You know, I just remembered something. I met a very weird person a couple years back, who gave me the creeps. He was kind of a bum, somewhat poor, but was telling me all about Bitcoin.

It troubles me greatly to think that this person may now be very wealthy.

Then again, probably should have already been deeply troubled by the capitalist society I live in.

Was it McAfee?

So uh, somebody should probably mention that the only proved collusion within the Trump campaign was that Netanyahu's government convinced the Trump campaign to get other governments to veto things in favor of Israel.

So.. Israelgate now too?

lol

not sure which direction the lol is in

I don't think McAfee was ever poor in my adult lifetime....

This guy was just a guy who accosted me at a public swimming pool because I told him I was studying mathematics, and he took it for granted that therefore I must know about Bitcoin. Presumably because I know what a one-way function is? IDK

The question I guess is really who approached who and for why. Trump's campaign could have reached out knowing they would want to pander to evangelicals.

Did he have a PhD too? Lol, sounds like an awkward experience

He didn't have any academic background at all as far as I knew. He was just some guy who lived near the house I was renting and went to the same public pool.

Gone like dust in the wind.

Oh, reading I guess Kushner invested in West Bank settlements, too.

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/12/01/us/politics/michael-flynn-guilty-russia-investigation.html

NYT claims Netanyahu reached out.

The US public loves Israel so much that I'm not sure something like this would be considered scandalous.

hehehe https://twitter.com/ReformedBroker/status/939542468072235008

That guy rules. It'd be way funnier though if he wasn't actively scamming people.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/nov/30/jeremy-corbyn-morgan-stanley-labour-brexit

Jeremy Corbyn is the man.

Per Steve Roth:

US gini coefficient excluding homes and vehicles is 0.93.

lol.

Allianz (huge European financial services company - manages 2.2 trillion USD) started measuring Gini coefficients a couple of years ago. They just reported the US at 0.81, by far the world's worst. Some researchers say it's still on the low side. Steve Roth tweeted that some other researcher suggests it is 0.88, including all assets (houses and cars).


The gini coefficient is 0 when all people have equal market power, and 1 when a single person holds all market power. Reporting 0.93 for non-shelter/car assets is utterly devastating. It basically means that you could fit all of the people in control of the American economy in a single room.

So I spent some time recently (putting off important things) reading the thoughts and opinions of neoliberals to get a sense of what the ideological competition is. Because center-leaning neoliberals are the only intellectual group worth reading and taking seriously, American Republicans are completely gone.

Neoliberals try really hard to derail discussions about inequality. There's actually a variance from what I can tell in people who support it, you have basically conservative anti-regulation sorts and anti-socialist social democrat kinda guys, but one thing they all agree on is that people like Corbyn and Sanders are radicals, ideologues who are extreme on the economic spectrum. They quote Thatcher, and well, they give a pretty simple argument about why they think income inequality isn't a problem: because income inequality, just like the Laffer curve, are not economically incorrect in principal, so by attacking it socialists are dumb.

Basically their argument is exactly what Thatcher says in the video: income inequality doesn't mean anything in itself, and other metrics are more accurate. Which is actually an alright criticism: income inequality doesn't, on principal, mean things are worse, it's conceivable that the gap could widen yet quality of life improve for all people, they also seem to love consumption inequality as a metric, claiming consumption inequality is static (while basically ignoring that consumption is increasingly funded by debt..). Just like the Laffer curve is sound economics on principal: at 0% and 100% tax rate, it's reasonable to assume no tax will be collected, and if there's continuity that means there will be a tax rate that returns the largest revenue. They think then that redistributive policies create market inefficiencies.

The problem is, their debates about inequality are used the same way Republicans use the Laffer curve: as a matter of principal and without applying it to, you know, actual cases. They seem to ignore super inconvenient studies like how even the IMF, not exactly a leftie source, says that basically income inequality inversely correlates to growth and redistribution has little to no effect on growth.

At most, neoliberals seem to admit that, when there's income inequality, people with more income have more undue influence on politics, this undue influence is anti-democratic and leads to populism (aka Trump, Sanders, the real evils). They seem generally accepting of social welfare just to, essentially, keep the proles happy so they don't elect someone like Sanders.

In other words, to be a neoliberal, you need to accept that there exists an argument that's true on premise but don't read any of the studies testing that hypothesis, because basically every study done on income inequality correlates it with things we all don't want.

Also, neoliberals seem to acknowledge but gloss over the fact that globalization hurts the poor of developed countries the most. Their response is, if you oppose neoliberalism then "you hate the global poor", because they believe neoliberal policy is the cause of people being slightly less impoverished over the past 30 years. So basically, their view is "**** the poor of developed countries, except they may vote for Sanders so you gotta give them enough to make them happy".

The more you think about it, the more you realize that neoliberalism really can't answer the problem. They recognize that income inequality results in a few having more political influence, and think there should be some mechanisms then to redistribute enough to keep people okay. But how can such policies exist when inequality gives the wealthy enough power to resist them? It's a catch-22 they don't seem to address other than by criticizing Sanders for not having a real economic plan.

Sure, Sanders doesn't seem to be concrete enough at times, and I beleive the left is often economically illiterate. However, these guys have cockamany solutions that don't actually have enough leverage to fix the problem.

I agree that there's a polemical dimension to their arguments on this issue, but the current economic regime has in fact pulled many out of poverty. Aside from pointing out that neoliberals use shame to defend the current economic regime, do you have substantive reasons to doubt the story they tell? From what I've seen, the improvements to quality of life and the sheer number of people who no longer live in poverty in what we used to call the third world are non-trivial.

Absolute poverty is defined in terms of purchase and consumption of goods to satisfy basic needs. It is a neoliberal metric, which was intentionally designed to minimize the natural resources wealth and non-capitalist economic activities of less industrialized countries. Except the poverty level doesn't even say anything intelligent about that; it's abstracted to income and consumption in US dollars, a currency people in absolute poverty do not and generally cannot use, with a value that has absolutely no relationship to local prices or actual quality of life.

Beyond being a highly questionable metric, it's also not obvious that neoclassical economics had much of anything to do with its increase. Was it really because of free trade? Or was it because of capital expropriation during decolonization, or more generally these countries shedding the toxic influence of (foreign) capitalists over the last century? And what about post-WW2 capital reconstruction - which also played a major role in expanding America's middle class? Nobody knows, but the neoliberals have certainly made up their minds. What we do know is that capitalism tends to increase inequality; that economic inequality is inversely correlated with economic growth; and that economic inequality has been decreasing in the developing world, while it has been radically increasing here. Which suggests to me, at least, that there is a much bigger and much more interesting discussion about all of this, one which neoliberals are strangely unwilling to have.

If that wasn't punchy enough for you, I'll put it this way.

If you define "poverty" as "naked, hungry, sleeping on the ground", like the neoliberals do, then yes, the current economic regime seems to have done something to improve the problem. For now. Until the current economic regime renders those areas of the planet uninhabitable, which it is presently working very hard to do. (Edit: Actually the neoliberals define poverty as living on less than $1.25 USD a day, but this is what they like to pretend they mean.)

But in the meantime, there's a lot of room between the neoliberal definition of poverty and a lifestyle that we would consider acceptable for ourselves. What about freedom and self-determination? Happiness? By the neoliberal definition of poverty, the most abused slave in the antebellum south would qualify as non-impoverished, a life scarcely worth living. And this is intentional; this is exactly the problem with neoliberals, exactly what I've been complaining about all along. They frame a person's whole existence in terms of currency, income and expenditure, and any other factors aren't even worth thinking about. When you ask a neoliberal a question like, "are these people impoverished", they will answer with "they are basically slaves of Coca-Cola, but thatched roofs are cheap so they're doing great". Basically the third world version of your baby boomer relatives saying "if you're so poor, why do you have an iphone".

So do I trust a neoliberal to honestly assess their own job performance using a neoliberal metric for an idea that only matters to neoliberals? No, other Barry. No I don't.

Edit: Just look into the history of that $1.25 figure. I did, and holy moly I was an hour in before I caught myself in a bathtub with a gun in my mouth. Back in the 1970s the neoliberals literally shifted the goalposts from "ending world hunger" to "getting people to buy $1.25 of **** every day". I am not kidding. This is what they care about. Is that a substantive enough reason to doubt the story they tell? So are poor people actually less poor, or are they just spending more money now?

Those are all substantive reasons that challenge elements of the neoliberal story about globalization and the developing world. But what about the fact that we aren't only seeing people going from making less than $1.25 to more than $1.25, but we're also seeing people break into the so-called "global middle class"?

$11 a day.

You know, a few decades ago middle class meant petit bourgeoisie. A small scale capital owner, who maybe had their own small shop and a couple of employees. If they made labor income, it was from working their own capital, for their own benefit.

Now it means you spend $11 a day.

Spend, mind; the neoliberals define this as gross, not net, a land where debt fueled consumption is good and not horrifically unsustainable.

Anyway, the definition of middle class changed here because it was an inconvenient and extremely rapid backward slide for those people who were actually in the middle class. Which is why all of us are in the middle class now. Including some pretty damn poor Chinese folks.

The shifting goalposts thing is probably the most important takeaway here.

Like, were people actually raised out of poverty, or were they inflated above the benchmark? The IMF et al goes for decades without adjusting their poverty income amount; I think the last increase to $1.25 was in 2006, or maybe even earlier. That is a very long time to go without adjustment.

Yeah, at that point it sounds like we are talking about a significant improvement to people's lives, even if $10 a day still doesn't amount to a middle class income for someone who lives in a western country. Some are also making more than that.

(Acknowledging, of course, that, as you point out, it may be that neoliberalism/globalization aren't in fact the causes of rising incomes in the developing world.)

No, I think there have been legitimate benefits to the global poor. If you could get the policies they want in place, things would probably be alright. The problem I see is that I don't see how those policies are practical or stable long term.

This last part is a fantastic point. One thing many don't know about England and India, and more people should know, is how developed India was before colonization. They were nearly at the level of many European countries in producing textiles and other manufactured goods.

However, producing raw materials is the goal of colonization, and the English destroyed productive capital to turn India into more of a plantation. They literally deindustrialized it to extract resources. How much of India's economic growth could be tied to the end of English rule? How much more developed would they be had the English not disrupted and destroyed their manufacturing base?

I should point out, exactly what and how big the benefits are is questionable, but I do think it exists.

https://www.nber.org/papers/w24106

Howdy dodee, madame. Nazis won more votes in regions of Germany undergoing austerity.

You know, I'm actually in the process of trying to find work by economists on the effects of decolonization on developing economies, and I can't seem to find much. I'm forced to the conclusion that they don't do much analysis here. Which could be why their conclusions about why the world is the way it is seem to be off base.

I’m sure whatever they’ve written has reduced the scenario to hopeless abstractions and mindless platitudes, like comparing expropriated capital to broken windows, or to trade barriers, which are automatically bad because reasons.

Like pretty much everything else neoliberals write on any subject.

Speaking of which, the more I investigate the topic of "neoliberalism has taken x people out of extreme poverty", the more skeptical I am of the claim. The majority of people taken out of poverty were done so in China.

So, is China neoliberal? Neoliberals would probably say yes, contrary to fact. It's true that China has liberalized, and continues to do so to this day. However, the Chinese government retains government control of key areas of the economy. This includes their central bank, which functions on a much more interventionist level. They're strictly closer to pre-Friedman Keynesian banking than strict monetarism of post-Reagan/Thatcher governments.

Other successes in Asia follow the Chinese model.



Friedman himself spoke in mindless platitudes. I just watched an interview of him recently where he asks rhetorically: "when have government bureaus ever accomplished anything?" only a few decades after the Soviets crushed the United States in nearly all aspects of the space race.

Yeah, but despite the fact that the Chinese economy is so centralized, the crowning achievement of the Chinese is their ability to set up logistics and globally integrated supply chains. Plus, the system is built on artificially keeping the cost of labor low.

I think whether China is "neoliberal" has less to do with how the economy is run domestically than the role in plays in a larger global economy. China wouldn't have been able to grow so rapidly -- and so many chinese wouldn't be entering the middle class -- if it weren't for its exports to countries that were the architects of globalization, and the specific role globalization allows China to play in the global economy.

That would be a fair argument I think if more neoliberal policies weren't also tried in other developing countries that failed. See: most of Latin America.

What do you mean?

It was called the Washington Consensus: a set of policies were given by primarily the US through the IMF, World Bank etc that were "neoliberal" in the sense of requiring strong liberalization of many industries, but specifically also of finance and other aspects of the economy. Much of Latin America followed this pattern, and growth overall has been smaller with less decline in poverty, compared to China, and countries like S. Korea which adopted a more China-like model in the late 90's.

Compare as well to Russia which was hyper-liberalized and saw negative growth.