Pushing Back on Neoliberalism: Mike Konczal's "Freedom From the Market"

 This is a good, short book laying out many of the ways that the market has crept up on us and made our lives smaller.

Konczal provides necessary pushback to the neoliberal project, showing just everything that we have lost as the forces of capital decided that the Great Society, the New Deal, and the Progressive Era were bridges too far against the corporate form.

It Was Supposed to Go a Bit Differently: Fall 2020 Economics Doctoral Admissions.

On my desk at work, I have had a note that says something like “write up the admissions process, post statements of purpose” for months. Of course, I can’t really tell you what is exactly on it because I haven’t been into work for months and months. It is right next to a different post it that tracks things I want to get better at, from Excel to R to Calculus to working on my poetry. 

I’ve previously posted in other places two separate essays, one about committing to the process of applying for a PhD in economics and then another about the waiting game, written after all the applications were in. I was feeling good. I had done what I thought was well enough on the GRE (166 verbal, 164 Quant, 4.5 Writing) and I was on my way to finish up the Master’s Program at Roosevelt University in Chicago with a 4.0. I had just finished a graduate level math class with an A, one where I was worried I was overmatched at the beginning but put the work in to make the grade. 

And then the waiting game dragged. 

My wife and I have made a tradition of planning out the next year as we drive to our see our families over Christmas. We live near Chicago and my family is in West Virginia and her family is in Kansas, so we have decently long drives to plan this out. The thing with this most recent trip was that there were so many unknowns about 2020 as 2019 came to a close. The focus was on finishing up my schooling and fixing up the house so that we could sell it and maybe move to wherever. 

I had applied to a mix of schools. Some because they made geographic sense, some reaches because I had never applied to Harvard when I was eighteen and I wanted to get a letter from Harvard, and then the six schools that don’t shun you for left-wing thought in economics – UMass, UMKC, The New School, Utah, American University and the University of Utah. Roosevelt is in this mix, but it doesn’t offer a PhD. What this meant was that we might be staying in Chicago, or there was a potential to move to a new city and try to find a place to live and maybe find new jobs. But it all depended on what the admissions committees said.

I got my first response, from American University in January even before their deadline. They let me in but then when I emailed about funding, they said that funding decisions would be made in the months to come. And then I got a bunch of rejections. And the New School let me in but only as an MS student. By the middle of April I had been rejected by all but the heterodox schools, which was fine since that’s where I really wanted to go (I had been wearing a UMass baseball had since I went to URPE conference almost two years ago now in Amherst). I was hanging out on their waitlist just hoping to hear back positively from them.

There were several problems with the process, the first and foremost was that of the three schools that let me into the doctoral program, none offered funding. I had agreed with my wife that I would not accept any offer that did not come with funding. As a mid-career professional, I make a decent salary so my opportunity cost is higher than someone just out of school, but it was not high enough that I could pay tuition and live in a city like DC or NYC while entirely supported  by my wife as a sugar momma. The opportunity cost is just higher. We still have debt from all my other schooling. The other problem of course was this pandemic. Had I thought about perhaps accepting at a school and maybe borrowing to pay tuition and living frugally in normal times, the environment in March and April looked to me like it would be impossible to find a new job in a place where we had no network for my wife and there was no guarantee what school would look like in the academic year staring in fall 2020 would look like. If it ever made sense to invest in yourself by increasing that old student debt balance, it did not in the spring of 2020. So I emailed the directors of graduate study at the schools that let me in and told them in the middle of April telling them that I could not enroll without funding, so thank you for the offer and expect to see my application again. On top of all of this my father passed suddenly in February, which cast a pall over everything and induced additional trauma that is separate from the pandemic but cumulative. I feel I was in the middle of the grieving process when the lockdowns started.  

So it was when I was refreshing GradCafe hoping to see people posting results and waiting to hear back from the schools I applied to, that I didn’t just want good news, but I wanted some counterweight to the sadness that has been sitting on top of me. But the cloud never dissipated. UMass eventually emailed that they didn’t have anyone not accept their offer and that was that. The huge empty space in our plans for the year stayed an empty space. And even without the generalized malaise of the pandemic it would be weird for me since there has been a sense of dual momentum in my life for the past decade, as I have ascended in my professional career doing new and interesting things and academically as I reinvented myself. (I first became interested in business and economics after the 2008 crash and that was after going to undergrad and an attempt at a master’s degree in English. (I’m still working on that MA, as I thought having started but not finished it would look bad on potential PhD applications. I was going to finish that this spring too, but with everything else it was amazing I was able to finish the Econ MA program class I took.)) So right now, there’s no momentum between not having been accepted into a funded program and being in this stasis that we call work from home.

The process of applying for a PhD is stressful. You have to have had taken the right classes and done well in them and fostered collegial relationships with your professors and then take a standardized test where there’s incredibly high stakes on how well you do in speed algebra. You have to figure out what schools you want to go to and try to figure out who you might want to work with and then you spend hundreds or thousands of dollars in this process. And then there’s the waiting. If I have one real criticism of the process it is the lack of transparency. It is especially interesting that it happens in economics, because in theory you should have a transparent market operating at maximum efficiency but that is not the case in practice. You have walls of mystification that as an applicant you might try to break through and the people you talk to on message boards are just as clueless as you are. As much as I love Roosevelt, I worry that since it is such a small program it’s not really a pipeline that sends its students off to PhD programs every year, so there’s just less institutional knowledge about the process. I didn’t have anyone in my cohort to commiserate about the process, for better or worse. 

The stress is doubled when things don’t go the way you wanted them to go. It brings out the doubt and all the second guessing. I was accepted to three schools and that was awesome. I would have loved to attend any of them. I had kept saying was all that I needed was one place to say yes and take a chance on me. So close, and yet… Second guesses abound. Should I have applied to different schools? Should I have used a different paper for my writing sample? Should I have asked for different letter writers? How can I redo my statement of purpose? And worries about things by this point out of my control, like why didn’t I come out of undergrad as a dual major in math and economics? How much programming should I have done? Should I have not emailed the professors and just hung around waiting for an offer to come through?

Back when I wrote that note where I wanted to post this essay, I had in mind a different version of this essay. It was going to be more triumphant, cautiously optimistic about the journey ahead but a little scared of the uncertainty of the path. This is not that essay, and it is fine. When asked about a plan B my response was that I have a job I like, and I live in a community that is home to me. The worst case was the status quo. This setback is not a point of failure but a time for a moment of reevaluation and reflection. What can I do to make my profile better to get over that hump? What kind of research can I do? The pandemic troubles all that though. It means that not just me, but all of us have to exercise our resilience especially because we don’t know what the second order and beyond effects this whole thing will have for the state of higher education. We know that in normal times a bad economy drives up applications. The environment will be more competitive. There may be a counter to that as xenophobia makes US institutions less appealing. I hope not. I want to learn with and from the best of the best in the world. 

I had imagined that this essay would signal the start of one journey and the start of another. I wasn’t wrong. I just stepped on a different path. I am not done yet.

A Very Necessary Book: Kelton's "The Deficit Myth"

Back after the 2008 crisis, I had lost my job and was sitting around unemployed and I started to get interested in economics for the first time in my life. The reason was that for all my life to that point the broader economy had not really broken down during my lifetime. I had long considered myself a Marxist from the experience of being a worker at the point of the spear in the service economy. In food service you see the menu price and you know your price and there’s a huge discrepancy between the two.

I had a sense that in the shadow of that crisis that we were bounded by only being to push at the edge of the status quo. The bailouts, both TARP and ARRA were real money that had to be paid back, so the democratic-led government in 2010 and through pressure from their political opponents,  started to roll back the funding that was on offer through the state. “Austerity” was the name of the game and big debts were scary and more important than the mass of Americans who were still without jobs in the economy that had been showing “green shoots” every quarter for 18 months.

I was unemployed and reading as much as I could about economics and especially the crisis. There were scores of books written by commentators and economists trying to get their hands around just what happened and why it happened. But it was not the first crisis. I eventually found myself making my way through Keynes and Minsky – with some understanding but not 100% of it. Keynes had some integrals I just skipped over and hoped that he was explaining all of them in the text. It was during this time that I came up with what I thought was a fairly novel idea that the household metaphor that politicians used was completely wrong. The government lives forever, I said, and it creates money. A worker is constrained in the money they have and the only way to get more is to work more even if the can temporarily increase their spending by borrowing they eventually have to pay it off (or pass down the debt once they die). I created an imaginary currency called “EdgarBucks” and knew my biggest problem was making sure that people accepted these “EdgarBucks”.

My insight about the fallacy inherent in the household fallacy was not novel it seems. While politicians and many economists talked about spending money being the constraint, there was a then little-known school of thought who had fleshed out the idea that money is not the constraint in the economy, but real resources are that constraint. You cannot run out of money if you are a currency issuer, but you can run out of factories. It brings to mind Keynes looking at idle workers and idle factories and realizing that you can have suboptimal equilibria where resources are underutilized. But what this little-known school of thought had done was flesh out that idea, and it has a name – Modern Monetary Theory (MMT).

The basics of MMT are that the real constraints are the real economy and in the book Professor Kelton works through the implications of the idea that money is more a record keeping device than some sort of fetishized commodity through simple, easy to understand metaphors. What is dangerous through the world as described through MMT is inflation and not debt, and the way to pull that back is to increase taxation. Also embedded in the structure is a call for a Job Guarantee to make sure that people have and can spend money. I personally am not for a Job Guarantee but lean more towards a Basic Income, but that is outside the realm of this review but I think within the realm of possible debates, so MMT is not strictly dogmatic.

I was receptive to the ideas of MMT because I was not a slave to the old orthodoxy and especially because I thought that the old orthodoxy was in a large part to blame for not preventing and not really being able to predict the crisis of 2008, I was ready to throw it all out and find an explanation for how capitalism worked and if possible how it could be made better for people if we were going to keep putting off the eventual worker’s revolution. MMT was, and still is centered on a couple of institutions like UMKC and Bard College in the US and has a couple of figureheads like Professor Kelton but also Warren Mosler and Scott Fullwiler. Despite this, MMT punches above its weight in policy discussion because it has many passionate adherents in both the blogosphere and on Twitter. It is, to me, also inherently commonsensical as we are not constrained by the amount of a shiny rock in the vaults of the Federal Reserve in New York or in Fort Knox. 

I was sitting, unemployed though the summer of 2011, smart and a hard worker and ready to be put to use so I could get money to pay my rent but no one was answering my applications. It was confounding and scary and just a total failure of policy because there were tens of thousands of people like me who wanted to work. But I was reading. The biggest problem for me when I was learning more about different economic schools in terms of learning about MMT was that there was no centralized place to start learning about it. People would talk about it in blog comments and you would ask where to go for more details and they would send you a link to a pdf or a self-published book on amazon and that did not inspire a lot of confidence. If someone was asking where to start to learn about Marxism you could point them to many different publishers who had put out versions of the Manifesto but this was like if the only resource available was Marxists dot org. What “The Deficit Myth” does is not just synthesize the ideas of MMT in a simple and easy to read format, but it also formalizes the school as something to be taken seriously by readers of levels. And for that reason, it is an especially important and necessary book.

When everyone sees what is on the end of every fork: Oesterich's "Pandemic Capitalism"

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.   

On Vollrath's "Fully Grown"

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.

Above the System: On General Laws of Capitalism

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. We must 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 low marginal 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. 

Capitalism: Golden Ages?

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 20^th 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.