by
Jason Hickel
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One of the problems with TI's methodology is that it measures people's perceptions of corruption, rather than corruption itself. People who live in Britain may not normally think of their country as being particularly corrupt, but that may be because corruption is something that they have been taught to associate with countries in the developing world--not with the rich world. In this case, Transparency International might be helping to create the very perceptions that it seeks to measure.
People find themselves surrounded by hideous poverty [...] They try to solve the problem of poverty, for instance, by keeping the poor alive. But this is not a solution: it is an aggravation of the difficulty. The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible. And the altruistic virtues have really prevented the carrying out of this aim. Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realised by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it, so, in the present state of things in England, the people who do most harm are the people who try to do most good. Charity degrades and demoralises.
he's quoting Oscar Wilde from the Soul of Man Under Socialism but I can't find a source that has the exact same wording that Hickel uses ...
[...] food aid from the West, for example, is carefully calculated to prevent the worst famines, to ensure that people receive at least enough calories to stay alive, because otherwise the injustices of the global economic system would become so apparent that its legitimacy would collapse and political upheaval would almost certainly ensure. To avoid this outcome, the more cynical among the rich are happy to channel some of their surplus into charity.
you can see neoliberalism as this very careful tightrope--too much of it and you end up redpilling/radicalising people against it; too little of it and you risk making capitalists unhappy
Some NGOs have called for debt 'relief' or even 'forgiveness', but these words send exactly the wrong message. By implying that debtors have committed some kind of sin, and by casting creditors as saviours, they reinforce the power imbalance that lies at the heart of the problem. The debt-as-in framing has been used to justify 'forgiving' debt while requiring harsh austerity measures that replicate the structural adjustment programmes that contributed to the debt crisis in the first place, effectively saying 'we will forgive your sins, but you will have to pay the price'. In other words, until now, debt forgiveness has largely just perpetuated the problem. If we want to be serious about dealing with debt, we need to challenge not only the debt itself but also the moral framing that supports it.
he cites Graeber on debt earlier in the book (you could even say that this book, as well as basically any other that mentions debt since 2011, is indebted to Graeber)
[...] there is a strong case to be made that the most essential technologies--like public health medicines--should be exempt from the patent system altogether. [...]
the standard pro-free-market response to this: this is bad bcus firms will stop investing in R&D etc etc
but this is just reification of the highest order, in all its absurdity. surely the fact that firms would penalise countries who do this very sensible thing means that these firms are being driven by the wrong factors? and thus perhaps we should reorganise our economic system to prevent it? pro-free-market ideology feels like a matter of limiting the imagination to the most dire point, when it would be so easy to just go a little beyond
[...] As Joseph Stiglitz put it, 'What we measure informs what we do. And if we're measuring the wrong thing, we're going to do the wrong thing.'
on GDP and how it is a pretty awful measurement. Hickel goes into the history of it a bit earlier: apparently Kuznets wanted a more social-first approach that would exclude areas like advertising, commuting and policing from the stats but alas Keynes' more "rational" approach won. funny cus i'd always had this image of Keynes as the more progressive of the two but I guess not
doesn't call it by name but that's essentially what he's referring to
So the problem isn't just the type of energy we're using, it's what we're doing with it. What would we do with 100 per cent clean energy? Exactly what we're doing with fossil fuels: raze more forests, build more meat farms, expand industrial agriculture, produce more cement and heap up more landfills with waste from the additional stuff we would produce and consume, all of which will pump deadly amounts of greenhouse gas into the air. We will do these things because our economic system demands endless economic growth. Switching to clean energy will do nothing to slow this down.
[...] He suggests that we are on the cusp of an open access revolution that will overcome capitalism, heralding a new mode of production based on the principles championed by the likes of Swartz (whom he does not mention). According to Mason, there is now a massive and irreconcilable contradiction between the forces of production (new technologies that promote sharing, peer production and counter-capitalist practices of open access) and the relations of production (based on private property, paywalls and the enforcement of laws that Swartz aimed to challenge). Mason places great emphasis on endogenous technological change (first posited by Paul Romer), claiming that because information is infinitely replicable, with a margin or reproduction cost of zero, the price mechanism is eroded since it can no longer be based on scarcity, supply and demand and so forth. Songs on an iPod don’t degrade with use and those same zero-marginal cost processes will soon infiltrate physical goods too as they acquire digital components. In this environment, firms must (a) simply invent a commodity’s price and (b) create a monopoly to shore up its value. As far as Mason is concerned, such structures are swimming against the tide, swiftly becoming obsolete as a new economic dawn arrives.
[...]
We should not believe for one minute that multinational firms are embarrassed by this outrageous income, as Mason implies, perhaps even backing down in shame. No, these institutions instead tend to react like an outraged monarch, displaying egregious aggression to preserve their right to extract wealth unhindered, since the profit margins are so lucrative yet based on such flimsy grounds. [...]
[...] A similar problem dogs liberal critics who call for a return to Keynesianism. It isn’t that capitalism has become corrupt and deviated from its underlying principles. No, the corruption has simply risen to the surface, especially given how the countervailing force of the labour movement has been obliterated.
When we think of capitalism, we mainly think of the production of things. Commodities, services, experiences all have to be produced before they’re consumed. However, this type of capitalist activity takes time, investment and a paid workforce. Companies at the vanguard of the present, feudal-like world economy are not really keen on that. Is there an easier way to make profits? Yes, so it happens. Rather than produce goods and services, better to enclose them, making use of the means of production that people already are. That would keep costs down. This is the business model for so-called ‘platform capitalism’, be it the Uber, Deliveroo or YouTube. These organisations seek to commercialise the informal economy and rent it back to the community.