I'm still reading The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century, which is fun, well-written and in my view less controversial than what most reviews have suggested. Yes, inequality tends to fall mostly by violent means during periods of crisis. Note, also, that Walter Scheidel uses in this book the concept of surplus, and as noted earlier here (or hereand here) before is part of this broader group of social scientists that still use the concepts of the old and forgotten classical political economists. There are significant advantages to this approach (see here, for example).
Having said there is an issue that is a bit annoying in the book, which is it simplistic Monetarist view of hyperinflation.The publisher's blurb forgets to mention that inequality results from primitive accumulation based on violence. Perhaps it is mentioned in the book, but if not it is an oversight.
The violence of primitive accumulation breeds inequality and privilege, which results in more violence to address it.
Naked Keynesianism
Hyperinflation and inequality
Matias Vernengo | Associate Professor of Economics, University of Utah
While it's well written and has many interesting statistics, this book is ultimately an ideological piece defending the status-quo. From my blog post on this book:
ReplyDeleteScheidl wants us to associate equality with violence and reject any hope for democracy, itself a mere temporary by-product of war and revolution. “There does not seem to be an easy way to vote, regulate, or teach our way to significantly greater equality”. We may as well just give up and accept subservience as our endless fate.
https://commentsongpe.com/2017/08/30/walter-scheidel-the-great-leveling/
We may as well just give up and accept subservience as our endless f
ReplyDeleteOr revolt.
Marx made a good case that if one accepts bourgeois liberalism as the natural replacement of feudalism, that is the case. The whole point of Marx's analysis is to demonstrate that, implying that violence is the only remedy for the violence perpetrated in primitive accumulation that enclosed the commons, along with the bourgeois state violence that perpetuates it through enforced privilege.
Of course, the better way would for "the means of production" to shift in such as way as to make better "relations of production" possible.
But in the end, the historical dialectic will decide the issue. Western bourgeois liberalism is not "the end of history" any more than attempts at imposing Marxism-Leninism.
And judging from the news flow, It seems that the world is poised on the cusp of another round of significant violence.
ReplyDeleteAgree.
Books like Scheidl's are propaganda pieces arguing that revolution isn't worth the price. No one valuing a better world should take it seriously.
But what if the materially unqualified/incompetent revolt and take over by force and then ofc everything is going to go to shit?
ReplyDeleteIs that going to be an improvement? I dont think so...
I for one am not going back to living in teepees ....
Tom the primitive accumulation people are probably thinking in a pre-flood framework where you had the TWO lines of Cain and Seth surviving and the conditions were subsistence ("by the sweat of your brow shall you eat your bread") economy...
ReplyDeleteSo with the 2, you had envy between them and over scarce resources so you can see 'primitive accumulation' happening under those conditions... dog vs dog...
THEN, post flood, you see the reset and have now all THREE lines survive out of Noah with Japeth, Shem and Ham ... AND the conditions are changed over to SURPLUS ("no longer will I be striking the ground on the account of mankind...")
Pre-flood: 2 lines and subsistence economy, we ofc get a shitty material systems result...
Post-Flood: 3 lines and surplus economy, this is still playing out ... (we throw out HALF of our food...)
So now with the THREE lines you have more complex (social?) and surplus economy conditions and simple envy and associated 'primitive accumulation' is OUT... maybe 'jealousy' is now in... or it is not per se 'jealousy' maybe something like it... certainly something more complex than simple envy like the moron libertarians always bring up...
Also Marx was out of a Hebrew background so he is biased towards the Seth (pre-flood) and Shem ("Shem"itic = Semitic) (post flood) point of views... Israelites were thru Seth and Shem...
There is a whole ROW of us who are Cain (pre-flood) and now Japeth/Ham people post flood... and under surplus conditions...
I dont think it does us any good to look back at 'primitive accumulation' as those days are LOOOOOONNGG OVER and behind us .... we need to be focused on what is happening NOW...
See Tom here is Marx:
ReplyDelete"The legend of theological original sin tells us certainly how man came to be condemned to eat his bread in the sweat of his brow; "
this is right out of Genesis 3:19 in the Hebrew Scriptures so this guy Marx is under that Hebrew bias...
but then he misses the post flood change over to surplus in Genesis 8:21 right after the flood..
He's a half-assed Hebrew living in hair-shirted Christemdumb under the gold standard ie he is going to be pretty confused...
Here this is him again: "In times long gone by there were two sorts of people; one, the diligent, intelligent, and, above all, frugal elite; the other, lazy rascals, spending their substance, and more, in riotous living."
This is a overly simplistic, 2 agent, pre-flood view of the world he has... those days are long over... this is like those libertarian people today funding that study on envy... its childish and immature....
And here:
ReplyDelete"In themselves money and commodities are no more capital than are the means of production and of subsistence. They want transforming into capital. "
this is an anthropormorphism or teleology or something... Tom he's obviously struggling with this stuff...
We can organize our institutions any way we want... seems to me with his "communism" like he is biased towards the old Hebrew Laws governing the equitable distribution of property and means... like Bernie Sanders lived on a Kibbutz sometime back and now he is biased that way too.. thinks the USA should be one big Kabbutz or something...
Its all classic Hebrew/Jewish law stuff....
and its not hard to go back and criticize historic western economies operating under scarce Column 11 metals... what is so hard about that? "oh hey it was really f-ed up back then!" yeah... wow... no shit Sherlock...
Why the obsession with this guy by so many???? He's f-ing clueless...
Tom do you believe we are under surplus conditions or not?
ReplyDeleteall of that "we're out of money!" stuff from those people is coming out of a belief that we are not under basic surplus conditions at core... a basic view that is of scarcity...
These are the same people who say shit like "we're running out of water!" meanwhile like the whole f-ing earth is covered in water...
Tom do you believe we are under surplus conditions or not?.
ReplyDeleteThe fact that inflation is low would indicate that supply is running ahead of demand, which implies surplus conditions wrt real resources and markets.
The people suffering from deficit hysteria and debt phobia are fiscal conservatives. They are offset in the GOP by the supply-siders.
The Clinton New Democrats are promoters of deficit hysteria and debt phobia, probably not so much because they are fiscal conservatives as believers in the "magic" of the Clinton government surpluses, not realizing they set the country up for a deep recession. There is no faction with any power in the Democratic Party to counter this yet. Bernie had the opportunity but blew it and no other significant faction has picked it up.
But what if the materially unqualified/incompetent revolt and take over by force and then ofc everything is going to go to shit?
ReplyDeleteIs that going to be an improvement? I dont think so...
The historical dialectic runs its course based on contemporary conditions. Historical moments are not necessarily replaced by better ones measured by objective standards. A lot of solutions that seem promising turn out otherwise.
My own view is that the cutting edge of human knowledge has resulted in capabilities that humans are not together enough to handle as a species. As a result, there is more likely to be a mass culling given conditions at this point than a step of progress.
But from the POV of nature, cullings are needed for consolidation in order to progress.
But mass culling are not always necessary if intelligence is applied. Forests burn cyclically, but intelligent cutting and waste removal can obviate that.
Can humans get it together to apply intelligence to emerging challenges generated by innovation?
We'll see, but I am tending to doubt it at this point. The only things saving us now is deterrence.
"The legend of theological original sin tells us certainly how man came to be condemned to eat his bread in the sweat of his brow; "
ReplyDeletethis is right out of Genesis 3:19 in the Hebrew Scriptures so this guy Marx is under that Hebrew bias...
Here Marx is calling the doctrine of original sin a myth. He regarded religion as the opiate of the people. As a drug it operated on promulgating and imposing myths rather than scientific understanding. Marx viewed religion as an anachronism and wanted to replace it completely with science. He was a positivist in that sense.
Well all he is doing is advocating for basically a re-establishment of the Mosaic Law of the Hebrew Scriptures as related to economic arrangements I hate to break the news to you...
ReplyDeletewhich i'll admit to his point might have been better than Christendumb operating under the Column 11 metals but as we now know.... TODAY .... that was certainly not an optimum way to operate the monetary system within an economy...
How can the Left be so anti-Israel and at the same time pro-Marx? .. they're like the same thing economically....
That would make another interesting paper, Matt. You do have some controversial ideas that would set you up for a Nobel if you make a good case for them.
ReplyDeleteBut what if the materially unqualified/incompetent revolt and take over by force and then ofc everything is going to go to shit?
ReplyDelete@MATT Maybe things are great in your ivory tower but for the majority things have definitely gone to shit. As for takeover by force - that accurately describes the use of wealth to control legislation and service. Money = power.
Wealth does not equal or even imply competence, it is simply a measure of money. And money has a strong tendency to make people stupid by insulating them from reality.
If you read the prophesies about how it was going to go for the Israelite dispora, you can see Marx written all over it...
ReplyDeleteto me Marx looks like a case of textbook Israelite dispora 101... he's a fish out of water...
@Matt Franko
ReplyDelete"But what if the materially unqualified/incompetent revolt and take over by force and then ofc everything is going to go to shit?
Is that going to be an improvement? I dont think so...
I for one am not going back to living in teepees ...."
This is Ayn Randian elitist nonsense. It's the structural power of a tiny minority that rules by force and they're parasites on us all. Perhaps you haven't noticed that everything's going to shit right now. As a matter of fact, it's been wallowing in shit for 10,000 years (a subtheme of Scheidl's book), the natural state of any system in which the majority is subservient.
"Maybe things are great in your ivory tower "
ReplyDeleteI'm not saying things are "great" from a normative perspective I'm saying things in REAL terms are working well... ie planes are not falling out of the sky, we get to throw out half of the food we produce, cars all start when we turn the key, cardiac surgeries, oncology, etc...
Things will start to get f-ed up even in real (material) terms if we dont put the material people in there as a start...
WHAT they do and HOW they do it is a different matter... this is what the left should be focusing on instead of saying they should take over and run it... the left is incompetent for these purposes they will F everything up...
Left should just be focused on quality of outcomes...
Look at the person Chris Christie put in charge of the GW Bridge as an example... she F-ed that up so bad she is now looking at actual JAIL... who knows if she didnt get caught and stayed there long enough maybe the bridge would have one day just fell into the Hudson...
ReplyDelete"Perhaps you haven't noticed that everything's going to shit right now"
ReplyDeleteFrom a material perspective it most certainly is NOT going to shit I hate to break the news to you... things are getting turned around and starting to roll after the 8 years of lackluster rule by the academe (Obama people)...
We have an uber materialist person in there now (Trump) and as far as he gets his way we are going to get substantial material systems improvements under his administration...
MMT utopia? No. But things will improve...
Job Guaranty? No. But that will never happen under current conditions of KNOWLEDGE (Lord to Israel: "the poor you will always be having...")
If the KNOWLEDGE increases (Tom maybe refers to this as a change in 'collective consciousness' from his eastern teaching perspective ok too... ) then maybe we could get that kind of Guaranty out of our institution of civil govt along with a health care guaranty too.. many other quality improvements...
But we have these libertarian zombie serpent tail chaser morons in there going all around saying "we're out of money!" still so forget it...
We need to be focused on increasing knowledge PERIOD leave the politics out of it its a complete waste of time and energy and resources... you cant politic morons .... they dont have the knowledge ....
Jim,
ReplyDeletethis is Matias here: "I noted before about the fact that historians, like McNeill use the notion of the surplus to explain how primitive societies developed economically. "
He's correct here, the underlying conditions are manifestly SURPLUS and here:
"While the book is mostly about how behavior, in particular sexual behavior but violence and war too, changed with the development of agriculture, they also introduce the role of the surplus in economic development. Note that the food surplus is what allows for social hierarchy and specialization, "
The Hebrew Scriptures, in the Genesis account, document that this change happened post flood when the soil conditions changed...
We've been under surplus conditions the whole time post Flood... but also with more complex social conditions...
Economists say it is "supply and demand!" which is wrong.... the conditions are perpetual surplus you have to be blind not to see that...
Surplus and its rate of change and rate of rate of change are chiefly functions of technological innovation and organizational capacity at scale.
ReplyDeleteThe argument (rationale) has been that those who bring tech innovation and organization deserve the bulk of the surplus, which they commandeer anyway through application of power either directly or indirectly through law (state power) and other institutions, state and non-state.
The argument is that those who are not as creative and enterprising are envious of those that create the surplus and therefore deserve to enjoy more of it proportionately.
It's not a terrible argument, but it does have holes. There is also the matter of degree of the portion deserved by "merit."
We are still arguing about this.
Tom,
ReplyDeletematerial 'surplus' and material 'surplus on steroids' are still both material surplus...
"The argument is that those who are not as creative and enterprising are envious of those that create the surplus and therefore deserve to enjoy more of it proportionately."
I dont see that case being made in a 2 agent context there are 3 agents involved ... you have the poor, the rich and then the 3rd agent who is the ones making the argument...
Its never directly "rich vs poor" in a 2 agent conflict.... there is always a 3rd agent today...
iow Many of those advocating for the poor are actually rich themselves... so its not 'envy'... its something else... the libertarian reasoning of 'envy' is BS...
And the 'merit' reasoning is straight out of Darwin 101 ie 'survival of the fittest'... you have to reward 'the fittest'... ie incentives... which is also BS...
Here this young woman champion tennis player didnt even stop to pick up the $1M+ check:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/early-lead/wp/2014/09/23/caroline-wozniacki-forgot-to-pick-up-her-1-45-million-u-s-open-winnings-check/?utm_term=.1837a7aa900d
Why is she playing tennis? its not for the munnie at this point....