My diagnosis is that, at least in the Global North, potential voters are, today: (a) profoundly unhappy with a neoliberal world in which the only rights that people have that are worth anything are their property-ownership rights and they are thus the playthings of economic forces that value and devalue their property; but (b) are anxiously unsatisfied with social democracy that gives equal shares of access to valuable things to those whom they regard as “undeserving”; and (c) while that economic anxiety can be assuaged by rapid and broad-based growth, it is also (d) stoked by those who like the current highly unequal distribution of wealth and thus seek to make politics about the discovery of (external and internal) enemies rather than about equitable prosperity.
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A good summary of the situation, and why it's so difficult to construct a better politics. I think that puts the items in the correct order; the people stoking fears for political and financial gain are important, but they wouldn't be as successful as they are if there wasn't an existing discomfort with social democracy.
Yet to keep the fiction that we are all fairly playing the reciprocal game of gift exchange in a 7.4 billion-strong social network—that we are neither cheaters nor saps—we need to ignore that we are coupon clippers living off of our societal inheritance.
And to do this, we need to do more than (a) set up a framework for the production of stuff, (b) set up a framework for the distribution of stuff, and so (c) create a very dense reciprocal network of interdependencies to create and reinforce our belief that we are all one society.
We need to do so in such a way that people do not see themselves, are not seen as saps—people who are systematically and persistently taken advantage of by others in their societal and market gift-exchange relationships. We need to do so in such a way that people do not see themselves, are not seen as, and are not moochers—people who systematically persistently take advantage of others in their societal and market gift-exchange relationships. We need to do this in the presence of a vast increasing-returns in the knowledge- and network-based societal dividend and in spite of the low societal marginal product of any one of us.
Thus we need to do this via clever redistribution rather than via explicit wage supplements or basic incomes or social insurance that robs people of the illusion that what they receive is what they have earned and what they are worth through their work.
Now I think it is an open question whether it is harder to do the job via predistribution, or to do the job via changing human perceptions
I want to highlight another element from the essay linked above. I mention it above as adding to the idea of fairness, but it also has a very elegant statement that connects to a different thought. One of the challenges of building a sustainable social democratic politics is that the amount of redistribution (and the different types of programs necessary to achieve re-distributive aims) increases over time. We don't just need people to agree to economic transfers for the sake of equality, they need to agree to _increasing_ transfers because:
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All of this “what you deserve” language is tied up with some vague idea that you deserve what you contribute—that what your work adds to the pool of society’s resources is what you deserve.
This illusion is punctured by any recognition that there is a large societal dividend to be distributed, and that the government can distribute it by supplementing (inadequate) market wages determined by your (low) societal marginal product, or by explicitly providing income support or services unconnected with work via social insurance. Instead, the government is supposed to, somehow, via clever redistribution, rearrange the pattern of market power in the economy so that the increasing-returns knowledge- and network-based societal dividend is predistributed in a relatively egalitarian way so that everybody can pretend that their income is just “to each according to his work”, and that they are not heirs and heiresses coupon clipping off of the societal capital of our predecessors’ accumulated knowledge and networks.
An interesting example of the way in which the neoliberal order became the operating assumption for everybody (including those that disagreed with it). I was just looking up this review of The Spirit Level, and struck by the following paragraph (I too find it frustratingly difficult to imagine a rapid transition to a more egalitarian society, but interesting to see how that's taken as a fact of life, rather than contested political position) :
"All this makes it hard to see how a gradualist approach is going to work. Wilkinson and Pickett insist that societies can change of their own volition, and they cite as evidence the rapidity with which inequality grew in Britain and the US following the Thatcher and Reagan reforms of the early 1980s. ‘If things can change so rapidly,’ they write, ‘then there are good reasons to feel confident that we can create a society in which the real quality of life and of human relationships is far higher than it is now.’ But it seems more likely that the shift since the 1980s, and the readiness with which it has been embraced by voters, is evidence of how hard it will be to change things back, certainly without some significant external shock. There is a faint hope (including among the technocrats around Obama) that the current recession might be the opportunity to force through otherwise unpalatable reforms that will create a more egalitarian society. But the public response so far doesn’t bode well; if anything, the current crisis seems to show how set in their ways both inegalitarian and egalitarian societies can become. In Britain and the US, the mood seems suspicious, hostile to government action and worried about the debt. In Japan, where the present economic difficulties stretch back twenty years, the public has learned to be more accepting of the idea that low growth and high public debt are the price of keeping people in their jobs. If anything, the experience of recession has served to make Japan a more equal society; it threatens to make Britain and the US less equal ones."
I very much like this paragraph
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My diagnosis is that, at least in the Global North, potential voters are, today: (a) profoundly unhappy with a neoliberal world in which the only rights that people have that are worth anything are their property-ownership rights and they are thus the playthings of economic forces that value and devalue their property; but (b) are anxiously unsatisfied with social democracy that gives equal shares of access to valuable things to those whom they regard as “undeserving”; and (c) while that economic anxiety can be assuaged by rapid and broad-based growth, it is also (d) stoked by those who like the current highly unequal distribution of wealth and thus seek to make politics about the discovery of (external and internal) enemies rather than about equitable prosperity.
------
A good summary of the situation, and why it's so difficult to construct a better politics. I think that puts the items in the correct order; the people stoking fears for political and financial gain are important, but they wouldn't be as successful as they are if there wasn't an existing discomfort with social democracy.
Mulling it over, I ended up re-reading this older piece by you which is also good: https://www.bradford-delong.com/2021/02/hoisted-from-%C3%BEe-archives-regional-distributional-policy-in-a-world-where-people-want-to-ignore-%C3%BEe-va.html
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Yet to keep the fiction that we are all fairly playing the reciprocal game of gift exchange in a 7.4 billion-strong social network—that we are neither cheaters nor saps—we need to ignore that we are coupon clippers living off of our societal inheritance.
And to do this, we need to do more than (a) set up a framework for the production of stuff, (b) set up a framework for the distribution of stuff, and so (c) create a very dense reciprocal network of interdependencies to create and reinforce our belief that we are all one society.
We need to do so in such a way that people do not see themselves, are not seen as saps—people who are systematically and persistently taken advantage of by others in their societal and market gift-exchange relationships. We need to do so in such a way that people do not see themselves, are not seen as, and are not moochers—people who systematically persistently take advantage of others in their societal and market gift-exchange relationships. We need to do this in the presence of a vast increasing-returns in the knowledge- and network-based societal dividend and in spite of the low societal marginal product of any one of us.
Thus we need to do this via clever redistribution rather than via explicit wage supplements or basic incomes or social insurance that robs people of the illusion that what they receive is what they have earned and what they are worth through their work.
Now I think it is an open question whether it is harder to do the job via predistribution, or to do the job via changing human perceptions
------
I want to highlight another element from the essay linked above. I mention it above as adding to the idea of fairness, but it also has a very elegant statement that connects to a different thought. One of the challenges of building a sustainable social democratic politics is that the amount of redistribution (and the different types of programs necessary to achieve re-distributive aims) increases over time. We don't just need people to agree to economic transfers for the sake of equality, they need to agree to _increasing_ transfers because:
------
All of this “what you deserve” language is tied up with some vague idea that you deserve what you contribute—that what your work adds to the pool of society’s resources is what you deserve.
This illusion is punctured by any recognition that there is a large societal dividend to be distributed, and that the government can distribute it by supplementing (inadequate) market wages determined by your (low) societal marginal product, or by explicitly providing income support or services unconnected with work via social insurance. Instead, the government is supposed to, somehow, via clever redistribution, rearrange the pattern of market power in the economy so that the increasing-returns knowledge- and network-based societal dividend is predistributed in a relatively egalitarian way so that everybody can pretend that their income is just “to each according to his work”, and that they are not heirs and heiresses coupon clipping off of the societal capital of our predecessors’ accumulated knowledge and networks.
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Yes, indeed… We are all, overwhelmingly, coupon clippers...
An interesting example of the way in which the neoliberal order became the operating assumption for everybody (including those that disagreed with it). I was just looking up this review of The Spirit Level, and struck by the following paragraph (I too find it frustratingly difficult to imagine a rapid transition to a more egalitarian society, but interesting to see how that's taken as a fact of life, rather than contested political position) :
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v31/n20/david-runciman/how-messy-it-all-is
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"All this makes it hard to see how a gradualist approach is going to work. Wilkinson and Pickett insist that societies can change of their own volition, and they cite as evidence the rapidity with which inequality grew in Britain and the US following the Thatcher and Reagan reforms of the early 1980s. ‘If things can change so rapidly,’ they write, ‘then there are good reasons to feel confident that we can create a society in which the real quality of life and of human relationships is far higher than it is now.’ But it seems more likely that the shift since the 1980s, and the readiness with which it has been embraced by voters, is evidence of how hard it will be to change things back, certainly without some significant external shock. There is a faint hope (including among the technocrats around Obama) that the current recession might be the opportunity to force through otherwise unpalatable reforms that will create a more egalitarian society. But the public response so far doesn’t bode well; if anything, the current crisis seems to show how set in their ways both inegalitarian and egalitarian societies can become. In Britain and the US, the mood seems suspicious, hostile to government action and worried about the debt. In Japan, where the present economic difficulties stretch back twenty years, the public has learned to be more accepting of the idea that low growth and high public debt are the price of keeping people in their jobs. If anything, the experience of recession has served to make Japan a more equal society; it threatens to make Britain and the US less equal ones."
Exactly!