Kingsnorth in Strasbourg???
I would pay good money to see Paul in Strasbourg. We may have to hide the EU for the day, though…
is Real England, Paul’s book about the loss of English culture to Market and State, and actually discussing the freedom of regions etc. with somebody with that kind of an insight into the particular is quite an experience…
Are ye for it, Paul? Can we get you to Strasbourg?
Community is not the answer.
There is a lot of nonsense talked about community.
Transition Towns has, for years, demonized the go-it-alone attitude of “preppers” and “survivalists” who expect to look to their own resources before those of their neighbours in a time of crisis, and it’s precisely and exactly wrong. A group of people who can all more-or-less stand on their own feet are stronger together than alone, but a group in which the average is less-than-survival together will simply tend to drag each-other down. There are simply no “economies of scale” in survival groups.
This is not to say that, for example, tribes are not incredibly resilient. But, like modern Mormons, there are intense social pressures on people to carry their weight - to be prepared, to be resilient, to be skilled, to add something of value to the tribal collective in exchange for their membership of it, to be an asset to your neighbours, not a burden.
When drowning the weak children became unacceptable to us, we made a State. I’m (of course) bending the causality here, but I’m also making a point - tribal societies often practiced euthenasia for the old, we are told - Eskimos who’d go off on a final hunting trip which consisted of sitting on an ice flow and drifting out to open sea, or deformed children left out in the snow. This stuff is no joke, and while I’m not an expert in the history (I’m aware these reports may have been biased by Colonial historians) we have to beware our own idealization of a prior state. We remember the benefits, but do not remember the costs.
In this context, the most vulernable need a State to protect them. A community cannot carry somebody who needs, say, kindey dialasis. A State can carry people with those kinds of medical costs, and so can the Market given a healthy health insurance system, but a community does not have the resources to amortize the costs of the weak.
There is a very real case to be made for the most vulnerable people in Greece to head for countries with a strong Welfare State and good free public health case. The safety net is necessary, and it’s still there in some places. Why not use one’s freedom as a European to take advantage of it?
On the second point, on scale… I think I’ve answered that to a degree, too. We need scale to amortize risks. Whether Europe is simply Too Big is a much, much harder question, but small unit societies cannot and do not carry their weakest members - they (often) drop them. If we’re to provide a really strong safety net, it may require quite a large political bloc to provide it, and I think that’s doubly true when we start talking about environmental protection. Large political blocs can make substantial dents in the global environmental situation by regulation. Smaller blocs know their actions don’t have much effect, so there’s a strong tendency to say “well, we’re only 1.3m people, what can we do?” and keep on burning the coal regardless.
I do believe we need massive local political control, but we also need to delegate upwards what we can’t do ourselves, and the burdens a small community cannot be expected to carry.
The Big State has Big Arms. The village does not.
States seem too stretched to provide more welfare…
Vinay,
I agree that a community is no safeguard without strong resilient indiviudals at the base, in fact given group think tendencies towards the lowest bar to meet many could be worse off when it comes survival. Though for now such groups are probably healthy and productive social exchanges.
Looking forward I’m less optimistic than you though about big states having the surplus to carry the weight for those who can’t . My current assumption is that the abundant surplus we expect from big states is only the product of highly succesful industrialism, barring new energy sources of similar net yields we will be witnessing for the first time in the history of the decline of the industrial system which underpins that surplus. If thats more less true I find it very hard to expect the state to be able to provide the deepening need for safety nets and welfare. Its resources and processing capabilities more less seem completely tapped out, and I’m not hopeful that political measures will change this, if for no other reason than the democratic process is not efficient enough at identify and treating the problem.
Now I should make it clear I’m for neither anarchy nor a more efficient facist state (which we are arguably flirting with to try and regain order) I appreciate the state is at is I just don’t think its a capable enough organization form to do much more than it is doing now. As it stands I think corporations would be more capable and adaptable at providing the safety net and resilience functions we are going to need. Yes they are certainly a big part of the problem behind a corrupted state, but perhaps we could invent new fitter corporate forms that better leverage the network, openly colloborate and have redifined goals and visions. I think in many ways these idealistic corporations could outcompete the big hierchal dinosaurs through radically reduced fixed overhead, and the ability to outmaneuver and adapt and more importantly the ability to actually have people rally behind their cause. I know such organizations would probably not provide welfare directly, but through increased job creation, flater distribution of profits, and a reskilling of the population with production and presumably resilient related skills, they would indirectly provide more people with the means to provide welfare.
Yes indeed
This is a really good point. The Euro welfare states are in decline. We can’t afford them anymore. My welfare state is less generous than the one my parents’ enjoyed, and if my kids see one at all it will be skeletal. That’s contraction for you.
The other point is the corporations and the finance houses, which are the real actors here. The hollowed-out state exists to serve their needs. Hence the religious mantra of ‘growth’, uber alles, intoned from Berlin to Bratislava.
Growth is in our societies DNA…
Paul,
The issue of societies built upon the assumption of growth is no small problem indeed. The calculus of our whole social arrangements radically change when this is no longer possible. Assumed surpluses vanish and whole goals and sectors of society no longer make sense. I don’t think we have much of a cultural memory in the west for surving periods of State wide decline either, we have little blips like depressions and war, but as a whole the march of progress or growth as been an unchecked faith article of our society.
Still I don’t know of any ideas that could realistically be implemented in western culture to get rid of the notions of growth, its deeply embedded into the source code of western societies. I think we are stuck with it until natural limitations make it unsuccesful and the opportunity clears up for a new civilization script to develop boot up. I also think that from that perspective that much of the corporate hollowing. of the state has been allowed at some level because it is recognized as one of the most succesful ways to serve our bottom line of growth at all costs.
If there is a silver lining I see it is that higher energy and resource costs coupled with the tools of the information age may drive the monopolostic corporations in the history books, as mass centralized manufacturing is replaced by a more competive and localized form of organization. I’m not certain though of that, but it seems as good of place as any to hang ones hope…
Agreed!
Hi Nick,
I agree entirely; you put it very well. Don’t know if you’ve come across the Dark Mountain Project, but we’ve been trying to fight our way through this thicket for a while! Rebooting is the only likely endpoint, I’d guess.
Ahem
‘When drowning the weak children became unacceptable to us, we made a State.’
Ah, yes? Mr Hobbes and Mr Monbiot would both be proud of you I’m sure.
Actually, ‘we’ did not make a state. States evolved as societies became more centralised and complex, and the elites needed protection from the people whose land they had stolen. The social contract is null and void. Contracts need to be signed by both sides to be legally binding.
But let’s leave that to one side.
I agree that ‘a lot of nonsense is talked about community’, but none of it is being talked by me, at least not here. You, on the other hand, have diverged into a random attack on ‘tribal societies’, which has no bearing on the point I was making. Who said anything about eskimos? Not me! Although I would say that a man from your background ought to know that many traditional socities were very good at carrying the weakest among them: considerably better than modern states, in fact. You’d be a damn site better off being mentally ill in village India than on a British sink estate in the care of the state psychiatric system.
My point was that deracinated individuals always fare badly when things go pear-shaped, and they fare worse if they are foreign. It’s a historical constant. Let’s try and imagine what would happen if several million Greeks, Spaniards and Italians followed your advice and left their families, homes and connections behind to move to Sweden, Norway and Scotland. One of the things that would happen would be that those working welfare systems would cease to work due to the extra strain being put on them by sudden mass immigration (which has happened in parts of the UK.) Another thing would be that resentment would build towards the influx of outsiders, especially if they had come simply to take economic advantage of a system built by others. Nations and ethnic groups still exist, despite the EU’s attempts to abolish them. After that, we’d have new Anders Breiviks, Pim Fortuyns and Marine Le Pens poping up all over northern Europe. I think we could do without this.
‘Community’, at root, is simply a word used to describe the process of being rooted. You need to be somewhere for a while, bed in, contribute, become accepted. Then people start looking after you, and looking out for you. That, it seems to me, would be a lot more useful in a collapse than anything the welfare state could offer.
Well, actually
Hello Paul, thanks for your insights. I want to contribute a point of view from a country, Italy, which has been both on the sending and (more recently) on the receiving end of a lot of immigration. It is far from certain that immigration breaks welfare; in fact, in my country, immigrants are net contributors to the welfare state (they pay in more in taxes than they take out in benefits), and in particular they contribute a lot to business creation. The most common first name among entrepreneurs registered at the Chamber of Commerce in Milano, as of March 2012, is Mohamed.
Other parts of your analysis hold, though. We have a lot of racial hate in Italy. But at least part of it seems to be due to an inferiority complex: the Moroccans, Egyptians and Romanians that flock to the country to start small businesses work hard, know their respective trades and are in their way to do well. People who feel they are being left behind find nothing better than to shout “foreigners!”; they have voting power, but it is far from clear who’s the élite and who’s the underdogs here.
Good points
Thanks Alberto. This is interesting. I agree with at least some of it.
I don’t know about the figures you mention and how they play out in my country, but I do know that at local level, big influxes of immigrants have put strains on schools and hospitals. The rate of change has been rapid over the last fifteen years. The unprecedented immigration rates in the UK represent two things to me: one, big business running the show (it’s all about the cheap labour); and two, a state trying to shore against the decline represented by an ageing population.
Part of the resentment against this comes from a sense that some immigrant communities have not integrated, and some of the rest comes from a sense of imposition. But that sense of being left behind is palpable in some places. We are lucky in Britain that we have no serious far right grouping. I think we do pretty well at mixing and matching here, which is something to be proud of, but there are always limits.
Again though, I think community is the key here. I don’t think most people have any problem with immigrants, because immigrants are just people. On an individual level, meeting people from other countries is interesting and welcome to most. Immigrants who move to a new place and bed themselves in are mostly made welcome, and very often breathe new life into places. The problems come again when the number and rate of change is too … big. Again, it’s about scale, and about belonging.
Some minor point
“States evolved as societies became more centralised and complex, and the elites needed protection from the people whose land they had stolen.”
Nice view on the origins of state 
Would like to learn about history from that perspective … anybody knows of a book or article discussing that in depth?
A minor point:
Both “community” and “being rooted” is quite abstract. What it’s implemented in is relationships, friendships. It’s true that these develop when living in and contributing to a local neighborhood, but not only there. In this age of online and moving around, there are several people who instead build their own globally distributed network of friendships, and likewise have somebody to ask for help in tough times. That seems esp. true for younger people, whose peers often happen to be distributed all around the world after the phase of formal education is over.
Rise and Decline of the State
Its a meaty historical read, but Rise and Decline of the State by Martin Van Creveld http://ebooks.cambridge.org/ebook.jsf?bid=CBO9780511497599 is a great book that addresses the evolutionary origins of the state and the current corparate and global forces that are undercutting it.
Actually truth be told I picked it up on a splurge a week ago and can’t really say I’ve any qualifications to rate it, other than to say its a damn fascinating piece of work, and really makes me ponder organizational theory in general…
“Big-ness”
I very much agree that ‘scale’ is an underexamined and core failure point in our whole paradigmatic mess.
It has long been a mantra of mine that ‘the bigger the organisation the bigger the sin…’
Centralisation of power and of networks, temporarily aided by nascent information technologies has allowed the nation state and the corporation to assume inhumane size and to thereby do inhumane things.
Looking forward to discussing this further with you…
The Euro is the accidental reimposition of the gold standard
There’s an almost blindingly simple reason why the Greek tragedy is unfolding, which is just that it was folly to create a system where individual national deficits were funded by a currency not also controlled by the nation in question. As Joe Weisenthal points out, Japan has a debt to GDP ratio far exceeding Greece’s, yet they can borrow at extremely low rates, and he makes a compelling argument that Japan will NEVER default because they borrow in their own sovereign currency:
According to a new school of economic thought called Modern Monetary Theory, the whole idea that deficits are “debt” is totally misleading and wrong. In fact, the money supply SHOULD grow, naturally, and that deficits are just the accounting record of surpluses injected into the private economy:
In other words, austerity is not only wrong, it is completely and utterly idiotic. The problem isn’t just the lack of political union within the EU, the problem is a lack of understanding of the nature of money versus the nature of goods and services.
The Euro as currently designed, with a ECB obsessed with preventing inflation, is essentially a reimposition of a failed idea: the gold standard. The brittleness of the European Union is due to an architectural failure and a lack of economic insight. Money is an asbtraction. What’s real are real goods and services. Europe and the world need to learn this lesson, and quickly.
Yes, but…
I agree about there being huge issues with nations borrowing in currencies that they don’t control - I lived in Iceland for a couple of years, and when their currency dropped sharply, people who had borrowed in Euros (there were a lot of them!) got absolutely hammered. It was very clearly a control issue.
But, and this is a big but, nobody controlled the gold standard - it couldn’t be manipulated for political advantage, there was provably no political intent in issuing the stuff, it was by all accounts a fair and objective store of value, with volatility because of discoveries and engineering issues, not political manipulation.
So here we are with, agreed, pressures on the Euro similar to those produced by the Gold Standard, but now with the additional dimension of large, wealthy currencies running the banks which affect the destiny of small, poor ones.
Surely this additional political complexity dominates what the Greeks should do in the face of these conditions?
Yes, but…a comment
The dominant creditor nation ‘controls’ the ‘standard’…eg the US in the case of the Gold Standard, Germany in the case of the Euro…and it is always manipulated for ‘political advantage’, it having been introduced for the purpose of achieving economic and thereby political domination of the subordinates…
The Euro should not have evolved into a ‘standard’ had the rules been followed…but they were ignored by everyone (rule-breakers, makers and enforcers alike…)
Now, Greece (and others) are on a ‘rack’ being tortured by the effort to adhere to a false standard.
The Greeks should just say…“this is how much we can pay after we have provided for ourselves, modestly. Take it or come and get the balance (If you dare…)” i.e. they should default…someone will soon, it might as well be them…
The latest Eclectica Fund report from Hugh Hendry is well worth reading re ‘standards’ and a global overview of the imbalances currently strangling the global economy…
The fundamental problem here is that, for all the problems with modern industrialized society, really the crisis in Europe now appears to be due primarily to fundamental lack of understanding of modern economics. Consider this:
http://hir.harvard.edu/debt-deficits-and-modern-monetary-theory
Put simply, when should governments begin to run budget surpluses?
We've been caught in between two false economic theories. It seems obvious to me that MMT is far closer to a description of the actual economic situation, but we're laboring between Keynesian and neoliberal/neoclassical economics (the former being less wrong than the latter, but both are wrong). Budget deficits are not "bad" as conservatives believe, and deficits aren't debt. The entire crisis in Europe is based on a lack of understanding of one thing: money is an abstraction, it doesn't have to be kept "in balance" --- what needs to happen is government policy should be designed to focus on the real economy: productive full employment.Particular budget outcomes should never be a policy target. What the government should be targeting is real goals, by which I mean a sustainable growth rate buoyed by full employment.
Why do we want governments? We want them because they can do things that improve our welfare that we can’t do individually. In that context, it becomes clear that public policy should be devoted wholly to making sure that there are enough jobs, that poverty is eliminated, that the public health and public education systems are first class, that people who are less well off are able to become better off, etc.
From a macroeconomic point of view, the spending and tax decisions of government should be such that total spending in the economy is sufficient to produce the level of real output at which firms will employ the available labor force. This is the goal, and the particular budget outcomes must serve this goal.
None of this is to say that budget deficits don’t matter at all. The fundamental point that the original developers of MMT would make—myself or Randall Wray or Warren Mosler— is that the risk of budget deficits is not insolvency but inflation. In saying that, however, we would also stress that inflation is the risk of any kind of overspending, whether investment, consumption, export, or government spending. Any component of aggregate demand could push the economy to that point where we get inflation. Excessive government spending is not always to blame.
In sum, we’re quite categorical that we believe that budget deficits can be excessive and can be deficient as well. Deficits can be too large, just as they can be too small, and the aim of government is to make sure that they’re just right to employ all available productive capacity.
Can you sell this to the grownups?
Thanks everyone, I am really enjoying the depth of the debate.
So here’s a side note: given the intellectual firepower that the resilience scene can deploy, how come it is so marginal? How come Vinay, Paul and wildfarmer are not junior ministers for resilience in the governments of their respective countries? And more importantly: how can a better pitch be made for this issue to attract more attention and investments?
The question is immediately operational. less than a month from now many of us will be in Strasbourg, in conversation with civil servants, elected politicians and policy advisors. Do you think you could use the chance to improve your case and move a step towards center stage? For what it’s worth, I am willing to help: I am in the Resilience session team anyway!
The crisis is man-made
Another hard angle on this, Alberto - it’s not why are we bad at selling resilience to government, it’s “why is government so blind that it caused this crisis and refuses to take the consequences of the mess it has made seriously.”
These debts, they’re huge, vast debts, but they were all built up as instruments of private profit - and goverment financial regulators created the system they were created in, and when it started to explode, bought up the debts and made them into public debt, into money owed by ordinary tax payers.
If they could have conceived of the problem, they would never have created it.
Resilience is hard to sell because goverment is short sighted. But fortunately we don’t have to sell it to government, at least not to national government - local government and private citizens are actually the backbone of all meaningful resilience efforts because resilience is almost explicitly something that kicks in when the efforts of Nation State governments don’t work. We’re here to catch the problems that national goverments either failed to catch or simply outright created.
As for selling it, the military and the big disaster agencies inside of government are pretty sold on resilience already. The problem is moving outside of the specialized arena of disaster relief professionals and into the wider situation. These two pieces in New Scientist magazine examine what’s happening in Greece from a humanitarian, epidemeological perspective, and the word is not good. They’re talking about Malaria coming back, and about a lot of older people dying of preventable diseases and suicides.
To fix that problem is going to take a whole-of-society re-engagement with actually taking care of each-other, our families, our neighbours, ourselves. But getting there means admitting how badly the State as screwed up in its duty of care by adhering to a neoliberal ideology which everybody knew was going to screw the poor, crash, burn and explode in the long run. They just didn’t know how short the long run would be.
So we have to be very careful in that in selling resilience as a concept to national government, we can’t let it turn into YOU FOOLS LOOK WHAT YOU HAVE CREATED and yet, in our own minds, we have to know the truth: we need resilience because they crashed the ship into the rocks.
I think that pushing the notion of protecting national life expectancy as a goal of government - protecting people from dying early because of stress, suicide and poor medical care - is a pretty good idea.
We could make it a prominent national indicator, like GDP used to be. What do you think?
Indicators
We are all born and we all die http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/ but not equally.
For what it’s worth, epidemiologists in Spain are moving in the direction of measuring the impact of the economic crisis, and talking about healthcare system sustainability (whatever that may mean). http://www.reunionanualsee.org/presentacion.php -> http://www.reunionanualsee.org/programa.php (PDF, Spanish). I can look for similar interests in other countries, or google “epidemiology (in your language) crisis [name of country]”.
These people talk about “years of potential life lost”. Is that it? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Years_of_potential_life_lost (try sorting countries with the “two triangles” icons at the top of each column of the table) Or is measuring deaths that way too little, too late? There must be better indicators, and I’ll go ask my peers.
Then there’s quality of life: “years without needing psychiatric therapy”, etc. Harder to measure, but also very important.
In any case, after measurements are done, pushing for explicit adoption is another matter. Where CoE might possibly have a role, methinks. And where govts are slow - so start sooner rather than later, and see that big boat slowly moving.
State may not be the organization up for that task…
I agree with the goals you lay out for the state, but do you really think that the state still has the powers it once had to actually put its foot down and do much outside of favors for industry? I think the very favoring of neoliberalism by the states shows that they were losing power and the rules were being written by those who stood to benefit.
Nimbler and more organizationally evolved corporations IMO seem to have the real power. There is also a deep element of finance favoritism involved in keeping these organizations on top. Its a big problem now because most necessary resources for our survival are in one way shape or form controlled by these entities. I think the battle ahead of us is to create new forms of corporations that provide more equal acessibility, flater distributions, and are socially and ecologically integrated. Unfortunately I really don’ know where we start on that goal…