2276 – The Age of Uncertainty with JK Galbraith (BBC series 1977)

What better counterpart to a decade where the rich won (2020s) and quantitative easting (short QE) seems to rule them all than to watch a documentary on how it all began. And also to understand what bugged free market libertarians like Milton Friedman’s than to watch the documentary that ‘triggered’ his response. Today we speak of ‘triggering’ in terms of what right wing is good at (Fox News etc) – and how easy it is to push their critics into ridiculous postures and very predictable behaviors, basically in what became a Pavlovian show. Who is going to make his opponent react in a knee-jerk way? And even better, who will make the other adopt one’s own tactics and meme first?

Well, before all that, we can place these two documentary series. Both very personal, with two key players. Big influencers supr in terms of statal policies and ideas. Do not get me wrong, these documentaries are about one of the most hated subjects around: economics (prove eme wrong!). Who does not hate the history of economics or the principal ideas deriving from that? A majority seems to suffer and endure under economicsl hardships even if money amd investment or financial system seem tok haunt us. What os a recession, what causes it, what are the class politics behind austerity measures? Who gets tok pay for inflation?

Maybe this will also answer some of the curiosities and questions regarding the 1970s when the great Golden Age of Capitalism in the West came to an end after a series of shocks. Several counter-measures culminating with the switch from liberal democracies where Big Government Keynesianism (both left or later on right-wing brands of Keysianism) finally gave way to the Austro-libertarian school of Economics represented by Friedman and the Chicago boys. While some may feel emboldened to say that today in the midst of the polycrisis we have a Keynesian moment coming around and neoliberalism is on the wane, I would rather say (with Quinn Slobodian and others in mind) that neoliberalism has mutated itself in the time of decoupling, de-risking and ethnopolitics. Maybe it is capitalism as usual – an upside down world that cannot get the right side up and will only get more lopsided.

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006) was perhaps one of the most interesting characters and appreciated social scientists of his time. There are echoes of Galbraith everywhere today, even in his admonishment of militaristic Keynesianism where the military-industrial-entertainment complex simplex in Washington begins to use all the levers of power to transform its Big Tech into a national asset amd industrial policy. Frmerly free-trade radicals feeding on nationalism start to recast themselves as anti-Chinese US stalwarts. All this is put into stark contrast by a new generation of Keynesian economists (Gabriela Gabor and Isabella Weber come to mind). Forgotten lessons seems valid again. To prevent inflation after WWII JK Galbraith was recommending strategic price controls (anathema to the free market radicals!)

As John Kenneth Galbraith explained “the role of price controls” would be “strategic.” “No more than the economist ever supposed will it stop inflation” … “But it both establishes the base and gains the time for the measures that do.” 4/

— Isabella M. Weber (@IsabellaMWeber) June 17, 2023

John Kenneth Galbraith is a representative of classical liberalism that also enjoyed tremendous influence & honed his skills & experience being active at the center of the US establishment. He was active in Democratic Party politics, serving in the administrations of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson. He also had relations to the Global South – being an ambassador to India (the biggest democracy on Earth) during the JFK administration. At the same time, he was red-baited by his opponents and considered by conservative think tanks the man who “made socialism mainstream“. So when he is saying that the powerful US Farmer lobby is still hailing back to the physiocrat thinkers in France, he knows what he is saying from direct experience. He pokes fun at everybody, especially at the privileged members of the ‘leisure class’. He does not miss an opportunity to constantly question the very thinkers he mentions according to their own principles or tax them when they employ theories or easy justifications in their own favor.

Yeah it looks oldskool and peak boomer in a way, at the same time all episode 1  The Prophets and Promise of Classical Capitalism is a tremendous effort to stage the history or economic ideas, the larger background, or the assumptionsof behind it all, including all the major thinkers. The stage is set by unsettling the stage – in a Brechtian manner, all the illusionist art, all the stagecraft, and the scaffolding of history is shown to be a BBC studio. He quotes John Maynard Keynes (Galbraith himself is regarded as a post-Keynesian) at the very beginning:

“The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually slaves of some defunct economist.”

What can be blander than pretending to be free of any influence or any previous antecedent thinker or just acting according to practical reason, bootstrapping yourself? Then we risk like Kant’s dove to think that we can fly faster and more frictionless if we would prefer a vacuum instead. Yet this vacuum strikes back. Many intellectuals prefer to ignore schools of thought that have spawned the economics and politics that they prefer to think is the result of practical decisions & spontaneity. On the other end, you have professional economists being absolutely adamant that you have to stick with what works. They are eminently disinterested and ignorant of the history of their trade. Well, then maybe that is why we need historians of the economy.

Other than most Galbraith recovers those very fragments from the texts cherished economists that are not usually quoted or followed. This makes us see how fragmentary and prejudiced our reading of them is. The ideas and abstractions he visits are constantly pulled from their pedestal – with historical examples that seem to show the way they were misused. If he gets us to visit Adam Smith and the writing of the Wealth of Nations, at the same time notices that Smith in his self-interest and critique of tenured academics have also chosen private tutoring as a more profitable income over his university career. Eps 1 is a journey through the Scottish Enlightenment and Smith’s friendship with philosopher David Hume who woke Kant fromhis dogmatic slumber! Galbraith stops at French markets to talk about the theories of the French physiocrats or observe that not even Smith’s disdain could make us dismiss the Tableau économique of Quesnay sonde the input-output analysis later developed by Russian economist Wassily Leontieff (1905-1999) or the planned economy of the Soviet Union is a direct descendent of that very table. Principles such as laissez-faire and free trade are paraded, while the importance of the division of labor gets exemplified with the help of a pin-making process.

David Ricardo (1772 – 1823) advanced a Labor Theory of Value that was also going to have a long history ahead. In this climate of the British Empire, you had the first stirrings of the Industrial Revolution and the experiments in social responsibility at New Lanark cotton mills in Scotland established by industrialist David Dale. Capitalist charity (which was not charity at all), since children and women became the first recruits and disciplined workers of the new era, worked just 1h less than in the other mills. Socialist Utopian experiments in collective living such as New Harmony, Indiana established by Robert Owen also get mentioned – an episode that rests in my heart because of Marguerite Young’s magnificent literary rendition of that in An Angel in the Forest: A Fairy Tale of Two Utopias (1945).

Early eviction and land-grabbing in the name of ‘agricultural improvement’ also get staged under the Highlander Clearances, where Scottish tenants were pushed out of homes to make room for more profitable (and aesthetically pleasing) sheep. The Irish Famine – and its Malthusian instrumentalization by the British State, as well as the migratory working class trails across the Atlantic, are important references. For Galbraith, it is also an example of how easy it is to abstract from the misery of others and decide to ignore their plight when one life and calculates remotely at a safe distance from their troubles. Or ordering bombs to drop on unknown others from above. The Irish had to pay with their lives and with their wheat to the landlords while the Corn Laws blocked the import of cheap corn. The Hamlet of Marie Antoinette that somehow modeled pastoral life of the education of princely offspring also gets mentioned.

Eps 2 Manner and Morals of High Capitalism – makes pretty obvious how Social Darwinism became the secular religion of the rich industrialists and robber barons (today’s oligarchs and Big Tech billionaires) of the Gilded Age. Put simply Social Darwinists embraced both racism and laissez-faire capitalism. The survival of the fittest dogma fitted their own socially privileged positions and even if they were not biologists, they used a biological language and twisted Darwin’s idea of natural selection to position themselves as the finest and most adaptable representatives of the species. The popularity of Herbert Spencer in the US is proportionate with the amount of capital accumulation and ruthlessness of the American ruling class. Carnegie and Rockefeller become thus prime representatives of this ideological thinking. Galbraith presents a bizarre series of such US apostles of Darwinism that were sometimes even predecessors of the pro-capitalist Prosperity Gospel. One of them is laissez-faire advocate and clergyman William Graham Sumner. Galbraith also illustrates the thin line separating the capitalist from the criminal, the hoodlum and rascal in the 19th century by recounting in detail the Eerie War – a bloody conflict between US financiers to control the Eerie Railway Company in an effort to corner the market. This is not very far from the current crypto kings. Galbraith also remarks something interesting – that the poor have always been a preferred subject of sociological research, with investigators going to the slums to study their existence, mores and sexual life, while the rich have not attracted this selfsame attention at the time. That was to be the task of Thorstein Veblen -that did exactly some reverse safari on them, depicting the rich as no more than Big Man, and explaining their luxurious living and excess in terms that are still familiar to us today: conspicuous consumption (think Trump, think Berlusconi, space billionaires and basically every other fat cat). There’s one of the most sympathetic views of Marx and that chapter also makes it even more clear than the internecine wars of western liberalism would make neoliberalism or even current secessionist anarcho-capitalists completly at odds with what went on for much of the post war period in the western world. There’s a lot to be desired in the series perhaps none more than the chapter on colonialism – and the anti colonial, transatlantic slavery trade, and all the current struggles and long shadow of colonialism that still ontinues to this day.

The rest of the episodes you can find here

imdb

Goodreads

2128 – Elon Musk: The Evening Rocket (podcast series by Jill Lepore)

This is one of the most informative things on the net about the rise of tech billionaires, and specifically E Musk. It is not in any sense meant as promo at a time when he gets way too much attention anyway (we might say he came to dominate TW in the absence of Trump). It is public knowledge that this attention and influence is translated into the rise and the fall of stocks. Somehow this defines the US American entrepreneur from his Chinese counterparts (see Jack Ma). His tweetstorms are at time outrageous, post-ironical affirmations and tend to self-contradict. They are the most egregious examples that another sort of speculation in its financial sense somehow running wild at the center of economies in unpredictable and volatile ways. He is not even a cypher to decipher. Demystyfication clearly does not work if you do not deal with both the toxicity and the ‘aura’ of such online celebrities and the myth of their success feeding on itself. Not in order to ‘smear’, to sacrifice them (as Thiel fantasized in his sacrificial mythopoetic flights of imagination), nor to adulate or pimp them further. They do not need this because they have armies of followers (50 million on TW), nor is it interesting to focus on such idolized targets (and increasingly dangerous) – at a time where everything is tied to personhood. Musk is no superhero nor is he a monster or Marvel villain, although he likes to LARP as one. The media certainly encourages him to do so. That’s not say techno pessimism or tech billionaire bashing is the solution – but rather to see what gets excluded or how cautionary tales are transformed into realities.

What stands out is how he plays on certain SF tropes and a certain pop iconography that pre-existed the rise of Space X or Tesla. Such a mid-XX century infatuation with the future or a certain total future of societies completely transformed by technology does not hold currency in today’s best SF, yet it still pervades commercial mass culture (least Western mass culture) and the minds of tech billionaires. Or in SF terms the ‘rapture or revenge of the nerds’ on the societies that shunned them. The world of Mars colonization, of libertarian no-government no-interference and microchipped pigs – is the world of the Golden Age of SF. The new inventors are not new at all, they are revived American imperialistic Gilded Age dreams with its electrical wizards that are hardened callous capitalist inventors, and half wondershow showmen performing demo- spectacles for us all. This only happens, if it ditches and deletes the anti-colonial and anti imperialistic tenor of such early works as HG Well’s War of the Worlds. If you are still entranced by these tech billionaire’s self-confessed SF fannishness, please contrast them with the vibrancy and biting wit of an author like Alfred Bester. That is why in spite of its ‘dare-do’ and ‘no panic’ signs theirs is a severely constrained and conservative worldview. For all its preoccupation with X-risk, extinction and saving the human species, for all its buzz and veneer of newness, such enterprise is ignoring systematically the working condition of their employees. There is “no future” outlook – because they refuse systematically to actually stay with the trouble here on Earth. One can witness daily for oneself how this impoverished yet productive techno capitalist SF is selling huge amounts of easily repackaged “buzz”. That does not mean we should ignore or pretend such such “buzz” does not exist. So while annoyance is almost inevitable it is also important to address the obsolescence cycles, hyped attractiveness and overrated aesthetics of the “gimmicky” and the “gadget”– that Suzanne Ngai puts at the center of our hyper-consumer culture. Just consider like Lepore does the adventure of letter “X”. X is ubiquitous in SF. Lepore makes an incredible roller coaster ride through the history of this letter’s adoption by futurists, scientists and popular science accounts of progress. How did such X- become required, why does it stick to X- Risk? And how does X signal novelty automatically, or how does it conjure up eXtra planetary visions or X-files and X-men?

Lepore is a historian and as a historian, she digs into a lot background materials, pop residues and infusions, focusing on how such actual contemporary figures tend to look more and more like Marvel characters than their baseline human counterparts. She digs not only into family stories – the largely ignored South African Apartheid background of Musk, but also a larger background of ideas and fads like the Technocracy movement (not to confuse with the Bogdanovist tectological ideals of a meta-science of organization) of the 1930s that his grandpa was involved with. What is evident in this case is that entrepreneurs can cherry-pick and built-up on de-fanged versions of critical and ironic materials such as Douglas Adams’s The Hitch Hicker Guide, or even online jokes and (Dodgecoin) memes to exploit and build expectations and turn reality upside down, topsyturvy riding the speculative wave that runs rampant on fictions and online chatter. What proliferates in this milieu is a particular brand of reading and using such SF materials and then trampoline oneself across from startup to startup, if possible never admitting wrongdoing or losses. There’s also a worrying alignement of space colonization revivals and back to the moon plans and conservative politics in the states. There’s also no mystery about Space X having contracts with the military since it all turns out to bs less an escape plan than a battleground strategy. It’s visions are more Star Wars than Star Trek and the DoD is backing it all up with 1 billion $.

What Jill Lepore terms “Muskism” is plain capitalism don’t kid yourselves, yet this recognition can barely keep up with these unleashed speculative, no limits yet incredibly farcical, bland and gee whiz forms of extreme techno-scientific capitalism. This does not mean there is a qualitative change or that we are entering another stage of cosmic capitalism. Yet it is worth grounding it, looking into its material origins, its diffusion, productivity, institutional effects. It’s not about technological pessimism but accepting that there are trade-offs and question why its few beneficial effects never get mentioned or never never the press attention (such as the battery farm in Australia). What does get mentioned is how tech entrepreneurs and ‘founders’ actually read, pillage or speculate around such pop influences and preexisting iconography. What type of scientific and technological imaginaries are we left with? How can one understand the current political and economic situation by looking into the real Cold War foundation of Marvel’s (or Stan Lee’s) Iron Man that became such a model for Musk. What has Peter Pan and fairy dust and Neverland having to do with mining crypto coins, or what do other less discussed science fiction stories from the 1900 (The Moon Metal by Garrett Putman Serviss) tell us about gold, inventing equivalents to gold or 1970s getting off the gold standard.

Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper Professor of American History and Affiliate Professor of Law at Harvard University and a staff writer for The New Yorker, where she writes about politics, history, law, and literature. A two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, her dozen books include These Truths: A History of the United States, cited as “nothing short of a masterpiece” by NPR, and, her latest, If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future, longlisted for the National Book Award.

Listen to the episodes here

Her book on Goodreads

“The Simulmatics Corporation, launched during the Cold War, mined data, targeted voters, manipulated consumers, destabilized politics, and disordered knowledge—decades before Facebook, Google, and Cambridge Analytica. Jill Lepore, best-selling author of These Truths, came across the company’s papers in MIT’s archives and set out to tell this forgotten history, the long-lost backstory to the methods, and the arrogance, of Silicon Valley.

Founded in 1959 by some of the nation’s leading social scientists—“the best and the brightest, fatally brilliant, Icaruses with wings of feathers and wax, flying to the sun”—Simulmatics proposed to predict and manipulate the future by way of the computer simulation of human behavior. In summers, with their wives and children in tow, the company’s scientists met on the beach in Long Island under a geodesic, honeycombed dome, where they built a “People Machine” that aimed to model everything from buying a dishwasher to counterinsurgency to casting a vote. Deploying their “People Machine” from New York, Washington, Cambridge, and even Saigon, Simulmatics’ clients included the John F. Kennedy presidential campaign, the New York Times, the Department of Defense, and dozens of major manufacturers: Simulmatics had a hand in everything from political races to the Vietnam War to the Johnson administration’s ill-fated attempt to predict race riots. The company’s collapse was almost as rapid as its ascent, a collapse that involved failed marriages, a suspicious death, and bankruptcy. Exposed for false claims, and even accused of war crimes, it closed its doors in 1970 and all but vanished. Until Lepore came across the records of its remains.

The scientists of Simulmatics believed they had invented “the A-bomb of the social sciences.” They did not predict that it would take decades to detonate, like a long-buried grenade. But, in the early years of the twenty-first century, that bomb did detonate, creating a world in which corporations collect data and model behavior and target messages about the most ordinary of decisions, leaving people all over the world, long before the global pandemic, crushed by feelings of helplessness. This history has a past; If Then is its cautionary tale.” (from the Goodreads description)

1908 – How ultra-processed food took over your shopping basket (podcast 2020)

UPFs (Ultra-processed foods) are food and drink products that have undergone specified types of food processing, usually by transnational and other very large ‘Big food’ corporations. These foods are designed to be “convenient, eaten on the go, hyperpalatable and appealing to consumers, and, most importantly, the most profitable segment of Big Food companies’ portfolios because of these foods’ low-cost ingredients”. Its rationale is that with nutrition and health now, ‘the issue is not food, nor nutrients, so much as processing’, and ‘from the point of view of human health, at present, the most salient division of food and drinks is in terms of their type, degree, and purpose of processing’. (wiki)

listen here

read article by Bee Wilson here