Rudd’s career lays bare the new rules of power: crash around and cash out

The ex-home secretary’s rise and fall is typical of an inexperienced elite that regards ordinary people with contempt writes Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian

At least one consolation remains for Amber Rudd. Drummed out of the Home Office, she can now spend more time in her constituency of Hastings: the same seaside resort she found irresistible because “I wanted to be within two hours of London, and I could see we were going to win it”. Yet Rudd loves her electorate, rhapsodising about some of them as people “who prefer to be on benefits by the seaside … they’re moving down here to have easier access to friends and drugs and drink”.

Relax. I come neither to praise nor to bury Rudd, but to analyse her. Or, rather, to place her in context. What stands out about this latest crash-and-burn is how well it represents the current Westminster elite, even down to the contempt for the poor sods who vote for them.

Rudd exemplifies a political class light on expertise and principle, yet heavy on careerism and happy to ruin lives. All the key traits are here. In a dizzying ascent, she went from rookie MP in 2010 to secretary of state for energy in 2015, before being put in charge of the Home Office the very next year. Lewis Hamilton would kill for such an accelerant, yet it leaves no time to master detail, such as your own department’s targets. Since 2014 Sajid Javid, Rudd’s replacement, has hopped from culture to business to local government, rarely staying in any post for more than a year. Margaret Thatcher kept her cabinet ministers at one department for most of a parliamentary term, but this stepping-stone culture turns urgent national problems – such as police funding and knife crime – into PR firefighting.
Another hallmark of this set is the disposability of its values. Cameron hugs Arctic huskies, then orders aides to “get rid of all the green crap”. As for Rudd, the May cabinet’s big liberal, she vowed to force companies to reveal the numbers of their foreign staff, stoking the embers of racism in a tawdry bid to boost her standing with Tory activists. Praised by Osborne for her “human” touch, she was revealed this week privately moaning about “bed-blocking” in British detention centres.

And when things get sticky, you put your officials in the line of fire. During the Brexit referendum, Osborne revved up the Treasury to generate apocalyptic scenarios about the cost of leaving. While doomsday never came, his tactic caused incalculable damage both to the standing of economists and to the civil service’s reputation for impartiality. Rudd settled for trashing her own officials for their “appalling” treatment of Windrush-era migrants.

None of these traits are entirely new, nor are they the sole preserve of the blue team. At the fag end of Gordon Brown’s government, the sociologist Aeron Davis studied the 49 politicians on both frontbenches. They split readily into two types. An older lot had spent an average of 15 years in business or law or campaigning before going into parliament – then debated and amended and sat on select committees for another nine years before reaching the cabinet.

The younger bunch had pre-Westminster careers that typically came to little more than seven years, often spent at thinktanks or as ministerial advisers. They took a mere three years to vault into cabinet ranks. This isn’t “professionalisation”. It is nothing less than the creation of a new Westminster caste: a group of self-styled leaders with no proof of prowess and nothing in common with their voters. May’s team is stuffed full of them. After conducting more than 350 interviews with frontbench politicians, civil servants, FTSE chief executives and top financiers, Davis has collected his insights in a book. The argument is summed up in its title: Reckless Opportunists.

Davis depicts a political and business elite that can’t be bothered about the collective good or even its own institutions – because it cannot see further than the next job opportunity. In this environment, you promise anything for poll ratings, even if it’s an impossible pledge to get net migration down to the tens of thousands.

Good coverage matters more than a track record – because at the top of modern Britain no one sticks around for too long. Of the 25 permanent secretaries in Whitehall, Davis finds that 11 have been in post less than two years. Company bosses now typically spend less than five years in the top job, down from eight years in 2010. Over that same period, their pay has shot up from 120 times the average salary to 160 times. Bish bash bosh!

There is one field that revels in such short-termism: the City. What emerges from Reckless Opportunists is the degree to which City values have infected the rest of the British elite. Chief executives are judged by how much cash they return to shareholders, even if that means slashing spending on research and investment. Ministers either come from finance (Rudd, Javid) or end up working for it (Osborne and his advisers).

Promise the earth and leave it to the next mug to deliver. Crash around, cash out and move on to the next job. State these new mantras, and you see how Jeremy Corbyn, whatever his other faults, can’t conform to them. You can also see how he poses such a threat to a political-business elite reared on them.

Soon after May moved into No 10, she famously declared: “If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what citizenship means.” The press wrote it up as her threat to migrants. Yet the more I think about it, the more accurately I believe it describes her own shiny-faced team, her own poisonous politics, her own self-serving elite.

Dhoni's feel for cricket

Jon Hotten in Cricinfo

  

MS Dhoni possesses a rare and charming combination of intuition, judgement and experience  © Getty Images

Enlarge

As the rain came down at Edgbaston, many blurry TV hours were filled with punditry, most of it lost on the airwaves to heaven. Somewhere along the way though, someone, and I don't recall who, said something like this: "At heart, MS Dhoni is a gambler… "

If that's so, he's the man you want to be standing next to at the roulette wheel; the chips are piling up, and there's nothing his India have not won. 

But is he? As anyone closely affiliated with actual professional gambling (not spot-fixing or bookmaking, but making a living from betting legally) will tell you, done properly, it is for the most part a boring and pragmatic assessment of odds and value. There are very few coups de theatre to be had.

What Dhoni did in offering Ishant Sharma the 18th over of England's innings with Eoin Morgan and Ravi Bopara at the crease and 28 runs required from 18 deliveries, was something altogether more instinctive, a rare and charming combination of intuition, judgement and experience that carried with it inherent risk. Here was the match, in the hands of the team's most profligate bowler.

Ishant, still coltish at 24 and with a career that often seems to be gripped by slow but inevitable entropy, was nervous - which he had the grace to admit afterwards. Morgan and Bopara had timed their charge, and both had begun to clear the boundary. Ishant began with a slow, short ball, a dot. Having got a look at him, Morgan dispatched the next over backward square leg.

Spooked now, not quite in rhythm around the wicket, Ishant bowled consecutive wides. He galloped in again, this time cutting his fingers across the ball for more control and slowing it down enough for Morgan to spoon him up wristily to Ashwin on the edge of the circle, a shot miscued to the degree that the batsmen had time to cross as it fell. Then a faster, shorter one on the line of the stumps that Bopara flat-batted straight to Ashwin, who had materialised as if by magic in the right place once more.

There was an element of Napoleon's dictum on luck about Dhoni's decision, and there is no doubt that had things gone the other way, he would have come under heavy fire

The game that was England's mid-way through the over was India's by the end, and hearteningly for all of us who love a trier, it was Ishant Sharma's, too. Dhoni applied his coup de grace, the mugging of England completed by the estimable partnership of Jadeja and Ashwin.

There was an element of Napoleon's dictum on luck about Dhoni's decision, and there is no doubt that had things gone the other way, he would have come under heavy fire. But one of his great qualities is a calm fearlessness that he has shown so often. The underlying logic behind using Ishant was sound; Dhoni knew that England would take the batting Powerplay in the last two overs, and he wanted his spinners for them. But his decision was proactively to bowl Ishant rather than Umesh Yadav or Bhuvneshwar Kumar, and that was at the heart of India's win.

It would be fascinating to hear Dhoni talk about it in depth, to know exactly where it came from. He has played so much cricket now, and so much of it under tremendous pressure, he has a deep feeling for the rhythm of the game; he hears its heartbeat acutely. It informs his subconscious, it leads what we might call intuition or instinct, but in reality it is something more weighty and useful. Let's call it intellect.

England have a great sense of order to their cricket, but they, and Alastair Cook, don't quite have what Dhoni has. It makes an eloquent argument for harmonising the calendar and allowing the players to go to the IPL and suchlike, to get game time in front of huge crowds when there is something on the line and they can absorb the kind of rhythm that Dhoni runs to. At heart he is a gambler, but beyond that, at heart he is a cricketer, in every sense of the word.

Soldiers as teachers why not as doctors?

by Archie Bland in The Independent

In its wisdom, the Government has decided to give members of the Armed Forces a fast-track route into teaching. The plan, long in the making, will give former troops the chance to teach even if they don’t hold a university degree, and I'm all for it, but I don’t think the Government is going far enough. Yes, we need a military ethos in our schools. But what about our hospitals?

Think about it. Schools will benefit from the military values of leadership, discipline, motivation and teamwork, as David Laws and Michael Govehave argued, but you know where else those values would be useful? The chaotic world of hospitals! OK, so not all soldiers have an education in medicine. But they have the right values. And the right values are much more important than the right qualifications.

The image of infantrymen moving from the military’s theatres of operations to the hospitals’ operating theatres is not the only one available to demonstrate how absurd this proposal is, how insulting to teachers and children, and how profoundly anti-intellectual, with its contempt for the idea that knowing about things might be a necessary prerequisite for teaching them. And these other modest proposals make still clearer the rationale for the Government’s pursuit of this particular wheeze. Imagine, for instance, that teachers were to be fast-tracked into combat units because of their capacities to work hard, manage people and deal with stressful situations. Or try to picture charity workers getting teaching jobs without a degree because a philanthropic ethos might be just as worth instilling in our children as a military one. Any such suggestion would be greeted, rightly, with puzzlement.

And yet with the military it’s different. This plan is based on an American example – with the difference that in America, 99 per cent of participants already had a degree – and in recent years we’ve been edging closer to the American model of unthinking glorification of our Armed Forces. When soldiers and sailors behave well, their exploits are used as evidence of military nobility. When they behave badly, they are seen as bad apples, and we rarely ask whether their wrongdoing might in fact be the product of a poisoned culture.

I suppose this squeamishness is understandable: ever since the invasion of Afghanistan, we’ve been engaged in brutal conflicts that cost most of us very little, and a few of us a great deal. We owe those few. But squeamishness, and a heavy debt, are not a sensible basis for policy making. So, although it feels frankly treacherous to say so, here goes: a military culture is appropriate for the front line, but not for the classroom, where independent thinking should be considered essential. Soldiers might be brave, and well-disciplined, but if they aren’t well qualified that probably won’t be enough to make them good educators. Teachers are doing something really difficult. And children? Children are not the enemy.

The rapist in the mirror

PRAVEEN SWAMI

TOPICS

crimesexual assault & rape
social issues (general)discrimination
social conditions
social problems

If we are to combat sexual violence in our cities, it is time to begin discussing the dysfunctions of young urban men

“I remember seeing a documentary about some animal being eaten from behind while its face seemed to register disbelief, fear, and self-hate at its own impotence,” recalls Roy Strang, the rapist at the centre of Irvine Welsh’s supremely disturbing Marabou Stork Nightmares, of one of his victims. “That was what she reminded me of,” says Strang, watching his victim’s eyes, “frozen,” “dead,” through the mirror he forced her to hold up to her face as he raped her.

Last month’s gang rape in New Delhi has focussed nationwide attention on the epidemic proportions of sexual violence against women in India. Long overdue debates on criminal justice and gender have begun — along, predictably, with bizarre calls for schoolgirls’ bodies to be concealed under overcoats and curfews. Yet, there have been only the awkward beginnings of a discussion on the problem itself — men.

It is time, though, to start looking at the rapist in the mirror.

RITUALS OF MASCULINITY

To anyone familiar with young men in India’s cities and towns, Strang’s world is far from alien. For many youth worldwide, violence against women — a spectrum that runs from gang rape to domestic violence and street sexual harassment — is part of the system of masculinity-making rituals, along with sport, drinking and brawling. 58 per cent of men arrested for rape in India in 2010 were aged 18-30; in the United States, 55 per cent are below the age of 30. 53.92 per cent of men held that year for molestation or sexual harassment were also from the same age group.

This is not to suggest that a dysfunctional masculinity is the root of rape; few human behaviours have a single cause. Yet, from the testimonies of women, we know that this cohort of young men have made homes and streets the site of a pervasive gender terrorism.

Rape, though, is something rapists do, not who they are. Precisely why particular individuals find pleasure in inflicting violence on women is a question everyone from evolutionary biologists to cultural theorists have weighed in on; there is no consensus, and may never be. Yet, as Welsh noted, strange behaviour “always has a context.” Five such contexts suggest themselves as possible keys to the production of India’s urban-male dysfunction. Together, these contexts ensure young men are rarely fully weaned; able to lead an adult life characterised by agency and individual choice. The consequence is a deep rage that manifests itself in nihilist behaviours.

India’s transforming urban economy has, firstly, produced a mass of young, prospectless men. The parents of these children, many first-generation migrants to cities, worked on the land or were artisans. Though this generation’s position in the economy may have been inequitable, its agency as workers was not. The young, though, find themselves fighting for space in an economy that offers mainly casual work. This casualisation has come about even as hard-pressed parents are spending ever more on education. Even the pressures on middle-class and lower middle-class men are enormous. Frequently coddled in son-worshipping parents, young men are only rarely able to realise the investment and hopes vested in them.

For a second context to hyper-violent masculinity, we must look at culture. Increasingly, cities have no recreational spaces for young men. Films, long one of the few cultural activities that a working-class audience could participate in, now target élites; movie theatre prices exclude large parts of the youth population. There is diminishing access to theatre, art, music and sport. In its place, the street becomes the stage for acting out adulthood, through substance abuse and violence.

Thirdly, a number of young men, particularly in new urban slums, are being brought up by no-parent families — families that fathers have abandoned or are largely absent from, and where mothers work long hours. Elsewhere in the world, too, this social crisis has been linked to sexual violence. South African researcher Amelia Kleijn, in a 2010 study of child rapists, found most had deprived childhoods marked by “physical and emotional abuse, as well as neglect.”

Fourth, there is a crisis of sexuality. Few men, working class or rich, have access to a sexual culture which allows them sexual freedoms or choices. The crisis is exacerbated by the fact that sections of urban élites participate in a sexual culture which is relatively liberal — a culture that young men can watch on television and in public spaces, but never hope to participate in. For some, the sexually independent woman is thus enemy to be annihilated. In his hit song C**t, the rape-valorising rap star Honey Singh voices his yearning to kick a woman after raping her, to drive out the bhoot of ego from her head. Similarly, Strang sees on the streets a wash of “blonde and auburn wigs, lipstick smeared on those deadly pincer-like insect jaws.”

COMMODITIES

Young men of all classes, finally, see women as status-enhancing commodities — emulating the long-standing gender privileges tradition has vested in élite men.

None of these five contexts is new. Particular stresses linked to the reordering of India’s social fabric, though, are giving new lethality to gender inequity. In a 2008 paper, Jon Wolseth showed how neoliberalism created the conditions for a murderous surge of youth gang violence in the Honduras during the 1980s. Economic policies, he argued, had not just impoverished the poor; they also tore apart community networks, diminished public spaces and closed the door to political participation. Evangelical Christianity and the assault rifle-armed gang emerged as mode of liberation. Elsewhere in Latin America, scholars have observed much the same.

In India, women’s bodies appear to have become the principal terrain on which male rage is venting itself. It isn’t that young Indian men are inherently violent than they were in the past. In 2011, according to the National Crime Records Bureau, 29,937 men between 18 and 30 were arrested for murder. Twenty years earlier, it was 38,961. In 1991, 270,602 men of this age group were arrested for rioting; in 2011, the figure was 72,867. Sexual violence data, though, trends the other way. 8,864 18-30 men were arrested for rape in 1991; 16,528 in 2011. Molestation and sexual harassment arrests from this cohort have also almost doubled, from 23,075 in 1992, the first year for which data is available, to 32,581 in 2011.

Lacking agency isn’t, obviously, the cause of sexual violence: women aren’t responding to their disenfranchisement by attacking men; men with power can, and do, rape. The point here is, rather, that the large-scale disempowerment of urban men is lending intensity to a pre-existing culture of sexual violence.

ILLUSION OF EMPOWERMENT

For many men, then, violence against women works much as drugs do for addicts: it offers at least the illusion of empowerment where none exists, fixing feelings of rage and impotence. This, in turn, points to a wider malaise. Marxist scholar Antonio Gramsci noted that Fascism arose in a society “where mothers educate their infant children by hitting them on the head with clogs.” How men behave — on the streets with women, with other men, with animals — is taught. In our society, violence is not an aberration; it is the tie that binds us.

In 2007, the Ministry of Women and Child Development surveyed 12,477 children to learn of their experience of abuse. 68.99 per cent of children, over half of them boys, reported suffering physical violence. One in 12 children, again a majority boys, reported suffering sexual violence. It is a staggering fact: half of all Indians have encountered abuse before they became adults.

For the overwhelming majority of Indian children, the education in violence begins in the family. The survey found 59 per cent of the 2,245 children who did not go to school located home as a source of violence. In institutions like orphanages, the survey recorded levels of violence very similar to homes. More than 65 per cent of the 3,163 school children surveyed said they received beatings along with classes in maths, science and languages. Employers of child labourers, interestingly, were significantly less cruel than teachers; 58.7 per cent of working children said they experienced beatings at home, at work, or both. In each of these categories, boys were overrepresented.

Maulana Azad Medical College researcher Deepti Pagare discovered, during a survey of boys at New Delhi’s Child Observation Home, that 76.7 per cent reported physical abuse. Half of them actually bore clinical evidence of violence — the perpetrators, in more than half of all cases, their own fathers.

Elsewhere in the world, figures like these would almost certainly have provoked a national scandal — followed by demands of criminal prosecutions. Look through Delhi’s crime statistics, though, and you will find not one father prosecuted for everyday crimes against his son.

India needs a masculinity that does not involve violence. Moral sermons, though, won’t cut it: respect for women can emerge only from a culture that genuinely values rights for all.

Why economics needs to be seen not as a science but a moral philosophy

Michael Sandel: 'We need to reason about how to value our bodies, human dignity, teaching and learning'

The political philosophy professor on his new book, What Money Can't Buy, and why economics needs to be seen not as a science but a moral philosophy

• 
• • Decca Aitkenhead
  • guardian.co.uk, Sunday 27 May 2012 20.01 BST

'What is a good hospital?' … Michael Sandel Photograph: Felix Clay for the Guardian

 

Something curious happened when I tried to potty train my two-year-old recently. To begin with, he was very keen on the idea. I'd read that the trick was to reward him with a chocolate button every time he used the potty, and for the first day or two it went like a breeze – until he cottoned on that the buttons were basically a bribe, and began to smell a rat. By day three he refused point-blank to go anywhere near the potty, and invoking the chocolate button prize only seemed to make him all the more implacable. Even to a toddler's mind, the logic of the transaction was evidently clear – if he had to be bribed, then the potty couldn't be a good idea – and within a week he had grown so suspicious and upset that we had to abandon the whole enterprise.

It's a pity I hadn't read What Money Can't Buy before embarking, because the folly of the chocolate button policy lies at the heart of Michael Sandel's new book. "We live at a time when almost everything can be bought and sold," the Harvard philosopher writes. "We have drifted from having a market economy, to being a market society," in which the solution to all manner of social and civic challenges is not a moral debate but the law of the market, on the assumption that cash incentives are always the appropriate mechanism by which good choices are made. Every application of human activity is priced and commodified, and all value judgments are replaced by the simple question: "How much?"

Sandel leads us through a dizzying array of examples, from schools paying children to read – $2 (£1.20) a book in Dallas – to commuters buying the right to drive solo in car pool lanes ($10 in many US cities), to lobbyists in Washington paying line-standers to hold their place in the queue for Congressional hearings; in effect, queue-jumping members of the public. Drug addicts in North Carolina can be paid $300 to be sterilised, immigrants can buy a green card for $500,000, best man's speeches are for sale on the internet, and even body parts are openly traded in a financial market for kidneys, blood and surrogate wombs. Even the space on your forehead can be up for sale. Air New Zealand has paid people to shave their heads and walk around wearing temporary tattoos advertising the airline.

According to the logic of the market, the matter of whether these transactions are right or wrong is literally meaningless. They simply represent efficient arrangements, incentivising desirable behaviour and "improving social utility by making underpriced goods available to those most willing to pay for them". To Sandel, however, the two important questions we should be asking in every instance are: Is it fair to buy and sell this activity or product? And does doing so degrade it? Almost invariably, his answers are no, and yes.

Sandel, 59, has been teaching political philosophy at Harvard for more than 30 years, and is often described as a rock star professor, such is the excitement his lectures command. In person there is nothing terribly rock star about him; he grew up in a middle-class Jewish family in Minneapolis, studied for his doctorate at Balliol college in Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, and has been married for decades to a social scientist with whom he has two adult sons. His career, on the other hand, is stratospheric.

Sandel's justice course is said to be the single most popular university class on the planet, taken by more than 15,000 students to date and televised for a worldwide audience that runs into millions. His 2009 book Justice, based upon the course, became a global bestseller, sparking a craze for moral philosophy in Japan and earning him the accolade "most influential foreign figure" from China Newsweek. If you heard a series of his lectures broadcast on Radio 4 in the spring you would have glimpsed a flavour of his wonderfully discursive approach to lecturing, which is not unlike an Oxbridge tutorial, only conducted with an auditorium full of students, whom he invites to think aloud.

In keeping with his rock star status, Sandel is currently embarked upon a mammoth world tour to promote his new book, and when we meet in London he has almost lost his voice. His next sleep, he croaks, half smiling, isn't scheduled for another fortnight, and he looks quite weak with jetlag. Understandably, then, he isn't quite as commanding as I had expected. But although I found his book fascinating – and in parts both confronting and deeply moving – in truth, until the very last pages I didn't find it quite as persuasive as I had hoped.

This may, as we'll come on to, have something to do with the fact that its central argument is harder to make in the US than it would be here. "It is a harder sell in America than in Europe," he agrees. "It cuts against the grain in America." This is truer today than ever before, he adds, for since he began teaching Sandel has observed in his students "a gradual shift over time, from the 80s to the present, in the direction of individualistic free-market assumptions". The book's rather detached, dispassionate line of inquiry into each instance of marketisation – is it fair, and does it degrade? – was devised as a deliberate strategy to "win over the very pro-market American audience" – and it certainly makes for a coolly elegant read, forgoing rhetoric for forensic examination in order to engage with free market economics in terms the discipline understands. But I'm just not entirely sure it works.

If, like me, you share Sandel's view that moral values should not be replaced by market prices, the interesting way to read What Money Can't Buy is through the eyes of a pro-market fundamentalist who regards such a notion as sentimental nonsense. Does he win you over then?

He certainly provides some fascinating examples of the market failing to do a better job than social norms or civic values, when it comes to making us do the right thing. For example, economists carried out a survey of villagers in Switzerland to see if they would accept a nuclear waste site in their community. While the site was obviously unwelcome, the villagers recognised its importance to their country, and voted 51% in favour. The economists then asked how they would vote if the government compensated them for accepting the site with an annual payment. Support promptly dropped to 25%. It was the potty-and-chocolate-buttons syndrome all over again. Likewise, a study comparing the British practice of blood donation with the American system whereby the poor can sell their blood found the voluntary approach worked far more effectively. Once again, civic duty turned out to be more powerful than money.

However, a true believer in the law of the market would surely argue that all this proves is that sometimes a particular marketisation device doesn't work. For them it remains not a moral debate but simply one of efficacy. Sandel writes about the wrongness of a medical system in which the rich can pay for "concierge doctors" who will prioritise wealthy patients – but to anyone who believes in markets, Sandel's objection would surely cut little ice. They would say it's a question of whether or not the system is fulfilling its purpose. If the primary purpose of a particular hospital is to save lives, then if it treats a millionaire's bruised toe while a poorer patient dies of a heart attack in the waiting room, the marketisation has clearly not worked. But if the function of the hospital is to maximise profits, then treating the millionaire's sore toe first makes perfect sense, doesn't it?

"I suspect that you have – we have – a certain idea of what a hospital is for, such that a purely profit-driven one misses the mark; it's deficient in some way; it falls short of what hospitals are properly for. You would say, wouldn't you, that that hospital – that market-driven one – is not a proper hospital. They've misidentified, really, what a hospital is for. Just as if they were a school that said: 'Our purpose isn't, really, primarily, to educate students, but to maximise revenue – and we maximise revenue by offering certain credentials, and so on,' you'd say: 'Well, that's not a proper school; they're deficient in some way.'"

I would, I agree. But a rabid rightwinger wouldn't. They would say the profit motive is in itself blameless, and pursuing it by mending people's bodies or expanding their minds is no different to making motor cars, as long as it works.

"My point is that the debate, or the argument, with someone who held that view of the purpose of the hospital would be a moral argument about how properly to understand the purpose of a hospital or a school. And, yes, there would be disagreement – but that disagreement, about purpose, would be, at the same time, a moral disagreement. I'd say 'moral disagreement', because it's not just an empirical question: How did this hospital define its mission? It's: What are hospitals properly for? What is a good hospital?"

I don't think that would convince a hardliner at all. Similarly, I imagine a hardline rightwinger might read Sandel's chapter about the practice in the US of corporations taking life insurance policies out on their staff, often unbeknown to the employees, and think: what's the problem? Sandel writes about the "moral tawdriness" of companies having a financial interest in the death of an employee, but as he doesn't suggest it would tempt them to start killing their staff, these policies would strike many on the right as a rational financial investment.

At this point Sandel begins to peer at me across the table with an expression of mild disgust and disbelief. Is this woman really, I think I can see him wondering, from the Guardian? So I explain hastily that I tried very hard to read his book wearing Thatcherite glasses.

"You tried a bit too hard," he says wryly. "You shouldn't have tried so hard. You should have gone with the flow a bit more." Which feels like a disappointing answer.

The irony is that I think Sandel would have written a more powerful book had he not tried to argue the case on free-market economists' own dry, dispassionate terms. It is, as he rightly points out, the language in which most modern political debate is conducted: "Between those who favour unfettered markets and those who maintain that market choices are free only when they're made on a level playing field." But it feels as if by engaging on their terms, he's forcing himself to make an argument with one hand tied behind his back. Only in the final chapter does he throw caution to the wind, and make the case in the language of poetry.

"Consider the language employed by the critics of commercialisation," he writes. "'Debasement', 'defilement', 'coarsening', 'pollution', the loss of the 'sacred'. This is a spiritually charged language that gestures toward higher ways of living and being." And it works, for the book suddenly makes sense to me. His closing elegy to what is lost by a society that surrenders all decisions to the market almost moved me to tears.

"Does that mean I should have just started and ended with the poetry, and forgotten about the argumentative and analytical part?" he asks. "I want to address people who are coming to this from different ideological directions." But funnily enough, I think the poetry might well do a better job of persuading those very sceptics he's trying to convert.

A fascinating question he addresses is why the financial crisis appears to have scarcely put a dent in public faith in market solutions. "One would have thought that this would be an occasion for critical reflection on the role of markets in our lives. I think the persistent hold of markets and market values – even in the face of the financial crisis – suggests that the source of that faith runs very deep; deeper than the conviction that markets deliver the goods. I don't think that's the most powerful allure of markets. One of the appeals of markets, as a public philosophy, is they seem to spare us the need to engage in public arguments about the meaning of goods. So markets seem to enable us to be non-judgmental about values. But I think that's a mistake."

Putting a price on a flat-screen TV or a toaster is, he says, quite sensible. "But how to value pregnancy, procreation, our bodies, human dignity, the value and meaning of teaching and learning – we do need to reason about the value of goods. The markets give us no framework for having that conversation. And we're tempted to avoid that conversation, because we know we will disagree about how to value bodies, or pregnancy, or sex, or education, or military service; we know we will disagree. So letting markets decide seems to be a non-judgmental, neutral way. And that's the deepest part of the allure; that it seems to provide a value-neutral, non-judgmental way of determining the value of all goods. But the folly of that promise is – though it may be true enough for toasters and flat-screen televisions – it's not true for kidneys."

Sandel makes the illuminating observation that what he calls the "market triumphalism" in western politics over the past 30 years has coincided with a "moral vacancy" at the heart of public discourse, which has been reduced in the media to meaningless shouting matches on cable TV – what might be called the Foxification of debate – and among elected politicians to disagreements so technocratic and timid that citizens despair of politics ever addressing the questions that matter most.

"There is an internal connection between the two, and the internal connection has to do with this flight from judgment in public discourse, or the aspiration to value neutrality in public discourse. And it's connected to the way economics has cast itself as a value-neutral science when, in fact, it should probably be seen – as it once was – as a branch of moral and political philosophy."
Sandel's popularity would certainly indicate a public appetite for something more robust and enriching. I ask if he thinks academia could do with a few more professors with rock star status and he pauses for a polite while before smiling. "That's a question I would rather have you answer than me, I would say." That someone as unflashy and mild-mannered as Sandel can command more attention in the US than even a rightwing poster boy academic such as Niall Ferguson must, I would say, be some grounds for optimism. On a purely personal level, I ask, is there any downside to engaging with the world through the eyes of moral philosophy, rather than simple market logic?
"None but the burden of reflection and moral seriousness."

The Crisis of European Democracy

by Amartya Sen

IF proof were needed of the maxim that the road to hell is paved with good intentions, the economic crisis in Europe provides it. The worthy but narrow intentions of the European Union’s policy makers have been inadequate for a sound European economy and have produced instead a world of misery, chaos and confusion. 

There are two reasons for this.

First, intentions can be respectable without being clearheaded, and the foundations of the current austerity policy, combined with the rigidities of Europe’s monetary union (in the absence of fiscal union), have hardly been a model of cogency and sagacity. Second, an intention that is fine on its own can conflict with a more urgent priority — in this case, the preservation of a democratic Europe that is concerned about societal well-being. These are values for which Europe has fought, over many decades.

Certainly, some European countries have long needed better economic accountability and more responsible economic management. However, timing is crucial; reform on a well-thought-out timetable must be distinguished from reform done in extreme haste. Greece, for all of its accountability problems, was not in an economic crisis before the global recession in 2008. (In fact, its economy grew by 4.6 percent in 2006 and 3 percent in 2007 before beginning its continuing shrinkage.)

The cause of reform, no matter how urgent, is not well served by the unilateral imposition of sudden and savage cuts in public services. Such indiscriminate cutting slashes demand — a counterproductive strategy, given huge unemployment and idle productive enterprises that have been decimated by the lack of market demand. In Greece, one of the countries left behind by productivity increases elsewhere, economic stimulation through monetary policy (currency devaluation) has been precluded by the existence of the European monetary union, while the fiscal package demanded by the Continent’s leaders is severely anti-growth. Economic output in the euro zone continued to decline in the fourth quarter of last year, and the outlook has been so grim that a recent report finding zero growth in the first quarter of this year was widely greeted as good news.

There is, in fact, plenty of historical evidence that the most effective way to cut deficits is to combine deficit reduction with rapid economic growth, which generates more revenue. The huge deficits after World War II largely disappeared with fast economic growth, and something similar happened during Bill Clinton’s presidency. The much praised reduction of the Swedish budget deficit from 1994 to 1998 occurred alongside fairly rapid growth. In contrast, European countries today are being asked to cut their deficits while remaining trapped in zero or negative economic growth.

There are surely lessons here from John Maynard Keynes, who understood that the state and the market are interdependent. But Keynes had little to say about social justice, including the political commitments with which Europe emerged after World War II. These led to the birth of the modern welfare state and national health services — not to support a market economy but to protect human well-being.

Though these social issues did not engage Keynes deeply, there is an old tradition in economics of combining efficient markets with the provision of public services that the market may not be able to deliver. As Adam Smith (often seen simplistically as the first guru of free-market economics) wrote in “The Wealth of Nations,” there are “two distinct objects” of an economy: “first, to provide a plentiful revenue or subsistence for the people, or, more properly, to enable them to provide such a revenue or subsistence for themselves; and secondly, to supply the state or commonwealth with a revenue sufficient for the public services.”

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of Europe’s current malaise is the replacement of democratic commitments by financial dictates — from leaders of the European Union and the European Central Bank, and indirectly from credit-rating agencies, whose judgments have been notoriously unsound. 

 

Participatory public discussion — the “government by discussion” expounded by democratic theorists like John Stuart Mill and Walter Bagehot — could have identified appropriate reforms over a reasonable span of time, without threatening the foundations of Europe’s system of social justice. In contrast, drastic cuts in public services with very little general discussion of their necessity, efficacy or balance have been revolting to a large section of the European population and have played into the hands of extremists on both ends of the political spectrum.

Europe cannot revive itself without addressing two areas of political legitimacy. First, Europe cannot hand itself over to the unilateral views — or good intentions — of experts without public reasoning and informed consent of its citizens. Given the transparent disdain for the public, it is no surprise that in election after election the public has shown its dissatisfaction by voting out incumbents.

Second, both democracy and the chance of creating good policy are undermined when ineffective and blatantly unjust policies are dictated by leaders. The obvious failure of the austerity mandates imposed so far has undermined not only public participation — a value in itself — but also the possibility of arriving at a sensible, and sensibly timed, solution.

This is a surely a far cry from the “united democratic Europe” that the pioneers of European unity sought.

Amartya Sen, a Nobel laureate and a professor of economics and philosophy at Harvard, is the author, most recently, of “The Idea of Justice.”

Will Western Liberal Values Hold Up During Difficult Times?

Millions of Asians - including Chinese, Indians, Filipinos, Sri Lankans, Pakistanis - and others from different corners of the world have made the West their home. What are the likely social and psychological consequences for us "others" in these hard times?

One of the defining features of Western democracies is said to be its liberal values. What it essentially means for people like us is that our presence is for the most part not considered a big deal. If the economist Benjamin Friedman is right, however, liberal values thrive and indeed depend on continued economic growth and prosperity of citizens.

"Economic growth - meaning a rising standard of living for a clear majority of citizens - more often than not fosters greater opportunity, tolerance of diversity, social mobility, commitment to fairness and dedication to democracy." In contrast, when there is economic decline, the "moral character" of citizens takes a hit.

They become less tolerant, less open and less generous towards the have-nots. Friedman contends that "merely being rich is no bar to a society’s retreat into rigidity and intolerance once enough of its citizens lose the sense that they are getting ahead".

In other words, a society's values are fickle. The future prospect of citizens largely determines the values they hold at any point of time. Economic growth matters more for a society's ‘moral character' than the country's overall wealth.

Clearly, the truth is more complex than what the stylized version of Friedman's thesis suggests. Any values that we hold do not change quickly. We let go of our old values and acquire new ones only over time.

But what if some kinds of values - in this case liberal values - are prone to easy abandonment because they never developed deep roots in ways we thought they did?

With no end to bad economic news, how many Europeans and Americans will retain or abandon liberal values? If more of the latter, which members of society are likely to become victims of growing intolerance and injustice?

The so-called "undeserving poor" certainly. Additionally, the victims are also likely to be from among what Canadians label as "visible minorities".

From this perspective, for the millions of visible minorities who live in the West, the hard times of today may be the beginning of worse to come. They face the prospect of greater discrimination in the economic and social spheres or more.

Are we then headed for an era of growing illiberalism in the liberal democracies of the West so far as "others" - whether the poor or visible minorities - are concerned? Are the foundations of liberal democracies really so shallow?

Some of us may recall Fareed Zakaria's seminal article in Foreign Affairs (1997) in which he drew attention to growing illiberalism in new democracies - countries which held reasonably free and fair elections without subscribing to constitutional liberalism. For Zakaria, "liberal constitutionalism" - that "tradition, deep in Western history that seeks to protect an individual's autonomy and dignity against coercion, whatever the source - state, church or society" - separates Western democracies from the rest.

The larger issue may well be whether the celebrated liberal values of Western societies - which together with constitutional and other legal provisions, provide the bedrock of liberal democracy - are really dependent on the continued prosperity of a majority of its citizens or whether they have replaced or compete with older traditions.

Perhaps Zakaria is right about the part where the "tradition" to protect individual autonomy and dignity - by which one should understand the referent to be all individuals irrespective of class or race - against coercion has developed deep roots among a large majority. If that is true, then liberal values may well hold their own in hard times.

What if, however, we overestimated the nature and extent to which liberal values have penetrated these societies without sufficient consideration to ethnic or other differences so that we became blind to its fragile bases?

If Friedman is right, then Western democracies face a challenge from within where "tradition" may not be of much help. Economic stagnation and decline will likely have immoral consequences because the same countries have other traditions too. The laundry list of these other traditions is long and well-known - racism, colonialism, slavery et cetera - and their existence shows up in the public spaces of "civilized" countries in the form of anti-immigrant rallies and demonstrations.

Under current conditions, the social fabric of many Western societies is strained to an extent not experienced at least since the times of the Great Depression. In Europe, as high rates of unemployment become endemic, a shrinking base of taxpayers is expected to support welfare handouts to not only the fair sons and daughters of the soil but dark-skinned others as well. Both in the US and Europe, there has been broad resentment against welfare for the undeserving poor (read African-Americans and Latinos) at least since the Ronald Reagan/Margaret Thatcher years.

The news about "others" from Europe - whether in Germany, the Netherlands or the United Kingdom - is not pretty. It remains to be seen how many American states will follow Alabama's lead in pushing for harsh anti-immigrant laws, invoking uncertainty, fear and worse.

I don't know about other liberal folks but I do wonder about my "moral character" holding up in hard times.

Pushkar is a Montreal-based researcher affiliated with the Institute for the Study of International Development (ISID), McGill University.