Robots, Robin Hanson, Nick Rowe, and Socialism

OK, if you all insist I'll break my New Year's resolution one more time since I already have today.

When I first saw this post by Russ Roberts about an Econtalk with Robin Hanson about "technological singularities" I was very interested in it and almost posted on it. I've heard Robin Hanson lecture on this before. The timing is always speculative, but the logic of the argument - particularly when you look across the length of human history - is persuasive.

I was tempted to write a very quick post in response, simply noting that if the technological singularity Hanson describes here ever happens it would probably be sufficient to turn me from a market Keynesian to a socialist.

I decided the admission would haunt me for the rest of my blogging career so I didn't post it, but what the hell.

I post it now because of this post by Nick Rowe fleshing out the implications of the technological singularity in more detail, and this post by Karl Smith. "Overproductionism" inevitably leads people to socialism for good ethical reasons - if providing for demand can be easily achieved without contracting for the services of a large portion of the population, you're going to have extreme inequality and suffering not as a result of differential compensation from differential marginal products, but simply because the labor content of output is negligble. The problem with this line of reasoning has always been that our demand always outpaces technological unemployment (this is why concerns about underconsumption are much more defensible than concerns about overproduction). If there is a paradigm shifting technological singularity that makes the overproductionist fallacy no longer fallacious, then we're going to have to rethink a lot about the way society was organized.

Yes, this is very Marxist. What of it?

The point is, though, it's all predicated on the assumption that everything we know to be true about the economy is no longer true as a result of this sort of Hansonian "technological singularity". That assumes the singularity even happens, and it assumes it happens in the asymptotic, extreme way that it's being discussed by Hanson, Rowe, and Smith.

I think it would be a good thing, if we could manage the transition. Whether it's likely to even happen is a different story. I'm personally inclined to bet against Marx and crude overproductionism, but time will tell.

I think about these issues a lot... I think about the social implications (e.g. - "this would make me a socialist") less thoroughly than I think about the intellectual history of these overproductionist ideas. So thoughts on my thoughts on the social implications would be appreciated.

Worst Sequel Contest

Robert Johnson, in the comment section for this post writes: "If we assume that scientists and artists somehow will have the basic necessities, then, yeah, the quote [which argued that pecuniary motives can't inspire great art and science] makes a whole lot of sense. High quality creative effort probably does come from something other than the promise of wealth. Maybe that's why movie sequels are usually so bad, because they are motivated primarily by earning, not by inspiration."

You can see my response after this comment of his, describing my thoughts on the conditions for a good sequel (which I think fit quite well with the quote). That got me thinking - what do you all think is the worst sequel to a movie ever?

My vote is Predator 2, with Danny Glover and Gary Busey. What a horrible movie after the first one was so badass. Let's face it, anything where Gary Busey goes apeshit in the end is at least marginally entertaining, but that little bit didn't really compensate for how bad the rest of it was. I did think Alien vs. Predator was good from an interesting story line and special effects perspective, and Predators looks good in the same way that the original was (lots of great characters with good one-liners fighting a big monster).

What's your worst sequel? I'm warning you - I may exercise my blog administrator priveleges if anyone says Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull. I happened to like that a lot, even if I'm in the minority. So think twice before you waste your vote on that.

*****

By the way, the quote was from Bertrand Russell's "Science and Art Under Socialism", in his Proposed Roads to Freedom (1918) (I read it in my copy of Essential Works of Socialism, which is a really fantastic and wide-ranging resource that's usually pretty easy to find in used bookstores). Lovecraft has a lot to say about the prospects of the artist under socialism, it's one of his most bedrock critiques of the Soviets, and it's one of his biggest hesitations about socialism in general (although he thinks it is feasible). I know Lovecraft turns to Russell for insights on a lot of different things, so when I thumbed through the book and saw this title I was curious. I just read selections of it briefly - but what I read seems to be consistent with Lovecraft's view: aware of the danger, optimistic about prospects.

Underworld Economics, Cleaned up and Formalized

Peter Dorman has a great post up explaining why market economies have tendency towards underconsumptionism, a position which Keynes called "underworld" economics, but which he identified as being closely related to his own thinking.

Dorman talks specifically about the problems with Walrasian price setting, and suggests that in the real world firms set quantities and compete for customers on price. He loosense utility maximization assumptions about consumers as well and suggests that if consumers have loyalty to firms that satisfy their quality requirements, firms will invest in more production as way to maintain customers. Dorman writes "This fits with the literature in marketing, which stresses that a sale should always be seen as the opening to future sales and therefore worth a much greater investment than it would justify from a myopic perspective."

One of the most interesting points that Dorman makes is connecting this argument to the work of Janos Kornai. I first encountered Kornai in the way that I think most people did - as a critic of planned economies in a discussion of comparative economic systems. What a lot of people forget is exactly what Kornai's criticism of planned economies was - the idea was actually not that central planners regularly make disastrous "market process" calculation mistakes (to borrow an Austrian phrase) - it was that planners deliberately underpriced their goods. Central planners, Kornai argued, are price-setters whereas market economy firms are almost always quantity setters and price takers. The result was the socialist "shortage economy" - and the flip side is that the market economy is a "surplus economy". That's not that bad of a problem to have, of course! In all my concerns about demand deficiency, you never see me saying "man - we'd all just be better off under central planning", after all. But it does shed light on the economic problems we do face, which is overproductionism/underconsumptionism to put it crudely - and employment as a function of effective demand to put it a little more respectably.

And it is an interesting point that Kornai makes about central planners, isn't it? I don't even know if I would have been that radical before reading this post. If, as Hayek or Mises contends, the primary problem is a socialist calculation problem, then wouldn't we expect to see chronic oversupply - full warehouses and overflowing shelves - as often as chronic shortages in socialist economies? If it's just a miscalculation issue, why the observed bias towards shortages? The traditional SCD logic (in which I side with Mises and Hayek, don't get me wrong) doesn't seem to be able to explain this feature. Kornai can explain that, and can also explain the struggles of market economies.

A little while back, Jonathan Catalan blogged on overproductionism here.

Also, I suppose worth noting, H.P. Lovecraft and Bertrand Russell were fervent adherents to the idea of overproductionism - and I've found at least one letter of Lovecraft's and an essay of Russell's that specifically identifies underconsumptionism as a problem (usually you find that the overproductionist variant dominates in the lay literature - underconsumptionism is largely restricted to economists, I've found). I've gotten the impression that overproductionist concerns were very, very common in the early part of the twentieth century (Albert Einstein made the point at one time as well) - which is interesting because you really don't hear the idea voiced among non-economists these days at all.

Interesting Posts on Castro

As some of you may be aware, Jeff Goldberg at The Atlantic recently spent some time in Cuba and has been posting some great accounts of his time with Castro.

- First, he and Castro address Ahmadinejad and anti-semitism. Castro says unequivocally "stop slandering the Jews". Here, Castro provides some fascinating insights on the prospect of a conflict between Israel and Iran, drawing from his own experience with the Cuban Missile Crisis.

- Here, Castro claims that the "Cuban model doesn't even work for us anymore" (no shit, Sherlock). There's also a funny exchange in the Havana Aquarium:

"Do you like dolphins?" Fidel asked me.

"I like dolphins a lot," I said.

Fidel called over Guillermo Garcia, the director of the aquarium (every employee of the aquarium, of course, showed up for work -- "voluntarily," I was told) and told him to sit with us.

"Goldberg," Fidel said, "ask him questions about dolphins."

"What kind of questions?" I asked.

"You're a journalist, ask good questions," he said, and then interrupted himself. "He doesn't know much about dolphins anyway," he said, pointing to Garcia. He's actually a nuclear physicist."

"You are?" I asked.

"Yes," Garcia said, somewhat apologetically.

"Why are you running the aquarium?" I asked.

"We put him here to keep him from building nuclear bombs!" Fidel said, and then cracked-up laughing.

"In Cuba, we would only use nuclear power for peaceful means," Garcia said, earnestly.

"I didn't think I was in Iran," I answered.

Fidel pointed to the small rug under the special swivel chair his bodyguards bring along for him.

"It's Persian!" he said, and laughed again. Then he said, "Goldberg, ask your questions about dolphins."

- In the most recent update, Castro has retracted his point that the Cuban model doesn't work for Cuba... sort of. All he says that Goldberg quotes him on is that the capitalist system doesn't work for the United States. He doesn't actually retract the claim that the Cuban model doesn't work for Cuba. These two points don't contradict each other. My guess is he really does think the Cuban model doesn't work for Cuba, he doesn't think capitalism works either, and he wanted to deflect domestic criticism by shifting the emphasis of the earlier point. But no change of position - superficial or substantive - seems to be in evidence here.

Central Planning as a Solution to Externalities

Anyone who has really absorbed the posts I've written on calculation vs. incentive problems, and my thinking on externalities knows that I approach issues like climate change and the environment from a thoroughly market-based angle. Markets are not always the tool in the toolbox that I pull out as a solution, but there is no disillusionment about the power and simply the reality of markets and the knowledge problem.

Inevitably, of course, I'm accused of approaching the issue from an angle that is not cognizant of market processes. I'm at a loss for how this can still be thrown at me (even if you don't agree with my conclusions from a practical standpoint), but it is. I'm guessing it has more to do with ideology than anything else.

Anyway, if you want to see central planning as a solution to an externality problem, look to China. This sort of approach is, of course, disastrous according to the market-based logic that I use. By the "market failure" approach that I take, this is precisely what you shouldn't do. And yet this is exactly the sort of central planning that people like Arnold Kling want to use to test my sort of approach. This is central planning, pure and simple, and the Chinese are proceeding with it in complete contravention to a proper understanding of the market process. It is diametrically opposed to an approach like a carbon tax.

Have I found my leftists?

Recently, Evan suggested to me that I try to actively engage leftist or radical positions in the same way that I engage libertarian and Austrian positions. With the Austrians, I find that I buy a lot of what they have to say - they have interesting insights that have a sense of being "untapped" because they are so out of the mainstream. But they have more than enough analytical, methodological, and philosophical problems that the debate I can have with them is always lively. They're also very active on the internet, which makes the interaction easy.

Evan suggested that I engage radicals in the same way. I'm not entirely opposed to the radical/socialist/leftist outlook. I've found the Trotskyite/New Left position enriching in the same way I've found the Austrians enriching - lot's of good insights but enough differences that I'd never personally align with them. Also, like the Austrians, they are very good at history of thought, which is always intriguing for me. Usually, I turn to Dewey, Hitchens, Orwell, etc. for this stuff. These are guys that don't leave any doubts about their positions on human liberty - which of course makes me more comfortable. Aside from that explicitly anti-totalitarian nexus on the left, though, it's slim pickings. Mattheus von Guttenberg gives an excellent example recently of a Marxist blogger that was so nonsensical he couldn't make heads or tails of the encounter (I would provide a link, but Mattheus and Jonathan's website is temporarily down). In the past I've shared similar concerns about Slavoj Zizek ravings about the end of capitalism. It's just hard. Even the good, sensible Marxists are speaking a whole different language from most of us - but a lot of them aren't even sensible.

Anyway, recently I've posted on the Modern Monetary Theory/post-Keynesian perspective. Whether they're really deficit owls or just deficit super-doves is up for debate. I can't help but get the sense that they're just repeating "solvency isn't a problem! solvency isn't a problem!", while the rest of us Keynesians are calmly saying "we know solvency isn't a problem - we never said it was - we're worried about real growth". If that's all going further down the rabbit hole of post-Keynesianism is going to get me, I'm not sure how fruitful it will be. But maybe they have more to say than that. I may just have to follow their blogs for a while and see. I don't want to just write a bunch of posts on solvency. We shall see. They're not radicals, but I may have found my leftists, Evan.

What do readers think? Would more post-Keynesian material, links, and well honed sniping to draw commenters in be interesting?

I still haven't quite given up on the idea of engaging more of the full-blown Marxists. Does anyone know of intelligible, engageable, interesting radical blogs/communities out there? I think New Left/Frankfurt School type stuff would be best. It would be a real learning experience for me, but I think if a reasonable person wants to engage the left, this is the left to engage.

A young Marx once wrote that philosophers have thus far only interpreted the world, but that the task is to change it. It's hard to argue with that. My problem with many leftists is that they have taken up the banner of change and left the banner of intepretation lying on the ground. That's dangerous - you have to continually re-evaluate your position and your ideas. To me, that's the major liability of the left. We shall see - let me know what you all think.

Einstein was a socialist

Maybe this was common knowledge, but I didn't realize it until I read an essay of his last night called "Why Socialism?" (1949). He is not an ideologue. The essay essentially runs through a series of problems he sees in the economy and in society, and he wraps it up very quickly at the end saying essentially "socialism is the solution, but we should avoid the totalitarianism of socialism". I suppose that puts Einstein in the New Left, but I do want to stress how casual this analysis was, so that we shouldn't read too much into it or get too excitable over it.
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At the beginning of the essay it wasn't even clear that he would end by advocating socialism. He starts by discussing how important it is for citizens to comment on society and on economics, particularly on socialism. He doesn't share his own views on socialism one way or another at that point (perhaps they were well known enough that he didn't have to). He then goes through a series of concerns he has, the resolution of which does not necessitate an embrace of socialism. The socialist portions of the essay feel like something of an afterthought, and I actually won't be sharing them explicitly here.

Anyway, that's my defense of Einstein, but here are some snippets of what he wrote:

"I have now reached the point where I may indicate briefly what to me constitutes the essence of the crisis of our time. It concerns the relationship of the individual to society. The individual has become more conscious than ever of his dependence upon society. But he does not experience this dependence as a positive asset, as an organic tie, as a protective force, but rather as a threat to his natural rights, or even to his economic existence. Moreover, his position in society is such that the egotistical drives of his make-up are constantly being accentuated, while his social drives, which are by nature weaker, progressively deteriorate. All human beings, whatever their position in society, are suffering from this process of deterioration. Unknowingly prisoners of their own egotism, they feel insecure, lonely, and deprived of the naive, simple, and unsophisticated enjoyment of life. Man can find meaning in life, short and perilous as it is, only through devoting himself to society."

That is the general framing provided to the rest of the essay. A couple paragraphs later he gets into his economics. I found this particularly notable:

"Production is carried on for profit, not for use. There is no provision that all those able and willing to work will always be in a position to find employment;"

What struck me was (1.) how the first sentence so creatively and decisively addresses Say's Law, and (2.) how the second sentence transitions so smoothly to the full employment implications of that insight. I don't know how much economics Einstein was actually familiar with, but that was a line I enjoyed stumbling across, regardless of whether he realized all the potential interpretations of what he had to say. He goes on, although reveals himself to be thinking more along the lines of older under-consumptionist theories rather than Keynesian ideas:

"An 'army of unemployed' almost always exists. The worker is constantly in fear of losing his job. Since unemployed and poorly paid workers do not provide a profitable market, the production of consumers' goods is restricted, and great hardship is consequence. Technological progress frequently results in more unemployment rather than in an easing of the burden of work for all. The profit motive, in conjunction with competition among capitalists, is responsible for an instability in the accumulation and utilization of capital which leads to increasingly severe depressions. Unlimited competition leads to a huge waste of labor, and to that crippling of the social consciousness of individuals which I mentioned before."

He has glimmers of a theory of effective demand here, but attributes it all somewhat haphazardly to "competition among capitalists". Still an interesting read, though.

There were a couple other pieces of the essay that I thought were worth noting. He was also very preoccupied with what has been called "monopoly capitalism". It's hard to overstate the importance of this idea in the public mind in the first half of the twentieth century. I recently read Bertrand Russell's Freedom vs. Organization, which was a history of Europe from 1815 to 1914, and this issue came up again and again with Russell as well. Well informed people who nonetheless thought somewhat casually about the economy, like Einstein and Russell, were very disturbed by the growing size of corporations and the perceived totalizing influence that would have on society. Some reacted more negatively than others, but its a very important thing to note simply because it was such a driving concern back then, while it isn't really a dominant narrative right now. You barely even hear the term "monopoly capitalism" anymore.

The other intriguing element of Einstein's piece was what he wrote on wages. At first I thought he was pedaling a labor theory of value. He wasn't, really. Upon a closer reading, he never came close to a theory of value, but he did quite clearly reveal a preference for piece rates, rather than an hourly wage. It did have the vague trappings of value theorists like Marx - he talked about connecting workers more closely to what they produced. But ultimately it was more a statement about what he thought was the ideal labor contract than anything else. Piece rates, Einstein suggested, would limit the scope for exploitation by employers. He used an interesting term for the current wage system that I liked. He called the wages workers earn "free" wages because they are independent of what the worker produces.

He also notes the difference between economics and physics, and why it's so much harder to draw conclusions in economics than in physics. So it was an interesting and strange read. I'll end with this additional thought from Einstein on the social nature of man:

"The individual is able to think, feel, strive, and work by himself; but he depends so much upon society - in his physical, intellectual, and emotional existence - that it is impossible to think of him, or to understand him, outside the framework of society. It is 'society' which provides man with food, clothing, a home, the tools of work, language, the forms of thought, and most of the content of thought; his life is made possible through the labor and the accomplishments of the many millions past and present who are all hidden behind the small word 'society'."

UPDATE: Hopefully this won't detract from the post, but while we're on Einstein I was wondering if some Trekkie's could confirm something for me. Kate and I were watching the new Star Trek again this weekend, and something bugged me. Is warp speed supposed to be the same as light speed in the Star Trek universe? When they all leave the assembly to go answer that distress call, they say that they will arrive (from Earth) and come out of warp speed in someting like eight or nine minutes. The way I figure it, that doesn't get them much past Mars if they're going light speed - certainly nowhere near Jupiter. Did I miss something? They didn't mention anything about using a wormhole (indeed - they're surprised when they find out that the bad guys used a wormhole - they made it sound like a shocking thing rather than a routine technology). Am I misunderstanding this, or was that just sloppy writing?

1848 and the Last Temptation of Marx

I thought I'd cruise through the book 1848: Year of Revolution now that my class is over, but of course I haven't (maybe it's because I blog too much). Starting Röpke's Crises and Cycles while reading it doesn't help, either. I did want to write about something I found very intriguing, though. The Habsburgs, after their initial shock at events in Paris, Milan, Vienna, and Berlin, began to respond to the assorted revolutionaries, liberals, leftists, and nationalists with considerably more craftiness than Metternich was able to muster before being ousted. As revolutionary fervor broke out in Galicia, the Austrians deftly played the Ukranian peasants against the Polish nobles and nationalists that demanded greater liberties from the empire. The Ukranians sided with the Austrians because the depredations of the Poles were more immediate than the arguably far greater imperial claims of the authorities in Vienna. This sort of sentiment was not uncommon during the American revolution either, where the refrain was often heard that "I would rather be ruled by one tyrant three thousand miles away than three thousand tyrants one mile away". Thus, the 1848 revolution in the Austro-Hungarian provinces especially took on a decidedly bourgeois (if not noble) tone, rather than a populist one. Paradoxically, the emperor became the "man of the people" rather than the democrats.

Another thing I found interesting was how damned sympathetic the leftists and the socialists come across in Paris and Berlin! I don't think it's the author's secret ideological sympathies, I think it's simply the fact that relative to monarchs and autocrats, a socialist that isn't saying that much about a workers' paradise, but is emphasizing constitutional reform and democracy doesn't seem all that bad. These are two somewhat surprising elements of the book, which upon further reflection of course aren't all that surprising at all.

Without knowing that much about the history of communism, I have to suspect that these two observations decisively shaped the future of the movement. Marx (an active participant in the Berlin revolution) certainly digested the monarchical alliance with the peasantry against the nobility, and he remarked on this process again a decade later when Tsar Alexander II emancipated Russia's serfs against the wishes of the Russian nobility:

"If the Russian nobility do not think that the “4th of August” (1789) has yet arrived, and that so far there is no necessity of sacrificing their privileges on the altar of their country, the Russian Government is going a great deal faster; it has already arrived at the “declaration of the rights of man.” What, indeed, do you think of Alexander II, proclaiming “rights which belong to the peasantry by nature, and of which they ought never to have been deprived"? Verily, these are strange times! In 1846, a Pope initiating a liberal movement; in 1858, a Russian Autocrat, a true samoderjetz vserossiiski, proclaiming the rights of man! And we shall see that the Czar’s proclamation will have as world-wide an echo, and an ultimate effect of far greater magnitude than the Pope’s liberalism."

What lessons could he have learned from this? I'll submit a few:

1. That autocratic authority can be brought to bear to serve the interests of the collective, and that the lower classes will embrace the autocrat for this.

2. That socialists are the good guys. It's easy to write-off the down-side of socialism when (1.) you've never seen the downside yet, and (2.) your formative years were spent battling emperors, kings, autocrats, and nobles. I'm sympathetic to the socialists as I read this book, and I know how the story ends! It's understandable how the revolutionaries could get so confident in their beliefs. It's comparable to Jefferson's support for the French Revolution, even as it started to descend into macabre chaos.

3. That a conflict of power is not the same as a conflict of class. For Marx, the dialectics of class were absolutely paramount. Today, in America especially, we have an inherent libertarianism. For us, exploitation is a function of the exercise of different power relationships. It's a perspective that is shared by French philosophers, particularly after Foucault, but it is also derived from a contractarian approach. But this is not a foundational assumption of many socialists and even many liberals in the 19th century who did not have a contractarian understanding of the world. For them, power was a tool to be used by either side - the oppressor or the oppressed. Simply exercising power over someone did not make you an oppressor. The primary source of oppression was class. To borrow from my recent series on calculation problems vs. incentive problems, the primary source of oppression was not a capricious violation of contract, but an institutional arrangement that stacked the deck in favor of one class over another. If autocratic power could rectify this, then so be it.

If you put these three together, the dictatorship of the proletariat follows naturally. It may be naive. It's a view that could greatly benefit from an infusion of contractarian thinking. But for a man that cut his teeth on the 1848 revolutions, it's understandable. If the imperial authorities had sided more vigorously with the nobility, and given Marx a greater distaste for autocratic power, I wonder if communism would have turned out differently.

A Pew poll with some surprising results

At Coordination Problem, Steve Horwitz writes about a Pew poll with some seemingly contradictory results. However, he doesn't really write about what surprises me and what he writes about I'm not particularly surprised by.

Steve starts by remarking on the seemingly contradictory result that a lot of 18-29 year olds are positively disposed towards "libertarianism" and a lot are also negatively disposed towards "capitalism". Steve writes:

"At first this seems contradictory and one's first thought might be that young people don't know the meaning of one term or the other. Or both. But I have a different hypothesis. I suspect they might generally know the meaning of libertarian, or at least know enough to have a decent idea. But I also suspect that they think "capitalism" describes the status quo in the US. After all, don't both left-wing critics and right-wing apologists talk about our capitalist economy?"

I think he's probably right that respondents don't have quite as sophisticated an understanding of "capitalism" as readers and commenters of this blog or of Coordination Problem do, but I doubt that's the driving factor. The term I think the American public is less likely to have a clear definition of is "libertarianism". Ron Paul does a prettty decent job laying it out in plain language, but libertarians can't even agree amongst themselves about who's a "real" libertarian (not that I expect them to, granted). After adding a subset of the population familiar with Noam Chomsky's "libertarian socialism", and "libertarianism" is a vague term as well. I've come across lot's of Tea Partiers that think they're libertarians because they've heard the term float around, but if you really talk to them they're just run of the mill conservatives or populists. So I suspect at the very least there is ambiguity in both terms, if not more ambiguity in libertarianism.

On the other hand, though, there is nothing inherently paradoxical about this result at all. 45% of 18-29 year olds reported feeling positively about libertarianism and 48% of 18-29 year olds feel negatively about capitalism (a plurality in both cases). I surmised in this post that Austrian economists that don't like to work with aggregated data are at risk of committing a fallacy of composition, while economists who work with aggregates risk committing an ecological fallacy. But here, Steve commits an ecological fallacy by even thinking that this data presents a problem in the first place. There is no reason at all to think that the 48% of the young population that feels negatively about capitalism is containted in the 55% of the population that isn't familiar with or feels negatively about libertarianism, and that the 45% of the population that feels positively about libertarianism is contained in the 52% of the population that isn't familiar with or feels positively about capitalism. Bingo - problem solved. I don't think Steve is naive enough to commit the most blatant version of the ecological fallacy, of course. But the fact that he labels it "contradictory" I think suggests that he's at least committing a mild version of it. There's nothing at all in these results that presents an immediate contradiction.

Those weren't the numbers that surprised me. What surprised me was that among 18-29 year olds 43% felt positively about socialism and 49% felt negatively, and 84% felt positively about "states' rights" while 14% felt negatively. The first finding is very discouraging and the second is very encouraging.

43% felt positively about socialism? That seems enormous. Perhaps this is the GOP attempt to brand Obama as "socialist" backfiring. People say "well he's socialist, and I like what he's doing, so I guess I'm positive towards socialism". I'm guessing that's not a lot of it, but perhaps that's playing into it. It could also be the equation of social democracy with socialism. The definition might be somewhat merited, but if that's the case then "socialism" isn't really the "socialism" that we think about and talk about here and the finding isn't quite as disturbing. I think in America at least it's safest to understand the term "socialist" as "Marxist socialist" of some variety, just like we use our definition of "liberal" rather than Europe's definition. I'm perfectly comfortable calling social democrats "socialists" - there's good reason for it - but if we do that we need to clarify that it's not the American understanding of "socialist". I'm not sure what's driving this strong positive showing - maybe it's simply a generational thing (that seems to be indicated by the difference between ages). This generation didn't grow up with Communism. I didn't either, but at least I learned from history. The idea that we could forget this lesson so quickly is scary.

The encouraging number, of course, is the 84% support for "states' rights" which was beaten out only by "family values" and "civil rights". In the past, I've bemoaned the unfortunate association of "states' rights" with reactionary politics, and cited this as the source of the dismemberment of robust federalism in the United States. I'm not sure whether these poll numbers signal a turning point in this trend (there's strong support for "states' rights" among all age groups), but hopefully it is.

One last point I'd make is that it's really unclear exactly what feeling "positively" or "negatively" about these things means. I'm not sure that saying you have a "positive" feeling for a certain ideology suggests that that ideology represents you. If I were to answer this survey, for example, I would say that I was positive towards everything on the list except for socialism. I'm not a libertarian. I think it has positive contributions to make, but I wouldn't call myself a libertarian. And I'd say precisely the same thing about "progressivism". So how do we interpret a "positive" disposition? It's pretty vague.

The Fascist Octopus Has Taken The White House!

Bryan Caplan has urged "grateful bloggers" to "dance on the grave of Marxism" this May Day [please also see update at the bottom of this post]. It seems to me to be a very appropriate dance floor. Caplan offers his own contribution in a counter-factual history of what could have happened if Lenin had his fatal stroke in 1917. I raise some issues with the counter-factual he poses (fifth comment down), but all in all it's interesting.

I was going to offer insights from my favorite anti-Marxist, John Maynard Keynes. But then I saw an Atlantic post on accusations of Obama's Marxism, and I decided that I needed to stamp that out instead. I think Keynes would have approved. He spent much of his career critiquing both laissez-faire and Marxism, and in pointing out to people how Marxism was anti-thetical to his own ideas and threatened the cause of liberty. Back to Obama. On his tour of the Midwest, Obama said something that agitated the hyper-sensitive, hyperbolic, and self-righteous Right. He said: "I do think that at a certain point you've made enough money." Mark Levin said that the sentiment has "strong shades of Marxism". Seems like a pretty reasonable interpretation...

Except that I've misquoted Obama. I added a period, where he had a comma. What Obama actually said was:

"We're not trying to push financial reform because we begrudge success that's fairly earned. I do think that at a certain point you've made enough money, [<-- COMMA!!!!!!!] but you know part of the American way is that you can just keep on making it if you're providing a good product or you're providing a good service. We don't want people to stop fulfilling the core responsibilities of the financial system to help grow the economy."

Yes, when you start switching around commas and periods, and when you don't restate the entire sentence you can make it sound like just about anything. What's sadder, though, is that you know this is going to get traction.

It's like that infamous Chicago radio interview where Obama explicitly said that the courts were not the right place to pursue economic justice, and yet somehow the message that came out of that was that we should pursue economic justice in the courts. It's the same thing here with this "enough money" statement. He explicitly said in the sentence quoted above that people should continue to earn money - more money than they even need - if they're providing a good or service that people want. That's the epitome of market capitalism. How the hell does that get turned into Marxism? It's bizarre to see people do these mental gymnastics to take a grammatically simple sentence and turn it into what they wanted him to say.

At least in the Chicago radio interview, Obama elaborated his idea over the course of several sentences. He spent quite a bit of time explaining why the courts failed to achieve all the aims of the Civil Rights movement, why they weren't the right place to achieve all the aims of the Civil Rights movement, and for that reason why the leaders of the Civil Rights movement were wrong to put so much emphasis on the court process when they should have put more emphasis on community organizing. It took him a while to lay that thesis out - it's a complicated thesis after all! But this point about "enough money" is just one sentence. Can't people read all the way to the period at the end of the sentence? A couple years ago I would have said "can't people listen to the end of a radio interview before forming your full opinion?". Since then I've realized we really don't have that much attention span - but I would have thought we could at least finish the end of a sentence. Apparently not.

In the Chicago radio interview, Obama laid out a strong case for (1.) negative rights, and (2.) a limited role for legislating from the bench. Willful misreading or involuntary ignorance twisted that into a case for (1.) positive rights, and (2.) an expansive role for the courts. By the same token, Obama is here making an explicit case for market capitalism, where people can continue to earn money beyond what they could possibly need if they're providing a useful product. But willful misreading or involuntary ignorance is turning it into precisely the opposite message. What's most striking is that they're twisting his words where they have common ground with him! They presumably agree with him on this point. So why not agree with him on this point and then disagree with him on the details of the finance reform where you legitimately disagree with him? The answer, of course, is simple. Claiming that Obama doesn't want you to make any more money after you've "made enough" plays better in a campaign ad than detailed disagreements on the financial reform bill. And these people - like all politicians - are all about winning power. They're all about the next election. So they choose to do and say what is most advantageous for winning power.

If the Lincoln-Douglas debates were held today, Douglas would have won hands down. People simply don't have the attention span to listen to an entire point. They form their opinion ahead of time and hear only the snippets that buttress that opinion. That is not a good sign for free society.

UPDATE: When I had read Bryan's initial post, I got the impression that this was just an opportunity for a bunch of people to discredit Marxism and celebrate the (relative) lack of Marxism that we've enjoyed as a planet since 1989. The Distributed Republic, which is aggregating many of these posts, has something more specific in mind - remembering the victims of Marxism. This is also an important thing to do today. I'm not sure what exactly to say on the matter - the facts speak for themselves. Millions died at the hands of this ideology. But why was the ideology so powerful? Ultimately, I think it was powerful because of human hubris. We place a high premium on our own intelligence and ability to figure things out. We are pretty smart creatures - it's not an entirely inexplicable hubris. But ultimately it's fallacious. We make mistakes. And our failures can be especially damaging when we get too wrapped up in extended, logically deduced megaprojects like Marxism. Logical deduction is very enticing. In theory, it's air-tight. It's a fantastic way to discover truths. But deductive logic is contingent on two pillars: accurate axioms or assumptions, and a valid chain of deductions. Human frailty often misleads us on both those points. However impressive logical deduction is on paper, we always manage to mess it up. Marxism emerged from this supreme confidence in man's ability to figure things out. When the early Marxists first devised their socialist framework, they relied on their ability to figure out the determinist contours of human society. That was hubris. The practitioners of Marxism added to that initial hubris the mistake of assuming that they could actually plan something as complicated as the economy. The Marxists were so confident in their deductive reasoning and so unwilling to test their ideas against experience that they felt justified in immolating countless innocent human beings. Hubris breeds confidence in our own logic, and confidence in our own logic leads us to violently defend logically deduced megaprojects that we've convinced ourselves can solve all the problems of the world. This hubris is the underlying failure of all megaprojects based on deductive logic: from Communism to libertarianism. Human reasoning is a powerful tool, but it has to be tempered and tested with experience. Anyone who tells you that they've figured everything out and by their logic Communism works is a fool. You can't figure out in your head some silver bullet form of social organization. By the same token, anyone who tells you that they've eschewed empirical testing and through their deductive logic they have concluded that libertarianism is a fool-proof silver bullet for social organization is also a fool. I'm bringing libertarianism into this, because I think the debate over Marxism is often skewed and distorted. Superficially, many ideologies are stark opposites - but unless we see their common underlying fallacies we inevitably threaten life and liberty. Verification, falsification, and empiricism dictate that people square their understanding of the social and political world with the understanding and experience of others. With these priorities, you cannot have the mass death that we experienced at the hands of Marxism. That sort of thing is only possible if you close your mind to experience and rely only on your own logical abilities (or, I suppose, if you are both an empiricist and a sociopath). The crimes of Marxism originated in the hubris of its deductive reasoning, which was cantilevered out to undergird an alien ideology.

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.

The purpose and pitfalls of open discourse

Evan raises the question of what an “open discourse” looks like, later adding the qualifier of an “open public discourse”. This theme reminded me of a work that I am only marginally familiar with – Karl Popper’s The Open Society and It’s Enemies. In it, Popper once again makes his case against Hegel, Marx, and historicism by emphasizing that knowledge is “provisional and fallible”, necessitating an openness to diverse opinions. The fallacy of totalitarianism and communism is to assume that well informed individuals can organize society according to deterministic laws. Popper points out that Plato makes a similar mistake in empowering his Philosopher King. More recently, and perhaps more benignly, I would suggest that we see this impulse in the writing of John Kenneth Galbraith, who heralds the rise of the Technocrat as a replacement of the Bureaucrat in social organization.

In democratic societies, we place a premium on open discourse because we believe that the laws of social organization don’t operate as predictably as the laws of physics. If determining whether foreign aid should fund programs that provide abortion services or whether a school bond initiative should be adopted could be accomplished by plugging some numbers into a formula, the argument for free speech and democracy might be much weaker.

I think what Popper’s analysis ignores is the more fundamental distortions of language that make it susceptible to the same kinds of tyranny that an “open discourse” is designed to protect against. The kind of tyranny I have in mind is the “discursive framework” or double-speak that is attached to the words and phrases that structure our public discourse. A discursive public square is a defense against the proclamations of a Philosopher King, but if the speech used in the public square is blunted or co-opted, there is no reason to put blind faith in "open discourse".

One example that comes to mind is the reemergence of the term "socialism" in American political discussion. Barack Obama and his domestic agenda is what is most often refered to as "socialist" particularly since the infamous statement he made to Joe the Plumber about "spreading the wealth around". What is most ironic about the media and the public's newfound love affair with this word is the conspicuous absence of socialism in the United States, a topic addressed in Seymour Lipset and Gary Marks' famous book "It Didn't Happen Here." No platform of either party even resembles socialism - a rarity in the industrialized world. And even if one of them did, the platforms of the two parties are so similar on the fundamental questions of social organization (i.e. - a progressive income tax, social insurance, etc.) that the differences between Democrats and Republicans can hardly be attributed to socialism on the part of the Democrats. Some of the nation's most celebrated Cold Warriors were Democrats, and the fundamental outlook of that party hasn't changed substantially since the early years of the Cold War (something that cannot be said for the Republicans, who brilliantly reimagined themselves in the late 1970s). There are definitely important questions of appropriate government intervention to address in public discourse today, but a discussion of socialism is wholly irrelevant to the issues before us. And yet, "socialism" is central to the current public discourse!

Why is that? Because new meaning for words is far easier to impose on the public discourse than new initiatives are. It is easier to reinvent the Earned Income Tax Credit (an instrument imagined by a conservative economist and initiated by a conservative president to supplant welfare) as "socialist" than it is to eliminate it.

We should guard the words we use, and use those words very precisely. We shouldn't use words like "socialism" unless we're discussing the abolition of private property rights and the collectivization of the means of production under the power of the state. In other words - we probably shouldn't use the word "socialism" in relation to American policy making at all. We should also be careful about applying terms like "fascist" to the Bush administration or Israel. The faults of the Bush administration and the state of Israel are very real, but a fair-minded assessment of those faults very quickly show that fascism has nothing to do with it. Only a handful of regimes in the world today could possibly be described as "fascist". When we identify our two political parties with the extremes of the political spectrum - socialism and fascism - we are discounting the rich "middle ground" policies that are actually being considered.

Who do I blame for this? I blame the Ann Coulters of the world who sell books by redefining words like "treason", "guilty", and "liberal". It's particularly sad because she makes her living as a writer who uses the English language every day - and yet her millions have been made from redefining hot-button words. At one time, "treason" meant betraying your country. Now it means betraying Coulter's idea of what the country should be. It's not the first time "treason" was defined that way. John Adams' Alien and Sedition Act had a similar interpretation of the word.

We should also blame people like Cindy Sheehan and the MoveOn.org crowd, who take perhaps legitimate concerns about the war in Iraq and superimpose language of fascism, Nazis, and "blood for oil" on the issue. MoveOn.org has also committed what we might call the "Coulter Fallacy" of assuming that betrayal consists of turning your back on a very specific interpretation what the county should look like. Recall the full page New York Times ads that MoveOn.org ran about "General Betray Us", mocking Gen. Petraeus and accusing him of betrayal. MoveOn.org had several good, legitimate points to make that where very critical of Petraeus - as Coulter surely did about the historical treatment of Sen. McCarthy - but they both chose an irresponsible short-cut. They chose to make their point by distorting language and the meaning of words.

I'm not trying to say that catchy titles are bad. But when you write titles, you have to consider how you're using words. Did General Petraeus "betray" us, or was he unobjective and misleading to Congress? Wouldn't it have been better to say "General Petraeus is Misleading Congress about the War in Iraq"? It's still certainly accusatory and eye catching. But presumably the word "misleading" is more defensible than "betrayal". The same goes with Coulter. Instead of "Treason" (my understanding is that she argues that liberals, as a group, are basically traitors to their country), she could have used the title "Ungrateful Whiners". It would capture what she's trying to say about the slander of Sen. McCarthy's record and her views on liberals without accusing them of being traitors - an accusation which is clearly false.

In conclusion, we all need to refamiliarize ourselves with Orwell's "Politics and the English Language". I'll leave the reader with a line from the conclusion of that piece:

"I have not here been considering the literary use of language, but merely language as an instrument for expressing and not for concealing or preventing thought. Stuart Chase and others have come near to claiming that all abstract words are meaningless, and have used this as a pretext for advocating a kind of political quietism. Since you don't know what Fascism is, how can you struggle against Fascism? One need not swallow such absurdities as this, but one ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end."