Prime Minister Cameron: Thank Europe

As the new Prime Minister David Cameron begins his long task of attempting to construct what is essentially a European-style Christian Democrat coalition, it’s worth pausing and noting one of the paradoxes at the heart of this deal he’s done. The major party that has over the years been the most instinctively, most viscerally hostile to the European project has been fully infected by the bug. The party that more or less completely split in two over European policy in the 1990s owes its new majority in Parliament to a series of key factors, all of which had Europe at their heart.

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Would you rather be in the Post Office?

I was struck, while reading the London Review of Books, by a remark in an article by Benjamin Kunkel which perhaps deserves some attention:

“Everyone talks, with good reason, about the runaway costs of healthcare in the US, but if healthcare inflation since 1980 has exceeded 400 per cent, the price of a university education has risen, on a recent calculation, by an incredible 827 per cent.”

In a sense, this should not be surprising. In the developed world we spend less and less of our resources proportionately on basic consumption – food, shelter and the like – and more and more on non-essential goods. Non-essential goods serve two basic functions: one, to make the experience of life more pleasurable; and two, to differentiate us from other human beings by allowing us to ascend within systems of social stratification. Of course, this idea makes most sense when we think about the benefits of joy and status that come from careening through town in a sporty new Jaguar, but this fact is certainly not only true for what Thorstein Veblen famously called “conspicuous consumption”. In fact, far more common is the type of inconspicuous consumption that, precisely because it is not drawn attention to, powerfully shapes the structures of our society. Being healthy and being educated are both prime examples of this.

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Personality politics and moral panics

Both sides of the Atlantic are currently watching first rate examples of the power of modern personality politics. In the States, the Democrats are finally realising that it helps to have an enemy they can point to, and have decided that a couple of derivatives traders at Goldman Sachs will nicely fit the bill. Meanwhile, in the UK, a Rochdale granny has been propelled to the front of the election campaign after Brown was overhead saying she was a “bigoted woman” on a microphone that was still running. This event has capped off an election campaign that has been quite astonishingly volatile, and certainly makes great TV.

The dramatisation of issues of public concern by focusing on individuals obviously meets some deep human need. Society always seems to have some kind of pecking order in which particular people are prominently emulated or hated. And it rarely takes a genius to decode the subtexts lying behind the choice of idols or foes: the Yuppies of the 1980s held up to exemplify the money-grabbing aspirations of the new conservative classes; the bearded revolutionaries of the sixties hung on the walls of teenagers to express their fury at their parents for not letting them out on a school night. But right now we’re in the middle of a hostility that is yet to locate itself on a single target: instead, pretty much anyone is open to a scatter gun of blame. Since the recession began and the popular mood shifted to one of blanket, indiscriminating fury, we’ve seen pot-shots taken at any sinners found lurking among the elite – whether they’re overpaid BBC presenters with big mouths, MPs fiddling their expenses, bankers on the take, or even historians’ caught secretly promoting their books on Amazon – people who, it seems, have apparently failed to fulfil the responsibilities of custodianship that come with the privileges society has accorded them - all treated with fairly equal disdain, despite the fact that the sins involved were of astonishingly different orders of magnitude. These targets capture a real and deep sense that something is genuinely unfair in the way ordinary people are treated in modern Britain, but also an undifferentiated sense that equates Jonathan Ross being rude with systematic legalised theft by the financial industry.

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In which Alex asks himself whether it's possible for him to get any more cynical about British politics

Well, well, well. Even that perennial no news channel BBC News 24 gets it right some of the time, and I just saw quite an amusing little "fact check" piece in the run up to the UK election.

As we all know, the Tories are in a bit of a bind when it comes to policy. Their only idea is cutting taxes, and that doesn't really add up when you've got the deficit to end all deficits. (Lucky for them that they don't currently appear to need any policies for the wonderful British public to vote them in, anyway.)

Anyway, today's big news on the campaign trail was that the Tories are going to save huge resources by cutting benefit fraud, specifically by banning any individual caught cheating three times from receiving any state benefits for a period of up to three years. BBC makes one call to the benefits office and finds out that the total number of people currently identified as having caught cheating three times is .... zero.

Well, that'll deal with the deficit then! Question one: are these people actually supposed to be running the economy in a month's time? Question two: how exactly can politicians find it difficult to understand why everyone hates them when they demonstrate such contempt for the voting public as to announce a waste reduction policy likely to produce a total of zero pounds savings?

Not that it matters to me ... since my second discovery today is that my vote is worth a grand total of 0.063 of a full vote, anyway. See here for more details.

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Health care: the last post?

At the risk of counting chickens, it appears that today congress will pass the most significant piece of healthcare reform since the 1960s and in so doing validate one of the central parts of the mandate that sent Barack Obama to office.

A relentless battle, each side pulling off more comebacks than Muhammad Ali and Bill Clinton in combination, has culminated in an extraordinary week of political manoeuvring in the House, leaving the Democrats within a hair’s breadth of passing this damned bill. Whatever happens, whether it’s a success or a failure, if this law gets to Obama’s desk, the President will have notched up his second major entry in the history books alongside his astonishing electoral triumph sixteen months ago.

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What goes around comes around...

From a New Yorker piece by Jeffrey Toobin, on possibly soon to be outgoing Supreme Court Justice Stevens, one of the last remaining adherents of a Republican politics otherwise long since dead:

"John Paul Stevens, who will celebrate his ninetieth birthday on April 20th, generally bides his time. Stevens is the Court’s senior Justice, in every respect. He is thirteen years older than his closest colleague in age (Ginsburg) and has served eleven years longer than the next most experienced (Scalia)... In some respects, Stevens comes from another world; in a recent opinion, he noted that contemporary views on marijuana laws were 'reminiscent of the opinion that supported the nationwide ban on alcohol consumption when I was a student.'"

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Individualists of the World, Unite!

Review of Jennifer Burns, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right

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Complexity and collapse? (Warning: wonkery ahead)

The latest issue of Foreign Affairs includes an article by Niall Ferguson called ‘Complexity and Collapse: Empires on the Edge of Chaos.’ Read it yourself, but the substance of the piece is that we should not think about the rise and fall of imperial systems in terms of traditional seasonal or cyclical narratives (which to Ferguson means Vico, Hegel, Marx, Spengler, Toynbee, Kennedy and Jared Diamond), since empires, like all other social organizations, are complex adaptive systems subject to arrythmic changes. In normal person English, this means that the collapse of an imperial power like the modern United States can happen in a matter of months and years, not centuries.

The piece marks a continuing enthusiasm on the part of Ferguson, dating back at least to his Virtual History book, for thinking about history in the context of complexity theory, something I endorse – but with increasing caution as time wears on. There’s no doubt in my mind that societies are complex systems; this is self-evident. Ferguson’s warning about the potential speed with which one can collapse is also well taken. The problem is with how we go about taking the scientific model and applying it to the human world; and here I believe we should be much more cautious than Ferguson is being.

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The great global nosh-up continues...

In another great 'voice of reason' piece in the LRB, John Lanchester acutely summarises the fix we're in. The combination of an arrangement of electoral interests that provides no opportunity for fiscal discipline; an unwillingness to restrain the big banks meeting ignorance about how exactly to do so without damaging 'honest' banking; and a looming debt hangover that will make us realise quite how comparatively mild the cost of the recession has been so far (compared, that is, both to prior recessions and the inescapable mathematics of how much we've paid to keep our economies moving) ... all this leads to only one likely outcome: inflation.

"The government has to cut the deficit. That involves raising taxes and cutting spending. The government can’t do it too quickly, or it would tip the country back into recession. But the government will have to administer some cuts in spending, because the bond market insists on it. The government can’t cut too thoroughly, because the electorate won’t wear it. Inflation looks like the only way out. Not too much inflation, because the bond market wouldn’t like that. Also, the rules currently forbid it – but the rules, let’s face it, are the least of the problems."

When alienating the voters or the power elite gets thrown out of the window, inflation is the variable that allows the global economic equation to add up back to zero.

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Democracy building in Afghanistan

After Hamid Karzai's latest act, appointing all the members of the electoral commission so that in future it won't do troubling things like point out his widespread involvement in voting fraud, any attempt to defend NATO policy in Afghanistan on the grounds of democracy promotion sounds fairly stale. Does anyone remember those justifications circulated at the time of the original invasion - that by overthrowing the Taliban we'd be able to secure rights for women living behind the burkah? How quaint and outmoded they seem now.

"We were puzzled and disturbed last year when the Obama administration didn’t — or couldn’t — persuade Mr. Karzai to run a reasonably clean race," writes the New York Times. "Aren’t tens of thousands of American troops and billions of dollars in American aid enough leverage?" Well, no, unfortunately they're not. Karzai is no fool; he knows that politically and militarily the US is deeply exposed through its commitment to solving Afghanistan's problems, and that no president could deal with the domestic political fallout of straightforwardly giving up and going home. At this stage, like it or not, the Karzai government is the only game in town. The presence of US troops is no leverage when they're only there to meet self-interested commitments.

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