A Facebook Post on the Disturbing Pomo Relativism of Philosophically Stupid Lefties, and what is the True Epistemology of Politics

Post-Keynesian Moral Anarchism

Published by Tom Aitken · 8 mins ·  · Politics

Some of the most unsavoury people are young left-wing Pomo truth relativists like Sam Kriss. They are very lazy thinkers and they annoy me: "Politics is something strange, however: It’s far closer to literature than it is to science—disagreements over political principle can’t be settled through a practical experiment—but for nearly two and a half thousand years it’s faced the criticism that it should be something different from what it is." This is one of the most facile sentences I've ever read. Extremely lazy thinking. This is what happens when you only read French philosophy; you don't even know HOW to think.
Let us now briefly explore the epistemology of politics, to clean the stain placed upon the world by this stupid sentence.
Ok, let's start with ethics, because politics is (I accept) fundamentally normative (political debates are about which policies are good and which are bad, which people are good and bad, which institutions are good and which are bad, which systems are good and which are bad, and so on).
No, ethics has very little to do with science (contra Harris), but there is clearly such a thing as rational moral discourse. Why? Because, though the starting point is our moral 'faculty' (our emotions, our strong belief in values like fairness, equality and freedom), which was programmed by evolution by our utterly contingent evolutionary history, there are extremely strong constraints placed upon rational moral discourse by /consistency/ (do you really apply your values, and your moral criteria, in a maximally consistent way, or do you often contradict your professed commitments?), and bulwarks placed against extreme or excessively demanding (even if consistent) ethical views or ethical systems by our intuitions and emotions (Benthamian utilitarianism fails for this reason). Moreover, the starting point itself (the moral faculty), though contingent upon our own evolutionary history, also has some non-contingent elements. What do I mean by this? Well, unlike the majority of contemporary meta-ethicists, I am actually quite happy to say that there are such things as "ethical truths", because I think there are some ethical "propositions" or judgments that are, undoubtedly, SUPER-ANTHROPIC. Take the following three 'atomic' or 'axiomatic' ethical judgments: Suffering is bad; Co-operation is good; Killing is wrong. If we encountered another intelligent alien species, it seems to me a near certainty that they would have beliefs of this kind (it doesn't matter if they were expressed through a completely different modality -- even if they transmitted mental content through gamma rays or whatever). Why would they have analogous beliefs? Because any intelligent species would have to have something akin to a strong moral faculty to reach civilisation, because civilisation requires co-operation, co-ordination and altruism. Simple.
Once you accept that there's such a thing as rational moral discourse, that immediately has implications for the epistemology of politics. Racists and sexists aren't applying moral values consistently, and usually don't have the facts right (which they use to justify their prejudices). So a self-respecting rational person can't be one of those. Right-wing Libertarianism and Anarcho-capitalism assume a value of "freedom" that isn't universalised, which means they are not even willing to engage in rational moral discourse. So a self-respecting rational person can't be one of those. Strong imperialist patriots -- people who think their home country should be allowed to invade another country to impose its will on that country -- are also not applying moral values like justice and freedom consistently (or, to put it another way, not treating all humans as ends in themselves). So a self-respecting rational person can't be one of those.
Now, of course, the epistemology of politics gets a lot trickier than this once you start talking about how ethics interacts with descriptive beliefs about the world (facts about poverty, about GDP, about debt and deficits, about death tolls in wars), and theories of economics and so on. I think one is forced to be somewhat of a "permissivist" about many political debates: accept that two rational, morally engaged agents could come to different views, even when exposed to the same evidence. However, let me just give some examples of political issues on which I think permissivism is incorrect (some of these are more normative than others):
- The Iraq War was bad. (All rational, morally engaged agents who have some idea of the number of Iraqi civilians who died in this war, how much destruction was unleashed on Iraq, and the utterly counter-productive effects of the war on terrorism will come to the conclusion that the war was bad (with a subset coming to the conclusion that it was repugnant, horrific, nightmarish, etc)). [That the Vietnam War was bad is even more clear-cut, and there are plenty of other clear-cut cases in which the US was involved.]
- Israel has repeatedly committed war crimes. (War crimes has a technical definition which is easily met by Israel. Now, as for debates on, say, what should be done about the Israel-Palestine conflict, well, certainly for a lot of these debates, different opinions could be had by rational, morally engaged people.)
- Deregulation and regulatory capture contributed in some way to the causation of the GFC.
- Neoliberal policies (as I defined them in other places) have utterly failed to deliver growth and have exacerbated inequality (inequality and growth admit of fairly precise definitions, so this is a mere fact).
- Private debt has an extremely important role to play in the causation of all financial crises.
- What the IMF calls "free-trade" and "free-market policies" (letting Western corporations and banks colonise these countries, and prevent them from developing their own manufacturing and industry) have had disastrous effects for the poor in Third-world countries. "Free-trade" has also had very bad effects for working people in the West.
- QE failed.
- The bank bailouts after the GFC were deeply wrong.
- Endogenous money is correct: banks effectively create money by originating loans, they don't need reserves to originate loans, and money has an effect on financial dynamics.
- Women still face significant injustice in the West.

The question of whether a single person can be "objective" on politics is different. On the conventional understanding of objective, I think the answer has to be a decisive NO. There are many reasons for this, which I have gone into in my project on Chomsky:
"One way of phrasing the question is the following: Is it possible for a human being to be ideally, optimally, deifically objective about politics and human affairs? Taking this extreme formulation, my answer would be No, it is not – and you don’t need any high-falutin’ PoMo vocabulary to say why. Here are the reasons:
• The available sources for any given event or set of events are always going to be patchy and less-than-fully-reliable.
• No matter your level of expertise, or the time you spend researching, a selection bias of some kind will inevitably affect which of these (patchy and less-than-fully-reliable) sources you scrutinise, which of them you carefully scrutinise, which of them you include in your actual analysis, and which details from them you include in your analysis.
• No matter how intelligent you are, the availability heuristic will likely cause you to hone in on certain non-crucial details or issues, and probably colour your perception of the event or events in general (nobody can hold all the details they know and all the images they have seen in their head at once, and weigh them up simultaneously). This becomes especially important when you are actually writing things down (though one does, of course, have an opportunity to revise).
• Every time one writes a sentence, one is framing. There are innumerable different ways of capturing a ‘state of affairs’ (say, a bombing attack) in language, and each of them colours that state of affairs in a different way. Different framings have the power to create the impression that there’s not even one ‘state of affairs’ after all ( clearly, a bombing attack is a very different thing when described from the perspective of those in the sky and described from the perspective of those on the ground). On a more fundamental level, it is a truism of semantics that no two formulations of the same ‘gist’ ever have the exact same meaning and connotations (compare “Sally played with the ball” to “Sally engaged in japes with the globular plaything”). Even merely changing a sentence from the passive to the active mood can completely change the impression (“The leader of the labour union was assassinated by US forces” versus “US forces assassinated the leader of the labour union”), as can subtly changing the diction (“The bombing caused some regrettable collateral damage, with seven civilian casualties reported at the scene” versus “The bombing blew up several innocent civilians, with seven charred and mangled bodies found at the blast-site”). Several well-known psychology studies have shown that “framing effects” can be disturbingly large, and can totally distort people’s perception of what should just be ‘data’ (if we were ideally rational) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framing_effect_(psychology)).
One could, of course, argue that framing is irrelevant to the question of objectivity, because the way you put things has no effect on the reality behind them – but this is facile. If it is simply not possible to avoid putting a spin on everything you write, that means that you can never quite be telling it “as it is”, but always with significant interpretation (and this does become a kind of PoMo point (or a Putnamian point about the collapse of the “fact-value distinction”)). Naturally, one worthy goal would be to try to be as consistent with your ‘spin’ as possible – for example, not describing atrocities in vivid detail for one side and talking about “unfortunate casualties” for the other. But one must also recognise that reality is vastly more complicated than anything that can be put down on paper (even in a very long book). In effect, therefore, every time you omit a fact, or a detail, you are omitting a slice of reality.
And even if you did get down every single relevant “fact” about, say, the Israel-Palestine conflict (including the details of every single bombing attack (from both sides), the names and backstories of all the people killed in the conflict overall, all the things the politicians on both sides have ever said, etc), you would still have the problem that no human could satisfactorily digest this data and compute an appropriate response (not even the person who had laid out all the facts). Instead, it is highly likely that anyone who chose to wade into this colossal factsheet would simply have their prejudices reinforced (and note that believing that “both sides are ultimately equally culpable” is itself a prejudice).
• No political analyst has the time, resources or knowledge to “criticise all sides equally” or identify and lament the “worst things” currently happening in the world – and yet this seems to be part of our intuitive conception of “objectivity” (as can be seen in the criticisms of Chomsky we’ll explore later). Most people seem to think it’s necessary for a good political writer to apportion her attention, and her moral judgments, in a way that’s almost exactly commensurate with the state of the world. This makes it unreasonable – for example – to spend all one’s time criticising evils committed by one nation or group, if there are other evils, some of greater magnitude, constantly going on in other places. And yet no-one can even approximate this ideal of bird’s-eye-view proportionality – not on the left or the right. Whereas the lefties focus on American and Israeli imperialism and military aggression (not bothering to talk at all about anti-Semitism and misogyny in Islamic culture), the righties completely downplay American and Israeli military aggression, and talk only about the evils and barbarity of “Islam”. In a sense, all polemics are exercises in tunnel-vision, since a polemic always focusses on a narrow slice of reality to the exclusion of everything else [of course, there are ways of justifying what one focusses on, and Chomsky does give a very strong ethical justification for what he focusses on (he has a chance of changing it).]
• Since politics is much more complicated than physics, involving lots of highly complicated, unpredictable organisms interacting with each other in complex human-created entities called institutions, and those institutions interacting with other institutions and other groups, all of which are situated within an extremely complicated economic structure with yet more complex, unpredictable organisms and institutions, there are no well-tested scientific theories of politics that make useful, novel predictions, and there are no scientific laws of politics. Human societies are complex systems – more complex than even the weather (in fact, the weather is one of the innumerable variables affecting human societies). Yes, it may be true that f (the use of force by a state) equals m (military might) × a (aggression)… but that’s actually a proposition of immense complexity (the aggression of a state is a highly abstract notion, for example), and it really isn’t that useful (it doesn’t enable you to make any specific predictions).
Of course, is also true that, in another sense, politics is much easier than physics, because you don’t actually have to understand what’s really going on in any deep sense in order to understand pretty well what’s going on the macropolitical and macroeconomic level of abstraction – the level of abstraction where the entities are what John Searle would call intentional entities (entities created by consciousness and language), like “states”, “politicians”, “parties”, “corporations”, “the profit motive”, “banks”, “Central Banks”, “Wall Street”, “the stock market”, “money”, “credit”, “debt”, “public debt”, “private debt”, “the military”, “the military-industrial complex” “financial interests”, “regulation”, “demand”, “supply”, “interest”, “inflation”, “deflation”, “GDP”, “capital controls”, “trade agreements”, “the national mood” etc. Whereas a physicist does try to predict things (for example, the path of a rocket through the atmosphere) and make exact calculations, no political scientist is trying to predict what will next happen in the US (beyond the vaguest details), or how the conflicts in Syria will play out, or what will become of the European Union. Instead, they just need to understand well enough how states generally work, how institutions (like corporations, or the UN) generally work, and some basic principles of economics (though they will make a mistake if they take mainstream, neoclassical economics too seriously, which, despite its pretences to “science”, is about as scientific as Ptolemaic astronomy).
Nevertheless, when it comes to investigating the causes of political events, or evaluating the significance of certain developments, this approach can still lead to trouble. What was the secret to the Golden Age of Capitalism, lasting from the 50s to the 70s? Did the abolition of Glass-Steagall contribute to the GFC? Did the War on Terror actually foster terrorism? What are the factors involved in Donald Trump’s rise? Such questions are roughly tractable, but they must be scrutinised very carefully, with an eye for all the evidence, and a wariness of glibness and simplicity (as any academic historians will tell you). Even then, the answers to these questions are not going to be nearly as precise or objective as the answers scientists can give to questions like “How many stars are there in the Milky Way galaxy?” or “What’s the chemical structure of ethanol?” or “How did the eye evolve?” The fundamental reason for this is that historical, political and sociological explanations are always explanations in terms of human intentions and intentional entities (the chemistry and physics underlying all of human cognition is taken for granted), so they are intrinsically airy and imprecise compared with naturalistic explanations of discrete events in the natural world. It is (of course) conceivable that a superintelligent species that had made massive advances in complexity theory and advanced mathematics (but otherwise strongly resembled us) could predict political events like we predict the weather or better, by plugging colossal amounts of physical and chemical data (including lots of neurobiological data, presumably) into a computer model consisting set of supercomplicated, multi-multi-multi-variable differential equations and then simulating this model on an immensely powerful computer. They could probably also use their superior understanding of complex systems to provide far more precise explanations of events (though it would obviously make no sense to discuss political and historical events in terms of physics and chemistry, because that is impossible – political and historical events are 100% emergent from physics and chemistry (and 90% emergent from biology)).
But, even though this is conceivable, such abilities are nowhere near actual for us. Our explanations for political and historical events are normally exceptionally vague, invoking general “interests” of entire groups of people, and “moods” of entire demographic groups or nations. It is impossible to analyse these explanations in terms of the entities of the natural sciences.
• We, as humans, are attracted to grand metanarratives that help us give a shape to the facts and, in the process, systematically distort our impression of what’s actually going on in the world (once you have a narrative, confirmation bias kicks into overdrive, and you lose the sense that there is any complexity). A left-wing buzzword like “neoliberalism” can indeed be characterised in various ways (it’s certainly not meaningless), capturing important developments in economic policy since Reagan and Thatcher (privatisation of state assets, lowering taxes for the wealthy, financial deregulation, regulatory capture, permission of corporate rent-seeking, lowering of capital controls, which all conform to an ideology of “market fundamentalism” (actually, a mendacious label)) which have had various, empirically identifiable consequences (the financialisation of western economies, a large increase in inequality, a quantifiable reduction in democracy, the rapid growth of massive private debt bubbles (such as the one that led to the GFC), the weakening of public services and infrastructure, a massive rise in the price of tertiary education, the decline of university Arts faculties, the mass exploitation of workers in the third world, the degradation of the environment, the exacerbation of climate change, an increase in the stupidity and propagandism of the media, a proliferation of shopping malls) – and yet, as you can see, it is also extremely vague. It is undeniable that, in using this word “neoliberalism” to encompass all these aspects of our society, we make the world look much simpler than it is.
Of course, centrists and right-wing people have far weirder and stupider metanarratives than the metanarrative of neoliberalism (which isn’t actually weird or stupid, and I use the word constantly). For example, that neoclassical economics is theoretically sound, empirically well-tested science (not an aesthetically-pleasing, non-empirical, non-reality-based catechism), that ‘liberalisation’ is always good, that privatising is always good, that conservative governments are better economic managers, that austerity makes any sense as an economic policy, that capitalism inherently tends towards equilibrium (barring “externalities”), that we live in a perfectly free and democratic society, that everyone deserves their place in society because our world is ‘meritocratic’, that Western interventions are about bringing freedom and democracy to the barbarians, that the corporate media is biased towards the left, that patriotism makes any sense, that "free-trade" agreements are actually about free trade, that it’s somehow ‘traitorous’ to criticise the genocidal past of your nation, that free speech is under attack by “cultural Marxists”, that Islam is a totalitarian ideology that’s going to destroy the west unless we stop it, that multiculturalism is a poison destroying the fabric of our society, that Bernie Sanders is a socialist (and that invocations of the USSR in relation to Bernie are uninsane), that climate change is a left-wing conspiracy, that Christianity is the foundation of the morality of our society, that modern-day conservatives are not going to look really bad in the history books for opposing gay marriage and deriding vegetarians, and so on."

Anyhow, that goes some way towards getting at a TRUER epistemology of politics.
Fact: RELATIVISTS ARE LAZY

A Brief Discourse on the Shame that Attends Previous Works

One of the odd things about being an intellectually protean young person is that reading practically anything I wrote more than two months ago induces in me massive, debilitating fits of cringeing -- and this pattern has obtained essentially since I first started writing for leisure, at the age of 15 and 9 months (I have, sensibly, put nothing from that very earliest period on this blog). Take my "formal" (political-economic) defence of feminism, for example, one of the "featured posts" on this blog (I made it one of the featured posts because it's very long, and I took weeks to write it (with the pornography section having been crafted, incrementally, over a process of several months)). While I remain impressed by own labours in constructing this long work, I now find that this document to be utterly infested with cringeworthy claims and pronouncements (I was always aware that the whole thing was a shameless exercise in "mansplaining" but I didn't care, because I hadn't yet encountered a political-economic defence of feminism written by a woman (and this is still the case)). The experience of re-reading it last night was like going to the pantry to grab a jar of honey only to find that the jar you seek is covered in crawling black ants and that the liquid itself is abundantly populated with formic corpses and live ants desperately trying to stay afloat above the deadly viscosity. No, you don't really want to put it on your toast, and making it appetising again will require lots of knifework, jar-banging and honey-waste (analogous to editorial excision, addition, alteration, etc); all you can think is, "Fuck".
      It's rather funny (if a little disquieting) to think that, when I was writing about sex differences in this work, I had believed that I was being highly nuanced about the subject, and that all the caveats and clarifications I was including were hallmarks of high intellectual integrity. I say it's rather funny because I now believe that I was being way too simplistic, and that I completely failed to acknowledge the immense complexity of the issue and the impossibility of rigorously establishing "innate" sex differences -- which is really a folk, biological-essentialist concept after all: http://philpapers.org/rec/GRIWII. It's a little embarrassing. I suppose I can partly blame it on Steven Pinker, who was really my main influence on the topic of sex differences, and who, in hindsight, also talked in a far too simplistic way about it in How the Mind Works and The Blank Slate (especially the latter, which is, in hindsight, a mediocre book (Pinker's logic: ideology has poisoned science, so I'm going to compensate by filling a book with my own, presenting only those results that support my political views as if they are the consensus, even though they are often marginal conjectures, and creating an incredibly tendentious and distortionary historical narrative of Marxist bias in the scientific academy)). 
    Of course, I haven't completely changed heart on this particular matter: I don't now believe that sex chromosomes and sex hormones have no effect on people, and I don't believe that human beings are an anomaly in the animal kingdom among sexually dimorphic species. I still think that the claim, "Gender is a total social construct" is a silly dogma when gender is defined as everything that isn't sex, where sex is defined merely as physical features (and not any psychological features). Are there decisive empirical reasons to believe this claim, taken fully literally? No, there are not. Gender is incredibly complex, and I don't think it is optimally described as merely a "social construct" (this way of phrasing things appears to imply belief in the false dichotomy between biology and society). I think it is better just to say what we know: that most humans are born with either the XX or the XY sex chromosome and that these chromosomes have an effect on various aspects of human development, that the gender binary is pan-cultural in Homo sapiens, that there do seem to be many cross-cultural commonalities (and some pan-cultural commonalities) in the distribution of personality-types and behaviour-types between the genders, that we are a mildly sexually dimorphic species, and that these latter three facts suggest that there were probably selection pressures to engineer some sexual differences in our evolution (but it's not to say that there are innate sexual differences, which is an excessively folk-essentialist claim, based on a teleological understanding of human biological development (natural selection is teleonomic, and it is disingenuous to say that whatever is adapted is innate, because development is so complex, and there are different strengths of adaptation (different levels of developmental fixity and environmental insensitivity in adapted traits)). A simplified way of putting the dilemma face in trying to identity "innate sex differences" is that we will never be able to test the development of men and women in a de-socialised environment, and the reason that we will never be able to do that is because there is no such thing as a de-socialised society, and a human raised in isolation is not going to be more 'natural' either; they will just be different, manifesting (phenotypically) far fewer of our species' adaptive traits to do with sociality and cognition than someone raised in a social environment, because many or most or all of these adaptive traits to do with sociality and cognition are still environmentally sensitive to a nontrivial degree (and everything is environmentally sensitive to at least some degree). This poses problems for anyone with an excessively strong view on psychological sex difference -- on either side of the divide.
     Of course, one might suggest (as I did in my essay) that we can draw serious conclusions about sex differences from anthropology, because anthropology allows us to compare the ways men and women have existed in an very wide range of social, cultural and physical environments, and therefore should, in theory, help to delineate the boundaries of gender possibility, which should, in theory, tell us something about 'innate' tendencies of maleness and femaleness. One might suggest, in particular, that if you see a certain pattern in enough societies, then you have good reason to think that it's "innate". However, that's not quite right. Indeed, this brings us to the issues that Griffiths raises. The truth is that when you understand the complexity of gene-environment interactions, and the shockingly-counter-to-our-folk-intuitions relationship between the genotype and phenotype -- along with our uniqueness as the one species with highly complex culture and a social world created by consciousness -- you suddenly realise that it is very foolish to say something like, "Oh, well, men must be more innately predisposed to being leaders" just because most societies documented in anthropology have patriarchal structures with the political sphere dominated by males. The world is a lot more complicated than that. Even if there weren't a single direct counter-example in anthropology (even if all societies had a patriarchal structure), it wouldn't be at all scientifically justified to talk about an "innate" complex psychological/behavioural predisposition on analogy to our innate predisposition to grow arms (it's certainly not the case that, just as the kidney excretes blood, the "male brain" (which is not a real thing (though there do seem to be some sex-related, average neuro-architectural tendencies)) 'produces aggression'). And just as long as there's even one counterexample to such a claim -- one society where the women are the major political leaders -- you begin to lose a grip on what innateness means here. Yes, it could mean, 'It's far more likely, because of testosterone (let's say), that there will be societies where most or all of the leaders are male, than that there will be societies where most or all of the leaders are female', but that's not what most people mean by innate, and even in that hedged form, the claim is not suddenly much more solid, because rigorously verifying this biological claim is impossible (how can you isolate the effect of testosterone on something as complicated and 'high-level' as gender differences in a culture?). (To be clear, if I had to state my position on sex differences, I would now say that I am less of a philosophical sceptic about them than Cordelia Fine and slightly more of one than Simon Baron-Cohen.)
     Another thing that I didn't mention in that essay is the very real possibility that the bodies of males and females help to shape their minds in a gendered way. It is a very real possibility (in fact, I think it's a probability) that the very fact of men's being taller, more muscular  and having deeper voices than the other, softer and smaller sex, affects male psychology to a nontrivial extent -- subtly encouraging males (or some of them) to feel more confident and act in a more dominant way -- and affects female psychology to a nontrivial extent also -- subtly encouraging females (or some of them) to feel less confident and act in a more meek way. This is another subtle point that is worth considering before you to hastily jump in to make claims about "innateness".
       As for my comments about rap and racism in the explication of the second mechanism of the Patriarchy Model ("Reinforcing the Paradigm") they are perhaps the most cringeworthy of them all. When I suggested that it is essentially reverse racism that explains why Kendrick Lamar is compared to Shakespeare and Macklemore is not (and that they both deserve no accolades), I was being, well, er, kind of stupid, and, well, I mean -- it does look rather reactionary, doesn't it? I mean, I am still not keen on any rap; my tastes have not really changed (the one recent development in my music listening habits since I wrote that essay is that I have got into Aphex Twin, but this has nothing to do with rap). And, of course, I still can't stand the misogyny that dominates popular music, and there's still no denying the fact that the colonisation of the popular music industry by hip-hop and rap in the 90s did increase the sexism and misogyny of the content of the average lyrics of pop music, and probably led to a rise in the amount of blatantly objectifying videos. But my strident suggestion that white uni students only exalt rappers like Kendrick Lamar and artists like Kanye West for affirmative-action-type reasons was absurd, and does seem, well, somewhat racist. I was projecting my own tastes onto others, and expecting them to view the sexism of these artists as irredeemable. I mean, I still think the sexism of these artists, and most rappers, is  indeed irredeemable, and I still find most rap music emotionally cold and corrosive to the soul, and I still think West's lyrics are puerile and empty, and I still find that a lot of the white guys who are fans of artists like Lamar, like them for extremely childish reasons that are themselves rather racist (they listen to these artists because they are rough, ruthless, primal, aggressive, violent, misogynistic black men, an attitude which fundamentally relies on a repugnant kind of Afro-fetishism and an embrace of the stereotype of black men as animalistic) -- but that doesn't mean that people who like these artists have no valid reasons for doing so.
    Another problem with the preliminary section of my defence of feminism (the section where I amateurishly discuss sex differences) is that it is too tendentious on "Postmodernism", which actually refers to a fairly wide landscape of different traditions and intellectual movements. I know it is a mistake to lump everyone who might fall under the label "Postmodernist" in the same group (and no doubt the work of people like Butler is not worthless, even if, from what I've read, her prose can be turgid and opaque, and she may not be a scientific naturalist (I don't know because I'm ignorant)).
     Yet another problem with the work is all of mechanism 3, "The Disproportionate...". I was far too strident here, because there is actually some evidence that the number of women in parliament can make a difference to policy.
     This work also generally evinces an extreme righteousness that is really smarmy and, truth be told, at odds with the facts about my own character (I am no perfect moral saint).
      One thing I would say is that I still stand by my unusual, ostensibly Theological views on pornography. Fortunately, I think this perspective is in popularity among young people these days, because more of them are recognising the damage being wreaked by addiction to porn, and the dangers of prolonged habitation in its sordid, unreal and amoral world.
     The other "featured post" on my blog, what I call my economic manifesto, is also cringeworthy in some ways (the main problem is that it is a little too dogmatic (with excessively strident phraseology)). Moreover, my exegesis of important chapters from Steve Keen's Debunking Economics is probably inscrutable to those who haven't read the book, or aren't familiar with Neoclassical economics. That said, I beleive there is still a hell of a lot of important stuff in there, and my views haven't really changed on anything of substance.
     Another fairly long non-fiction piece I am now quite strongly dissatisfied with is my essay called "What is the best possible society for our wretched species?", which I am planning to significantly revise and improve very soon. My revisions will make clear the aspects of that essay with which I am displeased.
     The one long non-fiction piece I am still pretty happy with is "Are Things Overall Good or Bad in the Modern World?"
     While I still retain a fondness for most of the old fiction I have posted on this blog, one thing I noticed a couple of months ago, upon reading the first few installments "Bleak Memoirs" for the first time in a while, was that these memoirs are essentially a total artistic failure. I didn't realise this until I read them recently, because it has only been for a little while that I have able to appraise them from a more detached perspective. I had previously thought, with cloudy eyes, that my autobiographical writings might have some aesthetic merit, despite (or perhaps because of) their eccentricity of construction, narration and general content. Indeed, I thought my amusing, mercurial and highly lexically diverse writing style might have been enough to make the disjointed anecdotes from my childhood very aesthetically interesting. But what I learned was that this was definitely not the case.
      I will not be updating my memoirs for quite a while now, and I feel zero compulsion to, both because I no longer think the project is of any real value and because, since about February or March of this year, I have become noticeably less narcissistic (narcissistically nostalgic and narcissistically retrospective) than I used to be. (Partly it's just been that I've been much more obsessed with politics and world affairs.) This is, of course, healthy, so I am glad.
     As for my early essays on ethics, well, they are rubbish. The one called "Deep Moral Dilemmas and the Futility of Formalisation" isn't terrible, and makes some very important points (although I fail completely to mention "average utility" utilitarianism), but its brief summary of developments in ethics during "the Enlightenment" is nauseatingly bad.
     I continue to learn and grow, although usually I think I've grown much more than I actually have.

A Facebook post on Australia's recession threat, and the Liberal Party's terrible ideas on how to eliminate it

Post-Keynesian Moral Anarchism

Published by Tom Aitken · 1 min · 

http://www.tradingeconomics.com/aust…/households-debt-to-gdp (look at long-term comparison -- unprecedentedly high)
http://www.tradingeconomics.com/australia/balance-of-trade (look at long-term comparison -- essentially unprecedentedly high right now, and significantly higher than it was during the mining boom, when it was, for a few short periods, almost unprecedentedly low)

Both these deficits mean that the government basically can't run a surplus. Like, it just can't. If it really tried to massively slash funding and massively bump up taxes, that would guarantee a recession pretty much straight away. It is not hard to understand why: when the government takes money out of the economy (which is what it means to reduce a deficit), the only thing that can compensate is, of course, extra private sector activity. But private debt is too high, interest rates are already really low, and when you've got a big trade deficit as well, there's just *no way* the private sector can save us. What we all really need, of course, is a debt jubilee -- also known as "QE for the people". But, sadly, I don't think that's really on Morrison's agenda.
And don't say, "But Howard ran a surplus". When Howard ran his famous surpluses, the trade deficit was very significantly lower and house-hold debt was very significantly lower, which meant that the latter had significant 'room to move'. This room to move fueled the continuing inflation of asset bubbles, and this property boom was a major driver of the economy, along with the beginning of the mining boom (which really dropped the trade deficit).
These are the facts. They are important, and we should take notice of them.

Two very Important Facebook Posts about Political Terminology, and Types of Societies (clearing away thickets)

23 August
Post-Keynesian Moral Anarchism

Published by Tom Aitken · 22 mins ·  · Politics

There's not a single commonly used political term today which is useful in either one of the following two ways: its contemporary usage connects back to its intellectual roots; its contemporary meaning possesses some intellectual cogency (with a logical relationship between the etymology of the term and the doctrines of its contemporary adopters). Here are several examples in support of this claim:
Whatever "liberal" means in the modern day, it has nothing to do with the doctrines of any of the Liberals of the Enlightenment (in the literature, it is generally said that the "Liberal tradition" is that which links Locke to Madison to Montesquieu to Bentham to Mill (although, for what it's worth, Chomsky claims that someone like Wilhelm von Humboldt was a Classical Liberal)).The group known as "liberals" today are basically all those people who accept the economic status quo, are passionately socially progressive, and vote for the left-of-centre or centre party in their country. There's not really any direct connection there to the Classical Liberal ideas (certainly not Lockeian ideas about the primacy of private property). The only connection I can discern is the extremely tortured one that the political system we have today is in large part the legacy of the ideas of these thinkers, and modern-day "liberals" accept and promote this political system ("The West is great," liberals can be heard saying, "Because of our grand tradition of "liberal democracies""). Meanwhile, people who call themselves "classical liberals" today (a group that strongly overlaps with "liberals" simpliciter) seem typically to see the "free-market" advocacy of Mill and believe that this directly 'maps on' to modern Neoliberalism (one thing that deceives them is the fact that Mill was influenced by Smith and Ricardo, and these guys also influence modern-day "market fundamentalists" (even if the reason this is the case is again largely the result of sloppy ahistorical exegesis)). Anyhow, this is a childish mistake. Mill's support of free markets was radically egalitarian for his day: bound up in his concept of a free market was the principle that all participants ought to *earn* their income, not be in the business of extracting it from others (like usurers or landlords (or Wall St, which acts as a usurer and a landlord)). He sought, by this advocacy, to eliminate the "unearned income" of the idle aristocracy -- the major rentiers of his day -- and create a far more fair and equal social order. This was a pretty revolutionary stance, as was his backing of an anachronistically strong version of democracy (if you really want to compare it to the contemporary era, we're talking Bernie Sanders kind of shit, or perhaps more radical). And the bigger point is that the world was just fucking fundamentally different then: Mill was in an era before welfare, before state-funded healthcare, before massive multinational corporations, before massive corporate monopoly power, and before Wall St, whose denizens are the parasitic rentiers of the modern day. This was a world without "markets" anything like ours. So saying that you are the intellectual heir to J.S. Mill because you support Neoliberal policies of privatisation, deregulation, dropping of capital controls, union crushing, permission of corporate tax evasion, and support for "free trade" is just bizarre. Political ideologies are inherently temporal and contingent; they belong to particular times and places. The reality is that the political, economic and social conditions of the world are constantly changing, and ideologies change along with them. What's radical in one era is reactionary in another, et cetera. Politics and economics are not like the natural sciences. .
Modern-day "conservatives" do not generally conserve. Sure, they often want to take us back to the social arrangements of the 50s, and in that way they're "conserving" (or regressing), and they also seem to want to take us back to the more obedient culture of the 50s, and in that way they're "conserving" (or regressing), but, except for a few rare free thinkers like Peter Hitchens, modern-day conservatives since Thatcher have been extremely unconservative in so many ways: they seek to wreck the great tradition of the welfare state, they seek to wreck public assets and utilities, they seek to wreck regulations and regulatory institutions, they seek to wreck the grand Liberal Arts tradition of education by corporatising universities, they seek to wreck social cohesion and civic-mindedness by destroying public spaces and increasing inequality, they seek to destroy democracy by fostering inequality and enabling massive political donations and abject corporatism, they seek to wreck the free press by suppressing public news organisations and supporting Murdoch corporate hegemony, they seek to wreck the environment and the planet by not putting any impediments in the way of industrial pollution and degradation, and they seek to destroy Western manufacturing and industry in favour of an internationalist regime of technocrats and financial traders (in other words, they seek to wreck the nation state in favour of "small government"). The people who most deserve the label "conservatives" in my opinion are Keynesian social democrats. Indeed, it is, I think, no accident that Keynes was a big admirer of Edmund Burke -- the man whom modern-day conservatives typically claim as their intellectual inspiration.
Libertarians do not care about freedom for all; indeed, their ideology is about securing the exact opposite, as I have written again and again, at length. And, as leftists are wont to point out, the very word "libertarianism" was exclusively used by the radical left and by socialists until Murray Rothbard hijacked it.
Socialism is a word that has been thoroughly poisoned by modern-day right-wing loonies. Until Austrian-school lunatics and toothless hicks started calling regulation and progressive tax "socialism", socialism actually meant one of two things: state control or oversight over all production and industry (as in the USSR), or libertarian socialism (which has only existed in tiny pockets of the world for short periods of time), which entails a system whereby workers reap the fruits of their own labour by having a democratic stake in their own workplaces or corporations (corporations which are non-hierarchial or democratic, not islands of Soviet-style tyranny). Sure, there's also this tradition called "Fabian socialism", which is basically the ideology that obtains in Scandinavia (or did a few decades ago), and which does roughly correspond to what Bernie Sanders calls "democratic socialism" -- but Fabian socialists are still capitalists... That is, if you understand capitalism properly, as (simply) the economic system where the means of production are privately held by hierarchial profit-making machines with managers (business owners, boardmembers, CEOs, CFOs, major stockholders) who make much more money than the workers (the people doing most of the labour). (The extent to which the state regulates or extracts taxes from these hierarchical profit-making machines doesn't affect whether the society is capitalist or socialist, because regulation is not owning.)

24 August 

Post-Keynesian Moral Anarchism

Published by Tom Aitken · 5 mins ·  · Politics

I thought very hard about my last status on the train to Warrawee Station tonight and on my long walk home in the rain, and I decided that my rough-and-ready taxonomy of the different kinds of socialism and their relation to "capitalism" is very deficient. I realise that it is necessary to give a much more precise and rigorous analysis -- and so that is what I have decided to do. Here it is:

I believe "capitalism" and "socialism", and the different types of socialism, all need to be defined interdependently.
Observing this principle, I have decided that the best taxonomy of the different types of "socialism" is as follows:

State socialism: this is any political system where the state fully owns the major "means of production" where "production" is understood to encompass all major industrial, technological and agricultural production [the phrase "major means of production" will continue to have this meaning every time I use it in the rest of this monograph]. This full state ownership of the major means of production secondarily entails (necessarily) state control over a vast number of assets, (necessarily) a state legal and prison system, (probably inevitably) a fully public system of healthcare and education, and (probably inevitably) a nationalised financial and banking system. Commerce (by which I understand all kinds of buying and selling of goods and services), along with more minor kinds of production, are still (in an important sense) private in such a system -- it's just that the state has a massive role in orchestrating basically all of this private (non-state-managed-but-state-enabled) economic activity, because of its control over major resources and major production (except for artisanal and luxury goods, the state would be creating almost all of the things that get sold in private shops), and it is guaranteed that the only large commercial corporations in such a society would be public, government-owned ones (if there was a supermarket franchise, it would necessarily be a government one)). In principle, a state socialist society can be representative-democratic, oligarchical or dictatorial. In theory, a representative-democratic state socialist society with a very strong representative-democratic system might be able to develop a relatively free, uncensored media (thus bolstering the "democratic" part of their representative-democratic system). Nevertheless, since this would require the people of such a society to apply massive pressure on a very powerful state, the existence of a state socialist society with a relatively free, uncensored media is unlikely in practice. The following are some examples of state socialist societies: the USSR (dictatorial/oligarchical), China before Deng Xiaoping (dictatorial/oligarchical), and Chile under Allende (representative-democratic (short-lived because of what Chomsky calls "the first 9/11" -- the CIA military coup which installed the murderous dictator Pinochet (friend of M. Friedman and R. Reagan))).

Command economies (also known as a "mixed economies"): this is any political system in which the state partly owns the major means of production (there is a degree of vagueness here deliberately, and I make no mention of banking because banking may or may not be nationalised in a command economy), and allows for a restricted capitalist "market system" in which the state nevertheless has massive control over assets, imposes heavy regulations and capital controls, and engages in massive planning. It is likely that education and healthcare will be fully public in such a system. In principle, a command economy can be oligarchical or representative-democratic (but probably not dictatorial like state socialism). The following are some examples of command economies: China since Deng Xiaoping, Venezuela under Chavez, Britain in World War I and World War II, and Nazi Germany.

Libertarian socialism: this is a purely theoretical political ideology, in the sense that there are no examples of large-scale Libertarian socialist societies, and it is highly unlikely that there ever will be (though not, I believe, for any facile reason like, "Such societies are inherently at odds with human nature"). I define Libertarian socialism to encompass any society in which the major means of production are not held by any centralised authority or state (indeed, as I will shortly explain, a Libertarian socialist society can in principle be stateless), but by corporations (like Mondragon in Spain) which are "worker-controlled" -- democratically organised, and run in the interests of all the employees. A Libertarian socialist society can in principle be of two kinds: stateless (though I think it highly unlikely that a large-scale society could exist without a centralised authority) or statist. A stateless Libertarian socialist society could only mean a "federated" (but not centralised) system of directly democratic (Classical-Greek-style), mostly collectivist polities. Each of these polities would, I would think, be large enough to have a few different local councils (perhaps each polity would be roughly the size of Periclean Athens)), and they would have to be significantly self-sufficient (probably having their own industrial, technological and agricultural production, banking system, justice system (including a police force (hopefully minimal), judiciary, and prison system), healthcare, education, media, etc), but they could trade with the other directly democratic, Periclean-Athens-sized collectivist polities within their federation to enjoy a (perhaps significant) degree of specialisation and "comparative advantage". [On the issue of currency, I suppose it is possible that each polity would have its own, yet it would seemingly make more sense (and facilitate trade) if all of the polities within a given federation used the same currency -- and yet you need a state (or something like it) to mint a general currency of this kind)]. A Libertarian socialist society with a state is not hard to imagine once you have imagined a Libertarian socialist society without a state like the one I just sketched. The essential difference between the two versions would, of course, be that the federation of directly democratic polities in the statist society would be a *centralised* federation (also known as a government) which would mint currency for all the polities and collect taxes in that currency . Each polity would have to elect (or perhaps choose by lot) a number of representatives to head to the central parliament of the federation (in one of the bigger polities, presumably) to make administrative decisions for the federation at large. This central parliament would then perform most of the functions of our own governments in the modern West -- though the nature of each polity (its mostly collectivist and directly democratic economic and social arrangements) would, in theory, guarantee that they wouldn't be funding social security (they might, very plausibly, be forced to assist one polity if it was struggling with healthcare or education or something, however). Obviously, if a Libertarian socialist federation was under military threat from another society (a non-Libertarian socialist one, we can assume), it would *need* a central government in order to organise a large enough military to fight off the attackers.

Fabian socialism: this is any political system with a representative democratic government that does not own the major means of production -- which are instead controlled by hierarchical, internally tyrannical profit-making entities (that is to say, companies and corporations operating under the capitalist model), which compete with each other in a capitalist "market system" -- but that has a progressive tax regime (including strong corporate tax), that has more public assets than just utilities (e.g. railways), that has strong corporate and financial regulation (and environmental protections), that has a strong welfare and pension system, that has free or heavily subsidised education and healthcare, that significantly invests in science and technology, that nontrivially invests in the arts, and that practises expansive fiscal policy and deficit spending. It may or may not be a society with a nationalised banking system, it may or may not be a society with a domestic manufacturing base, it may or may not have porous borders (though having less porous borders does, of course, help to protect the welfare state, which poses a serious dilemma for leftists (and few of them recognise it)), and it may or may not have a regulated press. The examples of such societies are the Scandinavian countries -- but they were, of course, more perfect examples of Fabian socialism before the 80s.

A capitalist society is any society where the major means of production are owned privately by hierarchical, internally tyrannical profit-making entities. That is why I say Fabian socialist societies are still capitalist (but command economies are not well-described as capitalist, unless the state only owns a tiny slice of the major means of production). A capitalist society, on this conception, can have a progressive or regressive tax regime, it can have a nationalised banking system or a fully liberalised one, it can have a big financial sector and a highly financialised economy or it can have the more productive and limited financial sector like that of post-WWII Europe and America, it can have public education or fully private education, it can have socialised healthcare or fully privatised healthcare, it can have a strong welfare system or none at all, it can have one or several public media services or none at all, it can have a strong manufacturing base or none at all, it can have a state which pours money into scientific and technological development whose fruits eventually get fed into the private sector (a la the US) or it can have a state that makes no scientific or technological investments, it can be representative-democratic with fairly equal distribution of power and influence (a la the Fabian socialist societies) or completely oligarchical, it can have a big military or no military, it can have open borders or very little immigration, it can be multicultural or monocultural, and it can be highly economically protectionist or highly economically 'liberal'. So capitalism, in my book, covers *everything* from Libertarianism to Fabian socialism.

An Essay called "A Refutation of the most Superficially Sophisticated Argument for Libertarianism"

A Refutation of the most Superficially Sophisticated Argument for Libertarianism

I’m going to excerpt some passages from this article (http://www.nationalreview.com/article/437324/neil-degrasse-tysons-rationality-pipe-dream), published almost two months ago in the ‘eminent’ right-wing journal known as The National Review,[1] and then briefly (but decisively) refute them. There are basically two reasons why I am doing this. The first is that it is a superficially convincing article which could easily deceive the ignorant or credulous reader: it has a strong start (with which I completely agree), making some important and correct points about complexity and chaotic systems and, whilst the reasoning becomes highly specious when the author actually starts talking about economics and politics, I have no doubt the argument would be able to persuade those who aren’t vigilant about the author’s fallacies, sophistries and distortions. The second reason for carrying out this exercise is that the article’s argument represents one of the standard, general arguments – probably the least obviously terrible argument – that Neoliberals, Libertarians and other “free-marketeers” actually have. This means that, by refuting it, I will be simultaneously undermining a major support for such ideologies. Basically, the article is an instance of the classic Hayekian, “knowledge argument” for Neoliberalism, which goes as follows:

1.)    We can’t possibly know enough about our massively complex society to carry out any effective “central planning” [a term used to encompass pretty much any kind of regulation, pretty much any kind of fiscal policy or government investment in health and education (in the Chicago School/Neoliberal view, the only government economic policy, and the only government role in directly affecting the economy, should be central bank monetary policy), and very often used to encompass welfare and social security].

2.)    There’s a real risk that major “central planning” might seriously backfire, either because: a) the world is chaotic and too complex for us cognitively limited humans (the justification the article uses) or b) it’s just basic economics that you shouldn’t be distorting the market – that will necessarily make things worse by encouraging inefficiencies and rent-seeking (the view based on Austrian economics and its religious picture of “free-market capitalism” as a self-equilibrating, self-correcting, optimal system, which the author almost certainly subscribes to also).

3.)    The “market”, left alone, is a powerful, dynamic engine of innovation, growth and progress (see just above), and is capable, alone, of solving most or all of the big problems that face us as individuals, and as societies (it can cope with any chaos it doesn’t cause).

Conclusion: we should avoid all “central planning” and just allow the “market” [whatever that is] free rein.

As I shall demonstrate, this is a very, very bad argument.

Before I begin my critique, I would like to clear a few things up about the article. As anyone who has actually clicked the link would now know, Kevin D. Williamson wrote the piece in response to a Neil de Grasse Tyson tweet, not directly as a defence of Neoliberalism or Libertarianism. However, despite strongly disagreeing with the way Williamson attacks this tweet (obviously), I do actually have my own problems with the Tyson tweet, and it is certainly not my aim to defend it. The reason I didn’t like Tyson’s tweet is, naturally, very different from the several reasons Mr. Williamson didn’t like it. I didn’t like it for the simple reason that it seems to imply a denial of the is-ought gap: it’s a blatant philosophical error to think that any society where all policy was based on “the weight of evidence” alone would necessarily be an ethical, equitable, free, effective society (and yet this must be what Tyson imagines). Tyson’s “one-line constitution” would, it seems to me, be compatible with plenty of societies that are ethically abhorrent and hellish (even if it would also be compatible with very good societies). Obviously, Tyson thinks Rationalia is just one society – one possible world – but as I just implied, I believe that, if you take Tyson’s stipulated “constitution” alone, there are many possible Rationalias. One possible Rationalia would be a Feudal (or neo-Feudal) society where a small class of barons and warlords enslaved everyone for their own benefit. I believe such a society would qualify comfortably to be a “Rationalia” just as long as the ruling class of such a society was enslaving everyone in a way that reflected the “weight of evidence” (that is, the weight of evidence as to how to effectively enslave people). The ruling class in this Feudal Rationalia could make sure they profited off the exploitation and subjection of millions of peasants in the most efficient and sustainable way possible, by using their best scientists and intellectuals to calculate how much land they should use without irreversibly damaging the environment, how to crush insurrections and rebellions, and so on. Clearly, this is not what Tyson had in mind, and this demonstrates the problem with his tweet.[2]  

Anyhow, that was an easy way of repudiating Tyson’s tweet, and yet it was a much better argument than the much more high-falutin’ one given in the article, which I’m about to destroy.

Here’s an extract from near the start of Mr Williamson’s article, the bit I agree with:

“Drawing from sources as diverse as the works of Henri Poincaré and mathematical biologist Robert May, scholars of complexity have disassembled Isaac Newton’s machine-like, deterministic model of reality that gave scientists the dream of a perfectly predictable world. As Melanie Mitchell put it in her indispensable Complexity: A Guided Tour: Newtonian mechanics produced a picture of a ‘clockwork universe,’ one that is wound up with the three laws and then runs its mechanical course. The mathematician Pierre Simon Laplace saw the implication of this clockwork view for prediction: in 1814 he asserted that, given Newton’s laws and the current position and velocity of every particle in the universe, it was possible, in principle, to predict everything for all time. With the invention of electronic computers in the 1940s, the ‘in principle’ might have seemed closer to ‘in practice.’ That hope turned out to be a false one. Some complex systems (weather patterns, markets, animal population groups) turn out to be extremely sensitive to tiny variations in initial conditions, which we call, for lack of a better term, chaos. You can have a theoretically perfect model of the behavior of a system, but that behavior remains unpredictable — even in principle — because of variations that are beyond our ability to measure. Phillips again: The presence of chaos in a system implies that perfect prediction à la Laplace is impossible not only in practice but also in principle, since we can never know [initial conditions] to infinitely many decimal places. This is a profound negative result that, along with quantum mechanics, helped wipe out the optimistic nineteenth-century view of a clockwork Newtonian universe that ticked along its predictable path. That is pretty heady stuff, but the unpredictability and fundamental unknowability of many aspects of reality are familiar enough, particularly when it comes to human social interactions (meaning, among other things, the whole of politics and economics), human beings being notoriously unpredictable creatures. Soldiers, entrepreneurs, and fashion designers all know that all of the best planning and research that can be done often goes up in a flash when actual events start to unfold. Never mind the failed businesses; go back and read the initial plans of some of our most successful firms, and you’ll get a good laugh.”

This is a basic primer on stuff that everyone should know. Nothing to disagree about. This completely sensible start is why this article has some rhetorical power, even if what’s about to come is somewhat insane. Here’s a much longer extract, coming just after in the article, in which he begins making his argument:

Politicians like to tell simple stories about social problems, preferably stories in which their friends wear white hats and their rivals wear black hats. The 2008–09 financial crisis is an excellent example of that: The Left says that the problem is that we deregulated finance (never mind that we didn’t actually do that) and that “greed” caused bankers to trick tens of millions of Americans into taking out mortgage loans that they couldn’t really afford, with the result that wicked banksters such as Dick Fuld managed to cleverly . . . lose themselves billions of dollars. It’s a dumb story.

Some conservatives tell a pretty dumb story, too: that the bankers and mortgage brokers were in reality good, public-minded, upstanding types, who were viciously strong-armed into making loans to poor people, especially black and brown ones, who schemed to enrich themselves by . . . getting themselves foreclosed on, ruining their credit, losing their investments, and being put out of their homes.

The reality is that regulations, regulatory reforms, and economic incentives interacted in ways that no one foresaw — or could foresee — producing results that no one wanted. Securitization (bundling and chopping up mortgages into financial instruments that could be easily traded among firms) was intended to distribute risk among investors and institutions, but it ended up concentrating that risk. Everything from public-school failures to advanced mathematics contributed to the housing bubble and meltdown.

Many of the policies relevant to the housing bubble go back to the 1930s. No one in the Roosevelt administration could have foreseen what their policies ultimately would contribute to, nor could the deregulation advocates of the Reagan and Clinton years, or the regulators who helped shape housing and financial markets from the Great Depression until the current day. There’s a case to be made (I made it in National Review on December 15, 2008) that the invention of photocopying played a role, with credit-rating agencies switching from an investor-pays business model to an issuer-pays model once the easy replication of their reports made it more difficult to get paid for their work.

These things happen all the time. Protectionist measures taken by the United States against Japanese automakers ended up contributing to those firms’ technological innovation (especially with smaller four-cylinder engines) and allowing domestic automakers to forgo improvements in quality and performance; this ultimately made Japanese cars more attractive rather than less attractive to U.S. buyers. Agriculture policies that kept sugar prices artificially high led to the popularity of high-fructose corn syrup. The Islamic State emerged from our war on al-Qaeda and its supporters. Etc., etc., etc.

The first paragraph is very odd. In just one sentence, he makes more howlers than there are grains of sand on the planet: “The Left says that the problem is that we deregulated finance (never mind that we didn’t actually do that) and that “greed” caused bankers to trick tens of millions of Americans into taking out mortgage loans that they couldn’t really afford, with the result that wicked banksters such as Dick Fuld managed to cleverly . . . lose themselves billions of dollars.”

Let me now explain, in numbered-point form, just what is wrong with this sentence (apologies in advance for the length):

1.)    The claim about “The Left” is a colossal Straw Man. Talk about “dumb stories”; this one about “The Left” is about as dumb as they get (unlike Williamson, I shall now seek to justify this caustic remark). Here, Williamson quite unashamedly suggests everyone who might conceivably be regarded as ‘Left’ (from Paul Krugman to Slavoj Zizek) belongs to one homogenous entity with a hivemind that thinks the two things he suggests, in exactly that straightforward, black-and-white way. Presumably, he doesn’t quite think of the left in quite such black-and-white terms, but that’s really beside the point: an intellectually honest person who disagreed with the ‘Left’ account would at least cite one or two people from this (massive) group, including at couple of quotes from their published works.

Now, to be fair to Williamson (which is not a favour I can imagine him returning), there may well be another place in his journalistic oeuvre where he has actually tried to justify his contempt for these deregulation- and greed-based ‘leftist’ accounts of the causes of the GFC. Nonetheless, as I shall show under headings 2.) and 3.), what he writes here is enough for me to conclude, safely, that he has absolutely no clue what he is talking about.

A different point is that, even if Williamson has elsewhere written a not-completely-idiotic, (partly) empirically founded criticism of the ‘leftist’ accounts of the causes of the GFC, it would still be intellectually dishonest of him to construct the laughable Straw Man that is on display in this article. Lectures about the nature of chaotic systems and the complexity of human societies do not suddenly give you licence to summarily dismiss (and smear) every single one of your ideological enemies (in this case, literally millions of people). That would seem to be – how shall I put it – rather simplistic.  

Now, I realise that, if I were trying to defend the viewpoint of a right-wing Hayekian (for whatever reason), I would probably do exactly what Williamson does here: ignore all the specific arguments of ‘leftists’ and the facts they marshal in support of them, and instead just try to make every single ‘leftist’ look like an idiot with a few empty, sarcastic jibes. If I didn’t do that, I’d worry that ‘the Left’ might end up looking slightly less childish and naïve than I was seeking to portray them. My biggest fear would be that my readers might even come to see that many on ‘the Left’ back up their arguments with substantial historical evidence, telling economic and financial data, and some even with sophisticated, dynamical models of debt build-ups, like Steve Keen (perish the thought). I’m not saying, of course, that Williamson himself is thinking in this highly calculating, cynical way; I think he probably does believe that ‘the Left’ have “a dumb story” that can be reasonably dismissed in one sneering and sardonic sentence. But, regardless of your sincerity, you can’t just sneer away the serious thought of millions of people, including probably hundreds of thousands of academics and scholars – economists (mostly heterodox), historians, anthropologists, etc… Even if you do think that the general truths of “complexity” decisively rule against the arguments of these ‘leftists’, you still have to explain exactly how. Given that I can use similar considerations of social complexity to make the argument that Hayekians or Libertarians who want to deregulate finance don’t understand the chaos of financial dynamics and financial instability (which is an argument I shall later elaborate), one clearly needs more than a facile appeal to complexity to refute the ‘leftist’ explanations of the GFC.

2.)    Williamson claims that “we didn’t actually [deregulate finance]” and then doesn’t cite any support for this claim. One doesn’t usually expect blatant, unambiguous falsehoods in major journals, but, by my lights, this comes pretty close. It sits in uncontroversial conflict with trivial facts that are completely open in the public record (in fact, the three deregulatory acts I’m about to mention have their own Wikipedia pages) and which have been written about in innumerable books. For the ignorant, there were two major deregulatory reforms that took place between 1980 and the GFC (the period of massive financialisation of the US economy, when financial instability also rose markedly (as determined by the lower period of the boom and bust cycle)): The Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act of 1980, which repealed the sections of the Glass–Steagall Act pertaining to retail banking interest rate regulation; and the infamous, Orwellianly named “Financial Services Modernisation Act” (“Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act”) of 1999 (ratified under Wall St’s favourite Neoliberal president, Bill Clinton), which repealed the part of the Glass-Steagall Act separating commercial from investment banks. In 1982, there was also the Garn–St. Germain Depository Institutions Act, which deregulated savings and loan associations and allowed banks to provide adjustable-rate mortgage loans. While I won’t, as yet, defend the (necessarily difficult) claim that these deregulatory reforms were definite, clear-cut factors in the causation of the GFC, it is important to make clear just how utterly mendacious Williamson is being.

Of course, he can’t be talking complete nonsense, and if I were to make a guess as to what exactly he is talking about, it is perhaps that he thinks that the major deregulatory reforms aforementioned were counteracted by the not-explicitly-deregulatory Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery and Enforcement Act of 1989, enacted in the midst of the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s and 1990s. Since this seems the most likely hypothesis as to why he doesn’t think Wall St had really been deregulated before the GFC, I will now very briefly review the savings and loans crisis, and the nature of the reforms included under the 1989 act.

The most interesting thing to note about the savings and loans crisis of the 1980s and 1990s is that, though the industry was in trouble before the deregulation that took place in 1980 and 1982 (indeed, the 1980 and 1982 acts were largely motivated by the mass insolvency of the industry),[3] this deregulation, combined with a significant increase in regulatory forbearance, ended up worsening the crisis –  allowing it to deepen and spread by artificially pumping up the beleaguered institutions, and fostering fraud and financial chicanery. I honestly don’t know what Mr Williamson thinks about the deregulation explanation in this case, but my guess is that he thinks it’s false (if he is happy to controvert the mainstream scholarly view of the GFC, I think he would be happy to controvert the mainstream scholarly view of this crisis). If he does think this, however, he’s definitely wrong, as we shall see.

Anyhow, I’ve l jumped the gun here. It is highly likely that most (if not all) of my readers won’t know what a savings and loan association is. So, for those too lazy to go on Wikipedia, a savings and loan association, also known as a “thrift” association, is a financial institution which “accepts savings deposits and makes mortgage, car and other personal loans to individual members (a cooperative venture known in the United Kingdom as a building society)” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savings_and_loan_crisis). Thankfully, the Wikipedia page I just linked has a fairly solid (albeit poorly structured and very clearly composite), well-cited account of the nature of the crisis and of its causes. I enjoin my readers to skim through this now, so that I don’t have to properly review the crisis myself.

Along with the work of the financial historian Kenneth Robinson, this Wikipedia article draws heavily from the writings of the well-known former regulator, regulation advocate and white-collar-crime-fighter William Black in his 2005 book The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One: How Corporate Executives and Politicians Looted the S&L Industry.[4] It’s worth talking a bit more about Bill. He was a man with a privileged view on the crisis, holding three important regulatory offices during the 80s in which he oversaw S&L activities: he was litigation director for the Federal Home Loan Bank Board (FHLBB) from 1984 to 1986 (leaving in the year that Charles Keating started to strangle and then hijack the board), then deputy director of the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation (FSLIC) in 1987 (which was administered by the FHLBB and insolvent throughout the crisis), and, finally, Senior VP and the General Counsel of the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco from 1987 to 1989 (which had, the year before, completed a damning investigation into Charles Keating’s Lincoln Savings and Loan Association, and whose members Keating called “homos”). Black ended up being a central figure in exposing Congressional corruption during the crisis, and his blistering testimony at the United States House Committee on Financial Services (also known as the House Banking Committee) in 1989 helped bring about the Senate Ethics Committee’s investigation into the Keating Five (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keating_Five) and the resignation of the post-1987 head of the FHLBB, Danny Wall. His testimony was largely based on notes he took at a meeting with the Keating Five in April 1987. Anyhow, the point is that he knows what he is talking about, and he blames deregulation and regulatory forbearance for the huge amplification of the crisis. He saw first-hand the way deregulation and regulatory forbearance allowed fraud to metastasise and poison the industry.

Let us now talk about the thing we promised to talk about several paragraphs ago: the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery and Enforcement Act of 1989. Once again, there’s a good Wikipedia page on this that I would recommend examining (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_Institutions_Reform,_Recovery,_and_Enforcement_Act_of_1989). Since there is this page, all I want to say is that the changes implemented by this act are not, overall, strongly regulatory: there are elements that one would describe as clearly adding regulatory oversight, but the FHLBB ad FSLIC were abolished by the act, and weren’t properly replaced by the institutions put in their place: the Office of Thrift Supervision and the Federal Housing Finance Board. Indeed, the Office of Thrift Supervision ended up being captured by Wall St to the point that, by the 2000s, it had adopted “an aggressively deregulatory stance towards the mortgage lenders it regulated” (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/22/AR2008112202213.html).

Thus, to put it simply, Williamson is talking nonsense.

Of course, something that Mr. Williamson says later in the extract does shed some light on how he could have made such a mendacious remark about deregulation and still preserved a modicum of self-respect. It is this – “Many of the policies relevant to the housing bubble go back to the 1930s. No one in the Roosevelt administration could have foreseen what their policies ultimately would contribute to […]”. He seems to think that the regulations enacted, and regulatory agencies created, as part of FDR’s New Deal from 1933 to 1934 were at least as important (perhaps more) than the deregulation (a deregulation which he does actually acknowledge with the noun phrase: “the deregulation advocates of the Clinton years”). Again, Mr. Williamson doesn’t bother providing any evidence for this suggestion about New Deal reform (I guess when the world is as complex as he claims, there’s no point bothering with evidence; you can just say whatever shit you want[5])), and, personally, I have literally no clue what he’s talking about (surely he doesn’t think regulation and deregulation both played a role, but that’s what his sketchy remarks seem to imply…). Does he really think the establishment of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (or “FDIC”) (the most important Glass-Steagall reform to survive), contributed to the GFC? Does he really think the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, which created the (impotent and acquiescent) Securities and Exchange Commission, contributed to the GFC? Or is it some other part or parts of the two New Deals that he thinks might have contributed to the GFC? Honestly, I have no fucking idea.

The more general mistake he makes here (as part of his general Straw Man strategy) is to ignore the fact that, at least from my reading (on the GFC, I’ve read the work of Satyajit Das, Joseph Stiglitz, Michael Hudson and Steve Keen), “Leftists” see the roots of the GFC not in financial deregulation, per se, (certainly not merely in financial deregulation), but in the general rise of financial instability (savings and loan crisis, dot-com Bubble, then the Subprime crisis) through the neoliberal period as Wall St’s entire regulatory apparatus – all its checks on criminality and fraud – essentially collapsed, and various kinds of financial chicanery, corruption and outright fraud were allowed to proliferate like algal bloom. He also misses out regulatory capture (including ratings agency capture (Standard and Poor, Moody’s and Fitch)) and Wall St lobbying, which “Leftists” always bring in when they’re talking about deregulation. These were other crucial factors that allowed complex, packaged junk (CDOs and the like) and toxic mortgages to proliferate throughout the market, jeopardising the whole circus.

3.)    The last part of this sentence – the sarcastic words about “wicked banksters”, finishing with an elliptical adjunct that seems to decisively undermine this left-wing idea that Wall St was dictated by greed – is just as stupid as what precedes it. Obviously, Mr Williamson thinks this entire narrative about greedy bankers is absurd, which explains his very sardonic tone. Honestly, I don’t know what to say about this attitude. Mr Williamson and I clearly have very different value systems; indeed, this probably helps to explain why he’s writing for The National Review in the first place, whereas I’m somewhat of a “leftist” who despises everything The National Review stands for, and regards it as dimwitted, sociopathic propaganda. As shocking as this may sound to Mr. Williamson, I think that the responsibility for the financial crisis should indeed lie with the avaricious fraudsters and crooks who created it, not Ma and Pa Kettle, and the kind of vulnerable and desperate people targeted with NINJA loans (“No Income, No Job, No Assets”) and adjustable-rate mortgages (delayed extortion bargains).  Like many of the ‘leftists’ who care about legal precedent and the importance of respecting law and order, I do actually think Wall St’s most fraudulent bankers should have been brought to trial for their enormous embezzlement and larceny; indeed, this seems to me trivial for anyone who believes in a universal moral principle of fairness. But, as it happened, not one of them was. Not a single one.

Mr. Williamson’s last flourish in the sentence is to introduce Dick Fuld, and his loss of billions of dollars, as some kind of sarcastic take-down of this notion that bankers were acting out of reckless self-interest. Huh? People like Fuld couldn’t foresee the crash, so they weren’t being greedy? What? (Weren’t you the guy sermonising about complexity and the limits of human prediction? Why do you expect Fuld to be omniscient here?) Even leaving aside Mr. Williamson’s total failure to make any sense, it’s important to stress that in bringing up Dick Fuld, he’s picked on basically the one unlucky CEO of any of the major investment banks: the CEO of Lehmann Brothers, the only major investment bank that was actually allowed to go bankrupt by the state, rather than being bailed out by a collusive treasury almost entirely beholden to its favourite constituency in the middle of New York. Yes, it is true that the CEOs of Bear Sterns, Merrill Lynch and Citigroup were forced to resign, but they gifted themselves very generous retirement packages on the way out, and the banks themselves were very quickly back to business as usual).

So, once again, Williamson is talking complete nonsense.

Finally, we have finished taking apart that single sentence. Let’s quickly take apart some others from the same extract. First, this sentence about securitisation: “Securitization (bundling and chopping up mortgages into financial instruments that could be easily traded among firms) was intended to distribute risk among investors and institutions, but it ended up concentrating that risk.”

This sentence is what we, in the business of rational argument, call a “lie by omission”. It is true that this idea that securitisation distributes risk is an important one on Wall St (though, of course, the fundamental reason this “financial engineering” takes place is to maximise bank profits), but it is certainly not the case that investment bankers and hedge fund managers had no clue what was going on. Quite the contrary. It was known to all the big players on Wall St that CDOs were toxic, and that the ratings given to them were fraudulent. The whole point was to sell the tranches to gullible investors – and they did this with a great amount of success, until the music stopped.[6] Warren Buffett was just one of many who identified the danger in the new financial “innovations” when, in 2002, he described CDOs and the other new derivatives as "financial weapons of mass destruction, carrying dangers that, while now latent, are potentially lethal" (http://www.fintools.com/docs/Warren%20Buffet%20on%20Derivatives.pdf). One big player who actually decided to get out of the market before the crash hit was Angelo Mozilo of Countrywide Financial, who had the foresight to sell $406 million of his own stock, and protect his $100 million-plus salary and bonuses from the (predicted) claws of future prosecutors. The other big players were more rash, but it’s not like they really thought the amount of toxic waste sloshing around Wall St was going to end well (they were gambling), and they also knew they had friends in high places, which made them feel, justly, pretty much invincible.

Williamson’s subsequent speculation about photocopying is a perfectly sensible one, and it gives me an opportunity to reiterate that I don’t think that explaining the causation of the GFC is at all simple (it’s just that it is clear that the fraud and chicanery enabled by deregulation was key). About the next paragraph, however, I have a few things to say. Obviously, Williamson doesn’t much like protectionism; I wonder if he knows that America, like every other prosperous country in the world, was built on protectionism. Anyhow, that’s somewhat of an irrelevancy; I accept that I can’t say anything about his first two examples, which are fair. About his third example, though, of the disastrous intervention to “defeat Al-Qaeda and its supporters”, I will say this: nobody, except rabid American hawks and demonic neocons, thought that applying a sledgehammer to Afghanistan and Iraq, killing hundreds and thousands of civilians, and trying to establish, by force, “democracy” (somehow forgetting the inherent paradox here) would actually help reduce or eliminate the terrorist organisations in the region. If you really thought that was the aim of the war, and you had any intelligence at all, you would not have endorsed it. It is as simple as that – and millions of silly ‘leftists’ can back me up on this. Williamson’s biggest mistake here is accepting the naïve assumption that the war really was just about destroying terrorism; other motives were at play within the US military-industrial complex, not least, control over oil.  

Let us now move onto another big extract:

The epistemic horizon is not very broad. We do not, in fact, know what the results of various kinds of economic policies or social policies will be, and there isn’t any evidence that can tell us with any degree of certainty. The housing projects that mar our cities weren’t supposed to turn out like that; neither was the federal push to encourage home-ownership or to encourage the substitution of carbohydrates for fats and proteins in our diets. A truly rational policy of the sort that Tyson imagines must take into account not only how little we know about the future but how little we can know about the future, even if we consult the smartest, saintliest, and most disinterested experts among us.

That is part of the case for limited government and free markets. Government can do some things, such as guard borders (though ours chooses not to) and fight off foreign invaders. There are things that it cannot do, even in principle, such as impose a “rational” order on the nation’s energy markets, deciding that x share of our electricity supply shall come from solar, y share from wind, z share from natural gas, all calculated to economic and environmental ideals. That is simply beyond its ken, even if all the best people — including Tyson, from time to time — pretend that it is otherwise. Free markets go about solving social problems in the opposite way: Dozens, or thousands, or millions, or even billions of people, firms, organizations, investors, and business managers trying dozens or thousands of approaches to solving social problems.

Consider the relatively straightforward question: How do we move people around to the places they need to go? Even the most simple-minded among us would realize that there isn’t a single answer to that question: Some trips are best done in a 747, some in a Honda Civic. What is the ideal mix of walking paths, bicycle routes, rickshaws, Hindustan Ambassadors, airliners, private jets, trains, hyperloops, spacecraft, sailboats, Teslas, hot-air balloons, zip lines, etc., for the world’s 7.125 billion people? And what will it be 20 years from now? Would you really trust a group of politicians to figure that out?

This section is what one might call a “red herring” orgy. First, this sentence: We do not, in fact, know what the results of various kinds of economic policies or social policies will be, and there isn’t any evidence that can tell us with any degree of certainty. This is an extreme, preposterous overstatement, and in it lurks our first red herring: “with any degree of certainty”. Is he seriously trying to claim that the government doesn’t know that lowering interest rates will increase investment (assuming the private sector isn’t massively indebted)? Is he seriously trying to claim that the government doesn’t know that implementing a stimulus package will stimulate the economy? Is he seriously trying to claim that those who implemented the New Deal couldn’t really have known that it would have had great success creating millions of jobs (even though you literally can’t help creating millions of jobs when you begin thousands of infrastructure projects at once)? Is he seriously claiming that when the government funds hospitals and schools, it can’t know that funding will go to hospitals and schools, and that they’ll most likely be improved (barring misallocation)? Is he seriously claiming that if the government implements environmental controls, it doesn’t know that they will protect the environment? If he’s not making batshit crazy claims like these, then this “with any degree of certainty” phrase must be doing a lot of work. Maybe he means Cartesian certainty. I accept we don’t have that (lol)…

The three examples that follow this sentence are fair, but if you’re going to make a case that the government should basically do nothing (which is what he’s about to do), then you need to show that the government can’t help but fuck up a lot of the time, even when it has the best of intentions (or you have to have some kind of extreme religious faith in the magical powers of “the market”); three little examples of counterproductive policy ain’t going to do it.

The next passage I’d like to target from that extract is these two sentences: There are things that it cannot do, even in principle, such as impose a “rational” order on the nation’s energy markets, deciding that x share of our electricity supply shall come from solar, y share from wind, z share from natural gas, all calculated to economic and environmental ideals. That is simply beyond its ken, even if all the best people — including Tyson, from time to time — pretend that it is otherwise. I’ve really only got one thing to say about this passage: RED HERRING ALERT. Who the fuck has ever said that the government can impose such an order on the nation’s energy markets? Who? Give me one person. Give me at least one citation from some of these “best people”. No? Oh…

One thing the government can definitely do is subsidise renewable energy technologies, and impose taxes on carbon. That doesn’t mean imposing the kind of rational order Williamson sketches above, and I don’t see any reason to think it would be nefarious. I’m sure Williamson thinks there is something terrible about this, but he hasn’t given a reason in the text, and I, personally, struggle to imagine one.

  Next, this extract: Dozens, or thousands, or millions, or even billions of people, firms, organizations, investors, and business managers trying dozens or thousands of approaches to solving social problems. This sounds nice, doesn’t it? All these little people, and these little organisations, working independently, to solve the world’s problems. Beautiful image.

There’s just one, teeny weeny problem with this vision: IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH THE WORLD WE LIVE IN. Is there any evidence that private, profit-making entities have ever solved any major social problems? No, there isn’t. Corporations and investment banks never have, and never will, solve our massive problems with inequality, or poverty. Corporations and investment banks are not going to help protect our natural environment and defend national parks (some of the biggest are, of course, doing the opposite). Corporations and investment banks are not going to uphold the grand tradition of liberal arts education (in fact, the corporatisation of the university system is the central reason for the decline of the grand tradition of liberal arts education, replaced by the ‘university as vocational training’ model). Corporations are not going to help impose a fairer corporate tax regime, or prevent corporate tax evasion (this one’s fairly straightforward). Corporations are not going to reduce crime (in fact, private prisons foster it).

Corporations are internally tyrannical profit-making machines; they are not accountable to the people (unlike the state, which is at least still a tiny bit accountable) and they have no reason to be community-spirited. Even if government planning is hard – even if many well-intentioned policies end in disaster – the burden of proof is colossal on someone who thinks that a neo-Feudalist plutocracy would be better. What kind of lunatic wants a world without public healthcare, public education, financial regulation or environmental regulation, and democracy? In 2016, while the world is heating up faster than ever, this kind of vision for society would seem to me, well, a little FUCKING CRAZY.

Finally, there’s this passage: What is the ideal mix of walking paths, bicycle routes, rickshaws, Hindustan Ambassadors, airliners, private jets, trains, hyperloops, spacecraft, sailboats, Teslas, hot-air balloons, zip lines, etc., for the world’s 7.125 billion people? And what will it be 20 years from now? Would you really trust a group of politicians to figure that out? This is, of course, another red herring, very similar to the previous one about energy. Who the fuck seriously thinks that anyone knows the “ideal mix” of all these transportation technologies? OF COURSE NO-ONE KNOWS THIS. The problem is that, if you leave transportation options to the private sector, the options are reduced, not increased. There has never been a train company started by an entrepreneur. There has never been a railway built by a corporation. The politicians don’t have to figure out the “ideal mix”, but perhaps they do have to try their best to figure out what might be best for the people of their constituency. Yes, that is somewhat of a challenge, but it doesn’t suddenly make funding public transport a mistake. What kind of fucking nutcase would believe that?

In the rest of the article, Williamson mentions one other example of a failed government policy: Obamacare. Naturally, he fails to note that ‘leftists’ also didn’t like that policy, and expected it to end quite badly, since it involved massive acquiescence to corporate power.

Ultimately, what Williamson fails to realise is that his argument can be used against him. If there are limits to human prediction in the social and economic sphere because of the immense complexity of the social and economic world, and the millions of variables at play, you’d have to be pretty fucking insane to say, “Oh, don’t worry, let’s just deregulate everything, destroy the fucking state, and corporations and investment banks will clean up the mess”. Ultimately, this whole view relies on a religious faith in “market” efficiency.

Now, tell me, Mr. Williamson, do you realise that markets are an invention of the state, and that the government creates the conditions for competition to flourish by regulation, taxation and monopoly control?  Do you realise that, though destroying it may help fatcats in the short run, welfare is ultimately necessary to keep profits high by keeping poor people consuming? Do you realise that Department of Defence investment is the origin of most of the technological innovation shaping the world today? Do you realise that state-funded science is the basis for the cutting-edge products of all those celebrated Silicon Valley companies? No, of course you don’t; if you did properly assimilate these facts, they would be fatal to your treasured ideology.

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[1] I read it just after it was published, via a link posted on Twitter by Nicholas Nassim Taleb (that nasty and demagogueish (intelligent) rooster), and I started thinking about this essay the day I read the article.

[2] Now, of course, Tyson was only making a tweet, not expounding a serious thesis about politics, so it’s probably unfair to be so captious and pedantic about it. But, anyway, it’s still a point worth making.

[3] The seeds of the crisis lie in the stagflation of the 1970s (which famously brought an end to the Keynesian Golden Age, already doomed by the disintegration of the Bretton-Woods system), since Paul Volcker’s attempts to control it by hiking up the federal funds rate was what catalysed the S&L insolvency (higher interest rates spelled doom for their business of issuing long-term loans at fixed interest rates).

[4] Oh no, I’ve played my hand! Obviously, I could never convince Mr. Williamson or people like him that they’re wrong. If Mr. Williamson were to ever read this essay, I’m sure he’d find some way of dismissing it as leftist lunacy.

[5] Ok, perhaps there’s some loonie right-wing book somewhere where he tries to defend these claims, and he’s assuming his audience has read it.

[6] But then they were bailed out anyway.