Tag: polemics

A Conversation I Don’t Want to Have

UPDATE: Aaron Benanav was sick and tested positive for covid the day of the event. So it didn’t take place. A fitting reminder, perhaps, of the context in which these debates are happening.

This Wednesday, John Jay College is hosting a debate between me and Aaron Benanav on, ostensibly, industrial policy and global overcapacity, whatever that means.

This is an event I agreed to participate in very reluctantly. To be honest, the prospect of it has been causing me considerable stress and anxiety lately. As a way of relieving this, I thought I would try to articulate why this is a conversation I don’t want to have.

1. I don’t like polemics, especially with others on the left. Doug Henwood used to quote a line from Foucault, which unfortunately I cannot locate at the moment, on the dangers of approaching intellectual debates on the model of war. I feel this strongly. We all know how unpleasant social media discussions become when everything gets reduced to which side you are on.

This is not some new development with social media. Alexander Cockburn tells this story about Lenin:

Krupskaya once tried to get him out of Zurich to take the day off, relaxing in the Alps and admiring nature. He tried but stayed fidgety, finally crying out to Krupskaya in exasperation, ‘Those bloody Mensheviks spoil everything.’

It’s very easy, once you’ve picked a side, to let those bloody other-siders spoil everything. I know I am susceptible to that tendency, I’ve given in to it too much in the past. So I’d rather avoid settings that encourage the picking of teams. I don’t like the debate format. I don’t like being on “Team Keynes” against “Team Brenner,” or however this is supposed to line up.

If one is going to have a debate, it should be with someone you respect, with a view that you can imagine holding, or perhaps have held in the past. Better than a debate is a conversation, with people whose ideas may be in tension at various points but who are genuinely interested in learning from each other. A public debate in front of an audience, by contrast, is a sort of combat where the goal is negative critique, tearing down, rather than synthesis.

2. I don’t find the overcapacity argument coherent enough to try to refute it. I’ve read a lot of Brenner’s stuff, it’s all over the map. I’ve read some of Benanav. The affect is clear enough: He really hates Keynesians. But as for a set of substantive claims about observable social reality, I don’t see it. Very smart people like Seth Ackerman and Alex Williams and Tim Barker have tried to engage with them, without much success. Experience suggests that trying to extract a coherent meaning of overcapacity to engage with will just provoke a response of “that’s not what we meant.” Debating this non-argument feels like wrestling with a cloud.

3. I don’t think that the kind of knowledge that both Brenner-Benanav and their critics are aspiring to is even possible. I don’t think the position they are taking can be replaced with a better one; the question is just not a useful one.

What I mean is this. Capitalism, or better, capital, is a game, an activity that people engage in. It has its rules, its values, its categories. Understanding its logic is important. But logic, on the level of logic, only tells us about the parameters, the dimensions, of capitalist space. It tells us nothing about what will actually happen. At best it allows us to identify tendencies, all of which have their counter-tendencies. The logic of capital tells us which ways the system can move, but nothing about how it has moved, or will move. When we turn to explaining concrete historical developments — retrospectively or prospectively — we need to do so in concrete historical terms. If we ask, let us say, why employment growth was slower in most European countries in the 1980s and 1990s compared with the 1960s and 1970s, there are a number of possible factors that might contribute, or point in the other direction. The only possible answer to the question will be a quantitative one, asking how much various factors contributed in this particular period. General tendencies of capitalism tell us nothing at all.

The academic work I feel best about is a couple of papers asking, in a concrete historical way, how we explain the changes in household debt-income ratios over the past 100 years The answers turn out to be different in different periods. The interesting thing, to me, is the key takeaway that the rise in the debt ratio in the 1980-2008 period, versus the stable ratio in the previous 20 years, is entirely explained by higher interest rates plus lower inflation. But the methodology — and this is the critical point — also reveals plenty of exceptions. During the mid 2000s, for instance, it really is true that households were borrowing more. If we want to learn about the world, we need a method of asking questions that gives answers of the form “x percent this, but also y percent that”, or “in this period mostly this, but in that period mostly that,” or “this factor was supporting the overall trend but that factor was retarding it.” These are all quantitative statements, and will be different depending on the place and time we are discussing. If you think you can reason in a purely logical way to concrete historical outcomes, you aren’t talking about the real world.

4. Continuing from 3 — to have a useful discussion, the questions have to be reframed as concrete, operational ones. Public spending on green energy will improve the bargaining power of workers, or it won’t. Chinese investment in renewable energy has reduced, or increased, manufacturing investment in the rest of the world by this much, more or less. Some more or less concretely specified central bank policy to favor green investment could reduce carbon emissions by some amount, or more, or less. Until we frame our questions in this sort of way, with answers that are numbers or clear yes-or-nos, there is nothing useful to talk about. We need to debate principles in such a way that we are learning about concrete reality. I don’t see this debate as a step towards that.

5. I am not convinced that the phenomenon of “stagnation” or “overcapacity” exists. It is true that by most measures growth appears to have been stronger in Europe in the decades after World War II than, to the extent we have comparable measures, in most other times and places. But it is not at all clear that the absence of this outstanding performance should be described as a distinct phenomenon of “stagnation” or “overcapacity”. Maybe we should instead ask what combination of institutional factors created this exceptional case. Nor is it clear that the same pattern exists if we broaden our focus — China, in the decades of so-called stagnation, has seen what is probably the greatest episode of capitalist accumulation in human history. (The problems that China poses for the Brenner argument need more attention than I am in a position to give.) 

And even if “stagnation” is valid as a descriptive historical fact, it doesn’t follow that it represents any underlying tendency. Let’s say we are in the US in 1935. Why is business investment so low, why are so many people unemployed? “Because it’s a depression” would be true in a certain descriptive sense. But, obviously, as an explanation it would get us nowhere at all. I’m not convinced that talking about overcapacity today is much different from that.

Admittedly, the question of whether some capitalist economies can be described as experiencing stagnation (and which ones, and over what period) is a concrete, empirically-tractable question, in a way that some inherent tendency toward stagnation is not. But the claim would have to be much more precisely specified before it could be disputed. And clearly neither of us is undertaking the sort of detailed, data-based analysis that would be called for.

6.  Benanav’s response to my blog post — it really was just a blog post — was dishonest and insulting. It still pisses me off that I can write, as I did, “leftists should not imagine that we control the state,” and get quoted as saying “we control the state.” It annoys me that I can suggest an analogy between the transition way from carbon and the industrial revolution and get this response: “any such comparison between the 1840s—an era of incipient French industrialization—and contemporary overcapacity, following the onset of the demand shift over a century later, is so ahistorical as to border on the absurd.” I mean, what is this? Ahistorical, absurd? Come on man. Industrialization wasn’t just a random bolt from the blue, it was the result of exactly the kind of positive feedback mechanisms I was talking about.

This blithe dismissal is simply a refusal to engage with the argument. I was trying to introduce something interesting into the conversation — is anyone else writing about the Green New Deal quoting 19th century French historians? And this guy, who is supposed to be some kind of social scientist, just pisses on it. I won’t pretend it doesn’t annoy me.

7. I have other work to do. I am trying to finish this book. I am trying to teach. (My teaching is bad, but my students are excellent.) I am trying to write opinion pieces for a general public; perhaps people will read them. All of that seems more important than this thing.

8. Finally the biggest one. The debate objectively places me in the position of a defender of the Biden Administration, something that, at this moment, I have no desire to be. Maybe, if I’m honest, this is the real reason why I am so angry about having to do this debate. Thousands of children are dead and dying under the rubble of Gaza. The bombs that killed them are marked “Made in USA.” Will I, under these circumstances, stand up and defend Bidenomics? No, I will not.

As an analytic matter, it’s certainly possible to separate the general case for industrial policy from the murderous regime that is currently its standard bearer. But in the specific context of the United States in November 2023, I don’t know that you can. Maybe my anger at Benanav, and at my colleagues who pushed me to debate him, is really anger at myself for having associated myself with a regime of child-killers. This is a possibility I must take seriously. It calls for resolute self-criticism and introspection.

There is a very complex and difficult problem here. We must sometimes take a clear stand on principle, we must stand against fascism and genocide. We must also, all the time, make an honest assessment of existing conditions, and what we can do in the concrete circumstances we find ourselves in. We must recognize that the path to a better world consists of one step after another, and starts from where we currently are.

Sometimes these two principles are consistent, sometimes they are not. It can be hard to figure out how to reconcile them. We do have to figure it out. I would be very interested in a roundtable on how socialists should relate to the state and established parties in the current moment. But one — or at least I — would have to approach it in a spirit of uncertainty, questioning and an openness to learning from others. Not a debate between opposing sides. 

However: John Jay economics is a great program! And we need students! So please do come out for this thing, and, if you’re at a suitable stage of life, please apply to our graduate program. Someday, maybe you will get all this stuff right, where I clearly have not.

What Should be Universal and Free?

In the US, as in many  countries, local governments often provide fire protection. In general — there are exceptions, but they’re still rare enough to make news — this is a free service, available to everyone who lives in whatever jurisdiction provides it. No one has to sign up or pay for coverage. To most people, I suppose, this is a normal and reasonable thing to do. 

One effect of fire protection is to stop peoples’ homes from burning down. As it happens, rich people are more likely to own homes than poor people. And when people with lower incomes do own houses, they are generally less expensive. So the distributional effect of preventing houses from burning is clearly regressive.

Why should everyone have to pay to keep millionaires’ mansions from burning? Modern apartment buildings probably aren’t even at that great risk of fire, what with sprinkler systems and so on. It’s the big houses up in the hills that are in the greatest danger.

So now comes a new mayor — let’s call him Mayor Pete — who proposes to abolish the municipal fire department and replace it with private fire services that people can contract with. Maybe he’ll take a page from ACA and have gold, silver and bronze levels of fire protection, sold on exchanges. It’s smart to build on what works, after all.

Naturally there will be means-tested vouchers for poor people to pay for fire protection. Or we can, say, cap the cost of fire protection at some percent of household income, with the difference made up by a subsidy. Just be sure you can fully document your income and assets each year, and don’t forget to fill out the forms. Of course not everyone needs fire protection — the homeless are free to opt out, and renters can decide for themselves if they prefer a building with fire coverage or cheaper rent. 

Obviously, I am making an analogy with free college. And obviously, people who don’t support free college (and probably many who do) are going to reject this analogy. Here are some possible counterarguments:

– Everyone wants to not die in a fire. Not everyone wants to go to college.

– If someone falls through the cracks and doesn’t get fire coverage, the effects can be catastrophic — loss of home and possessions, serious injury, death. If some people end up unable to attend college, that is certainly unfortunate but not a disaster in the same way. 

– It’s much more efficient to have a single fire service serving a whole area than to have lots of different contractors providing different levels of coverage in overlapping areas. There would be wasteful duplication of facilities, equipment, and personnel, and in an emergency confusion about who was responsible for what.

– If one house is allowed to burn that creates major risks for the houses nearby. Because fire spreads, fire protection isn’t something you can really opt into or out of on an individual level.

These are not unreasonable objections. On the other hand, we can debate how different fire service and college education really are on these dimensions.

Mike Konczal or I might say that they are not really so different – that many of the same practical considerations that favor a singe free, universal system of fire protection also apply to college. We might say that higher education is not a luxury in the contemporary US, and that if measures to keep the rich from getting a free education at a public college end up also excluding some non-rich people — as they inevitably well — that is a major cost. We might say that the machinery of assessing eligibility for various subsidies, vouchers, etc., collecting fees, and excluding or penalizing those who haven’t paid, is immensely wasteful. We might say that the benefits of higher education are social and public, and that these broader benefits are undermined when education is treated as a private good. 

Noah Smith or the real Mayor Pete might say on the contrary that there are big differences – lots of people don’t go to college and that’s fine; means-testing is accurate and reasonably efficient, at least compared with running duplicate fire departments; and that claims about the importance of higher education to a fulfilling life or a robust democracy are mostly just the self-flattering fantasies of college professors.  

Well, we disagree. But however you apply them in this particular case, these all seem like relevant arguments in thinking about how desirable it is to make a public service free and universal.

What they are not, is arguments about distributional impact. There’s no controversy over the distribution of student debt or tuition spending  – they rise with income, but fall as a proportion of income. We can debate over whether that makes forgiving student debt progressive or regressive, but I don’t think that’s what’s motivating either side here.  Disputes over whether something should be free and universal hinge rather on whether we see it as a fundamental right or a luxury; whether we see the risks of under- and overprovision as symmetrical; whether technical considerations favor provision through a single uniform system;  and whether the service is a public good in the traditional sense, and whether it has significant externalities. If we were actually debating the elimination of universal fire protection, these would be the kinds of arguments people would make. Not ones about the direct distributional impact. 

The distribution of college spending is quite a bit flatter than the distribution of home equity. So if you don’t oppose free universal fire protection on the grounds that it favors the rich, then I’m pretty sure you don’t actually oppose free public college on those grounds either. Mayor Pete certainly does not have any general objection to public spending from which the rich derive more direct benefit than the poor. Indeed, since public goods are mostly complementary to private goods — roads and cars; airports and airlines; meat inspectors and meat; police and private property —  this is probably true of the great majority of public spending, at least if you look at it in the same narrow financial terms that people are looking at college debt forgiveness.

So I don’t think distributional concerns are the real reason that people oppose free universal public college. Presumably the real reasons are some mix of “I think it is very important that everyone is protected from fires, but I don’t think it’s that important that everyone can go to college,” and “Charging people individually for fire protection is impractical, but charging people to go to college seems to work ok.” Which might be reasonable positions! But let’s debate those.

I’d love to have that debate. But I must add that the fact that people who oppose free college keep bringing up the distributional impact, suggests that they may not be confident of winning on other grounds. It suggests that they, at least, don’t believe that most Americans see college education as simply a private good.

ETA: This postwould have been better if I knew anything about the concrete historical development of public fire proteection. Unfortunately, I don’t. Also, on twitter, Matt Bruenig argues that the distributional question isn’t as straightforward as I claim because of insurance. So just to clarify: The point here is that if you’re wodering why we have free, universal public services — and we have a lot of them — imagining them as cash transfers isn’t helpful. The reason the public takes over some service is precisely because it doesn’t fit the model of giving people cash – because the nature of the service makes it unsuitable to treat as a commodity. So the relevant question, if we are asking whether something should be a universal public service, is how well it fits the model of a private good. Not to start by assuming it is a private good and then asking how it is distributed.