As Britain Approaches a New Round of Austerity Let's Look Back at the Old . . .

My study of the neoliberal turn in British economic and social policy since Thatcher's time took the story only up to the brink of the Great Recession--which broke out fifteen years ago.

The period before had plenty of pain--but I suspect that what happened afterward made a great many positively nostalgic for the earlier era.

I have a fuller account of that decade of "austerity" (2010-2019), with the requisite citation, here. In lieu of that consider these highlights:

* A significant increase in the Value Added Tax, to 20 percent. (By contrast the VAT was 17.5 percent pre-crisis, and while the top income tax bracket was raised from 40 to 50 percent, swiftly knocked back down to 45 percent. Meanwhile they actually cut the Corporate Tax from 28 to 19 percent.)

* Significant changes in Social Security. Two major welfare reform acts (2012 and 2016, the latter amending the former) replaced a large number of the social safety net's former benefits with a less accessible and less generous system of Universal Credit, and Personal Independence Payments, while other benefits were likewise eliminated, or made less generous or accessible (as with the elimination of the Council Tax Benefit that helped low-income persons pay their local tax bill, or the introduction of means-testing for Child Benefit). There was also repeated capping and freezing of Social Security more broadly.

* Austerity (as well as privatization) in the National Health Service, not least at the level of funding increases--likewise, held to below the inflation rate, and so working out to real cuts over time, as hospitals coped with an aging population's higher demand for medical care, and paying for those Private Finance Initiatives a certain prior government treated in the manner of a simpleton who thinks credit cards mean "Buy Now, Pay Never."

* The continuation of the movement away from tuition-free university attendance toward an American-style system of paying for higher education, with the cap on tuition raised from the £3225 it had been under Gordon Brown to over three times as much (£9250 pounds at present).

* The continued raising of the state pension age (66 for men and women as of 2020, with the raising of the age to 67 brought forward a decade in each case, from 2036 to 2026).

* The sharp reduction of government investment in housing (at the level of both the number of units and investment per unit) as "social" housing is marginalized (rather than being a main product of the program, "only to be supported in exceptional cases").

* Deep reductions in funding for public programs ranging from legal aid, to regulators providing consumer protection (the Food Standards Agency suffering a 51 percent cut in 2009-2019) and environmental protection (i.e. Natural England and the Environmental Agency).

* The across-the-board capping and freezing of public sector worker pay (which, apart from affecting the performance of the above duties, affects the incomes of the one-sixth of the British labor force which is part of this category), producing a long-term decline in median wages among such persons as doctors, teachers and police officers.

* The reduction of central government support to local councils (by 60 percent in 2010-2020 according to the Local Government Association), which have had to depend more heavily on their own resources --with the result higher council-set taxes (and a heavier reliance on sales, fees and charges), along with a significant drop in per capita spending (taxes up 8 percent and per capita spending down 23 percent according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies). Additionally, even as "statutory duties" received increased emphasis, the diminution of resources generally led to significant cuts to the most "protected" services, such as social care. (Social care saw a 10 percent drop in spending even as there was a 20 percent+ rise in the number of elderly, and the gap may have played a part in some 120,000 "excess deaths" by 2017 alone.) Meanwhile other services were cut still more steeply (with regulatory services and transport and culture and recreation subject to cuts of over 40 percent, and housing of over 50 percent).

And of course, while we consider all that remember the "synergies" that combined to make these cuts more painful (like the fact that Council Tax Benefits were cut just as Council Tax went up, or how the fact that public libraries were being closed down in record numbers meant that people who needed libraries for computer access and help with their applications for UC did not have them).

Of course, all that was before the pandemic, its own even sharper recession, the energy and broader price shocks of 2021-2022, Britain's having the kind of old-style currency crisis out of which the British right made a legend when it happened back in '76, and, under the third British government in as many months, a new round of austerity coming that, we are told by Paul Johnson of the Institute for Fiscal Studies (whose valuable work I cited above, and not for the first time), will mean "the largest fall in real household disposable income per head (4.3%) since the late 1940s" in 2023, and the year after that, "the second-largest fall (2.8%)." Indeed, "[a]verage household income per head is due to be the same in 2027-28 as it was in 2018-19, and 31% below where it would have been if the pre-2008 trend had continued"--or, as Johnson's colleague Tom Waters observed, "if we'd kept to trend, we'd be 47% richer. Imagine your income being 47% higher!"

If people aren't already nostalgic for the pre-Recession era, lousy as it was, they may--after Rishi Sunak's "austerity on steroids"--well find themselves thinking warmly of the '00s.

Or even the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad '10s.

Keir Starmer and the Ten Pledges

A politician's presenting a leftish platform with the intent of outflanking an opponent who is actually more leftish, or winning over vacillating leftist voters, and then in the spirit of "adults-in-the-room," "electability"-minded pragmatism dispensing with that platform, has been Standard Operating Procedure for center-left parties through the neoliberal era.

What distinguishes Keir Starmer's conduct in regard to said platform--his ten pledges--is how quickly and brazenly he ditched his pledges, which underlines the centrist ideologue's stance in regard to such matters.

I think the relevant bits can be boiled down to three principles, namely:

1. Politics is for professionals--and the general public is unfit to judge what professionals do beyond casting its vote for one of the (two) candidates presented it on the ballot on election day, without whining about how little they differ because from a centrist standpoint that's a feature, not a bug. (Yay, consensus!)

2. Politics is a pragmatic activity, not an ethical activity--and so complaining about a politician's breaking promises out of bounds is simple-minded, unrealistic and illegitimate. And finally, in line with the extension of this principle not only to the methods of politicians but the content of politics,

3. Politics should be civil rather than ideological--making the left and its principles inherently illegitimate, and anything done to defeat it, like making and breaking a bunch of lefty promises, not just acceptable, but a duty for a responsible, electable, adult-in-the-room politician who, as he constantly says, WANTS TO BE PRIME MINISTER!

Of course, not everyone feels the same way about all of this--and it is not for nothing that, in 2022, Starmer eschews Tony Blair's blatant disrespect for Old Labour and open disdain for talk about class and inequality, blending his centrist positions with gestures toward something more leftward, which on close inspection proves to be radical rhetoric, not radical policies (Starmer banging on about the 1 percent as if he were some Occupy Wall Street activist, and then proving himself New Labour to the core).

Robot Density in Russia

Not long ago I had occasion to consider Russia's manufacturing base relative to that of the West--and concluded that while the country is important as a producer of certain commodities, and has real strengths in some exacting areas, as a whole its manufacturing output looks like that of a developing country on the Mexico-Turkey level, and fairly unevenly at that, in part as a result of its unique history (with areas of world-caliber consequences offset by areas of extreme weakness).

While my conclusion was initially based on per capita manufacturing output, and on Russia's production and consumption of steel, machine tools and semiconductors (and I might add, on the contrast between Russia's status in aerospace and Russia's status in information technology), I have more recently had occasion to think about the installation of industrial robots--and in particular about "robot density"--as a useful metric in this area.

As it happened, when surveying the data (mainly with Britain in mind) I noticed that Russia is not even listed among the major users--who tended to at least be in the area of 200 robots per 10,000 manufacturing workers in 2021 (with the U.S. closing on 300, and China past that mark), with the most highly industrialized states in cases having much more, especially to the extent that they have robust, high-capital, high-productivity, high-tech sectors like autos and electronics (Germany and Japan both having about 400, and South Korea 1,000, per 10,000 workers).

Looking elsewhere for a Russian figure I did not find one for 2021, but I did find one for 2019.

The figure was six. Six robots per ten thousand workers.

Assuming Russian industry sustained the growth rate seen in the prior two years (it was four in 2017, translating to a 23 percent a year growth rate--proportionally rather faster than China in the same period), this would have worked out to no more than ten robots in 2021. Had it added as many new units per worker as China, it would have still been in the 30-40 range.

Going by this figure (which is probably wildly overoptimistic; even the 10-robots-per-10,000 workers may be overoptimistic for all I know, given the obstacles to the country's investment in the technology) Russia's robot density would still have been not only a very small fraction that of the U.S. or China, let alone that of a Korea, but well below the average for the planet as a whole (the global mean about 141 robots per worker in 2021), far behind even the weakest of the major industrialized powers (Britain having not much more than 100 robots per 10,000 workers at last count), and only where Mexico is (somewhere around forty robots per 10,000 workers). The result is that this, too, seems to support the reading of Russia's economy as still well behind that of the advanced industrialized countries, especially in these critical areas.

A Note on the NATO-Russia Military-Industrial balance

In reading up on the Russo-Ukrainian conflict I have found myself thinking about the claims some, outside the mainstream media but commanding considerable audiences (to go by the sales of their books, the comment threads on their blog posts, the measure of attention they get in certain corners of the Web), have made along the lines of a deindustrialized U.S. and NATO are weaker, and Russia stronger, in the military-industrial sphere than is generally reported by the conventional metrics, and usually assumed--which seem to have had traction with the war's dragging as it has, reports of massive and disproportionate Ukrainian casualties, and claims about NATO stocks of weaponry being depleted by transfers to Ukraine to help it with what is only a relatively limited conflict. (Indeed, Emmanuel Todd, who has long been a skeptic of the claims regarding U.S. economic strength and the substance of "post-industrial" economies generally, has recently added his voice to those already arguing this position.)

Given my long interest in the failings of the conventional wisdom regarding economic life--which are many and severe--the essential claim got my attention (the more in as I have so recently been attentive to the question of deindustrialization in countries like the U.S. and Britain specifically). And I have since tried to take a systematic look at the available data to check it (which you can find, with all the figures and all the footnotes, here).

Short version: that look persuaded me that some display an exaggerated view of Russia's weaknesses (all too familiar from, and not implausibly an extension of, the disdain that characterized so much writing about Russia in the Cold War era). As the supply shocks of this year remind all, the country's economy is not reducible to a giant "gas station," but a producer of numerous essential commodities of other kinds, not just foodstuffs but manufactured goods as well, among them crucial agricultural inputs like fertilizer, and metals (the country recently the world's second greatest steel exporter, in 2020 putting over 30 million tons on the international market). The country also has its undeniable strengths in some demanding industrial areas, like aerospace and defense generally.

Still, the kinds of goods Russia exports, and the overall numbers regarding Russian production (certainly per capita output numbers), seem to me indicative of a developing country, broadly on a level with Mexico or Turkey, albeit with significant "legacy" strengths from the Soviet era (with aerospace-defense the outstanding example). And sure enough the disparity in resources between NATO and Russia is gigantic--with NATO having an 11 to 1 edge in GDP (that's if we go by PPP-adjusted figures; it's more like 24-to-1 if we don't). Of course, some call out GDP as decreasingly meaningful in today's world (certainly Todd makes his case on these grounds), but going by value added the gap is a no less formidable 24-to-1 in manufacturing output, with an assessment of their consumption of critical inputs suggesting some substance to the figure. NATO's steel use is 5 or 6-to-1 Russia's by tonnage, its machine tool consumption greater by a 12-to-1 margin and its consumption of semiconductors perhaps two hundred times Russia's--while in the latter areas the production gap is greater, with NATO recently outproducing Russia 60-to-1 in machine tools, and Russian semiconductor production so marginal that any quantitative comparison risks exaggerating Russia's strength. (Reportedly Russia's biggest and most advanced producer is now producing 65 nanometer chips--the stuff of 2004-2007.)

One may add that the disparity between Russia and any one NATO country are smaller, but even all by itself the U.S has immense advantages--at least twice Russia's population and four times its GDP by even the most favorable measures, and for all the reality of its deindustrialization, by itself has eleven times Russia's manufacturing output (and far, far more in critical areas like microchip production).

Of course, that said no conflict is wholly and simply reducible to the output of the two sides--this one less than most, given the extensiveness and complexity of international involvement, and the dangers of escalation. But all the same--and again, even acknowledging the trend of economic life in the U.S. and other advanced industrial nations--any notion of the Western economies having so thoroughly hollowed out as to leave them at a disadvantage facing Russia (for that matter, at anything but a considerable advantage to Russia) seems simply unsupportable on the basis of the available information, while those taking that line, if bringing some justified skepticism to the conversation, offer no alternative foundation for their conclusions.

Keir Starmer's Bloviating and Britain's Robot Density: A Note

Ours is not a great age for oratory, least of all in the political sphere. Still, having had occasion to close-read the remarks of Keir Starmer these past couple of years, the attention accorded his speech to the Confederation of British Industry made it seem reasonable to take up the sure-to-be-dismaying task of perusing the official transcript.

As I had grown to expect with any major statement from Starmer the reading experience mostly consisted of suffering through another recitation of the same New Labour vintage 2022 clichés he uttered in the Labour Party Conference keynote back in September. "Aspiration" and a "fair chance" for people to "succeed." "Partnership" of government with business. Supply-side economics, but "modern" and somehow not "trickle-down" but rather a "New Deal for working people." Yada yada yada, one may say--except that I can't get over Starmer's expecting anyone in 2022 to take seriously the idea that British investors are just itching to pour money into "green" manufacturing and will happily do so if the British government, incidentally while balancing books in extreme disarray, arranges a bit of that "education"/job training for the country's "skill and application"-lacking proles that '90s-era neoliberals always sang as the solution to every problem, and likewise arranges for there to be a few more psychiatrists to aid with their mental health "issues," as if that were all that was holding the country back from the "march of the makers" supposed to lead to some Promised Land of a high-productivity, high-wage economy--and the rescue of the planet to boot! (In reality, thus do Climate Change Action Plans turn instead into natural gas bridges that go on and on what seems like forever to . . . well, we'll find out sometime--and, as the centrists applaud their sniveling about "the art of the possible" as "adults in the room"-caliber "leadership," get reduced to mere footnotes in recountings of the history when anyone bothers to actually write any.)

Still, amid all that a couple of details did catch my eye.

One was Starmer's enlarging a bit on the plan for a British sovereign wealth fund he mentioned in passing in the keynote address. He says that his government would "use it to manage risk on the critical investments we need to become a green growth superpower. But also--to create spill-over opportunities for businesses and supply chains right across the country in manufacturing and services." (It's still hazy in the extreme--the more in as, in line with New Labour tradition and yet more of the rhetoric he is adding to the stock of cliché by way of repeating so much of it from prior speeches--he insists that "sound money . . . come first," and the government not only have every policy "fully costed" but "reduce debt as a share of our economy," even if "this means . . . we won't be able to do . . . good Labour things . . . as quickly as we might like." Still, it's a little more than we got the last time.)

Another, more surprising bit, was his reference to Britain's "robot density," Starmer remarking that "Britain has fewer industrial robots than almost every comparable countries. We're behind Germany, France, Spain, Slovenia, Slovakia, Belgium--it's a long list."

This being a political speech and Starmer having much else to get to he gave no details (not his forte, anyway), but information on the situation he referenced has been easy to find.

According to the International Federation of Robotics (the main source of statistics of this kind) Britain has a hundred robots per ten thousand workers--which is below average for the world as a whole (the norm 126 per 10,000), never mind the advanced industrial countries.

Where the Group of Seven (G-7) advanced industrial countries are concerned this is about half the figure for Canada (178), France (194) and Italy (224), about two-fifths that of the U.S. (255), and a quarter that of Germany (371) and Japan (390).

Not to be neglected are the figures for the newer industrializers. If China's manufacturing output remains a long way from that of the G-7 it is on par with that of the more advanced states in this important area--with nearly the robot density of the U.S. (246), and Taiwan's figure about the same (248), Hong Kong's a little higher (275), Singapore's more impressive still (605), and South Korea in this way as in so many others, an outlier, with more than twice the robot density of any G-7 member, and about nine times the robot density of Britain (932). Nine.

Considering all this in light of other metrics, like per capita manufacturing output (which has South Korea and Germany and Japan at the top of the list, the U.S. some way down from there, Italy below that, and Britain at the bottom of the advanced country list, so far down China is coming up fast in its rear-view mirror), it seems to me that there is a broad consistency here, affirming that robot density is a meaningful indicator of a country's industrial investment, capability, dynamism. This seems to be reinforced by the fact that investment in robotics is hardly even across the range of industries most evident in high-tech, high-capital sectors. The automotive sector is at the forefront, and electronics not far behind.

The fact that Germany, Japan and South Korea are particularly formidable in those areas (and Britain, to put it mildly, is less so) seems to me to be far from irrelevant to the outcome.

Significant, too, is the fact that if the number of British robot installations is growing, and not by a little either, the country's position in 2020 suggested its falling further behind rather than closing the gap, with all that implies about what these years have meant for investment in a British manufacturing base long starved of it (and what the odds are for any more such investment, in or out of any "Green Prosperity Plan").

Understanding the American Political Spectrum: Four Points

In considering the American political spectrum it seems worth stressing four points.

1. The mainstream of American politics has throughout its entire history, and certainly its history since the Depression-World War II era, not really included a "left" (in the sense of people who unabashedly espouse the Enlightenment's position that we can use reason to understand society down to its roots and radically alter its structure for the better, that such change is not just possible but desirable and necessary, etc., the way that socialists do). Instead it has just a right and a "center."

2. The right and center are both conservative (in the sense of regarding reason and reason-driven social change of that nature as a false hope that is destructive when people act upon it, inclining them to instead accept what exists in line with the beliefs of the "Counter-Enlightenment," with this the grounds for that critical tenet of latterday conservatism, anti-Communism). However, the right and center may be said to represent different elements in the conservative and anti-Communist traditions. The right emphasizes loyalty to tradition. (It is embodied in Barry Goldwater saying that "We must, and we shall, return to proven ways . . . because they are true.") The center espouses the more pragmatic, compromising, sometimes "Everything must change for everything to remain the same" side of conservatism (such that, as it opposed Communism, it was prepared to make social concessions, as seen in the New Deal, rather than simply insist on the sanctity of "free markets").

3. The American right and center have together shifted rightward along the modern political spectrum since that mid-twentieth century period (as seen in the fact that neoliberalism and neoconservatism have both become the country's political default mode).

4. The main disagreement between right and center today is in the cultural sphere--and underlines the reality of a clash of differing conservatisms. (Where the older civil rights tradition was rationalistic and concerned with objective fairness, universalist, and hopeful of progress--and so classically left-leaning--the subjectivist, particularist, pessimistic outlook of identity, or "status," politics is in its premises, working, sound and feel plain old rightist nationalism, and people mainly confused about the difference because of 1. Being more used to seeing such nationalism on the part of dominant groups and not knowing what to make of it when it comes from those who are dominated, and 2. The residues of the old civil rights movement.)

If what this leaves us with is a conservative right and center, then why do we hear of the "left" constantly? Beyond the sloppiness with political terminology to which even "experts" seem to think themselves entitled the simple answer is that there is really a right in America, and the tendency to think in terms of every issue as having no more than exactly "two sides" means that what is not right is "left." This is reinforced by the tendency of the right to see those as left of itself as too close to the left for comfort; the fact that accusing them of being far more left than they are has been a longstanding political habit, the easier to keep up in an age in which what is "right" keeps moving rightward; and the fact that not having had to really contend with a left at home leaves them that much less likely to take a nuanced view. Moreover, this suits the center just fine--often happy as it is to present itself as more leftward than it really is, and not too distressed at a delineation of the political spectrum that treats the left (centrism's primary target from the start) as effectively nonexistent, left on the ash heap of history as the conversation was redefined.

But all this seems to me to do much more harm than good to our understanding of politics--the drivers behind and limitations of various tendencies, and what it all means as very possibly the spectrum shifts yet again. After all, if in the main it has been the right that has grabbed headlines and won elections, the word "socialist" has entered the American mainstream discourse as something other than a hyperbolic epithet, while the labor movement is stirring in a way that neoliberals had hoped to never see again.

Confusing a bunch of conservative centrists with actual leftists helps no one's understanding of such matters, however much it suits the convenience of political hacks without respect for fact, truth, history or language.

Centrism and the Epithet "Conspiracy Theorist"

The term "conspiracy" is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as "[a] combination of persons for an evil or unlawful purpose; an agreement between two or more persons to do something criminal, illegal, or reprehensible."

That being the case it would seem obviously indisputable that conspiracies happen all the time, especially in political life--while it would seem that a hypothesis that some event or other was the result of a conspiracy would not be intrinsically illegitimate, but rather a thing to be judged on its own merits, or lack thereof.

Yet the term "conspiracy theorist" has become an epithet. Of course, those who defend the term's use as such try to stress that a "conspiracy theorist" is somehow not someone who merely hypothesizes that there has been a conspiracy in some particular situation, more or less plausibly, but rather displays some deep, irrational tendency to imagine conspiracy where none exists. The attempt to draw a general-purpose distinction betrays a real strain, the more obvious in as the term is so readily deployed in contemporary political discourse.

Simply put, alleging conspiracy in political life is treated as automatically suspect as illegitimate--and considering the assumptions of the political centrism that defines mainstream discourse in the U.S. it is easy to see why. After all, a "conspiracy theory" is identified as such only because the alleged "combination of persons for an evil or unlawful purpose" does not have the recognition of the "consensus" (otherwise it would be called something else), with said non-recognition a big problem given the centrist's high regard for "consensus" (not really much more than what Authority tells you things are like)."

Moreover, the allegation itself flouts centrist premises in a deeper manner. After all, the charge of conspiracy implicitly entails a suspicion of elites, and alertness to differences in power--while the centrist typically demands deference to elites, and treats differences of power as effectively nonexistent.

Simply put, the centrist holds that, certainly in a complex modern society, especially of the liberal democratic type, power is so diffused--not least among voters and consumers--that in the end everyone has it, and therefore no one has it--which pretty much rules out meaningful conspiracy as a possibility. Indeed, merely to broach the idea of people having power--to say that society is arranged in a certain way--implicitly a way in which it ought not to be arranged--is to depart the "civil," "pragmatic" politics which take the status quo as a given for an "ethical" and "ideological" politics where people talk about what should be, or might be, that is necessarily outside the bounds of legitimate discourse so far as the centrist is concerned--while given the centrist's inclination to psychologism, and in particular their view of anyone not unquestioningly accepting the status quo as mentally ill, those who suspect elites for whom the centrist demands respects can only be "paranoid."

Thus is it that anyone who points out what everyone knows--that, irregardless of centrist ideology, there are differences in power in society, and those who have power use it for their ends in ways that are neither benign nor open--sneeringly identified with tinfoil hat wearers. In the process the term, like so much else in the vocabulary of the contemporary political mainstream, obscures rather than explains reality. But it does undeniably speak volumes about the centrists who so delight in tossing the term "conspiracy theory" about, while crowning all of this with the irony that, just as centrists accuse others of being ideologues while being indisputable, highly vehement, ideologues themselves, even as they fling the epithet "conspiracy theorist" at others they give themselves a free pass with their own conspiracy theories, examples of which are by no means few.

Giving Everyone a College Degree?

In one of his later novels, Friday, Robert Heinlein tells us that, after the recognition that people with bachelor's degree made on average 30 percent more than non-degree holders a referendum in California granted all of the state's high school graduates a bachelor's degree in the name of eliminating "undemocratic advantage."

The protagonist and narrator of that novel tells us she "can't see anything wrong with it," but, while Heinlein's politics changed through the course of his life, and were at times idiosyncratic or even ambiguous (in part because he was not above backing away from an opinion he gave in the face of backlash), given the period of Heinlein's life in which he published the book, and what he had to say about American education elsewhere, this bit seemed to me obviously satirical--an elitist right-winger's sneer at the ruin of education by a bunch of hare-brained "liberals" with egalitarian notions.

Still, there seems to me a basis for criticizing the proposal from other standpoints--the more obvious for something vaguely reminiscent of that having happened not just in California but the whole country in recent decades. After all, consider what the ultimate object of the California legislation was in Heinlein's story--helping those who are socioeconomically less well-off. As American history itself shows there are many ways to do that--for example, with laws regarding wages and benefits, broadening the room for maneuver enjoyed by organized labor, the improvement of public services, transfer payments, etc., all of which those broadly identifying as liberals once championed. However, instead those who passed for "liberals" in America (reflecting their meritocracy-mindedness, and their accommodation of themselves to a neoliberal outlook in which the other measures were less acceptable than before) increasingly fixated on "sending everyone to college" what they presented as a vision of uplift of the underprivileged.

Not everyone went, of course. But the percentage of people with degrees expanded enormously--nearly four in ten American adults now having a B.A.. By contrast incomes did not expand in the same manner. This was, of course, partly a matter of the consistently lousy growth record of this period--but even relative to growth workers' incomes simply did not move up, with, in spite of the notion that a degree is a magical amulet protecting the bearer against a global economy that is dark and full of terrors, the majority of B.A.-holding college graduates suffering from the same trend as everyone else. Of course, some of this was a matter of students getting degrees unlikely to be remunerative (thus the horror story of Columbia University film school graduates with which the Wall Street Journal regaled the country not so long ago), but even that can seem a matter of the fetish of which some have made college--and the broader reality of a credentialing crisis in which degrees are requiring larger investments and delivering diminishing returns as a growing number of B.A.-holders competed for a much less rapidly growing number of jobs actually requiring B.A.s; in which "sending everyone to college," far from helping resolve the Social Question, worsened it with a credentialing crisis and the burdening of graduates with trillions of dollars worth of student debt, such that the supposed uplift, as might be expected given its unbelievably half-baked nature, has in itself become a source of crisis for all involved.

The Post-Work Society, and the Possibility of "Enough": Are Human Wants Insatiable?

In considering the prospect of a post-work society one important question is "Given rising productivity can we imagine a world in which a critical mass of human beings feel they have enough things, sufficiently so that striving after the gain of more things will cease to be central to their lives?"

The standard reply of those who determine the orthodoxy in the field of economics--those who teach in the colleges (especially the colleges where those who get tenured professorships are likely to themselves be trained), those who edit the field's journals and publish in them, those who get prizes like the Nobel--and those who get hired as consultants or appointed to high public office--is "No. Never. Don't even think about it." Indeed, they go to great lengths in arguing why we should not even think about it, dismissing essential physical needs and material realities in favor of a relativistic subjectivism they are prepared to push to preposterous extremes. Thus will they tell us that a billionaire's desire for "one more ivory backscratcher" is no less a "need" than the need of someone literally starving to death for food, and its lack no less painful; and make much of how, for example, we might be able to give everyone a house, but there will only be so many lots around Lake Como, and that this will mean scarcity oppressing us as much as before we gave everyone a house; etc., etc., etc..

In considering such absurdities it seems relevant here that the economists in question espouse a dark, misanthropic view of human nature, and with it a pessimism about the prospects for a free, comfortable, happy life for very many of those on the planet--a view which is not without significant political implications. After all, if human wants are as infinite and insatiable--and relative--as they say then there is no getting off the treadmill of getting and spending, no end to the Rat Race and its ugliness, and no point to any reforms, whose benefits would only be lost on the grubby little can't-ever-satisfy-them bastards they see the general public as being.

Still, if the insatiability of human wants is an article of faith for economists (whose teaching is, of course, seen by many as a faith masquerading as science), it does seem fair to say that others have made a case that the matter is exactly the opposite of the way that such economists tell us it is, the "law of diminishing marginal returns" (ironically, another concept from economics, and indeed its mainstream) operative here. The implication of this argument is that for people who are really poor more money and more consumption (money for food, money for shelter, money to relieve pressing physical wants) really do make for more satisfaction and contentment and "happiness"--while in line with the aforementioned "law" the further away one is from being so poor the less does added money and consumption improve their sense of well-being.

In short, no matter how much orthodox economists sneer, it would seem plausible that that extra ivory back-scratcher really does mean less than that food for the starving person, the house for someone who is homeless mean less than the view of Lake Como for the already well-housed.

Indeed, one study of note suggested that we might hit a point at which simply having more money contributes little to one's sense of subjective well-being, concluding that after a country's per capita National Income hit $13,000 in the terms of a generation ago (or, after adjustment for inflation, $25,000 or so in today's terms) more growth does not in itself produce a sense of greater well-being. Going by World Bank figures at present over thirty countries are above that mark in nominal terms (pretty much all the North American, West European, East Asian and Australasian nations we call "advanced industrial" or "developed"). Dozens more do so when we go by Purchasing Power Parity (with states like Russia or Chile making the cut). Additionally those countries that do not make the cut are often not very far short of it (with the world average closing on $19,000 by the latter measure last year).

Does this mean that anyone whose country has $25,000 a year per capita can sit back content in the knowledge that life is as good as it gets? Of course not, innumerable other factors complicating the issue. People may well be personally poor in a society that is rich--and still left with unmet material needs of such a kind that a bit of money would mean a real improvement in their sense of well-being. A lot depends on how wealth is distributed, and perhaps even more fundamentally on how the provision of essentials is organized. (After all, we know from experience that even in a relatively affluent society--such as the U.S., with a per capita income nearly three times what the study identified as the requirement--a significant fraction of the population may suffer hunger, homelessness and other fundamental material lacks, with all their associated misery.) Still, the existence of scientific evidence that human needs may start being sated at a level well below what millions have, and minute next to what a handful have, is a powerful rejoinder to the preachers of want and misery as humanity's eternal lot.

Can Political Centrism Survive the Digital Age?

Previously discussing centrism I have stressed how much it has been a creation of the mid-century period, and especially of Cold War anti_Communism, such that it seems to me more useful to think of centrism as a species of conservatism (specifically, the more flexible, adaptable, bend-rather-than-break, pick-its-battles side of the conservative tradition, rather than the heels-digging variety associated with the hard right) rather than mere middle-of-the-roadness, or "practical" non-philosophy.

However, it also seems to me that centrism was a product of the mid-century media universe as well, with this evident in its attitude toward public discourse—centrism's sense of what are s legitimate boundaries, with certain viewpoints, certain modes of argument, acceptably "pragmatic," "pluralist" and "civil," and others not, and in line with the sense that the dialogue had to be carefully managed, carefully gatekept, against the latter. Those espousing this view seem to think it a great thing that the sources of information, the forums in which that information and the views based on it could be discussed, were few in number, making them more easily manageable, and the public dialogue along with them. Others took a more critical view of the matter, but it does seem worth noting that those unsatisfied with the center had few alternatives, enabling the center "to hold."

By contrast, with broadcasting given way to the Internet and its opportunities for innumerably more "channels" of communication, those dissatisfied with the center find it easier to present and to access such alternatives today--and are perhaps given more reason to do so with the center, in spite of being defined by its facilitation of compromise, actually less given to compromise of any kind. Indeed, it sometimes seems to me that with the mainstream so often seeming to speak in a single voice on many issues, and offer a lame "both sidesism" when it does not, those looking for any other view at all find themselves going elsewhere--and perhaps very easily pulled toward views far more extreme than they might otherwise have interested themselves in simply because the range of what centrism deemed allowable was so limited and so unsatisfactory.

In such a situation centrism would seem to be backfiring--and quite frankly the way centrists pine nostalgically for that earlier age in which everybody watched three channels that offered pretty much the same thing seems to bespeak their lack of ideas about how to cope with the present situation, which may be a feature, not a bug. After all, one way of coping with the situation would be to reconsider how the boundaries of the legitimate have been drawn, engaging with rather than simply shutting out anything that does not fit within the very tight confines of today's centrist-gatekept discourse. But in that event centrism would become something other than it has been--ceasing to be centrism.