8
votes
Our miserable 21st century
Link information
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- Title
- Our Miserable 21st Century - Nicholas Eberstadt, Commentary Magazine
- Authors
- Nicholas Eberstadt
- Published
- Feb 15 2017
- Word count
- 5278 words
Some salient points, but I couldn't help but be put a little on edge by the author name dropping Charles Murray like it's nothing, and being part of the American Enterprise Institute. Perhaps I've become too jaded, because rather than engaging with the article at face value, I found myself more interested in trying to determine what motive an author that's part of a far right think tank has for writing an article like this, critiquing the direction the country has taken largely at the behest of that think tank and others like it. Particularly given that there's little effort made examining why the United States has the problems it does, and active misdirection and attempt at separating economic inequality and insecurity, along with the implication that people voicing concerns about economic inequality are "virtue signalling" about an issue that "real americans" don't care about.
While it could theoretically be simple academic honesty- I don't actually know much about the author- I suspect there's something else at play. I might be reading a little too far into it, but I think that given the date, authorial associations, and overall vibe, this article was part of the early wave of conservative thinkers trying to ex-post-facto rebuild the intellectual framework of the movement, such as it is, around Trumpian psuedo-populism, by highlighting the real problems with this country, while dancing around the causes and culprits, and discrediting the movements and frameworks that have been trying to fix them for decades.
EDIT: To expand a little, for those not familiar with him, Murray is the guy who repackaged Spencerian scientific racism for modern (well 90's conservative) sensibilities in his book The Bell Curve. He's part of the same right wing think tank as this article's author, he's a cultural touchstone for modern fascists, and although here he's just name dropped for a pithy quote, bringing him up without this context is less a red flag or dog whistle than a red strobe light and air raid siren.
I agree. Given he doesn't mention progressives, people who explicitly oppose both of those things even once, alongside a lack of mentions of Reagan, Nixon or Neoliberalism, and heavily implies the bubble is made by mostly or solely Democrats, I definitely think this article has ulterior motives behind it, there's just too much omission to account for the lack of any overt lies.
20001970Half a century later we're still confused and still haven't understood what energy really means for the economy.
Personally I think it's more likely that the economic malaise the working class has experienced in the last half century is to do with the collapse of the Keynesian consensus and adoption of hack neoliberal economic policies, which started happening around the same time. Oil production is partly responsible, but only insofar as the energy crises and attendant economic problems of the 70's provided the opportunity to take neoliberal economic policy out of the military dictatorships in the periphery and into the countries of the industrial heartland. After all, the economy has continued to grow, including a surge in domestic fossil fuel production (though in natural gas rather than oil), but working people still haven't benefited from any of it, ever since shortly after that paradigm shift in economic policy.
I think this also dovetails with the practices outlined in this other topic to cover what's generally talked about as the financialization of the economy.
It's hard to have broad based prosperity or employment when the country doesn't directly participate in the making of things anymore. And what few things it does make are so high up on the value chain that you not only need advanced degrees to do them, you need advanced degrees in highly specialized fields and significant amounts of field experience on top of it. And the reason for it is that our processes for allocating capital are myopically focused on maximizing shareholder returns and ROI rather than the more core concern of simply doing cool shit.
I don't think it's a coincidence that the two most influential companies in the modern American economy are Apple under Tim "I don't give a damn about the bloody ROI" Cook and Jeff "Sure let's not turn a paper-profit for 30 years and invest every extra dollar into expanding into new areas" Bezos. Tech could get away with it because, for a long time, it was considered kind of a novelty industry and it had basically it's own parallel venture capital and finance arms on the West Coast that more traditional investment banking money didn't fully understand. That's all changed now though, especially over the past 10 years. And hey wouldn't you know it! That happens to coincide with the points in our timelines when the big tech companies went from being viewed as underdogs that kept improving consumer surplus value in ways that stodgy older industries they supplanted couldn't to being creepy, privacy invading, competition squashing, behemoths obsessed with revenue extraction.
That is a fantastic article that I hadn't read yet. I think it's all interrelated, the financialization of the economy led directly to stagnation through shifting of capital, human and otherwise, into essentially unproductive and highly socially stratified industries, and led both directly and indirectly to the neoliberal policy decisions perpetuating the same, through lobbying and the appearance of economic growth, while undercutting the economic and political power of the working class to fight this policy shift.
had existed in a context where the GDP grew very rapidly thanks to the availability of cheap energy. Back then, a shallow bore was enough for petroleum to gush, even in Oklahoma. This economy on overdrive provided governments with comfortable fiscal revenues which allowed keynesian models to operate.
The 1970 American peak oil and the 1973 and 1979 OPEC embargoes that ensued slammed the breaks on it all, and birthed the reaganomics.
Economics are, first and foremost, a matter of geology.
(Look around you : if you own it, petroleum made it.)
I just don't think this position is borne out by the evidence, it's very simplistic and doesn't take into account things that happened after the oil crises, social forces driving policy, or even the actual impacts of resource abundance on economies with regard to things like the resource curse. Energy and oil were cheap again after the 70's. Energy and oil are cheap now. We're still not prospering because of economic doctrines that were mainstreamed during those crises, but not due to the particular material concerns of those crises.
It wasn't material abundance that that drove the shattered, bombed out countries of post-war Europe to adopt social democratic economics, and it wasn't material scarcity that drove their abandonment of the same. Crisis conditions simply allow for heterodox thinking to become the new orthodox with surprising rapidity, fairly independently of how good those ideas actually are, so long as they have enough social support.
Neoliberalism (reaganomics if you prefer) was not a rational response to the energy crisis, it was just a school of thought that was appealing and convenient to a certain type of policymaker, had spent a lot of time building up parallel institutions to feign intellectual legitimacy, and was basically ready to go when the opportunity arose to remake the economy. It's a lot more complicated than a decrease in domestic oil production, regardless of how important oil is to the economy, because economics isn't a matter of geology, it's a matter of sociology.
If the meaning of cheap energy isn't so obvious, a glimpse of the crude oil prices since 1861 may offer perspective.
For a more detailled bibliography, I'd suggest the one that comes with Oil, power and war : a dark history.
Neoliberalism was neo because there existed a plain old liberalism before it : when the Industrial Revolution and the industrial exploitation of coal imposed free trade (and incidently colonialism) as the only way to dispatch the sudden overproduction of the newfangled steam-powered factories and to make use of the newfangled steam-powered railroads and steam-powered freight ships.
Economics may seem abstract, they are indeed deeply rooted in the material conditions that prevail at the considered point in time, and on the first order by the resources that we can extract for the environment, that is, stricto sensu, our immediate surrounding. Schools of thought don't exist : there are only geology and hungry stomachs.
This - this is basically when productivity and wage growth stopped growing alongside one another. Not coincidentally, it's also about the time Goldwater came in with his brand of American self-reliance and imbued it to Reagan, who then created tax and welfare policies reflecting it.