Svet

[eumeswil]

Via Anduril:

The Crisis of Market Fundamentalism

ANATOLE KALETSKY

 

LONDON – The biggest political surprise of 2016 was that everyone was so surprised. I certainly had no excuse to be caught unawares: soon after the 2008 crisis, I wrote a book suggesting that a collapse of confidence in political institutions would follow the economic collapse, with a lag of five years or so.

 

We’ve seen this sequence before. The first breakdown of globalization, described by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in their 1848 The Communist Manifesto, was followed by reform laws creating unprecedented rights for the working class. The breakdown of British imperialism after World War I was followed by the New Deal and the welfare state. And the breakdown of Keynesian economics after 1968 was followed by the Thatcher-Reagan revolution. In my book Capitalism 4.0, I argued that comparable political upheavals would follow the fourth systemic breakdown of global capitalism heralded by the 2008 crisis.

 

When a particular model of capitalism is working successfully, material progress relieves political pressure But when the economy fails – and the failure is not just a transient phase but a symptom of deep contradictions – capitalism’s disruptive social side effects can turn politically toxic.

 

That is what happened after 2008. Once the failure of free trade, deregulation, and monetarism came to be seen as leading to a “new normal” of permanent austerity and diminished expectations, rather than just to a temporary banking crisis, the inequalities, job losses, and cultural dislocations of the pre-crisis period could no longer be legitimized – just as the extortionate taxes of the 1950s and 1960s lost their legitimacy in the stagflation of the 1970s.

 

If we are witnessing this kind of transformation, then piecemeal reformers who try to address specific grievances about immigration, trade, or income inequality will lose out to radical politicians who challenge the entire system. And, in some ways, the radicals will be right.

 

The disappearance of “good” manufacturing jobs cannot be blamed on immigration, trade, or technology. But whereas these vectors of economic competition increase total national income, they do not necessarily distribute income gains in a socially acceptable way. To do that requires deliberate political intervention on at least two fronts.

 

First, macroeconomic management must ensure that demand always grows as strongly as the supply potential created by technology and globalization. This is the fundamental Keynesian insight that was temporarily rejected in the heyday of monetarism during the early 1980s, successfully reinstated in the 1990s (at least in the US and Britain), but then forgotten again in the deficit panic after 2009.

 

A return to Keynesian demand management could be the main economic benefit of Donald Trump’s incoming US administration, as expansionary fiscal policies replace much less efficient efforts at monetary stimulus. The US may now be ready to abandon the monetarist dogmas of central-bank independence and inflation targeting, and to restore full employment as the top priority of demand management. For Europe, however, this revolution in macroeconomic thinking is still years away.

 

At the same time, a second, more momentous, intellectual revolution will be needed regarding government intervention in social outcomes and economic structures. Market fundamentalism conceals a profound contradiction. Free trade, technological progress, and other forces that promote economic “efficiency” are presented as beneficial to society, even if they harm individual workers or businesses, because growing national incomes allow winners to compensate losers, ensuring that nobody is left worse off.

 

This principle of so-called Pareto optimality underlies all moral claims for free-market economics. Liberalizing policies are justified in theory only by the assumption that political decisions will redistribute some of the gains from winners to losers in socially acceptable ways. But what happens if politicians do the opposite in practice?

 

By deregulating finance and trade, intensifying competition, and weakening unions, governments created the theoretical conditions that demanded redistribution from winners to losers. But advocates of market fundamentalism did not just forget redistribution; they forbade it.

 

The pretext was that taxes, welfare payments, and other government interventions impair incentives and distort competition, reducing economic growth for society as a whole. But, as Margaret Thatcher famously said, “[…] there’s no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.” By focusing on the social benefits of competition while ignoring the costs to specific people, the market fundamentalists disregarded the principle of individualism at the heart of their own ideology.

 

After this year’s political upheavals, the fatal contradiction between social benefits and individual losses can no longer be ignored. If trade, competition, and technological progress are to power the next phase of capitalism, they will have to be paired with government interventions to redistribute the gains from growth in ways that Thatcher and Reagan declared taboo.

 

Breaking these taboos need not mean returning to the high tax rates, inflation, and dependency culture of the 1970s. Just as fiscal and monetary policy can be calibrated to minimize both unemployment and inflation, redistribution can be designed not merely to recycle taxes into welfare, but to help more directly when workers and communities suffer from globalization and technological change.

 

Instead of providing cash handouts that push people from work into long-term unemployment or retirement, governments can redistribute the benefits of growth by supporting employment and incomes with regional and industrial subsidies and minimum-wage laws. Among the most effective interventions of this type, demonstrated in Germany and Scandinavia, is to spend money on high-quality vocational education and re-training for workers and students outside universities, creating non-academic routes to a middle-class standard of living.

 

These may all sound like obvious nostrums, but governments have mostly done the opposite. They have made tax systems less progressive and slashed spending on education, industrial policies and regional subsidies, pouring money instead into health care, pensions, and cash hand-outs that encourage early retirement and disability. The redistribution has been away from low-paid young workers, whose jobs and wages are genuinely threatened by trade and immigration, and toward the managerial and financial elites, who have gained the most from globalization, and elderly retirees, whose guaranteed pensions protect them from economic disruptions.
 

Yet this year’s political upheavals have been driven by elderly voters, while young voters mostly supported the status quo. This paradox shows the post-crisis confusion and disillusionment is not yet over. But the search for new economic models that I called “Capitalism 4.1” has clearly started – for better or worse.

 

 

Sve super sem ovog za mlade i status quo.

Edited December 27, 2016 by miki.bg

[Budja]

I sto je pogresno interpretirao Pareto optimum.

[eumeswil]

dosta interesantan clanak

 

 

edit: a sto se ovde prica o saobracajkama i nosacima aviona?

Još jedan sa BBCa:

 

The man who studies the spread of ignorance

 

 

 

How do people or companies with vested interests spread ignorance and obfuscate knowledge? Georgina Kenyon finds there is a term which defines this phenomenon.

[Hella]

najava genocida nad filipinskim belolistićarima

 

izvršeno je retroaktivno poboljšanje božića u koji mi se miralem osro dražom petrovićem

 

[roksi]

izvršeno je retroaktivno poboljšanje božića u koji mi se miralem osro dražom petrovićem

 

 

sve je to swatko pod uslovom da ti doticni loose cannon nije u komsiluku. 

[Hella]

sve je to swatko pod uslovom da ti doticni loose cannon nije u komsiluku. 

 

evo menjamo se ti dođi kod vučića a ja kod rodriga može tako

[roksi]

evo menjamo se ti dođi kod vučića a ja kod rodriga može tako

 

:misko: ih. ma sve bolje od boljeg (licno ne bih umela da izaberem od tako izuzetne ponude).

 

na njega se (lokalno) jos uvek gleda kao na bizarnu pojavu, pa me to tesi. ali barem mi sa balkana znamo kako to ume da se zavrsi. odatle moja alergija na doticne likove. 

[eumeswil]

The Guardian’s Summary of Julian Assange’s Interview Went Viral and Was Completely False

Glenn Greenwald

December 29 2016, 2:41 p.m.

 

 

JULIAN ASSANGE IS a deeply polarizing figure. Many admire him and many despise him (into which category one falls in any given year typically depends on one’s feelings about the subject of his most recent publication of leaked documents).
 

But one’s views of Assange are completely irrelevant to this article, which is not about Assange. This article, instead, is about a report published this week by The Guardian that recklessly attributed to Assange comments that he did not make. This article is about how those false claims — fabrications, really — were spread all over the internet by journalists, causing hundreds of thousands of people (if not millions) to consume false news. The purpose of this article is to underscore, yet again, that those who most flamboyantly denounce Fake News, and want Facebook and other tech giants to suppress content in the name of combating it, are often the most aggressive and self-serving perpetrators of it.
 

One’s views of Assange are completely irrelevant to this article because, presumably, everyone agrees that publication of false claims by a media outlet is very bad, even when it’s designed to malign someone you hate. Journalistic recklessness does not become noble or tolerable if it serves the right agenda or cause. The only way one’s views of Assange are relevant to this article is if one finds journalistic falsehoods and Fake News objectionable only when deployed against figures one likes.

Edited January 1, 2017 by miki.bg

[Utvara]

Dobro da se između sebe nisu poubijali. Rus mi kaže da su skupili sve lokalne pandure i rekli im da pucaju u opštem pravcu na tu kuću gde su bili "militanti".

[Hella]

 

američki kapital da oplodi™

 

mir božji hristos se rodi

[roksi]

Manus Island: Australia's dirty little secret

 

"They deserved what they got!" Ronny Knight, one of PNG's more outspoken politicians, told me this week after two asylum seekers were bashed senseless by police on Manus Island. (...)                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 

(...) The truth is the Manus detainees are a mixed bunch, including writers, artists and professionals; men so traumatised they still refuse to leave their rooms after the violence that engulfed the centre in 2014; and some who drink too much and chase women; those who consider themselves the walking dead and those who retain the capacity to dream and hope.                                                            

 

What was remarkable was the furore attracted not one word of commentary from Australian politicians, Coalition and Labor, who assert the indefinite detention of asylum seekers on Manus and Nauru has been a critical factor in stopping the boats.  

                 

It is easy for politicians to avert their eyes because it is so very far away, so removed from notions of scrutiny and accountability, and so distant from the everyday concerns of Australians who, in any case, overwhelmingly support a hard line when it comes to border protection.

 

It is also easy for them to deflect responsibility for the situation we have today, where most of the asylum seekers are suffering from mental illness and less equipped to rebuild their lives than they were when they sought protection from Australia.

 

But the biggest failure has been not to offer a scintilla of hope to men who, in the majority of cases, have been found to have a well-founded fear of persecution in their home countries. On the contrary, the unrelenting focus has been to pressure them to return, regardless of their refugee status.

Edited January 7, 2017 by roksi

[arheolog1981]

Još jedan napad kamionom, ovaj put u Jerusalimu. Četvoro mrtvih, napadač ubijen. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-38546740

[Redoran]

Saudijska Arabija, panduri protiv terora na de_arabic mapi

 

[steins]

dobri stari Hladni Rat:

 

grčkog ambasadora roknu u Brazilu

Ruskog ambasadora roknu u Ankari

ruski konzul nadjen mrtav u grčkoj

albanci hoće da otimaju srpske diplomate.

 

Ima Džems Bond da tera do 50 nastavaka

[bigvlada]

Izgleda da je grčkog ambasadora odradila sopstvena žena, pa se ne računa.