Still Manufacturing Consent: An Interview with Noam Chomsky
fair.org
fair.org
The marking out of the symbiotic relationship between reliable information producers and journalists is also vital to understanding the media system. A reliable, centralised stream of new information content is the life blood of journalism organisations, with a strong emphasis on _reliable_ and _centralised_. This particular need that journalists have sees them often becoming dependent on state institutions and corporations at the expense of minority groups and labor. An example being the journalists 'on the beat' that used to hang out around the local courthouse because that's where the 'feeding trough' is. Or the reports so nicely formatted and condensed produced by the state departments such that journos merely have to copy-paste the information straight into their papers. Easy-peasy.
Fascinating book.
It's not quite the same. Before fact checking anything took an impossible amount of time and not a few resources - a very good library for a start. Now, or even a decade ago it suddenly became possible for everyone.
I vividly remember when the Iraq was announced, and you could see the "information producers" in full swing. I was amazed when my local radio station announcer, well known for his resistance for being bullshitted asked someone he was interviewing in a disbelieving voice if they didn't agree Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
The point being that by then I had already done my own homework (we were going to war, my fellow citizens were going to be killed and I wanted to know why), and knew full well Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. The reports and opinions of the UN weapons inspectors was easily available on the internet, along with numerous dumbed down pieces from the mass media. Anyone willing to waste a few hours could easily get past the propaganda smokescreen. Yet this news interviewer who up until then I assumed to be a master of his craft had been pulled in hook, line and sinker.
It changed the message in Chomsky's books from an interesting theoretical discussion to distressingly real. But it also created another puzzle: why didn't the Internet fix it? Why didn't people immediately put this bullshit filter to good use?
I still don't know the answer. There have now been numerous studies into the phenomenon of people continuing to loudly defend bullshit despite the facts being easily available in just about anywhere you look (cue: climate change). Apparently it has to do with people preferring to signal they are part of a particular tribe over acting in their best interest. Or something. I guess I'll never understand, as they aren't people like me.
Did changes in fact-checking change the proportion of information produced by state and corporate actors?
> I guess I'll never understand, as they aren't people like me.
I see what you did there, welcome to the tribe. Conforming to the tribe is often in the persons best interest as most tribes like mob justice.
[1] in On Anarchism.
[2] he said it was because the mandatory conciseness when talking live.
Chomsky can be seen on RT every now and then.
Of course, today’s woke equate RT as only propaganda while they consume whatever media they watch without question.
https://rtd.rt.com/shows/conversation-with/chomsky-correa-ta...
RT can be propaganda in intent but I do like that they are at least showing a very different point of view to the majority of mass media. That Chris Hedge gets a weekly program would never happen on most other networks nowadays.
Watch it, take it in but don't take it too seriously. Treat it as stuff to be contemplated in its context.
https://www.arte.tv/en/videos/071470-000-A/propaganda-engine...
Would check this one.
A (related?) four-part video series on this topic is called 'Century of the Self' and might be found out there somewhere
The actual hypothesis Chomsky puts forward in the book is childishly simple, though. He imagines literally every for-profit corporation, the military, and the entire federal government as being one fused united party with identical interests, and so NBCUniversal would never report anything critical of the military or the US government. This, um, doesn't track reality.
While it's easy for me to just dismiss this obviously incorrect hypothesis as 'dumb' (which it is), I think on a deeper level Chomsky is influenced by Marx who was influenced by other 18-19th century philosophers like Hegel. Who used extremely, overly broad handwavey concepts like Elites or The Powerful as part of their totally academic, abstract, philosophical explanation for How Society Works. As someone who read a bunch of Chomsky books when I was 20 years old- part of his worldview is that nothing happens by accident, but every major moment in history is part of a Hegelian Battle Between Forces (like elites vs. the working class or something). It's still a childishly unrealistic way of looking at how society actually functions, but it comes from a super super abstract philosopher's worldview where he can handwave Big Business/the Military/the Government as one unit with identical interests. If that makes sense at all. Sort of reminds me of ancient philosophers theorizing about how physics or medicine works without conducting any empirical tests whatsoever
Is that really his thesis?
It seems to me that it's more about how incentives for all these organizations are aligned towards those same interests. Only the very "top" of the power pyramid needs to be deliberately trying to manufacture consent; everyone else falls into line because of the incentives set up by those one level of power above.
It's a philosopher's 'let's model civilization as a one-page flowchart' level of analysis. I don't think it's particularly deep or interesting, and I read a great deal of Chomsky back in the day
> But in practice, we don't observe that these organizations blindly support 'those at the top'.
That isn't the same thing. I'm not sure how you connect these. This is better illustrated in specific countries, where the incentives are fierce and immediate. You still see dissent there too, but that's not relevant to the point ("I don't see it all the time so it's not true", missing the point).
Zooming out slightly, handwaving everyone who's wealthy or powerful in the US into 'elites' that are sort of one fused organic unit with identical interests is just bad, sloppy thinking, sorry. Wall Street, Silicon Valley, the military, Fortune 500 corporations, Hollywood, New York/DC-media companies, Ivy League universities- they're all 'elites' and they are competing, at times hostile power centers to each other. I don't take any analysis that smushes them into 'elites' or 'the 1%' or whatever seriously. (For example, the 'mass media' that Chomsky handwaves- a more precise description would be New York/DC media moguls- is actively hostile to Silicon Valley these days. Many of these power centers actively compete. His categories are absurdly broad)
There may be in-fighting between the elites, but that does not mean that these groups are not still aligned on most broad topics. Teh same has always been true for democrats VS Republicans. They do care who gets to be in power, and will fight tooth-and-nail for that, but neither will do anything that would hurt the elites in general.
Of course there is in-fighting amongst the elites. But there is no group of elites that is willing to reduce the power of even a different group in favor of 'the masses'. The NY/DC media moguls may want to take SV down a peg, but they wouldn't want to see, say, FB become a worker's co-op, or Jeff Bezos to start paying 90% progressive income tax.
>t's a philosopher's 'let's model civilization as a one-page flowchart' level of analysis.
Irony.
There may very rarely be an article or two that really are going against the grain, but that is to be expected, since there is no claim of hard censorship.
You know a better answer to this question than a 91 year old philosopher, so .. lets hear it.
This is meant constructively: Some of the rhetorical devices you've chosen ("childish", "dumb", etc.) nearly always read to me as coming from someone who hasn't understood the work they are commenting on, so I suspect you might communicate more effectively with different choices.
That's, a bad misreading.
Can you quote relevant sections that support this statement? The laying out of the propaganda model is only about 50 pages in entirely so you shouldn't need walls of text to show some evidence.
Of course there are factions within the most powerful, but there are also universal interests. For example, there are no rich or powerful groups in the US who are pro unionization in tech or pro worker's co-ops (there may be individuals, sure, but you won't find a PAC or lobby group). There are no rich or powerful groups in the US who would accept unilateral nuclear disarmament. There are no rich or powerful groups in the US which consider the US has no legal or moral rights to intervene militarily unilaterally anywhere in the world.
Of course, there are sometimes 'dissident' groups, like the currently surprisingly popular Bernie Sanders movement. If they do get a foothold, some popular opinions may also change. But such moments are a good time to test the hypothesis, and you can easily see how much the media, 'left' or right, is against the Bernie campaign, and considers it naive or pie-in-the-sky.
Overall, going on the empirical path, you'll be really hard-pressed to find any US mainstream media critical of US actions, or often even reporting on relevant events, if they put the US in a bad light.
The concept of "consent" as it's used in Manufacturing Consent does not apply to those movements at all. It means more than "some people agree with x because of information that was presented to them."
The mechanism is exactly the same. If the media didn’t carry the message and others wouldn’t grab in to that, it wouldn’t happen.
Why aren’t social causes not as prevalent in China? Because the media is controlled. Lots of feminists in CN lament that they are not allowed to influence people. And it’s true. The gov will not allow subversion of their power no matter how just a cause is. It will only happen on their terms.
However, I completely disagree with your statements that:
>The mechanism is exactly the same.
>People don’t just wake up and change their minds. These opinions are filtered down to them.
People do in fact change their minds, for various reasons. These mechanisms are not the same because of power. Large institutions in the media that have lots of reach and authority act as gatekeepers to what is or isn't discussed. This idea that movements are propelled from sympathizers who are popular or have authority just misses how movements form and grow to begin with.
Yes they start out small, but they aren't cleared by the media or any figure before they grow. Movements grow with pressure through direct action to a point where the media cannot ignore it anymore. It is a challenge for every movement that exists.
Manufacturing consent isn’t by default bad. Manufacturing convent to built pubic transit, manufacturing consent to have people vaccinated, etc., in the face of other interests is still manufacturing consent.
The mechanism is different though. We didn't just wake up one day and start hearing multiple coherent media voices that vegetarianism is the way forward. We did have precisely that for the Iraq war.
Iraq war-like talk basically is the poorman’s version of ideal propaganda.
"Propaganda" isn't just an attempt to convince somebody of something. Writing a book advancing a viewpoint isn't automatically propaganda.
And because they fundamentally change societies, they rarely have advocates who are "popular" or have "gravitas". If a social movement is a real social movement, then it does more than change what coats people wear to school. (Changing what clothes people wear happens every year. In fact, they made a whole industry out of it changing every year. The fashion industry.)
No, a social movement has the potential to threaten changes to everything, right down to the actual people in power at the top of a society.
If the people in the society generally accept the social movement as collectively beneficial, then the social movement becomes mainstream societal belief, and over time, will integrate into what we would call that society's "culture". If the people in the society generally reject the social movement, that's when you usually have a war.
For instance, republicanism was a social movement in France, but it's proponents could not get enough people to accept it as a good idea. The proponents refused to give up on the idea and it eventually resulted in war and the Reign of Terror. (Which, ironically, eliminated all of the ideas proponents.) France is now on its Fifth Republic at last count. (Not surprisingly, the Fifth Republic is one that had the support of the populace.) Similarly, the communist movement in Czarist Russia. Not enough accepted it. War ensued, which enabled the proponents to force communism on the people. Then the people got rid of it in the 1990s.
There are also movements that are accepted by the populace. Gandhi's radical idea of universal suffrage in India was readily accepted by legions of people on the Sub-Continent, and eventually, the British simply had to leave.
In all of these cases, those in power were staunchly opposed to the social movements in question. Obviously because those movements threatened not only their power, but to change, effectively, everything in society that even enabled their power.
Veganism, Vegetarianism, anti-fur, etc, those kinds of things just don't rise to the level of movements in my mind because they don't threaten to fundamentally change society in that fashion. There is no threat that the people making decisions if we eat veggies, would be different than the people making decisions if we eat meat. The societal structure remains in place in either case.
Those are not "social causes" and they do exist within the same system. Some corporation hires PR firm to redirect consumption away from expensive fur things, because it sells non-fur things and wants to get in on some of those spending money or another corporation that sells processed vegetable-based foods wants you to buy it, instead of meat and so on. There are lots of forces at play that create and support those movements, it's pretty hard to find truly honest social movements and even if some start that way they will be mostly supported by those who share the same enemies. The government itself wants to divide and marginalize people to make it easier to control them.
His attack is what causes we’re driven to consent to.
Elsewhere Chomsky has quipped along the lines of “oh no how horrible if we had world peace” via organic filtering among neighbors.
He’s not challenging that such a process exists. But how the organic process is bent toward disposable consumerism, imperialist conquering, not much different than in the old days of Napoleon and Alexander the Great, even though we call ourselves “civilized”.
And we consent via manufactured apathy. Every option the public may want is explicitly bad, m4a, reducing military spending, higher taxes. Every option the elites want is just the right balance, citizens united, lower taxes, binding arbitration, etc etc
Mass media is about the industrialised manifestation of these entities, in an effort to create 'godhead', or "everyone knows _ about _" conditions.
"Everyone knows that the _'s did it", is pretty much the epitome of such a substance.
Mass, collective 'reality' is basically a function of the things we can get as many people to agree to, as possible.
Alas, our individual instincts are not always aligned with the truth, nor the righteous, nor the just. Often-times our individual personalities, as functional components, mixed in certain ways into egregor, become vile creatures, nearly unstoppable power. This is why we do it.
There is no such thing as "America". This is a device invented, manifested, and maintained by an entity so large it seems undefeatable to an individual.
These powers are manufacturable. We can fabricate collective reality. What we can't do too well, is allow our collective minds to become too self-aware. This seems to collapse it in on itself.
Thus, a measure of ones prowess might be, how many lies can you get others to believe, and then: how many can you get them to repeat, in order that it eventually becomes a 'truth'?
However, if everyone is talking about Haskell and you come in and try to shift the conversation to "programming languages that use functions" you are likely not adding anything of interest to the conversation.
Similarly, "Manufacturing Consent" posited a set of specific filters and measured column inches as evidence for the existence of that set of filters. While you are certainly correct that all forms of human social interaction involve filtering information in order for people to have ideas and follow causes in the first place, it's a broad truism that sheds little light on the topic the book discusses.
As someone who leans left I notice this strongly with all those "left wing" causes. They will choose a variation of that to carry that is least likely to be informing and most likely to exaggerate conflict. For example, they will put the anger and tears of Greta Thunberg and voices like hers front and center again and again, while ignoring the literally thousands of climate experts who could come and explain the facts in a sober and non-polarizing way. This is no accident, it is by design, because it gets more viewers.
The end result of this is that media makes it easy to misinform and lie, hard to inform and tell the truth. This makes it easy for "the powers that be" to push a false narrative to get what they want. All they have to do is set up a conflict and the media laps it up.
This recent Kurds vs Turkey is an example of this.
The left usually hates war. Why? If you break down to the lowest level, it looks like the current left is mainly dominated by the maternal instinct. In every issue they divide the world into child vs predator. And they always come down on the side protecting the weak child.
You can see this across a number of social, economic and geo poilitical issues.
In terms of war, they look at it as America's selfish predatory instincts preying upon innocent parties in the middle east leading to countless lives lost of the weak.
So how do you get people who think like this to support war?
Simple. Invent a weak, childlike ally in the middle of the war zone, who are being attacked by a notorious hateful predator, and we would be abandoning them if we dont put our troops in harms way.
So, you rebrand the american troop presence as honorable protection rather than predatory intervention. Thats all it takes to manufacture consent.
Do you mean the politicians or the public? If you mean politicians, I haven't seen much evidence that Democrat (center/leftish) politicians hate war in the last few decades. Wilson was president during WWI, FDR during WWII, LBJ during Vietnam, Bill Clinton had Bosnia and Hillary Clinton voted for Iraq. Obama presided over quite a few conflicts. Maybe Jimmy Carter?
>the current left is mainly dominated by the maternal instinct
What are you basing this on?
>Simple. Invent a weak, childlike ally in the middle of the war zone, who are being attacked by a notorious hateful predator, and we would be abandoning them if we dont put our troops in harms way.
Typically war has been based on pushing a fear of "ism." Anarchism in the early 1900s, Communism middle 1900s, Terrorism in the 2000s.
It should be fairly obvious if you look at any issue the left focuses on. Blacks vs Whites. Rich vs Poor. Women vs Men.
The double standards of how they talk about christianity vs islam. Israel vs palestine.
Literally every issue. Divides the world into weak vs strong, blames the strong for the situation of the weak regardless of causal chain.
For more practical evidence, the only march which gained traction was the women's march. They tried it with latinos, science etc.
The biggest issue which has resonated against Trump is the children in cages. Why do you think that is?
Or is your problem only with the causal chain? Which leftist cause that condemns an abuse of power has incorrectly assumed a causal link?
I would say the biggest issue that has stuck against Trump is by a wide margin the alleged Russian collusion, but are you trying to say that people - nevermind leftists - _shouldn't_ be collectively upset about children being separated from their parents and kept in cages?
https://www.kurdistan24.net/en/news/13cf816e-8e40-41c8-bb76-...
I think this is a case where the establishment/media and the left actually agree. We shouldn't abandon allies. Additionally, Rojava is running a libertarian socialist society, which leftists obviously like. Finally, 60 or so troops is all that's needed to stop Turkey, and I wouldn't really call 60 troops "predatory intervention".
I don't think the left's opinion here is manufactured consent.
The way it is working out now is the best anyone, Americans at least, could hope for. Let the regional powers that have actual national interest sort it out.
If ISIS comes back, the US can come back if needed.
As a vet, with a son who was an Army Ranger and a daughter who is an Army aviator, 60 troops sounds like too many to me.
Also, I think CNN is screaming sympathy for the Kurds right now partly because they really hate Trump.
At least politically that is not true. There is a anti-war left, but politically its long gone.
However you overall point that 'we can't leave otherwise genocide' or 'if we don't act genocide' has been part of the narrative for every war.
Remember Bengazi? Apparently Gadaffi was gone go in an slaughter 50000 people. That was of course total nonsense but it convinced the government to act.
Maybe there is something to be said about how people think Liberal means leftie.
The reality is both right and the left have a strong anti-war movment and neither has political power.
I also don't think it'd be inconsistent to oppose going into various wars in the Middle East, while also opposing recklessly withdrawing once we'd stuck our noses in already.
The New York Times was recently criticizing Trump on the basis of him having reduced US influence due to his recent actions. I was a bit confused by that claim, as I wasn't sure what we needed the influence for. The previous stated goal was "defeating ISIS", which largely already happened. I have no real idea what the current goal was supposed to be.
>But as Patrick Cockburn pointed out in the Independent, what is happening in Afrin is about the same.
> AM: Happening where, sorry?
> NC: Afrin. Turkish forces and their allies are carrying out the attack in a mostly Kurdish area. Patrick Cockburn has covered it, but almost nobody else.
Doing some research on it, the articles I read in the Washington Post (https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2019/10/11/who-are-kurd...) said that the Turkish offensive was "days old" while the Independent article Chomsky references (https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/syria-afrin-crisis-turk...) attributes a death toll of 220 to Turkey in March 2018.
I first heard about Chompsky at the Uni when doing semester on compilers.
This stuff is referenced in textbooks on compilers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chomsky_hierarchy
Maybe there should be a generalist Nobel Prize for people who contribute across many different fields.
It was a stupid decision but it’s been a long time and the references are getting tired.
The Nobel committee doesn't want to "shake the floor too much" (i.e., wants to avoid controversy with the American/European elites on key topics).
Questioning the legitimacy of power by proxy is dangerous when protecting reputation.
This year, in another category, you have three winners who have "contributed" to the systematic analysis of poverty and solutions towards alleviating poverty. Glad they have their 1.5 million/3 each. I wonder what the truly impoverished would think about that.
`Panem et circenses` for the elite, that's all this is. Revolution is coming, don't doubt it for a second.
Has anyone told the current US leadership that we were terrorists to our own set of oppressors, back in the day?
Sorry, but this topic upsets me because no one seems to realize what all of these subtle actions really mean in the aggregate. Maybe I'm just a kook.
Back during the invasion of Afghanistan, there was a photo of a soldier holding up a poster. The poster read, "We are at war. America is at the mall."
Murdering browns and yellows abroad while being laser-focused on status and self-stimulation at home has been the American Way for the entire post-war period.
Today's google news recommendations:
- delete these android adware apps hiding on your phone - a british family on vacation accidentally drove into the US - cardi b stuns in louis vuitton bikini picture - salma hayek, 53, shares revealing acupuncture photo - 'wheel of fortune' contestant's crack about 'loveless marriage'
Obama was likely thinking the same but it's not diplomatic to reveal it.
Workers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains.
Here's an example from an article posted yesterday. While one might not agree with the article's main premise regarding climate change not being real or anthropogenic (I, for one, don't), the mechanism described here is all too common across many areas of science, economics, politics, public policy, etc:
"(...) many of the world’s major national academies of science (such as the Royal Society in the U.K., the National Academy of Sciences in the U.S.A and the Australian Academy of Science) persuaded themselves to issue reports giving support to the conclusions of the IPCC. The reports were touted as national assessments that were supposedly independent of the IPCC and of each other, but of necessity were compiled with the assistance of, and in some cases at the behest of, many of the scientists involved in the IPCC international machinations.(...)"
That's how one can find and quote N "independent" studies and organizations approving something or verifying another, when, looking carefully there's a single, well funded, or politically well supported, central origin behind all of their "findings", and their "independent verification" is basically a high level re-telling of what was giving to them (with nobody bothering to run the numbers).
(edit: Assange, not Snowden)
As for Julian Assange, the hearings with the two alleged rape victims DO NOT describe rape. It describes an asshole having sex with star struck women.
They do by the Swedish law.
> with star struck women.
So justice to you means blame the alleged victim?
I still prefer the Swedish way, the tribunals, the judges, and all the ceremony of a real justice system to your tribal "white men are always right" rite.
If there are procedural violations it does not have any bearing on whether TPB broke the law or not. It only means that TPB owners can revert that particular decision if they are right.
Assange - yeah, I'm amazed how people can still revere him. His personality aside, his blocking of information related to Russia or China to be published on Wikileaks is atrocious and pretty telling.
But again, that's beside the point. It's kind of weird to me, this whole "sturstruck" angle. When that happened he was no way near a celebrity. Also, why do you have to whitewash it like that? The "it's not rape, he's just an asshole" defense sounds pretty whitewashy to me.
[0] The Assange case has the veneer of legality. The Swedish law against statutory rape is actually very strict, stricter than what you might believe. It's just about everything else in the whole sordid affair which is horrible.
[1] Yes, Sweden has a constitution, not as neatly cut and well defined as the US one, but it exists. The point is ministers must not push their departments around, but let them follow the law on their own. It's even got it's own name "minister rule". ("Ministerstyre".)
As opposed to which model? The highly successful communist alternative?
Marx is socialist, socialism is not (only) Marxist.
You can be socialist without being Marxist.
So "There are non-neoliberal economic ideologies that aren't Marxian." it's not technically true.
Okay, understood.
> So "There are non-neoliberal economic ideologies that aren't Marxian." it's not technically true.
These two things just don't even remotely follow. Socialism isn't Marxism, therefore there have only ever existed Neoliberal and Marxian economic systems?
What do you think Neoliberalism is?
Furthermore, do you believe the United States was Neoliberal in, say, 1963?
One thing worth noting is that fascism (and neo-fascist/nazi groups) was anti capitalist, but not (of course) marxist-socialist.
They have some common ideas, the nationalization of the means of production for example, but it ends there, they aren't against social classes, they aren't against private property, they are simply against free market.
If for Marx communism was the goal, for fascists the goal is complete autarchy.
I would add neo-fascism to the list of anti capitalist movements, even though I sincerely hope they'll disappear ASAP.
I don't know what to tell you, but the Keynesianism the US applied before 1973 is fundamentally different from what followed in Reaganomics--i.e., Neoliberalism.
I don't think you have a strong grasp on what the word means.
It is true, but I think it was more about war reconstruction and applied automation that drove the public spending up.
Governments had to deal with the consequences of the war and made everything possible to give people a job, a purpose, to let the war behind.
The crisis of 1973 revealed the truth: that kind of growth is not sustainable, especially if it's global (in Italy we call that period "Italian economic miracle", it was more "spending the Marshall's plan money without thinking of the consequences on the future").
But without doubts it was different from Reaganomics, if I'm not wrong it was even possible to approve in the 60s a public healthcare system (kind of) in USA named Medicare. Of course the conservative attacked the idea and Reagan in particular was very vocal about invasion of the freedom and all the usual things they say.
But, if Reagan's idea of economy won is not because Reagan was particularly good, but because lobbies invested an enormous amount of money on propaganda and people in the 70s had good jobs, a powerful enemy to fight, baby boomers had lived 30 years of peace, fought no war and didn't think enough of the consequences of leaving the poorest behind.
They had been educated to believe that if you put enough effort in something, you will succeed.
If you don't succeed, it's because you haven't worked hard enough.
In places like Europe, were being socialist was not seen as a crime, public debate never ceased to address the fundamental differences between a free market economy (even with Keynesian bits) and a more equal society based on the idea that everyone deserves the same level of services from the state and the same protection, regardless of the single economic power.
So in a way USA before 1973 was more similar to what we call socialism, but not for the same (correct?) reason.
It was the best way they had found to sustain growth and fight unemployment and consequently discontent, but they did'nt really believe in a more equal society, that is the base for the economic ideas of socialism.
But they would be wrong, it's the other way around.
> and Xi Jinping would tell you that the PRC is socialist (with Chinese characteristics!),
It is, economically speaking, at least until it entered the WTO it was 100% a socialist country.
You're conflating politics and economics, China is a socialist country, Sweden is mostly a socialist country, Italy is mostly a socialist country, the state has a lot of economic power in these countries.
It is simply true.
What the U.S. take wrong (among many other things) is that it is not bad for the citizens. I live in Italy and would never change it for Silicon Valley. I don't want to live where homeless are homeless because the staste cares more about selling more guns, so that another mass shooting in a school can happen, than helping poor people.
How, then, would there have been an economic system which fits neither Neoliberal nor Communist models? It's super simple: there are more than two competing systems.
Probably something that doesn't blow up every 5-7 years or pushes us into a climate apocalypse.
"Climate apocalypse" is a function of capitalism/"neoliberal economics" only insofar that this system provides things that make living nice and comfortable - like smart-phones, air-conditioning on hot days, heating in the winter, affordable air travel, meat, washing machines, etc - and there is no way to provide those things to 7 billion people without major impact on the environment. You can choose a system that makes everybody poor and consequently environmentally friendly - but do you really want to?
Where is it evident that protectionism would sustainably help and not reduce aggregate demand or in fact not lower employment? And how would one prevent even more entrenched oligopolies?
Australia is an example of a protectionist capitalist society: in fact, its first federal government was formed by a party called the Protectionist Party, with the support of the union-based Labor Party.[0] Unions are relatively strong there, compared to the rest of the world, and Australia's immigration policy is pretty tight, which protects workers there from foreign competition. Consequently, workers have some of the highest (minimum) wages in the world, and enjoy relatively excellent working conditions. The economy has also been doing well since the 1990s, despite the GFC and everything.
The EU is probably another example: strong labour laws with stringent labour market tests and excellent working conditions, as well as stringent requirements on a wide range of commodities that has to be satisfied by imports.
Please define what you mean by "protectionist".
In what sense are unions not protectionist? Their sole function is to protect the labour market. I'd view unions in Australia as really protectionist: they've managed to secure very high minimum wages, as well as highly restrictive immigration policies that Trump praised to high heaven.[0]
>Also the protectionist government you are referring to the cabinet which was active until 1903
Their immigration policy[1] lasted for decades, before being replaced by the current immigration policy. The Protectionist Party[2] hung around until 1909, when they merged into the Commonwealth Liberal Party. This party was a predecessor of the current Liberal Party:
Protectionist + Anti-Socialist -> Commonwealth Liberal
Commonwealth Liberal + National Labor -> Nationalist
Nationalist + dissident Labor + Australian -> United Australian -> Liberal
So there is still protectionism hanging around in both major political parties today.
>the productivity growth in the 1990s was followed by Labour winning majority in the parliament. What am I missing?
It's spelled Labor, because modern spelling.[3] And Labor was in power from 1983 to 1996 (Hawke[4], then Keating[5]), so that productivity growth in the 1990s... probably Labor's fault? Lol. I think the proliferation of personal computers may have had more to do with it.
[0] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-06-27/donald-trump-tweets-s..., https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/mar/01/donald-trump...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Australia_policy
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protectionist_Party
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Labor_Party
The function of unions is decidedly NOT to “protect the labour market”, but to provide organised market power to a group of labourers. A union fulfils its function even if it secures jobs for its members at the cost of say workers of another trade or those who are not unionised. Hence a union can satisfy its members but reduce the overall employment.
Also, I don’t understand. At first you claim that the 90s boom was due to protectionist policies. Now you claim that it’s because of personal computers. Which one is it then?
I'm not sure which part of the Australian politics I've described doesn't fit your definition of what protectionism is.
I've certainly gone into great length about restrictive immigration policies: in fact, one of the first pieces of legislation of the Barton government was the 1901 Immigration Restriction Act,[0] the passage of which was a condition of Labor's guarantee of confidence and supply for the minority Protectionist government.
The 1901 election itself[1] was straight from the textbooks: Protectionist vs. Free Trade vs. Labor. Protectionism (Protectionists and Labor) won that election, both in terms of seats and popular vote. You couldn't get a more literal election than that.
As for tariffs and selective subsidies, Australia has that too.[2][3][4]
>The function of unions is decidedly NOT to “protect the labour market”, but to provide organised market power to a group of labourers. A union fulfils its function even if it secures jobs for its members at the cost of say workers of another trade or those who are not unionised. Hence a union can satisfy its members but reduce the overall employment.
You're presuming a fragmented union ecosystem, which isn't quite the reality in Australia. The Labor party was founded as the political arm of the unions; this shows a high enough degree of co-ordination amongst the unions at the very least.
And once you have a party in parliament, you get the power to influence policy-making in such a way as to protect the labour market. A single union may only be able to protect its own members, but a well-coordinated group of unions is well-positioned to protect the entire labour market itself. Labor did that in spades in the early days of federation, and still does to this day.
>At first you claim that the 90s boom was due to protectionist policies. Now you claim that it’s because of personal computers. Which one is it then?
I did not. You wrote:
>>yet the productivity growth in the 1990s was followed by Labour winning majority in the parliament. What am I missing?
I pointed out that you missed the fact that Labor was in power from 1983 to 1996.
I then made the facetious statement that perhaps it was Labor's fault that the 90s boom happened: this was a joke because, clearly, nobody blames a party for a good economy.
I then went on to suggest that the productivity growth may perhaps be more reasonably attributed to the proliferation of PCs, and the attendant automation. There are other plausible factors for the boom: the economic rise of China must surely have been one.
In any case, it's simply not true that the 90s boom was due to protectionist policies. Labor during the Hawke-Keating years was uncharacteristically enthusiastic about reforms, and I think the success of their policies may have inspired the Third Way of Blairite Labour.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Restriction_Act_19...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1901_Australian_federal_electi...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_tariffs_in_Australi...
A small community of people could come up with the greatest governmental system we could ever dream of, but if the leaders of the current system believe it to be a threat they could wipe out its adherents before it is ever properly understood by the wider population. Or spread misinformation about it to dissuade people from finding out more about it for themselves.
I have absolutely zero faith in the average HN user to understand, but why should I explicitly appease their ignorance? The downside is people like you, who obviously realise that it could be irony, might imagine the avg HNer would legit say it.
Any widespread movement or social institution exists under the pressure of new facts, new social norms, hence any social institution is a flexible moving target.
Only the heterodox, marginal movements can adhere to a rigid ideology. Mainstream science can't have one, only marginal branches can.
Modern economics is not a "neoliberal" plot, of course, there is a strong scientific discussion, various competing theories within it, which are constantly being validated using statistics, and omitted, if proved wrong. Economics today, 25 years ago and 50 years ago vastly differs even in methodology, it's a very vigorous field.
To say that this edifice is grounded in some ideology, one needs to omit all that constant scientific discussion, render empirically proved parts as ideological, axioms as "truths" etc.
This kind of intellectual dishonesty could come only from a ideology-loaded follower of some heterodox (and usually pseudoscientific) theory, most likely grounded in some ideology (guessing from value judgments of op like "neoliberal" -- left one) rather than verified by empiric data.
Of-course most people do not read economics papers.
This is like native speakers of a language (say, English) asserting that only non-native speakers of their language have accents. You do, you just speak with an accent that's considered to be standard.
>This kind of intellectual dishonesty could come only from a ideology-loaded follower of some heterodox (and usually pseudoscientific) theory, most likely grounded in some ideology (guessing from value judgments of op like "neoliberal" -- left one) rather than verified by empiric data.
And mainstream (i.e. neoclassical) economics[0] does that, even in the face of mathematical reality, let alone empirical data.[1] The ignorance of the implications of the SMD theorem,[2] because it implies that the aggregation problem remains unsolved and the fundamental breakdown of the "law" of demand, was a profoundly anti-intellectual move.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoclassical_economics
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21269064
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonnenschein%E2%80%93Mantel%E2...
You are confusing different things together. Mainstream exists in a form it is not because Mainstream translates the Truth™, but because there are no better theories yet.
Newton's mechanics is worse than Einstein theory in describing celestial bodies' movements, yet the former was better than anything until the latter appeared.
I have a lot to argue against neoclassical economy, especially about its view of a person as a profit-driven (rational, as they call it) degenerate, or fondness of regressions in the mid of chaos.
Yet it changes in the right direction, behavioral economics appeared, regressions are taken with a grain of salt now, rational choice is heavily criticized.
The problem is that no heterodox theory provides both an axiomatic basis and empirical framework to compete mainstream economic science. What would you propose instead of Neoclassical economics? Nothing?
It's not ignorance to accept theory that is not always true, it's stupidity to omit theory without having anything better, as Lakatos would say.
As for ideology, I don't see such a thing. People in mainstream science vary from Joseph "We all need to follow Venezuela example" Stiglitz to post Austrians like William White.
Where have I heard that before? Oh yeah, the string wars in theoretical physics.
>Newton's mechanics is worse than Einstein theory in describing celestial bodies' movements, yet the former was better than anything until the latter appeared.
In its early days, the Copernican model was no better than the mainstream Ptolemaic model at describing the motion of celestial bodies:
For his contemporaries, the ideas presented by Copernicus were not markedly easier to use than the geocentric theory and did not produce more accurate predictions of planetary positions. Copernicus was aware of this and could not present any observational "proof", relying instead on arguments about what would be a more complete and elegant system.[0]
>I have a lot to argue against neoclassical economy, especially about its view of a person as a profit-driven (rational, as they call it) degenerate
I think you're confusing a person with a firm. A person has rational preferences[1] -- another unrealistic assumption -- while a firm seeks to maximise profits.
>The problem is that no heterodox theory provides both an axiomatic basis and empirical framework to compete mainstream economic science.
The idea that an axiomatic basis is necessary for a good theory is classic physics envy[2], and ignores the fact that even physics itself does not have an axiomatic basis, because that is Hilbert's sixth problem, which remains open.[3]
I don't know why this phenomenon is called "physics" envy anyway: it seems like you want economics to follow the model of Euclidean geometry, hence "mathematics" envy, which is even more absurd.
I get that mainstream economics has become more diverse, but neoclassical economics, which I believe is still the dominant school, is based on postulates that are simply unsupported by empirical -- and even mathematical -- evidence.
>What would you propose instead of Neoclassical economics? Nothing?
A critical synthesis of everything that isn't marginalism? An empirical search for a new framework with postulates backed by evidence?
And perhaps economists should learn more mathematics and have the courage to invent their own tools. After all, if you want to carry on with your physics envy, you should know that Feynman invented his own integral[4], which mathematicians derided for a long time for its lack of rigour... until its power became clear, at which point the functional analysts got down to work to extract the deep mathematics underlying Feynman's formalism.[5]
>It's not ignorance to accept theory that is not always true
This is an acceptance of Friedman's discredited positivism.
>it's stupidity to omit theory without having anything better
We have, and had, better: marginalism (aka neoclassical economics) was heavily criticised even during the 20th century. It's stupidity to cling to a theory when there are better ones.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copernican_heliocentrism#Early...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preference_(economics)#Applica...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physics_envy
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert%27s_sixth_problem#Stat...
Man, if you want to hear about anti-intellectualism and bias, go and look at the SMD theorem. Economists will continue to assume that Macroeconomic demand curves will continue to slope downward.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/19991009000912/http://lheawww.gs...
I would agree.
> Just because a model is simple doesn't mean that it is bad or worse than a model with more complex assumptions.
I'm not condemning it being simple. If we were just talking about small or exceptional exclusions to the rules like Giffen or Veblen goods, then I wouldn't have made the above post. We're talking about fundamentally incorrect building blocks that aren't even acknowledged in the literature.
It's a joke to remind us of a sobering fact: that unreal assumptions lead to unreal results.
>Just because a model is simple doesn't mean that it is bad or worse than a model with more complex assumptions.
But if a model with more complex assumptions is a better approximation to reality than a model with simpler assumptions, would you not adopt the former?
What has happened in economics is that people have clung on to, say, Newtonian mechanics, instead of embracing Einstein's relativity.
Even this does not quite adequately express the enormity of the inertia that you see in economics, because at least Newtonian mechanics is right most of the time, whereas neoclassical economics is wrong most of the time. The SMD theorem guarantees, for example, that most market demand curves will NEVER satisfy the fundamental neoclassical "law" of demand.
Let me also point out that your comment is rehashing Friedman's positivism.[0] Even in quantum mechanics, which has for decades been dominated by the positivism of the Copenhagen interpretation, people are now transcending that positivism because they've come to the realisation that quantum mechanics can't be advanced without overcoming the crutch of positivism. And Friedman's assertions about assumptions are unsound anyway.[1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essays_in_Positive_Economics
[1] For a critique of Friedman's argument about assumptions in models, see https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-6435....
Not necessarily. Maybe the simpler model is enough to understand what is going on. Maybe a more complex model suffers from over-fitting and performs worse than the simpler model. It really depends.
> The SMD theorem guarantees, for example, that most market demand curves will NEVER satisfy the fundamental neoclassical "law" of demand.
Does it really say that? Or simply that weird market demand curves are possible in a few exceptional situations?
If only physics departments everywhere would adopt this philosophy! Physics undergrads would then be liberated from the yoke of Einstein's relativity, let alone the tyranny of the mind-blowing quantum field theory with its insufferably complicated Feynman diagrams.
It does not depend. The simpler model in economics is fatally flawed, and is the one suffering from over-fitting (to a straight line, no less) and contributing to the bad reputation of economics as a "dismal science".
>> The SMD theorem guarantees, for example, that most market demand curves will NEVER satisfy the fundamental neoclassical "law" of demand.
>Does it really say that? Or simply that weird market demand curves are possible in a few exceptional situations?
Yes, it does.[0] The exceptional situations are precisely those that neoclassical economics assumes are the norm, namely, that there is only one agent and one commodity in the market.[1]
As soon as you have more than one agent/consumer in an economy, the mathematics will undermine the "law" of demand, because the inter-agent interactions would generate non-linear terms in the market demand function.
And once you have terms of higher order, the demand curve generated by that function will have sections that slope upwards, exactly what is being forbidden by the "law" of demand.
And we haven't yet taken into account the very real fact that multiple consumers cannot possibly have the same preferences. Or that these preferences can change with different levels of income.[2]
In short, neoclassical microeconomics only works in a communist economy of identical clones with identical preferences and incomes.
Oh, the irony.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonnenschein%E2%80%93Mantel%E2...
Let's take electrical engineering as an example. If you model an electrical circuit, you assume that there simply is a voltage source where electricity comes from. That assumption is of course complete nonsense: In reality, electrical energy is not just there, it has to be generated somewhere, for example in a power plant. The electricity also flows through a grid that is shared with many other consumers.
So, according to your requirement to always use the more realistic model, electrical engineers should always model a whole power plant and an entire power grid in each circuit, because otherwise their model would be bullshit.
> Yes, it does.[0]
Do you know of any empirical studies that show that the models currently used in macroeconomics actually cause problems with real data?
I'd usually say you're shifting the goal posts, perhaps muse about how dehumanising and simplistic it is to think of humans as components in an electrical circuit, and move on. Then I thought that it'd be more illuminating to address your analogy, because your reasoning suffers from the same problem that I've been talking about.
>If you model an electrical circuit, you assume that there simply is a voltage source where electricity comes from. That assumption is of course complete nonsense: In reality, electrical energy is not just there, it has to be generated somewhere, for example in a power plant. The electricity also flows through a grid that is shared with many other consumers.
I think it might help to read Musgrave's paper[0] (the abstract will do if you can't get the paper itself) on the three kinds of unrealistic assumptions, in which he attacked Friedman's twist. The assumption you pointed out is the most benign type: a negligibility assumption. It's like assuming that a object falling through air experiences no friction: complete nonsense, but air friction exerts only a negligible effect on most falling objects, unless the object is, say, a feather.
In the case of your example, taking into account the power plant adds nothing to the analysis, because the electrical circuit you're concerned with usually doesn't output electricity. Usually. But in the 21st century, that can change...
>So, according to your requirement to always use the more realistic model, electrical engineers should always model a whole power plant and an entire power grid in each circuit, because otherwise their model would be bullshit.
Firstly, I did not say the more realistic model should "always" be used. The situation in economics is more like the more realistic model is ignored in favour of the incorrect unrealistic model, even when the more realistic model is appropriate. The analogy with Newtonian/Einsteinian mechanics is quite shaky here, since as I've said, Newtonian mechanics is vastly more accurate than neoclassical microeconomics.
To take another example from engineering and continue the theme of relativity, error corrections required for GPS depend on an understanding of relativity.[1] If, as you've previously suggested, the simpler and more easily understandable model should be preferred, then we would not have GPS and allied technologies today.
Secondly, in the 21st century when we have renewable energy, electrical engineers are now required to take into account a power grid, because consumers are now also power plants if they have solar power, for example, and want to feed the excess power generated into the power grid.
The point is this: if the circuit you're modelling is a passive one that doesn't generate electricity, sure, make use of the unrealistic assumption that there's an unknown voltage source. However, if your circuit is also a voltage source, that assumption is then false, and you need to update your model.
The same should apply in economics. Unfortunately, it turns out that markets and economies are far more complex systems than power grids: as soon as you have more than one agent (e.g. humans, corporate entities, HFT algorithms, etc.), the simplistic analysis derived from marginal utility theory fails. So, outside of the laboratory perhaps, the models used in neoclassical microeconomics are probably almost never appropriate for the problems they're treating.
>> Yes, it does.[2]
>Do you know of any empirical studies that show that the models currently used in macroeconomics actually cause problems with real data?
This is a really garbled question. Firstly, nowhere did I assert that economic models "cause problems with real data". I really don't understand this assertion and would welcome any clarifications.
Secondly, I think you misunderstand the point of my argument about the SMD theorem. The point is that, as soon as you have more than one agent/consumer (human, firm, algorithm, what-have-you), they will interact in a non-linear way, giving rise to a nonlinear market demand function that gives a "weird" market demand curve.
This has nothing to do with any effect that the belief in a certain economic model would have on the economic behaviour of an agent. That is an entirely separate question altogether.
Back to your question about whether "weird market demand curves are possible" only "in a few exceptional situations". The SMD theorem basically says no: in all but the most exceptional cases, multiple market equilibrium points can exist.
The implication is that the aggregation problem[3] is not solved by the neoclassical assertion that the market demand curve for a well-defined commodity has the same pleasant mathematical properties -- in particular, that it is monotonically decreasing ("downward-sloping"), i.e. obeys the "law" of demand -- as the demand curve for that commodity of a rational agent.
And the reason why the aggregation problem isn't solved is because, as soon as you have more than one agent or commodity (like in most IRL markets), you get a complex system. And when you have a complex system, you can't draw line diagrams like you do in the textbooks. You need to do modelling and numerical analysis. There's a field called complexity economics[4] that's only beginning to do that, some 40 years after the SMD theorem appeared. Better late than never, but it's still a lot later than the other less "dismal" sciences, which have come to realised that they're dealing with complex systems and have updated their thinking accordingly.
[0] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-6435....
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Error_analysis_for_the_Global_...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonnenschein%E2%80%93Mantel%E2...
The D in SMD was actually awarded the nobel prize in economics.
Debreu's work on general equilibrium, which was the basis of the award, had to skirt around the SMD theorem:
>Prize motivation: "for having incorporated new analytical methods into economic theory and for his rigorous reformulation of the theory of general equilibrium."[0]
In order for the Arrow-Debreu model[1] to give a unique equilibrium, which is usually desired, some strong (arguably, unrealistic) conditions must be assumed, otherwise there can be multiple equilibria, as guaranteed by the SMD theorem.[2]
In particular, the SMD theorem asserts that any polynomial function can be a market demand function, which fundamentally breaks the so-called "law" of demand in neoclassical economics. This is because most polynomial functions are not monotonically decreasing[3], as required by the "law" of demand, but give rise to demand curves that can curve up or down arbitrarily. As an example of such a function, just think of the curve generated by a generic cubic polynomial.[4]
This "anything goes" situation then leads to non-unique equilibria, since a supply curve can now intersect the market demand curve at more than one point. But since an equilibrium point is supposed to be where welfare is maximised in a society, the existence of non-unique equilibria means that there can be multiple economic arrangements under which social welfare is maximised. Then it's a matter of taste (i.e. "ideology") to decide which equilibrium point a society wants to be in.
[0] https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1983/deb...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%E2%80%93Debreu_model
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonnenschein%E2%80%93Mantel%E2...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotonic_function
[4] A graph of such a curve is shown here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Monotonicity_example3.png
Watch out for moving the goalposts. He was awarded the nobel prize after all. "Rigorous reformulation" does not sound like skirting at all.
> This "anything goes" situation then leads to non-unique equilibria, since a supply curve can now intersect the market demand curve at more than one point. But since an equilibrium point is supposed to be where welfare is maximised in a society, the existence of non-unique equilibria means that there can be multiple economic arrangements under which social welfare is maximised.
Economy (or climate or orbits) exhibit chatoic and complex behaviour and it is not surprising that they can have multiple stable points (look up bifurcation diagrams for a simple representation of chatoic solutions). If I am not mistaken, one can hear such things routinely in university economy classrooms today especially when giving caveats about models being wrong in general. Even when you include game theory and Nash equilibria with respect to economic solutions, there might not be efficient ways to reach the equilibrium points at all!
> Then it's a matter of taste (i.e. "ideology") to decide which equilibrium point a society wants to be in.
That is to assume that every equilibrium solution you get is tied to a specific policy or a set of them (or even more, an ideology!) or that points can be reached easily which are very strong assumptions. Maybe some ideologies don't exhibit any reachable equilibrium points or pertain only to unstable ones.
Says the one who's been moving the goalposts in the first place. The point of this thread was about whether or not the Nobel prize in economics was anti-intellectual and ideologically biased. You chimed in with:
>>>The D in SMD was actually awarded the nobel prize in economics.
Which is why I responded, because this was a non-sequitur and an appeal to authority (of the people awarding the prize, and the question was whether or not these people were biased).
>He was awarded the nobel prize after all.
That means nothing in the context of this thread, and is another appeal to authority.
>"Rigorous reformulation" does not sound like skirting at all.
The SMD theorem was a big deal, yet Debreu wasn't awarded the prize for that, but for a rigorous reformulation of Walrasian equilibrium,[0] which has very strong assumptions.
In particular, that rigorous reformulation, known as the Arrow-Debreu model,[1] fails under weaker (i.e. more realistic) assumptions, because of the SMD theorem.
This is skirting the issue.
>Economy (or climate or orbits) exhibit chatoic and complex behaviour and it is not surprising that they can have multiple stable points (look up bifurcation diagrams for a simple representation of chatoic solutions). If I am not mistaken, one can hear such things routinely in university economy classrooms today especially when giving caveats about models being wrong in general. Even when you include game theory and Nash equilibria with respect to economic solutions, there might not be efficient ways to reach the equilibrium points at all!
A few points:
- It's nice and all that caveats are being given, but what tools are being taught to economics undergrads to handle chaotic and complex behaviour? Please supply links to some university course syllabus as evidence (I'm happy to read material in a language other than English).
- If economics students aren't being taught tools to handle chaotic and complex behaviour, then giving caveats is just paying lip service.
- Game theory and Nash equilibria are tools to deal with equilibria, which is what neoclassical economics is comfortable with. To be more realistic, you need to look at what happens in disequilibria, as you've pointed out yourself.
- Chaos theory also showed that equilibria may never be attained at all by a system, so the obsession with equilibria in economics is, at best, unproductive.
>That is to assume that every equilibrium solution you get is tied to a specific policy or a set of them (or even more, an ideology!) or that points can be reached easily which are very strong assumptions. Maybe some ideologies don't exhibit any reachable equilibrium points or pertain only to unstable ones.
Agreed. Unfortunately, neoclassical economics, thanks to its underlying ideology, assumes that equilibrium points can be reached by the "free market" and are desirable.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competitive_equilibrium
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%E2%80%93Debreu_model
I think this statement is quite representative of the world we live in, don't you? My personal experience is, strongest adherents to an ideology are the least productive people .
> If there was no chemistry prize and Dow Chemical or Bayer stepped in to create one, it wouldn't be anywhere as respected as the actual Chemistry Nobel, would it?
The Nobel Prize was created by the owner of a Swedish chemical and weapons company. I don't see what's so great about it.
And as for the Swedish Central Bank, I think Paul Krugman hit the nail on the head: Oh, and cue the usual complaints that this isn’t a “real” Nobel. Hey, this is just a prize given by a bunch of Swedes, as opposed to the other prizes, which are given out by, um, bunches of Swedes.
Which is very unfortunate, because like medicine, the practice of economics has the power to influence decisions and affect lives.
So will the Economics Nobel be legitimate when it turns 100 then?
The official Nobel site lists the Economics prize:
* https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/
What other authority on the matter is there than the actual organization itself?
Edit: Brain having a moment off - s/Swiss/Swedish/
The very idea of it is anti-intellectual? That's absurd. There's nothing magical about awarding prizes to scientists that prevents it from being done with a motivation. The committee famously cancelled the prize for a year to avoid awarding it to Einstein, since he was a Jew with radical political beliefs.
I like Chomsky because he's such an antagonist (we need them) but I think he also misrepresents a lot of information.
And the claim that it 'legitimize a neoliberal economic ideology' is baseless nonsense if you actually look at who got the prices.
Chomsky doesn't get a nobel price in economics because nonthing he has done is close to worthy of that price. Whatever some Hacker News comment thinks.
This is something that would be quite hilarious to see from an actual scientist about a topic that is supposedly their field of expertise but it's very much something you'd expect from somebody who is there to legitimize a neoliberal (no quotes necessary) ideology.
My favourite Chomsky thing is the very short shrift he gives to conspiracy theorists.
e.g. Rethinking Camelot, his book about JFK - https://zcomm.org/wp-content/uploads/zbooks/htdocs/chomsky/r... - the thesis being that JFK was really no different to any other president at that time - the idea he was radical being a kindof post-hoc reconstruction - and hence there was absolutely no reason for anyone to want to bump him off.
A methodological point is perhaps worth mention. Suppose that we were to concoct a theory about historical events at random, while permitting ourselves to assume arbitrary forms of deceit and falsification. Then in the vast documentary record, we are sure to find scattered hints and other debris that could be made to conform to the theory, while counter-evidence is nullified. By that method, one can "prove" virtually anything. For example, we can prove that JFK never intended to withdraw any troops, citing the elusiveness of NSAM 263 and his unwillingness to commit himself to the withdrawal recommended by his war managers. Or we can prove that the attempt to assassinate Reagan was carried out by dark forces (Alexander Haig, the CIA, etc.). After all, Reagan had backed away from using US forces directly in Central America (unlike JFK in Vietnam); he was cozying up to the Chicoms; he had already given intimations of the anti-nuclear passion that led him to offer to give away the store at Rejkjavik and to join forces with the arch-fiend Gorbachev, whose perestroika was a transparent plot to entrap us; his associates were planning off-the-shelf international operations, bypassing intelligence and the Pentagon. Obviously, he has to go. Or suppose there had been an attempt to assassinate LBJ in late 1964, when he was refusing the call of the military to stand up to the Commies in Vietnam, pursuing Great Society and civil rights programs with a zeal well beyond Kennedy, and about to defeat a real alternative, Barry Goldwater. Nothing is easier than to construct a high-level conspiracy to get rid of this "radical reformer." The task is only facilitated by a search for nuances and variations of phrasing in the mountains of documents, usually committee jobs put together hastily with many compromises.
This is not the way to learn about the world.
That by the way this is my conspiracy theory, somehow in the last 20 years or so the focus of social movements changed from socio-economic and international inequalities, to gender-sexual orientation. Pretty convenient for the people in power. A me-too is 100 times easier to manage and even get advantage from compared to an occupy wall street.
You now see companies from P&G to Disney getting in the diverity wagon (purely for advertising reasons). For sure you wont see them advocating for better wages,work conditions or tax rules.
Unless you see his efforts at arresting Israel's nuclear program as the reason for why he was assassinated.
Which dovetails nicely with the "short shrift" he gave 9/11 conspiracy theorists, who largely implicate Israel in that attack.
All gleefully lapped up by hungry chicks with mouths wide open and not an ounce of critical-thinking skills they can call their own.
I'm not sure how to respond to your comment only to suggest you might apply some of the critical thought you condemn others for supposedly lacking.
Sheep's clothing, off-the-rack no less. Proves nothing.
But that Bloomberg Businessweek article [0] unearths some scary details:
“We took that 300,000 (AfD likes), and Facebook created a model of them and used their lookalike audiences to find the closest 1 percent of German people to match that audience,”
That "1 percent" sounds extremely familiar, particularly in a far-right context [1] It makes me wonder who originally came up with that concept, was it Harris Media or was it the idea of their client, the AfD?
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-29/the-germa...
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ein_Prozent_f%C3%BCr_unser_Lan...
I don't know and I seriously doubt it.
I didn't see Bernie Sanders stickers in the middle of Germany advertising for "We only need 1% to change the country", as the German identitarians do.
But as you say: It's very likely just a coincidence.
In all, Harris Media created seven target groups, according to Canter, including mothers (2.6 million targets), business owners (1.1 million), and working-class people such as union members (6.4 million).
The detail about the 1% is pretty much a non-sequitur; I don’t really follow why that is even mentioned.
As for Russian interference, the article you linked to says this: "The Russian meddling that German state security had been anticipating apparently never materialized. Instead, the foreign influence came from America."
Democracy was about educated voters, I thought. If you find this acceptable, we're on different planets. Perhaps ask a German about slippery political slopes? Or live long enough and find yourself in the middle of one.
> the article you linked to says this: "The Russian meddling that German state security had been anticipating apparently never materialized. Instead, the foreign influence came from America."
It also says "While the Russian episode involved ads bought under false identities by people with Kremlin ties" which you must have seen if you'd searched for 'russia'. How this statement links with the one you found, I don't know.
So trying to convince voters is undemocratic because voters are supposed to be educated before they become potential voters (and therefore don't require convincing)? Or is it just that you shouldn't try to convince them with simplified messages that don't reflect the actual complexity of the universe? Or that you shouldn't do it via Facebook?
yes, in that they make up their own minds rather than be open to influence by those with most money.
> Or is it just that you shouldn't try to convince them with simplified messages that don't reflect the actual complexity of the universe?
Such messages tend to be of the form 'vote X! Y is crap!'. Or outright lies (qv. certain leaders) That's not even a simplified messages, the first is pure tribalistic emotive, the second, well, it misrepresent reality (aka 'wrong' or 'deceitful' or 'lie').
If the were factually based and told both sides I guess I'd be OK with it.
> Or that you shouldn't do it via Facebook?
No, facebook is just a tool. How that tool is used is what makes it right or wrong.
That's at least how I understand the Americans.
Do you have an example of a message that you'd be okay with?
So an example message I'd be OK with is if bojo (boris johnson) had said that the uk gives 160 million (or 199 million[0]) a week to the EU, instead of his claim that it was £350 million a week (which deliberately and dishonestly ignored the rebate), I'd be OK with that.
I fear that tribalism is a disease that's damaging both the UK and the US at the moment; make your point with facts as far as possible.
[0] dependng on how you count, I've heard both figures
And since we typically vote on our shared expectations, "no false claims" would probably mean everybody has to shut up. That might be a good thing, I don't know. I don't believe in the power of elections to bring about change (whatever party wins will have very little room for maneuvering), so maybe removing the loud and divisive parts of them might be helpful. Basically: if they don't help, we can at least make them less harmful.
The entire point of profiling is to spend less money, or spend their money more efficiently, by only advertising to a smaller part of the population.
If you have tons of money, you can just carpet bomb the entire population with your message.
This totally misses my point.
"Although Canter gave up on getting the display ads approved, he did keep paying for the Google search term “Angela Merkel,” which it linked to the Oath Breaker site. The Merkel campaign could’ve paid Google more money to displace the ad, but, to Canter’s disbelief, it never did. “We’ve been running search on Merkel’s name, calling her ‘Oath Breaker,’ and pointing to a very ugly website about her,” Canter said, laughing. “If it was us, we’d say, ‘You need to invest to get that ad bumped down.’ ”
For US Americans this might not be anything out of the ordinary, after all, "money=speech" and political campaigns mostly focusing on tearing down the opposition have been the norm for decades.
But for the German political landscape, where political parties are publicly funded to ensure a somewhat level playing field (at least in theory) this is a complete perversion.
Particularly the change in tone in the political discourse, it's become extremely toxic, apparently in no small parts due to the introduction of US American campaign tactics.
Public funding is only a part (about ~30%), donations and member fees contribute far more.
As for that being totally new, I don't think so. The AfD is the only new addition in recent years which changed a lot and still takes adjustments (though I don't know if it's actually that different from the Greens way back when - only they aren't conservative, so they wouldn't have used the patriotism angle and websites weren't a thing).
I'm going to take the bold stance that: yes, fascists renting time on sophisticated ad networks to spread pro-fascist propaganda is in fact scary.
This is not a case of a simply political party pushing a policy agenda. This is a dangerous, militant and xenophobic group attempting to target individuals with materials designed to stoke fear and subtly misinform the public.
So yeah, it is scary. It's also scary that they had help from American interests. It speaks to how far right American politics are sliding.
They can be targeted to diffuse fear and inject purpose, hope etc. Which is the thesis of the book Nudge (by Nobel winner Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein who tried doing this during the Obama Administration)
For several reasons.
Over these past years the rise of the AfD, the alt-right in general, has been heavily credited to Russian interference.
But to this day there's no actual solid evidence for anything like that, and these accusations of "You are just a Russian bot!" have been a major factor for driving protest voters to the AfD.
When in reality it seems to have been a US American PR firm facilitating most of it, one that has managed to make political attack ads an actual thing in Germany. While I was wondering why and how the political discourse suddenly became so unbelievably hostile in Germany.
But all the German mainstream gets to read and hear about is the Russians attacking "democratic institutions in Germany" [0] and supposedly propping up the alt-right, which keeps on driving voters to the AfD for feeling marginalized with their "Russian opinions".
[0] https://www.dw.com/en/hackers-target-democratic-institutions...
Note for example that the mid-90s GOP health care proposal was eventually the basis for the Obama plan 20 years later, which the more recent GOP called some kind of communism.
Chomsky is left of the mainstream American "left", and it is common in that crowd to refer to the latter as center-right.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_positions_of_Noam_...
Mastheaders like David Brooks carried water for the far right for decades until he couldn’t keep up with them. He’ll still wax philosphical about Reagan, Gingrich or W at the drop of a hat.
But I guess they’re all “centrist” now.
Well, sorry, but the same has been true about governments for too long. For too long they controlled the message and some of them are doing their damn best to not lose that control. Whether but authoritarian methods as used in China to coercion of public opinion in Western countries that government needs to step in and protect people from the message they don't control and therefor is not true.
This is not to say that very large organizations like Facebook or Google are not a concern but to highlight the hypocrisy that does not call out the various governments who are worse regardless of what method they use to control speech and money
Imho, "the voters are stupid" is an easy way to explain why "my side didn't win". They cannot not agree with me, they must be stupid. Assuming that they are being manipulated is similar, I believe.
Then why is advertising spending such a great predictor of who wins a political race? Just because we want something to be true doesn't mean it is, and if you want to think about a problem clearly it is necessary to confront the disgusting reality of the thing.
This is demonstrably false, most vividly exemplified by the current president who raised far less than his competitor. In the United States, when there is a race with no incumbents, the winner is anticorrelated with the one who raised the most.
Money buys newspapers, TV stations, etc. The fact that it can also buy unlimited amounts of direct advertising is just plain gross.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/camilomaldonado/2019/10/10/trum...
The fact that he provided a better ROI than average than his competitor is tangential - because the fact that fundraising is a key concern at all proves the point.
In a genuine democracy elections would be fought on issues and demonstrated competence, not campaign income.
And on the veracity of reports about horrific slaughter made by Cambodian refugees: "Refugees are frightened and defenseless, at the mercy of alien forces. They naturally tend to report what they believe their interlocuters wish to hear. While these reports must be considered seriously, care and caution are necessary. Specifically, refugees questioned by Westerners or Thais have a vested interest in reporting atrocities on the part of Cambodian revolutionaries, an obvious fact that no serious reporter will fail to take into account."
Did Chomsky show poor judgement by discounting such refugee reports? Was the evidence of genocide really so muddy in 1977 that you could not 'know where the truth lies'?
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20131207072650/http://www.abc.ne...
[2] https://m.jpost.com/Opinion/Terra-Incognita-Chomsky-and-the-...
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2019/10/15/project_v...
Fox just lazily omits facts and arguments that don't fit while cnn presents both sides most of the time. I do not care if the information is framed in a specific way since i have to make up my mind anyway.
Then there are real propaganda outlets like the state owned RT or http://www.globaltimes.cn/opinion/ .
I do think that making these distinctions is useful.
Deep fakes are going to rock your world.
> Oh, it was camera footage, so we can automatically trust it despite the fact that the project doing it is inherently untrustworthy.
Agree.
I was interested in fringe politics as a social phenomenon and I've been following it for a year or two.
I now see CNN as a media outlet largely serving their interest groups. But see RT, Project Veritas, etc., as "second-order propaganda" serving their respective interest groups by selectively "exposing" targets for their political utility, not because they care about truth, it's half-truth, half-falsehoold. Meanwhile, the accusations of the mainstream media are made against them, not because they care about truth, but because their existence damaged the mainstream's own interest. It's all biases vs. biases all the way down.
If someone spends enough time and effort while maintaining rationality, it's possible to extract a great deal of useful information from the sum of all these propaganda. I think it's what open-source intelligence is largely about.
But I don't want to waste time doing this. Nowadays, I view many things in politics as mere talking points without make judgements, and get most of my news from Hacker News (which is, of course, heavily biased towards the Silicon Valley).
> Deep fakes are going to rock your world.
Definitely.
I think most (internet-savvy) people will eventually learn it and ignore things like that.
In Ghost in the Shell: S.A.C. 2nd GIG (second season of the TV animation), one group of politicians for their personal interests within the government, has launched a conspiracy to intensify a military conflict (against the refugee uprising) that involves nuclear weapon. The protagonists from Section 9, a national security agency that operates independent from the executive, saw the truth from the satellite footage, had the following dialogue.
> "How do we stop it? Can we post the video footage online?"
> "No. Video footage nowadays is seen as completely unreliable to this day."
Since most video footage "exposure" themselves are propaganda or hoaxes.
Released in 2000s, it portrayed and predicted our world remarkably well, and it'll give you a lot of inspirations of what would the future society look like.
>Since most video footage "exposure" themselves are propaganda or hoaxes.
>Released in 2000s, it portrayed and predicted our world remarkably well, and it'll give you a lot of inspirations of what would the future society look like.
I think the current situation is a bit more severe than what was portrayed there. It's not that video footage is unreliable, but that it is unconvincing. All evidence is interpreted through the eyes of tribalism first and foremost, while truth is relegated to the back, because how information is disseminated now exploits our natural behavioural patterns in a negative way. That is the core of the rot in our great age of "(dis)information".
> It's not that video footage is unreliable, but that it is unconvincing.
Why not both? It's a mixed bag.
Unreliability can be one problem. For example, "quoting one's words" is a common type of political videos on YouTube, they're mainly a few-second or few-minute of video segments that quote someone's words, and makes a point about it. Some of these videos are mostly reliable, but some other videos intentionally remove the relevant context and mislead the viewers to draw another conclusion. Because of the existence of misleading videos, my first response to any of them is distrust until it's proven reliable. The same principle applies to expressing a statement of something by a politician - is it true or is it misleading rhetoric?
This is why fact-checking becomes more and more popular. But the issue of reliability is greater than objective facts, you can fact-check data but you cannot fact-check the framing or context. As technology marches on, the issue of unreliability will become greater, e.g. DeepFake.
Unconvincing can be another issue. For example, some activists have been warned us about mass surveillance for a decade based on reliable evidence.
Both work together.
Perhaps a potential solution would be: full freedom of speech, but less freedom of the press, e.g. you can post whatever you want online until someone sues you, just like today, but media outlets should not be allowed to do the same without facing consequences.
Maybe I should have phrased it differently. The main issue we have the people who are not convinced of a source regardless of reliability. And even further, questioning reliability has become a strategy for dismissing an unfavourable source and has been weaponised. This is evident when people take the example of a single error made by a source that they believe are biased against them while dismissing all of the errors and falsehoods from source that they believe favour them.
This win-at-all-cost attitude in politics is killing any real discourse and along with it goes decency in public life. Politics is no longer about good governance, but instead another activity that people participate in to satisfy their tribal urges.
When news outlets consider themselves entertainment but present themselves as journalists how can the people trust reporting from any side? The press has been given a significant amount of power in an attempt to inform citizens who have the ultimate power, but that is being abused to reflect the views of a few unelected corporations that control media distribution.
And on the flip side, if you are a witness with a factual account of events and want to inform others, any attempt will be met with skepticism and, as you mention, “the eyes of tribalism”.
It’s unclear to me how we, as a society, move on from here. Should freedom of the press require explicit disclaimers about bias and require purely factual accounts under penalty of law? At least then, even with selective editing, accounts from multiple sources could be combined to reflect an accurate story, maybe.
0 - https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/15/media/abc-news-error-video/in...
I also have an observation.
The perceived problem of the mainstream media outlet is "a few unelected corporations that control media distribution", or that the state uses the media to feed propaganda. But it's not like that the problem didn't exist before. In fact, yellow journalism played an important role during the Spanish-American War of 1889 [0], People claimed that William Hearst said in a telegram, "Please remain. You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war." There is no evidence for the quote, but it showed the massive influence of the media. Later, world War II and the Cold War saw the height of government propaganda.
During the rise of the Internet and the social media, many people thought the more decentralized distribution of information can free people from the tyranny of big media and state propaganda. It seemed be to the case during Occupy Movement or Arab Spring, but as soon as the current trend of populism dominates, suddenly, the social media became another evil.
Well, I know that major players in politics and media often have much greater leverage on the web and they can do large manipulations, and I agree the conflicts of interest of web giants as public forums, and web as places for viral advertising is also a problem - However, the most popular attack on social media and the web is that "everyone, including many people with malicious intention (including big media and state propaganda) have a chance to control information distribution and push Fake News, outside the reliable mainstream media". And that we need to have a system to restrict and remove Fake News online.
So mainstream media is bad because unelected corporations, and the state propaganda controls it, but social media is bad because everyone has control. How do we reconcile this contradiction?
My conclusion is, this is pretty bad. But the age before the web is equally bad. letting the mainstream media to monopolize the media outlet is worse, having a system to restrict and remove Fake News online is dangerous if abused, because any system that restricts Fake News is also a system that restricts civil movement.
The future society just needs to learn living with it. Everyone needs to be skeptical about the information on the web, the battle against mis/disinformation should be fought with more useful and true information that informs people, not by banning them. And perhaps the society needs learning to cooperate without consensus (the "national consensus" has partially died). And perhaps that the mainstream media outlet should act according to a higher standard.
> And on the flip side, if you are a witness with a factual account of events and want to inform others, any attempt will be met with skepticism and, as you mention, “the eyes of tribalism”.
I don't know any solution, perhaps we just have to acknowledge the truth is intractable (web is bad, but the media before the web is hardly the truth, anyway), and simply live in doubt forever.
I'd rather to live in the world that has a few flat Earthers, anti-vax activists, or conspiracy theorists, that I can learn to ignore, than a world that has The Inquisition.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_of_the_Spanish%E2%8...
Wait. "Second-order" propaganda? What's "second order" about it? This is directly how these machines work. The only remotely novel thing about Project Veritas is that it has absolutely no news credibility at all, whereas CNN, Fox and RT can and do occasionally support real journalism as well.
> Since most video footage "exposure" themselves are propaganda or hoaxes.
I've yet to see a deep fake that holds up under scrutiny at high definition. It may be a matter of time, but I'm not sure we are "there" yet.
Its also worth noting that there is actually a cool use of blockchain-like technologies here. Until such time as deep fakes can be done perfectly in real time, a certification of video being taken close to the time of an event is still a very good indicator, and pubic blockchains are one of the best ways to do this. We don't even need proof of work to make this service! Outside of a specific time horizon (which you can tune), the trust is in the historical consensus which can't realistically be altered!
I used "second-order propaganda" as a catch-all term for propagandists that say "Everything you know is wrong, [exposing some cases of propaganda, can be real], see, these are propaganda and manipulations! But don't worry, just listen to my propaganda." I don't imply that there is anything new here.
> I've yet to see a deep fake that holds up under scrutiny at high definition. It may be a matter of time, but I'm not sure we are "there" yet.
I was describing a hypothetical scenario in the future.
> Its also worth noting that there is actually a cool use of blockchain-like technologies here. Until such time as deep fakes can be done perfectly in real time, a certification of video being taken close to the time of an event is still a very good indicator, and pubic blockchains are one of the best ways to do this.
Upvote. You proposed an interesting question: "how do we certify that a video is real in the future?", with a solution. If you have time, please write a blog post.
Claims it'll be used and transform politics have been largely overstated.
That CNN is part of the propaganda machine is doubtless. But they're just not that important compared to the bigger players.
> That CNN is part of the propaganda machine is doubtless.
So being "part of the propaganda machine" isn't enough to qualify as "even remotely relevant"? :/ If you value consistency and intellectual honesty you might want to backtrack on one of these claims or at least admit that your statements are obviously incompatible without further qualification. "Even remotely" isn't a very high bar to meet.
> Project Veritas is an American right-wing activist group. The group uses "disguises and hidden cameras to uncover supposed liberal bias and corruption." The group is known for producing deceptively edited videos about media organizations and left-leaning groups. In a 2018 book on propaganda and disinformation in U.S. politics, three Harvard University scholars refer to Project Veritas as a "right-wing disinformation outfit."
(Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Veritas)
I guess that explains the downvotes.
I've noticed this sort of thing and it just doesn't make sense. The UK press (not just the tabloids) loves to present Corby as simultaneously a "Red" and a "Putin's puppet". How does that work? Putin is not a communist. He's probably as far as it's possible to be from being a communist without being a Stalinist.
Corby is clearly a leftie, so what's his affiliation to Putin supposed to be? Why is the British press _still_ associating Russia to communism? They missed the memo in 1989?
(Ask me for refs on the press calling Corby a commie if you are curious).
Like, why would Syria and their ally be happy about a loss of Syrian territory?
One day the commander-in-chief of that powerful military decides to pull out his troops so that his friend — another tinpot dictator like you — can invade the land of those stubborn people. You find this development quite pleasing because the stubborn ones you've long been hoping to wipe out have lost their only ally, and you'd much rather fight your neighbor dictator than the world's most powerful military. Besides, an old friend of yours has promised to lend a hand there as soon as the powerful military is out of the picture.