An Animated Michael Sandel Explains How Meritocracy Degrades Our Democracy

in Economics, Philosophy, Politics | September 24th, 2019

Imag­ine if gov­ern­ments and insti­tu­tions took their pol­i­cy direc­tives straight from George Orwell’s 1984 or Jonathan Swift’s “A Mod­est Pro­pos­al.” We might veer dis­tress­ing­ly close to many a lit­er­ary dystopia in these times, with duck­s­peak tak­ing over all the dis­course. But some lines—bans on think­ing or non-pro­cre­ative sex, or seri­ous­ly propos­ing to eat babies—have not yet been crossed.

When it comes, how­ev­er, to meritocracy—a term that orig­i­nat­ed in a 1958 satir­i­cal dystopi­an nov­el by British soci­ol­o­gist Michael Young—it can seem as if the polit­i­cal class had tak­en fic­tion as man­i­festo. Young him­self wrote in 2001, “much that was pre­dict­ed has already come about. It is high­ly unlike­ly the prime min­is­ter has read the book, but he has caught on to the word with­out real­iz­ing the dan­gers of what he is advo­cat­ing.”

In Young’s his­tor­i­cal analy­sis, what began as an alleged­ly demo­c­ra­t­ic impulse, a means of break­ing up hered­i­tary castes, became itself a way to solid­i­fy and entrench a rul­ing hier­ar­chy. “The new class has the means at hand,” wrote Young, “and large­ly under its con­trol, by which it repro­duces itself.” (Wealthy peo­ple brib­ing their chil­dren’s way into elite insti­tu­tions comes to mind.) Equal oppor­tu­ni­ty for those who work hard and play by the rules doesn’t actu­al­ly obtain in the real world, mer­i­toc­ra­cy’s crit­ics demonstrate—prominent among them the man who coined the term “mer­i­toc­ra­cy.”

One prob­lem, as Harvard’s Michael Sandel frames it in the short RSA ani­mat­ed video above, is an ancient one, char­ac­ter­ized by a very ancient word. “Mer­i­to­crat­ic hubris,” he says, “the ten­den­cy of win­ners to inhale too deeply of their suc­cess,” caus­es them to “for­get the luck and good for­tune that helped them on their way.” Acci­dents of birth are ignored in a hyper-indi­vid­u­al­ist ide­ol­o­gy that insists on nar­cis­sis­tic notions of self-made peo­ple and a just world (for them).

“The smug con­vic­tion that those on the top deserve their fate” comes with its inevitable corollary—“those on the bot­tom deserve theirs too,” no mat­ter the his­tor­i­cal, polit­i­cal, and eco­nom­ic cir­cum­stances beyond their con­trol, and no mat­ter how hard they might work or how tal­ent­ed they may be. Mer­i­toc­ra­cy obvi­ates the idea, Sandel says, that “there but for the grace of God or acci­dents of for­tune go I,” which pro­mot­ed a healthy degree of humil­i­ty and an accep­tance of life’s con­tin­gency.

Sandel sees mer­i­to­crat­ic atti­tudes as cor­ro­sive to democ­ra­cy, describ­ing their effects in his upcom­ing book The Tyran­ny of Mer­it. Yale Law Pro­fes­sor Daniel Markovits, anoth­er ivy league aca­d­e­m­ic and heir to Michael Young’s cri­tique, has also just released a book (The Mer­i­toc­ra­cy Trap) decry­ing mer­i­toc­ra­cy. He describes the sys­tem as a “trap” in which “upward mobil­i­ty has become a fan­ta­sy, and the embat­tled mid­dle class­es are now more like­ly to sink into the work­ing poor than to rise into the pro­fes­sion­al elite.”

Markovitz, who holds two degrees from Yale and a doc­tor­ate from Oxford, admits at The Atlantic that most of his stu­dents “unnerv­ing­ly resem­ble my younger self: They are, over­whelm­ing­ly, prod­ucts of pro­fes­sion­al par­ents and high-class uni­ver­si­ties.” Once an advo­cate of the idea of mer­i­toc­ra­cy as a demo­c­ra­t­ic force, he now argues that its promis­es “exclude every­one out­side of a nar­row elite…. Hard­work­ing out­siders no longer enjoy gen­uine oppor­tu­ni­ty.”

Accord­ing to Michael Young, meritocracy’s tire­less first crit­ic and the­o­rist (he adapt­ed his satire from his 1955 dis­ser­ta­tion), “those judged to have mer­it of a par­tic­u­lar kind,” whether they tru­ly have it or not, always had the poten­tial, as he wrote in The Guardian, to “hard­en into a new social class with­out room in it for oth­ers.” A class that fur­ther dis­pos­sessed and dis­em­pow­ered those viewed as losers in the end­less rounds of com­pe­ti­tion for social worth.

Young died in 2002. We can only imag­ine what he would have made of the expo­nen­tial extremes of inequal­i­ty in 2019. A utopi­an social­ist and tire­less edu­ca­tor, he also became an MP in the House of Lords and a baron in 1978. Per­haps his new posi­tion gave him fur­ther van­tage to see how “with the com­ing of the mer­i­toc­ra­cy, the now lead­er­less mass­es were par­tial­ly dis­fran­chised; a time has gone by, more and more of them have been dis­en­gaged, and dis­af­fect­ed to the extent of not even both­er­ing to vote. They no longer have their own peo­ple to rep­re­sent them.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Michael Sandel on the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life Pod­cast Talks About the Lim­its of a Free Mar­ket Soci­ety

Michael Sandel’s Famous Har­vard Course on Jus­tice Launch­es as a MOOC on Tues­day

Free: Lis­ten to John Rawls’ Course on “Mod­ern Polit­i­cal Phi­los­o­phy” (Record­ed at Har­vard, 1984)

Piketty’s Cap­i­tal in a Nut­shell

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Economics 101: Hedge Fund Investor Ray Dalio Explains How the Economy Works in a 30-Minute Animated Video

in Business, Economics | April 11th, 2019

Want to know how the econ­o­my works? It “works like a sim­ple machine,” accord­ing to Ray Dalio, who explains its mech­a­nisms in the 30-minute video above. The pre­sen­ta­tion is “sim­ple but not sim­plis­tic,” says the site Eco­nom­ic Prin­ci­ples, a research arm of Dalio’s com­pa­ny Bridge­wa­ter Asso­ciates. The les­son packs in most of the major bold­faced con­cepts in the aver­age over­priced col­lege eco­nom­ics text­book, “such as cred­it, inter­est, rates, lever­ag­ing, and delever­ag­ing.” And it does so in that most engag­ing means of learn­ing things online, an ani­mat­ed video, nar­rat­ed by an expert.

All that’s well and good, but can we real­ly under­stand such a volatile beast as “the economy”—an abstrac­tion that some­times seems like a cru­el­ly rigged game and some­times like a not-par­tic­u­lar­ly-benev­o­lent (to most peo­ple) deity—in only half an hour? Should we trust Dalio to sum­ma­rize its com­plex­i­ty? The bil­lion­aire hedge-fund man­ag­er did, he tells us, man­age “to antic­i­pate and to side­step the glob­al finan­cial cri­sis.” And he has made quite an impres­sion on peo­ple like Forbes Senior Con­trib­u­tor Carmine Gal­lo with his “7,500-word LinkedIn arti­cle titled ‘Why and How Cap­i­tal­ism Needs to be Reformed.’”

In that piece, the “vora­cious learn­er who stud­ies nar­ra­tive and com­mu­ni­ca­tion… turns an enor­mous­ly com­plex sub­ject into a sim­ple, com­pelling nar­ra­tive.” He also makes it clear right in the title that by “the econ­o­my” he means a cap­i­tal­ist econ­o­my. It’s a point large­ly tak­en for grant­ed in the ani­mat­ed explain­er but an impor­tant one nonethe­less giv­en the under­ly­ing assump­tions of the the­o­ry. Seri­ous cri­tiques of cap­i­tal­ism seem much hard­er to con­dense because they’re tasked with unpack­ing all those assump­tions.

Marx’s Das Kap­i­tal spans three vol­umes, though he only lived to pub­lish the first one, itself a mon­ster of a read. Thomas Piketty’s Cap­i­tal in the 21st Cen­tu­ry is maybe a lit­tle breezi­er, at 696 pages (though if you let The Econ­o­mist read it for you, they can sum it up in four para­graphs). By con­trast, Dalio offers a com­pre­hen­sive primer in brief for those of us who skipped that macro­eco­nom­ics course, or who nev­er got the chance to sign up for one. But else­where he has matched cap­i­tal­is­m’s biggest crit­ics with his own best-sell­ing book Prin­ci­ples: Life and Work, a huge and high­ly-praised look at eco­nom­ic crises of debt, gross inequal­i­ty, stag­nant wages, etc. See him describe the book, in five min­utes, on 60 Min­utes, just above.

Cap­i­tal­is­m’s best-known crit­ics, even those who want to see the cur­rent sys­tem swapped out for a more equi­table, sus­tain­able mod­el, have known they must begin by learn­ing how the cur­rent sys­tem works, or how it doesn’t. Dalio him­self isn’t set­ting out to build a worker’s par­adise or to make financiers like him­self obso­lete, but he does have some tren­chant thoughts on capitalism’s failures—and they are many, in his esti­ma­tion. Still, he believes he knows how it can be reformed “to pro­duce bet­ter out­comes.” Learn more in his com­pelling­ly-writ­ten essay here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How The Eco­nom­ic Machine Works: A 30-Minute Ani­mat­ed Primer by Hedge Fund Investor Ray Dalio

Free Online Eco­nom­ics Cours­es

David Harvey’s Course on Marx’s Cap­i­tal: Vol­umes 1 & 2 Now Avail­able Free Online

Piketty’s Cap­i­tal in a Nut­shell

Free Online Eco­nom­ics Cours­es 

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Buckminster Fuller Rails Against the “Nonsense of Earning a Living”: Why Work Useless Jobs When Technology & Automation Can Let Us Live More Meaningful Lives

in Art, Creativity, Economics, Education, Politics, Technology | March 13th, 2019

We are a haunt­ed species: haunt­ed by the specter of cli­mate change, of eco­nom­ic col­lapse, and of automa­tion mak­ing our lives redun­dant. When Marx used the specter metaphor in his man­i­festo, he was iron­i­cal­ly invok­ing Goth­ic tropes. But Com­mu­nism was not a boogey­man. It was a com­ing real­i­ty, for a time at least. Like­wise, we face very real and sub­stan­tial com­ing real­i­ties. But in far too many instances, they are also man­u­fac­tured, under ide­olo­gies that insist there is no alter­na­tive.

But let’s assume there are oth­er ways to order our pri­or­i­ties, such as valu­ing human life as an end in itself. Per­haps then we could treat the threat of automa­tion as a ghost: insub­stan­tial, imma­te­r­i­al, maybe scary but harm­less. Or treat it as an oppor­tu­ni­ty to order our lives the way we want. We could stop invent­ing bull­shit, low-pay­ing, waste­ful jobs that con­tribute to cycles of pover­ty and envi­ron­men­tal degra­da­tion. We could slash the num­ber of hours we work and spend time with peo­ple and pur­suits we love.

We have been taught to think of this sce­nario as a fan­ta­sy. Or, as Buck­min­ster Fuller declared in 1970—on the thresh­old of the “Malthu­sian-Dar­win­ian” wave of neolib­er­al thought to come—“We keep invent­ing jobs because of this false idea that every­body has to be employed at some kind of drudgery…. He must jus­ti­fy his right to exist.” In cur­rent par­lance, every per­son must some­how “add val­ue” to share­hold­ers’ port­fo­lios. The share­hold­ers them­selves are under no oblig­a­tion to return the favor.

What about adding val­ue to our own lives? “The true busi­ness of peo­ple,” says Fuller, “should be to go back to school and think about what­ev­er it was they were think­ing about before some­body came along and told them they had to earn a liv­ing.” Against the “spe­cious notion” that every­one should have to make a wage to live–this “non­sense of earn­ing a living”–he takes a more mag­nan­i­mous view: “It is a fact today that one in ten thou­sand of us can make a tech­no­log­i­cal break­through capa­ble of sup­port­ing all the rest,” who then may go on to make mil­lions of small break­throughs of their own.

He may have sound­ed over­con­fi­dent at the time. But fifty years lat­er, we see engi­neers, devel­op­ers, and ana­lysts of all kinds pro­claim­ing the com­ing age of automa­tion in our life­times, with a major­i­ty of jobs to be ful­ly or par­tial­ly auto­mat­ed in 10–15 years. It is a tech­no­log­i­cal break­through capa­ble of dis­pens­ing with huge num­bers of peo­ple, unless its ben­e­fits are wide­ly shared. The cor­po­rate world sticks its head in the sand and issues guide­lines for retrain­ing, a solu­tion that will still leave mass­es unem­ployed. No mat­ter the state of the most recent jobs report, seri­ous loss­es in near­ly every sec­tor, espe­cial­ly man­u­fac­tur­ing and ser­vice work, are unavoid­able.

The jobs we invent have changed since Fuller’s time, become more con­tin­gent and less secure. But the obses­sion with cre­at­ing them, no mat­ter their impact or intent, has only grown, a run­away delu­sion no one can seem to stop. Should we fear automa­tion? Only if we col­lec­tive­ly decide the cur­rent course of action is all there is, that “every­body has to earn a living”—meaning turn a profit—or drop dead. As Con­gress­woman Alexan­dria Ocasio-Cortez—echoing Fuller—put it recent­ly at SXSW, “we live in a soci­ety where if you don’t have a job, you are left to die. And that is, at its core, our prob­lem…. We should not be haunt­ed by the specter of being auto­mat­ed out of work.”

“We should be excit­ed about automa­tion,” she went on, “because what it could poten­tial­ly mean is more time to edu­cate our­selves, more time cre­at­ing art, more time invest­ing in and inves­ti­gat­ing the sci­ences.” How­ev­er that might be achieved, through sub­si­dized health, edu­ca­tion, and basic ser­vices, new New Deal and Civ­il Rights poli­cies, a Uni­ver­sal Basic Income, or some cre­ative syn­the­sis of all of the above, it will not pro­duce a utopia—no polit­i­cal solu­tion is up that task. But con­sid­er­ing the ben­e­fits of sub­si­diz­ing our human­i­ty, and the alter­na­tive of let­ting its val­ue decline, it seems worth a shot to try what econ­o­mist Bill Black calls the “pro­gres­sive pol­i­cy core,” which, coin­ci­den­tal­ly, hap­pens to be “cen­trist in terms of the elec­torate’s pref­er­ences.”

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bertrand Rus­sell & Buck­min­ster Fuller on Why We Should Work Less, and Live & Learn More

The Life & Times of Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Geo­des­ic Dome: A Doc­u­men­tary

Every­thing I Know: 42 Hours of Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Vision­ary Lec­tures Free Online (1975)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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To Save Civilization, the Rich Need to Pay Their Taxes: Historian Rutger Bregman Speaks Truth to Power at Davos and to Fox’s Tucker Carlson

in Economics, History, Politics | February 25th, 2019

Cer­tain econ­o­mists may have down­grad­ed the labor the­o­ry of val­ue, but most of us can agree on the basic moral intu­ition that no one per­son is worth mil­lions, even bil­lions, more than almost every­one else on the plan­et. Yet we live in a soci­ety that allows indi­vid­u­als to hoard mil­lions and bil­lions of dol­lars in cash, assets, and cap­i­tal gains, with­out even the pre­sump­tion that they demon­strate why they should have it–especially to the degree that the top 1% now holds more wealth than 90% in the U.S.

What social con­tract allows for this sit­u­a­tion? I’m not per­son­al­ly inter­est­ed in the answer from econ­o­mists, though I imag­ine there are many excel­lent­ly accred­it­ed pro­po­nents. The dom­i­nant assump­tions in eco­nom­ics come from fan­tasies like ceteris paribus, “all else being equal,” and the con­cept of “exter­nal­i­ties.” World his­tor­i­cal inequal­i­ty, polit­i­cal insta­bil­i­ty, and eco­log­i­cal dev­as­ta­tion do not seem to pose seri­ous prob­lems for most main­stream eco­nom­ic think­ing. But what do his­to­ri­ans say? This is, after all, a his­tor­i­cal ques­tion.

Many sim­i­lar sit­u­a­tions have obtained in the past. Some­times they have result­ed in bloody rev­o­lu­tions, some­times sack­ing and pil­lag­ing, some­times redis­tri­b­u­tion schemes. Noblesse oblige: land grants, endow­ments, hos­pi­tals, muse­ums, uni­ver­si­ties… these have not only eased the con­sciences of the rich but have stood out as appeas­ing acts of pub­lic gen­eros­i­ty. But the only thing that has real­ly mit­i­gat­ed the con­di­tions for soci­etal col­lapse under cap­i­tal­ism?

Accord­ing to Dutch his­to­ri­an and writer Rut­ger Breg­man, it’s high tax­es on high incomes and estates. It just so hap­pened, how­ev­er, at this year’s Davos World Eco­nom­ic Forum, as Breg­man lament­ed in a Davos pan­el dis­cus­sion, tax­es were the one thing bil­lion­aires would not dis­cuss. This was so, he observes, at a con­fer­ence that fea­tures Sir David Atten­bor­ough “talk­ing about how we’re wreck­ing the plan­et.”

I mean, I hear peo­ple talk­ing the lan­guage of par­tic­i­pa­tion and jus­tice and equal­i­ty and trans­paren­cy, but then, I mean, almost no one rais­es the real issue of tax avoid­ance, right? And of the rich are just not pay­ing their fair share. I mean, it feels like I’m at a firefighter’s con­fer­ence and no one’s allowed to speak about water.

Pic­tur­ing fire­fight­ers hoard­ing water and refus­ing to share it while the plan­et is going up in flames is a sin­is­ter image, but maybe the inten­tions are beside the point. Even where tax rates are high(ish), gov­ern­ments go out of their way to allow com­pa­nies and indi­vid­u­als to avoid pay­ing them. Sure­ly, many peo­ple believe this is nec­es­sary to cre­ate jobs? So what if those jobs lack secu­ri­ty, ben­e­fits, or a liv­ing wage?

Breg­man pulls back from the inflam­ma­to­ry metaphor to con­cede that one pan­el did address the issue. He was one of fif­teen par­tic­i­pants. We have to “stop talk­ing about phil­an­thropy,” he says, “and start talk­ing about tax­es,” just like Amer­i­cans did in the sup­pos­ed­ly hal­cy­on days of the 1950s, when under Repub­li­can pres­i­dent Dwight D. Eisen­how­er the top mar­gin­al tax rate was 91%. He says this to peo­ple like Michael Dell, who once asked Breg­man for an exam­ple of a 70% tax rate ever work­ing.

Oxfam’s exec­u­tive direc­tor Win­nie Byany­i­ma sub­stan­ti­ates his polemic, not­ing glob­al­ly “we have a tax sys­tem that leaks so much, that $170 bil­lion” annu­al­ly ends up in tax havens. This is wealth that is extract­ed from the planet’s resources, from gov­ern­ment sub­si­dies and the labor hours and health of gross­ly under­paid work­ers. Then it is dis­ap­peared. If you’ve seen this video, you’ve seen the charges of “one-sid­ed­ness” lobbed by for­mer Yahoo CFO Ken Gold­man from the audi­ence. Byany­i­ma’s response rebuts all of his talk­ing points. She deserves her own cheer­lead­ing video edit.

Breg­man took the same con­fronta­tion­al stance in an unaired inter­view with Fox’s Tuck­er Carl­son. After Carl­son seemed to agree with him, the his­to­ri­an bris­tled and point­ed out that as “a mil­lion­aire fund­ed by bil­lion­aires,” Carl­son has faith­ful­ly rep­re­sent­ed and com­mu­ni­cat­ed the inter­ests of his employ­ers for decades, whether that’s the bru­tal scape­goat­ing of immi­grants or the defense of unlim­it­ed prof­i­teer­ing and huge tax cuts for the wealthy (and tax rais­es for every­one else). The host ends the inter­view sput­ter­ing insults and obscen­i­ties and sneers “I was will­ing to give you a hear­ing.” The prob­lem requires more than a con­de­scend­ing pat on the head, Breg­man argues.

His solu­tion to mas­sive inequal­i­ty and unrest, uni­ver­sal basic income, is one that, like high mar­gin­al tax rates, once appealed to Repub­li­cans. The pro­pos­al has a long his­to­ry, many seri­ous detrac­tors, and it’s also polit­i­cal­ly ignored. You can hear Bregman’s argu­ment for it above, and against Mar­garet Thatcher’s ruth­less­ly ahis­tor­i­cal char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of pover­ty as a “per­son­al­i­ty defect.” If you think UBI goes too far, or not near­ly far enough, maybe you’d be inter­est­ed in oth­er ideas, like a 15-hour work­week and open bor­ders, part of the “ide­al world” Breg­man says is pos­si­ble in his book Utopia for Real­ists. You can down­load it as a free audio­book if you sign up for Audi­ble’s free tri­al pro­gram.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Alan Watts’s 1960s Pre­dic­tion That Automa­tion Will Neces­si­tate a Uni­ver­sal Basic Income

Experts Pre­dict When Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Will Take Our Jobs: From Writ­ing Essays, Books & Songs, to Per­form­ing Surgery and Dri­ving Trucks

Bertrand Rus­sell & Buck­min­ster Fuller on Why We Should Work Less, and Live & Learn More

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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How the Ancient Mayans Used Chocolate as Money

in Economics, Food & Drink, History | October 8th, 2018

We’ve had hun­dreds and hun­dreds of years to get used to mon­ey in the form of coins and bills, though exact­ly how long we’ve used them varies quite a bit from region to region. Of course, some spots on the globe have yet to adopt them at all, as any­one who’s heard the much-told sto­ry of the Yap islanders and their huge lime­stone discs knows. But the his­to­ry of mon­ey is, in essence, the his­to­ry of bar­ter­ing — trad­ing some­thing you have for some­thing you want — becom­ing more and more abstract; now, with dig­i­tal cryp­to-cur­ren­cies like Bit­coin, it looks like mon­ey will ascend one lev­el of abstrac­tion high­er. But to imag­ine what a tru­ly non-abstract cur­ren­cy looks like, just look at the ancient Mayan civ­i­liza­tion, the mem­bers of which paid their debts with choco­late.

“The ancient Maya nev­er used coins as mon­ey,” writes Sci­ence’s Joshua Rapp Learn. “Instead, like many ear­ly civ­i­liza­tions, they were thought to most­ly barter, trad­ing items such as tobac­co, maize, and cloth­ing.” Thanks to the work of archae­ol­o­gist Joanne Baron, a schol­ar of murals, ceram­ic paint­ings, carv­ings and oth­er objects depict­ing life in the Clas­sic Maya peri­od which ran from around 250 BC to 900 AD, we’ve now begun to learn how choco­late took on a major, mon­ey-like role in the Maya’s econ­o­my.

Some images depict cups of choco­late itself, which the Mayans usu­al­ly enjoyed in the form of a hot drink, being accept­ed as pay­ment, and oth­ers show choco­late trad­ed in the coin-like form of “fer­ment­ed and dried cacao beans.” In many scenes, Maya lead­ers receive their trib­utes (or tax­es) most often in the form of “pieces of woven cloth and bags labeled with the quan­ti­ty of dried cacao beans they con­tain.”

Cacao beans even­tu­al­ly became such a valu­able cur­ren­cy “that it was evi­dent­ly worth the trou­ble to coun­ter­feit them,” writes Smith­son­ian’s Josie Garth­waite in an arti­cle about the ear­ly his­to­ry of choco­late (a sub­ject about which you can learn more in the TED-ed video above). “At mul­ti­ple archae­o­log­i­cal sites in Mex­i­co and Guatemala,” she quotes anthro­pol­o­gist Joel Pal­ka as say­ing, “researchers have come across remark­ably well-pre­served ‘cacao beans’ ” that turn out to be made of clay. “Some schol­ars believe drought led to the down­fall of the Clas­sic Maya civ­i­liza­tion,” Learn notes, and accord­ing to Baron, “the dis­rup­tion of the cacao sup­ply which fueled polit­i­cal pow­er may have led to an eco­nom­ic break­down in some cas­es.” That may sound strange­ly famil­iar to those of us who — even here in the 21st cen­tu­ry, among the many who have gone near­ly cash­less and may soon not even need a cred­it card — have break­downs of our own when we can’t get our choco­late.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Mar­velous Health Ben­e­fits of Choco­late: A Curi­ous Med­ical Essay from 1631

Mak­ing Choco­late the Tra­di­tion­al Way, From Bean to Bar: A Short French Film

The Ups & Downs of Ancient Rome’s Economy–All 1,900 Years of It–Get Doc­u­ment­ed by Pol­lu­tion Traces Found in Greenland’s Ice

Mod­ern Artists Show How the Ancient Greeks & Romans Made Coins, Vas­es & Arti­sanal Glass

Bit­coin, the New Decen­tral­ized Dig­i­tal Cur­ren­cy, Demys­ti­fied in a Three Minute Video

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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The Simpsons Take on Ayn Rand: See the Show’s Satire of The Fountainhead and Objectivist Philosophy

in Comedy, Economics, Philosophy, Politics, Television | June 25th, 2018

Say what you will about the tenets of Objectivism—to take a fan favorite line from a lit­tle film about bowl­ing and white Rus­sians. At least it’s an ethos. As for Ayn Rand’s attempts to real­ize her “absurd phi­los­o­phy” in fic­tion, we can say that she was rather less suc­cess­ful, in aes­thet­ic terms, than lit­er­ary philoso­phers like Albert Camus or Simone de Beau­voir. But that’s a high bar. When it comes to sales fig­ures, her nov­els are, we might say, com­pet­i­tive.

Atlas Shrugged is some­times said to be the sec­ond best-sell­ing book next to the Bible (with a sig­nif­i­cant degree of over­lap between their read­er­ships). The claim is gross­ly hyper­bol­ic. With some­where around 7 mil­lion copies sold, Rand’s most pop­u­lar nov­el falls behind oth­er cap­i­tal­ist clas­sics like Think and Grow Rich. Still, along with The Foun­tain­head and her oth­er osten­si­bly non-fic­tion­al works, Rand sold enough books to make her com­fort­able in life, even if she spent her last years on the dole.

Since her death, Rand’s books have grown in pop­u­lar­i­ty each decade, with a big spike imme­di­ate­ly after the 2008 finan­cial cri­sis. That pop­u­lar­i­ty isn’t par­tic­u­lar­ly hard to explain as an appeal to ado­les­cent self­ish­ness and grandios­i­ty, and it has made her works ripe tar­gets for satire—especially since they almost read like self-par­o­dy already. And who bet­ter to take on Rand than The Simp­sons, reli­able pop satirists of great Amer­i­can delu­sions since 1989?

The show’s take on The Foun­tain­head, above, has baby Mag­gie in the role of archi­tect Howard Roark, the book’s genius indi­vid­u­al­ist whose extra­or­di­nary tal­ent is sti­fled by a crit­ic named Ellsworth Toohey (a card­board car­i­ca­ture of British the­o­rist and politi­cian Harold Las­ki). In this ver­sion, Toohey is a vicious preschool teacher in tweed, who insists on edu­cat­ing his charges in banal­i­ty (“medi­oc­rity rules!”) and knocks down Maggie’s block cathe­dral with a snide “wel­come to the real world.”

In response to Toohey’s abuse, Mag­gie deliv­ers a pompous solil­o­quy about her own great­ness, as Rand’s heroes are wont to do. She is again sub­ject­ed to preschool repres­sion in the clip just above—this time not at the hands of a social­ist crit­ic but from the head­mistress of the Ayn Rand School for Tots. The dom­i­neer­ing dis­ci­pli­nar­i­an tells Marge her aim is to “devel­op the bot­tle with­in” and dis­suade her stu­dents from becom­ing “leech­es,” a dig at Rand’s tendency—one sad­ly par­rot­ed by her acolytes—to dehu­man­ize recip­i­ents of social ben­e­fits as par­a­sites.

Read­ers of Roald Dahl will be remind­ed of Matil­da’s Miss Trunch­bull, and the bar­racks-like day­care, its walls lined with Objec­tivist slo­gans, becomes a site for some Great Escape capers. These sly ref­er­ences hint at a deep­er critique—suggesting that the lib­er­tar­i­an phi­los­o­phy of hyper-indi­vid­u­al­ism con­tains the poten­tial for tyran­ny and ter­ror as bru­tal as that of the most dog­mat­i­cal­ly col­lec­tivist of utopi­an schemes.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Christo­pher Hitchens Dis­miss­es the Cult of Ayn Rand: There’s No “Need to Have Essays Advo­cat­ing Self­ish­ness Among Human Beings; It Requires No Rein­force­ment”

Flan­nery O’Connor: Friends Don’t Let Friends Read Ayn Rand (1960)

When Ayn Rand Col­lect­ed Social Secu­ri­ty & Medicare, After Years of Oppos­ing Ben­e­fit Pro­grams

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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The Diderot Effect: Enlightenment Philosopher Denis Diderot Explains the Psychology of Consumerism & Our Wasteful Spending

in Economics, Philosophy, Psychology | April 26th, 2018

In point­ing out the clear and present dan­gers posed by out-of-con­trol con­sumerism, there is no need for Marx­ism 101 terms like “com­mod­i­ty fetishism.” Sim­ply state in plain terms that we revere cheap­ly-mass-pro­duced goods, made for the sake of end­less growth and con­sump­tion, for no par­tic­u­lar rea­son oth­er than per­pet­u­al nov­el­ty and the cre­ation of wealth for a few. Every­one nods in agree­ment, then gets back to scrolling through their social media feeds and inbox­es, con­vinc­ing them­selves, as I con­vince myself, that tar­get­ed adver­tis­ing in dig­i­tal networks—what Jaron Lanier calls “mass behav­ior-mod­i­fi­ca­tion regimes”—could not pos­si­bly have any effect on me!

While 18th-cen­tu­ry French philosophe Denis Diderot in no way pre­dict­ed (as Lanier large­ly did) the mass behav­ior-mod­i­fi­ca­tion schemes of the inter­net, he under­stood some­thing crit­i­cal­ly impor­tant about human behav­ior and the nascent com­mod­i­ty cul­ture tak­ing shape around him, a cul­ture of anx­ious dis­qui­et and games of one-upman­ship, played, if not with oth­ers, then with one­self. Renowned, among oth­er things, for co-found­ing the Ency­clopédie (the first Wikipedia!), Diderot has also acquired a rep­u­ta­tion for the insights in his essay “Regrets on Part­ing with My Old Dress­ing Gown,” which inspired the con­cept of the “Diderot Effect.”

This prin­ci­ple states that mod­ern con­sump­tion requires us to “iden­ti­fy our­selves using our pos­ses­sions,” as Esther Inglis-Arkell writes at io9. Thus, when per­suad­ed by naked lust or the entice­ments of adver­tis­ing to pur­chase some­thing new and shiny, we imme­di­ate­ly notice how out of place it looks amongst our old things. “Once we own one thing that stands out, that doesn’t fit our cur­rent sense of uni­ty, we go on a ram­page try­ing to recon­struct our­selves” by upgrad­ing things that worked per­fect­ly well, in order to main­tain a coher­ent sense of who we are in rela­tion to the first new pur­chase.

The phe­nom­e­non, “part psy­cho­log­i­cal, and part delib­er­ate manip­u­la­tion,” dri­ves heed­less shop­ping and cre­ates need­less waste. Diderot describes the effect in terms con­sis­tent with the tastes and prej­u­dices of an edu­cat­ed gen­tle­man of his time. He does so with per­spi­ca­cious self-aware­ness. The essay is worth a read for the rich hyper­bole of its rhetoric. Begin­ning with a com­par­i­son between his old bathrobe, which “mold­ed all the folds of my body” and his new one (“stiff, and starchy, makes me look stodgy”), Diderot builds to a near-apoc­a­lyp­tic sce­nario illus­trat­ing the “rav­ages of lux­u­ry.”

The pur­chase of a new dress­ing gown spoiled his sense of him­self as “the writer, the man who works.” The new robe strikes a jar­ring, dis­so­cia­tive note. “I now have the air of a rich good for noth­ing. No one knows who I am…. All now is dis­cor­dant,” he writes, “No more coor­di­na­tion, no more uni­ty, no more beau­ty.” Rather than get rid of the new pur­chase, he feels com­pelled to become the kind of per­son who wears such a thing, by means of fur­ther pur­chas­es which he could only new­ly afford, after receiv­ing an endow­ment from Cather­ine the Great. Before this wind­fall, points out James Clear, he had “lived near­ly his entire life in pover­ty.”

Clear gives sev­er­al exam­ples of the Diderot effect that take it out of the realm of 18th cen­tu­ry aes­thet­ics and into our mod­ern big-box/A­ma­zon real­i­ty. “We are rarely look­ing to down­grade, to sim­pli­fy,” he writes, “Our nat­ur­al incli­na­tion is always to accu­mu­late.” To counter the ten­den­cy, he rec­om­mends cor­rec­tive behav­iors such as mak­ing sure new pur­chas­es fit in with our cur­rent pos­ses­sions; set­ting self-imposed lim­its on spend­ing; and reduc­ing expo­sure to “habit trig­gers.” This may require admit­ting that we are sus­cep­ti­ble to the ads that clut­ter both our phys­i­cal and dig­i­tal envi­ron­ments, and that lim­it­ing time spent on ad-dri­ven plat­forms may be an act not only of self-care, but of social and envi­ron­men­tal care as well. Algo­rithms now per­form Diderot effects for us con­stant­ly.

Is the Diderot effect uni­ver­sal­ly bad? Inglis-Arkell argues that “it’s not pure evil… there’s a dif­fer­ence between an Enlight­en­ment screed and real life.” So-called green consumerism—“replacing exist­ing waste­ful goods with more durable, clean­er, more respon­si­bly-made goods”—might be a healthy use of Diderot-like avarice. Besides, she says, “there’s noth­ing wrong with want­i­ng to com­mu­ni­cate one’s sense of self through aes­thet­ic choic­es” or crav­ing a uni­fied look for our phys­i­cal spaces. Maybe, maybe not, but we can take respon­si­bil­i­ty for how we direct our desires. In any case, Diderot’s essay is hard­ly a “screed,” but a light-heart­ed, yet can­did self exam­i­na­tion. He is not yet so far gone, he writes: “I have not been cor­rupt­ed…. But who knows what will hap­pen with time?”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bertrand Rus­sell & Buck­min­ster Fuller on Why We Should Work Less, and Live & Learn More

How Infor­ma­tion Over­load Robs Us of Our Cre­ativ­i­ty: What the Sci­en­tif­ic Research Shows

Every­day Eco­nom­ics: A New Course by Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion Uni­ver­si­ty Where Stu­dents Cre­ate the Syl­labus

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Brian Eno’s Advice for Those Who Want to Do Their Best Creative Work: Don’t Get a Job

in Art, Economics, Music | April 2nd, 2018

“Once upon a time, artists had jobs,” writes Katy Wald­man in a recent New York Times Mag­a­zine piece. “Think of T.S. Eliot, con­jur­ing ‘The Waste Land’ (1922) by night and over­see­ing for­eign accounts at Lloyds Bank dur­ing the day, or Wal­lace Stevens, scrib­bling lines of poet­ry on his two-mile walk to work, then hand­ing them over to his sec­re­tary to tran­scribe at the insur­ance agency where he super­vised real estate claims.” Or Willem de Koon­ing paint­ing signs, James Dick­ey writ­ing slo­gans for Coca-Cola, William Car­los Williams writ­ing pre­scrip­tions, Philip Glass installing dish­wash­ers – the list goes on.

Wald­man sug­gests that we con­sid­er day jobs not just bill-pay­ing grinds but deliv­ery sys­tems for “the same replen­ish­ing min­istries as sleep or a long run: reliev­ing cre­ative angst, restor­ing the artist to her body and to the tex­ture of imme­di­ate expe­ri­ence.” Bri­an Eno thinks dif­fer­ent­ly. “I often get asked to come and talk at art schools,” he says in the clip above, “and I rarely get asked back, because the first thing I always say is, ‘I’m here to per­suade you not to have a job.’ ”

That does­n’t mean, he empha­sizes, that you should “try not to do any­thing. It means try to leave your­self in a posi­tion that you do the things you want to do with your time, and where you take max­i­mum advan­tage of what­ev­er your pos­si­bil­i­ties are.”

Eas­i­er said than done, of course, which is why Eno wants to “work to a future where every­body is in a posi­tion to do that,” enact­ing some form of uni­ver­sal basic income, the gen­er­al idea of which holds that soci­ety will func­tion bet­ter if it guar­an­tees all its mem­bers a cer­tain stan­dard of liv­ing regard­less of employ­ment sta­tus. But if that stan­dard ris­es too high, might it run the risk of soft­en­ing the rig­ors and loos­en­ing the lim­i­ta­tions need­ed to encour­age true cre­ativ­i­ty? Musi­cian Daniel Lanois, who has worked with Eno on the pro­duc­tion of sev­er­al U2 albums as well as ambi­ent music projects, describes learn­ing that les­son from his col­lab­o­ra­tor in the Louisiana Chan­nel video just above.

“At the peak of my son­ic exper­i­men­ta­tions with Bri­an Eno, we only ever used four box­es,” says Lanois. “That’s when we start­ed get­ting these real­ly beau­ti­ful tex­tures and human-like sounds from machines. We got to be experts at those few tools.” The lim­i­ta­tions under which they worked in the stu­dio may not have fol­lowed from any par­tic­u­lar phi­los­o­phy, but the actu­al expe­ri­ence taught them how a rich­er artis­tic result can arise, para­dox­i­cal­ly, from more strait­ened cir­cum­stances. Since the begin­ning of art, its prac­ti­tion­ers have always had to find inno­v­a­tive ways around obsta­cles, whether those obsta­cles have to do with tech­nol­o­gy, sides, time, mon­ey, or any­thing else besides. As Lanois reas­sur­ing­ly puts it, “I can imag­ine that if you have lim­i­ta­tion, even finan­cial lim­i­ta­tion, that might be okay, man.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

William Faulkn­er Resigns From His Post Office Job With a Spec­tac­u­lar Let­ter (1924)

Charles Bukows­ki Rails Against 9‑to‑5 Jobs in a Bru­tal­ly Hon­est Let­ter (1986)

Bri­an Eno Explains the Loss of Human­i­ty in Mod­ern Music

The Genius of Bri­an Eno On Dis­play in 80 Minute Q&A: Talks Art, iPad Apps, ABBA, & MoreBri­an Eno on Why Do We Make Art & What’s It Good For?: Down­load His 2015 John Peel Lec­ture

Bri­an Eno Lists 20 Books for Rebuild­ing Civ­i­liza­tion & 59 Books For Build­ing Your Intel­lec­tu­al World

The Employ­ment: A Prize-Win­ning Ani­ma­tion About Why We’re So Dis­en­chant­ed with Work Today

Hear Alan Watts’s 1960s Pre­dic­tion That Automa­tion Will Neces­si­tate a Uni­ver­sal Basic Income

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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