While Duflo and Banerjee are in line with a technocratic democracy, the Ostroms sustain a Tocquevillean democratic self-governance. For the latter, institutions emanating from democratic processes, far from being straitjackets, are the core of economic processes. They simultaneously constraint and enable human action.Paternalism versus democracy. That's pretty much the "compassionate conservative," liberal divide.
Experts versus populists, bureaucracy versus democracy: Paul Tucker, former deputy governor of the Bank of England and a fellow at Harvard's John F Kennedy School of Government, chooses books that wrestle with the central dilemmas of today's liberal political order….Important with respect to the paradoxes of liberalism that are are now coming to a head in the conflict between politics as usual and populism. Steven Bannon's chief target was the administrative state, which is bound up in the meaning of "draining the swamp." This post is a good summary of the issues involved and the major positions concerning them.
Everything comes back to the elected legislature, because our system of government ultimately depends upon the legislature drawing lines between the pursuit of efficiency and of equity, reconciling our disagreements on various fronts for the time being. Legislation itself is a commitment device. You can’t flick a switch and it’s no longer law; you have to go through a process to change it, and it’s done in more or less bright sunlight. We debate legislative change, which is terrific. My book is trying to draw on both our liberal traditions and our republican traditions. The problem with the liberal tradition, as Lowi saw, is that it too easily ends up saying that vague delegations are inevitable, and therefore we must have these technocrats overseen by the courts and we must make it easy to challenge their rules and decisions via the courts.
I don’t want to argue against those processes, but they can’t suffice because they amount to no more than one group of unelected officials (judges) overseeing another group of unelected technocrats (central bankers and regulators). So, if we have legislatures that just pass vague statutes—in effect handing over their power and responsibility to set high policy—and then say that judges will see it’s all okay, then something has gone deeply wrong.…These issues are directly related to economic policy, most obviously monetary policy set by a politically independent central bank. They also concern governance and policy in general in a democratic republic as the contemporary state becomes less democratic and more technocratic.
Today, I have a lot of travelling coming up. So time is tight. Regular readers will know my views on the Eurozone. I have held those views since the late 1980s when I was a young lecturer. Nothing has changed to change my opinion. It is an unmitigated disaster. And, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, the Europhiles on the Left and the Right continue to put out propaganda trying to defend their monstrosity. Here is a selection of the latest input from the elites on how the EU is the salvation of democracy and sovereignty and yet Eurozone Member States are to be treated like high risk car drivers – paying more for a pittance of fiscal protection from the technocrats. It really beggars belief....Bill Mitchell – billy blog
It is Wednesday so only a couple of snippets today. I was going to write about the BBC’s ridiculous attempt to portray Jeremy Corbyn as a sort of Russian-spy-type-dude in its Newsnight segment last Thursday (March 15, 2018). They manipulated his peaked hat (via Photoshop or through lighting) to make it look like a typical Lenin-type “Soviet stooge” hat and presented him against a red Kremlin skyline of Red Square (href=”https://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/newsnight-denies-photoshopping-jeremy-corbyn-image-to-make-him-look-russian-a3792681.html”>Source). The BBC denied they had altered the hat but then admitted the BBCs “excellent,hardworking) graphics team … had the contrast increased & … colour treated) but it was only accidental (not!) that he was made to look as Leninesque as possible. Amazing how deep the anti-neoliberal Groupthink has penetrated. This is the public broadcaster! But Groupthink is alive and well in Europe and doing its best to pervert, distort, stifle and suppress debate on important matters relating to democratic freedoms and the failure of the EU.Bill Mitchell – billy blog
I have now escaped the near-Arctic chill and back to warmer climes for a little while. While I was in Finland though, the Finnish news media was agape over the – Joint Statement – released by 8 Finance Ministers from the smaller Northern EU Member States (March 6, 2018). The statement released by the finance ministers of Finland, Denmark, Estonia, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands and Sweden aired their views on how the Eurozone (EMU) might develop. Nobody should be under any delusion that significant reforms are going to come soon. These characters are locked into the austerity mindset and any claims that a new Macron-Merkel partnership will take the EMU into more progressive territory should be viewed as blind hope rather than bedded down in any realistic understanding of what is likely or possible....
As an aside, when I was in Barcelona (March 1-3), it was repeatedly claimed by the audiences of the events I spoke at that a unified European culture would eventually emerge, which justifies the progressive Europhile position to stick with the ‘reform’ process and reject breaking up either the Eurozone, the overall EU or both.Oh, good, the Deutsche Reich has only 100-150 years to run.
Time horizons of around 100 to 150 years were mentioned....
Economic planning and societal control: The digital transformation is changing the rules of the game in the global systemic competition. China's determined pursuit of a "digital Leninism" presents a major challenge to liberal market economies and democratic political systems.
Sebastian Heilmann is the founding president of the Mercator Institute for China Studies (MERICS) and professor for the political economy of China at the University of Trier (currently on leave). Heilmann also conducted research at Harvard University’s Fairbank Center, the University of Oxford China Centre, and the Harvard-Yenching Institute. He has published extensively on China’s political system, economic policy making, and international relations.
Heilmann has years of experience providing advice to the German federal government and EU institutions. From 2010 to 2013, he was the principal investigator of a project group funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research examining the industrial and technology policies of the People’s Republic of China. In 2014, he was appointed as one of 15 German representatives to the German-Chinese Dialogue Forum, which fosters non-governmental exchanges and bilateral confidence-building.
[CIA chief John] Brennan, who spent years stationed in the Middle East, offered a sober assessment about the prospect of Western-style democracies taking root in that arid terrain.
"I think there were very, very unrealistic expectations in Washington, including in some parts of the administration, that the Arab Spring was going to push out these authoritarian regimes and democracy is going to flourish because that's what people want," he said.
Nincompoopery rising to the level of malfeasance. More moronism at the highest levels of US government.It turns out that what they actually want, he countered, was freedom "for themselves, or their group, or their tribe. But the concept of democracy is something that really is not engrained in a lot of the people and the cultures and the countries out there."
I have no sympathy for Trump’s repulsive disregard for facts, truth, and legitimate expertise. Yet he was canny in identifying how both parties’ technocratic mindset — their approaching every problem with a five-point plan designed to produce evidence-based deliverables — had left democracy vulnerable. Trump knew that if he waged a war on democratic values, the technocrats who now monopolize the country’s political elite would be incapable of fighting back.
Technocrats have always shown little interest in fights over fundamental values. Their work proceeds from the assumption that everyone — or at least all the people who truly matter — already share the same enlightened commitment to democratic values. The only debate they are concerned about is over evidence on “what works” among policy inputs to produce the desired measurable outputs, like higher wages and GDP, less poverty, less crime and terrorism, or less war.
The problem occurs when some people turn out not to share those enlightened values and insist on challenging them. Technocrats, in these situations, don’t know what to say because they can’t rely on evidence to make their case. So when technocrats are all we have to defend democracy, fights over fundamental values become embarrassingly one-sided....In the first place, the author conflates a liberal democracy as rule of, by and for the people with a modern republic, which is rule by a technocratic elite that is more an oligarchic plutonomy than a liberal democracy.
Introduction: Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff was removed from office through a well-organized, carefully planned operation among the corrupt Brazilian political elite, closely linked to the stock-market, financial institutions and foreign energy companies.
This ‘legislative coup d’état ‘eliminated the democratically-elected ‘political intermediaries’ and installed a regime directly controlled by the CEO’s of leading multi-nationals. The corporate composition of the post-coup regime insured there would be a radical restructuring of the Brazilian economy, with a massive shift from wage support, social spending and public ownership toward profits, a foreign capital take-over of strategic sectors and foreign-domestic elite dominance over the entire economy.
This paper will describe the socio-economic dynamics of the coup and its aftermath, as well as the strategy and program that Brazil’s new rulers will pursue. In the second half of the paper, we will discuss the Workers Party regimes’ policies (under Lulu and Rousseff) that prepared the political and economic ground-work for the right-wing seizure of power…Probably more like a trillion than a billion. This is a grab of Brazil's resources that belong to the people of Brazil by a comprador government to turn over to transnational corporations (read "to the US elite").
The ‘coup’ was no ’secretive conspiracy’ - it was an overt, direct capitalist seizure of power. Once installed, it proceeded to dismantle the public sector economy and transfer the jewels of Brazil’s economy to foreign multi-nationals.James Petras Website
CEPR economist Mark Weisbrot says the failures of the Eurozone and European economies are due to unaccountable, unelected authorities who have taken control of fiscal policy in order to remove social and economic protections for ordinary people…The Real News Network
Although "Helicopter Money" debate is clouded in economist mysticism about money, the underlying debate revolves around the role of the technocrats in setting public policy.I would also add that most of these technocrats either come directly from the financial sector or represent its interests indirectly. Technocracy is no substitute for fiscal policy based on democratic representation.
The GFC clearly, in my view, demonstrated that the political positions held by both the left- and right-wing governments in the West with respect to economic policy were untenable. Both sides of politics in each major and country adopted versions of market liberalism where the overlap was more dominant than the differences. While the left maintained some emphasis on social policy and the right maintained an emphasis on individual freedom (which was more about corporate freedom than anything), the fact remains that these differences were blurred by the dominance of the free market approach in each of their platforms. It is ironic, that as a consequence of the GFC, the bureaucratic state is more dominant now than it was, especially in the European Union where the political and technical elite interacts with the so-called market to create what has been called the democratic deficit. We now have technocrats in the European bureaucracy, in the IMF, in the World Bank and other multilateral organisations who contrive to implement policies which have allowed the benefits of economic activity to be increasingly diverted to beneficiaries who are at the top end of the income and wealth distribution. Today’s blog continues reporting some of the research I’ve been doing for my next book on the demise of the Left and the subjugation of public purpose in the name of austerity. It seems that we have concentrated on fiscal austerity but the general notion of austerity, which is now the centrepiece of political positions in most advanced countries, goes well beyond just fiscal policy. The response to the recent events in Paris demonstrate how far the state is willing to centralise authoritative controls on the rights of their citizens.…Connecting the dots between economics and politics in Europe.
Central bank independence is controversial. It requires the delegation of powerful authority to a group of unelected officials. In a democracy, this anomaly naturally raises questions of legitimacy. It also raises fears of the concentration of power in the hands of a select few.…
Unaccountable forces removed from democratic control are today in control in the European Union, President Michael D Higgins has declared in one of the most pointed speeches of his term in office.
“The present institutional structure of the European Union can be seen as reflecting the distribution of political power in recent decades, decades that have seen the emergence of a new financialised global order, where unaccountable agencies and forces removed from democratic oversight or control are in the ascendancy,” he said.
He made the speech as he opened the Royal Irish Academy’s Centre for the Study of the Moral Foundations of Economy and Society.…
The anti-austerity street protests in many EU states, he said, could be seen as “not just the mechanical result of deplorable levels of unemployment and deteriorating material circumstances”, but also a reflection of a “breakdown of trust between citizens and their institutions”.
Deep injury has been inflicted on people’s moral outlook in recent decades by an extraordinarily narrow version of economics which had cut ties with its ethical and philosophical roots, Mr Higgins said.
European leaders must remain “attentive and open”, he added saying, “a social view of Europe demands that our fellow citizens should never be seen merely as ‘consumers’ of public policies, driven by a sense of their sectional interests.”…The Irish Times
I was privileged to be invited by the St. Paul’s Institute to discuss (on the 3rd November, 2015) the thesis in Paul Mason’s recent book PostCapitalism: A Guide to Our Future with a keynote speech from the author.
Mason’s book is both a riveting and intellectually exhilarating read. It challenged me at a range of levels, and has added considerably to my list of must-read books. However, I have strong disagreements with Mason, and these are outlined in my review, published here as a PRIME e-publication.
I disagree primarily with his assumption that capitalism is subject to Kondratieff waves or “mutations”. The implication is that these waves are “natural” and unavoidable – beyond human agency. I strongly disagree. We have subordinated capitalism to the interests of society before – during the Golden Age of Economics from 1945 – 1971 – and can do so again.
Second, Mason is preoccupied by profits. I consider profits to be an out-of-date account of the rise in capitalist wealth, which is now accumulated as capital gains by the new, expanded and more ruthless rentier capitalism.
Third, Mason is optimistic about technology’s ability to eliminate pricing, to free up knowledge and to empower society to act collaboratively and with a “general intellect”. While I share some of that optimism, I see new technology as intensifying exploitation – by barring access to society’s collective public goods, and by transferring all risk on to today’s increasingly insecure working class – the precariat. Above all Mason’s optimism about technology’s role in our future means that he never fully grasps the nettle of ecological limits.
To download the review in full, click hereDebtonation
