Telling the whole truth in a post-truth environment
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oecdinsights.org
Right now, I don't see anything like a new vision of the future coming out of the Left, just (in my view)a justified horror at the direction the country is heading. I've been trying to think about what something better might look like, and I hope people more versed in these subjects than I are doing so as well.
And they didn't have to deal with zillion different over-optimized, hyper efficient propaganda machines pumping fear into the ether 24*7, and they will still tell you times were chaotic. But they survived and things got better.
I always liked this view:
"The world is falling apart!"
"When was the last time it wasn't?"
If you live in one of these places and have not spent time in the interior you don't get it.
For an example look into the first, say, ten companies to offer viable home computers. They were in places like Albaquerqie (MITS), Dallas (Tandy), Philadelphia (Commodore), Atlanta (Compucolor), Boca Raton (IBM's PC group), etc. as well as Apple and a few others in the Bay Area. Today they would just about all be in SF/SV with maybe one token in Seattle.
Everything is like that. Regular jobs leave the interior for other countries or are replaced by automation, while high end jobs all go to to LA, NYC, SF, Seattle, and Boston.
I am in LA and grew up in Cincinnati and am as guilty as the next person. It's hard to swim against a torrent. When I go back there I see people stockpiling guns and talking about the new record for heroin deaths. Young people talk about escaping.
This is also bad to a degree for people in rich coastal cities since all this is driving real estate hyperinflation there. No jobs or unaffordable housing: pick one.
For average people things have become tangibly worse. It started in the 70s, accelerated after 2001, and became a visceral downward spiral after 2008. Trump and Sanders talked about this. Nobody else cares or even sees the problem.
You are oversimplifying and by doing so basically disguising an argument that seems to be that more wealth should be transferred from coastal cities to the interior.
How about the interior elects some reasonable governments, engages in trying to educate their populace, put some regulations in so they can build some decent communities and try to attract talent -- how about the interior starts trying to compete rather than blaming their woes on the federal government while seeking to increase their outsized (and poorly managed) federal handouts (which gets funneled disproportionately toward their tiny economic elite because of their states rights motivated insistence on the freedom to form corrupt local governments.)
Well, this also requires that the Feds enforce antitrust law.[1]
[1] -- http://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/novdec-2015/bloom-and-...
Wait, what??? Capitalism has been ludicrously effective at creating wealth and raising standards of living. What it hasn't necessarily done is guarantee equality or ensure that the very lowest (economic) class of citizens have a SoL that's above the baseline that a lot of people want. And given that Capitalism isn't a prescriptive system anyway, that's hardly surprising. It's also less than surprising given that we don't live (at least in the US and most of the Western world) in a truly capitalistic society to begin with. Most of this world is a mixed economy which features massive government regulation and other elements which work against pure laissez-faire.
Personally, I don't consider a certain measure of inequality to be a problem, with the caveat that nobody is artificially restrained from achieving economic success.
To me, we aren't waiting for "the left" (whatever that is) to present some new anti-capitalist plan... we're waiting to find a way to evolve society so that we can avoid the extremes of inequality that we have now, and create that baseline SoL for everyone. And I see no reason to think that Capitalism isn't the foundation those things should be built on.
The biggest thing that worries me right now is the whole "technological unemployment" issue. I remember worrying about that as far back as 7th grade... and while, so far, robots haven't replaced jobs to such an extreme that it's rendered human labor useless, one does wonder what will happen if/when that comes to pass. And there, to be honest, I will say that I'm not sure if the Capitalist approach will be workable. But on the flip-side, I'm not sure what other approach we can construct that doesn't require use of violence to redistribute wealth.
I've been trying to think about what something better might look like, and I hope people more versed in these subjects than I are doing so as well.
Likewise. Mainly I wish I had more time to think about this stuff.
And less abstractly, this of course ignores the emergent downward trends in American lifespans, wages, and job security.
Agree with you on the unemployment cliff. I think about it a lot. Currently I think if we don't fix our educational system we're have no chance of making it through without severe upheaval
Personally, I don't consider a certain measure of inequality to be a problem, with the caveat that nobody is artificially restrained from achieving economic success.
This is a bit of a straw-man. You'll find that most people accept a certain measure of inequality. The key point is that when people are presented with a range of income distributions they usually end up with something closer to Sweden than the US.
If it involves state control, it's communism. If it's a planned economy, it's communism. If it puts restrictions on the market economy, it's socialism. If it suggests increasing taxes, it's socialism. If it aims to shape market behavior, it's socialism.
If it comes from someone who has previously suggested one of these previous ideas, it's socialism.
The luddite argument is that we should stop progress because it is too drastic a change. (most of) the Left is not advocating that. However, there is a strong argument to say what got us here is causing more problems than solutions, and the same solutions dismissed earlier are now within range of implementation.
I'm not suggesting whole hog Cockshott's "Toward a new Socialism" -- most people here could tear it apart justifiably. One interesting idea is that the government charges full externality and market costs for the resources it controls, rather than the cost to maintain those resources, and distributes the excess as social credit. (Basic income suggests that one can live on it - social credit is the distribution of social wealth, but is not necessarily livable to start.)
But again, that has government involvement implications, so it must be socialism.
That doesn't mean there isn't room to move in this direction. But I think it's going to have to be along the lines of "saving Capitalism" like we had in the New Deal era. Putting a literal floor of survival with things like basic income and nationalized healthcare, while preserving markets for their creative capacity in industries like science and technology.
Yeah. That's why Trump would have had such a field day with Bernie about his socialism. Which Trump would have conflated with communism etc.
Left and right are fundamentally just different ways of analyzing a situation, and they're generally both valid. But mass media has polarized us into believing they represent diametrically opposed tribes, when the actual divide is distributed liberty versus centralizing oligarchy.
The oligarchy holds its power by keeping the masses fighting each another over bikeshed politics, and this last election was no exception. The real disruption of this system is not going to come from more false prophets flying blue or red flags (sorry Trump supporters, you bought into the same simulated disruption that Obama won with), but from bottom-up organization of individuals coordinating through p2p communications infrastructure (left thinking) and asserting their rights for themselves (right thinking).
> Neoliberal Capitalism has failed to create the circumstances necessary for large swathes of the population to survive
If you look at the states in the union that have embraced neoliberal capitalism, their economies are in substantially better post-recession state than their counterparts, often have more effective social services, and generally are considered to be central to the revival of the American economy (even as they overturn huge swaths of it).
This is not an accident. Each of these states has carefully prioritized their spending and law to attempt to remain relevant in a rapidly changing economy. California is a shining example of this. California prioritizes a strong state university system, immigration & trade, and extremely aggressive pro-worker laws that enable very small businesses to compete with very large businesses directly. New York has done similar things and keeps broadening things like its non-compete laws. Similar stories exist about more aggressive state-level health care and public health initiatives.
Many (but please, of course not all) people feeling they're left out of this can and should first look to how their state elected officials have utterly failed to steer their state towards relevance before pointing to quite frankly outright benign federal regulation. People arguing "Obamacare made it too expensive to run a business" were the same people who said, "Employers shouldn't have to pay for meaningful employee health care despite that being the only feasible way for people to get it in America since the Nixon administration." States COULD address this, and anyone can point to the blue states doing it and how their economies ARE the positive growth metrics of America, but instead the argument is about further eroding worker protection and stability in those states.
GOP and Trump politics, despite claiming to be pro-business, are really very aimed at protecting large companies at the expense of small business owners and newer companies. A great example of this is the way Wyoming is not only stopping all subsidization of renewable energy (despite it being a fantastic business proposition for the state where its environmental and footprint impacts are MUCH smaller than in other states, they've become a wind energy powerhouse with only modest cost to the taxpayer), but starting to introduce subsidization for the coal industry despite that industry already receiving heavy federal subsidies and producing far fewer in-state jobs (especially over projections going forward). This is ultimately an anti-competitive, anti-capitalist agenda.
We cannot simply be complacent with the idea that "neoliberalism is prosperity." But we should definitely point out that things like decreasing the individual burden for core services and giving workers more freedom demonstrably improves the economies that do this. We can no longer say, "That sort of works for France but look at how bad their employment system is." We've been running a comparison for a long time now and we can see that better education, less concern for health care and education costs actually work in the US system even when implemented partially and in a half-assed way. We need to assume a planned economy to take that to the next step. Certainly the UK can show that its health care system has an outstandingly positive effect on the # of people employed (or self-employed).
It's really easy for things like social services to look good when you overspend your budget by 22%!
[1] https://ballotpedia.org/California_state_budget_and_finances
[2] http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/politics/sdut-welfa...
It's a commonly used tactic to dismiss California because they've had to deal with nation-sized problems with a State level approach with mixed success, but it's the same California that's lead the nation in job and GDP growth.
California is also one of those awkward giver states that so heavily subsidized other states that offer a fraction of the social services without substantially better growth.
So yeah. Even Delaware has found strategies to be relevant. New York has also gone hard on innovation to keep from losing their dominance in finance. Meanwhile Wyoming is subsidizing a questionably run fossil energy business because they're feeling pressure from the tiny fraction of modern wind generation they don't own.
But as an aside, I'm more than happy to shut down the people exploiting an ancient grant for our state's water. Their existence is based around destroying the state's future.
"Giver state": not relevant for this discussion. The parent post talked about the State of California doing a good job of handling the recovery. The State of California does not give anything to other states (that I am aware of). The people of California pay more in federal income taxes than they collectively get back, but it is the State government that was asserted to be an economic exemplar. (And according to [1], California is not even a huge giver, as it receives about $.95 [guestimated from the bar chart] for every $1 its people pay in federal taxes.)
Delaware, New York, Wyoming are also irrelevant. My point is that California is not an obvious shining economic example. Whether DE, NY, and WY are making wise or foolish choices is unrelated to CA's choices.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/05/which-s...
California and Californians should be considered as a whole, as one enables the other. Californian's pay federal taxes and they lose money on these.
> California is not even a huge giver, as it receives about $.95 [guestimated from the bar chart] for every $1 its people pay in federal taxes.)
Worth noting that this is still more than other states because of the size of the economy in question.
> My point is that California is not an obvious shining economic example. Whether DE, NY, and WY are making wise or foolish choices is unrelated to CA's choices.
If the field is "States in the US" then California's strategies are obviously demonstrating success. That California also has governance problems is inarguable (our petition system needs to change, you can't govern public policy in a vacuum from the budget). It doesn't invalidate the point.
The point is that California's stance on worker protection, health care, overtime, and libel have enabled its citizens to succeed despite a federal economy that its somewhat hostile to the states.
That's the opposite of neoliberalism[1]. Peak neoliberalism in the USA is Kansas and Michigan.
In a strict sense, you're right. As a consequence of federal policy, it's inevitable that some states would try these strategies. They're the ones that the less successful states point at and say, "smug elites". My point is that their state legislature did very little to protect them. I realize that I edited a paragraph to say "embraced" to remove the remainder of the sentence to remove the words "as opposed to gamed the system", which is what I consider several blue states to be doing.
In this sense, neoliberalism has enabled an apples-to-apples comparison in an increasingly open border economy. Some people even argue that this was the ONLY way to get any sort of test (which is what I was alluding to with my prosperity statement, I don't buy this).
We've been working that out[1]: full automation, the reduction of waged work hours, and universal basic income as the road through and past capitalism. I would add workers' cooperatives and very strong antitrust laws, to strengthen the autonomy of firms that drives market economies[2].
[1] -- http://www.publicseminar.org/2015/10/inventing-the-future/#....
[2] -- https://www.jacobinmag.com/2012/12/the-red-and-the-black/
The tragedy is that there wasn't more substantive debate about it, but this cycle was a circus of emails and Trump defending the size of his dick.
There is an viable economic alternative already. Look at countries like Sweden and Denmark. They are very rich developed countries that have an alternative model. The problem to many people in Anglo-Saxon world is that that model is based on high taxes to support a very comprehensive social security net.
> The NAEC agenda is ambitious, calling for a new growth narrative that recognises the complexity of human behaviour and institutions, and calls on sociology, psychology, biology, history, and other disciplines to [...] build better models to inform economic decisions
So the issue is growing inequality, and the solution is to muddy the waters with unproven models (potentially mixing dozens of disciplines)? The OECD collected data on growing inequality all along [1], but apparently they chose to recommend policies based on GDP averages instead.
There's nothing "post-truth" and "emotional, not rational" about people who "have not seen their situation improve in the last decades" and "accumulate disadvantages". What's disconcerting is throwing out the whole concept of rationality instead of admitting they should have recommended policies based on different data (which they had).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient#Gini_coeffici...
"Particularly those that are intangible or non- measurable concepts" doesn't sound like a retreat from rationality to me. It sounds like a belated acceptance (or more likely, an internal power shift in a debate that's been going on a while) that their rational models had substantial blind spots.
When was society ever persuaded by "facts" alone? It's more than intellectual cowardice and naivety - it's lazy thinking.
You still need to convince people that certain facts presented are of such significance as to supersede preconceived notions, prejudices or personal opinions.
Throwing a temper-tantrum and feigning shock when people don't agree with you is like speaking louder at someone who doesn't speak your language. Try instead to learn how to communicate effectively and persuasively.
It just comes across as an attempt at sounding clever by claiming the world has changed and you're the only one that's realized it.
Government serves itself, and voters serves themselves.
This is true of Trump and it would have been true of Hilary.
There, I just laid down the whole truth, now what? Can we really escape our human condition?
If not, I'm actually asking for suggestions as to what societal model could account for it, and still succeed at providing equal opportunity and enhanced quality of life for all. I guess I'm open to anything except the "Savior/Champion will rise" type of models.
I was just giving you the straightforward answer to your question. You asked if we can escape the human condition. I think it's pretty easy and we'll all accomplish it; we'll die. That's the escape.
Whether it's too little, too late remains to be seen.
0. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MR65ZhO6LGA&ebc=ANyPxKoh0L2swq...
International trade also has a big competitor in mechanization and automation. For example, big machinery ate up small farms and mining jobs.
In general, this helps people who want to argue on ideological grounds rather than hurting them. It's bad for people who want to treat somewhat arbitrary concepts as objective to stifle debate.
A good example: gender roles vary so much culturally and possess so many outliers in the data that attempting to argue for an objective ground truth almost invariably ignores or dismisses numerous counter examples.
"M&F seen as having different natures" "F->M direct child care" "M->F more competitive" "M->F greater spatial range" etc
Steven Pinker talks about this (and much else) in this speech. Skip to 26:56 for this particular point. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n691pLhQBkw
An objective truth doesn't have to apply to every individual without exception, to be an objective truth. It just has to be a consistent trend. So M/F differences like the above really are objective truths, the same as "men are taller than women" or "cougars are more dangerous than goats".
(edit: this is not to say anything prescriptive about what ought to be done; it's simply a descriptive statement. Of course Pinker covers all this ground; I recommend the whole talk)
I agree with this. We can objectively say, for example, that in the US many women end up as primary care providers for children. We can even note that because of breastfeeding & postnatal recovery we expect to see women become primary care providers.
But what I'm hinting at is that a lot of people are using "objective facts" as a code for extremely prescriptive speech right now on the grounds that the observation of majority means that that majority is correct, hence my mention of gender roles.
A lot of criticism of the notion of "post-modern" thought is that it questions norms previously thought to be purely objective. The degree to which one does this is of course an individual thing and we need to constantly affirm the boundary beyond which it no longer makes sense to erode the pretense of objective truth (e.g., the Sokal paper).
And while objective truth does exist, I think the moral panic recently about being "post truth" is a little hyperbolic. Tabloid-style media has been a major issue in politics since the printing press was invented.
And while people might complain about the "other side" being in an echo chamber, I'd suggest that in the internet age people are less isolated now than they have been at any point in human history.
It is exactly BECAUSE of the lack of isolation that people are butting heads so often right now. In previous years different local communities would receive radically different media that only re-enforces their previously held beliefs.
I guess my point is that while objective truth is in fact real, both sides also have truths that they claim are objective while in reality they're relativistic. Just the issue of coal alone brings that to light with both the left and right having their objective truths, neither of which encompass the entire picture.
Here is where I don't get people: my default intuition when facing people with firm beliefs that conflict with mine is to broaden my picture and see what happens when I include other side's arguments in it. But it seems that this line of thinking is for some reason hard for many people. I'm not sure why.
Indeed, it is possible for macroeconomic measurements to improve without large segments of the population seeing the fruits of those improvements.
That's why it's incredibly important for political leaders to connect with people from all walks of life. Bill Clinton understood this very well. Hillary, unfortunately, did not. She was content with relying on polls and numbers, which of course could not capture many truths that, by their nature, cannot be quantified.
I was impressed when I visited a medieval castle, where the luxuries of the lord included an automatically served table (that is, it would be manually lifted up from the kitchen). That required a whole castle with who knows how many employees.
These days, everybody can just Microwave their food, for a few bucks. Even though (almost) everybody is poorer than the medieval landlord in relative terms, in absolute terms everybody is richer.