Posts Tagged ‘neoliberalism’

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Comments on Polanyi’s assertions about the failure of the 19th Century economy

March 17, 2024

Quotes from The Great Transformation

The economist and political theorist Karl Polanyi argued that 19th century society failed because of “the measures which [it] adopted in order not to be… annihilated by the action of the self-regulating market.” This ‘free market’ conflicted with “the elementary requirements of an organized social life” and produced the “strains and stresses which ultimately destroyed that society” (257). Capitalist markets are destructive of life and freedom even if they are constructive in other ways.

The problem arose from organising the economy on the principles of self-interest. As Polanyi points out “Such an organization of economic life is entirely unnatural, in the strictly empirical sense of exceptional.” It tried to naturalise its oddness, by claiming that all contrary behavior was “the result of outside interference” (257).

However, while self-interest exists, it is not the only principle of human action. There are also factors going beyond the calculating little self, like co-operation, compassion, charity, generosity and so on, all of which are needed for a satisfying life. Perhaps reduction to this simplicity comes from a market which expects it and destroys satisfaction in order to persuade people to consume what is unneeded.

More to the point, these so called “free markets” are also engineered by force:

Economic history reveals that the emergence of national markets was in no way the result of the gradual and spontaneous emancipation of the economic sphere from governmental control. On the contrary, the market has been the outcome of a conscious and often violent intervention on the part of government [or business] which imposed the market organization on society for noneconomic ends. (258)

Moreover, the supposed separation of politics and economic, which has never happened, served political purposes, to produce freedom foe some “at the cost of justice and security” and liberty for most other people who were condemned by riches, and kept in powerlessness. It was not a political decision to keep them dependent on ‘their betters’ for survival and to pay them low wages, it was what the impersonal economy demanded. Yet it may be worth preserving the ideas of “moral freedom and independence of mind” for all, not just the dominant class. It is that freedom, when used from the point of view of those suppressed by the economy, that suggests the economy does not deliver what it promises. As we see today, markets do not always deliver liberty and prosperity for all, they may even deliver authoritarianism (as discussed in the next part of this blog).

The shifting of industrial civilization onto a new nonmarketing basis seems to many a task too desperate to contemplate. “They fear an institutional vacuum or, even worse, the loss of freedom. Need these perils prevail?” (258).

As Polanyi points out, this current market is already permeated by loss of freedom for most people, employment with unlivable wages, economic crashes, profiteering, inability to act because of lack of money or leisure etc. The market was curtailed for a while after WWII, but came back in the 1970s to 80s. Now we have the additions of climate change, ecological destruction and plutocracy. Not doing something may be a greater danger.

The removal of corporately controlled ‘free markets’ will not be the end of markets, trade and exchange flourished long before capitalism and wage labour, but it could be the end of treating people and land as commodities controlled by the market, able to be dismissed cheaply or destroyed for profit.

With a new economy, freedom might not be as constrained by market forces.

The current corporate free market market not only seems unnatural and suppressive of humanity, but is kept going by force. It is becoming less easy to keep going by force the more that ecologies ‘fight back’ against their destruction and produce conditions under which those markets, and market societies, likely cannot exist in a vaguely satisfactory way.

However, the danger is that people may attempt to resolve (not solve) these challenges by a resurgence of authoritarianism, which suppresses people and awareness of the real issues, while favouring the Party and the rich elites. In short, we are threatened by a fascism which will make the situation worse.

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Neoliberalism: its knowledge and free markets are weak

March 15, 2024

Neoliberalism is not just an economic theory but a cosmology, and a political/ethical way of understanding humans and the universe. As such, it is extremely limited, and hence surprisingly weak in some ways.

Neoliberalism attempts to govern complexity and emergence by only attending to markets. It possibly rightly warns of the dangers of government planning and of concentrated government power, as (due to complexity) no government planning can be based on a total understanding of the world system (or ‘Gaia’), and governmental power can interrupt and disrupt beneficial processes. It tends to see all government action on behalf of ‘the majority of the people’ (such as livable minimum wages, social security etc) as leading to totalitarianism. Neoliberalism supports its position by suggesting that the market acts as both an information system and as a responsive system generating spontaneous and beneficial order. As such it tends to argue that markets can solve all problems, and that governments are necessarily sources of disruption, corruption and inefficiency, and should do little beyond supporting the market, enforcing contracts and providing military defence.

In order to make these claims neoliberalism ignores some important factors. It ignores the effects of corporate power and planning and riches, by assuming that rich people and organisations will not ally and plan together, organise to structure markets in their favour, or have enough power to affect the system. It denies that the power of riches could be as disruptive and ignorant as the power of government. It also does not appear to consider that attending to price systems as information systems emphasises price signals, profit and the power of others to disrupt profit, while suppressing or distracting people from other vital information. It lives within self-produced disinformation. It also downplays the possibility neoliberal corporately bought governments may be encouraged by market participants to support established markets and market players and throttle emergent or necessary change or correction.

In other words neoliberalism may well cut itself off from information vital to its sustainability, and interfere with systemic processes to disrupt its survival. It also seems to ignore the idea that Gaia is relevant to economies, and propose that markets have no limits which they should refrain from disrupting. Neoliberalism encourages a politics of unboundedness, which is not currently founded on fact. Neoliberals largely ignore climate change and ecological destruction, although they would acknowledge them as price signals. Limits are only known as far as they affect profits, and that might encourage (or not hinder) destructive practices to maintain profits.

Discussing neoliberalism’s success as a cosmology and method of preserving corporate power from challenges may give the impression that it is a system of total control. Neoliberalism may be a system which encourages a type of total control that reduces every possibility to some form of profit or capitalist organisation and evaluation. There is also the possibility of its followers using some kind of corporate fascism (as capitalists did in the 1920s and 30s) to maintain stability, but complexity means that control cannot be total, or feel total – it is distributed. Neoliberals my try so hard because they always fail to make everything capitalist.

Neoliberalism is vulnerable to its own success in removing visible opposition, the lack of perception it encourages, the interstitial gaps it produces and cannot recognise, and the resistance it generates. If many of the rich elites are concerned with escaping from the world crisis as suggested by Bourdieu and Rushkoff, then that is an indication they have no solutions they have any faith in, and hence that their weakness is growing.

There is also the possibility that some of the harmful effects of neoliberalism such as growing inequalities, massive ecological destruction and climate change are unintended consequences of its practices, rather than the product of deliberate evil (Keen #)[j1] . This possibility might also change the way we approach it.

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What economic theory needs to realise?

March 6, 2024

A kind of sequel to the previous post about free markets and politics.

A realistic economic theory needs to recognize that:

Politics

  • ‘The Market’ is never separate from politics. Riches gives power so, to survive as a free and open market, the economy needs power relations to be equalized (especially across generations) and equitable access to power available to all.
  • It is standard for the rich to team up to protect and increase their riches. The rich want power and buying it is easy in a society that values ‘The Market’ beyond anything else, as everything is up for sale. It would be seem to be immoral not to make a profit when its offered. Standard market theory recognizes that poorer people can team up against the rich, and does everything it can to stop it, but does nothing to stop the rich teaming up against the poorer – or even hails it as good business practice.
  • The rich tend to pollute more, and often attempt to make sure that pollution gets dumped on poorer and less powerful people. This is the real meaning of the trickle down economy.

Psychology and information

  • People are co-operative as well as competitive. Market theory needs to recognize that actually functioning markets involve co-operation, collaboration and competition, and that models based on entirely ‘selfish’ individual actions are unreal. Social psychologies are complex.
  • Price systems are not perfect information processors, because market practice includes distorting information, PR, advertising, faking prices, collusion, internal trading, wiping out small competitors by price cutting, becoming monopolies or oligopolies, profit gouging, overriding local information, and so on – all of which distort the price system, until it is too late and a crash of some kind occurs. Markets operate in unreal and fantasy spaces as much as in real spaces.
  • Markets are reflexive. What people believe about the market and how the market works, may change their behaviour and therefore change the market. Economists are much more likely to be driven by ‘selfishness’ than non-economists who have a more complicated view of human nature. The same is likely to be true of business people, who believe this idea. Hence control over information is important to market activity.
  • Maximal profit seeking does not conserve traditions, stability or anything else (it is anti-conservative), and does not encourage ‘virtue’. It even invents religions who proclaim that God allocates wealth to good people, and that if you are not rich, you are not virtuous. The market is likely to continually undermine its moral legitimacy. More importantly, encouraging only the one value, motivation and form of organisation, can lead to lack of variety in response and hence lack of resilience.
  • In current riches-structured markets, corporate power can ignore information about say climate change, with the apparent exception of insurance corps who recognize the growing problem that past data on disasters is no longer of use to calculate their risks. In this market bent by power and propaganda, it seems really good strategy for fossil fuel companies to continue to sell their products and massively profit, while they still can, despite the harms it will bring for others or for the market in general. They hope that riches will protect them as other people die. And its profitable for politicians to go along with this, and to fear what the corporations will do to them, if they act. Ideologues can even dismiss business concerns about survival as being woke capitalism.

Complexity

  • Economies are complex systems that interact with complex social, psychological, ecological, energy, and technological systems, amongst other systems. As such, markets are inherently unstable subject to unpredictable changes – equilibrium may be rare. Markets crashes occur even if all actors are perfectly selfish and rational because markets require actors to make predictions in an unpredictable situation with bad information.
  • Complex systems have patterns which arise despite the intentions or workings of the participants. Thus market workings cannot be completely derived from ‘economic man’ even if it was an accurate idea. ‘Economic man’ is as likely to arise from the system as vice versa.

Ecology

  • A functional market requires a functional ecology. Markets operate within ecologies. Ecologies are not completely submissive to market demands. Ecologies can change because markets alter or destroy them.
  • Markets and manufacture involve waste, pollution and extraction. These necessary processes to particular forms of market organisation, can be harmful to the market as they can destroy the ecology the market depends upon. Markets are systems of destruction as much as they are systems of production.
  • Markets cannot expand forever on a finite planet. We are already over consuming our resources faster than they regenerate, which will lead to a crash, because of lack of water or other essential supplies. We cannot assume useful innovation will certainly happen.

Innovation

  • Markets like other complex systems have emergent properties and they can be considered creative.
  • Innovations and product substitutions may not be possible, no matter how useful, or how much the price system signals that it would be a good idea.
  • Innovations may not arrive in time, in a form which is useable, at a price which makes them useable, in a form which is acceptable to both the dominant elites or the economic system, and they may have destructive effects which undermine their use.
  • Markets cannot solve every problem or challenge that can arise, because some problems may be wholly or partly generated by markets, such as climate change.
  • Emergence does not have to harmonise with what the market would like. Emergent processes can destroy essential properties of the market.

Energy

  • Markets require energy and energy sources. With declining energy, then in general, but not always, less can be done. Systems will likely collapse without a change in organisation or organisers. With more energy more can be done and more can be disrupted or destroyed.
  • Energy availability is usually structured by riches. The rich use more energy not only in their work lives but in their personal lives.
  • The basic form of energy for markets is human labour, or labour power. However, this can eventually become far less important than other sources of energy, and these other sources can become directed by machines. The economy can destroy the need for much human labour. A question is whether labour providers then starve or not.
  • The main sources of effectively unlimited energy are the Sun, nuclear forces, earth processes (such as wind, tidal power, and thermal gradients).
  • The presence of entropy (energy dispersion) and physical entropy (pollution and costs of maintenance and repair), cannot be ignored in a real economic model..

All of this may be difficult, but having easy but fundamentally inaccurate theories, which leave out vital parts of economic dynamics, will not give useful results, and may hinder necessary transformation.

Finally

Non-revolutionary approaches to the free market, are basically plans to reinforce power and wealth inequalities and stop most people from improving their lives. Forty plus years of neoliberal talk and legislation for ‘free markets’, should show the truth of this.

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Free market theory

March 5, 2024

Ok I keep writing similar things 🙂 but the variations might be useful.

The obvious first point is that capitalism does not allow a ‘free market.’ Free markets will always be prevented by the entrenched power and the patterns of behavior of those who benefit from the current market arrangement including: the corporate class, the hyper-rich, their networks of think tanks and their bought, or hopeful to be bought, political supporters.

Markets are always about politics. Even markets of ‘gift exchange’ tend to be about establishing alliances, relationships, obligation, dominance etc. which involves and manifests politics. Gift exchange economies have the advantage that the tend not to build up class systems, they are more ‘immediate’ and status cannot be inherited, and most people can participate in them if they want.

If a free market could exist, it would undermine itself politically. Such markets inevitably lead to plutocracy and to constant demands for ‘the people’ to subjugate themselves to bosses. The more talk of free markets, the more plutocracy, and the more markets are structured to favour those who are already a success and their children.

If a person really wanted free markets then there seem, in general, to be two ways of getting them. One is the Revolutionary way and one we might call the Neoliberal way

The revolutionary way to get a free market is to abolish and overthrow the currently existing market completely, as it is a market established, designed and built for the rich and their networks of exclusion – and it does not work to deliver general liberty, openness, equal opportunity, efficiency or prosperity.

This revolutionary approach would first get rid of huge accumulations of ‘private property’ and its power, as property is often stolen from original inhabitants and ordinary people. That property should be made common. Perhaps people could be allocated roughly equivalent housing and other essential property and start again more equally with a more level playing field with open access. This would help get rid of the wealth inequalities which would then get rid of the rich’s ability to buy markets, politicians and information. People would need to make it so the wealthy cannot structure the market to suit them and to stop a massively unequal accumulation of riches from ever happening again and destroying free and open markets through modes of inheritance and accumulation. People would need to remove all state subsidies for wealth and corporate pollution, although allowing equitable social insurance so everyone has some levels of protection against misfortune, fraud, and the capitalist boom and bust syndrome. You would also need to try and destroy the rich’s networks for ‘self-help’ and mutual backscratching, so people can operate according to their abilities rather than to who they know. And so on.

Libertarians will never take a revolutionary approach, because libertarianism is about protecting the liberty of the wealthy, protecting rich people from other people and from the State. Nothing more than that.

The Neoliberal (conservative political party) way is to protect all the inequalities, and roll back the State from helping anyone who is not rich. It aims to stop the State from protecting people though environmental or anti-pollution regulation, eliminating fraud, legislating minimum wages, minimum protections at work, social security and welfare and so on. They officially say this will increase liberty but it clearly won’t – it will just free the corporate sector to do what it likes to you, and make you more desperate to sell your life to a job.

Libertarians generally support this Republican approach, which increases the power of the rich.

The next post looks at some of what a realistic theory of economics needs to consider

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Continuing the points: systems of ‘physical entropy’:

February 18, 2024

Physical Entropy

  • Living systems take energy from outside their own fuzzy boundaries in the form of sunlight and/or food.
  • The boundaries are fuzzy, because the living system would not exist without the food and sunlight. They use this energy to build, repair and develop themselves.
  • In this building, repairing and developing, living systems turn energy sources into waste, in the form of excreta: gasses, liquids and ‘solids’.
  • In a coherently evolved system this ‘waste’ then acts as food for other beings (plants, insects, worms, etc). The waste does not accumulate, poison or overwhelm the system as a whole, but is ‘recycled’ as part of the Gaia system.
  • Eventually most living systems either change through processes of evolution, start to run down, or can no longer extract enough energy to keep their processes completely functional. They wear out and die – assuming that they do not die by accident or through feeding some other being. As they wear down the chances of accident increase – they can avoid fewer accidents or recover from them as well as previously.
  • We can call this process, after it starts, “physical entropy” to distinguish it from normal entropy which is the dispersion of energy, into non-usable forms (usually as heat).

Social generation of Physical Entropy

  • All social systems, like all other systems, generate entropy or energy dispersion. This what they do. As long as the Sun keeps going this is not a problem for Gaia as a whole, although systems which use non-renewable energy may face considerable challenge.
  • ‘Physical entropy’ likewise happens normally, but can also be generated by economic and social systems, to a degree which overwhelms these social and economic processes.
  • Sometimes this may arise from the system slowly suiciding, although the system may be able to responsively change and adapt, and not suicide (as argued in the Toynbee cycle [1]).
  • This blog considers social generation of ‘illth,’ the term John Ruskin developed for the generally ignored (by the elites), but socially generated forms of harm which manifest as increasing physical entropy. Illth is the opposite of wealth. Ruskin appears to argue that true wealth is collective.
  • The blog recognises Illth as arising from the following processes. There may be more.
    • Pollution: when materials are released into the ecologies, which are poisonous or non-reprocessable by those ecologies. It is contrasted to recyclable ‘waste.’
    • Dispersion: when essential materials are dispersed into the ecology, and require too much energy to be able to recompile. Contemporary Marxists talk about this as the ‘metabolic rift’.
    • Destructive extraction: when the process of gathering essential materials destroys or poisons ecologies, faster than they can regenerate, or makes regeneration impossible in a humanly ‘reasonable time frame’.
    • Harmful production: when the process and products of economic action hurt beings.
      This includes harmful labour and work which poisons people, causes them to develop occupational or consumerist illnesses, distracts them from challenges, hurts their modes of being and thinking, and so on.
    • Expansion – involves a society or a social process growing beyond the ability of the ecology, or the extraction system (etc) to support it. Expansion can also involve military force aiming to get new ‘resources’. Any social feature which demands increasing ‘growth’ is going to lead to crisis in a finite bounded system, possibly fairly quickly. Estimates show that we already ‘overshoot’ or consume more in a year than the planet can produce in a year. This should show that continual growth is no longer an option. In 2023 we consumed Earth’s production by the 2 August. In 1971 we consumed it by nearly the end of December, so the increase of destruction is marked. We are already highly indebted with a lowering income.
      • [I don’t know if this is correct or not, but these figures result from using the exponential growth calculator. Let us assume that we currently consume 1 earth per year and are just about balanced. Let us also assume that we grow at 2% per year. That’s pretty small by capitalist standards, probably bad for business. In just 100 years (assuming this would be possible without interruption or collapse), we end up consuming 7.2 Earths per year. That is clearly not ‘sustainable’. Continuing expansion is destructive]
  • Physical entropy can be ‘natural’ and the system slowly evolves to a new equilibrium (attractor point).

Power Relations and Physical Entropy.

  • As shown, in social systems, physical entropy can be generated by unconsidered social processes, or through elites ignoring both the entropic challenges which are arising and the energy needs for repair. They presumably are worrying about other things, or severely implicated in producing the entropy to maintain their status or power, and worry about other things to keep themselves from worrying about their own self-destructiveness.
  • Social entropy often involves power relations, or the ability to keep on generating illth processes, against opposition, or evidence of impending collapse.
    • Power relations allow pollution to be usually dumped on the relatively poor and powerless.
      Elites think they will be immune.
    • Power relations and technologies allow elites to consider that dispersion of materials will be overcome by economic need and economic processes.
    • Power relations allow people and other beings to be dispossessed from their land or water (or even killed), and for that ecology to be destroyed. The inhabitants and users are ignored, while the elites consider themselves immune.
    • Harmful production: the elites consider themselves immune from harming others, and are able to make people work in harmful labour.
    • Power relations make expansion continue, because it is thought be elites to be essential, and it gives the less powerful some hope of sharing in social wealth.
  • The more energy is dispersed and systems start to break down (perhaps because of power relations) the more vulnerable the system becomes to accident overtaking the ability to repair, especially with cumulative accidents, such as wild weather events coming one after the other. Hence the system is also likely to collapse, unless this challenge is dealt with. For example, the Lismore floods reached 11.6m in march 2017. Repairs were not complete before the record floods of 2022 when the flood level reached 14.4m. Lismore today is still full of damaged and unusable buildings (personal observation), and obviously there is some lack of human energy, because we don’t know how long it will be before the town and surrounds seriously floods again.

Capitalism, Developmentalism and power

  • Capitalism and developmentalism, especially their neoliberal forms, can be considered as a systems of: power relations, exchange, production, and illth generation.
  • Many other systems are systems of production and exchange which are not remotely capitalist – unless you are willing to define capitalism so generally that even a working communism would count as capitalism.
  • Many other economic systems can generate illth production. Overthrowing capitalism may not be either necessary or enough to stop illth. We are simply referring to the obvious present.
  • Neoliberal Capitalism and developmentalism (and state communism if you wish) seem patterned by their illth production and the power relations that allow this to continue.
  • As cleaning up, not polluting, not dispersing, not destroying etc, cost companies money, and therefore subtract from profit, capitalist organisations will make non-destructive behaviour secondary and consider illth to be an externality which is no concern of theirs, unless they are compelled to prevent it by regulations and legislation. Pro-corporate politicians will often try and remove any restrictions on pollution as part of their service to profitable polluters and destroyers.
  • Power relations and normal capitalist processes of advertising, PR, hype, marketing, misdirection, etc, also corrupt the production and distribution of information, and disempower movements against illth. Workers do not have the knowledge to act and face the dangers or asking. For example: Exxon knew about climate change and denied it to maintain sales and profit [1]. [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8].

Not Suiciding by Physical Entropy

Not suiciding or system continuance, requires, at a minimum:

  • 1) System repair: Systems that are wearing out, need repair or replacement. Repair or replacement need available energy, money, ‘resources’ and organisation.
  • 2) Maintaining renewable resources: Renewable resources (including oxygen production), should not be used, or destroyed, faster, than they can regenerate.
  • 3) Replacement of non renewable resources: non-renewable resources should be replaced by renewable ones, wherever possible.
  • 4) Fewer physical entropy and illth generating actions: Only production of recyclable waste and less pollution, less dispersion, less destructive extraction, less harmful labour.
  • 5) Careful waste production: no waste should be produced faster than it can be recycled or re-processed. Obviously that includes CO2 and other Greenhouse gases.
  • 6) Recovering awareness: Less unconsciousness of the social and economic destruction of systems that support continuance – ecologies, other people and so on.
  • 7) Better information sources, that are independent of corporations and governments.

These are all relatively obvious, sensible and logical processes, hence they have been avoided for 50 or so years. We cannot assume that sense and logic is persuasive to the elites or the populace.

The next blog speaks more directly to solutions.

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Economics and climate: Another defense mechanism? 02

November 6, 2023

Common economic models of Climate Change

Apparently the Economic models used to predict the damage of climate change are totally unreal. They essentially do not even start to recognise that economies depend upon working ecologies and fairly stable weather patterns. They do not realise that modes of production can be modes of destruction, or that the (dis)information systems cultivated by business can also disrupt understanding of the economy, leading to booms, busts and bailouts. Any model which assumes economic stability, and lack of self-disruption, is not an accurate model of an economy.

William Nordhaus apparently put together the basic types of climate economy models which are used by financial organisations, the US EPA and the IPCC. These are known as ‘Dynamic Integrated Climate Economy’ (DICE) models. The IPCC calls its similar models ‘Integrated Assesment Models’ (IAM).

The prime conclusion from these models is that social and economic adaptation to climate change is pretty cheap. Nordhaus predicted “damage of 2.1 percent of income at 3◦C, and 7.9 percent of global income at a global temperature rise of 6◦C”.

At this price, it may be so cheap that it is not really worth cutting back emissions, or doing anything that could potentially harm profits. He apparently even suggests that the global economy reaches an “optimal” adaptation with a temperature rise between 2.7 and 3.5 degrees Celsius. So that is what we should aim for…. much higher than climate scientists generally think is reasonable.

Apparent assumptions of the models

Nordhaus and others can only argue the lack of both severe costs and serious disruption at even 6 degrees, by assuming that:

  • Frictionless market adaptation can occur easily and that companies which are profitting from damage, will not try and delay change through political connections and information distortion so that people (in power and elsewhere) will not want to change. Resistance to change can accumulate and block change, until only violent and unpredictable change can occur,
  • Global temperature increases have no significant or disruptive outcomes, and that increases in temperatures produce smooth and linear changes in weather and ecology, as if the temperature increase only produced warming and did not have ‘side effects’ like increased storm damage, change in rainfall, increased frequency of fires, activation of trigger points, increased death rates in some parts of the world, and change in agricultural conditions.
  • Pollution and destructive extraction have no effect on the economy, are external to it, or can easily be avoided,
  • Energy supply can continue to grow and will not slow down the economy, and that,
  • GDP can continue to increase in an economy that is hitting planetary boundaries.

He also assumes that thereare no bad consequences from ‘just-in-time’ production and distribution which cuts down on storage costs, and has the capacity to reduce resilience in a disruption (supermarket shelves emptying in times of panic etc). If just-in-time can be abandoned, long term storage set up or local production engineered again, then maybe this would be a lesser problem, but it would drastically change patterns of cost.

Trivialising Damage from Climate Change

As Keen et al put it in their abstract:

Such relatively trivial estimates of economic damages—when these economists otherwise assume that human economic productivity will be an order of magnitude higher than today—contrast strongly with predictions made by scientists of significantly reduced human habitability from climate change.

Nonetheless, the coupled economic and climate models used to make such predictions have been influential in the international climate change debate and policy prescriptions

Keen et al 2021 Economists’ erroneous estimates of damages from climate change IDEAS Working Paper Series from RePEcrg

They continue. arguing that the models:

severely underestimate.. damages from climate change by committing several methodological errors, including neglecting tipping points, and assuming that economic sectors not exposed to the weather are insulated from climate change. Most fundamentally, the influential Integrated Assessment Model DICE is shown to be incapable of generating an economic collapse, regardless of the level of damages

ibid

Tipping points should be part of the models

Tipping points are part of current climate models and cannot be ignored in economic models of climate change. There is almost no likelihood of a completely smooth transition, and current predictions are that several tipping points will get started long before the end of the century and before the average temperature increases are greater than 2 degrees. It may be necessary to point out that completion of a tipping point may take years but will continue after it starts, so tipping points can start before they are noticed.

Keen et al point to the:

concept of “tipping cascades”, whereby passing a threshold for one system—say, a temperature above which the Greenland ice sheet irreversibly shrinks—triggers causal interactions that increase the likelihood that other tipping elements undergo qualitative transitions—in this example, freshwater input to the North Atlantic increases the risk of a collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC—also referred to as the ’thermohaline circulation’).

Such causal interactions can also be mediated by global temperature changes whereby tipping one system—e.g. the loss of Arctic summer sea-ice—amplifies global warming, increasing the likelihood that other other elements undergo a qualitative transition

ibid

The intial work by Nordhaus setting up the DICE denies the possibility of tipping points and cascades completely. According to Keen et al, Lenton et al:

calculated that including tipping points in Nordhaus’s own DICE model can increase the “Social Cost of Carbon” (by which optimal carbon pricing is calculated) by a factor of greater than eight [8], and proposed 2◦C as a critical level past which “tipping cascades” could occur [9,10,15]….

inclusion of tipping point likelihoods in DICE…. leads to much higher damages [8]

ibid

The economy is safe when indoors?

Using similar models to DICE, the 2014 IPCC report stated that “Estimates agree on the size of the impact (small relative to economic growth)” with a 2.3% increase in global income for a 1 degree C increase in global temperature over pre-industrial levels.

The Report summarised that:

For most economic sectors, the impact of climate change will be small relative to the impacts
of other drivers (medium evidence, high agreement). Changes in population, age, income,
technology, relative prices, lifestyle, regulation, governance, and many other aspects of
socioeconomic development will have an impact on the supply and demand of economic
goods and services that is large relative to the impact of climate change

Chapter 10 Key Economic Sectors and Services, p 662 In Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability. Part A: Global and Sectoral Aspects. Contribution of Working Group II to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

This unlikely assumption appears to be based on another bad assumption that:

  • by far the majority of economc action is independent of ‘weather’ events, ecological destruction and resources depletion.

That is, again, that this climate economics does not consider the world the economy occurs within. It also appears to assume that air cooling technology and energy supplies will be able to cope with the extra loads. Again the models ignore the economic consequences of “potential loss of lives and livelihoods on immense scale and fundamental transformation and destruction of our natural environment” (Stern et al 2022). Not to mention agricultural collapse. While Economists apparently don’t eat, most people would recognise that the total economy is errected upon food supplies, no matter how much else goes on. Stern writes that 6 degrees increase is unlikely to give losses of 8.5% of GDP, but:

we could see deaths on a huge scale, migration of billions of people, and severe conflicts around the world, as large areas, many densely populated currently, became more or less uninhabitable as a result of submersion, desertification, storm surge and extreme weather events, or because the heat was so intense for extended periods that humans could not survive outdoors. It is profoundly implausible that numbers around 10 percent of GDP offer a sensible description of the kind of disruption and catastrophe that 6 C of warming could cause.

Stern 2022 A Time for Action on Climate Change and a Time for Change in Economics , The Economic Journal, 132, 644: 1259–1289

Likewise:

Climate change (either regional or global) has played a role in the collapse or transformation of numerous previous societies (37) and in each of the five mass extinction events in Phanerozoic Earth history (38). The current carbon pulse is occurring at an unprecedented geological speed and, by the end of the century, may surpass thresholds that triggered previous mass extinctions (39, 40).

Kemp et al 2022 Climate Endgame: Exploring catastrophic climate change scenarios PNAS

Even if you could allocate calculated risk and danger factors for events that could completely change the system, that still does not mean that an estimate of a 1% chance of collapse means collapse cannot occur.

The orthodox economists, their models and the politicians who use them, seem completely unaware that complex systems can collapse, or change very rapidly, and they depend upon the idea that free markets can always beneficially adapt to almost anything without much cost.

Importance of noting extremes, disorder and uncertainty

Kemp et al 2022 suggest that investigating the “bad-to-worst cases is vital” for improving resilience, and informing policy and emergency responses. “

First, risk management and robust decision-making under uncertainty requires knowledge of extremes. For example, the minimax criterion ranks policies by their worst outcomes (28). Such an approach is particularly appropriate for areas characterized by high uncertainties and tail risks….. Climate damages lie within the realm of “deep uncertainty”: We don’t know the probabilities attached to different outcomes, the exact chain of cause and effect that will lead to outcomes, or even the range, timing, or desirability of outcomes, (30). Uncertainty, deep or not, should motivate precaution and vigilance, not complacency

They propose 4 main questions: all of which point to the importance of considering disorder and the production of lack of resilience.

  • 1) What is the potential for climate change to drive mass extinction events?
  • 2) What are the mechanisms that could result in human mass mortality and morbidity?
  • 3) What are human societies’ vulnerabilities to climate-triggered risk cascades, such as from conflict, political instability, and systemic financial risk?
  • 4) How can these multiple strands of evidence—together with other global dangers—be usefully synthesized into an “integrated catastrophe assessment”?

“even simpler ‘compound hazard’ analyses of interacting climate hazards and drivers are underused. Yet this is how risk[/danger] unfolds in the real world. For example, a cyclone destroys electrical infrastructure, leaving a population vulnerable to an ensuing deadly heat wave”. They further suggest that IPCC reports do not spend large amounts of space analysing what will happen at 3 degrees or above warming, and have indeed shifted over time to considering 2 degrees or less which might be fine if there was evidence we will reach that target. However, the culture of climate science tends “to ‘err on the side of least drama’ (7), to not to be alarmists, which can be compounded by the consensus building processes of the IPCC.

Political and economic instability, feeds into the dangers, as does a teetering energy system, heavy illth production, technological lock-in, failure to face challenges, and a harmful (dis)information system. These are all observable current problems.

What do the models do?

The Optimism of these models, and their framing of easy social change within an unstable environment, without political opposition from anyone, is absurd.

The models seem out of touch with what we know about earth systems and social systems, they can only be seen in terms of being a defense mechanism, ideologies useful for protecting the business and political system as it is now and which actively halt adaptation and prevention measures. They help convince people that doing nothing is ok, and nothing bad can happen.

However, eco-and-climate system change changes will almost certainly spill through other systems and change almost everything, including the current market’s ability to function, and the powerful people who use these models will not be prepared for it…. and hence neither will we. They are part of a collective suicide and refusal to face challenges, which might cost some people profit.

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Economics and climate: Another defense mechanism? 01

November 5, 2023

We know emissions are still rising.

We know that temperatures are increasing faster than expected. We have just had several months in which global average temperatures were over 1.5 degrees warmer….

We know governments such as those of Australia, the UK, the USA etc are still authorising new fossil fuel fields that can be described as “carbon bombs” that will either lock us into even greater emissions, or be abandoned at a huge loss to fossil fuel companies – no prizes for guessing which is most likely.

We know that it does not matter which country the fossil fuels are burnt, whatever governments argue about measurements of emissions, the burning will increase climate change for everyone.

We know that this increase is likely to lead to tipping points being triggered (such as runaway ice melts, Amazon forests dying, oceans dying, release of methane from under land and sea ice), which are likely to trigger even more tipping points, leading to irreversible ecological and climate change.

These events are likely to trigger agricultural collapse in at least some parts of the world, which could lead to mass human death, and human population movement.

In other words, while the best solution is to install governments that will listen to scientists and to the signs of collapse, the most likely result is that we will break the 1.5 degree limit.

One of the apparent tools to allow this emissions increase is economic models.

Economics

John Stuart Mill explicitly excluded a large number of human and social factors from economic analysis, in order to make it simple. In somewhat convoluted terms (skip if its too much of a headache) he wrote:

“Political Economy” …. does not treat the whole of man’s nature as modified by the social state, nor of the whole conduct of man in society. It is concerned with him solely as a being who desires to possess wealth, and who is capable of judging of the comparative efficacy of means of obtaining that end…

Political Economy considers mankind as occupied solely in acquiring and consuming wealth; and aims at showing what is the course of action into which mankind, living in a state of society, would be impelled, if that motive, except in the degree in which it is checked by the two perpetual countermoves above adverted to [aversion to labour, and desire of the present enjoyment of costly indulgences,] were the absolute ruler of all their actions….

With respect to those parts of human conduct of which wealth is not even the principal object, to these Political Economy does not pretend that its conclusions are applicable. But there are also certain departments of human affairs, in which the acquisition of wealth is the main and acknowledged end. It is only of these that Political Economy takes notice….

Not that any political economist was ever so absurd as to suppose that mankind are really thus constituted, but because this is the mode in which science must necessarily proceed.

Mill On the Definition of Political Economy and Method of Investigation Proper to It

He admits to massively simplifying human psychological complexity. He also simplified other matters, but the problem is that on the whole, most neoclassical neoliberal economics, ignores vital factors of life and forgets they are doing it, making their economics the whole of life.

Mill admits to his economics ignoring the psychology of markets, the ways we engage in self destruction, fantasy, self-justification for harms and scapegoat others. He ignores the ways that markets and information might shape our psycologies in ways which sabotage our ability to take action on the challenges facing us, and even to use economics to distract us from real problems.

It ignores the way economic action is part of politics. Markets are also structured by power and politics, and power and politics structure markets. It ignores the fact that inequalities of wealth lead to inequalities of action and influence, and that inequalities of wealth can reinforce those inequalities through the State its laws, regulations and procedures. Established economics will tend to support established political and riches arrangements, as those forms of economics will receive the awards, the funding and promotion.

It ignores the effects of economic action on the ecology and climate, and the effects of climate and ecology on economic action. The pricing mechanism is supposed to mean that if prices go up, then people change their usages, or are stimulated to produce more. It does not assume that ecological effects can link together, or be suppressed by politics until they cascade or hit like a tidal wave. It ignores the politics and ecological ‘side effects’ of the struggle for resources. Economics is locked into viewing ecology as passive and endlessly giving – if something dies off somewhere, the same can be produced elsewhere. Economists can even argue that because agricultural production is a small fraction of the gdp (<4%) it is largely unimportant, while most people can figure out that without that production the rest of the contemporary world economy would crash.

It ignores the effects of illth (pollution, dispersion, destructive extraction and harmful labour), rendering them externalities that do not have an effect on the economy or life. Essentially this leaves it to taxpayers to clean up the mess produced by business, and helps boost profit from destruction and the loss of vital materials. Economics ignores harms produced by its actions, as it tends to be about justifying riches and producing more riches.

It ignores the effects of technology and technological lock-in, other than through magical claims that needed technology will always appear through the market. Economics only considers technology beneficial if it makes money.

It ignores the importance of information systems for economies, and how those can be ‘corrupted’ or ‘distorted’ by politics, riches or over-plenty, so that the economy is functioning only at a level of fantasy, (and that the economics used to describe that action is also a consoling fantasy). Economics ignores the ways economic propaganda can create harms and fantasies to boost the wealth of people making the sales. This is because one of its fundamental assumptions is that only good information counts, every one has access to good information, or that the price system acts as a perfect information processor. Economics assumes that error is not normal, and that people will not buy rubbish like collateralized debt obligations, which will lead to economic harm.

Finally it assumes energy production is simple, and continuous with no harms or limits, dependent largely on money (which stores psychological energy to an extent), so that economies can grow forever. Economies can supposedly violate the laws of thermodynamics with ease.

There are undoubtedly other issues that mainstream economics dismisses or hides which are important.

It should be clear that by ignoring these factors economic models go about hiding the challenges of climate change and eco-destruction, and that is the subject of the next page.

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Science and climate denial a dialogue

October 1, 2023
  • The claims of anthropogenic climate change are fraught with outlandish claims that never materialize, most likely due to narrative pushing and a desire to instill fear, to effect political control…

The claims may be outlandish, but they are also real, even if you are not hearing the realities. We are having ‘unprecidented’ temperatures, runs of high temperatures, wild fires, floods, ocean warming etc, all over the world. In many cases the damage already seems to be exceeding our capacity to repair, and people are being left homeless and farms have been close to destruction. However the MSM rarely bother to report this. If we are going to be allowed to make explanatory political hypiotheses, this may be because they want to reasure people so that the establishment can maintain its political and priofitable control, rather than risk everything in the uncertainty of major change.

  • Only the truly insane would claim that climate doesn’t change

People do claim climate is not changing now, or that the change is out of our hands. Some claim it is too late to do anything. However, the claim that climate changes all the time, is a deliberate minimalisation. The current climate seems to be changing rapidly, and permanently, by normal geological standards. The rapidity of change increases climate and weather destablisation, and this makes a considerable difference to the ability of creatures and civilisations to adapt, and the system to revert to previous normal. That is why scientists are talking about a possible “6th great extinction”. World-wide extinction on the scale we seem to be heading towards is unsual to put it mildly. That’s why we only recognise 5 previous such events.

  • The question is ultimately “how will climate change affect us”?

Yes, and the evidence suggests badly. Secure stable placed civilisation expects repetative conditions so as to adapt. When destabilisation occurs that does not happen. We need to stop disrupting the climate, so it can settle down.

  • Are we headed into “hot climate” or “cold climate”? As far as I can tell, the science and observational data show strong evidence that this current interglacial period is about to end, and we will see a return of ice-age (increasing polar ice caps) conditions.

You are possibly right. Some people have argued (particularly in the 1970s) that the world should be heading towards an increasingly cold period, but we are not. No current data implies that. Temperatures are steadily rising. Glaciers and ice sheets are melting and declining. There is no evidence to suggest that a new ice age will happen anymore. If the ‘natural’ cycle was heading towards an ice age, it has been broken by increasing Greenhouse gas emissions. I don’t know of anyone in the climate sphere who is arguing that a new ice age is now likely. That was a hypothesis which has been abandoned. Although this hypothesis is often brought up to discredit scientists by showing they change their minds. Which we might hope would be the case when theories are not born out by evidence.

  • Science theory MUST be reviewed against actual observational data. When observations fail to support a theory, we should assume a problem with the theory, and look deeper at the assumptions made. This is actually how scientific divides are closed. The end result should be either the abandonment of a false assumption, or improvements to the theory to achieve more realistic results.

Absolutely correct. The theory of climate change must be checked against observational data all the time. As you say that is basic to science. This observation has led to a considerably better understanding of the global climate system. For example, few people expected that the Oceans could absorb so much heat, so we now understand the ‘slow down’ in expected temperature rises. This is now back to expectations..

If the data was not matching expectations there would be a lot of relieved and excited scientists. Relieved becauset their observations would tell them we are not headed for eco-disaster (because of lack of approprate action by governments and corporations), and excited because their theories need to develop and there would be massive new research and publication opportunities. They might also be delighted that they don’t have to face interminable attacks for proposing that we are in danger.

  • Climate science is not open to refutatory evidence, as can be seen by the way they dismiss objectors to the consenus.

My problem here is that the anti-climate change people in general do not seem to proceed by scientific method. Every prediction that I’ve seen them make, such as temperatures would return to normal, reef bleaching would stop rather than spread, has proven false so far. However there is no change in their ‘theory’ or rather assertions. Indeed they keep bringing points back which have been falsified repeatedly. I have never seen a climate change skeptick give an outline of the progress of skeptical science, explaining why they have been wrong, and how they have modified their theories. Not saying it does not exist, but I’ve never seen it. Whereas I see that in Climate science quite regularly.

When observations fail to support a set of assertions, like the propositions that climate change is no big deal, we should assume a problem with the assertions, and look deeper at the assumption that everything is fine. This is actually how scientific divides are closed, if everyone is playing by idea of being as accurate as possible about the world. If they are playing, a different game, such as maximising profit, there is nothing much can be done about resolving an argument. Ideally the end result should be either the abandonment of a false assumption, or improvements to the theory to achieve more realistic results, but that is rarely seen in climate denial.

Its easier to generate bullshit than argue for truth, because there need be no consistency.

Even the most highly regarded scientific theory may be falsified with observational data, or it may appear to be continuingly fruitful as with climate change theory and observation. But anti-clinate change does not care about falisification. It’s not about Truth but protecting the establishment from its own destructiveness..

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“Cuddly History”

September 19, 2023

Cuddly history is a history that is comforting and unreal.

It aims to tell its readers or hearers, that they and their ancestors and their nation never did anything terribly wrong, disreputable, cruel or which had long-term or unintended conequences.

It often invokes moral relativism: “Oh in those days it didn’t count” or “it couldn’t have happened anyway” or “It dosn’t matter what happened then, because we are all equal now.” “‘left wing’ history is just stirring up trouble”,

The cuddly version reeassures people that they can’t be being bad when they continue to treat people badly.

Its a way of removing all discomfort. Especially the discomfort of awareness….

Examples

“Colonialism had no ill effects on indigenous people, and indeed improved life for all them in the long term.” This is usually stated if any one mentions the death rate of colonisation. Because of this, no one needs to talk about the present day in which indigenous people generally live in poverty, and have their lands (should they still have them), stripped away and given to miners, or get imprisoned regularly.

“They would have been worse off if it wasn’t for us” A variation on the first point, they should really be thanking us for massacring them, taking their land and often their children.

“If people died out, then it was because they were inferior, and could not accept our superior culture. They were weak. We tried, but sadly could not keep them alive.”

In Australia: “We never had slavery, they worked because they liked being in chains and it was good for them. It gave them discipline, and strutured time, all essential for civilisation. It was a minor issue anyway, and they heard the Gospel, and its over now.”

In the USA: “Slaves were treated as members of the family, and learnt a lot from us that they would never have learnt otherwise, like agriculture…..”

“Slavery was not our fault, it was the fault of those Africans and Muslims who sold their country men and women”.

“We are all equal now, and blacks just whinge and won’t get off their arses. There’s no racism any more. It’s the best of all possible worlds”

“People should become happy workers like we are, its the best system and never did anyone any harm”

“The Market is a beautiful scheme which produces balance and prosperity. Allegations that it also brought murder and dispossession, are communist fantasies. Capitalists have no interest in harming anyone. All the conditions and prosperity that workers have, was given to them freely by their masters. They certainly never needed to fight for it. Capitalism was brought by God.”

“Nazis were left wing” This is often said by the same people welcoming Nazis to Trump rallies

“Women enjoyed being raped and threatened at the time….. Its just a bit of fun…”

“‘All men’ are not responsible for women’s experience of oppression, so leave all men alone. Any bad situatuation was brought on themselves by women who crave strong men, or as part of the necessary protection of women from ???? men..,.” “It was a bit rough in them days, but women were respected and protected – if they were good and obedient.” “Rape in marriage is impossible by definition.”

During the recent debates on abortion in the US, some (and I emphasise some) Republicans where arguing that there did not need to be an exception allowing abortion in cases of rape, because women could only get pregnant if they enjoyed it – otherwise their reproductive mechanisms would just shut down. Unwanted pregnancy is always the sinful woman’s fault.”

“We were invaded too. Never harmed us. Should we demand recompense from the Vikings and the Romans? There are far worse people than us, and we got over it.”

Conclusion

Our group is always good and virtuous. We did the right thing, and if anyone suffered it was their own fault, and inability to change, due to adherence to savage traditions.

We decalre that everything is ok now (no racism or sexism), so every thing was ok then.

I feel so good knowing this, and don’t have to listen to anything else…..

Its sooo cuddly warm and comfy

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Project 2025

September 8, 2023

We have had 40 years of neoliberalism. The incredibly influential corporate think-tank the Heritage Foundation‘s Project 2025 [1],[2],[3], is an attempt to boost that movement even further under the next Trump Administration. If accepted, which is likely, this will have a huge effect on the USA’s willingness to have anything to do with reducing fossil fuel burning, or preserving ecologies.

Neoliberalism, has resulted in a crisis of living for most of the population: lower wages, worse working conditions, greater debt (especially for education), less social mobility, less affordable housing, fewer and harsher prospects for people’s children, greater inequality of riches and power, and so on. Neoliberalism has been a significant contributor to extending and intensifying ecological destruction and the failure of action on climate change. The main focus of neoliberalism is to disqualify any governmental action that:

  • Impinges on corporate power or profit,
  • Involves government planing for the future
  • Involves government planning for ‘justice’ or support for the lower classes

The aim is to leave everything to The Market, a God whose invisible hand always delivers wealth to the virtuous and the talented. Leaving things to The Market also tends to benefit established power and wealth, as they have succeeded in that Market and the politics of that Market. The secret doctrine is that the only time governments should intervene is when powerful corporations are threatened by their own stupidity, and the intervention should be free taxpayer-funded cash to do what they like with (pay emergency bonuses etc).

The rich elites argue that the main problems the world faces is that we don’t have enough neoliberalism, and that the few, weak attempts to contain climate change interfere with corporate liberty. They also note that China, which does not pursue neoliberalism, is possibly becoming a powerful economic threat. This implies neoliberalism is not that great at promoting prosperous economies.

Neoliberal policies require ordinary people to give up hope that they can participate in their own government at any level. These policies also lead to the branding of any dissent as ‘marxist,’ ‘politically correct,’ ‘woke’ etc and to proposals to crush dissent as un-American or un-Australian or whatever. This could display the potential weakness of contemporary capitalists: dissent and ecological challenges must be slurred, suppressed or avoided. All news must aspire to Murdochism (ie Fox, Australian Sky etc)

The newest neoliberal attack on liberty, in support of Tump, is called Project 2025 and comes from the American Heritage Foundation and other corporate think thanks.

The Background

The American Heritage Foundation has long been at the heart of rightwing politics in the US. As they say:

“the Trump administration relied heavily on Heritage’s “Mandate” for policy guidance, embracing nearly two-thirds of Heritage’s proposals within just one year in office.”

https://www.project2025.org/about/about-project-2025/

How many people knew that when they voted for Trump they were really voting for a corporate think-tank, which has been bought by the hyper-rich? Or that Trump would not clean up the swamp, but enthusiastically embed special interests into his Presidency? This is not an idea which originates with ‘Trump haters’ but which is pointed out by the servants of those financial elites themselves.

Lets be clear these people have no false modesty, as they say in their manifesto for Project 2025, The Mandate for Leadership: the Conservative Promise [this seems to have been hidden from the people again! try https://static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf It will probably be moved again later]

one set of eyes reading these passages [in this proposal] will be those of the 47th President of the United States

Mandate: xiii

It may be somewhat unlikely to be being read by the 47th President if it’s Trump, as it is a long and fairly boring book, but someone may point-form some of it for him (more freedom to make money, more tax cuts, ignore climate change, more fossil fuels etc). It would be surprising if they did not already have someone on the Trump team to do that. Remember this Project is well financed and well connected. It will be implemented unless voted out.

They give some more background history, showing their elite influence on US poltics:

In the winter of 1980, the fledging Heritage Foundation handed to President-elect Ronald Reagan the inaugural Mandate for Leadership. This collective work by conservative thought leaders and former government hands—most of whom were not part of Heritage—set out policy prescriptions, agency by agency for the incoming President. The book literally put the conservative movement and Reagan on the same page, and the revolution that followed might never have been, save for this band of committed and volunteer activists

Mandate: xiii

By the end of that year, more than 60 percent of its recommendations had become policy

Mandate: 2.

So they are telling us that the Reagan years, with:

  • the destruction of the American economy,
  • the outsourcing of government operations which led to increase in costs and declines in services,
  • the collapse of S&Ls through deregulation which left some people very rich and others without their life savings,
  • the asset stripping of companies undervalued on the stock market which led to the loss of functional US companies and local jobs,
  • the return of frequent boom and bust cycles which from which the rich were bailed out and the poor and middle class left to rot,
  • the beginning of outsourcing jobs to China and other cheap labor countries,
  • the decline of wages and security
  • the overspending on the military
  • the increase of government debt because of that spending together with massive tax cuts to the wealthy.
  • the stripping back of those State services which helped people and gave them some levels of security because they ‘cost too much’ and supposedly supported ‘welfare queens,’
  • the support for murderous pro-corporate dictatorships in Latin America (The founding of neoliberalism occurred under Pinochet in Chile)
  • the boosting of people who would become the USA’s most destructive enemies (the Taliban, Iraq, Iran etc).
  • The induced collapse of Russia into Organised Crime Capitalism which led to a massive decline in Russia’s population (through starvation?) and eventually to Putin.

All of this, can all be traced to the American Heritage Foundation, by their own boasts.

Fighting against Democracy

They rather oddly comment about:

elite support for economic globalization. For 30 years, America’s political, economic, and cultural leaders embraced and enriched Communist China and its genocidal Communist Party while hollowing out America’s industrial base.

Mandate: 11

and

Unfettered trade with China has been a catastrophe. It has made a handful of American corporations enormously profitable while twisting their business incentives away from the American people’s needs…

America’s elites have betrayed the American people

11-12

For some reason they forget to mention that the elites in question were the neoliberal capitalist wealth elites who support Heritage and neoliberalism. Capitalism has always been global, always seeking cheap resources, cheap labour and cheap pollution. It was the neoliberals who hollowed out America’s industrial base, with the full support of the Republican Party. It was also the neoliberal elites that tried to shut down ‘left wing’ anti-neoliberal-globalism. The Left was protesting about how this kind of globalism increased corporate power, ending both national sovereignty and attempts at making a ‘helpful’ State across the globe.

History apparently can be hammered into an ‘acceptable shape’ with enough repetition and power.

I’m also not quite sure why anyone would be proud of causing and boosting all these problems, but they do add that:

The late 1970s were by any measure a historic low point for America and the political coalition dedicated to preserving its unique legacy of human flourishing and freedom

Mandate: 1

Presumably they are referring to the events covered by the well known Trilateral Commision Report, which alleged that the USA and other parts of the world were suffering from a crisis of too much democracy: Women’s liberation, Black Liberation, Gay liberation, the workers getting uppity, the birth of popular envionmental and anti-pollution movevments, etc. These movements were a real problem for the rich-elites. They were panicking. All this democracy could strip away their power and wealth, leading to chaos for them. Who knows what could follow? This fear underlies a fundamental neoliberal doctrine going back to Hayek and Mises: the spread of democracy needs to be stopped as it impinges on The Market, and possibly stops corporations taking all the wealth for themselves. A proposed focus on promises of individual prosperity, breaking up community action, distrust of government and faith in freedom of The Market seemed a workable solution to this fear. Hence their advice to Reagan was aimed at shutting down the possible increase in liberty for the people, and reinforcing the power of corporate elites.

They even link this 1970s surge of non-elite liberty to the present day:

Contemporary elites have even repurposed the worst ingredients of 1970s “radical chic” to build the totalitarian cult known today as “The Great Awokening.”

Mandate: 1

They admit that the radical chic of the anti-elite democratic movements of the 1970s are comparable to ‘woke’ support for human rights for the suppressed people of the present day. This includes the terrible woke support for not shooting people because they are black, or not victimizing people because of their sexual identity, etc. The neoliberal position is clear: liberty must be thwarted unless it is just corporate liberty. They obviously think that having previously told Reagan how to benefit the financial elites is a selling point for the normal population, which perhaps it is, given how that period has been sanitised by the corporate media.

They also make it clear that one of their prime policy objectives is clearing the public service of anyone who disagrees with their project and appointing people who will do exactly as they are told by the Republican President. As when Trump removed Comey and his attorney general Jeff Sessions for not stopping the Mueller inquiry. So ends Democracy and discussion. If loyalty to the President is the sole denominator of success and employment, then no one will ever tell the executive when their plans are going desperately wrong. North Korea is not the ideal State.

To rephrase Reagan: “the most chilling words you will ever hear, are ‘I’m from a corporation and I’m here to bring you liberty'”

Scapegoating: Don’t blame the riche elites for anything

As neoliberalism not only failed to produce general prosperity but generated the opposite, neoliberals need a long line of scapegoats to explain the failure. Obviously none of these explanations will include the neoliberal project itself or the self-destructiveness of capitalism, because corporations are tools designed and used to avoid personal responsibility (limited liability), and the media is largely owned by corporations or billionaires. Perhaps weirdly most of these alleged scapegoats are ludicrously inadequate for the magnitude of events attributed to them:

The long march of cultural Marxism through our institutions has come to pass. The federal government is a behemoth, weaponized against American citizens and conservative values, with freedom and liberty [for corporations] under siege as never before.

Mandate: xvi

Everyone ‘knows’ both that the US is full of powerful Marxists, and that they are an unpopular and tiny portion of the population. The only way that Marxists can be an explanation for neoliberal failure, when there are no self-identified, active or important, political Marxists in the US, is to either call Democratic Party members Marxist, or talk about supposed ‘cultural marxists’ swarming through institutions but otherwise invisible or hidden. On top of that, the evil is represented by a certified list of powerless people such as trans people, drag queens, people who talk about racism and the problems it generates, “anti-family campaigners” (?) etc. who are destroying our children: {“children suffer the toxic normalization of transgenderism with drag queens and pornography invading their school libraries” Mandate: 1}. It is never the actually powerful or rich that cause problems.

A central strategy of neoliberalism to is to remove responsibility for suffering from those elites causing the suffering, while putting the responsibility onto minority scapegoats. This builds up two opposed categories, ‘straight and visible pro-capitalist champions of liberty and protectors of children’ vs ‘sexually corrupt, hidden, evil, anti-capitalist champions of tyrannical government and child abuse.’ You are either loyal to neoliberals, or something which is only barely human. You either accept the truth of your ‘information group’ or become corrupted by listening to, or discussing anything with, the wicked. This was a technique that was effective for the Nazis as well, but its pretty basic.

They say they will help this process of binarisation and:

start… with deleting the terms sexual orientation and gender identity (“SOGI”), diversity, equity, and inclusion gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights,

Mandate: 4-5

Apparently merely saying these words is a tyrannical threat to other people’s first amendment rights to free speech. No one said Neoliberals were coherent, but right-wing freedom of speech often involves removing other peoples right to speak, rewriting history, and making sure that poor weak corporations and evangelical foot-soldiers, are heard and protected (but only if they agree with the project).

The task at hand to reverse this [tiny and trivial] tide and restore our Republic to its original moorings is too great for any one conservative policy shop to spearhead. It requires the collective action of our movement. With the quickening approach of January 2025, we have two years and one chance to get it right. Project 2025 is more than 50 (and growing) of the nation’s leading conservative organizations joining forces to prepare and seize the day

Mandate: xiv

So there are lots of rich elite sponsored organisations involved in this pro-corporate revolutionary attack on minorities and non-powerful people. What a suprise. This all suggests that some defenders of a collapsing capitalism, as in the 1930s, are happy to use persecution and violence to keep it going.

As a kind of footnote, it is possible in neoliberalism to attack some forms of capitalism, just as Nazis were allowed to attack Jewish capitalism, this attackable capitalism is the ‘new’ information technology capitalism. “The worst of these companies prey on children, like drug dealers, to get them addicted to their mobile apps.” (Mandate: 5). They don’t say that this is just like the way food companies try to addict kids to sugar and artificial chemically filled foods, or arms manufacturers might try to get kids addicted to their weapons, or toy companies to their scraps of plastic. This pushing of addiction is normal capitalism, as they would know. They also allege that info-tech companies are “a tool of China’s government. In exchange for cheap labor and regulatory special treatment from Beijing, America’s largest technology firms funnel data about Americans to the CCP”. Again these bad companies behave just like ordinary companies who use Chinese labor, and attempt to gain favour from the Chinese government. Trump pays taxes in China for his Maga goods which are made there, Ivanka gets special trademark deals with the Chinese government, but this is completely ok. It can be ignored

The established elite nearly always despise the nouveau riche, who are the not-yet-establishment. They can even talk about “Big Tech,” but you can’t talk about “Big Oil” or “Big Ag”, even though Big Oil may ‘rule the world’.

War

It also seems clear that they want war with China. Again authoritarianism needs wars to boost the profits of arms manufacturers, and get rid of competition.

The next conservative President must, restore war-fighting as [the military’s] sole mission, and set defeating the threat of the Chinese Communist Party as its highest priority

Mandate: 8, but the message is hammered all through the book

Putin is not such a concern, but is a concern (cf 181-2)

Of course no mention of needing to use the army to help rebuild the USA as climate change wrecks it.

No one should be naive about China, but I suspect most people are not quite as keen for war with China as these elites – its a great money making oportunity for “Big Arms’. Encouraging external threats, and singling out weak internal threats for suppression, are part of the authoritarian schema.

Environmentalism

Environmentalism which inhibits corporate action is defined as Left wing fanaticism. Environmentalism should not actually be concerned with the environment.

Those who suffer most from environmentalism would have us enact are the aged, poor, and vulnerable. It is not a political cause, but a pseudo-religion meant to baptize liberals’ ruthless pursuit of absolute power in the holy water of environmental virtue. At its very heart, environmental extremism is decidedly anti-human. Stewardship and conservation are supplanted by population control and economic regression. Environmental ideologues would ban the fuels that run almost all of the world’s cars, planes, factories, farms, and electricity grids. Abandoning confidence in human resilience and creativity in responding to the challenges of the future would raise impediments to the most meaningful human activities. They would stand human affairs on their head, regarding human activity itself as fundamentally a threat to be sacrificed to the god of nature.

Mandate: 11

Oddly population control as a remedy for climate change is a right wing talking point, and no evidence is presented that climate change and ecological destruction and corporate poisoning do not affect “the aged, poor, and vulnerable”. They, in a characteristically unconservative manner, refuse to recognise that a working environment is necessary for humans, especially the poor and vulnerable, and that humans do not live away from the Earth’s environment (without huge amounts of costly technology). And that if corporations will not realise that the fuels which currently run the world’s corporations harm the world’s humans and enivronment, then corporations must be forced to recognise that their profits are destroying everything important to us.

It is they who abandon the confidence in human resilience and creativity, by assuming their polluting energy sources, and other forms of ecological destruction, cannot be abandoned or transcended by human ingenuity.

Corporate activity sacrifices everyone to profit and disregards the laws and workings of God’s creation. We do not need to boost its power to do more violating of our lives, by voting for the Right.

Given all this, their approach to climate change is obvious if sometimes vague. If action inconveniences profit, the problem is unimportant.

The President should also issue an executive order to reshape the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) and related climate change research programs. The USGCRP produces strategic plans and research (for example, the National Climate Assessment) that reduce the scope of legally proper options in presidential decision-making and in agency rulemakings and adjudications. Also, since much environmental policymaking must run the gauntlet of judicial review, USGCRP actions can frustrate successful litigation defense in ways that the career bureaucracy should not be permitted to control. The process for producing assessments should include diverse viewpoints

Mandate: 59

the Biden Administration’s climate fanaticism will need a whole-of-government unwinding.

Mandate: 60

We might wonder what fanaticism for slowing climate change we are talking about when Biden is encouraging new fossil fuel licenses and mines, and continuing subsidies for fossil fuels.

In March 2023 the Chair of the Senate Budget Committee wrote:

As we’ll hear today, the United States subsidizes the fossil fuel industry with taxpayer dollars.  It’s not just the US: according to the International Energy Agency, fossil fuel handouts hit a global high of $1 trillion in 2022 – the same year Big Oil pulled in a record $4 trillion of income.  

In the United States, by some estimates taxpayers pay about $20 billion dollars every year to the fossil fuel industry.  What do we get for that?  Economists generally agree: not much.  To quote conservative economist Gib Metcalf: these subsidies offer “little if any benefit in the form of oil patch jobs, lower prices at the pump, or increased energy security for the country.”  The cash subsidy is both big and wrong. 

But the really big subsidy is the license to pollute for free.  The IMF calls this global free pass an “implicit” fossil fuel subsidy.  Economists call it an “unpriced externality.”

SEN. WHITEHOUSE ON FOSSIL FUEL SUBSIDIES: “WE ARE SUBSIDIZING THE DANGER”

It seems that doing even less to curb ecological destruction, or subsidizing it even more, is the only thing compatitble with corporate liberty. This implies corporate freedom is not only more important than democracy, but more important than life itself.

We should indeed ignore climate change and the role of fossil fuels:

USAID should cease its war on fossil fuels in the developing world and support the responsible management of oil and gas reserves as the quickest way to end wrenching poverty and the need for open-ended foreign aid. The next conservative Administration should rescind all climate policies from its foreign aid programs (specifically USAID’s Climate Strategy 2022–20307 ); shut down the agency’s offices, programs, and directives designed to advance the Paris Climate Agreement; and narrowly limit funding to traditional climate mitigation efforts. The agency should cease collaborating with and funding progressive foundations, corporations, international institutions, and NGOs that advocate on behalf of climate fanaticism.

Mandate 257-8

Yes Fossil fuels and their companies must be supported. It can be presumed that responsible management of oil and gas reserves, means full exploitation and sales at the highest price with almost no local benefit, as that is what it usually means. In Australia we know this means attacks on local government, pollution, destruction of water supplies, and almost no financial benefit from the mines, or the sales, because of minimal mineral royalties, tax breaks, tax evasion through foreign tax havens and paybacks of high interest loans from branches of the same company overseas. More neoliberal globalism in action to benefit profit, not locals.

In fact, almost nothing need be done. Especially anything which challenges corporate liberty to destroy the world for profit.

Again their arguments are selective:

The Biden Administration’s extreme climate policies have worsened global food insecurity and hunger. Its anti–fossil fuel agenda has led to a sharp spike in global energy prices.

Mandate: 257

No mention of the Russian invasion of Ukraine which massively lowered the supply of both food and fossil fuels, putting prices up all over the world not only in the USA. No mention of the record profits of major oil companies cronying up together to increase prices even more than they should have increased. No mention of food company profit increases. The dogma seems to be that whatever an established corporation does must be good, and have no deleterious effects at all. It is extreme to even pretend to worry about climate change.

They make the usual Bjon Lomborg argument:

The aid industry claims that climate change causes poverty, which is false. Enduring conflict, government corruption, and bad economic policies are the main drivers of global poverty. USAID’s response to man-made food insecurity is to provide more billions of dollars in aid—a recipe that will keep scores of poor countries underdeveloped and dependent on foreign aid for years to come.

Mandate: 257

We can note that the only bad industry is one which attempts to help people. However, climate change does cause poverty, through crop failure, wild fires, drought, floods and homelessness. We might even think about how working outside in excessive heat can cause death, which may lead the rest of the family into even greater poverty. But we have to believe families are more at risk from a small number of transsexuals’ than they are from corporate destruction. Climate change kills while it brings profits, so its ok. We already know that they do not really mean sensible economic policies, they mean letting corporations do what they will, as the environment is doing fine in the hands of corporations….

Mischaracterizing the state of our environment generally and the actual harms reasonably attributable to climate change specifically is a favored tool that the Left uses to scare the American public into accepting their ineffective, liberty-crushing regulations, diminished private property rights, and exorbitant costs. In effect, the Biden EPA has once again presented a false choice to the American people: that they have to choose between a healthy environment and a strong, growing economy

Mandate: 419.

It seems to me that the neoliberal right is saying somthing like:

  1. you should ignore warnings about collapsing ecologies and wild destructive weather, because we don’t know how to solve theses problems while keeping our established companies hyper-profitable,
  2. It is important to recognise that property rights give property owners the right to destroy their property even if it harms others.
  3. We don’t want people to get involved in government, and planing to save the planet as who knows where it will end? and
  4. You cannot have both a strong economy and a healthy environment, so you must choose ‘The Market’ at all times, and that will always deliver because we say so, and you must trust us.

In reality, you also won’t get a ‘healthy economy’, if by healthy you mean one that benefits everyone and their ecologies, as one of the points of neoliberalism is to stop general benefit from happening. General benefit generates calls for democracy, like we had in the 1960s and 70s, and that is a problem for corporate control and elite profits.

Temporary conclusion

That is probably enough for the moment. The point is that a new Trump presidency, will attempt to make things even better for corporations at even bigger costs to the American People.

On this issue we can rewrite one of their passages to be a more accurate of themselves:

Ultimately, the Right does not believe that all men are created equal—they think they are special. The established corporate rich are special when compared to the middle class and the poor. Men are special in comparison to women. Straight people are special in comparison with gay or queer people. Republicans are special in comparison with Democrats. They certainly don’t think all people have an unalienable right to pursue the good life, because they cut wages at every opportunity, intensify corporate power, and shift the cost of the State onto the middle classes. They think only they themselves have rights, along with the moral responsibility to make decisions for everyone else. They don’t think any citizen, state, church, or charity should be allowed any freedom until they first bend the knee to corporate power.

Mandate: 16 rephrased

These think tanks are aiming at suppression of any dissent, or objection to, excessive corporate power and profit – and are relatively open about it, once you realise that, in their world view, liberty is something that only exists for established corporations and their supporters. It is something which is for sale and can be bought, or not bought if you don’t have the money. The rest of us can suffer the consequences of that liberty and watch the world burn, flood and fall apart.

As Ronald Reagan put it: “Freedom is a fragile thing and it’s never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by way of inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation”

Mandate: 2

We need to defend our liberty against the corporate sector and its think-tanks.

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