The pandemic that we got going on around here has gotten me thinking of two separate but related things.
The first is from the novel / literary artefact “Naked Lunch”, where Burroughs described the titular meal as: "The title means exactly what the words say: naked lunch, a frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork."
The second is from Warren Buffet describing the Minskyian Ponzi finance, “Only when the tide goes out do you discover who's been swimming naked.”
Both are about moments where everything freezes for a moment and we are allowed reflection in that period between when you realize the fragile bowl has slipped from your hand but right before it really starts falling – you really don’t have time to think but you’re just reacting. It is the filmstrip quality of living life as through a downtempo strobe light is all you have for illumination.
We live moment to moment but need those periods where the moments stop and we can take a moment to reflect. I think that now is the time. The initial fear of the COVID-19 virus has passed as has the initial response in too-spotty but expensive fiscal and monetary reactions from the state (here I’m American-centric because that’s where I’m at).
What the pandemic has done is really exposed where all the cracks have already been. Chris Oesterich in his book “Pandemic Capitalism” looks at both the problem of the virus and the early reactions but really focuses on how we can use these moments to create a more fair and equitable system. This is something that Oesterich has examined before. His Wicked Problems Collaborative put out a nice collection looking at the issue of inequality from several different angles only a few years back. The solution that he focuses on is the need for a basic income so that people have the money in times of crisis right now. This is especially pertinent because had we some such policy in place, we would not be in so much of a scramble trying to create second and third best options that had the political convenience but won’t be extended.
Of course, I worry about a couple of things. I doubt that we have the will. Yang ran explicitly on a Basic Income platform and that couldn’t find a real traction amongst the primary voters in America’s center-left party. Then there’s the piece where as a Marxist I can applaud the idea of improving the material conditions for the workers and other citizens, but such policies are just tinkering at the edges and does nothing to change the social relationships that are characteristic of capitalism.
Pandemic Capitalism is timely not just because it is of the moment but also in left wing books that it stands against. I also just finished Professor Kelton’s primer on MMT, “The Deficit Myth” and though I am incredibly sympathetic to the MMT framework for fiscal policy at the state level, what they mostly propose, as a safety net is a job guarantee – centering work at all times. I am not the biggest fan of work. I happened to be part of the crew at the Big Rock Candy Mountain who hung the jerk who invented it, but on a broader perspective it is times like this where we need to ratchet down the work. (Though to be fair, I have seen people say that the job that would be guaranteed right now would be a job of staying home but that seems like extra steps). This debate is not explicit in the text of the book but exists in the argument over what is to be done, and Pandemic Capitalism makes a concise, forceful argument.
In Fully Grown, Vollrath really takes you step by step through what was lowering the rate of GDP growth in the last couple of decades. For me, what really makes intuitive sense is the move from a more goods-producing, industrial economy to a more service-oriented economy. A service-oriented economy by nature has less opportunity to scale and thus is held back from growth. The classic example of Baumol’s cost disease here is a good illustration – 100 years ago you needed 4 musicians to play an hour of a quartet by Mozart, and even now you still need those same 4 musicians (OK, maybe not the same ones but four members of the set “musicians”) to play that quartet. In the same time our factory output has soared while seeing fewer workers.
Of course, this book, like any other economic books released before about 3/17/2020 is from the before-times but I feel that the general trend will hold as our new normal gets as close as possible back to the old normal. One final note – this book is systematic. While reading I noted to myself that it was very well organized. That’s not something that normally pops in my head while reading, so I must give the author and his editors kudos on that one.
Capital starts with the commodity form of production, but Marx is not focused on the commodity in his grand work. Instead he is looking at the system which creates this commodity form, where there is a split between those who own the means of production and those who lend their hands in creating the only object that is not diminished by its use – labor power.
Where the young Marx in 1848 would emphasize the importance of class struggle in the productive process, a more mature Marx looks at the system in Capital. He takes this to the point where he is analyzing how the system works in its totality such that he can offer up a general law of capitalist accumulation.
What Marx illustrates in Chapter 25, “The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation” in the capitalist system is a theory of the business cycle, how production ebbs and flows with the size of the labor force. To read Marx you must go through the thick jungle of nineteenth century prose, but you do get some gem phrases like “the juggernaut of capital” (19). And this is Volume One where he had time to edit it. More fire breathing Marx working under a deadline like in the Manifesto gives you more quotable phrases but less developed theses.
In the Marxian system, the worker is not tied to the individual capitalist, but the system itself. In this chapter Marx is looking at the growth of capital in terms of its ratio to labor, how more fixed capital grows and there is relatively less variable capital as the factories grow larger and capital is more centralized. This growth does not free the working class, they are still tied to the system with a “golden chain” (4) even as wages grow. But the system is not defined through a continual process of growth, but this dynamic process in which the amount of surplus labor stolen from the worker changes “If the quantity if unpaid labour supplied by the working-class, and accumulated by the capitalist class, increases so rapidly that its conversion into capital requires an extraordinary addition of paid labor, then wages rise, and, all other circumstances remaining equal, the unpaid labor diminishes in proportion” (5). Then the cycle peaks and returns. All the while the capitalistic relation between the classes persists.
This whole process is driven by centralization and accumulation as “larger capitals beat the smaller” (8), but what is really what makes the immiseration of the working classes possible and yoking their lives to the wheel of capital is the army of the unemployed, a “relatively redundant population of laborers” (11). This population in turn through labor and the continued accumulation of capital create their own servitude through their social reproduction rendering themselves redundant, a “disposable industrial reserve army, that belongs to capital quite as absolutely as if the latter had bred it at its own cost. The reserve army thus is a “mass of human material always at the ready for exploitation” (12) which can be set in motion in times of growth and then discarded to the dung heaps as soon as there is a general glut. Capitalism is not possible without this army. Further, the quality of the workers changes as there is the capital accumulation. Men are replaced with women and women with children and the exploitation is pushed to its limits, pulling as much surplus value out of the working day as possible (13), becoming the entire “pivot” on how the law of supply and demand works (15). Foe Marx, the growth of wealth is not possible without this scheme, labor and poverty being one side of the coin that includes capital and wealth on the other side (19).
What we have with Marx’s general law of capitalist accumulation is a model. And with any model we have necessary simplification that makes it false, but we also have the potential to learn about the world. What we can say is that the Marxian laws were built on an economy that looks a lot different from the one we see in modern America. Manufacturing in this one country has shrunk as a fraction of employment of the potential labor force. What this did not lead to was wide immiseration (though there is still gross inequality) but instead the economy shifted to a service-driven economy. So that on one hand makes it tempting to dismiss the Marxian framework. We have fewer factory workers and are the richest country in the history of the world. Wemust revisit Marx’s placing of all value creation in the labor power of the manufacturing worker. Many of this nation’s most valuable companies do not produce anything. Their products are replicated with lowmarginal cost. It is more like the story where a dollar was introduced to a small town and that single dollar was enough for everyone to pay off their debts. Labor might not be the fount of all wealth. This ignores all the goods we consume that are not made or grown in the United States, however. Or it is not possible to lay Marshall’s scissors over an LTV-driven commodity analysis.
While we may not be able to see the manufacturing base working from the bottom up, the more general law of capitalist accumulation feels true as someone who has been both in and out of that reserve army of the unemployed. The structure of society is such that you are defined by your profession. When you are in school you are asked what you want to be when you grow up, and then when you are in college you are asked what your major is, and then when you are an adult you are what you do. I was a contestant on the television quiz show program Jeopardy! in 2011, filming when I did not have a job. They introduce you by two bits of biographical information, where you are from and what you do. My local has always been fraught, but even worse was that I did not have a job at that point. I was trying to figure out what my next job was going to be, but in discussion with the production staff, they would not let me be “unemployed.” I was denied that status even though it was the best reflection of what was going on with my relationship to the workforce. Even in the shadow of the recession, the reserve army existed but it was not mentioned in good company.
The worst thing during that episode of unemployment was that I wanted to be exploited. There is no effective way beyond the system. It makes me think of Edwin Abbott’s “Flatland” where the characters are two-dimensional shapes and they can only conceptualize in their two dimensions or lower, but it is impossible to see in an extended dimension. In Flatland, a sphere is just another circle. That is what Marx is trying to get at. The general law is beyond the class struggle of the Manifesto, in trying to pull away and see the system from above it. I am not sure if he fully realized that (or if as Robinson suggests, the project of Capital was abandoned because all the parts were not reconcilable).
Cited
Marx, K., Engels, F., Mandel, E., & Fowkes, B. (1990). Capital: A critique of political economy. London: Penguin in association with New Left Review.
Compare and contrast the analysis of the
rise and fall of the Golden Age of Capitalism/Social Democracy in Bowles and
Carlin’s CORE-ECON Chapter 17, “The Great Depression, the Golden Age Of
Capitalism and the Global Financial Crisis”, with the analysis favored by your
instructor. In what ways are they the same and in what ways are they different?
Are the views of Bowles, Carlin and your instructor consistent with Thomas
Piketty’s view that the Golden Age was an aberration, unique and
non-repeatable, the result of a special set of historical circumstances
(chiefly, the two world wars and great depression) and that the years after
1980 (the era of Neoliberalism / hypercapitalism) have been a return to normal?
Langer
notes that there were several defining traits in the so-called golden age of
capitalism. He emphasizes that they are a strong safety net; a high minimum
wage; a situation where a good number of workers are in unions; a high top
marginal tax rate; strong regulations on wall street; and low inequality. These
were all caused through various mechanisms. First was the existence of the
labor movement as a countervailing power. There was also the communist threat, so
the postwar capitalist order was determined that a fair deal was possible under
capitalism. Then there was the need to rebuild the economy and physical infrastructure
after the destruction of war, so labor peace was needed. Then there were a
couple self-reinforcing ideological where the decadence of the nineteenth
century was seen as the result of rampant capitalism and greed, and Keynesianism
was seen as the key to economic policy.
For
Langer, this all fell apart with the rise of Reagan’s and Thatcherism. This was
pushed thorough with the decline of the labor movement and increased union
busting, anti-labor legislation and the growth of globalization. Corporate
profits had been squeezed, so there was pushback from big business and the
wealthy. Geopolitically, the end of communism in the Soviet Union as a
countervailing political / economic structure decreased the incentive to create
an equitable social system.
A
somewhat alternative view of the postwar economic utopia is seen in Bowles and
Carlin’s CORE econ book. In their formulation, the defining traits of the
golden age are low unemployment; high productivity growth; high growth rate of
capital stock; falling tax rates on corporate profits; and falling inequality
(7). Additionally, they note relative labor peace, as Langer does (21). They
also note the falling profit rates (25) as a reason for the end of the golden age
but seem to lay that more on worker militancy rising and less on government
policy pushback. Overall, they seem to rely more on a productivity-led
explanation for the growth than Langer does, as well as noting the effect of
the outside oil shock (25-6).
One
of the big questions in economic policy is if we can return to the period where
everything worked. It is called a golden age because prosperity was shared
between the workers and the capitalists in a sort of treaty (The treaty of
Detroit on a grand scale perhaps?). But the returnability is under debate
still. Thomas Piketty draws a giant asterisk on most of the 20th
century, saying that the period of 1914 to 1980, most of the whole “short
twentieth century” at least does not count. Now, this feels mighty presumptuous
to exclude a huge chunk history when your time period of examination is maybe
450 years. That is with dating the modern era generously. How far back do you
go, Watt, Luther, or Columbus? Piketty is wrong, and that perhaps Langer and
Bowels would agree in that we could get back to the economic conditions around
the golden age of capitalism. However, Langer’s class-based analysis is closer
to the key. Looking at how much emphasis Bowles et al put on productivity
growth is to remind me that TFP is more a “measure of our ignorance” than
someth8inga that can be gunned for in policy. Add to that my sympathy towards
Robert Gordon’s argument that we have picked the low hanging fruit of productivity
growth already, and the CORE golden age is less re-attainable. Of course,
history does not repeat itself, it merely rhymes. I hope that we are fortunate enough to come
out the other side of the current crisis with a reevaluation of our economic
priorities. I am just not that optimistic that we will.
The “rational class consciousness'”
hypothesis is that in a class-based model, each class, besides being modeled,
will use the model to decide upon how it should act. Discuss the implications
of this hypothesis when it is applied in a Goodwin-Mehrling style model.
The
rational class consciousness is in looking at a model and using it to shape how
you act. If we take the Goodwin-Mehrling model, we can see that there are the
four outcomes that they model. Goodwin models the business cycle as wage shares
go up and down while unemployment goes down and then up, baring a special case
where unemployment and wages shares somehow hit on an equilibrium point and
stay there. Mehrling extends this model and says what if the classes are not
acting as autonomous individuals, but instead worked together. Through this assumption
(and several others), he models three other outcomes. There are three
possibilities. Two where the individual classes bargain as a class and where the
opposite class bargains separately and a third possibility where both classes bargain.
These
three possibilities have different outcomes in terms of wage share and
unemployment. If the capitalists bargain as a class and the workers bargain
alone, the system operates in a situation where the capitalists share of output
is the great majority and the workers only get enough to socially reproduce
(iron law of wages here?). Even with the lowered wage share, the workers will
still see unemployment in this model. If the opposite happens and the workers
are united and the many small businesses organize on their own, unemployment
does not exist, and the worker wage share is increased. It is in the third case
where both classes bargain as one where the best outcome happens for both
classes. There is full employment and the business class gets more of the wage
share than if they did not organize.
So, if you are a
capitalist or a worker, you can look at this a menu with multiple outcomes. Either
you are a capitalist and you bargain, or you do not, or you are a worker and
you bargain, or you do not. Importantly, you must have your entire class with
you. If you just try to bargain on your own what you are doing is making your
ultimate outcome worse than if you did nothing at all (averaged over the course
of the cycle). It is like the people on the stern of the Titanic, unable to
believe that they are sinking when they are so high up.
In times of crisis and great uncertainty it is easy to panic and to focus on the short term and to forget about the long term. The current economic situation is scary, but for most of us it will pass. How do I know this? Because in 2008 I faced the same thing. I was laid off from my job right as I was starting to develop my career in the face of a slow recovery. Despite that, I was able to meet financial goals – I paid off my student loans and bought a house. I do not want to pretend I did not have some advantages. I was lucky enough to have gone to college. I was married so we had a two-income household. However, these hints helped me, and I hope that they can help you too.
1)Have a plan. It is too easy to go from paycheck to paycheck and shuffle what you’re paying and then to splurge when you have a little bit more if all you’re doing is focusing on the next paycheck. By having concrete financial goals, you are saving FOR something and not just nebulously putting money away. This mental accounting means that if you decide to splurge you are taking something away from your future self that you have already decided you want. This goal can be something small like those Riotfest tickets or something bigger like a house. As the saying goes, if you fail to plan, you are planning to fail.
2)Track your money. The biggest thing I did to help myself was to start plugging in all my financial information into the website Mint.com. Mint acts as a central repository that allows you to track your spending and wealth growth across all your accounts. What this does is not only allow you to see what is going on in the short term with your money, but also what your larger trends are in terms of your spending month by month and you can watch your net wealth grow. If you have software that you trust, you must commit to staying on top of things. You will make better financial decisions when you have an ongoing snapshot of your financial position in your head.
3)Pay yourself. One of the best things you can do is to automatically have a set amount of funds go directly into a savings account. Set this up through direct deposit if you have the ability. If you have an account that is savings and you never see the money in your checking account then it was never yours to spend, but it goes into savings for your future self’s goals. If you do not have direct deposit you can set up a small deposit from your checking to a savings account on a regular basis. This does not have to be a lot. As little as five dollars a week can start to grow a nest egg. The other thing to note here is that if your company offers a match on a retirement account, you should save enough of your paycheck to at least get the match. Not only is it free money in the short term, depending on the kind of account you use, you might gain tax advantages.
4)Cheat. Though you do not want to steal from your long-term goals, the point of saving money is to meet those financial goals. The point is not to live like some Buddhist monk. If you want some ice cream or some avocado toast, get that threat. But you must do this in moderation. Enjoying small luxuries can help prevent the splurge when you have totally denied yourself.
5)Inherit Money. This might be the hardest one to pull off. Hopefully you have someone that is connected to you who is a bit older and has some capital put away somehow. This is the opportune time for them to die so that you can get some of that capital. Now, I hope it isn’t someone you care about a lot, since that would add in tragedy and we don’t want that. You don’t need to inherit a lot either. Back in about 2010 my wife’s grandma died and had a windfall of about ten thousand dollars. That was enough to pay off most of our debt and turn the cash that wasn’t being consumed from debt service to savings. Soon after that, we were putting a down payment on our house!
I hope that you can take away a couple of things here and help you meet your financial goals. I know it is a scary time and most of us have debt already – that should be paid down promptly. Some debt loads feel so crushing that it feels like you will never be able to get out from underneath it because you did all the right things and got the degrees and impressed your parents but still live on six figures of debt with a five figure job. The advice you hear to have six months of savings in cash just sitting around is hard to reconcile with studies that show 40% of Americans cannot cover a $400 emergency expense. But if you follow these steps you can start to turn around and face the uncertainty off the future with a small plan to make sure you have financial flexibility in the future.
Keep Running: A Graduation Speech for the Class of 2020
Graduation was canceled, but that means that we have to be even more resilient. Below is the speech I prepared for a special celebration of one.
Good afternoon honored guests, esteemed faculty, parents, and the amazing graduating class of 2020. Before I begin my speech, we should note all who could not be here today through illness, bad Wi-Fi, or untimely passing. We love them and miss them dearly. However, we realize that they are all here with us in spirit on this joyous day.
I am overwhelmed with gratitude for having been chosen to speak on such a momentous occasion. Of all the members of the class of 2020 I can imagine that there are many who might be as qualified than I am or perhaps more so. But I was chosen. So, I get to tell my story and give my advice.
In West Virginia High School Track and Field, there is an event called the 300 intermediate hurdles. The runners start a quarter of the way around the track, and all come towards the same finish line that is used for all events. The hurdles are high, but not that high. I just googled this while writing and it seems that they are 36 inches. Three feet doesn’t seem that daunting, but you’re running at full speed and you have to clear them and not lose your stride. If you find yourself jumping hurdles, you’re doing it wrong. The key is to kick with your leading leg and then snap your hip over with your trailing leg so you’re basically a real big bounding step.
I was in track for three years, and if you can believe it from looking at me was a fairly successful sprinter given the context of school size and state. During my track career, I think I participated in every possible event except for long jump and the distance races. This happened because my coach, Harrison County Sports legend Ted Robinette, god rest his soul, would say “MIHELIC! You’re running the 400 relay” when I had never practiced the 400 relay and the thing I really wanted do was run my 20 second event and then go flirt with girls and smoke cigarettes. You know, the things a track athlete does.
One meet Coach Robinette did that thing, asking me what I thought of the 300 hurdles and I told him they were high and the race was longer than I wanted to run and he told me I was running the 300 and that’s fine I’ll be ok since I ran the shuttle hurdles I’ll know what to do. Now, here’s where I point out the intermediate hurdles are six inches higher and I’m not that tall.
Class of 2020, let me tell you there is nothing like the tension and anticipation you feel when you’re in the starting blocks coiled and ready for the pistol to go and then you start thinking if its ever coming and sometimes you get caught off guard. But the starting for the 300 is away from everyone, on the back straightaway where the first handoff zone for the 4 x 100 relay is so you’re all alone and your teammates on the bleachers are flirting with girls anyway and it’s just you and the lane and the hurdles. It’s a lot like right now, here.
The gun goes off and you set off at a full sprint like you know how to do and I, this specific time, started to realize I had no plan. If you do the hurdles a lot, you know how many steps to take, you know how many times you breathe during the race and you have a plan. I didn’t have a plan. I ran ran ran, then hopped. Then I did it again. I was in the lead. I was on one of the outer lanes, so you feel like you’re in the lead, but we were coming up to the last turn and I started getting a bit cocky. I had this. I was going to win the heat. Those girls will be impressed.
I was rounding that turn and then I felt another feeling that is unmatchable, that of your body failing you. I came up on one of the last hurdles, right before the home stretch. I kicked my front leg and that back leg just said no. Instead of clearing that hurdle and winning that heat, my foot hit clear in the center of the crosspiece of the hurdle.
And we’re going to put a pin in that right there. Because this is a graduation speech, it is clearly not just an excuse to talk about the highlights of my sporting life which is half a lifetime ago now. NO! this is a didactic frame because we’re going to talk about failure.
I have failed in many ways, many times. I was unemployed for two years, each week reaching out to try to find a job, any job. I got engaged at way too young an age to a great person but who I was not the right person for. Twice I ran for election and lost. Twice I was demoted at work. Twice I was escorted home by the police. Once they didn’t take me home.
I applied to MFA programs in 2004 all out of state because I wanted to leave West Virginia and find greener pastures, but I didn’t get in anywhere, so I was in West Virginia for another year. I had all sorts of crushes go unrequited, and some of those people I even told about my crush and they said we’re better friends. The specific person I’m thinking of right here was right since at the time I was waving a whole army’s worth of red flags (Which makes sense since I just told you about them in the last paragraph there). Just this year I applied to Harvard and Harvard said we don’t want you here. I flew to LA to be on Jeopardy only to be reminded now that when I was on the television, I got a question about Rocky Balboa “wrong”.
Failure can define you if you let it define you. If you allow it to be the final act in your story. But what it can also be is a teacher. What you learn through failure is the humility to know where your weaknesses are, and where you can improve. If you’re failing at something — if you’re trying for the first time or you’re failing at something you though you have mastered, every mistake is a teacher. True wisdom is being able to find those moments and have the bravery to admit to yourself that you have failed this time. You are not a failure. This resilience is a mark of character that you can learn through adversity. The most interesting person has a lot of scars. If you’ve never failed, you don’t know who you are.
I’m going to take this pin back out now.
I kicked that hurdle and it fell over and I went tumbling after. I was splayed out on the track on the part of the track that is right in front of the main bleachers where everyone was sitting. And I got up. And I started running towards the finish line. There were two more hurdles. I didn’t try the fancy hurdle step, but instead did the inelegant little hop over the last two and finished.
I didn’t come in first. But I tell you what. I didn’t fucking come in last either.
It is a lesson I learned from my father a long time ago but never really understood until I got older: “Suck it up and drive on”.
And here is where I stop for a second and transition. My father was a huge part of helping me develop intellectually. I feel his absence today. He set an example in showing what can be achieved and the hard work it takes to keep developing your knowledge, like watching him study hard when he had to take the boards again. He and my mom encouraged me by letting me explore my interests. They didn’t work against me when I decided I wanted to study poetry nor did they kick me out too often when I wanted to stay inside reading the encyclopedia or make me go to bed when I was staying up late just to finish one more chapter.
My parents were my first and best teachers, but I have had the good fortune to have great teachers at every level. From Pat Clayton in elementary school to Karen Morgan and Mary Anne Ferris in high school to Doctor P and Jim Harms and Mark Brazitis and Greg Eiselein and Tim Dayton and Christina Hauck and Joe Stachnick beyond that, I have been fortunate to find guides who have helped me develop by sharing their knowledge. I have found two more mentors here at Roosevelt, and the sadness I have in leaving the school is tempered with the knowledge that Professors Langer and Ziliak are now a part of my life and we live in parallel. Roosevelt’s economic department has been an intellectual home for me like no other. I have been challenged and grown academically and personally. Here I want to note all my peers who I was fortunate to work with, learning and growing together. I have many friends I have made through my schooling, but meeting Anita takes the cake. There’s not enough praise I can give her as all human languages are too constrained in the face of her greatness. She is the most important person in my life. She makes me laugh and she makes me want to be a better person, and with her I know I can do anything.
I know that because I have been through a lot and have picked myself off the ground and kept running. Those mistakes and how you approach them are what define you. When you fall, will you get back up?
And class of 2020, that’s what I have to share with you. This year is not a good year to be graduating. Many of us are trying to start our lives or at the very least a new chapter. There are a lot of scary things out there from a virus to a pandemic to Murder Hornets and near-earth asteroids. We cannot live in fear but learn from our mistakes and know that when we fall down, the best thing we can do is pop back up and keep running.
