The standard of living across time and space. A very basic question for historians is how to measure and compare the standard of living experienced by people in different historical settings. Is it possible to arrive at credible estimates of the standard of living in the Roman Empire, medieval Burgundy, nineteenth-century Britain, and twentieth-century Illinois? Can we say with any confidence that Romans had a higher (or lower) standard of living than a twelfth-century Burgundian? One part of the problem is conceptual. What do we mean by the standard of living? Is there a specific set of characteristics that are constitutive of the standard of living -- say, nutrition, income, access to health remedies and education, quality of housing, personal security?
And how should we take account of the unequal distribution of these characteristics across a given population? The second major problem we must confront is the availability and quality of historical data about wages, prices, and consumption. Here are Allen's conclusions: The moral basis for an extensive state. A recent post focused on the conception of society involved in seventeenth and eighteenth English political thinking, the theory of possessive individualism.
The post suggested that this conception has a lot of resonance with the ideas and rhetoric of the Tea Party today. I've also posted a number of discussions of the social ideals of John Rawls (link, link), expressing a liberal democratic view of the good society. These posts remind me how important it is to have some fairly specific ideas about how we would want society to be organized in the future, so we can also have some ideas about current reforms that might take us in that direction. And today we don't seem to have a lot of clarity about this kind of vision, especially on the progressive side of the political spectrum. The ideal that seems to lie behind the conservative Tea Party political philosophy is simple but alarming: (1974). Provides an excellent discussion of Rousseau's political theory; link. A Predator State – the worst bits of Capitalism, Communism and Feudalism « forensicstatistician. We live in a Capitalist country, right? We believe in the power of markets, don’t we?
That’s what seperates us from the spectre of Communism that haunted us from the 1950s to end of the 1980s, isn’t it. And we understand the theory: a Capitalist country achieves the most efficient allocation of resources by facilitating trade & commerce by the practice of prices, and price only. No plans, no dictates, no sentiment. But, just to soften the edges, we have a bit of a heart too. Sounds plausible doesn’t it. In the face of bank collapse our politicians ennacted sizeable bailouts.
The consequence has been Austerity and Inflation. Yes we have a mixed economy, but one that is instead the worst of both worlds; privatised profits and yet socialised losses. It is a form of Crony Capitalism, and a slipperly route back to the retrograde structure of Feudalism. “What did the new class… set out to do in political terms? Predator State “In a true market economy, bad choices get penalized. Like this: The emergence of a movement against corporate personhood in the U.S. Via CommonDreams.org:Move to Amend is a movement fighting (in the U.S.) against the damaging legal fiction of Corporate Personhood.
Excerpted from Kaitlin Sopoci-Belknap: “Throughout the country … (are) … organizing against “corporate personhood,” a court-created precedent that illegitimately gives corporations rights that were intended for human beings. The movement is flowering not in the halls of Congress, but at the local level, where all real social movements start. Every day Americans experience the devastation caused by unaccountable corporations. Thanks to the hard work of local organizers, Boulder, CO could become the next community to officially join this growing effort. Councilmember Macon Cowles is proposing to place a measure on the November ballot, giving Boulder voters the opportunity to support an amendment to the U. At the forefront of this movement is Move to Amend, a national coalition of hundreds of organizations and over 113,000 individuals (and counting).
Maybe History Ended After All: Reconsidering Fukuyama. Mattei on the State, the Market, and the Commons. All this, evidently requires the jurist’s attention to the difficult and urgent task of constructing the new foundation of a legal order capable of transcending the property-state dualisms inherent in the current order. Given the dominance of private property, individualism, and competition as the basis of the current legal order, the new order must correct this imbalance by focusing on the collective and the commons as the center, creating an institutional setting reflecting long term sustainability and full inclusion of all the global commoners including the poorest and most vulnerable (human and non humans).
To do so we need first an epistemic (and political) emancipation from the predatory appetites of both the State and private property, the two fundamental components of the dominant imperialistic Western wisdom. Commons lie beyond the reductionist opposition of “subject-object”, which produces the commodification of both. For the full version with notes, go here. Introduction. Musings on Hierarchy. Energy is cycled upwards by hierarchy, by definition. A hierarchical form has the systemic function of concentrating wealth to focused purposes, though all will share the quality that they enable the further functioning of that hierarchy. Anything else would self-defeating. No system can be coherent for long if its very nature is self-destructive.
So the hierarchical form concentrates wealth to its top in its own interest. The bottom bears the weight, again, by definition. The benefits of the process must accrue more to the top than to the bottom, otherwise the form would not be hierarchical. This much is uncontroversial. There is no myth in the above, brief analysis. To me the most fascinating justifying myth of all is the Myth of Free Markets. The Free Market Fairytale is, in my opinion, sheer genius.
Ponzi schemes must grow or they collapse. Musing about 2011 and an un-national generation. Happy New Year everyone. If you haven’t heard of William Stafford before, you should try and spend some time reading his poetry. Stafford, who died in 1993, was made the US equivalent of Poet Laureate in 1970, and was known for his gentle, pithy style.
A prolific poet, he is estimated to have written over 22,000 poems, though only a fraction are available in print. One of my favourite Stafford poems is At The Un-National Monument Along The Canadian Border, shown below, a good reason to go out and buy a collection of his poems today: If you like what you see above, there’s also a decent archives site you can find here. There are many reasons for my liking the poem. Even now, years after coming across it, I can still savour every line. There’s also a tangential reason for my liking the poem. For many years now, I’ve been pondering what it means to be “global”. When I joined BT some years ago, the issue of “being global” came up in conversation with the then CEO, Ben Vervaayen.
Like this: Thinking more about un-nationalness. [Note: this is a follow-up to my post a few days introducing the theme of un-nationalness.] Krosno Odrzanskie, Poland. Dakar, Senegal. Greenwich, London. Uzice, Serbia. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Cardiff, Wales. These are the birthplaces of the 11 who took the field in today’s Barclays Premier League soccer match between Manchester United and Stoke City, two venerable English clubs.
Not one person born in Manchester made that starting line-up. The goals were scored by men born, on average, 4106.32 miles away from Manchester, one from Cape Verde and one from Mexico. Why is all this important? Talent knows no borders, and Manchester United have done a good job garnering and harnessing global talent. So the Manchester United of today is quite different from the Manchester United of a few decades ago. For some decades now, it has been getting easier and easier to move money around the world, with the unintended consequence of making terrorism and tax avoidance easier. But it’s over.
A coda. Collapse Of The "Ownership Society" Bush's "ownership society" has collapsed under the dead weight of debt. There is too much debt and too little income to support it. Please consider President shifts focus to renting, not owning. The Obama administration, in a major shift on housing policy, is abandoning George W. Bush’s vision of creating an “ownership society’’ and instead plans to pump $4.25 billion of economic stimulus money into creating tens of thousands of federally subsidized rental units in American cities.The idea is to pay for the construction of low-rise rental apartment buildings and town houses, as well as the purchase of foreclosed homes that can be refurbished and rented to low- and moderate-income families at affordable rates.Analysts say the approach takes a wrecking ball to Bush’s heavy emphasis on encouraging homeownership as a way to create national wealth and provide upward mobility for low- and working-class families, especially minorities.
Barney Frank The Hypocrite What a distortion of reality. Presuppositions of Policy. Wouldn’t it be great to get advice directly from Herman Daly? It’s no surprise that his speech to graduating public policy students contains wisdom for all of us. As you graduate I want to remind you of something you already know. Since you have not only chosen to study public policy, but have persevered to graduate with a Master’s degree, you must already have rejected the perennial and pernicious philosophical doctrines of determinism and nihilism. That is what I want to remind you of. Determinists believe that there is only one possible future, rigidly determined either by atoms in motion, selfish genes, dialectical materialism, toilet training, or the puppet strings of a predestining deity. Of course there are also many merely conceivable or imaginary futures that really can be ruled out as impossible – such as, for example, growing the economy forever on a finite planet that is subject to the laws of thermodynamics and ecological interdependence.
Open Society. State Entity. Anarchism. Marxist Perspective. Decline of the West. Civic State. Market State. Capitalism.