Sunday, March 11, 2018

Hughes's "Fair Shot": What a UBI looks like when a Liberal looks at a UBI



I’m skeptical about Hughes writing for a guaranteed income. 

Mainly it was because he’s been so lucky. Though he fought up from class position, he did end up as a white kid at Harvard. Then he became even luckier by having Mark Zuckerberg as a roommate. That’s given him millions of dollars to play with. First, he bought a magazine then he’s been doing this advocacy work.

The book is short and functions as a bit of biography and a bit of a policy proposal. The meat is the proposal, and as meat, it’s kind of gristly. His proposal is for a $500 monthly disbursement for everyone making less than $50K a year. It’s small, but even then, he wants a slow roll out. Significantly, it is tied to work – very broadly drawn.

For me, if we as a society are going to move towards a UBI, this kind of thing is the last sort of proposal we need. I complained to my friends as I was reading it that Hughes had reinvented the EITC. I was a little shocked when I was reading later that this is the model he has in mind. The only real difference is that he wants payouts monthly instead of yearly.

I’m personally on the edge about what a UBI might mean socially. However, the way Hughes draws it creates all the problems of administering another social program. It is not basic, nor universal. My concern when reading was that the 50K level is a huge drop-off. You make 49.5 and you get the payment, but one dollar over gets nothing (this is addressed many pages after the basic proposal is laid out, in one line). He also wants to have an adjustment based on cost of living.
So, his proposal is for a new program of a smaller sum (not to downplay how much an extra 500 bucks a month would play in my life) targeted towards the poor with a huge bureaucratic element thrown in. I’m really not sure how Hughes sees this being implemented, but in a political environment where even broader-based government programs are under attack, I can’t see this having a chance of being implemented.

The size and work requirements are what really get me. Dude hit the lottery and understands the power of receiving cash grants (he looks at similar income schemes in developing countries) but he’s still fetishizing work. The grant he proposes isn’t enough to live on and you to have worked the year before to qualify, so we’re still using an 18th century model of relief for the 21st century, with loads of uncertainty of what work will look like for the next generation. 

The very point of a UBI is that within a capitalist framework it can be emancipatory since it is enough for basic subsistence and that is universal. If you do well enough, we can tax it away on the back end. There’s still bureaucracy in place, but if everyone gets a check, there’s less chance for those fun racially coded republican arguments against it. (And what’s really galling is that Hughes uses handwaving about his failure at the New Republic as a justification against a larger grant – UBI is literally a safety net for everyone, just like he had with his Facebook Money. Oh, and also that in a couple places he says he wants the book to “start a conversation” when the conversation has been going on for decades. Sigh. 

So, it’s good that the Facebook bro writes a book for a basic income and gets blurbbed on the back by Bill Gates and Arianna Huffington. But the problem is that he’s doing that weird liberal thing where you pre-concede your position and ask for less than what’s really needed. (So we don’t see a whole program here of state-provided health care or schooling through the bachelor’s level to address other structural inequities.) I guess it’s a start.     

Monday, March 5, 2018

Iconoclasm Sells Books: The Writings of N. N. Taleb



The story goes that Socrates was the wisest man in Athens, because only he admitted he knew nothing. Taleb is the Socratic inverse, because he believes that only he knows everything.

I have a lot of feelings about Nassim Taleb, most of them not charitable. He’s got me blocked on social media for reasons unknown to me. He brags about liking to win, but that’s not a win.

I actually dislike him so much that whatever value his ideas have are lost in the presentation. I dislike him so much when people I respect show their respect for Taleb, it doesn’t make me reassess Taleb, it makes me question those people. I have to ask, what is wrong with Branko Milanović, what is wrong with Miles Kimball. I dislike Taleb so much that I made a point of checking this book out of the library instead of spending my money and having some of that pass through to him.

And it’s a shame. I really liked the Black Swan. It was smart and well-written and fun to read and taught me things I hadn’t thought about. The problem was that it was successful. So that gave Taleb the freedom to say no to his editors and just write and be arrogant. Antifragile was overwritten and under edited – oddly in that he decries people loading up books with more and more argument in this book (specifically here to attack Piketty).  

So instead of looking at each book as a distinct whole, at some point he decided that they were linked and gave them a name. This isn’t “In search of lost time,” Naseem. But I suppose you want it to be, flashing your erudition out there for your readers, posting polyglot sentences and footnoting them, bringing in obscure references and belittling those who would need to google what the heck he’s talking about.

Because there’s the elephant in the room you have to talk about when you talk about Naseem Taleb. He has that sort of self-confidence that makes him think he’s above the social norms, like a Donald Trump or a school shooter. You can call him a bully or arrogant, but he likes that because he likes being confrontational. He is certain his worldview is correct, no matter how much it feels like some back-formed justification of who he already is.

But he’s smart enough to know that foundation of rhetoric: audience matters. You write [infinitive] [noun]. Here I’m writing to persuade readers. I’m not sure who the audience for these books are. This one, to get to the point, is also overwritten – rambling and unfocused though it is only 250 pages. The weird thing is there is a 15-page technical appendix at the end that is written clearly and readably and void of the personal attacks that fill the rest of the book. Because he does hold grudges – against Stephen Pinker and Sam Harris and the Saudis – he rides these like horses that as a reader get tired. And then there’s the weird thing that he really wants to identify with the cultures to the west of his homeland. Though Lebanese Christian, Turkey is about as Asian as his referents are; Africa ends on the banks of the Nile.

The shame is that there’s the seeds of an interesting book here. It just fails to grow.

Friday, March 2, 2018

Co-Ops and the Panoptic Society

In class, we were talking about the structural benefits of co-ops, using the Craig and Pencavel paper as a jumping off point.

Last night when I get home, reading Polanyi - he references Bentham.

It made me think of one aspect of the co-op that may be a downside we didn't talk about.

In a previous life, Bentham was known to me more because of his idea being referred to in Foucault's Discipline and Punish.

Foucault uses the Panopticon to expand from the prison to the panoptic society. It is a society where we are all being watched, not just by someone above us, but by each other (so much for having no bosses, everyone is simultaneous a boss and a subordinate).

This might extend to the co-op literature. There are fewer no direct supervisors in a co-op situation.
In classical firms, if you have one, you can shirk (like I'm doing right now). You might have more or less autonomy, but you can also take just a bit longer in the bathroom than you really need.

But in a co-op, every is a boss, always being watched and at the same time having to perform the role of the boss since there's no principal agent problem here. One could imagine that this increases the intensity of work on its own, and that's even before adding the extra hours.

Friday, January 26, 2018

Reading Through the Socialist Calculation Debate

I’m glad that we started out with the readings on the socialist calculation debate. I’ll tell you why. I love Marx. The Marx I fell in love with was the Marx of the Manifesto that my girlfriend was mad that she was being forced to read for a political science class. But the problem with the Manifesto is the same problem as with all the old movies: once you ride off into the sunset, happily ever after does not just happen. Happily ever after must be theorized. Proletarier aller Länder, vereinigt euch!, sure but then what? And then of course as Marx progresses in his career what does he do if not show us the way by developing a much more in-depth analysis of the capitalist mode of production and exchange in the first volume of Capital and then working towards more volumes and then dying without completing his valedictory work. Even more contemporary activists struggle to explain the plan of the future as criticism of the current system is much easier to show injustice than to create. Mises, in his “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth identifies the problem as how “[Utopians] invariably explain how, in the cloud-cuckoo lands of their fancy, roast pigeons will in some way fly in the mouth of their comrades, but they omit to show how this miracle will take place” (2).

Economic argument did not sleep between the 1848 Manifesto and 1920, when Mises published his broadside against socialism, the previously quoted paper “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth,” but it is here that we begin our examination. The six papers we will examine all are in response to Mises’s provocation — Lange and Lerner writing in an effort to show where Mises was mistaken, and Hayek writing a repost in support and expansion of Mises’s original point. In this brief paper, we will examine several claims in the original paper and look at the responses.

The role of consumption goods in a socialist economy
The first thing to we want to look at is the role of consumption goods in a socialist society. Mises claims that in the socialist society, it is “who is consuming and what is to be consumed by each which is the crux of the problem of socialist distribution” (Calculation 4). For Mises, the problem is that under socialism, “It is characteristic of socialism that the distribution of consumption goods must be independent of the question of production and if its economic conditions” (Calculation 4). For Mises, we see there is a separation between the question of production and consumption, and this difference exposes the inherent problem with the socialist economy. For Oskar Lange, in his “Economic Theory of Socialism: Part One,” this fundamental issue identified by Mises does not exist. In fact, he does not see the common ownership of the productive machinery of society being an impediment to free choice in consumer goods: “The fact of public ownership of the means of production does not in itself determine the system of distributing consumers’ goods and of allocating people to various occupations, nor the principles guiding the production of commodities,” continuing, “In the socialist system as described we have a genuine market” (60). Both Lange and Lerner go to pains to show that this apparent contradiction identified by Mises is no such thing, showing how in their estimation a socialist market might work.

The problem with value in a socialist economy
One of these methods of looking at the potentiality for trade in the socialist economic system is the question of how you value the outputs of the economy. For Mises this is a problem. He sees an economy where “distribution will be determined upon the principle that the state treats all its members alike […] each comrade receives a bundle of coupons, redeemable within a certain period against a definite quantity of certain specified goods” (Calculation 5). In this economy he can see exchange building up based on these individual preferences, but he makes a point to say that this exchange will be limited and confined to exchange, and that since “no production good will ever become the object of exchange, it will be impossible to determine its monetary value” (Calculation 5–6). What happens according to Mises is that once market exchange develops and relative values are determined then that brings into question the value of labor. He assumes that a socialist society would be completely remunerated based on labor input “The comrade is thus marked up for every hour’s work put in and this entitles him to receive the product of one hour’s labor” (Calculation 6) and even though looking at a case where “labor is not a uniform” so in the end for Mises it becomes impossible to split the labor inputs and how to divide the yield of the labor socially (Calculation 7).
Mises goes deeper in the second section. It is in these pages that he makes the central claim of the work — “Without economic calculation, there can be no economy” (Calculation 14). This does not come from left field. He builds his argument by dividing goods between production goods and consumption goods, he makes the distinction between higher order and lower order goods. It is these higher order goods that he focuses on. Small individual exchange can happen, but higher-level coordination needs valuation to give production goods meaning: “The human mind cannot orientate itself properly among the bewildering mass of intermediate products and potentialities of production without such aid. It would simply stand perplexed before the problems of management and location” (Calculation 13).

Of course, these claims do not go without being addressed. Lerner takes this head on by asserting that Mises is trying to import the whole paradigm of the capitalist economy and lay it over a socialist economy. In fact, he notes “the competitive price system has to be adapted to socialist society. If it is applied in toto we have not a socialist but a competitive society” (Economic Theory and the Socialist Economy 55). And Lange notes that Mises is making a definition error, thinking that what is needed to make decisions is a monetary price, but a higher level relative valuation can work since what the planners utilize is the economic problem as a “choice between alternative” (On the Economic Theory of Socialism 54).

The separation of consumption and production in a socialist economy
From above, the starting point for Mises was the problem is that under socialism, “It is characteristic of socialism that the distribution of consumption goods must be independent of the question of production and if its economic conditions” (Calculation 4). This separation led to the whole issue of needing to value goods and then the introduction of money and then the problem with labor and higher order production goods. But as we have seen, demand doesn’t just go into a black box. As Lange notes, “The administrators of a socialist economy will have exactly the same knowledge, or lack of knowledge, of the production functions as the capitalist entrepreneurs have” (55). Hayek would argue that this would not be enough. The entrepreneurs are in aggregate, but if there was only one board they could have the same chance of making a mistake in production as any one entrepreneur would have but the distributed knowledge would make the system work: “the sort if knowledge with which I have been concerned is knowledge of the kind which by its nature cannot enter into statistics and therefore cannot be conveyed to any central authority in statistical form” (524). Where the consumer and producer are rent by socialism, the advocates of the competitive society see the market bringing them back together.

The virtues or vices of a “competitive society”
Within our reading, the strongest advocate for the competitive society was in Hayek’s “The Use of Knowledge in society”. In it, he show how the decentralized nature of the competitive society is the more useful way to respond to the constant change the economy faces: “If we can agree that the economic problem of society is mainly one of rapid adaptation to changes in the particular circumstances of time and place, it would seem to follow that the ultimate decisions must be left to the people who are familiar with these circumstances” (524). He goes on to emphasize that we must solve it be some form of decentralization. And is this decentralized society that most have lived in and that Mises points out that it “has obtained for some thousands of years” (14), but his destruction of the possibility of socialism relies less on building up the idea of the competitive economy, but instead taking it as the ideal status quo which to prove the impossibility of the socialist state.
The socialist side of the debate is not wholly critical of the competitive society. In fact, Oscar Lange thanks (though how much tongue in cheek, I do not know) for Mises forcing “socialists to recognize the importance of an adequate system of economic accounting to guide the allocation of resources in a socialist economy” (53). Far from the impossibility of taking the good parts from the capitalist system and overlay it on the socialist system, Mises arose the socialist theorists and made them look at their own system in the new light, so much that Lange offers up a statue of Mises in the economic planning bureau — an image so memorable that Hayek cites it in his own paper ten years later (529).

The virtues or vices of a socialist society
If you’re Ludwig von Mises, the whole point of your effort in writing was to prove not that socialism is bad, but that it is on the face impossible. But interestingly, he concedes at the end that no matter what he argues, the socialists will not listen, as he writes “Whoever is prepared himself to enter upon socialism on ethical grounds on the supposition that the provision of goods of a lower order for human beings under a system of common ownership of the means of production is diminished or whoever is guided by the ascetic ideals in his desire for socialism will not allow himself to be influenced in his endeavors by what we have said (33). Which is good, since Mises did not have the last word, in fact, as we looked at above, this paper set off the debate so much that he deserves a statue in Red Square.

One thing that really struck me was that I had been expecting to read about the waste of the capitalist system and the unequal distribution of resources between the workers and the capital owners in the reading. Though tangential, it had seemed as if the battle lines had already been drawn. It was not until the second part of Lange’s paper where anyone makes full throated appeal for socialism and against the capitalist mode of production and distribution, where he makes claims such as “Only a socialist economy can distribute incomes so as to attain the maximum social welfare” and “Under capitalism the distribution of the ownership of the ultimate productive resources is a very unequal one, a large part of the population owning only their labor power” (On The Economic Theory of Socialism: Part Two 123).

Conclusion:
One thing I noticed specifically in the reading for this week was that I have motivated reading. I took the wrong route and started reading the socialists responses before I read Mises because I was more sympathetic to them and the packet was smaller, honestly. That deprived me of the context I had to get by rereading while I was working on typing this up and able to see all the papers as a whole. It is a different way of looking at things so that it is more a becoming of an understanding — even though I know I’m only scratching the surface here. The other piece was not about the order I read things in, but in how I read them. I found that reading the socialists was more about reading for understanding, while reading the Mises piece I was reading prepared to criticize. Once I realized I was doing that I moved onto the Hayek essay with a much more open mind than the first time I read Hayek eight years ago.


Works Cited

Ludwig von Mises, Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth (1920 [1990]): 1–46. The present translation was first published in F.A. Hayek, ed., Collectivist Economic Planning (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1935; reprint, Clifton, N.J.: Augustus M. Kelley, 1975).

Friedrich A. Hayek, “The Use of Knowledge in Society,” American Economic Review, Vol. 35, №4. (Sep., 1945): 519–530.

Abba. P. Lerner, “Economic Theory and Socialist Economy,” The Review of Economic Studies, Vol. 2, №1 (Oct., 1934): 51–61.

Abba. P. Lerner, “Theory and Practice in Socialist Economy,” The Review of Economic Studies , Vol. 6, №1 (Oct., 1938): 71–75.

Oskar Lange, “On the Economic Theory of Socialism: Part One,” The Review of Economic Studies, Vol. 4, №1 (Oct., 1936): 53–71

Oskar Lange, “On the Economic Theory of Socialism: Part Two,” The Review of Economic Studies, Vol. 4, №2 (Feb., 1937): 123–142

Wednesday, January 10, 2018

Daniel Pink's "When": Clever Synthesis of Science to Tell a Story

Daniel Pink’s strength in is books is taking interesting studies and framing them with context to make those individual studies have greater meaning through the connections with other work. It may come across as more self-help than social science, but sometimes self-help is needed. In this case, it is at least grounded in science.

In “When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing,” Pink looks at the nature of time in three sections. In the first, he looks at the day, and how we can be self-aware of our own natural patterns to make the most of our days, and order them that will optimize our work and decisions. Importantly, this will vary across individuals, so there is no one-size-fits-all answer.

In the second section, he pulls back and explores beginnings, middles, and ends separately – their importance and again how to maximize each step in a project if it is going to last a day or even how to make the most out of your whole life. For many reasons, both my age and where I’m at in a project at work, the section on middles spoke to me. Neither are at the beginning, but I know the finish line is out there. I’m still growing, but already writing my legacy. I think I’m at the point where he identifies a “uh-oh effect” where I can recenter and make progress anew.
Finally, there is a section on the importance of syncing up with people around you, if you’re in a chorale group or transporting food in India – being part of a larger whole gives purpose and meaning to your actions and is good for you to boot!

What makes it self-helpy is that after each chapter is an unnumbered section with worksheets and advice on how to apply the lessons just covered. I’m not going to go through each one and follow it, but  I did have a couple of takeaways about the importance of building and maintaining my network that I might follow through with.

When is a quick read – just over 200 pages with several charts and sections broken up so you can fly through it in an evening, so there is pretty good bang for your time investment.

Tuesday, December 26, 2017

De Bello Christo




Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of secularists dropping softly behind.

Sale! SALE! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling
Grabbing the buggies just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a human sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the buggie that we flung them in,
Toys and electronics reflecting in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the hate
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Buy one, get one free*
With purchase of equal or lesser value.