In 1898 Ivan Bloch published a study titled The Future of War in its Technical, Economic and Political Relations – widely known in English by the title of an abridged version, Is War Now Impossible?
In that study Bloch considered the evolution of military forces in his time. He paid particular attention to recent advances in weaponry (particularly the skyrocketing increases in the killing power of small arms and artillery in that period, and the advent of smokeless powder), advances in the techniques of fortification, and the size of modern armies – as well as the problems all these factors raised for command and control, logistics and the care of the wounded. He concluded that these factors would combine to make war a matter of prolonged, large-scale and extremely costly sieges, which would shift the advantage from the offensive to the defensive. A similar explosion in the technological sophistication and firepower of warships was simultaneously ongoing at sea, which seemed equally unlikely to prove a decisive instrument in the hands of any of the actors he examined, given the geopolitics of the continental states. (Britain, because of its special reliance on sea power as an island nation uniquely dependent on far-flung colonies and trade, was the only major European state really reliant on its navy, with the others more or less wasting their money – Russia most of all.)
At the same time, he looked at the vulnerability of urbanized, industrialized societies to the disruptions caused by the mobilization of a national economy (like the conscription of much of the labor force), and the cut-off of international trade which the outbreak of hostilities would involve; and to the psychological strain such warfare seemed bound to entail, especially over the course of prolonged fighting, both for soldiers in the field and civilians on the home front. In combination with the rough parity in military power between the two alliances prevailing on the continent (specifically the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria and Italy, and the Franco-Russian entente), all of this guaranteed that any war would be a long contest of attrition, bound to push economies and populations to the breaking point, with the belligerents driving their societies to the point of collapse (victors as well as losers), and the most likely outcome socialist revolution.
Consequently, war, in the sense of general warfare among the great powers, had become impossible as a rational instrument of national policy. However, Bloch appreciated that the fact would not necessarily stop these nations from fighting exactly this kind of war, and that they might in fact experience the conflict before learning their lesson.
Of course, it was two decades before the war he wrote of actually came, and much did change in that time – with many of the changes rendering the fighting even deadlier. In his book Bloch had been attentive to improvements in rifles and artillery; he did not think of the machine gun or chemical weapons. He only dimly foresaw the advent of submarine warfare, and the advent of the aircraft and the armored tank (fielded only during the conflict) not at all. Despite these developments, the belligerents continued to endure the strain longer than he anticipated – but what he predicted did come to pass in its essentials. On the Western Front, the fighting was indeed characterized by trench warfare of the kind he described, and the war's end saw the collapse of Germany, Austria and Russia, which all saw socialist revolutions on their soil (and the Bolsheviks actually emerging triumphant in Russia).1
The western allies would seem to have suffered less than he suggested they would – but this can be chalked up to a profound shift in the pattern of alliances, with Britain joining the Franco-Russian entente a few years later, Italy following it in 1915, and the United States doing the same in 1917. Nonetheless, after the war Italy suffered a period of upheaval that ended with a fascist takeover – a revolution of its own, albeit from the right. France saw a round of dramatic strikes, and while little came of these, the country was left politically exhausted and divided, and remained so in the decades that followed. Britain, the European belligerent most sheltered from the war, suspended the gold standard, and accumulated a massive debt, while facing turmoil across its empire by war's end – including the rebellion that made Ireland free a few short years later, and labor unrest in England itself. Even the United States, despite its late entry, massive resources and comparative insulation from the fighting, proved not to be immune to the effects of the war on the world's economic system, the accumulation and mismanagement of international debts contributing to a worldwide Great Depression in the 1930s in which it was particularly hard hit.
All of this, of course, helped lead to the outbreak of World War II – that second taste of modern warfare he speculated the great powers might indulge in before recognizing the enterprise's futility. Granted, it was not a simple repeat of World War I, the conflict remembered today for armored offensives and strategic bombing rather than the static style of warfare that prevailed on the Western Front a generation earlier – but also its being an even bloodier, more destructive fight than that of 1914-1918. In fact, that destructiveness was such as to spell the end of the European states on which he'd focused as first-rank international actors, excepting the Soviet Union, which along with the United States (again, protected from the war's effects by its late entry into the war, and its distance from the fighting, as well as its sheer size and wealth) dominated the continent at its end. Western Europe rebuilt with American aid provided on a scale that had seemed unthinkable in the aftermath of the First World War, and their colonial empires dissolved in the following decades, while virtually every one of the European participants saw a new political order established in their territory, allies included – the French Fourth Republic, and in a milder form, "Labor" Britain, as well as post-war Germany (divided between East and West) and Italy. (By contrast, the Soviet Union, which suffered massive human and material losses, is thought by some to have never quite recovered from the war.)
It is notable, too, that Bloch's view that war had "become impossible," which had its adherents in the pre-war period (like H.G. Wells) but had little actual impact on practitioners, only continued to gain credence as the century progressed. In the interwar period, after the advent of strategic bombing and chemical weapons, it was not uncommon to view armed forces as instruments capable of putting an end to the modern world. The advent of the ballistic missile and the nuclear bomb made this outlook the conventional wisdom after 1945, so much so that while the American- and Soviet-led blocs competed globally and militarily, and confronted each other in numerous crises, neither resorted to a direct, open clash of arms with its principal opponent (even as thinkers on both sides continued to theorize and fantasize about how nuclear war might be made winnable).
Consequently, even as the armies grew, the alliance systems expanded and the technology evolved far beyond what he anticipated, the twentieth century bore out his essential predictions about how devastating general war had become, and what its consequences would be – enough, in fact, to show up the tiresome smugness of those who dismiss such predictive efforts out of hand. So far, the twenty-first century has done the same. Just last year I wrote that "the relations of the major powers are less defined by concerns about traditional, state-centered threats than at any time since the nineteenth century, if not earlier." That still seems to me an accurate assessment of the situation. The reality of nuclear weaponry and its associated delivery systems continue to make general war too destructive to be a practical option, among not only the great powers, but a circle of states expanding beyond them as well (as seen in areas like the Middle East and South Asia).
However, the possibility of a reversion to more intense military competition remains. Very large question marks still hang over the international system, and especially the three actors far and away most likely to be involved in a clash between great powers – China, Russia, and the United States. (The South China Sea, for instance, presents a more worrisome picture today than it did a few years ago.) Yet, it might reasonably be hoped that we will manage to avoid the stupidity and waste of such a course, which this increasingly crowded, interconnected and precarious planetary civilization can less and less afford.
1. Notably Russia was the one country where he'd dismissed such a possibility – though in fairness, he'd been writing twenty years earlier, when the country was less developed.
Thursday, June 21, 2012
Death of the Liberal Class, by Chris Hedges
New York: Nation Books, 2010, pp. 248.
Phrases like "liberal Establishment" have always struck me as oxymoronic. It is hard to see how anything can be both those things at once. Chris Hedges' latest book, Death of the Liberal Class, would seem to testify to the untenable position of those making the attempt.
As defined by Hedges, a liberal class (in contrast to the corporate-government-military "power elite") could be found holding positions in organized religion, the arts, universities, the media, unions and the Democratic Party.1 Of course, these institutions were never outside the reach of corporate and other conservative influences, the interests of which they usually did represent, but liberal views and voices were sufficiently present to constitute a force there.2
During that time this liberal class occupied the center of American politics, to the right of socialists and Communists, and to the left of the conservative establishment of the business-centered "power elite." It acted as a check on that elite's power, provided some representation for the disenfranchised (the poor and even the middle class), and in so doing made moderate, but meaningful, reforms possible. However, that class was ultimately coopted by the very power elite whose actions it had sought to mitigate, the party of the New Deal giving way to the party of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, and the journalism of Progressive-era muckrakers to the crude, sadistic drivel of a Thomas Friedman. The result is that when liberals dare to criticize the status quo at all they limit themselves to only the most tepid kinds of critique, discussing tactics rather than goals or principles, and advocating mild reforms that have little meaning in the context of the "inverted totalitarianism" and "participatory fascism" Hedges identifies.3 Especially from the 1970s on this has meant the dismantling of every obstacle and restraint on corporate power, resulting in the juggernaut of neoliberal globalization, with all its destructive economic, social and ecological consequences – which, through climate change, may even threaten the survival of the species. Long reduced to the courtiers of the power elite, the liberals – by this point, given to celebrating corporate power, militarized foreign policies and the like – can hardly do much about it, making them impotent, irrelevant and despised even by the politically weaker groups they were supposed to defend (whom they have failed miserably).
According to Hedges' history, while the liberal elite was always compromised by its embrace of the power elite, its "greatest sin" (p. 15) was its collusion with the right against the left, during and after World War I, then after the left's revival amid the Great Depression, again during the Cold War (the role of these conflicts no coincidence, conditions of "permanent war" being inimical to the liberal class's balancing act). The corrupted remainder even joined in the attack on those within their own ranks who continued to adhere to liberalism's ostensible convictions. (Hedges profiles Richard Goldstone, Norman Finkelstein and Ralph Nader as current examples of jurists, scholars, journalists and activists betrayed in this manner – while also telling the story of how he was himself pushed off the pages of the New York Times, like many a principled liberal before him.)
Crushing the left resulted in the liberals' ending up the new left of center, eliminating their old role and dumping on them a new one they were incapable of filling. In the process the liberals also grew alienated from the very working class that they were supposed to speak for in a variety of ways, including the turn from economic issues to identity politics, or even a broader turn away from politics of all kinds (for instance, in the disengagement of the "beat" ethos in the '50s, and the preoccupation with psychoanalysis and mysticism in the '60s counterculture), all of which worked out in ways quite conducive to corporate power.
Meanwhile, the very institutions the class inhabited were being dismantled. The membership of both the mainline churches and the labor unions declined. Colleges educate more students than ever, but the professors who teach in them have been transformed into insecure part-timers in no position to carry out research or perform broader intellectual functions, while the receding pool of tenured faculty (going the way of unionized steelworkers to use his analogy) sticks to overspecialized study of the obscure and minute, and to theoretical debates inoffensive to those who hold genuine power. Where some have seen in it a source of hope, even the Internet is a problem for Hedges, the image-based culture of the new electronic media being far less conducive to rational, individual thought and debate than earlier print media, while further undermining artists, journalists and the like by making it impossible for them to earn a living, so that culture is turned over not merely to part-timers, but to "part-time amateurs."
As a result, not only has the left been neutralized, but the former center is moribund, leaving a vacuum in American politics which can only be filled from the political right, in the form of a right-wing populism with all its fascistic tendencies (already evident in movements like the Tea Party and the revival in militia activity), actually funded by the same corporate forces that brought about the crisis in the first place. Indeed, as he has done in earlier works (particularly 2007's American Fascists), Hedges draws a comparison between the United States today and Weimar Germany, characterizing the U.S. as now in greater danger than it was in the 1930s precisely because of the absence of the kind of countervailing left-center forces that existed then.
As far as Hedges is concerned, there can be no salvation from a rightist movement, only political regression, with the soft tactics of "inverted totalitarianism" perhaps being supplanted by the more overt ones of the classic kind. This line of development (or degeneration) concludes with an image of broad economic and ecological collapse (driven in large part by climate change) precipitating Roman Empire-style political collapse, and perhaps even species extinction, if the processes he describes are not halted.
Alas, there is little time for bringing about such a halt, and few options with the conventional avenues for dissent and reform ceasing to function. He sees little point in appealing to the conscience or enlightened self-interest of the power elite. While he regards the greatest potential for change as being among the disenfranchised, he is doubtful about the prospect of a mass movement emerging which can challenge that elite successfully, let alone the prospects for more egalitarian structures of power. Instead he advocates (non-violent) resistance in the form of small, individual acts undertaken more for their moral rightness than the chances of their contributing to a happy ending to the story. Those who would go on serving the role that the corrupted liberal class was supposed to would all but take vows of voluntary poverty to pursue their vocations of relieving misery, slowing the slide toward destruction, and upholding values like truth, justice and reason, with Hedges offering the life of Dorothy Day of the Catholic Workers' movement as an example of the kind of action he envisions.
Hedges' subject is a vast one, and a two hundred page book on it is necessarily the short version of the oft-told story of the bankruptcy of liberal institutions like the Democratic Party (Obama's chapter in which is already a well-established subject with the appearance of books like Paul Street's The Empire's New Clothes, Roger D. Hodge's The Mendacity of Hope and Tariq Ali's The Obama Syndrome during the past two years). Indeed, the book might be more appropriately titled Suicide of the Liberal Class, focusing as it does on the ways in which the class contributed to its own destruction. One might add that even here Hedges' focus is on the liberals' corruption by a combination of opportunism (the desire for patronage by the ambitious, the ruin of intellectuals by money) and fear (of appearing unpatriotic, or "soft on Communism"), rather than their strategic or tactical errors (like their elevation of identity politics over everything else, a story Todd Gitlin tells in The Twilight of Common Dreams).
Hedges also devotes little attention to events to both the liberals' left and right, despite the significance of events at both those ends of the political spectrum for the way in which this story played out. The frailty of the American radicalism that was so important to keeping liberals honest and relevant (a theme explored in works like Gabriel Kolko's Main Currents in American History, or Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks' It Didn't Happen Here) is never really examined.4 Likewise, the ascendancy of the far right within the Republican Party (memorably related by alienated Republican insiders like John Dean, Kevin Phillips and Michael Lind), and the way in which their time in government not only shifted the political terrain, but tied the hands of any would-be liberals succeeding them (a process Thomas Frank explored in The Wrecking Crew), is not discussed. The result is that those looking for a really broad, full view of this history will have to supplement Hedges' book with a good deal of other reading.
It may be relevant that far more than is the case in most of these works Death of the Liberal Class is a jeremiad, its author's anger nothing short of scathing, and the severity of its assessment of our situation deeply depressing. (Given that I've been studying societal collapse for a decade now, I don't say this lightly.) Hedges' personal religious beliefs strongly inform his view of the situation, from his harsh criticism of hedonism and the "cult of the self," to the kind of resistance he advocates, which is suggestive of the example of the early Christians. The result is that even readers sympathetic to his broader position who happen not to share those particular beliefs may be put off by much of what he says. Certainly I found myself taking issue with his dismissal of any serious possibility of redressing the world's problems. (This can seem like a rejection of politics akin to those he criticized earlier generations of liberals for, if of a less obviously self-indulgent kind, as well as an abandonment of the responsibility to try and develop materially effective tools and strategies to deal with the situation.) Additionally, he seemed to me to slight the sciences (which can fairly be thought of as a bastion of the "liberal class"), even as he draws on science for his strongest argument for the dangers presented by our current trajectory – the likelihood of climate catastrophe. (I may also add here that it has long seemed to me that science and technology are certain to play a crucial role in any scenario in which we cope successfully with our ecological problems. Unfashionable as it may be, and dismaying as the technological stagnation of the last decade has been, far and away our best bet for a tolerable outcome is a "technological fix" that cuts the challenge down to size.)
Yet, it would be a mistake to dismiss Hedges' book as a rant or a screed. His passion may occasionally get the better of his style, but never his argumentation. Moreover, dire as his assessment is, there is no sense of tactical exaggeration, or the perverse eagerness to be validated by disaster that often appears in warnings of ecological doom. Rather there is a great deal of solid, well-grounded analysis here, informed by an impressive survey of the relevant literature, and Hedges recounts a great deal of history well worth knowing. His diagnosis of our political paralysis, the hollowness of our pieties and the role of liberalism's betrayals in this – the very heart of his critique – are especially compelling, and his defense of the value of the arts and humanities (so often slighted by others) is the strongest I have seen in some time. Indeed, after following Hedges' writing from War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (2002) on, The Death of the Liberal Class struck me as a summary work, capping off a long period of reflection and study well worth the attention of those engaged by his earlier writing, and by those looking for an introduction to these issues as well.
NOTES
1. By "power elite" C. Wright Mills referred to the men and women "in command of the major hierarchies and organizations of modern society . . . the strategic command posts of the social structure" (The Power Elite, p. 4), corporate, state and military, which Mills viewed as interlocking, placing them in a common group with common interests - and quite distinct from the liberal elite described above.
2. Where the media is concerned, Hedges refers to Ed Herman and Noam Chomsky's critique of the press in Manufacturing Consent, which offers a "propaganda" model of the media in which the press is controlled by a high cost of operation subordinating it to business (from its need for expensive licensing to advertising revenue), its dependence on "sourcing" (e.g. government and business press releases) because of the high cost of investigative reporting, a sensitivity to the organized media criticism termed "flak," and the role "anti-Communism" has played "as a national religion" (Manufacturing Consent, p. 29).
3. Sheldon Wolin's theory of "inverted totalitarianism" describes a totalitarianism which has no demagogues or charismatic leaders, and no revolutionary structures and symbols (key trappings in the "classic" totalitarianism of Germany and Italy), but rather the preservation (and thoroughgoing corruption) of the old institutions and culture to support virtually complete corporate political control. Charlotte Twight's "participatory fascism" refers to a condition in which voter choice is reduced to the irrelevant.
4. American history in this respect is well worth comparing to that of Britain, where the Liberal Party was eclipsed by the left-of-center Labor Party, a story Pulitzer Prize-winner George Dangerfield recounts in his classic The Strange Death of Liberal England.
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Phrases like "liberal Establishment" have always struck me as oxymoronic. It is hard to see how anything can be both those things at once. Chris Hedges' latest book, Death of the Liberal Class, would seem to testify to the untenable position of those making the attempt.
As defined by Hedges, a liberal class (in contrast to the corporate-government-military "power elite") could be found holding positions in organized religion, the arts, universities, the media, unions and the Democratic Party.1 Of course, these institutions were never outside the reach of corporate and other conservative influences, the interests of which they usually did represent, but liberal views and voices were sufficiently present to constitute a force there.2
During that time this liberal class occupied the center of American politics, to the right of socialists and Communists, and to the left of the conservative establishment of the business-centered "power elite." It acted as a check on that elite's power, provided some representation for the disenfranchised (the poor and even the middle class), and in so doing made moderate, but meaningful, reforms possible. However, that class was ultimately coopted by the very power elite whose actions it had sought to mitigate, the party of the New Deal giving way to the party of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, and the journalism of Progressive-era muckrakers to the crude, sadistic drivel of a Thomas Friedman. The result is that when liberals dare to criticize the status quo at all they limit themselves to only the most tepid kinds of critique, discussing tactics rather than goals or principles, and advocating mild reforms that have little meaning in the context of the "inverted totalitarianism" and "participatory fascism" Hedges identifies.3 Especially from the 1970s on this has meant the dismantling of every obstacle and restraint on corporate power, resulting in the juggernaut of neoliberal globalization, with all its destructive economic, social and ecological consequences – which, through climate change, may even threaten the survival of the species. Long reduced to the courtiers of the power elite, the liberals – by this point, given to celebrating corporate power, militarized foreign policies and the like – can hardly do much about it, making them impotent, irrelevant and despised even by the politically weaker groups they were supposed to defend (whom they have failed miserably).
According to Hedges' history, while the liberal elite was always compromised by its embrace of the power elite, its "greatest sin" (p. 15) was its collusion with the right against the left, during and after World War I, then after the left's revival amid the Great Depression, again during the Cold War (the role of these conflicts no coincidence, conditions of "permanent war" being inimical to the liberal class's balancing act). The corrupted remainder even joined in the attack on those within their own ranks who continued to adhere to liberalism's ostensible convictions. (Hedges profiles Richard Goldstone, Norman Finkelstein and Ralph Nader as current examples of jurists, scholars, journalists and activists betrayed in this manner – while also telling the story of how he was himself pushed off the pages of the New York Times, like many a principled liberal before him.)
Crushing the left resulted in the liberals' ending up the new left of center, eliminating their old role and dumping on them a new one they were incapable of filling. In the process the liberals also grew alienated from the very working class that they were supposed to speak for in a variety of ways, including the turn from economic issues to identity politics, or even a broader turn away from politics of all kinds (for instance, in the disengagement of the "beat" ethos in the '50s, and the preoccupation with psychoanalysis and mysticism in the '60s counterculture), all of which worked out in ways quite conducive to corporate power.
Meanwhile, the very institutions the class inhabited were being dismantled. The membership of both the mainline churches and the labor unions declined. Colleges educate more students than ever, but the professors who teach in them have been transformed into insecure part-timers in no position to carry out research or perform broader intellectual functions, while the receding pool of tenured faculty (going the way of unionized steelworkers to use his analogy) sticks to overspecialized study of the obscure and minute, and to theoretical debates inoffensive to those who hold genuine power. Where some have seen in it a source of hope, even the Internet is a problem for Hedges, the image-based culture of the new electronic media being far less conducive to rational, individual thought and debate than earlier print media, while further undermining artists, journalists and the like by making it impossible for them to earn a living, so that culture is turned over not merely to part-timers, but to "part-time amateurs."
As a result, not only has the left been neutralized, but the former center is moribund, leaving a vacuum in American politics which can only be filled from the political right, in the form of a right-wing populism with all its fascistic tendencies (already evident in movements like the Tea Party and the revival in militia activity), actually funded by the same corporate forces that brought about the crisis in the first place. Indeed, as he has done in earlier works (particularly 2007's American Fascists), Hedges draws a comparison between the United States today and Weimar Germany, characterizing the U.S. as now in greater danger than it was in the 1930s precisely because of the absence of the kind of countervailing left-center forces that existed then.
As far as Hedges is concerned, there can be no salvation from a rightist movement, only political regression, with the soft tactics of "inverted totalitarianism" perhaps being supplanted by the more overt ones of the classic kind. This line of development (or degeneration) concludes with an image of broad economic and ecological collapse (driven in large part by climate change) precipitating Roman Empire-style political collapse, and perhaps even species extinction, if the processes he describes are not halted.
Alas, there is little time for bringing about such a halt, and few options with the conventional avenues for dissent and reform ceasing to function. He sees little point in appealing to the conscience or enlightened self-interest of the power elite. While he regards the greatest potential for change as being among the disenfranchised, he is doubtful about the prospect of a mass movement emerging which can challenge that elite successfully, let alone the prospects for more egalitarian structures of power. Instead he advocates (non-violent) resistance in the form of small, individual acts undertaken more for their moral rightness than the chances of their contributing to a happy ending to the story. Those who would go on serving the role that the corrupted liberal class was supposed to would all but take vows of voluntary poverty to pursue their vocations of relieving misery, slowing the slide toward destruction, and upholding values like truth, justice and reason, with Hedges offering the life of Dorothy Day of the Catholic Workers' movement as an example of the kind of action he envisions.
Hedges' subject is a vast one, and a two hundred page book on it is necessarily the short version of the oft-told story of the bankruptcy of liberal institutions like the Democratic Party (Obama's chapter in which is already a well-established subject with the appearance of books like Paul Street's The Empire's New Clothes, Roger D. Hodge's The Mendacity of Hope and Tariq Ali's The Obama Syndrome during the past two years). Indeed, the book might be more appropriately titled Suicide of the Liberal Class, focusing as it does on the ways in which the class contributed to its own destruction. One might add that even here Hedges' focus is on the liberals' corruption by a combination of opportunism (the desire for patronage by the ambitious, the ruin of intellectuals by money) and fear (of appearing unpatriotic, or "soft on Communism"), rather than their strategic or tactical errors (like their elevation of identity politics over everything else, a story Todd Gitlin tells in The Twilight of Common Dreams).
Hedges also devotes little attention to events to both the liberals' left and right, despite the significance of events at both those ends of the political spectrum for the way in which this story played out. The frailty of the American radicalism that was so important to keeping liberals honest and relevant (a theme explored in works like Gabriel Kolko's Main Currents in American History, or Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks' It Didn't Happen Here) is never really examined.4 Likewise, the ascendancy of the far right within the Republican Party (memorably related by alienated Republican insiders like John Dean, Kevin Phillips and Michael Lind), and the way in which their time in government not only shifted the political terrain, but tied the hands of any would-be liberals succeeding them (a process Thomas Frank explored in The Wrecking Crew), is not discussed. The result is that those looking for a really broad, full view of this history will have to supplement Hedges' book with a good deal of other reading.
It may be relevant that far more than is the case in most of these works Death of the Liberal Class is a jeremiad, its author's anger nothing short of scathing, and the severity of its assessment of our situation deeply depressing. (Given that I've been studying societal collapse for a decade now, I don't say this lightly.) Hedges' personal religious beliefs strongly inform his view of the situation, from his harsh criticism of hedonism and the "cult of the self," to the kind of resistance he advocates, which is suggestive of the example of the early Christians. The result is that even readers sympathetic to his broader position who happen not to share those particular beliefs may be put off by much of what he says. Certainly I found myself taking issue with his dismissal of any serious possibility of redressing the world's problems. (This can seem like a rejection of politics akin to those he criticized earlier generations of liberals for, if of a less obviously self-indulgent kind, as well as an abandonment of the responsibility to try and develop materially effective tools and strategies to deal with the situation.) Additionally, he seemed to me to slight the sciences (which can fairly be thought of as a bastion of the "liberal class"), even as he draws on science for his strongest argument for the dangers presented by our current trajectory – the likelihood of climate catastrophe. (I may also add here that it has long seemed to me that science and technology are certain to play a crucial role in any scenario in which we cope successfully with our ecological problems. Unfashionable as it may be, and dismaying as the technological stagnation of the last decade has been, far and away our best bet for a tolerable outcome is a "technological fix" that cuts the challenge down to size.)
Yet, it would be a mistake to dismiss Hedges' book as a rant or a screed. His passion may occasionally get the better of his style, but never his argumentation. Moreover, dire as his assessment is, there is no sense of tactical exaggeration, or the perverse eagerness to be validated by disaster that often appears in warnings of ecological doom. Rather there is a great deal of solid, well-grounded analysis here, informed by an impressive survey of the relevant literature, and Hedges recounts a great deal of history well worth knowing. His diagnosis of our political paralysis, the hollowness of our pieties and the role of liberalism's betrayals in this – the very heart of his critique – are especially compelling, and his defense of the value of the arts and humanities (so often slighted by others) is the strongest I have seen in some time. Indeed, after following Hedges' writing from War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (2002) on, The Death of the Liberal Class struck me as a summary work, capping off a long period of reflection and study well worth the attention of those engaged by his earlier writing, and by those looking for an introduction to these issues as well.
NOTES
1. By "power elite" C. Wright Mills referred to the men and women "in command of the major hierarchies and organizations of modern society . . . the strategic command posts of the social structure" (The Power Elite, p. 4), corporate, state and military, which Mills viewed as interlocking, placing them in a common group with common interests - and quite distinct from the liberal elite described above.
2. Where the media is concerned, Hedges refers to Ed Herman and Noam Chomsky's critique of the press in Manufacturing Consent, which offers a "propaganda" model of the media in which the press is controlled by a high cost of operation subordinating it to business (from its need for expensive licensing to advertising revenue), its dependence on "sourcing" (e.g. government and business press releases) because of the high cost of investigative reporting, a sensitivity to the organized media criticism termed "flak," and the role "anti-Communism" has played "as a national religion" (Manufacturing Consent, p. 29).
3. Sheldon Wolin's theory of "inverted totalitarianism" describes a totalitarianism which has no demagogues or charismatic leaders, and no revolutionary structures and symbols (key trappings in the "classic" totalitarianism of Germany and Italy), but rather the preservation (and thoroughgoing corruption) of the old institutions and culture to support virtually complete corporate political control. Charlotte Twight's "participatory fascism" refers to a condition in which voter choice is reduced to the irrelevant.
4. American history in this respect is well worth comparing to that of Britain, where the Liberal Party was eclipsed by the left-of-center Labor Party, a story Pulitzer Prize-winner George Dangerfield recounts in his classic The Strange Death of Liberal England.
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Tuesday, June 19, 2012
Canada's Tar Sands: A Closer Look
It has become a commonplace to term Canada not just the holder of the world's third-largest oil reserves, but the U.S.'s biggest source of oil imports, supplying a quarter of these needs, well over 2 million barrels a day.
The reality is a bit more complex. The U.S. consumes over 19 million barrels a day. The country's net imports come to about 8.3 million barrels a day. Meanwhile, Canada currently produces about 3.5 million barrels a day. However, Canada consumes about 2.3 million barrels a day itself. This leaves its net exports a mere 1.2 million barrels – with the million-barrel difference covered by the country's own imports from Saudi Arabia, Africa and Venezuela. In short, Canada meets a quarter of the U.S.'s energy needs only by meeting its own needs with oil coming in from more traditional producers, and indeed the exact same countries Canadian oil is supposed to delink American energy consumption from. Putting it another way, Canada's production above its own needs supplies 14 percent of U.S. imports, only a bit over half of the more commonly cited figure, and that the situation appears otherwise is due to the Canadian energy market being "subsidized" by cheaper oil imports from elsewhere.
Certainly Canadian production is widely expected to grow, with one EIA forecast positing its expanding from about 3.5 million barrels a day in 2010 to the area of 5 million barrels in 2020-2025, and 6-7 million barrels a day in 2030-2035. Additionally, Canada's consumption is likely to grow at a much slower rate than that during this time frame. Of course, it remains to be seen that production will actually reach these levels, and even were they to do so, Canada might well seek to meet more of its own needs from domestic energy production. Still, this would likely leave a growing surplus available for export.
At the same time, there is considerable optimism about the U.S.'s need for oil imports actually falling between now and then, quite a bit of it having to do with a report from British Petroleum this year (highlights from which were reported in the Guardian earlier this year). The report envisages the U.S.'s consumption falling (as oil use becomes more efficient), and its production of its own liquid fuels increasing (as the long-promised production of shale oil takes off, and biofuels substitute for crude oil). Yet, there is at the very least room for skepticism about the prospect of an imminent shale boom. It is also worth remembering that even if Canadian production was voluminous enough to meet all of the U.S.'s needs, the reality is that Canadian oil production will still be just part of the global pool – so that prices and supplies will still be subject to fluctuations caused by events elsewhere in the world. It is worth noting, too, that the production of oil from tar sands depends on the use of natural gas – another fossil fuel which has grown more expensive in recent years, and which remains concentrated overwhelmingly in Russia and the Persian Gulf region. (And of course, where greenhouse gas emissions and other environmental effects are concerned, non-conventional oil of this type is significantly worse than regular, liquid oil.)
Just as before, the only way to really end U.S. dependence on problematic fossil fuel exporters is to end its dependence on fossil fuels, in favor of energy production from other sources. For the time being, this would mean trading natural resources of one kind for another – given the role of rare earth elements in renewable energy technology, for instance – but, politically and ecologically, that would still be an improvement over burning a constant, massive flow of hydrocarbons.
The reality is a bit more complex. The U.S. consumes over 19 million barrels a day. The country's net imports come to about 8.3 million barrels a day. Meanwhile, Canada currently produces about 3.5 million barrels a day. However, Canada consumes about 2.3 million barrels a day itself. This leaves its net exports a mere 1.2 million barrels – with the million-barrel difference covered by the country's own imports from Saudi Arabia, Africa and Venezuela. In short, Canada meets a quarter of the U.S.'s energy needs only by meeting its own needs with oil coming in from more traditional producers, and indeed the exact same countries Canadian oil is supposed to delink American energy consumption from. Putting it another way, Canada's production above its own needs supplies 14 percent of U.S. imports, only a bit over half of the more commonly cited figure, and that the situation appears otherwise is due to the Canadian energy market being "subsidized" by cheaper oil imports from elsewhere.
Certainly Canadian production is widely expected to grow, with one EIA forecast positing its expanding from about 3.5 million barrels a day in 2010 to the area of 5 million barrels in 2020-2025, and 6-7 million barrels a day in 2030-2035. Additionally, Canada's consumption is likely to grow at a much slower rate than that during this time frame. Of course, it remains to be seen that production will actually reach these levels, and even were they to do so, Canada might well seek to meet more of its own needs from domestic energy production. Still, this would likely leave a growing surplus available for export.
At the same time, there is considerable optimism about the U.S.'s need for oil imports actually falling between now and then, quite a bit of it having to do with a report from British Petroleum this year (highlights from which were reported in the Guardian earlier this year). The report envisages the U.S.'s consumption falling (as oil use becomes more efficient), and its production of its own liquid fuels increasing (as the long-promised production of shale oil takes off, and biofuels substitute for crude oil). Yet, there is at the very least room for skepticism about the prospect of an imminent shale boom. It is also worth remembering that even if Canadian production was voluminous enough to meet all of the U.S.'s needs, the reality is that Canadian oil production will still be just part of the global pool – so that prices and supplies will still be subject to fluctuations caused by events elsewhere in the world. It is worth noting, too, that the production of oil from tar sands depends on the use of natural gas – another fossil fuel which has grown more expensive in recent years, and which remains concentrated overwhelmingly in Russia and the Persian Gulf region. (And of course, where greenhouse gas emissions and other environmental effects are concerned, non-conventional oil of this type is significantly worse than regular, liquid oil.)
Just as before, the only way to really end U.S. dependence on problematic fossil fuel exporters is to end its dependence on fossil fuels, in favor of energy production from other sources. For the time being, this would mean trading natural resources of one kind for another – given the role of rare earth elements in renewable energy technology, for instance – but, politically and ecologically, that would still be an improvement over burning a constant, massive flow of hydrocarbons.
Monday, June 11, 2012
Toward A Sixth-Generation Fighter: Directed-Energy Weapons
Back in November 2010 the Capability Development and Planning Division of the Aeronautical Systems Center (part of the U.S. Air Force's Materiel Command) issued a presolicitation notice announcing that it was "conducting market research analyses to examine applicable materiel concepts and related technology" for a next generation tactical aircraft with an initial operating capability "of approximately 2030." The fighter was expected to "operate in the anti-access/area-denial environment that will exist in the 2030-2050 timeframe," thought likely to include "advanced electronic attack, sophisticated integrated air defense systems, passive detection, integrated self-protection, directed energy weapons, and cyber attack capabilities."
It is the mention of directed energy weaponry that really got my attention. Predictions regarding directed-energy weapons have proven consistently overoptimistic, with projects like the Nautilus and the Airborne Laser turning out to be serious disappointments. (Indeed, Israel has turned to the guided missiles of the Iron Dome air defense system rather than lasers to shoot down short-range rockets.) Much like the flying car, they have simply not happened. Might that change in twenty to forty years' time? Perhaps.
It also seems noteworthy that the directed-energy weapons are mentioned as part of the threat environment – and not the aircraft's own armament. Some technologies start small and get bigger (as has often been the case with vehicles), while others start big and get smaller (like computers), and directed-energy weapons seem very likely to be in the latter category, as the programs mentioned above indicate. Speaking intuitively, I'd say that the appearance of lasers or microwave weapons small enough to fit inside a tactical aircraft and at the same time powerful enough to justify their weight are extremely unlikely between now and 2050. Though I wouldn't be surprised if they also failed to appear, larger, ground- or sea-based air defense weapons don't seem wholly outside the realm of the possible.
Assuming they do appear, what would that appearance mean for combat aircraft? Obviously speed-of-light weapons cannot be dodged, the way jets dodge surface-to-air missiles. It does not even seem to me likely that the next generation of fighters will even be much faster or higher-flying than they are now (given how unlikely hypersonic flight seems for a multi-mission aircraft like the one discussed in the notice).1 Yet, techniques comparable to those we now have for building stealth aircraft, and mounting "hard" suppressive attacks (like using anti-radiation missiles against radars) could remain on the table. So would the use of decoys and jamming to blind or trick the fire control systems of attacking weapons and other sensors, and it may even be possible to jam the beam of the weapon itself – just as communications and sensors based on lasers and microwaves can be jammed. And just as missile casings can be thickened to make them more resistant to the energy of a laser beam, aircraft might (up to a point) be armored.
Exactly how these factors will interact is at this point beyond the scope of reasonable extrapolation, not least because it depends on still other factors – like the race between stealth technology and radar. However, were laser weapons to prove capable of effectively targeting vast numbers of sophisticated attackers, they might make the use of expensive, high-performance strike aircraft prohibitively costly, and drive a turn to large numbers of simpler, cheaper drones or stand-off missiles instead. Such a turn may make the platforms succeeding the F-22 and its counterparts in their mission so different as to constitute not a sixth-generation jet fighter, but the first generation of something else.
1. The presolicitation notice envisages a multi-mission aircraft, capable of performing not just "Offensive and Defensive Counterair," but "Integrated Air and Missile Defense," "Close Air Support" and "Air Interdiction," and possibly also "airborne electronic attack" and "intelligence-surveillance-reconnaissance capabilities."
It is the mention of directed energy weaponry that really got my attention. Predictions regarding directed-energy weapons have proven consistently overoptimistic, with projects like the Nautilus and the Airborne Laser turning out to be serious disappointments. (Indeed, Israel has turned to the guided missiles of the Iron Dome air defense system rather than lasers to shoot down short-range rockets.) Much like the flying car, they have simply not happened. Might that change in twenty to forty years' time? Perhaps.
It also seems noteworthy that the directed-energy weapons are mentioned as part of the threat environment – and not the aircraft's own armament. Some technologies start small and get bigger (as has often been the case with vehicles), while others start big and get smaller (like computers), and directed-energy weapons seem very likely to be in the latter category, as the programs mentioned above indicate. Speaking intuitively, I'd say that the appearance of lasers or microwave weapons small enough to fit inside a tactical aircraft and at the same time powerful enough to justify their weight are extremely unlikely between now and 2050. Though I wouldn't be surprised if they also failed to appear, larger, ground- or sea-based air defense weapons don't seem wholly outside the realm of the possible.
Assuming they do appear, what would that appearance mean for combat aircraft? Obviously speed-of-light weapons cannot be dodged, the way jets dodge surface-to-air missiles. It does not even seem to me likely that the next generation of fighters will even be much faster or higher-flying than they are now (given how unlikely hypersonic flight seems for a multi-mission aircraft like the one discussed in the notice).1 Yet, techniques comparable to those we now have for building stealth aircraft, and mounting "hard" suppressive attacks (like using anti-radiation missiles against radars) could remain on the table. So would the use of decoys and jamming to blind or trick the fire control systems of attacking weapons and other sensors, and it may even be possible to jam the beam of the weapon itself – just as communications and sensors based on lasers and microwaves can be jammed. And just as missile casings can be thickened to make them more resistant to the energy of a laser beam, aircraft might (up to a point) be armored.
Exactly how these factors will interact is at this point beyond the scope of reasonable extrapolation, not least because it depends on still other factors – like the race between stealth technology and radar. However, were laser weapons to prove capable of effectively targeting vast numbers of sophisticated attackers, they might make the use of expensive, high-performance strike aircraft prohibitively costly, and drive a turn to large numbers of simpler, cheaper drones or stand-off missiles instead. Such a turn may make the platforms succeeding the F-22 and its counterparts in their mission so different as to constitute not a sixth-generation jet fighter, but the first generation of something else.
1. The presolicitation notice envisages a multi-mission aircraft, capable of performing not just "Offensive and Defensive Counterair," but "Integrated Air and Missile Defense," "Close Air Support" and "Air Interdiction," and possibly also "airborne electronic attack" and "intelligence-surveillance-reconnaissance capabilities."
Monday, June 4, 2012
Review: Twenty-Three Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism, by Ha-Joon Chang
New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010, pp. 286.
Ha-Joon Chang's book Twenty-Three Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism is a critical analysis of the "free market" (aka, "neoliberal") version of capitalism prevalent for over three decades now, organized around a point-by-point debunking of twenty-three claims of orthodox economic thought.
This school of thought holds that human beings as rational and self-interested actors which most successfully maximize their individual (and by extension, their collective) benefit when the "invisible hand" of the market is given the greatest freedom to allocate resources. Government interventions in this process are held to be injurious because its decisions are necessarily of poorer quality than those of private actors for a number of reasons, including its having priorities besides maximizing the economic gain of its constituents (such as holding on to political power), and the inadequacy of its information (a government bureaucrat presumably knowing a particular situation less well than the businessman actually in the middle of it). Government intervention specifically for egalitarian, redistributive purposes, is harmful in its diminution of the incentive of all actors to create wealth (the rich who will hesitate to invest when they will lose some of their income gains to higher taxes, the poor who will forgo work when they can coast on welfare), while a government's "picking winners and losers" by favoring one enterprise or sector over another (like promoting manufacturing over services, or trying to restrain finance to protect the "real" economy), for the aforementioned reasons, means sub-optimal decisions damaging to economic efficiency. Accordingly, what government should do is get out of the way as much as possible.
By contrast, Chang holds that human rationality is "bounded," limited by such things as the time available in which to make particular decisions, and the finiteness of the individual and collective ability to process information (so that the rationale that a private actor's access to greater information than public policymakers automatically leads to better decisions is doubtful), while human motivations are complex, including not just a selfish pursuit of material gain, but positive traits like self-respect or duty as well (without which, he argues, deceit and mistrust would be so overwhelming as to bring the market to a halt). Moreover, in contrast with the easy confidence that what leads to the maximum benefit of individuals leads to the maximum benefit of society as a whole, there are clashes between the individual and collective interest, evident in such issues as the externalities produced by economic activity (like pollution), while the pursuit of short-term gains may mean losing out on other greater but longer-term gains (as seen in the tendency toward short-termism which has so characterized corporate decision-making in recent decades). The result is that there are many ways in which markets fail, so that there is a role for government to play in economic life far beyond the libertarian minimum of protecting property and enforcing contracts – and government's active and competent performance of that role is crucial to the development, and continued health, of national economies.
Moving past theory, Chang demonstrates that the economic success stories of modern history occurred in precisely those places where economic life did not adhere by the orthodoxy. Those countries which are wealthy generally became that because their governments intervened in their economies in ways like cultivating infant industries – crucial because wealth in the modern world is a function of successful industrialization, an outcome not usually produced by private capital and initiative alone. Britain in the eighteenth century, the United States and Germany in the nineteenth, Japan and South Korea in the twentieth, and China today, all reflect this pattern.1 Moreover, none of these governments ever stopped directing their national economic life, given such realities as national R & D budgets, government control of essential infrastructure and services of various kinds (utilities, the postal service), and immigration policies (a "protectionist" measure directed at the inflow of labor rather than the goods it produces). Additionally, the meritocracy demanded by the imperative of market efficiency requires enough "equalization of outcome" among parents to insure that their children get a fair chance, while social safety nets encourage risk-taking, providing a justification for the welfare state so loathed by the political right. (Indeed, Chang regards the welfare state as the working-class's equivalent of bankruptcy laws for businessmen.)
Equally, the shift to neoliberal policy by the 1980s has been strongly correlated with a sharp drop in the rate of economic growth around the world (something I have repeatedly noted in my own researches). Most pointed is their failure to produce growth in those regions where the reforms have been most aggressive (Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa), which cannot be complacently attributed to problems of geography or culture, as orthodox thinkers would have it. The relationship between development and the received circumstances of geography and culture is in Chang's view actually the opposite of what the orthodoxy posits: development is not a byproduct of favorable circumstances, but rather overcomes unfavorable circumstances like harsh climate or ethnic fragmentation as it proceeds (a pattern seen from Scandinavia to Singapore). The tendency to blame culture can be especially deceptive as the residents of poor countries are, if anything, more entrepreneurial than their rich-country counterparts, as they must be because of the terms of life in the informal economy in which so many of them survive (while the well-paid citizens of wealthy countries are beneficiaries less of their own entrepreneurial talent than the strong institutions their countries developed, and the technological know-how those institutions absorbed, over long periods of time).2
In visiting our most recent troubles Chang does not let orthodox economists off the hook as "innocent technicians who did a decent job within the narrow confines of their expertise until they were collectively wrong-footed by a once-in-a-century disaster that no one could have predicted" (247). Rather he holds that they played a key role in creating the disaster with their simplistic and ideologically-driven prescriptions – which ignored the vast, long-standing and still-growing body of theory and history which made their intellectual errors, and the risks of the course they cheered on, all too clear. He is also quite clear that, despite the hype, recent changes in technology and political economy – the information technology revolution, and the presumed footlooseness of international capital (both overrated in his view) – have not invalidated those earlier lessons.
Those well-acquainted with the subject of economics will appreciate that all of this has been said before, many times, not just by other thinkers from Adam Smith to James Crotty, but by Chang himself, in books like his recent Bad Samaritans.3 Rather than the presentation of original theses, this book's virtue is its accurately and clearly representing ideas gathered from all across the field's vast literature, organized into a coherent critique which is made accessible to the general reader in a series of succinct chapters (each about ten pages long, free of unnecessary jargon and the equations which proponents of orthodoxy use to "blind with science") that make the relevant points and amply support them with germane, concrete examples. In the handy concluding chapter he draws together the many threads of his argument, and outlines an alternative basis for economic policy.
That is not to say that Chang's book is perfect. I found his treatment of inflation and related aspects of monetary policy unpersuasive. Far from tight money having prevailed in recent decades, the loose money policies of Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke have played a major role in creating the bubbles so damaging to the American and world economies in recent years (as Matt Taibbi demonstrates in Griftopia). Chang's discussion of financial crisis would also have benefited from some deepening, as he merely references the crucial work of John Maynard Keynes, Charles Kindleberger and Hyman Minsky in passing, rather than using them to present a picture of how speculative bubbles happen, and send economies running off their rails (a twenty-fourth thing he might have told the reader about capitalism). I might also add that Chang does not address the politics of how neoliberalism came to prevail, or how it has remained so dominant after not just decades of nearly complete failure characterized by economic stagnation and recurrent financial crisis, but the disaster of 2008 in which it all came to a head, through which we are still living – but that is a whole story in itself, which can plausibly be regarded as outside this book's purview.
1. Indeed, no country much larger than a Monaco or a Luxembourg can found its prosperity on international finance, with Switzerland and Singapore – ordinarily thought of as models for this approach – actually among the world's most heavily industrialized.
2. For an interesting journalistic account of the informal economy, see Robert Neuwirth's recent Stealth of Nations: The Global Rise of the Informal Economy.
3. Perhaps the most iconoclastic point Chang made is his argument that there has been an overemphasis on higher education as a path to national economic advancement. (As he notes, not only is the correlation weak, but much of what is taught in school is of little use in most lines of work, and much of the knowledge needed for work is acquired on the job - while a rush to increase the numbers of graduates can simply mean the fostering of credentialing crises.)
Ha-Joon Chang's book Twenty-Three Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism is a critical analysis of the "free market" (aka, "neoliberal") version of capitalism prevalent for over three decades now, organized around a point-by-point debunking of twenty-three claims of orthodox economic thought.
This school of thought holds that human beings as rational and self-interested actors which most successfully maximize their individual (and by extension, their collective) benefit when the "invisible hand" of the market is given the greatest freedom to allocate resources. Government interventions in this process are held to be injurious because its decisions are necessarily of poorer quality than those of private actors for a number of reasons, including its having priorities besides maximizing the economic gain of its constituents (such as holding on to political power), and the inadequacy of its information (a government bureaucrat presumably knowing a particular situation less well than the businessman actually in the middle of it). Government intervention specifically for egalitarian, redistributive purposes, is harmful in its diminution of the incentive of all actors to create wealth (the rich who will hesitate to invest when they will lose some of their income gains to higher taxes, the poor who will forgo work when they can coast on welfare), while a government's "picking winners and losers" by favoring one enterprise or sector over another (like promoting manufacturing over services, or trying to restrain finance to protect the "real" economy), for the aforementioned reasons, means sub-optimal decisions damaging to economic efficiency. Accordingly, what government should do is get out of the way as much as possible.
By contrast, Chang holds that human rationality is "bounded," limited by such things as the time available in which to make particular decisions, and the finiteness of the individual and collective ability to process information (so that the rationale that a private actor's access to greater information than public policymakers automatically leads to better decisions is doubtful), while human motivations are complex, including not just a selfish pursuit of material gain, but positive traits like self-respect or duty as well (without which, he argues, deceit and mistrust would be so overwhelming as to bring the market to a halt). Moreover, in contrast with the easy confidence that what leads to the maximum benefit of individuals leads to the maximum benefit of society as a whole, there are clashes between the individual and collective interest, evident in such issues as the externalities produced by economic activity (like pollution), while the pursuit of short-term gains may mean losing out on other greater but longer-term gains (as seen in the tendency toward short-termism which has so characterized corporate decision-making in recent decades). The result is that there are many ways in which markets fail, so that there is a role for government to play in economic life far beyond the libertarian minimum of protecting property and enforcing contracts – and government's active and competent performance of that role is crucial to the development, and continued health, of national economies.
Moving past theory, Chang demonstrates that the economic success stories of modern history occurred in precisely those places where economic life did not adhere by the orthodoxy. Those countries which are wealthy generally became that because their governments intervened in their economies in ways like cultivating infant industries – crucial because wealth in the modern world is a function of successful industrialization, an outcome not usually produced by private capital and initiative alone. Britain in the eighteenth century, the United States and Germany in the nineteenth, Japan and South Korea in the twentieth, and China today, all reflect this pattern.1 Moreover, none of these governments ever stopped directing their national economic life, given such realities as national R & D budgets, government control of essential infrastructure and services of various kinds (utilities, the postal service), and immigration policies (a "protectionist" measure directed at the inflow of labor rather than the goods it produces). Additionally, the meritocracy demanded by the imperative of market efficiency requires enough "equalization of outcome" among parents to insure that their children get a fair chance, while social safety nets encourage risk-taking, providing a justification for the welfare state so loathed by the political right. (Indeed, Chang regards the welfare state as the working-class's equivalent of bankruptcy laws for businessmen.)
Equally, the shift to neoliberal policy by the 1980s has been strongly correlated with a sharp drop in the rate of economic growth around the world (something I have repeatedly noted in my own researches). Most pointed is their failure to produce growth in those regions where the reforms have been most aggressive (Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa), which cannot be complacently attributed to problems of geography or culture, as orthodox thinkers would have it. The relationship between development and the received circumstances of geography and culture is in Chang's view actually the opposite of what the orthodoxy posits: development is not a byproduct of favorable circumstances, but rather overcomes unfavorable circumstances like harsh climate or ethnic fragmentation as it proceeds (a pattern seen from Scandinavia to Singapore). The tendency to blame culture can be especially deceptive as the residents of poor countries are, if anything, more entrepreneurial than their rich-country counterparts, as they must be because of the terms of life in the informal economy in which so many of them survive (while the well-paid citizens of wealthy countries are beneficiaries less of their own entrepreneurial talent than the strong institutions their countries developed, and the technological know-how those institutions absorbed, over long periods of time).2
In visiting our most recent troubles Chang does not let orthodox economists off the hook as "innocent technicians who did a decent job within the narrow confines of their expertise until they were collectively wrong-footed by a once-in-a-century disaster that no one could have predicted" (247). Rather he holds that they played a key role in creating the disaster with their simplistic and ideologically-driven prescriptions – which ignored the vast, long-standing and still-growing body of theory and history which made their intellectual errors, and the risks of the course they cheered on, all too clear. He is also quite clear that, despite the hype, recent changes in technology and political economy – the information technology revolution, and the presumed footlooseness of international capital (both overrated in his view) – have not invalidated those earlier lessons.
Those well-acquainted with the subject of economics will appreciate that all of this has been said before, many times, not just by other thinkers from Adam Smith to James Crotty, but by Chang himself, in books like his recent Bad Samaritans.3 Rather than the presentation of original theses, this book's virtue is its accurately and clearly representing ideas gathered from all across the field's vast literature, organized into a coherent critique which is made accessible to the general reader in a series of succinct chapters (each about ten pages long, free of unnecessary jargon and the equations which proponents of orthodoxy use to "blind with science") that make the relevant points and amply support them with germane, concrete examples. In the handy concluding chapter he draws together the many threads of his argument, and outlines an alternative basis for economic policy.
That is not to say that Chang's book is perfect. I found his treatment of inflation and related aspects of monetary policy unpersuasive. Far from tight money having prevailed in recent decades, the loose money policies of Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke have played a major role in creating the bubbles so damaging to the American and world economies in recent years (as Matt Taibbi demonstrates in Griftopia). Chang's discussion of financial crisis would also have benefited from some deepening, as he merely references the crucial work of John Maynard Keynes, Charles Kindleberger and Hyman Minsky in passing, rather than using them to present a picture of how speculative bubbles happen, and send economies running off their rails (a twenty-fourth thing he might have told the reader about capitalism). I might also add that Chang does not address the politics of how neoliberalism came to prevail, or how it has remained so dominant after not just decades of nearly complete failure characterized by economic stagnation and recurrent financial crisis, but the disaster of 2008 in which it all came to a head, through which we are still living – but that is a whole story in itself, which can plausibly be regarded as outside this book's purview.
1. Indeed, no country much larger than a Monaco or a Luxembourg can found its prosperity on international finance, with Switzerland and Singapore – ordinarily thought of as models for this approach – actually among the world's most heavily industrialized.
2. For an interesting journalistic account of the informal economy, see Robert Neuwirth's recent Stealth of Nations: The Global Rise of the Informal Economy.
3. Perhaps the most iconoclastic point Chang made is his argument that there has been an overemphasis on higher education as a path to national economic advancement. (As he notes, not only is the correlation weak, but much of what is taught in school is of little use in most lines of work, and much of the knowledge needed for work is acquired on the job - while a rush to increase the numbers of graduates can simply mean the fostering of credentialing crises.)
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