Social Policy and Marketing Parking Spaces

As most of you know Matthew Ygleasias is neoliberal nitwit. For some reason, perhaps the utility of nitwits to forward neoliberal nonsense, lots of folks on the putative left like to link to him and engage with his nitwittery. Over here, for example Mike Konczal mention Yglesias and the guy who invented the idea of using market mechanism to create a dynamic pricing of parking spaces in the same passage. Over here, we find a discussion of the same set of issues, using the market to increase the costs of good and services by including "negative externalities." In the latter example, Peter Frase concludes with these perfectly sensible comments:

Willingness to pay, of course, is also a function of ability to pay, and a market mechanism implicitly attributes worth to a person’s desires in proportion to the money they have to spend.

Thoughtful neoclassical economists know this, but they usually choose to ignore it, presumably because the consequences of confronting it would be too politically uncomfortable. Their own theories tell them that, due to the decreasing marginal utility of money, an extra dollar is worth more to the poor than to the rich. It follows that asking an extra dollar for parking hurts the well-being of the poor far more than the rich, and systematically privileges those who don’t need to think twice about paying six dollars for a parking space. To which a good left neo-liberal would no doubt reply that the issues of rational pricing and wealth redistribution are logically distinct and should be thought separately. But politically, this means that redistribution is the lonely last instance that never comes.

All of which is enough to make a good progressive recoil from such a thing as “the market price for street parking”. But this position is not nearly audacious enough. Rather than a rejection of market relations, this is merely a rejection of a novel form of planning, in favor of the older, more obscure, more unfair and more inefficient methods of planning the use of public space. We could say instead that what’s needed is a direct assault on the inequalities of wealth and income that subvert the functioning of prices, and thereby impede the realization of the plan.

What I don't understand, to be frank, is why we have all these bright fellows seeking to resolve epiphenomenon when the real problem, as Frase points out, is economic inequality. Basing any set of social or political responses to the problems of humanity in society on market mechanism necessarily results in a society based on wealthy people's desires.

So how about everyone on the loft leave Yglesias to blather on in the well-funded obscurity of Slate except, perhaps, to point out that his solutions to life's problems are the "and a pony" of "left" policy discourse.

Remain Calm

Matthew Yglesias doesn't understand the concept of immiseration and, what is more, is unable to look out the window. The current Neoliberal international economic order has created more inequality and more and more vicious economic catastrophes and yet he wants us to think that all is well. It is true, I suppose, that there is more wealth but it is also true that the fewer have captured that wealth. Consequently, all is not well.


This capture of wealth by fewer is true globally as well.  What kind of a deranged maniac looks at the world as it is and concludes that it isn't at all like it is but rather a Neoliberal utopia?

Oh For Dumb

So Matthew Yglesias understands that all the promises of charter schools are a nonsense. But he can't bring himself to reverse his position on choice and the perfection of the market. He, consequently, moves the goal posts from charter schools and choice creating better outcomes to charter schools and choice increasing human happiness because of illusions.

On the other hand, when confronted with something that all profession educators understand as a necessary first step to improving outcomes: class size. He denigrates it.

It's almost like he doesn't care about ends so longs as his means are put into place.

Wrong-Headed

Francis Fukuyama is famous for being wrong. Wrong about the end of history, wrong about Neoliberalism, and wrong, I am guessing here, to tell his wife that her butt did, in fact, look big in those jeans. Despite all this wrongness, he continues to prosper and now in what can only be seen as singular opportunity to be exceptionally wrong about nearly everything, he has released the first of two books in which he

mines the fields of anthropology, archaeology, biology, evolutionary psychology, economics, and, of course, political science and international relations to establish a framework for understanding the evolution of political institutions.

Ever eager to take humanity's ability to create its own history, he

posits a link between Darwinian natural selection and political evolution. Because human nature has universal, evolved characteristics, he writes, "human politics is subject to certain recurring patterns of behavior across time and across cultures." Biology, he continues, "frames and limits the nature of institutions that are possible."

He want's to answer one

 fundamental question: Why do some states succeed while others collapse?

It's nice to see that his faith in fictive totalizing narratives wasn't diminished by the failure of Hegel's claim about the course and nature of history to bear anything like fruit. We can only wait in breathless anticipation for the inevitable moment when Fukuyama, once again, admits he was wrong.

Productive Workers versus Robots

Recently the Koch Brothers, who aid and abet Scott Walker, laid off 158 employees at one of their paper mills here in Wisconsin.  The lay offs result from the introduction of automated machines which made the workers redundant. The factory was already profitable and there is no sign of a decline in demand for its various paper products. 158 employees represent about 25% of the total work force. Assuming the theory that more productive workers gain income because of their increased productivity, which is a fact of the matter according to the Baumol Effect, we would expect the remaining workers to share in the income of the formerly employed workers, who now have the chance to retrain for some other job that doesn't exist or won't exist in the near future.

For the sake of argument lets say that the 158 workers salaries excluding benefits was 30k. 158 * 30000 = 4,740,000.  If I have this right, the total work force would have been 632; 632-158=474; 4,740,000 / 474=10,000 means an increase of 10,000 per remaining worker with all the other labor costs passing back to the company. Otherwise everybody involved, the City of Green Bay, the business, banks, and etc previously patronized by the now unemployed workers, except two of the richest men in the world loses out.

What do you bet the odds are that the remaining workers paychecks went up? I agree: zero. After all the Koch Brothers are currently working to destroy public unions, and they own power plants, no?,  -- although I am sure that's all just a coincidence, I'm sure they see their various industrial endeavors as primarily as a means of fulfilling a socially useful function and not at all are they interested in profit maximization.  Nope. Beside which private vice = public virtue, all the classical economists say so.

Never Let the Facts Get in the Way of a Good Narrative

Just now Anderson Cooper was on CNN touting the Army as the good guys on the establishment side of the ledger in Egypt.  Maybe, but than again, maybe not:

The Egyptian military has secretly detained hundreds and possibly thousands of suspected government opponents since mass protests against President Hosni Mubarak began, and at least some of these detainees have been tortured, according to testimony gathered by the Guardian.

It'd be nice if Cooper and his cohort would spend more time dealing in the facts of the matter and less time making stuff up. An idle dream, I realize.

Guessing isn't Reasoning

J.M. Keynes once quipped that

[w]hen the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?

Today, Paul Krugman argued that a committment to an ideology isn't like race in that former is mutable and latter isn't. In response, Megan McArdle blathered that

I presume that Paul Krugman holds the beliefs he does because they are his best guess at what is true, and that he could no more change his beliefs than he could change his native language.

McArdle, in short, thinks that people arrive at an unshakeable world view because they "guess" at how the world works and having once guessed they can never alter their guesses, which -- I suppose -- explains her own refusal to change her mind even as the world proves her guess to be wildly off base.

Sort of like John Derbyshire's admission that he can't  or, in any event, won't reason at all., this is really all you need to know of the Glibertarian mindset. See also.

There's a Riot Goin On II

Megan McArdle emerges from hours studying Egypt through the eyes of CNN and lets us know that there is no dominate theory about why riots topple states and governments. Not to get all technical but the reason there is no dominate theory is because each case is different and consequently the success or failure of a given mass protest, riot, or other spontaneous popular uprising would have all what's to do with the concrete situation.  And, as by the way, did you know that sometimes mass popular events stopped coups d'etat?  It's true.