Horner's Corner

It’s really quite simple, but in case anyone is a politician I’ll try to be very clear.

If you don’t have enough of some things, letting people choose which ones they want will still leave some people who don’t get any of those things.

OR

If you have enough things, but some are more desirable than others (or believed to be more desirable -perhaps because a lot of people desire them), and you let people choose what they want, then some people will still not get the more desirable things.

And

if you do this (encourage people to believe they can have something if they choose it, when there is scarcity)

(a) you will tend to favour those best able to compete (the sharp elbows principle)

(b) you may promote an attitude and practice which favours individuals over the common good (or just over other individuals). This may of course be what you wanted to happen – but do pause to think this through in case it isn’t what you really want to occur.

(c) You may drive down the actual quality of the ‘less desirable’ things, thus making them seem even less desirable for the unlucky in the competition for desirable things

(d) You will have some people who feel, quite, slightly or very disappointed.

There are other effects, but I’m sure the politicians are having trouble staying focused..so just one more:

(e) If you do all this, then you lecture people on citizenship, the community, duty or The Big Society  you will give the impression that you are a twat.

His book is a good read – he takes issue with the liberal myths we’ve been stuck with for too long

Fast Tube by Casper">All the 12 episodes are on youtube

This is worth checking out..

Democratic Audit – Home Page.

The relevance to the UK of what follows  is clear. We have similar problems about the demarcation of ‘responsibility’ in the UK -we too got up to our necks in neo liberal casino-capitalism. Except ‘we’ didn’t: the vast bulk of us just do our jobs, pay our taxes and live with the consequences of what our masters decree. Now we have been told that the UK (= bulk of working people) will have less schools, hospitals etc in order to pay for the vast debt our country has taken on in bailing out the banks – Chris Horner

Truth and Consequences

How often have we heard Republicans, Conservatives, and Christian fundamentalists preach about responsiblity? Everyone is supposed to take responsibility, personal responsibility. People are supposed to take responsibility for their drug and alcohol use (rehab? no! no! no!); for their obesity, lack of exercise, and failure of will power; for their credit card debt and excess expenditures; for their unprotected sex. Three strikes and you are out, out, out. Unwanted pregnancy? Responsibility means having that baby. The smaller and more personal the transgression, the greater your exposure to excessive punishment, all in the name of responsibility. We are small enough to be allowed to, even encouraged to, fail. If we don’t fail and encounter the consequences, the system can’t work–no incentives to be good (Reagan taught us this back in the 80s by making sure that we saw homeless people all over our cities; he called them welfare queens; the media called them bag ladies; we knew they were that the fate we had to avoid at all costs). We are all supposed to face the consequences of our actions.

But this ‘all’ is actually pretty narrow. Who’s left out? The rich and the privileged, especially if they are white and male. And they get extra dispensation if they are or have been employed in the finance sector or the Bush administration (sorta the same thing, if you think about it). So the finance sector doesn’t have to face any consequences. And it looks like the Bush administration might escape the consequences of its actions as well (I favor a war crimes tribunal and execution, myself; I expect they will escape accountability for running torture and prison camps because leading congressional Democrats were in on it all along; I admit the drawback of my position is that it rapidly escalates into mass hangings).

Which ‘all’ comprises the citizens? It seems clear that the ‘all supposed to accept the consequences’ are the people–but this people isn’t the part of no part. It’s the part that has to be counted, included, and literally made to pay. Those excluded from this all, excluded from the consequences, are the privileged ones, the exception. It’s like a state of exception turned inside out: those who inhabit the terrain of lawlessness are the financial elite and their state arm.

Too many voices of the allegedly pragmatic Democratic left claim that Obama should move on, deal with the economy, and let the crimes of the past remain in the past. This is wrong, severely, unconscionably wrong. The crimes are the same crimes. The economic crimes are inextricable from the crimes of torture and aggressive war. All result from the attempt to escape law, to move beyond and outside it, to persist in exceptional space without consequences.

via I cite: Truth and consequences.

Fast Tube by Casper">watch?v=kmv-eYlV1D4]

Nancy Fraser interviewed in Eurozine:

Nancy Fraser: Let me start with the “post-socialist condition”. I coined this term in the mid 1990s to characterize the predominant mood following the fall of communism, in which an apparently de-legitimated social egalitarianism gave way to a miraculously resurrected free-market fundamentalism. Whenever I use the expression “post-socialist condition”, then, I put it in scare quotes to indicate that I am referring to an ideological trope. It’s not, in other words, that I myself think socialism is irrelevant; rather, this was the common sense of the age. Naming an epochal shift in the grammar of political claims-making, the phrase signalled the fact that many progressive social actors had ceased couching their claims in terms of distributive justice and were resorting instead to new discourses of identity and difference. In this shift “from redistribution to recognition”, as I called it, presumptively emancipatory movements such as feminism and anti-racism, which previously militated for social equality, began in the post-Cold War era to reinvent themselves as practitioners of the politics of recognition. In writing of the “post-socialist condition,” then, I aimed to call attention to the decentring of the socialist imaginary, which had oriented leftwing struggles for a century and a half. I also sought to contextualize that sea change in political culture in relation to the spectacular rise of neoliberalism, whose proponents could only rejoice in the decline of social egalitarian. It was this constellation, in which identity politics dovetailed all too neatly with neoliberalism, that constituted the “post-socialist” mood. ..

More here

frieze.com

‘Sir’ Fred Goodwin: does he look bothered?

So ‘Sir Fred’ Goodwin, aged 50 and 3/4  is to walk away from the RBS banking catastrophe he caused with a 700,000 +  per year pension for life, funded by the tax payer (us). What kind of government is it that let’s this happen? This New Labour Government is the kind, apparently. More seriously, why have they only just noticed the revolting injustice and lack of general proportion in the remuneration of Britain’s ‘Top’ CEOs (I use the adjective purely in a quantitative sense, to describe fat payouts)? Why are we the most unequal country in Europe?

Sir Fred is the target because of the gargantuan losses he has foisted on to the taxpayer. But a £700,000-a-year pension is by no means tops: at least 12 other CEOs are well ahead of him, and most bosses enjoy lavish schemes denied to their staff. Remember, top CEO pay has multiplied from 17 times that of their average workers to 75 times in just 20 years. (Polly Toynbee, The Guardian  28/02/09 – my emphasis)

It’s not just the UK of course, there’s always US reptiles like  Dick Fuld, the ex head of the ex Lehman Bros, with his multiple mansions and his general failure to grasp why all those ordinary folks out there like us can’t see he isn’t part of the problem. The big difference here is that he said he was honestly very sorry at all the job losses and and misery and so forth he’s been instrumental in causing. So that’s OK, then. At least he’s prepared to act a bit. Don’t expect that from “Sir” Fred and his chums .  Apologies from the likes of them are as scarce as rocking horse droppings. They intend to look dignified, keep quiet and keep the money.

Gordon, here’s what you do, man: you take the damn money back off them, you know, the way you take money off the poor when you miscalculate their tax credits. Oh, and another thing: nationalise the banks and don’t ask, make them give money to people who can make stuff. Remember making stuff? it’s what we did a lot of before we decided everybody on Airstrip One (a.k.a. the UK plc) was going to work in call centres and, er, banking.

And while we’re on the subject of the bold Sir Fred, why the knighthood? What’s he done for it? saved orphan children? worked weekends in an old people’s home? nope. It was for ‘services to banking’ apparently. What would these services be, exactly? Making hay while the sun shone? being extra creative with the tax avoidance schemes? It’s the mark of a decrepit regime like ours that a certain class of people get knighthoods for just doing the job they are paid handsomely for anyway. Any knighthoods for, say, teachers and social workers? apparently not.

Face it: it’s not a few bad apples we’re on about here. It’s a system that doesn’t deserve anyone’s loyalty, based on a radically unfair distribution of life’s goods (ie, 90 % of the wealth to 5% of the population); one that robs the poor of the world in the name of free trade (aka globalisation) and then asks the plebs to dig deep for charity (go on: do something funny for money while we get on with making sure the poor of Africa stay poor). What’s the name of this set up? oh yes: capitalism.

Chris Horner

I wrote this when New Labour was promoting this concept. It’s still relevant.

‘The class war is over. But the struggle for true equality has only just begun’ –Tony Blair

What would a fair society look like? ‘New Labour’ thought it had the answer: “meritocracy”. This is the vision of a society in which the highest rewards go to those who deserve them, unhindered by the barriers of inherited wealth, class and privilege. It will be achieved by ‘equality of opportunity’, an equal start for all, regardless of class, race or creed. In this way the energetic, ambitious and talented reach the top, whatever their origins. This view of a just society has a powerful appeal in an unequal society like that of the UK, where class, gender, and race still limit the life chances of many. Unfortunately, the goal of a meritocracy is in itself deeply problematic, and equality of opportunity, at least as understood by Blair and Co., is likely to make society even less fair than it is already. That’s why anyone who cares about genuine social justice should oppose both.

THE BIG RACE

Equality of opportunity is an attractive idea. Some inequalities between people are unrelated to anything they might have done: gender, race, being born to poor parents and so on. These kinds of differences ought to be compensated for, as people shouldn’t suffer because of brute bad luck, a roll of the genetic dice. But for New Labour it is as if people’s circumstances were like the opening of a race. Just as we would expect a race to be arranged so that each runner has an equal start, so the state ought to take steps to ensure that people are given equal opportunities to get on in life. Thus the state should intervene to ensure that accidents of birth (race, gender, poverty) do not act as obstacles to success in the race of life. But that’s just at the start: life, like a race, will still produce winners – and losers. The fastest win the prizes.

It’s here we hit our first problem. Equal opportunities alone cannot achieve the goal of a meritocratic society. Imagine two caterers, each earning £10,000, and two clever and industrious lawyers, earning £100,000 each. If both couples marry and have children the difference in their combined incomes will be huge. With their £200,000 the lawyers will be able to buy their child the best start in life, including expensive schooling. Their child, regardless of merit, has an enormous relative advantage, one that it will pass on to its children in turn. In a society dominated by market values ‘equal opportunities’ is doomed to reproduce inequality, irrespective of merit.

THE MIRAGE OF MERIT

‘Merit’ can be understood in different ways: as courage, self-sacrifice, industriousness and so on. But the market is not going to reward just any kind of merit: it selects only those with the ‘right’ kinds of abilities: ‘market merits’. Bus drivers, nurses and office cleaners aren’t necessarily less valuable to society than solicitors and advertisers, but they will be much less well rewarded. So will those, mainly women, who spend their time and energy bringing up children or supporting the elderly. “Market merit” turns out to comprise a narrow range of human characteristics, some of them, like ambitiousness, not always morally admirable. Ambitious people are often ego driven and self-centred. Contrast that type with the nurse or the unpaid carer.

Yet surely we can reward people for their ability? One is talented at playing the violin; another has financial acumen and entrepreneurial flair. We want to factor out the irrelevant things (heredity, upbringing) letting talent bloom and be rewarded. But how? People don’t choose their abilities. Take Nigel Kennedy’s talent with the violin. He didn’t choose to have that any more than he chose the colour of his eyes. Of course, we might want to distinguish between what he was born with and what he chose to do with it. We might say: Kennedy worked hard to develop his talent, and it’s his energy and determination that deserve praise and reward. But the difficulty here is how to know where one thing ends and another starts. Perhaps Kennedy’s determination to practice the violin was also a product of his upbringing or genes. If so then he was no more responsible for it than he was for his talent or the colour of his eyes. All this goes to show how difficult it is to pick out what, exactly, we mean by merit and desert. That takes us to the heart of the question: the nature of just rewards.

JUSTICE FOR ALL?

Justice is about the business of costs and benefits, rewards and burdens – what one ought to do, what it would be fair to expect. The following principle, which goes back to Aristotle, is a common starting point: individuals ought to be treated in the same way unless there is a relevant difference between them. So if two people are to be given a slice of cake, each of them ought to get a piece the same size. But suppose one of them is already well fed while the other is malnourished; then one of them needs it more, and so would benefit more from a larger helping. Justice sometimes involves treating people differently, on account of their different circumstances and needs. And this takes us back to merit. For the meritocrat is introducing another ‘relevant difference’ as justification for unequal shares: the principle of deservingness. But what we have also seen is that (1) New Labour’s preferred method for rewarding desert is likely to entrench undeserved privilege; (2) ‘merit’ in this context has a highly restricted meaning and (3) the concept of desert itself is a highly problematic one.

The defenders of the current system of reward seem to be on stronger ground when they cite efficiency rather than merit as their justification. They argue that the free market delivers greater overall prosperity through an unequal distribution of rewards. So perhaps this is the best of all possible systems. But even this can be questioned. First, it is not immediately obvious that if this were the most efficient system, it is the one we ought to have: ‘efficient’ doesn’t mean ‘right’. Second, it may not be true that this is the most effective approach to harnessing talent in the pursuit of prosperity, as inequality tends to bury talent and human worth. Lastly, it’s clear that the often staggering rewards that some receive aren’t genuinely tied to performance. To take one example: in 2001 Britain’s top executives received an average 28% pay increase (six times the national average) although profits fell by 11.5 %. The link between even ‘market merit’ and reward is a shaky one. In practice, the best way to ensure a good income is still to get oneself born into the family of a high earner. If New Labour really wants a fairer Britain it must go beyond the rhetoric of ‘meritocracy’ and start tackling structural inequalities. Or ‘class’, as we used to call it.

Originally published in Think 2004