on another inconvenient truth

The Democrats are more fucked than a prison-boy with girlish hips. The idea everyone will just forgive and forget when all this is over and they have actually picked between a post-racial or a post-genitals candidate is looking increasinly ridiculous. In the wise words of Steven Ybarra, an uncommitted superdelegate from California:

“If I piss on your leg, and the next day I say I didn’t really mean to piss on your leg, but if you look down and see the yellow stain, you’re going to say, 'Come on'’”

But here's a thought - could the sexual post-2000 Al "Hollywood" Gore unite the party following a divisive election campaign...?

hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!!!!!!!!

(no)

on the wealth of nation(al)s

Another article that has really caught my eye recently was published through the Center of Global Development by Michael Clemens and Lant Pritchett which attempts to provide an entirely new statistic (I'll try to avoid the temptation to ask if yet another number is what the economics or development professions need right now), what they call 'income per natural'. This is the mean income of persons born in a given country, regardless of where that person now resides. As they put it:

"Most of humanity was born in a “low-income” or “lower middle-income” country. How much money do those people earn each year? No one knows. Armies of statisticians have spent decades carefully estimating how much people in poor countries earn or produce. It is a simple matter to learn the income or output of a person who resides in El Salvador or Albania. But no one has made systematic estimates of the income of a typical Salvadoran or Albanian...[p1]

...[I]f income per resident is used as the measure of Salvadorans’ welfare it leads to untenable conclusions: if a Salvadoran moves from the countryside to San Salvador to get a factory job that raises her income 30%, this will be recorded as a welfare improvement for Salvadorans on average, but a 500% increase in income from a factory job in Texas does not (with, at best, only the portion remitted to residents counted)...[p1]

...42.8 million people live in countries whose income per natural is 50% higher than its income per resident; 235 million people live in a group of countries where the difference is 20% or more, and for 1.1 billion people the difference is 10%...[p1]

...Put differently, for those billion people [for whom the difference between naturals and residents is 10 %] departure from the country is one of the largest national “industries” in terms of its contribution to average material welfare per person of naturals. It is likely that by a reasonable international standard of poverty, two of every five living Mexicans who have escaped poverty did so by leaving Mexico; for Haitians it is four out of five...[p23-4]

This means that departing one’s country of birth is today one of the most important sources of poverty reduction for a large portion of the developing world. If economic development is defined as rising human well being, then a residence-neutral measure of well-being emphasizes that crossing international borders is not an alternative to economic development, it is economic development" [abstract; emphasis added]

These are deliberately provacative (and attention grabbing) words, and I am not at all sure I agree with the polemical level to which they go to emphasise the benefits of migration. I think in order to make a political point about the barriers that put up to the movement of labour they overstep the mark. As much as it is "people, not patches of earth, have well-being", people would most likely attach importance themselves to those patches of earth, and perhaps even more importantly it marginalises production as the single most important global phenomenon. Nevertheless, to focus too much on these conclusions misses the point I think. This new statistic really illuminates more than it obscures, and in that sense I welcome it.

so green we go red (part II)

A while back in what was, in point of fact, my second post, I had a little ramble about just what might happen if we do start taking this environment business seriously (or indeed if we don't have any other choice but to). Well it has been interesting in recent days to read a couple of interesting articles developing this same point, my favorite of which is this - "Risk, Inequality and the Economics of Disaster" published in what used to be called the Post-Autistic Economics Review . The author is bringing a very different theoretical framework in the shape of Amartya Sen's rights as capabilities approach with the hope of truly fulfilling the liberal vision of a free and fair society. I think for all my flirtations with radical leftism it is here that I feel most comfortable. Perhaps the limit lies in my imagination, for as Zizek puts it, that which is considered realistic is what allows everything to remain pretty much the same. For now let it suffice that there are substantive reasons to think that climate change really will impose significant changes on the material world we inhabit, and reason to believe that the coming project will be to define how that can be done most progressively.

As the author puts it:

"[T]he market fundamentalism of Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, the inspirational twin intellectual dynamos of the profession for the past three decades or more, will soon slip into oblivion because climate change will push all of us to understand that unlimited capitalism is, in the end, inextricably connected to the disposability of human beings...

...[C]limate change destroys market fundamentalism by showing why market based inequalities necessarily lead to hierarchies of pleasure and suffering where the well-off regularly sacrifice the well-being and lives of the poor and vulnerable...[C]limate change poses such severe collective risks to societies that polities must explicitly choose whether to reorient national and local economic policy in ways that share these risks in an egalitarian manner or to deliberately shift these risks to the bottom of society."

The marketised society is one founded on the ideology that everyone has the right to be treated equally, and furnished with the same freedoms. The closer to this ideal we get, then the more necessarily true it is that the distribution of benefits that arise from the workings of a free economy cannot be unjust, though they might perhaps be unfortunate. Any interference to correct these however is almost inevitably unjust since it must engage in a form of social engineering which alters the balance of outcomes that arise from a relatively fair set of economic processes. Outcomes might perhaps at times be unfortunate, but to change them in any significant ways does harm to those who have done nothing more than succeed where others have failed.

However as Amartya Sen taught us the inherent flaw in this perspective is that it elevates a particularly limited number of formal rights over the substantive ability to exercise those rights. It is when disaster strikes that the true distribution of the capability to exercise rights becomes startlingly apparent, for example amid the burst banks of the canals of New Orleans. And it becomes even more clear when considered in light of the likely realities of climate change.

"The public in the rich world will soon have to face up to the fact that its wealth has been purchased at a vast human cost as well as choose whether or not to resist changing their methods of production and habits of consumption...In other words, the hierarchy of pleasure and suffering on a global scale is slowly becoming quite plain to citizens in rich societies, just as their willingness to either accept or resist change will soon tell the world whether fighting or negotiation will be the mechanism for allocating the right to use high concentrations of [Green House Gasses] to drive the growth of national wealth... [O]nce citizens of rich societies realize that they have purchased their well-being at the expense of the lives and well-being of others living far away, they may become curious about whether this system of pleasure and suffering exists closer to home. Imagine what would happen to white middle class America’s faith in markets if enough of them were to honestly ask if their pleasures required the suffering of others in their country?"

Faced with an ethical commitment that clearly implies some sort of sacrifice on the part of those that profess to hold it, the choice becomes starkly clear; it must be obeyed or it must be sacrificed. It is precisely the bourgeois morality in which the vast middle classes of the industrialised world wrap themselves that may force them to fundamentally reorient what are considered to be the political limits of justice. This is a remarkable possibility, beautifully expressed in the words of the author himself...

"Climate change will, in time, push even the most market obsessed societies to see the ethical and practical sense of Sen’s analysis of freedom, discrediting the Hayekian nightmare as the radical, nearly predatory mantra of a dangerous cult."

Progressive disaster theory anyone...?