The Hipcrime Vocab European Tour

Thank you to all of the new members who have joined up in the last few days. When I began this blog a few years ago, I was unsure if anyone would read it. Now I am truly humbled whenever I glance at the right-hand column and see your lovely faces (avatars?). And thanks to all the wonderful comments and feedback.

So I feel a bit guilty taking a vacation now. But I’ve decided to take a leap and will be spending a few weeks in Europe. Why? Well, because I can. Maybe it’s a mid-life crisis, but I’ve got enough money saved up, and a lot of vacation time to burn, and well, I could get hit by a bus tomorrow, so why hold on to it? Science tells us that the surest way to change money into happiness is to buy experiences. It’s a bit painful depleting the savings, but I’d rather do it now, before airline travel becomes an even more expensive luxury. It’s a lifelong goal to see all these places I’ve only read about, and who knows if I’ll have the opportunity to again.

I’ll also be experiencing the sharing economy first-hand – most of my places to stay have been booked through airbnb. We’ll see how that goes. I don’t know what, if anything I will be able to post. I’m travelling light, so I’m not sure what if any Internet access I will have. So feel free to browse the back catalog during by absence. Half the time I don’t even remember what I wrote when I go back and reread it. I meant to set up some posts and write a link dump, but, ah, the best laid plans…

I doubt I have any readers on the continent, but if anyone wants to meet up, send an email. Hopefully I’ll be able to check it. I’ll be in Paris Thursday, May 9th through Sunday. Monday I’m taking the TGV to Milan, where I’ll spend the day Tuesday. Then it’s off to Bologna for most of that week, with side trips to Venice and nearby towns. The following Sunday I’ll head to Florence for the first half of the week, then Thursday to Rome, where I’ll be flying out of on Sunday, May 26. I’ll be back in the U.S. on Memorial Day.

I can’t wait to see Italy. As you can tell from the posts here, I’m a Roman history nut, so I can’t describe how excited I am to actually be in the actual land of the Romans. And, of course, I’ll be looking at lots of architecture. Believe it or not, I’ve never spent a significant period of time in a non-United States culture (except in high school for a couple of weeks in Mexico), so I hope to learn a lot.

P.S. If you want to learn stuff for a couple of hours, Mark Shepherd taught my Permaculture class and I had the privilege of visiting his farm last summer. He's a true inspiration:



And for another couple of hours of listening, check out this music from ancient Rome:



Ciao and à bientôt!

The Gift of Poverty

Someone asked me recently what actions I have taken based on the types of things I write about here. To answer that, first I'd like to digress a bit.

Back when Roberto Benigni won the Oscar for Life Is Beautiful, there was one phrase he used that struck me at the time, and I have remembered it ever since. He thanked his parents for "the gift of poverty."

The gift of poverty?

Now the reason that phrase struck me so hard is that I could not believe anyone could see poverty as a gift. For me it has been a curse. All my life I have lived with people who have more than me. Sure, many people have less, and I know that intellectually, but the way our minds work, we judge ourselves by our peer group and our immediate surroundings. The fact that people in Africa or Central America live without running water does not register if you live in a city in the American Midwest.

Poverty put me in debt from an early age. Poverty meant that I was bullied and abused in school. Poverty meant that I grew up in rentals with loud downstairs neighbors across from a housing project and next to a cement factory (seriously, I could write a good Blues song about it). Poverty meant I had no dates in high school. Poverty meant I had little choice in choosing a college. Poverty meant my car would break down before it was paid off, and I had to drive without insurance to drive at all. Poverty meant I could not travel the world as a young man they way I wanted, for fear of debt collectors. Poverty meant I could not quit jobs I didn't like, or get decent vacations or benefits.

Poverty meant that I could not get an advanced degree, and my career would suffer. Even in the professional world, you work twice as hard for half as much as the people around you. They live lifestyles you could only dream about. They give their kids every advantage you can imagine. It's a very different world from the one I grew up in. I often say that I feel like I'm behind enemy lines in the class war. The principal I work for, a true class warrior and fanatical Republican, promotes only those who know the "secret handshake" of casual privilege - the loud and boastful self-promoters who have that easy air of confidence that comes from a family background of money and connections. The rest are little more than galley slaves. And let's not even talk about my personal life, which is isolating and lonely. Yes, it's true, women don't like to marry outside of their class, either.

So to me, poverty took my life away from me. I'm never going to get those years back (I'll be 40 this year). So that phrase struck me as so profoundly opposite of my experience, that I could not even wrap my head around it.

You won't hear things like this in the mainstream media. People like me are not in the mainstream media, so you need to keep in mind what the background is of those people when you listen to their pronouncements. That's why they talk about things like the improving jobs report and rising stock prices, and obsess about things like gay marriage and guns in schools.  They live in a bubble of privilege, and always have. To them, we're just an anonymous mass in flyover country. I recommend tuning them out entirely. I hope that bloggers like me, ordinary people who actually live among you - can provide a useful corrective. I think we have  a better idea of what's going on.

But as I got older, I began to understand a little bit what he meant. You see, when you start with very little, it has a couple of effects. One, and it's a cliche but it's true, is that you have to work hard for literally everything you have. You have to be smart, because you can't be stupid. There is no safety net for people like me, no rich parent to bail you out of your mistakes, just the hard hammer coming down on you in a society with no other ultimate purpose than for hard men to make as much money as possible by breaking workers at the wheel. You quickly develop an awfully dark view of human society, one that I still carry with me.

And you don't have the sense of entitlement that you see in so many people around you. People of my grandparents' era had much nicer living standards than people today (even without iPods), but they never felt it was something they deserved. Their grandchildren, however, feel entitled to a comfortable middle-class life. They feel they deserve a comfortable office job with fancy benefits, and that they need a big house in a good school district with a nice lawyer foyer, a new minivan to chauffeur their children to their copious extracurricular activities, Netflix, cable TV, ski vacations, and the like; and they feel they deserve all this because they work harder or are somehow better than the Mexicans tearing up sod in front of the building or cooking their omelettes. I can tell you that many coworkers refuse to really spend the time learning new skills or new software because they have risen up the ladder by virtue of their status, so really, why should they bother? By contrast, people like me have to learn these things just to have a job at all. Getting ahead is not really a concern; your entire life is lived in survival mode.

But mostly, you realize there really is nothing to lose. Because only when you think there's something to lose do you act to preserve it. When you're poor, everything is a gift, so you feel no particular desire to hold onto it. All you have, in the end, is yourself and your relationships. This is the message of spiritual disciplines worldwide. This is why religious people give everything away. Put another way, it's all gravy, or as Scarface put it, "every day above ground is a good day."

I've often been struck by how much of the Peak Oil scene is an upper middle class phenomenon. The Mexicans in the aisles of MiSuper Foods or rolling ice cream trucks down my street probably have no concept of Peak Oil or collapse and don't care. And people have often noted the lack of African-Americans in the Peak Oil movement. In many places like Detroit, the collapse happened a long time ago and is old news. Peak oil just doesn't register. When they grow urban gardens, it's because they need jobs even more than they need oil. I think there is a lesson in that. As I often say, if you want to know America's future, look at Detroit.

When I lost my job after September 11 (I was a Web programmer) and had to sell all my possessions and move home, I realized how totally useless all this "stuff" was, and I permanently lost any desire to buy or accumulate anything. After all, that stuff didn't save me, did it? Besides, one fire could destroy everything you own in an hour, anyway. When you talk to people who have lost everything in a fire, often times they express the realization that their stuff didn't matter, and they often do not repurchase what they had before. If you realize this without a fire or job loss, you will be very much ahead of the game. I still buy things, of course, but I think really long and hard about it. And I don't buy anything I am not prepared to lose or have stolen tomorrow.

So the simple answer to the reader's question is: nothing. Why should I? Why am I so different than the other 315 million Americans, or 7 billion inhabitants of the planet that I need saving? I live my life from day to day, that's all. I don't worry. What happens, happens. This is that attitude the ancients cultivated, and hunter-gatherers for that matter. And I recommend it to anyone. You'll be much happier. As Steve Jobs put it in his famous speech, the knowledge that you're going to die someday should disabuse you of the notion that you have anything to lose.

It’s like death. Admitting your own mortality can take a huge load off your chest. It helps you focus on what you, personally, can and cannot do, with what you really want to do with your life. Any fighter knows that no matter how tough the opposition, you can't spend all your time in a defensive crouch. You miss out on life that way. Yes, I see what's going on, and I write about it. But I am not afraid or worried at all.

I think some people's minds are overly attuned to danger and threats. It has to do with an overactive amygdala, something that was probably beneficial on the ancestral environment. I recognize this tendency in myself. It's the opposite of the complacency and blind optimism so many people live with. but of course, neither extreme is good. I suspect a lot of my readers might have the same tendency. But of course, like the optimist, it's easy to take it too far. So if you , like me, recognize this tendency in yourself, it might be a good idea to observe your own thoughts, and gain a measure of control over them. Perhaps you are overreacting, after all. Meditation is helpful for this. Maybe take some time away from it all (even from here - I won't mind ;), go for a walk, garden, play with your kids, pick up dames, whatever. Look out your window. Right now as I write this, it's a nice spring day and the sun is shining. There is something to be said for that. As Buddhists point out, this is the only true way to experience life. Worrying is just paying for a bill that hasn't come due.

There is a good part in this in interview with Noah Raford about the attitude his colleague from Africa had, which sums up my views pretty well:

Back before Y2K I was really freaking out a bit and had a year’s supply of food all stored up, gas cached away, etc. I was telling people to buy gold, learn to hunt, whatever. I thought that could be the end. And mind you, it might have been if we hadn’t figured it out before hand and poured billions of dollars into fixing it. A lot of people like to dismiss it because we fixed it. But that wasn’t like the UFO story. This was a documented, observable bug that really could have caused some serious damage if we didn’t fix it in time. But thankfully we did.

Anyway, while I was preparing for this, I was talking to a Ghanaian friend of mind, from Ghana in West Africa. He grew up with power outages, civil wars, water shortages, etc.

His responds was, “Ah, worst case scenario I starve to death. So what?”

I’ll never forget that. It sounds crass or fatalistic or something, but there is a wisdom in that statement. It’s not like he was giving up and volunteering to die. Quite the opposite. He had life experiences that taught him what he could and could not control, what he should and shouldn’t worry about. And this acceptance gave him a sense of realism that is really quite liberating.

So what? Cultivate a "so what" attitude. That's the attitude of people who are, or have been, poor. Be prepared to lose it all. That doesn't mean you should seek out that outcome, of course, but you must make peace with it.

That, then, is the final gift of poverty.

We're all caught in something larger than ourselves. It’s not like any of us can prevent collapse from happening. Not you, not me, not Barack Obama, not Bill Gates, not Ben Bernanke, not the Pope. No one is charge anymore. It’s just too big, too fast, and too complex. The best we can do is to live though it, the way so many of our ancestors have done. One of the reasons I like history so much is that it puts everything in perspective. People  throughout history have made enormous contributions, and lived valuable, meaningful lives with just a fraction of what you and I possess. People in the nineteenth century often had no heat or running water. They lived in a world full of pollution and injustices like debtors' prisons, robber barons and slavery. Yet look at what they did. Look at what people do every day across this planet with so much less than us. Get some perspective.

The French have a word debroullier. It's the art of always landing on one's feet, of surviving by the skin of your teeth, of overcoming odds by breaking the rules and slipping between the cracks. The French call this "System D." We should take note. System D ought to be in the toolkit of every Peak Oil aware person. I also recall the advice the Sokka Gakkai Buddhists give to their followers: be prepared to do the things that others don't want to do. if that is your attitude you will do well in whatever society we end up living in.

Philosophically, I would also recommend reading the Stoic philosophers. It seems to be that Stoicism, born of an earlier civilization undergoing collapse, is the ideal philosophy for the Peak Oil era. Try starting with Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, and the Enchiridion (the 'manual') by Epictetus (it's practically a pamphlet). I'd also recommend "Man's Search for Meaning," by Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl.

Having said all that, I'll include a few more practical and prosaic things I have done. Really, it's nothing more than what everyone else has been saying. When I first read Ran Prieur's famous essay, How to Drop Out (like everyone else, it's how I found his site), I realized that I had independently arrived at many of his conclusions. You don't need to completely drop out; just live on the margins and depend on mainstream society as little as possible. Artists have been experts at this - make friends with some if you can. Buy a bicycle and learn to fix it. Learn to cook good food at home, including beans and rice. Invest in a grill and slow cooker if you're a meat-eater like me. Try and get a skill where you can paid on the side. Keep out of debt. Make friends with people who can help you. Reciprocity is fundamental to our species, and it will work when the big systems fail. Like I said, nothing you won't read on the Archdruid Report or Club Orlov.

I'm fanatically allergic to anything I cannot walk away from. I don't like long-term contracts, and for a long time it kept me from having a cell phone (I now have a no-contract phone). I don't have Netflix. I obviously have Internet service (reluctantly). Everything I do for entertainment is via the Web or the local library. I don't play computer games - I'd rather spend my time creating a blog post, reading a good book, or architectural design.

I buy most things second-hand or at rummage sales except clothes. My entire house is furnished with flea market items. This does two things - not only is it cheaper, but it keeps stuff out of a landfill and prevents the need to add new stuff to the world. 99 percent of the stuff the human race needs has already been manufactured, let's use the last of the oil wisely, eh? Plus, old stuff is often of superior quality.

I shop at farmer's markets, ethnic groceries, and buy directly from local farms. Yes, I pay more, but that accomplishes two things - it gives you better health, and it gives money to people who are farming the earth responsibly. The more money people like that earn, the more people will be doing it. Paying more for good, sustainable food is better than any charity - it is actually shifting the way we do things via the free market. And that's a good thing. If it helps, think of the extra money as charitable donations to promote things like organic agriculture and responsible husbandry.

Unemployment pays one-third of your previous income, so it stands to reason that you need to live on one-third of your income, whatever that is. I studiously do so, and bank the rest.

Last year, I did something I never thought I would do. I bought a house. My savings weren't earning anything in the bank, so I put it as down-payment on a house because I was tired of being a rent mule. I thought of buying a house outright, but I still couldn't find an acceptable one in my price range. But my large down payment (40 percent) means that my house is cheaper than even the cheapest one bedroom rental in my city. I pay as much of the mortgage as I can to build equity in the house. And the repairs I make are all with an eye to energy efficiency - I put in a new furnace to take advantage of the credits being offered (it was a very old furnace). Luckily, I'm well insulated, but if you're not, insulate and weatherize first. Then think about energy independence - wood stoves, solar hot water, photovoltaics, etc.

The way I see it, you're always going to need a roof over your head. And say what you will about gold, but the value of a house truly never goes to zero. I'm lucky I live in a very affordable rust-belt city, where housing prices are reasonable and have stabilized. And my house is comfortable but humble - even with this year's increased assessment, it is still assessed at under six figures by the city. The best part - I can literally walk to everything I need and bike or bus everywhere else. I realize not everyone is this lucky, though, as jobs change, etc. But often house location is a valuable tradeoff for price.

I've set up my life so that I can purchase food and shelter even while working for minimum wage, since this will be what most of the wonderful new jobs our leaders are creating will pay. That includes my mortgage payment. I highly recommend this for everyone. Anything above that you can bank or invest.

The stuff in Mr. Money Moustache also sums up a lot of my advice. I don't think you need to be afraid of investments or stick your money in a mattress. I think banks will remain solvent and some investments will still increase in value. Again, as always, don't gamble with what you can't afford to lose. I have not invested my savings, because I want them liquid in case of job loss (the house being the exception). My money is in my credit union, and I went through them to finance my house. Keep you money out of the big banks. I think savings in credit unions are safe, so that would be my primary method, with investments being above and beyond that. I don't think FDIC will fail, remember, we can always print money - we're doing enough of it already.

And definitely get involved in your community. Kompost Kids and Victory Garden Initiative are two I've been involved with in the past, but certainly your town is looking for help and volunteers, whether they are "officially" for peak oil or not. Homeless shelters and food banks are worth more in the coming collapse than cob ovens and windmills (not there's anything wrong with those). I roll my eyes at Transition Towns a little, because it seems like more of a networking group for upper class green liberals. What we really need are ways to get homeless people into foreclosed houses and jobs rather than solar panels or biodeisel at this point. As I've said, fossil fuels are still around; it's their cost that's going to kill us, along with their environmental impact. I think one of the benefits of gardening is that you realize how much of human life is dependent on the climate. Anyone who doesn't get that is not worth listening to.

Say what you will about religion, and I'm the harshest critic there is, but it often motivates people to help others. But you don't need religion for that. If Peak Oil aware people really rolled up their sleeves and got involved, rather than just endlessly pontificated about the apocalypse, we would really make a difference, and that is how movements are born, not blogs (yes, I'm damning myself here a bit too). Christianity took over the Western world not through its nonsensical theology, but because it gave people a helping hand in tough times. The Peak Oil movement needs to take a page from that. By doing so, people will start listening to us instead of the corporate media. Occupy is good start, but it's just a start.

I've said enough, I think. It seems as though poverty is a gift that more and more of us are going to receive, whether we want it or not. Seeing it, no making it, a gift is something that we can and should cultivate. And finally, I would close with the words of that great American sage, Kurt Vonnegut: "Goddamn it, you've got to be kind."

Twenty-First Century Stoic -- From Zen to Zeno: How I Became a Stoic (BoingBoing)

Drawing Blood: Being a Poor Person in America (Post Swag Poetics). I recognize a lot of my own story in this terrific essay.

Automation and the Resource Curse

Important article by Steve Randy Waldman at intefluidity. He has, I think, a significant insight. The increasing wave of automation (and globalization for that matter), has meant that Western industrialized nations are now becoming resource curse countries.

For years, economists have noted that countries with plentiful natural resources - fossil fuels being the most significant - are often corrupt, poor, and backward places. Think places like Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Libya or Nigeria. And often countries with poor natural resources - think Japan or South Korea or Ireland or Denmark - are relatively wealthy and well-governed. What's going on?

As Waldman tells it, countries with plentiful natural resources need only a small amount of people to extract the resource, meaning most people are superfluous to how the country makes its money. Wealth is produced not by business activity, but by ownership of the resource. That means a few things - the country does not develop its "human capital" like a resource poor country does. The leadership shares the proceeds of the resource among an "ownership class," who see themselves as "civilized," while those who lie outside of that class are increasingly seen as "uncivilized." They do not need to produce much domestically, because they can trade the natural resource for whatever goods they need from abroad. So most people are simply ignored, and even seen as a threat.

Automation acts as sort of a natural resource. The owners of automation, don't need us anymore - they can produce what they want with just a few workers, and the majority of us are superfluous to the economy. Thus 'human capital' is not developed - people are allowed to get poorer, education to atrophy, social services to be cut, health to decline, and infrastructure to decay. Wealth becomes concentrated into a hereditary ownership class based on automation rather than natural resources. Politics becomes corrupt too, more responsive to the needs of the ownership class and hostile to anyone outside of it looking for more bargaining power, much like a "banana republic." Thus, the pathologies of resource-poor countries become manifest in industrialized nations as well.

[Resource-rich countries have] valuable tradable goods the extraction of which requires a small numbers of workers relative to the size of the economy as a whole. [*] Goods like this create a very strong tension between private property and social welfare. In the mythology of capitalist economics, “as if by an invisible hand”, the self-interested pursuit of private wealth promotes the general welfare precisely because we all require one another’s help. The butcher slaughters her beasts and the baker sugars his cakes, each with an eye to their own profit. But the butcher needs her carbs and the baker likes his meat, so the end result of their self-interested selling is mutual aid rather than mere accumulation.

This logic breaks down in an economy dominated by a valuable natural resource. Yes, the miners require meat and mead, but if they are small in number relative to the rest of the population, that won’t cost them very much. They are few mouths to feed, and the not-miners are many and lack bargaining power. What makes happy capitalism work, the silent tendon of the mythologized hand, is a kind of balance between individuals’ desire to accumulate and their need for the assistance of others. If there exists a very valuable natural resource, and if that resource can be privately controlled, there is no balance. Self-interested agents drop their butchering and bakering, and try to gain control of the resource. No magic force turns that into a positive sum game. Unless there are “very strong institutions” — whatever that might mean — the pursuit of wealth becomes a game with winners and losers. The invisible hand can manage no more than to lift a middle finger.

The more resource-curse logic binds, the more likely as a technological matter that control over economic value will be concentrated among a relatively small fraction of the society. This leads to a greater separation of circumstance, between winners who perceive themselves and their communities as “civilized”, and losers exhibiting social pathologies that may be more effect than cause of disadvantage, but are nevertheless real, and usefully assist in reinforcing the arrangement’s legitimacy. Corruption and idealism become impossibly fused. Did Timothy Geithner “save the world”, or did he perpetuate the stranglehold of a particular extractive elite? He did both. He saved his world.

You also get circumstances where the society's wealth and resources are channeled into protection of elites' wealth rather than human capital development. Thus you get the American phenomenon where we spend more on prisions then on schools, and a blank check is handed to the national security state even as more and more Americans lack jobs or adequate health care. Again, very similar to a banana republic. Note that Waldman points out the demonization of the "uncivilized" in resource-rich societies, and we're seeing the same thing here - the poor are lazy, they drop out of school, they have babies too early, etc., never mind the failing schools, lack of jobs and job training, crushing debts. etc.

But his footnote is even more intersting. He notes that they key is bargaining power. In countries which need just a fraction of the workforce, most workers have no bargaining power, i.e. the ability to demand higher wages as their productivity goes up. He notes that the period of industrialization we have just been through was an anomaly in human affairs - it needed a lot of workers for economic production. Take that away, and what you have looks a lot like feudalism - poor and desperate workers unable to achieve bargaining power or exercise control over production.

It’s probably more accurate, although depressing, to qualify this, and rewrite it as “a small numbers of workers capable of achieving bargaining power relative to the size of the economy as a whole.” Feudal economies, in which the majority of people work to produce agricultural goods, look a lot like resource-curse economies, even though numerical involvement in production is not concentrated. Bargaining power, defined as the ability to assert control over production, remains very unequal. If you define the resource curse this way, you end up with “cursedness” as the normal state of human affairs, and it becomes more sensible to talk about the “industrial age blessing”, a fleeting mix of social and technological conditions under which large numbers of workers contributed to production through processes that required scale and coordination. These circumstances allowed unusually broad segments of the population to organize and achieve bargaining power, increasing the scope of economic prosperity and the impetus to mass production that economists eventually label “growth”.

I think this is a very important insight. People assume the way things were is the way things will always be, but the fundamental cicumstances have changed. A lot of people have compared our current conditions to a sort of Neofeudalism, and based on the above, we can see why this is the case. Are automation and globalism driving us toward Neofeudalism?

Peak Democracy

Fascinating article on Aeon magazine. I think it has a very important point - to understand what's happening we need to think about the very fundamental notions of democracy, the nation state, and industrialism and ask ourselves if these things have a future. I think one thing is certain: democracy as we classically understand it no longer exists. As the byline to the article puts it, "Governments now answer to business, not voters. Mainstream parties grow ever harder to distinguish. Is democracy dead?" I'm going to go ahead and answer that question: yes, it is. Now what?

[Colin] Crouch sees the history of democracy as an arc. In the beginning, ordinary people were excluded from decision-making. During the 20th century, they became increasingly able to determine their collective fate through the electoral process, building mass parties that could represent their interests in government. Prosperity and the contentment of working people went hand in hand. Business recognised limits to its power and answered to democratically legitimated government. Markets were subordinate to politics, not the other way around.

At some point shortly after the end of the Second World War, democracy reached its apex in countries such as Britain and the US. According to Crouch, it has been declining ever since. Places such as Italy had more ambiguous histories of rise and decline, while others still, including Spain, Portugal and Greece, began the ascent much later, having only emerged from dictatorship in the 1970s. Nevertheless, all of these countries have reached the downward slope of the arc. The formal structures of democracy remain intact. People still vote. Political parties vie with each other in elections, and circulate in and out of government. Yet these acts of apparent choice have had their meaning hollowed out. The real decisions are taken elsewhere. We have become squatters in the ruins of the great democratic societies of the past.

Neo-liberalism, which was supposed to replace grubby politics with efficient, market-based competition, has led not to the triumph of the free market but to the birth of new and horrid chimeras. The traditional firm, based on stable relations between employer, workers and customers, has spun itself out into a complicated and ever-shifting network of supply relationships and contractual forms. The owners remain the same but their relationship to their employees and customers is very different. For one thing, they cannot easily be held to account. As the American labour lawyer Thomas Geoghegan and others have shown, US firms have systematically divested themselves of inconvenient pension obligations to their employees, by farming them out to subsidiaries and spin-offs. Walmart has used hands-off subcontracting relationships to take advantage of unsafe working conditions in the developing world, while actively blocking efforts to improve industry safety standards until 112 garment workers died in a Bangladesh factory fire in November last year. Amazon uses subcontractors to employ warehouse employees in what can be unsafe and miserable working conditions, while minimising damage to its own brand.

Instead of clamping down on such abuses, the state has actually tried to ape these more flexible and apparently more efficient arrangements, either by putting many of its core activities out to private tender through complex contracting arrangements or by requiring its internal units to behave as if they were competing firms. As one looks from business to state and from state to business again, it is increasingly difficult to say which is which. The result is a complex web of relationships that are subject neither to market discipline nor democratic control. Businesses become entangled with the state as both customer and as regulator. States grow increasingly reliant on business, to the point where they no longer know what to do without its advice. Responsibility and accountability evanesce into an endlessly proliferating maze of contracts and subcontracts. As Crouch describes it, government is no more responsible for the delivery of services than Nike is for making the shoes that it brands. The realm of real democracy — political choices that are responsive to voters’ needs — shrinks ever further.

Politicians, meanwhile, have floated away, drifting beyond the reach of the parties that nominally chose them and the voters who elected them. They simply don’t need us as much as they used to. These days, it is far easier to ask business for money and expertise in exchange for political favours than to figure out the needs of a voting public that is increasingly fragmented and difficult to understand anyway. Both the traditional right, which always had strong connections to business, and the new left, which has woven new ties in a hurry, now rely on the private sector more than on voters or party activists. As left and right grow ever more disconnected from the public and ever closer to one another, elections become exercises in branding rather than substantive choice.

Crouch was writing Post-Democracy 10 years ago, when most people thought that things were going quite well. As long as the economy kept delivering jobs and growth, voters didn’t seem to mind about the hollowing out of democracy. Left-of-centre parties weren’t worried either: they responded to the new incentives by trying to articulate a ‘Third Way’ of market-like initiatives that could deliver broad social benefits. Crouch's lessons have only really come home in the wake of the economic crisis.

The problem that the centre-left now faces is not that it wants to make difficult or unpopular choices. It is that no real choices remain. It is lost in the maze, able neither to reach out to its traditional bases of support (which are largely dying or alienated from it anyway) nor to propose any grand new initiatives, the state no longer having the tools to implement them. When the important decisions are all made outside of democratic politics, the centre-left can only keep going through the ritualistic motions of democracy, all the while praying for intercession.

Post-democracy is what we're living in. Now what?

Perhaps, over time, they will figure out how to engage with the mundane task of slow drilling through hard boards that is everyday politics. Perhaps, too, the systems of unrule governing the world economy, gravely weakened as they are, will fail and collapse of their own accord, opening the space for a new and very different dispensation. Great changes seem unlikely until they happen; only in retrospect do they look inevitable. Yet if some reversal in the order of things is waiting to unfold, it is not apparent to us now. Post-democracy has trapped the left between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born. We may be here for some time.

Henry Farrell - On Post-Democracy. Aeon Magazine

As vested interests capture the state, and the government becomes a wholly-owned subsidiary of corporate America, people simply abandon the state as a means of producing beneficial change (unlike in the Great Depression). Their voices are not heard, and they are increasingly powerless, while the authorities live in an alternative universe where money and jobs are plentiful, totally disonnected from the people they "serve." Meanwhile, the media attempts to mollify us and keep us at each others' throats to prevent any kind of concensus. And all the while, the system is collapsing around us, leading to fear and paranoia. It's an ugly situation indeed.

Related: The Rise of the Corporate State (FireDogLake) best part:

We see how that socialization works for corporate fodder. Work hard and keep your nose clean, and maybe you can make a decent living. Or maybe we’ll fire you because we want to make more money or because we don’t like you. Or because we checked your credit score and we didn’t like it. Or because you didn’t wear enough flair. The random outcomes keep people off-balance, and working harder and harder, like perseverating pecking pigeons.

Perhaps you thought your technical and professional skills would protect you, but that’s not true, as all too many excellent computer coders, engineers, accountants and lawyers have learned. It’s no different for many professionals in private practice, and even for middle level administrators. The plain fact is that your success or failure doesn’t depend on your skills, but on whether you get lucky in your selection of a career and an employer.

Has Peak Oil Been Cancelled?

That seems to be the subject of a few recent articles:

What If We Never Run Out of Oil (The Atlantic)

The Deluge: We Are Entering a New Era of Fossil Fuels (Pacific Standard)

And Matt Yglesias, of all people, supplies a useful corrective:

Long story short, we're in nothing like the peak oil nightmare that a naive forward projection of the 2003-08 hockey stick would have led you to expect. But we've hardly conquered oil scarcity either. New discoveries are having trouble keeping pace with rising car ownership in Asia and declining production from many established oil sources. Meanwhile, unconventional oil is coming onto the market in part because oil is scarce and expensive, which makes it profitable to extract hard-to-extract oil. That's better for the economy than if we didn't find any, but it also means we haven't returned to the 1990s oil bounty and most likely never will.

Natural Resource Scarcity Is A Real Thing (Slate) See also - Oil Supply and Demand to 2025 (Early Warning). I'm a little wary of listening to some of the major Peak Oil pundits as they have invested so much into the concept that they will defend it at all costs to avoid looking foolish. I think the reality is, we really do have a serious situation on our hands. The very fact that we are fracking and planning tar sands pipelines seems to me incontrovertible proof that Peak Oil is real and happening. The major questions are, is there enough "nonconventional oil" to offset the loss of conventional fields and keep growth going, and what effects will this have on the climate.

I think two things are hurting the optimists, though. We need to continue growing exponentially in the developing world as well to keep the capitalism Ponzi scheme running, and the new sources of fuel are more expensive (remember EROEI). But I don't think the shelves will be empty of food and taps running dry of water anytime soon. It seems like economic disintegration means we'll be living sub-third world lifestyles even if there is plenty of oil and natural gas for the time being. And besides, even if there are enough futile dodges to put off the day of reckoning, that day will still come.

Is The New Economy Off The Books?

What happens to workers who drop out of the labor force? (Sober Look)

1. Older workers retiring earlier.
2. Young workers going back to school.
3. Getting paid under the table.
4. Disability.

Whether it's the spouse, the underground economy or the federal government providing the income, there is "life" after the unemployment checks stop coming. Meanwhile, the "official" labor participation rate keeps falling.

Related: The Underground Recovery, James Suroweicki, The New Yorker:

The increasing importance of the gray economy isn’t only a reaction to the downturn: studies suggest that the sector has been growing steadily over the years. In 1992, the I.R.S. estimated that the government was losing $80 billion a year in income-tax revenue. Its estimate for 2006 was $385 billion—almost five times as much (and still an underestimate, according to Feige’s numbers). The U.S. is certainly a long way from, say, Greece, where tax evasion is a national sport and the shadow economy accounts for twenty-seven per cent of G.D.P. But the forces pushing people to work off the books are powerful. Feige points to the growing distrust of government as one important factor. The desire to avoid licensing regulations, which force people to jump through elaborate hoops just to get a job, is another. Most important, perhaps, are changes in the way we work. As Baumohl put it, “For businesses, the calculus of hiring has fundamentally changed.” Companies have got used to bringing people on as needed and then dropping them when the job is over, and they save on benefits and payroll taxes by treating even full-time employees as independent contractors. Casual employment often becomes under-the-table work; the arrangement has become a way of life in the construction industry. In a recent California survey of three hundred thousand contractors, two-thirds said they had no direct employees, meaning that they did not need to pay workers’-compensation insurance or payroll taxes. In other words, for lots of people off-the-books work is the only job available.

Sudhir Venkatesh, a sociologist at Columbia and the author of a study of the underground economy, thinks that many workers, particularly younger ones, have become comfortable with casual work arrangements. “We have seen the rise of a new generation of people who are much more used to doing things in a freelance way,” he said. “That makes them more amenable to unregulated work. And they seem less concerned about security, which they equate with rigidity.” The growing importance of services in the economy is also crucial. Tutors, nannies, yoga teachers, housecleaners, and the like are often paid in cash, which is hard for the I.R.S. to track. In a 2006 study, the economist Catherine Haskins found that between eighty and ninety-seven per cent of nannies were paid under the table.

Here's the story of one labor-force dropout: an interview with the Mr. Money Moustache guy. Click through to the interview. I link to the Slate article because there should be some interesting comments. I'll just note that I've followed nearly every proscription he has - paid down debt, no cable TV, walk or bike, don't buy useless junk, etc. I am nowhere near retiring, however. For one, I was heavily in debt for college, and when I graduated I made $25,000 with a lengthy commute on top of it, not $77,000 with no debt. And I have not invested my money, as for most years I had no disposable income, and I need access to money in case of job loss. So I think his circumstances are highly unusual. Still, there are some good tips here.

The Perils of Progress

Continuing on what seems to be a theme this week:

Edward Tenner's new book, Why Things Bite Back, is subtitled Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences. And that, in a nutshell, is Tenner's message. When we apply our technologies to the world around us, things do indeed bite back.

In other episodes (e.g., 81, 457) I talk about the way a new safety device lulls us into carelessness and increases accidents -- how pesticides and germicides breed new and tougher insects and diseases. Tenner's idea isn't new, but he does a fine job of rearticulating and re-emphasizing it. Tenner's Revenge Effect means that, if we mess with the natural order of things, things bite back.

He takes care not to be simplistic in his examples. New technologies certainly do improve the quality of our lives. Medical procedures have reduced the time we spend in hospitals and hastened recoveries. Yet the number of procedures and medications a patient undergoes has risen astronomically. Laparoscopic gall bladder removals, for example, are much less invasive than old-fashioned surgery. The result is, far more people are having their gall bladders removed and insurance costs are rising. Worse still, we now find surgeons making more mistakes when they use a grainy fiber-optic image on a TV screen to guide miniaturized instruments.

Medicine has been shot through with routine hi-tech medications, catheterizations, injections, IVs ... Errors in a tiny percentage of these procedures cause widespread harm because so many are done.

We suffer so many revenge effects in medicine because the human system is terribly complex and still poorly understood. Two hospital procedures combine to produce effects that wouldn't be produced by either one alone. Three or more procedures can lay impossible demands on any doctor's knowledge of side effects.

The same thing carries over into engineering systems as they become more complex. Complex devices that interact with our human system always produce revenge effects. Tenner talks about computers -- the way they've made our work routines less straightforward than handling paper. We lose enormous time and money learning software that never stands the test of time. Meanwhile, eye strain, neck strain, and carpal tunnel syndrome all increase.

So does this mean we should reject new medicine and turn away from computers? Hardly! New technology is bred in our bones. The day we quit pioneering, we quit being human.

The answer is as subtle as the problem itself. Nature demands a wearing-in process. We have to be alert to early warnings and ready to back off. Wanting too much is what causes us to ignore those warnings and react too slowly. And every time we fail to listen, nature will forcefully get our attention.

Things Bite Back - John Lienhard, Engines of Our Ingenuity

In 2010 we saw how even the most secure “air gap” can be breached when the Iranian nuclear reprocessing plant at Natanz was infected with the Stuxnet virus. This appears to have been achieved when an operator plugged in an infected USB stick to an isolated PC that was used to communicate with the embedded computers that controlled and reported upon the centrifuges producing enriched uranium. The Stuxnet virus simultaneously caused the centrifuges to malfunction whilst reporting that all was well to the operators.  Leave a USB stick lying around with what looks like a free game, and you’d be surprised how many users will plug it into the nearest computer.

Since this incident there has been a growing realisation that various elements of a critical national infrastructure are similarly vulnerable.  They use similar, if not identical, embedded computer systems as were used at Natanz. The initial thought was one of defending the realm against foreign aggressors. After all, it was an obvious way to cripple a country without firing a physical shot. Why launch missiles if you can switch out the lights and turn off the water.  It’s cheaper too. So much so that this form of attack has become a great leveller, allowing small nations to potentially punch well above their weight.

For a while there were detractors who have said that this type of threat is nonsense, and that it simply could not happen.  However, tests were already being conducted at research institutes such as the Idaho national laboratories (known as Aurora) by the time Stuxnet was released.  Such tests showed that access to these SCADA systems could not only turn off equipment that we all rely upon but it could cause the equipment to self-destruct.

Hence, embedded computing needs to be kept updated and have protection just as much as the computers with which we are all more familiar. Unfortunately, keeping embedded computers updated can be problematic. Perversely, although they may be vulnerable to remote attacks, updating their software (known as firmware if it cannot be accessed routinely by a remote computer) can require visits to the physical devices.  This takes time and effort, and when coupled with a history of complacency about their risk of attack, many systems remain vulnerable for significant periods after a vulnerability is reported.

The Unexpected risks of Intelligent Infrastructure (Scientific American)

What’s inside your new walls might be even more dangerous. While the flame retardants commonly used in sofas, chairs, carpets, love seats, curtains, baby products, and even TVs, sounded like a good idea when widely introduced in the 1970s, they turn out to pose hidden dangers that we’re only now beginning to grasp. Researchers have, for instance, linked one of the most common flame retardants, polybrominated diphenyl ethers, to a wide variety of potentially undesirable health effects including thyroid disruption, memory and learning problems, delayed mental and physical development, lower IQ, and the early onset of puberty.

Other flame retardants like Tris (1,3-dichloro-2-propyl) phosphate have been linked to cancer. As the CDC has documented in an ongoing study of the accumulation of hazardous materials in our bodies, flame retardants can now be found in the blood of “nearly all” of us.

Nor are these particular chemicals anomalies. Lurking in the cabinet under the kitchen sink, for instance, are window cleaners and spot removers that contain known or suspected cancer-causing agents. The same can be said of cosmetics in your makeup case or of your plastic water bottle or microwavable food containers. Most recently, Bisphenol A (BPA), the synthetic chemical used in a variety of plastic consumer products, including some baby bottles, epoxy cements, the lining of tuna fish cans, and even credit card receipts, has been singled out as another everyday toxin increasingly found inside all of us.

Recent studies indicate that its effects are as varied as they are distressing. As Sarah Vogel of the Environmental Defense Fund has written, “New research on very-low-dose exposure to BPA suggests an association with adverse health effects, including breast and prostate cancer, obesity, neurobehavioral problems, and reproductive abnormalities.”

Teflon, or perfluorooctanoic acid, the heat-resistant, non-stick coating that has been sold to us as indispensable for pots and pans, is yet another in the list of substances that may be poisoning us, almost unnoticed. In addition to allowing fried eggs to slide right onto our plates, Teflon is in all of us, according to the Science Advisory Board of the Environmental Protection Agency, and “likely to be carcinogenic in humans.”

These synthetic materials are just a few of the thousands now firmly embedded in our lives and our bodies. Most have been deployed in our world and put in our air, water, homes, and fields without being studied at all for potential health risks, nor has much attention been given to how they interact in the environments in which we live, let alone our bodies. The groups that produce these miracle substances — like the petrochemical, plastics, and rubber industries, including major companies like Exxon, Dow, and Monsanto — argue that, until we can definitively prove the chemical products slowly leaching into our bodies are dangerous, we have no “right,” and they have no obligation, to remove them from our homes and workplaces. The idea that they should prove their products safe before exposing the entire population to them seems to be a foreign concept.

You are a guniea pig: americans exposed to biohazards in uncontrolled experiment (Naked Capitalism) see also: Roundup, An Herbicide, Could Be Linked To Parkinson's, Cancer And Other Health Issues, Study Shows (Reuters)

Economics as a Religion - Losing Our Faith

It stands to reason that as the power of the Catholic Church was replaced with economic doctrine, that doctrine can in turn be replaced. That is, we can learn to lose our "faith" in economic reason as its tenets increasingly become unsound and contradicted by evidence.

And that crisis of faith is all around us. As I write this, it has emerged that a paper from two of the leading Cardinals of the economic priesthood used to defend "austerity" contained a number of sloppy mistakes, ruining their conclusions. Their research was accepted unquestioningly by the media and the establishment as revealed truth, but the error was uncovered by a 28 year old graduate student. One of the discredited economists is a member of the Harvard faculty and former IMF chief economist whose columns run in major publications. In other words, an ensconced member of the elite. Another elite economist recently declared that the financial system is increasingly run by sociopaths for their own benefit, while corrupting democratic politics. Another has been on a crusade to point out the debilitating effects of inequality. Numerous books are questioning the obsession with growth, various economists are questioning the orthodox versions of economic theory, and new organizations are talking about alternatives.

The analogy is often made to Thomas Kuhn's The Structures of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn was mainly talking about revolutions in the natural sciences, but his thinking also holds for the pseudoscience of economics. His point is that a "paradigm shift" must occur in which the entire world view is upended before progress can occur. This often happens, as Niels Bohr put it, "one funeral at a time," as people who conservatively hold to old ideas die off and new people who accept the new ideas come in. The classic case Kuhn analyzes is the displacement of the geocentric model of the universe, accepted since Ptolemy if not earlier, with the heliocentric model developed by Copernicus and championed by Galileo.

And the signs are all around us. While being told how "free trade" would make us all better off, cheap goods from overseas have eliminated American manufacturing, leaving in its wake minimum wage service jobs, with the result of the the American heartland becoming benighted wasteland of abandoned factories, decaying houses, crumbling schools, and drug dens, mired in unemployment, poverty, crime and hopelessness. Real median incomes have not budged in forty years and in recent years have actually declined, even with corporate profits at all-time highs and the rich being richer than ever before, all while prices of necessities (gas, housing, education, health care) continue to skyrocket. The American public has been told they need "more education" to compete, yet even with the best-educated workforce in history, mass unemployment stalks the land. Unemployment sits side-by-side with overwork. Houses sit abandoned in a country mired with homelessness and child poverty. Military and police spending continues to increase,along with social dysfunction. Overall happiness levels have gone down, not up, with a larger economy. Goods become shoddier every year. Obesity levels, diabetes, mental illness and autism are all increasing.  Austerity and shrinking government budgets have failed to bring back prosperity, nor have lower taxes. And we need not even discuss environmental destruction and pollution. Are we starting to lose our faith?

Over and over, the words of economists ring hollow, and they sit impotent as society crumbles around them. Meanwhile, the words of sociologists, who tell us how corrosive inequality is to society, and of natural scientists, who warn of an uninhabitable planet as we burn through non-renewable and irreplaceable resources, are ignored and marginalized. Protests have been ignited around the world against politicians who care more about balancing budgets and repaying bankers than citizens unable to find work, properly educate their children, heat their homes, run their businesses, access their medications, adequately feed themselves, or put a roof over their heads.

Is it time for a new paradigm? Maybe the Market is not infallible after all. Maybe enabling the rich does not bring about the best outcomes for all.  Maybe the absence of regulations or protectionism is not the path to prosperity. Maybe free trade is not all it's cracked up to be. Maybe markets aren't naturally headed toward equilibrium and maximizing utility. Maybe the rich have not "earned" their outsize wealth. Maybe the rich just get richer and the poor get poorer, forever.

We now know:

Rather than  a rational market headed towards equilibrium, the Market is a gambling parlour driven by emotions like greed and fear and subject to regular manias, bubbles, panics and crashes, not to mention outright manipulation.

Corporations instinctively seek monopolization and control of entire markets to increase efficiency and maximize profits through measures like the vertical and horizontal integration of markets.

Mergers, acquisitions, buyouts and business failures naturally lead to a small number of corporations controlling entire markets (banking and finance, automobiles, agricultural commodities, Internet and cell phone service, big-box retail, microchips, software, just to name a few). The big fish eat the little fish.

Humans are not rational, but emotional, and embedded in webs of reciprocity and mutual obligation.
Pecuniary gain is not the major, nor the sole, motivating factor for human effort and creativity. We want our work to be meaningful, fulfilling and helpful to others.

Monetary relationships are power relationships, and money influences and corrupts governments and undermines the regulatory atmosphere that we count on to manage the commons. All capitalism is "crony" capitalism, and "bad" capitalism always drives out "good." (Phillip's Law).

A rising tide does not lift all boats.

"Externalities" are the rule, not the exception; nearly every transaction in the economy affects other people who were not included in it, since everything is ultimately connected.

Rather than job creators, the wealthy are more often speculators, causing more destruction than creation. "Creative destruction" is often just a fancy economic term for looting.

Absent government controls, industries will engage in deceptive practices, collusion, price fixing, extortion, and rank profiteering. Rather than "free exchange," many businesses are predatory, such as the banking, healthcare and education cartels.

Debts always outgrow the "real" economy, since the real economy is constrained by the laws of thermodynamics, whereas debt grows exponentially forever. Market saturation and diminishing marginal returns means growth has to slow or end for most businesses.

More growth does not correlate to more happiness. Too much choice leads to dissatisfaction. Wants and needs are not the same, our appetites are not insatiable, and we quickly become accustomed and inured to any windfalls or setbacks.

Inequality is corrosive to a healthy, functioning society, a healthy, functioning democracy, and, increasingly, even a healthy, functioning economy.

Unregulated market activities are burning through resources at a unsustainable rate, and environmental destruction is increasingly undermining the very natural systems we depend upon for human survival.

Energy and material resource flows are the prime drivers of the economy and living standards, yet are completely ignored in economic theory, along with things like money creation, banking, debt, psychology, etc.

And then there is the fundamental value system that says productivism and maximizing wealth should be the only goal of society, that we are atomized rational utility maximizers, and that nature has no intrinsic value outside of human use. I think most people find these value judgements abhorrent, even as they implicitly accept them. I could go on, but I'll stop here.

No one knew what would came "after" the Catholic Church or the feudal system, or that anything could come after the Catholic Church and the feudal system. The supposedly hyperrationalist accounting regime that has managed the planet to date is failing, and I think even defenders of the system know it's no longer tenable. But, like the Church, they're fighting like hell to control the debate, to preserve their status, to marginalize their critics, and to make sure we believe that "there are no alternatives." As Adam Curtis put it:

One of the guiding beliefs of our consuming age is that we are all free and independent individuals. That we can choose to do pretty much what we want, and if we can't then it's bad.

But at the same time, co-existing alongside this, there is a completely different, parallel universe where we all seem meekly to do what those in power tell us to do. Ever since the economic crisis in 2008, millions of people have accepted cuts in all sorts of things - from real wages and living standards to benefits and hospital care - without any real opposition.

The cuts may be right, or they may be stupid - but the astonishing thing is how no-one really challenges them.

I think that one of the reasons for this is because a lot of the power that shapes our lives today has become invisible - and so it is difficult to see how it really works and even more difficult to challenge it.

So much of the language that surrounds us - from things like economics, management theory and the algorithms built into computer systems - appears to be objective and neutral. But in fact it is loaded with powerful, and very debatable, political assumptions about how society should work, and what human beings are really like.

But it is very difficult to show this to people. Journalists, whose job is to pull back and tell dramatic stories that bring power into focus, find it impossible because things like economic theory are both incomprehensible and above all boring. The same is true of "management science". Mild-mannered men and women meet in glass-walled offices and decide the destinies of millions of people on the basis of "targets" and "measured outcomes".

Like economics it pretends to be neutral, but it isn't. Yet it's impossible to show this dramatically because nothing happens in those glass-walled offices except the click of a keystroke that brings up another powerpoint slide. It's boring - and it's impossible to turn it into stories that will grab peoples imaginations - yet hundreds of peoples' jobs may depend on what is written on that slide.

And David Graeber:

... under no conditions can alternatives, or anyone proposing alternatives, be seen to experience success. This helps explain the almost unimaginable investment in “security systems” of one sort or another: the fact that the United States, which lacks any major rival, spends more on its military and intelligence than it did during the Cold War, along with the almost dazzling accumulation of private security agencies, intelligence agencies, militarized police, guards, and mercenaries. Then there are the propaganda organs, including a massive media industry that did not even exist before the sixties, celebrating police. Mostly these systems do not so much attack dissidents directly as contribute to a pervasive climate of fear, jingoistic conformity, life insecurity, and simple despair that makes any thought of changing the world seem an idle fantasy. Yet these security systems are also extremely expensive. Some economists estimate that a quarter of the American population is now engaged in “guard labor” of one sort or another—defending property, supervising work, or otherwise keeping their fellow Americans in line. Economically, most of this disciplinary apparatus is pure deadweight.

In fact, most of the economic innovations of the last thirty years make more sense politically than economically. Eliminating guaranteed life employment for precarious contracts doesn’t really create a more effective workforce, but it is extraordinarily effective in destroying unions and otherwise depoliticizing labor. The same can be said of endlessly increasing working hours. No one has much time for political activity if they’re working sixty-hour weeks.

It does often seem that, whenever there is a choice between one option that makes capitalism seem the only possible economic system, and another that would actually make capitalism a more viable economic system, neoliberalism means always choosing the former. The combined result is a relentless campaign against the human imagination. Or, to be more precise: imagination, desire, individual creativity, all those things that were to be liberated in the last great world revolution, were to be contained strictly in the domain of consumerism, or perhaps in the virtual realities of the Internet. In all other realms they were to be strictly banished. We are talking about the murdering of dreams, the imposition of an apparatus of hopelessness, designed to squelch any sense of an alternative future. Yet as a result of putting virtually all their efforts in one political basket, we are left in the bizarre situation of watching the capitalist system crumbling before our very eyes, at just the moment everyone had finally concluded no other system would be possible.

Maybe it's time for a new revolution. David Graeber, again:

Revolutions are thus planetary phenomena. But there is more. What they really do is transform basic assumptions about what politics is ultimately about. In the wake of a revolution, ideas that had been considered veritably lunatic fringe quickly become the accepted currency of debate. Before the French Revolution, the ideas that change is good, that government policy is the proper way to manage it, and that governments derive their authority from an entity called “the people” were considered the sorts of things one might hear from crackpots and demagogues, or at best a handful of freethinking intellectuals who spend their time debating in cafés. A generation later, even the stuffiest magistrates, priests, and headmasters had to at least pay lip service to these ideas. Before long, we had reached the situation we are in today: that it’s necessary to lay out the terms for anyone to even notice they are there. They’ve become common sense, the very grounds of political discussion.

Perhaps it's time for a new revolution that incorporates what we know about economics, psychology, resources, and the like into rational systems of economics and governance that really will give the human race a fighting chance at survival and happiness. If it happened before, it can happen again. Just as the new system was not built in a day, neither can the alternatives.

Economics as a Religion and the Idea of Progess

The idea of economics as a religion is not so farfetched after all. The scientific revolution came right at the same time as social relations were undergoing a profound shift in Western Europe. The Church's influence had been waning since a large part of the flock had broken off during the Reformation, partially in relation to the corruption of the Catholic Church (for example, the selling of indulgences to raise money for the pope's lavish lifestyle), and partially because the monopoly the Church held over scripture had been broken by the printing press and translations of the Bible into vernacular languages.

Combine that with the remarkable discoveries of science and mathematics, and the rise of a burgeoning merchant class whose wealth and influence was beginning to rival those of the feudal aristocracy and clergy, and you've got yourself a  bona-fide social crisis. The universal Catholic Church (a redundancy), which had presided over the social life and rituals of a relatively stagnant Western Europe since the fall of the Roman Empire, was coming under a lot of pressure to accommodate the  new ideas, and was pushing back as large hierarchical systems inevitably do.

Things came to a head in the days leading up to the French Revolution. Ideas began to circulate in the coffee houses of Paris that were actively and openly hostile to the concepts of monarchy and religion, ideas which would have been thoroughly squelched in years prior. A number of philosophers (the philosophes) wrote treatises that considered human social relations in light of logic and rationality (as did earlier English philosophers such as Hobbes) rather than custom and tradition. The encyclopaedist Denis Diderot famously wrote that "mankind will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest." The colonies of the New World existed beyond the range of kings in self-governing mode, and England's thirteen colonies decided to become completely independent and go their own way, with no king or state religion. It was explosive stuff.

The powder keg went off during the French Revolution - the King and much of the aristocracy was killed, and the old social order was upended. Products were flowing in from every corner of the world, and Europeans came in contact with cultures that had never even heard of Catholicism, yet seemed to function more or less serviceably. The first factories came online, and the rural and household economies was just starting to come under pressure from mass industrialism. New Protestant Christian sects based upon disparate readings of the Bible by various itinerant preachers began popping up like daisies and spreading new religious ideas. The latter half of the eighteenth century seemed to upend a social order that had existed for as long as anyone could remember. The question was, what would replace it?

So if you were a philosopher living around this time, what form  the "new" social order would take was a foremost concern. One of the lesser-known people to seriously take this question up was Claude Henri de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-Simon.

Saint Simon was an aristocrat who had seen both revolutions - he had fought in the American revolution, and had manage to survive (although he was imprisoned for a time) the French revolution. He decided to dedicate his life to philosophy after experiencing a "vision" of Charlemagne in prison. Despite his passion for philosophy, Saint-Simon's ideas never coalesced into a coherent doctrine, and his thinking was often muddied, confused and repetitive. He seemed to arbitrarily bring up ideas and then abandon them, reacting to events of his time rather than attempting to bring his ideas in any sort of consistent or practical conclusion (today he would probably be diagnosed as bipolar). Nevertheless, his ideas did have a profound influence on the next generation of European philosophers, developing a following around him, and even, briefly, a religion.

For religion was central to Saint-Simon's ideas. Before Nietzsche proclaimed the death of god, Saint-Simon felt that religion had become outmoded, and that the Church's control over peoples' behavior was fading into irrelevance thanks to social changes, economic realities and scientific discoveries, yet he believed that religious ideas were absolutely essential for the harmonious functioning  of society. He believed that the masses of the people needed a religion to believe in or else society would descend into chaos (such as the chaos of the French revolution).

His proposal was for science to essentially replace religion, that is, to assume the temporal and moral power of the Catholic Church. Often, this is phrased as a call for a "church of science" to supplant the vacuum left by the Catholic Church, and people's faith in scienctific principles to replace faith in God*. He called for scientists to become the new priests, and educate the people in the wonders of science. He put forth Isaac Newton as a sort of "pope" of the new religion, and gravity as a substitute for God. This may seem a bit bizarre to us today, but Newton's uncovering of a mysterious, omnipresent, invisible "force" that kept heavenly bodies in their place and caused apples to fall to the ground, and it's illustration and prediction by the use of maths, seemed as remarkable to people of the late eighteenth century as the idea of an invisible, unseen, all-powerful God was to medieval people. It was then thought that gravity would be the unifying force to unite all the sciences until subsequent discoveries refined that view.  Long before Star Wars, Saint-Simon proposed a belief in "the force" with Newton as Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Saint-Simon argued in the Introduction to the Scientific Studies of the Nineteenth Century that religion should be used as a political tool and that, rather than educating the masses in his physicism, they should be encouraged to continue to believe in God. This, he felt, was the only way to ensure social stability. Like many other writers and thinkers of this period Saint-Simon was fearful of a repeat of the horrors of the Revolution. Thus the educated elite (who would run the rational society of the future) would keep their adoption of physicism a secret, pretending in public to believe in the old religion.

http://www.thegreatdebate.org.uk/Saint-Simon.html

And just as people's belief in scientific principles would replace those of religion, those same scientific principles would provide illuminate the new social organization that would rise from the ashes of medieval feudalism. Saint-Simon believed science would uncover the "laws" of society as assuredly as physics had uncovered the "laws" of the physical universe. Once those laws were uncovered, it was thought, society could be run as rationally as a clockwork machine, with none of the messiness and chaos of the feudal system or the Terror. But from where would these scientific principles emerge?

The same year as the American colonies had proclaimed their independence and James Watt had perfected his steam engine, a Scottish philosopher named Adam Smith published an enormous volume describing the new field of "political economy": An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Smith described the changing nature of the rapidly expanding trade-based mercantilist economy, and the new modes of production such as the division of labor. He asserted that people working in their own self-interest managed to somehow make overall society function and average people better off over time (with many qualifications to that concept that have been subsequently ignored).

Later "worldy philosophers" and "social scientists" expanded on Smiths ideas, and even applied mathematical principles to these concepts, much as Newton had done with the physical world, uncovering things like the "laws" of supply and demand. It soon appeared that all of these "rules" of social organization would be uncovered and understood. This is exactly what Saint-Simon was looking for. He fell in with the French industrialists and businessmen who were inventing the new economy in France, in particular Jean-Baptiste Say. It increasingly began to look like business and productivity would provide the long sought for organizing principles to replace the dying feudal order and the Catholic Church. Saint-Simon 's writings lumped scientific discovery and business enterprise together as "industrialism," and called for industrialism to provide the overriding organizing principles of society, with "industrialists" replacing the aristocracy the new ruling class based on merit and social value alone:

Saint-Simon became increasingly influenced by Jean-Baptiste Say, one of the Idéologues. Say’s writing highlighted the increasing importance of industry, reflecting the shift away from the centrality of agriculture that was taking place in Western Europe. Say used the term “industry” in a much more general way than we tend to today, referring to many types of productive work, including scientific endeavour, scholarly work and business. He emphasised the value of labour, pointing out, like the great political economist Adam Smith, that it was labour that generated wealth. Thus he maintained that it was not government but economics that was the dominant force in modern society. Say believed that social stability would be re-established through industrialisation. Since more and more people would play a productive part in economics there would be greater co-operation and improved social consensus. Thus political economy would be the true science of society.

Saint-Simon’s To all Englishmen and Frenchmen who are passionate about the public good (1815) shows clearly the influence of Say, echoing many of his ideas. In it, Saint-Simon suggested creating a Baconian Society which would play a key role in unifying Europe. This society would be grounded in the scientific method, using observation as its main tool in deciding how society should move forwards. It would provide a historical understanding of the march of progress over the last 400 years. Emphasising the importance of industry, Saint-Simon picked up on Say’s definition of industriel as including business, science and intellectual endeavour, defining society as the “mass and union of men devoted to useful works.”

In his usual astute manner Saint-Simon decided to capitalise on his new found enthusiasm for business and industry by producing a new journal called l’Industrie (Industry), which would be backed by industrialists, bankers and the like. l’Industrie began publication in 1816.

In May 1817, Saint-Simon set out in l’Industrie a declaration of principles which emphasised the need for freedom from government interference for producers and consumers in the new industrial society. The primary role of government, he argued, should be to facilitate the freedom to produce. This meant limiting the influence of the nobility, church and other non-productive members of society. Political writers would assume political leadership under this new system of organisation as they were the people best placed to improve the common lot. A clear connection was made between literary and scientific industry and that of commerce and manufacturing. In Letters from Henri Saint-Simon to an American in the same volume of l’Industrie, Saint-Simon made explicit his new found certainty that political economy would provide the foundation for a positive science of politics. Based on the notion of industry laid out in the declaration of principles, the “science of production” would generate the knowledge necessary to reorganise society rationally, securing a better social system for the future.

In other words, business is the ordering principle of society, and businessmen its natural rulers. Government only exists to facilitate this "natural" working order which has been illuminated by the "laws" of economics, which are as fundamental as the laws of gravity. Interfering with these laws could only cause regression to the more primitive forms of social order.

While Saint-Simon's ideas went much beyond this (he is considered to be the forerunner of both socialism and technocracy, and his apprentice, Auguste Comte is often credited with the invention of sociology), it is the above principles which became the guiding assumptions of modern economic theory. In the subsequent years, "economics" assumed more and more social importance, considering that the first person in history to be identified as an "economist", Thomas Malthus, lived only two hundred years ago (Adam Smith was primarily a moral philosopher). Now economics is a major course of study, and there are hundreds of thousands of them, directing our governments, managing our industries, running our banks, financing our businesses, all using the alleged "science" of money flows and interest rates and the "laws" of economics to manage society. Saint-Simon's ideas of a technocracy administering society according to basic economic laws undergirds the economic world view described earlier. Thus economics as the replacement for religion is not so farfetched at all. In fact, it follows from history.

A couple side notes. Once of the more influential philosophers preceding Saint-Simon was the Marquis de Condorcet. Condorcet was a brilliant mathematician, and once of the early interpreters of Newton's calculus. He was an advisor to Turgot, the minister of King Louis XVI, who had tried to liberalize the French economy from it's static administration (for example, he wished for grain to be traded on open exchange rather than distributed by the state as a way to prevent shortages and famine)**. Condorcet's ideas revolved around the idea of the government using the new scientific discoveries to improve the well-being of citizens and facilitate trade, an idea so obvious to us today that we hardly give it a second thought. He felt that government should maintain bureaus of scientists to advise kings in the best way to govern. In this, he was a successor to Francis Bacon's ideas and a forerunner to the technocracy movement. He even invented a weighted method of elections, the Condorcet method, to overcome the limitations of strict majority (yes, we knew there were problems and solutions for this two hundred years ago already).

Condorcet, unlike Saint-Simon, did not survive the French Revolution. While on the run and in prison, though, he wrote an influential pamphlet called Sketch for an Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind. This was one of the first true codifications of the Enlightenment Idea of Progress - that scientific discovery would led to better and better lives for all, and the human society was on a long slow read to perfection, and scientific discovery would eventually allow a perfect society to from and the lot of human being would continue to improve forever, once all the kinks were worked out. He described all of human history as a series of ten epochs, with society progressing through each epoch at different rates. Post-revolutionary France was in the ninth epoch, with the tenth being the final state where science would bring about the ideal social state:

While it is clearly related to much that had already been written about the rights of man, and discarding the superstition and authority of the past, this was a very different type of work. Through an historical study of the development of human thought, Condorcet hoped to point the way towards future improvement of the human condition. His history consists of nine “grand epochs” of the past, and a tenth epoch in which he advances “some conjectures upon the future destiny of mankind.” However, while his description certainly has time dependence running it, with a corresponding advance in human understanding and material well being, Condorcet is clear that progress is uneven. This is not a naïve view of a continual improvement in the human conditions – not everyone benefits from advances that are made; knowledge and wealth are not always shared; and the states described in each epoch actually frequently run alongside each other. He is explicit in pointing out that there are even people who still live in states corresponding to the first and second epochs. However, part of the point of recognising the progress that has already been made is to point to a trajectory towards a better future state.

http://www.thegreatdebate.org.uk/CSketch.html

Condorcet's ideas of progress were central to the new economic ideas floating around at the time, so central, in fact, that they are taken for granted.  Like other tenets of faith, it is simply assumed to such an extent that people don't even think about it much less question it.

And a final note- Jean-Baptiste Say, mentioned above, is the founder of Say's Law, another tenet of modern economic faith. Say argued that since the production of goods generated income, that income would seek to buy more goods. So the income a businessman makes and pays to his employees would have to go somewhere, and that somewhere would be in the purchase of more goods, causing more goods to be produced (and hence more wages seeking more goods, etc.). Thus, production of goods necessarily created demand for more goods. Say asserted that human wants were essentially insatiable.***

Say's Law has been hotly debated ever since by economists. It came under scrutiny during the Great Depression, since Say's Law dismisses the idea that there would ever be a glut of goods, or that peoples' desires would ever be satisfied.  It also dismissed the idea that workers would be paid too little to purchase all the goods they produced (a necessary tenet of some economic theories such as Marxism). During the Depression, it looked like overproduction and efficiency set the economy off its wheels. There were plentiful supplies of everything, but no demand. Say's Law was summed up critically by John Maynard Keynes as "supply creates its own demand."

Yet Say's law is still treated as an article of faith, even if it is not explicit. It is an essential feature of "supply-side" economics; the idea that if you give businesses every incentive to produce more and more (low taxes, minimal wages, etc.), that this increased production will bring about prosperity for all. Say's Law argues that a "general glut" is impossible. It also assumes that there is no point of satiety, and there will never be too much stuff for people to buy. It assumes that there are no monopolies that can control markets. It assumes that there are no negative effects from production such as resource depletion and pollution. It is the main justifier for low taxes on the wealthy and businesses, even if it is not stated outright.

*Alain de Botton has called for a "Church of Atheism," and has called for the creation of a temple to this end.

** It was Turgot, who first officially described the modern Idea of Progress, according to Wikipedia. He also predicted a lot of Adam Smith in his descriptions of the European economy.

***It's also used to justify unlimited immigration since more immigrants = bigger economy = more jobs.  This is a good example to show how these "laws" actually are used to justify patent absurdities.

Economics Is Our Religion

Blogger note: this is in response to the Archdruid Report's latest series of posts, this one in particular.

There are a good series of posts currently running on the Archdruid Report exploring a concept he has referred to often but not explicitly spelled out - that the notion of progress is essentially the main religious faith that underpins modern societies.

It's an intriguing notion, and I think there's much truth in it. But I'm going to propose the idea that it's in need of refinement. In fact the real religion that undergirds our modern societies is actually economics - and the belief in progress is actually a component of that doctrine, rather than the doctrine itself.

Think of it this way - Christians believe in an afterlife. This belief is an essential feature of Christianity. But it is not, in itself Christianity. It is a necessary component of the set of semi-coherent and self-reinforcing beliefs that make Christianity work as a religion. Yet Christians do not describe their religion as the religion of afterlife. They do not go to church and confess belief in afterlife-ism. Even many non-Christians believe in an afterlife. It is merely a tenet of the religion, not the religion itself.

Similarly, I would argue that the notion of progress is essential to the free-market economics that is the guiding social structure of our world today. It is not so much the belief in progress, but the concepts of the "science" of economics, that took over the social order of Europe and the world after the "death of God" proclaimed by Nietzsche. Economics claimed to be a "rational science," yet it is based around around certain core assumptions that are unquestioningly accepted by people today. And, it is claimed, as long as we adhere to these beliefs and assumptions the living standards of the human race will improve continually forever.

One core principle of the religion of economics is that productivism is a goal in and of itself that will bring about an earthly paradise and that everything must be sacrificed to the cult of productivity: functioning communities, local economies, family relationships, healthy ecosystems, social justice, equality, physical and mental health, societal well-being and happiness, leisure time, etc. This spirit of sacrifice that runs throughout capitalism at every level resembles to me nothing so much as a religious impulse. As the philosopher Slavoj Žižek put it:

"Capitalism is, and this I'm almost tempted to say what is great about it, although I'm very critical of it, Capitalism is more an ethical/religious category for me. It's not true when people attack capitalists as egotists, they don't care for... no! An ideal capitalist is someone who is ready again to stake his life, to risk everything, just so that production grows, profit grows, capital circulates. His personal or her happiness is totally subordinated to this. This is what I think Walter Benjamin, the great Frankfurt School companion [and] thinker had in mind when he said Capitalism is a form of religion. You cannot explain, account for a figure of a person that [is] capitalist, obsessed with expanded circulation, with the rise of his company, in terms of personal happiness."

You see this today in the belief that the poorer nations of the world will adapt market economies, and will eventually all become wealthy and prosperous. Look at China. They literally tore their society apart when they embraced Capitalism. Peasants left their villages and families by the millions to go to work in factories for sixteen hour days  and sleep in spartan bunks in dormitories for a pittance. Entire villages became infected with cancer, the sky became dark with haze, and the rivers became filled with toxins and dead animals. They were willing to do this becuase their descendants, they are told, will get an education and live comfortable, affluent, Western lifestyles once China becomes rich and the wealth trickles down to the masses. How can one not describe this as a religious faith, similar to that of the medieval peasant whose bitter toil would store up for him rewards in the next life? Except today the rewards are material and in this life, just in the future. Currently, the Chinese look upon the future as sort of a "promised land" for their descendants, and their rewards as creature comforts rather than eternal life. The fact that this is already unravelling in Western countries does not seem to discourage their faith.

Another underlying belief is that economic growth equals progress, and that progress will solve all ills. This why progress is an essential component of the "religion" of modern economics. More growth means better and better living standards for all in perpetuity, the argument goes. Similarly, more growth leads to "innovations" which will solve every problem humans will ever encounter.

For example, a widespread belief is that somebody, somewhere, will come up with inventions like a new power source, or a non-polluting technology, or artificial intelligence, that will be introduced into the market and cure all our ills, political, environmental, and social, even sickness and death in the views of the more extreme believers. Innovation is an "ultimate resource" that will never be exhausted and will overcome even the finite nature of the earth itself! How can one not see this as a fundamentally religious belief? Thus, economists preach that anything that hinders or limits economic growth must be forbidden, and we must do all we can to "promote innovation" no matter the cost to the wider society.

Another fundamental article of the faith is the idea of trickle-down: the idea that if the wealthy and powerful are given an environment to operate without any constraints, that their actions will ultimately bring about a better life for all, whereas restraining their actions in any way will only cause us to be poorer in the long run and do more harm than good. It seems to justify the "ruling class" of capitalism the way The Divine Right of Kings justified absolute monarchy for centuries. It's the "great man theory" of economics.

Another article of faith is often called the "Just World Hypothesis." According to this article of faith, the economically productive are rewarded exactly in proportion to their contributions to society; no more, and no less. Wealth is correlated with virtue and social contribution. There can be no cheating or gaming of the system, because all the actors in the Market possess total freedom and perfect information, and thus the market will eventually dispense retribution against those who cheat and reward those who are virtuous. Everyone is born with the same opportunities, and anyone who prospers does so by their own abilities and nothing else. Thus the wealthy have "earned" every last penny of their income and wealth through "hard work and sacrifice" and to take away any of it (as with taxation) is "theft." Thus, a hedge fund manager who earns ten thousand dollars in a single day has contributed that much "value" to society, as has  professional sports player who earns 120 million dollars a year.

The flip side of this is that the poor are always deserving of their fate for being lazy and unproductive. Low pay can only be explained by peoples' work as having "lesser social value." than others. Prosperity is available for everyone if only they work hard enough, and anyone who is suffering hard times has brought their fate down upon themselves and has no one to blame for their failures but themselves. (This is similar to the Calvinist idea of "the Elect of God").

Central to the religion of economics is the concept of "The Market." The Market is not treated as a human construct, but rather as a semi-divine entity, and is regarded with a quasi-religious awe. It is considered benevolent, all-knowing, and infallible, just like the theological concept of God. Any problems with the Market are caused by human interference and a lack of understanding, not by the Market itself, because the Market is infallible. Overtly religious terms like the "invisible hand" are used in reference to the Market. The "invisible hand of the Market," we are told, allocates all goods and services in an ideal manner in accordance with its divine will, and we never to question the "wisdom" of the Market or interfere with its  workings. It must be left alone to work its magic. The Market is benevolent, but it is also capricious, rewarding those who adhere most closely with its wishes, and punishing those that deviate from its strictures. The Market is synonymous with human freedom, and regulating or interfering with the Market in any way at all is tantamount to taking away peoples' freedom.

If there is  downturn, then we have "sinned" against the Market, and must put our house in order. If we pay down debt and cultivate surpluses to restore "balance" to the Market, it will once again shower us with prosperity for our virtue just as in times past. "Austerity" is the way we collectively punish ourselves for our exuberance, and the market will reward us for our pain and suffering. Debt is equated with weakness and shame, and budget surpluses with health and prosperity, almost as if we're treating money like grain in an agricultural economy. The lives of ordinary workers are sacrificed to the Market as surely as prisoners were slaughtered by the tens of thousands to appease the rain gods atop Mayan temples.  It is a religious, not a logical impulse.

The workings of the Market have been revealed to us though a series of "prophets" - Adam Smith (the Jesus of economists), David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, Wilfredo Pareto, Kenneth Arrow, Irving Fisher, Paul Samuelson, John Maynard Keynes, Eugene Fama, Milton Friedman, et. al. Each prophet expands our understanding and brings us closer to the "truth,"and we must judiciously study their writings, even ones written centuries ago. Economics even has its Antichrist - the devil Karl Marx, and his heretical doctrine of Communism which must be rooted out and eliminated wherever it is found.

Just as no one can agree on the nature of God, we can't agree on the nature of economics either - instead of Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Calvinists, Mennonites, Catholics, Mormons and others; we have Keynsians, Austians, Marxists, Neoclassical economists, the "saltwater" and "freshwater" schools, etc. Heretics, such as behavioral or biophysical economists, are dismissed and marginalized (but thankfully not killed anymore)*. Like Galileo, no one is allowed to challenge the orthodoxy of the faith. We even use terms like "orthodox" and "heterodox" to describe economic ideologies, surely a testament to how much economic thinking is influenced by religious thinking. See Wikipedia's entry for heterodox economics.

Economics claims to define the very nature of human beings today. Where people were once defined by religion as immortal souls in need of redemption, we are now defined us as "walking calculators" - perfectly rational self-interested solitary individuals always seeking ways to derive the maximum personal benefit for the least amount of cost. It also illuminates our view of the natural world. We assume everything in nature can be assigned a price for "ecosystem services," from the value of a clean river to the pollination activities of bees. If an animal or ecosystem does not provide enough "economic value" to us, we are free to let it be destroyed or go extinct, with no moral condemnation. Thus, a forest has no value in and of itself as part of creation until it is chopped down and turned into products for human use. Similarly, for example, an animal, rather than being part of God's creation and thus intrinsically valuable, is simply a number on a spreadsheet, and can be allowed to go extinct if it provides too little economic "value."  This is a profound shift in man's view of the world, and it is hardly ever even acknowledged. If something shapes the fundamental world view of a people, how can it not be said to be a religion? And how can that world view not govern our actions?

Economics also determines our social relationships and social hierarchy. You are now defined by your role in the economic order rather than your place in the feudal caste system or your familial or tribal relationships. So instead of king, peasant, serf, vassal, villein, knight, yeoman, or chief, we have business owner, investor, CEO, entrepreneur, businessman, professional, blue-collar worker, unemployed, etc. Each of these form their own "class" in society which is not so different from that of the Middle Ages. We relate to each other not out of blood relations or mutual obligations, but as isolated individuals seeking maximum benefit by impersonal exchanges in the market. There are no obligations other than to maximize one's own profit, and altruism is disparaged. Blatantly unjust and exploitative social relationships are justified by economics just as theologians once defended the Divine Right of Kings, the Crusades, papal infallibility, blasphemy, indulgences, serfdom, and slavery.

In the same way theology was a major course of study in the Middle Ages for many of the brightest young men from the upper classes, economics today is a popular course of study for many of the children of the wealthy seeking to gain power and influence. At prestigious universities they are indoctrinated into a system with it's own jargon and implicit world view, and that world-view becomes the tunnel through which they see the world. They come up with theoretical constructs like Ricardian Equivalence, Pareto Optimality, the Efficient Markets Hypothesis, and the Exogenous Growth Model and explain everything on that basis (compare to theological jargon such as "binitarianism," "unconditional election," "hyper-dispensationalism" and "imminitizing the eschaton"). These concepts are taken for granted, just like Noah's flood and original sin, and eveything is built off of those first principles.

Rather than the Bible and Aristotle, they use economic texts and mathematical equations which are abstruse to the commoners to justify things like free trade, offshoring, deregulation, usury, financialization and mass layoffs which common-sense would seem to imply are destructive to society. Economists have prestigious chairs at universities and write books and papers. They advise governments. They travel to conferences all over the world. Just like being in the Medieval clergy, it can be extremely lucrative and rewarding for practitioners - economists are some of the wealthiest and most influential members of society for doing essentially no productive activity.

Just as kings once consulted with Cardinals and Archbishops to determine the appropriate course of action and had advisers schooled in theology, today's world leaders have cabinets full of economists to tell them what to do, not natural scientists, sociologists, philosophers, or engineers (e.g. The President's Council of Economic Advisers).

Just as Christianity privileged itself on providing the ultimate answers to all important questions - from justifications for war to the  age of the earth to the motion of the planets - economics has been apotheosized to a similar degree with the rise of "Freakonomics." Economists claim to able to explain absolutely every aspect of human social behavior in terms of rational incentives and game theory - from the raising of children, to dating and marriage, to schools and public health (see, for example, nudge theory) - and determine the optimal course of action for governments to take at the local and national levels. Economists are dispatched like missionaries all over the world to convert the "heathen" - poor counties that have not yet embraced the gospel of free market liberalization and global trade (such as in Latin America in the 1970s).

Just as the medieval world view was reinforced every Sunday by church services performed by the clergy, turn on the TV and our economic world view is constantly reinforced by the media. Economists pontificate from the television news programs and from the pages of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal like preachers explaining God's will to the peasants from their pulpits. Free markets and economic growth are preached as a self-evident truths in all media outlets, even "leftist" ones. The debate boils down to little more than what are the appropriate levels of spending and taxation, and how do we bring about the maximum amount of economic growth. The Market must be appeased, and sacrifices must be made no matter how much poverty, unemployment and social dysfunction it creates.

Note that our banks look like temples. They are stately, majestic, imposing buildings by design, utilizing the finest, most expensive materials from all over the world. This is not accidental. The chairman of the Federal Reserve is like the "pope" of capitalism, with the Federal Reserve Board as his college of cardinals. He is elected essentially for life, and his every pronouncement is a world-changing event for the faithful. There are magical rituals and incantations like creating money out of nothing ("keystrokes"), and transmutation of precious metals into money. There are sacred dates like Tax Day and the end of the fiscal year. Sometimes we proclaim a "tax holiday" instead of a religious holiday. Economists even claim to be able to predict the future - in fact it's part of their job description!

Powerful institutions like the IMF and World Bank make rules behind closed doors that affect millions and superseded democratically-elected governments. Sometimes economists are even appointed as rulers of nations, the idea being that the principle goal of leaders today is not to maximize societal well-being, but to "balance the books" - the statesman as accountant. I remember hearing about "interdict" in the Middle Ages - a Pope would order priests to refuse services to the faithful in order to bring about unrest and topple leaders at will. Compare that to economic sanctions levelled against any world leader who defies the global economic order and you'll see that financial institutions, like the Church, are set above governments, even democratically elected ones.

In the Middle Ages when there would be a crisis of faith - a famine, say, or a plague, the apologists for the Catholic religion would not question their faith; they would just come up with ex-post-facto justifications such as "it is God's Will, and humans cannot comprehend God's will," and could advise little more than prayer and forbearance. Similarly, the negative outcomes of the market, from stock market crashes to housing bubbles to climate change, to pollution, to resource depletion, to widespread unemployment to social dysfunction, to rising levels of unhappiness and poverty are waved away by economists as "externalities" - natural workings of the Market that must be endured and can easily be corrected with the proper technocratic management if only we keep the faith. Economists' failure to predict the economic downturn, or to agree on the what the appropriate course of action is to remediate it, are similarly rationalized away, and no fundamental change in world view is even contemplated.

Yet economics, like theology, is a pseudocience. It is non-falsifiable. It starts from first premises, such as the ones I outlined above, and seeks evidence to justify those premises while dismissing any and all alternatives or contrary evidence (like the Church once dismissed astronomy and human evolution). Economic debates resemble nothing so much as medieval dialogues on how many angels can fit on the head of a pin. No matter how often they are proven wrong, no one questions the basis for their belief. That sounds a lot like religion to me.

So I would argue that the religion of progress is actually a subset of the religion of economics. Economics fulfills all the criteria of a foundational religion of a society, just like the Medieval Catholic Church, Confucianism or Islam. It establishes the fundamental social order and legitimizes the ruling class. It defines social relationships between people and purports to describe fundamental human nature. It is based on a set of beliefs with no rational, empirical basis, just sacred texts and theory. It is consistently contradicted by real-world experience, yet it is never questioned. It is the advisor to governments, and defines the parameters in which they must operate. It has it's own priesthood and hierarchy, its prophets and apostates. It has its conflicting schools of thought and its heretics. It has its declarations of faith and ruthlessly crushes any and all alternatives. It has its sacred temples, its rituals, it's indocrination tools, and its own terminology. It is a universal faith - its institutions straddle the world. It claims to be the source of ultimate truth. It has its sacrificial lambs, and its black sheep. It is, quite simply, the fundamental religious dogma underpinning modern human society.

* for example, Frederick Soddy, Thorstein Veben, Herman Daly, Nicole Foss, Charles A. S. Hall, Hazel Henderson, etc. Even "established" economists like Michael Hudson, Steve Keen, Ha-Joon Chang, John Quiggin and others are ignored if they step outside the acceptible bounds of orthodox thinking.

Zeitgeist watch. I'm hardly the first to say it. Here are some other articles on the same theme:

Are markets Our God? (Harvard Business School)
The Religion of Economics (John Seed)
The ‘laws of economics’ don’t exist (The Edgy Optimist)
Economics: pre- and post- Copernican (Transition Milwaukee)
Scientific viewpoint or 'religious' belief: My cat explains energy optimism (Resilience)
The Market as God (The Atlantic)
Economics as Religion (Decline of the Empire) and see Two TED Talks, Open Thread Two years ago, I posted the following comment to this post:

[Economics] starts with a foregone conclusion – like the idea that so-called “free” markets, lack of regulations and globalization will make everyone better off - and then gathers evidence to support those conclusions. And isn’t it interesting how the forgone conclusions of economists always end up supporting the wealthy and powerful? In fact, its antecedent is medieval theology. References to sacred texts like The Bible and Aristotle were substituted for any type of empirical evidence, and anything that did not fit that world view (like a receding glacier or a dinosaur fossil) was discarded or explained away by tortured logic.

Many observers have compared the economics profession to the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages. In fact, their role is precisely the same – to provide a philosophical justification for a clearly dysfunctional and unjust social order. Rather than kingship by divine right, it attempts to justify to the masses things that are clearly absurd – like Americans competing against workers all over the world will make all of us more prosperous. Or that supply creates its own demand (Say’s law). Or that infinite growth is possible on a finite planet. Of course the conclusions of economists always support those who wield the money and power. Coincidence? The sole purpose of economics as it is practiced today is to come up with justifications for the status quo. Think about it – the “father of classical economics,” Adam Smith, did not attempt to come up with some sort of ideal, rational system, he merely described what was already happening. Then later, these observations became codified a “science.”

The conceits of modern economics come out of Enlightenment attempts to make social governance as “rational” as Newtonian physics. Two critical ideas underlie this - that individuals were atoms whose interactions were as precisely quantifiable as the effects of gravity on physical objects, and that the “laws” of economics were as immutable as Newton’s laws, such as F=MA. Never mind that every “law” of economics has been proven false (even supply and demand – have you looked at college prices lately), and that the money system is an entirely artificial creation, subject only to whatever rules we wish to apply. This has gotten even worse as what used to be called institutional economics was replaced with abstract mathematical models promoted by game theorists and think-tanks. With institutional economics, the effects of policy were implicitly an object of study. When the idea of the market as a perfectly rational, all-knowing machine that correctly allocates all resources became gospel, any questions about social effects were tossed out the window. Economics finally realized their Enlightenment goal. Too bad their “Market” seems to be identical to the Medieval Catholic Church’s notions of God – all-knowing, all-powerful, capricious, and most of all, never to be questioned under any circumstances. That why economists can no more explain financial crises than medieval monks could explain famines or the Black Death to the suffering populace.

The truth is, markets have always been driven not by scientific principles, but by greed and fear. Is there a quantifiable unit that measures greed (may I propose the “Blankfein” as such a unit).

Like the Catholic Church, modern economics does not tolerate dissent. Remember Galileo? If you look up heterodox economics (type it into Wikipedia) you can see what happens to people and ideas that do not fit in the current economic free-market paradigm. Any apostates from this world view , no matter how intelligent and qualified, are dismissed entirely. In fact, the ultimate “heterodox” economist, Karl Marx, seems to have predicted exactly what is happening to capitalism, and a few more intelligent observers are starting to note that uncomfortable fact, to wit:

http://blogs.hbr.org/haque/2011/09/was_marx_right.html http://seekingalpha.com/article/187119-the-fate-of-capitalism-was-marx-right http://www.oftwominds.com/blogaug11/crisis-of-capitalism-8-11.html http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-14764357

As Adam Curtis so aptly put it in a recent blog post, mainstream economists and think-tanks are designed not to come up with solutions, but rather to limit our ideas to those that benefit the already powerful and preserve the status quo. Here is an eloquent statement from his blog:

“The guiding idea at the heart of today's political system is freedom of choice. The belief that if you apply the ideals of the free market to all sorts of areas in society, people will be liberated from the dead hand of government. The wants and desires of individuals then become the primary motor of society.”

“But this has led to a very peculiar paradox. In politics today we have no choice at all. Quite simply There Is No Alternative.”

“That was fine when the system was working well. But since 2008 there has been a rolling economic crisis, and the system increasingly seems unable to rescue itself. You would expect that in response to such a crisis new, alternative ideas would emerge. But this hasn't happened.”

“Nobody - not just from the left, but from anywhere - has come forward and tried to grab the public imagination with a vision of a different way to organise and manage society.”

“It's a bit odd - and I thought I would tell a number of stories about why we find it impossible to imagine any alternative. Why we have become so possessed by the ideology of our age that we cannot think outside it.”