Excellent post by Jeff Sachs lambasting the eurocrats and EZ leadership. Cites Keynes.
Project Syndicate
The Endgame in Greece
Jeffrey D. Sachs, Professor of Sustainable Development, Professor of Health Policy and Management, and Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, is also Special Adviser to the United Nations Secretary-General on the Millennium Development Goals
19 comments:
Have to say that's pretty darn good stuff from Sachs.
When you see the lion's teeth don't think it's smiling.
"Shock therapy" Sachs--the one who helped sack Russia. A criminal, a "snake in a suit".
"Pretty darn good stuff" my foot. American liberals are so "molesse intellectuelle."
That's true, John. Russia was a disaster, but it wasn't only Sachs. See Andrei Shleifer, for instance.
The Nation, The Harvard Boys Do Russia (1998)
As I have said, his heart is the right place, but his economics sucks. I don't put Sachs in the class of the economists that push disaster capitalism as a neoliberal tool. I think Sachs genuinely wants to make the world a better place, but he doesn't know how and just mucks it up when he is given the opportunity to try. Hopefully, he has learned something from his mistakes. I think that is the case to some degree — the Harvard boyz were somewhat chastened by their results in Russia. But he still hasn't figured out how to change his economic thinking.
I think this is true of a lot of people. Many of them mean well but they are incompetent. Others don't mean well and all to competent in achieving their ends that benefit the few because liberalism and trickle down.
I wouldn't know about his heart. I think his actions are a sufficient gauge. One mustn't be naive here.
Failing to pry away the entire Ukraine, Plan B is to break it into parts, much as U.S. strategists are fomenting Uighur and Tibetan separatism in China. Dismemberment usually is achieved most easily in today’s world under the force majeur of IMF “stabilization” such as tore Yugoslavia apart (an early venture of Jeffrey Sachs). The aim is to break away as much of Ukraine as possible from the Russian orbit, and to do so in ways designed to hurt Russia the most.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/page2/the_new_cold_wars_ukraine_gambit_20141023
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...Åslund raises a series of irrelevant and diversionary points. He denies being somewhere–Arkhangelskoe–where I never said he had gone. If he is implying that he was not involved when the Gaidar team prepared its program, then that is contradicted by his own writing (see, for example, his book How Russia Became a Market Economy, p. 2). In a similar vein, the order in which Kokh and Boycko chaired the Russian Privatization Center is wholly irrelevant to the issue of their corruption. It was the deputy head of the Gaidar Institute, Dr. Alexei V. Ulyukaev, who said, in a taped interview with Anne Williamson, that "Sachs was never an official adviser to the government, that's his own illusion" [my emphasis]. Sachs and David Lipton had a close working relationship, as evidenced in numerous joint publications and in Lipton's position as vice president of Sachs' consulting firm. However, it was a Russian representative at the IMF who said that "Jeff and David always came [to Russia] together", a point that others have made as well.
As to Sachs/Åslund's more general comments, former World Bank Chief Economist Joseph Stiglitz is among a growing number of economists who believe that the policies that Sachs and Åslund advocated were misconceived and harmful to Russia and to most of the other post-communist countries. Russia didn't "stumble", as Åslund characterizes it; it was inundated with counterproductive advice from people like himself.
http://legacy.ciaonet.org/olj/ni/ni_00saj01.html
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http://michael-hudson.com/2011/09/russian-ripoff/
The head of the economics section of the Academy of Sciences did ask me to write up most of these ideas to put them into discussion but the discussion has been almost entirely censored by the neo-liberal advisers who they brought over, ever since Jeffrey Sachs and the Harvard boys all came over and said don’t follow any advice but ours – there was a choice and they don’t realize in Russia that there was a choice.
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http://fpif.org/jeffrey_sachss_metamorphosis_from_neoliberal_shock_trooper_to_bleeding_heart_hits_a_snag/
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Naomi Klein
A lot of people are under the impression that Jeffrey Sachs has renounced his past as a shock therapist and is doing penance now. But if you read The End of Poverty more closely he continues to defend these policies, but simply says there should be a greater cushion for the people at the bottom.
The real legacy of neoliberalism is the story of the income gap. It destroyed the tools that narrowed the gap between rich and poor. The very people who opened up this violent divide might now be saying that we have to do something for the people at the very bottom, but they still have nothing to say for the people in the middle who’ve lost everything.
This is really just a charity model. Jeffrey Sachs says he defines poverty as those whose lives are at risk, the people living on a dollar a day, the same people discussed in the Millennium Development Goals. Of course that needs to be addressed, but let us be clear that we’re talking here about noblesse oblige, that’s all.
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What the Hell Was Economic Hit Man
Jeffrey Sachs Doing at Occupy Wall Street?
http://www.internationalist.org/jeffreysachsows1110.html
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The Shock of the Real: The Neoliberal Neurosis in the Life and Times of Jeffrey Sachs
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/anti.12058/abstract
Abstract
This paper draws on Slavoj Žižek's critique of ideology in seeking to account for the persistence and transformability of the neoliberal project. Against understandings of neoliberalism as a utopian representation projected onto an external reality, I argue that neoliberal ideology operates as a social fantasy, which structures reality itself against the traumatic Real of Capital. The evolution of the neoliberal project should be understood, not as the meticulous manipulation of social reality, but as a series of increasingly desperate attempts to hold the very fabric of reality together. Reconceptualizing neoliberalization as a form of obsessional neurosis can help to explain the relentless persistence of “zombie neoliberalism” and its paradoxical trajectory towards increasingly intensive forms of social engineering. This argument is developed through a critical engagement with the work of the economist Jeffrey Sachs. From shock therapy to the Millennium Villages Project, Sachs's trajectory embodies the characteristics of the neoliberal neurosis.
The paper aims to undermine the apparently monolithic power of neoliberalism, by challenging dominant critical representations of the neoliberal project in terms of a hyper-rational governmentality. It also aims to subvert the attempts by Jeffrey Sachs and other neoliberals to reposition themselves as opponents of the Washington Consensus, and as spokesmen of the Occupy movement. The chosen method of attack is more satirical than polemical. Neurotic neoliberals such as Sachs have successfully appropriated ethical objections to neoliberalism in the name of “globalization with a human face”. In the present conjuncture, an immanent critique that reveals the internal incoherence of neoliberal ideology, and the hapless floundering of its proponents, is perhaps more effective than a repetition of familiar forms of moral condemnation. An alternative subtitle for this paper might therefore be “Towards a satirical materialism”.
Antipode
Volume 46, Issue 1, pages 301–321, January 2014
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All of that stuff may be correct, but Sachs is 100% right about Greece.
All of that stuff may be correct, but Sachs is 100% right about Greece.
Zizek: Reconceptualizing neoliberalization as a form of obsessional neurosis can help to explain the relentless persistence of “zombie neoliberalism” and its paradoxical trajectory towards increasingly intensive forms of social engineering. This argument is developed through a critical engagement with the work of the economist Jeffrey Sachs. From shock therapy to the Millennium Villages Project, Sachs's trajectory embodies the characteristics of the neoliberal neurosis.
I agree in large part with Zikek here. Most of these people are smart people, smart enough to get it, but they don't on several grounds, economic and political. It can only be accounted for, I think, as either neurosis or bad faith.
For a lot of them, and I think this includes Sachs, which is why he cannot change his economics, which then implies neoliberalism.
For others it is bak faith and they are in it for what they can get out of it personally in some way.
I think that Sachs was in the first group regarding Russia, for instance, while Andrei Shiefer looks to fall in the later. Sachs was never accused of corruption personally that I know of, and there is no evidence I have seen that he was corrupt. That's not true of some the others involved.
Here is an apologia pro sua vita by Sachs.
What I did in Russia
We've agreed many time about people being either stupid or complicit. I have generally been on the side of Randy in arguing for favoring complicity when smart people do stupid things that benefit them. Matt has generally been on the side of stupidity. But I think that Sachs is most likely just stupid, blinded by his neurosis.
If "stupid" is too crude for some, then I would say they are not qualified and not competent to be working in the area they are working....
Doing the same thing over and over expecting different results is either stupid or insane. That's why neurosis seems apt.
Neurosis is less severe than psychosis. I don't think these people are psychotic or at least most of them. Those that are complicit may be sociopaths, however. It's also pretty clear that being very smart and also stupid is contradictory so there has be to some explanation. It's clearly related to blind-sidedness wrt to assumptions. They think that the assumptions and methods are correct and the failure lie in incorrect or incomplete application. So they keep doubting down on a system of understanding and approach that is fundamental flawed.
The refusal to consider other options and declare that the methodological controversy is settled in their favor in spite of the egregious failures is further evidence of neurotic behavior.
Yesterday, we talked somewhat about education and educational reform. I've long held that the current approach to education is neurotic and produces neurotic output. So this is no surprise to me as an educator.
"very smart and also stupid is contradictory"
Oh no, not at all. They are frequently found together. The binding element is pride, hubris, big ego. Pride and stupidity are bosom buddies.
I view character flaws generally as the result of neurosis. Most people don't try to be bad.
The medieval scholastics used to say that it is difficult to be a good person in a bad society. It's the enculturation.
I should add here that there seems to be evidence that taking even an undergrad course in economics erodes moral responsibility.
"I view character flaws generally as the result of neurosis. Most people don't try to be bad."
This is liberalism and its core delusion in a nutshell."People are basically good. It's the system that needs revamping."
I could be wrong, but I suspect you have led very sheltered and comfortable life. Have you ever even been away from the Midwest or the US? Have you been in military combat?
Have you ever even been away from the Midwest or the US? Have you been in military combat?
Yes. Next question.
I am not saying this of the top of my head nor as an uniformed opinion. I have actually studies this stuff and come to the conclusion that Freud did. Civilization induces neurosis and there is a good chance it can lead to either the extinction of the species are very severe culling now that human have developed WMD and also influence their environment negatively based on mass neurosis.
This is not to say there is no moral responsibility. It is simply to assert that there is a lot less evil than craziness.
Agreed, to a point. Modern civilization breeds craziness--in my view, due to its fundamental atheism--or if you prefer, lack of a civilization oriented towards a higher reality--a supreme Principle--transcending the cosmos. Absent that, since you referenced scholasticism,the traditional point of view is that fallen man is most definitely not "good" but a highly ambiguous creature and, regarding the average run of men, very subject to their passions. And as the Gospel puts it, most men go by the "wide gate", the Pitriyana. They are only "accidentally human," one might say. I realize my perspective is far from politically correct and that it goes against the spirit of the age. At any rate, to be aware of the nature of evil, there are the words at Delphi: gnothi seauton!
According to perennial wisdom spiritual ignorance is the result of lack of realization of wholeness, whatever that is called. Spiritual ignorance is life lived in the duality, the duality of subject and object and the duality of opposites, that constitutes phenomenal, relative and changing in contrast to the noumenal, absolute and unchanging. This is the human condition that all are subject to, even the great sages that have not yet transcended duality to realize unity.
I think that this is the most likely conceptual model. But even if one accepts this conceptual model without having experienced it, all the issues of the phenomenal, relative and change persist. There are still all the issues on that level that need to be explained.
Within this conceptual model, often expressed in highly symbolic from, is an explanation of the conditions underlying experience of the phenomenal, relative and changing manifestation of unbroken wholeness in terms of the duality subject and object.
It can be inferred from this explanation that Freud was essentially on the right track in his discovery that the ordinary human consciousness could be categorized into that of which people are aware or can call to awareness through memory which he called ego, that which is subconscious as subliminal, often repressed, which he called id, and that which is super-conscious as structure, which he called super-ego. Jung differed with Freud in certain respects but he agreed with Freud's basic model, as does humanistic and transpersonal psychology. Jung, humanistic and transpersonal psychology were all influenced by perennial wisdom.
Freud also knew of perennial wisdom through his friend Roman Rolland, but he rejected the account of perennial wisdom as a theory of consciousness and sought an explanation in terms of his own materialistic theory of consciousness, which he believed to be scientific. See The Future of An Illusion (Die Zukunft einer Illusion, 1927). (I would not say that materialism is wrong as much as that it is a partial explanation, limited to the gross world, and therefore it cannot be the basis for a general theory of consciousness and reality that includes the range of possible experience of the subtle, causal, transcendent, and holistic as well as the gross.)
In Civilization and Its Discontents (Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, 1930), Freud sets forth a thesis that human beings are trapped between their primal desires as large animals and having to conform to the rules of the game imposed in the process of socialization, which are imprinted through early training and later take on a normative through the pressure of social convention.
continued
continuation
Humans are alienated from themselves in a fashion that is somewhat analogous to the alienation resulting from separation from wholeness. In Christianity, for instance, sin is defined as separation from God. The alienation to which all humans are subject can be interpreted similarly in perennial wisdom and in Freudianism as the symbolic meaning of the Fall and original sin. In both the Freudian view and that of perennial wisdom, human beings are not born bad, but rather they are born alienated.
This alienation is so determinative in life that so-called free will is not perfectly free, as many suppose, especially those who believe that behavior always involves a moral choice in which freedom implies responsibility. Since I subscribe to a view that includes alienation, I reject the view that humans are "born bad." I reject the view that humans are born good for the same reason. Its much more complicated that that and a lot of factors are involved that influence behavior.
But getting back to Civilization and Its Discontents, since humans are alienated to one degree or another just being born into duality, or as Freud would explain it separated from the primal wholeness of the womb, and then become further alienated through socialization, and even further alienated owing to the conditions of civilized life, people generally act this out one way or another. Some repress and some sublimate and some vent. Those who adjust are considered normal, over a wide range, while those that don't either become neurotic or psychotic, or else, if they sublimate, become the exemplars. Unfortunately, even most of the so-called normal people are somewhat borderline and can easily fall over the edge under duress, especially mass hysteria.
I am not saying that Freud got it right but I think his explanation has the advantage of being simple to understand in terms of conflicting impulses regarding which most people are only dimly aware consciously but of which just about everyone is quote conscious of being there. In Christian terminology, it is called "temptation". On the other hand, the explanation of perennial wisdom is a much bigger stretch for many people, while the conventional wisdom is as usual simplistic, while religious explanations are usually to highly symbolic to be readily understood at their deepest level and so simplistic interpretations dominate.
I am not claiming that there is no freedom in choice and therefore no moral responsibility. Rather the extenuating circumstances are great. Moreover, when people act either in aggregate or in concert, individual neurosis is not merely present but it can also become amplified. In a bad society individual neurosis is amplified greatly and in a good society it is dampened. This is a reason that the ancients were chiefly interested in what it means to life a good life in a good society. Now that we are coming understand the deeper mechanics of consciousness, this question takes on a deeper dimension.
At any rate, to be aware of the nature of evil, there are the words at Delphi: gnothi seauton!
What the oracle meant by "Know thyself" is disputed. My interpretation is that of perennial wisdom rather than introspection. I think this is especially plausible in that the oracle was connected with the Greek mysteries, which seem to have been based on perennial wisdom, that is, that the purpose of life is realization of one's true nature. In Christian terminology:
11When I was a child, I used to speak like a child, think like a child, reason like a child; when I became a man, I did away with childish things.
12For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face; now I know in part, but then I will know fully just as I also have been fully known.
13But now faith, hope, love, abide these three; but the greatest of these is love. — I Cor. 11-13.
The perennial teaching is that love is the great unifier.
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