Beyond a Predatory Capitalism? Comments on Lazonick and Shin 
Posted: March 29, 2022 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a commentWilliam Lazonick and Jang-Sup Shin, Predatory Value Extraction – How the Looting of the Business Corporation Became the U.S. Norm and How Sustainable Prosperity Can Be Restored, OUP 2020
[These comments originate from an online seminar with Professor William (Bill) Lazonick to discuss his joint research with Professor Jang-Sup Shin on April 26, 2021]
I should begin by thanking Professors Lazonick and Shin not only for this book but for the decades of research it encapsulates (Lazonick and Shin 2019). It deserves to be widely read and to be widely influential. The core of the book is economics and I am mindful, in preparing this response, that I am not an economist. I have approached the book as a political philosopher and political economist and have tried to stay in my lane. Professor Lazonick has already summarised the book so I will be brief in my general characterisation of its aims and approach before I move to some commentary on its key theses.
It is a work grounded on what I would call the Schumpeter-Minsky approach to the firm and to finance (Thomas 2020a). It is an approach that locates the efficiency of capitalism in its dynamic efficiency: the capacity of the large-scale industrial organisation to muster and organise resources to produce market disruptive innovations. Every firm seeks a monopolistic edge over its competitors, even if it is short lived. The consistently successful firm innovates in plural ways to maintain this edge in numerous different forms. One focus of this book is the importance of viewing the firm as a learning device, correcting itself through trial, error, and sustaining the results via organisational memory. From a distributive point of view, the key fact is that while such firms are, internally, command economies from an internally distributive point of view their profits must be shared with key employees to retain them and their contribution to sustaining the learning process. I will return, later, to the problem of what you might call the “external” distributive effects of placing this Chandlerian conception of the firm on the commanding heights of the economy.
It is this conception of how we ought to structure the macro-economy for sustainable and inclusive prosperity that is the normative core of this book. In tracing out the ideological assault on this conception, Lazonick notes the strange theoretical disconnection between theories of the static efficiency of capitalism and theories of its dynamic efficiency. It is difficult to think of analogies in other sciences for such a disconnection. In the case of modelling an entire economic system there is a disconnect between the model of perfect competition in the textbooks that putatively model static efficiency and the dynamic models of Keynes and Schumpeter.
One way to approach this disconnect is that welfare economists take the foundational theorem of their discipline to be the Arrow-Debreu theorem in which the utility maximising consumer meets the efficiency maximising firm (Arrow and Debreu 1954). Now both Arrow and Debreu were political progressives, and their goal was to answer this simple question: if an economic system is for the general good, how can we model that system such that it maximises utility? This model is clearly wholly inappropriate for the modelling the dynamic efficiency of a macro-economy.
Lazonick’s book centrally takes issue not with Arrow-Debreu, but with the politically motivated project of taking its micro-foundational perspective on competitive efficiency to offer any insight into macro-level dynamic efficiency, which it clearly does not.
Mention of a political motivation induces me to change registers and to comment on the underlying philosophical motivation for the critique of Lazonick and Shin’s proposal. The reason that libertarians and other see an affinity between capitalism and their normative commitments is this feature of the A-D model: everyone in it is powerless. Every agent in the model, both producer and consumer, is a price taker and not a price maker. Liberty is preserved, in this model, because everyone is equally powerless. At this point we have to introduce the vexed topic of neo-liberalism, about which I will try to be brief. Utopian neo-liberals believe that the market does, indeed, ideally disperse power if we can intervene to prevent imbalances of power emerging. As it is potentially efficient and utility maximising, we should expand marketisation so that the depth and efficiency of markets can underpin as many of our social institutions as possible. This suggests, complementarily, that the state can take a back seat, perhaps restricted to defence, regulation, the correction of market failures but, on the whole, markets are self-correcting. The deeper and more extensive any such market is, the more purely it approximates this ideal suggesting that the financial market, above all, should be the fundamental disciplinary-cum-governance institution in the economy.
Those are the views of the utopian neo-liberal; the non-utopian neo-liberal espouses a limited role for government and a more extensive role for markets. However, what she actually engages in is putting the state at the disposal of private capitalists (Galbraith 2008). The state is only selectively “rolled back”. If rolling back state protections harms the worst off, or trade unionists, or if rolling back capital controls favours the best off, or the rentier investor class more generally, then the state will be rolled back. However, it is more often co-opted (Thomas 2017). The state is co-opted to generate rent seeking niches such as when its immense spending power is directed to certain favoured industries. It is co-opted, in a way central to Lazonick’s book, when public subsidies are seized to fund innovation only for the commercialisation of that innovation to produce private profit only for taxation on that profit to be evaded. In other words, our conception of the democratic state as the honest broker between competing private interests has been transformed, under actually existing neo-liberalism, into the state as a dishonest broker that favours the interests solely of the rentier-investor class (Thomas 2020b).
The core thesis of Lazonick’s book is the conflict between the entrepreneurial function and the interests of the rentier-investor class (Deutschmann 2012). The rhetoric of the utopian neo-liberal is used falsely to legitimate the policies of what one might call the actually existing neo-liberalism of our time.
That is why it is misleading when neo-liberal rhetoric suggests that the US economy has become “hyper capitalist” or “turbo capitalist” with the extension of the logic of marketisation merely bringing us some uncomfortable truths. (Don’t shoot the messenger.) If blue collar manufacturing jobs ought to be shipped to China in the interest of productive efficiency, let them be shipped (Lind 2020a). That is characteristic of a certain kind of false naturalisation of economic constraints: America’s coastal elites view themselves as meritocrats who have adjusted to the new realities of a knowledge based economy. The majority of their fellow citizens have, by this meritocratic standard, been judged and found wanting – the market here works as a cruel truth teller. Peter Temin, in the Vanishing Middle Class, classifies America’s high wage sector as located in the “Finance, Technology and Electronics” or FTE sector – 20% of the US population. The remaining 80% work in the low wage sector (Temin 2017). I hold the more political view, shared with Dean Baker and Michael Lind, that this false naturalisation is better explained by class politics (Baker 2016; Lind 2020b).
It is no accident that the neo-liberal experiment happened predominantly in the two countries where organised labour was blamed for the crisis of productivity of the 1970s (Prasad 2006). The Reagan-Thatcher project brought the state down, like a hammer, on both organised labour and the broader democratisation of the economy that the aspirations of labour represented. It is undoubtedly true that both corporations and organised labour suffered when Volcker’s solution to the problem of stagnation and high inflation together was the scorched earth approach of simply destroying parts of the US economy’s own productive capacity (Sonti 2018). However, that short term shock was at the service of the longer term triumph of the US business class. Lazonick’s book focuses on the internal conflict within that class.
The stable price regime in place since the Nixon and Volcker shocks has deepened financialization. It was easy to make money when you could lend it out at 19%, but interest rates have slowly declined over the last few decades, its path eased by that which the markets call the “Greenspan put”. But as margins decline, leverage must increase, one way or another, and in the search for leverage the Wall Street system has become increasingly fragile and even more prone to crisis, until we had the Crisis of 2007–8 where the Federal Reserve system was forced to become the lender of last resort for global capitalism (Tooze 2018). That merely indicated, as Daniela Gabor puts it, that the entire system rested on the de-risking state to deal with the massive risk externality built into the Wall Street model of finance (Gabor 2020). The regulatory capture of the SEC, described in this book, is one aspect of the rise of the private predator who not only skirts the law, but who through extensive lobbying gets to write the laws in her own favour.
Lazonick’s book is about the transformation of the Chandlerian firm into the vehicle of predatory value extraction by the rent seeking insiders of the US economy. Since this process of massive upwards redistribution, as opposed to the fantasy of trickle down, has been facilitated by law and institutions it is only reasonable to call it a form of corporate socialism. The institutional form of the firm, the corporate governance regime in which it is embedded, and its relation to the financial sector have all been put at the service of value extraction. Qua political philosopher, the one phrase missing from Lazonick’s book which I wish had been there was “systemic corruption”.
Under the doctrine of Maximising Shareholder Value what has disappeared is the corporate person of the firm itself, with its own interests, under the stewardship of a board and executive who owe a fiduciary duty to the firm. That duty to the firm underpins a commitment to the temporally extended balance between retained earnings and investment in productivity with the payment of debt obligations and dividends. Corporations have long-term interests in which capital is invested under the direction of a board that also appoints management. It is a form of systemic corruption when the interests of the Pikettyan supermanager, working in combination with a remuneration committee, ignores the clear conflict of interest involved in engaging in financial engineering to boost not only the share price but, in the process, their own remuneration. All of this is, as Lazonick notes, not at the behest of the diffuse and anonymous group of limited liability shareholders, but at the behest of the organised representatives of the rentier-investor class – the major players in that which Minsky called “money manager capitalism” (Minsky 1986/2008).
Lazonick rightly focuses on share buybacks as the most egregious form of this systemic corruption, but his book demonstrates that the problems run more deeply than that. I think one way to frame the success of this book is as the extension of the arguments of another book I very much admire, James Kenneth Galbraith’s Created Unequal: the Crisis in American Pay – a book that dates from 1998 (Galbraith 1998). Lazonick’s and Galbraith’s frames are exactly the same: understanding why, on a Schumpeterian account of the firm, we can expect a fissured economy (Thomas 2020a). What I mean by this is that the legacy of the US developmental state had to create the conditions of deep, structural inequality and macro-instability unless the centralised state was strong, not weak; unless it was an honest broker, not a dishonest one, between competing social interests.
From his sectoral, macro-perspective Galbraith diagnosed a situation where the legacy of the US developmental state, from my perspective better described as an imperial and militarised state, fractured the macro-economy into capital creating firms, capital using firms, and services. The outlines of Jason Furman’s “superstar firms” lay in the creation of the conditions for these firms in the industries that the USA seeks to dominate (Furman and Orszag 2018). Capital using firms, manufacturing, contributed to the fissured economy through their “rationalisation” (a point to which I will return). Finally the low-end services sector, employing a significant majority of US workers looks like the textbook case of a perfectly competitive sector in the sense that firms are under-capitalised, margins and profits are tight and work that is precarious and very poorly paid. Without direct support from government via wage support workers in this sector would barely get by, but that puts a sticking plaster over the problem of low pay. This is part of the structural transformation of welfare state capitalism across the affluent West, but markedly so in the racialised and inefficient version of the welfare state in the USA (Alesina and Glaeser 2004).
In my view Lazonick takes Galbraith’s framework and shows how things are even worse than you might think. If Galbraith takes the Schumpeterian explanatory framework to show that there was a fundamental, structural, inequality in the US economy grounded on sectoral division, what has happened in Lazonick’s accounting is that the financial sector has colluded with both the capital goods creating sector and the capital goods using sector to engage in predatory value extraction using the mechanisms that he carefully documents. The malformation of the American state’s investment policies has produced a lopsided capital distribution across the economy, that has created a fatted calf for the value extracting elite (including the “high end” part of the service sector). What “the neo-liberal state” means in this context is a state that enables, and sustains, this activity. It creates and sustains rent seeking niches, it places its own massive spending at the service of sectors deemed key to its political purposes, and it places the exorbitant privilege of the dollar at the service of derisking the financial sector.
That segues into my basic question for Lazonick: if we reinstate the Chandlerian firm do we not have the same problem of the fissured economy that worried Galbraith in 1998? In some ways this is a corollary of the problems with which Lazonick is concerned: one aspect of the doctrine of MSV, which he notes in passing, is that a firm should focus on its “core activities”. That means any part of a firm’s generic operations that can be outsourced, should be outsourced. So, for example, if Microsoft is forced to share its profits with its highly talented software engineers, it is not so constrained when it comes to paying the minibus drivers who shuttle the engineers across the Redmond campus. That service should be outsourced – and it is. The same holds true for a plethora of functions that used to be part of the Chandlerian firm but which the logic of “downsize and distribute” dictates should be outsourced. If this outsourcing also involves jurisdictional arbitrage, where the work can be done by poorly paid employees in developing countries, so much the better.
In fact, underpinning Lazonick’s and Galbraith’s worrying diagnoses there is a further one that is even more troubling. I do not want to deny that if we could put the clock back to the 1950s and 1960s in the USA to those decades which are, in this book, paradigms of sustainable and inclusive prosperity it would be a major improvement on the historical episode that has come to a close. But the deeper diagnosis, originating with Keynes but applied to the political economy of the USA by Minsky and Robinson, is that the structural basis of current inequality lay in those earlier decades (Robinson 1972, 1976, 1977).
The American state saw its task in those years as sustaining profits in the private sector. Aggregate demand was thus targeted solely via the sector that created capital goods in key industries radiating outwards from a core focused on military expenditure. While Keynes thought that two thirds of national investment should be under state control, the US state concentrated on channelling private investment, by guaranteeing profits, into this capital intensive sector (Minsky 1975, 1986/2008). Those sectors that employed the majority of American workers were, by contrast, not the recipients of investment. If you want to control inflation, then a core set of goods and services must be produced at stable prices, but this investment policy did not set itself this aim (Feygin 2021).
Instead, conflict emerges because of the contrast between the employees of the Chandlerian firm, who must receive a share of the profits, and workers more generally. With no investment, because of low anticipated profits, across most the US economy, the output of goods and services from this periphery remained stable while a newly affluent group of industrial workers are, indeed, receiving their Schumpeterian dividend. The result simply had to be the inflation crisis of the 1970s that was, comically, then blamed on something called “Keynesianism”. If it was easy to destroy the organised power of the working class in the 1970s it is because the Chandlerian firm has already divided the skilled from the unskilled, and those employed in the investment intensive sectors from those who were not.
My question is, then, whether it is enough to recapture the prominence of the innovative, Chandlerian firm, at the commanding heights of the US economy, without Keynes’s complementary emphasis on the state control of public investment via a national strategy whose aim went beyond sustaining private profits. If our concern is justice, and the fate of the worst off, then we have to be concerned with the workers who are either not candidates to be in the Chandlerian firm, or were “outsourced” from it. In spite of the remarkable achievements of this book, it seems to me that its reform agenda will have to extend to a wider reform of industrial policy, the role of the state in directing investment, and in a jobs guarantee.
The need for a comprehensive and national investment strategy leads to the deepest question this book raises – a political question. Time is a central theme of this book. The predatory value extractor does nothing to create future value, being content to extract rent from an existing value creation process. As a result that process is effectively sabotaged. What, then, of the future?
Here we come up against the basic fact, recently noted by Mark Blyth and Thomas Oatley, that the post-WWII growth model was based on the material reality of fossil fuel industry with an attendant politics they call a “carbon coalition” (Blyth and Oatley 2021). It is undoubtedly true that, as we transition away from that, many of the coastal elite are already working as symbolic analysts in a New Economy. But far more members of the business elite are, instead, profiting from the transition of a carbon based economy into an economy shaped by the climate crisis into what they envisage as a class of permanent rentiers. The predatory value extractor has no concern for future productivity as the plan is to live off the proceeds of past productivity for as long as possible.
Not only to address climate change, but to transform America’s politics, Professor Lazonick’s policies have to be embedded in a new investment strategy. As Blyth and Oatley put it:
Non-coastal, largely Republican states must be the epicenter of the green transition and be the recipients of most of the investment. After all, they have the most assets to turn around and the most to lose if they are not compensated. If all they are offered is “you decarbonize/we keep the money,” then all they will give back is more Trumpism. (Blyth and Oatley 2021)
To which I think we should simply add one fact about Carl Icahn, the anti-hero of this book’s chapter six: he was, at one point, considered for appointment as Donald Trump’s Treasury Secretary. A good point at which to draw this commentary to a close.
List of Works Cited
Alesina, Alberto, and Edward Glaeser. 2004. Fighting Poverty in the USA and Europe: A World of Difference (Oxford University Press: Oxford).
Arrow, Kenneth J, and Gerard Debreu. 1954. ‘Existence of an Equilibrium for a Competitive Economy’, Econometrica, 22: 265–90.
Baker, Dean. 2016. Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer (Center for Economic and Policy Research: Washington, DC).
Blyth, Mark, and Thomas Oatley. 2021. “The Death of the Carbon Coalition.” In Foreign Affairs.
Deutschmann, Christoph. 2012. ‘Limits to Financialisation’, European Journal of Sociology, 52: 347–89.
Fazi, Thomas, and William Mitchell. 2017. Reclaiming the State: A Progressive Vision of Sovereignty for a Post-Neoliberal World (Pluto Press).
Feygin, Yakov. 2021. “The Deflationary Bloc.” In Phenomenal World. New York.
Furman, Jason, and Peter Orszag. 2018. ‘A Firm-Level Perspective on the Role of Rents in the Rise of Inequality.’ in Martin Guzman (ed.), Toward a Just Society: Joseph Stiglitz and Twenty First Century Economics (Columbia University Press).
Gabor, Daniela. 2020. ‘Critical Macro-finance: A Theoretical Lens’, Finance and Society, 6: 45–55.
Galbraith, James K. 1998. Created unequal: the crisis in american pay (A Twentieth Century Fund Book: New York).
———. 2008. The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Do Too(The Free Press).
Klein, Matthew C., and Michael Pettis. 2020. Trade Wars Are Class Wars: How Rising Inequality Distorts the Global Economy and Threatens International Peace (Yale University Press).
Lazonick, William, and Jang-Sup Shin. 2019. Predatory Value Extraction: How the Looting of the Business Corporation Became the US Norm and How Sustainable Prosperity Can Be Restored (Oxford University Press).
Lind, Michael. 2020a. “The China Question.” In Tablet.
———. 2020b. The New Class War: Saving America from the Managerial Elite (Portfolio).
Minsky, Hyman. 1975. John Maynard Keynes (Columbia University Press).
———. 1986/2008. Stabilizing an Unstable Economy (McGraw Hill).
Prasad, Monica. 2006. The Politics of Free Markets: The Rise of Neoliberal Economic Policies in Britain, France, Germany and the United States (University of Chicago Press).
Robinson, Joan. 1972. ‘The Second Crisis of Economic Theory’, The American Economic Review, 62: 1–10.
———. 1976. ‘The Age of Growth’, Challenge, 19: 4–9.
———. 1977. ‘What Are the Questions?’, Journal of Economic Literature, 15: 1318–39.
Sonti, Samir. 2018. “The World Paul Volcker Made.” In Jacobin.
Temin, Peter. 2017. The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy (MIT Press).
Thomas, Alan. 2017. Republic of Equals: Pre-distribution and Property-Owning Democracy (Oxford University Press).
———. 2020a. ‘Full Employment, Unconditional Basic Income and the Keynesian Critique of Rentier Capitalism’, Basic Income Studies, 15: online first.
———. 2020b. ‘Rawls On Economic Liberty and the Choice of Systems of Social Cooperation.’ in John Mandle and Sarah Roberts-Cady (eds.), John Rawls: Debating the Major Questions (Oxford University Press).
Tooze, Adam. 2018. Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World (Allen Lane).
It’s Deja Vu All Over Again – Adam Tooze’s Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World’s Economy, Allen Lane, 2021
Posted: September 23, 2021 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a commentIn his latest book Adam Tooze, the most important historian of our generation, brings his combination of analytic skill and capacity to synthesise a vast amount of evidence to develop a narrative history, in medias res, of the coronavirus pandemic. As his title indicates, his primary focus is the historically unprecedented shutdown of the global economy caused by the pandemic. This time it was different: economic activity was not suppressed by the ebb and flow of the business cycle, rather shut down by a “biological shock” (p.292). These shutdowns happened sometimes at the behest of states, at other times driven by ordinary citizens demanding that their work be suspended because of the threat from the virus. The scope of the shutdown was truly global and Tooze sketches out the politics of the pandemic on a large canvas.
Tooze is an old fashioned theorist of great power politics which, in our time, works via elite governance. These elites are more or less co-ordinated with each other and, for that matter, more or less concerned with the issue of their own democratic legitimacy. While Tooze’s scope is global, he is particularly concerned with three blocs: the EU, the USA and China. This book can usefully be read against the backdrop of his previous book, Crashed, an outstanding narrative of the financial crisis of 2007-8. That which connects these books is that we are once again dealing with risk societies in Ulrich Beck’s sense: “our modern economic and social system is is systematically generating disease risk” – the key word being “systematic” in a way that connects this book to its predecessor (p.31) Once again, as in the financial crisis of 2007-8, this risk has been “mispriced” by markets. Yet again, the investments in public health infrastructure to address this risk has been inadequate – the funding of the WHO being a case in point (pp.32–34). It matters here that these are global risks requiring robust, and well funded, trans-national institutions. In their absence, there had to be various forms of rapid catch-up in the face of (another Beck term) “organised irresponsibility”. If anything, I thought Tooze’s judgements were a little harsh at this point in his argument about our global preparedness: SARS and MERS came and went, no one wanted to jump the gun, and it was not clear how much pre-preparation would have been necessary to take the edge off the speed and extend of the coronavirus’ impact. As Keynes was keen to emphasise: some things we just cannot know in advance.
The most interesting single thread of argument in the book concerns finance and that will be my focus here. It is often said that our economies are “financialised”, usually not as a compliment, and this is matched by a sceptical backlash against the financial sector from the progressive Left. This book picks up where Crashed left off. Thirty years of political rhetoric from the 1980s to 2007 putatively saw the “rolling back” of the state, faced with the increased efficiency and benefits for human welfare from more extensive and deeper markets. The most important such markets, where the appetite for risk in calculating the returns on investment in productive capital was measured, are financial markets. Yet it turned out, in the political debacle that accompanied the bailouts after the 2007–8 crisis, that major actors on those markets were following the classic capitalist logic of socialising a massive, systemic, risk externality offloaded on to the state while taking the equally massive private profits that their activity generated (at virtually no risk to themselves). It turned out that the ordinary democratic citizen – and taxpayer – who had been assured that there was no alternative to the anti-democratic technocratic governance of the elites, had indeed been duped. The promise of elite governance was bankrupt; 2007–8 saw the start of a backlash against elite governments across the affluent societies of the West. This book fills out a key part of that narrative, namely, the ironic consequences of the insulation of central banking from democratic legitimation, putatively at the service of its “technocratic mandate” – a justification that some of us think is entirely bogus and, in fact, a political strategy disguised as a problem of knowledge (1).
The search for political alternatives has been on-going ever since. Issues such as massive inequality, rent seeking by insider elites, and the symbiosis between elites in government, the professional-managerial class, the global wealthy and the financial sector are openly debated in a way that they were not prior to the crisis. One of the most important issues that Tooze discusses in this book is whether the progressive Left is right to foresee that, after forty years on the retreat, the coronavirus crisis coming so soon after the financial crisis affords them an historical moment to seize the political momentum. In particular, can they turn the sovereign power of the state in money creation to progressive ends?
Tooze’s answer is “no”, but it is worth setting out the details of how he reaches that conclusion. His argument has four parts. First, Tooze explains the mechanism by which states backstop the financial sector via the activity of central banks: we learned from Crashed that the Federal Reserve System of the USA is, in effect, the central bank for global capitalism. It is the backstopping bank to the other central banks with which it has direct relationships via liquidity swap lines.
Second, he notes that we live in an age of capital abundance without the threat of inflation: Crashed explained how $15tn either of direct cash or guarantees was pumped into the global economy in the 2007-8 crisis, but the inflationary crisis that ought to have succeeded that event, on classical assumptions, failed to materialise. On the contrary, even neo-classical economists worried, instead, about a period of secular stagnation that seemed to reproduce Japan’s “lost decade” of near zero interest rates, no growth, the overhang of private debt, and the threat of deflation. As we will see below, this was particularly problematic for a governing ideology that offered decreases in democratic legitimacy in return for the prospect of continual economic growth.
Third, Tooze notes that there is a symbiotic, indeed mutually destructive, relationship between the state’s central banks and a hypertrophied financial sector. This is an important part of his argument influenced by the work of Daniela Gabor and her research collaborators (2).
Fourth, and this is crucial for Shutdown, practice has completely outrun theory. The governing ideology of elites from the Nixon Shock to the present day was that floating, fiat, currencies threatened to put monetary policy in the hands of progressive forces – real Keynesians, not the fake ones – and so a key complement to the mantra of “there is no alternative” in economic policy is the creation of independent central banks tasked with the “fundamental” issue of creating a stable price environment. What that means, in effect, is the targeting of inflation above all else – employment go hang – because the future of rentier-investor capitalism depended on protecting the asset holder and expanding the class of the indebted.
I would put Tooze’s point this way: the state never went away during the era of so-called “neo-liberalism” – it came down, heavily, on labour in all its forms – and it did so always at the service of the rentier-investor class. Unfortunately, the resulting social system – to borrow a Rawlsian term – has proven to be unstable. I would add a distinction, intended to be helpful for Tooze’s argument, between that which George Soros called “market fundamentalism” as a set of ideas, and neo-liberalism as the upshot of applying them in a context where imbalances of power either already existed or were created (3). The power of the state was rolled back on where it furthered the sectional interests of the rentier-investor class to do so. (See my Republic of Equals, OUP, 2017 (4)) Elsewhere the state was put at the service of private corporate profit, just as Joan Robinson and Hyman Minsky predicted, as the rampant inequality of the period from 1980–2020 saw stagnant wages, massive private indebtedness, and precarious employment for the many (5). These developments were accompanied by disproportionate returns, excess saving, and total political domination for the few. This is not, nor was it ever, Soros’s market fundamentalism: it is socialism for major corporations (financial and non-financial) and for rich people globally, but particularly so in the USA. The reason is that we are not, currently, breaking free of neo-liberalism as the progressive Left hopes is that we were never neo-liberal in the first place. As Tooze pithily puts it, the GOP has “been for decades committed to blocking the construction of a state apparatus befitting of an advanced society and dismantling it where it does exist” (p.299). (I would add the caveat that the GOP is happy to construct its fortresses at the level of individual states – the federal structure of US governance allows them to build a national “vetocracy” while building regional power bases at state level. This further allows the electoral biases between the states, as built into the electoral college, to magnify their capacity to make mischief.)
All of this frames Tooze’s answer to the progressives’ question: it turns out that, in our world, fiscal (tax) policy and monetary (money supply) policy have indeed (as Paul Culley puts it) “merged”. Two allegedly distinct parts of government are, in practice, fused: for example, the state pays money directly into people’s bank accounts during the coronavirus crisis in order to furlough them from their work. That is government spending. It is “funded” when the Treasury department issues a bond instrument. Who buys those bonds? Another branch of government – the central bank. How does the central bank “afford” those purchases? It uses the power of a monetarily sovereign government, which cannot go bankrupt in its own currency, to create money (6). The assets and liabilities on the central bank’s balance sheet grow together like a broadening base of a pyramid. (7) It seems, then, just like Keynes and Abba Lerner (8)the proponent of “functional finance”) always claimed, that we can fund whatever social purposes we set ourselves. If this the truth that we learned when that $15tn was created during the financial crisis then we have, in the words of the Britney Spears song, “Oops, I did it again” – just done it again. Our governing elites, when they want to pursue their own social purposes, never seem troubled by the question of how “”we”” can afford it.
Why, then, the progressive asks will we not see this extension – really, recovery – of the full panoply of the monopoly powers of the state put at the service of a democratic socialism that we have always, clearly, been able to afford? Tooze insists that the optimistic progressive is reading the current moment incorrectly. As he notes, throughout the coronavirus crisis the image of war has been drawn on by various political leaders and in this case the metaphor of world war is no longer a metaphor – this crisis really does involve all seven billion of us on this planet. I would add to his analysis the observation that the idea of wartime democratisation is a familiar one: that when the mass of a population lives through a time of sacrifice, and when it sees what a fully mobilised state can achieve, there is pressure not to go back to the status quo ante. The Attlee government in the UK in 1945; the involvement of the French communist party in the negotiations that led to the trentes glorieuses in France; indeed, a wave of sympathy for communism across the European continent that America struggled to contain – all of this was the upshot of wartime democratisation. If there is mass popular support for radical reform and the tools are at hand why is this not the progressive moment – especially when it comes to the Green New Deal?
Tooze’s diagnosis is that elites only lifted the curtain on what could be achieved by deploying all the sovereign powers of the state when they felt free to act with impunity: only after forty years of political action had destroyed all countervailing power. Early in the book he notes that “For all the centrist handwringing about ‘populism’, class antagonism was enfeebled, wage pressure was minimal, strikes nonexistent” (p.15). Central bankers may be “kicking over the traces” (p.189), but they are the only radical agents of social change who remain. They have to deny that this radicalism is, in fact, what they are engaged in and, in any case, their actions reinforce the power of finance. Public debt of all kinds, whether US Treasury debt or the creation of novel pooled debt in the form of Eurobonds, supplies the rocket fuel for collateral based market finance. Treasury bonds are the safe collateral needed for market based finance (for “safe” read “cheap”) while also serving the essential function of benchmarking an ideally risk free portfolio. Far from lamenting the inflationary pressures of state spending, asset managers are only too happy to see their fuel supply expanded – particularly if they can finally diversify beyond US Treasuries.
Progressives are, then, reading the current moment wrongly, that is to say from Tooze’s perspective, a-historically:
“Such comparisons with the mid-century heyday of Keynesianism no doubt help to capture the drama of the moment. They express the wish of many, on the left as well as the right, to return to that moment when the national economy was first constituted as an integrated and governable entity. As the interconnected implosion of demand and supply demonstrated, macroeconomic connections are very real. But as a frame for reading the crisis response in 2020, this retrofitting risks anachronism. The fiscal-monetary synthesis of 2020 was a synthesis for the twenty-first century. While it overturned the nostrums of neoliberalism, notably with regard to the scale of government interventions, it was framed by neoliberalism’s legacies, in the form of hyperglobalization, fragile and attenuated welfare states, profound social and economic inequality, and the overweening size and influence of private finance”. (p.132)”
As Tooze makes clear, this fragmentation of the opposition from the Left applies across the EU, the UK and the USA: the only meaningful political debate was between the technocratic centrists and the belligerent wing of “right populists” (p.284) further to the Right even of them.
I have heard political economist Mark Blyth make the same point by invoking Heraclitus: you cannot step into the same river twice. There is no going back to the political conditions that created the “good capitalism” of 1945–1970 because of what has happened in the interim. The point is deepened if the true heirs of Keynes – Joan Robinson and Hyman Minsky – were right that the conditions put in place in the post-WWII USA created the structural tensions that culminated in the 1970s and could only be contained by the overt state syndicalism of the last forty years. The state never “went away” for all of us – it only went away from the lives of the poorest and worst off in the form of austerity politics and reduced public provision. We cannot re-boot from 1945 because we are , politically, in the hands of the big winners of the last forty years. Any progressive measures in the interim will be what they allow us to get away with.
The details matter, and progressives are guilty of applying the duck test. The new monetary regime looks as though we have democratic control of both tax (fiscal) and monetary policy working in combination to pursue progressive ends. But central banks have, in fact, been led entirely the interest of their “clients” in the financial sector. This sector has engaged in more and more risky practices knowing full well that it is backstopped by what Daniela Gabor calls the “derisking state” (9). If the image of “shadow banking” is of an unregulated fringe operating in the shadows, that is a misunderstanding of the fact that shadow banking is actually the core of the transformation of the financial sector into that which Gabor (and others) usefully call “market based finance” with no interest in federally insured and regulated deposits because they are not risky enough to generate a return (10). It is shadow banking that is the voracious consumer of state issued bonds turning central banks into what Alberto Giovannini calls “collateral factories” to feed the beast (11). Charged with the impossible task of stabilising an inherently unstable system, central banks pursue their own agendas and, in the process, reduce borrowing “costs” for governments, but as Gabor puts it “this is a side effect, not a policy target” of their actions (12). It is an institutional mis-alignment of incentives that sees central banks myopically take care of the brief assigned to them – macro-financial stability – with their direct aim being (as Tooze puts it) “to manage interest rates and ensure financial stability” (p.148). However, he continues:
“[W]hich in practice meant underwriting the high-risk investment strategies of hedge funds and other similar investment vehicles. Rather remarkably, they insisted that tending to financial markets was a more legitimate social mission than openly acknowledging the highly functional, indeed essential, role they played in backstopping the government budget at a time of crisis” (pp. 148–9)
In her own contribution to post-pandemic macro-economics, Gabor refers to this transformation as a “Revolution without revolutionaries” (13). What explains these bizarre developments?
Shadow banks, in our economies, have several key features: they are maxed out on leverage so when they post collateral for their borrowing any change to its underlying value immediately impacts their overall position: profitability demands that they be leveraged to the maximal degree at all times (or money is being left on the table). When that collateral is a sovereign bond, its “price” is determined by its supply and demand – and the producer is the central bank. This forces the role of central bank intervention to change from the classic Bagehot role being a lender of last resort to being a market maker of last resort because the central bank, trying to prop up a distressed institution by lending to it, increase and does not decrease the margin call on that institution triggered by the drop in the value of its collateral (14). Thus the central bank targets not the distressed institution, but the macro-level, systemic, price of collateral in the system. The central bank becomes the ultimate supplier of liquidity in the system – the role of the dealer of last resort – while also adding another tool to its armoury of macro-, systemic, stablisation, namely, Quantitative Easing (15).
The interest rates set by central banks are supposed to have a “signalling role” for private credit creators (Gabor, 2021, p.6). That signalling role is threatened when interest rates hit zero – so the central bank also engages in quantitative easing policies. The reason is simple enough: when interest rates go below zero, banks might as well hoard their cash rather than lend it out. QE then moves from targeting the interest rate to targeting the level of reserves in the banking system (16). When a central bank buys financial assets, more cash goes into the system, and the value of the remaining assets in the system goes up. Bond yields go down, with the ultimate aim of driving down borrowing costs throughout the economy and sending the cash in the system out in search of higher returns – for example, into private company bonds and equities (shares) – hence the “juicing” of the US stock market by the Fed that so pleased President Trump. All of this does ease government borrowing costs, but central banks are adamant that this is not their aim – their aim is within their narrow brief of inflation targeting.
Thus Tooze documents the operation of a system of perverse incentives where, in order to advance desirable social ends such as tiding our economies over the coronavirus pandemic, central banks secure that indirect end via the direct aim of taking care of hedge fund billionaires and the rentier-investor class more generally. Off the page, then, is the diagnosis of the critical macro-finance theorists such as Gabor who have been deeply influenced by Hyman Minsky (17): that our economies are driven by financialised cycles, punctuated by periodic crises, that culminated in what Thomas Palley called the culmination of a Minskyan “super-cycle” in the catastrophic events of 2007–8 so well documented in Crashed (18). The background effect is a cycle of increasing inequality, a rich gets richer dynamic, more financialisation as excessive savings are recycled, producing an increasingly fragile system that crashes, is re-booted, and in the process the institutional and social dynamic is reinforced (19). Every recovery is a recovery for the rich, and every crisis deepens the next crisis and moves it closer towards the present. And on we go, with central banks aiming to dampen this process of instability while, in fact, accelerating it via their complicity in a system that they lack the power either to control or to dismantle.
Thus it is that, on the one hand, Tooze argues that the CARES Act in the USA seems to be its first large-scale exercise in public socialism since the New Deal. But, on the other hand, both the mode of its delivery and its purpose are anti-progressive. A historian of Germany, Tooze knows that the Bismarckian welfare state was created to stop its working class turning to communism (p.139) and here, too, the purpose of this social legislation is conservative. Tancredi Falconeri’s “everything must change so that everything can stay the same” is the most pertinent diagnosis (p.293). As for the mode of delivery, as Tooze notes in the US pandemic response:
“For all the talk of a new social contract and the scale of the spending, coronavirus fiscal policy was a much a reflection of pre-existing interests and inequalities as any other area of government action….Every detail of the trillion dollar programs reveals the mark of inequality” (p.141)
Even the CARES Act contained a typical American boondoggle whereby lobbyists smuggled significant breaks for the very wealthy into the legislation. Under Trump, the net benefit to America’s wealthiest citizens ran to the tune of $174bn. Nice (non-)work if you can get it.
This is in keeping with the other major theme of this book, not simply of central banking being liberated in a time of superabundance, but the latter itself. On page 172 Tooze quotes Goldman Sachs’s chief economist for Latin America “we are living in a world with abundant liquidity.” Just as proponents of the Green New Deal, such as Robert Hockett, have long emphasised the right kind of public investment does not “crowd out” private investment: it crowds it in (20). Perhaps Tooze does not focus enough on the fact the global credit card seems indefinitely expansible because, in the search for yield, there is so much capital out there that investors will take any deal. That is a recurrent theme throughout the book: while the EU area may have thoroughly botched its fiscal response to the coronavirus crisis – here Tooze repeats his negative scorecard for the EU Project in Crashed – borrowing across the EU was cheap with the ECB taking on its books 40% of German and Italian debt (p.283). The summative judgement of the whole book is that “the problem was not money. The problem was how to use it” (p.284).
That plays a role in his regional diagnoses: the mid-size emerging markets, with some exceptions, have weathered the storm because they repeated their strategy of resilience developed prior to the 2007-8 crisis (as documented in Martin Wolf’s The Shifts and the Shocks (2015)). They built up substantial foreign exchange reserves, borrow in their own currency and resist dollar pegs, thereby creating scope of action for – of course – their own central banks. (There is some tension here between this mechanism and Tooze’s broader generalisation that the spread of the US dollar helps to stabilise the global economy “at many points” including these regional nodes (p.294). These emerging market economies are in the dollar system but have successfully insulated themselves from its pressures.)
At the global level, this crisis is different because the real economy, for the most part, simply went into hibernation. The question was what people would actually live on during this hiatus and the answer, crudely, is the global credit card. Financialisation, for all its ills, allowed us collectively to weather the storm – which is not to ignore the tragedy of the lives lost, many avoidably so, as also documented in this narrative.
This point becomes important as the book develops and Tooze turns his attention to the global distribution of vaccines. It turns out that nation-states, or blocks of such states such as the EU, have cast aside their fiscal discipline in their domestic budgets. But when it comes to the global bet that the $25bn it would take to vaccinate everyone in the world would, according to the IMF, restore $9tn to global GDP by 2025 (p.244) there is no one willing to take that deal. Once again, our trans-national institutions are not working as they should – beyond, that is, the global scientific community. The only thing as absurd as this signal failure of global financialisation was the insistence, by the major private players in Big Pharma involved in the vaccine project, that they retain their intellectual property rights (p.245). Only states cowed into learned helplessness would let them get away with this.
On the issue of climate change, Tooze is clear that the coronavirus pandemic is, as he puts it, the first major crisis of the Anthropocene and that is its long term significance: “an exceptional and transient crisis, no doubt, but also a way station on an ascending curve of radical change” (p.292). We had better come to a measured assessment of our collective crisis response as it is the first of many to come. The constellation of climate issues in 2020 drove the point home – from cyclones to locus plagues to wildfires. At this point Tooze’s project in Shutdown segues into his forthcoming climate change project and China is crucial. Might the tectonic plates in global politics be shifting?
As he notes, the standard play from the elites’ playbook is to dismiss all resistance to their collective failure as evidence of “populism”. However, perhaps aware that this is not enough, the EU’s elites have tried to burnish their progressive credential by taking up the mantle of climate change. There is, once again, some convergence with Blyth’s ideas in a paper he co-wrote with Thomas Oatley: that we can detect the workings of the Cunning of History in the spectacular extent of American inequality (21). The wealth is in the hands of the Biden favouring US coastal elites and the Biden administration, like its European elite counterpart, has also seen the opportunity to develop its radical credentials by positioning itself as a Green administration. Blyth and Oatley think that American inequality supplies a war chest for that part of the American corporate elite willing to align itself behind a Green transition against the ancien regime of fossil fuel interests that overlap, interestingly, with Trump’s core support. Those whose livelihoods are going to be made obsolete will have to be bought off, just as Tooze notes that 17.5 billion euros was earmarked to ease the passage of the EC’s draft climate law “to pay off Polish miners.”
His chapter devoted to China (chapter ten) is significantly titled “momentum” (echoing Xi’s speech in January 2021 (p.298)): given the capacity for state control in its authoritarian political system, the coronavirus pandemic has deepened China’s comparative economic advantage over the affluent West because of the speed of its recovery (p.195). The predicted date at which China’s GDP will outstrip that of the USA has been brought forward to 2028–9. As trust in the Chinese Communist Party declines in the affluent West, it has taken the opportunity to suppress the last vestiges of democratic resistance in Hong Kong, and to proceed with ambitious plans for further investment and decarbonisation that has key players in the Western investment ecosystem champing at the bit to be let in to China’s vast market. Investment firms want stability and a favourable investment environment and are, in that respect, no more concerned than the CCP with details such as democratic legitimacy. Bridgewater are emblematic here, with Ray Dalio’s pivot to China because of a disillusionment with America’s transition to a rentier economy with “loose” monetary policy. The bottom line is that QE has “crushed” US Treasury yields and Chinese sovereign debt was the safer haven in 2020, the ideology of the CCP notwithstanding (p.203).
As a chronicler of elites and their pet project of “”globalisation””, Tooze studies those aspects of the global economy where inter-dependence is most marked – notably the financial system. If it is true that China will, indeed, be carbon neutral by 2060 then it will be even more attractive to an EU-Chinese axis at the expense of the USA. In the immediate future, the US foreign policy and military establishment has pivoted to a new Cold War with China as its target with a view to “containing” America’s strongest geo-political rival. It is, as Tooze notes, a fundamental threat to the globalists’ vision of a “flat” world as the US tries to choke off Chinese access to key technologies and China moves to a dual component form of development with one component being wholly autarchic. Qua student of this trans-national elite project, Tooze thinks it has gone too far effectively to be reversed (p.297) – except in the case of China. Here we are dealing with “the greatest social experiment of all time” (p.298) and here there can only be questions, not answers. The CCP does not intend to “converge” on liberal norms: this is a Marxism for the twenty-first century that has learned from the errors of the Soviet Union.
As Tooze notes, Biden did come into office aligning the US as confronting two global challenges that required national mobilisation: climate change and China (p.296). A degree of scepticism as to whether the US can rise to these tasks emerges from the governance crisis in the USA that is the subject of Tooze’s chapter eleven, “America’s National Crisis’. Tooze documents the success with which America’s corporate oligarchy has totally destabilised any normal form of democratic politics. The simply bizarre spectacle of the GOP turning on corporate CEOs as anti-American apostles of woke-ism is only one of the multiple divisions charted in this chapter as the ruling elite splinters. We can at least conclude that the promise of the ‘doux commerce’ tradition that Americans can at least come together in market transactions, has not withstood the latest round of the culture wars. In a chapter replete with ironies, the controversy over keeping American business open – or re-opening it – saw “enraged petty capitalists and right-wing oligarchs” arrayed against “corporate liberalism.” (p.216). There is palpable frustration as Tooze the theorist tries to make sense of the policy absurdities of the GOP: a party of fiscal discipline always in favour of military adventurism and tax cuts for the rich; of small government but in favour of a massive military and “a party of self-reliance that counted on the Fed to juice the stock market” (p.219) The oversized ego of POTUS 45, who knew that he gained electorally from fear and chaos, overshadows this whole chapter. The resolution to Tooze’s puzzle, as he at times hints, is the potency of a politics of identity that benefits the American Right just as it fragments and disperses what (passes for) the American Left.
Tooze is under no illusions about the Biden administration’s radical credentials: as he notes, it is indebted to those of its wealthy backers who threatened to split the anti-Trump vote had there been any serious prospect of the Democratic Party nominating Bernie Sanders as its presidential candidate (p.227). He is clearly on side with the “modernising” forces of the USA, by which I think he means those forces that would, at least, suggest that the richest society that there has ever been could afford a social democratic welfare state. Yet he is sceptical that Biden administration policy actually matches its high flown rhetoric: once again, the developmental state is sidelined, reduced to the role of catalyst for private investment decisions resting, as he under-stately puts it “on optimistic assumptions” (p.300). The only – tattered – hope is that the institutional fragmentation of America’s political institutions mean that “it can continue to function in a divided way” driven by a kind of pragmatic survival instinct.
Tooze’s aims are diagnostic: if we live in a dollar denominated system, and the US must be at the forefront of the emerging climate crisis, do we want its powers re-unified under a revanchist fossil fuel regime? Or is there a sense of “better” in which it would be better if it remained “a more incoherent American regime in which key levers of power remain the purview of functional elites, globalised interests, and modernising coalitions in key centres like New York and Silicon Valley.” (p.301). Let’s put a name to it, which Tooze won’t, are the rest of us better off if the US becomes more, not less, oligarchic? From this perspective, it seems that the path-dependent nature of our current models of “technocratic” governance demand not more democratic legitimacy, but even less.
The origin of the diagnosis seems to lie in the fact that what most alarms Tooze is the mismatch between the global power of the politics of the US dollar and the fragility of its political foundation in US domestic politics. Had the fiscal package that Trump signed at the last minute in December, 2020, not been signed it would all have been up to the Fed and as he notes its policy instruments are effective but “”blunt””. By the skin of its teeth, the US combined fiscal stimulus with expansive monetary policy and “pumped demand into the world economy” (p.273). That is good news, but there is a close possible world in which US domestic polarisation had undercut the fiscal stimulus while the Fed’s “compensatory” QE deepened domestic inequality and led to currency wars with countries seeking to protect themselves from a devalued dollar.
In practical terms, this meant that there was to be no repeat of any measures to address the pandemic of the scale of the CARES Act. Once again, only the Fed could step up in the face of dysfunction in America’s oligarchic governance, notably, via its purchase of the municipal debt incurred by the local governments at the cutting edge of dealing with the pandemic. In the process there was a major portent of a fundamental shift in the Fed’s macro-economic policy: via its re-framing of it inflation target for the first time in a generation the US economy might be allowed to “run hot”. That is an appropriate context for the current moral panic surrounding inflation that is affecting the rentier-investor class and its influential spokespeople in the media. As Tooze noted in a complementary recent publication ‘The Gatekeeper’ – his best short form essay – the answer to secular stagnation is to allow the economy to run hot so that private agents of all kinds – consumers and businesses – will stop hoarding cash and be forced to spend it rather than see it lose its real purchasing power (22).
Amidst all the suffering and the chaos, there is a basically optimistic perspective to be taken away from this book, not least its conclusion that “the scientific community’s response to the coronavirus will go down in history as one of humanity’s more remarkable collective achievements” (p.237) – a nice example of Tooze’s capacity for British under-statement. The opening stages of a vaccine response were primed, as it were, by the research provoked by the SARS outbreak in 2003 (p.238). If this was a vaccine race, as Tooze chooses to describe it, that is because it has been our collective political choice to organise pharmaceutical research and bioscience in this way. Despite the idiocies of respecting the Pharmaceutical industry’s interest in preserving its rent generating intellectual property protections – a topic where, we learn, the Gates Foundation holds strong views (p.245) – no less than 90 global vaccines are in production. This optimism, however, is balanced by the failure of our global institutions to organise a solution in our collective self interest to global vaccination, combined with effective debt relief for the world’s poorest countries – what actually took place is well described by Tooze as a “mockery” (p.259). It seems that financial innovation within the affluent West is not to be matched by the creative use of the world’s only global currency, the special drawing rights at the IMF, to underpin an effective response from the G20. Here the malign influence of Trump is clearly evident and, more generally, American resistance to the rise of a global rival to the US dollar.
At this point of the argument, the USA’s polarised politics really does play out on the global stage. Equally problematic, as Tooze notes in his chapter 13, are the scale of China’s debt imperialism via its belt and road initiative, and the outsize role played in the financing of the debt of the world’s poorest countries by private lenders working in conjunction with the private ratings agencies. All of these factors undercut the Debt Service Suspension Initiative. That a framework is emerging to resolve the collective action problem when the relief of debts by public agencies serves only to cross-subsidise the gains of private lenders is encouraging, but, once again, this essentially political project faltered as an immediate response to the pandemic. Tooze is the authoritative guide to the competition between Chinese state investment via the belt and road initiative, and a plurality of competing schemes from the Western powers with one common feature – a limited degree of public investment is leveraged by private sector actors. The problem with the latter is two-fold: the private investor seeks the guaranteed returns from “middle income, not low income” countries (p.264) and the bottom line sums are simply not enough. For the 670 million people who live in the world’s poorest countries, their mere existence “did not pose a systemic risk to the centres of economic and political power in the global north” (pp.264–5). Given the nature of the governance regime we are living under, that means that, in effect, they simply didn’t count (enough).
Early in the book, Tooze cites a template for explaining multiple crises developed by Xi Ping’s intellectual advisor Chen Yixin: the risk matrix of “back flow” from state action; the merging of superficially separate threats; the layering of distinct threats from separate domains; global communication linkages; the magnifier effect of an internet based informational ecosystem; a copycat effect where problems in one place are imitated elsewhere (pp.6-7). By the Conclusion to this book this image of a polycrisis recurs in the context of a crisis of a “model of American-led globalisation”: that Tooze judges to be “in deep trouble” as it had been “for some time” (p.288). In Crashed, Tooze notes that he had to make a rapid course adjustment when it seemed to him that Obama’s efforts to recover from the 2007-8 crisis had largely succeeded, only for Tooze to realise both that it had not, and that the political fallout from that crisis were on-going and escalating. Anxious to avoid such premature optimism this time round in this new book, Tooze emphasises just how deeply in crisis the US remains. He is guardedly optimistic that the Biden administration has learned the lessons from 2007–8 and has “gone big” with its fiscal stimulus via its infrastructure plan. This development reinforces Tooze’s central thesis: that the Fed has finally worked out that it is no longer the 1980s: with organised labour defeated decisively, the economy can be run hot without the mythical threat from the wage price spiral that is the nightmare of monetarists. Tooze’s view, shared by many, is that the Fed has put itself in a position where, in effect, it underwrites the bond market in a way from which it cannot withdraw. (Blyth calls this “a moral hazard extortion game” (23).) The idea of “normalising” the Fed’s relation to the bond market has, in the light of the events of 2020, receded to a future that seems likely never to arrive. Tooze takes this emblematic of the general theme that the pandemic has highlighted a degree of state involvement in the economy from which, across jurisdictions, it is unable to retreat.
This is a book, then, primarily written for students of irony. Radical political action is being taken by the most unaccountable of politic actors, central banks, beneficiaries of an institutional set up designed to protect them from democratic “pressure”. This development is celebrated by progressives, who affect to despise unaccountable technocratic elites, notwithstanding the fact that the elite cadre of the world’s central banker are the most unaccountable elite of them all. We can expect the conditions imposed by the pandemic to have exacerbated the degree of our domination by elite financial interests. In this “revolution without revolutionaries” it is capitalism, itself, that is going through its own revolution and very much on its own terms.
At the outset of the book Tooze describes its central theme as “a comprehensive crisis of the Neo-liberal era” (p.22). His diagnosis is that the governing elites managed what I would call a “kludge”: a financial and a medical fix that failed to co-ordinate across nation-states in the interests of either efficiency or fairness (p.292). In Tooze’s terms, this is “crisis management on an ever-larger scale, crisis-driven and ad hoc” and we can look forward to more of the same. That is why central banking, so central to his narrative, is paradigmatic for how we are to read the long term effects of the crisis. Now that the curtain has been drawn back – what next? Tooze describes the model on offer from our technocratic elites as a “growth model” – their answer to everything. He also takes at face value, as the chronicler of their mores, that we have just witnessed an example of “technocratic governance”. He frames the issue, then, as to how this technocratic governance that comes up with an ad hoc solution to crises, economic or biological, can be reconciled with democratic legitimacy. For the reasons noted, I do not accept this framing, and Tooze has provided all the evidence we need to challenge it. But that is a large issue for another occasion.
Crashed was written in the light of a resigned acceptance that at least in one domain, finance, a tight form of globalisation was a fait accompli. Shutdown takes the argument a step further: that regime forms part of a broader model of oligarchic governance that may, in the case of the USA, produce less damaging global consequences than (for example) a presidential win for a 78-year old Donald Trump in 2024 (Biden’s current age). If you have any residual faith in democracy, let’s hope the leading interpreter of our current politics and its global challenges is wrong and that we face better choices than which form of oligarchic governance we would like to live under. It is worth bearing in mind, here, as I noted in Republic of Equals, that the ruling elites in the USA are uniquely free of the putative pressures of globalisation that they impose on others (pp.333–336).
Overall, then, this is a deeply interesting book that deserves the wide audience it will undoubtedly receive. It will be a public service if the broader reading public reads it alongside the usual suspects of academics working in history, geography, economics and, for that matter, philosophy. While we will be seeing a plethora of books on this subject matter in the months to come, it seems to me highly unlikely that they will be more insightful than Tooze’s opening effort. As with Crashed, we are once again all very much in his debt.
Notes
(1) As discussed in my ‘Is the Democratisation of Central Banking a Technocratic Problem?‘; see also Stefan Eich (2021) ‘Independence From What?’ https://justmoney.org/s-eich-independence-from-what/
(2) Notably in three papers: Daniela Gabor (2020) Critical Macro-finance: A Theoretical Lens. Finance and Society, 6(1), 45–55; Gabor, Yannis Dafermos and Jo Michell (2020) ‘Institutional Supercycles: An Evolutionary Macro-Finance Approach‘, Rebuilding Macroeconomics Working Paper series; Daniela Gabor (2021) ‘The Wall Street Consensus’, Development and Change, vol. 52, issue 3, pp. 429–459.
(3) George Soros (1998) The Crisis of Global Capitalism, Public Affairs.
(4) Alan Thomas (2017) Republic of Equals, Oxford University Press, esp p.62, p.65.
(5) See Alan Thomas, Alfred Archer and Bart Engelen (forthcoming) Extravagance and Misery: the Emotional Regime of Market Societies, chapters one and two.
(6) This is true of monetarily sovereign states: hence it is not an option available to any of the member states of the eurozone, whose ersatz “central bank, the ECB, operates under legal restrictions enthusiastically policed by the inflation phobic, anti-Keynesian, Bundesbank.
(7) This is called the “monetisation” of government debt instruments.
(8) Abba Lerner (1943) ‘Functional Finance and the Federal Debt’, Social Research, vol. 10, no. 1, pp.38–51.
(9) Daniela Gabor (2020) ‘Critical Macro-Finance’.
(10) Daniela Gabor and Cornel Ban (2016) ‘Banking on Bonds: the New Links between States and Markets’, Journal of Common Market Studies, vol.54, no.3, pp. 617–635.
(11) A. Giovannini (2013) ‘Risk Free Assets in Financial Markets’, BIS paper 72, pp.73–79.
(12) Daniela Gabor (2021) ‘Revolution Without Revolutionaries: Interrogating the Return of Monetary Financing’.
(13) Daniela Gabor (2021) ‘Revolution Without Revolutionaries: Interrogating the Return of Monetary Financing’.
(14) Perry Mehrling (2010) The New Lombard Street: How the Fed Became the Dealer of Last Resort, Princeton University Press. Mehrling draws a distinction between the orthodox central bank function of liquidity funding and the unorthodox extension of underwriting market liquidity by becoming, in effect, an insurer to the dealer system charging expensive premia for this service of protection against tail risks.
(15) Gabor, Dafermos and Michell are careful to explain how the process described by Mehrling is distinct from QE in spite of the similarity in the way the central bank actually operates (2020).
(16) The St.Louis Fed has a remarkably clear explanation of how QE works, written by Brett Fawley, that is worth consulting in detail.
Suppose you want to undertake a commitment, now, fully to pay an amount in the future — say five or ten years time. You would select an absolutely safe asset — a US Treasury bond — and determine its purchase price today. The discount rate you ought to use is equivalent to the yield on bonds of the same maturity (5 or 10 years).
But why would an investor buy a Treasury bond rather than simply take out a loan every day and rolling it over (re-financing) every day? What tempts them to buy a bond?
First of all, consider the length of the bond’s term and project what the overnight interest rate will be for every day of that term. Will the yield on the bond be higher? But tying up money is itself a risk, so the investor will also want to be paid a “risk premium” because central bank policy may change interest rates over the lifetime of the bond. Then, for some lenders, there is the risk of default (not, one might add, in the case of US Treasuries). Add in the effects of inflation on the real purchasing power of the return on the bond. Do all that arithmetic, and the yield on the bond must be higher than simply rolling over an investment on a daily basis.
How QE impacts on these calculations, as Fawley explains, is by sending to distinct kinds of signal. First, it does not directly say “short term borrowing costs in the future will be x, y or z”. It does signal that the central bank thinks that, by the mere act of engaging in QE, it can send the signal that interest rates will be low.
Second, an even more interesting effect of QE is on the premium paid both for risks and for the length of the holding of the bond (the term). As Fawley explains “If investors demand a premium for holding 10-year Treasuries over 5-year Treasuries, then this premium should depend in part on the relative supplies of 10-year and five-year Treasuries. If the Fed purchases 10-year Treasuries, removing them from the market, investors should require a smaller premium to hold the reduced quantity of 10-year Treasuries in their portfolio.” This is Tobin’s portfolio balancing effect: the longer the duration of an asset, the riskier it is to hold it (James Tobin, 1958 ‘Liquidity Preference as Behavior Towards Risk’, Review of Economic Studies, 25, pp.124–131).
Cancel a substantial amount of the assets with high duration in the market, while injecting cash, and investors will re-balance their portfolios. Why? There is less duration risk in the aggregate and the premium for holding it goes down. Again, why? This for three reasons: with the overall risk in their portfolio reduced, investors require less compensation to hold fewer of the riskier assets than they did when they held more. Or those who hold the long duration assets are the ones most willing to bear the risk because of their preferences, so the overall price of the risk goes down (the other investors required disproportionately higher compensation for bearing those risks). Or some investors actually want the long time horizon for, e.g. their retirement assets.
https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/research/staff_reports/sr441.pdf
Fawley points out that this effect depends on investors actually being sensitive to this issue: if they are indifferent between 5-year and 10-year bonds, then this change would have no impact on their portfolios. But “imperfect asset substitutability” is a fact, therefore this portfolio rebalancing effect is one of the important effects of QE. A smaller premium = cheaper borrowing and Fawley argues that, empirically, the portfolio rebalancing effect was empirically the strongest effect of QE via its reduction in term premia. With yields reduced, investors are displaced into the purchase of private sector bonds and equities; private consumers see their long term borrowing made cheaper (notably their mortgages); there is a wealth effect when asset holders see the value of their assets inflated by state asset purchases.
(17) I discuss some of these issues in my attempt to interpret Minsky as a political philosopher, not solely an economist, in ‘Hyman Minsky: More than a Moment’, unpublished ms.
(18) Thomas Palley (2011) ‘A Theory of Minsky Super-cycles and Financial Crises’, Contributions to Political Economy, vol.30, no. 1, pp.31–46; Hyman Minsky (1986/2008) Stabilising an Unstable Economy, McGraw-Hill
(19) Thomas, Archer and Engelen (forthcoming), Extravagance and Misery, chapters one and two.
(20) Robert Hockett (2020) Financing the Green New Deal: A Plan of Action and Renewal, Palgrave Macmillan.
(21) Mark Blyth and Thomas Oatley, ‘The Death of the Carbon Coalition‘, Foreign Policy, February 12, 2021.
(22) Adam Tooze, ‘The Gatekeeper’, LRB, vol. 43, no. 8, 22nd April 2021.
(23) Mark Blyth, ‘Fed Defends the ‘Creditors Paradise’. In theAnalysis.news. https://theanalysis.news/interviews/fed-defends-the-creditors-paradise-mark-blyth/
Online Symposium on the Philosophy of Samuel Freeman
Posted: October 13, 2020 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a commentThe journal Philosophy and Public Issues has just been released with papers by William Edmundson, Jessica Flanagan, Ingrid Salvatore and myself responding to Freeman’s Liberalism and Distributive Justice (Oxford University Press, 2018).
Freeman’s extensive reply discusses a property-owning democracy at length and defends it from various critiques; he also re-formulates his case for workplace democratisation, grounded on the Fair Equality of Opportunity principle and an argument from stability. Check it out!
My paper sets out a further defence of the pre-distributive versus re-distributive distinction as alternative forms of egalitarianism.
C-19, QE and the Great Pivot
Posted: July 14, 2020 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a commentForty years of neo-liberalism have produced a distorted economic landscape: forget the bedtime story about neo-liberals ‘rolling back’ the state. They co-opt the state at the service of a class war aimed at destroying the bargaining power of the working class. If you succeed – and the evidence of ‘success’ is all around us – then you drive down labour’s share of the productive surplus and real wages leading to chronic and extensive inequality. The flip side is the distortion of the corporate sector. The question is whether state response to the current coronavirus crisis can help to remove these distortions and lead us to a sustainable, mass consumption, full employment capitalism of the kind described here and here. (1)
Wherein lies the distortion? If a corporation has played the game intelligently, and well, then it has successfully exploited the state and the public sector. Perhaps it stole ‘borrowed’ patents from the public stock, or sought public subsidies for its innovation, but when the time came to pay the fair share on the return it reneged by jurisdiction shopping to cut the tax bill. If a corporation required any manufacturing capacity, that was outsourced overseas as were its ‘just in time’ supply chains. Focused on the religious mantra of shareholder value, all nonessential corporate functions were outsourced. (The halo effect of being a non-productive worker in a corporation was reduced.) This is the world not of superstar employees – although many of the employees of such firms like to think of themselves as the LeBron James of their employment niche – but of superstar firms. These firms, large-scale multinationals adept at tax evasion, have massive profitability and could fund any innovation they chose through their retained earnings. They do not, then, need external financing from the financial sector: what they do, instead, is become financial market players in their own right. (Apple’s joint issuance of a credit card with Goldman Sachs is the way of the future for this class of firms.)
This leaves the service sector. Some services, such as financial, legal and accounting services, are so closely imbricated with the successful corporate sector that it shares its (happy) fate. However, the vast majority of employment is located in a broader service sector that, unlike capital intensive production, cannot be outsourced (although it can in some cases be automated). Here we have firms where margins are very tight, profits are negligible and pay is very low. Many workers in this sector receive state benefits in work as a result of their low pay and/or precariousness of employment. (Or they may, in the UK, rely on private charity in the form of food banks.) For these sectors of the economy, the financial sector is an irrelevance. And here’s the rub: the Fordist-Keynesian model of production relied on Henry Ford paying his workers enough to buy a car. The lumpy profile of the fissured economy drives a structural deficit in consumption: wages are too low to support consumption (even when supplemented by private debt).
Suspended across these two sectors is the small and medium enterprise sector: too small to be of interest to lenders to the major corporation (whose monopolistic position gives them what every banker wants: the ability to be a price maker, not taker, in their markets to guarantee the flow of returns). A more stable and employment friendly capitalism – or successor to capitalism – working towards a full employment and mass consumption economy would have to be re-built from here.
The C-19 pandemic has seen the installation of many different kinds of emergency plumbing to see state support channelled through to firms, wages, and consumption. The ultimate origin of that support is the central bank: the Bank of England in the UK, the Federal Reserve in the USA. Both banks know that the major corporates are playing what Mark Blyth has called a “moral hazard extortion game” against the central banks with, as he also notes, the rider that “they [the central banks] are aware of it, they just don’t know how to get out of it”.
As Bill Blain has argued, the total disconnect between asset prices and the real economy cannot go on for ever. No amount of financial engineering can conceal the impact of C-19 on supply chains, manufacturing and sales in the medium term. As the weaker of the major corporates slide towards insolvency with downgraded credit ratings on the way we know exactly how they are going to respond: by firing people. As we know from Bill Lazonick’s work, we live in an economy with such perverse incentives that a firm laying off staff is welcomed by the market by an increase in its share price. Cue the Great Depression of 2021–22….
This is where, amongst the plethora of progressive solutions emerging in response to C-19 including Robert Hockett‘s suggestion of a people’s QE via a digital dollar/pound, state bailouts receiving, in return, a Golden Share of corporate stock for governments (as endorsed by the FT), part of a managed shift to greater economic democracy and worker ownership or profit sharing – there is a connection be forged between QE and the Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) sector. In contrast to the mega-corporates, this sector can be an employment buffer, particularly when workers participate in decision making. They can be a bridge between the QE agenda, the central banks’ capacity to extract themselves from the “moral hazard extortion game” and the community wealth building initiative. The long term process of rebuilding after the pandemic will keep some of the emergency plumbing permanently in place to engineer a structural reform to our current, inequality generating, fragile and crisis prone economies.
The community wealth building agenda arose from the ruins of extractive capitalism when localities such as Cleveland in the USA and Preston in the UK had economically to regenerate in their own terms. The key was to keep both production and consumption local with local government playing a key enabling role. One way to integrate all these different approaches is to give Central Bank QE the aim of supporting the SME sector in particular via wage support and providing much needed capitalisation with a retained stake in these enterprises. Taken in aggregate, this stake holding should be used to leverage employee ownership and a Citizens’ Sovereign Wealth Fund during the post-C19 recovery that will not return us all to the secular stagnation of the failed “recovery that wasn’t” from the global financial crisis of 2007–8. In the UK context, and to a certain extent in the USA, a community wealth building strategy based on SMEs could also contribute towards a regional re-balancing of wealth (and power) to geographical locales beyond London and the South-East or America’s coastal megacities.
Central bank reaction to this crisis has been swifter and more focused: perhaps one can hope it will also lay the foundation for a more resilient economic future as the pandemic tails off and we return to a new ‘new normal’ that replaces the old new normal. The C-19 pandemic will pass: the opportunity it presents for a more just, sustainable and inclusive capitalism ought not to be allowed to pass along with it.
(1) E-mail me for an offprint of the latter…
Challenge of Market Socialism
Posted: January 26, 2020 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment20 – 21st February 2020
Goethe University, Frankfurt
Paper: ‘Market Socialism: Macro, Meso- and Micro- Justifications
Abstract
This paper assesses the claim that to avoid labour alienation we must be market socialists committed to an extensive sector of worker-owned firms. The labour republican tradition offers three different versions of this argument: David Ellerman argues that non-alienation demands that all workplaces be worker owned. Robert Hockett has argued that it demands implementation as a macro-economic policy that the state function as the employer of last resort. Bob Taylor argues that republicanism merely requires a strengthened exit right for workers. This paper develops an earlier argument that mandatory market socialism would be illiberal by thinning the market for labour and removing the fair value of exit rights. The most reasonable view, overall, accepts that the state must be the employer of last resort so as to eliminate labour alienation, but this is a macro-level commitment that does not place any meso-level restrictions on the nature of the firm. Yet this commitment is the way in which exit rights are given a fair value. In the context of associational pluralism, the special value of worker owned firms can be identified as a stabilising aspect of a liberal-republican economy.
Tenth Summer School in Political Philosophy and Public Policy
Posted: June 19, 2019 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a commentJuly 9 – 11
Democracy, Corporations and the Limits of the Market
University of Minho, Braga, Portugal.
https://10thsummerschoolbraga.weebly.com
I will be participating in the tenth annual summer school at Braga with Lisa Herzog, Abraham Singer, and Isabelle Ferreras.
My paper will be “Modern Monetary Theory and the Scale of the Firm”
Abstract
Modern Monetary Theory has become a recent focus of attention, partly because of its role in the Green New Deal, but it has provoked as much controversy from progressives as from conservatives. Going back to source, in the work of Minsky, MMT is both an account of the nature of money, an explanation of how sovereign monetary systems actually operate and a set of policy prescriptions. However, it would be a mistake to detach Minsky’s views of money – and his policy prescriptions – from his concrete proposals of institutional reform to put in place an economy centered on small and medium scale firms, a limited and robustly controlled financial sector, and geared towards full employment, mass consumption and low investment. This blueprint, it is argued, can be the basis for a Mill-in style defense of workplace democracy as a valuable associational form that can be left to the free choice of individuals who seek more, or less, autonomy respecting workplaces. However, a presupposition of that Millian approach is a commitment to full employment (via the state) and to policies that favor high employment over the technological replacement of labor.
Summer School, McMaster University June 24–27
Posted: April 23, 2019 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a commentCapitalism, Democratic Solidarity and Institutional Design
I will be participating in this summer school organised by Stefan Sciaraffa at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, this summer with Mark Blyth, Bill Edmundson, Robert Hockett, Stephanie Mudge and Stefan. Full program and details of how to apply here:
https://www.solidaritydesign2019.com/
My talk will be:
‘Property Owning Democracy and the Role of the State: Big State, Small State, Smart State Or….?’
Both political liberals, such as John Rawls, and republicans, such as Richard Dagger, think that a fully specified implementation of a just society will take the form of a property-owning democracy. In this presentation I will begin by explaining why both of these traditions converge on this specific form of what Rawls called a “realistically utopian” private property system that is not capitalist. I will then address a fundamental problem for this approach to the specification of a schematic political economy; its failure clearly to demarcate itself from its rivals, and an inherent vagueness about the envisaged role of the state. For both supporters and critics, a property-owning democracy can seem to be nothing more than the familiar welfare state capitalism, supplemented by some ad hoc asset based policies (such as baby bonds, or estate taxes). Alternatively, it is the wholesale rejection of welfare state capitalism to be replaced by a competitive individualism that gives citizens only “starting gate” equality of opportunity (plus a demogrant). Another way of framing the issue here is the role envisaged for the state in a property-owning democracy. Is it the “big state” of traditional redistributive socialism with an extensive sector of public ownership? Is it the “small/smart” state of neo-liberalism, allied to a specific vision of globalization? By examining the role of the state in guaranteeing full employment, democratizing finance, directing public investment, underwriting key markets for essential goods, and the democratic co-opting of all major forms of capitalized institution (the open corporation, charitable trusts, pension funds) I hope to defend the distinctiveness of asset based egalitarianism as a realistic utopia.
Republic of Equals: Further Reviews in 2019
Posted: March 16, 2019 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a commentGabriel Monette, Philosophiques, vol 45, no. 2, autumn 2018, p. 343
“Cet ouvrage ambitieux et érudit de la plume du philosophe britannique Alan Thomas est une contribution significative à la recherche sur le libéralisme, et plus généralement à la philosophie de l’économie”…”C’est un projet ambitieux qui pose des questions importantes sur les institutions économiques de nos sociétés au regard de nos principes de justice. L’auteur déploie une connaissance encyclopédique de la littérature et des débats sur le libéralisme qui, à elle seule, mérite qu’on s’y intéresse. Outre la question de la forme des entreprises, qui fait défaut, peu de questions restent inexplorées. Quiconque veut se familiariser aux enjeux économiques du libéralisme ou du républicanisme est encouragé à parcourir ce livre.”
Lisa Herzog, Ethics, vol. 129, no. 3, pp. 497–501
“In this impressive book, Alan Thomas pursues two central aims: to reconcile Rawlsian liberalism with neo-republicanism, and to argue that the institutional system needed to realize justice as fairness must be a property-owning democracy (POD in what follows). In doing so, he covers a broad range of current discussions in analytic political philosophy and defends his positions in great detail. If one loves a good analytic debate, reading this argumentative firework is pure joy.”…”In going through the different arguments to delineate and defend his proposal, Thomas engages with a huge number of approaches and proposals in contemporary liberal egalitarian thinking, to which I have not done justice in my summary. “…”For this book in particular, it would be a shame if its readership remained limited to an academic audience.”
9th Summer School in Political Philosophy and Public Policy
Posted: June 18, 2018 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a commentWhich Property? Whose Capital? Property-Owning Democracy and the Socialist Alternative
When? 3-5 July 2018
Where? Auditorium of the Institute of Arts and Humanities (ILCH), University of Minho
Organization:
Centre for Ethics, Politics and Society – University of Minho (CEPS)
University of York – Department of Philosophy
Serralves Museum – Porto
PROGRAM
Day 1 — 3 July 2018
9.30am: Registration
9.45am: Welcome
João Cardoso Rosas (Dean of the Institute of Arts and Humanities, ILCH, University of Minho)
João Ribeiro Mendes (Director of the CEPS, University of Minho)
10.00am: Public Lecture by Alan Thomas (University of York), Property-Owning Democracy and Socialism
Chair: Daniele Santoro (CEPS, Un. of Minho)
11.00am: Coffee Break
11.15am: Workshop A: Property, Wealth, and Inequality
Chair: Roberto Merrill (CEPS, Un. of Minho)
– Eric Fabri, (Université Libre de Bruxelles), What is property ? From modern to contemporary definitions
– Dick Timmer (Utrecht University), What’s Wrong with Wealth?
– Sylvain Lajoie (Utrecht University), From Individual Wealth Inequalities to Political Illegitimacy: A Case for the Reconceptualisation of Property
1.00pm: Lunch
2.30pm: Workshop B: Property-Owning Democracy, Distribution, and Libertarianism
Chair: Hugo Rajão (CEPS, Un. of Minho)
– Cain Shelley (London School of Economics and Political Science), The Politics of Property-Owning Democracy
– Cristián Fatauros (National Scientific and Technological Research Council, Argentina), Distributive Justice, Consumption Taxes and Property Owning-Democracy
- Jason Keyser (University of South Florida), Self-Ownership, Provisos, and Addendums: Why Libertarians Shouldn’t Accept Their Own Justifications for Inequality
4.15pm: Coffee Break
4.30: Public Lecture: William Edmundson (Georgia State University), The Property Question
Chair: Alan Thomas (University of York)
Day 2 — 4 July 2018
10.00am: Public Lecture: William Edmundson (Georgia State University), What Is the Argument for the ‘Fair Value’ of Political Liberty?
Chair: António Baptista (CEPS, Un. of Minho)
11.00am: Coffee Break
11.15am: Workshop C: Property-Owning Democracy and the Socialist Alternative
Chair: Alan Thomas (University of York)
– Dai Oba (Waseda University), Connecting dependency and productivity: job training in Rawls’s property-owning democracy
– Kristina Meshelski (California State University, Northridge), Pure Procedural Justice and Property-Owning Democracy
– Marc-Antoine Sabaté (Université Libre de Bruxelles), Rawls’ “Reticent Socialism” and the Case for a Universal Basic Income
1.00pm: Lunch
2.30pm: Workshop D: Capital and Production
Chair: Lucas Petroni (Brazilian Center of Analysis and Planning (Cebrap) / University of São Paulo / CEPS, Un. of Minho)
– Dennis Moore (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee), Political Liberty and the Means of Production
– Kimberly Chuang (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor), Tax contributions and political legitimacy
– Angus Hebenton (University of York/UK), Relational equality and hierarchies of authority in economic production
4.15pm: Coffee Break
4.30: Public Lecture by Raul Magni-Berton (Sciences Po, Grenoble), How Should We Distribute Education? Individual Versus Collective Property of Educational Capital
Chair: José de Sousa e Brito (University of Lisbon)
Day 3 — 5 July 2018
10.00am: Public Lecture by Alan Thomas (University of York), The State as Employer of Last Resort
Chair: Catarina Neves (Nova University & CEPS Research Group on UBI)
11.00am: Coffee Break
11.15am: Symposium on William Edmundson, (2017). John Rawls: Reticent Socialist. Cambridge University Press.
Chair: Gonçalo Marcelo (CECH, Univ. de Coimbra / Católica Porto Business School / CEPS Research Group on UBI)
João Cardoso Rosas (CEPS, Un. of Minho), Roberto Merrill (CEPS, Un. of Minho), Daniele Santoro (CEPS, Un. of Minho), António Baptista (CEPS, Un. of Minho), Lucas Petroni (Brazilian Center of Analysis and Planning (Cebrap) / University of São Paulo / CEPS, Un. of Minho)
Replies by William Edmundson (Georgia State University)
1.00pm: Lunch
2.30pm CEPS Panel on Basic Income, organized by the Research Group on UBI)
Chair: Raul Magni-Berton (Sciences Po, Grenoble)
Catarina Neves (Nova University & CEPS Research Group on UBI), UBI, Distributive Justice and Employment
Joana Gomes (Independent Scholar) and Gonçalo Marcelo (CECH, Univ. de Coimbra / Católica Porto Business School / CEPS Research Group on UBI), Working Time Flexibilization and Universal Basic Income: complementary strategies for the future of work
Hugo Rajão (CEPS Research Group on UBI, Un. of Minho), Is UBI a good interpretation of opportunity?
Jorge Félix Cardoso (University of Minho & CEPS Research Group on UBI), Can a Basic Income be a public health measure?
Lina Coelho (Faculty of Economics – University of Coimbra & CEPS’ research group on UBI), UBI and Feminism
Replies by Guy Standing (SOAS University of London)
7.30pm: School dinner near Serralves Museum, Porto
9.30pm: Debate on Basic Income at Serralves Museum, Porto
Chair: Roberto Merrill (CEPS, Un. of Minho)
Guy Standing (SOAS University of London), Alan Thomas (University of York), Francisco Louçã & Martim Avillez Figueiredo
Republic of Equals: a year of reviews
Posted: October 15, 2017 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a commentWith the anniversary of publication coming up (November 6th) there are currently five reviews of the book (in reverse chronological order):
John Wilesmith in Economics and Philosophy:
“I consider Thomas’s book to be required reading for anyone working at the intersection of normative political theory and political economy. It makes valuable contributions to a range of existing debates and also opens up new avenues of research, particularly in the final chapter on globalization. Thomas should be applauded for the sheer ambition of his project. His attempt to synthesize the most plausible normative insights from two leading traditions of political thought into a coherent theory of justice and then develop its institutional implications in close conversation with the social sciences is political theory at its most courageous.”
Paul Raekstad in the European Journal of Political Theory:
“Original and interesting.”
“Ambitious and wide-ranging.”
“An important and challenging work that will set the stage for a great deal of the discussion not only of justice and republicanism, but also of POD, market socialism and broader discussions of alternative economic institutions, to come. It develops an interesting synthesis of republican and Rawlsian liberal ideas, and uses this synthesis to contribute to one of the most important problems of our time, namely the growing inequality and oligarchy and the disastrous effects they are having on our world.”
James Lindley Wilson in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews:
“The level of policy detail, informed by Alan Thomas’s studies of historians, economists, and political scientists, is impressive.”
“Thomas’s book articulates and thoroughly defends several important theses … these theses are of great concern to theorists and justice and to those interested in the goals of egalitarian reform. Given the great breadth of this work, it is hard to imagine a reader who will not find much to learn from Thomas’s remarkably well-informed treatment of these pressing matters.”
Nicholas Vrousalis for The Philosophical Review:
“[A] groundbreaking new book.”
Phil Parvin for Political Theory:
“Thomas’s vision of an egalitarian property-owning democracy is powerful and compelling. In drawing on civic republicanism to highlight both the deficiencies of Rawls’s political liberalism and also the specific challenge to democracy and freedom posed by the rise of the New Inequality, Thomas arguably provides the best hope that liberal democratic states have for ensuring greater justice and also repairing what has broken in our current democratic theory and practice.”
ethicssocialphilosophy 