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Catalyst
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It is worth lingering on both tax exemptions and tax expenditures. As Tony Atkinson has argued, the “personal exemption” and “standard deduction” in the income tax is closely related to basic income. If the tax rate is 30 percent and the exemption threshold is $10,000, the exemption provides personal savings of $3,000; these “savings” are state expenditures like any other and are not unlike a basic income. But notice its regressive construction: A person with $8,000 in income gets only $2,400 in the above example. Those with no income get nothing. A basic income would remove the regressiveness hidden in the tax code. [...]
im all for this
Second, if my popularity hypothesis is true, capital flight may become an opportunity to leverage the polity into socialism. Those firms or industries at risk of exit should be scapegoated and specially targeted for nationalization. This brings additional revenue for the growing dividend and serves as appropriate comeuppance for defecting industries. If there exists a popularity effect that serves to grow social expenditures and a profitability effect that acts as a break on that growth, the historical record has shown the former to completely swamp the latter. As popularity runs into capitalist defection the exploitation of new sources of capital income becomes increasingly plausible. This is the mechanism through which the move towards a generous basic income is something akin to the move towards democratic socialism.
hahaha i love this
Is my dialectical program just neoliberalism by stealth? Does this darkly Hegelian road come to a dead-end? It is widely believed that basic income presents a clear and present danger of cooptation. This is true; it is entirely possible to imagine it being coopted. The same is true for a jobs guarantee, Roemer’s coupon socialism, strengthened unions, Medicare for All, and every ambitious but plausible scheme to reorganize socioeconomic life for the better. While we should be sensitive to this dilemma, striving to make all our proposals uncooptable is a mistake. Proposals that are uncooptable might have appeal to political ascetics, but they are far less likely to be feasible, and fare even worse on achievability. Cooptability should be seen as a necessary condition for our policy proposals, not a reason to disavow them. It is a measure of success rather than failure because it implies a design aimed at fitting itself onto the world as it actually is. Moreover, it is a dilemma that comes naturally with power, and can only be escaped by clinging onto our marginality; confronting these dilemmas only means we are that much closer to realizing the world we want.
very thoughtful
Given the gap that exists between ideal and nonideal theory and the conditions under which each is elaborated, it would seem that the more demanding the ideal, the more distant that ideal is from societies as we know them, the heavier the burden to articulate a theory of the transition from where we are to where we ought to be. But if Rawls’s agreement with socialist accounts of justice is real, even if reticent, the gap that separates his understanding of politics, including politics taken from a nonideal perspective, from the socialist tradition of reflection on the topic is enormous, and much more challenging to fill.
For a start, Rawls’s remarks about the transition from nonideal theory to ideal theory are mostly limited to discussing the role of civil disobedience and conscientious refusal in a well-ordered society. A well-ordered society is a society in which the basic structure of social institutions is just, or nearly just. The reason Rawls gives for starting with the simpler cases is that once we are clear on those, they “may help clarify the more difficult problems.”6 Ideal theory, he argues, provides “the only basis for the systematic grasp of these more pressing problems” At least Rawls acknowledges they are more pressing.7 But very little is said on how exactly his orientation is supposed to work, if it works at all. And Edmundson’s book, notwithstanding a final chapter devoted to questions of agency and of political transition, also struggles to bring out the contribution of Rawls’s theory at this point. The requirements of civil disobedience apply only when citizens are already motivated by a public sense of justice, and indeed rely for their effectiveness on a public appeal to a roughly just constitution. A society rigged by class injustice, where the interests of a few wealthy citizens shape the dominant rules of social cooperation, is clearly not a well-ordered society. Indeed, Edmundson reminds us that it is not even a “decent” society like the one Rawls mentions as a contrasting model in one of his later books, The Law of Peoples, to describe the structure of government oriented by a decent consultation hierarchy. Welfare-state capitalism is what Edmundson calls “a badly ordered society,” and a badly ordered society is one that lacks a just constitution, that lacks reciprocally acceptable criteria that shape its sense of justice, and where the strictures of public reason are inapplicable because the “public” in public reason is never institutionalized.
i like this
Put simply, a poor person has not been allocated the stuff (or the ability to buy it) that a rich person has. The needs of the rich and poor are met and unmet in wildly different ways: the potential to fully articulate their humanity is cut off at the root for some, while others are granted space to flourish. Inequality limits what a person, and indeed society, could otherwise do; it delimits our freedom. Past generations have fought to expand the realm of freedom—to ensure all adult humans have the same rights and to ensure that any new capabilities delivered through technological advance are to be made available to all. And if we are to continue this battle to correct the titanic, manifest unfairness of the way things are, we must therefore wage a struggle over which method for the allocation of things we want as a society.
The technique, a type of vendor-managed inventory, works to minimize what businesses call the “bullwhip effect,” the free market’s kissing cousin to Stalinism’s shortage problem. First identified in 1961, the bullwhip effect describes the phenomenon of increasingly wild swings in mismatched inventories against product demand the further one moves along the supply chain toward the producer, ultimately extending to the company’s extraction of raw materials. Therein, any slight change in customer demand reveals a discord between what the store has and what the customers want, meaning there is either too much stock or too little.
To illustrate the bullwhip effect, let’s consider the “too-little” case (although the phenomenon works identically in either scenario). The store readjusts its orders from the distributor to meet the increase in customer demand. But by this time, the distributor has already bought a certain amount of supply from the wholesaler, and so it has to readjust its own orders from the wholesaler—and so on, through to the manufacturer and the producer of the raw materials. Because customer demand is often fickle and its prediction involves some inaccuracy, businesses will carry an inventory buffer called “safety stock.” Moving up the chain, each node will observe greater fluctuations, and thus greater requirements for safety stock. One analysis performed in the 1990s assessed the scale of the problem to be considerable: a fluctuation at the customer end of just 5 percent (up or down) will be interpreted by other supply chain participants as a shift in demand of up to 40 percent.
like the butterfly effect but for supply chains i guess
But there’s a catch—a big one for those who defend the market as the optimal mechanism for allocation of resources: the bullwhip effect is, in principle, eliminated if all orders match demand perfectly for any period. And the greater the transparency of information throughout the supply chain, the closer this result comes to being achieved. Thus, planning, and above all trust, openness and cooperation along the supply chain—rather than competition—are fundamental to continuous replacement. This is not the “kumbaya” analysis of two socialist writers; even the most hard-hearted commerce researchers and company directors argue that a prerequisite of successful supply chain management is that all participants in the chain recognize that they all will gain more by cooperating as a trusting, information-sharing whole than they will as competitors.
[...] Too often we confuse the violence of despots with what makes despotism wrong. But much of this violence is a grotesque tool to enforce submission. It is this unfreedom—unchallengeable control of a human by another—that is the worst crime.
The manager’s exercise of central planning over his small province of tyranny is therefore not simply a better means to an end, as Coase thought, but a reflection of how the economy actually works. The adversarial relationship between bosses and workers that capitalism creates is no accident of markets merely introducing transaction costs that are best avoided through planning. Yet for mainstream economists, the confrontation between workers and managers only comes up in the context of “shirking.” The GPS device in the UPS driver’s truck, the call center badge that monitors washroom breaks or the white-collar worker’s app that tracks web browsing history are the sticks requiring one does as one is told; the bonuses are the carrots.
Shirking, however, is a very rational response for someone who has little or no say over their work, often has no deeper sense of collective responsibility and knows that the profit from what they do ends up in someone else’s pocket. Shirking is not an innate tendency toward laziness, but rather the way people are under capitalism. Any complex society will have people with different, sometimes-conflicting interests who need to cooperate toward common goals. Humans have embarked upon and accomplished projects in common, from the mundane to the spectacularly ambitious, long before the advent of capitalism and its subtly coercive labor market—indeed, often involving much more explicit coercion. Across history, however, people have also found ways to plan and act together without bosses to tell them what to do.
[...] Instead of optimizing the satisfaction of our needs and desires, as well as workers’ working conditions and livelihoods, Amazon’s plans are geared toward maximizing profit for its shareholders—or future profit, since Amazon keeps plowing money from sales into research, IT and physical infrastructure to squeeze out competitors. Planning for profit is in fact an example of capitalism’s web of allocation inefficiencies. The planning technologies dreamed up by Amazon’s engineers are a way of meeting a skewed set of social needs—one that ends up enriching a few, misusing substantial free social labor, and degrading workers. A democratized economy for the benefit of all will also need institutions that learn about people’s interests and desires, optimize via IT systems, and plan complex distribution networks; but they will look different, perhaps alien to the systems we have today, and they will strive toward dissimilar goals.