Austerity & Capitalism
I am reading through Marilynn Robinson's latest book of essays today am trying to follow the article on Austerity and Ideology. It is thoughts like this that seem so new to me. She is talking about the cold war and where we have landed ... (America won and Russia lost):
"I know we capitalists are supposed to feel triumphant about this, and I may cause scandal by noting that the United States has had a long history of wealth and Russia a much longer history of poverty, that the United States built up its economy during World War II, while Russia suffered devastation. Perhaps I lament a readiness for competition that cannot acknowledge its advantage, now more common by the day."
Or in another passage where she references the quick return to power that took place after the 2008 economic crisis:
"It is this supranational power, Economics Pantocrator, that failed us all in fairly recent memory. It has emerged from the ashes with its power and its prestige enhanced even beyond the status it enjoyed in the days of the great bubble. The instability and the destruction of wealth for which it is responsible actually lend new urgency to its behests. This makes no sense at all."
This reminds me of Nassim Taleb's third principle for a black-swan proof world: People who were driving a school bus blindfolded (and crashed it) should never be given a new bus. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/5d5aa24e-23a4-11de-996a-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2Un9JCfeo
Robinson continues: "Certainly its authority with the public aligns badly with any conception of rational choice, which is supposedly a pillar of this selfsame economic theory. It can proceed confidently, and moralistically, in the face of common sense and painful experience because it is an ideology, the one we are supposed to believe was the champion of freedom and prosperity in the epic struggle called the Cold War. "
And this leads to an important discussion of terms, surprisingly absent in public dialogue. Is it capitalism or democracy that won the Cold war? Are we to compare democracy and communism or capitalism and communism? What is socialism? Is 'freedom" threatened in our country and is the threat from socialism or capitalism? (These are all my questions and questions from recent conversations with friends, she does not mention all these terms in this way). But what she does, which is shocking and only goes to show how rare this discussion takes place is:
"in America an abstraction called capitalism has truly begun to function as an ideology. The word is not included in the 1882 (!) edition of Webster's dictionary ... In contemporary America it has taken on the definition, and the character, Marx gave it, and Mao, and all the pro-Soviet polemicists. This despite the fact that Marx did not consider the United States of his time essentially capitalist. This despite the fact that the United States as a society is structured around a number of institutions that are not, under this definition, capitalist. Suddenly anything public is 'socialism,' therefore a deviancy, inevitably second-rate, and a corruption of, so to speak, the public virtue."
Ok, let me jump in and say that I started to doubt this on further reflection. I mean, what about Adam Smith and the Wealth of Nations? Yes, yes, I have never read it and most of us haven't, though we all have it on the tip of our tongues. The invisible hand and all that. However, when I searched the internet (ha! what a laugh!) I found that the word capitalism was never used by Adam Smith. So we do have a confusion of terms in this regard and it seems very interesting that such an important word, one commonly imagined as the only way of freedom, is so new and so indefinable.
She goes on to comment on how our country does not and never has fit with a strict construction of the word "capitalist": postal system, public education, national parks, graduated income tax, social security, the electrification of America, etc.
She also discusses the amazing nature of mid-western state universities and how they have been built and sustains over so many decades by little farm towns and how they are now in danger of being overtaken and squeezed by monied interests ...
At some point she comments "in the strange alembic of this moment, the populace at large is thought of by a significant part of this same population as a burden, a threat to their well-being, to their 'values' ... the nimbus of art and learning and reflection that has dignified our troubled presence on this planet seems now like a thinning atmosphere. Who would have thought that a thing so central to human life could prove so vulnerable to human choices?"
"I know we capitalists are supposed to feel triumphant about this, and I may cause scandal by noting that the United States has had a long history of wealth and Russia a much longer history of poverty, that the United States built up its economy during World War II, while Russia suffered devastation. Perhaps I lament a readiness for competition that cannot acknowledge its advantage, now more common by the day."
Or in another passage where she references the quick return to power that took place after the 2008 economic crisis:
"It is this supranational power, Economics Pantocrator, that failed us all in fairly recent memory. It has emerged from the ashes with its power and its prestige enhanced even beyond the status it enjoyed in the days of the great bubble. The instability and the destruction of wealth for which it is responsible actually lend new urgency to its behests. This makes no sense at all."
This reminds me of Nassim Taleb's third principle for a black-swan proof world: People who were driving a school bus blindfolded (and crashed it) should never be given a new bus. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/5d5aa24e-23a4-11de-996a-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2Un9JCfeo
Robinson continues: "Certainly its authority with the public aligns badly with any conception of rational choice, which is supposedly a pillar of this selfsame economic theory. It can proceed confidently, and moralistically, in the face of common sense and painful experience because it is an ideology, the one we are supposed to believe was the champion of freedom and prosperity in the epic struggle called the Cold War. "
And this leads to an important discussion of terms, surprisingly absent in public dialogue. Is it capitalism or democracy that won the Cold war? Are we to compare democracy and communism or capitalism and communism? What is socialism? Is 'freedom" threatened in our country and is the threat from socialism or capitalism? (These are all my questions and questions from recent conversations with friends, she does not mention all these terms in this way). But what she does, which is shocking and only goes to show how rare this discussion takes place is:
"in America an abstraction called capitalism has truly begun to function as an ideology. The word is not included in the 1882 (!) edition of Webster's dictionary ... In contemporary America it has taken on the definition, and the character, Marx gave it, and Mao, and all the pro-Soviet polemicists. This despite the fact that Marx did not consider the United States of his time essentially capitalist. This despite the fact that the United States as a society is structured around a number of institutions that are not, under this definition, capitalist. Suddenly anything public is 'socialism,' therefore a deviancy, inevitably second-rate, and a corruption of, so to speak, the public virtue."
Ok, let me jump in and say that I started to doubt this on further reflection. I mean, what about Adam Smith and the Wealth of Nations? Yes, yes, I have never read it and most of us haven't, though we all have it on the tip of our tongues. The invisible hand and all that. However, when I searched the internet (ha! what a laugh!) I found that the word capitalism was never used by Adam Smith. So we do have a confusion of terms in this regard and it seems very interesting that such an important word, one commonly imagined as the only way of freedom, is so new and so indefinable.
She goes on to comment on how our country does not and never has fit with a strict construction of the word "capitalist": postal system, public education, national parks, graduated income tax, social security, the electrification of America, etc.
She also discusses the amazing nature of mid-western state universities and how they have been built and sustains over so many decades by little farm towns and how they are now in danger of being overtaken and squeezed by monied interests ...
At some point she comments "in the strange alembic of this moment, the populace at large is thought of by a significant part of this same population as a burden, a threat to their well-being, to their 'values' ... the nimbus of art and learning and reflection that has dignified our troubled presence on this planet seems now like a thinning atmosphere. Who would have thought that a thing so central to human life could prove so vulnerable to human choices?"
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