Trump has a point about globalisation

Larry Elliott in The Guardian

The president’s belief that the nation state can cure economic ills is not without merit


  

‘The stupendous growth posted by China over the past four decades has been the result of doing the opposite of what the globalisation textbooks recommend.’ Photograph: AFP/Getty Images


Once every three years the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank hold their annual meetings out of town. Instead of schlepping over to Washington, the gathering of finance ministers and central bank governors is hosted by a member state. Ever since the 2000 meeting in Prague was besieged by anti-globalisation rioters, the away fixtures have tended to be held in places that are hard to get to or where the regime tends to take a dim view of protest: Singapore, Turkey, Peru.

This year’s meeting will take place in a couple of weeks on the Indonesian island of Bali, where the IMF and the World Bank can be reasonably confident that the meetings will not be disrupted. At least not from the outside. The real threat no longer comes from balaclava-wearing anarchists throwing Molotov cocktails but from within. Donald Trump is now the one throwing the petrol bombs and for multilateral organisations like the IMF and World Bank, that poses a much bigger threat.

The US president put it this way in his speech to the United Nations on Tuesday: “We reject the ideology of globalism and we embrace the doctrine of patriotism.” For decades, the message from the IMF has been that breaking down the barriers to trade, allowing capital to move unhindered across borders and constraining the ability of governments to regulate multinational corporations was the way to prosperity. Now the most powerful man on the planet is saying something different: that the only way to remedy the economic and social ills caused by globalisation is through the nation state. Trump’s speech was mocked by fellow world leaders, but the truth is that he’s not a lone voice.

The world’s other big economic superpower – China – has never given up on the nation state. Xi Jinping likes to use the language of globalisation to make a contrast with Trump’s protectionism, but the stupendous growth posted by China over the past four decades has been the result of doing the opposite of what the globalisation textbooks recommend. The measures traditionally frowned upon by the IMF – state-run industries, subsidies, capital controls – have been central to Beijing’s managed capitalism. China has certainly not closed itself off from the global economy but has engaged on its own terms. When the communist regime wanted to move people out of the fields and into factories it did so through the mechanism of an undervalued currency, which made Chinese exports highly competitive. When the party decided that it wanted to move into more sophisticated, higher-tech manufacturing, it insisted that foreign companies wishing to invest in China share their intellectual property.

This sort of approach isn’t new. It was the way most western countries operated in the decades after the second world war, when capital controls, managed immigration and a cautious approach to removing trade barriers were seen as necessary if governments were to meet public demands for full employment and rising living standards. The US and the EU now say that China is not playing fair because it has been prospering with an economic strategy that is supposed not to work. There is some irony in this.

The idea that the nation state would wither away was based on three separate arguments. The first was that the barriers to the global free movement of goods, services, people and money were economically inefficient and that removing them would lead to higher levels of growth. This has not been the case. Growth has been weaker and less evenly shared.

The second was that governments couldn’t resist globalisation even if they wanted to. This was broadly the view once adopted by Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, and now kept alive by Emmanuel Macron. The message to displaced workers was that the power of the market was – rather like a hurricane or a blizzard – an irresistible force of nature. This has always been a dubious argument because there is no such thing as a pure free market. Globalisation has been shaped by political decisions, which for the past four decades have favoured the interests of capital over labour.
Finally, it was argued that the trans-national nature of modern capitalism made the nation state obsolete. Put simply, if economics was increasingly global then politics had to go global, too. There is clearly something in this because financial markets impose constraints on individual governments and it would be preferable for there to be a form of global governance pushing for stability and prosperity for all. The problem is that to the extent such an institutional mechanism exists, it has been captured by the globalists. That is as true of the EU as it is of the IMF.

So while the nation state is far from perfect, it is where an alternative to the current failed model will inevitably begin. Increasingly, voters are looking to the one form of government where they do have a say to provide economic security. And if the mainstream parties are not prepared to offer what these voters want – a decently paid job, properly funded public services and controls on immigration – then they will look elsewhere for parties or movements that will. This has proved to be a particular problem for the parties of the centre left – the Democrats in the US, New Labour in Britain, the SDP in Germany – that signed up to the idea that globalisation was an unstoppable force.

Jeremy Corbyn certainly does not accept the idea that the state is obsolete as an economic actor. The plan is to build a different sort of economy from the bottom up – locally and nationally. That’s not going to be easy but beats the current, failed, top-down approach.

Does Social Science tell the Truth - David Shanks at UCL

Why western philosophy can only teach us so much

Julian Baggini in The Guardian

One of the great unexplained wonders of human history is that written philosophy first flowered entirely separately in different parts of the globe at more or less the same time. The origins of Indian, Chinese and ancient Greek philosophy, as well as Buddhism, can all be traced back to a period of roughly 300 years, beginning in the 8th century BC.

These early philosophies have shaped the different ways people worship, live and think about the big questions that concern us all. Most people do not consciously articulate the philosophical assumptions they have absorbed and are often not even aware that they have any, but assumptions about the nature of self, ethics, sources of knowledge and the goals of life are deeply embedded in our cultures and frame our thinking without our being aware of them.

Yet, for all the varied and rich philosophical traditions across the world, the western philosophy I have studied for more than 30 years – based entirely on canonical western texts – is presented as the universal philosophy, the ultimate inquiry into human understanding. Comparative philosophy – study in two or more philosophical traditions – is left almost entirely to people working in anthropology or cultural studies. This abdication of interest assumes that comparative philosophy might help us to understand the intellectual cultures of India, China or the Muslim world, but not the human condition.

This has become something of an embarrassment for me. Until a few years ago, I knew virtually nothing about anything other than western philosophy, a tradition that stretches from the ancient Greeks to the great universities of Europe and the US. Yet, if you look at my PhD certificate or the names of the university departments where I studied, there is only one, unqualified, word: philosophy. Recently and belatedly, I have been exploring the great classical philosophies of the rest of the world, travelling across continents to encounter them first-hand. It has been the most rewarding intellectual journey of my life.

My philosophical journey has convinced me that we cannot understand ourselves if we do not understand others. Getting to know others requires avoiding the twin dangers of overestimating either how much we have in common or how much divides us. Our shared humanity and the perennial problems of life mean that we can always learn from and identify with the thoughts and practices of others, no matter how alien they might at first appear. At the same time, differences in ways of thinking can be both deep and subtle. If we assume too readily that we can see things from others’ points of view, we end up seeing them from merely a variation of our own.

To travel around the world’s philosophies is an opportunity to challenge the beliefs and ways of thinking we take for granted. By gaining greater knowledge of how others think, we can become less certain of the knowledge we think we have, which is always the first step to greater understanding.

Take the example of time. Around the world today, time is linear, ordered into past, present and future. Our days are organised by the progression of the clock, in the short to medium term by calendars and diaries, history by timelines stretching back over millennia. All cultures have a sense of past, present and future, but for much of human history this has been underpinned by a more fundamental sense of time as cyclical. The past is also the future, the future is also the past, the beginning also the end.

The dominance of linear time fits in with an eschatological worldview in which all of human history is building up to a final judgment. This is perhaps why, over time, it became the common-sense way of viewing time in the largely Christian west. When God created the world, he began a story with a beginning, a middle and an end. As Revelation puts it, while prophesying the end times, Jesus is this epic’s “Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last”.

But there are other ways of thinking about time. Many schools of thought believe that the beginning and the end are and have always been the same because time is essentially cyclical. This is the most intuitively plausible way of thinking about eternity. When we imagine time as a line, we end up baffled: what happened before time began? How can a line go on without end? A circle allows us to visualise going backwards or forwards for ever, at no point coming up against an ultimate beginning or end.

Thinking of time cyclically especially made sense in premodern societies, where there were few innovations across generations and people lived very similar lives to those of their grandparents, their great-grandparents and going back many generations. Without change, progress was unimaginable. Meaning could therefore only be found in embracing the cycle of life and death and playing your part in it as best you could.

Confucius (551-479 BC). Photograph: Getty

Perhaps this is why cyclical time appears to have been the human default. The Mayans, Incans and Hopi all viewed time in this way. Many non-western traditions contain elements of cyclical thinking about time, perhaps most evident in classical Indian philosophy. The Indian philosopher and statesman Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan wrote: “All the [orthodox] systems accept the view of the great world rhythm. Vast periods of creation, maintenance and dissolution follow each other in endless succession.” For example, a passage in the Rig Veda addressing Dyaus and Prithvi (heaven and earth) reads: “Which was the former, which of them the latter? How born? O sages, who discerns? They bear themselves all that has existence. Day and night revolve as on a wheel.”

East Asian philosophy is deeply rooted in the cycle of the seasons, part of a larger cycle of existence. This is particularly evident in Taoism, and is vividly illustrated by the surprising cheerfulness of the 4th century BC Taoist philosopher Zhuangzi when everyone thought he should have been mourning for his wife. At first, he explained, he was as miserable as anyone else. Then he thought back beyond her to the beginning of time itself: “In all the mixed-up bustle and confusion, something changed and there was qi. The qi changed and there was form. The form changed and she had life. Today there was another change and she died. It’s just like the round of four seasons: spring, summer, autumn and winter.”

In Chinese thought, wisdom and truth are timeless, and we do not need to go forward to learn, only to hold on to what we already have. As the 19th- century Scottish sinologist James Legge put it, Confucius did not think his purpose was “to announce any new truths, or to initiate any new economy. It was to prevent what had previously been known from being lost.” Mencius, similarly, criticised the princes of his day because “they do not put into practice the ways of the ancient kings”. Mencius also says, in the penultimate chapter of the eponymous collection of his conversations, close to the book’s conclusion: “The superior man seeks simply to bring back the unchanging standard, and, that being correct, the masses are roused to virtue.” The very last chapter charts the ages between the great kings and sages.

A hybrid of cyclical and linear time operates in strands of Islamic thought. “The Islamic conception of time is based essentially on the cyclic rejuvenation of human history through the appearance of various prophets,” says Seyyed Hossein Nasr, professor emeritus of Islamic studies at George Washington University. Each cycle, however, also moves humanity forward, with each revelation building on the former – the dictation of the Qur’an to Muhammad being the last, complete testimony of God – until ultimately the series of cycles ends with the appearance of the Mahdi, who rules for 40 years before the final judgment.

The distinction between linear and cyclical time is therefore not always neat. The assumption of an either/or leads many to assume that oral philosophical traditions have straightforwardly cyclical conceptions of time. The reality is more complicated. Take Indigenous Australian philosophies. There is no single Australian first people with a shared culture, but there are enough similarities across the country for some tentative generalisations to be made about ideas that are common or dominant. The late anthropologist David Maybury-Lewis suggested that time in Indigenous Australian culture is neither cyclical nor linear; instead, it resembles the space-time of modern physics. Time is intimately linked to place in what he calls the “dreamtime” of “past, present, future all present in this place”.

“One lives in a place more than in a time,” is how Stephen Muecke puts it in his book Ancient and Modern: Time, Culture and Indigenous Philosophy. More important than the distinction between linear or cyclical time is whether time is separated from or intimately connected to place. Take, for example, how we conceive of death. In the contemporary west, death is primarily seen as the expiration of the individual, with the body as the locus, and the location of that body irrelevant. In contrast, Muecke says: “Many indigenous accounts of the death of an individual are not so much about bodily death as about a return of energy to the place of emanation with which it re-identifies.”

Such a way of thinking is especially alien to the modern west, where a pursuit of objectivity systematically downplays the particular, the specifically located. In a provocative and evocative sentence, Muecke says: “Let me suggest that longsightedness is a European form of philosophical myopia and that other versions of philosophy, indigenous perhaps, have a more lived-in and intimate association with societies of people and the way they talk about themselves.”

Muecke cites the Australian academic Tony Swain’s view that the concept of linear time is a kind of fall from place. “I’ve got a hunch that modern physics separated out those dimensions and worked on them, and so we produced time as we know it through a whole lot of experimental and theoretical activities,” Muecke told me. “If you’re not conceptually and experimentally separating those dimensions, then they would tend to flow together.” His indigenous friends talk less of time or place independently, but more of located events. The key temporal question is not “When did this happen?” but “How is this related to other events?”

That word related is important. Time and space have become theoretical abstractions in modern physics, but in human culture they are concrete realities. Nothing exists purely as a point on a map or a moment in time: everything stands in relation to everything else. So to understand time and space in oral philosophical traditions, we have to see them less as abstract concepts in metaphysical theories and more as living conceptions, part and parcel of a broader way of understanding the world, one that is rooted in relatedness. Hirini Kaa, a lecturer at the University of Auckland, says that “the key underpinning of Maori thought is kinship, the connectedness between humanity, between one another, between the natural environment”. He sees this as a form of spirituality. “The ocean wasn’t just water, it wasn’t something for us to be afraid of or to utilise as a commodity, but became an ancestor deity, Tangaroa. Every living thing has a life force.”

David Mowaljarlai, who was a senior lawman of the Ngarinyin people of Western Australia, once called this principle of connectivity “pattern thinking”. Pattern thinking suffuses the natural and the social worlds, which are, after all, in this way of thinking, part of one thing. As Muecke puts it: “The concept of connectedness is, of course, the basis of all kinship systems [...] Getting married, in this case, is not just pairing off, it is, in a way, sharing each other.”

The emphasis on connectedness and place leads to a way of thinking that runs counter to the abstract universalism developed to a certain extent in all the great written traditions of philosophy. Muecke describes as one of the “enduring [Indigenous Australian] principles” that “a way of being will be specific to the resources and needs of a time and place and that one’s conduct will be informed by responsibility specific to that place”. This is not an “anything goes” relativism, but a recognition that rights, duties and values exist only in actual human cultures, and their exact shape and form will depend on the nature of those situations.

 

A Mayan calendar. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

This should be clear enough. But the tradition of western philosophy, in particular, has striven for a universality that glosses over differences of time and place. The word “university”, for example, even shares the same etymological root as “universal”. In such institutions, “the pursuit of truth recognises no national boundaries”, as one commentator observed. Place is so unimportant in western philosophy that, when I discovered it was the theme of the quinquennial East-West Philosophers’ Conference in 2016, I wondered if there was anything I could bring to the party at all. (I decided that the absence of place in western philosophy itself merited consideration.)

The universalist thrust has many merits. The refusal to accept any and every practice as a legitimate custom has bred a very good form of intolerance for the barbaric and unjust traditional practices of the west itself. Without this intolerance, we would still have slavery, torture, fewer rights for women and homosexuals, feudal lords and unelected parliaments. The universalist aspiration has, at its best, helped the west to transcend its own prejudices. At the same time, it has also legitimised some prejudices by confusing them with universal truths. The philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah argues that the complaints of anti-universalists are not generally about universalism at all, but pseudo-universalism, “Eurocentric hegemony posing as universalism”. When this happens, intolerance for the indefensible becomes intolerance for anything that is different. The aspiration for the universal becomes a crude insistence on the uniform. Sensitivity is lost to the very different needs of different cultures at different times and places.

This “posing as universalism” is widespread and often implicit, with western concepts being taken as universal but Indian ones remaining Indian, Chinese remaining Chinese, and so on. To end this pretence, Jay L Garfield and Bryan W Van Norden propose that those departments of philosophy that refuse to teach anything from non-western traditions at least have the decency to call themselves departments of western philosophy.

The “pattern thinking” of Maori and Indigenous Australian philosophies could provide a corrective to the assumption that our values are the universal ones and that others are aberrations. It makes credible and comprehensible the idea that philosophy is never placeless and that thinking that is uprooted from any land soon withers and dies.

Mistrust of the universalist aspiration, however, can go too far. At the very least, there is a contradiction in saying there are no universal truths, since that is itself a universal claim about the nature of truth. The right view probably lies somewhere between the claims of naive universalists and those of defiant localists. There seems to be a sense in which even the universalist aspiration has to be rooted in something more particular. TS Eliot is supposed to have said: “Although it is only too easy for a writer to be local without being universal, I doubt whether a poet or novelist can be universal without being local, too.” To be purely universal is to inhabit an abstract universe too detached from the real world. But just as a novelist can touch on universals of the human condition through the particulars of a couple of characters and a specific story, so our different, regional philosophical traditions can shed light on more universal philosophical truths even though they approach them from their own specific angles.

We should not be afraid to ground ourselves in our own traditions, but we should not be bound by them. Gandhi put this poetically when he wrote: “I do not want my house to be walled in on all sides and my windows to be stuffed. I want the cultures of all lands to be blown about my house as freely as possible. But I refuse to be blown off my feet by any. I refuse to live in other people’s houses as an interloper, a beggar or a slave.”

In the west, the predominance of linear time is associated with the idea of progress that reached its apotheosis in the Enlightenment. Before this, argues the philosopher Anthony Kenny, “people looking for ideals had looked backwards in time, whether to the primitive church, or to classical antiquity, or to some mythical prelapsarian era. It was a key doctrine of the Enlightenment that the human race, so far from falling from some earlier eminence, was moving forward to a happier future.”

Kenny is expressing a popular view, but many see the roots of belief in progress deeper in the Christian eschatological religious worldview. “Belief in progress is a relic of the Christian view of history as a universal narrative,” claims John Gray. Secular thinkers, he says, “reject the idea of providence, but they continue to think humankind is moving towards a universal goal”, even though “the idea of progress in history is a myth created by the need for meaning”.

Whether faith in progress is an invention or an adaptation of the Enlightenment, the image of secular humanists naively believing humanity is on an irreversible, linear path of advancement seems to me a caricature of their more modest hope, based in history, that progress has occurred and that more is possible. As the historian Jonathan Israel says, Enlightenment ideas of progress “were usually tempered by a strong streak of pessimism, a sense of the dangers and challenges to which the human condition is subject”. He dismisses the idea that “Enlightenment thinkers nurtured a naive belief in man’s perfectibility” as a “complete myth conjured up by early 20th-century scholars unsympathetic to its claims”.

Nevertheless, Gray is right to point out that linear progress is a kind of default way of thinking about history in the modern west and that this risks blinding us to the ways in which gains can be lost, advances reversed. It also fosters a sense of the superiority of the present age over earlier, supposedly less advanced” times. Finally, it occludes the extent to which history doesn’t repeat itself but does rhyme.

The different ways in which philosophical traditions have conceived time turn out to be far from mere metaphysical curiosities. They shape the way we think about both our temporal place in history and our relation to the physical places in which we live. It provides one of the easiest and clearest examples of how borrowing another way of thinking can bring a fresh perspective to our world. Sometimes, simply by changing the frame, the whole picture can look very different.

Labour’s just declared class war. Has anybody noticed?

Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian

You’d expect a declaration of class war by the main opposition party to merit at least a mention in the country’s tabloids. After all, on Sunday night Labour announced a SIX BILLION POUND RAID ON BUSINESS – the kind of thing one might reasonably hope to be screamed in huge font across the front pages and condemned in fist-shaking, bloodcurdling editorials. But nothing. Barely a squeak.

Just why that should be I’ll discuss in a moment, but first there is the policy itself – and a big, bold thing it is. At Labour conference on Monday, John McDonnell declared that he plans to force all companies with more than 250 staff to put 10% of their equity into a fund for their workers. Each employee will then be entitled to company share dividends worth up to £500 a year. Any extra will go back into public services.

The sums involved are massive: Labour calculates that 10.7 million workers covered by the scheme will get about £4bn a year in share dividends by the end of Jeremy Corbyn’s first term in government, while the public sector will receive an annual £2bn.

This also represents a big shift in Labour’s thinking. A few days ago, I met a senior aide to the previous party leader Ed Miliband who talked for a while about how, for all the rhetoric deployed by the new team, little of substance had changed in policy. “Apart from this stuff about a worker fund,” he mused. “Now that is big.” 

Big indeed. This isn’t just about giving employees more money; it’s handing them a stake and a voice in the enterprises on which they spend most of their waking hours.

To do so, McDonnell will use the stick rather than the carrot, compulsion rather than encouragement over china teacups. His argument is that shareholders are not the only ones entitled to company profits: the employees and the rest of society (which pays for the infrastructure used by businesses and allows them the great privilege of limited liability) also have a claim. No wonder business lobby groups are furious, with Confederation of British Industry director general Carolyn Fairbairn decrying a “diktat” that will have investors “packing their bags”.

For decades, the British have practised a carelessness that lets the people wielding the biggest chequebooks buy whichever assets they like and do whatever they want. That attitude has allowed Philip Green to strip BHS to the bones, Kraft to run Cadbury into the ground, and Thames Water to be picked over by a consortium of international investors.

The rewards from all this carnage have flowed to one group: shareholders. In 2015, Bank of England chief economist Andy Haldane charted what has happened to workers’ share of national income over the long-run. He found that labour had been getting smaller and smaller slices of the pie: from 70% in the 1970s to 55% now. By his reckoning, employees get proportionately less now than they did at the very outset of the Industrial Revolution in the 1770s.

Had workers’ wages kept track with the rise in their productivity since 1990, the average employee would today be 20% better off. Or they could have three-day weekends all year long and still get paid the same.

To secure a real rise in wages will require more than waiting for the economy to recover from its decade-long slump and the labour market to return to “normal”. Hence today’s announcement. This is not to say I think it’s perfect. It won’t touch the likes of Google and Facebook, because they’re listed abroad. It’s not clear to me how it will affect Amazon, which has relatively few direct employees but warehouses full of agency workers. Labour says it has suggestions – I’m not sure Jeff Bezos will be listening. The opposition’s key challenge remains largely unaddressed, which is how to get private sector businesses to behave as if they’re part of the society in which they operate.

Like Labour’s tax on second homes, you can see what the party is getting at even while thinking that the proposals as they stand are likely to be gamed.

At the same time, it’s especially difficult for Theresa May to oppose. Don’t the Conservatives boast of being the party of shareholder democracy (even though share ownership has become less widespread since Margaret Thatcher came to power)? Didn’t David Cameron commission a report into companies owned by their employees, the first line of which read: “Employee ownership is a great idea.” ? And doesn’t all the evidence show that companies owned by their workers are more productive and stick around for longer?

The Tories’ uneasiness over how to respond accounts for part of newspapers’ silence on this Labour proposal. Add to that the agonies over Brexit that will be played out over the next two weeks of conference. But the closer Labour edge to power, the more scrutiny ideas like this will receive.

As far as I know, McDonnell’s policy has been tried in one other comparable situation. In the early 80s, Sweden’s Social Democrats promised to give 20% of company shares to workers. Named after its architect, trade union economist Rudolf Meidner, the policy was popular with the party faithful.

But in this polite and outwardly cohesive country, it caused outright war, writes Robin Blackburn in his classic history Banking on Death: “Business leaders were intensely alarmed and spent five times more money attacking the plan than the cash laid out by all the parties on the 1982 election. The privately-owned press ran a sustained and vigorous campaign … under assault, support for the scheme ebbed and the Social Democrat leaders believed that it was prudent greatly to dilute the scheme…” By the mid-90s, the policy was dead.

A warning there for all those gathering in Liverpool this week – and for anyone who believes workers should receive a greater share of the stuff we produce: get ready for the onslaught.

Let’s face it. Our university factory has failed to deliver on its promises

Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian







In any other area it would be called mis-selling. Given the sheer numbers of those duped, a scandal would erupt and the guilty parties would be forced to make amends. In this case, they’d include some of the most eminent politicians in Britain.

But we don’t call it mis-selling. We refer to it instead as “going to uni”. Over the next few days, about half a million people will start as full-time undergraduates. Perhaps your child will be among them, bearing matching Ikea crockery and a fleeting resolve to call home every week.

They are making one of the biggest purchases of their lives, shelling out more on tuition fees and living expenses than one might on a sleek new Mercedes, or a deposit on a London flat. Many will emerge with a costly degree that fulfils few of the promises made in those glossy prospectuses. If mis-selling is the flogging of a pricey product with not a jot of concern about its suitability for the buyer, then that is how the establishment in politics and in higher education now treat university degrees. The result is that tens of thousands of young graduates begin their careers having already been swindled as soundly as the millions whose credit card companies foisted useless payment protection insurance on them.

Rather than jumping through hoop after hoop of exams and qualifications, they’d have been better off with parents owning a home in London. That way, they’d have had somewhere to stay during internships and then a source of equity with which to buy their first home – because ours is an era that preaches social mobility, even while practising a historic concentration of wealth. Our new graduates will learn that the hard way.

To say as much amounts to whistling in the wind. With an annual income of £33bn, universities in the UK are big business, and a large lobby group. They are perhaps the only industry whose growth has been explicitly mandated by prime ministers of all stripes, from Tony Blair to Theresa May. It was Blair who fed the university sector its first steroids, by pledging that half of all young Britons would go into higher education. That sweeping target was set with little regard for the individual needs of teenagers – how could it be? Sub-prime brokers in Florida were more exacting over their clients’ circumstances. It was based instead on two promises that have turned out to be hollow.

Promise number one was that degrees mean inevitably bigger salaries. This was a way of selling tuition fees to voters. Blair’s education secretary, David Blunkett, asked: “Why should it be the woman getting up at 5 o’clock to do a cleaning job who pays for the privileges of those earning a higher income while they make no contribution towards it?” When David Cameron’s lot wanted to jack up fees, they claimed a degree was a “phenomenal investment”.

Both parties have marketed higher education as if it were some tat on a television shopping channel. Across Europe, from Germany to Greece, including Scotland, university education is considered a public good and is either free or cheap to students. Graduates in England, however, are lumbered with some of the highest student debt in the world.

Yet shove more and more students through university and into the workforce and – hey presto! – the wage premium they command will inevitably drop. Research shows that male graduates of 23 universities still earn less on average than non-graduates a whole decade after going into the workforce.

Britain manufactures graduates by the tonne, but it doesn’t produce nearly enough graduate-level jobs. Nearly half of all graduates languish in jobs that don’t require graduate skills, according to the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. In 1979, only 3.5% of new bank and post office clerks had a degree; today it is 35% – to do a job that often pays little more than the minimum wage.

Promise number two was that expanding higher education would break down class barriers. Wrong again. At the top universities that serve as gatekeepers to the top jobs, Oxbridge, Durham, Imperial and others, private school pupils comprise anywhere up to 40% of the intake. Yet only 7% of children go to private school.Factor in part-time and mature students, and the numbers from disadvantaged backgrounds are actually dropping. Nor does university close the class gap: Institute for Fiscal Studies research shows that even among those doing the same subject at the same university, rich students go on to earn an average of 10% more each year, every year, than those from poor families.

Far from providing opportunity for all, higher education is itself becoming a test lab for Britain’s new inequality. Consider today’s degree factory: a place where students pay dearly to be taught by some lecturer paid by the hour, commuting between three campuses, yet whose annual earnings may not amount to £9,000 a year – while a cadre of university management rake in astronomical sums.

Thus is the template set for the world of work. Can’t find an internship in politics or the media in London that pays a wage? That will cost you more than £1,000 a month in travel and rent. Want to buy your first home? In the mid-80s, 62% of adults under 35 living in the south-east owned their own home. That has now fallen to 32%. Needless to say, the best way to own your own home is to have parents rich enough to help you out.

Over the past four decades, British governments have relentlessly pushed the virtues of skilling up and getting on. Yet today wealth in Britain is so concentrated that the head of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, Paul Johnson, believes “inheritance is probably the most crucial factor in determining a person’s overall wealth since Victorian times”.

Margaret Thatcher’s acolytes promised to create a classless society, and they were quite right: Britain is instead becoming a caste society, one in which where you were born determines ever more where you end up.

For two decades, Westminster has used universities as its magic answer for social mobility. Ministers did so with the connivance of highly paid vice-chancellors, and in the process they have trashed much of what was good about British higher education. What should be sites for speculative inquiry and critical thinking have instead turned into businesses that speculate on property deals, criticise academics who aren’t publishing in the right journals – and fail spectacularly to engage with the serious social and economic problems that confront the UK right now. As for the graduates, they largely wind up taking the same place in the queue as their parents – only this time with an expensive certificate detailing their newfound expertise.

For everyone’s sake, let us declare this experiment a failure. It is high time that higher education was treated again as a public good, as Jeremy Corbyn recognises with his pledge to scrap tuition fees. But Labour also needs to expand vocational education. And if it really wants to increase social mobility and reduce unfairness, it will need to come up with tax policies fit for the age of inheritance.

The limits of using GDP

Keya Acharya in The Wire.In


Most countries swear by it. It is cited by newspapers, banks and business. Almost all prominent world political leaders have used the GDP (gross domestic product) to show their countries’ well-being. Prime Minister Narendra Modi and finance minister Arun Jaitley repeatedly use India’s apparently rising GDP to point to the country’s progress and as a defence tool against criticism.

GDP measures the monetary value of goods and services produced by a country, mostly for sale in markets. Though the concept had earlier beginnings, national income and a nation’s products were first created by American Nobel laureate Simon Kuznets of the US Department of Commerce in 1934, born due to the information gaps that led to the Great Depression.

By the 1940s, wartime planning led John Maynard Keynes of the British Treasury and Henry Morgenthau Jr. of the US Treasury to go further and develop the metric of measurement we now know as GDP.

The question now is, is the concept still relevant in today’s situation? There have been criticisms for decades, from prominent economists and academics, that GDP is inadequate in measuring development, not least of all by Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz together with Amartya Sen and Jean-Paul Fitoussi in their 2010 report Mismeasuring our Lives: Why GDP Doesn’t Add Up.

Stiglitz, Sen et al say that statistical concepts in GDP may be correct, but the system is fundamentally flawed in that is does not measure a country’s income distribution or the well-being of its citizens. They take the case of traffic jams (page 3 of their book’s summary) as an example: GDP may rise because of increased sale of cars and gasoline but does not take into account the impact of the overuse of these on the quality of life.

The case of Delhi’s air pollution, and its major connection to its use of diesel could well be an example for us. Six years ago, a World Bank report put India’s costs of air pollution and environmental destruction at $80 billion per year; the costs could well have increased in the intervening years. Stiglitz, Sen themselves have said that statistical measures which ignore air pollution will be an inaccurate estimate of citizen’s well-being.

Indeed, even Simon Kuznets, the original founder, had said over fifty years ago that to assess a nation’s welfare, economists need to ask not how much the economy is growing, but what is growing and for whom, points out Canadian political scientist Ronald Colman (co-architect of Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness index).

Robert Costanza of Australian National University says GDP ignores social costs, environmental degradation, income-inequality, something even the OECD’s (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) head of national accounts, Francois Lequiller concurs.

The WEF has a new term called inclusive development index, to measure a country’s progress. In January 2018, India ranked 62nd out of 74 emerging economies in its development index, beaten by Sri Lanka, Nepal and Pakistan in its region for development progress.

Colman outlines the enormous failure of the GDP to account for the accelerating trends of resource depletion, species extinctions and increasing greenhouse gas emissions. The last 12 years have been the hottest in millennia; sea-levels will rise by a metre by 2100; forests have been decimated and overhunted, disappearing by 1% per year whilst 40% of the world’s tropical forests have already disappeared, he says. The impacts of these existing threats do not reflect in the GDP.

And yet, in spite of this wide array of prominent criticism by noted scholars, an alternative index of economic and overall well-being has not become mainstream. Stiglitz and Sen’s economic critique was commissioned by French President Nicholas Sarkozy in 2009; yet the 2015 Paris Agreement, signed in France and deemed a milestone in the global agreement on climate change mitigation measures by 195 countries, has no inclusion of anything that offers an alternative GDP system.

At an international gathering of journalists in Italy, late November 2017, which saw a panel of economic experts from around the world discussing alternative GDP issues, I asked American physicist Fritjof Capra, director of the Centre for Ecoliteracy at Berkeley, US, why there was such a gaping lack of the inclusion of alternative GDP measures in the Paris Agreement. Capra believed that the lack of civil society participation in this particular field was a major reason for its absence. Costanza said that the habit was hard to kick, equating the GDP system to an ‘addiction’, difficult to erase.

Colman believes the fundamental reason for an alternative measurement system not finding its rightful place is that it ‘threatens the short-term economic base’: “This is unpalatable in the political arena; who is willing to challenge this?” he asks. He does agree that civil society needs to be far more engaged to displace GDP as fundamental to measuring a country’s progress.

Costanza has looked at the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as an alternative system. The SDGs however, are not compulsory policy practice, merely a persuasion for nations to follow. They are also complex in their interrelatedness, making it all the more difficult to present as a binding guideline. Integrating some of these development measures into the current GDP system is not possible, says Colman.

The complexity is indeed enormous, which is one reason for there not being any unity amongst economists in pushing what should be a crucial system for gauging development.

Obviously then, we need to make ecological and development economics a compulsory, system for nations to follow. Some have already done it (New Zealand, Bhutan, UK; China has re-started green growth research). It needs political will and push.

Governments might well find their own interests served in moving to an alternative GDP and striking out on a new path.

What is your brand of atheism?

Arvind Sharma in The Wire.In

The modern world is nothing if not plural in the number of possible world views it offers in terms of religions, creeds and ideologies. The profusion can be quite perplexing, even bewildering. And atheism too is an important component of the cocktail.

The book under review – John Gray’s Seven Types of Atheism – acts like a ‘guide to the perplexed’ in the modern Western world by bestowing the same kind of critical attention to atheism as theologians do to theism, and historians of religion do to the world religions.

In doing so, it identifies seven types of atheism: (1) new atheism, or an atheism which is simply interested in discrediting religion; (2) ‘secular atheism’, better described as secular humanism, which seeks salvation of the world within the world through progress; (3) ‘scientific atheism’, which turns science into a religion – a category in which the author includes ‘evolutionary humanism, Mesmerism, dialectical materialism, and contemporary transhumanism’; (4) ‘political atheism’, a category in which fall what the author considers to be modern political religions such as Jacobinism, Communism, Nazism and contemporary evangelical liberalism; (5) ‘antitheistic atheism’ or misotheism, the kind of atheism characterized by hatred of God of such people as Marquis de Sade, Dostoevsky’s character Ivan Karamazov (in a famous novel) and William Empson; (6) ‘non-humanistic atheism’, of the kind associated with the positions of George Santayana and Joseph Conrad who rejected the idea of a creator God but did not go on to cultivate benevolence towards humanity, so characteristic of secular atheism; and (7) mystical atheism, associated with the names of Schopenhauer, Spinoza, and the Russian thinker Leo Shestov. The author states his position in relation to these seven types candidly; he is repelled (his word) by the first five but feels drawn to the last two.

The seminal insight of the book, in the Western context, is that according “contemporary atheism is a continuation of monotheism by other means”. The author returns to the point again and again so that this insight enables us to examine both religion and atheism in tandem. It is thus an admirable book on atheism in the Western world and is strewn with nuggets such as:

“Scientific inquiry answers a demand for explanation. The practice of religion expresses a need for meaning…”;

“The human mind is programmed for survival, not truth”;

“Science can never close the gap between fact and value”;

“The fundamental conflict in ethics is not between self-interest and general welfare but between general welfare and desires of the moment”;

“It is not only the assertion that ‘moral’ values must take precedence over all others that has been inherited from Christianity. So has the belief that all human beings must live by the same morality”;

“… beliefs that have depended on falsehood need not themselves be false”;
“Some values may be humanly universal – being tortured or persecuted is bad for all human beings. But universal values do not make a universal morality, for these values often conflict with each other”;

“Liberal societies are not templates of a universal political order but instances of a particular form of life. Yet liberals persist in imagining that only ignorance prevents their gospel from being accepted by all of humankind – a vision inherited from Christianity”;
“Causing others to suffer could produce an excitement far beyond any achieved through mere debauchery”;

“Prayer is no less natural than sex, virtue as much as vice”;

“Continuing progress is possible only in technology and the mechanical arts. Progress in this sense may well accelerate as the quality of civilisation declines”;

“Any prospect of a worthwhile life without illusions might itself be an illusion”;

“If Nietzsche shouted the death of God from the rooftops, Arthur Schopenhauer gave the Deity a quiet burial”;

“The liberated individual entered into a realm where the will is silent”;
“Human life… is purposeless striving… But from another point of view this aimless world is pure play”;

“If the human mind mirrors the cosmos, it may be because they are both fundamentally chaotic”; and so on. 

Its provocative ideas and brilliant summaries notwithstanding, the book is bound by a limitation; its scope is limited to the West. The author does touch on Buddhism and even Sankhya but only as they have implications for the West; he does not cover Asian ideas of atheism alongside the Western. Neither Confucianism nor Daoism are hung up on a creator god and thus seem to demand attention, if atheism is defined as “the idea of the absence of a creator-god”. Similarly, in Hindu theism, the relation between the universe and the ultimate reality is posited as ontological rather than cosmological.

The concept of atheism also needs to be refined further in relation to Indian religions. In this context it is best to speak of the nontheism of Buddhism (which denies a creator god but not gods as such), and the transtheism of Advaita Vedanta (which accepts a God-like reality but denies it the status of the ultimate reality). In fact, the discussion in this book is perhaps better understood if we invoke some other categories related to the idea of God, such as transcendence and immanence. God is understood as transcendent in the Abrahamic traditions. God no doubt creates the universe but also transcends it; in the Hindu traditions, god is considered both transcendent and immanent – God ‘creates’ the universe and transcends it but also pervades it, just as the number seven transcends the number five but also contains it.

The many atheisms described in the book are really cases of denying the transcendence of god as the ultimate reality and identifying ultimate reality with something immanent in the universe. This enables one to see the atheisms of the West in an even broader light than when described as crypto-monotheisms.

One may conclude the discussion of such a heavy topic on a lighter note. Could one not think of something which is best called ‘devout agnosticism’ as a solution to rampant atheism in the West, if atheism is perceived as a problem? Such would be the situation if one prayed to a God, whose existence had been bracketed by one.

Crying for help from such a God in an emergency, is like crying for help in a less dire situation in which one shouts for help without knowing whether there is any one within earshot. Even the communists in Kerala might have found this possibility useful if the torrential rains filled them with the ‘fear of God’.