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The Search for Autonomy: Gavin Mueller's "Breaking Things at Work"

 
Okay today we're looking at Breaking Things at Work, the new book from Verso by Gavin Muller. It’s an interesting text because it's short and I was reading it and I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. The first part is just the history of Luddism and industrial push-back from the early eighteen-hundreds to current but also includes the office environment.
 
The thing is it has one of the absolute best last chapters of any social science book that I've read. Usually, these last chapters are some sort of call to action that really you can't do much about, the problem they were looking at in the text is stuck as it is unless you go about really changing the entire system. 
 
I think where Mueller really excels is where he hits on his sense of autonomy. The whole point of the book is that it is not having autonomy where you have the freedom to work on your own terms is where the push-back begins. 
 

Quick story: I worked at a pizza shop. I tried to make my work like art. By creating each pizza as a little piece of art it felt as if I had control over what I was doing. I didn’t get paid anywhere comparable to the amount of my productivity over most of my co-workers because I was good, and I was fast. But  I was able to do the work on my own terms. Then my boss decided to put a scale in and really regiment just the amount of cheese we were adding. Which makes sense from a business perspective because you want to make sure all your products are consistent and to cut down on your food cost, so the people don’t add too much cheese. But that constraint really made everybody mad, especially the fact that at the same time they installed a bunch of cameras in the store and the far as I remember there were installed it like three cameras in the kitchen for everyone camera in the dining room and we were open late night that we have a lot of problems with. Our boss was less concerned about that then being able to exert control internally and I think what Mueller is thinking is something like this. The autonomy is what controls being able to do things on your own terms as you like them and not fully controlled. 
 
What we have is a lack of Freedom where the employee is the tool instead of using technology as the tool itself. And that's where we get this larger unrest and a lack of satisfaction, needing meaning at work. The other thing that Mueller does well is that he doesn't claim to have a big answer. What we really need  to create that autonomy is to have some sort of organization at the firm level or even at a higher level of the social political organization. I really liked the book in the end even though the first part I was a little unsure about what he was trying to do. It all came together well.
 

On "The Care Crisis" by Emma Dowling

Today I'm going to talk about the Care Crisis by Emma Dowling. It is a new release from Verso and the subtitle “is what caused it and how can we end it”. Overall it's a pretty good book. It does identify a lot of the problems with our caring organizations from the elderly all the way on down to the youth. I think the big problem for me with this book was that it was more focused on the British context. And they fund their care a little bit differently than we do here in America. But what we do have in common is that there is a lack of funding and support for the organization of the people who do care in both countries.

This of course is a little bit is a bit disappointing because I think there's an idea that the European system and model is a little bit better in terms of healthcare. But especially in the English context we've seen how neoliberalism has brought its Market upon everything.

The English have less distributed governments in terms of taxing. They have their local Council but they're reliant on getting grants from the central government and these grants have been cut over time so the organizations that are reliant on funding for them are just in trouble. Here in America I know personally I work for a caring organization and though we have multiple funding streams that complicate our financials if there is a cut from our funders we have other fullbacks. That's less so here in the context that Dowling describes. So what happens is there's less time and people are more stretched and people that need care either don't get it or it's at a substandard level.

When this book is at its strongest it is in describing the various problems we have with the caring organizations. It does fall off a little at the end, the last two chapters. The penultimate chapter is one that talks about self-care and it kind of feels like it's from left field and doesn't fit in with the rest of the book really. And then the final chapter is the inevitable what is to be done chapter and it just doesn't feel as if there is a way to push back against neoliberalism because it is working within that context and really the entire social system and economic system needs to be reformed and unfortunately I don’t think it's going to happen tomorrow. But overall it's a worthwhile read.

Lawrence Summers Can Eat My Ass

 I have a lot of feelings about the man, mostly negative. He's out of touch and in spite of everyone who says he's brilliant, he's done a net harm to the country and the Economics profession by devaluing it as a policy making tool. To be fair that last part just wasn't him. For all that he's done over his career, he can eat my entire ass. 

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.