Public ideas
Articulate conservatism
A Burkean points out that conservatism doesn’t have to be amoral and destructive.
How the elite rigged society (and why it’s falling apart) is the title of a speech to the UK Alliance for Responsible Citizenship by prominent Canadian-American conservative David Brooks, who describes himself as a Burkean conservative. Brooks is well-known to many Australians because for a long time he was a regular guest of Philip Adams on Late Night Live.
His speech is an assertion of traditional conservative values, rooted in moral values and respect for society’s institutions. Brooks’ short speech is about how those claiming to be conservatives have undermined America’s social, moral and institutional fabric. He criticises the way they have allowed inequality to grow unchecked, the way they have replaced traditional “western” values with moral relativism, and the way they have systematically assaulted and downgraded that nation’s institutions. He sees MAGA as a manifestation of this decay.
His speech is met with a polite but cool reception by the audience. Although it presents a genteel façade to the world, the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship is more representative of the MAGA right than of Burkean conservatism. (Its board members include Tony Abbott, John Anderson, Andrew Hastie, and John Howard.)
Competition or trust?
Policymakers can become too obsessed with competition policy, displacing the goal of improving human welfare with the goal of designing textbook markets.
“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.”
That well-known quote from Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations captures the idea that if public policy can be directed to ensuring markets are competitive, then people’s economic welfare will be maximized. It’s the basis for those artistic intersecting curves on dimensionless graphs that constitute Economics 1 classes. And it’s the basis of much of economic policy. Get the competitive settings right – no barriers to entry, easy interchange of information between buyers and sellers, no collusion – and all will be well.
Writing in the Griffith Review – Trust and the competition delusion – Nicholas Gruen points out that there are more ways to shape economic outcomes than relying on the self-interest mechanisms of the competitive market.
As he writes:
We’re falling for the “competition delusion” by which I mean this: in our embrace of private competition as a goal, we mostly pass over a prior issue – which is the terms on which that competition takes place. This is undermining trust in a remarkably wide range of institutions in our economic and public life.
That “competition delusion”, rather than improving well-being, has actually detracted from public value in many areas. For example when academics and journalists are forced to compete with one another the dissemination of knowledge that could improve human welfare is compromised.
In many markets competition leads not to lower prices or innovation (the Eco 1 lesson), but to competition for its own sake, with claim pitched against claim, bullshit against bullshit, all costing a lot without any public benefit. In this regard Gruen could have illustrated his essay with the creation of electricity “retailers” in the National Electricity Market – businesses in the paper economy, who operate in CBD towers remote from any generators, transmission lines and transformers, but who manage to add 10 to 15 percent to your bill all in the name of “competition”.
Gruen’s essay covers much the same ground as earlier scholars such as Robert Axelrod and Russel Hardin who wrote about trust and cooperation. Trust is a shared asset that helps lower transaction costs: when trust is lost we have to harness self-interest to get markets to bring benefits, but that’s wasteful and costly. It’s a message that has to be repeated as Gruen has done, because we are prone to see competition as an end in itself, rather than as one of the possible ways to improve human welfare.
Through a creative twist Gruen directs his essay towards a conclusion in support of citizens’ juries as a mechanism to solve collective action problems. It’s a well-supported argument, but he could make the more general point that policymakers tend to turn too easily to the lines of their Eco 1 classes, forgetting that economics is about outcomes, not jus
Collapse
Rethink everything you have learned or assumed about the conditions leading to societal and state collapse.
Forget what Edward Gibbon told you about the fall of Rome. Even after the Roman state fell, life continued and even improved for some people.
The distinction between societal collapse (rare but devastating) and the state collapse (common, because no state lasts forever), is one of Luke Kemp’s points in his book Goliath’s curse: the history and future of societal collapse. Kemp is a research affiliate at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge – a title that gives you some idea of his message.
David Marr interviews him on Late Night Live: How can societal collapses of the past guide us in these uncertain times?. A precondition for a state to collapse is that it has to be established in the first place. Therefore, Kemp starts by describing the conditions, usually involving violent conquest, that see states develop.
Then he moves on to refer to the conditions that make for societal and state collapse. An external threat – plague, climate change – can be a factor, but what saps the resilience of a state or society is growing wealth inequality, which works in corrosive ways. Most notably if people have no stake in preserving the social order, they will lack the will to defend it.
Conversely, state and societal longevity is helped by the existence and support of democratic and inclusive institutions. In this context Kemp refers to the post-1945 settlement in western societies, which involved deliberate moves, through redistributive taxes, to avoid the development of wide wealth inequalities.
The ABC’s Nick Baker and Sarah Allely have a summary of the session on the ABC website. Their article includes images of Cahokia, a city in present day Illinois, which Kemp points to as a rare example of a case where societal and state collapse has been total.