Ian Welsh

Affect: noun (a-fekt): a set of observable manifestations of a subjectively experienced emotion.

Benjamin Franklin popularized the phrase “time is money” circa 1748 in his essay “Advice to a Young Tradesman.” Never since have so few words of advice been accepted so wholeheartedly, while simultaneously being so pervasively destructive. You see, Ben embodied what once passed as the model of what it meant to be a man. He was a “Renaissance man.” But in an ironic twist of fate, his advice murdered the archetype.

As testimony to Mr. Franklin’s advice, speed has become virtually synonymous with business success. UPS moves “at the speed of business.” Mark Zuckerberg thinks we should “move fast and break things” because “unless you are breaking stuff, you are not moving fast enough.” Marc Benioff goes so far as to conflate the terms, stating “Speed is the currency of business.” Can there be any doubt that since Franklin’s time the world has just continued to move faster, and faster, and faster?

To compensate for the demands associated with maintaining such blistering speed, society has responded by delegating knowledge more diffusely. Meaning, of course, each of us knows our role more intimately, while simultaneously knowing less about the world writ large. And while the business community acts as if speed exists in a vacuum, in reality, speed invariably exists in relation to mass. Thus, as applied to society, the “turning the ship” metaphor is incomplete and must be extended. We’re not only a massive ship traveling at tremendous speed, but one powered by eight billion parts, each so singularly focused on the specialized task at hand that no single part has the ability to comprehend the danger posed by the rocks just off the bow. The ship is without a captain.

The tragedy in this is that extremely smart people abound today. What appears to be lacking is leadership born of wisdom. We can always refer to specialists as smart, intelligent, or knowledgable. But how often do we refer to them as possessing wisdom? And, do we necessarily equate specialists with good leadership? Sometimes, I suppose. However, we always seem to equate good leadership with wisdom.

So where does the wisdom that guides good leadership come from? What do the great leaders of the past share that the specialists of today do not? It’s simple. They share a high concentration of knowledge in its disparate forms. For example, Franklin had a wide range of interests including natural sciences, literature, and politics. He was an inventor, civil activist, diplomat, author, and political theorist. Thomas Jefferson was many things, including an architect, author, lawyer, musician, botanist, inventor, philosopher, political theorist, and naturalist. And while Abraham Lincoln didn’t fit the lettered tradition associated with the Renaissance archetype, he certainly made up for it by being a remarkable autodidact in business, military affairs, law, and engineering. For example, he still holds the distinction of being the only U.S. president to receive a patent by designing a system for lifting riverboats off sandbars.

The never-ending quest for speed through specialization appears to have come at a steep cost. We haven’t changed the way each one of us thinks about ourselves individually. Our egos still tell us all that we’re all of above average intelligence. However, we have drastically changed the way we educate ourselves by emphasizing, to an absurd degree, the value we place upon commodifying ourselves to be more marketable. Who has time to learn something that isn’t marketable? We’ve STEM’ed ourselves stupid.

Psychologists talk about the Dunning-Kruger effect. If we’re unaware of what we don’t know to such a degree that we can’t conceive of somebody knowing more about it, we tend to think we’re as knowledgable about the subject as those who actually do know the subject inside out; witness Donald Trump. As such, I think we need a new term to describe what society is suffering due to our dogmatic adherence to Franklin’s “time is money” maxim. Perhaps, the societal malaise can be summed up as mass suffering from the Dunning-Kruger effect.

by Tony Wikrent
Economics Action Group, North Carolina Democratic Party Progressive Caucus

Strategic Political Economy

Organizing for Survival in New York City

[Commune, via Naked Capitalism 4-26-20]China Spends $600 Billion To Trump America’s Economy
[Forbes, May 1, 2020]

Ten years from now, when economists mull the exact moment the U.S. ceded the future to China this week’s events are sure to top the list of time-stamp candidates.

This was the week, after all, when Chinese President Xi Jinping tossed another 4 trillion yuan, or $565 billion, at an economy taking devastating coronavirus blows….

Within the same 24 hours during which Xi’s announced a nearly $600 billion plan to build even more airports, railways and power grids, Senate Majority Leader McConnell gave the thumbs down to comparable upgrades to America’s economic hardware. “Infrastructure is unrelated to the coronavirus pandemic that we’re all experiencing and trying to figure out how to go forward,” McConnell said.

Music to Xi’s ears. The trillions of dollars his government lavished on the “Made in China 2025” extravaganza is already positioning China to lead the future of artificial intelligence, automation, micro-processing, renewable energy, robotics, self-driving vehicles, you name it. And Trump made it easy for Xi. As China prepares for the global economy it will confront in 2025, Trump is making coal great again.

Why Mitch McConnell Wants States to Go BankruptDavid Frum, April 25, 2020 [The Atlantic]
Note this is by former Bush Jr. speech writer Frum, so represents thinking inside the Republican party elites.

State bankruptcy is not some passing fancy. Republicans have been advancing the idea for more than a decade. Back in 2011, Jeb Bush and Newt Gingrich published a jointly bylined op-ed advocating state bankruptcy as a solution for the state of California. The Tea Party Congress elected in 2010 explored the idea of state bankruptcy in House hearings and Senate debates. Newt Gingrich promoted it in his run for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination…. A bankruptcy is not a default…. A default is a sovereign act. A defaulting sovereign can decide for itself which—if any—debts to pay in full, which to repay in part, which debts to not pay at all. Bankruptcy, by contrast, is a legal process in which a judge decides which debts will be paid, in what order, and in what amount….

Since 2010, American fiscal federalism has been defined by three overwhelming facts.

First, the country’s wealthiest and most productive states are overwhelmingly blue. Of the 15 states least reliant on federal transfers, 11 are led by Democratic governors. Of the 15 states most reliant on federal transfers, 11 have Republican governors.

Second, Congress is dominated by Republicans. Republicans controlled the House for eight of the last 10 years; the Senate for six. Because of the Republican hold on the Senate, the federal judiciary has likewise shifted in conservative and Republican directions.

A state bankruptcy process would thus enable a Republican Party based in the poorer states to use its federal ascendancy to impose its priorities upon the budgets of the richer states.

Regional compacts on #COVID19
[Twitter, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 4-28-20]
The fabric of the Union begins to unravel under the pressure of Trump’s incompetence and Republican intransigence.

Grover and the Bathtub Barry Levinson [Huffington Post, December 6, 2017]

Read More

(Guest Post by Tony Wikrent)

Over $3 trillion in emergency spending has been authorized by Congress in the past month, with another $6 trillion plus in money creation and lending powers given to the Federal Reserve. Judged solely by its size, this has been an impressive response.


There are two crucial facts to note and questions to ask:


1. Little of these trillions of new dollars has gone to help the people and businesses who need it most. Why?
2. In the discussion of these emergency spending measures, why is there no one asking: How are we going to pay for it? 

The answers to these two questions are pretty much the same: The United States is no longer a republic ruled by the Constitutional mandate to promote the General Welfare. As even former President Jimmy Carter has observed, the US has become a plutocratic oligarchy, and the federal government has been mutated to protect and promote the wealth, power, and privilege of plutocrats and their retainers.

Ben Mathis-Lilley, Slate’s chief news blogger, argues that even the retainers are beginning to understand: The Coronavirus Is Showing Members of the Professional Class That the Government Doesn’t Work for Them Either.

…government programs in the United States–even those supported by the purportedly pro-government party–are not designed to solve problems. Rather, they are designed to solve a given problem only to a degree–and that degree can’t require an amount of spending that would necessitate financial sacrifice on the part of high-income taxpayers. This is not a leftist conspiracy theory, but the overt position of the party’s leaders, who believe they will not be able to achieve crucial voting margins in upscale suburbs if they authorize too much taxation and spending….

A bewildering array of socio-economic schools of analysis offer explanations for why the American political system no longer responds to the demands and aspirations of most Americans, from the libertarian argument that there is not enough capitalism, to the Marxist argument that the problem is capitalism itself.

We do not have time for an academic debate, however. This is a deadly pandemic that has caused an economic collapse faster and deeper than the collapse of the 1929-1933 Great Depression. The remarkably fast responses by Congress show that the political capacity to act promptly exists. What needs to be done now is to redirect that political capacity away from serving the plutocrats almost exclusively, to actually benefiting the American people, and to try to redirect as much as possible of the $3 trillion already passed, and the new $1 trillion package now being discussed, directly into the hands and pockets of the American people and small businesses. [1]

This requires a fast and massive mobilization of political factions that can outweigh and counteract the lobbyists and special interests which serve the plutocrats. There are hundreds of progressive and liberal political action and interest groups, each pursuing their unique agenda, but past experience instructs us it will require too much time and effort to get them out of their silos to cooperate together.