Socioeconomic Realities: Dreaming of Denmark

One of the most abused and misunderstood words in the English language is “socialism.”  At one extreme we have the Russian communists who referred to their governmental form as socialism leading to the impression that socialism and communism are essentially the same thing.  At the other extreme we have what have been termed “social democracies” which are often assumed to be a form of socialism when in fact they are capitalist systems regulated in an attempt to maximize social justice.  Anyone using the word socialist or socialism in the current environment in the United States is most likely referring to a form of social democracy but risks being burdened with a communist-like association.  Consider a current dictionary definition of the term socialism.

“a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole”

It is the phrase “or regulated” that makes all the difference.  This was an addition made to the classical definition in order to make it consistent with current usage.  Under this definition, all nations can be considered “socialist.”  

The question then becomes: of all the forms socialism might take, which is the most desirable?  Fareed Zakaria considers this issue in his recent book Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World.  He provides a brief but succinct political and economic history of the postwar years.  Economic growth was large and inequality was diminished up until around 1980 when the US entered the Reagan era and the UK entered the Thatcher period.  Eliminating much of the progressivity of tax structures, diminishing the economic and political power of wage earners, limiting the role of government programs and workers, starving social program of funds, and attacking the very notion of society as a collection of individuals with shared interests contributed to slower economic growth and greater inequality, both economic and political.  Matters were further muddled in the US as the Supreme Court decided that spending money was a form of speech and the infringing the right to free speech was the one thing that could never be tolerated.  This freed up the assets of wealthy individuals and corporations to be utilized in purchasing the allegiance of legislators.  The only laws or regulations considered bad are those that one did not get to write. 

Zakaria’s focus is provided by the Covid virus pandemic, thus the performance of the US in dealing with that must be discussed.

“At the start of the pandemic, the Norwegian University of Science and Technology made a Facebook post urging any of its students studying abroad to return home, adding, ‘especially if you are staying in a country with poorly developed health services and infrastructure and/or collective infrastructure, for example, the USA.’  The university later deleted the reference to America because it recognized it had made a gaffe—as the joke goes, it had accidently told the truth.”

Clearly, the US performance in dealing with the virus has been dismal.  Other advanced countries have viewed the results with a mixture of pity and laughter.  The US’s look-alikes are the European nations with whom it compares poorly in nearly all aspects of governmental performance. 

“Thomas Philippon, a French economist, arrived in America in the 1980s, amazed by how competitive the economy was, offering an array of choices in products—from airline tickets to banking to phone services—at low prices.  Today, however, it is Europe that has the cheaper goods and services and a greater variety of them.  Over the last twenty years, Europe broadened its offerings while the United States narrowed them.  Philippon’s research shows that some of the forces behind this shift are structural—in the digital economy, any given market tends to be dominated by one or two players, which then have the ability to raise prices.  But a crucial cause, his scholarship revealed, is industries’ political power.  Companies are able to write the rules in a way that shuts out competition and keeps their profits high.”

“Perhaps it is not surprising that, as Philippon shows, the European Union does a better job at enforcing open competition than America.  The ‘Eurocrats’ in Brussels might be arrogant and officious, but they do not sell waivers to regulations in return for campaign contributions.” 

Zakaria does suggest a candidate for the most desirable form of social democracy.

“In his ambitious two-volume work, Political Order and Political Decay, Francis Fukuyama writes that the fundamental question for every human society is simple: How do you get to Denmark?  ‘By this I mean less the actual country Denmark,’ he writes, ‘than an imagined society that is prosperous, democratic, secure, and well governed, and experiences low levels of corruption.’  Fukuyama is speaking more of a political than an economic system, but the two are deeply connected.  Indeed, one reinforces the other.  Denmark is successful politically because it is successful economically—and vice versa.”

Bernie Sanders has often referred to Denmark as possessing the type of society that provides a model for the US to emulate.  As a self-labeled socialist, the Danes were somewhat upset about the implication that their country was in any way socialist. 

“This led the prime minister of the country to publicly contradict Sanders.  ‘Denmark is far from a socialist, planned economy.  Denmark is a market economy,’ Lars Løkke Rasmussen explained in 2015.  The facts bear him out.  Denmark ranks higher than the United States in the free-market Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom (eighth for Denmark, seventeenth for the US).  In general, Denmark, like most Northern European countries, has an open, low-tariff, competitive economy.  In some ways it better incentivizes the accumulation of capital than America does, with lower taxes on capital gains and inheritance…”

The manner in which a society adjusts to market changes that create unemployment is an indication of the efficiency with which the economy can operate.  Ideally, one would prefer minimum disruption by allowing instant termination of unneeded workers followed by rapid retraining or placement in a new role with no significant loss of income in the transition period.  At one extreme some countries respond by making it difficult to terminate workers, while at the other extreme workers can be terminated immediately without cause and left to fend for themselves.  The US exists as the example of the latter extreme.  Denmark has strived for the ideal with an approach it refers to as “flexicurity.” 

“…the first half of the term was key: ensuring employers had the flexibility to hire and fire workers easily, without excessive regulation or litigation, in an economy that’s open to the world and competition—but all within a system that provides the security of a generous safety net.”

Denmark is an example that is representative of what are referred to as the Nordic countries: Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Iceland.  All are high-tax capitalist economies with broad social policies that encourage equality of opportunity and limit excessive economic inequality.  The high tax rates are applied to all citizens, not just the wealthy, but all people benefit because the tax revenue provides high quality services for all people, services which must be purchased by individuals from for-profit venders in the US.  Citizens from a country like Denmark will come out ahead economically from this tax regime and will further benefit by having access to the same services that are available to the wealthy.

“What distinguishes Northern European countries from the United States are their high levels of general taxation and redistribution.  In other words, the system is designed to make it easy to generate wealth through free markets and free trade.  Then the state collects much of that wealth and spends it to ensure that its citizens have equal and abundant opportunities.  Denmark’s taxes add up to 45% of its GDP, whereas in the United States the figure is 24%.  And Denmark doesn’t just tax the rich.  Like other European countries, Denmark collects a large part of its revenues from a national sales tax.  Its sales tax rate is 25%, in line with the European Union’s overall average of 20%.  In the United States, state sales taxes average just 7%.  Denmark’s consumption taxes on everything from beer to eggs to smartphones naturally fall more heavily on the poor, who spend a larger share of their income on purchases.  This regressive system of taxation is more than made up for, however, by the fact that the government expenditures and programs disproportionately help the poor and lower middle class.  One additional advantage of a commonly shared tax burden is greater solidarity: everyone supports the government programs because they feel that everyone has contributed to them.” 

“Imagine that you’re an average family.  You and your spouse have a child, and make the mean household income.  You could choose to live in either America or Denmark.  In high-tax Denmark, your disposal income after taxes would be about $15,000 lower than in the states.  But in return for your higher tax bill, you would get universal healthcare (one with better outcomes than in the US), free education right up through the best graduate schools, worker retraining programs on which the state spends seventeen times more as a percentage of GDP than what is spent in America, as well as high quality infrastructure, mass transit, and many beautiful public parks and other spaces.  Danes also enjoy some 550 more hours of leisure time a year than Americans do.  If the choice were put this way—you can take the extra $15,000 but have to work longer hours, take fewer vacation days, and fend for yourself on healthcare, education, retraining, and transport—I think most Americans would choose the Danish model.”

The services available in the Nordic model also include luxurious child rearing benefits such as generous childcare and family birth benefits that are shared between both parents, pensions, high gender equality and so on.  In particular, it should be noted that the Nordic concept of liberty is focused on providing its citizens with the opportunity to become somebody.  One can risk a low probability career in the arts, for example, without worrying that one will soon starve.  The US concept of liberty is more one of license, the ability to do something: own a gun, refuse to wear a mask during a pandemic, discriminate against a class of people, and so on.  One ventures into a career in the arts knowing they will have no support to fall back on—and perhaps never makes the attempt.

It is also worthy to note that the World Happiness Report has identified the happiest countries and as has been a regular occurrence, the Nordic countries dominate the rankings: Finland, first, Denmark, second, Iceland, fourth, Norway, fifth, and Sweden, seventh.  The US came in at eighteenth. 

Zakaria ends the discussion with an appropriate comment. 

“In staying open to the world and yet arming its people, the countries of Northern Europe, such as Denmark, have found a path that is dynamic, democratic, secure, and just.  They understood that markets were amazingly powerful, yet not sufficient; that they need supports and buffers and supplements.  We should all adapt their best practices to our own national realities.  There really is no alternative.”

  

Castes: The United States, and India

 What is currently the United States of America has been dealing with the issue of slavery and its consequences since the first African slaves appeared on its shores in the seventeenth century.  Many nations have been stained by a history of slave trading and slave labor, but in none was slavery so intrinsic to a nation’s functioning as in the United States.  We began our nation with claims that all men were created equal and immediately made that notion laughable by creating a Constitution forever damaged by accommodations made to protect that vile institution.  It would take nearly a century and a bloody Civil War to end legal slavery.  It would take an additional century to make informal forms of slavery illegal.  The result would be a significant population of descendants of African slaves that the nation must figure out a way to incorporate as fully equal citizens.  Such a goal is far from being reached.  In fact, our polity is currently split between two major parties, one of which at least preaches support for universal equality, while the other facilitates white supremacy.  As the two sides seem to be settling into the same political and rhetorical extremes that preceded the Civil War, one fears for how this will end. 

Isabel Wilkerson has provided a different perspective on our racial issues in her book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.  Most of our racial troubles are usually attributed to lingering historical racism.  In her view that is not the most productive way to consider the interactions of whites and blacks.

“What we face in our current day is not the classical racism of our forefathers’ era, but a mutation of the software that adjusts to the updated needs of the operating system.  In the half century since civil rights protests forced the United States into making state-sanctioned discrimination illegal, what Americans consider to be racism has shifted, and now the word is one of the most contentious and misunderstood in American culture.  For the dominant caste, the word is radioactive—resented, feared, denied, lobbed back toward anyone who dares to suggest it.  Resistance to the word often derails any discussion of the underlying behavior it is meant to describe, thus eroding it of meaning.” 

It is often claimed by Southern whites that they get along better with blacks than urban whites in the West and North.  There can be some truth in that statement, but it comes with a big caveat.  Throughout the Jim Crow era, and extending into the present, whites and blacks in the South coexisted peacefully as long as blacks limited their activities to the ones deemed acceptable by the whites.  Whites used their power to enforce social and economic restrictions on blacks in order to maintain them as a group subordinate to them.  This is a classical example of a caste system.  

“Caste is the granting or withholding of respect, status, honor, attention, privileges, resources, benefit of the doubt, and human kindness to someone on the basis of perceived rank or standing in the hierarchy.”

Casteism can be supported by people who otherwise would be deemed decent and respectable.

“Caste is insidious and therefore powerful because it is not hatred, it is not necessarily personal.  It is the worn grooves of comforting routines and unthinking expectations, patterns of a social order that have been in place for so long that it looks like the natural order of things.” 

“Any action or structure that seeks to limit, hold back, or put someone in a defined ranking, seeks to keep someone in their place by elevating or denigrating that person on the basis of their perceived category, can be seen as casteism.” 

In Wilkerson’s view, we would be better served by considering the whites who flock to Donald Trump as casteists rather than racists, although some do fall into that category. 

“Casteism is the investment in keeping the hierarch as it is in order to maintain your own ranking, advantage, privilege, or to elevate yourself above others or keep others beneath you.  For those in the marginalized castes, casteism can mean seeking to keep those on your disfavored rung from gaining on you, to curry the favor and remain in the good graces of the dominant caste, all of which serve to keep the structure intact.”

Wilkerson quotes sociologists who have studied the dynamics of caste systems to conclude that caste produces an inevitable form of narcissism among the dominant caste.

“’No matter how degraded their lives, white people are still allowed to believe that they possess the blood, the genes, the patrimony of superiority.  No matter what happens, they can never become “black”,’ wrote the sociologist Andrew Hacker.  ‘White Americans of all classes have found it comforting to preserve blacks as a subordinate caste: a presence that despite all its pain and problems still provides whites with some solace in a stressful world’.” 

The elite in the slave states imbedded in their society the notion that “the lowest white is superior to the most accomplished black.”  Slavery was difficult economically for lower class whites who continually competed with slaves for their wages.  Yet, when slavery was under military threat in the Civil War, poor whites were willing to die to protect this system that so disadvantaged them. 

“History has shown that nations and groups will conquer, colonize, enslave, and kill to maintain the illusion of their primacy.  Their investment in this illusion gives them as much a stake in the inferiority of those deemed beneath them as in their own presumed superiority.  ‘The survival of the group.’ Fromm wrote, ‘depends to some extent on the fact that its members consider its importance as great or greater than their own lives, and furthermore that they believe in the righteousness, or even superiority, of their group as compared to others.”

In the era of Trump, we wonder at the fanaticism of his followers.  Fromm provides some necessary perspective.

“The right kind of leader can inspire a symbiotic connection that supplants logic.  The susceptible group sees itself in the narcissistic leader, becomes one with the leader, sees his fortunes and his fate as their own.  ‘The greater the leader,’ Fromm wrote, ‘the greater the follower…The narcissism of the leader who is convinced of his greatness, and who has no doubts, is precisely what attracts the narcissism of those who submit to him’.”

The nature of castes and their social consequences have been discussed.  Wilkerson devotes much of her volume to discussing caste systems in other countries to convince the reader that such a situation is exactly what blacks in the United States face.  She discusses the discrimination imposed by German Nazis on Jews during the Hitler era.  While they learned from the Jim Crow laws of the American South and admired the use of violence to keep the black caste in line, using American eugenics research as a theoretical underpinning for their activities, the most relevant comparison is with the ancient division of India into castes.  We will focus on only a few comparisons with that system to make the point.

The most important and longest-lasting sources of discrimination in the world are those based on religious beliefs.  To truly justify the enslavement of African Americans and the rendering of a collection of Indians as “untouchables,” one must identify these people as being subhuman in some way.  Religions provide the readiest opportunities if that is one’s intention. 

“Before the age of human awareness, according to the ancient Hindu text of India, Manu, the all-knowing, was seated in contemplation, when the great men approached him and asked him, ‘Please, Lord, tell us precisely and in the proper order the Laws of all the social classes as well as of those born in between.”

Four major castes, or varnas, were described with their attributes and the functions to be performed.

“From lowest to highest, bottom to top: The Shudra…the servant, the bearer of burdens.  The Vaishya…the engine, the merchant, the trader.  The Kshatriya…the warrior, the protector, the ruler.  And above them all, the Brahmin…the philosopher, the sage, the priest, the one nearest to the gods.”

“Unmentioned among the original four varnas were those deemed so low that they were beneath even…the Shudra.  They were living out the afflicted karma of the past, they were not to be touched and some not even to be seen.  Their very shadow was a pollutant.  They were outside of the caste system and thus outcastes.  They were the Untouchables who would later come to be known as Dalits, the subordinate cast of India.”

“In some parts of India, the lowest-caste people were to remain a certain number of paces from any dominant-caste person while walking out in public—somewhere between twelve and ninety-six steps away, depending on the castes in question.  They had to wear bells to alert those deemed above them so as not to pollute them with their presence.”

“Touching or drawing near to anything that had been touched by an Untouchable was considered polluting to the upper castes and required rituals of purification for the high-caste person following this misfortune.  This they might do by bathing at once in flowing water or performing Pranayama breaths along with meditation to cleanse themselves of the pollutants.” 

One can easily view these traditions as an attempt to create a stable social structure in which those in power maintain their power over the castes below them.  In India, the identification of a caste member must be done carefully.  Lower caste members tend to be darker in skin color, but not reliably so.  They are also identified by their names and occupations.  Untouchables do the type of work that is only performed by an untouchable, and act like a subservient person thus reinforcing the system. 

Parallels with the treatment of blacks in our nation as a lower caste are apparent, but people have not taken the time to notice them.  That is why Wilkerson’s book is so important.  She tells the tale of Martin Luther King’s realization of his status only after being identified by an Indian Dalit as a fellow untouchable.  This realization would come in 1959 after he had already acquired international status as a person of repute.

“Then he began to think about the reality of the lives of the people he was fighting for—20 million people, consigned to the lowest rank in America for centuries, ‘still smothering in an airtight cage of poverty,’ quarantined in isolated ghettoes, exiled in their own country.” 

“And he said to himself, ‘Yes, I am an untouchable, and every negro in the United States of America is an untouchable’.”

“In that moment, he realized that the Land of the Free had imposed a caste system not unlike the caste system of India and that he had lived under the system all of his life.  It was what lay beneath the forces he was fighting in America.” 

Western nations would find justification for imposing their power on black people from the Old Testament.  In that document, after the great flood which Noah survived, the world would be repopulated by the offspring of Noah’s three sons.  One son, Ham, would have a son named Canaan.  Ham would displease his father who would issue a curse upon his son’s offspring.

“Cursed be Canaan!  The lowest of slaves will he be to his brothers”

Driven by a lot of wishful thinking, the children of Ham would be associated with black Africans, particularly after the slave trade became profitable.  The Old Testament, in Leviticus, was further useful in encouraging the enslavement of any person who was considered a non-believer. 

“As the riches from the slave trade from Africa to the New World poured forth to the Spaniards, to the Portuguese, to the Dutch, and lastly to the English, the biblical passage would be summoned to condemn the children of Ham and to justify the kidnap and enslavement of millions of human beings, and the violence against them.  From the time of the Middle Ages, some interpreters of the Old Testament described Ham as bearing black skin and translated Noah’s curse against him as a curse against the descendants of Ham, against all humans with dark skin, the people who the Europeans told themselves had been condemned to enslavement by God’s emissary, Noah himself.”

The importance of the Bible in supporting the eternal degradation of black-skinned people is clear from this quote from a defender of slavery.

“’The curse of Ham is now being executed upon his descendants,’ Thomas R. R. Cobb, a leading Confederate and defender of slavery, wrote, 240 years into the era of human bondage in America.  ‘The great Architect had framed them both physically and mentally to fill the sphere in which they were thrown.  His wisdom and mercy combined in constituting them thus suited to the degraded position they were destined to occupy’.”

One might believe any comparison with the fears of pollution by Indians from contact with an untouchable would be overdrawn in the American caste system.  Wilkerson provides examples that parallel the Indian fear of being polluted in an American setting.

“The town of Newton, Kansas, went to the state supreme court to keep black people out of the pool it built in 1935.  The city and its contractor argued that black people could never be permitted in the pool, not on alternate days, not at separate hours, not ever, because of the type of pool it was.  They told the court it was ‘a circulatory type of pool,’ in which ‘the water is only changed once during the swimming season.’  White people, they argued, would not go into water that had touched black skin.  ‘The only way white residents would swim in a pool after blacks,’ wrote the historian Jeff Wiltse, ‘was if the water was drained and the tank scrubbed.’  The operators couldn’t do all that every time a black person went into the pool, so they banned black people altogether.  The court sided with the city, and, for decades more, the town’s only public pool remained for the exclusive use of the dominant caste.”

“A public pool outside Pittsburg solved this problem by keeping black people out until after the season was over in September, which meant it was closed to black swimmers at the precise time that they or anyone else would have wanted to use it.  The manager said this was the only way the maintenance crew could get ‘sufficient time to properly cleanse and disinfect it after the negroes have used it’.”

Wilkerson has made the point that relationships between blacks and whites are better thought of as those between a dominant and a subordinate cast than as ones characterized by traditional racism.  Given that, what should do about it?  She is much weaker here.  It seems there are two primary options.  The first would encourage greater interaction between the castes and assume that what would follow would be a gradual breakdown of the caste boundaries.  Haven’t we been hoping for this since the 1960s with only little progress?  Perhaps recognition of the caste nature of the status quo would accelerate this process? 

The Indians, who have lived with their caste system much longer, concluded that some more aggressive affirmative action would be required if the lot of the Dalits was to improve.  When they gained their freedom to control their own fate, they included what has become referred to as “reservations” as part of their Constitution.  From Wikipedia: 

 “Reservation is a system of affirmative action in India that provides historically disadvantaged groups representation in education, employment, and politics.”

This is essentially a set of quotas to enforce wider participation of these groups in various aspects of society.  Such an approach has not been universally popular in India and has thus far been rejected in the United States, being viewed as counterproductive in trading one form of unfairness for another. 

One could argue that both approaches have provided some benefits over time, but not that either approach is the most appropriate.  Perhaps the solution is that both approaches should be applied in some coherent form.  Hopefully, Wilkerson’s efforts will produce some original and insightful thinking.

 

Zombies: Can They Be Real?

Charles King has provided an interesting tale of the development of anthropology as a scientific field in his book Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century.  His story focuses on the career of Franz Boas as he formulated his personal beliefs and propagated them through his and his students’ activities.  King focuses on four of the most famous and most interesting: Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ella Cara Deloria.  It was unusual at that time to encounter one woman performing cutting edge research, let alone accumulating four.  And Hurston was an African-American woman, while Deloria was of Native-American descent.  

Zora Hurston never became a full-time student, but she did participate in research suggested by Boas and also pursued her own initiatives.  Given her heritage, she was mostly involved in work among the blacks of the American South, and Caribbean peoples.  Her most interesting accomplishment was to be the first person to photograph what she believed to be a real, live, undead zombie.  Her efforts would produce the book “Mules and Men,” but she would ultimately become best known as a writer with her most famous work being the novel “Their Eyes Were Watching God.” 

Hurston would reach Haiti in the 1930s already familiar with the traditions of voodoo from a book by William Seabrook, The Magic Island (1928).  Seabrook had described the prevalent belief that zombies existed: “a soulless human corpse, still dead but taken from the grave and endowed by sorcery with a mechanical semblance of life.”  Hurston would discover that belief in  zombies was a significant part of Haitian life.

“Everyone Hurston knew had met one, or new someone who had met one.  But all that was talk.  Nothing could quite prepare her for coming face-to-face with such a creature herself.”

Hurston would encounter a woman being kept in a hospital who was known as Felicia Felix-Mentor.  She had been found a year earlier walking on a country road naked.  She told someone she had once owned a property there that she inherited from her father.  The owner of the property showed up and identified the woman as his sister.  Her former husband would also recognize her as being his former wife.  The medical records indicated that she had died and was buried in 1907, twenty-nine years ago. 

“Doctors told Hurston that Felix-Mentor was likely the victim of poisoning.  A practitioner of dark magic, a bocor, might have given her a drug that simulated death, concocted from a secret formula passed down from priest to priest.  The bocor could then summon her back to life, brain-damaged and only a shell of the person she had been before…” 

This case could be representative of a common theme about zombie creation.  A person is rendered a zombie in order to eliminate someone troublesome or convert that person into a docile servant. 

“In her absence, everyone, including Felix-Mentor herself, had become someone else.  The brother was a prosperous farmer, with control over the old family property that might otherwise have been shared with her.  The husband was a minor official in the postoccupation government, with a new family of his own.  There was little to be done except to seal her up again, this time behind the walls of the hospital where Hurston found her.”

Hurston spent some time searching for this secret potion, now believing it to exist, but eventually decided that that could prove to be rather risky.

So, did Hurston encounter an actual zombie, someone returned from the grave or not?  Wikipedia is usually a good source to turn to.  The author of the zombie article found there dismisses zombies as being a myth.

“…a fictional undead corporeal revenant created through the reanimation of a corpse.”

As to Felix-Mentor, she is claimed to be bogus because she was reputed to have had a broken leg at some point and x-rays could not detect such a break having occurred.  Someone more expert would have to rule on whether or not that is a definitive finding.  But others would look and discover other instances of the undead. 

The journalist, David Leafe, tells the tale of Clairvius Narcisse. 

“Doctors in Haiti had been baffled anew by the case of Clairvius Narcisse, a man in his 40s who in 1962 suffered a mysterious fever and within a fortnight was pronounced dead by two doctors, and buried.” 

“Eighteen years later, his sister was traumatised when a heavy-footed and vacant-eyed man approached her at the market, claimed to be her brother and told her he had been zombified by a witch doctor and put to work on a sugar plantation in the intervening years.”

“At the time of his ‘death’ he had been conscious but rendered immobile, he said, listening to his sister weeping as he was pronounced dead, powerless to protest as his coffin was lowered into the ground.”

“When two Haitian psychiatrists quizzed him on aspects of the family’s past that only a relative would know, he correctly answered all their questions — and many villagers insisted he was the Clairvius Narcisse they had known.”

The Narcisse case generated scientific investigations.  As is normal in much of science, those who wanted to believe could find explanations, those who wanted to not believe could find objections to any explanation.  It seems there is at least one chemical that can produce the near-death state that can lead to burial, and candidates are available to explain the automaton-like behavior after being disinterred.

“…puffer fish whose reproductive organs contain a nerve poison called tetrodotoxin, which lowers a victim’s metabolic rate almost, but not quite, to the point of death.”

“In Japan, where such fish are a delicacy, there had been several famous cases of poisoning, including that of one man who apparently ‘died’ after eating puffer fish, but regained consciousness seven days later in a morgue.”

“Another victim had an even narrower escape, coming round soon after he was nailed into a coffin.” 

Dismissing a phenomenon just because you cannot understand it comes disturbingly close to barbarism, so let the studies and debates go on.  Some useful scientific enlightenment might be revealed.  Perhaps more sophisticated movie and television fare will emerge.  New types of lifeforms, witches, werewolves, vampires, zombies, allow endless variations on human themes, many of them quite entertaining.  

Zora Hurston was an educated and intelligent woman.  What she observed led her to believe in the existence of zombies and that the Haitian culture, a mixture of indigenous influences and African influences, was capable of developing the means of producing zombie-like behavior in humans.  A people “primitive” by our standards should not be assumed to be stupid.  What Boas and his students sought to teach humanity was that all humans are essentially the same even if they did not look alike and they did not follow the same customs.  They fought long and hard against the notion that the more technologically advanced nations were biologically superior to other peoples just because they could physically dominate them. 

If Boas and his team were successful, it would be temporary.  We seem to need to be taught the same lessons over and over.  Those in power are so much happier when they can ignore what science tells us.

  

Why Trump Must be Made to Pay for His Crimes

 Many of us have experienced in our lifetimes two instances of presidents who were so corrupt that they deserved removal from office.  Richard Nixon was forced to resign rather than being impeached as eventually a bipartisan conclusion was reached that his secret machinations were intolerable.  Donald Trump, whose dastardly machinations were mostly public—and proudly proclaimed—was ultimately the more dangerous to our nation, yet he received approval from one of our two political parties and almost half the population.  What has happened to us in the intervening period?  Fintan O’Toole considers that question in Democracy’s Afterlife: Trump,the GOP, and the rise of zombie politics, an article that appeared in the New York Review of Books.

When Nixon left office there was a general feeling that the nation had survived a difficult and dangerous time and could now look forward to a return to a normalcy.

“In 1974 upon his inauguration as president, just half an hour after the resignation of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford declared, ‘My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over.’ He implied that the lawlessness and derangement of Nixon’s presidency, laid bare in the Watergate scandal, had been more traumatic for the United States even than the violence of the Vietnam War, its wounds ‘more painful and more poisonous than those of foreign wars.’ Yet he also suggested that Nixon’s departure had left the country in a good place: ‘Our Constitution works; our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men.’ With its institutions intact, the US could quickly return to its natural condition of mutual benevolence: ‘Let us restore the golden rule to our political process, and let brotherly love purge our hearts of suspicion and of hate’.”

But Nixon went away.  Trump will never go away.  He was terrible as a businessman.  He found his calling as an entertainer: he could play a businessman on television.  He loved it and made a lot of money doing it.  The same emotions make him love being president: empowerment of role and the adulation of his fans.  He’s addicted.  He can turn this lost election into a victory by convincing his fans that he only lost because of a deep conspiracy against him.  He couldn’t quite defeat the conspirators in his first term, but give him another chance and surely he will.  Trump will continue to poison our national life as long as he can draw a breath.

“In this frame of mind, there can never be a result of the 2020 election. One thing we can be sure of is that for Trump and his followers there are not five stages of grief, leading from denial to acceptance. The furthest their sense of it can go is to the second stage, anger. Just as there is ‘long Covid,’ there is long Trump. The staying power of his destructiveness lies in the way that disputed defeat suits him almost as much as victory. It vindicates the self-pity that he has encouraged among his supporters, the belief that everything is rigged against them, that the world is a plot to steal from them their natural due as Americans.

“If Trump is eventually removed from the Oval Office, the study of revenge and immortal hate, not sober self-criticism, will be the response in Trumpworld. There will be no chastening, just a further injection of resentment and conspiracy-mongering.”

What Trump has accomplished is to capture a Republican Party that was morphing into something disgusting and accelerate its transformation into something which is an existential threat to the nation we have assumed ourselves to be. 

“This is zombie politics—the life-after-death of a former conservative party. And as Gothic stories tell us, it is very hard to kill the undead. One half of a two-party system has passed over into a post-democratic state. This reality has to be recognized, and a crucial aspect of that recognition is to accept that the claim Ford could make in 1974—'Our Constitution works’—no longer applies. After the long national nightmare of Watergate, America could rub its eyes and awaken to a renewed confidence in its system of checks and balances.” 

“But the Trump presidency has been no nightmare. It has been daylight delinquency, its transgressions of democratic values on lurid display in all their corruption and cruelty and deadly incompetence. There may be much we do not yet know, but what is known (and in most cases openly flaunted) is more than enough: the Mueller report, the Ukraine scandal, the flagrant self-dealing, the tax evasion, the children stolen from their parents, the encouragement of neo-Nazis, Trump’s admission that he deliberately played down the seriousness of the coronavirus. There can be no awakening because the Republicans did not sleep through all of this. They saw it all and let it happen.”

“There was no revulsion among the party base. The faithful not only witnessed his behavior, they heard Trump say, repeatedly, that he would not accept the result of the vote. They embraced that authoritarianism with renewed enthusiasm. The assault on democracy now has a genuine, highly engaged, democratic movement behind it.”

Biden has a problem on his hands.  It is his duty to protect our country from any invaders or others who would do us harm.  Trump, as the effective head of the Republican Party, has every intent to do us harm.  What should Biden do about it?  What can Biden do about it?  He is said to have claimed that he did not want to spend his term in office running after Trump.  He does not have a choice. 

“The dominant power in the land, the undead Republican Party, has made majority rule aberrant, a notion that transgresses the new norms it has created. From the perspective of this system, it is Biden, and his criminal voters, who are the deviant ones. This is the irony: Trump, the purest of political opportunists, driven only by his own instincts and interests, has entrenched an anti-democratic culture that, unless it is uprooted, will thrive in the long term. It is there in his court appointments, in his creation of a solid minority of at least 45 percent animated by resentment and revenge, but above all in his unabashed demonstration of the relatively unbounded possibilities of an American autocracy.”

“As a devout Catholic, Joe Biden believes in the afterlife. But he needs to confront an afterlife that is not in the next world but in this one—the long posterity of Donald Trump.” 

It seems Biden must somehow induce the Republican Party to return to obeying democratic principles and stop aiding and assisting in fomenting the political hatred that exists today between the two parties; or, he must so discredit Trump that Republican legislators will be too embarrassed  to associate with him.  With Trump’s long history of ethical, moral, and legal transgressions, the latter path seems the most promising.  Consider his hourly complaints about fraud in our election systems.  It is a crime to provide false information about a supposed crime.  That might be a fruitful place to start.

 

Democracy’s Demise: The End of Majority Rule

The term democracy is used broadly.  Given that this is being written in the weeks after the presidential election of 2020 and Donald Trump still clings to power attempting to disenfranchise sections of voters in order to overturn the will of the people and remain in office, a relevant definition of democracy can be a system in which elections are held in which essentially universal suffrage exists.  An essay by Rana Dasgupta titled The Silenced Majority appeared in Harper’s Magazine making the case that such democracies are currently in a perilous state. 

Dasgupta tells us we must reexamine our history in order to understand our current status, and when we do that, we will discover that democracy is a fairly recent development that originated from a specific set of conditions.  Further, the era in which democracy thrived is unraveling and reverting to a more oligarchic era when input from the masses of citizens was neither wanted nor needed.  There were very few instances of what we have called democracy until the late nineteenth, early twentieth century.  For most of recorded history, political power was derived from wealth, which usually meant property in the form of land.  In the latter centuries, financial instruments and physical capital would be added to the property of the wealthy.  Given this history, a society’s practices were dominated by the wishes of the property owners: protect our private property no matter what.  Such an attitude would favor restriction of suffrage to only property owners. 

For most of history the laboring class was diffuse and spread out in small agricultural or craft activities.  That would change with the advent of industrialization.  The laboring class was now collected into significant groups and placed in a position of complete dependence on their wages for income.  This naturally led to confrontations between laborers and business owners.   The property owners had control of the state and used its police powers to eliminate collective action by the workers.  However, the workers would persist and gradually, over decades, begin to share some of the power of the property owners.  Dasgupta considers first the British experience. 

“The supremacy of property was disrupted, from the 1780s onward, by the rise of a competing world principle of labor. The most stupendous product of the Industrial Revolution was the working class itself. Working people were organized into futuristic battalions, and their unprecedented productive power became the central driver of the global economy. They were also forced, from the outset, into political activism—for while agriculturalists, in difficult times, might wheedle some extra bounty from nature, factory workers relied solely on their wages, and every additional penny had to be wrested from owners’ profits. The Combination Act of 1799 attempted to prevent collective bargaining, but was ultimately unsuccessful. Labor became politically formidable, and property lost its stranglehold. The first significant electoral expansion was enacted in 1832: ‘to prevent,’ in the words of the prime minister, ‘the necessity of revolution’.” 

“But conflict was endemic. Ordinary people had known the state’s most savage cruelty, and its self-preserving entreaties rang hollow. Well into the twentieth century, many believed the only lasting cure for the state’s partiality to property owners was proletarian revolution: workers must take over the state apparatus and divert its purpose from that of property protection. In fear of such a prospect, governments made further concessions—it was just after the Bolshevik Revolution that Britain lifted most of its last restrictions on adult suffrage—but this only moved class war into the democratic arena. Over the course of the twentieth century, left-wing politicians and labor unions sought revolution by electoral means. And their activism on issues of employment and wages caused domestic contradictions to spill out across the world.” 

It would only be after World War II that a relative peace would descend upon the land. 

“Only after the Second World War would Britain’s two economies finally merge. With global property holdings and the international trading system in ruins, all Western European states constructed comprehensive national economies: national capital combined with national labor steered by national social democracy. Even the former ‘leisured classes’ now needed jobs, and with Western labor at its peak value, and growth touching 6 percent, industriousness became the basis for social participation. There was broad, cross-class consent for a historically anomalous formula—full employment, inflated salaries, high taxes, endless consumption, and generous public subsidies.” 

Workers were needed and thus had political power, and this sharing of power worked for a while.  However, the US would exert its postwar influence and encourage a “capitalism friendly” attitude.

“…European states continued their protection of private property, markets remained open, and socialist demands for fundamental changes to the structure of ownership were edged out.”

The US inherited British customs and produced an antidemocratic Constitution with the twist that the property to be protected included slaves.  Expansion of voting rights often required the awkward and difficult act of amending the Constitution.  Labor would gradually gain power withstanding the violence involved as in Britain, but the labor movement would never acquire the political status it attained there because of the racism baked into US society.  A labor movement required all workers to participate.  But the white workers were loath to consider black workers as equals.  The issue would doom unionization in many of the former slave states and create home grown nonunion competition in large parts of the nation.  Voter exclusion was common for blacks and other minorities—and still is.

“But white inclusion was the priority: it was crucial for administrators that white working-class activists, who had brought business to its knees in the 1930s, should not join forces with their black counterparts. Even Lyndon Johnson made clear how much the American democratic balance depended on such manipulation: ‘If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.’ Though disenfranchisement of African Americans was officially outlawed in 1965, the Supreme Court soon endorsed felony disenfranchisement, which by the time of the 2016 election barred more than six million mostly non-white Americans from voting. If there was ever a heyday of American democracy, it was recent and short-lived.”

The postwar years of prosperity and relative equality could not last.  There were too many who yearned to return to the good old nineteenth century days where real money could be made without the worry of labor issues and state regulation.  Democracy must be contained if not ended.  The eternal threat that the masses could choose to distribute wealth and property must be eliminated.  The possibility of a worker class that might organize and vote coherently must be rendered impossible.  This could be accomplished by reinstituting the nineteenth century model for a globalized economy.  Middle class jobs would be sent to low-wage lands, particularly manufacturing plants where union organizing was easiest.  Moving production to distant lands allowed companies also to escape the health and safety regulations that protected the masses but ate into the profits of the owners of capital.

“The cross-class accord of the national economy, fragile and partial though it was, is often held up as the authentic manifestation of American civilization. But neoliberal ideologues—such as Friedrich von Hayek and his Chicago disciples—still dreamed of liberating capital from the clutches of national politics, restoring nineteenth-century internationalism, and undoing the labor-friendly aberrations that had been institutionalized by the New Deal. America’s golden age was for them a dark age—so they drew up plans for revolution. In the 1970s, those plans came out of the drawer. Today, after five decades of political, financial, and technological transformation, the American empire no longer tolerates national economic containers. The structure of the economy has resumed what we might call its more normal (i.e., transnational) guise. As a result, the principle of property is once again supreme and the principle of labor is in retreat.”

“The most visible consequence of this change is financial inequality. The incomes of the bottom 50 percent of workers have shown little increase over the past forty years; most men in this group earn less now than in 1980. Incomes at the ninetieth percentile, meanwhile, have increased by nearly 40 percent in the same time (and by more for white people), while for the top 1 percent the figure is 157 percent.”

The net result is that jobs for the working class have not disappeared.  Rather, as each job classification has been diminished in number it has been replaced by a lower wage service position.  But that is only the beginning.  One began worrying that jobs would be lost to robots—and some are—but the real threat to the dignity and stability of work is coming from the tech industry.  Real jobs will be eliminated by algorithmic advances or replaced by “gig work” where workers get to participate in the act of eliminating job security and benefits, and compete with each other to drive wages ever lower. 

“Silicon Valley will not simply destroy the jobs on which the industrious society was built. It will corrode and negate the principle of labor. It will do this in part by establishing unpaid, uncontracted labor as a social norm.”

“This social norm is spreading: the U.S. Department of Labor recently relaxed restrictions on unpaid work, while the frequent talk of a universal basic income concedes that work can no longer provide the basis for social participation. The principle of labor is ebbing fast.”

A platform such as Facebook has the tools available to suppress or enhance political participation, bully people its owners don’t like, destroy competition, and promote themes as they wish.  The fact that some restraint has been exhibited does not mean it will always be there.  And how long will it be before someone with ignoble intentions takes control of such a tool?

“’I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,’ Peter Thiel, Trump’s principal advocate in Silicon Valley, once wrote in a techno-libertarian manifesto. ‘The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism’.” 

“Such thinking required things to break, and Trump came into power as a wrecking ball, a role for which his celebrity and vulgarity qualified him well. He created a ‘populist’ alliance of financial elites with anxious masses, and he sought to uproot the latter from their last remaining expectations of material advancement—converting them instead to a parallel system of immaterial consolations and rewards. Traditional solutions for disenfranchisement and postindustrial grief were closed off; the only currency the president now dispensed was violent sensation. Trump vowed to protect ‘good’ Americans from an ever-expanding range of scapegoats: rich people, poor people, gay people, black people, Latinos, Jews, Muslims, immigrants, women, scientists, intellectuals, Democrats, politicians, CNN, the New York Times, hackers, vandals, hoodlums, agitators, terrorists, Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Europe, Canada, the World Health Organization, the United Nations, and many more. Race was particularly important, of course. The major economic process of the moment, after all, transferred mass prosperity from the West to Asia—the first significant interruption to white-supremacist world organization in centuries, which disrupted the carefully managed racial hierarchies on which American democracy was built. Trump’s apoplectic assaults on China and his colonial attitudes toward Africa offered many white people the hope that he might preserve the old symbolic order, and so supply a most traditional consolation for the heartlessness of twenty-first-century neoliberal depredation.”

Trump seems to have been successful at attacking and disabling the federal government and other democratic norms that we have assumed for generations.

“If less than half the U.S. population is now satisfied with democracy as a system, down from 75 percent in 1995, this is partly the result of Trump’s determined effort to present it as a liability to the MAGA endeavor: it was subject to fraud, it was infiltrated by foreigners, it gave a voice to unpatriotic Americans.”

Workers gained the vote and political influence at times when they threatened the ruling oligarchy, or when the oligarchy recognized that it needed them.  Dasgupta tells us we must recognize that there no longer is anything remotely like a working class capable of formulating an agenda and defending it.

“Industrial employment has largely been replaced with what David Graeber called “bullshit jobs,” and the bottom 50 percent are drifting back to their preindustrial condition: dispersed, politically and spiritually weak, on the periphery. Millions of Americans dull the pain with prescription opioids. Seventy thousand die every year from drug overdoses, most of them in states where endless propaganda advises them to solve their problems with guns and credit cards.”

“But the shift won’t be reversed: the system can no longer afford Western production, and even America’s poor are dependent on the subsidy of cheap Asian labor to maintain their precarious consumer status. Along with debt, of course. U.S. consumers have incurred nearly $1 trillion in credit card debt, $1.5 trillion in student loans, another $1.3 trillion in auto debt, and almost $10 trillion in mortgages.”

If the nation’s workers are not in a position to represent themselves effectively, they become, at best, pawns in the electoral games; at worst, they become irrelevant and the business elite will find it convenient to nullify any role for them.  It is democracy itself and majority rule that are at stake.  Republicans, representing the oligarchy, have spent decades trying to suppress voting and have admitted that democracy is “inconvenient.”  The Constitution has provided them the tools with which to form a permanent minority ruling party.  What we have in our future is nothing less than a war between those who favor democracy and majority rule and those who do not.

“Eighteenth-century Britain could not afford democracy. Today, as the economy reverts to a similar structure, America is encountering the same problem. It is difficult to carry out a mass economic expulsion, after all, while everyone has a vote. And it will not be possible indefinitely to suppress those left-wing voices demanding that the state abandon its raison d’être and serve, not property and empire, but American citizens themselves. The stakes, in other words, could not be higher: if the present order is to continue, an almighty war must take place in U.S. politics.”

The Democratic Party is ruled by a professional and educational elite.  The Republican Party is ruled by a business elite.  The Democrats preach democracy and appeal to the best instincts of the masses.  The Republicans preach oligarchy and appeal to the worst instincts of the masses.  Thus far, the Republicans appear to have the better strategy.  The Democrats must do better.

Dasgupta finishes with this grim realization.

“The neoliberal revolution aimed to restore the supremacy of capital after its twentieth-century subjugation by nation-states, and it has succeeded to an astonishing degree. As states compete and collude with gargantuan new private powers, a new political world arises. The principle of labor, which dominated the twentieth century—producing the industrious, democratic society we have come to regard, erroneously, as the norm—is once again being supplanted by a principle of property, the implications and consequences of which we know only too well from our history books.”

“The real political battle in America today is not between a ‘liberal’ left and a ‘fascist’ right. It is between the people and a grandiose private system of social, economic, and political management that has the power to bring to an end the democratic certainties on which Americans have come to rely. If we wish to preserve those certainties, we will have to do a lot more than remove Donald Trump”

 

. 

Eliminating the National Debt with a Keystroke: Modern Monetary Theory

Stephanie Kelton has become a spokesperson for an insurgent group of economists who are propagating the notion that most current economists do not understand the nature of money and have been causing the United States and other countries unnecessary grief.  These people refer to their viewpoint as Modern Monetary Theory (MMT).  If MMT is correct, the United States and other countries become free to direct the necessary funds to battle poverty, unemployment, the coronavirus pandemic and global warming.  A new economic era is created.  What could be more important than resolving the applicability of MMT.  Kelton defends this theory and its consequences in her recent book The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People's Economy.

The United States and a few other countries have complete monetary sovereignty.  That is, they spend, tax, and borrow in a currency that does not need to be converted into some other quantity such as gold or some other currency.  Such money is referred to as a fiat currency. 

“The main arguments that I present apply to any monetary sovereign—countries like the US, the UK, Japan, Australia, Canada, and others—where the government is the monopoly issuer of a fiat currency.  MMT changes how we view our politics and economics by showing that in almost all instances federal deficits are good for the economy.  They are necessary.  And the way we have thought about them and treated them is often incomplete and inaccurate.” 

“The taxpayer, according to the conventional view, is at the center of the monetary universe because of the belief that the government has no money of its own.  Therefore, the only money available to fund the government must ultimately come from people like us.  MMT radically changes our understanding by recognizing that it is the currency issuer—the federal government itself—not the taxpayer, that finances all federal expenditures.  Taxes are important for other reasons that I will explain in this book.  But the idea that taxes pay for what the government spends is pure fantasy.” 

The underpinnings for MMT are very old.  Perhaps so old that they have long faded from modern economic textbooks, but they have not been forgotten by historians and anthropologists.  When Kelton was still a graduate student, she encountered a book titled Soft Currency Economics by Warren Mosler, who was not an economist by training, but an investor.  His main point was that economists misunderstood the relationship between governmental taxing and spending.  Governments don’t tax in order to be able to spend, they spend in order to tax.  That notion requires a bit of explaining and Kelton initially was not buying it, but she would eventually see the light. 

“Warren [Mosler] saw things that most economists were missing.  To many of us his ideas sounded completely original, but most weren’t.  They were only new to us.  It turns out they could be found (and we found them) in canonical texts, like Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations or in John Maynard Keynes’s two-volume classic, A Treatise on Money.  Anthropologists, sociologists, philosophers, and others had long ago arrived at similar conclusions about the nature of money and the role of taxes, but the economics profession largely lagged behind.”

“Taxes are there to create a demand for government currency.  The government can define the currency in terms of its own unique unit of account—a dollar, a yen, a pound, a peso—and then give value to its otherwise worthless paper by requiring it in payment of taxes or other obligations.  As Mosler jokes, ‘Taxes turn litter into currency.’  At the end of the day, a currency-issuing government wants something real, not something monetary.  It’s not our tax money the government wants.  It’s our time.  To get us to produce things for the state, the government invents taxes or other kinds of payment obligations.  This isn’t the explanation you will find in most economics textbooks, where a superficial story about money being invented to overcome the inefficiencies associated with bartering—trading goods without the use of money—is preferred.” 

Kelton provided an example of how this relationship between money and taxes works, but we will consider another example, one provided by David Graeber (an anthropologist) in his book Debt:The First 5,000 Years.  One of Graeber’s concerns was understanding how money and money-driven markets came to originate.  He points out that there is no evidence of a classical barter economy ever existing.  Consider a small kingdom or a domain ruled by a lord.  There would be an economy based on exchange by gifting.  If someone needed something possessed by another, the other, if possible, would provide the goods as a gift with the understanding that the person in need would return the favor with a roughly equivalent gift.  Peer pressure would help keep such exchanges satisfactory to both participants.  Barter was viewed as a path to perdition because the temptation to try to get the better of the deal would be too great.  The peasants of this entity would conduct their business in this manner and give some portion of what was produced to the ruler as tribute.

Now suppose this leader decided he wanted to maintain a squad of soldiers to protect his lands or to attack a neighbor.  These soldiers would have nothing to contribute to the local peasants yet must be supported with food and supplies.  A clever way to promote this trade would be to issue to the soldiers a supply of objects with no intrinsic value.  They would attain value when the lord issued a tax on the peasants requiring them to provide the lord with some number of these valueless objects.  With the imposition of the tax, the objects acquired a value and forced the peasants to exchange goods with the soldiers in order to acquire the number of objects needed to pay their tax.  Instantly a form of money, a fiat currency, was created along with a market in which goods could be valued and exchanged.  The tax was a way to guide the behavior of the lord’s subjects. If the lord decided he needed a larger number of soldiers, he would acquire them and produce more objects to give them for exchange.  Note that for the system to work, the peasants must have the capability to produce enough to satisfy the needs of the soldiers.  If the number of soldiers became too great for the economy to support, the extra objects possessed by the soldiers could not buy more produce.  Rather, these excess objects would produce what we moderns call inflation: too much money seeking too few products. 

This example illustrates essentially how a currency-issuing country like the United States actually operates.  It issues fiat money backed by nothing but the requirement that it must be used to pay taxes.  The amount of money that the country can create and place in the economy is only limited by the desire to avoid inflation, because inflation is itself the indication that the government is driving the economy, by spending or injecting more money, to produce more goods than it is capable of producing.

As currency issuer, the lord can increase the money supply simply by producing more of the objects and distributing them.  In a modern country like the US the Fed would merely make an entry in a bank account in order to create money.  Money is created all the time.  Every time a loan is issued by a bank, there is no money transferred from a reserve account to that of a user.  An account is merely created and the bank records that there is a certain amount of funds in that account.  More money has come into existence.

Getting back to the ancient lord, things would become more complicated if he wished to exchange goods with another lord using his objects as currency.  In order to use them in this manner he would have to replace his object by something recognized be his partner as having value.  Hence, we get coins with precious metals included in order to provide something of universal value.  This notion of tying the value of money to precious metals would persist until Richard Nixon took the United States off the gold standard. 

We, and nations such as Britain and Japan are issuers of fiat money and have what Kelton refers to as currency sovereignty.  All have currencies that are accepted around the world at a stable value.  All are producing what we misguidedly refer to as a “deficit” and are doing well.  But they could be doing even better if they created more money and ran larger deficits.  We seem to have learned the wrong lessons from all those years on the gold standard. 

The proponents of MMT are trying to reeducate people about the true nature of money.  The consequences of their viewpoint are enormous.  National debt is just an accounting item.  Balancing the federal budget is a very harmful waste of time.  Spending should be at the level required to provide what society needs.  The implications are enormous.  Consider Kelton’s chapter on the national debt.  She begins with this statement. 

“The national debt poses no financial burden whatsoever.” 

To pay any interest on the national debt, the Federal Reserve merely produces a credit to whatever account it is due.  These transfers are tallied by tradition, but they have no economic impact.  The issuing of bonds in a value equal to the deficit spending of government is also a tradition.  Its main economic impact is that it provides a means of controlling interest rates.  Kelton suggests that the Fed could buy back all the bonds issued as easily as it pays the interest on them, with little if any adverse effects. If the Fed were to credit the value of the bond to the account of each bond holder it would merely be exchanging non-interest-earning dollars for interest-earning dollars.  The net wealth of the bondholders would be unchanged, but the interest earned would disappear.  There would be no new surge of excess dollars into the economy.  The loss of income would be slightly deflationary. 

How can two such different economic viewpoints exist within a discipline which likes to refer to itself as a science?  If MMT is correct, and I have begun to think it is, then we must begin to act accordingly.  Otherwise, there is no way we will ever be able to deal with the situations in which we find ourselves.

 

Nature vs Nurture, Biology vs Culture: Refighting Old Battles

 The manner in which we humans comport ourselves can be influenced both by biological factors (nature) and by cultural factors (nurture).  At various times it has been argued that one or the other is decidedly dominant.  More usually, it is recognized that we are influenced by both factors, but the argument over which is dominant, and by how much, seems to go on.  A recent book by Charles King provides an interesting history of the various contentions as they existed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: Gods of the Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century.  The subtitle promises a lot—and King does not disappoint. 

The central characters in this tale are Franz Boas, one of the prime movers in the development of anthropology as a scientific discipline, and four women he mentored as students and researchers: Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ella Cara Deloria.  It was unusual at that time to encounter one woman performing cutting edge research, let alone accumulating four.  And Hurston was an African-American woman, while Deloria was of Native-American descent.

Mead was probably the best known, partially because of her publications and partly because she outlived the others.  She was also the most intriguing because of her complex sex life.  She would make a name for herself living among Samoans, ultimately resulting in “Coming of Age in Samoa.”  Boas had sent her out there with this goal:

“…the first serious attempt to enter into the mental attitude of a group in a primitive society.” 

Mead would make her voyage on a ship called the “Sonoma.”  To make sure the reader realized that she was not a typical female of the time, he included this aside.

“On board Sonoma was a twenty-three-year-old Pennsylvanian, slight but square built, unable to swim, given to conjunctivitis, with a broken ankle and a chronic ailment that sometimes rendered her right arm useless.  She had left behind a husband in New York and a boyfriend in Chicago, and had spent the transcontinental train ride in the arms of a woman.” 

Ruth Benedict would be the Boas student who would go on to be his right-hand woman in co-mentoring students, organizing research initiatives, and performing research of her own.  She was a sometimes lover of Margaret Mead and always a dear friend.  She would be best known for her very popular books “Patterns of Culture” and “The Chrysanthemum and the Sword.”

Zora Hurston never became a full-time student, but she did participate in research suggested by Boas and also pursued her own initiatives.  Given her heritage, she was mostly involved in work among the blacks of the American South, and Caribbean peoples.  Her most interesting accomplishment was to be the first person to photograph a real, live, undead zombie.  Her efforts would produce the book “Mules and Men,” but she would ultimately become best known as a writer with her most famous work being the novel “Their Eyes Were Watching God.”

Deloria was fluent in English and in several major Native-American dialects.  One of the major anthropological thrusts was to capture what could be learned of Indian cultures.  The difficulty was that those cultures had long been corrupted by interactions with the whites.  Deloria played the important role of trying to verify cultural descriptions that had already been published and trying to capture evolving Indian cultures as they existed at the current time.

When Boas concluded that he would become an anthropologist, the meaning of that word was still being defined.  The major activity in the field was called anthropometry.  It was believed that by measuring physical characteristics, mainly cranial shape and size, one could determine characteristics that could be associated with race, intelligence, criminality, stages of evolution and so forth.  Boas soon concluded that this was nonsense. 

“The idea of a natural ranking of human types shaped everything: school and university curricula, court decisions and policing strategies, health policy and popular culture, the work of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and U.S. colonial administrators in the Philippines, as well as their equivalents in Britain, France, Germany, and many other empires, countries, and territories.  The poor were poor because of their own inadequacies.  Nature favored the robust colonizer over the benighted native.  Differences in physical appearance, customs, and language were reflections of a deeper innate otherness.  Progressives, too, accepted these ideas, adding only that it was possible, with enough missionaries, teachers, and physicians on hand, to eradicate primitive and unnatural practices and replace them with enlightened ways.  That was why America’s foremost periodical on world politics and international relations, published since 1922 and now the influential Foreign Affairs, was originally called The Journal of Race Development. 

People were coming up with hypotheses and then looking for data that would prove the hypotheses correct.  This was a dangerous perversion of the scientific method that allows biases to render research valueless.  Boas would insist, and drill into his students, that the data be accumulated first—and then you attempt to form a hypothesis.  Their research would provide a basis for greater equality among races, ethnic groups, sexes, and economic classes.  If only nations would have accepted what their science had told them.

“Real, evidence-driven analysis, they believed, would overturn one of modernity’s most deeply held principles: that science will tell us which individuals and groups are naturally smarter, abler, more upstanding, and fitter to rule.  Their response was that science pointed in precisely the opposite direction, toward a theory of humanity that embraces all the many ways we humans have devised for living.  The social categories into which we typically divide ourselves, including labels such as race and gender, are at base artificial—the products of human artifice, residing in the mental frameworks and unconscious habits of a given society.  We are cultural animals, they claimed, bound by rules of our own making, even if those rules are often invisible or taken for granted by the societies that craft them.”

“The belief that our ways are the only commonsensical, moral ones has a powerful allure, especially when expressed in the language of science, rationality, religion, or tradition.  All societies are predisposed to see their own traits as achievements and others’ as shortcomings.  But the core message of the Boas circle was that, in order to live intelligently in the world, we should view the lives of others through an empathetic lens.  We ought to suspend our judgement about other ways of seeing social reality until we really understand them, and in turn we should look at our own society with the same dispassion and skepticism with which we study far-flung peoples.”

Boas and his group called the type of research they performed cultural anthropology and their basic theory cultural relativity or cultural relativism.

“For nearly a century their critics have accused them of everything from justifying immorality to chipping away at the foundations of civilization itself.  Today, cultural relativism is usually listed among the enemies of tradition and good behavior, along with such terms as postmodernism and multiculturalism.  The work of the Boas circle makes appearances as bugbears and objects of derision in conservative media and on alt-right websites, among campaigners against diversity programs and political correctness, and on such lists as ‘Ten Books that Screwed Up the World.’  How can we make any judgements about right and wrong, critics ask, if everything is relative to the time, place, and context in which our judgements occur?” 

The Boas group helped to eliminate some of the worst abuses of science, but it is difficult to assess the extent of their influence on the course of events.  World War II was quite an event.  The scientific dispute continues over the roles of biology and culture.  Louis Menand wrote on this issue in a review of King’s book that appeared in The New Yorker: How Cultural Anthropologists Redefined Humanity.  The title of the paper version in the magazine was The Looking Glass and began with this lede: “Are we at the end of the nature-nurture debate?” 

“The new biologists are not like the scientists Boas did battle with in the early twentieth century. They agree with Boas that ‘man is one.’ But they think this means that there exists a single ‘human nature,’ and that the success or failure of different forms of social organization depends on how faithful they are to this species essence.”

“This has become almost the default mode of analysis among social and political commentators, who like to cite work by cognitive scientists, endocrinologists, and evolutionary psychologists. In the most reductive version of the new biologism, life is programmed, and culture is simply the interface. Even the social science that is most popular, like behavioral economics, is human-nature-based. Nurture is out.”

“And yet the issues on which Boas and Mead made their interventions, issues around race and gender, are now at the center of public life, and they bring all the nature-nurture confusion back with them. The focus of the conversation today is identity, and identity seems to be a concept that lies beyond both culture and biology. Is identity innate, or is it socially constructed? Is it fated, or can it be chosen or performed? Are our identities defined by the existing state of social relations, or do we carry them with us wherever we go?”

Menand then makes this comment. 

“Other species are programmed to ‘know’ how to cope with the world, but our biological endowment evolved to allow us to choose how to respond to our environment. We can’t rely on our instincts; we need an instruction manual. And culture is the manual.” 

Menand comes down on the side of culture, as do I, but he seems to have a serious misunderstanding of the biology of animals of which humans are only one example.  The reason we have the opportunity to select so many different ways to socialize is because the need to socialize has been so deeply ingrained in our biology—and the biology of many of the animals.  Evolution, long ago, provided the tools that allow us to get along almost no matter what situations we create for ourselves. 

Frans de Waal provided an enlightening examination of the similarities between us and some of our animal kin in his book Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves.  A lower class of animal might survive with the instinct to bite anything it encounters.  Of course, some things will bite back or respond in other lethal ways.  What more advanced animals developed were emotions.  An emotion differs from an instinct because it causes no direct action.  What it does is prepare the body to take action and provides this higher order animal with the time to decide what is the best course of action.  Fear can be responded to with flight, fight, hide, or do nothing at all.  Four options are better than one. 

Emotions were designed to produce physical responses.  It was as though evolution decided that animals would get along better if they could understand the emotions of their neighbors.  Facial expressions tend to make our emotions apparent to an observer.  This knowledge is usually used for prosocial purposes, but antisocial behavior can follow should one specimen try to take advantage of the emotional state of another. 

Perhaps the most socially important emotion is empathy.  Empathy can be defined as the ability to interpret and share the feelings of another.  What de Vaal wishes to make perfectly clear is that the emotion of empathy is not restricted to humans, and that empathy is a physical phenomenon—our bodies are designed to participate in the process, and its activities often take place subconsciously.  One thing that research has established is that emotions are conveyed by facial expressions and animals are excellent at interpreting these signals, particularly within their own species.  Part of the mechanism of empathizing is the unconscious mimicking of observed expressions of another. 

Humans have a large number of facial muscles allowing it to produce an incredible number of very nuanced expressions.  Are humans unique in possessing such complex responses?  Perhaps, but not by much. 

“When a team of behavioral scientists and anthropologists finally tested the idea by carefully dissecting the faces of two dead chimpanzees, they found the exact same number of mimetic muscles as in the human face—and surprising few differences.” 

Scientists tell us that the human line evolved off the chimpanzee line 4-6 million years ago.  It is difficult to believe that both species evolved by developing the exact same facial musculature.  That capability to emote and presumably recognize emotion, must have developed long before the two species diverged. 

Nature really worked hard to provide us the tools for successful socializing.  But nowhere was there a rule describing how the tools should be used.  I agree with Menand’s final comment.

“Only we can tell us how to live. There is nothing that prevents us from deciding that the goal of life should be to be as unnatural as possible. ‘Human nature’ is just another looking glass.”

King anticipated that the nature-nurture arguments would continue by including a quote from the famous physicist Max Planck. 

“A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”