by
Jason Hickel
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[...] The mobility of liquid capital is too perfect, while that of labour and fixed capital is not perfect enough.
think about this some more--some parallels to Mervyn King's theory of a mismatch between bank lending & deposits?
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.
[...] To me, poetry and thought are a system of communicating vessels. The source of both is my life. I write about what I have lived and am living. To live is also to think, and sometimes to cross that border beyond which feeling and thinking become one: poetry. Meanwhile, the pages on which I had scrawled my notes in India turned yellow, and a number of them were lost in moves to new quarters and in my travels. I abandoned the idea of writing the book.
PERCEPTIBLE REALITY HAS ALWAYS BEEN A SOURCE of surprises to me. Of proofs as well. In a long-ago article, written in 1940, I referred to poetry as “the testimony of the senses”. True testimony: its images are palpable, visible and audible. To be sure, poetry is made up of words linked together, which give off reflections, glints, iridescences. But what it shows us, are they realities or illusions? Rimbaud said: “Et j’ai quelquefois vu / ce que l’homme a cru voir” (And I sometimes saw / what man believed he saw). Fusion of seeing and believing. In the joining of these two words lies the secret of poetry and its testimony: what the poem shows us we do not see with our carnal eyes but with the eyes of the spirit. Poetry lets us touch the impalpable and hear the tide of silence that covers a landscape devastated by insomnia. Poetic testimony reveals to us another world inside this world, the other world that is this world. The senses, without losing their powers, become servants of the imagination and let us hear the inaudible and see the invisible. But isn’t this what happens in dreams and in the erotic encounter? When we dream and when we couple, we embrace phantoms. Each of the two who constitute the couple possesses a body, a face and a name, but their real reality, precisely at the most intense moment of the embrace, disperses in a cascade of sensation which disperses in turn. There is a question that all lovers ask each other, and in it the erotic mystery is epitomized: Who are you? A question without an answer … The senses are and are not of this world. By means of them, poetry traces a bridge between seeing and believing. By that bridge, imagination is embodied and bodies turn into images.
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