Public ideas
Social determinants of imprisonment
It’s hardly novel, but when politicians are ramping up a law’n’order campaign it’s informative to consider the social determinants of imprisonment. In a Conversation contribution Ruth McCausland and Eileen Baldry of the University of New South Wales list 8 factors that increase your risk of imprisonment.
Their 8 factors contain no surprises, but poverty, in itself, is not one of them, although they all correlate closely with poverty. For example homelessness or unstable housing and poor schooling are among the factors, and these do correlate with poverty. Notably “Being Indigenous” is one of the 8 variables. That means, all other factors considered and accounted for, simply being an indigenous Australian increases your likelihood of being imprisoned. That suggests there is a degree of deep-seated discrimination.
Their analysis helps explain that even though crime rates are falling, incarceration rates of certain people, particularly indigenous Australians, remain “shamefully high”. Others over-represented in jails are those with mental and cognitive disability, people experiencing addiction, and the homeless.
Emerging public ideas after neoliberalism
Dani Rodrik, in an article on the Zawya website, asks What’s next for globalization? He describes the public ideas that arise and dominate in different periods, starting with those that arose in the Bretton Woods order. That order was followed by hyper-globalization involving the free flow of finance, supported by the public idea that the domestic and world order could be determined, benignly, by relying as much as possible on the invisible hand of the market. It failed because in allowing so much power to accrue to corporations, governments were unable to deliver necessary public goods and services.
He is optimistic about the ideas that will emerge within economies (even if he chooses a horrible name):
One emerging economic-policy framework, which I have called “productivism,” emphasizes the role of governments in addressing inequality, public health, and the clean-energy transition. By putting these neglected objectives front and center, productivism reasserts domestic political priorities without being inimical to an open world economy.
In terms of a world order, however, he is pessimistic. World trade and foreign relations are likely to revert to a pre-Bretton Woods pattern of zero-sum conflict.
Thinking long term – very long term
“Why should I care about posterity? What's posterity ever done for me?” asked Marx (Groucho).
It’s a reasonable question, with which serious economic philosophers, such as the late Tom Schelling, have grappled. In practical terms it has to be addressed by those concerned with the long-term effects of climate change.
It has no easy answer. Schelling was able to convince his classes that in terms of utility theory it could reasonably be argued that if climate change would slowly and with little pain eradicate the human population over a few centuries, it would be better than trying to protect future populations from climate change. That’s because there would be fewer and fewer people – eventually none – suffering the effects of climate change. QED.
That was not Schelling’s belief: he was passionate about dealing with climate change, but it does illustrate some of the ethical problems in dealing with the very long term using economists’ standard concepts of utility theory and discounting. We cannot simply lay out the costs and benefits over time and apply a discount rate to being these benefits to a present value – the standard technique in benefit-cost analysis.
But because we don’t know what the future holds, when we compare present costs and benefits with future costs and benefits, it is surely reasonable to apply some discount factor to those future costs and benefits as a way to deal with uncertainty. As Nicholas Stern pointed out, however, in his seminal 2006 report The Economics of Climate Change, any realistic discount rate reduces future costs and benefits to insignificant levels when they are considered over hundreds of years.
Writing in The Conversation – Longtermism – why the million-year philosophy can’t be ignored, Katie Steele of ANU reviews the book What we owe the future by William MacAskill. Like Schelling, MacAskill points out that just as we have moral obligations to people in other countries, separated from ourselves in space, we also have moral obligations to those from whom we are separated in time.