Posts Tagged ‘neoliberalism’
“Neoliberalism: An ideology to absolve banks, landlords and monopolists from accusations of predatory behavior”*…
Neoliberalism has undoubtably contributed to remarkable economic growth, but it has also fostered inequality and “enshittification.” In any case, neoliberalism is, to put it politiely, showing strains. What’s next for the structure of the economy in the U.S. and the world? The estimable Branko Milanović…
Why did neoliberalism, in its domestic and international components, fail? I ask this question, in much more detail than I can do it in a short essay here, in my forthcoming The Great Global Transformation: National Market Liberalism in a Multipolar World. I am asking it for personal reasons too: some of my best friends are neoliberal. It was a generational project of Western baby-boomers which later got adopted by others, from Eastern Europe like myself, and Latin American and African elites. When nowadays I meet my aging baby-boomer friends, still displaying an almost undiminished zeal for neoliberalism, they seem like the ideological escapees from a world that has disappeared long time ago. They are not from Venus or Mars; they are from the Titanic.
When I say that neoliberalism was defeated I do not mean than it was intellectually defeated in the sense than there is an alternative ready-made project waiting in the wings to replace it. No: like communism, neoliberalism was defeated by reality. Real world simply refused to behave the way that liberals thought it should.
We need first to acknowledge that the project had many attractive sides. It was ideologically and generationally linked to the rebellious generation of the 1960s, so its pedigree was non-conformist. It promoted racial, gender and sexual equality. By its emphasis on globalization, it has to be credited by helping along the greatest reduction in global poverty ever and for helping many countries find the path to prosperity. Even its much-reviled Washington consensus—while some of its commandments were taken to an extreme length and other ignored—is fundamentally sound and has much to recommend itself. Not least that it provides an easily understandable shortcut to economic policy. It does not require more than an hour to explain it to the most economically ignorant person.
So, to go back to the original question, why did neoliberalism not remain the dominant ideology? I think there are three reasons: its universalism, hubris of its adherents (which always comes with universalism), and mendacity of its governments.
That neoliberalism is universal or cosmopolitan requires, I believe, little convincing. Liberal ideology treats, in principle, every individual and every nation the same. This is an asset: liberalism and neoliberalism can, again in principle, appeal to the most diverse groups, regardless of history, language or religion. But universalism is also its Achilles’ heel. The pretense that it applies to everybody soon comes into conflict with the realization that local conditions are often different. Trying to bend them to correspond to the tenets of neoliberalism fails. Local conditions (and especially so in social matters which are products of history and religion) are refractory to the beliefs founded under very different geographical and historical conditions. So in its encounter with the real world, neoliberalism retreats. The real world takes over.
But all universalists (communists among them too) refuse to accept that defeat. As they must because every defeat is a sign of non-universalism. That’s where the intellectual hubris kicks in. The defeat is seen as due to moral flaws among those who failed to adopt neoliberal values. To its votaries nothing short of its full acceptance qualifies one as a sane and morally righteous person. Whatever new social contract its votaries have determined is valid, were it only a week ago, must unconditionally be applied henceforth. The morality play combined with economic success that many proponents of neoliberalism enjoyed due to their age, geographical location, and education, gave it Victorian or even Calvinist undertones: becoming rich was seen not only as a sign of worldly success but as an indication of moral superiority. As Deng Xiaoping said, “getting rich is glorious”. This moral element implied lack of empathy with those who failed to find their right place within the new order. If one failed, it was because he deserved to fail. Faithful to its universalism, Western upper middle-class neoliberals did not treat co-citizens any differently from foreigners. Local failure was no less merited than the failure in a faraway place. This contributed more than anything else to the neoliberals’ political defeat: they simply ignored the fact that most politics is domestic.
The hubris which comes from success (and which got elevated to unheard-of heights after the defeat of communism) was reinforced by universalism—a feature shared by all ideologies and religions that by their very construct refuse to accept that local conditions and practices matter. Syncretism was not in the neoliberals’ playbook.
Finally, mendacity. The failure to observe, especially in international relations, even the self-defined and self-acclaimed “rules-based global order”, and the tendency to use these rules selectively—that is, to follow the old-fashioned policies of national interest without acknowledging it, created among many the perception of double standards. Western neoliberal governments refused to own to it and kept on repeating their mantras even when such statements were in glaring contradiction with what they were actually doing. In the international arena, they ended in a cul-de-sac, manipulating words, reinventing concepts, fabricating realities, all in the attempt to mask the truth. A part of that mendacity was present domestically too when people were told to shut up and not complain because the statistical data were not giving them reason and thus their subjective views were wrong and had to be ignored.
What next? I discuss that in The Great Global Transformation. I think there is one thing on which most people would agree: that the past fifty years have seen the debacles of two universalist ideologies: communism and neoliberalism. Both were defeated by the real world. The new ideologies will not be universal: they would not claim to apply to the entire world. They will be particularist, limited in scope, both geographically and politically and geared toward the maintenance of hegemony wherever they rule; not fashioning it into universal principles. This is why the talk about global ideologies of authoritarianism is meaningless. These ideologies are local, aiming at the preservation of power and of the status quo. This does not make them averse to the old imperialist temptation. But that temptation can never be extended to the world as a whole nor can various authoritarianisms work together to accomplish that. Moreover, since they lack universal principles, they are likely to clash. The only way for authoritarians not to fight with each other is to accept a very narrow set of principles, essentially those of non-interference in domestic affairs and absence of aggression, and leave it at that. Xi Jinping’s proclamation of five such narrow rules at the recent Shanghai Cooperation Organization meeting may be based on such a calculation…
Neoliberalism in crisis: “Defeated by reality,” from @brankomilan.bsky.social.
For a less certain perspective: “Will Trump Bring Neoliberalism’s Apocalypse, or Merely a New Iteration?” (source of the image above).
And apposite: “Why Neoliberalism Needs Neofascists,” “Has Liberalism’s Very Success in Delivering Human Flourishing Doomed It?,” and “The future of the world economy beyond globalization – or, thinking with soup.”
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As we rethink, we might recall that it was on this date in 1975 that New York City came within two hours of bankruptcy. The city had payments due of $350 million, but had only a fraction of that available. Washington had refused craft a bailout package. It was estimated by some that 100 banks would fail if the city went bankrupt. A notice had been drafted and signed by the mayor:
But at the last minute, as creditors were lined up at government buildings and teachers were being notified to stay home, the teachers union pension fund came to the rescue, buying city bonds and giving the city the lifeline it needed to avoid default.
More at: “The Night NYC Saved Itself”
“I have said before that metaphors are dangerous”*…
… still, metaphor animates much of our thought and of the received wisdom that it can become. Quinn Slobodian unpacks the ways in which metaphors of the natural sciences loom large in the neoliberalism conception, then walks us through its myriad permutations, concluding with metaphor’s corrosion at the hands of Silicon Valley’s reactionary accumulation regime…
Polyps confounded political theorists in the 18th century. The creatures that collectively make up coral reefs acted in ways that defied both expectations of divine design and the established hierarchy of the animal kingdom. How could these lowest of organisms create such enormous structures—especially ones that appeared to be the product of one mind? How could microscopic creatures obstruct the ships of the most powerful forces on Earth, rupturing their hulls and forcing them to chart their way around polyp metropoli risen into islands? It’s no wonder that the anarchist anthropologist James C. Scott later drew an analogy between polyps and peasants. “Just as millions of anthozoan polyps create, willy-nilly, a coral reef,” he wrote, “so do thousands upon thousands of individual acts of subordination and evasion create a political or economic barrier reef of their own.”
The historian of science Whitney Barlow Robles quotes Scott in her wonderful book, Curious Species, where she explains how coral unsettled certainties. Fed by sunlight like grass, plants with their tentacles laid down layers of limestone. The power of polyps turned ideas of agency on their head, a molecular sightless mass acting as architect. Robles imagines it would be like “suddenly learning that butterflies, not people, planted all the trees in Central Park.”
It was a similar wonder at the endless events of the natural world that led classical liberals to draw connections between the order of nature and the order created by human exchange in the profane world of political economy. Philip Mirowski reminds us that natural metaphors serve double duty: they are “reassuring and graphically concrete images of order, situating humanity squarely at home in ‘its’ universe” while they also tame the disorder of nature, making “an unintelligible alien world comprehensible.”
Nature offered what Deirdre McCloskey calls the ”metaphors economists live by.” Because so much of our politics relies on an explicit and implicit understanding of economics, this means we live by those metaphors too. The intellectual movement of neoliberalism arrived at its ideas of the good society by thinking with and through nature. As the post-Cold War consensus around neoliberal globalization crumbles and the boundaries of individual freedom narrow, new metaphors might help us understand the successor ideology…
[Slobodian outlines the intellectual history of neoliberalism, from Friedrich Hayek, its intwined connection with he sciences, and the centrality of the “garden” metaphor in economics. He describes the displacement of the graden with the “swarm” and argues that it is now being wrestled into a mechanistic, surveillance-centric vision of control– a factory…]
… In Curious Species, Whitney Robles reminds us that the polyp agglomerations—those coral structures built by tiny, collective labor—were dubbed “colonies” in the language of the European merchant empires and the Romans before them. The metaphor was no accident. Colonial science mapped political fantasies onto biological forms.
Robles insists that the polyps were never docile subjects. Yet, however resilient, the polyps are not immortal. When the waters around them acidify and warm, these vast reef-structures bleach and break apart. The microorganisms that once formed a community detach from the whole and float away—winking, fluttering, nearly invisible. A nothing. A dispersal. Polyp politics does not just teach us about creation. It teaches us about endings, too.
The neoliberal imagination, when it looked to nature, saw spontaneous order, unplanned complexity, and the beautiful unpredictability of emergent systems. But it often underestimated the possibility of collapse—not as failure of planning, but as a systemic consequence of the very freedom it prized.
What happens when the waters change? When the reef dissolves?
In our current moment, we are no longer just asking how order emerges, but how it vanishes. We are watching the garden trodden underfoot, the swarm militarized, the factory reinstalled as a total system of command. And in this long shift—from polyps to protocols, from butterflies to drones—there is a profound political lesson.
Freedom, when real, is fragile. So is spontaneity. So is improvisation. The forces of order may begin in a coral reef or a Central Park meadow, but they can end in a codebase, a drone cloud, or a boardroom with no windows.
The question is no longer whether we can find metaphors from the natural world to describe human society. It is whether we can preserve the kinds of life that those metaphors once made thinkable…
As Robert Frost once said, “unless you are educated in metaphor, you are not safe to be let loose in the world”: “Garden, Swarm, Factory,” from The Ideas Letter and @open-society.bsky.social.
Apposite: “Artificial intelligence” as we’re being encouraged to understand and accept it is a lie that depends on a worldview the richest people on the planet need you to believe in, namely that intelligence is “measurable and hierarchical” “Toolmen.”
And further: “A Reality Check for Tech Oligarchs.”
* Milan Kundera
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As we analyze our analogies, we might send lyrical birthday greetings to a master of metaphor, Walt Whitman; he was born on this date in 1819. A poet, essayist, and journalist; he also wrote two novels. Whitman is considered one of the most influential poets in American and world literature. He incorporated both transcendentalism and realism in his writings and is often called the father of free verse. His work was controversial in his time, particularly his 1855 poetry collection Leaves of Grass, which was described by some at the time (and again, more recently) as obscene for its overt sensuality.
Whitman grew up in Brooklyn, where over time he moved from printing to teaching to journalism, becoming the editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in 1846. He began experimenting with a new form of poetry, revolutionary at the time, free of a regular rhythm or rhyme scheme, that has come to be known as “free verse.” In 1855, Whitman published, anonymously and at his own expense, the first edition of Leaves of Grass— which was revolutionary too in its content, celebrating the human body and the common man. Whitman spent the rest of his life revising and enlarging Leaves of Grass; the ninth edition appeared in 1892, the year of his death.
Whitman and the Butterfly, from the 1889 edition of Leaves of Grass (source: Library of Congress)
“It turns out that we’re actually capable of something other than neoliberalism and actually we’re really capable of enjoying ourselves more than we do under neoliberalism”*…
… but the path from here to there, the estimable Brad DeLong warns, could be overcast. In notes for his lectures to his Econ 135 class at Berkeley (“The History of Economic Growth,” shared in his terrific newsletter, Grasping Reality) he begins with an explanation of neoliberalism [also explained here– source of the image above], then considers what might be next…
So what is coming after neoliberalism?
First, one thing that is coming, at least here in America, is renewed or perhaps novel attention to places. Places have never been important in American identity. American identity has, instead, long been defined by a focus on mobility and opportunity. Americans are people who have moved to new places—undertaken errands unto the Wilderness—precisely because of the mistakes being made in and the limitations circumscribing their choices where they were. Americans are people who have abandoned some Old World because of its mistakes, and have moved to a New World to remake themselves and make a new society that will at least make different mistakes. The promise of more abundant resources and the chance to build a better life has driven this pattern of migration and reinvention. Thus the advice given to those who find their birth-region constraining or insufficiently prosperous has always been “go west!”: move to opportunity.
My Richardson ancestors were farmers in the hilly, rocky terrain of New England in the 1840s. Farming the land was difficult. To say that New England soil is “stony” is to greatly understate the case, as you can see even today from the ubiquitous stone walls found throughout New England all built from rocks that had to be removed from the fields before farming could even begin.
The Richardson family decided to leave New Hampshire and traveled down the Ohio River to St. Louis, where they established a pharmaceutical company: the Richardson Drug Company. The family story is that they specialized in cocaine—legal at the time, and their cocaine products were very low concentration, nothing like lines or crack. But, still, my ancestors became the very first cocaine pushers west of the Mississippi in St. Louis. The company was quite successful for two generations. Then, one New Year’s Day, a catastrophic fire destroyed their chemical plant. The fire department was, the story goes, slow to respond, as they were recovering from New Year’s Eve. And how does a catastrophic fire start when the plant is entirely shut down for the holiday. I am suspicious of my ancestors.
Rather than rebuild the plant, the Richardsons opted to take the large insurance settlement and shift their focus to banking. The course of the Richardsons is thus a very American story: change who you are and what you are doing and where you are doing several times over the course of even a few generations.
The Neoliberal Order was about capitalism but it was also about freedom. And one aspect of this freedom was freedom to successfully organize to resist being dominated by the behemoths of the New Deal Order: Big Government, Big Business, Big Labor, and also Big Cultural Expectations. The assumption that your husband should get a job with a large corporation and commute by car as you moved to suburbia and that you alone should raise the children was an essential part of the New Deal Order. And it called forth a middle-class feminist rebellion. The assumption that Blacks should largely stay in their place and be happy with slow advances toward equal rights and a small share of the benefits from social-insurance programs was an essential part of the bargains in the 1930s that formed the New Deal Order. The Black Civil Rights movement was not in itself neoliberal, but was an expression of the underlying anti-system anti-bureaucracy current. And with respect to land-use planning—Big Government bureaucrats should not be able to assist Big Finance money and Big Business bulldozers to order you around and bulldoze and “renew” your community. It was individual unbureaucratic enterpreneurship that was supposed to be beautiful. Hence NIMBYism (Not In My Backyard-ism) as we know it today is an important piece of the Neoliberal Order, as it actually was on the ground.
Consider San Francisco’s Embarcadero Freeway, an 8-story, 90-foot high structure that blocked views of the ocean and bay. Residents preferred to maintain the open views rather than prioritize faster commutes for drivers from Marin County. This was seen as a victory for rational, people-centered development at the time. And the post-1989 earthquake removal of the initial parts of the Embarcadero Freeway was a huge win—it resulted in a much more pleasant and open waterfront area for residents and visitors to enjoy.
But in the long run NIMBYism has been a disaster. Berkeley houses no more people now than it did fifty years ago. So housing prices have skyrocketed, and the guy who runs the Little Farm Children’s Center in Tilden Park has to commute from beyond the Altamont Pass.
NIMBYism killed America’s tradition of moving to opportunity stone dead. This has been a very powerful if indirect cause of rage against The Neoliberal Order Machine. Thus the growing call for place-based policies to make opportunity move to where people are, instead of assuming people will move to opportunity. The Polanyian right to the land—to keep Schumpeterian creative-destruction from destroying your community as a side-effect of its pursuit of profit—is and will take a more prominent role in whatever comes after the Neoliberal Order.
Second, the “after” will include explicit industrial policies. The Neoliberal Order was about hyperglobalization. Under the Neoliberal Order it was assumed that free trade and laissez-faire policies were beneficial for all. They were beneficial for the Global North as they heightened the concentration of high-value and high-externality activities like science, engineering, and worthwhile manufacturing within itself. And they were beneficial for the Global South because only the threat that economic activity and talented people would leave could curb the predatory instincts of Global South governments. The concerns of economists like W. Arthur Lewis that trade in a globalized market on terms increasingly tilted against primary products actually developed the fact of underdevelopment were pushed to one side.
But now the assumption that free trade works to concentrate high-value and high-externality activities like science, engineering, and worthwhile manufacturing in the United States is very much in doubt. The CHIPS Act of the Biden administration signals the end of the belief that the global market was working in America’s favor. The CHIPS Act represents a shift away from the implicit acceptance of the global market’s inequities now that they no longer seem to be working so strongly in America’s favor. Instead, there is now a demand for more explicit industrial policies as an alternative..
Third, the “after” will include a strong demand for champions of the people. There is growing recognition that neoliberalism has led to an unfair domestic plutocracy. The 2008 Republican presidential and vice-presidential ticket was almost composed of individuals who collectively owned 20 houses—John McCain owned 12 houses, and Mitt Romney owned 8. Political advisors felt that that foreclosed choosing Romney as likely to make the ticket look ridiculous, and so they prevailed on McCain to choose the very odd Alaska Governor Sarah Palin insted.
What to do about plutocracy, where there is a growing belief that the system is working not for the people but for the super-rich and for their rootless cosmopolite allies and clients? Power requires countervailing power. Hence what is needed is someone powerful to vindicate the interests of the common people, rather than of some privileged élite: a strongman to disrupt the status quo and the inertia of “business as usual”.
It has never been the case that the “strongman” has to come from the people. Indeed, often in history a plutocrat, oligarch, or aristocrat has been preferred—a “class traitor” as other members of Harvard’s Porcellian Society whispered about their fellow member, New Deal President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The idea is that only someone who has thoroughly benefitted from being in the system and knows it inside and out will know enough about its vulnerability to be able to disrupt it.
Analogously, consider Andrew Jackson. He positioned himself as a defender of the common people against the system—land speculators, Philadelphia financiers, and corrupt politicians who together made sure that the people could not prosper as America grew.vJackson presented himself as an outsider who would protect the interests of the “Kentucky frontiersmen” against the domestic élite, even though he himself was no true frontiersman.
Indeed, the earliest examples of strongman politicians overthrowing existing oligarchic systems to vindicate at least the short-run interests of a broader “people” come from the early days of Classical Hellenic civilization. Peisistratos, Tyrant of Athens in the -500s, is the prime historical example. The Tyrants abolished debt slavery, canceled the debts of the overindebted, and redistributed land more equitably—paving the way for the establishment of Hellenic democracy, which was a very attractive civilization as far as the societies of domination of those days went.
Unfortunately for us, the champions of the people being chosen today appear more fascist than populist—more interested in telling people what to do to make them followers to burnish the glory of the leader than in lifting the burdens from the people by cancelling the debts and redistributing the land—and more kleptocrat than plutocrat, with the leader’s skills more in running a con game than in understanding the workings of the system.
Fourth, what is coming after the Neoliberal Order appears to be a politics of fear: fear of the diverse, fear of the woke, fear of the other—whatever the other is, people who seem strange and weird—and fear of the rootless cosmopolite.
In the last analysis, the Neoliberal Order fell because it did not deliver the goods. Free markets and largely ineffectual gestures at freeing-up individual autonomy from bureaucracy were not enough to create a society where people felt at home, even if there was a great expansion of individual freedom to choose elsewise than commanded by formerly-dominant social norms. But the failure of the past Order did not in itself bring a new one into existence. In this sense we are in a similar period of uncertainty to that of the late 1920s and early 1930s. Back then, before he died in Mussolini’s jail, the Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci observed: “The Old Order is dying, and the New Order appears perhaps to be stillborn: now is a time of monsters”…
Oh, to be able to go back to school… Eminently worth reading in full: “Neoliberalism & After,” from @delong.bsky.social. See also the notes from a proximate lecture: “Post-2010 “Polycrisis”: Culture, Communications, Politics, & War.”
* “It turns out that we’re actually capable of something other than neoliberalism and actually we’re really capable of enjoying ourselves more than we do under neoliberalism. It feels that if neoliberalism is first about privatizing desire and imagination before the economy, then we’re in this process of publicizing it again.” – Rebecca Solnit
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As we fumble with the future, we might recall that it was on this date in 1968 that 60 Minutes, which had premiered two months earlier, introduced its trademark “ticking stopwatch” opening logo/transition. 60 Minutes is, of course, the most-watched television news show in history.
Since near the show’s inception in 1968, the opening of 60 Minutes features a stopwatch. The Aristo (Heuer) design first appeared in 1978. On October 29, 2006, the background changed to red, the title text color changed to white, and the stopwatch was shifted to the upright position. This version was used from 1992 to 2006 (the Square 721 type was changed in 1998). Source
“Without reflection, we go blindly on our way”*…
… or at least sociopathic. Indeed, Evgeny Morozov suggests, we may be well on our way. There may be versions of A.G.I. (Artificial General Intelligence) that will be a boon to society; but, he argues, the current approaches aren’t likely to yield them…
… The mounting anxiety about A.I. isn’t because of the boring but reliable technologies that autocomplete our text messages or direct robot vacuums to dodge obstacles in our living rooms. It is the rise of artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., that worries the experts.
A.G.I. doesn’t exist yet, but some believe that the rapidly growing capabilities of OpenAI’s ChatGPT suggest its emergence is near. Sam Altman, a co-founder of OpenAI, has described it as “systems that are generally smarter than humans.” Building such systems remains a daunting — some say impossible — task. But the benefits appear truly tantalizing.
Imagine Roombas, no longer condemned to vacuuming the floors, that evolve into all-purpose robots, happy to brew morning coffee or fold laundry — without ever being programmed to do these things.Sounds appealing. But should these A.G.I. Roombas get too powerful, their mission to create a spotless utopia might get messy for their dust-spreading human masters. At least we’ve had a good run.Discussions of A.G.I. are rife with such apocalyptic scenarios. Yet a nascent A.G.I. lobby of academics, investors and entrepreneurs counter that, once made safe, A.G.I. would be a boon to civilization. Mr. Altman, the face of this campaign, embarked on a global tour to charm lawmakers. Earlier this year he wrote that A.G.I. might even turbocharge the economy, boost scientific knowledge and “elevate humanity by increasing abundance.”
This is why, for all the hand-wringing, so many smart people in the tech industry are toiling to build this controversial technology: not using it to save the world seems immoral. They are beholden to an ideology that views this new technology as inevitable and, in a safe version, as universally beneficial. Its proponents can think of no better alternatives for fixing humanity and expanding its intelligence.But this ideology — call it A.G.I.-ism — is mistaken. The real risks of A.G.I. are political and won’t be fixed by taming rebellious robots. The safest of A.G.I.s would not deliver the progressive panacea promised by its lobby. And in presenting its emergence as all but inevitable, A.G.I.-ism distracts from finding better ways to augment intelligence.
Unbeknown to its proponents, A.G.I.-ism is just a bastard child of a much grander ideology, one preaching that, as Margaret Thatcher memorably put it, there is no alternative, not to the market.
Rather than breaking capitalism, as Mr. Altman has hinted it could do, A.G.I. — or at least the rush to build it — is more likely to create a powerful (and much hipper) ally for capitalism’s most destructive creed: neoliberalism.
Fascinated with privatization, competition and free trade, the architects of neoliberalism wanted to dynamize and transform a stagnant and labor-friendly economy through markets and deregulation…
… the Biden administration has distanced itself from the ideology, acknowledging that markets sometimes get it wrong. Foundations, think tanks and academics have even dared to imagine a post-neoliberal future.Yet neoliberalism is far from dead. Worse, it has found an ally in A.G.I.-ism, which stands to reinforce and replicate its main biases: that private actors outperform public ones (the market bias), that adapting to reality beats transforming it (the adaptation bias) and that efficiency trumps social concerns (the efficiency bias).These biases turn the alluring promise behind A.G.I. on its head: Instead of saving the world, the quest to build it will make things only worse. Here is how…
[There follows a bracing run-down…]
… Margaret Thatcher’s other famous neoliberal dictum was that “there is no such thing as society.”The A.G.I. lobby unwittingly shares this grim view. For them, the kind of intelligence worth replicating is a function of what happens in individuals’ heads rather than in society at large.
But human intelligence is as much a product of policies and institutions as it is of genes and individual aptitudes. It’s easier to be smart on a fellowship in the Library of Congress than while working several jobs in a place without a bookstore or even decent Wi-Fi.
It doesn’t seem all that controversial to suggest that more scholarships and public libraries will do wonders for boosting human intelligence. But for the solutionist crowd in Silicon Valley, augmenting intelligence is primarily a technological problem — hence the excitement about A.G.I.
However, if A.G.I.-ism really is neoliberalism by other means, then we should be ready to see fewer — not more — intelligence-enabling institutions. After all, they are the remnants of that dreaded “society” that, for neoliberals, doesn’t really exist. A.G.I.’s grand project of amplifying intelligence may end up shrinking it.
Because of such solutionist bias, even seemingly innovative policy ideas around A.G.I. fail to excite. Take the recent proposal for a “Manhattan Project for A.I. Safety.” This is premised on the false idea that there’s no alternative to A.G.I.But wouldn’t our quest for augmenting intelligence be far more effective if the government funded a Manhattan Project for culture and education and the institutions that nurture them instead?
Without such efforts, the vast cultural resources of our existing public institutions risk becoming mere training data sets for A.G.I. start-ups, reinforcing the falsehood that society doesn’t exist…
If it’s true that we shape our tools, then our tools shape us, then it behooves us to be very careful as to how we shape them… Eminently worth reading in full: “The True Threat of Artificial Intelligence” (gift link) from @evgenymorozov in @nytimes.
Apposite: on the A. I. we currently have: “The LLMentalist Effect: how chat-based Large Language Models replicate the mechanisms of a psychic’s con,” from @baldurbjarnason.
[Image above: source]
* Margaret J. Wheatley
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As we set aside solutionism, we might we might send thoroughly-organized birthday greetings to Josiah Wedgwood; he was born on this date in 1730. An English potter, businessman (he founded the Wedgwood company), and inventor (he designed the company’s process machinery and high-temperature beehive-shaped kilns), he is credited, via his technique of “division of labor,” with the industrialization of the manufacture of pottery– and via his example, much of British (and thus American) manufacturing. Wedgwood was a member of the Lunar Society, the Royal Society, and was an ardent abolitionist. His daughter, Susannah, was the mother of Charles Darwin.
“The only corporate social responsibility a company has is to maximize its profits”*…
Congressman Fred Hartley and Senator Robert Taft, namesake co-sponsors of the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act (which figures in the tale referenced below)
… Happily that wasn’t always the accepted belief, and may some day recede. The redoubtable Bill Janeway explains– and laments– the passing of corporations that felt a duty to constituents other than their shareholders…
In his new book Slouching towards Utopia, the economist J. Bradford DeLong points out, correctly, that the “industrial research laboratory and the modern corporation” were the keys to unleashing a radical increase in the rate of scientific and technological innovation, and thus economic growth, from 1870 onward. DeLong also identifies the Treaty of Detroit, a landmark 1950 settlement between General Motors and the United Auto Workers, as a linchpin of American-style post-World War II social democracy. But what ever happened to the behemoth corporations that unlocked decades of growth while sponsoring health insurance and pensions for their employees?…
The rise of the neoliberal order in the 1970s and 1980s coincided with the demise of companies that served their societies and employees as well as their shareholders. Since then, the US federal government and other institutions have managed to offset the loss of only part of the broader contributions that big business once made. The fascinating, sad story at “The Rise and Fall of the Socially Beneficial Corporation,” from @billjaneway in @ProSyn.
* Milton Friedman, intellectual leader– and avatar– of the neoliberal order
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As we learn from the past, we might send inclusively-calculated birthday greetings to a Cambridge University faculty colleague of Bill’s, Sir Partha Sarathi Dasgupta; he was born on this date in 1946. An Anglo-Indian economist, Dasgupta’s contributions have been broad, covering welfare and development economics; the economics of technological change; population, environmental, and resource economics; social capital; the theory of games; ecological economics; and the economics of malnutrition. His deepest interest has been in ecological economics, more particularly in the nexus of population, consumption, and the natural environment and in the economics of biodiversity. With the late Karl-Goran Maler, he developed the concept of “inclusive wealth” as a measure of human well-being.
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