Cory Doctorow

In his #AmericanProspect editorial, "What Comes After Neoliberalism?", #RobertKuttner declares "we’ve just about won the battle of ideas. Reality has been a helpful ally...Neoliberalism has been a splendid success for the top 1 percent, and an abject failure for everyone else":

https://prospect.org/economy/2023-03-28-what-comes-after-neoliberalism/

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https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/28/imagine-a-horse/#perfectly-spherical-cows-of-uniform-density-on-a-frictionless-plane

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What Comes After Neoliberalism?

We are winning the battle of ideas. We have a long way to go before we win the politics.

The American Prospect
Mar 28, 2023 at 3:48pmWeb
Show threadCory DoctorowMar 28, 2023

Kuttner's op-ed is a report on the #HewlettFoundation'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."

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Show threadCory DoctorowMar 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 - the kind of economist who uses mathematical models to demonstrate the best way to do anything:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/27/economism/#what-would-i-do-if-i-were-a-horse

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Pluralistic: 27 Oct 2022 Substituting economics for politics is a failure – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Show threadCory DoctorowMar 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?'"

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.

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Show threadCory DoctorowMar 28, 2023

For example, if you're cheering the idea of "#reshoring" industries like semiconductors and solar, these economismists want you to know that you've been misled:

https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/03/24/economy-trade-united-states-china-industry-manufacturing-supply-chains-biden/

Indeed, you're "doomed to fail":

https://www.piie.com/blogs/trade-and-investment-policy-watch/high-taxpayer-cost-saving-us-jobs-through-made-america

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.

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America’s Zero-Sum Economics Doesn’t Add Up

Industrial policy and subsidies are nothing new and can be useful. But shutting off from the world will have consequences.

Foreign Policy
Show threadCory DoctorowMar 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. 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.

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Show threadCory DoctorowMar 28, 2023

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

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Show threadCory DoctorowMar 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://chokepointcapitalism.com/

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(no title)

a book about why creative labor markets are rigged - and how to unrig them Competition is supposed to be fundamental to capitalism. Over the last four decades though, greedy robber barons have worked out how to lock in customers and suppliers, eliminate competitors, and shake down everyone for more than their fair share. This…

Show threadCory DoctorowMar 28, 2023

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

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Show threadCory DoctorowMar 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://pluralistic.net/2022/09/12/streaming-doesnt-pay/#stunt-publishing

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Pluralistic: 12 Sep 2022 Spotify is a ripoff, a Spotify exclusive – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Show threadCory DoctorowMar 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 - 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://doctorow.medium.com/united-we-stand-61e16ec707e2

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United We Stand - Cory Doctorow - Medium

For the second half of the 20th century, artists of all stripes were fed a Big Lie: namely, that when we created, we did so all on our lonesome. Our creative works were solely and wholly ours, sprung…

Medium
Show threadCory DoctorowMar 28, 2023

(In the same way that giving creators the right to decide who can train a "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://pluralistic.net/2023/02/09/ai-monkeys-paw/#bullied-schoolkids

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Pluralistic: Copyright won’t solve creators’ Generative AI problem (09 Feb 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Show threadCory DoctorowMar 28, 2023

After 40 years of deregulation, union busting, and consolidation, the entertainment industry as a whole 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.

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Show threadCory DoctorowMar 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."

Smart economismists care about the *size* of the pie, not who gets which slice.

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Show threadCory DoctorowMar 28, 2023

Unsurprisingly, the greatest advocates for economism are the people to whom this philosophy allocates the biggest slices. It's easy not to care about distributional effects when your slice of the pie is growing.

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.

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

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Show threadCory DoctorowMar 28, 2023

But it fails very, very badly. 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*.

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Show threadCory DoctorowMar 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.") For example, offshoring high-tech manufacturing to distant lands works well, but fails in the face of covid lockdowns:

https://locusmag.com/2020/07/cory-doctorow-full-employment/

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Cory Doctorow: Full Employment

I am an AI skeptic. I am baffled by anyone who isn’t. I don’t see any path from continuous improvements to the (admittedly impressive) ”machine learning” field that leads to…

Locus Online
Show threadCory DoctorowMar 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://pluralistic.net/2021/03/29/efficient-markets-hypothesis/#too-big-to-sail

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Pluralistic: 29 Mar 2021 – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Show threadCory DoctorowMar 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: just have them drop their landing gear. It'll work brilliantly, but you don't want to be around when it starts to fail, brother.

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.

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Show threadCory DoctorowMar 28, 2023

For years, economism's position was that we shouldn't worry about the fact that we were all trapped in a bus barreling full speed for a cliff, because technology would inevitably figure out how to build wings for the bus before we reached the cliff's edge:

https://locusmag.com/2022/07/cory-doctorow-the-swerve/

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Cory Doctorow: The Swerve

We’re all trapped on a bus. The bus is barreling towards a cliff. Beyond the cliff is a canyon plunge any of us will be lucky to survive. Even if we survive, none of us know how we’ll climb out of …

Locus Online