Rafia Zakaria in The Dawn
IN a recent report, the Centre for Global Development made a surprising and somewhat startling observation. Looking at the data from several recent studies, they noted that even the very best international development programmes to reduce global poverty could only produce outcomes that were 40 times less successful than the income gain people in poor countries experienced when their citizens were provided greater labour mobility. In simple non-economist terms, it means that visas work faster and better to reduce global poverty by a lot than even the very best international development programmes.
The visa, then, with the promise of mobility that it holds, is one of the few single things that has the greatest capacity to eliminate global poverty than anything else in the world.
What is true, however, is not always popular, and this is certainly true of the visa solution. While this may be true, the extent of the discrepancy between the effectiveness of international aid programmes versus work visas is quite alarming. A study published in Science magazine reveals how intensive and highly targeted programmes directed at poor countries like Pakistan and Ethiopia were successful at reducing poverty even if they were far more expensive to implement and produce.
Even so, the mood of the announcement was triumphant; pricey as it may be, their study had found that international aid could work. The fact that work visas and access to labour markets work better was never mentioned.
The international aid system is a moral hierarchy, with the aid grantors at the top.
The omission is not surprising. As another study has noted, the infrastructure of aid depends on hierarchies in which Western experts imported into impoverished environments diagnose how and what poor countries must do to escape persistent poverty. Even while development lingo has evolved to include terms like ‘local involvement’ and ‘community input’, no project is complete without the messenger experts of the West arriving to impart their pearls of wisdom.
Behind all of this, there is a hierarchy at work and it always involves donor countries and their experts being at the top. This is even more visible in public presentations of development work at this or that conference; in one example, noted in the report (but recurrent everywhere), an organiser had to fight to ensure that at least one Arabic speaker be included in a panel on international development in the Middle East and the North African region.
It’s not just panels and experts that are the problem; it is also the impact of these interventions on local populations. Take, for instance, the issue of ‘capacity building’, a term of art deployed when aid is handed out in poor communities but little improvement is seen in their metrics.
At this point, ‘capacity building’ enters to save the day, that is, to introduce skills, such as financial management, entrepreneurship, etc that would hypothetically enable better results and prove the development programmes effective after all. Few of these ‘capacity-building’ programmes actually deliver the promised, improved results.
The reason is simple. Contrary to the assumption that aid grants exist solely to eliminate global poverty in the world’s most wanting populations, the international aid system is also a moral hierarchy. The aid grantors are at the top; they have the most and know the best, but in addition to all that they are also morally superior, willing to grant assistance with little expectation in return. They are the world’s altruists, whose purity of purpose lends them the authority that no others possess. They can pretend that they are doing good while expecting nothing at all in return.
When this moral aspect of international aid and aid giving in general is noted, the international aid system can be recast not as a means of actually helping the poor (because visas and labour mobility would accomplish this with far greater efficacy) but rather a means via which a moral hierarchy is created and maintained — the world’s wealthy, also the world’s noblest, inhabiting its summit, and the wanting at the bottom.
Seen against this, the purpose of development programmes may not actually be to reduce poverty or eliminate it but rather to enable the continued existence of this moral hierarchy. Per its dimensions, the world’s poor are not simply to be pitied but also morally wanting, often too lazy or devoid of initiative to figure out how to lift themselves out of their hapless circumstances. They are the ignoble, always awaiting alms from the good and noble.
Permitting some programme of labour mobility would dismantle this structure, whose moral currency permits the West to justify wars, trade restrictions and so much else that enable the maintenance of Western dominance. Research shows that an individual’s own desire to change his or her circumstances, one that aligns with the provision of work visas, is the best predictor of success in escaping poverty. Even while development professionals create metrics for this and that, measure effectiveness through complex statistical models, these basics that show a better route than the system of international aid are ignored.
Even while virtual platforms of communication enable organisation and discussion across national and continental boundaries and time zones, even as jet travel puts the world at our disposal and makes movement across borders a regularity, Western countries continue to rely on the archaic premises that borders are real, racial and religious difference are threats and the basis on which opportunities are distributed. It is not the lack of capacity or initiative among farmers in sub-Saharan Africa or shepherds in Ethiopia, then, that explain the persistence of global poverty, it is the inability of these people to travel freely to work where the jobs are.
Wednesday 18 April 2018
Tuesday 17 April 2018
The India I grew up in has gone. These rapes show a damaged, divided nation
Anuradha Roy in The Guardian
A protest march in Kolkata for Asifa Bano, an eight-year-old girl who was raped and murdered. Photograph: Piyal Adhikary/EPA
Achilling leitmotif of Nordic crime fiction is a child leaving home to play, never to return. Detectives search out trails pointing to sexual violence and murder, and by degrees it becomes clear that the crime is not isolated: it is the symptom of a damaged community. The abduction, gang-rape, and murder in India of eight-year-old Asifa Bano reveals such damage on a terrifying scale. It shows that the slow sectarian poison released into the country’s bloodstream by its Hindu nationalists has reached full toxicity.
Where government statistics say four rapes are reported across the country every hour, sexual assault is no longer news. Indian minds have been rearranged by the constant violence of their surroundings. Crimes against women, children and minority communities are normalised enough for only the most sensational to be reported. The reasons Asifa’s ordeal has shaken a nation exhausted by brutality are four. The victim was a little girl. She was picked because she was Muslim. The murder was not the act of isolated deviants but of well-organised Hindu zealots. And the men who raped her included a retired government official and two serving police officers.
Achilling leitmotif of Nordic crime fiction is a child leaving home to play, never to return. Detectives search out trails pointing to sexual violence and murder, and by degrees it becomes clear that the crime is not isolated: it is the symptom of a damaged community. The abduction, gang-rape, and murder in India of eight-year-old Asifa Bano reveals such damage on a terrifying scale. It shows that the slow sectarian poison released into the country’s bloodstream by its Hindu nationalists has reached full toxicity.
Where government statistics say four rapes are reported across the country every hour, sexual assault is no longer news. Indian minds have been rearranged by the constant violence of their surroundings. Crimes against women, children and minority communities are normalised enough for only the most sensational to be reported. The reasons Asifa’s ordeal has shaken a nation exhausted by brutality are four. The victim was a little girl. She was picked because she was Muslim. The murder was not the act of isolated deviants but of well-organised Hindu zealots. And the men who raped her included a retired government official and two serving police officers.
When the police in Jammu (the Hindu-dominated part of Kashmir) tried to arrest the guilty last week, a Hindu nationalist mob threatened not the killers but the few honest policemen and lawyers who were trying to do their jobs. The was a mob with a difference: it included government ministers, lawyers and women waving the national flag in favour of the rapists, as well as supporters of the two major Indian parties, Congress and the Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) – the party of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who is in Britain this week to attend the Commonwealth heads of government meeting.
Nationalism can be benign as well as malignant: Tagore foresaw the malignant variant a century ago. “Alien government in India is a chameleon,” he wrote. “Today it comes in the guise of an Englishman … the next day, without abating a jot of its virulence, it may take the shape of our own countrymen.” Given the right political conditions, virulent nationalism creeps into every bone, every thought process. When it leads to the calculated mutilation of a child, ethnic cleansing does not appear too far distant. If the world has understood fascism better through Anne Frank, its understanding of contemporary India will remain incomplete unless it recognises the political venom that killed Asifa.
Asifa belonged to a nomadic Muslim tribe that herds its cattle 300 miles twice a year in search of pasture. In January, when the snow lies deep in their alpine meadows, these shepherds walk down to Jammu. Here they graze their animals in the little land still available to them. Asifa went one evening to bring back grazing horses, and never returned.
Recently filed police investigations conclude that eight men imprisoned her for a week, drugged her, starved her, and took turns to rape her in a Hindu shrine. It was well organised. The mastermind, who runs a Hindu fundamentalist organisation, knew Asifa’s daily routine. The hiding place was agreed, and sedatives kept at hand. Once the girl was theirs, the kidnappers phoned a friend in another city to join their party: he travelled several hours, as if on a business trip, to rape a sedated eight-year-old. The motive was to strike terror among the Muslim nomads and drive them from Rasana, a largely Hindu village. Tribal Muslims make up a negligible percentage of the local population, perhaps 8%. Even so, the Hindus there fear “demographic change”, and have been fighting to drive them out.
Absolute darkness begins imperceptibly, as gathering dusk. Reading of 1930s Vienna in Robert Seethaler’s The Tobacconist some months ago, I began to feel an uneasy sense of familiarity. At first, only a few minor problems befall Seethaler’s Jewish tobacconist. His antisemitic neighbour, a butcher, contrives through a series of petty offences to make life difficult. After each act of vandalism, the tobacconist replaces broken glass, swabs away entrails, opens his shop again. The vandalism is a feeble precursor of what is to come. Anschluss is a few months away and it requires little conjecture to know how the novel and its tobacconist end. Even as the details of Asifa’s death emerged, another crime came to light, this time from Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, also ruled by the BJP. The father of a teenage girl wanted merely to lodge a report with the police that his daughter had been raped over several days by a legislator and his brother. The father was arrested and died soon after, allegedly beaten to death in custody.
Indian court orders arrest of politician for gang-rape
Read more
The thread that binds these crimes is the sense of invincibility that a majoritarian regime has granted its personnel and supporters. Manifestations of the newfound swagger include vandalising sprees after electoral victories, and the lynching of Muslims and Dalits (the lowest in the Hindu caste hierarchy). The general idea is to create a sense of terror and uncertainty, and in this the tacit support of the state pumps up the mobs – and they rampage with greater confidence. In swathes of rural north India, violating women to signal caste, religious and masculine supremacy is only an extension of such activity. The primeval divisions within Indian society have never been sharper. The BJP’s ruthless drive to consolidate patriarchal Hinduism has pressurised women about what they can wear, families about what they can eat, and young people about who they may marry. Parties in the opposition, envying the electoral success of the BJP, tend to speak out against this culture of sectarian hatred after first sniffing which way the wind is blowing, then gauging how strongly it is blowing.
In the India where I grew up, memories of Gandhi, Tagore and Nehru were strong; the necessity of secularism was drummed into us. We knew that our politicians were largely venal, but it was still a country in which morality and humanity mattered. Now, journalists and writers who speak up against the undeclared war on Dalits, Muslims, poor people and women are trolled by cyber-mobs. – if they’re lucky. The most publicised murder last year was of a dissenting journalist shot dead outside her home in Bengaluru, in south India.
Modi, renowned as a demagogue, is coming to be even better known for what he chooses to stay silent about. Sympathy for the suffering individual, many have noticed, is not among his most distinctive traits. When the student Jyoti Singh “Nirbhaya” was raped and killed in Delhi in 2012, it took several days of massive public outrage to stir Sonia Gandhi and her ruling Congress party, from their mansions. In the aftermath of Asifa, the current prime minister, perhaps quicker off the blocks, took a mere three days after the details of the eight-year-old’s killing were released to understand how much he stands to lose by saying nothing when the whole world is watching. The times are such that even so little so late from Modi has been seen as an acknowledgement, however reluctant, that India’s constitution requires him to ensure justice and equality for all its many communities.
Nationalism can be benign as well as malignant: Tagore foresaw the malignant variant a century ago. “Alien government in India is a chameleon,” he wrote. “Today it comes in the guise of an Englishman … the next day, without abating a jot of its virulence, it may take the shape of our own countrymen.” Given the right political conditions, virulent nationalism creeps into every bone, every thought process. When it leads to the calculated mutilation of a child, ethnic cleansing does not appear too far distant. If the world has understood fascism better through Anne Frank, its understanding of contemporary India will remain incomplete unless it recognises the political venom that killed Asifa.
Asifa belonged to a nomadic Muslim tribe that herds its cattle 300 miles twice a year in search of pasture. In January, when the snow lies deep in their alpine meadows, these shepherds walk down to Jammu. Here they graze their animals in the little land still available to them. Asifa went one evening to bring back grazing horses, and never returned.
Recently filed police investigations conclude that eight men imprisoned her for a week, drugged her, starved her, and took turns to rape her in a Hindu shrine. It was well organised. The mastermind, who runs a Hindu fundamentalist organisation, knew Asifa’s daily routine. The hiding place was agreed, and sedatives kept at hand. Once the girl was theirs, the kidnappers phoned a friend in another city to join their party: he travelled several hours, as if on a business trip, to rape a sedated eight-year-old. The motive was to strike terror among the Muslim nomads and drive them from Rasana, a largely Hindu village. Tribal Muslims make up a negligible percentage of the local population, perhaps 8%. Even so, the Hindus there fear “demographic change”, and have been fighting to drive them out.
Absolute darkness begins imperceptibly, as gathering dusk. Reading of 1930s Vienna in Robert Seethaler’s The Tobacconist some months ago, I began to feel an uneasy sense of familiarity. At first, only a few minor problems befall Seethaler’s Jewish tobacconist. His antisemitic neighbour, a butcher, contrives through a series of petty offences to make life difficult. After each act of vandalism, the tobacconist replaces broken glass, swabs away entrails, opens his shop again. The vandalism is a feeble precursor of what is to come. Anschluss is a few months away and it requires little conjecture to know how the novel and its tobacconist end. Even as the details of Asifa’s death emerged, another crime came to light, this time from Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, also ruled by the BJP. The father of a teenage girl wanted merely to lodge a report with the police that his daughter had been raped over several days by a legislator and his brother. The father was arrested and died soon after, allegedly beaten to death in custody.
Indian court orders arrest of politician for gang-rape
Read more
The thread that binds these crimes is the sense of invincibility that a majoritarian regime has granted its personnel and supporters. Manifestations of the newfound swagger include vandalising sprees after electoral victories, and the lynching of Muslims and Dalits (the lowest in the Hindu caste hierarchy). The general idea is to create a sense of terror and uncertainty, and in this the tacit support of the state pumps up the mobs – and they rampage with greater confidence. In swathes of rural north India, violating women to signal caste, religious and masculine supremacy is only an extension of such activity. The primeval divisions within Indian society have never been sharper. The BJP’s ruthless drive to consolidate patriarchal Hinduism has pressurised women about what they can wear, families about what they can eat, and young people about who they may marry. Parties in the opposition, envying the electoral success of the BJP, tend to speak out against this culture of sectarian hatred after first sniffing which way the wind is blowing, then gauging how strongly it is blowing.
In the India where I grew up, memories of Gandhi, Tagore and Nehru were strong; the necessity of secularism was drummed into us. We knew that our politicians were largely venal, but it was still a country in which morality and humanity mattered. Now, journalists and writers who speak up against the undeclared war on Dalits, Muslims, poor people and women are trolled by cyber-mobs. – if they’re lucky. The most publicised murder last year was of a dissenting journalist shot dead outside her home in Bengaluru, in south India.
Modi, renowned as a demagogue, is coming to be even better known for what he chooses to stay silent about. Sympathy for the suffering individual, many have noticed, is not among his most distinctive traits. When the student Jyoti Singh “Nirbhaya” was raped and killed in Delhi in 2012, it took several days of massive public outrage to stir Sonia Gandhi and her ruling Congress party, from their mansions. In the aftermath of Asifa, the current prime minister, perhaps quicker off the blocks, took a mere three days after the details of the eight-year-old’s killing were released to understand how much he stands to lose by saying nothing when the whole world is watching. The times are such that even so little so late from Modi has been seen as an acknowledgement, however reluctant, that India’s constitution requires him to ensure justice and equality for all its many communities.
An Alternative View - The Gas Attack on Douma, Syria
Robert Fisk in The Independent
This is the story of a town called Douma, a ravaged, stinking place of smashed apartment blocks – and of an underground clinic whose images of suffering allowed three of the Western world’s most powerful nations to bomb Syria last week. There’s even a friendly doctor in a green coat who, when I track him down in the very same clinic, cheerfully tells me that the “gas” videotape which horrified the world – despite all the doubters – is perfectly genuine.
War stories, however, have a habit of growing darker. For the same 58-year old senior Syrian doctor then adds something profoundly uncomfortable: the patients, he says, were overcome not by gas but by oxygen starvation in the rubbish-filled tunnels and basements in which they lived, on a night of wind and heavy shelling that stirred up a dust storm.
As Dr Assim Rahaibani announces this extraordinary conclusion, it is worth observing that he is by his own admission not an eyewitness himself and, as he speaks good English, he refers twice to the jihadi gunmen of Jaish el-Islam [the Army of Islam] in Douma as “terrorists” – the regime’s word for their enemies, and a term used by many people across Syria. Am I hearing this right? Which version of events are we to believe?
By bad luck, too, the doctors who were on duty that night on 7 April were all in Damascus giving evidence to a chemical weapons enquiry, which will be attempting to provide a definitive answer to that question in the coming weeks.
France, meanwhile, has said it has “proof” chemical weapons were used, and US media have quoted sources saying urine and blood tests showed this too. The WHO has said its partners on the ground treated 500 patients “exhibiting signs and symptoms consistent with exposure to toxic chemicals”.
At the same time, inspectors from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) are currently blocked from coming here to the site of the alleged gas attack themselves, ostensibly because they lacked the correct UN permits.
Before we go any further, readers should be aware that this is not the only story in Douma. There are the many people I talked to amid the ruins of the town who said they had “never believed in” gas stories – which were usually put about, they claimed, by the armed Islamist groups. These particular jihadis survived under a blizzard of shellfire by living in other’s people’s homes and in vast, wide tunnels with underground roads carved through the living rock by prisoners with pick-axes on three levels beneath the town. I walked through three of them yesterday, vast corridors of living rock which still contained Russian – yes, Russian – rockets and burned-out cars.
So the story of Douma is thus not just a story of gas – or no gas, as the case may be. It’s about thousands of people who did not opt for evacuation from Douma on buses that left last week, alongside the gunmen with whom they had to live like troglodytes for months in order to survive. I walked across this town quite freely yesterday without soldier, policeman or minder to haunt my footsteps, just two Syrian friends, a camera and a notebook. I sometimes had to clamber across 20-foot-high ramparts, up and down almost sheer walls of earth. Happy to see foreigners among them, happier still that the siege is finally over, they are mostly smiling; those whose faces you can see, of course, because a surprising number of Douma’s women wear full-length black hijab.
I first drove into Douma as part of an escorted convoy of journalists. But once a boring general had announced outside a wrecked council house “I have no information” – that most helpful rubbish-dump of Arab officialdom – I just walked away. Several other reporters, mostly Syrian, did the same. Even a group of Russian journalists – all in military attire – drifted off.
It was a short walk to Dr Rahaibani. From the door of his subterranean clinic – “Point 200”, it is called, in the weird geology of this partly-underground city – is a corridor leading downhill where he showed me his lowly hospital and the few beds where a small girl was crying as nurses treated a cut above her eye.
“I was with my family in the basement of my home three hundred metres from here on the night but all the doctors know what happened. There was a lot of shelling [by government forces] and aircraft were always over Douma at night – but on this night, there was wind and huge dust clouds began to come into the basements and cellars where people lived. People began to arrive here suffering from hypoxia, oxygen loss. Then someone at the door, a “White Helmet”, shouted “Gas!”, and a panic began. People started throwing water over each other. Yes, the video was filmed here, it is genuine, but what you see are people suffering from hypoxia – not gas poisoning.”
Independent Middle East Correspondent Robert Fisk in one of the miles of tunnels hacked beneath Douma by prisoners of Syrian rebels (Yara Ismail)
How could it be that Douma refugees who had reached camps in Turkey were already describing a gas attack which no-one in Douma today seemed to recall? It did occur to me, once I was walking for more than a mile through these wretched prisoner-groined tunnels, that the citizens of Douma lived so isolated from each other for so long that “news” in our sense of the word simply had no meaning to them. Syria doesn’t cut it as Jeffersonian democracy – as I cynically like to tell my Arab colleagues – and it is indeed a ruthless dictatorship, but that couldn’t cow these people, happy to see foreigners among them, from reacting with a few words of truth. So what were they telling me?
They talked about the Islamists under whom they had lived. They talked about how the armed groups had stolen civilian homes to avoid the Syrian government and Russian bombing. The Jaish el-Islam had burned their offices before they left, but the massive buildings inside the security zones they created had almost all been sandwiched to the ground by air strikes. A Syrian colonel I came across behind one of these buildings asked if I wanted to see how deep the tunnels were. I stopped after well over a mile when he cryptically observed that “this tunnel might reach as far as Britain”. Ah yes, Ms May, I remembered, whose air strikes had been so intimately connected to this place of tunnels and dust. And gas?
This is the story of a town called Douma, a ravaged, stinking place of smashed apartment blocks – and of an underground clinic whose images of suffering allowed three of the Western world’s most powerful nations to bomb Syria last week. There’s even a friendly doctor in a green coat who, when I track him down in the very same clinic, cheerfully tells me that the “gas” videotape which horrified the world – despite all the doubters – is perfectly genuine.
War stories, however, have a habit of growing darker. For the same 58-year old senior Syrian doctor then adds something profoundly uncomfortable: the patients, he says, were overcome not by gas but by oxygen starvation in the rubbish-filled tunnels and basements in which they lived, on a night of wind and heavy shelling that stirred up a dust storm.
As Dr Assim Rahaibani announces this extraordinary conclusion, it is worth observing that he is by his own admission not an eyewitness himself and, as he speaks good English, he refers twice to the jihadi gunmen of Jaish el-Islam [the Army of Islam] in Douma as “terrorists” – the regime’s word for their enemies, and a term used by many people across Syria. Am I hearing this right? Which version of events are we to believe?
By bad luck, too, the doctors who were on duty that night on 7 April were all in Damascus giving evidence to a chemical weapons enquiry, which will be attempting to provide a definitive answer to that question in the coming weeks.
France, meanwhile, has said it has “proof” chemical weapons were used, and US media have quoted sources saying urine and blood tests showed this too. The WHO has said its partners on the ground treated 500 patients “exhibiting signs and symptoms consistent with exposure to toxic chemicals”.
At the same time, inspectors from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) are currently blocked from coming here to the site of the alleged gas attack themselves, ostensibly because they lacked the correct UN permits.
Before we go any further, readers should be aware that this is not the only story in Douma. There are the many people I talked to amid the ruins of the town who said they had “never believed in” gas stories – which were usually put about, they claimed, by the armed Islamist groups. These particular jihadis survived under a blizzard of shellfire by living in other’s people’s homes and in vast, wide tunnels with underground roads carved through the living rock by prisoners with pick-axes on three levels beneath the town. I walked through three of them yesterday, vast corridors of living rock which still contained Russian – yes, Russian – rockets and burned-out cars.
So the story of Douma is thus not just a story of gas – or no gas, as the case may be. It’s about thousands of people who did not opt for evacuation from Douma on buses that left last week, alongside the gunmen with whom they had to live like troglodytes for months in order to survive. I walked across this town quite freely yesterday without soldier, policeman or minder to haunt my footsteps, just two Syrian friends, a camera and a notebook. I sometimes had to clamber across 20-foot-high ramparts, up and down almost sheer walls of earth. Happy to see foreigners among them, happier still that the siege is finally over, they are mostly smiling; those whose faces you can see, of course, because a surprising number of Douma’s women wear full-length black hijab.
I first drove into Douma as part of an escorted convoy of journalists. But once a boring general had announced outside a wrecked council house “I have no information” – that most helpful rubbish-dump of Arab officialdom – I just walked away. Several other reporters, mostly Syrian, did the same. Even a group of Russian journalists – all in military attire – drifted off.
It was a short walk to Dr Rahaibani. From the door of his subterranean clinic – “Point 200”, it is called, in the weird geology of this partly-underground city – is a corridor leading downhill where he showed me his lowly hospital and the few beds where a small girl was crying as nurses treated a cut above her eye.
“I was with my family in the basement of my home three hundred metres from here on the night but all the doctors know what happened. There was a lot of shelling [by government forces] and aircraft were always over Douma at night – but on this night, there was wind and huge dust clouds began to come into the basements and cellars where people lived. People began to arrive here suffering from hypoxia, oxygen loss. Then someone at the door, a “White Helmet”, shouted “Gas!”, and a panic began. People started throwing water over each other. Yes, the video was filmed here, it is genuine, but what you see are people suffering from hypoxia – not gas poisoning.”
Independent Middle East Correspondent Robert Fisk in one of the miles of tunnels hacked beneath Douma by prisoners of Syrian rebels (Yara Ismail)
Oddly, after chatting to more than 20 people, I couldn’t find one who showed the slightest interest in Douma’s role in bringing about the Western air attacks. Two actually told me they didn’t know about the connection.
But it was a strange world I walked into. Two men, Hussam and Nazir Abu Aishe, said they were unaware how many people had been killed in Douma, although the latter admitted he had a cousin “executed by Jaish el-Islam [the Army of Islam] for allegedly being “close to the regime”. They shrugged when I asked about the 43 people said to have died in the infamous Douma attack.
The White Helmets – the medical first responders already legendary in the West but with some interesting corners to their own story – played a familiar role during the battles. They are partly funded by the Foreign Office and most of the local offices were staffed by Douma men. I found their wrecked offices not far from Dr Rahaibani’s clinic. A gas mask had been left outside a food container with one eye-piece pierced and a pile of dirty military camouflage uniforms lay inside one room. Planted, I asked myself? I doubt it. The place was heaped with capsules, broken medical equipment and files, bedding and mattresses.
Of course we must hear their side of the story, but it will not happen here: a woman told us that every member of the White Helmets in Douma abandoned their main headquarters and chose to take the government-organised and Russian-protected buses to the rebel province of Idlib with the armed groups when the final truce was agreed.
There were food stalls open and a patrol of Russian military policemen – a now optional extra for every Syrian ceasefire – and no-one had even bothered to storm into the forbidding Islamist prison near Martyr’s Square where victims were supposedly beheaded in the basements. The town’s complement of Syrian interior ministry civilian police – who eerily wear military clothes – are watched over by the Russians who may or may not be watched by the civilians. Again, my earnest questions about gas were met with what seemed genuine perplexity.
But it was a strange world I walked into. Two men, Hussam and Nazir Abu Aishe, said they were unaware how many people had been killed in Douma, although the latter admitted he had a cousin “executed by Jaish el-Islam [the Army of Islam] for allegedly being “close to the regime”. They shrugged when I asked about the 43 people said to have died in the infamous Douma attack.
The White Helmets – the medical first responders already legendary in the West but with some interesting corners to their own story – played a familiar role during the battles. They are partly funded by the Foreign Office and most of the local offices were staffed by Douma men. I found their wrecked offices not far from Dr Rahaibani’s clinic. A gas mask had been left outside a food container with one eye-piece pierced and a pile of dirty military camouflage uniforms lay inside one room. Planted, I asked myself? I doubt it. The place was heaped with capsules, broken medical equipment and files, bedding and mattresses.
Of course we must hear their side of the story, but it will not happen here: a woman told us that every member of the White Helmets in Douma abandoned their main headquarters and chose to take the government-organised and Russian-protected buses to the rebel province of Idlib with the armed groups when the final truce was agreed.
There were food stalls open and a patrol of Russian military policemen – a now optional extra for every Syrian ceasefire – and no-one had even bothered to storm into the forbidding Islamist prison near Martyr’s Square where victims were supposedly beheaded in the basements. The town’s complement of Syrian interior ministry civilian police – who eerily wear military clothes – are watched over by the Russians who may or may not be watched by the civilians. Again, my earnest questions about gas were met with what seemed genuine perplexity.
How could it be that Douma refugees who had reached camps in Turkey were already describing a gas attack which no-one in Douma today seemed to recall? It did occur to me, once I was walking for more than a mile through these wretched prisoner-groined tunnels, that the citizens of Douma lived so isolated from each other for so long that “news” in our sense of the word simply had no meaning to them. Syria doesn’t cut it as Jeffersonian democracy – as I cynically like to tell my Arab colleagues – and it is indeed a ruthless dictatorship, but that couldn’t cow these people, happy to see foreigners among them, from reacting with a few words of truth. So what were they telling me?
They talked about the Islamists under whom they had lived. They talked about how the armed groups had stolen civilian homes to avoid the Syrian government and Russian bombing. The Jaish el-Islam had burned their offices before they left, but the massive buildings inside the security zones they created had almost all been sandwiched to the ground by air strikes. A Syrian colonel I came across behind one of these buildings asked if I wanted to see how deep the tunnels were. I stopped after well over a mile when he cryptically observed that “this tunnel might reach as far as Britain”. Ah yes, Ms May, I remembered, whose air strikes had been so intimately connected to this place of tunnels and dust. And gas?
Sunday 15 April 2018
The right and left have both signed up to the myth of free market
Larry Elliot in The Guardian
Occupy Wall Street movement. After the financial crisis the public lost faith in the economics profession. Photograph: KeystoneUSA-Zuma/Rex Features
You can’t buck the market. The turn to the right taken by politics from the mid-1970s onwards was summed up in one phrase coined by Margaret Thatcher in 1988.
This idea tended to be associated with liberal economists such as Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, both of whom influenced Thatcher deeply. Both thought that left to their own devices buyers and sellers would work out the price for everything, be that a loaf of bread, a wage, or an operation in the health service.
But economists and politicians who would certainly not have classified themselves as Hayekians, Friedmanites or Thatcherites also found the idea of market forces hard to resist. The new Keynesian school believed that there might be short-term impediments – or stickiness in the jargon – and that it was the job of government to deal with these market failures. But in the long term they too thought markets would return to equilibrium.
All sorts of policies flowed from this core belief: from privatisation to curbs on trade unions; from cuts in welfare to the attempt to create an internal market in the NHS. It also justified removing constraints on capital and the hands-off approach to financial regulation in the years leading up to the banking crisis of 2008. Anybody who suggested a gigantic bubble was being inflated was told that in free markets operated by perfectly rational economic agents this could not possibly happen.
Then the financial markets froze up. This was a classic emperor’s new clothes moment, when the public realised that the economics profession did not really have the foggiest idea that the biggest financial crisis in a century had been looming. Like a doctor who had said a patient was in rude health when she was actually suffering from a life-threatening disease, it had failed when it was most needed.
Just before Christmas, I wrote a column supporting the idea for some new thinking in economics. It caused quite a stir. Some economists liked it. Others hated it and rushed to their profession’s defence.
My piece said there was a need for a more plural approach to economics, with the need for a challenge to the dominant neo-classical school as a result of its egregious failure in 2008. The argument was that a bit of competition would do economics good.
If the latest edition of the magazine Prospect is anything to go by, a debate is now well under way. Howard Reed, an economist who has worked for two of the UK’s leading thinktanks, the Institute for Public Policy Research and the Institute for Fiscal Studies, says the malaise is so serious that a “deconomics” is needed that “decontaminates the discipline, deconstructs its theoretical heart, and rebuilds from first principles”.
Reed says a retooled economics would have four features. Firstly, recognition that there is no such thing as a value-free analysis of the economy. Neo-classical economics purports to be clean and pure but uses a cloak of ethical neutrality to make an an individualistic ethos the norm.
Secondly, he says too much economics is about how humans ought to behave rather than how they actually behave. Thirdly, economics needs to focus on the good life rather than on those areas most susceptible to analysis through 19th century linear mathematics. Finally, he calls for a more pluralistic approach. Economics should be learning from other disciplines rather than colonising them.
Prospect gave Diane Coyle, a Cambridge University economics professor, the right to reply to Reed’s piece and she does so with relish, calling it lamentable, a caricature and an ill-informed diatribe.
Most modern economics involves empirical testing, Coyle says, often using new sources of data. She rejects the idea that the profession is stuck in an ivory tower fiddling around with abstruse mathematics while ignoring the real world. Rather, it is “addressing questions of immediate importance and relevance to policymakers, citizens and businesses”.
Nor is it true that the discipline requires that people be rational, calculating automatons. “It very often has people interacting with each other rather than acting as atomistic individuals, despite Reed’s charge.”
Coyle accepts that macro-economics – the big picture stuff that involves looking at the economy in the round – is in a troubled state but says this is actually only a minority field.
The point that there are many economists doing interesting things in areas such as behavioural economics is a fair one, but Coyle is on shakier ground when she skates over the problems in macro-economics.
It was after all, macro-economists – the people working at the International Monetary Fund, the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, the Bank of England – that the public relied on to get things right a decade ago. All were blind to what was going on, and that had quite a lot to do with their “markets tend to know best” belief system.
Policy makers did not find the works of Hayek and Friedman particularly useful when a second great depression was looming. Instead, they turned, if only fleetingly, to Keynes’s general theory, which told them it would not be wise to wait for market forces to do their work.
Reed’s argument is not just that blind faith in neo-classical economics led to the crisis. Nor is it simply that the systemic failure of 2008 means there is a need for a root-and-branch rethink. It is also that mainstream economics has been serving the interests of the political right.
Some in the profession, particularly those who see themselves as progressives, appear to have trouble with this idea. That perhaps explains why they have been so rattled by even the teeniest bit of criticism.
You can’t buck the market. The turn to the right taken by politics from the mid-1970s onwards was summed up in one phrase coined by Margaret Thatcher in 1988.
This idea tended to be associated with liberal economists such as Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, both of whom influenced Thatcher deeply. Both thought that left to their own devices buyers and sellers would work out the price for everything, be that a loaf of bread, a wage, or an operation in the health service.
But economists and politicians who would certainly not have classified themselves as Hayekians, Friedmanites or Thatcherites also found the idea of market forces hard to resist. The new Keynesian school believed that there might be short-term impediments – or stickiness in the jargon – and that it was the job of government to deal with these market failures. But in the long term they too thought markets would return to equilibrium.
All sorts of policies flowed from this core belief: from privatisation to curbs on trade unions; from cuts in welfare to the attempt to create an internal market in the NHS. It also justified removing constraints on capital and the hands-off approach to financial regulation in the years leading up to the banking crisis of 2008. Anybody who suggested a gigantic bubble was being inflated was told that in free markets operated by perfectly rational economic agents this could not possibly happen.
Then the financial markets froze up. This was a classic emperor’s new clothes moment, when the public realised that the economics profession did not really have the foggiest idea that the biggest financial crisis in a century had been looming. Like a doctor who had said a patient was in rude health when she was actually suffering from a life-threatening disease, it had failed when it was most needed.
Just before Christmas, I wrote a column supporting the idea for some new thinking in economics. It caused quite a stir. Some economists liked it. Others hated it and rushed to their profession’s defence.
My piece said there was a need for a more plural approach to economics, with the need for a challenge to the dominant neo-classical school as a result of its egregious failure in 2008. The argument was that a bit of competition would do economics good.
If the latest edition of the magazine Prospect is anything to go by, a debate is now well under way. Howard Reed, an economist who has worked for two of the UK’s leading thinktanks, the Institute for Public Policy Research and the Institute for Fiscal Studies, says the malaise is so serious that a “deconomics” is needed that “decontaminates the discipline, deconstructs its theoretical heart, and rebuilds from first principles”.
Reed says a retooled economics would have four features. Firstly, recognition that there is no such thing as a value-free analysis of the economy. Neo-classical economics purports to be clean and pure but uses a cloak of ethical neutrality to make an an individualistic ethos the norm.
Secondly, he says too much economics is about how humans ought to behave rather than how they actually behave. Thirdly, economics needs to focus on the good life rather than on those areas most susceptible to analysis through 19th century linear mathematics. Finally, he calls for a more pluralistic approach. Economics should be learning from other disciplines rather than colonising them.
Prospect gave Diane Coyle, a Cambridge University economics professor, the right to reply to Reed’s piece and she does so with relish, calling it lamentable, a caricature and an ill-informed diatribe.
Most modern economics involves empirical testing, Coyle says, often using new sources of data. She rejects the idea that the profession is stuck in an ivory tower fiddling around with abstruse mathematics while ignoring the real world. Rather, it is “addressing questions of immediate importance and relevance to policymakers, citizens and businesses”.
Nor is it true that the discipline requires that people be rational, calculating automatons. “It very often has people interacting with each other rather than acting as atomistic individuals, despite Reed’s charge.”
Coyle accepts that macro-economics – the big picture stuff that involves looking at the economy in the round – is in a troubled state but says this is actually only a minority field.
The point that there are many economists doing interesting things in areas such as behavioural economics is a fair one, but Coyle is on shakier ground when she skates over the problems in macro-economics.
It was after all, macro-economists – the people working at the International Monetary Fund, the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, the Bank of England – that the public relied on to get things right a decade ago. All were blind to what was going on, and that had quite a lot to do with their “markets tend to know best” belief system.
Policy makers did not find the works of Hayek and Friedman particularly useful when a second great depression was looming. Instead, they turned, if only fleetingly, to Keynes’s general theory, which told them it would not be wise to wait for market forces to do their work.
Reed’s argument is not just that blind faith in neo-classical economics led to the crisis. Nor is it simply that the systemic failure of 2008 means there is a need for a root-and-branch rethink. It is also that mainstream economics has been serving the interests of the political right.
Some in the profession, particularly those who see themselves as progressives, appear to have trouble with this idea. That perhaps explains why they have been so rattled by even the teeniest bit of criticism.
'There is no such thing as past or future': physicist Carlo Rovelli on changing how we think about time
Charlotte Higgins on Carlo Rovelli's book on the elastic concept of time. Source The Guardian
What do we know about time? Language tells us that it “passes”, it moves like a great river, inexorably dragging us with it, and, in the end, washes us up on its shore while it continues, unstoppable. Time flows. It moves ever forwards. Or does it? Poets also tell us that time stumbles or creeps or slows or even, at times, seems to stop. They tell us that the past might be inescapable, immanent in objects or people or landscapes. When Juliet is waiting for Romeo, time passes sluggishly: she longs for Phaethon to take the reins of the Sun’s chariot, since he would whip up the horses and “bring in cloudy night immediately”. When we wake from a vivid dream we are dimly aware that the sense of time we have just experienced is illusory.
Carlo Rovelli is an Italian theoretical physicist who wants to make the uninitiated grasp the excitement of his field. His book Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, with its concise, sparkling essays on subjects such as black holes and quanta, has sold 1.3m copies worldwide. Now comes The Order of Time, a dizzying, poetic work in which I found myself abandoning everything I thought I knew about time – certainly the idea that it “flows”, and even that it exists at all, in any profound sense.
We meet outside the church of San Petronio in Bologna, where Rovelli studied. (“I like to say that, just like Copernicus, I was an undergraduate at Bologna and a graduate at Padua,” he jokes.) A cheery, compact fellow in his early 60s, Rovelli is in nostalgic mood. He lives in Marseille, where, since 2010, he has run the quantum gravity group at the Centre de physique théorique. Before that, he was in the US, at the University of Pittsburgh, for a decade.
Carlo Rovelli in Bologna. Photograph: Roberto Serra / Iguana Press / G/Iguana Press / Getty Images
He rarely visits Bologna, and he has been catching up with old friends. We wander towards the university area. Piazza Verdi is flocked with a lively crowd of students. There are flags and graffiti and banners, too – anti-fascist slogans, something in support of the Kurds, a sign enjoining passers-by not to forget Giulio Regeni, the Cambridge PhD student killed in Egypt in 2016.
“In my day it was barricades and police,” he says. He was a passionate student activist, back then. What did he and his pals want? “Small things! We wanted a world without boundaries, without state, without war, without religion, without family, without school, without private property.”
He was, he says now, too radical, and it was hard, trying to share possessions, trying to live without jealousy. And then there was the LSD. He took it a few times. And it turned out to be the seed of his interest in physics generally, and in the question of time specifically. “It was an extraordinarily strong experience that touched me also intellectually,” he remembers. “Among the strange phenomena was the sense of time stopping. Things were happening in my mind but the clock was not going ahead; the flow of time was not passing any more. It was a total subversion of the structure of reality. He had hallucinations of misshapen objects, of bright and dazzling colours – but also recalls thinking during the experience, actually asking himself what was going on.
“And I thought: ‘Well, it’s a chemical that is changing things in my brain. But how do I know that the usual perception is right, and this is wrong? If these two ways of perceiving are so different, what does it mean that one is the correct one?’” The way he talks about LSD is, in fact, quite similar to his description of reading Einstein as a student, on a sun-baked Calabrian beach, and looking up from his book imagining the world not as it appeared to him every day, but as the wild and undulating spacetime that the great physicist described. Reality, to quote the title of one of his books, is not what it seems.
He gave his conservative, Veronese parents a bit of a fright, he says. His father, now in his 90s, was surprised when young Carlo’s lecturers said he was actually doing all right, despite the long hair and radical politics and the occasional brush with the police. It was after the optimistic sense of student revolution in Italy came to an abrupt end with the kidnapping and murder of the former prime minister, Aldo Moro, in 1978 that Rovelli began to take physics seriously. But his route to his big academic career was circuitous and unconventional. “Nowadays everyone is worried because there is no work. When I was young, the problem was how to avoid work. I did not want to become part of the ‘productive system’,” he says.
Academia, then, seemed like a way of avoiding the world of a conventional job, and for some years he followed his curiosity without a sense of careerist ambition. He went to Trento in northern Italy to join a research group he was interested in, sleeping in his car for a few months (“I’d get a shower in the department to be decent”). He went to London, because he was interested in the work of Chris Isham, and then to the US, to be near physicists such as Abhay Ashtekar and Lee Smolin. “My first paper was horrendously late compared to what a young person would have to do now. And this was a privilege – I knew more things, there was more time.”
Albert Einstein worked at the Swiss patent office for seven years: ‘That worldly cloister where I hatched my most beautiful ideas.’ Photograph: Keystone/Getty Images
The popular books, too, have come relatively late, after his academic study of quantum gravity, published in 2004. If Seven Brief Lessons was a lucid primer, The Order of Timetakes things further; it deals with “what I really do in science, what I really think in depth, what is important for me”.
Rovelli’s work as a physicist, in crude terms, occupies the large space left by Einstein on the one hand, and the development of quantum theory on the other. If the theory of general relativity describes a world of curved spacetime where everything is continuous, quantum theory describes a world in which discrete quantities of energy interact. In Rovelli’s words, “quantum mechanics cannot deal with the curvature of spacetime, and general relativity cannot account for quanta”.
Both theories are successful; but their apparent incompatibility is an open problem, and one of the current tasks of theoretical physics is to attempt to construct a conceptual framework in which they both work. Rovelli’s field of loop theory, or loop quantum gravity, offers a possible answer to the problem, in which spacetime itself is understood to be granular, a fine structure woven from loops.
String theory offers another, different route towards solving the problem. When I ask him what he thinks about the possibility that his loop quantum gravity work may be wrong, he gently explains that being wrong isn’t the point; being part of the conversation is the point. And anyway, “If you ask who had the longest and most striking list of results it’s Einstein without any doubt. But if you ask who is the scientist who made most mistakes, it’s still Einstein.”
How does time fit in to his work? Time, Einstein long ago showed, is relative – time passes more slowly for an object moving faster than another object, for example. In this relative world, an absolute “now” is more or less meaningless. Time, then, is not some separate quality that impassively flows around us. Time is, in Rovelli’s words, “part of a complicated geometry woven together with the geometry of space”.
For Rovelli, there is more: according to his theorising, time itself disappears at the most fundamental level. His theories ask us to accept the notion that time is merely a function of our “blurred” human perception. We see the world only through a glass, darkly; we are watching Plato’s shadow-play in the cave. According to Rovelli, our undeniable experience of time is inextricably linked to the way heat behaves. In The Order of Time, he asks why can we know only the past, and not the future? The key, he suggests, is the one-directional flow of heat from warmer objects to colder ones. An ice cube dropped into a hot cup of coffee cools the coffee. But the process is not reversible: it is a one-way street, as demonstrated by the second law of thermodynamics.
String theory offers an alternative to Rovelli’s work in loop quantum gravity.
Time is also, as we experience it, a one-way street. He explains it in relation to the concept of entropy – the measure of the disordering of things. Entropy was lower in the past. Entropy is higher in the future – there is more disorder, there are more possibilities. The pack of cards of the future is shuffled and uncertain, unlike the ordered and neatly arranged pack of cards of the past. But entropy, heat, past and future are qualities that belong not to the fundamental grammar of the world but to our superficial observation of it. “If I observe the microscopic state of things,” writes Rovelli, “then the difference between past and future vanishes … in the elementary grammar of things, there is no distinction between ‘cause’ and ‘effect’.”
To understand this properly, I can suggest only that you read Rovelli’s books, and pass swiftly over this approximation by someone who gave up school physics lessons joyfully at the first possible opportunity. However, it turns out that I am precisely Rovelli’s perfect reader, or one of them, and he looks quite delighted when I check my newly acquired understanding of the concept of entropy with him. (“You passed the exam,” he says.)
“I try to write at several levels,” he explains. “I think about the person who not only doesn’t know anything about physics but is also not interested. So I think I am talking to my grandmother, who was a housekeeper. I also think some young students of physics are reading it, and I also think some of my colleagues are reading it. So I try to talk at different levels, but I keep the person who knows nothing in my mind.”
His biggest fans are the blank slates, like me, and his colleagues at universities – he gets most criticism from people in the middle, “those who know a bit of physics”. He is also pretty down on school physics. (“Calculating the speed at which a ball drops – who cares? In another life, I’d like to write a school physics book,” he says.) And he thinks the division of the world into the “two cultures” of natural sciences and human sciences is “stupid. It’s like taking England and dividing the kids into groups, and you tell one group about music, and one group about literature, and the one who gets music is not allowed to read novels and the one who does literature is not allowed to listen to music.”
In the elementary grammar of things, there is no distinction between ‘cause’ and ‘effect’
The joy of his writing is its broad cultural compass. Historicism gives an initial hand-hold on the material. (He teaches a course on history of science, where he likes to bring science and humanities students together.) And then there’s the fact that alongside Einstein, Ludwig Boltzmann and Roger Penrose appear figures such as Proust, Dante, Beethoven, and, especially, Horace – each chapter begins with an epigraph from the Roman poet – as if to ground us in human sentiment and emotion before departing for the vertiginous world of black holes and spinfoam and clouds of probabilities.
“He has a side that is intimate, lyrical and extremely intense; and he is the great singer of the passing of time,” Rovelli says. “There’s a feeling of nostalgia – it’s not anguish, it’s not sorrow – it’s a feeling of ‘Let’s live life intensely’. A good friend of mine, Ernesto, who died quite young, gave me a little book of Horace, and I have carried it around with me all my life.”
Rovelli’s view is that there is no contradiction between a vision of the universe that makes human life seem small and irrelevant, and our everyday sorrows and joys. Or indeed between “cold science” and our inner, spiritual lives. “We are part of nature, and so joy and sorrow are aspects of nature itself – nature is much richer than just sets of atoms,” he tells me. There’s a moment in Seven Lessons when he compares physics and poetry: both try to describe the unseen. It might be added that physics, when departing from its native language of mathematical equations, relies strongly on metaphor and analogy. Rovelli has a gift for memorable comparisons. He tells us, for example, when explaining that the smooth “flow” of time is an illusion, that “The events of the world do not form an orderly queue like the English, they crowd around chaotically like the Italians.” The concept of time, he says, “has lost layers one after another, piece by piece”. We are left with “an empty windswept landscape almost devoid of all trace of temporality … a world stripped to its essence, glittering with an arid and troubling beauty”.
More than anything else I’ve ever read, Rovelli reminds me of Lucretius, the first-century BCE Roman author of the epic-length poem, On the Nature of Things. Perhaps not so odd, since Rovelli is a fan. Lucretius correctly hypothesised the existence of atoms, a theory that would remain unproven until Einstein demonstrated it in 1905, and even as late as the 1890s was being written off as absurd.
What Rovelli shares with Lucretius is not only a brilliance of language, but also a sense of humankind’s place in nature – at once a part of the fabric of the universe, and in a particular position to marvel at its great beauty. It’s a rationalist view: one that holds that by better understanding the universe, by discarding false beliefs and superstition, one might be able to enjoy a kind of serenity. Though Rovelli the man also acknowledges that the stuff of humanity is love, and fear, and desire, and passion: all made meaningful by our brief lives; our tiny span of allotted time.
What do we know about time? Language tells us that it “passes”, it moves like a great river, inexorably dragging us with it, and, in the end, washes us up on its shore while it continues, unstoppable. Time flows. It moves ever forwards. Or does it? Poets also tell us that time stumbles or creeps or slows or even, at times, seems to stop. They tell us that the past might be inescapable, immanent in objects or people or landscapes. When Juliet is waiting for Romeo, time passes sluggishly: she longs for Phaethon to take the reins of the Sun’s chariot, since he would whip up the horses and “bring in cloudy night immediately”. When we wake from a vivid dream we are dimly aware that the sense of time we have just experienced is illusory.
Carlo Rovelli is an Italian theoretical physicist who wants to make the uninitiated grasp the excitement of his field. His book Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, with its concise, sparkling essays on subjects such as black holes and quanta, has sold 1.3m copies worldwide. Now comes The Order of Time, a dizzying, poetic work in which I found myself abandoning everything I thought I knew about time – certainly the idea that it “flows”, and even that it exists at all, in any profound sense.
We meet outside the church of San Petronio in Bologna, where Rovelli studied. (“I like to say that, just like Copernicus, I was an undergraduate at Bologna and a graduate at Padua,” he jokes.) A cheery, compact fellow in his early 60s, Rovelli is in nostalgic mood. He lives in Marseille, where, since 2010, he has run the quantum gravity group at the Centre de physique théorique. Before that, he was in the US, at the University of Pittsburgh, for a decade.
Carlo Rovelli in Bologna. Photograph: Roberto Serra / Iguana Press / G/Iguana Press / Getty Images
He rarely visits Bologna, and he has been catching up with old friends. We wander towards the university area. Piazza Verdi is flocked with a lively crowd of students. There are flags and graffiti and banners, too – anti-fascist slogans, something in support of the Kurds, a sign enjoining passers-by not to forget Giulio Regeni, the Cambridge PhD student killed in Egypt in 2016.
“In my day it was barricades and police,” he says. He was a passionate student activist, back then. What did he and his pals want? “Small things! We wanted a world without boundaries, without state, without war, without religion, without family, without school, without private property.”
He was, he says now, too radical, and it was hard, trying to share possessions, trying to live without jealousy. And then there was the LSD. He took it a few times. And it turned out to be the seed of his interest in physics generally, and in the question of time specifically. “It was an extraordinarily strong experience that touched me also intellectually,” he remembers. “Among the strange phenomena was the sense of time stopping. Things were happening in my mind but the clock was not going ahead; the flow of time was not passing any more. It was a total subversion of the structure of reality. He had hallucinations of misshapen objects, of bright and dazzling colours – but also recalls thinking during the experience, actually asking himself what was going on.
“And I thought: ‘Well, it’s a chemical that is changing things in my brain. But how do I know that the usual perception is right, and this is wrong? If these two ways of perceiving are so different, what does it mean that one is the correct one?’” The way he talks about LSD is, in fact, quite similar to his description of reading Einstein as a student, on a sun-baked Calabrian beach, and looking up from his book imagining the world not as it appeared to him every day, but as the wild and undulating spacetime that the great physicist described. Reality, to quote the title of one of his books, is not what it seems.
He gave his conservative, Veronese parents a bit of a fright, he says. His father, now in his 90s, was surprised when young Carlo’s lecturers said he was actually doing all right, despite the long hair and radical politics and the occasional brush with the police. It was after the optimistic sense of student revolution in Italy came to an abrupt end with the kidnapping and murder of the former prime minister, Aldo Moro, in 1978 that Rovelli began to take physics seriously. But his route to his big academic career was circuitous and unconventional. “Nowadays everyone is worried because there is no work. When I was young, the problem was how to avoid work. I did not want to become part of the ‘productive system’,” he says.
Academia, then, seemed like a way of avoiding the world of a conventional job, and for some years he followed his curiosity without a sense of careerist ambition. He went to Trento in northern Italy to join a research group he was interested in, sleeping in his car for a few months (“I’d get a shower in the department to be decent”). He went to London, because he was interested in the work of Chris Isham, and then to the US, to be near physicists such as Abhay Ashtekar and Lee Smolin. “My first paper was horrendously late compared to what a young person would have to do now. And this was a privilege – I knew more things, there was more time.”
Albert Einstein worked at the Swiss patent office for seven years: ‘That worldly cloister where I hatched my most beautiful ideas.’ Photograph: Keystone/Getty Images
The popular books, too, have come relatively late, after his academic study of quantum gravity, published in 2004. If Seven Brief Lessons was a lucid primer, The Order of Timetakes things further; it deals with “what I really do in science, what I really think in depth, what is important for me”.
Rovelli’s work as a physicist, in crude terms, occupies the large space left by Einstein on the one hand, and the development of quantum theory on the other. If the theory of general relativity describes a world of curved spacetime where everything is continuous, quantum theory describes a world in which discrete quantities of energy interact. In Rovelli’s words, “quantum mechanics cannot deal with the curvature of spacetime, and general relativity cannot account for quanta”.
Both theories are successful; but their apparent incompatibility is an open problem, and one of the current tasks of theoretical physics is to attempt to construct a conceptual framework in which they both work. Rovelli’s field of loop theory, or loop quantum gravity, offers a possible answer to the problem, in which spacetime itself is understood to be granular, a fine structure woven from loops.
String theory offers another, different route towards solving the problem. When I ask him what he thinks about the possibility that his loop quantum gravity work may be wrong, he gently explains that being wrong isn’t the point; being part of the conversation is the point. And anyway, “If you ask who had the longest and most striking list of results it’s Einstein without any doubt. But if you ask who is the scientist who made most mistakes, it’s still Einstein.”
How does time fit in to his work? Time, Einstein long ago showed, is relative – time passes more slowly for an object moving faster than another object, for example. In this relative world, an absolute “now” is more or less meaningless. Time, then, is not some separate quality that impassively flows around us. Time is, in Rovelli’s words, “part of a complicated geometry woven together with the geometry of space”.
For Rovelli, there is more: according to his theorising, time itself disappears at the most fundamental level. His theories ask us to accept the notion that time is merely a function of our “blurred” human perception. We see the world only through a glass, darkly; we are watching Plato’s shadow-play in the cave. According to Rovelli, our undeniable experience of time is inextricably linked to the way heat behaves. In The Order of Time, he asks why can we know only the past, and not the future? The key, he suggests, is the one-directional flow of heat from warmer objects to colder ones. An ice cube dropped into a hot cup of coffee cools the coffee. But the process is not reversible: it is a one-way street, as demonstrated by the second law of thermodynamics.
String theory offers an alternative to Rovelli’s work in loop quantum gravity.Time is also, as we experience it, a one-way street. He explains it in relation to the concept of entropy – the measure of the disordering of things. Entropy was lower in the past. Entropy is higher in the future – there is more disorder, there are more possibilities. The pack of cards of the future is shuffled and uncertain, unlike the ordered and neatly arranged pack of cards of the past. But entropy, heat, past and future are qualities that belong not to the fundamental grammar of the world but to our superficial observation of it. “If I observe the microscopic state of things,” writes Rovelli, “then the difference between past and future vanishes … in the elementary grammar of things, there is no distinction between ‘cause’ and ‘effect’.”
To understand this properly, I can suggest only that you read Rovelli’s books, and pass swiftly over this approximation by someone who gave up school physics lessons joyfully at the first possible opportunity. However, it turns out that I am precisely Rovelli’s perfect reader, or one of them, and he looks quite delighted when I check my newly acquired understanding of the concept of entropy with him. (“You passed the exam,” he says.)
“I try to write at several levels,” he explains. “I think about the person who not only doesn’t know anything about physics but is also not interested. So I think I am talking to my grandmother, who was a housekeeper. I also think some young students of physics are reading it, and I also think some of my colleagues are reading it. So I try to talk at different levels, but I keep the person who knows nothing in my mind.”
His biggest fans are the blank slates, like me, and his colleagues at universities – he gets most criticism from people in the middle, “those who know a bit of physics”. He is also pretty down on school physics. (“Calculating the speed at which a ball drops – who cares? In another life, I’d like to write a school physics book,” he says.) And he thinks the division of the world into the “two cultures” of natural sciences and human sciences is “stupid. It’s like taking England and dividing the kids into groups, and you tell one group about music, and one group about literature, and the one who gets music is not allowed to read novels and the one who does literature is not allowed to listen to music.”
In the elementary grammar of things, there is no distinction between ‘cause’ and ‘effect’
The joy of his writing is its broad cultural compass. Historicism gives an initial hand-hold on the material. (He teaches a course on history of science, where he likes to bring science and humanities students together.) And then there’s the fact that alongside Einstein, Ludwig Boltzmann and Roger Penrose appear figures such as Proust, Dante, Beethoven, and, especially, Horace – each chapter begins with an epigraph from the Roman poet – as if to ground us in human sentiment and emotion before departing for the vertiginous world of black holes and spinfoam and clouds of probabilities.
“He has a side that is intimate, lyrical and extremely intense; and he is the great singer of the passing of time,” Rovelli says. “There’s a feeling of nostalgia – it’s not anguish, it’s not sorrow – it’s a feeling of ‘Let’s live life intensely’. A good friend of mine, Ernesto, who died quite young, gave me a little book of Horace, and I have carried it around with me all my life.”
Rovelli’s view is that there is no contradiction between a vision of the universe that makes human life seem small and irrelevant, and our everyday sorrows and joys. Or indeed between “cold science” and our inner, spiritual lives. “We are part of nature, and so joy and sorrow are aspects of nature itself – nature is much richer than just sets of atoms,” he tells me. There’s a moment in Seven Lessons when he compares physics and poetry: both try to describe the unseen. It might be added that physics, when departing from its native language of mathematical equations, relies strongly on metaphor and analogy. Rovelli has a gift for memorable comparisons. He tells us, for example, when explaining that the smooth “flow” of time is an illusion, that “The events of the world do not form an orderly queue like the English, they crowd around chaotically like the Italians.” The concept of time, he says, “has lost layers one after another, piece by piece”. We are left with “an empty windswept landscape almost devoid of all trace of temporality … a world stripped to its essence, glittering with an arid and troubling beauty”.
More than anything else I’ve ever read, Rovelli reminds me of Lucretius, the first-century BCE Roman author of the epic-length poem, On the Nature of Things. Perhaps not so odd, since Rovelli is a fan. Lucretius correctly hypothesised the existence of atoms, a theory that would remain unproven until Einstein demonstrated it in 1905, and even as late as the 1890s was being written off as absurd.
What Rovelli shares with Lucretius is not only a brilliance of language, but also a sense of humankind’s place in nature – at once a part of the fabric of the universe, and in a particular position to marvel at its great beauty. It’s a rationalist view: one that holds that by better understanding the universe, by discarding false beliefs and superstition, one might be able to enjoy a kind of serenity. Though Rovelli the man also acknowledges that the stuff of humanity is love, and fear, and desire, and passion: all made meaningful by our brief lives; our tiny span of allotted time.
Friday 13 April 2018
How much is an hour worth? The war over the minimum wage
Peter C Baker in The Guardian
No idea in economics provokes more furious argument than the minimum wage. Every time a government debates whether to raise the lowest amount it is legal to pay for an hour of labour, a bitter and emotional battle is sure to follow – rife with charges of ignorance, cruelty and ideological bias. In order to understand this fight, it is necessary to understand that every minimum-wage law is about more than just money. To dictate how much a company must pay its workers is to tinker with the beating heart of the employer-employee relationship, a central component of life under capitalism. This is why the dispute over these laws and their effects – which has raged for decades – is so acrimonious: it is ultimately a clash between competing visions of politics and economics.
In the media, this debate almost always has two clearly defined sides. Those who support minimum-wage increases argue that when businesses are forced to pay a higher rate to workers on the lowest wages, those workers will earn more and have better lives as a result. Opponents of the minimum wage argue that increasing it will actually hurt low-wage workers: when labour becomes more expensive, they insist, businesses will purchase less of it. If minimum wages go up, some workers will lose their jobs, and others will lose hours in jobs they already have. Thanks to government intervention in the market, according to this argument, the workers struggling most will end up struggling even more.
This debate has flared up with new ferocity over the past year, as both sides have trained their firepower on the city of Seattle – where labour activists have won some of the most dramatic minimum-wage increases in decades, hiking the hourly pay for thousands of workers from $9.47 to $15, with future increases automatically pegged to inflation. Seattle’s $15 is the highest minimum wage in the US, and almost double the federal minimum of $7.25. This fact alone guaranteed that partisans from both sides of the great minimum-wage debate would be watching closely to see what happened.
But what turned the Seattle minimum wage into national news – and the subject of hundreds of articles – wasn’t just the hourly rate. It was a controversial, inconclusive verdict on the impact of the new law – or, really, two verdicts, delivered in two competing academic papers that reached opposite conclusions. One study, by economists at the University of Washington (UW), suggested that the sharp increase in Seattle’s minimum wage had reduced employment opportunities and lowered the average pay of the poorest workers, just as its critics had predicted. The other study, by economists at the University of California, Berkeley, claimed that a policy designed to boost worker income had done exactly that.
The duelling academic papers launched a flotilla of opinion columns, as pundits across the US picked over the economic studies to declare that the data was on their side – or that the data on their side was the better data, untainted by ideology or prejudice. In National Review, the country’s most prominent rightwing magazine, Kevin D Williamson wrote that the UW study had proven yet again “that the laws of supply and demand apply to the labor market”. Of course, he added, “everyone already knew that”.
Over on the left, a headline in the Nation declared: “No, Seattle’s $15 Minimum Wage Is Not Hurting Workers.” Citing the Berkeley study, Michelle Chen wrote: “What happens when wages go up? Workers make more money.” The business magazine Forbes ran two opposing articles: one criticising the UW study (“Why It’s Utter BS”), and another criticising liberals for ignoring the UW study in favour of the Berkeley study (“These People are Shameless”). This kind of thing – furious announcements of vindication from both sides – was everywhere, and soon followed by yet another round of stories summarising the first round of arguments.
When historians of the future consider our 21st-century debates about the minimum wage, one of the first things they will notice is that, despite the bitterness of the disagreement, the background logic is almost identical. Some commentators think the minimum wage should obviously go up. Some think all minimum-wage laws are harmful. Others concede we may need a minimum wage, but disagree about how high it should be or whether it should be the same everywhere – or whether its goals could be better accomplished by other measures, such as tax rebates for low-income workers.
But beneath all this conflict, there is a single, widely shared assumption: that the only important measure of the success of a minimum wage is whether economic studies show that it has increased the total earnings of low-wage workers – without this increase being outweighed by a cost in jobs or hours.
It is no coincidence that this framing tracks closely with the way the minimum wage is typically discussed by academic economists. In the US’s national organs of respectable public discourse – New York Times op-eds, Vox podcasts and Atlantic explainers – the minimum-wage debate is conducted almost entirely by economists or by journalists steeped in the economics literature. At first glance, this seems perfectly natural, just as it may seem completely natural that the debate is framed exclusively in terms of employment and pay. After all, the minimum wage is obviously an economic policy: shouldn’t economists be the people best equipped to discuss its effects?
But to historians of the future, this may well appear as a telling artifact of our age. Just imagine, for a moment, combing through a pile of articles debating slavery, or child labour, in which almost every participant spoke primarily in the specialised language of market exchange and incentives, and buttressed their points by wielding competing spreadsheets, graphs and statistical formulas. This would be, I think we can all agree, a discussion that was limited to the point of irrelevance. Our contemporary minimum-wage debates are similarly blinkered. In its reflexive focus on just a few variables, it risks skipping over the fundamental question: how do we value work? And is the answer determined by us – by politics and politicians – or by the allegedly immutable laws of economics?
In the last four years, some of the most effective activists in America have been the “Fight for $15” campaigners pushing to raise the minimum wage – whose biggest victory so far had come in Seattle. Thanks to their efforts – widely viewed as a hopelessly lost cause when they began – significant minimum-wage increases have been implemented in cities and states across the US. These same activists are laying plans to secure more increases in this November’s midterm elections. The Democratic party, following the lead of Bernie Sanders, has made a $15 minimum part of its official national platform. US businesses and their lobbyists, historically hostile to all minimum-wage increases but well aware of their robust popularity, are gearing up to fight back with PR campaigns and political talking points that paint the minimum wage as harmful to low-wage workers, especially young workers in need of job experience.
In the UK, Jeremy Corbyn has pledged that a Labour government would raise the national minimum wage to £10 “within months” of taking office. (It is currently on schedule to rise slowly to £9 by 2020, which has been criticised by some on the right, citing Seattle as evidence that it will eliminate jobs.) In recent years, EU policymakers have raised the possibility of an EU-wide minimum-wage scheme. All this activity – combined with concern about rising economic inequality and stagnating wages – means the minimum wage is being studied and debated with an intensity not seen for years. But this is a debate unlikely to be resolved by economic studies, because it ultimately hinges on questions that transcend economics.
So what are we really talking about when we talk about the minimum wage?
The first minimum-wage laws of the modern industrial era were passed in New Zealand and Australia in the first decades of the 20th century, with the goal of improving the lives and working conditions of sweatshop workers. As news of these laws spread, reformers in the US sought to copy them. Like today’s minimum-wage proponents, these early reformers insisted that a minimum wage would increase the incomes of the poorest, most precarious workers. But they were also explicit about their desire to protect against capitalism’s worst tendencies. Without government regulation, they argued, there was nothing to stop companies from exploiting poor workers who needed jobs in order to eat – and had no unions to fight on their behalf.
In the field of economics, the concern that a state-administered minimum wage – also known as a wage floor – could backfire by reducing jobs or hours had been around since John Stuart Mill at least. But for many years, it was not necessarily the dominant view. Many mainstream economists supported the introduction of a minimum wage in the US, especially a group known as “institutionalists”, who felt economists should be less interested in abstract models and more focused on how businesses operated in the real world. At the time, many economists, institutionalist and otherwise, thought minimum-wage laws would likely boost worker health and efficiency, reduce turnover costs, and – by putting more cash in workers’ pockets – stimulate spending that would keep the wheels of the economy spinning.
During the Great Depression, these arguments found a prominent champion in President Franklin Roosevelt, who openly declared his desire to reshape the American economy by driving out “parasitic” firms that built worker penury into their business models. “No business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country,” he said in 1933.
Inevitably, this vision had its dissenters, especially among business owners, for whom minimum-wage increases represented an immediate and unwelcome increase in costs, and more generally, a limit on their agency as profit-seekers. At a 1937 Congressional hearing on the proposed Fair Labor Standards Act (FSLA) – which enacted the first federal minimum wage, the 40-hour work week and the ban on child labour – a representative of one of the US’s most powerful business lobby groups, the National Association of Manufacturers, testified that a minimum wage was the first step toward totalitarianism: “Call it Bolshevism or communism, if you will. Call it socialism, Nazism, fascism or what you will. Each says to the people that they must bow to the will of the state.”
Despite these objections, the FLSA passed in 1938, setting a nationwide minimum wage of $0.25 per hour (the equivalent of $4.45 today). Many industries were exempt at first, including those central to the southern economy, and those that employed high proportions of racial minorities and women. In subsequent decades, more and more of these loopholes were closed.
But as the age of Roosevelt and his New Deal gave way to that of Reagan, the field of economics turned decisively against the minimum wage – one part of a much larger political and cultural tilt toward all things “free market”. A central factor in this shift was the increasing prominence of neoclassical price theory, a set of powerful models that illuminated how well-functioning markets respond to the forces of supply and demand, to generate prices that strike, under ideal conditions, the most efficient balance possible between the preferences of consumers and producers, buyers and sellers.
Viewed through the lens of the basic neoclassical model, to set a minimum wage is to interfere with the “natural” marriage of market forces, and therefore to legislatively eliminate jobs that free agents would otherwise have been perfectly willing to take. Low-wage workers could lose income, teenagers could lose opportunities for work experience, consumer prices could rise and the overall output of the economy could be reduced. The temptation to shackle the invisible hand might be powerful, but was to be resisted, for the good of all.
Throughout the 70s, studies of the minimum wage’s effects were few and far between – certainly just a small fraction of today’s vast literature on the subject. Hardly anyone thought it was a topic that required much study. Economists understood that there were indeed rare conditions in which employers could get away with paying workers less than the “natural” market price of their labour, due to insufficiently high competition among employers. Under these conditions (known as monopsonies), raising the minimum wage could actually increase employment, by drawing more people into the workforce. But monopsonies were widely thought to be exceptionally unusual – only found in markets for very specialised labour, such as professional athletes or college professors. Economists knew the minimum wage as one thing only: a job killer.
In 1976, the prominent economist George Stigler, a longtime critic of the minimum wage on neoclassical grounds, boasted that “one evidence of the professional integrity of the economist is the fact that it is not possible to enlist good economists to defend protectionist programs or minimum wage laws”. He was right. According to a 1979 study in the American Economic Review, the main journal of the American Economic Association, 90% of economists identified minimum-wage laws as a source of unemployment.
“The minimum wage has caused more misery and unemployment than anything since the Great Depression,” claimed Reagan during his 1980 presidential campaign. In many ways, Reagan’s governing philosophy (like Margaret Thatcher’s) was a grossly simplified, selectively applied version of neoclassical price theory, slapped with a broad brush on to any aspect of American life that Republicans wanted to set free from regulatory interference or union pressure. Since becoming law in 1938, the US federal minimum wage had been raised by Congress 15 times, generally keeping pace with inflation. Once Reagan was president, he blocked any new increases, letting the nationwide minimum be eroded by inflation. By the time he left office, the federal minimum was $3.35, and stood at its lowest value to date, relative to the median national income.
Today, invectives against Reaganomics (and support for minimum-wage increases) are a commonplace in liberal outlets such as the New York Times. But in 1987, the Times ran an editorial titled “The Right Minimum Wage: $0.00”, informing its readers – not inaccurately, at the time – that “there’s a virtual consensus among economists that the minimum wage is an idea whose time has passed”. Minimum-wage increases, the paper’s editorial board argued, “would price working poor people out of the job market”. In service of this conclusion, they cited not a single study.
But the neoclassical consensus was eventually shattered. The first crack in the facade was a series of studies published in the mid-90s by two young economists, David Card and Alan Krueger. Through the 1980s and into the 90s, many US states had responded to the stagnant federal minimum wage by passing laws that boosted their local minimum wages above what national law required. Card and Krueger conducted what they called “natural experiments” to investigate the impact of these state-level increases. In their most well-known study, they investigated hiring and firing decisions at fast-food restaurants located along both sides of the border separating New Jersey, which had just raised its wage floor, and Pennsylvania, which had not. Their controversial conclusion was that New Jersey’s higher wage had not caused any decrease in employment.
In Myth and Measurement, the duo’s book summarising their findings, they assailed the existing body of minimum-wage research, arguing that serious flaws had been overlooked by a field eager to confirm the broad reach of neoclassical price theory, and willing to ignore the many ways in which the labour market might differ from markets in consumer goods. (For one thing, they suggested, it was likely that monopsony conditions were much more common in the low-wage labour market than had been previously assumed – allowing employers, rather than “the market”, to dictate wages). The book was dedicated to Richard Lester, an economist from the institutionalist school who argued in the 1940s that neoclassical models often failed to accurately describe how businesses behave in the real world.
Card and Krueger’s work went off like a bomb in the field of economics. The Clinton administration was happy to cite their findings in support of a push, which was eventually successful, to raise the federal minimum to $5.15. But defenders of the old consensus fought back.
In the Wall Street Journal, the Nobel prize-winning economist James M Buchanan asserted that people willing to give credence to the Myth and Measurement studies were “camp-following whores”. For economists to advance such heretical claims about the minimum wage, Buchanan argued, was the equivalent of a physicist arguing that “water runs uphill” (which, I must note, is not uncommon in man-made plumbing and irrigation systems). High-pitched public denunciations like Buchanan’s were just the tip of the disciplinary iceberg. More than a decade later, Card recalled that he subsequently avoided the subject, in part because many of his fellow economists “became very angry or disappointed. They thought that in publishing our work we were being traitors to the cause of economics as a whole.”
There were some shortcomings in Card and Krueger’s initial work, but their findings inspired droves of economists to start conducting empirical studies of minimum-wage increases. Over time, they developed new statistical techniques to make those studies more precise and robust. After several generations of such studies, there is now considerable agreement among economists that, in available historical examples, increases in the minimum wage have not substantially reduced employment. But this newer consensus is far short of the near-unanimity of the 1980s. There are prominent dissenters who insist that the field’s new tolerance for minimum wages is politically expedient wishful thinking – that the data, when properly analysed, still confirms the old predictions of neoclassical theory. And every new study from one side of the debate still generates a rapid response from the other team, in both the specialist academic literature and the wider media.
What has returned the minimum wage to the foreground of US politics is not the slowly shifting discourse of academic economists, but the efforts of the Fight for $15 and its new brand of labour activism. The traditional template for US labour organising was centred on unions – on workers pooling their power to collectively negotiate better contracts with their employers. But in the past four decades, the weakening of US labour law and the loss of jobs in industries that were once bastions of union strength have made traditional unions harder to form, less powerful and easier to break, especially in low-wage service industries.
These conditions have given birth to what is often called “alt-labour”: a wide variety of groups and campaigns (many of them funded or supported by traditional unions) that look more like activist movements. Campaigns such as the Fight for $15 often voice support for unionisation as an ideal (and their union backers would like the additional members), but in the meantime, alt-labour groups seek to address worker grievances through more public means, including the courts, elections and protest actions, including “wildcat” strikes.
In November 2012, some 200 non-unionised workers at fast-food chain restaurants in New York City walked off the job and marched through the streets to broadcast two central demands: the ability to form a union and a $15 minimum wage. (At the time, New York’s minimum wage was $7.25, the same as the national minimum.) The marches also sought to emphasise the fact that, contrary to persistent stereotype, minimum-wage jobs are not held exclusively, or even primarily, by teenagers working for pocket money or job experience; many of the participants were adults attempting to provide for families. The march, the largest of its kind in fast-food history, was coordinated with help from one of the US’s largest and most politically active unions, the Service Employees International Union. Soon the SEIU was helping fast-food workers stage similar walkouts across the country. The Fight for $15 had begun.
As the campaign gathered steam – earning widespread media coverage, helping secure minimum-wage increases in many cities and states, and putting the issue back into the national political conversation – the media turned to economists for their opinion. Their responses illustrated the extent to which the old neoclassical consensus had been upended, but also the ways in which it remained the same.
The old economic consensus insisted that the only good minimum wage was no minimum wage; the new consensus recognises that this is not the case. Increasingly, following Card and Krueger, economists recognise that monopsonistic conditions, in which there is little competition among purchasers of labour, are more common than once thought. If competition among low-wage employers is not as high as it “should” be, wages – like those of fast-food workers – can be “unnaturally” suppressed. Therefore, a minimum wage is accepted as a tweak necessary to correct this flaw. For economists, the “correct” minimum wage is the one calculated, on the basis of past studies, to give the average worker more money without significantly reducing the number of available jobs.
For economists, the key would be to calculate a wage with benefits (in hourly wages) that could be predicted, based on the weight of past studies, to outweigh its costs (in lost jobs and hours).
But this meant that almost no economists, even staunch defenders of minimum-wage increases, would endorse the central demand of the Fight for $15. A hike of that size, they pointed out, was considerably more drastic than any increase in the minimum wage they had previously analysed – and therefore, by the standards of the field, too risky to be endorsed. Arindrajit Dube, a professor at the University of Massachusetts, and perhaps contemporary economics’ most prominent defender of minimum-wage increases, cautioned that $15 might be fine for a prosperous coastal city, but it could end up incurring dangerously high costs in poorer parts of the country. Alan Krueger himself came out against setting a federal target of $15, arguing in a New York Times op-ed that such a high wage floor was “beyond the range studied in past research”, and therefore “could well be counterproductive”.
Of course, these economists may be right. But if all minimum-wage policy had been held to this standard, the US federal minimum wage would not exist to begin with – since the initial jump, from $0 to $0.25, was certainly well “beyond the range studied in past research”.
Almost exactly a year after fast-food workers first walked off the job in New York City, launching the Fight for $15, the country’s first $15 minimum wage became law in SeaTac, Washington, a city of fewer than 30,000 people, known mostly (if at all) as the home of Seattle’s major airport, Seattle-Tacoma International. It was an emblematic victory for “alt-labour”: for years, poorly paid airport ground-crew workers had been trying and failing to form a union, stymied by legal technicalities. With SEIU help, these workers launched a campaign to hold a public referendum on a $15 wage – not expecting to win, but in the hope that the negative publicity would put pressure on the airlines that flew through SeaTac. But in November 2013, the city’s residents – by a slim margin of 77 votes – passed the country’s highest minimum wage.
That same day, a socialist economist named Kshama Sawant won a seat on Seattle’s City Council. Sawant had made a $15 minimum wage a central plank of her campaign. Afraid of being outflanked from the left in one of the most proudly liberal cities in the US, most of her fellow council candidates and both major mayoral candidates endorsed the idea, too. (At the time, the city’s minimum wage was $9.47.) On 2 June 2014, the city council – hoping to avoid a public referendum on the matter – unanimously approved the increase to $15, to be phased in over three years, with future increases pegged to inflation.
The furious Seattle minimum-wage debate of last summer was ostensibly about the $15 rate. But the subject of those competing studies was actually the city’s intermediate increase, at the start of 2016, from the 2015 minimum of $11, to either $13 – for large businesses with more than 500 employees – or $12, for smaller ones. (Businesses that provided their employees with healthcare were allowed to pay less.)
When a group of researchers at the University of Washington (UW) released a paper analysing this incremental hike in June 2017, their conclusion appeared to uphold the predictions of neoclassical theory and throw cold water on the Fight for $15. Yes, low-wage Seattle workers now earned more per hour in 2016 than in 2015. But, the paper argued, having become more expensive to hire, they were being hired less often, and for fewer hours, with the overall reduction in hours outweighing the jump in hourly rates. According to their calculations, the average low-wage worker in Seattle made $1,500 less in 2016 than the year before, even though the city was experiencing an economic boom.
Some of the funding for the University of Washington researchers had come from the Seattle city council. (The group has released several other papers tracking the minimum wage’s effects, and plans to release at least 20 more in the years to come.) But after city officials read a draft of the study, they sought a second opinion from the Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics at the University of California, Berkeley – a research group long associated with support for minimum-wage increases. The Berkeley economists had been preparing their own study of Seattle’s minimum wage, which reached very different conclusions. At the city’s request, they accelerated its release, so it would come out before the more negative UW paper. And after the UW paper was released, Michael Reich, one of the Berkeley study’s lead authors, published a letter directly criticising its methods and dismissing its conclusions.
Illustration: The Project Twins
It was around this point that the op-ed salvos started flying in both directions. The conditions for widespread, contentious coverage could hardly have been more perfect: supporters of the Fight for $15 and its detractors each had one study to trumpet and one to dismiss.
Conservatives leaped to portray liberals as delusional utopians who would keep commissioning scientific findings until they got one they liked. Some proponents of the Fight for $15, meanwhile, scoured the internet for any sign that Jacob Vigdor, who led the UW study, had a previous bias against the minimum wage.
Critics of the UW study pointed out that it had only used payroll data from businesses with a single location – thus excluding larger businesses and chains such as Domino’s and Starbucks, which were most likely to cope with the short-term local shock in labour costs (and, plausibly, to absorb some of the work that may have been lost at smaller businesses). The Berkeley study, on the other hand, relied solely on data from the restaurant industry, and critics contended this did not fully represent the city’s whole low-wage economy.
But on one point, almost everyone agreed. Both studies were measuring the one thing that really mattered: whether the higher minimum wage led to fewer working hours for low-wage workers, and if so, whether the loss in hours had counteracted the increase in pay.
This approach revealed a fundamental continuity between the post-Card and Krueger consensus and the neoclassical orthodoxy it had replaced. When Roosevelt pushed for America’s first minimum wage, he was confident that capitalists would deal with the temporary price shock by doing what capitalists do best: relentlessly seeking out new ways to save costs elsewhere. He rejected the idea that a functioning economy simply must contain certain types of jobs, or that particular industries were intrinsically required to be poorly compensated or exploitative.
Economies and jobs are, to some extent, what we decide to make them. In developed economies like the US and the UK, it is common to lament the disappearance of “good jobs” in manufacturing and their replacement by “bad” low-wage work in service industries. But much of what was “good” about those manufacturing jobs was made that way over time by concessions won and regulations demanded by labour activists. Today, there is no natural reason that the exploding class of service jobs must be as “bad” as they often are.
The Fight for $15 has not notched its victories by convincing libertarian economists that they are wrong; it has won because more and more Americans work bad jobs – poorly paid jobs, unrewarding jobs, insecure jobs – and they are willing to try voting some of that badness out of existence.
This willingness is not the product of hours spent reading the post-Card and Krueger economic literature. It has much more to do with an intuitive understanding that – in an economy defined by historically high levels of worker productivity on the one hand, and skyrocketing but unevenly distributed profit on the other – some significantly better arrangement must be possible, and that new rules might help nudge us in the right direction, steering employers’ profit-seeking energies towards other methods of cutting costs besides miserably low pay. But we should not expect that there will be a study that proves ahead of time how this will work – just as Roosevelt could not prove his conjecture that the US economy did not have an existential dependence on impoverished sweatshop labour.
Last November, I spent several days in Seattle, mostly talking with labour activists and low-wage workers, including fast-food employees, restaurant waiters and seasonal employees at CenturyLink Field, the city’s American football (and soccer) stadium. In all of these conversations, people talked about the higher minimum wage with palpable pride and enthusiasm. Crystal Thompson, a 36-year-old Domino’s supervisor (she was recently promoted from phone operator), told me she still loved looking at pictures from Seattle’s Fight for $15 marches: proof that even the poorest workers could shut down traffic across a major city and make their demands heard. “I wasn’t even a voter before,” she told me. In fact, more than one person said that since the higher wage had passed, they were on the lookout for the next fight to join.
The more people I talked to, the more difficult it was to keep seeing the minimum-wage debate through the narrow lens of the economics literature – where it is analysed as a discrete policy option, a dial to be turned up or down, with the correct level to be determined by experts. Again and again, my conversations with workers naturally drifted from the minimum wage to other battles about work and pay in Seattle. Since passing the $15 minimum wage, the city had instituted new laws mandating paid sick and family leave, set legal limits on unpredictable shift scheduling, and funded the creation of an office of labour investigators to track down violators of these new rules. (One dark footnote to any conversation about the minimum wage is the fact that, without effective enforcement, many employers regularly opt not to pay it. Another dark footnote is that minimum wage law does not apply to the rapidly growing number of workers classified as “independent contractors”, many of whom toil in the gig economy.)
It was obvious in Seattle that all these victories were intertwined – that victory in one battle had provided energy and momentum for the next – and that all of these advances for labour took the form of limits, imposed by politics, on the latitude allowed to employers in the name of profit-seeking.
Toward the end of my visit, I went to see Jacob Vigdor, the economist who was the lead author of the UW study arguing that Seattle’s minimum wage was actually costing low-wage workers money. He told me he hadn’t ever expected to find himself at the centre of a national storm about wage policy. “I managed to spend 18 years of my career successfully staying away from the minimum wage,” he said. “And then for a while there it kind of took over my life.”
He wanted to defend the study from its critics on the economic left – but he also wanted to stress that his group’s findings were tentative, and insufficiently detailed to make a final ruling about the impact of the minimum wage in Seattle or anywhere else. “This is not enough information to really make a normative call about this minimum-wage policy,” he said.
The UW paper itself is equally explicit on this front, something its many public proponents have been all too willing to forget. But it wasn’t just pundits who took liberties with interpreting the results: in August 2017, the Republican governor of Illinois explicitly cited the paper when vetoing a $15 minimum-wage bill. That same month, the Republican governor of Missouri also cited the UW study, while signing a law to block cities within the state from raising their own minimum wages. Thanks in large part to efforts of business lobbyists, 27 states have passed “pre-emption” laws that stop states and counties from raising their wage floors. (Vigdor has since acknowledged, on Twitter, that it was disingenuous for the governors to cite his study to justify their “politically motivated” decisions.)
Much like my conversations with low-wage workers across the city, talking to Vigdor ultimately left me feeling that, when examined closely, the minimum-wage discourse playing out in the field of economics – and, by extension, across the media landscape – had startlingly little direct relevance to anything at all other than itself. I mentioned to Vigdor that, walking around Seattle, I’d seen a surprising number of restaurants advertising an immediate, urgent need for basic help: dishwashers, busboys, kitchen staff. This had motivated me to go digging in state employment statistics, where I learned that in 2016 and 2017, restaurants across Seattle recorded a consistent need for several thousand more employees than they could find. How did this square with the idea that the higher minimum wage had led to low-wage workers losing work?
“That’s a story about labour supply,” Vigdor said. “Our labour supply is drying up.” Amazon and other tech companies, he said, were drawing in lots of high-skilled, high-wage workers. These transplants were rapidly driving up rents, making the city unlivable for workers at the bottom of the economic food chain, a dynamic exacerbated by the city’s relatively small stock of publicly subsidised low-income housing.
These downward pressures on the labour supply, Vigdor pointed out, were essentially independent of the minimum wage. “The minimum wage [increase] is maybe just accelerating something that was bound to happen anyway,” he said.
This was not the sort of thing I had expected to hear from the author of the study that launched a hundred vitriolic assaults on the $15 minimum wage. “A million online op-ed writers’ heads just exploded,” I said.
Vigdor laughed ruefully. “Well, we’re going to be studying this for a long time.”
A few days earlier, I met with Kshama Sawant, the socialist economist who had been so instrumental in passing the $15 wage. She was eager to make sure I had read the Berkeley study, and that I had seen all the criticisms of the UW study. But her most impassioned argument wasn’t about the studies – and it was one that Roosevelt would have found very familiar.
“Look, if it were true that the economic system we have today can’t even bring our most poverty-stricken workers to a semi-decent standard of living – and $15 is not even a living wage, by the way – then why would we defend it?” She paused. “That would be straightforward evidence that we need a better system.”
No idea in economics provokes more furious argument than the minimum wage. Every time a government debates whether to raise the lowest amount it is legal to pay for an hour of labour, a bitter and emotional battle is sure to follow – rife with charges of ignorance, cruelty and ideological bias. In order to understand this fight, it is necessary to understand that every minimum-wage law is about more than just money. To dictate how much a company must pay its workers is to tinker with the beating heart of the employer-employee relationship, a central component of life under capitalism. This is why the dispute over these laws and their effects – which has raged for decades – is so acrimonious: it is ultimately a clash between competing visions of politics and economics.
In the media, this debate almost always has two clearly defined sides. Those who support minimum-wage increases argue that when businesses are forced to pay a higher rate to workers on the lowest wages, those workers will earn more and have better lives as a result. Opponents of the minimum wage argue that increasing it will actually hurt low-wage workers: when labour becomes more expensive, they insist, businesses will purchase less of it. If minimum wages go up, some workers will lose their jobs, and others will lose hours in jobs they already have. Thanks to government intervention in the market, according to this argument, the workers struggling most will end up struggling even more.
This debate has flared up with new ferocity over the past year, as both sides have trained their firepower on the city of Seattle – where labour activists have won some of the most dramatic minimum-wage increases in decades, hiking the hourly pay for thousands of workers from $9.47 to $15, with future increases automatically pegged to inflation. Seattle’s $15 is the highest minimum wage in the US, and almost double the federal minimum of $7.25. This fact alone guaranteed that partisans from both sides of the great minimum-wage debate would be watching closely to see what happened.
But what turned the Seattle minimum wage into national news – and the subject of hundreds of articles – wasn’t just the hourly rate. It was a controversial, inconclusive verdict on the impact of the new law – or, really, two verdicts, delivered in two competing academic papers that reached opposite conclusions. One study, by economists at the University of Washington (UW), suggested that the sharp increase in Seattle’s minimum wage had reduced employment opportunities and lowered the average pay of the poorest workers, just as its critics had predicted. The other study, by economists at the University of California, Berkeley, claimed that a policy designed to boost worker income had done exactly that.
The duelling academic papers launched a flotilla of opinion columns, as pundits across the US picked over the economic studies to declare that the data was on their side – or that the data on their side was the better data, untainted by ideology or prejudice. In National Review, the country’s most prominent rightwing magazine, Kevin D Williamson wrote that the UW study had proven yet again “that the laws of supply and demand apply to the labor market”. Of course, he added, “everyone already knew that”.
Over on the left, a headline in the Nation declared: “No, Seattle’s $15 Minimum Wage Is Not Hurting Workers.” Citing the Berkeley study, Michelle Chen wrote: “What happens when wages go up? Workers make more money.” The business magazine Forbes ran two opposing articles: one criticising the UW study (“Why It’s Utter BS”), and another criticising liberals for ignoring the UW study in favour of the Berkeley study (“These People are Shameless”). This kind of thing – furious announcements of vindication from both sides – was everywhere, and soon followed by yet another round of stories summarising the first round of arguments.
When historians of the future consider our 21st-century debates about the minimum wage, one of the first things they will notice is that, despite the bitterness of the disagreement, the background logic is almost identical. Some commentators think the minimum wage should obviously go up. Some think all minimum-wage laws are harmful. Others concede we may need a minimum wage, but disagree about how high it should be or whether it should be the same everywhere – or whether its goals could be better accomplished by other measures, such as tax rebates for low-income workers.
But beneath all this conflict, there is a single, widely shared assumption: that the only important measure of the success of a minimum wage is whether economic studies show that it has increased the total earnings of low-wage workers – without this increase being outweighed by a cost in jobs or hours.
It is no coincidence that this framing tracks closely with the way the minimum wage is typically discussed by academic economists. In the US’s national organs of respectable public discourse – New York Times op-eds, Vox podcasts and Atlantic explainers – the minimum-wage debate is conducted almost entirely by economists or by journalists steeped in the economics literature. At first glance, this seems perfectly natural, just as it may seem completely natural that the debate is framed exclusively in terms of employment and pay. After all, the minimum wage is obviously an economic policy: shouldn’t economists be the people best equipped to discuss its effects?
But to historians of the future, this may well appear as a telling artifact of our age. Just imagine, for a moment, combing through a pile of articles debating slavery, or child labour, in which almost every participant spoke primarily in the specialised language of market exchange and incentives, and buttressed their points by wielding competing spreadsheets, graphs and statistical formulas. This would be, I think we can all agree, a discussion that was limited to the point of irrelevance. Our contemporary minimum-wage debates are similarly blinkered. In its reflexive focus on just a few variables, it risks skipping over the fundamental question: how do we value work? And is the answer determined by us – by politics and politicians – or by the allegedly immutable laws of economics?
In the last four years, some of the most effective activists in America have been the “Fight for $15” campaigners pushing to raise the minimum wage – whose biggest victory so far had come in Seattle. Thanks to their efforts – widely viewed as a hopelessly lost cause when they began – significant minimum-wage increases have been implemented in cities and states across the US. These same activists are laying plans to secure more increases in this November’s midterm elections. The Democratic party, following the lead of Bernie Sanders, has made a $15 minimum part of its official national platform. US businesses and their lobbyists, historically hostile to all minimum-wage increases but well aware of their robust popularity, are gearing up to fight back with PR campaigns and political talking points that paint the minimum wage as harmful to low-wage workers, especially young workers in need of job experience.
In the UK, Jeremy Corbyn has pledged that a Labour government would raise the national minimum wage to £10 “within months” of taking office. (It is currently on schedule to rise slowly to £9 by 2020, which has been criticised by some on the right, citing Seattle as evidence that it will eliminate jobs.) In recent years, EU policymakers have raised the possibility of an EU-wide minimum-wage scheme. All this activity – combined with concern about rising economic inequality and stagnating wages – means the minimum wage is being studied and debated with an intensity not seen for years. But this is a debate unlikely to be resolved by economic studies, because it ultimately hinges on questions that transcend economics.
So what are we really talking about when we talk about the minimum wage?
The first minimum-wage laws of the modern industrial era were passed in New Zealand and Australia in the first decades of the 20th century, with the goal of improving the lives and working conditions of sweatshop workers. As news of these laws spread, reformers in the US sought to copy them. Like today’s minimum-wage proponents, these early reformers insisted that a minimum wage would increase the incomes of the poorest, most precarious workers. But they were also explicit about their desire to protect against capitalism’s worst tendencies. Without government regulation, they argued, there was nothing to stop companies from exploiting poor workers who needed jobs in order to eat – and had no unions to fight on their behalf.
In the field of economics, the concern that a state-administered minimum wage – also known as a wage floor – could backfire by reducing jobs or hours had been around since John Stuart Mill at least. But for many years, it was not necessarily the dominant view. Many mainstream economists supported the introduction of a minimum wage in the US, especially a group known as “institutionalists”, who felt economists should be less interested in abstract models and more focused on how businesses operated in the real world. At the time, many economists, institutionalist and otherwise, thought minimum-wage laws would likely boost worker health and efficiency, reduce turnover costs, and – by putting more cash in workers’ pockets – stimulate spending that would keep the wheels of the economy spinning.
During the Great Depression, these arguments found a prominent champion in President Franklin Roosevelt, who openly declared his desire to reshape the American economy by driving out “parasitic” firms that built worker penury into their business models. “No business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country,” he said in 1933.
Inevitably, this vision had its dissenters, especially among business owners, for whom minimum-wage increases represented an immediate and unwelcome increase in costs, and more generally, a limit on their agency as profit-seekers. At a 1937 Congressional hearing on the proposed Fair Labor Standards Act (FSLA) – which enacted the first federal minimum wage, the 40-hour work week and the ban on child labour – a representative of one of the US’s most powerful business lobby groups, the National Association of Manufacturers, testified that a minimum wage was the first step toward totalitarianism: “Call it Bolshevism or communism, if you will. Call it socialism, Nazism, fascism or what you will. Each says to the people that they must bow to the will of the state.”
Despite these objections, the FLSA passed in 1938, setting a nationwide minimum wage of $0.25 per hour (the equivalent of $4.45 today). Many industries were exempt at first, including those central to the southern economy, and those that employed high proportions of racial minorities and women. In subsequent decades, more and more of these loopholes were closed.
But as the age of Roosevelt and his New Deal gave way to that of Reagan, the field of economics turned decisively against the minimum wage – one part of a much larger political and cultural tilt toward all things “free market”. A central factor in this shift was the increasing prominence of neoclassical price theory, a set of powerful models that illuminated how well-functioning markets respond to the forces of supply and demand, to generate prices that strike, under ideal conditions, the most efficient balance possible between the preferences of consumers and producers, buyers and sellers.
Viewed through the lens of the basic neoclassical model, to set a minimum wage is to interfere with the “natural” marriage of market forces, and therefore to legislatively eliminate jobs that free agents would otherwise have been perfectly willing to take. Low-wage workers could lose income, teenagers could lose opportunities for work experience, consumer prices could rise and the overall output of the economy could be reduced. The temptation to shackle the invisible hand might be powerful, but was to be resisted, for the good of all.
Throughout the 70s, studies of the minimum wage’s effects were few and far between – certainly just a small fraction of today’s vast literature on the subject. Hardly anyone thought it was a topic that required much study. Economists understood that there were indeed rare conditions in which employers could get away with paying workers less than the “natural” market price of their labour, due to insufficiently high competition among employers. Under these conditions (known as monopsonies), raising the minimum wage could actually increase employment, by drawing more people into the workforce. But monopsonies were widely thought to be exceptionally unusual – only found in markets for very specialised labour, such as professional athletes or college professors. Economists knew the minimum wage as one thing only: a job killer.
In 1976, the prominent economist George Stigler, a longtime critic of the minimum wage on neoclassical grounds, boasted that “one evidence of the professional integrity of the economist is the fact that it is not possible to enlist good economists to defend protectionist programs or minimum wage laws”. He was right. According to a 1979 study in the American Economic Review, the main journal of the American Economic Association, 90% of economists identified minimum-wage laws as a source of unemployment.
“The minimum wage has caused more misery and unemployment than anything since the Great Depression,” claimed Reagan during his 1980 presidential campaign. In many ways, Reagan’s governing philosophy (like Margaret Thatcher’s) was a grossly simplified, selectively applied version of neoclassical price theory, slapped with a broad brush on to any aspect of American life that Republicans wanted to set free from regulatory interference or union pressure. Since becoming law in 1938, the US federal minimum wage had been raised by Congress 15 times, generally keeping pace with inflation. Once Reagan was president, he blocked any new increases, letting the nationwide minimum be eroded by inflation. By the time he left office, the federal minimum was $3.35, and stood at its lowest value to date, relative to the median national income.
Today, invectives against Reaganomics (and support for minimum-wage increases) are a commonplace in liberal outlets such as the New York Times. But in 1987, the Times ran an editorial titled “The Right Minimum Wage: $0.00”, informing its readers – not inaccurately, at the time – that “there’s a virtual consensus among economists that the minimum wage is an idea whose time has passed”. Minimum-wage increases, the paper’s editorial board argued, “would price working poor people out of the job market”. In service of this conclusion, they cited not a single study.
But the neoclassical consensus was eventually shattered. The first crack in the facade was a series of studies published in the mid-90s by two young economists, David Card and Alan Krueger. Through the 1980s and into the 90s, many US states had responded to the stagnant federal minimum wage by passing laws that boosted their local minimum wages above what national law required. Card and Krueger conducted what they called “natural experiments” to investigate the impact of these state-level increases. In their most well-known study, they investigated hiring and firing decisions at fast-food restaurants located along both sides of the border separating New Jersey, which had just raised its wage floor, and Pennsylvania, which had not. Their controversial conclusion was that New Jersey’s higher wage had not caused any decrease in employment.
In Myth and Measurement, the duo’s book summarising their findings, they assailed the existing body of minimum-wage research, arguing that serious flaws had been overlooked by a field eager to confirm the broad reach of neoclassical price theory, and willing to ignore the many ways in which the labour market might differ from markets in consumer goods. (For one thing, they suggested, it was likely that monopsony conditions were much more common in the low-wage labour market than had been previously assumed – allowing employers, rather than “the market”, to dictate wages). The book was dedicated to Richard Lester, an economist from the institutionalist school who argued in the 1940s that neoclassical models often failed to accurately describe how businesses behave in the real world.
Card and Krueger’s work went off like a bomb in the field of economics. The Clinton administration was happy to cite their findings in support of a push, which was eventually successful, to raise the federal minimum to $5.15. But defenders of the old consensus fought back.
In the Wall Street Journal, the Nobel prize-winning economist James M Buchanan asserted that people willing to give credence to the Myth and Measurement studies were “camp-following whores”. For economists to advance such heretical claims about the minimum wage, Buchanan argued, was the equivalent of a physicist arguing that “water runs uphill” (which, I must note, is not uncommon in man-made plumbing and irrigation systems). High-pitched public denunciations like Buchanan’s were just the tip of the disciplinary iceberg. More than a decade later, Card recalled that he subsequently avoided the subject, in part because many of his fellow economists “became very angry or disappointed. They thought that in publishing our work we were being traitors to the cause of economics as a whole.”
There were some shortcomings in Card and Krueger’s initial work, but their findings inspired droves of economists to start conducting empirical studies of minimum-wage increases. Over time, they developed new statistical techniques to make those studies more precise and robust. After several generations of such studies, there is now considerable agreement among economists that, in available historical examples, increases in the minimum wage have not substantially reduced employment. But this newer consensus is far short of the near-unanimity of the 1980s. There are prominent dissenters who insist that the field’s new tolerance for minimum wages is politically expedient wishful thinking – that the data, when properly analysed, still confirms the old predictions of neoclassical theory. And every new study from one side of the debate still generates a rapid response from the other team, in both the specialist academic literature and the wider media.
What has returned the minimum wage to the foreground of US politics is not the slowly shifting discourse of academic economists, but the efforts of the Fight for $15 and its new brand of labour activism. The traditional template for US labour organising was centred on unions – on workers pooling their power to collectively negotiate better contracts with their employers. But in the past four decades, the weakening of US labour law and the loss of jobs in industries that were once bastions of union strength have made traditional unions harder to form, less powerful and easier to break, especially in low-wage service industries.
These conditions have given birth to what is often called “alt-labour”: a wide variety of groups and campaigns (many of them funded or supported by traditional unions) that look more like activist movements. Campaigns such as the Fight for $15 often voice support for unionisation as an ideal (and their union backers would like the additional members), but in the meantime, alt-labour groups seek to address worker grievances through more public means, including the courts, elections and protest actions, including “wildcat” strikes.
In November 2012, some 200 non-unionised workers at fast-food chain restaurants in New York City walked off the job and marched through the streets to broadcast two central demands: the ability to form a union and a $15 minimum wage. (At the time, New York’s minimum wage was $7.25, the same as the national minimum.) The marches also sought to emphasise the fact that, contrary to persistent stereotype, minimum-wage jobs are not held exclusively, or even primarily, by teenagers working for pocket money or job experience; many of the participants were adults attempting to provide for families. The march, the largest of its kind in fast-food history, was coordinated with help from one of the US’s largest and most politically active unions, the Service Employees International Union. Soon the SEIU was helping fast-food workers stage similar walkouts across the country. The Fight for $15 had begun.
As the campaign gathered steam – earning widespread media coverage, helping secure minimum-wage increases in many cities and states, and putting the issue back into the national political conversation – the media turned to economists for their opinion. Their responses illustrated the extent to which the old neoclassical consensus had been upended, but also the ways in which it remained the same.
The old economic consensus insisted that the only good minimum wage was no minimum wage; the new consensus recognises that this is not the case. Increasingly, following Card and Krueger, economists recognise that monopsonistic conditions, in which there is little competition among purchasers of labour, are more common than once thought. If competition among low-wage employers is not as high as it “should” be, wages – like those of fast-food workers – can be “unnaturally” suppressed. Therefore, a minimum wage is accepted as a tweak necessary to correct this flaw. For economists, the “correct” minimum wage is the one calculated, on the basis of past studies, to give the average worker more money without significantly reducing the number of available jobs.
For economists, the key would be to calculate a wage with benefits (in hourly wages) that could be predicted, based on the weight of past studies, to outweigh its costs (in lost jobs and hours).
But this meant that almost no economists, even staunch defenders of minimum-wage increases, would endorse the central demand of the Fight for $15. A hike of that size, they pointed out, was considerably more drastic than any increase in the minimum wage they had previously analysed – and therefore, by the standards of the field, too risky to be endorsed. Arindrajit Dube, a professor at the University of Massachusetts, and perhaps contemporary economics’ most prominent defender of minimum-wage increases, cautioned that $15 might be fine for a prosperous coastal city, but it could end up incurring dangerously high costs in poorer parts of the country. Alan Krueger himself came out against setting a federal target of $15, arguing in a New York Times op-ed that such a high wage floor was “beyond the range studied in past research”, and therefore “could well be counterproductive”.
Of course, these economists may be right. But if all minimum-wage policy had been held to this standard, the US federal minimum wage would not exist to begin with – since the initial jump, from $0 to $0.25, was certainly well “beyond the range studied in past research”.
Almost exactly a year after fast-food workers first walked off the job in New York City, launching the Fight for $15, the country’s first $15 minimum wage became law in SeaTac, Washington, a city of fewer than 30,000 people, known mostly (if at all) as the home of Seattle’s major airport, Seattle-Tacoma International. It was an emblematic victory for “alt-labour”: for years, poorly paid airport ground-crew workers had been trying and failing to form a union, stymied by legal technicalities. With SEIU help, these workers launched a campaign to hold a public referendum on a $15 wage – not expecting to win, but in the hope that the negative publicity would put pressure on the airlines that flew through SeaTac. But in November 2013, the city’s residents – by a slim margin of 77 votes – passed the country’s highest minimum wage.
That same day, a socialist economist named Kshama Sawant won a seat on Seattle’s City Council. Sawant had made a $15 minimum wage a central plank of her campaign. Afraid of being outflanked from the left in one of the most proudly liberal cities in the US, most of her fellow council candidates and both major mayoral candidates endorsed the idea, too. (At the time, the city’s minimum wage was $9.47.) On 2 June 2014, the city council – hoping to avoid a public referendum on the matter – unanimously approved the increase to $15, to be phased in over three years, with future increases pegged to inflation.
The furious Seattle minimum-wage debate of last summer was ostensibly about the $15 rate. But the subject of those competing studies was actually the city’s intermediate increase, at the start of 2016, from the 2015 minimum of $11, to either $13 – for large businesses with more than 500 employees – or $12, for smaller ones. (Businesses that provided their employees with healthcare were allowed to pay less.)
When a group of researchers at the University of Washington (UW) released a paper analysing this incremental hike in June 2017, their conclusion appeared to uphold the predictions of neoclassical theory and throw cold water on the Fight for $15. Yes, low-wage Seattle workers now earned more per hour in 2016 than in 2015. But, the paper argued, having become more expensive to hire, they were being hired less often, and for fewer hours, with the overall reduction in hours outweighing the jump in hourly rates. According to their calculations, the average low-wage worker in Seattle made $1,500 less in 2016 than the year before, even though the city was experiencing an economic boom.
Some of the funding for the University of Washington researchers had come from the Seattle city council. (The group has released several other papers tracking the minimum wage’s effects, and plans to release at least 20 more in the years to come.) But after city officials read a draft of the study, they sought a second opinion from the Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics at the University of California, Berkeley – a research group long associated with support for minimum-wage increases. The Berkeley economists had been preparing their own study of Seattle’s minimum wage, which reached very different conclusions. At the city’s request, they accelerated its release, so it would come out before the more negative UW paper. And after the UW paper was released, Michael Reich, one of the Berkeley study’s lead authors, published a letter directly criticising its methods and dismissing its conclusions.
Illustration: The Project Twins
It was around this point that the op-ed salvos started flying in both directions. The conditions for widespread, contentious coverage could hardly have been more perfect: supporters of the Fight for $15 and its detractors each had one study to trumpet and one to dismiss.
Conservatives leaped to portray liberals as delusional utopians who would keep commissioning scientific findings until they got one they liked. Some proponents of the Fight for $15, meanwhile, scoured the internet for any sign that Jacob Vigdor, who led the UW study, had a previous bias against the minimum wage.
Critics of the UW study pointed out that it had only used payroll data from businesses with a single location – thus excluding larger businesses and chains such as Domino’s and Starbucks, which were most likely to cope with the short-term local shock in labour costs (and, plausibly, to absorb some of the work that may have been lost at smaller businesses). The Berkeley study, on the other hand, relied solely on data from the restaurant industry, and critics contended this did not fully represent the city’s whole low-wage economy.
But on one point, almost everyone agreed. Both studies were measuring the one thing that really mattered: whether the higher minimum wage led to fewer working hours for low-wage workers, and if so, whether the loss in hours had counteracted the increase in pay.
This approach revealed a fundamental continuity between the post-Card and Krueger consensus and the neoclassical orthodoxy it had replaced. When Roosevelt pushed for America’s first minimum wage, he was confident that capitalists would deal with the temporary price shock by doing what capitalists do best: relentlessly seeking out new ways to save costs elsewhere. He rejected the idea that a functioning economy simply must contain certain types of jobs, or that particular industries were intrinsically required to be poorly compensated or exploitative.
Economies and jobs are, to some extent, what we decide to make them. In developed economies like the US and the UK, it is common to lament the disappearance of “good jobs” in manufacturing and their replacement by “bad” low-wage work in service industries. But much of what was “good” about those manufacturing jobs was made that way over time by concessions won and regulations demanded by labour activists. Today, there is no natural reason that the exploding class of service jobs must be as “bad” as they often are.
The Fight for $15 has not notched its victories by convincing libertarian economists that they are wrong; it has won because more and more Americans work bad jobs – poorly paid jobs, unrewarding jobs, insecure jobs – and they are willing to try voting some of that badness out of existence.
This willingness is not the product of hours spent reading the post-Card and Krueger economic literature. It has much more to do with an intuitive understanding that – in an economy defined by historically high levels of worker productivity on the one hand, and skyrocketing but unevenly distributed profit on the other – some significantly better arrangement must be possible, and that new rules might help nudge us in the right direction, steering employers’ profit-seeking energies towards other methods of cutting costs besides miserably low pay. But we should not expect that there will be a study that proves ahead of time how this will work – just as Roosevelt could not prove his conjecture that the US economy did not have an existential dependence on impoverished sweatshop labour.
Last November, I spent several days in Seattle, mostly talking with labour activists and low-wage workers, including fast-food employees, restaurant waiters and seasonal employees at CenturyLink Field, the city’s American football (and soccer) stadium. In all of these conversations, people talked about the higher minimum wage with palpable pride and enthusiasm. Crystal Thompson, a 36-year-old Domino’s supervisor (she was recently promoted from phone operator), told me she still loved looking at pictures from Seattle’s Fight for $15 marches: proof that even the poorest workers could shut down traffic across a major city and make their demands heard. “I wasn’t even a voter before,” she told me. In fact, more than one person said that since the higher wage had passed, they were on the lookout for the next fight to join.
The more people I talked to, the more difficult it was to keep seeing the minimum-wage debate through the narrow lens of the economics literature – where it is analysed as a discrete policy option, a dial to be turned up or down, with the correct level to be determined by experts. Again and again, my conversations with workers naturally drifted from the minimum wage to other battles about work and pay in Seattle. Since passing the $15 minimum wage, the city had instituted new laws mandating paid sick and family leave, set legal limits on unpredictable shift scheduling, and funded the creation of an office of labour investigators to track down violators of these new rules. (One dark footnote to any conversation about the minimum wage is the fact that, without effective enforcement, many employers regularly opt not to pay it. Another dark footnote is that minimum wage law does not apply to the rapidly growing number of workers classified as “independent contractors”, many of whom toil in the gig economy.)
It was obvious in Seattle that all these victories were intertwined – that victory in one battle had provided energy and momentum for the next – and that all of these advances for labour took the form of limits, imposed by politics, on the latitude allowed to employers in the name of profit-seeking.
Toward the end of my visit, I went to see Jacob Vigdor, the economist who was the lead author of the UW study arguing that Seattle’s minimum wage was actually costing low-wage workers money. He told me he hadn’t ever expected to find himself at the centre of a national storm about wage policy. “I managed to spend 18 years of my career successfully staying away from the minimum wage,” he said. “And then for a while there it kind of took over my life.”
He wanted to defend the study from its critics on the economic left – but he also wanted to stress that his group’s findings were tentative, and insufficiently detailed to make a final ruling about the impact of the minimum wage in Seattle or anywhere else. “This is not enough information to really make a normative call about this minimum-wage policy,” he said.
The UW paper itself is equally explicit on this front, something its many public proponents have been all too willing to forget. But it wasn’t just pundits who took liberties with interpreting the results: in August 2017, the Republican governor of Illinois explicitly cited the paper when vetoing a $15 minimum-wage bill. That same month, the Republican governor of Missouri also cited the UW study, while signing a law to block cities within the state from raising their own minimum wages. Thanks in large part to efforts of business lobbyists, 27 states have passed “pre-emption” laws that stop states and counties from raising their wage floors. (Vigdor has since acknowledged, on Twitter, that it was disingenuous for the governors to cite his study to justify their “politically motivated” decisions.)
Much like my conversations with low-wage workers across the city, talking to Vigdor ultimately left me feeling that, when examined closely, the minimum-wage discourse playing out in the field of economics – and, by extension, across the media landscape – had startlingly little direct relevance to anything at all other than itself. I mentioned to Vigdor that, walking around Seattle, I’d seen a surprising number of restaurants advertising an immediate, urgent need for basic help: dishwashers, busboys, kitchen staff. This had motivated me to go digging in state employment statistics, where I learned that in 2016 and 2017, restaurants across Seattle recorded a consistent need for several thousand more employees than they could find. How did this square with the idea that the higher minimum wage had led to low-wage workers losing work?
“That’s a story about labour supply,” Vigdor said. “Our labour supply is drying up.” Amazon and other tech companies, he said, were drawing in lots of high-skilled, high-wage workers. These transplants were rapidly driving up rents, making the city unlivable for workers at the bottom of the economic food chain, a dynamic exacerbated by the city’s relatively small stock of publicly subsidised low-income housing.
These downward pressures on the labour supply, Vigdor pointed out, were essentially independent of the minimum wage. “The minimum wage [increase] is maybe just accelerating something that was bound to happen anyway,” he said.
This was not the sort of thing I had expected to hear from the author of the study that launched a hundred vitriolic assaults on the $15 minimum wage. “A million online op-ed writers’ heads just exploded,” I said.
Vigdor laughed ruefully. “Well, we’re going to be studying this for a long time.”
A few days earlier, I met with Kshama Sawant, the socialist economist who had been so instrumental in passing the $15 wage. She was eager to make sure I had read the Berkeley study, and that I had seen all the criticisms of the UW study. But her most impassioned argument wasn’t about the studies – and it was one that Roosevelt would have found very familiar.
“Look, if it were true that the economic system we have today can’t even bring our most poverty-stricken workers to a semi-decent standard of living – and $15 is not even a living wage, by the way – then why would we defend it?” She paused. “That would be straightforward evidence that we need a better system.”
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