On the "Law of Unintended Consequences"

The Law of Unintended Consequences is a supposed law governing human action. It states that, uh, changes in a complex system inevitably will have unintended consequences. Which is true, for what it's worth, and certainly includes human institutions. It's very similar to the humorous Murphy's Law ("everything that can go wrong, will") but unlike Murphy's Law, it's kinda sorta treated extremely seriously by conservatives as a real and important facet of reality that continually needs to be reckoned with. These people believe that, if properly understood, the law tends to support their conservative worldview and beliefs.

Now, I wouldn't bother writing this if I thought this Law of Unintended Consequences were merely a cutesy truism that people curmudgeonly wielded in political discussions and business meetings as a form of small talk or informal argument, a kind of signal of maturity from the grandparent to the child, from the expert to the novice, from the teacher to the student. Instead, the Law of Unintended Consequences functions as a skeleton key into a whole continuum of ideological beliefs professed by all manner of conservatives, libertarians, paleoconservatives, and classical liberals (which for this essay I will simply shorthand as "conservatives"). And yet, for such a supposedly important belief, they (almost without exception) apply this belief in such a slipshod, irrational, and self-serving way that it undermines not only the validity of their beloved Law itself, but also serves to undermine the entire premise that conservatives as a group have any exclusive claim on any moral, logical, or social wisdom. In other words, it's a singularly clear window into the basic illegitimacy of the "facts and logic" right, a singularly clear window that, properly observed, constitutes a singularly powerful reason for a reasonable person to desert the right in the United States. I hope that, by working through several examples, I can show you what I mean.

First, you should know that the Law of Unintended Consequences, as a general rule, is basically only applied to government actions to restrict corporations. There are exceptions of course, but they are exceptions that prove the rule in the breach. 

This selective application of a supposed Law, if it is sincere and not disingenuous, is almost absurdly illogical and ingenuous on its face.

Let's start with the fact that these Unintended Consequences are always implied or explicitly-stated to be negative. I probably don't need to elaborate on why this is absurd, but very quickly: Whether in business, government, or daily life, it's obvious that solving one problem very often leads unintentionally to solving whole classes of other problems, and it's equally obvious that this is not exclusive to private actions. Two of the bases for modern public health and statistics involved a couple of beleaguered individuals trying to solve two extremely specific problems: a) tracing a cholera epidemic in one city to waste in the water supply and b) trying to rationally manage frontline hospitals in the Crimean War. Billions of people have had better lives because someone said that a few military hospitals in Central Asia should be run better and someone else wondered what the source of an local epidemic was. Does any of this miraculous discovery count in the favor of Unintended Consequences? If not, why not? If so, then why is a government attempting to solve a problem necessarily a bad thing? Why would you bring such a principle up, as if government, prudently following a Law, should err on the side of inaction in general, when some of its unintended consequences have fundamentally and objectively transformed society for the better? Everyone who would have died of cholera or sepsis in the last century and a half should be deeply skeptical of the deployment of a principle that treats secondary benefits and costs as somehow inherently suspicious.

My point isn't that the Law of Unintended Consequences is necessarily wrong as a principle or as a heuristic. No; it's worse. Worse, because it's a deeply-meaningless prescription masquerading as a principle and an inconsistent thought masquerading as a heuristic. To mix metaphors, it's a bottomless abyss of shifting quicksand that drowns any careful analysis of human action in favor of a meretricious feeling of consistency and even wisdom about big government that conservatives are said to singularly possess. And yet, even on the basic question of whether those unintended consequences might sometimes be good, the conservative has no answer, revealing their supposed Law of Nature to be little more than a lazy bit of rhetoric.

Lest you think this is a cherry-picked, boutique little contradiction that I'm disingenuously promoting as if it's the Holy Grail of Modern Conservative Thought, let's get serious and engage with the Law on its primary domain, in its primary application in terms of recommending government inaction as opposed to action. I think that's fair.

Well, here's an example from real life: Companies backed by venture capitalists like Uber and Lyft will enter a city's market with the literal and explicitly-stated goal of disrupting an industry. The business model is explicitly to disrupt the city's transportation sector. If that is not in fact the business model, then countless investors into these ventures have been defrauded. If "unintended consequences" means anything, it positively must apply to this situation! How could it not? An external market entrant uses external funding with the intention of changing how countless local economies work on the deepest levels: jobs, wages, infrastructure, environmental regulations. But conservatives will very rarely apply the Law of Unintended Consequences to any of these situations where that Law would obviously apply if it were real: I'm talking about new technologies, new industries, newly-created markets, new market entrants, or anything else that emerges as a new phenomenon from corporations pursuing self-interest. If the Law does not apply here, where else would it possibly apply? If it does not apply here, why on earth would you call it a Law? 

But, the Law simply never comes up when Uber and Lyft entered cities with the intent of disrupting industries with billions of VC funds. Perhaps it never crossed anyone's mind. However, here's the rub: if a state, local, or federal government ever tries to regulate Uber and Lyft, suddenly the Law of Unintended Consequences becomes the fundamental mechanism by which we are all governed: as real, as irresistible, and as powerful as gravity. Suddenly conservatives can't stop talking about what might happen if such an onerous regulation were to be enacted. You're messing with forces you don't understand. That could affect jobs, wages, infrastructure, the environment. These are the most important parts of our society. How dare you meddle in the beautiful emergent order from disorder that constitutes an economy? Have you not heard the Greek tragedies about hubris? Pride goeth before the fall, my ignorant lib.

If a city's government tries to impose a smoking ban in restaurants for public health reasons, that ban is subject to the Law of Unintended Consequences. But, if I have a billion dollars and want to disrupt the same city's restaurant industry by attempting to mimic and undercut every major restaurant in town, then I'm not subject to the Law. That is, unless the city had already imposed the smoking ban and I'm trying to come in and take advantage of a fortuitous loophole in the language of the law that technically allows smoking only for restaurants that I buy. Then, for all intents and purposes, I'm the Law itself, dispassionately acting on the Law's behalf and imposing its will! However, if the city's restaurant owners were to collectively get together at an industry convention and decide to voluntarily impose a smoking ban for their own sake, then that isn't subject to the Law at all. Unless they're only doing it because they want to get ahead of what they believe to be the likelihood of the city imposing a smoking ban. Then the government is involved again, so therefore the industry group is not only subject to the Law but acting as the arbiter and enforcer of the immutable Law of Unintended Consequences.

I realize the above example is confusing. But that's the point. The Law of Unintended Consequences comes and goes as it becomes convenient for conservatives to make whatever point they want to make. It's pure rhetoric that naturally falls apart when it is analyzed from beginning to end. So, seriously: The Law of Unintended Consequences basically only comes up when we're talking about government intervention. And so it cannot be a Law. we have that the Law is either real but selectively-applied (in which case, why should we listen to only its selective application?) or altogether unreal (in which case, who cares how it's applied?) 

It's true that conservatives don't always apply the Law to governments and never to corporations. However, when conservatives do breach this nearly-universal generalization, it's typically only to blame the government in a slightly more sophisticated way. Ex: "The government caused the subprime mortgage crisis of 2007-2008 (and the ensuing global financial crisis) by effectively requiring businesses to lend to subprime lenders." 

And that brings us to the equally-fraught question of agency. Because, whether or not the above paraphrase is a fair description of the causes of the mortgage crisis and the Global Financial Crisis (it's not, but that's for another time), it's a bizarre theory to say "So then the government was primarily responsible -- the Law of Unintended Consequences strikes again!" After all, presumably lending institutions like Wells Fargo weren't absolutely hidebound to one specific do-goody regulation about lending requirements, because they shamelessly and maliciously broke many other laws, like the ones against fraud. The idea that one single well-meaning regulation caused global financial collapse is, yes, a just-so story that conveniently places blame onto the one possible cause that isn't rooted in rampant private financial greed,. But it's also a deep moral rationalization that is deeply ethically blinkered in a way that conservatives pride themselves on supposedly avoiding in other contexts.

You see, if a government attempts to impose what we (regardless of our beliefs) might consider to be a reasonably-intended law, and a corporation flouts that, the conservative tendency to blame only the government action and not the corporate reaction is illogical on its face.

In morality, it takes two to tango, as most conservatives will happily concede when it comes to individual actions. Banning shoplifting is important, yes, but most conservatives will agree that it's arguably more important that individuals, by and large, have the basic moral fabric not to shoplift in the first place. After all, most will agree that the law doesn't necessarily create morality, and morality is the basis for collective trust on which society is built at the end of the day. 

However, this same moral understanding fails them when attempting to deal with government. When a corporation flouts a reasonable proscription on its actions (and let's be clear that very often a corporation is owned by a sole proprietor, a small group of individual owners, or a single extremely wealthy individual with a majority stake), all these careful considerations about individual and collective morality go out the window: The Law of Unintended Consequences kinda sorta lets them all off the hook, and actually kinda sorta instead blames people for organizing to impose reasonable moral rules on their economy, because "you didn't consider that people would find a way around that" and "you didn't consider that maybe your attempt to fix it would make it even worse". Wise words from the eternal backseat drivers. But where is their scorn for a small group of people simply and selfishly deciding to deliberately undermine the will of an entire society? "They needed to do it to satisfy their shareholders." Or what? Or they'd be fired? Is their job so precious, their shareholders so important, that they can decide by fiat to find a loophole in enactment or in enforcement to completely nullify the will of the majority? We need to treat the idea of "technically legal greed and exploitation" the same way we treat "cleverly getting away with shoplifting".

The only reason these bizarre distinctions and special pleadings and selective appeals to morality that instantly fall apart upon a glance is remotely workable as an ideology on any level is because of that careful distinction made between "economy" and "culture" that somehow excises moral responsibility for individuals acting in the former while strictly imposing moral responsibility on the latter (whether through law, custom, or blame). The idea that "rational" people do moral crimes does not excuse those crimes in any other context, of course. We don't look at a murderer and think, "Well, you were just doing what society told you to, and besides, killing that landlady was actually rational for you." That's an extreme, strawman version of liberal and leftist beliefs that all but the very staunchest of prison abolitionists don't really accept. (And even this person of straw, were they to exist somewhere, would almost certainly not defend the murder but question [perhaps to an absurd extent] the carceral and punitive response to a perhaps-avoidable tragedy.) However, if a corporation on the other hand releases a new type of chemical into its products, the air, or water that it knows from internal research to be harmful and may cause the deaths of thousands of people, this isn't thousands of times more evil, necessarily. The corporation could simply be reacting to a new EPA regulation that bans the use of a different, more well-studied chemical. They're simply acting rationally on the Law of Unintended Consequences. They have shareholders to placate, and quarterly reports to publish. People work for that company, you know?

Of course I'm not saying conservatives would defend the corporation here or are fine with corporations murdering people (at least not necessarily and not in this context). In fact, they would probably make the reasonable response (even if I personally find it inadequate) that various individuals within the corporation should be prosecuted and that class-action lawsuits be filed by affected victims to the tune of billions of dollars. I'm not at all saying conservatives are inherently unreasonable people, nor that they are individually incapable of ethically dealing with the problem of corporate wrongdoing. But I am saying that their treatment of actions by corporations, individuals, and governments is so wildly inconsistent that it undermines their claims to be rational thinkers, at least within the context of their stated ideology. No one on the facts-and-logic right says "Wow, deregulating EPA regulations or removing workplace safety requirements might cause some unintended consequences down the road!" A cynical read might be that this doesn't happen because we know precisely what the intent of such actions will be, and we have a pretty good idea what the consequences will be. But a more generous read is that conservatives perform an consistently inconsistent form of mental double-entry bookkeeping where market actors, government actors, and individuals all have wildly different moral standards applied to them, and this inconsistency/discrepancy, which may be defensible on its own terms, is then absurdly posited as a Law of Nature.

Of course, on this last point, a conservative might respond, "I'm a conservative precisely because I believe the respective situations with corporations and governments to be different, namely that government actions are enforced by explicit coercion and corporate actions are not (unless with the participation of the government). It's not inconsistent if I have an empirical belief and carefully incorporate that empirical belief into my ideology. I apply the Law of Unintended Consequences because it works."

Which would all be fine and good if true. But my point isn't just that the application isn't inconsistent  -- my point is that the application of the Law of Unintended Consequences is irreconcilably and irredeemably inconsistent either to the point of total paradox and total absurdity or to the point of total triviality and inconsequentiality. The Law, in the hands of these masters of logic, devolves either to flat contradiction or to an infinitesimally-thin ex post facto tautology.

After all, if a government's action can cause unintentional consequences (always negative) but that same government's inaction, on the same matter, in the same breath, somehow cannot cause such consequences? Then we're not even dealing in morality -- we're dealing in divination! We're dealing with the invocation of government (and all the attendant rhetorical tropes such as "force", "coercion", and "Freaking Orwell was right, he just got the year wrong!") as a magical or theological spell, the casting of which, violating of the natural laws of the economy, must inevitably bring bad harvests. 

If I thought this was only about the Law of Unintended Consequences, a relatively-arbitrary bit of a much larger picture, I wouldn't have bothered to write this. No, I wrote this because I think this is about the basic logical shortcomings and rhetorical compensations endemic to all conservative thought in the United States. Because I'm talking about the smart ones here. In fact, I'm trying to talk to the smart ones here. If you have such a valuable ideology with such inherently valuable ideas about human nature, it shouldn't be trivially easy to pick apart a core stated principle simply by looking at it. If you have any intellectual integrity, you should either abandon such deeply inconsistent or fundamentally empty principles or else rewrite them so that they are actually consistent, useful, and wise for the governance of a society. One reason I finally abandoned all forms of conservatism several years ago is when I found that the vast majority of people who purged themselves of preconceptions in this way eventually just stopped being conservative.

I will happily concede that many conservative individuals often possess this empirical wisdom in their own lives and personal domains. But I maintain that this wisdom is for unrelated and tangentially-related reasons (hard work, respect for elders and posterity, and moral dignity can go a long way in character-building). With that said, I actually find the reasonable conservative very impressive considering that they're fighting through a self-imposed handicap of an ideology which does not aid this wisdom in the slightest, but in fact hinders them at every turn by providing the worst possible "governing framework" for a worldview: One that is paternalistic, condescending, inconsistent, unwise, and unempirical. The Law of Unintended Consequences, while superficially a fount of wisdom to the thinking person on the right, in fact acts as both an extremely lazy heuristic and an extremely active sycophant, parasitically endearing itself to the erstwhile-thinking person by flattering them into not thinking. The Law of Unintended Consequences is one of many conservative ideas that, speaking charitably, has had the unintended consequence of delegitimizing their whole project.

Which, to be clear, is a good thing, here speaking personally as a person on the left. But it might be a far better social equilibrium if thinking people of supposed judgment and taste on the right simply would stop incapacitating their own reason with the ether of an intellectually-undead ideology and began to help those of us on the left to build a kinder, fairer, more equal, and more prosperous world. Right now, these people of supposed conscience have had that conscience hobbled and maimed by, most charitably, a big cluster of well-nursed grievances, unexamined assumptions, and unreflective just-so stories that pass for thoughts.

The whole conservative ideal --to stand athwart history by reminding reformers of the barrenness of human nature and the fragility of institutions-- can seem a noble and appealing goal to someone of conscience. But the ideal too easily descends into thwarting humanity from ever improving, effectively proving their point of a faulty, tragic human nature by the precise extent to which they themselves endeavor to embody both those faults and the ensuing tragedy, spiting humanity's future to flatter their self-image of moral integrity. I can think of little sadder.

Capitalism is Dead, Long Live Capitalism

Most of us already hate capitalism (and its ideological cousin, liberalism*), in one form or another.
*That is, "liberal" in the everywhere-but-American sense

The easiest example I can come up with would be slavery in the American South, which was thoroughly capitalist from its inception. An easy post-slavery example we could talk about is King Leopold's Belgian Congo. Despite that Leopold was, well, a king, the Belgian Congo and its atrocities were thoroughly private in nature, and more-or-less completely separate from his duties back in Belgium. Another easy example, again from America: The infamous robber barons of the oil, steel, and railroad monopolies. One man saw an opportunity and came to own hundreds of billions of dollars. Or we could talk about the Great Depression, caused in large part by a deflationary spiral when Hoover's government refused to spend counter-cyclically after the stock market crashed.

The key flaw with each of these examples is that a) they're mostly not what we recognize today as capitalism, and b) liberal capitalists (of various flavors) were part of a militant response to all of these things: Slavery (British Empire, American North), the Belgian Congo (again, American/British libs), the monopolists (trust-busting progressives), and the Great Depression (Keynes and FDR, and today the various forms of social democracy in places like Scandinavia).

So, in other words, capitalists have been responsible for many horrible atrocities, but they (often the same ones, strangely!) have often been instrumental in ending atrocities as well, and they've broken bread with the socialists and communists that shared their moral outrage.

Even today, capitalists can be hard to pin down. Very few people are proudly and openly advocating for sweatshops or Carnegie-like monopolies. (Well, except for Amazon and Google. But even then, public sentiment is already beginning to turn on both, and the capitalist line today is that "something new will come along to disrupt and replace them", which isn't really something you can disprove. Point is, this argument is less about supporting Google/Amazon than about tolerating them and supporting the general system of capitalism.)

The point isn't to tar all capitalists as slavery-lovers or closet-monarchists or whatever. The capitalists who opposed slavery, just like those who supported slavery, did so with incredible conviction (It just so happens the opponents were on much sounder moral ground). This isn't because capitalism is some nebulous, undefined mass of impulses. Actually, I think most capitalists and their supporters are generally exactly what they say they are -- liberals who believe in free trade, private property, and less government regulation, along with the protection of basic political rights. They oppose government programs, spending, sanctions, and interference in the market.

However, what capitalists are alright with within that basic framework varies wildly from era to era, and just what capitalism (or capital) actually means is an evolving conversation. Sometimes it meant that people could be bought and sold. Sometimes it meant people could be used up very much like slaves. Sometimes it meant owning an entire sector of the economy and jacking up the price. Sometimes it meant not investing in jobs programs even though a huge proportion of the labor force couldn't find work.

And sometimes, in all these cases, capitalism meant just the opposite. Sometimes it meant that people needed to be protected from being bought and sold, or from being worked like slaves, or from being under the thumb of a plutocrat, or from... that chapter with the rotting oranges in Grapes of Wrath.

Sometimes capitalism means dehumanization and sometimes it means humanization.

But in all its forms, capitalism means an economic order that imposes itself anew into a political system and eventually overwhelms (or overturns, becomes, etc) the political system that had adopted it. The British Empire used to pit tribes/ethnicities against one another -- sure, there were minor (or major) ethnic differences before they imposed their colonial order, but the colonial system made those minor differences into the whole structure of society, until that new reified ethnic divide could function even without any help from the Empire.

Capitalism -- no matter how "neutral" or "voluntary" a system it presents as (rhetorically or genuinely) -- always becomes a social and political system, for good or ill. I hesitate to call any given form of capitalism a "project", though there's often a very deliberate plan and motive behind, ex: Hamilton's big capitalists crushing the little (& more egalitarian) capitalists in the Whiskey Rebellion.

And just as capitalism always becomes a social and political system, its defenders will, virtually from Day One, always treat their provincial little township as the Natural Order of Things, an efficient and even moral organization of resources.

So I don't really have to nitpick capitalism as a system -- its defenders have already argued with equal moral clarity for and against slavery, for and against colonialism, for and against environmental preservation, for and against Indian removal, for and against every positive and negative social change of the last four centuries. Another way to put it is that capitalism is less a specific economic system as it is an approach to economic system design, one that always centers around some form of ownership, a form which eventually comes to dominate the way that society is organized.


Because of the diversity of capitalisms and capitalists, it would be absurd to say that they're all crazy and wrong and I, the NBA blogger guy, can prove it. Even if I produced such a proof, it wouldn't hold up for long. As soon as President Ocasio-Cortez implements student loan debt forgiveness with a rider to re-implement the draft for green jobs, a new form of capitalism has been created, and we're right back to square one.

But, what I can do is point out the absurdity of capitalism as I experience it (and by "absurdity" I don't just mean something obviously dumb, I mean, literally, self-contradiction to the point of farce).

Take advertising, for example. Everybody in the U.S. is exposed to many, many ads per day. Even me, and I avoid them like the plague -- it's hard to get a good ad-blocker for my phone, some of my favorite podcasts advertise, and though our awesome community radio station is a non-profit, they still have to "pay our bills" every hour or so. This in addition to the large amount of native advertisements, astroturfing, mailers, secondhand ads, adware-heavy NBA streaming sites, etc. And again, I'm someone who consciously avoids ads!

Now, everybody knows someone who thinks they aren't affected by ads. Let's suppose for the sake of argument that this person is right! Well, assuming they're part of the same human species as everyone else that ads target, this must a fundamental flaw in how money is allocated! Why would rational advertisers try to peddle their wares in every possible medium if there are lots of people that ads just don't work on?

Or, conversely, let's suppose that person is just full of shit, of course ads work, how can you seriously think that, etc. Then why would that person -- and the hundreds of millions of Americans who also say this or, worse, never even think about it -- rationally choose to devalue their time by listening to ads under the delusion that they're not being affected?

As with Amazon and Google (which, funded by ads, just saying), there are sophisticated responses that capitalists can make to this question: Consumers are able to comb through advertisements and, in general, make a rational response to what they see. Advertisers know that most ads won't work, and are counting on a small percentage of people with a specific ("rational", they might try to argue) need for a product. On a system-wide level, consumers do need to be informed about new products and deals that are available to them, just to make sure warehousing and seasonal labor are as economically efficient as possible. (Hell, I don't even know if they make that argument, but they should. It's a solid argument!)

But the sophistication can be deployed equally by those of us who hate and avoid ads: Fundamentally, advertisers are playing on dishonest motives any time products don't "sell themselves". For everyone who has never tried some new flavor of soda that they would love, there are ten people being exposed to a $5 million Super Bowl ad for Pepsi that plays upon a genetic hormonal craving for sweetness. Even when ads *are* rational, the product they're selling is not necessarily to an individual's long-term benefit or social good - sometimes it just appeals to a base desire to own and have more than our neighbors.

And there are countries (like, for example, almost everywhere else) that ban certain types of advertising (pharmaceuticals, for example). If these countries can exist without falling apart, it's hard to argue that the current (USA, 2018) regime of advertising can be justified -- we are exposed to far too many ads that in aggregate do not really serve a social purpose, and the things that ads prop up (sports, TV, search results, social media) would be even cooler if they weren't under the distortion of advertisement. I don't feel too much regret that I was denied the freedom to watch Marlboro ads on TV.

Advertising is a state within the state of capitalism, but I think it's autonomous enough and fits the pattern well enough to call it a specific form of capitalism. And those of us who have been deprogrammed from ads tend to be the biggest critics of this form of capitalism. Like, for example, me.

Quick story: Throughout college, I mostly watched TV in the form of DVDs, YouTube/etc., streaming services, and torrents. And so it went that, other than NBA games, I hardly saw longform TV ads at all. And I never went back to having a cable box. So, a couple years after graduating, I was looking for an apartment in Milwaukee and got snowed into my hotel room. With nothing better to do, I started watching one of the shows I'd loved when I was torrenting/streaming it. And it was just awful -- suddenly I understood why episodes of House were 42 minutes long -- there were 18 minutes of ads in an hour! I literally could not sit there and watch the ads. I'm not being a snob -- it just felt like an eternity. I literally turned the TV off even though I had nothing better to do. Five years of avoiding ads had completely (and unwittingly) made me viscerally hate them.



Another story, from later that year: When I lived in Milwaukee, the bus system was truly awful in a way that Madison's is not. Let's see: The fare was $2.25 (exact change). The only way to get passes in the whole Wauwatosa area was this one Pick N' Save under a bridge by the Fox River (I think?). The Pick N' Save was way off the bus route, and you could only buy passes a week at a time, and it wasn't like "the clock starts the first time you use it". It was like "June 15-20". And if it was June 18, you were fucked. Luckily, the bus passes were almost never in stock.

I could call this racism (which it absolutely was), or neglect for the poor (yep), or a byzantine system that by design was barely usable (it was all of those things and more).

Or, I could try to justify the way the buses worked, saying "at least there IS a bus system!". After all, it was nice to get to work without calling a taxi, even if I had to cross some awful roads every day. And, hey, with gas prices, $4.50 isn't a horrible amount to pay to get to a solidly middle-class software job. Really. And I'm sure they're working on making it better.

But mostly, over four months of riding the bus to my disastrous new job, I came to see the whole system as a stupid, infuriating waste of everybody's time. It would've been better to have a zero fare -- given the net worth of the companies we were often commuting to, the system would quickly have paid for itself. More importantly, I came to see it not just as a poorly-designed system (or even a maliciously-designed system) but as proof-positive that "economic" systems could never be socially neutral -- that economic systems were always by nature the precursor to or the extension of social systems and hierarchies. And capitalism, to me, started to look more like that bus system (while rich/middle-class people, of course, all drove their own cars to work, which is deeply inefficient and fucked in its own set of ways).

Despite all the contradictions and variation in the different forms of capitalism over the years, the great commonality in all these forms is that there those who (by Nature, or Divine Will, or Market Forces) are "owners" and others who are "owned". The system will always make it as hard as possible to get by in the owned class, even if that oppression doesn't necessarily make the owners any happier.

Fundamentally, the capitalist in me learned to hate capitalism because he believes that people ought to be judged on their merits, not on the merits chosen for them by a social system. People who were born into the Milwaukee ghetto deserve to be able to get to work. And, uh, about that ghetto existing in the first place?

The socialist in me rejects the idea that this merit can ever really be divorced from social systems, and so enforced economic egalitarianism is the only way individuals can ever be given a fair chance of flourishing within society. And honestly, why are individuals so goddamn important, anyway? I could go on for hours abo

The anarchist in me rejects the idea that a state can truly enforce these things without creating a new form of caste which depends on equally brutal violence.

The little fascist voice in my head (think, Hitler on helium) gleefully informs me that he's very happy about the hierarchies every form of liberal capitalism seems to support (including socialists who love US imperialism), but these hierarchies just never go *far enough* for him. He's a real sick fuck. Everyone else wishes we could drown him, but he's always *there*.

And the amateur ecologist in me thinks that this whole discussion rests on the idea that the Earth is going to support humans in 100 years and that's kind of where my analysis breaks down.


I learned to despise TV ads because of a five-year hiatus after basically tolerating them for 20 years. I have the strong sense that no one would miss capitalism in health care after approximately 20 minutes. People would adapt to money and groceries being founded on a more eco-friendly basis. We'd find ways to make buses more livable if everyone had to ride them. We'd find ways to make housing more affordable (and better for everyone) if we couldn't just kick poor people into the streets or out of the city. We'd adapt to city council meetings and presidential elections being less of a captive audience thing and more about representing the will of the electorate, as opposed to the richest developer (or richest venture capitalist) in town. We'd find jobs for people, just as we did after the Great Depression, and I think those jobs would turn into good ones, and jobs that people would take pride in. If we focused our educational system on equity, we'd eventually achieve it, and our kids would end up equitably near the top of the world rankings again, just like Finland or China.

I also think we'd often find ways to make these things oppressive, and exclusionary, and mean. There would be plenty of individuals whose honest beliefs would get ostracized as counter-revolutionary or crypto-fascist. There would be some graft and corruption in the jobs program (maybe no worse than the construction industry today, but), and there would almost certainly still be some racial and gender discrimination. Even if the United States reduced our carbon emissions to zero, we'd find some other way to be obnoxious, murderous, and imperialistic in our decisions. There will probably be a few people out there who have to wait a little longer for some medical procedures.


But as the (very liberal) Vox podcast once pointed out, "Yes, people have to wait in Canada for health care sometimes. But, what they say is that they are alright with it because they know everyone waits in the same line."

As a species, humans are not going to solve species-wide problems until and unless our ruling class and their subjects are one in the same class. Otherwise the conversation will never be "How can we solve this problem?" It will be "How can we escape from this problem and pass it off to those people who ride the buses?"

That is why I think egalitarianism and global governance constitute the only possible solution to climate change. If it is unworkable, so is the human species. Scandinavia managed to survive implementing social democracy. Every country managed to survive abolishing slavery. Every country implemented, then dismantled some form of feudalism as capitalism stepped into the picture. Somehow I think we'll survive if capitalism steps back again. It might not be a pretty transition (these things rarely are) and we may not hit upon the system exactly right the first time. But we are obligated to try.


I don't know what should replace capitalism yet, because we're in frankly uncharted territory, and even the smartest leftists I know often seem to get hung up on quibbles and definitions. Figuring out the system that will replace our form of capitalism will be the great task of our generation and the generation that succeeds us.


Some Good Sources

Corey Robin -- "The Reactionary Mind" is an excellent description of how conservatism grapples with the aftermath of revolution to reassert itself (ex: how Burke realized that France could never go back to the ancien regime)

Barbara & Karen Fields -- "Racecraft" is a great illustration of how hierarchies are naturalized and then become unquestioned common sense, despite being total fictions. The title alludes to witchcraft.

Philip Mirowski -- "Never Let a Serious Crisis Go To Waste" lays out the more sophisticated forms that modern "neoliberal" capitalism takes.

Adam Hochschild -- "King Leopold's Ghost" lays out the history of the Belgian Congo. Leopold, in a very modern way, originally framed it as a humanitarian mission.

Rock, Paper, Scissors

On Twitter, the distillation of bad political commentary is the notorious Hot Take*. The general inclination is to blame an excess of Takes for the perpetually dumb, rotten state of political commentary.

*Hot Take (pr. n.) -- a short, timely opinion that's controversial and inflammatory, but never in any way that matters

The remedy for this Hot Takes disease is clear: Takes are short, unreflective, and insincere, so we obviously need more longform, self-reflection, and authenticity. "If only we stopped, stated our basic assumptions, and had an honest discussion about what we believe, we might actually have some Good Takes once in awhile!"

Maybe the best way to see this is in sports:

"You can't give up 115 points and expect to have a chance against this team."
-Mark Jackson, commentating on the NBA Finals, as the Warriors reached 115 against the Cavs

This is a Pretty Good Take, as far as Mark Jackson is concerned. It's built on his experience as a coach, it's an empirical claim that probably holds up, and, while not longform, I have no doubt that he could be called upon to expand his opinion.

But it tells us nothing: If we take Jackson's point seriously, should the Cavaliers have played only their 5 best defensive players for 48 minutes, focusing monomaniacally on defense? Possibly. Jeff Van Gundy notes the Cavs making a careless turnover. So, on this logic, should the Cavaliers focus their entire offense on making sure they get a shot up on every possession, so they don't ever have a recorded turnover? Possibly. But probably not.

Now, obviously, I'm picking on Jackson and Van Gundy: Two TV commentators (both former coaches) extemporized and asked for slightly better execution. But their comments remind me of a ubiquitous fan refrain that pines always for an Ideal Basketball Team filled with Ideal Basketball Players. Even among smarter fans, there's this imaginary place where everyone plays within their limits, no one makes dumb mistakes, everyone fouls when they should, and the better players step up whenever called upon, and deliver. Everyone is simultaneously perfectly aware of the stats and perfectly aware of the skills called upon in an individual possession. And afterwards everyone takes a cold bath, drinks their recommended protein shakes, and goes back to the hotel room to meditate and watch film footage (never forgetting to call their moms, as necessary). No one sulks or celebrates. Everyone gets up early.

But it's precisely that teams and players don't do the perfect thing every time that we have a sport worth watching at all (San Antonio excluded): If every decision-maker and coach in basketball demanded that their players avoid mistakes as the Prime Directive, then most of our most stellar players would be weeded out as unreliable from the age of 13. On the other hand, mediocre players, stellar only in consistency and deference, would be elevated to the pros. Basketball would become a moral, stubborn, didactic sport, with physical differences still dominating, but only after all the interesting mental wrinkles were ironed out. From the modern NBA, Players like Tim Duncan and Chris Paul would survive, but even they'd have to play in a tighter style. LeBron James would, eventually, be tolerated. Stephen Curry would be treated just as he would've been 30 years ago--talented, and a good kid, but a little unpredictable and turnover-prone. And he loves the 3 too much.

In fact, this is how the prevailing opinion-makers in sports commentary have actually thought about these players before being forcibly converted by the jaw-dropping team successes of LeBron and Curry in recent years. Which is to say, the only thing they prefer to a narrative of moral adherence is a narrative of meritocratic success.

Mark Jackson above is making a sincere point about defensive efficiency. His colleague Jeff Van Gundy sincerely condemns careless turnovers. There's a point here. Ideally, we should all strive to be our best at all times. But, factually, we're not at our best at all times, and most human beings are not cut out for the pure moral, physical, or intellectual integrity needed to always be our best, nor would this monomaniacal focus on consistency even be ideal.

A world where consistency alone is valued and mistakes alone condemned, is a world stripped of art, meaning, and even value. If you only see mistakes, you are forever going to strain to see progress, not to mention creative approaches that overturn established notions of what plays are mistakes and which plays are good. In practice, Good Opinions are typically launched by perfectionists, commentators who see the cost of everything and the value of nothing.

See, Hot Takes are the fish in the proverbial barrel. They're the careless turnover everyone can spot, the nonsensical foul everyone can see makes no sense. Everyone who's smart enough to critique them is smart enough to understand why they exist: They're fun, they generate attention, and on social media, they're a good way to create content without, you know, actually going to the trouble of having an original thought.

But our Good Opinions are more pernicious. Good Opinions usually reflect background assumptions, conscientious editorial choices, and the undeniable appeal of a rational, authentic, intentional universe. Good Opinions come from received common sense, and, as a result, they tend to make quite a bit of sense and they tend to function as actual, enjoyable content. Most Hot Takes are superficially appealing precisely because they're reverse-engineered from Good Opinions, using the same rational schema and the same metrics (but deliberating eschewing Truth and Authenticity, to the irritation of Good Opinionators).

The kind of writing that challenges fundamental assumptions is much harder than the kind that puts those assumptions together into the most sensible, coherent framework. It's painting a landscape vs. color-by-numbers. The most that Good Opinions can ever do is make us say, "Wow. This belief, whether I agree with it or not, has been perfectly well-expressed, and I now understand better the implications of my beliefs!". There's a function to the very best Good Opinions, but it's a function most akin to digestion. At best, we're better for having read it because we can get to work superseding it.

Good Opinions can form the foundation of Great Writing, but Great Writing is never reducible to Good Opinions. As soon as it is so reducible, the Great Writing immediately becomes an Adequate Catalog of Some Possibly-Related Good Opinions.

In American political culture, the militant intellectual ideal of our often-well-educated, often-rational, often-self-reflective elites is to surround yourself with others who have Good Opinions and don't have Bad Opinions (and keep the worst Hot Takes to a minimum). Even ignoring the elitism, self-interest, and class prejudice we might ascribe to this goal, these elites will always select for Good Opinions over Great Writing, and thus will always be stuck in the mud of received common opinion. So long as our decision-makers live up to their stated ideals (and when they don't, the result is usually even worse), they will select for the status quo. Which, if you see things as I do, is untenable.

American political elites love the Singularity, and love to hate Climate Change. But in their minds, the solution that gets us to one before the other can never be an actual revolution--only a faster model of the current blender, a more convenient driving experience, a smarter open-plan office design. The future, to them, looks like an asymptotically-infinite superposition of paint-by-numbers drawings of the current world -- the hyperrational limit of a template in which so many still needlessly suffer. They would disagree with "needlessly" in that previous sentence, because perhaps the predominant Good Opinion of our time is that everything good has to have a trade-off. And so their success and freedom must come at the expense of someone else's failure and suffering.

The revolution that will impose itself on these elites (before the Singularity, but after Climate Change) will come either from painters on the left or from book-burners on the right. As yet, it's not clear what they prefer--after all, they don't need paper as much as artists do.

Hillary Clinton is not nearly practical enough. Sad!

Hillary Clinton is not nearly practical enough. I say this not because I'm trying to be a contrarian but for the simple and demonstrable reason that Clinton has repeatedly made catastrophic decisions for the United States. After all, this is the only sensible way the word "practicality" could be seen as a positive in a national politician seeking our votes. But, even apart from these calamities, she's not nearly practical enough, not even in her own political self-interest. Sad!


Supporting the Iraq War was not the practical decision, as far as the United States was concerned. Clinton's decision to authorize war ultimately cost the U.S. trillions, further destabilized the strategically-crucial Middle East, and led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and thousands of American soldiers. Sad!

Supporting the financial industry before 2006 was not the practical decision as far as the United States was concerned. Clinton's decision to stand with Wall Street in view of past recessions and scandals led directly to one of the great economic disasters since the Great Depression. In the process, this already-on-its-own-merits-impractical decision had staggering implications that we're living with today: The crash economically disenfranchised a whole generation, devastated the wealth held by blacks and Hispanics, and let the beast of fascism burst through the creaking door. Sad!

Supporting welfare reform and mass incarceration during the Clinton administration was not the practical decision as far as the United States was concerned. As Doug Henwood shows repeatedly in My Turn, Hillary and Bill form an tag-team, politically[1], and both of these measures were classics of the DLC triangulation genre the Clintons pioneered together. So it's totally on the table even if you don't buy that she bears direct responsibility for Bill's presidency. In any case, millions of single mothers had their livelihoods taken away and went into severe poverty and low-wage employment as a result of welfare reform. From a fiscal perspective, this was probably helpful, as there were now tons of fathers newly in prison who suddenly needed food, shelter, and health care. Sad!

All of the above were catastrophes that set the United States back years or even decades without an obvious corresponding benefit, and in all cases, Clinton gave her enthusiastic support to the wrong side. Plenty of writers who specialized in the financial industry knew how unstable and prone to recession and collapse it was. Plenty of foreign journalists were critiquing the Iraq War with criticisms that, in retrospect, were often laughably tame and understated. And everyone knew what welfare reform and mass incarceration actually meant. Sad!



But even as far as her own interests are concerned, it's fair to question what all these accumulated disasters--which count as signature Clinton achievements--are actually doing to help her politically nowadays. Arguably, her support for the Iraq War cost her both the nomination and the presidency in 2008. Barack Obama ran a brilliant campaign, but even Obama might have come up short if he couldn't differentiate himself so easily on the biggest debacle of the previous decade. Sad!

Now that the other party might just nominate a bigoted, racist fascist, it's perhaps time to reflect on the practical consequences of racism that both parties engaged in in the 1990s. For example, it might have been nice for the nation's future if the Clintons hadn't disenfranchised and impoverished so many men and women of color with their welfare and crime policies. While no one could've predicted how these 2016 primaries have gone[2], or just where they'll end up going, it's looking kinda shortsighted, maybe, to have deliberately criminalized, impoverished, or otherwise disenfranchised a generation of poor black men while now, also, depending on a multiethnic coalition of working-class Americans to win the nomination and the presidency, again, against an open racist fascist bigot. Sad!

And, of course, inequality, poverty, and Wall Street are central issues that have endangered Clinton in both the primaries and in the general election as an increased surge in populist anger mars her establishment candidacy. Once again, the wisdom of selling out an entire generation of progressives and sticking to transactional allies despised by her political base has totally backfired on the more practical candidate. Sad!

And today, even in her supposedly practical platform for achieving progressive goals, Clinton is just as bafflingly shortsighted. Even as Democrats from all walks of life (but especially a huge segment of young people) cry out for change, inspiration, leadership, and integrity, Clinton supports a dull platform of deliberately-uninspiring, a la carte, focus-grouped compromises. Clinton opposes single-payer, free tuition, and financial reform, and has allowed herself to be painted as cravenly unconcerned with both the working class and the truth. Sad!

Clinton doesn't even act like a practical person who makes occasional mistakes and then learns from them: After all, she still listens to the same kinds of foreign policy advisors that neocons like Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz also listen to. So she can't even back out of the terribly-mistaken decision which cost her the presidency in 2008, because she's still beholden to the foreign policy establishment which most Democratic voters have reviled for 12 years. Clinton is still close to genocidal idiot Henry Kissinger. Hillary gave private speeches to the reviled Goldman Sachs and conceals to this day the transcripts, even though it's likely releasing the transcripts would help her with most Americans, who barely understand how corruption actually works. Clinton shortsightedly used a private email server while working as Secretary of State, and likely plans to nominate yet another Wall Street heavy for Treasury Secretary (more on Blackstone here). Part of practicality means having and using good information, and Hillary has consistently demonstrated that she would prefer to be surrounded with bad advice. Part of practicality means adapting to the demands of political theater to avoid looking dishonest. Hillary has demonstrated neither. Sad!


Again and again, Hillary demonstrates far too little fluency in responding to current events in a campaign that her entire life has been building towards. The best moment of her campaign was the outrage she expressed at the water crisis in Flint. And she did great. But it was one moment, among a campaign that routinely fights below its weight class--a campaign that, more than anything the Sanders campaign has done, has mobilized young people against her. Part of practicality means taking advantage of opportunities that present themselves in real time and can lead to long-term gains. Hillary is batting below .500 against Little League pitchers. Even the intellectuals who have brazenly sold out to Clinton will reluctantly admit that she's been prone to countless indefensible gaffes and errors in judgment in this campaign alone. Sad!


Talking turkey for a moment: Even looking at her supposedly realistic plans which are meant specifically to differentiate herself from Sanders as a serious candidate who knows how to compromise, Clinton's compromises are transparently unworkable, pandering, and frequently less politically-viable than Sanders' more extreme analogues. Sad!

For example, Clinton categorically opposes raise taxes on the middle class, but also expects to raise taxes on "the most fortunate"[3] for family leave, practically guaranteeing that her proposal will never get through Congress as such by her own transactional theories of power. After all, how on Earth is Clinton supposed to build a coalition to raise taxes just on the wealthy? It's a zero-sum game, and she can't even get elected without their money. So where are the votes, Hillary? The only way Hillary can hope to thread this needle is to give up something even dearer to the working class to the same oligarchs who have waged class warfare on workers and intellectuals for the past 40 years. Which isn't exactly appealing, horse-trading-wise. Sad!

Hillary Clinton doesn't actually make practical decisions consistently in terms of the best economic and political interests of our country, Hillary Clinton isn't even practical on her own terms. Rather, like all the sophisticated media cheerleaders of the Iraq War who inexplicably still have big media jobs, Hillary Clinton is a "transactional" politician who plays nice with plutocrats in a plutocracy, who lets people buy influence from her, who compromises on seemingly any principle to win, and who doesn't understand why someone would still be upset about something that happened 10 years ago. Sad!

Hillary certainly does a lot of things right, but, at the end of the day, Clinton has a history of poor, stubborn judgments on the most important issues. And these judgments, crucially, end up serving her opponents' interests far more than her own. Hillary's tactics are often subtle, canny, and effective; no question. But her strategy, and judgment, however, are often phenomenally impractical, both personally and politically, quite apart from also being disasters for the American people. Sad!

The establishment media (who never tire of playing the proverbial hack sportswriter from your small-town newspaper in 1983) often state that Sanders got lucky to time his campaign just as America had its populist awakening, seemingly at random. Maybe that's true. But, to these eyes, it's Clinton who has had the amazing fortune to run as an establishment candidate right before the Democratic media and political elite realized how much Americans have come around to hating them. Sad!


When I started to write this post, I wanted to build to a couple of non-negotiable demands. I wanted the punchline of this post to be that I would demand two take-it-or-leave-it concessions from the Clinton campaign:

1. That Clinton would purge from her advisors and future Cabinet nominees anyone who supported the Iraq War into 2004 as a fully-grown adult, and anyone who still held the neoconservative ideology.
2. That Clinton would purge from her advisors and future Cabinet nominees any major executive at an investment bank in the last 20 years, or anyone else with close ties to the financial industry (this would exclude, for example, Lawrence Fink of Blackstone).

Those were supposed to be my two humble demands, without which Hillary could not expect my vote. And I stand by them. But, after writing this piece and reflecting, I've come to the far more terrifying conclusion that it doesn't much matter if I roll out of bed that morning. Because President Hillary Clinton may just accelerate the myopic self-destructive trends of the American political elite which have led directly to the rise of the fascist right and which seem ready to lead directly to its rise for the foreseeable future. A campaign taking 9 agonizing months to work through "Berniebros" will soon be an administration dealing with 4 years of avowed fascists. And those preppy media surrogates we've all grown so fond of won't command nearly the same default respect from the Koch machine and Nyarlathotrump, the Crawling Chaos. Sad!


Now, please understand I'm not throwing her under the bus. Hillary does learn from her mistakes to an extent. But when I see Hillary stumble over yet another obvious trap set for her by the right or the left, I start to think of the twilight years of another great establishment power-broker, and one of the few people who might claim fairly to have more experience than Hillary going into office,

For, just like Lyndon Johnson, Hillary is no idiot. They both know how to put a coalition together, how to make a deal and a friend in the cloakroom, how to build a personal fortune from which to mount a campaign, and how to wait 15 years to achieve a solution. They're both smart as a whip.

Just like Lyndon Johnson, Hillary has precious few blindspots: in foreign policy, in public perception, and in ethical compromises. These are flaws which may not harm someone in a Senate committee or in a cabinet post, but they're much more troublesome when you present them to the guileless American public. And, just like Lyndon Johnson, Hillary learns far too slowly when it comes to those blindspots, turning what would be mere liabilities into abject disasters.

48 years ago, on March 31, 1968, Lyndon Johnson announced he would not run for another term, as growing outrage at his administration from both left and right flanks proved to be too dispiriting and harmful. After a tremendous run of civil rights and anti-poverty achievements that stand with Lincoln and Roosevelt in their ambition, the backlash against civil rights and his growing commitments in Vietnam sunk President Johnson's agenda. One of the great backroom politicians in history, finally undone by the weight of his earlier decisions.

This isn't a perfect parallel. The lessons aren't clear, nor do they point only to Hillary's downfall. But we're seeing a festering movement on the right and the death spiral of the conservative movement, We're seeing a time of tremendous achievement and ambition on the one hand, and tremendous decadence and decay on the other. And, in the tumultuous era that the United States is entering, Hillary's failure to adapt--in its tragic, hubristic impracticality--may be our undoing as a nation.

Sad!


[1] - "Hillary was at Bill’s side throughout all of this and was a close collaborator in the education reform operation. She co-wrote Bill’s 1991 keynote speech at the DLC’s national convention, which turned out to be a major hit.", from My Turn: Hillary Clinton Targets the Presidency, by Doug Henwood
[2] - (other than Carl Diggler and the #MBET, obviously)
[3] - Speaking of which, minor point, but calling the rich "the most fortunate" is a surefire way to make them ideologically angry. Remember "you didn't build that"? They're still harping on 57 states. Does Hillary even have a chance of currying the elites that she's constantly courting? Which is kinda the point of running to the left for real.

Note to Readers: Politics is a relatively new sphere for me, and it's especially new as a subject in my writing. Now, I do have some experience with inexperienced writing; just check the archives from 2009. Such history has shown that I'll likely look back on this period of writing as sprawling, smug, and self-contradictory. That said, the posts seem to be getting better--though at a slow pace. Time will tell. In the meantime, I appreciate your patience, Pearls Divers(e). 
-Dave -Alex

GDP and Well-Being

Update: This isn't a real journalism outlet so, based on feedback from an anonymous reviewer, I'm editing this for clarity for tone, voice, subject matter, central argument, supporting evidence, and breadth and, also, now it's like 3 times as long. Just a quick rewrite.

I'd like to talk briefly and inadequately about a recent economic controversy. Bernie Sanders' single-payer health care plan--and economist Gerald Friedman's model which favors this plan--has been attacked by several eminent economists, perhaps most notably NYT columnist Paul Krugman. Matthew Yglesias has a nice summary of the feud here.

I won't rehash the central arguments, but the dispute basically revolves around Friedman's optimistic projections for GDP growth. Economists who have weighed in have run the gamut between "sensible", "optimistic", "highly-implausible", and "I wouldn't believe this unicorn crap if it were the plot of a fictional My Little Pony episode!" (and I'm paraphrasing here).

These economists are, of course, actually economists, versus me, who has no experience with the dismal science whatsoever. So I'm inclined to believe that they're all making a decent case. But there's some extra baggage caused by the current political situation, and it gives everyone some pause: Friedman's backers on one hand claim the pessimistic economists are really just propagandists for elite Democratic establishment. On the other hand, Friedman's critics claim that these economists are simply reporting the facts of the matter, regardless of what any idealistic lefties might want to think. There's some truth to both sides, if marred by oversimplification.

In short, the Friedman controversy has become just one more microcosm of the general fight between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton.

Yglesias captures this tension well:

And to an extent, mission accomplished. The coverage has been generated. But for better or for worse, the entire premise of the Sanders campaign is that the existing Democratic Party establishment needs to be overthrown, so imperious dismissals by establishment figures don't really hurt Sanders. His policy director, Warren Gunnels, told Danielle Kurtzleben that the economists in question are "the establishment of the establishment" and claimed to be unbothered by the criticisms. 

"That does not bother us at all," he told her. "What bothers us is the fact that the U.S. has more kids living in poverty than nearly any major country on earth."

But if this is simply one more Sanders vs. Clinton dispute, it's one that touches on something I've been thinking about a lot: The way neoliberals count things, account for things, and achieve their practical goals.

The original version of this piece (as a helpful reviewer noted) sought to answer the question of whether GDP growth was inherently valuable, but ended up unintentionally pivoting to the question of whether per-capita GDP itself was really a great measure of well-being, even on its own terms. It's a subtle difference, but it does matter.

I don't know anyone who would dispute that GDP captures consumer spending and productive activities extremely well. If I had five seconds to look up a nation's income, I'd look up GDP and GDP per capita, and if you gave me five more I'd look up a graph of their GDP growth. GDP captures the average and the total production of a nation well, and allows us to talk about everything else.

So let's start by talking about what GDP actually is, because I've got a more refined argument I'd like to make. In a nutshell, GDP measures consumption plus investment plus government spending, and, in this way, accounts for a nation's trade balance.

In math-y terms:

GDP = Consumption + Investment + Gov't spending + (eXports - iMports)

In other words, GDP captures the total value of what we spend on goods, as consumers, as investors, as governmental bodies, and as global traders. It avoids double-counting, and GDP overall does a good, reliable job measuring national production, national consumption, and national income.

GDP (and specifically GDP per capita) is the best single-number tool for differentiating poor countries from medium countries, and medium countries from from rich countries.



One reason I'm writing this is that there's something to be said for the sort of 0% GDP growth that would radically equalize the structure of society. Of course this isn't captured in raw or adjusted GDP, but income inequality numbers have been around for a long time, and

There are nuanced arguments to make that the United States actually transfers a whole lot of its revenue to a public safety net--but aside from Social Security, much of that goes not to cash/near-cash transfers but to the high cost of publicly-subsidized health care, public education, and family welfare, much of it in the form of tax benefits.

The means-tested transfers and tax credits that the United States tends to favor are, I believe, a form of social control which in fact make all Americans' lives more inefficient (and therefore poorer), and do so in ways that won't necessarily show up on an economic balance sheet--or, they will, but will in fact be positive. I believe you can make the same argument for the structure of our work lives and some dominant tendencies of our culture--many such factors that add up to my central claim: Despite our high median and high average GDP per capita, I believe that we, as Americans, have a worse median existence relative to other, less-wealthy countries with more efficient systems of distribution, entirely for that reason.

This bizarre, potentially-true fact of American life (a potentially-true fact I'm coming to believe in) is what I'd like to explore.


My contention in the original version of this piece was that Americans spend too much on consumer goods which exist to compensate for our overstressed, inefficient lives and our crumbling social fabric. This isn't a radical lefty argument--we spend more than anyone in the OECD on health care by a wide margin, higher education is expensive, and we work longer hours than most other countries.

Our public transportation system is lousy, we have more cars than we know what to do with, most poor people, young people and minorities see little opportunity to get into the homeowning middle-class (an artifact of racial discrimination for minorities, and an artifact of inequality for everyone else), and lots of people suffer directly or indirectly from the carceral state.

We have bad poverty rates relative to other OECD countries even in terms of absolute income (see Digression 3 below), our inequality is worse than almost anyone, rich or poor, our citizenry feels relatively powerless over its own existence, and the social fabric is slowly unravelling and Americans are worrying that the rise of Trump may mean we're finally "getting what we deserve".

It's not all bad, and it's often not all that bad. But it is bad.

And, if our society were more humane and efficient in its structure, I don't think we'd spend nearly as much on transportation, rent/housing, food, electronics, pharmaceuticals, health care, guns, or even leisure.


Much of the spending Americans make is not for consumer goods which improve their lives, but on necessities such as housing or rent, utilities, food, transportation, health care, child care, student loans, and credit cards. Every bit of legislation that goes towards making these more expensive also increases "Consumption" in those sectors.

But even the good stuff, the fun kind of spending, has its problems. I believe that much of what is counted in our national Consumption is loaded with goods and services which improve our lives only by ameliorating or perpetuating the parts of our country that are unfulfilling, banal, hateful, brutal, inefficient, and sad. Unhealthy food we can only eat because we have no time to cook. Medicines for mental and physical maladies we might be able to get around if we had more autonomy in our lives. Guns because we don't feel safe. Insurance because we don't feel secure. Electronics that we only buy because we know we'll spend an hour a day or more in our cars. Expensive housing we only spend on to avoid the ghetto. Cars we only need because we need to be able to go into work at a moment's notice. Child care we only need because our welfare has a work requirement. Expensive leisure spending because it's not every day one can make time for entertainment.

And all this palliative spending, like the spending that goes to necessities, goes into our GDP calculation and appears superficially as a national windfall. It's national income and it's consumer spending. There may be crowding-out effects from this less-bad spending, of course, but economics in general --and GDP in particular-- seems to have trouble distinguishing between spending which makes a bad life livable and spending which makes a good life even better.

And I don't think our lives are so good. Even ignoring the systemic stuff, our leisure time is, if anything, overstated by statistics--we're always on-call, always managing something, always being asked to suffer one more indignity of impatience. Many workers, especially in the service industry, don't have a consistent week-to-week schedule. Their quality time with kids is frankly dictated by their company. The higher strata of workers, empowered but bereft of unions, live in constant fear of the at-will employment knife, the retirement funds unvested, the bundled health care that could go away, and the stigma of being jobless for even six months. Students fear they won't get jobs for their loans and desperately fight for any scrap of time or extra income that their personal bearings can afford.

And just look at the current lead/chlorine water crisis in Flint, Michigan--from a GDP standpoint, it's probably not a huge deal in the short- and medium-term. People with aching bones will buy expensive medicines--people will buy new appliances, build new homes. Water coolers so that infant children can bathe in the large source of freshwater of the Great Lakers without losing IQ points. They'll buy cars so that all but the most desperately poor can get water from neighboring regions on a tragically-necessary biweekly commute. All that disruption and privatization probably ends up as a GDP gain until the demographic consequences of massive lead poisoning catch up to them. Depreciation is in fact counted in Net Domestic Product, but I do question the extent to which economists really capture this kind of complexity in their models, as they as a rule tend to talk about other, more gainful things. Economist Joseph Stiglitz notes in The Price of Inequality that environmental damage (often tragically permanent) doesn't count against our GDP, and he points to Green GDP as an alternative, aspirational measure.

Whatever number you choose, you can add it all up and you're still left with a single number or four. Simple indicators to be manipulated by wily policymakers, and an ethic of selfishness that will corrupt our most heartfelt attempts to attack poverty, inequality, and the fundamental unhappiness which our society begets. 

There is inherent value in having a society whose spending, private and public, takes place by and large to improve the lives of its citizens, solve their problems, and gives them the freedom of mobility and creativity that our economy now denies them. When it comes to public goods, the government should be the one to provide them. When it comes to public problems, the government should be able to address them. When it comes to the public advocacy of its citizens both rich and poor, the government should be able and willing to fight. Individually, I've found that Americans try to solve all our problems with consumer goods, and almost never with government spending--to solve all our issues at our front porch (and stopping there), rather than with policy, with the net result that we recapitulate one another's sufferings in silence and leave those who follow us to do the same, ad aeternum.

Consumer goods are often great things and improve everyone's lives--but to some extent, in America, they mostly seem to be necessary palliatives in an inefficient nation of ideologues with a fetish for work and everyone who gets caught in their role playing. 

And even the really good stuff? The consumer goods? Well, that stuff is the really good shit--when we can get around to it. But although Americans are notoriously optimistic, I do wonder if most of us really do get around to it--or if we instead take expensive classes, buy expensive equipment, promise to invest more time in the good stuff every year and consistently fall short of our expectations--not just because this is human nature, but in part because we force it to be so.

Gerald Friedman's argument was about a certain macroeconomic model producing a certain level of GDP growth. Intelligent minds can agree or disagree with his projections, but this discussion--in granting the economists the whole frame--rings a bit hollow to me, and those words "GDP growth" sound now a note of falsehood. What kind of nation has a gigantic bureaucracy to provide what other nations can provide without such bureaucracy, and then deems this same bureaucracy impossibly unrealistic to remove? Who cares what it does to that GDP number on the page which tells us how poor we got this year, if the net result was that people rich and poor can now see a doctor when they need to, when last year they couldn't? Who cares what happens to GDP if we fix all our problems? These questions might sound glib, but their converse is equally so. Who cares how many people on the bottom must suffer if the GDP rises next year? The tone of these dry economic discussions (if amusingly catty at times) seems to treat the economy and its indicators as ends in themselves, rather than as means for creating happiness and prosperity--the shape and silhouette of our institutions mistaken for their whole content.

In the Friedman controversy, I found in most of the economists, Krugman especially, a tone of detached amusement towards their object of study, even as they grew animated at one another and about one another's credentials. While I like some funny crosstalk here and there, the sneering dismissiveness of the establishment's experts towards the common rabble is troubling, and not just because they rarely sneer at their far more ridiculous pundit friends and colleagues.

See, unlike most scientists, economists are studying that part of the world which is populated by these cries of agony--the mass psychology of panic, reaction, and revolt, as well as the calculations that lead people to take a certain action at a given fork in the road. Young people have overwhelmingly affirmed their fealty to the madness of Sanders' plans, and all Krugman can do is patronizingly lecture them about how great they have it, or about how there's nothing they could do to fix things anyway.

These economists are true experts, unlike me. But also unlike me, they seem to find it easy to ignore all the demographic and sociological data that's coming their way and ignoring it as the white noise of an Internet meme that will resolve itself when the dolts in the general public wise up and their comedic futility finally becomes evident even to themselves.

Economists' appeals to indicators may be important, but in the context of an active political debate involving tens of millions of suffering young people crying out in terror, Krugman's amused, detached appeals to indicators constitute an inadequate and fallacious response to human suffering, regardless of whether these indicators correlate with human happiness (which no one doubts). I don't mind whether the economists in question happen to be right or wrong--we're all trying our best. And I'm not, like, offended by their tone, and even if I had been, not every person is the right discussant for every discussion. I would be happy to let Krugman's comments pass into a distant history.

But I just don't think that, for all their dismissiveness, these economists are even correct. These experts--who taxed their precious time to crash the party and bring dismal reality back to the harried masses--appealed not to reality, but instead only to their own manic conceits:

Instead of the poor, uninsured, and disaffected of Sanders' campaign, they hand-wavingly appealed to historical GDP trends and closed the discussion triumphantly as arbiters of the real. Discussion over. Thanks for playing. Get back to me when you have a Nobel Prize. To those of us in this country who are poor and uninsured and disaffected, and those others of us who give a damn what happens to this country--to those of us who happened to read through much of it--we found no answer in the chuckling economists' field to questions in our immiserated field, a field we're becoming experts in.

What was missing--and what has been missing for some time from all of the neoliberal ideologues--is the understanding that all our indicators are answerable to reality, and not the other way around.

We are not answerable to GDP--our GDP is answerable to us, our choices and our policies. If our high GDP is predicated on spending too much for health care, then maybe it ought to decline. If our GDP is predicated on food costs incurred at the workplace solely because there's nothing better available? Maybe it ought to decline. If our GDP is predicated on sending more and more people from our welfare rolls into our horrifically-overtaxed workforce instead of allowing them to raise children full-time? Maybe it ought to decline. If our GDP is predicated on inefficient military spending that is only justified to that extent because of an insane eschatological ideology of warmongers in Washington? Then, just maybe, our GDP should decline on that account. Whether it's GDP, unemployment, poverty, inequality, mobility, or any such measure of our lives, reality is the master of men, rather than the men who claim mastery over reality.

And, if our GDP can't suffer a little infrastructure spending, or welfare spending, or the necessary restructuring of our terrible rent-seeking bureaucracies, both governmental and corporate? Maybe our GDP is not the answer but the excuse, or even the problem. Again and again, the field of economics, while seeming to have a lot of legitimacy in measuring our world, seems equally to be marshaled again and again as pretext for those who would do nothing in the face of suffering whose toll has not been measured yet. I don't think the economists who act in this capacity are privy to special knowledge, or wisdom--they are privy to the interests they serve, and they are privy to whatever reality they must promote to serve those interests. And again and again, the interests that they serve and oppose necessarily hide behind the names of their conceits--growth, deflation, austerity, sustainability, shocks, privatization, realism, rationality, choice. An economist acting in the name of the Kochs or the Gateses or the Clintons or the Bloombergs will never speak their name, but will find in their own work a perfect mapping from their fundamental economic concepts to their deeper personal compromises.

We cannot speak of unemployment without speaking of incarceration. We cannot speak of poverty and inequality and mobility without speaking the names of those programs by which income flows and wealth stocks have been forcibly redirected. We cannot speak about political reality and political feasibility without calling out the names of the enablers and arbiters of what is politically feasible and what is politically feasible.

There is no economy, of any sort, without the political economy to prop its assumptions and institutions up. Our economic statistics reflect reality only to the extent we allow them to, because no one has a right to more than he needs when that right impugns upon others' enjoyment. So it isn't just unkind or thoughtless of these economists to dismiss a wounded young cohort as delusional because the economy cannot support their concerns--but, in fact, the most unrealistic fantasy of all. A world of human institutions conducting itself a certain way in spite of and in opposition to the will of nearly all its constituents? That's the fantasy. That's the apocalyptic madness. Not the scarred and wounded hope of the young.


In my more cynical moments, I sometimes ponder that we in the US of A are so devoid of political agency to accomplish things that it hardly makes sense to treat us as a country in the first place, and measuring our national income simply serves to reify this delusion for another day. But I'll back away from that ledge for now.

We're a rich country by GDP, but we don't function in a rich way, if we ever did. I've often thought about how nice it would be to live instead in a medium-rich country that functions as a rich country, or which functions as a country at all. But for Americans, that kind of country is a distant dream (if it's a dream at all), and perhaps will always remain that way. It's perhaps well to note that I don't say this with the mournful, yearning eyes of a dreamer, but with fiery eyes and apocalyptic grin passing in that order beneath the brow as you crumble over now decades--not centuries--to my feet.

Three Digressions That Didn't Fit Anywhere Else:

(1. On the macro-level, I question whether corporations and finance really embrace innovation with the kind of vigor they always like to claim--sure, the tech industry is surging forward, but what about the industries that didn't get a major head start from Bell Labs, DARPA, MIT, and Berkeley? Have they really plunged into the future without kicking and screaming? I'm skeptical anytime I read about an "advanced scheduling algorithm" that a comp. sci. undergrad could have written in 1983 with little prompting, especially when that algorithm mainly serves to reduce labor costs and decrease labor power. But that's neither here nor there.)

(2. I first heard of Gerald Friedman on a podcast interview he did a few weeks ago, before this controversy really broke--and found him a funny, sprawling, sharp mind who spoke fluently and thoughtfully about political realities and about the direction he wanted the country to go in. I later learned he was supporting Hillary Clinton, which surprised me given how humorless and mean her shills have been. The decent Friedman's endorsement of Hillary is a good argument in itself that perhaps all the fuming, mad, realist hacks in her camp just might have a point worth hearing, even if the true costs of her ideology are sort of the entire reason I'm writing this. But I digress. Again.)

(3. Conservative and libertarian commentators are right to note that relative poverty measurements are problematic. But we're talking about a society where most people who might be classified as poor do not own their own house and must pay for rent as well as utilities, food, transportation, health care, child care, student loans, and credit. And those who do own homes often have onerous mortgages whose value is often determined by residents with more ability to pay who drive the prices up. In fact, the nature of relative poverty/inequality is probably exacerbated in a market economy, because little in the way of goods or services are guaranteed.)

A Realistic 3-Step Program For Hillary Clinton To Earn Millennials' Votes

It's easy (and understandable) for some centrists to misread the left's disdain for Hillary Clinton as a matter of "purity"--a youthful dalliance into idealism before running into the reality of a Trump or Cruz ballot in November.

"Hillary has undoubtedly made a lot of mistakes," a typical argument goes, "and neither the Clinton administration nor Hillary's senatorial career were the ideal bastions of leftward thought. But it's time to put down the red flag and work together for a common cause, kids. Hillary's come around on several mistakes, and besides all that, the Clintons have had a hard road, with Republican intransigence at every turn and the need to balance diverse coalitions. If she can compromise, why can't you?"

And there's some truth to this narrative. She's not a monster, she's not heartless, and, in the final tally, Hillary Clinton seems like a decent human being with a decent grasp of the issues who would work for the causes she advocates in her campaign. And, yes, Clinton has "come around," to the point where her platform honestly and accurately represents a left-of-center agenda in the American political establishment.

But the part about millennial idealism just isn't true: I'm nothing if not a realist. Her campaign, by sheer dint of its own cynical power, is living proof that the United States as currently constructed will never, ever, ever achieve universal health care, much less the broader goal of social democracy. Hillary won't fight for it, and with Democrats like Hillary in power, Bernie can't hope to achieve it. Her brand of Democrats simply doesn't care about poor Americans enough to fight for them, I've decided.

===

So let's get real. After all, most of us millennials are practical in the final tally--we simply don't have enough in our pockets to be idealistic! So here's a gritty, realistic, simple 3-step mini-agenda that should helpfully illustrate what Hillary Clinton might do right now to earn my vote now and in November:

1. The Clinton Foundation, their friendly super-PACs, etc. must be irrevocably transferred to a progressive organization separate from either Sanders or Clinton's campaign whose resources must be primarily dedicated to humanitarian and progressive goals. Right now, Bill and Hillary Clinton are worth 9 figures--and a realistic millennial knows never to trust a plutocrat with their political institutions. At least bring that net worth down to a high 7 figures, where a mere 99.99% of us live. Otherwise I have no reason to think you'll represent my interests.
2. The Clinton campaign must distance itself forever from Henry Kissinger and every other war-criminal still hanging around her door. It should be enough for now to explicitly denounce Kissinger for his war crimes, call for an investigation into Kissinger, and pledge to do better on that front. I believe that Hillary has come along in her thinking on foreign policy--but as a canny millennial I've come to believe you're only as good as the people around you who can support you and give advice. The Benghazi stuff doesn't seem fair at all, but how is someone who listens to Kissinger going to make good, humane decisions on foreign policy that redound to the credit of the United States?
3. The Clinton campaign must acknowledge that social democracy--or at least a few toddling steps towards it--is a real, important goal of the younger generation, that it's both an ethically and practically good goal, and that we will find anything less unacceptable as our cohort ages into power. Therefore, to this end, Hillary will fight for universal health care, education, food, and housing when in office, and prove her commitment to this cause by announcing several social democrats she would elect to her cabinet. As a millennial who has continually discovered the generosity of the American people only by sharing my troubles, I know that you can't hope to get something until you ask for it. 
4. BONUS: This almost goes without saying, but this agenda would be incomplete without a massive commitment to gender and racial equality, income and wealth inequality, investment into infrastructure, massive campaign finance reform, environmental regulation. And, because it would be awesome and historic to elect the first woman president but incomplete without this, I want to see something by the DNC to guarantee women are represented in both houses of Congress and all future judiciary nominations.

That's a good start. If Hillary (or Bernie, for that matter) wants my vote, she should prove she represents my interests, and not the wealthy class, hawkish advisors, and milquetoast intellectuals to whom she currently seems to subscribe.

It's only practical, you see.

===

Establishment writers always puzzle and puzzle about why young people--"even young women!!"--don't seem to want Hillary Clinton to become president. These writers--beloved and sophisticated, if generally obtuse--invent so many tortuous explanations for Bernie Sanders' support. They lecture at length about entitlement and idealism, they pathologize our passion, they talk in serious tones about "messaging". And on and on and on.

On and on to defeat in July. Look, Hillary could do what she always does: Listen to a grave team of august Ivy-educated advisors (class of '06!) about why Hillary Clinton is not a "brand" the "younger demographics" seem to "engage". Her "net favorables" are "underwhelming". Clinton could wait for a generation that Beltway insiders have condemned as "entitled" to pick as the lesser of two evils someone who has shown them mostly contempt for the last 8 months or so.

Or, Clinton could fix the gap between the political reality she is offering and the political reality young people want.

I hope this is helpful.

yes, you're a fraud for your music tastes. no, i don't hate you for it

if you've ever harbored a secret anxiety that your opinions on music will mark you as a "fraud", there's a good chance that you're absolutely right. i like music a lot and i can tell when you describe music in ways that are arbitrary and pretentious and meaningless. you're just gonna have to trust me on this--if you're a fraud about music, i pretty much know with certainty that you're a fraud. even if i've never met you or interacted with you. i am standing right beyond you

ah, but here's a little reassurance: if you're afraid further that you're just one more conversation away from being exposed and called out humiliatingly, you're wrong: i'm never going to call you out on it.

first of all, i have no reason or desire to make you feel like a bad person for your musical tastes, even though they're actually borrowed from a critic. i love music, and all i want to do is share it with others. if that means cutting through a little bit of affectation to bond with someone i care about over some music i care about, i can put aside my ego and talk to you like a human being--i can communicate on your level, in other words, and i'm happy to do so as long as it makes our lives a little better. besides, there's a good chance you actually really like music, and there's a very good chance you'll be more honest if i make you feel comfortable.

second and more cynically, you're not alone in this form of anxiety, and, if i called you out, everyone who has the same anxiety would see me as a monster--literally, the bogeyman of their personal nightmares. further, everyone who knows someone who thinks they're a fraud deep down would rightfully see my action as shaming mental-illness over a petty quibble. suffice it to say that mocking you would be more embarrassing to me, i'd look like a bad person. you'd look like the aggrieved victim. and frankly, that's exactly how it would be.

so you're safe. but just know that i know you're a fraud about music, and, while in my heart of hearts i leer for a half-instant at your philistinism, i don't honestly hold it against you. really, you're not a bad person, you just like socializing and projecting a certain image to the world more than listening publicly to what you actually love and talking about it as a person and not as a critic writing the pull quote. face it, there's nothing wrong with you, or even anything particularly uncommon: you have a guilty pleasure in a guilt-ridden society which encourages you to feel guilt for "ill-gotten" pleasure, which is bullshit: society--and the irrepressibly mean human psyche acting upon its ego--is the problem, not you. lots of people have depression and anxiety or just haven't figured out what they're doing in life, or what this whole crazy thing is about.

you're a fraud, sure as the sun rises. but listening to music is such a tiny, adorable thing to be a fraud about. of all the things to be worried about!--i know you can't turn that thought off, but you should know that it's irrational, it's not your fault, and you shouldn't feel bad about yourself for thinking of yourself as a fraud, if at all possible. i basically see you as a kitten, preening and mewling over your keyboard, a little bit sad deep down but putting forth your best face, i'm not the kind of person who eats kittens, except when it's life or death, them or me, and that has only happened once, and it turned out i actually didn't need to, so i would feel extra bad about taking yet another unnecessary life. and it's not out of contempt or condescension that i say this--i like kittens, and i know they are normally pretty rad beneath the surface. you are too. trust me.

you're just fine, you lovable damn fraudster. if you ever get up the confidence to talk about your music tastes even though you don't think you're so smart, hit me up. i'll be happy to hear what you're listening to myself and even help you find other music.

for example, i bet you'd like "Muswell Hillbillies" by the Kinks. that's a good one, based on the feedback you're giving me. every song is crisp as hell. here, fuck; get in the hangout lets listen to it now.