February Round-up
Quick question for you: Is language a virus? And what exactly is the Metaverse (not the Facebook one)?
If the (incredibly good) book and articles below don’t interest you, I strongly suggest scrolling down to a couple of mind-bending essays on the power of language and narratives. One is by Cormac McCarthy, who’s one of my favorite authors, even though many of his books are brutal to read. There’s also a movie trailer for a very strange and funny film called “The Plumber,” which is about a plumber.
Have you been reading anything good this month? I’d love to hear about it so please share!
The Economists’ Hour: False Prophets, Free Markets, and the Fracture of Society
This book by Binyamin Appelbaum provides a wonderfully readable historical account of how economists in the second half of the 20th century went from being ignored by policymakers to setting the agenda for the entire world—with utterly disastrous results. This book is so good that I started re-reading it about a week after finishing it.
“The clear focus of federal economic policy at the end of the 1960s still was to ensure that Americans had jobs, even at the expense of inflation. By the beginning of the 1980s, the clear focus of economic policy would be on getting rid of inflation, even at the expense of jobs.
That shift, which carried around the globe, was Friedman’s most important legacy.
How We Broke the Supply Chain
By David Dayen and Rakeen Mabud at The American Prospect on how “rampant outsourcing, financialization, monopolization, deregulation, and just-in-time logistics” wrecked our supply chain.
Behind all of these choices was Wall Street, insisting on more profit maximization through deregulation, mergers, offshoring, and hyperefficiency. They demanded that companies skimp on long-term resilience, build moats around their businesses by undermining or buying up rivals, adopt practices that kept inventories lean, break down the social contract between employers and workers that offered economic security, and return outsized profits to shareholders. Financiers built our supply chain to enrich investors over workers, big business over small business, private pockets over the public interest.
These policies caused innumerable harms long before the whole system collapsed during the pandemic. Entire regions of the country were abandoned for cheap foreign labor, and the drive for profit maximization facilitated a race to the bottom when it came to labor standards around the world, including the U.S. The transition to a service economy shuttled people into dead-end, low-wage jobs that are among the most brutal and undignified of any industrialized nation.
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But here was the bargain: In exchange for funneling all this money upward, hollowing out the industrial base, ruining competitive markets, and worsening U.S. jobs, businesses would keep consumer prices low. And low prices have a definite psychological pull. That belief in getting more for less, of perceiving that you’ve beat the system, was enough to keep people reasonably satisfied. If you are stuck with low wages, you depend on low prices. As long as shelves were stocked, and America’s desires were covered with overseas goods, this radical reinvention of the supply chain kept us fulfilled. Until it didn’t.
Monopolies and Humiliation
By Matt Stoller at American Affairs on how monopolies spread fear and humiliation to consumers, workers, and small businesses; how we forgot America’s powerful anti-monopoly tradition; and how we’re relearning once again to reclaim our freedom.
Our legal system is so tilted in favor of capital that we’ve gone far beyond breaking unions, towards constraining workers by contract. Roughly thirty million Americans have signed non-compete agreements preventing them from working for a rival employer, many of them at fast food restaurants or other low wage occupations. Employer power over labor is so extreme that one set of economists calculated it cuts overall output and employment by 13 percent and labor’s share of national output by 22 percent.
And finally, a third reaction to these indignities is to quit. And that’s what’s happening in force. Over 40 precent of American workers are looking for another job, or planning to, according to the Society for Human Resource Management. The ‘turnover tsunami’ is concentrated among younger workers, black workers, and Hispanic workers. The quit rate this year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, will apparently be at a record high.
But this data is incomplete, because we don’t measure in any credible way whether people think they are free, and I don’t think it’s possible to do so. When discussing concepts like freedom, dignity, resentment, I turn to the arts. Office Space is the greatest piece of political satire of the late twentieth century, a Twain-esque send-up of the still-dominant forms of political economy, which essentially amounts to rule by McKinsey management consultants.
The False Promise of Good Jobs
By Oren Cass and Richard Oyeniran at American Compass about how the obsessive “supply-side” push for mass college education in America has produced far more college educated people than available jobs that actually require a college education. This in turn has badly misallocated resources, leaving millions with student debt for a college education their job doesn’t even require, while creating a sprawling, bureaucratic, and expensive college education industry.
If earning a BA at least provided reliable access to the higher end of the labor market, policymakers could argue that the solution to this bifurcated market lies in greater investment in education—certainly, that’s the argument they do make. Alongside, the multinational corporations who have most benefited from globalization lament a “skills gap” and insist they are creating the jobs of the future if only Americans were prepared to fill them.
This is, empirically, false.
In fact, the net increase in BA+ workers has outpaced the net increase in BA+ jobs by more than two-to-one. BA+s accounted for 97% of net worker growth, but 41% of net job growth required a high school degree or less. Put another way, in 2000 there were enough BA+ jobs for 79% of BA+ workers, but by 2019 there were enough for just 67%.
The Moon should be privatised to help wipe out poverty on Earth, economists say
The economists are at it again.
According to a strange report by neoliberal think tank the Adam Smith Institute, the satellite should be divided into parcels of land and assigned to different countries to rent out to businesses, boosting the economy.
The economists also reckon this would boost space tourism, exploration and discovery.
Democrats, Speak to Working-Class Discontent
By Stanley B. Greenberg, a pollster and political strategist for over forty years, writing at The American Prospect on how Obama’s economic policies failed working-class America, and how Democrats can (and must) reverse the resulting erosion in their support among working class voters, including deep losses of both working-class Blacks and Hispanics, by giving voice to the pain of workers and taking on corporate America.
If you govern for the whole country, you know that two-thirds of all registered voters never graduated from a four-year college. Well before the financial crash in 2008, they were angry. Employment in manufacturing had plummeted after 2000 from almost 18 million to 14 million jobs. Innovations in technology and structural changes in the economy were raising worker productivity, but the top 1 percent and then the top .01 percent were seizing all the gains in income.
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Many analysts believe racism explains almost everything, and Obama himself mused after 2016, “Maybe people just want to fall back into their tribe.” But that misses how the Obama administration’s economic policy failed all working people. It took seven years from the 2008 crash for them to get back to their pre-crisis income level—that is, to where they were during Bush’s Gilded Age.
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The Obama years were the critical juncture when Democratic leaders stopped seeing the working class and feeling its despair and anger. They stopped advocating for workers against corporate excess and stopped challenging the exceptional corruption that allowed billionaires and Wall Street to dominate politics. The result is that the Democratic Party has lost touch with all working people, including its own base. When Obama himself was re-elected in 2012, he confirmed for Democrats that he was a successful president. But he wasn’t a success in building a long-term majority. In every election while he was president, Democrats took losses. Republicans gained control over half of America’s states, and Donald Trump, not Hillary Clinton, succeeded him in office.
The Kekulé Problem: Where did language come from?
By Cormac McCarthy (author of The Road, No Country for Old Men, Blood Meridian) on the origins of language and the workings of the unconscious mind.
The sort of isolation that gave us tall and short and light and dark and other variations in our species was no protection against the advance of language. It crossed mountains and oceans as if they werent there. Did it meet some need? No. The other five thousand plus mammals among us do fine without it. But useful? Oh yes. We might further point out that when it arrived it had no place to go. The brain was not expecting it and had made no plans for its arrival. It simply invaded those areas of the brain that were the least dedicated. I suggested once in conversation at the Santa Fe Institute that language had acted very much like a parasitic invasion and David Krakauer—our president—said that the same idea had occurred to him. Which pleased me a good deal because David is very smart. This is not to say of course that the human brain was not in any way structured for the reception of language. Where else would it go? If nothing else we have the evidence of history. The difference between the history of a virus and that of language is that the virus has arrived by way of Darwinian selection and language has not. The virus comes nicely machined. Offer it up. Turn it slightly. Push it in. Click. Nice fit. But the scrap heap will be found to contain any number of viruses that did not fit.
There is no selection at work in the evolution of language because language is not a biological system and because there is only one of them. The ur-language of linguistic origin out of which all languages have evolved.
Narrative and Metaverse, Pt. 1: The Living Word
By Ben Hunt at Epsilon Theory on how narratives and storytelling change the way we think—and in so doing change the nature of reality itself.
The metaverse is not some mental ghost in the machine of the human brain. No, it is a physical expression of the way that the human brain wires itself at the cellular level in response to linguistic stimulus, creating a persistent alien world – alien in the truest sense of the word – of grammatical and narrative entities that are born, grow, adapt, reproduce and die within an electric, neurochemical ocean of quadrillions of self-organized neurons across billions of human brains. The metaverse is the world of human thought, composed of unstructured data instantiated across neural clusters and patterned by linguistic grammars. The metaverse isn’t just as real and as alive as you and me, the metaverse is literally what makes you and me … you and me.
Nothing I am saying is new. Everything I am saying has already been said for literally thousands of years, across every human civilization, by poets and philosophers and prophets who taught of an ideated world of human-motivating and society-creating words and images possessed of – not just as much power and reality as our human-scaled meat-world – but more power and reality. This is transcendentalism, the recognition that there is another world beyond the mundane macroverse, and it is the foundation of every great religion and faith in human history.
What’s new, for me at least, and I suspect most of you, is that I used to think that these teachings were delivered as metaphor. Today I think they were delivered as fact.
“The Plumber” wins February’s highly coveted Movie of the Month Award
This 1979 Australian film (directed by Peter Weir) is about a plumber, as you may have already guessed. The rest of it you couldn’t possibly guess, as it’s in an incredibly strange, hilarious, and at times disturbing movie about a talkative, demented, folk-song-playing plumber, played by Ivan Kantz, who shows up unbidden to fix the pipes in an academic couple’s apartment, creating a host of class and gender issues along the way.
Max : I was just gonna' say, you've got problems. Whoever did the pipes in this block oughta' be shot. It's a wonder the place hasn't flooded!
Jill Cowper : Well, what's wrong with them, exactly?
Max : Well, your pipes - if you'll pardon the expression - are buggered.
The runner up movie this month was the definitely-must-have-inspired-David-Lynch-pre-Twin-Peaks film, “Picnic at Hanging Rock”. (The original movie from 1975, not the 2018 TV miniseries).
In Small-Time Related News
I wrote and published the exceedingly rare (for me) short story. It’s called “The Delivery Dance” and I really enjoyed the whole process. Incidentally, it was also my least-viewed post of all-time. Hahahahaha. Hahaha. Haha. Ha. Hh.
I also published a recording of “Eight American Anthems for Nobody.”
And wrote an article in defense of joy.
As always, thanks for reading!