:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBazR59SZXk
Capital, that's what everyone I've encountered seems to say to. No idea which translation. Thanks for the recommendations in that other comment below, enough of my smart & politically active friends are some flavor of leftist that I've always wanted to give it a fairer shake.
I use Ben Fowkes' translation of Capital which is published by Penguin. I think it is mostly regarded as the best translation. The first few chapters of Capital are quite dry so looking at secondary material will help.
> Harvey's point is that capitalism has a series of internal contradictions or tension points, and that capitalists getting out of one crisis often lay the foundations for the next crisis. That is, that capitalism has a series of irrationalities built into the system and cannot be constructed in a wholly rational manner.
Can you distinguish this point from something like:
> [Imaginary person's] point is that humanity has a series of internal contradictions or tension points, and that humans getting out of one crisis often lay the foundations for the next crisis. That is, that humanity has a series of irrationalities built into the system and cannot be constructed in a wholly rational manner.
My read is that no society ever has eliminated internal contradictions or tension points. No society ever has managed to eliminate crises. Capitalism seems unremarkably non-unique on this point. Moreover, it seems frankly absurd to imagine that if we only got one little slice of the human experience right (the economic system), then it would magically resolve the internal contradictions, tension points, and repeated crises caused by *every other* facet of human society. Instead, I imagine we'd see a different set of crises on the output side of things, and we'd have no way of distinguishing. Actually pretty directly analogous to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observability">observability theory</a> .
What's the irrationality built into the "humanity" system? I'm not really sure what you're getting at in your hypothetical point where you substituted the word 'humanity' for 'capitalism.'
The human experience is vastly more complex than just the economic system. To take just two of the most obvious examples, political and legal philosophy. I don't think that even the most ardent capitalist would claim that if only we adopted capitalism properly, it will fix all of the problems in humanity and prevent all crises.
So, let's just say that I'm viewing the world through the lens that humanity has a series of internal contradictions which cause crises. And we observe crises, in all societies, regardless of economic system. What observable can I look at to decide that I should throw away that lens and instead adopt the lens that it is capitalism, specifically, that has internal contradictions which cause crises?
Marxists can point towards the tendency of the profit rate to fall and stuff like that regarding capitalist contradictions. I suggest looking at Andrew Kliman's work if you're interested in that.
I don't feel like I learned anything after reading the review. It's hard to tell if it's because book was so bad or because review strawmanned it too much.
It's not one of Harvey's best books, but Scott seems to have completely misread it. I would recommend The Limits To Capital maybe, but I think this one probably requires more of an understanding of Marx first.
Based on the lengthy quotes, I'm guessing the former.
I graduated from law school in June 1975. I had arranged a job with a"wall street" law firm. I moved to NYC and took the bar exam in July. I started to work in August 1975. The first thing I worked on was the legal consequences of a municipal bankruptcy. In 1979, I was working in midtown when the dollar went into free fall and gold shot up to $800/oz. I saw people lined up down 47th street to sell rings and jewelry.
I was raised as a Democrat. the law firm I went to work for had a very prominent Democrat on its mast head. My mother was a fund raiser for Jimmy Carter. And I voted for the male child of a female canid. By 1980, based on my experience living and working in NYC at a fairly high level and in contact with events of public consequence, I revised my political opinions and voted for Ronald Reagan. Je ne regrette rien.
Man, if ever there were an illustration of the tendency to use "neoliberal" to mean "everything the author doesn't like," it's:
"...a flood of tracts and books, with Nozick’s Anarchy State and Utopia perhaps the most widely read and appreciated, emerged espousing neoliberal values."
Whatever you may think about Anarchy, State, and Utopia, or about Nozick in general, "neoliberal" is not a reasonable descriptor.
Thank you, Scott. I thought the review was fair. There are many popular criticisms of Neoliberalism -- the problem is they tend to lack substance.
Sometimes it feels like 90% of published thought is argued poorly and from a strange and wrong set of common assumptions.
It would be a breath of fresh air to read pieces starting from the premise that unions are inefficient and bad for everyone, which then builds new interesting ideas on top.
Instead there's a long war to be fought with unsystematic thinkers bombarding us with fashionable ideas across all media sources.
Save us Scott.
But the "premise that unions are inefficient and bad for everyone" is clearly historically and geographically wrong, so a much more interesting question is what makes for inefficient/bad unions compared to efficient/good unions ?
I think there is a special case when unions are good which is when workers have no other options for choosing their employer. So like in a company town where everyone works in coal mining.
I'd love to hear another example where unions have been net beneficial.
My broader point stands that nearly every source either assumes unions are good or has no opinion. The diversity of thought is missing in precisely the areas I think are true.
I think the orthodox idea is that if there is only a single employer and many independent potential workers, then there is an imbalance of power in favor of the single employer; when there is a thick market of competing employers, and all workers are in a single union, then there is an imbalance of power in favor of the union; but it's less clear how to think about the situation when there is a small number of employers and/or a large number of workers in the union while others are independent.
In most parts of the United States, there are two high-speed internet providers - the phone company and the cable company. Everyone seems clear that this causes problems, and I would think that the same thing is true when there are only two or three employers in an industry (or who do the vast majority of hiring in an industry).
Supposedly unions are working pretty well in ordoliberal Germany (where I assume there is a significant range of options for workers ?), but it might be just a myth ?
Nearly every source also assume that 2+2=4, too.
The lack of works based on assumption X is only a problem is X isn't obviously false, and I'm afraid I think that while there are plenty of weaker anti-union claims whose falseness isn't obvious enough to safely assume, the bald statement "unions are inefficient and bad for everyone" goes too far to be worth taking seriously.
Unions capture value for their members from the rest of society. That's usually bad for everyone else, but pretty much invariably good for members. And while the net effect on GDP is probably negative, the net effect on utility of any unions who are disproportionately poor is very likely to be positive.
Working from first principles, unions **shouldn't** be positive. They should be inefficient and bad for everyone. This falls out of 101-level econ and is not changed by advanced versions. Starting from this assumption and working through the conditions that exist, and how they complicate the issue, and eventually arriving at an assessment of how unions as she are spoke affect the world, elaborating on which parts of the underlying badness are still there and which are overwhelmed by other factors, is the useful thing.
I'm a long time SSC/ACT reader, and have always appreciated the rigor and clarity of the reviews on here, but this one's got me questioning whether I was just wasn't reading closely enough in the past.
Scott says:
"Harvey’s picture of an idyllic New York getting hit with a financial crisis for no reason"
After quoting Harvey saying:
"Capitalist restructuring and deindustrialization had for several years been eroding the economic base of the city, and rapid suburbanization had left much of the central city impoverished. The result was explosive social unrest on the part of marginalized populations during the 1960s, defining what came to be known as ‘the urban crisis’ (similar problems emerged in many US cities). The expansion of public employment and public provision—facilitated in part by generous federal funding—was seen as the solution. But, faced with fiscal difficulties, President Nixon simply declared the urban crisis over in the early 1970s."
Scott's gloss is clearly meant to be a kind of sarcastic hyperbole, but its so so so far removed from what Harvey's actually saying as to be a gross mischaracterization. I've done my share of hatereading in the past, and realized later how going in with that lens deeply distorted my reading to the point of blunt misreading. This whole review is *glowing* with that vibe.
I've hoped for a long time that Scott would review this book. I didn't expect him to *agree* with it - or even like it - but this leaves me bummed out.
+1
Scott Alexander actually has a long history of not reading left-wing books carefully:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-global-economic-history#comment-1795464
Here's him quoting Marx without understanding what the quotes mean. The longer you stick around SSC/ACT the more you will notice egregious mistakes like this.
Everyone, take a drink!
Its kind of weird that people here just make funny posts instead of engaging with my very logical points. I get the impression that there's a lot more conflict theorists around here than the Rationalist community would like to admit.
>Its kind of weird that people here just make funny posts instead of engaging with my very logical points.
You're noticing confusion! Well done! Now, can you think of a common factor shared between people engaging with your points?
Here's one: they are regular SSC readers, enjoy it, and largely agree with Scott's reviewing methods and worldview. Which is why Marxbro's incredible persistence is probably not productive. I too have noticed large mistakes in the book reviews - most notably Singer's book on Marx. Though I personally enjoyed it, I have also heard that the review for Seeing Like a State is off-base; the book is on my reading list.
> Here's one: they are regular SSC readers, enjoy it, and largely agree with Scott's reviewing methods and worldview.
Great hypothesis, now time to evaluate it: do many people who give Marxbro funny reponses meet these three critera? Do many people who meet these three criteria give Marxbro funny responses?
Perhaps some people are ideologically committed to ignoring Scott Alexander's obvious mistakes. Scott has also pointed out that some people are just irrational:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/if-you-can-be-bad-you-can-also-be
It's unclear what category these mistakes by the Rationalist community fall into.
Great hypotheses, now time to evaluate them: do you see many people who give you funny responses falling into one of those categories? Do many people who fall into those categories give you funny responses?
Of course you´d get that impression if you dismiss the alternative explanations for no reason.
Wise point.
I read Scott’s criticism as pointing to NY defaulting on its large debt, and how
the source of this debt or cause of the default aren’t really explained. Unless maybe “The expansion of public employment and public provision—facilitated in part by generous federal funding—was seen as the solution” is meant to imply that NY just started hiring tons of people with borrowed money with no plan for how to recoup the money? I agree with Scott that this is far from a helpful description of how the crisis happened.
I agree that Scott skipped too many steps to say, even in jest, "for no reason." I agree with Scott that Harvey fails to link "restructuring and deindustrialization" with the neoliberalism that follows. In Harvey's mind, it appears to all be a part of the "rich capitalists fighting for class dominance"-kind of approach, but Harvey is sloppy on linking those changes in the 1960s and 70s (when he says the old system is in place and presumably things are good) to the 1980s when neoliberalism is taking over. As Scott mentioned, things were really bad in obvious ways prior to neoliberalism. It makes a lot more sense (to me, and apparently to Scott) to consider neoliberalism a response to a failing system than an attempt to destabilize a working system.
To my mind, there's a continuous effect that can be followed, without the need to blame neoliberalism or capitalists for doing anything in particular. That is, the proposed reforms would have become popular and happened anyway, even if the details and dates changed.
WWII wiped out industry around the world, except in the US which had just expanded massively to supply the Allies (and then help rebuild the rest of the world). This massive build up made enough excess wealth in the US that everyone had it pretty easy economically in the 1950s into the 1960s (except racial minorities, but for different reasons and they were purposefully refused access to the wealth). When the rest of the world began to catch up with the US economically, and manufacturing became possible elsewhere in the world again, prices would naturally fall. Marginal production, for which high cost labor would be a significant issue, would outsource to poorer regions with lower wages. Early on this would be Japan, later moving to less affluent areas as Japan advanced. Harvey notes this trend, but then blames the capitalists for it, as if they intentionally hurt laborers in NYC, rather than seeing it as inevitable due to world conditions. Even high tariffs and a mercantilist approach would not have worked, because the boom of the 50-70s was as much about foreign markets as internal production. You block other countries and you lose your market as well. That system was not sustainable, and lots of people were looking for alternatives and getting angrier and angrier with the current situation, including a lot of blue collar laborers across the US. That's why middle class and working class people still think Carter was a bad president and happily gave Reagan some of the biggest electoral victories in US history.
I'll add in another note about that Status 451 blog you link to and speak very highly of. In it the author claims:
"Sustained political violence is dependent on the willing cooperation of admirers and accomplices. The Left has these. The Right does not."
After a decade in which right-wing terrorist against killed at least 63 people in the US alone (ironically, 1 more than was killed in the decade of the 70's according to Wikipedia's numbers), this is a disgraceful claim. I suppose they might quibble about the meaning of "sustained", but it simply reads like right-wing apologism.
We don't have to speculate about the possibility of a sustained rightwing campaign of violence in the 2010's and 2020's because there already has been one. The left's body count during the same period is minuscule. What the left did, it did 50 years ago or it did recently, but most likely didn't kill anyone. That's the underlying truth that the status 451 article article isn't acknowledging. At present, the left simply isn't as violent, in statistical terms, as the right. Certainly if we measure violence by body count it is not even close.
"Institutions are organizations the Left controls that operate for the benefit of the Left’s people. The Right doesn’t really have these. As an example, there are occasional hard right lawyers, but so far as I know there is no such thing as the Reactionary Lawyers’ Guild."
A majority of supreme court justices were selected in part for their involvement in the Federalist society, FFS. The federalist society is further to the right than the national lawyer's guild is to the left by world standards, and probably by American standards to. The fact that the federalist society hasn't been, to my knowledge, implicated in past terrorism doesn't change that. If the author wants to play the equivalent of the game I see on the left sometimes "it doesn't count as left-wing unless I like it", but for the right instead, fine, but that's not serious analysis. The right, including the Trumpist right, has plenty of institutions. Relative to the percentage of the population who would support the right if everyone voted, it has a very nice swathe of institutions indeed.
"Some of this could actually be constructive for campus civility. For instance, I’ve long argued that if a Righty speaker is disrupted on a college campus, then campus Righties should *disrupt every single Lefty speaker for the remainder of the school year.*"
I'll note that what this is proposing is A) escalation and B) escalation not necessarily against the people directly responsible for the first attack (it says "every single lefty speaker").
The 451 blog post is hack work. Interesting hack work in part, with valuable statistics and anecdotes, and well written, but ultimately right-wing apologia. I simply don't think you'd uncritically link to a similar blogpost on the left *nor would I expect you to*.
I've defended this blog in the past from the accusation of being a rightwing hub, and I took one of the virtues of this blog to be an attempt to rise above the fray- a genuine effort at analysis that isn't left or right, but is effortful. Praising something like this, I find disappointing.
I mean, ultimately your first point comes down to definitions of "right". There are several political axes and my read on the alt-right is that they're more concerned with culture and with personal liberty than they are with free markets.
It's not wrong to say that "do what benefits yourself" as an ideology is not very conducive to things like suicide bombings. On the other hand, it enables all sorts of crimes for profit - the most blatant examples are Minamata disease and the Sampoong collapse.
Interesting, then you would put the alt-"right" at the anarchist bottom rather than the fascist top ?
https://www.politicalcompass.org/analysis2
Or is a 3rd axis required ?
I use three for the modern West - economic left/right, societally libertine/authoritarian, and cultural conservative/SJ (culture has a lot of parts to it, but they tend to roughly correlate into one or two axes, and right here and right now that one axis mostly captures it).
The alt-right reads as fairly libertine to me, and they're *definitely* culturally conservative.
When you say “a sustained rightwing campaign of violence“ what do you mean?
Weird. I first learned about the Bretton Woods system from a practice SAT test, where it was nestled as a footnote, and now it's being discussed as one of the the most important economic things ever in the past century. Is this 🦋 the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon?
Also I thought this was a guest review for a bit.
I've seen it discussed a LOT since the 2008 crisis. But then also perhaps I was just too young before that to notice it being discussed ?
Funny the effect should be named after the Baader-Meinhof group, who were of course heavily involved in the issues of the 1970s that are under discussion here!
My main association with the phrase "Bretton Woods" (and even more so of the name "Felix Rohatyn", who was mentioned once in this post, in passing) is the Lyndon LaRouche cult that recruited heavily on campuses in the early 2000s (and probably still do?) who have an .... idiosyncratic .... take on all of this. (Somehow the explanation involves Queen Elizabeth, Mikhail Gorbachev, and William Weld, conspiring with the Rothschilds and Felix Rohatyn, to pull the US out of Bretton Woods and collapse the world economy and assassinate Lyndon LaRouche himself .... all on behalf of the ancient Aristotelian conspiracy against the true Platonists. I've probably missed some steps.)
I feel like this would be a good pairing with Marc Levinson's <em>An Extraordinary Time</em> and Matt Stoller's <em>Goliath</em>. Levinson is basically talking about the same economic period and transition as Harvey, but with much more of an international comparison focus and less Conflict Theory. Stoller is all about the history of antitrust policy and efforts, and he'd probably argue that the 1950s and 1960s were a golden age of new business startups and commerce that was ruined by what came after the 1970s.
It sounds like Harvey (when discussing the NYC financial crisis) does that thing that <em>Jacobin</em> does as well, where they have to elide the causality of why some crisis occurred because it creates dissonance with their ideological priors. So they talk about NYC getting hit with a financial crisis, but not about how the city was brought to the point of vulnerability in a financial crisis by hefty city-level taxes, high social spending (nostalgically referred to as NYC's equivalent of "Red Vienna"), aggressive unions, rising crime, and businesses deciding they didn't want to deal with that stuff anymore and following people out to the suburbs and South.
It almost seems like a law of the universe in my experience that when a pernicious trend (declining union membership, social trust, rising Gini coefficients, etc.) is attributed to neoliberalism by a prominent academic (Turchin, Krugman, Applebaum, Putman, looking at you), a quick examination of the numbers will show that the trend clearly predated neoliberalism.
I think for most of us, neoliberalism is not so much the *cause* of declining union membership, social trust, rising inequality etc, rather neoliberalism *is* all of those things. When people use the phrase they're mostly not talking about the ideology of Friedman etc, they're talking about a series of social transformations that concentrated power in the hands of the rich.
But then if I'm not mistaken the Chicago school ideas of utility maximization, game theory, economic analysis of law impacts ; emphasizing markets, profit and government non-intervention all have been slowly percolating into the society since the 1950s (?) until becoming mainstream in the 1970s, but therefore already had some effects before the 1970s ?
That may be a useful way to look at it, but the implications are not good for the left. The old system was not sustainable, and people were more and more aware of it. If natural effects of people's decisions broke the unions because the alternatives seemed to them worse, then there was no hope for such a union-based system.
I think the timing is not good for supporters of the left's approach here, because these issues were happening long before the economic right had the power or organization to create the problems. By the 1980s the problems were fully apparent and they could easily capitalize on the people's anger and distrust of the old system. Even then, it wasn't until 1994 that Republicans took control of the House of Representatives, for the first time in over 40 years. By that point Bill Clinton was practically running as a conservative, for lack of support on the left.
"[dramatic adverb] [dramatic adjective]" should be "[dramatic adverb] [dramatic verb]", no?
(first time I've ever caught an SSC/ACT typo! This is exciting!)
Notice Scott doesn't actually quote anything in this section either. I searched the book for "savagely slash" and the only quote I can find is "savagely cutting" - i.e. Harvey used an adverb that Scott doesn't like but actually the verb that he _does_ like. One wonders why Harvey is being mocked for something he didn't say. Perhaps Scott is not really reading this book carefully and is just looking for excuses to dislike it?
Scott, from where do you get your story of how embedded liberalism met its demise? The Milton Friedman take is essentially that the phillips curve broke down because we had a supply shock (rather than wages driving inflation) hence stagflation. I’m not especially familiar with that timeframe, so I’d love to hear where the stuff about Medicare and Unions and the like originates.
Anyone who writes like this is probably not interested in finding the truth. To use vocabulary like that is to ignore that there are tradeoffs to any economic decision making. The fact that taxpayers have a lessoned bill and bondholders (that’s your 401k or pension, unless you have absolutely 0 plan for retirement) are made whole is irrelevant to the author. Either the author doesn’t understand how these tradeoffs work, or he doesn't care to acknowledge that there are tradeoffs in the first place. Given that he sounds like a Marxist, I’ll take #2–he doesn’t want to acknowledge the tradeoffs because the decision, let’s say, to “slash” benefits is purely morally wrong within a Marxist moral framework. It doesn’t explicitly advantage the working class vis-à-vis the bourgeoisie, therefore, it’s bad. No matter that the case could easily be made that this is in the long-run interests of everyone.
"Anyone who writes like this is probably not interested in finding the truth."
Ah yes, the outgroup is not interested in finding the truth. Doesn't sound very charitable, does it?
"nowadays economists (including the most left-leaning ones) are telling the government it should be less concerned about debt, not more."
Clearly you haven't read John Cochrane's blog (see e.g https://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2020/09/debt-matters.html) who is a well-known economist; certainly economists are not as a whole saying the government should be less concerned about debt. You're also missing the part of the picture which is that US debt is now being bought in large amounts by the Federal Reserve in what amounts to money printing to finance spending.
I think you are being too harsh on the debt prediction; after all there *was* an incident last year when a member of congress suggested defaulting on US debt to China ("nobody protested foreigners having too much debt").
Yeesh. I lived through the 70s and remember it well. None of this makes the slightest sense. The sea change in political and social mythology that came at the end of that decade was, from my ground-level view, driven from the bottom up. No politician started it, no secret cabal, no vast shadowy conspiracy of Rothschilds and Wall Street financiers. Half the politicians were taken by surprise and their fortunes went up in flames.
People were just freaking sick of brutal inflation and economic stagnation, the endless lecturing from academics and politicians about accepting a steadily diminishing quality of private life in the name of the greater good, or because of some vague universal limitations only they could truly understand (because we were all too stupid to get it), and being assured too many times that the chocolate ration was being raised to 20g/week.
People flung it all away and decided to give the statist do-gooders the boot, give untrammeled private greed and The Invisible Hand a try not because they were good students of Mieses or something, but simply because they were sick of the endless malaise and being lectured to, and some politicians (obviously particularly Reagan and Thatcher) were smart enough to see that nascent wave and ride it to victory.
The message I think people heard from people like Reagan was this: "Collective action is a dead end. It hasn't had a new idea in decades. Maybe your dad was a loyal FDR New Dealer, heck I was too, but it isn't the 30s any more and those ideas are played out, exhausted, not working. But listen: I believe in *you*, all you individuals. I think *you* have new ideas, that you can imagine new and better ways to run your private lives, and I bet if we just got all the dead weight of the collective organizations off your back -- the government, the big unions, the big banks, the big networks, the lawyers from one of the massive alphabet-soup agencies -- all the operations of 10,000 people run by people a thousand miles away from you -- if we can get them to back off, why, you'll come up with better ideas that will prove we don't need to accept a steadily declining quality of life, turn the heat down and wear a sweater."
I think people generally understood that was at least a little naive, perhaps a litle delusional, and they doubted it was so simple. But my God it was a breath of fresh air, to have the President saying "Hey, I trust *you* and you and you, all you regular schmoes, just as much or even more as the usual brainy aristocrats, and I think if you're let more alone to do whatever you think is best, we'll be just fine." People thought, what the hell, let's give it a try. And you can't overestimate the attraction of a politician saying "I trust the American people" and actually meaning it.
There was a great Doonesbury cartoon of the day I remember, in which Reagan is giving some statement or other to the press, and they ask a pointed question, and he replies as if he's addressing the public directly and Rick Redfern says "Hey no fair! He's going over our heads to the people...!" And it kind of felt that way, that Reagan was "going over the heads" of everyone who had been telling us how to think and act and breathe for 25 years, and tickled our fancies to think of ourseves as *being* over the heads of all the smart guys.
I think that's about it, that's all there was to it, from my bug's eye point of view. The rest just follows from the huge semi-emotional wave that crested at the time. The fact that it worked out OK, that the 80s were a boom decade -- who knows why *that* happened? Maybe Reagan was smarter than he looked, maybe there was brilliant tactical leadership further down, maybe it was all just dumb luck, maybe there were blind massive economic and social (or demographic) forces at work that would've made it work out had Mickey Mouse been President.
I find this account to be strongly persuasive. It also accords, more or less, with my own sense of the era.
> And you can't overestimate the attraction of a politician saying "I trust the American people" and actually meaning it.
I have to say, this line and the following paragraphs reminded me strongly of Trump's rise, for better or worse.
"I am not sure what Harvey means here about how under (non-neo) liberal practices lenders take the losses. In the 1960s, would bankers have loaned to Mexico and then, when Mexico couldn’t pay it back, just said “okay, whatever, keep the extra”?"
This why different interest rates exist. Riskier loans pay higher interest because of the greater chance of default. If everyone is forced to pay loans back regardless of ability to pay, the system makes no sense. Which is why imf forcing African countries to privatize their resources and impoverish citizenry through austerity measures to service a debt that was made 50 years ago and direct deposited into a dictators bank account and has been paid back many times over but thanks to the miracle of compounding interest is larger than ever- gives neoliberalism a bad name. Highly recommend Debt by david graeber, gripping account of money and debt through history.
How is the IMF forcing African countries to pay back loans, other than refusing to give them any more money if they don't? It's not like the IMF can send in an army. It doesn't even have the power to seize the country's assets abroad.
They can enact economic embargos which would cut off the country from the rest of the world, very few countries dare to defy the dollar. Also it don't act as an independent neutral entity, the imf is controlled by the us since the us provides the vast majority of funding. Not to mention there are quite a few examples from african history of progressive democratic presidents getting assassinated because they threatened to not pay their internation debts, like Sankara in 1987, those sorts of things helps keep countries compliant.
Just curious to get your opinion on an alternative solution.
Let's say that instead of assassinating the progressive president or cutting off all trade, that instead the IMF said "no new loans." The results would have been terrible for those countries, with no new money available. In my view, it would have been similar to a trade embargo, but through different means.
Would that have been better/acceptable? Do you think the IMF or other organizations should have continued to provide loans to countries that would sometimes just refuse to pay debts? The alternative of higher interest rates only works if there's still a chance of being repaid, but I'm also not sure if you would be content with a 50% interest rate (making this rate up for effect, presumably it would be very high if the alternatives are assassination and embargo) instead of no loans at all.
I think that would be wonderful. Abolish the IMF and forgive all debts. I think you are overestimating the good faith behind these debts in the first place. Would they have been made in the first place if the IMF weren't there to ensure compliance? Would you loan a million dollars to a dictator in a 3rd world country? They were made because they knew the country had the resources and human capital to draw on and they had the leverage to ensure these markets were neoliberalized aka opened to private foreign capital. If you look at how the people of the country actually benefited from these loans, it was very little to negative in the long term. The IMF is not the only source of money in the world, these countries would easily be able to find investors with more reasonable terms, but also lifting the debt burden would allow the countries resources to funnelled back into benefiting the people of the country (okay assuming a not totally corrupt govt--but at least funds would be less inclined to lend money to those types of govts without the guarantee of being rewarded)
"Would you loan a million dollars to a dictator in a 3rd world country?"
"The IMF is not the only source of money in the world, these countries would easily be able to find investors with more reasonable terms"
How do you reconcile these two statements?
The IMF is a lender of last resort. Nobody goes to the IMF if they can possibly get any money from private investors at reasonable rates. That's why African countries are increasingly turning to China instead of the IMF, despite not fully trusting China's intentions.
I think I agree with you on premises, but your conclusion seems very odd to me. As dionysus mentions, the IMF is a last resort option. I have no confidence (as you seem to agree) that these loans would have been made in the first place without the IMF. The reason is that these are unstable countries with corrupt governments. Nobody would lend to them without guarantees that could be enforced.
I also agree with you that the actual use of the money doesn't always help the population.
I think I see your point that the new government should not be held accountable for loans taken out in bad faith by a previous (dictator) government and used for enriching himself. I'm not sure how to reconcile that without taking away the lender of last resort and/or removing the options for the future leaders to get loans to actually improve the state of the nation.
I'm picturing a scenario where a future "democratic" (I'm not sure exactly how we tell the difference, or whether that's even a meaningful metric for giving loans) government wants to build useful infrastructure. The IMF says "we already loaned you $20 million, pay that back first or no new loan." So you're suggestion is for the IMF to ignore that debt, but also not to make a new loan? I'm not sure how that really helps the situation, as they still want to build the infrastructure, but now have no way to finance it.
Now, if you're complaint is that the IMF isn't always fair, then sure. That's a subjective argument and will depend on the merits of the case. Some cases are probably more or less fair than others, and maybe the IMF should take better care not to loan to a dictator that might get overthrown shortly thereafter, leaving a debt on the new government. It's going to be very hard to draw a bright line for when that's happening. A lot of "democratic" governments in corrupt countries are less than ideal, even if they're replacing an absolutely evil dictator and are obviously better than the previous government. A lot of dictators are in charge of countries for very long times, making a decision not to ever loan to them difficult to justify (especially with the difficulty in telling the difference between how good or bad successive governments are). Should they loan money to a government that won a contested election? How about a leader who is bad on some human rights issues but really good on improving the country? It seems your ideals are utopian rather than helpful in actually solving the complicated issues.
Yes you are right, I am coming from a very utopian pov. I don't like to see the powerful exploit the powerless, which is how I see the whole WB, WTO, IMF collaboration with the global south. I see poor countries suffering because of the debt burden they hold, and yet rich countries such as the US only benefit from more debt because we control the financial apparatus of the world. Is foreign debt necessary? Don't countries in the global south have natural resources and plenty of human capital? If you want practical solutions, beyond abolishing the IMF, I advocate giving individual human beings money in the form of UBI that would cover basic living expenses. This would need to be a global initiative with a global wealth tax and universal basic income so that the ultra rich can't hoard their money in permissive countries and exploit cheap labor in other countries. If you say that's not realistic because the humans in power are too greedy, you probably have a point. But it would be simple and super effective.
When has the IMF enacted an economic embargo? I searched on Google and can't even find anyone accusing the IMF of doing this, or having the power to do this. If you're saying the US is controlling the IMF and it's the US that imposes sanctions, when has the US sanctioned an African country for being unable to pay back debts?
Sankara was not assassinated by the US because he threatened to not pay international debts. Some in Burkina Faso believe he was assassinated by France, because: "On 15 October 1987, Sankara was killed by an armed group with twelve other officials in a coup d'état organized by his former colleague Blaise Compaoré. When accounting for his overthrow, Compaoré stated that Sankara jeopardized foreign relations with former colonial power France and neighbouring Ivory Coast, and accused his former comrade of plotting to assassinate opponents.[1]" (Wikipedia)
Burkina Faso's entire foreign debt in 1987 was $800 million, in today's dollars. That's a trivial amount of money for a country like France. If France did orchestrate the assassination, Cold War geopolitics was a far likelier motive, although I don't think the coup needs any other explanation than "Compaore wanted power and took it".
Yes I'm sorry for oversimplifying and maybe embargo isn't the right word. It is a vast complicated bureaucracy of the WB, WTO, IMF with the financial and military might of the US and other western powers behind it. The IMF merely insures that the debts be paid no matter what by getting countries to refinance and agree to austerity measures and opening up of natural resources to creditors. The US doesn't sanction African countries because they are paying their debts, painfully. Also they aren't powerful enough to be a threat to US dominance.
I choose the Sankara example because I thought France had confessed to aiding the coup but in fact activists have only petitioned the French govt to declassify docs pertaining to their involvement. Maybe it was only a coincidence that within a short time period of Sankara openly urging other African countries to stick together and not pay their debts that he was violently overthrown in a coup by a dictator that was coincidentally very accommodating to Western influence. Weird that none of those other African nations decided to default on their debts.
I don't think it's really a secret that the US has been periodically involved in reorganizing foreign govts either violently or through other means to bring in Western friendly heads of state. Also the US loves to embargo and sanction countries that don't comply with its objectives (Cuba? Iran? Venezuela?) It seems naive to think that there would be no fear of repercussions, politically or financially.
I guess I don't understand your position, do you think that IMF is a net good for these countries, kind of like a pay day lender for poor people who don't have other options and so they are grateful for the help?
Wait what? How can the IMF enact an economic embargo? I've never heard of such a thing.
Different stores charge different markups based on the level of shrinkage; this is already built into the price. I don't get how they decide they get to prosecute me for shoplifting.
uhhh that sounds like a completely different situation? But sure to go with your analogy: what if a relative bought the shirt in your name and you never agreed to it, but technically the debt was in your name and you've already paid for it many times over, should all your earnings go to the store for the rest of your life so that your legal obligations be met?
That book, "Debt: The First 5000 Years" was simultaneously immensely fascinating, but also so infuriating that it's probably the only book I've intentionally stopped reading. It helped me understand so much about the role of taxation in creating the value of fiat money, and gave me good ways of thinking about the origin of monetary units in denominating debt, long before actual currency existed, and also the role of reciprocal unpaid debts in solidifying friendships and family relations - and yet Graeber just rails on and on about how economists try to justify things with made-up just-so stories, without ever stopping to notice that he is doing exactly the same thing! But Graeber's personal response to the seminar on his work at Crooked Timber (https://crookedtimber.org/category/david-graeber-debt-seminar/) made me think he is just fundamentally a non-serious thinker, despite having some really gripping ideas. And the "Bullshit Jobs" book has cemented that thought for me.
well Graeber considers himself an anthropologist not an economist, so I guess he could be considered a storyteller about storytellers, and he is a bit hyperbolic, which I enjoy personally but I understand a lot of people don't. Do you consider Michael Hudson, the economist on which he bases his work, also non-serious?
I'm not familiar with Michael Hudson, but if he's the source of the ideas that I did find quite fascinating in Graeber's book, that sounds promising.
Debt: the first 500 Years makes one (1) excellent point, about how the supposed barter economy is mostly just nonsense. It deserves very real praise for this.
This does not compensate for how bad the rest is.
https://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2014/11/monday-smackdown-in-the-absence-of-high-quality-delong-smackdowns-back-to-david-graeber.html
>This why different interest rates exist.
The flip side of a higher interest rate is that it's harder for the borrowing country to pay off. Is there always an interest rate which compensates for the risk in the loan while still being possible for the target country to actually pay?
Aside from the many economic crises of the 1970s, there were also lots of structural factors that made pre-1970s liberalism unsustainable:
1. A declining unionization rate. Fewer people in unions means strikes, union security agreements, and the like, which benefit the unionized labor aristocracy at the expense of everyone else, become less popular.
2. An aging population. It's a lot easier to have generous welfare benefits when you have lots of working young people supporting a few elderly, than when the largest demographic group in your population is old people who need Social Security and Medicare.
3. The rise of the developing world, especially China. It's a lot harder to have ultra-high tax rates, ultra-high blue colar wages, and onerous regulations when companies can take their manufacturing elsewhere.
4. The failure of the communist countries to create any semblance of prosperity, which damaged the credibility of left-wing economic arguments.
Strange... I 'remember' the Winter of Discontent (UK) as being earlier in the decade, and I lived through it. My suspicion is that many books like this take the bones of an idea and then hang bits of cherry picked history on it.
Pausing the review just to say this:
"Guess progressivism is a sham astroturf movement that merely used the Great Recession as an excuse to push their class war agenda!"
You clearly don't know enough libertarians if you haven't encountered people who literally claim this.
A few stray remarks from someone who was there at the time.
Any ideology under pressure will tend to lash out at its opponents, often by presenting a very biased and exaggerated account of the past, or of alternative presents that may be proposed. You have to be over 60, I should think, to have any real memory of what life was like in the period 1945-75, and, taking advantage of this, neoliberals have developed over the decades an entire counter-history of the time. To the challenge "that's wrong!" about an assertion they will say something like "I suppose you think that period was a paradise then!" which effectively shuts down any further discussion. Of course it wasn't paradise, and there was no overarching ideology to be discredited anyway. There was just a realisation, by governments of all political persuasions, that there could be no return to the poverty and depression of the 1930s. The analogy I normally employ is that of driving a car: it helps to know where you want to go, where you are, to keep your eyes on the road and hold the steering wheel. That's pretty much all that the economic policies of different countries had in common. Increasingly from the 1970s, the car was under the control of those who thought you should close your eyes, take your hands off the wheel and fight with the other passengers about where the car was going to go.
The fact that this second group won out, increasingly since the 1970s, is primarily a matter of chance. I'd just mention three things. One was the inter-generational conflict after 1968, which was more significant than is often thought, but which, under more benign economic conditions, would have played out very differently, and indeed probably cemented the postwar consensus in place. The second was the political, but also economic, effects of the Vietnam war, including the US moving off the gold standard in 1972, which affected the whole world. The third was the toxic mix of inflation and deflation that followed the massive increase in oil prices after the 1973 Middle East War. This produced unemployment, for the first time since 1945, and trades union militancy as peoples' standards of living were hit. You'll see firstly that none of these things had anything to do with the economic policies of the 50s and 60s - all were extraneous shocks. You'll also see that there's some playing fast and loose with dates, as is usual in arguments of this sort, since the 70s were very different.
The British case is especially interesting (I was there). For a start, the rise of Thatcher was essentially an accident. The Tories went down to a humiliating defeat in 1974, and in the machiavellian manoeuvring that followed, Thatcher was put forward as a stalking horse to defeat the moderates; But the arithmetic was wrong, and she came out top, essentially as a protest vote. This was bizarre, since her politics were very much a minority in the party, and they were, indeed, a more radical version of those that had led to defeat in 1974. She could also easily have lost the 1979 election. Had the then Labour PM, Callaghan, called an election in October 1978 he might well have won, or at least ensured a Tory minority government. As it was, there was a particularly bad winter in 1978 (the famous "Winter of Discontent") and the Tories just scraped into power the following year. Although the media made a terrible fuss, the idea that Britain underwent some kind of ideological sea-change at that point is absolutely wrong. Indeed, the first few years of Thatcher were so catastrophic that it was only the fact that the Labour Party split into two and the halves fought each other that saved the Tories from being wiped out in the next election. The attempt to construct a narrative of inevitability around all this is quite dishonest: had it not been for some extraordinary luck, and some suicidal decisions by the Labour party, neoliberalism would have been dead by 1985. And what happened in Britain, remember, influenced greatly what happened elsewhere.
"... the US moving off the gold standard in 1972, which affected the whole world."
The collapse of fixed exchange rates between currencies was a major contributor to the end of the "postwar liberal consensus." I remember one country after another having to adjust the exchange rate versus the dollar in that period, often multiple times, and it was always front page news.
"some suicidal decisions by the Labour party"
One can usually count on those, can't one? But seriously, if Labour hadn't split, then it would have been a different Labour Party.
I agree that 1979 is too early to consider it inevitable, and that many details could have gone differently which would have had significant effects. On the other hand, I do see the writing on the wall even by the 70s that things needed to change, somehow. The neoliberals in the 80s were so successful in the long run (regardless of luck or how they got into power) that by the 90s there was no chance at all of going back. The people were happy with the new system, so Bill Clinton championed welfare reform and crime bills! The old left had all but collapsed by that point, along with the Soviet Union. The feeling in the US was that "we won" and had proved (we thought for all time, but nothing lasts forever) that communism/socialism were failures and that free markets were the best answer.
As with all things, lack of opposition makes an ideology sloppy and forget how to argue its own points. Given the 30 years since the collapse of communism, we took that victory for granted, and now younger kids are growing up with an entrenched system of free markets and fewer people remembering how or why to argue in favor of it.
Very well written.
Incidentally, in the past year or two (inspired by my thoughts in December 2019 about what the impacts of the ending decade had been) I've become more and more convinced that whatever we're living through at the moment (Arab Spring, BLM, Brexit, Trump, #metoo, cancel culture, TERFism, etc.) is the by-product of the boom of social media. Which made me wonder whether the culture wars of 1964-1975 was exactly the same by-product of the boom of television.
In the '80s and '90s there was plenty of discussion of culture war around "post-modernism" and "political correctness" and "yuppies" and "Ms." and "ebonics" and so on - but somehow at the time, it all still *felt* like echoes of 1968 (and now they all feel like pre-cursors of what was to really come in the social media era).
I'm not old enough to have lived through Kent State and Vietnam and all that, but it does seem like the period from 1980 to 2005 or so was (oddly) a break in the culture war, perhaps because the media environment of the television era was gradually settling down, and hadn't yet been disrupted by the new thing.
"Increasingly from the 1970s, the car was under the control of those who thought you should close your eyes, take your hands off the wheel and fight with the other passengers about where the car was going to go."
That's really the heart of the issue, I think, and not just economically. The concept that you don't need to plan further ahead than the next electoral cycle, that the market knows best; the abandonment of building utopia, which was still an aspiration in the postwar West (and of course in the USSR as well). Even in the modern progressive movement - Medicare for All is mainly a political/electoral project, a very difficult one but only for reasons of social reality, not physical reality (and to be executed by politicians rather than the masses). The Green New Deal is more than that, but ultimately it gets reduced to passing one bill through Congress, at some point in time. True, it's impossible to make longer-scale plans because the Republicans will stop anything the moment they gain the power to, but forgetting plans for a moment, what about dreams? The biggest goal of the US left seems to be just turning into Europe. Aside from Europe having its own problems - is that really the limit of your ambition? Can you imagine nothing better than Europe?
Though possibly some of this is me projecting social media negativity backwards. This comment section often treats 'utopianism' as a dirty word, but to some extent that's because it's a lot easier to criticize others' dreams than promote your own on the modern Internet. And there's also something to say, though at the moment I can't really think of what, about rationalism and the goals of immortality and AI safety, and the difficulties in making progress on either without a roadmap.
I'm really surprised that there are negative comments about this review. Before I was half way through I was thinking "This is what the book review contestants should compare themselves to (and aspire to). Interesting, thoughtful and thought-provoking - I'm not sure what else people could want.
A couple of personal nitpicks,though. I was disappointed that even with a picture of the Iron Lady on the 'front page' and it starting off with (in the second sentence) talk of the 'global economy', almost the entire review was about one country - America. In fact from talking about the global economy to the first mention of 'the government', it is not even specified which country is being talked about. I know Scott is American and so is the majority of the readership but I always find this irritating (it happens in a lot of the essays here). The Iron Lady was conspicuous by her absence and I was expecting a lot more of Milton Friedman - as the supposed guru behind Reagan and Thatcher.
However, I'm now going to read the review again - I really thought it was that good.
Oh, and if it doesn't say "Your Book Review" at the beginning, isn't it obviously by Scott?
There are negative comments because Scott says things like:
"Harvey's theses, framed uncharitably, are:
1. Embedded liberalism was great and completely sustainable."
Firstly, Scott Alexander is framing himself as being uncharitable, which is a hilarious admission of his own biases. Secondly, David Harvey is a Marxist and at no point would make the argument that liberalism is completely stable (Harey has multiple books about how it _isn't_ stable!). Scott Alexander is failing a Turing test here and this review seems like a simple exercise in misrepresenting the outgroup rather than a serious attempt to charitably read outgroup thinkers.
I have a challenge for Scott; find me a single David Harvey quote in this book that says anything close to "Embedded liberalism was great and completely sustainable". I suggest that he wont be able to do this, and will likely never reply to this post or even acknowledge his mistake.
You have quoted this line word-for-word 3 times, to Scott's single use of it; I think you've made your point about disagreeing with this phrasing. Would you mind offering some constructive summaries (less than 200 pages long, i.e. shorter than the original book) of what you do believe David Harvey's thesis (or theses) to be? I would be really interested in content to the effect of "David Harvey actually says X, Y, Z" -- as opposed to what you're producing currently, which is of the form "Scott thinks that Harvey says A, B, C, and is completely wrong". Or is this impossible, because the ideas require at least 200 pages to get across?
David Harvey is a Marxist, and his point is not that "embedded liberalism was great and completely sustainable". There's a reason why Scott Alexander (nor anybody else) can find a single quote to support this blatant strawman.
Harvey's point is that capitalism has a series of internal contradictions or tension points, and that capitalists getting out of one crisis often lay the foundations for the next crisis. That is, that capitalism has a series of irrationalities built into the system and cannot be constructed in a wholly rational manner.
My responses here probably seem quite crotchety, but I've had problems in Rationalist circles making people understand the most basic elements of leftist philosophy. I have gone through one example here:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-global-economic-history#comment-1795464
I cannot emphasise this strongly enough: Scott not only seems to misunderstand leftist philosophy/outlook, he doesn't seem to be comprehending the words that are in front of him on the page at a very basic level. This leads to incredible distortions in an author's work, completely unrecognisable compared to the original, such as summarising Harvey's thesis as "embedded liberalism was great and completely sustainable". At no point does Harvey say anything approaching this, and it would not pass an Ideological Turing Test. I think to some degree Scott knows that this is unfair, framing his own response to the book as "uncharitable". But then the question becomes, why is Scott publishing uncharitable takes on left-wing writings?
There seems to be a pretty big hole in both the review (and the book ?) and these discussions about the material conditions behind the 1970s :
- US oil production reached a peak in 1971.
- While demand kept growing (causing some supply difficulties even in 1970).
- So US crude imports more than doubled between 1970 and 1973 (and before 1973, import quotas were in place).
- In April 1971, practically for the first time since WW2, the American trade balance was in the red.
- 4 months later Nixon ends the Bretton Woods gold standard : the convertibility between gold and dollars, leading to a strong devaluation of the dollar.
- At the same time OPEC quickly sensed the wind turning, and feeling powerful for the first time, threatened an embargo in January 1971. Western companies caved in to this price increase, only the first one of a long series of concessions... (And OPEC partially *have* to do it, as the dollars they are getting for the oil become devalued compared to gold, important in the Islmai hawala ! Not to mention that they're just following supply and demand, at least until the (semi-) embargo itself.)
- Oil companies got nationalized all over the world : Algeria, Venezuela, Iraq, Lybia...
- A transfer of shares from Western companies to Arab Gulf countries in their oil companies (like Aramco, which extractions doubled between 1970 and 1973 !) was negotiated.
- Speculative : about the "Christmas Eve Massacre" itself : according to the ex-minister of the Saudi oil, the Shah of Iran had told him that Kissinger wanted a higher price so that the Western oil companies could finance big new oil projects, now primarily offshore.- Between 1973 and 1974 the natural decline of American extractions was almost double the reduction of oil mandated by OPEC's political decisions.
- 1970 to 1973 was a transition from the oil market being ruled by demand to being governed by supply.
Source : *Oil, Power, and War: A Dark History* by Matthieu Auzanneau
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42527868-oil-power-and-war#
Love the last sentence: "Overall it looks like Harvey was wrong about all of his specific beliefs, but right that increasingly many people would agree with him. This is probably a metaphor for life."
Also, nice dramaturgical twist in the first part of the review.
A supplementary fun fact, for those who enjoy political science:
It was not only Reagan/Thatcher who initiated the "neoliberal" change. Equally important was the Labour party in New Zealand. The main actor bringing about this internal ideological change in Labour was the finance minister Roger Douglas (his policies were later dubbed "Rogernomics").
Similar ideological changes took place within the Scandinavian social democratic parties, and the German social democratic party under Schroeder. The Social Democrats have often been in the driver's seat with regard to these allegedly "neoliberal" changes: enhance competition, do outsorcing of publicly financed services, introduce purchase-provider splits and so on. Arguably, such policies supplement older Social Democratic tropes such as ensure wage moderation in unions, and fiscal discipline (you don't mess with "our" public finances); so the degree of ideological shift should not be exaggerated.
The Conservatives have sometimes been more reluctant to embrace so-called neoliberalism than Social Democrats, in countries where Conservative parties are split between an old-fashioned conservative faction emphasising culture, tradition and gradualism; versus a liberal faction emphasising individual freedoms and never-argue-with-the market.
You got the same change in British Labour as well, under Tony Blair; however this change within Labour only happened in the aftermath of Thatcher, and may thus be regarded more as a consequence of her regime, than as a homegrown change within the party (as in New Zealand, the Scandinavian countries and Germany). Perhaps for this reason, the ideological shift/slight re-orientation within Social Democracy has not been sustained in British Labour (but things may be in the process of changing there again).
Be that as it may, who can ever forget Margaret Thatcher's reply when a journalist asked what was her main achievement: "New Labour".
Oh, also, Scott quotes two paragraphs about neoconservatism as the next stage and then concludes "As far as I can tell, neoconservatism reached its apex during the Bush administration, and since then everyone has backed away from it. It was not an inevitable next phase of capitalism"
But a lot of the aspects of neoconservatism Harvey describes did survive and got amplified by the Trump administration, right? (Of course, others didn't, and also I think different people were involved, so nobody calls it neoconservatism.)
What aspects of neoconservatism got amplified by Trump?
My impression has been that neoconservatism is the ideology that is most diametrically opposed to Trumpism - it's about international entanglements to produce secular democratic states while encouraging the free movement of peoples, and a more laissez-faire domestic economy. The Bush-era neocons made all sorts of compromises, aligning with Christian conservatives at home, and with repressive totalitarian regimes in the Middle East, because they thought they would help their goals in Iraq and Afghanistan (and maybe some day Iran). But it's only these things, that were understood as compromises by the neocons, that Trump seems to have obviously continued.
I was thinking more of this bit:
"...makes the anti-democratic tendencies of neoliberalism explicit through a turn into authoritarian, hierarchical, and even militaristic means of maintaining law and order"
And regarding the "ruling elites to restore, enhance, or, as in China and Russia, to construct an overwhelming class power", I recommend this:
https://www.epsilontheory.com/yeah-its-still-water/
I was a child during the 70s and vaguely remember the queues at petrol stations (gas stations in American) and of course, there always seemed to be a strike going on - I think I spent nearly as much time with the electricity off and the old reliable kerosene lamp going as I did with the electric lights on! The craziest one probably was the bank strike which nearly created an entire new economic system in the country https://hbr.org/2010/11/the-irish-banking-crisis-a-par (we had one preceding this in 1966 and one afterwards in 1976, but the 1970 one was the most notable).
But Ireland always lagged behind everyone else, so the really bad times didn't hit until the 80s, and the 80s were *bad*. While Britain started to recover under Thatcherism and the "loadsamoney" effects of that towards bringing a lot of working-class people up into the middle-class, we were still relying on the usual solution to Irish problems, namely, everyone emigrated to the countries that were doing better such as Britain, the USA, Canada and Australia. We being so heavily dependent on American investment for employment does explain why, if the American economy caught cold in the 70s, we ended up with the flu in the 80s.
“narcissistic exploration of self, sexuality, and identity” (does he mean gay people?)"
Not outstandingly so, *everyone* in the 70s (well, at least in the USA and maybe parts of Europe) was going for Sexual Liberation. If you ever see TV shows and movies from the time, it's very obvious (and you can perhaps also see why 70s feminism took off in response to the attitude towards women). All kinds of psychological and pseudo-psychological regimes and therapies were very popular, this article mentions just four (and I do remember hearing about est): https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2010-nov-15-la-he-psychology-fads-20101115-story.html
The Enneagram, Carlos Castaneda, Erich von Daniken and all the Ancient Astronauts and Advanced Ancient Civilisations stuff - this was a rich field to plough all through the 70s. It was the culmination of the 60s attitudes, where in the new decade the new generation was now starting to be in charge and all the changes were going to be made permanent and everyone was going to be rich, free, and enlightened through exploration of one's own unique identity, throwing off the shackles of the past, and using scientifically (ahem) based techniques of psychoanalysis melded with ancient native wisdom to restructure your personality the way you wanted it to be. This was going to be the decade of automation meaning the four-day work week and hence a lot of leisure (and money) to spend on self-improvement and narcissism; after all, having to gaze deeply and for a long while into the depths of one's psyche to find out where your parents and society had fucked you up, and stifled your talents and gifts, so that you could then apply the remedies of whatever guru caught your fancy, encouraged this kind of navel-gazing.
I don't think Harvey's take on this history of human rights as a concept is actually correct, at least not when applied to US foreign policy. The high-water mark there was probably under Carter in the late 70s, where it was taken seriously enough to lump a bunch of authoritarian regimes that were on our side of the Cold War with the communists. In 1980, we got Reagan, who was more concerned with ending communism, and rightly so.
Democratization in the Southern Cone, Central America, Bolivia, Brazil, Taiwan, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Korea was under Reagan.
I get confused by the seeing neoliberalism described as Regan-Thatcherism, and Scott calling himself a neoliberal, and Scott saying he voted for Elizabeth Warren in the primary. Is there a conflict here? Is Warren a neoliberal? Is modern neoliberalism not all that similar to what it used to mean in the days of Reganism? Are there just no neoliberal candidates to vote for so Warren becomes the next closest? Maybe the vote is purely on social politics considerations and despite economics?
And in general, what do modern neoliberals believe? The basic premise from the wikipedia article on it makes me think more of the Tea Party. Yet I don't think that seems to reflect things well (r/neoliberal is fervently in favor of Joe Biden, for example and he was kinda the original opposition to the Tea Party). The description Scott quoted years ago of "free markets are great at making wealth, but bad at distributing it" resonates with me but not, I think, with Regan. Do neoliberals these days believe in single-payer healthcare? UBI? Increasing corporate taxes in the US? Social safety nets? Breaking up Big Tech? The EU? I have little idea.
Neoliberalism means a lot of different things, especially when critics and proponents are fighting about it, but it's generally a philosophy that for the most part "markets work."
And I'm not speaking for Scott, but "being neoliberal" doesn't mean "must vote for most neoliberalest candidate" all the time.
Voting for Warren is just an example of Scott's statements that don't seem very much like Reganism to my limited understanding (another example: supporting UBI). So can we get any more concrete than "markets work"?
I think it's a comparison term, rather than an absolute term. Compared to communist leaders, any American president would be more neoliberal, but far more so after Reagan than before. Bill Clinton was neoliberal, but by the standards of the 1970s (Nixon creating the EPA, OSHA, etc.), even Obama was very neoliberal. If Warren agrees that free markets is the default, then even adding regulations and trying to temper them to perform better (meaning, more people share in the wealth created), that's still within the neoliberal framework. Contrast that with Maduro in Venezuela, and it's obvious. Even compared to Bernie Sanders it's pretty clearly a different approach, despite the two of them often being considered in the same "lane" during the primaries.
Neoliberalism historically hasn't had many champions who use it as a primary label, but it's definitely had its detractors - most notably over the 80's period this book reviews. The consequence is that it's typically defined by its enemies, and there's a feedback where that means there's little value in a politician embracing the label.
r/neoliberal is part of a more recent trend that I wouldn't be comfortable describing outside of a US context, but there it functions as a generally Left-aligned counterpart of Libertarianism. (Note the capital letters there.) On social matters, the theory is that individuals can be best served by limited government intervention preventing them from pursuing their interests. On economics, the key insight is that free markets are an unparalleled *generator* of wealth and prosperity, but that some level of redistribution is desirable to keep society at a point where everyone has the tools necessary to participate in a healthy way.
In terms of policy prescriptions, that might cash out as legalization of all but the hardest drugs, little-to-zero government involvement in marriage of any stripe, minimal tariffs and protectionism, minimal regulation of businesses, open borders and immigration, and a streamlined and robust social safety net. (Healthcare is a complicated mess, but that's just a fact on the ground.)
Important note - if you solicited a modern self-described neoliberal what they though of continuing Regan-Thatcherism in the current context, expect a decidedly lukewarm reply. Whether that's due to changing opinions or changing circumstances will vary on specifics, but there's definitely drift (like there would be with any living political coalition).
Thanks I think this is sufficiently specific to help me understand it.
Dan L has it right.
Self-described neoliberals *do* believe in many things like (though not necessarily any particular one of these, to any particular self-described neoliberal) single-payer healthcare, UBI, social safety nets, breaking up big tech, and the EU, because all of these things are interventions that are expected to help markets work more effectively. If your healthcare and basic ability to survive are tied to your employer, then you're not in a position to negotiate as an equal in the marketplace - entrepreneurship requires a safety net to catch you if you fall. If big tech consists of five gigantic companies that do most of the hiring and most of the product creation in everything ranging from smartphones to social media to online retail to search to browsers, then there's not going to be much competition among them to keep things working for the greater good. Greater international collaboration and cooperation to harmonize economic rules across larger areas of developed economies is one of the core ideas of self-described neoliberalism, to help expand markets and encourage greater competition, and expand the opportunities for individuals and companies to find new solutions to problems.
Critics of neoliberalism tend to identify it with Reagan and Thatcher, and anyone who focuses on divesting government ownership of systems and putting more things into the hands of crony capitalists.
The thing the two descriptions have in common is that they both generally say that markets should do more. But the self-described neoliberals say that we need a lot of government intervention to create functioning markets, while the other-described neoliberals fetishize private ownership, even in systems like transportation, healthcare, and education, where unified networks are more efficient support for markets in everything else.
That's a great description of the conflicts - 'the government should actively work to encourage free markets' is ideologically coherent, but the application in any given situation is going to be nuanced and contentious. Even political allies are going to have significant disagreements about the details, and there's plenty of room for isolated parts of a neoliberal agenda to be supported for unrelated (if not downright nefarious) reasons.
Neoconservativism has not backed away or gone away, unless the wars on Libya, Syria, Yemen, etc., the coups in Ukraine, Bolivia and Honduras didn't happen. Hell, look at the howls of outrage from the national security establishment when Trump made noises about leaving Syria, a country that has never harmed us in any way and in which we have no real interest.
Just that now, the wars are justified not by "the war on terror" but by some self-serving and hypocritical human rights talk.
It's down from its apogee in the Afghanistan-Iraq era. At least now there's a lot of caution about not having "boots on the ground" or occupying the country.
I dunno, we're more careful about avoiding
American casualties, but regardless whether we kill innocents by means of local death squads (Honduras and Ukraine) , via "targeted.air strikes" (Libya and Syria), via starvation (Yemen) or whatever, those innocents are still dead.
And then there's our basic strategy in Syria, which is to occupy a portion of the country and assist forces trying to overthrow the government, in hopes that the government will deliver us an excuse to make war on them by kicking the occupiers out.
Wait, I'm pretty familiar with Russian-operated and/or Russia-sympathetic death squads in Ukraine (starting with the one that caused the bloodbath that led to the 2014 revolution), but which were the USA ones ?
So it must be Russians that are organizing neo-Nazis paramilitaries on behalf of the Kiev regime? Hell, even The Atlantic Council acknowledges that Ukrane has a Nazi problem, I guess those Russians must be responsible.
I bet Russian death squads murdered Oles Buzyn in broad daylight in downtown Kiev as well.
So it must be... the American's organizing neo Nazio paramilitaries? What?
There needs to be a new political axis - how much agency you believe people have. On one end you have pure "pick yourself up by your bootstrappers" and on the other end you have "literally every bad thing in the world is being directly perpetuated by neolib bankers".
At times I might agree, but the participation of the United States in the coup in Ukraine and its aftermath is abundantly documented. As pointed out previously, no less than Stratfor (which is no friend of Russia) described it as "the most blatant coup in history".
Libya and Syria are the last solid examples of neoconservative activity, and those are a decade old. Bolivia is a strong case for a neoconservative intervention that is later than that, but it occurred in a much more attenuated form than the military ones. (And I haven't checked recently, but isn't it being undone?)
Calling Ukraine a neocon intervention is a controversial stance, since it seems to at least minimize the role of Russian intervention. Yemen seems to be primarily a Saudi-led thing, which doesn't have any of the neocon fig leaves. I'm not sure which event in Honduras you're referring to, but it seems like the coup is even more than a decade old.
Unless I am mistaken, Syria is still ongoing, and Libya has not exactly recovered from our tender mercies.
As far as Ukraine goes, Stratford (no friend of Russia) described it as "the most blatant coup in history." Those looking for neocons will note the prominence of John McCain and Victoria Nuland. Note that American troops are still there.
Yemen is a Saudi driven project, and the neocons have proven close to the Saudis.
Anyway, if you want an example of neocon activities closer to the present in time, look at Venezuela.
Are you saying that Obama is a neoconservative? Libya and Syria were during his administration. I think I can squint and see the perspective, but that would definitely not be considered a mainstream thought.
I don't know or care what Obama's innermost thoughts are. His record (and his personnel, such as Nuland, Power, etc.) speak for themselves.
Again, the results are the same, just dressed up with some self-serving and hypocritical human rights talk.
This is a good source of the year the broke the US: https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
Serious question, why waste time reading books by hacks like this when there are so many good books to read? I got about half way through your review before I lost all respect for David Harvey as an objective observer.
If you value objective observers what did you think when you got to this part of the review?
"Harvey's theses, framed uncharitably, are:
1. Embedded liberalism was great and completely sustainable."
Since we're objective observers here, I challenge you to find a quote that even approaches this statement in David Harvey's work.
You have quoted this line word-for-word 3 times, to Scott's single use of it; I think you've made your point about disagreeing with this phrasing. Would you mind offering some constructive summaries (less than 200 pages long, i.e. shorter than the original book) of what you do believe David Harvey's thesis (or theses) to be? I would be really interested in content to the effect of "David Harvey actually says X, Y, Z" -- as opposed to what you're producing currently, which is of the form "Scott thinks that Harvey says A, B, C, and is completely wrong". Or is this impossible, because the ideas require at least 200 pages to get across?
Good luck with that request.
David Harvey is a Marxist, and his point is not that "embedded liberalism was great and completely sustainable". There's a reason why Scott Alexander (nor anybody else) can find a single quote to support this blatant strawman.
Harvey's point is that capitalism has a series of internal contradictions or tension points, and that capitalists getting out of one crisis often lay the foundations for the next crisis. That is, that capitalism has a series of irrationalities built into the system and cannot be constructed in a wholly rational manner.
My responses here probably seem quite crotchety, but I've had problems in Rationalist circles making people understand the most basic elements of leftist philosophy. I have gone through one example here:
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-global-economic-history#comment-1795464
I cannot emphasise this strongly enough: Scott not only seems to misunderstand leftist philosophy/outlook, he doesn't seem to be comprehending the words that are in front of him on the page at a very basic level. This leads to incredible distortions in an author's work, completely unrecognisable compared to the original, such as summarising Harvey's thesis as "embedded liberalism was great and completely sustainable". At no point does Harvey say anything approaching this, and it would not pass an Ideological Turing Test. I think to some degree Scott knows that this is unfair, framing his own response to the book as "uncharitable". But then the question becomes, why is Scott publishing uncharitable takes on left-wing writings?
(I will make two responses, because I have two different things to say.)
Is the following paraphrase approximately correct?
Scott claims that Harvey believes that embedded liberalism was sustainable. Harvey doesn't believe this, and has multiple books on the subject. He does believe that it was better than the neoliberalism that came after it, although that doesn't make it "great". Harvey seeks to trace out the details of how the (inevitable!) crisis of embedded liberalism led to the worse crisis of neoliberalism. It is not relevant to the narrative whether the people who promoted the neoliberal reforms were seeking to create a worse crisis or screw everyone else over for their own benefit; it is only relevant that this was the end result.
Do you think you could produce more details along these lines? Perhaps you can create your own four theses for the book, or at least point out what variant of Scott's four theses would be more correct?
"He does believe that it was better than the neoliberalism that came after it, although that doesn't make it "great"."
Better for who?
You're right, that was imprecise. How is "less oppressive to the workers" in place of "better"?
(I will make two responses, because I have two different things to say.)
To your question of why Scott is publishing uncharitable takes on left-wing writings: I would guess that part of the reason is the same as what drives you to publish "crotchety" responses; I assume that common reason to be a desire to vent frustration with a piece of writing that doesn't live up to your expectations. In Scott's case, I would also expect that he would welcome responses that explain where he went wrong and how to go right; I'm less clear on what you expect to accomplish by repeatedly claiming that this community is wrong about leftist philosophy.
The platonic form of an engaging correctionary response is something like
"Scott says A. Actually, A is incorrect, because X. Instead, Y."
Your comments are instead often of the form "Scott says A, which is totally wrong" -- with little if any explanation of why A is incorrect, and no proposals of what is the correct Y. (The comment you link is a notable exception, though your gloss of it here is, approximately, "Scott must be a total idiot to say A" -- hardly a compelling invitation to engage in an intellectual discussion!)
I think if you're looking to educate and engage the Rationalist community on leftist ideas, which you say the community doesn't get, you will need to make an effort to write positive statements about what those ideas are, instead of merely asserting that the community's understanding of them is incorrect.
Note that doing this won't guarantee you a response by Scott (there's only a handful of responses by Scott in this entire discussion!), but I think it will make it much more likely that you will productively engage people.
I explained very thoroughly what Scott got wrong both in this review and with his approach to Marx more generally. I've made an immense effort, yet nobody has fixed their mistakes. I asked Scott to find something in David Harvey's book that even vaguely approaches the statement:
"embedded liberalism was great and completely sustainable"
Scott has been unable to do this. If you think that you are able to do it, then I invite you to do so.
You know, if you want leftists to make positive statements then you need to engage with written sources such as Marx or David Harvey. Writing (self-admitted!) uncharitable takes will lead to people treating Scott uncharitably in return.
I'm one of the most patient and persistent people you will ever meet, so I am an exception. Most people are not.
"(The comment you link is a notable exception, though your gloss of it here is, approximately, "Scott must be a total idiot to say A" -- hardly a compelling invitation to engage in an intellectual discussion!)"
How is that a 'gloss' of what I say? I explained very clearly that Marx never uses words like 'completely malleable'. He's talking about our descriptions of human nature very clearly being 'ensemble' - that is, generalities of vast swathes of people - not something inherent to each individual person. There's nothing even approaching "completely malleable" here. Scott is not a complete idiot and I don't say anything close to this. I say that he got it wrong; which he did.
If Scott (or you) want to argue this point, feel free. I suggest you could start by saying where this "completely malleable" comes from.
You say "he doesn't seem to be comprehending the words that are in front of him on the page at a very basic level". To me that reads less like "Scott got it wrong" and more like "Scott is an idiot". If you mean only "Scott got it wrong", it would help if you stuck to that phrasing, and didn't escalate to "laughably wrong" or "doesn't understand words".
You say you went to a heroic effort to explain: I count three positive statements in that linked comment: "[Marx] just says that the 'essence of man' is not inherent in every single person, but rather the essence of man is an ensemble of social relations." and "This is just saying that economists look at human interactions under capitalism and posit this as original and natural - that it has existed throughout history. He's saying that other economists are wrong about humans, not that there is "no such thing as human nature" and that "everything was completely malleable".". Everything else is saying that Scott was wrong, or wondering how he could possibly have been this wrong, or warning readers that he's wrong. Is "three sentences of explantation" really worthy of the name "heroic effort"? Or do you get to a different country if *positive statements that actually propose to say what leftists do think*? Because those are what's going to engage this community; complaining that the community is wrong just isn't that engaging.
>the neoliberal drive towards the construction of asymmetric market freedoms but makes the anti-democratic tendencies of neoliberalism explicit through a turn into authoritarian, hierarchical, and even militaristic means of maintaining law and order.
Not sure why you say this hasn't happened when police militarization is at an all time high, all over the world (not just in the US) civilian protests are crushed by militarized police, and less than 12 months ago the President of the United States WAS literally screaming about LAW AND ORDER.
I read this part as particularly prescient and was very surprised when you said "nope, nothing like this has happened"
Do you think that civilian protests are being *more* crushed by police now than they were a decade ago, or two decades ago, or three decades ago? They certainly aren't being more crushed now than they were four or five decades ago.
For the record, it was made completely clear that this wasn't a book review contest entry. Scott calls it "Your Book Review" whenever it's a contest entry, and just "Book Review" - like he always has! - when it's a regular post. Plus there's a 6ish-line disclaimer atop every contest entry.
It's amusing to me that people are calling for more clear signposting. It's not that hard to tell. It's obviously understandable if you got confused, but I think asking Scott to therefore preface posts on his blog with "no, this wasn't written by someone else" instead of just checking twice when reading the title, especially knowing there's currently a contest going on, (which is what I do) is a bit unnecessary?
Absolutely. I understand people will have an uncomfortable feeling when they realise they have made a false assumption about who wrote the review, but perhaps the lesson is simply to pay more attention to the clearly written words at the beginning of all the reviews.
Another agreement here. It's possible that a person whose reading comprehension doesn't extend to parsing words even when presented in a consistent, formalized way should recuse himself from evaluating others' writing.
Caveat (with the note that you aren't claiming otherwise, but someone might easily think you are): The people who were confused are not all calling for clearer signposting.
I for one was confused, because I've been reading extra book reviews lately (the ones in the docs) and so am in the contest mindset, and there wasn't anything that immediately said "no, this is Scott" here. But I noticed I was wrong, laughed, and accepted it was my mistake. I wouldn't *object* to an explicit marker, but I also don't think it's at all necessary.
I mean, if 5% of your readers are confused by something, and you can fix it with a four word phrase at the beginning ("Review by Scott Alexander"), then even if it's "unnecessary", it's probably a good idea for future reference.
Leftist critique of "human rights" is not "unique and original" with Harvey's book, goes back at least to the eighties; by the nineties there was already a pro-rights backlash and an anti-rights backbacklash. If there's any consensus it's that human rights aren't liberation and aren't going to further the kind of structural change Leftists think necessary--at best. I can see why in the context of USA politics conversations human rights looks like a "Left" thing, but this seems more because of recent culture wars politicization of human rights rather than because progressives think they're the biggest deal around.
In response to some of the comments about this review being unusually uncharitable, I feel compelled to point out that it wouldn't be much of a book review if Scott just went "here's what the book says, I don't think the arguments it makes are all that good, here's how I would support the same position."
Also, I don't think he has the necessary mental gears to steelman the economic-left's case, which is the very reason he keeps trying to engage with their literature (and keeps picking the wrong books, it seems to me). Holding this kind of review to the standards of a blog post is probably unfair.
I'm reminded of his review of MacIntyre's After Virtue, which basically just says "I don't get it", and was followed by some posts that engaged with the commenters' attempts to explain and/or steelman the book's position. Similarly, this one could really use a "highlights from comments" follow-up.
It was Marx himself who originally characterized 'human rights' as a bourgeois concern, which of course gave cover for the lack of concern for human rights typical of real-world Marxist governments. Harvey seems to be keeping as much of the party line as possible while also trying not to sound like a monster.
I liked this review. I think you did a good job, and it was enjoyable reading. Normally I wouldn't comment just for that, but when only angry people comment I imagine it can be disheartening.
Good & interesting review 👍
It was a pretty weird experience reading some of the quotes from the book, honestly. He speaks negatively about "artistic freedom and artistic license", "opening up of the cultural field to all manner of diverse cosmopolitan currents", "the exploration of self, sexuality, and identity" (what's so narcissistic about that?), human rights, individualism, "civil society as a centre of opposition, if not an alternative, to the state", etc. All of those seem unambiguously good to me! Harvey and I have fundamentally different worldviews, I guess. Maybe the book elaborates in more detail why he thinks those are bad (beyond calling them neoliberal/imperialist/a weapon in a class struggle/other content-free verbiage); for the most part, the review gives the impression that he just takes their badness for granted.
In particular: to my mind, liberalism means living your life how you see fit, and democracy is for coming together to solve collective problems that require unselfish coordination. But it seems like Harvey (and many other leftist theorists) wants democratic decision-making to impact every facet of my life, which seems like a transparently awful idea to me. Whatever happened to live and let live?
Another rambly thought:
When I was younger, I thought that (what I now call) liberalism was the foundation that everyone was starting from. Democratic or Republican or anything else, we all agreed on a particular set of foundational starting values and more-or-less what the ideal society looked like. The disagreements were about (1) how to get there, and (2) some of the small details of how exactly to weigh messy tradeoffs. I've since learned that this is a lot less true than I thought it was. (E.g.: when I watched Trump's campaign announcement speech, I felt in my *bones* that he would not come close to winning the Republican nomination. Just how low of an opinion did this man have of Republicans voters that he thought he'd get votes for *that*?) Oh well. Guess all I can do about all these socialists and nationalists is try and respect our differences keeping trying to persuade them.
Well, this is specifically one criticism of neoliberalism : that, like Thatcher said "There Is No Alternative". Well, this could only have lasted so far, even in the US, "alternatives" ended up by popping up, and the more repressed, the "madder" they got : Daesh, Q-Anon...
? Isn't this an argument *for* neoliberalism? Every proposed alternative ranges from "fails whenever tried" to "trivially insane". That was Thatcher's claim; not that there are literally no other ideas, but that they are all bad. There is no *serious* alternative, according to her.
(Also IDK why you are refering to Daesh as an alternative that popped up in the US?)
Yes, but nothing lasts forever, an ideological monoculture will always end up taking itself for granted and will end up being abused. As the 9/11 attacks have shown, there's no "end of history".
I assume that he's seeing them in a negative light because he's seeing them as "fake" emanations of the market, rather than coming from "real" human emancipation ?
Yeah, that's exactly the sort of thing that sounds like vague hand-waving to me. I don't even know what that's supposed to mean. Presumably leftists have a larger, more coherent worldview under which that sentence means something to them.
Like, replacing the word market with its definition, that sentence becomes "<insert various good things here> are 'fake' emanations of *people freely doing what they want with each other and with their stuff*, rather than coming from 'real' human freedom". Huh??
Obviously far leftists have a much more negative view towards markets, and presumably have a differently worded definition. I guess "their stuff" is probably the (a?) sticking point.
(To be clear, I understand and agree (to a point) with the more moderate leftist viewpoint: that markets can create inequalities that we can ameliorate, sacrificing some amounts of efficiency for the sake of equality (which makes sense in a utilitarian framework on account of diminishing marginal utility).)
I'm going to guess again - you have to remember that a capitalist market and money based society is a very specific form of society (and certainly not a "natural" one in the sense that it's very far from a hunter-gatherer society we've evolved in).
I *think* that Marxists assume that it's bad because they assume that it automatically leads to the domination of workers and the alienation of work (they kind of got a point there, but good luck doing better), that the "free market" doesn't really exist (ditto), and that a better world is not only possible, but inevitable (wishful thinking IMHO) ?
You can simply read Marx if you wish to find out what the Marxist critique of capitalism is all about.
Yeah, *Das Kapital* is inching ever closer to the top of my "to read" list...
"The government is a blob of power that gets captured by different groups at different times and directed willy-nilly to one purpose or another; just because it does not perfectly follow a specific philosophy without deviation for fifty years doesn’t make that philosophy inherently fraudulent."
I think that this is strawmanning what I found to be one of Harvey's strongest points: that neoliberalism hasn't just occasionally failed to live up to its own Laissez-faire principles, but that it has consistently and predictably ignored those principles whenever they conflicted with the interests of capital.
What makes this criticism more salient towards neoliberalism than say conservatism or socialism, is that than most conservatives and socialists already understand there ideologies to be political ones. If you attacked a socialist with "you'll just do anything you need to to help the working class and redistribute wealth" they would probably respond with "duh".
Neoliberals truly invsisioned themselves as unmoored by the messy reality of partisanship and instead viewed their free market beliefs as ends unto themselves. Proving --as I think Harvy does quite compellingly -- that philosophical convictions have never gone so far as to let there be any real consequences for the wealthy (especially in regards to the financial industry) makes it hard to take these claims at face value. It reminds me of the famous Alan Greenspan bit where after every bank failure he would give unconditional bailouts and then say "This is a fluke and we will never have to do this again". Understanding the actions of people like Greenspan as "they were just really convinced about the efficiency of markets" makes no sense given any of the decisions they made in practice
Its worth noting that I read ABHoNL in an international development class (not a notably left area of academia), which is a field that at this point broadly accepts most of Harviess claims on this matter. No one really takes laissez fair economists at face value anymore and no one really thinks it's worth analysing the deregulation of the past 40 years as a philosophical movement that went a bit to far.
What is very amusing to me about this kind of Pinker VS Harvey dialogue you see in rationalist circles where people are arguing that free markets are either AMAZINGLY RATIONAL FREEDOM DELIVERY MECHANISMS or irrational but valuable things which need persistent and systemic intervention is not really reflecting any serious disagreement within academia (or even politics) at this point. Most people think the latter outside of very certain econ departments which are rapidly being marginalized.
I agree with the observation that leftist critique of "human rights" is not "unique and original" with Harvey's book. Being left wing is basically about collective ownership and decision-making; as the old clause IV of the Labour Party phrased it,
"To secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service".
There's nothing in there about human rights, which are often presented as the rights of an individual. A left-wing critique of sexism or racism or anti-LGBT would focus more on the collective struggle of the group against oppression rather than the rights of the individual.
Please note that I'm not advocating either position here; I'm just trying to explain the different approaches (as I understand them).
Part of the success of Blair's "New Labour" project, coming after Thatcher, was to ally traditional Labour voters with progress in civil rights, while rewriting clause 4 to remove the bits about collective ownership. In this way he formed an alliance between left-wingers and liberals. My impression that a similar shift happened in the USA. Progressives were unable to gain much in the economic sphere, while those who focussed on civil rights made more headway.
Since we're talking about that time period and forgetfulness, it's fascinating to me that until recently we had seemingly completely forgotten about the "Hong-Kong" flu of 1968 and 1969, which killed 1-4 million people worldwide (2-8 scaled to current population, COVID is at 3 million so far), and 33k-100k in the US alone (53k-160k scaled to current population, COVID is at 600k so far).
Everyone was predicting a financial crisis in 2008 - Adam Tooze lays it all out in great detail in his book Crashed. It's just that everyone was predicting a crisis caused by US bonds, not one caused by mortgages.
> As far as I can tell, neoconservatism reached its apex during the Bush administration, and since then everyone has backed away from it.
I don't know, the notion of domestic applications military power seems spot on. Not just the law and order rhetoric from Trump and other Republicans, but note how the US Capital is still host to thousands of troops. Democrats are also still crowing about the need for new laws to combat domestic threats, despite little evidence that such threats exist or that new laws are even needed to combat such threats.
I'm sympathetic to the notion that power corrupts, and that at one point, perhaps unions had too much power and neoliberalism was a response to abuses of power. The pendulum has almost certainly swung too far the other way though, and economic and political elites have been abusing their power for quite some time now.
If you want a stronger argument, I think you'd find Krugman's book 'The Conscience of a Liberal' much better. Ignore the title - it's actually a relatively dense book on US political economy dating back to around 1900. I think you would find it interesting for a few reasons:
1) Krugman was formerly much more neoliberal leaning (and of course is a top economist), so he's not blind to its advantages.
2) There's some statistical focus to sort through plausible narratives.
3) His school of thought is apparently influential in the current administration, so it could shed light on the current political dynamics even if you don't ultimately find it compelling.
I'd also consider his short essay "The Instability of Moderation".
I somehow thought this was an entry in the book review competition and not something SA wrote himself, and throughout the whole post kept thinking "this guy writes a lot like Scott, is he consciously aping the style in order to increase his chances of winning" and "this guy is pretty good I may have to think about voting for this one" haha
You really need to look at the pre war period to evaluate liberalism’s economic performance. Friedman, Sowell and Hayek argue/d at length that Keynesianism’s track record is appalling in comparison, especially when looking at inflation levels in the 70s and the causes of the Great Depression.
Also, consider the track record of similar liberal economies vs statist ones. Britain vs France, Estonia/Lithuania vs Portugal/Greece, US vs EU. Britain is a good example of the failure of Keynesianism - it was called the sick man of Europe until Thatcher came to power and they joined the EEC.
Because of horrific social-democratic economical policies that led to inflation and constant currency devaluations due to excessive wage increases and persistent budget deficits, Sweden had no - NO - real wage growth for 20 years in the period 1975 to 1995. Only "neoliberal" reforms finally made the economy functional again after a completely home-grown economic crisis pushed interest rates to 500% (!!). Since then, the economy has been consistently fine, even managing Great Recession very well, and real wages have risen dramatically while public debt has decreased massively. Even the Covid crisis only dented it.
Graphics link: https://tino.us/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/link-real-wages-in-sweden-1960-2013-4-739x556.png
I kind of agree with another person who said this review was a bit "off". I think I know something which felt wrong to me: that Scott isn't fairly characterizing the book in the passages he cites.
Let's look at Scott's summary of Harvey on the NYC situation:
"So Harvey’s picture of an idyllic New York getting hit with a financial crisis for no reason, being betrayed by greedy bankers, and then turning gritty and mean doesn’t really seem to check out."
A little above:
"Also, I think at least some of those pages are false: Wikipedia says that “the city [had] gained notoriety for high rates of crime and other social disorders” by 1970, five years before any of this happened. Also, here’s some more of the relevant article:"
But the passage of the book which Scott excerpt **starts off** with the "urban crisis" in NYC in the 1960s. Nowhere does it say that NYC was "idyllic" before the 1970s. The argument in the book is that the federal govt. (under Nixon) stopped federal aid by prematurely declaring the crisis over in 1970, and then (under Ford) refused aid in the negotiations in 1975. The federal govt. may have good reasons for its actions (though Harvey suggests that Ford's decision was driven by ideological advice), but the picture I get is very different from what Scott says.
Note: I have not read the book, nor do I have deep knowledge of any of the economics involved.