I’m working on a bunch of essays, book chapters and maybe even a book or two in response to the global financial crisis, making the general point that the sudden collapse of the neoliberal order has found social democrats unprepared for the shift from a long defensive struggle to the opportunity (and need!) to develop a progressive response to the crisis. As obvious examples, it’s necessary to reconstruct the global financial system and to ensure that the burden of the debts that are building up so rapidly is not borne by the poor, who did nothing to create the crisis. This piece (PDF) is an example of what I’m thinking.
I have plenty of ideas about policy (though of course I’m always interested in new ones). But, I don’t have much of a feeling for the political strategies that are needed, so I thought I would try the crowdsourcing thing, which has worked pretty well for me in the past .
Any thoughts are welcome, but it might help to sketch out my own limited ideas. First, it’s important to note that the situation is different from country to country and region to region. For example, the task of selling the ideas to the public seems likely to be easier in Europe, but many of the European social democratic parties seem to be in a pretty dire state (or at least they look that way from the other side of the planet).
Looking at the possible vehicles for progressive change, I can think of
* Existing left-of-centre political parties
* Possible third parties
* Unions
* Other civil society movements
* (Largely hypothetical) progressive corporations
* Blogs and other kinds of online activism
All of them seem to have problems. And then there are the standard questions of incrementalism vs radicalism, issue-oriented politics vs a coherent program and so on.
Anyway, over to you.
* I’m not at all an admirer of Lenin, but, at least as translated into English, he invariably seems to have the right phrase for questions like this.
John Quiggin 
Unionns are missing something these days JQ – they are not dealking at all well with the new casualisation of the labour force. I would hazard a guess and say most casuals dont belong to unions. Im a long term casual myself teaching eco students in unis (some 15 years). I get nothing from the union. They make noises about being kindly to casuals but at the end of the day they fight for the rights of the permanently employed. I dont waste my money on a union that fights for desks for me or access to telephones (technology has moved way beyind that – I have my own portable technology and am not too proud to move in on someone’s equipment if I need to).
What the union cant or wont fight for is an increase in my permanency (despite obvious repetitive use…) So I would suggest unions are ignoring the modern work environment and are becoming more irrelevant as a result. They are not prepared to fight for the tenure or security of casuals, rather to fight for protection of the tenure of the already employed from casual encroachment. Yet as a result the traditional market of unions is shrinking. They need to get out more….and see where the real problems are???
Oh dear – numerous spelling errors in above post!
“the sudden collapse of the neoliberal order”
Just keep repeating it, Professor. Maybe then eventually it will become true. 😉
JQ – further – as a long term casual you learn to stand on your own two feet. The union cant even fight for – Ok – say a string of semesters. Are you OK for one or two semesters – teaching wise?? – then we guarantee you four semesters of work!
No – it hasnt happened. Every twelve weeks of a uni semester they can sack me if they want to. After fifteen years? Why would I pay a union? In fifteen years they have fought for nothing for casual academics, for me or the countless other casuals out there. I would place more trust in an employment lawyer and thats saying something (given the cost).
Unions are verging on being dinosaurs of the 1960s era. They have not changed their methodologies (yet the world has changed) and it shows.
I’m a big fan of unions as a concept*, but I left the CPSU when I realised they were less interested in getting the best deal for our workplace than they were in coordinating an ideological campaign, to my detriment and that of my colleagues.
I have to agree with Alice – unions appear to be fighting old battles using old tactics, and don’t seem to be the most promising of vehicles for constructive socio-economic change.
* Despite the built-in problematic incentives, socially speaking, like pushing for benefits for established, permanent, full-time workers at the expense of casuals or the unemployed – again in agreement with Alice.
Jarrah – on this we agree. Im far better off fighting my own battles!! Its all in the contract if thats the way they want to play. Contracts at least give me access to civil law. Why pay a union that does nothing?
And Jarrah – I was all for unions …once upon a time…. but they have lost the “fight” for once what was important…..secure employment for all and employment rights for all.
Unions have essentially been “divided and conquered” by greater casualisation, and they have failed to adapt to this change in the workplace….they stayed looking inwards at the securely employed and their base of loyal union fee payers has shrunk.
Meanwhile casuals have become adaptive. They dont put all their eggs in one basket. They have learnt that employer loyalty is not needed (because its not reciprocal). In fact its far better if you have no loyalty except to those who pay the most.
Meetings? I dont do meetings! I get to choose!
(execept for my students) I have the best job. Nothing better than spending your time with a crowd of bright eyed youth (so young) and…… no one else to make me dot is or cross ts or take notes!!!.
I swear it doesnt get any better.
I believe a good place to start is a proper understanding of “that government is best that governs least”. It should not be read as a prescription to stop governing, any more than “a healthy person should not be taking medicine” means that you will get healthy by giving up medicine. Rather it means that, when things are in proper order, ipso facto little or nothing needs to be done. In such circumstances, doing more is actually harmful. However, when as now things are not like that, it is necessary to do things to cope. The saying, then, shows how far short of the ideal things are – and it also shows that the whole social democratic idea is a counsel of despair, for it presupposes that the only thing to do is permanent supportive treatment with actual recovery not even being pursued as an ideal.
Nevertheless, as things stand things do need to be done. The ideal helps design thought experiments to see what those might be, by seeing what would happen if this or that were not done (either not undertaken, or if already underway, stopped). But the ideal also says (contra social democracy) that the short term things shouldn’t obscure the long term ideal, and should be handled as part of a transition towards that. It was in that light that I presented my submissions to the Henry Tax Review, which I won’t repeat here; they allow yet further changes away from government action by getting rid of the need for it, later on. (Note that this implies my personal preference for incremental approaches, and is compatible with Burke’s thinking and Viscount Falkland’s dictum that “when it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change”, often considered the definition of conservatism.)
So that’s two examples of concrete suggestions, in the area of retirement independence and employment availability. There, the suggestions went to the Henry Tax Review. More broadly, concrete suggestions need a target audience. I will think on other concrete suggestions, but to my mind it is clear that:-
– Suggestions need to fold into them a working answer to Lenin’s who/whom question, including not only what to do but also who should do it and to and for whom.
– They should be specific short term measures that will make a start that is itself an improvement and will tend to reduce the overwhelming effect of what is happening now.
– They should not build in permanency but aim at successive steps away from needing things to be done at all, i.e. there should be “engineering out” of needs, reaching towards the ideal I mentioned.
Before I go away and ruminate further, it’s probably worth leaving readers with an insight on “Untangling Line”, from Geoffrey Budworth’s 1983 “The Knot Book”:-
‘No matter how methodically you stow away line, when you go to use it again, it looks like a bird’s nest. To sort out such a muddle, there is an effective trick. First, keep the tangle as loose as possible. Do not pull experimentally or impatiently so that the whole thing jams up. Locate the point where the end enters the tangle. Enlarge the opening around it, so that the tangle resembles a[n American] doughnut. Rotate this “ring” outwards so that the lengthening end of the rope continues to emerge from the center [sic] of the mess… This method of untangling knots often works and is always worth a try… If the rope is too snarled up to use this method, there is no alternative but to go through the laborious process of pulling the loose end through again and again.’
But anyway I dont want to go on about the lack of progressivism of unions so lets try some of JQs other suggestions
* Existing left-of-centre political parties
generally support dinosaur unions (no good)
* Possible third parties
Who? Needs more people to become impoverished. Salvos??
* Unions
Forget about it. Out of date. Supporting the structures of old union bureacracies.
* Other civil society movements
Like revolution? OK – Ill be in it!
* (Largely hypothetical) progressive corporations
Where?
* Blogs and other kinds of online activism
Great for a whinge but do they have sufficient political clout? Not just yet.
As I see it… Not many avenues for progressive change. The unemployed or underemployed need to grow larger (still) for progressive change to happen…because its not happening yet. Look to the riots in France for the type of progressive changes to emerge..
So, Alice – violent revolution is the only solution? It has a great track record.
Despite Alice’s distaste for unions things would be a lot worse here without them.
Lenin of course (in the above mentioned book) called for something with a bit more oomph than boring old social democracy and trade unionism. That turned out well.
This begs two questions.
1. Did those that are not poor (eg people who live in places like Australia) do something to create this crisis?
2. If the poor had done their bit to create this crisis would we then expect them to pay for our governments debts?
Politics is a closed shop in Australia. A game for insiders. A scam. It entails loads of deliberate barriers to entry. Take public funding for example. If you don’t make the 4% threshold you lose your deposit (ie the private money put up by supporters) and you get no public funding at all. If you get over 4% you get the private money refunded and a government handout. It is designed to keep the small parties poor and near to insolvent whilst fattening the incumbants and leaving the big party machines as gatekeepers.
p.s. I’d happily let you have a member of the communist party in the senate if we could get a libertarian candidate there in exchange. At least we would get some more interesting debates in parliament.
I don’t see any major changes coming out of the current recession. Nearly everyone’s now expecting a resumption of the ancien regime.
But the other shoe is yet to drop. JQ, Roubini and Setser (amongst others) have been derided here and there for failing to predict the precise nature of the crash – they were all pointing to a plummeting USD, but hey guess what, the US banking system crashed and the USD skyrocketed.
The USD fall has yet to happen, but it will. Until it does, though, there’s not going to be sufficient pressure for any meaningful changes to the way the US manages its business, politics or society.
Here in Oz, we’re just the tail. We might try, but we can’t really wag the dog.
ProfQ,
The problem I have with the idea of social democracy is that it is too narrowly applied. In the UK and western Europe, social democracy is the norm. Centre-right parties are social democratic in instincts and in policies. This tends to happen with civil and civic infrastructure and institutions are weak.
The financial crisis will present long-term challenges that are part of the secular changes to the economy. Firstly, the rise of casualisation of the workforce, outsourcing and personal economic uncertainty mean that people look towards the government as a source of stability in their lives. Secondly, and paradoxically, people want greater personal control over their economic future hence the shift from large corporates to contract work.
So what is the next step?
The role of the government has to expand but if we look across to Europe and the UK, social democracy has reached the limits there. A centralising government has racked up billions of pounds and Euros in debt, the schools are failing because of centralised targets, there is little incentive for inwards investment and innovation. What we see in Europe is the narrow definition and application of social democracy: powerful state squashing enterprise and picking winners.
The only way forward is for state to be the stabiliser. This is not a social democratic answer since it is part of liberal democracy as much as anything else (Keynes was a Liberal, David Lloyd George was a British Liberal PM who brought down the 1909 “peoples budget” which set up old age pensions). So what is required is for the government to provide stability via – tax cuts or infrastructure spending and certainty regarding healthcare provision.
The massive role of charities and religious/social organisations has to be more deeply explored. These orgnisations are more flexible to deal with the challenges that face this modern, less homogenous society. This is also not social democratic by nature or by instinct.
10#Andrew says
“So, Alice – violent revolution is the only solution? It has a great track record.”
Violence ….eeew no. Definitely not.
I was thinking more of a renaissance in societal attitudes. An intellectual revolution Andrew. Market ideology and worship has become a bit dry and stale.
As a practical response I would see that ‘transparency’ is a major issue affecting government quality. I’m thinking of the whole caboodle of information flows Mass media plus FOI stuff plus Education etc. Private corporate information must be made more available – maybe with time lags for commercial advantage reasons.
Opening up information flows to greater scrutiny would at least have the potential to break down the secretive dealings that corrupt our system.
Secrets are killing us.
I think the professors and students who are agitating for a change in the economics curricula are on the right track. Neoclassical economics has failed dismally.
More generally, the stranglehold of corporatism on government, education, management and other key areas of our society has to be broken.
We need to move from being a corporatist society back to being a properly democratic society with an educated and involved citizenry. What that means and how we might do it would be the subject of a longer post. I’ll try to post something on Weekend Reflections sometime soon.
Professor Q, do you now see any signs of a shift in the profession to the recognition that its prevailing orthodoxy is pretty much… wrong?
‘I have plenty of ideas about policy (though of course I’m always interested in new ones). But, I don’t have much of a feeling for the political strategies that are needed …’
I think the discussion so far has missed John’s specific inquiry. A definition of political strategy is:
‘… the identification of a strategy for success in the struggle for political power. It tends to associate some abstract goals with some specific policies and some policy orientations, and sets out possible courses of action to achieve them.’
Military strategists tend to have pithier definitions. Basil Liddell Hart’s wrote that strategy is ‘the art of distributing military means to fulfil the ends of policy.’ Substitute ‘political’ for military and think that should be the starting point of discussion.
You can only conceivably achieve your social democratic goals if you can mobilise people and build alliances to support them. Enlightened corporations are nice – but there will never be enough of them and they will need political allies.
Unions don’t have an unblemished social democratic record. However even in their weak condition they could still campaign to shift votes and unseat a government here in Australia (yes there were other factors). If you want to link your goals (reconstructing global finance etc) to a means of mobilising public support – unions are still the biggest game in town. In the US there union backed groups like the Apollo Alliance which, as the name suggests, works on aligning groups with a common interest in green collar jobs. So people debating their favourite ‘vehicle’ for revived social democracy is a bit wrong-headed. You need ALL of them working together to achieve your policy ends.
http://apolloalliance.org/
Alice, I have to agree that unions don’t look like vehicles for progressive change. I always thought they should be offering paid for services to non-members, such as employment contract negotiations. I know I’ve had occaisons when I would have liked to negotiate better than the minimum the employer offerred but was always too fearful that my ‘please sir can I have some more’ would get derisive laughter and an escort to the door. But then again, if I’d brought in an outside negotiator I suspect that I would miss the job – not for bringing in a union negotiator (who could think that!) but because someone who didn’t and accepted the minimum on offer without question was found to be ‘more suitable’ for the position. Ha. Unions do have a pool of skills besides the power to bully but back when I was a member the expectation that members go along unquestioningly with the proposals from Reps and above was so strong as to be easily mistaken for … bullying.
I don’t know where the vehicle for progressive change is. Existing Political parties, like unions, appear to expect new members to join because of agreement with their existing policies and will not welcome those johnny-come-lately’s that join with the intention of changing them. New parties? So rarely do they amount to anything.
I wonder if we aren’t more and more divided and as a consequence our range and freedom of choices precludes the Strength in Unity that was the hallmark of old unionism.
Widespread injustice and gut wrenching poverty were strong unifying forces, but I don’t wish them back for the sake of making reform easier. In the absence of unity amongst reformers the system will favour well resourced vested interests entrenching their positions, I suppose until that trend goes so far that it produces widespread injustice and gut wrenching poverty.
Ken….says “back when I was a member the expectation that members go along unquestioningly with the proposals from Reps and above was so strong as to be easily mistaken for … bullying.”
I think it is sad that union power is declining because I always thought at least a bullying union provided a reasonable offset to bullying employees and it worked sometimes very well and sometimes (obnoxiously badly) in the past.
But since the invention (when was it exactly?) and rise in use of short term casual “contracts” – watching unions from my view is like watching ants scurrying to protect a crumbling anthill.
#23 Sadly Ken I also tend to agree with this comment of yours
“In the absence of unity amongst reformers the system will favour well resourced vested interests entrenching their positions, I suppose until that trend goes so far that it produces widespread injustice and gut wrenching poverty.”
That is what I meant in my above reference to unemployment and underemployment rising, and the example of the French riots as an impetus for change…
Not what you want to see as an impetus for progressive change but often what occurs and there are no guarantees any change will be an improvement.
“other civil society movements” is a pretty broad sweep.
There may be value in fleshing this one out – with further subsets and practical examples.
Try Bill Moyer (movement for a new society) for strategies – if not already reviewed.
Pr Q says:
Pr Q has confused his literary-historial allusions. The prhase What is to be done originated from Nikolai Chernyshevsky, not Lenin.
His novel was a call for the Russian intelligentsia to form a cadre of revolutionary (atheist, republicanm socialist) intellectuals to lead the ignorant and supersitious masses out of their blinkered bondage of Christianity, Tsarism and serfdom. Wikiepdia quotes Amis’s book: “Chernyshevsky’s novel, far more than Marx’s Capital, supplied the emotional dynamic that eventually went to make the Russian Revolution.”
In that sense WITBD was a call for one elite (a revolutionary party) to replace another elite (an reactionary aristocracy). But the cure for elitism is populism, not another form of elitism.
If Pr Q wants a phrase from Lenin that suits this issue he could do worse than picking up: “Who, Whom?”. The financial system has been hijacked by parasites and predators. For more than a decade I have been suggesting that a purge is the best way forward. Administrative, rather than capital, punishment, of course.
When things turn bad, many people turn to religion. So perhaps you should be getting together a new religion, perhaps one based on social solidarity and ecology. Whether this is some variant on Christianity or something new, or whatever, I do not know.
28# Martin, the problem is we have a religion called market fundamentalism. Its not working that well. I dont think its variant of Christianity. It puts policy makers into a trance (possibly a variant of Voodoo), turns good people bad, intelligent people mad and the meek get trodden on.
Pr Q says:
No, we dont have to wait till we “reconstruct the global financial system” to do something positive ourselves as a nation. We can impose taxes (such as the Tobin Tax) on financial transactions straight-off. Put sand in the financial mechanism.
[crank alert enabled] We could also move towards a more Georgist position on general taxation, focusing on taxing land rather than labour. This might cause grumbles from the middle-class to begin with. But it could be directed at silvertails and property developers. Arrest the tendency to turn property from an industrial into an financial asset.[crank alert disabled]
(BTW Most economists I know or read are always claiming that they are going to publish the definitive refutation of Georgism, Real Soon Now. But somehow they never get around to it. Puzzling.)
Pr Q says:
The obvious ideological space to start is the elitist v populist conflict. And the obvious geographical place to start is at home.
What is needed is a new form of financial populism for the Left in the Class War. Analagous to the cultural populism used so successfully by the Right in the Culture Wars.
The domestic precedent is instructive. The Hansonite cultural populists swept into positions of power and helped to expose and repel the child-rapists, political assasins, ethnic lobbies, hate criminals, people smugglers, dope fiends et al who were cleaning up behind the facade of purportedly equitable cultural elitism.
So we need a domestic movement of (Quigginite?) financial populists to sweep into positions of power and expose and repel the parasites, predators, swindlers, spivs, who have cleaned up behind the facade of purportedly efficient financial elitism.
People should know that financial populists do not intend to wage indiscriminate Class War against all capitalists. Most capitalists are innocently employed in making useful things.
The real class enemies are the parasites and predators in the financial system, eg Richard Fuld. Not producers and innovators in the real industrial system, eg Bill Gates.
Significantly, the derisive first Bail Out offer put out by Paulson was resoundingly rejected by the old-fashioned REPs, not the Congressional DEMs. Pelosi et al were willing to sign off on it as they have become harlots of high finance.
This proves that the Old Right can be courted to develop a political force to counter-act the New Right. If Leftists are willing to hold their noses about the Old Rights nastier cultural policies.
More generally, as Pr Q’s reference to “neo-liberal” alludes, the common ideological denominator swirling around the heads of all these scoundrels is the philosophy of “new liberalism”. A construct built for self-serving uni-educated elitists moving into power in the post-eighties era, which has turned into a vicious racket for careerists.
Pr Q says:
Newsweek suggests that the post-modern parties of the European Left are in “protracted recession”. I have been drawing attention to this for most of the second half of this decade.
Could be that the Left-wing parties have not sufficiently identified themselves with their own nations and too much with the European region? That would explain the success of the more nationalistic Right-wing parties.
Lenin did adopt the phrase though it may not have originated with him.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/index.htm
A very short refutation of Georgism. While the key policy proposal, namely more use of land taxes, has a lot to commend it, the claim that the entire operation of government could be funded by this means is nonsense, as illustrated by the fact that the same claim is made now, when government is 30-40 per cent of national income as in George’s da (< 10 per cent).
I hope that suffices
On your Europe point, I’m drawing the opposite conclusion. The left needs to mobilise at the European level and take EU governance out of the hands of neoliberal technocrats. Atavistic European nationalism is as pointless as “states rights” dogma in Australia – the correct approach is one of subsidiarity.
PrQ,
Do you not see the contradiction betwen your two last comments? The (supposedly) “neo-liberal” technocrats control 30 to 40 percent of national income!
Great “neo-liberal” outcome and a fascinating little contradiction there.
@29 Alice, there are plenty of religions out there now, but I’m not sure any of them are on our side. Mind you, you probably should not what we come up with a religion, but you might want to include:
– some idea of personal ethics (always Leninism’s weak point)
– collective rituals (again, the left is short of these)
– some shared stories
– regular get togethers (ok, plenty of these, your average monthly party branch meeting seems mainly to serve the need for collective ritual)
“While the key policy proposal, namely more use of land taxes, has a lot to commend it, the claim that the entire operation of government could be funded by this means is nonsense, as illustrated by the fact that the same claim is made now, when government is 30-40 per cent of national income as in George’s da[y] (< 10 per cent)”.
No, that does not make it nonsense, it, just shows that it is incompatible with typical current spending levels – and even then, only if you additionally show that it couldn’t raise that much, which you have not done (I agree, it seems unlikely, but the argument still needs to be made).
Even so, that’s not nonsense because on the one hand, if it were, not even the lower spending levels of George’s time and place could salvage it (nonsense and anachronistic are not the same); and, on the other hand, some people actually want lower spending levels (see my earlier comment), and see natural limits on revenue raising as a positive feature. The fact that it would not fund what you want funded, or that people are currently accustomed to seeing funded, doesn’t make it nonsense – unless and until you separately establish that other, lower funding levels are nonsense (and again, that’s stronger than “currently unrealistic” or something of that sort).
PML,
Sinclair Davidson has posted a bit recently on Catallaxy on this subject. See here
Mark Hill was throwing around numbers recently with the suggestion that you could replace all existing taxes with a 4-5% land value tax. If correct such an approach would certainly shake things up a bit.
In terms of land taxes I do find it ironic that one of the few taxes in this country that are subject to regulatory caps are in fact local land taxes. The fact that they are land taxes and that they are local taxes means that they are much more sane than almost any other tax we have. Why not put a cap on income tax and remove the cap on local land taxes?
jquiggin Says: June 2nd, 2009 at 4:10 pm
Yes, it suffices. Its worth going through the exercise to calculate the implied rent of AUS’s multi-trillion dollar residential property market. Christopher Joye summarises:
Lets do the Fermi calculation on Georgism using these values. Assume a 5% rental return on the value of the total property market. Thats $170 billion pa. But then one has to deduct maintenance etc.
That gives an imputed rent of $150 billion. That sounds about right, being 15% of AUS’s 1 trillion GDP.
Assuming a 33% average rate of tax, that would generate $50 billion in land tax pa. Not even close enough to cover the ~$250 billion CW budget.
I’m not even sure that $50 billion in rental tax would be dragged in by Georgist taxes. They are supposed to be levied on the appreciation in the unimproved site value of the land. And one thing one can say about AUS real estate is that there has been alot of “home improvements”. That means $50 billion is probably an exaggeration on the land tax that can be grabbed at current rates of income tax.
Okay, I did let on that Georgism was a bit “cranky”.
jquiggin Says: June 2nd, 2009 at 4:12 pm
No one would be happier than me if the EU could get its political act together at the federal level. The founding fathers drove unification from the top-down.
BTW they were mostly Right-wing nationalist and religious politicians such as Churchill, de Gaspieri, Adenauer and de Gaulle. And the old-style EU technocrats were more “neo-corporal” than neo-liberal.
From a policy perspective “subsidiarity” is the “correct approach” alright. But I thought we were talking about the politics of economic populism. And for that to work it may be that the EU needs to ditch the obsession with Brussels and go back to the drawing board: to “atavistic nationalism”.
ProfQ,
Have you ever lived under the yoke of the EU? Fishing quotas, CAP, reams and reams of regulation strangling business and enterprise… The EU is a basketcase of high debt, high taxes and democratic institutions being subjugated to the power of social democratic incompetent technocrats.
SeanG, are you saying fishing quotas are a bad thing? The standard (and valid) criticism of the EU is that quotas are too lax, leading to overfishing.
JQ,
The community needs better tools with which to cooperate and communicate. By working on the “how” we do things we increase the possibilities of “what” and by trying out different things we might even work out some of the why.
The Internet is great tool for building new systems of human communication and cooperation and we have to make sure that the tools we build on this system and the way we use them are to the advantage of all.
One tool on which we are working is what we call an electronic angel. An electronic angel is a piece of software that looks after the individual’s interests in the electronic world. It enables a person to function efficiently and effectively in the world of the internet, iphones and blogs. An electronic angel, under your control, will have access to electronic information about you held by organisations willing to cooperate. An electronic angel will be completely controlled by you and will “reside” where you want it to reside. Most will probably keep it on their phone.
We can add functionality to an electronic angel and it can assist individuals communicate with other fellow humans and with collections of individuals through their angels. Once we have these then we have a powerful tool for cooperation and for resolving differences. We have the functionality to allow access to information depending on the characteristics of an electronic angel (e.g. I need to look at my health records and so does my doctor and carers – but no one else). We can use this to get access to most bits of information a government holds about us. This can lead to open more transparent governments, to increased cooperation and to a more involved society.
My company Edentiti is well on the way to getting this implemented. I will shortly be approaching social networking web tools suppliers – like word press – to add functionality to social networking websites that can take advantage of an electronic angel. We will supply the electronic angel tool free of charge to web tools systems blogs who want to use them to allow people to identify themselves privately but responsibly on social networking websites.
The next tool I suggest is one that I have been promoting through comments on your blog. This is a tool for spending community money. I have called it Rewards at this time but it is probably not the best name. This tool enables the community to spend money to the advantage of both the community and the individual and “solves” the tragedy of the commons. The essential idea is to give members of any community resources (money) that is spent to what the individual sees is their best advantage but for a defined purpose of benefit to the whole community. The ones I have been promoting are for Water and Health.
For water we give people Rewards in inverse proportion to the amount of water a person consumes but require the Rewards to be spent increasing the amount of available water either through saving or increasing the supply. For health we give people Health Dollars according to their general state of health. People now spend this to their best advantage on health matters.
Another tool I have been promoting in comments on this blog is the tool to increase the money supply. This one is very important because it can supply the money for other social “goods” such as reducing the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and for funding the new broadband network. I have called this tool an amasset in contrast to a loan.
I have been thinking about a tool to help us make better community decisions (and better decisions between groups of conflicting people like nations). Essentially it is a market based approach but where we replace money with votes, where we have a limited number of votes, a limited number of choices but where we can choose how many votes to cast for different decisions.
So rather than think all the time about policies I would suggest we also think about what tools we need to implement policies.
The way forward with policy is to, in parallel, build tools that will facilitate policy implementation.
A possible split in right-of-centre parties is, I think, possible. The Liberal Party has long been the home of middle class morality – Judith Brett has studied this extensively. Risible though the label sounds these days, that viewpoint included valuing things such as thrift, owning up to mistakes, retaining an independent position. These values, among others, have in fact been undermined by the neo-liberals, who focus on market economics to the exclusion of all else (how else to explain their hypocrisy over economic protection from international trade vs economic protection from climate change?). As usual, Paul Krugman said it better, in his column last week: the GFC is Reagan’s legacy basically. At the same time, a lot of social reserach is backing up some Old Liberal middle class assumptions, such as the importance of civil society, communities, families, continuity. The things that some of the rioters at Seattle in 1999 were arguing for were, really, Old Liberal values, but ths time argued from the street than the Reform Club. A savvy progressive politics could harness these trends to split away the Old Liberals from the neo-liberal economic monomaniacs. Rudd Burghers, perhaps, instead of Howard Battlers.
“The left needs to mobilise at the European level and take EU governance out of the hands of neoliberal technocrats.”
The problem is that even within the left (I’m a card carrying member of the french Parti Socialiste) saying even the slightest critique against EU neoliberal technocrats is immediately seen as being “anti-Europe”.
As for EU governance there was a window when the latest EU treaty was rejected in some country by referendum for politicians to try to do something about EU governance, but the only thing that happened is that they just did pass the exact same treaty without referendum (only chance to derail it is for Ireland re-referendum to get “no” again which is unlikely given the crisis).
EU parliament which we’ll elect this sunday has no effective power to do anything, and is filled with people who are happy to “compromise” that is when lobbies asked to extend copyright from 50 to 90 years they “compromised” 70 years ignoring public outcry and without any debate on where intellectual property is going, how wonderful.
Now, on the solution part right now my thinking is that we (concerned citizens whatever that means 🙂 need less “political essays” and more public data and legislative proposals.
On public data I’ve pointed out for example that publishing inflation without publishing raw and detailed price data and quality adjustments parameters (even after a few month delay) is just incredible and has no justification whatsoever in most countries. On climate change, raw data is also not published. In the internet age where raw data publication is essentially free, it makes no sense and open the doors to endless improductive by construction debates.
On legislative proposals vs political essays, I find in practice essays are too vague and so improductive. The devil is always in the details. And after working on it legislative proposals are not so hard to write (and current legislators and doing an ultra poor job on it), and this is what business lobbies are good at: filling legislators inboxes with all packaged legislative proposal + “one sentence TV ready” public justification.
So my advice is: stop writing political essays, ask your colleagues why there aren’t publishing raw data to citizens through the internet and write directly legislative proposals. For the general public you just need to brainstorm the “one sentence TV ready” and for the demanding public a good paper based on public data will do.
46#Thankyou Laurent – I agree. Do you know how many public sector departments in this country publish excellent (really really excellent) statistics?? Why? Because they want academics to use them honestly. We dont need sophisticated mathematical or empirical “tricks” or this “imputation” or this “exotic model” applied (to demonstrate some individuals unique and rare mathematical abilities?).
Researchers need to report on the excellent data already collected by public departments as it is, (that is why they have quite sophisticated statistics departments to collect it), to be of most use to general knowledge and the public.
Its all there.
Alice, from the other side of the world:
http://www.freeourdata.org.uk/blog/
published on Australia and NZ data policy:
However for bush fires and google there were some intellectual property issues IIRC:
http://octavianet.blogspot.com/2009/02/access-to-victorian-fire-data.html
Do they make detailed price and quality data available?
Hmm looks like the interface ate my previous comment, John do you have it?
jquiggin Says: June 2nd, 2009 at 4:12 pm
I am happy to agree so long as by “neo-liberal technocrats” one includes the geniuses behind cultural policy flops, such as human rights charters, multiculturalism etc. that are driving most EU populi to the Right, at both national and continental scales.
But somehow I think these cows are still sacrosanct.
“Atavistic European nationalism” seems to be the only effective popular response to neo-liberalism in its financial and cultural aspects. In fact the Right does seem to be “mobilising at the European level” to combat this. But I dare say this does not stimulate Pr Q’s heart to perform little somersaults of joy.
It does not exactly make my day either. I would prefer it if the Broad Left took a stand on the question of European identity, which is of course the great taboo subject underlying debates of the “Whither Europe” sort.
I am not suggesting a return to the “Caucasian race, Christian religion, Constitutional regent” format. But the EU really needs to decide what are foundational values at the continental scale. Are they all civic, or do they partly embody European ethnicity?
Its pretty obvious that the post-modernist form of liberalism embraced by the EU elites has not captured the imagination of the EU populus. Until they do the parties of the EU Left will continue to get hammered at the ballot box, see below.