Bill Mitchell — Why progressive values align more closely with our basic needs

Thomas Fazi and I have been discussing the shape of our next book and I think it will be an interesting and worthwhile followup to Reclaiming the State: A Progressive Vision of Sovereignty for a Post-Neoliberal World (Pluto Books, 2017). We hope it will be published some time late in 2019. One of the angles that will be delved into is the way in which neoliberal narratives and constructs have permeated individual consciousness. Yes, sounds a bit psychological doesn’t it. But there is a strong literature going back to well before the recent period of neoliberalism that allows us to draw some fairly strong conclusions on how the process has worked. It also allows us to make some coherent statements about the dis-junctures that are going on across the world between the people and their polities, which have spawned the support for Brexit, the election of Donald Trump, the popularity of far-right movements, the electoral demolition of the traditional social democratic political parties, the election of the new Italian government, and the on-going trouble that the Gilets Jaunes are causing the mainstream political processes in France (and Brussels). The literature also provides a guide as to how the Left might break out of their current malaise based on their tepid yearning for cosmopolitanism, identity and their fear of financial markets to reestablish themselves as the progressive voice of the people. That is what I am writing about at present and here is a snippet....

Bill goes "there," where "there" is philosophy in the best sense as "the study of the wholes in terms of wholes," that is, in terms of systems and subsystems. Economics cannot be approached on than on a simplistic basis without considering its relationship to society. Society is a network of networks, and these networks are dynamic rather than static. That implies that history counts, which includes culture, traditions, and institutional arrangements that are fluid.

Without taking into consideration the considerable knowledge that has been developed in the various disciplines, the social sciences in particular, economics doesn't have much to say about society that is of any worth practically. And the world is looking for practical solutions to pressing challenges.

In other words the mechanistic models based on physics that assumes that human being are like atoms obeying laws of nature and that assume ergodicity are barren with respect to practical application. Reality is not like that idealized world, which is mathematically tractable but non-representational. The social world is non-ergodic; uncertainty and asymmetries are facts of life.

As managers of our lives and environment, we humans need appropriate models to approach human problems efficiently and effectively, and devise workable solutions to pressing issues of the day. The paraphrase management guru Peter F. Drucker, "Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things." Business people figured out long ago that conventional economic theory is of little usefulness in management. Go figure.

Bill Mitchell – billy blog
Why progressive values align more closely with our basic needs
Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia

George Monbiot — We’re Not as Selfish as Economists Think We Are. Here’s the Proof.

In complex adaptive systems, optimization involves adaptation through feedback and learning, as well as taking into account return on coordination. This happens naturally and spontaneously not only cognitively but also affectively since it a positive evolutionary trait. Evolutionary success involves a combination of competition and cooperation through coordination, as in teamwork. Homo socialis is the reality rather than homo economicus.

Evonomics
We’re Not as Selfish as Economists Think We Are. Here’s the Proof.

George Monbiot

Francois Badenhorst — Martin Luther King Jr. Asked This Economist a Profound Question

The interesting career of Sam Bowles. His latest book, The Moral Economy, will be available in March.

Evonomics
Martin Luther King Jr. Asked This Economist a Profound Question
Francois Badenhorst

Ira Chernu — If Only the Tea Party Crowd Knew Where Their Ideas Came from

It all began when I was re-reading Gordon Wood's The Radicalism of the American Revolution (trying to escape from obsessively tracking the DC rollercoaster.) As Wood observes, the Jeffersonians and Hamiltonians divided over basically the same issue that plagues us now: How much of a role should government play in people's lives? (Though the clash back then was so fierce, and split American society so sharply, that it makes today's politics look rather mild by comparison.

But Wood takes us deeper into the substance of the issue. Jeffersonians were willing to limit government only because they assumed that there was "a principle of benevolence ... a moral instinct, a sense of sympathy, in each human being." They were founding an American nation upon the European Enlightenment's belief that "there was 'a natural principle of attraction in man towards man' [as Hume put it], and that these natural affinities were by themselves capable of holding the society together."

This was exactly the point that frightened Alexander Hamilton most. He summed up his opponents' view quite accurately: "As human nature shall refine and ameliorate by the operation of a more enlightened plan," based on common moral sense and the spread of affection and benevolence, government eventually "will become useless, and Society will subsist and flourish free from its shackles." Then Hamilton, the greatest conservative of his day, dismissed this vision of shrinking government as "a wild and fatal scheme."

The Republicans who now control the House obviously have a very different view of what it means to be a true conservative. But that doesn't mean they have become Jeffersonians. Not by any means. In many ways they would be closer to Hamilton, who scorned Jefferson's trust in human nature.

AlterNet
If Only the Tea Party Crowd Knew Where Their Ideas Came from
Ira Chernu

Chris Mooney — 6 Amazing Ways Animals Show Compassion

...if you're a primatologist..., your view of morality is radically different. You probably see indications of "moral" behaviors all throughout the animal kingdom, and especially among our primate relatives such as bonobos—who show high levels of empathy, have a female-dominated social structure, and use sex, rather than violence, to solve in-group social conflicts, and even when they encounter other, potentially hostile groups.

Emory University's Frans de Waal—the celebrated primatologist familiar from other books like The Age of Empathy—makes a case for our evolved and biologically grounded morality in his new bookThe Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates. Morality, de Waal argues, "antedates religion… [and] much can be learned about its origins by considering our fellow primates."

In our interview (audio clip above, full length here), De Waal carefully explained his case for how morality springs from evolution and is part of us on a basic, emotional level—literally, part of the human wiring. That hardly means we're incapable of wrong. But it does mean that sympathy, compassion, and a sense of fairness are deeply embedded in us—and also, in our fellow animals.

Mother Jones
6 Amazing Ways Animals Show Compassion
Chris Mooney

Lord Keynes — Mises Flunks Evolution 101

Mises: "The fundamental facts that brought about cooperation, society, and civilization and transformed the animal man into a human being are the facts that work performed under the division of labor is more productive than isolated work and that man’s reason is capable of recognizing this truth. But for these facts men would have forever remained deadly foes of one another, irreconcilable rivals in their endeavors to secure a portion of the scarce supply of means of sustenance provided by nature. Each man would have been forced to view all other men as his enemies; his craving for the satisfaction of his own appetites would have brought him into an implacable conflict with all his neighbors. No sympathy could possibly develop under such a state of affairs.”

Reading too much Hobbes and not enough life science.

Social Democracy for the 21st Century
Mises Flunks Evolution 101
Lord Keynes

Dirk Ehnts — Sympathy for the deficit – or better empathy?

It seems that prosocial behavior is acquired, not hardwired into the genes. If that is so, the recent failure of empathy in the European Monetary Union has much deeper roots than financial problems. Perhaps antisocial behavior was rewarded too much in the past, with taxes falling for the wealthier part of Europeans, tax flight being more and more common and financial crimes were decriminalized.

econoblog101
Sympathy for the deficit – or better empathy?
Dirk Ehnts | Berlin School for Economics and Law

Two relevant recent findings. First, taking university courses in economics makes on less pro-social, and secondly, elevated social status and wealth also make one less pro-social. Maybe there are some lessons here.

Cat Johnson — The Top 10 New Books about the Sharing Economy

Want to hunker down with some good, shareable nonfiction this winter? Classic titles of the sharing economy, includingThe Mesh and What’s Mine is Yours , are good places to start. If you’re ready for more, we’ve rounded up a collection of 10 new books (plus three bonus selections) for the hardcore sharer that delve into the inner-workings of collaborative consumption, sharing law, the cultural shift toward collaboration, the importance of community-building, and more.

Shareable
The Top 10 New Books about the Sharing Economy
Cat Johnson

Steve Roth — Creating the Commons: A Tragedy in No Acts

I've been posting on the commons lately. Here are some of Steve Roth's thoughts on "the tragedy of the commons." It's a travesty. The cattlemen knew what they were up against with they resisted the sheep herders' push for enclosure.

Asymptosis
Creating the Commons: A Tragedy in No Acts
Steve Roth

Buddhist monk declared world’s happiest man

As he grins serenely and his burgundy robes billow in the fresh Himalayan wind, it is not difficult to see why scientists declared Matthieu Ricard the happiest man they had ever tested.

The monk, molecular geneticist and confidant of the Dalai Lama, is passionately setting out why meditation can alter the brain and improve people’s happiness in the same way that lifting weights puts on muscle.

“It’s a wonderful area of research because it shows that meditation is not just blissing out under a mango tree but it completely changes your brain and therefore changes what you are,” the Frenchman told AFP.

Ricard, a globe-trotting polymath who left everything behind to become a Tibetan Buddhist in a Himalayan hermitage, says anyone can be happy if they only train their brain.

Neuroscientist Richard Davidson wired up Ricard’s skull with 256 sensors at the University of Wisconsin four years ago as part of research on hundreds of advanced practitioners of meditation.
The scans showed that when meditating on compassion,

Ricard’s brain produces a level of gamma waves — those linked to consciousness, attention, learning and memory — “never reported before in the neuroscience literature”, Davidson said.

The scans also showed excessive activity in his brain’s left prefrontal cortex compared to its right counterpart, giving him an abnormally large capacity for happiness and a reduced propensity towards negativity, researchers believe. 

Research into the phenomenon, known as “neuroplasticity”, is in its infancy and Ricard has been at the forefront of ground-breaking experiments along with other leading scientists across the world....

Much more of interest in the full article.

The Raw Story
Buddhist monk declared world’s happiest man
Agence France-Presse

Kind of undercuts the assumption of "pursuit of happiness" in terms of maximum utility based on measurement of units of consumption, and the scarcity thinking on which neoclassical economics is based.

Michael Norton — How to buy happiness

TEDxCambridge — Michael Norton: Money can buy happiness

Harvard Business School professor Michael Norton's counterintuitive talk challenges the way we think about money. If you think money can't buy happiness, maybe you're not spending it right.

TEDxEast Dr. Michael Norton: What to do with your money?

Dr. Michael Norton shares his research from behavioral economics about ways to spend money to increase happiness. Hint: it is not about buying more for ourselves...

Study: How Wealth Reduces Compassion

As riches grow, empathy for others seems to decline

Read it Scientific American
How Wealth Reduces Compassion
by Daisy Grewal

Favorite paragraph: In order to figure out whether selfishness leads to wealth (rather than vice versa), Piff and his colleagues ran a study where they manipulated people’s class feelings. The researchers asked participants to spend a few minutes comparing themselves either to people better off or worse off than themselves financially. Afterwards, participants were shown a jar of candy and told that they could take home as much as they wanted. They were also told that the leftover candy would be given to children in a nearby laboratory. Those participants who had spent time thinking about how much better off they were compared to others ended up taking significantly more candy for themselves--leaving less behind for the children.

Kevin Drum — Helping the Poor is Now Apparently Anti-Bible

...while I might not be an expert in the Bible, I've read enough to know that Jesus sure didn't seem to think that helping the poor robbed them of dignity. Can someone help me out here? What part of the gospels do you think [Rev. Rick] Warren is referring to?

Read it at Mother Jones
Helping the Poor is Now Apparently Anti-Bible
by Kevin Drum

Certainly not Matthew 25:31-46.

Humans are 'naturally nice'

New research shows there is a biological basis for co-operative and empathetic behaviour.

Read it at Al Jazeera

Humans are 'naturally nice'

Biological research is increasingly debunking the view of humanity as competitive, aggressive and brutish.

"Humans have a lot of pro-social tendencies," Frans de Waal, a biologist at Emory University in Atlanta, told the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science on Monday.

New research on higher animals from primates and elephants to mice shows there is a biological basis for behavior such as co-operation, said de Waal, author of The Age of Empathy: Nature's Lessons for a Kinder Society.

Until just 12 years ago, the common view among scientists was that humans were "nasty" at the core but had developed a veneer of morality - albeit a thin one, de Waal told scientists and journalists from some 50 countries at the conference in Vancouver, Canada.

But human children - and most higher animals - are "moral" in a scientific sense, because they need to co-operate with each other to reproduce and pass on their genes, he said.Research has disproved the view, dominant since the 19th century, typical of biologist Thomas Henry Huxley's argument that morality is absent in nature and something created by humans, said de Waal.

And common assumptions that the harsh view was promoted by Charles Darwin, the so-called father of evolution, are also wrong, he said.

Mainstream economics is based on game theory, and game theory presupposes that humans are individualistic and driven by self-interest, so that they are naturally competitive rather than naturally cooperative.

Ayn Rand's Objectivism takes this to its logical conclusion, in which the ideal individual is one having no social (altruistic) tendencies. Rand, following Nietzsche, attributes altruism to nurture instead of nature, viewing it as a consequence of deficient culture, largely owing to religious ideology. Interestingly, Rand says she is an Aristotelian, but Aristotle considered the human being (anthropos) to be a social animal (Politics 1.2), and the state (polis) to be the highest from of community.

Rand's view is that of ontological individualism, a curious view of human nature in the history of thought. It is the basis of extreme methodological individualism assumed by a rational representative agent motivated by exclusive pursuit of maximum utility.

In contrast, biologist and MMTer Roger Erickson continually emphasizes the importance of increasing the rate of adaptability through coordination and exploration of options as the scientifically substantiated method of meeting challenges.