Phil Hoad — TV's new lesbian Batwoman joins growing numbers of diversity-friendly superheroes

Batwoman and Dreamer join a recent spate of comic book adaptations for cinema and television that has wised up to the fact that today’s most culturally dominant genre has to mirror modern society better. In February, Marvel’s Black Panther film became a landmark event. It was the US’s third highest-grossing film, not only breaking a ceiling for black cinema, but riding on the back of a nuanced understanding of African-American history to become the series’ best yet.

Pop art as leading indicator of cultural change. Pop art follows the money, unlike fine art as "art for arts sake." Economic liberalism in this case is interacting with social liberalism to produce rapid change. This is concerning to many traditionalists, who see the the world as they see it threatened. This is an aspect of the historical dialectic at work.

World Economic Forum
TV's new lesbian Batwoman joins growing numbers of diversity-friendly superheroes

Phil Hoad

Bill Mitchell — The rise of the “private government”

I have always found it odd (read totally inconsistent) that people rail against government intervention as if it is a blight on our freedom, but ignore the ‘governance’ of workplaces by capital, who seek every way possible to destroy our freedom and initiative unless it is serving to advance their bottom line. We ignore the benefits of collective goods and laws that protect us, but turn a blind eye to the on-going, minute-by-minute, repression in the workplace. I was reminded of this again as I was reading a new book that came out in May 2017 – Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk About It) – by American philosopher Elizabeth Anderson. She studies that way in which corporate America serves in effect as a “private government” minutely and vicariously controlling our daily working lives yet many of us still accept the construction that this is the ‘free market’ operating. It is when the word ‘free’ loses all meaning. I especially like her use of the term “private government” to reinforce the hypocrisy of the elites and the inconsistency of those (workers included) who call for small ‘government’ as if that is the exemplar of freedom.

This is what happens when economic liberalism is equated with liberalism. Then economic liberalism is prioritized institutionally over social and political liberalism, and the result is illiberal. This is one of the internal contradictions of liberalism that are also called paradoxes of liberalism.

Whose freedom?

Bill Mitchell – billy blog
The rise of the “private government”
Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia

Branko Milanovic — Will social democracy return? A review of Offer and Söderberg

Avner Offer and Gabriel Söderberg (“The Nobel factor: the prize in economics, social democracy and the market turn”) look at the strange death of social democracy at the hands of market liberalism. That death was accelerated by the role of the Nobel prize in economics that conferred to economics an allure of science and that was used to much greater profit by neoliberal economists to push for their version of economic policies.

Offer and Söderberg define social democracy as a continuation of Enlightenment: from equality before God to equality before law, to equality between men and women and races, to equality of entitlements between citizens. Since each citizen goes through periods of dependency (as a child, as a mother, as unemployed, or as an old person) when he/she cannot earn an income, he has to depend on transfers from the working age population. This life-cycle pattern is shared by all, and thus society, in a form of social insurance, sets a system that provides redistribution from the earners to the dependents.

How does market liberalism solves the life-cycle problem? By positing that everyone is a free agent with his endowments of capital and labor. When he cannot work, he uses the proceeds from his capital (assuming of course that he originally either inherited or saved enough wealth to have a capital). It is not a “society” in a true sense of the word, but a group of “agents” who manage own income over the life-cycle. Since returns are to one’s ownership of labor and capital and there is no redistribution, it is a “just world” society where one gets back what he has put in, and where income inequality is never an issue—precisely because income is exactly proportional to one’s contributions.

These are indeed two different views of the world. As Offer and Söderberg write, social democratic view was extremely successful empirically but was not theoretically worked out much by economists. The neoliberal view has exactly the reverse characteristics: empirically it was not much of a success (look at private pension schemes in Chile), but economists have extensively worked on it theoretically…

The difference between social democracy and market liberalism can be summarized as a difference in approach.

Market liberalism assumes methodological individualism based on ontological individualism, so that economics can be pursued as an autonomous discipline.

Social democracy assumes that individuals are embedded in social systems, one aspect of which is economic.

Perhaps the most telling difference is that market liberalism assumes that efficiency and economic growth are the chief criteria of economics. Economic" has come to mean efficient.

Social democracy, being based on systems thinking, posits that overall effectiveness of the system in accomplishing its social, political and economic goals is of a higher priority than economic growth and economic efficiency, and that economic efficiency must be brought into balance with systemic resilience.

A chief problem with theoretical economics based on the methodological choices of market liberalism is that the necessity for restrictive assumptions makes much of the theory inappropriate for informing policy.

A second issue is that market liberalism does not consider policy goals but assumes that market efficiency leads to systemic optimization in all major respects, which goes illogically beyond the assumptions and data.

Social democracy begins with desired outcomes and seeks to achieve those outcomes based on historical experience and evidence provided by data as well as social, political and economic theory.

The question of return implies that the answer is historical. History is dialectical, proceeding experimentally and adapting to emergence. There is no categorical "end of history." While history does not repeat itself it does rhyme in the sense that experiment draws on experience.

The dialectical nature of both experience and history is that when one position is posited, its complement, although excluded, is necessarily included as a potential. As anomalies arise with a particular view, since no view is can be a comprehensive account owing to emergence, the complement is called forth as opposing views. The human experiment is never complete.

For example, market liberalism is a political stance that equate political liberalism with economic liberalism.

Social democracy views economic liberalism as only one aspect of liberalism along with social and political liberalism. The challenge is to harmonize this trifecta by acknowledging its paradoxes as they arise and transcending them by innovating the system.

The rest of the post examines how an interest elite intentionally conflated economic liberalism with political liberalism., for example, through by establishing the "Nobel prize in economics."

Milanovic then posits what he views as the four major challenges to the return of social democracy.

I view such challenges to the return of social democracy as it formerly existed as examples of emergence. The next stage of the experiment will not be a return to the past but rather drawing on the past while innovating in order to surpass the deficiencies of the present approach.

MMT speaks to this economically and socially in terms of macroeconomic theory and policy formulation based on the fiscal space that the current monetary system provides to address overcapacity owning to demand deficiency in a market-based world.

These, and perhaps a few other, elements seem to me to imply that a return to the Golden Age of social democracy is unlikely to happen. On the other hand, there is a realization of inadequacy of the neoliberal model that bequeathed a huge crisis (which did not turn into another Great Depression precisely because the key rules of neoliberalism were abandoned in order to save the system). As many times in history, we are now at the point where neither of the two established doctrines seems to provide reasonable answers to today’s issues. That leaves the field open to new thinking and experimentation.

Global Inequality
Will social democracy return? A review of Offer and Söderberg
Branko Milanovic | Visiting Presidential Professor at City University of New York Graduate Center and senior scholar at the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS), and formerly lead economist in the World Bank's research department and senior associate at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Julia Ruiz Pozuelo, Amy Slipowitz, Guillermo Valeting — Democracy does not cause growth

Growth is the result of economic liberalism. Democracy is about social and political liberalism rather than economic liberalism.

There is a tradeoff between growth and fairness. 

Economic liberalism promotes growth, while social and political liberalism promote fairness and reciprocity.

Capitalism as an expression of economic liberalism is antithetical to democracy as the basis for social and political liberalism.

Achieving grown and fairness requires optimization of goals based on opposing values. Maximizing growth leads to a decline of fairness and reciprocity social and politically, which now goes by the term "inequality."

Vox.eu
Democracy does not cause growth
Julia Ruiz Pozuelo, Amy Slipowitz, Guillermo Valeting
ht Mark Thoma at Economist's View

Peter Radford — Liberty To Do What?

Peter Redford further exports the observation of Dani Roderik and Sharun Mukand about conflict among types of rights being endemic to liberalism. They write:

Liberal democracy rests on three distinct sets of rights: property rights, political rights, and civil rights. The first set of rights protects owners and investors from expropriation. The second ensures that groups that win electoral contests can assume power and choose policies to their liking – provided these policies do not violate the other two sets of rights. Finally, civil rights guarantee equal treatment before the law and equal access to public services such as education.

Property rights and political rights both have powerful beneficiaries. Property rights are of interest primarily to the elite – owners and investors. They may be comparatively few in number, but they can mobilize material resources if they do not get their way. They can take their money elsewhere, or choose not to invest – imposing substantial costs on the rest of society.

Political rights are of interest primarily to the organized masses – the working class or ethnic majority, depending on the structure and cleavages in society. Members of the majority may be comparatively poor, but they have numbers on their side. They can threaten the elite with uprisings and expropriation.
The main beneficiaries of civil rights, by contrast, are typically minorities that possess neither wealth nor numbers....

Theories that purport to explain the historical origins of democracy have overlooked this asymmetry among claimants for different types of rights.

This accords with Radford's observation:

How many times do we come across, in this avid nation of ours, some foolish comment that our social policies must not restrict commerce? How many times do we hear some politician arguing that we must become more business friendly? We scarcely can move an inch without tripping over someone cajoling us with fears that limitations on liberty are actually limitations on prosperity. As if prosperous was purely an arithmetic reference and had no qualitative content.

This is Condorcet’s fear alive and well. We seem to have reduced liberty to some small prop for the making of profit. Liberty is simply, in this ghostly shadow of what it once was, a veil behind which profits can be amassed without reference to the fabric of society as whole. And certainly without reference to any larger interest than that of the individual, or individuals, engaged in making that profit.

The invasion of the economic lexicon and way of thinking into domains where it has absolutely no right being is to blame for this diminution of our liberty. Or at least the severe limits placed on our understanding of what liberty means.

Then Redford asks how this happened:

Which is why we ought to search for the causes of this distortion: where did the idea of liberty get so reduced? 

The answer, I suggest for our purposes, sits squarely within the libertarian screeds that pour forth from Chicago.

This may be true for the contemporary version of neoliberalism, but this version of liberalism actually began with classical liberalism of John Locke, Adam Smith, Jean-Baptiste Say, Frédéric Bastiat, and David Ricardo, for example. This was a bourgeois liberalism.

So Thomas Jefferson could write the famous words of the Declaration, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness," without perceiving any contradiction as a slave-holder.

The Radford Free Press
Liberty To Do What?
Peter Radford

Brad DeLong — Making Sense of Friedrich A. von Hayek

More about tensions within liberalism than just about Hayek. Good introduction to the basic issues and challenges in political economy as a combination of philosophy, law, political science, sociology, etc., with economics.

Economic (classical) liberalism and social liberalism (utilitarianism) are antithetical, that is, neoliberal and anarcho-capitalism are incompatible with social democracy, e.g., owing to conflicting rights such as the property rights with the right to life and liberty. In one view, property rights prevail and in another, property is subservient to people (the general welfare) and the environment (externalities).

The modern compromise is republics that are dominated by the haute bourgeoisie rather than the landed aristocracy as it feudalism. The result is inequality of income and wealth owing to the institutional arrangements rather than just deserts or merit, as claimed. Thus the need for accommodation to avoid social unrest and political turmoil. The outcome has been mixed economies in which there is a ongoing tension between money and machines, and people and the environment.

Marx and Engels, Lenin, Polyani, Keynes, and Hayek all recognized this as a challenge to the present liberal order and offered different solutions.

WCEG — The Equitablog
Making Sense of Friedrich A. von Hayek
Brad DeLong

John Maynard Keynes — The end of laissez-faire (1926)

Weekend reading. This was posted on a Libertarian site, so it may also be of interest to anti-Keynesians. For Keynesians, disregard the anti-Keynesian characterization in the introductory note. It's the only place I've been able to locate a copy on the Internet that is free access.

"The end of laissez-faire" begins with a brilliant presentation of the history of philosophical and economic thinking that led to liberalism, which is followed by Keynes's own ideas and comments.

I have no hesitation in calling this a must-read.

John Maynard Keynes — The end of laissez-faire  (1926)

(h/t  Brad DeLong)

Daniel Little — Basic social institutions and democratic equality [John Rawls and James Meade meet Piketty]

We would like to think that it is possible for a society to embody basic institutions that work to preserve and enhance the wellbeing of all members of society in a fair way. We want social institutions to be beneficent (producing good outcomes for everyone), and we want them to be fair (treating all individuals and groups with equal consideration; creating comparable opportunities for everyone). There is a particularly fundamental component of liberal optimism that holds that the institutions of a market-based democracy accomplish both goals. Economic liberals maintain that the economic institutions of the market create efficient allocations of resources across activities, permitting the highest level of average wellbeing. Free public education permits all persons to develop their talents. And the political institutions of electoral democracy permit all groups to express and defend their interests in the arena of government and law.

But social critics cast doubt on all parts of this story, based on the role played by social inequalities within both sets of institutions. The market embodies and reproduces a set of economic inequalities that result in grave inequalities of wellbeing for different groups. Economic and social inequalities influence the quality of education available to young people. And electoral democracy permits the grossly disproportionate influence of wealth holders relative to other groups in society. So instead of reducing inequalities among citizens, these basic institutions seem to amplify them. ...

So how should progressives think about a better future for our country and our world? What institutional arrangements might do a better job of ensuring greater economic justice and political legitimacy in the next fifty years in this country and other democracies of western Europe and North America?

Martin O’Neill and Thad Williamson’s recent collection, Property-Owning Democracy: Rawls and Beyondcontains an excellent range of reflections on this set of problems, centered around the idea of a property-owning democracy that is articulated within John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice....

One thing that is striking about the discussions that recur throughout the essays in this volume is the important relationship they seem to have to Thomas Piketty’s arguments about rising inequalities in Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Piketty presents rising inequality as almost unavoidable; whereas the advocates for a property-owning democracy offer a vision of the future in which inequalities of assets are narrowed. The dissonance disappears, however, when we consider the possibility that the institutional arrangements of POD are in fact a powerful antidote to the economic imperatives identified by Piketty....

Two questions arise with respect to any political philosophy: is the end-state that it describes a genuinely desirable outcome; and is there a feasible path by which we can get from here to there? One might argue that POD is an appealing end-state; and yet it is an outcome that is virtually impossible to achieve within modern political and economic institutions. (Here is an earlier discussion of this idea; link.) These contributors give at least a moderate level of reason to believe that a progressive foundation for democratic action is available that may provide an effective counterweight to the conservative rhetoric that has dominated the scene for decades.

Understanding Society
Basic social institutions and democratic equality
Daniel Little | Chancellor of the University of Michigan-Dearborn, Professor of Philosophy at UM-Dearborn and Professor of Sociology at UM-Ann Arbor

Liberalism and Egalitarianism

This post is cobbled together from comments I've made recently here and elsewhere that have been fleshed out a bit.

The fundamental issue politically is between the opposing views of liberalism set forth in the words of the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court John Jay and President Abraham Lincoln.

  “No power on earth has a right to take our property from us without our consent.” ~John Jay

“Those who own the country ought to govern it.” ~John Jay (American History Central)

"It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." ~Abraham Lincoln, The Gettysburg Address

These are expressions of mutually exclusive principles of social and political philosophy that define the difference between the left and right — economic liberalism based on republican propertarianism and elitism and democratic social liberalism based on egalitarianism and human rights.

In the view of the right, distribution is exclusively an economic matter to be determined in the competitive marketplace in which all compete equally and the most meritorious reap the greatest success from their own superior qualities.

In the view of the left, distribution is a social and political matter as well as an economic one, and perfect competition does not exist under capitalism in a monetary production economy that is influenced not only by market-based exchanged but also cultural and institutional factors that result in asymmetries that direct outcomes with respect to status, power, and accumulation.

The argument is over the balance between liberty and law and order, which is the distinction between libertarianism at one extreme and authoritarianism at the other, and between personal freedom and cultural convention expressed as custom and tradition, which is the distinction between social liberalism and social conservatism, with radicals at one extreme and reactionaries at the other. The tension among these poles modulates historical change dialectically.

A fundamental issue is the degree to which economic liberalism is compatible with political liberalism, and other is the degree to which social liberalism is compatible with cultural continuity. This implies a critique of the feasibility of alternatives.

Different people fall into different quadrants and different positions within the quadrants, so it is impossible to find outcomes that please everyone. Therefore, the need to address the "tyranny of the majority" in a popular democracy.

The way we do that now is through asymmetrical status, power, and wealth, tilting the playing field toward an elite.

If the desire is to change this, the questions then become, what are the options, and what are the advantages and disadvantages of the anticipated outcomes.

Neoclassical economists assumes a market with no government, no banks, and no intruding social, political or economic institutional arrangements that supervene or strongly influence, in which there is near perfect symmetry among individuals with respect to all relevant information and bargaining power. It's not even correct to call the model built on such assumptions simplistic. It's a fantasy world.

This issue, like most, is much more complex that most narratives make it out to be. There is no such thing as an economy that is the subject of study of the discipline of economics. "The economy" is a conceptual construct that is built on assumptions that characterize one methodological approach among many other existing approaches and many more possible approaches.

The conventional approach that starts with the problem of scarcity rather than the distribution of a surplus defines the problem and therefore constructs the subject of study based on a set of assumptions that assume certain things as relevant and assume away other things as irrelevant. Conventional economics assumes a cycle of production, distribution, and consumption in which distribution is handled by the invisible hand of the market, which is presumed to be optimally efficient to the degree that it cannot be improved upon.

Only those institutional arrangements are appropriate that advance market efficiency or economic efficiency more broadly considered. For example, intellectual property like patents, copyright and trademarks, are considered to advance economic efficiency through creating incentive — even though they also create asymmetric market power. The corporation as a legal person capable of owing property in perpetuity is another. There are many more. The proof of their efficiency and effectiveness is in the innovation that they bring and growth they produce.

Opponents object that this disregards negative externalities that are socialized, ecological, environmental, social and political, in addition to economic. The so-called free market as a mechanism of price discovery and efficient distribution is a myth. Actual practice, such as administered pricing that now predominates, and legal and institutional arrangements that dictate winners and losers reveal that markets are not as represented.

They cannot be made free either, any more than friction can be eliminated from physical systems owing to the construction of modern society and its institutions. "Liberalization" simply increases the market power of factions in that social, political and economic asymmetry cannot be eliminated from individual relationships any more than friction can from the physical world. The idea of a market in which all participants are symmetrical in information, power, and influence is a fantasy.

Once this is recognized and acknowledged then that problem of allocating scarce resource comes to be seen in a different light, where the surplus a society creates is social rather than an aggregate of the contributions of individuals competing equally on a level playing field. Just it was a social and political issue initially about what institutional arrangements to create to produce results that are effective and efficient according to defined criteria; so too, is it a social and political issue to distribute those results in a way that takes into account that certain participants were favored in order to produce the optimal results.

The notion of redistribution is a matter of responsibility where there is a right to use private property for economic gain in addition to subsistence. Since individuals characteristically do not rise to the responsibility, it becomes necessary to undertake it institutionally.

Economically, the issue may be seen as addressing scarcity in the optimal way to achieve efficiency and effectiveness in accordance with defined criteria (norms). However, in the larger context of a society social, political, legal, institutional factors must be considered along with the economic factors.

In addition, open national economies must be considered relative to a closed world economy. Given that modern economies are interdependent, e.g. with respect to resources, and humans inhabit the same global ecology in which externalities play a fundamental role socio-economically, addressing scarcity and abundance becomes a human issue, involving human rights, and a global issue with respect to context.

These opposing views are based on conflicting ideologies. Paradigms provide the context for the development of ideas within the bounds of a universe of discourse. All ideologies are paradigms of a sort in that they define a universe of discourse through a framework of methodological rules in which assumptions are included as ideological norms. Theorems are deduced from these starting points as defining norms. Any conceptual system that privileges its assumptions from error or question is dogmatic rather than scientific. Dogmatic ideologies characterize phenomena like religions and they can persist with little change over long periods of time. Science, however, is developmental and reacts to changing circumstances like new knowledge and changing context.

Moderns generally agree that the scientific approach is superior to a dogmatic one. However, all discourse takes place in terms of "webs of belief" (W.V.O. Quine) that are defined by assumptions that function as norms. Key assumptions functioning as norms are considered first principles and taken to be self-evident and non-negotiable. Being privileged from error or even question, they are non-empirical and non-scientific. Almost everyone is dogmatic about key fundamentals.

Once a debate argues down to opposing first principles the parties either agree to disagree, or they come into conflict unless they can compromise. Compromise is of the essence of the democratic process of governing as the only way to accommodate the range of views is a complex society. This is an ongoing process in that context is ever-changing and it is an unfolding process owing to discovery, invention, and innovation.

The two views of liberalism, which might be characterized as economic liberalism and social liberalism, have been in conflict since the dawn of liberalism in the Enlightenment. The road since then has been rocky and it is no less so now. Much ink has been spilled over this, but now it is Thomas Piketty's work that is the contemporary catalyst for a debate that is getting underway.

Are economic liberalism based on property rights and social liberalism that includes egalitarianism and human rights possible to achieve simultaneously through a political process given the institutional arrangements in place? If yes, what are the obstacles to achieving this? If not, what needs to change if this is a desirable goal? Can political compromise achieve it without conflict?

Arturo Garcia — Bill Maher: Atheism will be ‘the new gay marriage’ (via Raw Story )

Bill Maher: Atheism will be ‘the new gay marriage’ (via Raw Story )

While his atheism would preclude him from public office, Real Time host Bill Maher said in an interview Monday night, he suggested that could change for other future political prospects in the future. “[Atheists are] out there, they’re thinking…

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