Appreciating & Reviewing Patrick Wyman: "Þe Verge"; & BRIEFLY NOTED: 2021-12-11 Sa

Things that went whizzing by that I want to remember:

First: Appreciating & Reviewing Patrick Wyman: The Verge:

Let me start with some background:

Karl Polanyi saw three fundamental types of economic organization: reciprocity, redistribution, and exchange:

(1) Reciprocity is the human division of labor mediated by our psycho-sociological propensity to engage in gift-exchange. Reciprocity is limited to our kin (and not all of them), our friends, and our neighbors.

(2) Redistribution follows the logic of power: it may have some component of social insurance, it may have some component of provision of some kind of public goods, but most of the time it is tuned to the advantage of the trained-professional thugs-with-spears and their fraudster cousins: the strong do what they wish, and the week suffer what they must.

(3) Exchange comes in with the invention of money. All of a sudden your psycho-sociological gift-exchange relationships that mediate the reciprocity-based division of labor are not confined to kin, friends, and neighbors. Rather, any one of the other 8 billion people in the world can become your partner in a one shot money mediated win-win market exchange. Money allows the division of labor to be deepened and widened to an unbelievably large and an unbelievably productive extent.

But there is more: Reciprocity, and redistribution too, are carried out at valuation ratios that have a psycho-sociological logic. But the market-exchange one-shot system of organizing the division of labor is carried out at prices that are not fair, in the sense of being what people deserve given their status and identity, but rather prices that balance supply-and-demand. This gives it an extraordinary flexibility, as people are given massive incentive to respond to market signals. The market economy thus crowdsources the solutions to the problem it sets itself, and that is a good thing—even though most of the time the problem at the market economy sets itself is how to make the life of the richest luxurious and the life of the merely rich comfortable. Crowdsourced solutions allow humanity to function as a very smart anthology intelligence, as opposed to top-down solutions that force humanity to function as a very dumb hive mind.

What happens when we take a leap beyond cash-on-the-barrelhead money and into extended long-term debt? Much of the time debt simply serves to rob the non-rich of what little social power they possess in a market economy. By not requiring half the interest due be paid immediately, and by instead adding it to the principal, the moneylender does you what he sees as—and what you must acknowledge as—a favor. You then owe the money-lender more than just a larger because compounded market-economy debt. You also owe the moneylender a favor in a reciprocal gift-exchange relationships that has acquired a sociological tinge, and made him not just your creditor but, in some sense, your benefactor—and that eventually turns into him being your lord, and then your master.

And now let me come to my main point:

But sometimes debt plays a different role. Sometimes—debt plays a role analogous to the role that money plays as a way of triggering crowdsourcing solutions to the market economy’s problem of getting the right commodities to those with the demand. Sometimes debt is a way of getting people with ideas for things to do but no control over resources into contact with people with control over resources but no idea what to do with them. Sometimes debt greatly amplifies the entrepreneurial energies of a society vastly beyond previous imagining—an amplification for both good and ill.

And this brings us to Patrick Wyman: The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World <https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Verge/CyQLEAAAQBAJ>:

In just four decades [1490-1530]—the blink of an eye, relatively speaking—Europe erupted. Around 1490… Europe was a backwater…. An alien visitor looking for the high points… would have much preferred… Istanbul or Beijing… Tenochtitlan, Delhi, Cairo, or Samarkand. Europe… an economic and political periphery, an also-ran…. No sane bettor would have placed their money on Europe as the genesis of globally vast colonial empires, much less the home of industrialization and the utter transformation of world economies several hundred years down the line…

So what happened? Many things happened. In Patrick Wyman’s view, over 1490-1530 western Europe suddenly becomes very creative across a wide range of processes:

Exploration, state growth, gunpowder warfare, the printing press, and the consequences that went along with them…

Something like the Ottoman Empire or Ming China could have mobilized its civilizational capacity to accomplish these—but the resource-mobilization process was always a top-down one, a matter of the logic of redistribution, and the giver-of-orders at the center would have to be interested. (Which he sometimes was, but in this era almost always in gunpowder warfare, and on occasion exploration.)

By contrast, western Europe’s emerging form of financial capitalism allowed all of these “entrepreneurial” ideas—not just gunpowder warfare, but exploration, investments in state capacity, printing and knowledge dissemination, and lots of other things as well, all of them:

expensive, capital-intensive processes and technologies… substantial amounts of money for initial financing, and even more to sustain them…. Any one of these processes was a major development in its own right…. All of these processes collided in the short decades on either side of 1500. That was not a coincidence; the availability of capital had supercharged all of them. Each process was intensely disruptive…

And, as Wyman stresses, many of these processes were intensely evil.

These processes of financial capitalism-fueled entrepreneurship—economic, social, political, and military entrepreneurship—did not slow down after 1530, but continued to accelerate. Western Europe thus explored the possibilities of patterns of human organization and interaction in a way no civilization had ever been able to before. Thus the result—for good and ill—was us.

I very highly recommend Patrick Wyman’s The Verge.

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One Picture:

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One Video:

Eric Cline: 1177 B.C.: When Civilization Collapsed <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4LRHJlijVU>:

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Forthcoming September 6, 2022, from Basic Books:

Slouching Towards Utopia: A History of the Long Twentieth Century: Paragraph 5: What follows is my grand narrative, my version of what is the most important story to tell of the history of the twentieth century. It is a primarily economic story. It naturally starts in 1870. I believe it naturally stops in 2010.

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Very Briefly Noted:

• Ronald N. Giere: How Models Are Used to Represent Reality: ‘We should focus on the pragmatic activity of representing…. Scientists use models to represent aspects of the world for specific purposes… use designated similarities between models and aspects of the world to form both hypotheses and generalizations… <https://philpapers.org/rec/GIEHMA>

• Elizabeth Lopatto: Elizabeth Holmes Was Always in Control: ‘All the queen’s men… <https://www.theverge.com/2021/12/9/22820995/elizabeth-holmes-theranos-trial-testimony-defense-abuse>

• Ethan Wu: Only 10 US stocks Really Matter: ‘While the bulk of American equities have outperformed non-US stocks by 11 percentage points, it’s 28 points for the S&P 10. All of them are up this year, most of them by a lot… <https://www.ft.com/content/1c3c474a-5370-4b4b-86bb-1068fc9dbf09>

• Sarah Zhang: Omicron’s Rapid Case Growth Is a Warning: ‘We don’t know how severe Omicron is, but we do know it’s spreading very fast… <https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/12/omicron-spread-infection-severity/620948/>

• U.S. Macroeconomists Survey <https://www.igmchicago.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/RESULTS-2021-12-03-Survey-03.pdf>

• Lauren Michele Jackson: The 1619 Project & the Demands of Public History: ‘The ambitious Times endeavor, now in book form, reveals the difficulties that greet a journalistic project when it aspires to shift a founding narrative of the past… <https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/the-1619-project-and-the-demands-of-public-history>

• Network for a New Political Economy: Hewlett New Political Economy Graduate Summer Institute: ‘In Summer 2022, the Network will bring together 10 Ph.D. candidates from programs around the world in Economics, History, Political Science, and Sociology for a two week workshop at Berkeley which will allow them to collaborate with faculty and each other to define what a new political economy could look like. The Hewlett Foundation will provide a stipend of $4000 to each accepted fellow to cover expenses… <https://n2pe.berkeley.edu/summer-institute/>

• Longview Economics: ’It’s that time of the month where we see another CPI rise, have a healthy discussion about the definition of transitory, and note that bond yields really haven’t started rising yet…

Longview Economics @Lvieweconomics

It's that time of the month where we see another CPI rise, have a healthy discussion about the definition of transitory, and note that bond yields really haven't started rising yet... @MichaelAArouet

• Dan Alpert: ’CPI November up… 0.5% core…. The energy side will reverse with the collapse of the oil bubble… that will impact food (all transport and production energy) as well…. Core goods is still very much a tradables/supply disruptions and silicon chips/autos story. My read on this data with regard to core goods is consistent with what I have said in the past: relief evidences itself by end of Q1 2022… <

Dan Alpert @DanielAlpert

#CPI November up 0.8% M/M headline and 0.5% core. The first thing to recognize is that the energy side will reverse with the collapse of the oil bubble that has transpired since November, and that will impact food (all transport and production energy) as well. So core...>>

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Paragraphs:

Paul Krugman: The Inflation Suspense Goes On: ‘If there was any information content in today’s release,… extreme scenarios in both directions became a bit less likely…. The headline number is highly likely to come down over the next few months, if only because the big run-up of oil prices from their pandemic lows seems to have gone into reverse…. Underlying inflation appears to be running high by recent standards, maybe around 4 percent instead of the 2 percent that is the Fed’s target…. Production is constrained both by bottlenecks and by the withdrawal of several million Americans from the labor force…. How long will elevated inflation last? The secret answer (don’t tell anyone) is that we don’t know…. The most likely scenario is a minor-league version of the 1946–48 inflation spike…. I still don’t see any evidence that 1970s-type stagflation, in which everyone kept raising prices because they expected everyone else to keep raising prices, is emerging. But today’s numbers neither reinforced nor challenged my beliefs…

LINK: <https://messaging-custom-newsletters.nytimes.com/template/oakv2>

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Jochen Böhler: States Of War: ‘Parties with national agendas are gaining ground in multicultural societies. It has largely been forgotten that between 1918 and 1921, these agendas plunged Eastern and Central Europe into civil war…. Ernest Renan formulated a provocative thesis: “The act of forgetting, I would even say, historical error, is an essential factor in the creation of a nation, which is why progress in historical studies often constitutes a danger for nationality...” Europeans have forgotten the aftermath of the First World War…. Whatever the politicians said or thought, local populations in disputed territories perceived the conflict as civil war, and not as a national awakening…. In disputed and multiethnic border regions, such as Upper Silesia or the Polish-Ukrainian borderlands, state allegiance, to the extent that it existed at all, was divided and often ambivalent. National identities needed time to develop. And not only in the border regions…. The new nations were formed as part of the conflicts that broke out between 1918 and 1921. It was only during these hostilities that individuals and populations… were suddenly forced to decide which side they were on…. Parties with national agendas are gaining ground in multicultural societies. The fact that these agendas plunged Eastern and Central Europe into a civil war between 1918 and 1921 has been largely forgotten…

LINK: <https://www.cosmopolitanglobalist.com/states-of-war/>

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Steve M.: Axios Reports Poll Numbers That Contradict the Dominant Narrative, Sticks with Narrative Anyway: ‘Now, here’s how Axios reports its own poll: “Most Americans aren’t willing to make big changes in their behavior… according to a new Axios-Ipsos poll…. Some of those responses have massive partisan differences too, like private business mask mandates (94% of Democrats support them to respond to Omicron, vs. just 43% of Republicans) and local government mask mandates (93% of Democrats vs. 34% of Republicans).” Hey, who cares if two-thirds of Americans want a public health response. Republicans object! They have veto power over everything, don’t they? Even when we get facts from the mainstream media that contradict the media’s preferred narratives, the narratives endure…

LINK: <https://nomoremister.blogspot.com/2021/12/axios-reports-poll-numbers-that.html>—-

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Ralph Miliband (1980): Military Intervention & Socialist Internationalism: ‘The Vietnamese intervention in Kampuchea…. Who is to decide… that a regime has become sufficiently tyrannical?… [It] opens the way to even more military adventurism, predatoriness, conquest and subjugation…. The rejection of military intervention on this score is not meant to claim immunity and protection for tyrannical regimes. Nor does it. For there are other forms of intervention… economic pressure by way of sanctions, boycott and even blockade. Tyrannical regimes… do not make [opposition] impossible…. The point is to help internal opposition rather than engage in military ‘substitutism’…

LINK: <https://www.marxists.org/archive/miliband/1980/xx/intervention.htm>

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Ryan Avent: Dire Straits: ‘If China were peaceful and democratic, with an income level similar to Japan’s, it would wield massive economic and cultural influence not only in Asia but all around the world. Most countries would look to China first, not America, and most of those that looked to China first would probably do it happily. But the Party stands in the way of that, and I worry that the Party must be soundly, decisively discredited before it can be displaced….m There is no safe route forward, not now. The menu of options in front of Xi does not include the status quo ante, I fear, because the property-market engine is dead and the infrastructure cannon has been fired too many times and the world has had enough of China attempting to simply export its way out of crisis (and the Chinese economy is too big for that to be an option either). And several years of limping growth, well below what the Chinese have grown used to, alongside other hardships like a loss of housing wealth, could seriously threaten what Xi has tried to accomplish over the course of his tenure: the building of a powerful China, able to command respect and bend the arc of world history to its desires…

LINK:

Dire straits

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For Paid Subscribers Only: One Future for American Politics

Looking forward, here is one of the possible—perhaps even likely—futures for American politics.

In it, major Democratic Party initiatives will be nullified—as the Voting Rights Act and campaign-finance reform—or crippled—as ObamaCare was—by the Supreme Court, until court expansion takes place. Court expansion will take place only when the Democrats have a Senate majority and the marginal senators in the majority will be willing to prioritize the long-run interests of the party over their short-run electoral interests in triangulation: in other words, never, given the large pro-Republican gerrymandering of the Senate. The attachment of blue-state electorates and politicians to nonpartisan redistricting commissions well red-state politicians have no truck with such foolishness will produce a gerrymandering of the House and of state legislatures as well. If the Republicans are “smart” and partisan, they will lose the 2024 election but in so doing have two or three state legislatures assert that they, rather than any vote count, are the arbiters of who the electors will be. Thus by 2028 there will be precedent that electors will be chosen by Republican-gerrymandered state legislators when it matters—when it doesn’t, the ballots can by countered.

We are thus, I think, looking forward to a generation of minority rule. Now if Republicans were willing to work for their constituents, that would not be the worst thing in the world. Republican constituents, after all—with the exception of the plutocrats and the lower-upper class Republican Worthies—have neither economic nor cultural power, and if they have political power they can bargain to get an America in which they do not get quite as short an end of the stick.

But Republican politicians will not bargain for their constituents’ material interests. Instead, they will provide lower-upper class Republican Worthies with low taxes and sociological predominance, plutocrats with corrupt augmentations to their fortunes as long as they play political-cultural ball with their Republican politician-masters, and the base with culture-war victories over foreigners and the urban rootless cosmopolites.

How are we to think about this potential future? I find myself looking for rhyming episodes in past history. And I have concluded that I need to learn a lot more about America’s Bourbon Deep South from the breaking of Populism on the altar of racial animosity to the coming of the Civil Rights era.

So what should I read next to understand it?

Here is one thing. Here is Lyndon Johnson, during the 1964 campaign, in New Orleans, talking about that South as he tried his mightiest to break it:

Some of my political philosophy was born in this State. As a young secretary, I came to New Orleans before I ever went to Washington. I saw something about the political history of Louisiana. And I saw a man who was frequently praised, and a man who was frequently harassed and criticized, and I became an admirer of his because I thought he had a heart for the people.

When I went to Washington in the dark days of the Depression as a young country kid from the poor hills of Texas, I had a standing rule with the page office that every time Senator [Huey] Long took the floor, he would call me on the phone and I would go over there and perch in the Gallery and listen to every word he said. And I heard them all.

I heard a lot about the history of this State. I heard a lot of names in this State. But I never heard him make a speech that I didn't think was calculated to do some good for some people who needed some speeches made for them and couldn't make them for themselves.

The things that I am talking about from coast to coast—I talked to six New England States last week and I am going to speak in six western States next week—the things I am talking about from coast to coast tonight and tomorrow and next week are the things that he talked about 30 years ago.

• He thought that every man had a right to a job, and that was long before the Full Employment Act.

• He thought that every boy and girl ought to have a chance for all the education they could take, and that is before the GI bill of rights.

• He thought that the old folks ought to have social security and old age pensions, and I remember when he just scared the dickens out of Mr. Roosevelt and went on a nationwide radio hookup talking for old folks' pensions. And out of this probably came our social security system.

• He believed in medical care for those so that they could live indecency and dignity in their declining years, without their children having to come and move them into their house with them. He was against poverty and hated it with all his soul and spoke until his voice was hoarse.

Well, like Jack Kennedy, he believed in those same things. But their voices are still tonight, but they have left some to carry on. And as long as the good Lord permits me, I am going to carry on.

Now, the people that would use us and destroy us first divide us. There is not any combination in the country that can take on Russell Long, Allen Ellender, Lyndon Johnson, and a few others if we are together. But if they divide us, they can make some hay. And all these years they have kept their foot on our necks by appealing to our animosities, and dividing us.

Whatever your views are, we have a Constitution and we have a Bill of Rights, and we have the law of the land, and two-thirds of the Democrats in the Senate voted for it and three-fourths of the Republicans. I signed it, and I am going to enforce it, and I am going to observe it, and I think any man that is worthy of the high office of President is going to do the same thing. But I am not going to let them build up the hate and try to buy my people by appealing to their prejudice.

I heard a great son of Texas who came from an adjoining State, whose name I won't call [Joe Bailey], but he was expelled from the university over there and he started West, and he got to Texas as a boy and stopped to see a schoolmate of his.

He liked things so well in Texas that he just decided to make it his permanent address. In 4 years he went to the Congress. After he had been in the House 2 years, he became the Democratic leader, and he served a few years as Democratic leader. And he went to the Senate and he served in the Senate 4 years and he became the Democratic leader in the Senate. He served the district that Mr. [Sam] Rayburn later served.

When Mr. Rayburn came up as a young boy of the House [around WWI], he went over to see the old Senator, the leader [Joe Bailey], one evening, who had come from this Southern State, and he was talking about economic problems. He was talking about how we had been at the mercy of certain economic interests, and how they had exploited us. They had worked our women for 5 cents an hour, they had worked our men for a dollar a day, they had exploited our soil, they had let our resources go to waste, they had taken everything out of the ground they could, and they had shipped it to other sections.

He was talking about the economy and what a great future we could have in the South, if we could just meet our economic problems, if we could just take a look at the resources of the South and develop them. And he said, "Sammy, I wish I felt a little better. I would like to go back to old"—and I won't call the name of the State; it wasn't Louisiana and it wasn't Texas:

I would like to go back down there and make them one more Democratic speech. I just feel like I have one in me. The poor old State, they haven't heard a Democratic speech in 30 years. All they ever hear at election time is "n——r, n——r, n——r!"