Christopher Hitchens on electoral politics

Excellent as usual. Here's an excerpt:

I could introduce you to dozens of enthusiastic and intelligent people, highly aware of "the issues" and very well-informed on all questions from human rights to world trade to counterinsurgency, to none of whom it would occur to subject themselves to what passes for the political "arena." They are willing to give up potentially more lucrative careers in order to work on important questions and expand the limits of what is currently thinkable politically, but the great honor and distinction of serving their country in the legislature is only offered to them at a price that is now way too steep.

Consider: What normal person would consider risking their career and their family life in order to undergo the incessant barrage of intrusive questioning about every aspect of their lives since well before college? To face the constant pettifogging and chatter of Facebook and Twitter and have to boast of how many false friends they had made in a weird cyberland? And if only that was the least of it. Then comes the treadmill of fundraising and the unending tyranny of the opinion polls, which many media systems now use as a substitute for news and as a means of creating stories rather than reporting them. And, even if it "works," most of your time in Washington would be spent raising the dough to hang on to your job. No wonder that the best lack all conviction.

My family has lived in Arlington, Virginia - just about as close to D.C. as you can get without living in it - for five generations, and there hasn't been the slightest inclination among anyone in my family tree to get into electoral politics or even to work on Capitol Hill, with one exception - my great grandad ran for and won a spot on Arlington County School Board a couple times (he helped integrate Arlington County schools in the 1950s, and for those efforts the state legislature in Richmond revoked the right of Arlingtonians to elect their own School Board - so needless to say, no electoral politics after that). When you live this close to the sausage factory you don't really want any part of that.

Hitchens on the grandiosity of the claim to be "pro-freedom"

Christopher Hitchens speaks with Charlie Rose about a variety of things, but I thought the opening portion of this segment was interesting. Hitchens distinguishes between being pro-freedom and anti-totalitarian, and claims that the former is too grandiose a claim. I would also add that it becomes a very complex claim very quickly. I, for example, don't consider the libertarian movement to be at the forefront of the fight for liberty for reasons I've outlined ad nauseum here. Like Dewey and Foucault, I see society as composed of a dense web of relations and obligations and it can be hard to call any single arrangement of those relations and obligations "free" and another one "unfree". That's not at all to say that freedom is an illusion - but just that its exact definition can be illusory. Many, many, people substitute ideologically convenient definitions of "freedom" for real freedom.



Part 1 of the interview is here, Part 2 here, 3 here, and 4 here.

NYRB on Hitchens

The New York Review of Books has a great review of Christopher Hitchens's new memoir.

The author actually represents my take on Hitchens pretty well. Lots of good to say about him. A little eccentric, a little too black-and-white sometimes, a little too willing to engage in his own brand of fundamentalism while legitimately criticizing that of others. I would only take issue with this review insofar as I think Hitchens has a point about the nature and importance of the threat of fundamentalist Islam to civilization. I would not follow Hitchens in extrapolating that insight into a justification for the Iraq war, but I do think the reviewer minimizes the importance and accuracy of that insight, and the clarity with which Hitchens has expressed it. Everything else here is quite good.

Collection of Posts on Socialism

I've seen several posts and sources - both new and old - on socialism recently which I thought were worth sharing collectively. What I like about these pieces is that they move beyond the Marxist-Leninist-Soviet socialism that a lot of Americans instinctively think of when they hear the word.

First is Bryan Caplan at Econlog on the Baader-Meinhoff gang, a decidedly Marxist-Leninist group operating in West Germany in the last quarter of the 20th century.

I also enjoyed Matthew Yglesias's discussion of George Orwell's socialism - an anti-totalitarian, anti-Leninist brand of socialism associated with the New Left in the post-war period. Yglesias's most salient point is the deep misunderstanding of Orwell's socialism by American conservatives.

And of course, no consideration of Orwell is complete without Christopher Hitchens, who discusses 1984 here and here. Listen to the very end - at the end he has an interesting discussion about which dystopian future is more likely: that of 1984 or Brave New World.

One of my favorite discussions of socialism is that provided in Keynes's The End of Laissez-Faire, available in it's entirety here. I like to think of this short book as a genealogy of liberalism. It does a very good job outlining how classical liberalism split into an individualistic and a communitarian branch. He goes into great detail on pre-Marxian socialism, and the sense in which modern (at the time of the writing, in 1926) laissez-faire and modern Marxist socialism in many ways bastardized the liberal tradition from which they both emerged.

Brad DeLong has a quick, interesting discussion of what about Marx is still important for modern, neoclassical economists to acknoweldge and respect.

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Finally, I recommend this discussion between Bryan Magee and Herbert Marcuse, about The Frankfurt School and Marcuse's socialism (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5). Marcuse is one of the foremost socialist critics of Marxism. If "anti-Marxist socialism" sounds like an oxymoron to you, I suggest you listen to this series.

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For probably obvious reasons, I have a great deal more respect for the New Left and the anti-Marxist socialists than I do for Marxists, but I still have to offer this to you as well.

Production vs. Prosperity

I want to explore a little bit of Evan's query:

"Do those who provide goods and services contribute to useful cultivation, or do they perpetuate a practice of commoditization, either of ideas, tools, or resources?"

It's a reasonable question. Many have opined that the GDP statistics we collect are a poor measure of the true "wealth" of society precisely because this summation of values doesn't necessarily correspond to the creation of actual value in society. A homeless shelter may purchase paper plates and spaghetti from the store, and those purchases will show up in GDP statistics - but the couple of bucks that they contribute to GDP will far underestimate the "value" of that purchase to society when the spaghetti is served with a friendly face, an open ear, and a safe atmosphere.

But as Christopher Hitchens has recently pointed out: "There’s also the not-inconsiderable question of capitalism’s ability to decide, if not on the value of a commodity, at least on some sort of price for the damn thing." We need not assume that GDP encompasses all value to admit that there is value to the idea of GDP (and the products that it measures).

If we set up a straw man of modern production as some monstrous, commoditizing, corrosive influence then of course we will be able to vanquish that straw man and banish it to oblivion. But that would be a hollow victory, because that straw man doesn't really represent the "modern economy" as an idea.

Something like GDP is useful if we are realistic about what exactly it is: Gross (i.e. - after subtracting off imports) Domestic (a fundamentally political concept) Product (those things which are produced for sale in a particular jurisdiction). "Production" is a much more humble thing than "culture" or "happiness" or "value". Production includes the plows and tractors that make cultivation possible, as well as the proverbial pick up truck, farm windowsill, and apple pie (perhaps the apples are home-grown, but the flour is most likely ground somewhere else and the baking tin is almost certainly made elsewhere). This is what GDP is - production that is brought forth in the context of a market. And a market is nothing if not a social collective, and therefore absolutely relevant to "culture".

But Berry and Evan have a point that is illustrated in my example of the spaghetti and paper plates used in a homeless shelter. These contribute to GDP, but they only contribute prices - i.e., market values - and not social values. A great deal of social value is produced that is totally omitted from the GDP statistic.

Charles Murray (a real conservative's conservative) used the occasion of his March 11th Irving Kristol Lecture to speak on how a civilization's happiness is grounded in it's cultural institutions, rather than in cold economic calculations alone. On the other side of the aisle the Nobel prize winner responsible for attacking the Clinton administration from it's left flank, Joseph Stiglitz, has been tasked along with Amartya Sen by French President Sarkozy with exploring new ways of measuring growth to capture social happiness.

I think Berry's point is not lost even on those who deal with the modern, competitive market every day. The task is to:

1. Understand how markets both complement and conflict with culture and value, and
2. To be more realistic about exactly what GDP is and what markets can accomplish in the first place, and not penalize them for failing to accomplish something that it was never their task to accomplish.