Stumbling and Mumbling

Liberal values: empirical evidence

Ordinarily, I'm in favour of philosophical reflection. Without it, ideas such as fairness, freeddom and democracy risk becoming empty politicians' cliches. However, I fear the philosophical debate between Norm and Paul about value pluralism is not going to be fruitful.

Paul says:

There are other worldviews, which do not depend on the primacy of the individual, which are potentially as valid.

Norm replies:

If other views not depending on the primacy of the individual may be as valid as liberal values and a belief in human rights, then a community which every now and then drops some of its members into a large meat grinder is fine.

This doesn't get us far. Can I try a different line? Rather than use philosophy, why not appeal to facts about people's preferences instead? If liberal values are better than other ones, we'd expect to see people migrate to countries with such values. If they are not, we'd expect no such pattern.

The World Bank has data on this. They show that, with one exception which we'll come to, people tend to migrate from states with poor human rights records to states with better ones. In 2010 there were 993,729 Cubans living in the US, but only 522 Americans living in Cuba. There were 66,612 Iraqis living in the UK, but only 947 Brits living in Iraq. And so on.

Generally speaking, countries with poor human rights records have more emigrants than immigrants. For Cuba, the ratio is 79.9 to one. For China, 12.2 to one, for North Korea 8.1 to one, for Iraq 18.6 to one. Countries with liberal values, however, have more immigrants than emigrants. For the US, the ratio is 17.7 to one, for Sweden 4.1 to one, for Australia 12.5, for France 3.8.And so on.

These ratios understate people's preferences for liberal values, for three reasons. One is the home bias; people prefer to stay at home, and only up sticks if things are much better elsewhere. Another is that liberal nations give people opportunities to emigrate, partly because they educate them better, thus making them attractive to potential hosts; partly because in Europe liberal nations are close to each other, thus facilitating migration; and partly because liberal nations permit migration in a way that, say, North Korea does not. And thirdly, of course, there are immigration controls in most western countries. If all nations were to open their borders, would Cubans migrate to the US, or Americans to Cuba?

You might object here that people don't migrate towards countries with liberal values but towards rich ones. Evidence for this is that the main exception to my pattern is that oil-rich Arab nations have high net immigration.

But I'm not sure how much weight this objection has. It is surely no accident that rich countries tend overwhelmingly to have either liberal values or oil wealth - because these are pretty much the only ways of becoming rich*.

With the exception of economic migration to oil-rich states, then, the figures show a clear fact. People of all cultures seem to prefer to live under liberal values than not.

Of course, this preference might be wrong. Maybe people are deluded in preferring liberal values. Maybe they regret migrating. Unless you can produce strong evidence for this, however, there is a more natural inference. It is that whilst we might not be able to prove philosophically that liberal values are superior, there seems to be intercultural subjective agreement that they are.

* China is NOT an exception to this. Its GDP per head is only around $8400, a quarter of the UK's.

Lucky Osborne?

Has George Osborne been one of the luckiest Chancellors ever? It seems an odd question, given that he's had the misfortune of the euro crisis and the dearth of investment opportunities. But in one respect, he's had some tremendous luck.

I'm referring to the productivity stagnation.

Imagine that non-oil GDP per worker had grown 2% a year since 2007Q4 - half a percentage point less than it did in the previous ten years. Had this happened, there'd now be 3.1 million fewer jobs than there actually are. Unemployment would probably be over four million - 14% of the workforce. And instead of there being 755,000 more jobs than there were since Osborne became Chancellor, there'd be 755,000 fewer*.

In the face of such massive unemployment, there would surely be little doubt that the coalition's fiscal policy was an abject failure. The only thing preventing the Tories and Lib Dems from being even more unpopular than they are would be the fact that unemployment rose a lot under the Labour government too. Perhaps, as in 1981, civil unrest would be a big problem. And the political class as a whole would be in even deeper disgrace than it is.

So, has Osborne been very lucky to have seen productivity stagnate rather than unemployment soar? There are two possible replies here.

One is that my counterfactual is implausible. If unemployment had risen so much, real wages would have fallen further, pricing more workers into jobs. And the Bank of England would have run a looser monetary policy, perhaps also creating more jobs.

Maybe. But one could equally argue that, offsetting this, the higher unemployment would have depressed consumer spending even more, depressing GDP even more.

I suspect, then, that this scenario is not unreasonable.

A second possible reply is that the government deserves credit for keeping people in work. This is possible in three ways:

- Public sector job cuts have contributed to falling real wages which might have priced people into jobs.

- The low interest rates which accompany austerity have contributed to low productivity "zombie" companies staying in business, thus preserving jobs.

- Maybe some firms believe Osborne's claim that cutting the deficit increases business confidence. If so, some firms might have hoarded labour in the hope of better times to come.

I suspect, though, that these are only part of the reason for the productivity puzzle. Certainly, I've not heard many Tories saying "look what a fantastic job we've done in causing productivity to stagnate."

Insofar as the coalition is not responsible for the productivity stagnation, then Mr Osborne is a lucky Chancellor.

Shifting the Overton window

There have been at least two interesting reactions to my post on supply-side socialism.

One is that there's little distinctively socialist about them; Stephen Tall claims most are a form of liberalism.

Good. Although the left spent much of the 1980s talking about hegemony, it has been mostly pretty poor at practicing it, preferring instead silly egocentric posturing and obscurantist sectarianism. Why not try and engage with others instead?

The second, very separate, reaction is that these policies will be a hard sell to voters.

Herein, however, lies a reason why I'm not interested in mainstream managerialist politics. The competition between the main parties resembles that between the mediocre marketing departments of snake oil companies, trying to sell ineffective quack remedies to an uninterested but sometimes gullible public.

The interesting question is: can this change? Is it possible to shift the Overton window?
There's a precedent here. If you'd suggested in the mid-70s privatizing utilities and weakening trades unions, you'd have got the same reaction as my call for supply-side socialism: it's a hard sell, not practical politics. Within a few years, however, such policies were mainstream.

Could supply-side socialism achieve the same success? Here, there's an optimistic and a pessimistic answer.

The optimistic answer is that the Thatcherite revolution shows that intellectual effort can work. As Richard Cockett showed, think tanks such as the IEA and Adam Smith Institute helped make neoliberal ideas credible. Perhaps groups such as the Employee Ownership Association, BIEN and LVTC - not to mention countless individuals - might have a similar effect.

There is, though, a more pessimistic answer. There's a difference between the neoliberal policies and supply side socialism. Neoliberal policies promised large gains for a relatively small group of people - capitalists. it was, therefore, relatively easy for them to organize to push their agenda - for example by funding think tanks and sympathetic politicians and through ordinary networking.

Supply-side socialism, by contrast, offers smallish gains for many people. And this runs into the problem of collective action. Whereas there was a class able and willing to organize in support of neoliberalism, there's no obvious strong class base for supply side socialism.

The feasibility of supply side socialism thus hinges on the old question: what is the motive force behind politics - ideas or interests?

Paradoxically, the same Marxist instincts which lead me to support supply side socialism also make me sceptical that it can ever be achieved.     

Osborne's bet on Mundell-Fleming

What's wrong with the Mundell-Fleming model? This question probably doesn't much pre-occupy the political class, but it should because it provides pretty much the only defence remaining for the coalition's macroeconomic policies.

The model predicts that, under certain conditions, fiscal policy has no effect upon output whereas monetary policy does. Here's one of the battered textbooks of my youth:

In the Mundell-Fleming model a monetary expansion leads to an increase in output while a fiscal...expansion has no effect at all upon the level of output. (Dornbusch, Open Economy Macroeconomics, p195).

Yes, a tigher fiscal policy tends to weaken domestic demand. But the story doesn't stop there. Weaker domestic demand reduces the demand for money, which tends to reduce interest rates, thus causing an incipient capital outflow, which reduces the exchange rate. And this raises net exports and offsets the fall in domestic demand. A monetary expansion exacerbates the downward pressure upon interest rates, thus forcing the exchange rate down further, which boosts output.

In the Mundell-Fleming model, then, "fiscal conservatism and monetary activism" is the right policy mix. To argue against Osborne, you must therefore reject this model. Can we do so?

You might think it's simple, because the model uses a dubious LM curve. But I don't think this is a clinching argument in our context because a key prediction of the model has been correct recently. Sterling has fallen - which suggests Mundell-Fleming is more relevant than, say, the Obstfeld-Rogoff model (pdf).

And Osborne's supporters might add that if Mundell-Fleming is good enough for Krugman, it's good enough for them.

Instead, I'd highlight several problems.

One is the time lag. Austerity hits output quickly, whilst exchange rate moves, at best, are slow to raise exports. This problem has been exacerbated by a failure of implementation; a serious monetary activist would not have waited three years to change the Bank of England's remit.

A further problem is that there is sand in wheels, which prevent exchange rates having a large impact upon net exports. The very volatility of exchange rates cause exporters and potential exporters to adopt a "wait and see" attitude; they only move in and out of markets if they expect an exchange rate move to be permanent. Globalized supply chains mean that exports have a large import content. Pricing to market and intra-multinational trade mean that the impact of currency moves on consumer prices is limited, and this limits the switch from imports to import-substitutes.

You could argue that these problems don't invalidate Mundell-Fleming, but merely mean that we need a very large fall in sterling indeed.

But there are at least two reasons to doubt we'll get this. One is simply that exchange rates are cussed little bastards that rarely move as macroeconomic models predict. Just as it's silly to base asset allocation strategies upon exchange rate forecasts, so it's silly to base economic policy upon them.

The other reason is that the UK is not the only country trying to be fiscal conservatives and monetary activists. So too are the US and euro area - though the latter is better at the conservative bit. Not all countries can have a depreciating currency. The global economy is closed, so Mundell-Fleming is irrelevant.

I suspect, then, that Mundell-Fleming doesn't justify the coalition's policies. This might explain why, AFAIK, none of its supporters have appealed to it.

In defence of property taxes

Brandon Lewis seems to confirm the image of the Tories as the stupid party. On the Today programme, he said:

The problem with having a revaluation [of council tax bands] is that you'd then be moving people to a higher tax bracket that they are in through no fault of their own.

This, of course, is not a problem with property taxes, but a virtue. The case for taxing land is precisely that its value depends not so much on the efforts of its owner as upon society's efforts.If the value of your house rises because (say) transport links have improved, you've gotten a windfall because of other people's efforts. You should be taxed on that.As someone said back in 1909:  

Roads are made, streets are made, services are improved, electric light turns night into day, water is brought from reservoirs a hundred miles off in the mountains— and all the while the landlord sits still. Every one of those improvements is effected by the labour and cost of other people and the taxpayers. To not one of those improvements does the land monopolist, as a land monopolist, contribute, and yet by every one of them the value of his land is enhanced. He renders no service to the community, he contributes nothing to the general welfare, he contributes nothing to the process from which his own enrichment is derived.

So spoke that notorious communist, Winston Churchill (quoted here (pdf)).

In this sense, a land tax is exactly the sort of tax we want. It raises money without deterring useful activities such as work, entrepreneurship or saving. This is why people as diverse as the IEA and IFS both support it.

In fact, far from deterring work, property taxes might even encourage it. What sort of person lives in an expensive house? In many cases, it's someone of high ability - the sort of person we want to be working hard. Forcing them to pay to stay in their home might therefore make them carry on working, rather than retiring or downshifting. Land value taxes, then, might be a way of "tagging" (pdf) high-ability people, incentivizing them to work. In this sense, they are an optimal (pdf) tax (pdf).

But what of those who can't afford to pay - say, the retired?

No problem. They should sell up, thus ensuring that a scarce resource - a big house - is reallocated to those who most want it. Property taxes are, then, just a "bedroom tax" for the rich. And what could be wrong with this? After all, we're all in this together, aren't we?

Supply-side socialism

I rashly promised yesterday to suggest what some supply-side socialist policies might comprise. Here goes.

1.Invest in education, especially in the early years. The demand for unskilled labour has collapsed, and we shouldn't bet in on recovering. Instead, we should try to raise human capital. This requires pre-school interventions, improving the standards of schools in poor areas (pdf) and, perhaps, simply more intensive education. If inequalities of human capital can be reduced, so will one source of income inequality. 

2. Shift the tax base. Efforts to tax profits don't work. Better ways of taxing the rich, whilst preserving incentives to work and save would involve taxes on land, inheritances and a progressive consumption tax.

3. A state investment bank. Personally, I'm sceptical of the idea that banks systematically starve promising companies of funds; I suspect the bigger reason for low investment is the lack of innovation. Neverthless, we should ensure that the few good investment ideas there are get funded. And most of the arguments against a state bank are exaggerated.

4. A citizens' basic income. This is normally seen as a redistributive policy, a way of increasing workers' bargaining power. It might raise productivity through at least two routes. First, it would give workers the chance to reject bad jobs, and wait until a better match turns up. Second, the increased wages which would follow from this rise in bargaining power might compel firms to raise productivity in order to maintain profits.

5.Freer migration. In the short-run, immigration can raise growth by removing labour market bottlenecks. In the longer-run, it can increase innovation and productivity (pdf).

6. Coops.The financial crisis is, in many ways, a crisis of managerialism and ownership. Top-down bank CEOs got overconfident and made terrible decisions; failed to solve principal-agent problems that led to excessive risk-taking; and failed to adapt well to the new macroeconomics of the 2000s.Outside shareholders did nothing to prevent this. This suggests the need for new forms of ownership. The obvious (though not only) candidate is worker ownership. There's good evidence that this increases productivity, and it might have longer-term benefits for growth too, insofar as it helps encourage a culture of trust.

7. Shrink the state. It's possible - I put it no stronger - that a smaller state is conducive to faster economic growth in the long-run. Hopi's proposal for zero-base spending review might therefore make sense. But you cannot cut spending intelligently from the top down. A precondition for intelligent cuts is to empower public sector workers, who are better placed to identify genuine waste.

8. Macro markets. One role for government should be to encourage - perhaps via nationalized banks - markets for insurance in income risks, as Robert Shiller has proposed. Such moves might be egalitarian - insofar as such products are given freely to worse-off workers. But they might also help encourage real innovation by allowing entrepreneurs to insure against the background risks (eg of recession) which can undermine otherwise good investments.

This is not a complete list, and there are countless details to examine. This list should, however, remind us that supply-side economics needn't be the preserve of the right.

Another thing. Some of you might remember my book. Some chapters, however, were not published. This pdf is one of them.

The need for supply-side socialism

There's an important fact that's lost in the debate about economic policy. It's that counter-cyclical policy is nothing like sufficient.

The back of a beermat tells us this. Let's say we wanted to get unemployment (on the LFS measure) down from its current 2.5m to one million. How many jobs would we need to create?

The answer is NOT 1.5m. This is because many jobs would be filled by those out of the labour force - the retired, home-makers, students on marginal courses and, OK, immigrants. For example, in the last year employment (pdf) has risen by 584,000 but unemployment has dropped by just 156,000. This tells us that reducing unemployment by 1.5m would require well in excess of 3m new jobs. That's an increase of over 10%.

This requires a massive expansion in GDP. Once we allow for the possibility that productivity will begin to rise again, we probably need a rise in GDP of over 15%. And we'd need a bigger rise in money GDP to achieve this, simply because a large part of any fiscal or monetary expansion would raise prices rather than real GDP: the Bank of England estimates (pdf) that its first £200bn of QE raised real GDP by 1.5-2 per cent and inflation by up to 1.5 per cent.

Getting unemployment down to one million would therefore require a rise in money GDP of perhaps 30 per cent - over £400bn. Nobody is proposing a fiscal or monetary expansion anything like this*.

Instead, the belief seems to be that a small policy stimulus will kick-start the economy, get the normal capitalist engine of growth purring again.

But this is questionable, for at least two reasons.

- There's a dearth of investment opportunities. There are many reasons for this: a (maybe temporary) slowdown (pdf) in technical progress; the migration of low-wage industry to the east; an inability to monetize what new technologies there are; or perhaps a wising up to the fact that innovation never really paid off anyway.

- Inequality has become a barrier to growth. This could be because it reduces the marginal propensity to consume. More likely, I suspect, it's because it has added to debt and because the same institutions that create inequality - managerialism - also give us bad decision-making and rent-seeking.

Policy-making, then, requires more than (very mild) stimulus and the hope of return to business as normal. We must think about ways of increasing trend growth.

It should be obvious to anyone not blinded by ideology that the right's ideas here - of reducing the power of the working class - no longer work. Instead, Duncan Weldon, Stewart Wood and Ha-Joon Chang are right; the left must think about supply-side socialism.

Now, you might object that I've argued that history shows that long-run growth doesn't much change. This fact, though, might not be so hostile to supply-side socialism. For one thing, it shows that "moderate" policies don't work, so perhaps we need something radical. And for another thing, it shows not just that few policies raise growth, but also that few depress them. And this suggests that perhaps radical leftist policies are a "free hit": they might not be disastrous for the economy. As for what such policies might be, I'll suggest some later.

* Because most of the money printed by QE just stays in the financial system, we'd need far more than £400bn of QE to raise money GDP by £400bn - around £1.5 trillion if we (heroically!) scale up the Bank's estimates.

Vicky Pryce & the nature of rationality

In the Times, Janice Turner asks: "Why did Vicky Pryce, a pre-eminent economist lavishly paid to predict the future of nations, not foresee her own doom?" This raises an awkward point in the philosophy of economics - that rationality is more ambiguous than often realized.

The standard conception  in economics comes from Hume:

Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.

In this conception, rationality consists in maximizing "utility", in choosing that action which best satisfies whatever passion we have. This allows economists to speak (pdf) of rational addiction. From this point of view, Ms Pryce was rational. Her passion was negative altruism, a desire to hurt Huhne even at a cost to herself, and she achieved this. She was rational in the way that Eli Berman and David Laitin claim (pdf) suicide bombers to be.

But surely, there's a distinction between Ms Pryce and suicide bombers? There is. It lies in our second conception of rationality. This requires that beliefs are proportionate to evidence. Most of us would claim that suicide bombers are irrational in that their beliefs in paradise and in the evil of the west are not proportioned to the evidence. But Ms Pryce's beliefs were not so irrational; Huhne had treated her terribly.

The passions are not always beyond reason. We can judge Ms Pryce's negative altruism as rationally motivated, but suicide bombers' as not.

You might wonder why I'm talking of negative altruism rather than hatred or anger. I do so for two reasons.

First, to note a distinction between hatred and anger. Anger often clouds rational thought whereas hatred can be consistent with it - as, for example, when a military commander pursues the best strategy.

Secondly, it's because that word "altruism" brings me to my third conception of rationality.

Altruism - positive or negative - sits oddly with economists' presumption of rationality.They might think of it as just a passion beyond reason, or try to embed within a system of reciprocity, or look for an evolutionary explanation for it.

But there's another possibility, stressed by Alasdair Macintyre in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? This says that rationality is not a feature of desiccated calculating machines who exist outside of society and history, but is instead embodied withni practices and tradition. Take, for example, the doctor who treats patients outside his contractual hours or the soldier risking his life for his comrades. These might seem irrationally altruistic to economists. To Macintyre, however, such behaviour is rational - it's part of what it means to be a good doctor or good soldier. In this conception, the question "how can I serve God?" makes sense - as a striving to continue a tradition - even though many of us would say it doesn't according to our second conception of rationality.

But - Macintyre would say - just as we can ask "what is a good doctor or good soldier?" so we can ask: "what is a good life?" And by this standard, Ms Pryce has been irrational because most of us would say that a good life consists partly in staying out of the Big House.

Ms Pryce has therefore inadvertently done us a service. She's shown that rationality has many, sometimes incompatible, meanings. (And this is before I mention Nozick!) Faced with these, the challenge is to avoid the twin dangers of either a Dawkinsite pigheadedness ("That's not what I think, so it's stupid") or a sloppy "anything goes" relativism. I fear that nobody tries hard to steer between these.

Talking about immigration

Sunny says  the conventional ways of arguing for a more liberal immigration policy have been unsuccessful. I agree. I also agree that we shouldn't look to the Labour party to change this. Political parties tend to follow the public mood, not lead it.

So, how should we make the case for more open borders? One guide should be Jon Haidt's The Righteous Mind. He says there are six moral "taste receptors": care/harm; liberty/oppression; fairness/cheating; loyalty/betrayal; authority/subversion and sanctity/degradation. One reason why conservatives have often suceeded, he says, is that they often appeal to all six of these whereas leftists, in focusing upon care and fairness, appeal to more restricted palates. They're like chefs who only serve salt, he says.

Popular arguments for immigration, then, should try to appeal to all the receptors.

In one sense, this is easy. The case for immigration is one for freedom; people should be free to hire whom they want and live where they want. We should never stop pointing out that (some?) Ukippers' claim to be libertarian is mere hypocrisy. 

In other cases, though, it's not quite so easy. I'm thinking of three receptors here.

1. Care/harm. Anti-immigrationists fear migration will harm (some) workers, and perhaps put pressure on public services. One reply to this is to tie in the case for open borders with redistributive policies to help the low-paid. Another is to reframe the debate: shouldn't we care for people who want a better life for themselves?

2. Fairness/cheating. Anti-immigrationists fears migrants will disproportionately claim benefits. To this, the answer must be the facts. And again, there's a need for reframing; what about being fair to people who want to come here and work hard?

3. Loyalty/betrayal. This is the nub. The strongest foundation for anti-immigration attitudes lies not in economics or hard facts but in an inarticulable sense that migration will change the national character. It's no accident that there's a big overlap between antipathy towards immigration and towards gay marriage; both are based upon a conservative disposition which, in many ways, is an admirable instinct.

How do we combat this? Paradoxically, we do so not by being modern metropolitan liberals, but by celebrating our "national story" - by pointing out that immigration is nothing new but part of our heritage. Churchill was the son of an immigrant, as is the heir to the throne. You don't get more British than that. And one-fifth of the pilots who fought in our "finest hour" were foreigners.In fact, the number of Poles living in the UK would have to rise by two million merely for their proportion of the UK population to equal the proportion who fought for us in the Battle of Britain. I could go on - though not perhaps this far.

Another thing we should do is celebrate immigrants' successes. If the gutter press can highlight the tiny proportion of immigrants who are benefit cheats or criminals, shouldn't we highlight the large numbers who are bring great benefits to the nation. To confine myself just to Oscar winners in recent years, we have Danny Boyle, Rachel Weisz, Helen Mirren, Daniel Day-Lewis and Tilda Swinton.

Herein, though, lies a paradox. We don't think of successful immigrants as immigrants at all, by virtue of the very fact that they have integrated so well. And nor should we. But this naturally creates a bias towards thinking of immigrants as a "problem" - simply because the countless successes aren't "immigrants". In this sense, perhaps, it's hard to argue for the benefits of immigration. But we should try.

Power-blindness

Paul says that rather than merely opposing austerity, the left should be pushing for supply-side socialism that opposes managerialist capitalism. I'm pretty sure he's right, and very sure he'll be ignored.

I say this because very many people are - still - blind to the problem of power. We see this in both serious and trivial issues. For example, why are there efforts to rein in bankers' bonuses and CEOs' pay, but almost none to constrain the origin of those big payouts, namely their power? Why do conventional economists spend so little time thinking about distributional issues, such as those between wages and profits? Why did Toby Young think it relevant that Lord Rennard doesn't look like George Clooney, as if the issue were one of sex rather than power?

Even Owen Jones, for all his virtues, seems afflicted by power blindness. Underneath the tubthumping, his call for "real alternatives to the failure of austerity" looks like just bogstandard Keynesianism that's quite compatible with capitalism. It's more Leijonhufvud than Luxemburg.

Why is power-blindness so ubiquitous? I blame cognitive biases, among them:

1. The just world illusion. People want to think we get what we deserve in this world. So just as they say rape victims were asking for it, they think high salaries are due to superstar effects rather than rent-seeking.

2. The fundamental attribution error, when allied to the urge to moralize, causes us to focus upon individual failures rather than structural ones. The phrase "greedy bankers" is a cliche, but the phrase "overly powerful bankers" is not.

3. Path dependence. It's natural to think that anything that's lasted a long time but be "natural" or immutable. Just as peasants thought it inevitable that lords would rule them, so we think today that it's inevitable that there must always be bosses; the failre to distinguish between management and administration adds to this error.

4.The Bonnie Tyler effect. A (large) part of the left are comfortable with concentrations of political power because they are holding out for a hero - a Chavez-type who will use that power for ends they like. But this lust for a white knight on a fiery steed will be unfulfilled. If you must take your politics from the hits of Dillow's youth, take the Stranglers rather than the Neath chanteuse.

Now, you might object that I've missed the point and that it's just utopian to think that managerialist power can be abolished. Maybe so, in the short-term. But it's also utopian to think that monetary and fiscal policies can create lasting full employment, or that it is easy to raise long-term growth.

Here, the left can learn from the right. A lot of what we now take for granted - privatized utilities and emasculated trades unions - were unthinkable once. But thanks in part to people preparing the intellectual ground, they went from unthinkable to inevitable quite quickly.