On fantasy politics

One of the great political divisions today is between those who acknowledge reality and those whose politics derive solely from the voices in their head.

After Trumpites stormed Congress earlier this week Ian Austin tweeted that “I don't believe the hard left would have accepted an election defeat” – ignoring the fact that only 13 months ago the left did indeed accept Labour’s defeat peacefully.

And then Matt Goodwin tweeted:

Johnson is socially liberal at heart, Trump is authoritarian. Johnson is instinctive free trader, Trump is protectionist. Johnson is pro-migration at heart, Trump is xenophobe.

Again, this is untethered to reality. As mayor of London, Johnson banned alcohol on the tube and tried to use water cannon on protestors; he was a member of the government that pursued the hostile environment policy; and his Brexit deal erects trade barriers.

We can add to this Andrew Neil’s claim that “academia today is often more interested in closing down debate than encouraging free speech”, which echoes the right’s largely deluded (and certainly hypocritical) obsession with cancel culture; anybody past the age of 21 who’s interested in student politics needs to give their head a wobble,

What’s going on here is more than just normal political lying, which at least can serve the function of getting one out of a tight spot or advancing a policy you might advocate on other grounds. It’s a gratuitous denial of basic reality.

In my formative years, the right wanted lower taxes and weaker unions – demands which had at least some connection to facts. Today, they fantasize about cancel culture and promote Covid denialism; their American counterparts are of course even more barking.

Which poses the question: why is post-truth politics so widespread?

Of course, we all retreat into fantasy when reality is uncomfortable. Michael Oakeshott saw this. In his classic essay, On Being Conservative (pdf) he describes the conservative inclination as being an empirical one:

To be conservative…is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible.

But, he said, “If the present is arid, offering little or nothing to be used or enjoyed, then this inclination will be weak or absent.”

And from a rightist point of view, the present is indeed arid. There are, I suspect, three aspects of reality that are forcing many on the right and centre into these fantasies.

Phil points out one – that right-wing politics, at least in its current form, is living on borrowed time:

Conservatism and right wing politics presently constituted are in long-term decline. Social liberalism is the commonsense of the rising generation, and as older people pass on the cap doffing, imperial nostalgia, and anti-social bloody-mindedness is not getting replaced like for like. The consequence is in the medium to long-term the eventual diminishing of the audience for their wares - despite the explosion of rightist outlets and a pantheon full of interchangeable atavists. Banging on about leftists and cancellation is an expression of their terror for an irrelevant future, a manifestation of the threat they feel in their marrow.

A second is that much of the right suffers a cognitive dissonance. On the one hand, they like to think of themselves as freedom fighters but on the other hand hard facts show that it is the left that’s on the side of freedom and the right of repression. So-called “libertarians” such as Desmond Swayne oppose drug legalization and the Tory government has pushed through a bill permitting the security services to break the law in the face of opposition from the left. The right’s response to this dissonance has been to invent stories of how the left is oppressing them.

Thirdly, (neoliberal?) capitalism is failing. The financial crisis taught us that light regulation does not ensure stability or growth. And productivity – and therefore wages – has stagnated for almost 15 years. Exactly why this has happened is a matter of debate among economists. Possible causes include: investment being depressed by a fear of future innovation; a falling rate of profit; scarring (pdf) effects upon animal spirits of the 2008-09 recession; the long-term effects of high inequality; firms’ realization that innovation and investment don’t pay; the rise of rentierism squeezing entrepreneurial profits; a slowdown in the rate of innovation; falling productivity of R&D and so on.

The point is, though, that Tories (and centrists like Austin too) are ignoring this debate. As Stian Westlake has said, “the Tories, both in government and more generally, seem to have stopped talking and thinking about economics.” Their response to the crisis of capitalism has not been to try and fix it, as Thatcher did, but to deny that it exists – to either pretend that Brexit will unleash a new golden age or to retreat into culture wars.

Now, this is not to say that all Tories have lost touch with reality: Jesse Norman and Neil O’Brien, to name two, are still connected with it. Instead, the point is that the rightists haven’t collectively suffered a bang on head. They have retreated from reality because in some respects that reality is unpleasant for them.

Comments

[Ralph Musgrave]

So Chris Dillow thinks there’s no significant amount of cancel culture and that anyone who think there is needs to “give their heads a wobble.” I suggest Chris Googles the words “deplatform” and “university”. He’ll find a large variety of people and organisations which claim there’s far too much deplatforming and “cancelling” taking place.

[Tim Worstall]

" And productivity – and therefore wages – has stagnated for almost 15 years. Exactly why this has happened is a matter of debate among economists."

An alternative not mentioned is that we're measuring output wrong. As an example I offer WhatsApp.

It charges nothing. It carries no advertising. It doesn't therefore, appear in any GDP measurement based upon production or consumption. The wages of the couple of hundred engineers running it will turn up, presumably, somewhere.

But costs incurred without any production being measured? That's a decrease in productivity. Yet a billion people get some or all of their telecoms from this supposed reduction in productivity.

We're measuring it wrong.

Yes, I know, there's always been some of this in the economy. There wouldn;t be a consumer surplus if there weren't something like this going on. My contention is that there's a lot, lot, more of it than there used to be.

I would argue that real wages are much higher than measured, that means productivity is too - and the reason is the mismeasurement of digital and free goods.

[Zen]

Having more foodbanks than MacDonald's hardly smacks of a successful high productivity economy. Rather low pay and a broken welfare state.

I for one am happy Hitler was no platformed by the allies after 1939!

Rich right wing pricks certainly have become good at whining about imaginary problems. It distracts from the real ones they have imposed on everyone else.

[Dave Timoney]

@Ralph, if you Google the word "ghost" you'll find a large variety of people and organisations that claim ghosts exist.

[Dave Timoney]

@Tim, it's quite possible that the aggregate value of "digital free goods" isn't being properly accounted for in GDP figures, but it doesn't follow that this means productivity is higher than reported.

What social media in the workplace (like email before it) allows is the offsetting of improved comms by time-wasting. A task that would once take half a day can be done in minutes, but you then use the gained time to chat with your mates.

The point of desktop IT, compared to the power loom, is that the rhythm of work is really set by the worker, & only loosely by the employer. Why do the latter allow this? Because they couldn't attract staff otherwise & they would rather provide free time than better wages.

As for WhatsApp, the slow integration of it with Facebook, which does carry ads, indicates that it was originally bought as an address book: it's the contacts & networks that matter, & they will be monetised.

[Guano]

"One of the great political divisions today is between those who acknowledge reality and those whose politics derive solely from the voices in their head." ........................

Yes indeed. I am reminded of Matthew d'Ancona defending the BBC showing Jeremy Corby against a backdrop of the Kremlin because it was a link that existed in his head.

"What’s going on here is more than just normal political lying, which at least can serve the function of getting one out of a tight spot or advancing a policy you might advocate on other grounds. It’s a gratuitous denial of basic reality." .........

"Which poses the question: why is post-truth politics so widespread?"

I agree - this kind of post-truth politics is widespread and very worrying. I think that part of it is because facing up to what is reality would mean facing up to some hard choices that politics finds very difficult. The inability of many in UK politics to admit, even now, that there was no justification for the invasion of Iraq I would put down to the fear of admitting that war is not a panacea and that the USA often gets things wrong - much mainstream politics finds it difficult to cope with this.

Our problem is that there a large number of these underlying assumptions that need examining and there isn't the space in today's UK politics to do it.

[Mike Smith]

Tried to facebook your post and got a 'rejected - breaches community standards' dialogue box!

[JohnM]

@Tim_Worstall

"How Facebook Plans to Monetize the Messaging Giant"

https://observer.com/2020/01/whatsapp-ads-facebook-monetization-payment-platform/

[Jim]

They have retreated from reality because in some respects that reality is unpleasant for them. Nail hit on head.

All Western governments are in a tight spot, their populations are useful as consumers but expensive as producers. The consumer base is large and will remain useful for another decade or three without governments doing anything much. But slowly and inexorably power and money is slipping eastwards.

The outer fringes are already feeling the pinch and the mantra is 'levelling up'. Won't happen, no real incentive to do the levelling and no real incentive to be levelled unless flogging internet influencer courses floats your boat. We are in a long cycle to reverse the over pricedness of the West. Think a century or two may do it while the cycle slowly revolves. Neither long term capitalists nor socialists with taxpayer's diminishing pockets seem likely to last the distance.

The only viable short term business opportunities I can see are flogging off the BBC and the NHS. We have plenty of shills promoting this notion, willing fools or paid knockers? Neither sale of any advantage to the populace but a good money extraction wheeze. Hardly matters on the 100 year timeframe, the value will have evaporated.

Some might think Brexit will help this process along. But too early by 100 years I think, any strategic advantage will be long since dissipated.

[ltr]

January 9, 2021

Coronavirus

UK

Cases   ( 3,017,409)
Deaths   ( 80,868)

Deaths per million   ( 1,188)

Germany

Cases   ( 1,914,328)
Deaths   ( 41,061)

Deaths per million   ( 489)

[ltr]

I am reminded of Matthew d'Ancona defending the BBC showing Jeremy Corby against a backdrop of the Kremlin because it was a link that existed in his head....

[ Completely undemocratic, completely shameful. ]

[Blissex]

"Cancel culture" used to be called "blacklisting", and used to be (and still mostly is) applied against centre-left (or "worse") people, see the Corbyn or Williamson etc. cases.

Culture makes indeed a big difference, for example to understand the difference between "freedom fighters" and "coup conspirators", have a look at the "peaceful demonstration" in the Hong Kong Legistlative Council building in July 2019, as from unimpeachably liberal sources, a couple of videos:

https://edition.cnn.com/videos/world/2019/07/01/hong-kong-protesters-legislative-council-matt-rivers-vpx.cnn
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/stories-49157807

“On 1 July 2019, hundreds of protesters stormed Hong Kong's Legislative Council, (Legco), spraying graffiti and defacing symbols of the Hong Kong law-making body. The ransacking of the government building marked a turning point in a protest movement against a now suspended extradition law.”

[Blissex]

«real wages are much higher than measured, that means productivity is too - and the reason is the mismeasurement of digital and free goods.»

I guess that the production of free goods like clean air, rivers, seas, uncongested roads, short commutes, true loves and sunny days, has much increased since Thatcher :-).

Also I am not aware of there being any free digital goods, they are all paid for their value by their customers (advertisers for example), and the vendors of digital goods tend to be very profitable, which sort of would be impossible if they were free of charge.

[rsm]

Blissex isn't aware of open source? Wikipedia is distributed free of charge. Berners-Lee put the World Wide Web protocols in the public domain, eschewing the opportunity to profit from intellectual property rights. Linux can be downloaded for free. Etc., etc...

[Steven Evans]

"One of the great political divisions today is between those who acknowledge reality and those whose politics derive solely from the voices in their head."

Writes the Marxist.

[Blissex]

«Blissex isn't aware of open source? Wikipedia is distributed free of charge.»

I was expecting that someone would make the moronic argument that *copyright* reduces enormously GDP, and the establishment of copyright laws a 1-2 centuries ago cut GDP and living standards a lot.

That is also the argument that every time I go to listen to a free performance of music, singing and speech making, called a mass in a church, my real wages are boosted as masses are as "free of charge" like Wikipedia. Or that every visit someone makes to a public library, the pre-digital version of Wikipedia, also dramatically increases their real wage, being "free of charge" too.

Never mind that Wikipedia, masses, public libraries are all paid for by "donations", and this is already accounted for in GDP and GDI.

[Blissex]

«There wouldn;t be a consumer surplus if there weren't something like this going on. My contention is that there's a lot, lot, more of it than there used to be.»
«@Tim, it's quite possible that the aggregate value of "digital free goods" isn't being properly accounted for in GDP figures»

Dear "Dave Timoney" etc. please don't fall for the "consumer surplus" shysterism, because that has a clear political content:

* Similarly to China today, post-WW2 politics was based on "limited democracy" where the workers accepted it in exchange for rising material standards of living.

* Material standards of living for workers have stopped rising, thus putting in danger the post-WW2 overall political deal.

* Therefore the elites, but only now that material production per person is not doing so well, are trying to persuade the gullibles that their standard of living is not objective but subjective: what matters is not production but enjoyment ("hedonics"): and since enjoyment is subjective and metaphysical, the sky is the limit.

As an example of the propaganda value of switching to a subjective and metaphysical measure of "GDP", here is Larry Summers being slightly embarrassed by a particularly extreme case:

"the extent to which differential productivity growth characterizes our economy is, I think, sometimes underappreciated. The Bureau of Labor Statistics normalizes the consumer price indices at 100 in the period 1982 to 1984. Below are some recent values of the Consumer Price Index (CPI) for 2012. [...] Television sets at five stand out. That is obviously a reflection of a rather energetic hedonic effort by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. One suspects that equally energetic hedonic efforts are not applied to every consumer price."

The BLS in essence is arguing that between 1982 and 2012 the subjective, metaphysical enjoyment of each television set improved by 20 times, and this "ipso facto" meant that their price had "really", "actually", fallen by 16% compound per year over 20 years. Amazing news from America! :-)

“It appeared that there had even been demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grammes a week. And only yesterday, he reflected, it had been announced that the ration was to be REDUCED to twenty grammes a week. Was it possible that they could swallow that, after only twenty-four hours?… Was he, then, ALONE in the possession of a memory?”

[Blissex]

«There wouldn;t be a consumer surplus if there weren't something like this going on. My contention is that there's a lot, lot, more of it than there used to be.»
“thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grammes a week”

As to that not only adjustments of metaphysical, subjective "enjoyment" are currently used to "improve the accuracy" of prices, but also of GDP itself, here is a quote from BusinessWeek:

http://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-10-19/no-u-s-manufacturing-isn-t-really-booming
"Without adjusting for deflation, value added in computer and electronics manufacturing is up 45 percent since 1997. With the adjustments, it’s up 699 percent! What’s happening here is that the Bureau of Economic Analysis has been trying to account for vast improvements in the processing capacity and thus quality of computers, semiconductors and other electronics equipment."

And related to that:

http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.co.uk/2005/05/grossly-distorted-procedures.html
«The most current figure I have for hedonic adjustment to the GDP is 2.257 TRILLION dollars which is roughly 22% of the GDP.»

As they used to say: " YES SIR, the mess ration is excellent and plenty" :-).

PS: the blowing up of "real" USA GDP to account for much greater "enjoyment" should create a vast discrepancy with "real" USA GDI, but curiously it does not. There is probably an interesting story there (related to finance and property)...

[Blissex]

«There wouldn;t be a consumer surplus if there weren't something like this going on. My contention is that there's a lot, lot, more of it than there used to be.»
“thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grammes a week”

To give an idea of the systerism in the "digital consumer surplus" argument and the "a lot, a lot more" aspect of it, a publication by some propagandists claims that amounts to:

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/jul/22/why-uk-economy-needs-leap-of-imagination-harry-potter
“Overall, they say, our use of search engines, email and other products like social media and digital maps should cost as much as $25,700 (£19,560) a year per typical internet user if it was not free.”

The median income in the UK is around £21k, so try to imagine telling a typical "lazy loser" that he should not worry that his wage has been stagnant or falling in purchasing power for 40 years since Thatcher, or that getting to the end of the month is so hard with rents and bills hitting heavy, because the cellphone in his pocket is really, actually, seriously, "worth" a doubling (and rather more than that after-tax) of his wage! :-)

[Guano]

"One of the great political divisions today is between those who acknowledge reality and those whose politics derive solely from the voices in their head." Writes the Marxist.

Yes, ironic isn't it? But it is undoubtedly true that many people who consider themselves to be in the political mainstream are in denial about reality.

[ltr]

January 10, 2021

Coronavirus

UK

Cases   ( 3,072,349)
Deaths   ( 81,431)

Deaths per million   ( 1,196)

Germany

Cases   ( 1,929,353)
Deaths   ( 41,434)

Deaths per million   ( 494)

[ltr]

Culture makes indeed a big difference, for example to understand the difference between "freedom fighters" and "coup conspirators", have a look at the "peaceful demonstration" in the Hong Kong Legislative Council building in July 2019...

Thank you so much, Blissex

[ltr]

Culture makes indeed a big difference, for example to understand the difference between "freedom fighters" and "coup conspirators", have a look at the "peaceful demonstration" in the Hong Kong Legislative Council building in July 2019...

[ Remember, these violence advocates were invited to Washington and lauded in Congress and supported with Congressional sanctions. ]

[ltr]

January 11, 2021

Trump tries to incite a putsch, and his UK cheerleaders reveal their own contempt for democracy

Would be democratic dictators, elected heads of state who want to ensure they can never lose an election, should know the first rule to staying in power. It is to control a sufficient amount of the media. Convincing your faithful that the mainstream media is fake news is not enough. What that sufficient amount is will depend on many factors, including the voting system for President. It may be, for example, that given the advantages a united right wing socially conservative party has in the UK, control of a majority of newspapers and a compliant BBC may be sufficient to ensure Johnson is PM for as long as he likes.

Trump also has the advantage of a biased system (the electoral college), but he did not have enough control of the media to win the 2020 election, or provide sufficient credence to his pretense that he really won. Fox News, his once biggest media supporter, called the election for Biden. But he came close, with nearly 48% of the vote and by small numbers in the key electoral college states. A large part of that 48% actually believe he won. We were not far away from a second Trump term.

When would be democratic dictators lose elections, they have a choice. They can either accept defeat, or attempt to overthrow democracy. Donald Trump, having exhausted every legal means to stay in power (and some illegal ones), took the ultimate step last week and organised a putsch against Congress as it was affirming his successor. What seemed fairly harmless outside the Capitol was anything but inside. The objective of at least some of those inside was to capture politicians who had incurred Trump’s ire. Five people are dead, including one of the policemen who were bravely defending politicians as they were evacuated.

Trump attempted to capture through his appointments the institutions that ensure the survival of democracy, much as Johnson is now doing in the UK....

-- Simon Wren-Lewis

[Kaganovitch]

Well imagine this situation: you are First League major team playing against a slovakian club in a return Champion League match. You won 4-0 at home, you're overconfident and even arrogant. In order to preserve your stars, you mostly sent a group of substitutes to play in Bratislava. The problem is that you're know led by 0-5 and only a few seconds to play. What can you do? Too late for bribery, too late to review your tactics...just need to wait until the next season. I think this describes the current state of western world industry. If I continue my First league story, what I would do, as a president would be to fire the coach for somebody less arrogant, that would be exhanching, for example, Trump against a sort of american Deng Xiaoping.

You think Mr Deng was not democratic? So much the better, we don't need the democratic bla-bla-bla, we need to reempower workers, not consumers.

[ltr]

January 11, 2021

Coronavirus

UK

Cases   ( 3,118,518)
Deaths   ( 81,960)

Deaths per million   ( 1,204)

Germany

Cases   ( 1,941,119)
Deaths   ( 42,097)

Deaths per million   ( 502)

[MJW]

People shouldn't get too distracted by the alt-right freak show, yes, it's suits the purpose of certain factions who exploit it, but it isn't as important to the policy agenda as the noise it makes suggests. Contrast it to how progressive agendas with potential for popular support end up hijacked by wokeish cultists and charlatans, losing popular interest as they tenuously stretch the point. Take Phil's comment about 'cap doffing, imperial nostalgia', this type of bollocks is a fantasy existing only in the imaginations of professional gobshites rinsing 'anti-imperialist' schtick; they need to keep it alive because they define themselves professionally in opposition to it. For the majority it doesn't even register, it's something their grandparents saw the fag end of.

[rsm]

Blissex should look up "externality". GDP is a political figure reflecting political values. Intellectually honest statisticians would include error bars for GDP; they don't, because the margins are so wide as to make them useless for public policy. GDP is over half made up. Donations are imputed; how can you know donations come from wages and not money created out of thin air by private banks in financial markets? My TSLA stock went up 14k%, that's not measured by GDP. GDP should be abandoned as a measurement of anything other than economic la-la-land imputations bearing no relation to out-the-window reality.

[rsm]

Tldr: how do you include Wikipedia's productivity in GDP? Is the BLS really using wikipedia's reported donations and pretending they are sales that pay wages? But that has no relation to what wikipedia is actually producing, nor what contributors are getting paid.

Blissex's story is bunk.

[ltr]

January 12, 2021

Coronavirus

UK

Cases   ( 3,164,051)
Deaths   ( 83,203)

Deaths per million   ( 1,222)

Germany

Cases   ( 1,957,492)
Deaths   ( 43,203)

Deaths per million   ( 515)

[Big Nose]

The productivity gains have been swallowed by the high cost of finance and asset price inflation.

Its what happens when private is allowed to create money without democratic control.

We voted for it, honest.

Remember?