Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Friday, May 31, 2013

Paul Krugman Gets the Last Word

"A well-run modern welfare state is actually a pretty decent kind of society. And it can be done, and we have done it pretty well in various parts of the western world. And I think it's more a question of getting back to those ideals than it is about searching for some science fictional solution. We basically do know how to do this, we just have chosen not to."

Of course, one bridles a bit at that "western" and that "we" -- but Krugman would no doubt sympathize with that bridling and his point remains enormously important. While no one existing or historical welfare state has ever gotten everything right, enough have gotten enough right that we can tell what would work well enough to be incomparably better for everybody than what we have now. Just think about that for a moment, think about what it means! The plutocrats who are making key decisions in spite of the rest of us -- imposing austerity, deregulation, looting common and public goods -- aren't failing to do the right thing because they don't know better but because they are personally benefiting from doing the wrong thing and are insulated by those very benefits from the lived reality of those who suffer from the decisions they are making. The "science fictional solutions" that are proposed to solve problems of climate catastrophe, wealth concentration, social immobility are actually symptoms of the abstract distance of these problems as lived realities from the privileged celebrity CEOs and pundits and other pop-tech pseudo-intellectuals who indulge in them, and I am talking about Very Serious intellectuals and creative workers and decision makers across the public disursive range of prevailing neoliberal financial and innovation disourse to the successful collaborators in the now-dominant science fiction entertainment imaginary to the more extreme cheerleaders of eugenic-transhuman and digital-utopian futurology.



This talk did offer up more programmatic ideas, of introducing more steeply progressive taxes, with an upper bracket at between 60% and 73% depending on variables state to state, of an international governing body demanding global floors and basic regulations minimizing international tax avoidance, and of providing a global income guarantee for children, paid mostly to mothers, to end child poverty everywhere in the world. These ideas were all welcome, but I really do agree with Krugman's last word, quoted at the beginning of the post, that simply doing French style health care and American style social security and Finnish style public education and German style renewable energy investment around the world would save the world and bring us closer to a world that works for everybody than any software designer or future robotech, biotech, or nanotech innovation from a future celebrity CEO ever will. Just think how close we could be to saving the world and solving so many of our problems -- and the slick siren call of actually-reactionary pseudo-revolutionary techno-utopian futurological distraction and derangement instantly, irrevocably, and absolutely loses the least appeal to any sensible, decent person.

12 comments:

jollyspaniard said...

I am becoming increasingly confident that America is going to make a massive turn in a progressive direction on these issues. The US can do a lot to single handedly end corporate tax dodging not just in the US but worldwide. The good news for the rest of the world is that a disproportionate amount of the dollar damage caused by global warming is going to hit the US economy. Once that sinks the US will become a climate hawk.

And the gops recent scandal mongering foibles just show for the umpteenth time that when these guys find themselves in a hole their only response is to dig harder and faster.

Stay motivated, you're on the cusp of a once in a generation breakthrough.

jimf said...

Well, you know, John Stossel doesn't think so.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10022931443

Dale Carrico said...

I feel pretty sure the sentence you intended to write was simply: "John Stossel doesn't think."

Dale Carrico said...

I tend to agree about the turning of the tide. I know what you mean by "once in a generation," but personally think the inflection is slower moving, a whole generation of change rather than once a generation change, probably it will have taken more than ten years just turning the ship around, before the real building of equitable sustainability is consolidated. For me, the turn began in 2006 and I am assuming that Hillary's term(s) with the veto pen will protect us from the worst efforts of the reactionary white-racist market/jeebus-theocratic anti-civilizational death-cult GOP before demographic die-off and the stink of clown-college stunts renders them permanently marginalized and enables the center-left (to my right of course but something I can live with while pushing from the left) to establish a more sustainable social democracy on something like a Canadian/EU model here -- the anti-austerian turn among intellectuals and activists here and there is already well underway, too. It's a pity the US couldn't have become a leader on climate and healthcare and multilateral diplomacy in the 90s instead of the convulsive nudging in that direction through this Obama epoch inflection nearly two decades later -- it's breathtaking to contemplate the deaths and ruined lives lost in consequence. America's original sin -- slavery rationalized by white racism -- has a hell of a lot to answer for, since Jim Crow stratified the New Deal and stole single payer from the postwar contract, then the Southern Strategy, the Contract on America, the killer clown administration, the Tea Bag stoopids always standing in the way of any working consensus forming around sustainably equitable healthcare, education, environmental, tax, drug, gun, foreign policy objectives. But, as you say, I remain as motivated as ever and feel the wind is at our backs (even if it really is too bad about the smell).

jimf said...

> America's original sin -- slavery rationalized by white racism --
> has a hell of a lot to answer for, since Jim Crow stratified
> the New Deal and stole single payer from the postwar contract,
> then the Southern Strategy, the Contract on America, the killer
> clown administration, the Tea Bag stoopids always standing in
> the way of any working consensus forming around sustainably
> equitable healthcare, education, environmental, tax, drug, gun,
> foreign policy objectives.

Part of my growing up -- starting in my mid-to-late 40s :-0 --
has been, on being exposed to the Internet's "marketplace of ideas",
learning that not only stupid (FSVO "stupid") people are
conservatives. It's been a shocking lesson for me.

First I found out that the transhumanoids are crypto-conservatives,
with all the baggage that entails. Simultaneously, I became
aware that a hell of a lot of the IT professionals and
techno-enthusiasts that I had made my bed amongst were of
the same ilk as the transhumanoids (yes, I'm a little
slow on the uptake sometimes).

It's easy to make fun of the religious right and the
know-nothing Tea Partiers. But it's a little more disconcerting
to see a branch of the self-styled intelligentsia make
similar noises in the name of "libertarianism" or whatever.

I suppose, for example, being a reader of P. Z. Myers'
"Pharyngula" blog, you're aware of the war going on among
the on-line self-styled "skeptics" and "New Atheists",
over (ostensibly at least) the legitimacy of feminism
in their community. It seems to be largely a post-"elevatorgate"
phenomenon, but it doesn't show any signs of dying down.
It's very complicated to read the scorecard if you
haven't been following the controversy in detail.
There seems to be something called the "slimepit"
(or "slymepit"), the denizens of which have rallied
around the Men's Rights contingent of New Atheism, and
have declared P. Z. and the feminists "enemies of
reason", or some such thing. It's all very depressing.

jimf said...

> There seems to be something called the "slimepit"
> (or "slymepit")

See, e.g.,
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Slymepit

Dale Carrico said...

Oh, yes, I'm following it. Although I will stick to my diagnosis of slavery rationalized by white racism as the original sin with which America still grapples, in the spirit of providing a hook to hang one's hat on critically speaking, of course there is a more general white-racist patriarchal greedhead incapacity for nuance and preferance for binary thinking (aka stupidity) complex in play more generally in America's plutocratic/reactionary movements, among them, as we both know and ever more others seem to know, technoscientisms and transcendental futurologies -- buoying up and stratifying the white racism part.

jollyspaniard said...

There's more than a few creeps sheltering under the New Atheist umbrella. Sam Harris comes to mind.

I don't know anything about elevatorgate but rampant sexism amongst these lot doesn't surprise me.

jimf said...

> There's more than a few creeps sheltering under the
> New Atheist umbrella. . .
>
> I don't know anything about elevatorgate. . .

That seems to have put Richard Dawkins in a rather unflattering
light. Folks on this blog have commented on the more
unsavory aspects of the late Christopher Hitchens.

That leaves Daniel Dennett, whose latest (_Intuition Pumps_)
I've just started to read. ;->

jollyspaniard said...

Douglas Adams made the argument infinitely better than any of that lot and he was good natured and funny to boot. Richard Dawkins was an admirer of his, it's a pity that Adams style didn't rub off on him.

Richard Dawkins isn't advancing a new line of argument he's just aggressively repeating old ones. He's also full of crap on a lot of scores. A lot of the conflicts he blames on religion are due to other reasons. The problem with North Africa and the Middle East for instance is that they are drying out which creates conflicts (Syria's civil war is caused by a drought for instance. Dawkins looks at that and points a finger at Islam. Not very smart or productive in my view.

The most annoying thing about Dawkins is that he makes me want to defend religion, not something I'm usually won't to do.

Dale Carrico said...

Yay, Douglas Adams!

jimf said...

> There's more than a few creeps. . .

Oh, and BTW, the Stephen Bond mentioned here a month ago
( http://amormundi.blogspot.com/2013/05/bayes-as-bane.html )
has written an essay "Why I Am No Longer a Skeptic"
that discusses this stuff:

http://plover.net/~bonds/nolongeraskeptic.html