What Comes After Neoliberalism?

In a @TheProspect op-ed, "What Comes After Neoliberalism?" @rkuttnerwrites writes "we’ve just about won the battle of ideas. Reality has been a helpful ally…Neoliberalism has been a splendid success for the 1%, an abject failure for everyone else":https://t.co/FMJFCRa088 1/ pic.twitter.com/eeK3XaD9FX

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 28, 2023

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on https://t.co/iSBh8sqXw0, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:https://t.co/mNBZQOiSmm 2/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 28, 2023

Kuttner's op-ed is a report on the @Hewlett_Found's recent "#NewCommonSense" event, where Kuttner was relieved to learn that the idea that "the economy would thrive if government just got out of the way has been demolished by the events of the past three decades." 3/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 28, 2023

We can call this #neoliberalism, but another word for it is #economism: the belief that politics are a messy, irrational business that should be sidelined in favor of a technocratic management by a certain kind of economist. 4/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 28, 2023

Namely, the kind of economist who uses mathematical models to demonstrate the best way to do anything:https://t.co/6jrAft9hge 5/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 28, 2023

These are the economists whose process Ely Devons famously described thus: "If economists wished to study the horse, they wouldn’t go and look at horses. They’d sit in their studies and say to themselves, 'What would I do if I were a horse?'" 6/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 28, 2023

Those economists - or, if you prefer, #economismists - are still around, of course, pronouncing that the "new common sense" is nonsense, and they have the models to prove it. 7/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 28, 2023

For example, if you're cheering on the idea of "#reshoring" key industries like semiconductors and solar panels, these economismists want you to know that you've been sadly misled:https://t.co/EN3BofIdw8

Indeed, you're "doomed to fail":https://t.co/27k4QKFLGn 8/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 28, 2023

Why? Because onshoring is "inefficient." Other countries, you see, have cheaper labor, weaker environmental controls, lower taxes, and the other necessities of "innovation," and so onshored goods will be more expensive and thus worse. 9/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 28, 2023

Parts of this position are indeed inarguable. If you define "efficiency" as "lower prices," then it doesn't make sense to produce *anything* in America, or, indeed, any country where there are taxes, environmental regulations or labor protections. 10/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 28, 2023

Greater efficiencies are to be had in places where children can be maimed in heavy machinery and the water and land poisoned for a millions years.

In economism, this line of reasoning is a cardinal sin - the sin of caring about *distributional outcomes*. 11/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 28, 2023

According to economism, the most important factor isn't how much of the pie you're getting, but how big the pie is.

That's the kind of reasoning that allows economismists to declare the entertainment industry of the past 40 years to be a success. 12/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 28, 2023

We increased the individual property rights of creators by expanding copyright law so it lasts longer, covers more works, has higher statutory damages and requires less evidence to get a payout:https://t.co/Avs02iBRNM 13/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 28, 2023

At the same time, we weakened antitrust and limits on abusive contractual clauses, which let three firms acquire 70% of all sound recording copyrights in existence, whose duration is effectively infinite (the market for sound recordings older than 90 is immeasurably small). 14/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 28, 2023

This allowed the Big Three labels to force Spotify to take them on as co-owners, whereupon they demanded *lower* royalties for the artists in their catalog, to reduce Spotify's costs and make it more valuable, which meant more billions when it IPOed:https://t.co/GVz8aT0WWA 15/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 28, 2023

Monopoly also means that all those expanded copyrights we gave to creators are immediately bargained away as a condition of passing through Big Content's chokepoints. 16/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 28, 2023

Giving artists the right to control sampling is just a slightly delayed way of giving *labels* the right to control sampling, and charge artists for the samples they use:https://t.co/ragEBriW8n 17/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 28, 2023

(In the same way that giving creators a right over training "Generative AI" with their work will simply transfer that right to the oligopolists who have the means, motive and opportunity to stop paying artists by training models on their output:)https://t.co/vRSLn6WldM 18/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 28, 2023

After 40 years of deregulation, union busting, and consolidation, the entertainment industry is larger and more profitable than ever - and the share of those profits accruing to creative workers is smaller, both in real terms and proportionally, and it's continuing to fall. 19/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 28, 2023

Economismists think that you're stupid if you care about this, though. If you're keeping score on "free markets" based on who gets how much money, or how much inequality they produce, you're committing the sin of caring about "#DistributionalEffects." 20/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 28, 2023

Smart economismists care about the *size* of the pie, not who gets which slice. Unsurprisingly, the greatest advocates for economism are the people to whom this philosophy allocates the biggest slices. 21/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 28, 2023

It's easy not to care about distributional effects when your slice of the pie is growing. 22/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 28, 2023

Economism is a philosophy grounded in "efficiency" - and in the philosophical sleight-of-hand that pretends that there is an objective metric called "efficiency" that everyone can agree with. 23/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 28, 2023

If you disagree with economismists about their definition of "efficiency" then you're doing "politics" and can be safely ignored.

The "efficiency" of economism is defined by very simple metrics, like whether prices are going down. 24/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 28, 2023

If #Walmart can force wage-cuts on its suppliers to bring you cheaper food, that's "efficient." It works well.

But it fails very, very badly. 25/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 28, 2023

The high cost of low prices includes the political dislocation of downwardly mobile farmers and ag workers, which is a classic precursor to fascist uprisings. More prosaically, if your wages fall faster than prices, then you are experiencing a net price *increase*. 26/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 28, 2023

The failure modes of this efficiency are endless, and we keep smashing into them in ghastly and brutal ways, which goes a long way to explaining the "new commons sense" Kuttner mentions ("Reality has been a helpful ally.") 27/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 28, 2023

For example, offshoring high-tech manufacturing to distant lands works well, but fails in the face of covid lockdowns:https://t.co/gYuCsp75Ea 28/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 28, 2023

Allowing all the world's shipping to be gathered into the hands of three cartels is "efficient" right up to the point where they self-regulate their way into "efficient" ships that get stuck in the Suez canal:https://t.co/3DN6QZA3pg 29/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 28, 2023

It's easy to improve efficiency if you don't care about how a system fails. I can improve the fuel-efficiency of every airplane in the sky right now: just have them drop their landing gear. It'll work brilliantly, but you don't want to be around when it starts to fail. 30/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 28, 2023

The most glaring failure of "efficiency" is the #ClimateEmergency, where the relative ease of extracting and burning hydrocarbons was pursued irrespective of the incredible costs this imposes on the world and our species. 31/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 28, 2023

Economism's long-held position was to not worry about the fact that we were all trapped in a bus barreling for a cliff, because technology would inevitably figure out how to build wings for the bus before we reached the cliff's edge:https://t.co/aUllcCwPbo 32/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 28, 2023

Today, many economismists will grudgingly admit that putting wings on the bus isn't quite a solved problem, but they still firmly reject the idea of directly regulating the bus, because a swerve might cause it to roll and someone (in the first class seats) might break a leg. 33/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 28, 2023

Instead, they insist that the problem is that markets "mispriced" carbon. But as Kuttner points out: "It wasn’t just impersonal markets that priced carbon wrong. 34/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 28, 2023

It was politically powerful executives who further enriched themselves by blocking a green transition decades ago when climate risks and self-reinforcing negative externalities were already well known." 35/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 28, 2023

If you do economics without doing politics, you're just imagining a perfectly spherical cow on a frictionless plane - it's a cute way to model things, but it's got limited real-world applicability. 36/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 28, 2023

Yes, politics are squishy and hard to model, but that doesn't mean you can just incinerate them and do math on the dubious quantitative residue:https://t.co/0yMUwcgsdK 37/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 28, 2023

As Kuttner writes, the problem of ignoring "distributional" questions in the fossil fuel market is how "financial executives who further enriched themselves by creating toxic securities [used] political allies in both parties to block salutary regulation." 38/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 28, 2023

Deep down, economismists know that "neoliberalism is not about impersonal market forces. It’s about power." That's why they're so invested in the idea that - as #MargaretThatcher endlessly repeated - "#ThereIsNoAlternative":https://t.co/Rq8wzC3UXi 39/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 28, 2023

#Inevitabilism is a cheap rhetorical trick. "There is no alternative" is a demand disguised as a truth. It really means "Stop trying to think of an alternative." 40/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 28, 2023

But the human race is blessed with a boundless imagination, one that can escape the prison of economism and its insistence that we only care about how things work and ignore how they fail. 41/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 28, 2023

Today, the world is turning towards electrification, a project of unimaginable ambition and scale that, nevertheless, we are actively imagining. 42/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 28, 2023

As @robinsloan put it, "Skeptics of solar pantomime a kind of technical realism, but…the really technical people are like, oh, we’re going to rip out and replace the plumbing of human life on this planet? I remember that from last time. Let’s gooo!"https://t.co/fnGhDTHHjQ 43/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 28, 2023

Sloan is citing @debcha, "Every place in the world has sun, wind, waves, flowing water, and warmth or coolness below ground, in some combination. 44/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 28, 2023

"Renewable energy sources are a step up, not a step down; instead of scarce, expensive, and polluting, they have the potential to be abundant, cheap, and globally distributed":https://t.co/cONFoTi4wZ 45/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 28, 2023

The new common sense is, at core, a profound liberation of the imagination. It rejects the dogma that says that building public goods is a mystic art lost along with the secrets of the pyramids. 46/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 28, 2023

We built national parks, Medicare, Medicaid, the public education system, public libraries - bold and ambitious national infrastructure programs.

We did that through democratically accountable, muscular states that weren't afraid to act. 47/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 28, 2023

These states understood that the more national capacity the state produced, the more things it could do, by directing that national capacity in times of great urgency. 48/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 28, 2023

Self-sufficiency isn't a mere fearful retreat from the world stage - it's an insurance policy for an uncertain future.

Kuttner closes his editorial by asking what we call whatever we do next. "Post-neoliberalism" is pretty thin gruel. 49/

— Cory Doctorow (@pluralistic@mamot.fr) (@doctorow) March 28, 2023