Value of Nothing
22. Polanyi's double movement. "History shows that the cure cannot come from government alone, but requires change from within market society. As Polanyi makes clear, the birth of the free market required a great deal of violence, but he also observed something else: People fought back. The Speenhamland laws were introduced because of the anger of a rural public suffering the rapacity of enclosure. Poor laws are not an example of how self-regulating markets turn new things into stuff that might be bought and sold--they are a response to society's demands in the age of self-regulating markets. Polanyi showed how people fought back 'against' the expanding market. In this back and forth, Speenhamland provided an example of what Polanyi called the double movement. On the one hand, transforming land and labor into things that might be bought and sold required widespread disenfranchisement--this is the first movement. The second movement is a response from society, which seeks to heal the wounds that the self-regulating market has inflicted. And both these movements happen within the framework of the market society.
Although the relative strength of movement and countermovement varies, this isn't a tug-of-war between markets pulling society forward into the future, and countermovements yanking it back into the past. Countermovements are built out of the politics that people have to hand, and with those politics and associations, entirely new institutions are built like the New Deal in the United States, or the welfare state in Europe. Social change, according to Polanyi's model, isn't a one-step-forward-one-step-back process, a sort of collective Charleston where, after a lot of motion, you end up where you started. It's more like an infinite symphony, with one movement building from the previous one."
26. John Stewart Mill. Gary Becker. 'The Economic Approach to Human Behavior'. Chicago School.
29. Dan Ariely's 'Predictably Irrational'. "In many North American indigenous cultures, generosity is a central behavior in a broader social and economic system. One anecdotal account examined what happened when boys from white and Lakota communities received a pair of lollipops each. Both sets of boys put the first one straight in their mouths. The white boys put the second one in their pockets, while the Native American boys presented it to the nearest boy who didn't have one. Its not surprising to see the culture shape how resources are accumulated and distributed, and dictate the social priority of saving over sharing, but the experiment also reminds us that the opposite of sunsumption isn't thrift--it's generosity."
29. 'Economists Free Ride, Does Anyone Else?' The Public Goods Game. The game works like this: I give you (and many other people) a fistful of tokens, and tell you that you have to choose between two ways of investing them. You can invest some (or all) of them in my bank, in which case you'll get a guaranteed rate of a penny per token. Or you can invest some (or all) in a community bank. The community bank belongs to everyone, regardless of whether you invested in it, and the more that is put in the pot, the bigger the payout for everyone. It doesn't take many tokens in the pot for the payout to everyone to be bigger than a penny per token. The collectively rational outcome is for everyone to put 100 percent into the chest, but for any individual, the rational decision would be to hope that everyone else puts in 100 percent while you put in 0 percent--which means you get the collective payout and the penny per token from your investment in the individual bank account. When high school students in Wisconsin played the game, they didn't behave like 'Homo economicus' and put in 0 percent--instead, they put in 42 percent. The experimenters varied everything from amount that people put in remained roughly the same. They did it with a general group of college student, and the results were similar. With every possible permutation they could think of, there was only one time that the coorperation rate fell to 20 percent--and that['s] when the game was played by first-year economics graduate students."
31. Ultimatum Game. Most people split the deal halfway or keep 60 percent and give away 40 percent. "The residents of an island in eastern Indonesia, the Lamalera whale hunters, played the game with cigarettes instead of money, to avoid the appearance of gambling, and the player with the cigarettes on average kept 43 percent and gave away 57 percent. The researchers suggested that this was because the experiment reflected patterns of sharing and fairness in wider Lamalera society, where hunting whales is a cooperative village-level effort. When a whale is killed, the rituals of fairly dividing it are always scrupulously followed."
"When the game was played in the jungles of southeastern Peru, where the Machiguenga practice seminomadic horticulture, they cooperated a great deal less, with the majority of people giving either 25 percent or 15 percent of the spoils and keeping the rest. Again, this behavior is attributed to a social structure that offered very little reward for cooperation"
32. Jorge Moll. "Human Fronto-Mesolimbic Networks Guide Decisions About Charitable Donation". "Those who took the money lit up the part of their brains associated with food and sex, and those who gave the money away lit up an entirely different part of the brain--to do with attachment and bonding."
32. Frans de Waal. "Research with coyotes, for example, reveals that members of the pack who refuse to be a part of the social group are more likely to leave the pack, and face a 55 percent mortality rate, while those who stay face a 20 percent mortality rate. Further proof that we're not hardwired egotists comes from our closest evolutionary cousins--primates. One of the pioneers of this area of reearch, Frans de Waal, has observed chimpanzees' interactions, trading in multiple "currencies" and exchanging grooming for food or other favors. The chimpanzees were well able to keep track of who had done what to whom, giving and taking fairly. To quote de Waal, "In humans, this psychological mechanism is known as 'gratitude,' and there is no reason to call it anything else in chimpanzees." Gratitude isn't a characteristic of 'Homo economicus'."
"Tests with capuchin monkeys and chimpanzees involved giving tokens to two monkeys. One monkey exchanges the token for a high-value reward--a grape--while the other monkey, the experiment's subject, watches. Immediately afterward, the subject is given a less desirable reward for its token--a cucumber. If they were given the same thing as their partners, capuchin monkey subjects and chimpanzee subjects would behave as utility-maximizing agents, trading their tokens. But if they were treated unfairly, they often refused to complete the transaction, even if they'd have been better off.
Moreover, when the partner monkey was given things "free," without any trade, the subject capuchin monkeys (though not, interestingly, chimpanzees) were even more likely to walk away from the deal. So what does this show? That capuchin monkeys are happy to cooperate, but what seems to aggravate them is unfairness--either in rewards (the difference between grapes and cucumbers) or in behavior (no effort versus having to swap for a token). In tests with groups of chimps who had lived together the longest, they behaved most communally. The slower and possibly more deliberative the chimps were, the more they reacted to inequality. In other words, the most basic childhood playground calls of "That's not fair!" are ones that we share with our closest animal relatives. This "inequity aversion," as it's called by researchers, can even be seen in dogs.
Chimpanzees also punish one another for breaching trust. A chimp who betrays another can expect some sort of retaliation, from denial of food all the way up to a hefty smack in the face. The use of punishment to condemn uncooperative behavior is a fundamental building block of fairness, and a way that society is regulated among chimpanzees.
Humans have an advantage over chimpanzees because we have not only the possibility of punishment, but the quality of mercy too. A particularly striking set of experiments demonstrates this by asking you to put some money for me in an account. The sum grows, and you can then choose how much I should give back to you, threatening me the option of a fine if I do not cooperate. When you don't threaten me with a fine, I tend to give more money than I would if there were the possibility of a fine. So, having the ability to punish but choosing not to increases cooperation and trust. "
35. "12,000 incoming freshmen from twenty-one select colleges in the United States took part in a survey in 1976 that included questions about their financial goals and life satisfaction in a number of areas. They were surveyed again in 1995. Those who placed more importance on money in 1976 were less satisfied in 1995. Another survey, of 266 business students, found the same thing: The greater importance a person placed on money, the lower their reported level of well-being. The greatest negative impacts were among those respondents whose motivation for earning money was to alleviate feelings of self-doubt.
At an international level, one of the most important pieces of research on money and happiness is called the Easterlin paradox, named after economist Richard Easterlin. In a 1974 article, he found that people with higher-than-average incomes reported being happier than their poorer counterparts. No big surprise there, but he also found that once a country had moved beyond a level of income where basic needs for housing, food, water and energy could be met, average happiness did not increase. The paradox, in other words, is that after a certain point, more money doesn't make us happier. Instead, we find ourselves on a hedonic treadmill, in which happiness is about matching our level of consumption with our peers, and when they do better and we don't, even if we are better in absolute terms, we are less happy.
More recent data suggests that while it is possible for a nation to increase its average happiness, the cost of doing so is very high. After reaching the level of sufficient income to meet basic needs, happiness becomes geometrically linked to income. So to go from one to two units of happiness might take ten dollars, but after hitting the point at which our basic needs are met, to go from two to three units of happiness would take one hundred dollars, from three to four would take one thousand dollars, and so on."
Increasing income gap in the US. "...between 1979 and 2005, posttax income for the top 1 percent increased by nearly 200 percent, while for the poorest fifth of the population, it went up by 6 percent. More and more wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few, whose lifestyles are glorified by the media, which means that the expectations of the majority have become increasingly beyond their means."
37. Positional goods. "...the kinds of goods that reflect your social status back to you and to society--is why rising inequality makes the majority of people less happy. Worse, this inequality is rising internationally, which might explain the recent rise in crime in Bhutan--once the world's happiest nation. The steep dive in the country's gross national happiness, an index of how well its people are doing, independent of what they earn, coincided with the importation of satellite television by the new Oxford-educated king of Bhutan. Television's images of impossibe lifestyles, body shapes, clothes and accessories have resulted in not only a deep resentment but a crime wave, as young people steal in order to afford the trinkets sold on Rupert Murdoch's Star Network. TV presents a world unattainable to the majority of people both in the United States and Bhutan and, in seeking to recover their happiness, the youth have gone shoplifting."
"The New Economics Foundation in the United Kingdom has published a rich set of data under the rubric of "national well-being" that looks at everything from personal feelings of happiness and vitality to supportive social relations. In European rankings, Denmark come out on top almost every time. Britain comes thirteenth out of the twenty-two, just ahead of France.
38. "These indices are attempts to capture the elusive notion of the good life, what the ancient Greeks called 'eudaimonia', in which happiness is linked to human flourishing, rather than cash. There is a branch of psychology that urges us to think of happiness as a byproduct of something deeper--psychological well-being. The more psychological well-being we have, the more happiness we produce. Generosity and altruism are ways of building that repository of well-being, but they also have the benefit of creating happiness in the short run too. This hypothesis helps to explain a problem in the field of happiness studies right now--what happens when happiness is not acquired by receiving money, but by giving it away. One experiment, performed with all sorts of controls, showed that.
1. generosity doesn't directly lead to happiness, and
2. happiness doesn't cause generosity;
3. being rich doesn't cause generosity or happiness, but
4. psychological well-being is a source for both generosity and happiness.
There's a paradox here, one that John Stuart Mill understood well. To be happy, you need to forget to try to be happy:
"Those only are happy (I thought) who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness, on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the way. "
What Mill understood, and Becker seems not to, is the richer human experience that is destroyed if we try to live as 'Homo economicus', the bonds that rely on their 'not' being treated as the fodder for markets and maximization. Becker's analysis and policy is a vector for Anton's blindness--yet it is pervasive, and it is so for a reason beyond its analytical tidiness. The applications of his method are not innocent--his parsimony is political. Invariably, it supports policies that favor the powerful, whether rationalizing the persistence of economic monopoly, patriarchy or trade in body parts."
39. "The global life insurance industry today is worth over $2 trillion, but it was once a practice widely banned in Europe, and one which only overcame the moral stigma of "cash for dead" after the 1840s in the United States."
46. Desertification. 18.1 percent of China's formerly productive lands are now deserts and drifting sand. World Bank estimated desertification will cost $31 billion a year.
52. Rudyard Kipling in 'American Notes' : "I was absolutely alone in this big city of white folk. By instinct I sought refreshment and came upon a bar-room full of bad Salon pictures in which men with hats on the backs of their heads were wolfing food from a counter. It was the instituion of the "free lunch" I had struck. You paid for a drink and got as much as you wanted to eat. For something less than a rupee a day a man can feed himself sumptuously in San Francisco, even though he be a bankrupt. Remember this if ever you are stranded in these parts."
53. Richard McKenzie. 'Why Popcorn Costs So Much at the Movies'. In regard to a free printer with the computer. "He knew that the manufacturer would make its money back on expensive cartriges, so when the printer ran out of ink, he did the rationalthing--he threw it away."
54. Coltan. "In 2009, the cell phone company Nokia posted profit of 12.7 billion [euros] sales, with a dividend over 20 percent higher than in the previous year. To make its phones, as makers of electronic equipment the world over do, it uses mineral extracted from bloody conflict in the Congo, where 70 percent of the world's reserves of coltan are found. Coltan is the source of niobium and tantalum, used to make the capacitors at the heart of most portable electronic gadgetry. In patrolling access to these resources, military units in the Congo have raped, tortured, enslaved and killed. Women struggling to bring up children in the Congo have a life expectancy of forty-seven years, continue to suffer through the world's worst rape epidemic and earn just over half what men do--$191 per year. This happens whether coltan prices are high or low, but with prices down at the moment, workers in the coltan mines now have to work much harder to be able to earn the same amount that they did in the boom years. These are the bloody externalities of electronics in general."
59. "The French sociologist Marcel Mauss wrote 'The Gift' to explore the complex social relations that surround the acts of giving and receiving. He concluded that, in sociology as in economics, there's rarely anything that comes free from expectation of reciprocity and respect. Under market society, the social bonds of exchange fall under the sign of profit. When it comes to free baby-milk powder, the rules and culture of exchange are written by corporations, those fictional "legal people" who seek profit wherever they can. For these entities, "free" is a bet, with odds and a degree of unpredictability, but one thing is certain. Whether something is free or costs $100 million, it will share the same features that arise from the profit-driven markets that make the goods possible in the first place. The blood on our cell phones suggests that there are wider externalities in the everyday cut and thrust of modern consumer capitalism, and those costs are ones that are generated through the normal daily operation of the way marketsociety values the world."
61. John Keynes: "Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone."
"Over 1.4 million Ayn Rand's books have been given away to American high schools by the institute that bears her name--the books are free to any teacher prepared to make their students suffer them. Her work is taught as a sort of Adam Smith Lite, an entry-level text in support of the free market that finds its most articulate and subtle formulations in the works of the great Scottish philosopher. This is unfair to Smith.
While Rand spun tedious rationalizations for selfish behavior, Smith was very far from a praise-singer for unfettered markets. The term with which his name is most singularly associated, "the invisible hand," appears just once in 'The Wealth of Nations', When it does, it isn't used to describe the beneficent effect of free markets at all. The invisible hand is the guiding force that makes Scottish investors behave parochially, preferring to put their money into the Scottish economy rather than investing abroad. By investing in their local economy, investors get a return, of course, but so does the society in which they invest and, because they live there, investors enjoy the economic stimulus too. This is the beneficial yet unintended consequence of investors' selfish motives, and it only come about because of a preference for domestic over international investment. Not exactly the policy that people who quote Smith are usually in the business advocating when they talk about the invisible hand."
62. Adam Smith on diamonds and water / exchange and use value: "The word value...has two different meanings, and sometimes expresses the utility of some particular object, and sometimes the power of purchasing other goods which the possession of that object conveys. The one may be called "value in use"; the other, "value in exchange." The things which have the greatest value in use have frequently little or no value in exchange; and, on the contrary, those which have the greatest value in exchange have frequently little or no value in use. Nothing is more useful than water; but it will scarce purchase anything; scarce anything can be had in exchange for it. A diamond, on the contrary, has scarce any value in use; but a very great quantity of other goods may frequently be had in exchange for it."
63. Theory of price in 19th century by British William Stanley Jevons, the Austrian Carl Menger and the Swiss Leon Walras. "...equiped with the latest in physics and mathematics, then solved the problem of value by understanding it as a question about prices. They did it by looking at the margin, at what happens when you add an extra unit of something to the market. They were able to show how and why prices look the way they do because water is relatively abundant and diamonds scarce.
The value of diamonds or anything else in neoclassical economics is a measure of what would be given up in order to obtain them. As the value of something is measured through exchange, you an't tell the value of something just by looking at it, or knowing how much it cost to make, or the good that it might do you. According to the neoclassicals, to find its value you have to trade it--that's the only way that our individual preferences can enter the public language of commerce.
This is how the paradox of something vital being cheap, but something unnecessary being expensive, is explained. What is omitted in this version, however, is that no one seriously thought there 'was' a paradox until the late nineteenth century. The diamond and water conundrum was popularized by a post-World War II textbook written by economist Paul Samuelson. The culture of free markets needed a bible, and Samuelson's 1948 'Economics' provided just the right sort of revisionist history. It ignored the face that Adam Smith understood very well why diamonds were more expensive than water. In his 1762 'Lectures on Jurisprudence', he put it rather plainly:
"For these terms plenty and cheapness are in a manner synonymous, as cheapness is a necessary consequence of plenty. Thus we see that water, which is absolutely necessary for the support of mankind, by its abundance costs nothing but the uptaking, whereas diamonds and other jewels, of which one can hardly say what they serve for, give an immense price."
64. "Smith's idea of use value is best understood not as an unseccessful attempt to develop a theory of marginal utility so much as a technique for looking behind the scenes to explain why economic activity looked the way that it did at a more fundamental level. To separate out the superficial world from this deeper reality, Smith introduces a distinction between what we pay and thing's "real price." For Smith to get from market price ot the real one required time and effort: [p65.]
"The real price of every thing, what every thing really coss to the man who want to acquire it, is the toil and trouble of acquiring it. What every thing is really worth to the man who has acquired it, and who wants to dispose of it or exchange it for something else, is the toil and trouble which it can save to himself, and which it can impose upon other people."
Smith grappled with the links between value, labor and wages. In his view, the yardstick of the real value of everything was the trouble that went into making it:
"Labour alone, therefore, never varying in its own value, is alone the ultimate and real standard by which the value of all commodities can at all times and places be estimated and compared. It is their real price; money is thier nominal price only."
He thought that the reason that some jobs were better paid was simply because some people were more willing to suffer the loss of nonmonetary goods. The reason a park keeper makes less than a stockbroker is because the broker doesn't get to spend the days walking in the woods. Smith thought that wages would tend toward equality in the long run, with minor discrepancies relating to the amount of time people could take for holidays and compensating for the unpleasantness of the job. By this calculus, people who work in sewers at night ought to be billionaires. For Smith, the fact that the world clearly didn't work like this signaled that something was wrong with the economy, something systemic, something that distorted what different groups of people received for their work."
66. Marx's theory of labor value. "Karl Marx agreed with Smith that time and effort were central to the production of goods, but he went one better, unpicking how that time and effort mattered through "the labor theory of value." Let's pretend that you are an ace short-order cook, and you can flip two hundred hamburgers an hour. I, a lapsed Hindu with beef issues, might be able to cook twenty in an hour. Does that mean that mine are ten times more valuable than yours? A simple labor theory of value would say yes, but Marx pointed out why the answer is clearly no. Very simply, yours is the normal industry rate of productivity, and I'm a laggard. The way Marx talks about this is through the idea of the "socially necessary" labor time--my hamburger flipping takes far longer than the socially necessary time, the time that's normal in an industry. The word "social" here implies that it's never "natural" but, rather, the outcome of a great deal of human invention, politics and power."
67. Surplus value. "Any value beyond that which it takes to replenish the laborer's ability to work goes to the person who hired her. Marx calls this the "surplus value," and this is the ultimate source of profit."
Capitalism. "From this little dance--in the exchange of work for money, and money for commodities--Marx pulls a description of capitalism. Capital isn't just money--a chest of banknotes isn't capital. Capital is the 'process' of transofrming money into commodities the can be sold for more than the wages paid to the workers and the costs of machines and materials, to make a profit. The capital that is generated from this process has taken on a life of its own, as financial capital
As definitions go, it's not bad. It points to the constant process of growth and expansion that capitalism needs to sustain itself. It suggests why 'Homo economicus' is the perpetually ravenous creature of such an economy. It also points to a central inequaity in power, between those who control capital and those who have nothing to sell but their labor. In other words, the definition binds together ideas of power, ownership, work and--crucially--profit. These ideas prove useful in understanding not only the conundrum of value, but also how we might start to unlimit ourselves by restraining profit-driven markets.
It's not by labor alone that value is created. Another route through which profits might be expanded is by having to pay less to workers. The cheaper it is for workers to survive and reproduce, the better for profits. While it is beyond the means of any single capitalist to lower the price of labor power, it is something that they together can fight for collectively, as we shall see. To reproduce workers requires more than making babies: It's a long process of child-rearing, feeding, clothing, housing, educating, socializing and disciplining, and the costs of this are the source of perhaps the most fundamental misvaluation, worldwide--the market's treatment of women's work in the home. The daily work of rearing children, maintaining a household and engaging in civic work--the unpaid slabs of work that feminists have called "women's triple burden"--remains unpriced worldwide. Were all unpaid work to be remunerated, the sum was estimated in 1995 to be $16 trillian... Of that, $11 trillion represented women's unpaid work. That's $15 trillian in 2007 dollars. Back in 1995, this was more than half of the world's total output. What's worse, this miscalculation isn't innocent. It's 'because' this reproductive work has been naturalized as women's work, and because women's work is unpaid, that there can be such a large paid economy. Because their work is uncounted, women appear to have "free" time, time that is used by development agencies to explain why women are able to "burden share," to pick up some of the slack where public services fail. This sexism spreads to the wage economy too--according to the International Labour Organization, women in most countries earn between 70 and 90 percent what men earn for the same work, though in some places, particularly in Asia, that figure is lower."
68. Enclosure. There's a final route through which profit might be created, one that doesn't involve labor: enclosure. Polanyi's observations about the creation of market society aren't mere historical curiosities. Geographer David Harvey has written about how the capitalist search for new resources to privatize generates its own maps of crises. When a national forest is sold for timber, biodiversity is put under patent or mineral rights are auctioned off, there's an enclosing, a privatizing of that resource that allows someone to profit from it at public expense.
71. Theory of interest. "...Keynes argues that "the rate of interest is a highly psychological phenomenon," because the interest rate is the price for money, the demand for which is save to the individual psychologies of entrepreneurs. When entrepreneurs consider how to invest, they need to evaluate not their own opinion on the best return, but everyone else's opinion too. This is how Keynes describes the process:
"Professional investment may be likened to those newspaper competitions in which the competitors have to pick out the six prettiest faces from a hundred photographs, the prize being awarded to the competitor whose choice most nearly corresponds to the average preferences of the competitors as a whole; so that each competitor has to pick, not those face which he himself finds prettiest, but those which he thinks likeliest to catch the fancy of the other competitors, all of whom are looking at the problem from the same point of view. It is not a case of choosing those which, to the best of one's judment, are really the prettiest, nor even those which average opinion genuinely thinks the prettiest."
Keynes found one nation particularly worth of mention in this pursuit:
"Even outside the field of finance, Americans are apt to be unduly interested in discovering what average opinion believes average opinion to be; and this national weakness finds its nemesis in the stock market."
72. "Keynes was, among other things, a sociologist of the market, and his understanding of collective psychology led him to his next insight--that in times of depression, the personal virtue of saving could be come the public vice of deflation. The solution, suggested Keynes, is for the government to fill in for private enterprise until it gets its nerve back, by stimulating demand 'as a whole'.
The trickiest part of this to understand is that no matter what government does, as long as it spends, the economy will pick up. Keynes suggested, rhetorically, that if they lacked the imagination for anything more creative, governments could simply bury bottle of money under tons of trash, and that this would help get the economy going. It may sound bizarre, but it would certainly be worth someone's while to dig up free money. To find these banknotes would require workers. Those workers would need to pay for food and shelter and everything else they needed to survive while they dug. The grocers who fed them and the landlords who rented to the workers would then have cash to spend, which they would use to buy other goods, and so on. This is called the "multiplier effect," and it's the added return that a government gets from spending its money in the economy. The beneficial effects are greater among lower-income communities than high-income ones, because giving money to people who already have a lot of it won't make them spend more, whereas giving money to those who have none means that the cash will be spent immediately. This is why a tax cut for the rich is an absurd idea (according to one economist, making the Bush tax cut permanent has a multiplier effect of 0.23), while one of the most effective ways for the U.S. government to stimulate the economy is through food stamps (with a multiplier effect of 1.73)
It is his analysis of animal spirits and the possibilities of public spending that have made Keynes the economist of the moment. He shows why the free market needs governments to kick-start the economy, because there's something missing from the economy that money can't buy but that governments can substitute for--confidence. He also brings in a factor that the original political economists ignored--not only can people be motivated by the profit motive, but they can be irrational while doing it, and that irrationality can be magnified by finance capital.
To remedy this, Keynes saw a special role for government in economic management, fixing the collective mistakes that no one individual was able to address alone. It is under this banner that governments worldwide have made trillions of dollars available to the banking system, as well as promising "stimulus" to the economy, so that money can start once again to flow, so that employment might once again increase."
"Corporations are powerful--they constitute two-thirds of the 150 largest economic entities in the world--but it is governments that shape the terrain on which they operate, and it is time to see quite how they fit into market society."
75. Government regulation. "In a 2008 survey covering 60 percent of the world and involving 50,000 people, 81 percent of people felt that governments should be in the business of preventing disscrimination against women, 87 percent fel that governments should provide food to the hungry (the two countries with the lowest percentages being India at 70 percent and the United States at 74 percent), 92 percent wanted government provided health care (again, with India and the United States being the least enthusiastic) and 91 percent wanted public education (with India at 64 percent, Egypt at 77 percent and then the United States at 83 percent)."
76. Preventing malaria via mosquito nets with repellant at $6 each given by the World Health Organization found to be 70% effective at preventing mosquito bites.
78. Military Industrial Complex. "Defense is one of the very few places where free marketers will acknowledge some role for government, but military spending is also a poster child for the kind of corruption that happens when public and private sectors collide. U.S. president and former general Dwight D. Eisenhower's final public words in office were a warning that we should remain vigilant against "the military-industrial complex." He added, "The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.
Eisenhower was right to be worried. He saw how the spirit of capitalism could hijack government, by using public money to line private pockets while using democratic institutions to camouflage the crime. The unpopular wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, together with dozens of ongoing counterinsurgencies and hundreds of "training" operations, reveal that the military-industrial complex is not subject to public control. Only now is it being mooted that private military contractors be held responsible for their actions in Iraq, and it looks unlikely that the architects and profiteers from this war will ever be held responsible for their actions, despite their being part of a governmental, and hence notionally democratic, enterprise. Firms like Xe, pronounced "Zee," but actually pronounced "Blackwater"--the infamous security company renamed itself in February 2009--have not only insinuated themselves into Iraq and Afghanistan, but were even hired to patrol the streets after Hurricane Katrina.
The vicious logic of privatized security consumes both the Global North and the Global South. In the midst of recessionary cutbacks, defense is one of the government line items that has continued to expand. In 2008 nearly $1.5 trillion dollars were spent on defense worldwide. To borrow a trick from the brilliant essayist John Lanchester, if you were to count at a dollar per second, it'd take twelve days to count a million, thirty-one years to count a billion, and for a trillion, a thousand-fold more, it'd take six times all recorded history. Nick Turse points out that the figures declared by ministries or departments of defense tend to be lower than the grand totals across all government agencies: Adding up all defense spending in the public sector, the U.S. government alone plows over $1 trillion into its military. Defense spending is increasing among a range of more and less democratically elected governments around the world (though none at the scale of the United States, which spends almost half of the planet's total). In France, domestic arms purchases are scheduled to double in 2009, while in the same year China's military budget is up 15 percent and India's is up 34 percent. When the biggest crises facing the planet require education, training, health care and investment in sustainable energy and agricultue, governments are piling record sums into guns, not butter. "
80. In regard to state sanctioned monopoly, Adam Smith: "The directors of such [joint-stock] companies, however, being the managers rather of other people's money than of their own, it cannot well be expected that they should watch over it with the same anxious vigilance with which the partners in a private copartnery frequently watch over their own. . . .Negligence and profusion, therefore, must always prevail, more or less, in the management of the affairs of such a company."
81. Smith divides the world into laborers, landlords, and merchants. Smith again: "The interest of [those who live off profit], however. . . is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public. To widen the market and to narrow the competition, is always the interest of the dealers. To widen the market may frequently be agreeable enough to the interest of the public; but to narrow the competition must always be against it, and can serve only to enable the dealers, by raising their profits above what they naturally would be, to levy, for their own benefit, an absurd tax upon the rest of their fellow-citizens. The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order, ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it."
82. "Alexander Hamilton, the first U.S. treasury secretary, wrote in 'Federalist' No. 35 that: "mechanics and manufacturers will always be inclined, with few exceptions, to give their votes to merchants, in preference to persons of their own professions or trades. . . . They know that the merchant is their natural patron and friend; and they are aware that however great the confidence they may justly feel in their own good sense, their interests can be more effectually promoted by the merchant than by themselves. . . . We must therefore consider merchants as the natural representatives of all these classes of the community."
84 "Corporations paid less than a quarter of all federal income tax (with flesh-and-blood people paying the remaining 76 percent) and the Internal Revenue Service now audits millionaires at just half the rate they did even in 2007. After conducting his own internal audit, Warren Buffett discovered that he pays a far smaller percentage of his income in taxes than the secretaries and clerks in his office. "There's class warfare, all right," Buffett said, "but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning."
"The great French historian Fernand Braudel distilled this process of government capture by corporations and the rich, using a three-layer cake to show how the economy and the government really function together. At the bottom is the timeless work of survival, with which everyone struggles daily. Above that "comes the favoured terrain of the market economy, with its many horizontal communications between the different markets: here a degree of automatic coordination usually links supply, demand and prices. Then alongside, or rather above this layer, come the zone of the antimarket, where the great predators roam and the law of the jungle operates. This--today as in the past, before and after the industrial revolution--is the real home of capitalism." In other words, corporate capitalism runs anathema to proper free exchange."
85. Change wanted. "In one international survey, 63 percent of people thought that their governments were run in the service of "big interests" as opposed to the 30 percent who thought governments served the will of the people. In almost every country, those polled wanted their governments to behave in ways that were more responsive to the people. An international survey of more than 29,000 people undertaken by the BBC revealed that two out of three respondents said that there was a need to transform the international and domestic economic systems."
92. Garrett Hardin 1968 Science article. "tragedy of the commons". victimized the poor and called for depopulation.
93. "Every indicator in the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, an exercise involving 1,360 scientists over five years in an international effort to measure humanity's impact on the natural world, shows that we're destroying the planet.
94. "There's more than enough food on earth today to feed the world one and a half times over."
96. In regard to Pakistani fishing villagers forced into mass production factories. "The Pakistani proverb "When all else fails, the sea will provide" remains partly true. Even though fisheries are on a sharp decline, they continue to provide--but who they provide for is changing. Pakistan's fisheries collapses, the industrial trawlers will simply move to more lucrative and profitable waters. Pakistan's traditional fishing families, however are not so free."
98. Magna Carta. Charter of the Forest. "Although largely forgotten today, the Charter of the Forest guaranteed the ability of commoners to access pasture for their animals, to till land, to collect wood, harvest honey, use medicinal plants, forage and so on. Peter Linebaugh, who has done more than any other contemporary historian to recover the history of this charter, observes in 'The Magna Carta Manifesto' that a commons right guaranteed freedoms in perpetuity over local resources for everyone. This did not mean that everyone could take as much as they wanted. To have a commons isn't to license a free-for-all, as Hardin suggests, and it is not what happened historically. The precise shape of commoning was negotiated in a particular place and time, dependent on the ecology and the community. Common rights evolved over time, shaped by the relative power of those around the table, as well as the changing geography ofthe physical commons itself. The commons was, in other words, both a place a "process of freedom," in which people fought for the right to shape the terms on which they could share the commons.
Its important not to romanticize the idea. Commoning did not take place in some protodemocratic Eden where everyone got a fair and equal say. The commons were an ongoing battlefield between lords and their serfs, but it was on which the poor had won some victories, and had managed to stake a claim to public space in defiance of those who oppressed them. The Magna Carta itself represented a line in the sand, a negotiated end to the rapacity of King John of England who, in order to bankroll both a crusade and a war in France, had committed all manner of crimes. He taxed barons, stole forests, took children hostage and even sold his first wife, Isabella of Gloucester, to the Earl of Essex for twenty thousand marks. The barons rebelled. In 1215, they marched into London, where they were met with open gates, a mark of the City's approval. They confronted the king, and negotiated hard. The Magna Carta certainly included demands made by the barons, merchants and the well-to-do in London, but it also included a strong set of protections of common rights, providing common access to the food, fuel, freedom and fruits of the forest provided for common people, returning to the public the natural resources that King John had taken for himself. This is the commons that historians have pointed to in rejection of Hardin's arguments. Contrary to the prediction, people figured out how to manage and maintain access to a scarce resource, despite the desire of kings and nobles to privatize it. If one's looking to affix the word "tragedy" to the commons, the nightmare did not begin with the creation of the commons, but with the process of its destruction, the process under which it was taken under private ownership. "
100. A history of inclosure. "Sometimes piecemeal, sometimes sweeping (as with Henry VIII's 1536 dissolution of monasteries), enclosure was the process by which land was once again taken out of public hands. Surveyors would use their chains, known as the devil's guts, to rope off areas of common land and formally assign title to a single individual. Not only fields, but forest and water were similarly enclosed--with lords preventing access to ponds and streams well stocked with fish, and forests teeming with game that had provided the poor with meat. By 1500, 45 percent of cultivable land in England had been enclosed, and took on a new logic--not only to provide private land for individual landlords, but also to drive up the price of rent for those landlords.
Needless to say, this theft was deeply unpopular and provided the backdrop for rebellions ranging from small-scale acts of insubordination (the Lord of Arundel lost one hundred swans in a night--the killing of game was a warning to the rich) to the 1381 Peasants' Revolt, to the Diggers in the mid-1600s and beyond. The protests and resistance were always crushed, and because enclosure had seized the peasants' only means of survival, they had only two choices: to work for their new landlords, or to try their luck in the cities. Adam Smith lamented the violence being done to the commons by the spread of private property, though by the time he made his remarks, the process was already over: "The wood of the forest, the grass of the field, and all the natural fruits of the earth, which when land was in common, cost the labourer only the trouble of gathering them. . . [he must now] pay the license to gather them; and must give up to the landlord a portion of what his labour either collects or produces." It was these displaced peasants who, within a generation, were to become the proletarion backbone of the Industrial Revolution.
The world was being enclosed well beyond England, of course. By the time capitalism was firmly entrenched in Europe, colonists were killing and commodifying overseas. "Savage" was colonialism's magic word--it not only opened the door to the Aladdin's cave of land from Ireland to Australia, but was also used in the socery of turning bodies into things that could be bought and sold, in the Middle Passage enslavement of over ten million Africans. In the Americas, 75 million died in the century after colonization, and although staightforward killing was a tool of enclosure, the colonists also had a set of arguments and rationales with which to explain their actions as those of civilized people. The justifications for enclosure were provided by none other than John Locke, the man who today is considered one of the godfathers of liberalism. His argument that the natural rights of man were "life, liberty and estate" appears, with one slight change, in the American Declaration of Independence.
As secretary of the Board of Trade and Plantations, and in his role as secretary to the Lords and Proprietors of the Carolinas, Locke was intellectually and financially invested in finding a reason to increase the acreage under his company's ownership. His justification for turning "unowned" land into private holdings had two parts. First, because everyone owns their labor, improving land with that labor means you own it. If you've worked on land, that's yours to keep, but anything that appears not to be used properly was considered fair game for enclosure. Second,, land can be taken out of the commons if there is "enough and as good" left for everyone else.
102. Legalizing the commons. "Although the reasons that the English wanted to scoop up property in the Americas were utterly selfish, the justification for property and ownership yields an important clue about how a different market system might work. Private property requires society to approve of it being taken out of common hands. Property is, in other words, social--there's nothing natural about the way some people are allowed to exclude others from land, for instance. Indeed, it was the rescinding of rights to share common resources that radicalized a young German thinker who had recently left the academy, and was working as a journalist. His political opinions ran to an optimistic liberalism--think of him as a ninteenth-century 'Wired' reader--a man who thought that with a free press and functioning parliament, the future would be bright. Two events would change his opinion. The first was when he witnessed the debates in the local parliament over customary wood-gathering right in Rhineland forests, which made him realize the centrality of questions of property to politics. The second was the ease with which the Prussian censorship closed down his paper. It was these events that nudged the young Karl Marx toward thinking about the centrality of property in politics and society."
103. Flexible property rights of Latin American constitutions. "Land, for example, can be privately owned as long as it's being put to use, but the moment it is left derelict, or if the land is owned purely for speculative purposes, ownership rights to the land are forfeit, and it becomes available to anyone who will put it to greater use. Property rights, in other words, can be far more flexible and elastic than we currently imagine them.
103. Native American Agriculture. The Three Sisters: Corn, Beans, & Squash. "Within these tribes, as in much of the Global South today, it was women's work to tend to the growing of food for domestic consumption while the men went out hunting. The English couldn't comprehend that agriculture was exclusively managed by women whose English counterparts had been confined to domestic, noncommercial duties. So the colonists described the women's activity not as agriculture, but as gardening; and then they expropriated their land.
Along the Pacific coast in North America, indigenous economies came under different forms of attack. An institution central to many cultures was "potlatch." It was a ceremony in celebration of a guest or event--each society had its own specific set of rules and customs. The common denominator, and the one that most exercised the white government, was that a potlatch involved the mass redistribution of wealth in which the giving away of things was a sign of rank. In the eyes of the U.S. and Canadian governments, without the morally improving virtues of frugality and prudence, Native Americans would be condemned to perpetual backwardness. Potlatch was describes as "[the] parent of numerous vices which eat out the heart of the people. . . . [It] is not possible that Indians can acquire property or can become industrious with any good result, while under the influence of this mania." So, from 1885 to 1951, the Canadian government declared it illegal, levying a punishment of between two and six months in jail.
104. Africa. 1884 Berlin Conference created the boarders of Africa.
105. US recently announced AFRICOM, a unified command post in Frankfurt.
106. Successful commons by state institution. "Chile banned industrial trawlers in the 1960s so that its artisanal fishing sector would be sheltered from competition with destructive transnational operations. After a quota system failed, the government began to work with fishermen's organizations up and down the coast. Together, they ccame up with a system of TURFs--or territorial use rights in fisheries. Fishing villages and fishers' organizations were awarded collective rights over specific traditional fishing ground that they'd known and fished for generations. Enforcement was devolved to local fisher people's unions. It worked: The fisheries recovered. The TURFs were modeled on the historical fishing grounds of local fisherfolk, essentially granting present-day collective rights to what in previous centuries had already belonged to the local community."
112. Money as the right to have rights as depicted in Jerry Cohen's thought experiment of a tickets each with a description of what the ticket will let you do, right to visit sick mother, right to eat a steak, ect.
116. December 10, 1948. Universal Declaration of Human Rights was signed in Paris. "...there were two treaties--the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Together, the declaration and the two covenants made up the International Bill of Human Rights. When they were finally adopted in 1966, they were intended as a definitive line beyond which neither governments nor corporations should cross."
119. "...La Via Campesina. Founded in 1993 by a number of American and European farmers' groups, they have grown, by some estimates, to a movement with over 150 million members in sixtynine countries, all of them peasants, farmers, farmworkers or landless people wanting to grow food. One of those original organizers is now the president of Bolivia--Evo Morales. Although constitued in the early 1990s,their member organizations have been going for considerably longer. The creation story of La Via Campesina is an object lesson in how democracy works, and how to make rights happen. There's an irony here: The people least able to value the land--the word "peasant" in English is laced with spit and contempt--offer through their politics a way of saving the planet."
124. E.M. Forester's question: "How can I know what I think till I see what I say?"
126. What robots compete with. Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW). 90% of U.S. winter tomato supply is from Immokalee. "A talented picker who is lucky enough to work in a field that hasn't yet been picked (they're picked up to four times, and on the fourth sweep, there's pitifully little left on the vine) can fill 150 buckets a day. Workers lift up to 2.4 tons of tomatoes per day, sold in stores for about $5,000, and for which they might be paid $67 for twelve hours' work. This is a rate of forty-five cents per thirty-two-pound bucket of green tomatoes, and it has increased only five cents in the past thirty years--if the piece rate had only kept pace with inflation, it would today be $1.02 per bucket. The only reason the five-cent increase happened was due to a month-long hunger strike by six members of the CIW."
130. Fast food chains like Subway, Burger King, McDonalds now pay a penny per pound of tomotoes due to the CIW lobby.
137. Hernando de Soto. "...land titles encouraged entrepreneurship--but it's not necessarily the poor who benefit, because unless the underlying inequalities in power are addressed, there seems to be little benefit for the people in whose name the transformation was carried out.
In his defense, De Soto regards land titling as merely a platform for other changes, especially in government, so that bureaucracy is scaled back and enterprise might flourish. But the evidence seems to be that property rights work only 'after' governments are democratic and limits on the unfair concentration of property are put in place, not the other way around. The chant of "Property rights first, and all else will follow," doesn't just put the cart before the horse--it turns out to be a way to camouflage a grant theft. This is something the shackdwellers in South Africa have learned the hard way."