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Austerity Is an Antidemocratic Strategy to Boost Capital

175 points by robtherobber 3y ago

rsp1984 3y ago
The opposite of austerity, stimulative spending (by printing money), has also been argued, by similar groups, to increase inequality due to the inflation of asset prices. Which way, left-leaning man?
- ilikerashers 3y ago
  Austerity also causes increases in asset prices. The UK property market is a good example so I'm not sure your point holds.
say_it_as_it_is 3y ago
Voting to fire people working in government to lower costs is antidemocratic? In government, you aren't even fired but retired, allowing you to collect your pension and benefits. It's as humane a practice as it can be while addressing financial responsibility. It's undemocratic to continue growing in perpetuity and not be held accountable to those who pay for it.
jgilias 3y ago
Ok, austerity bad, but the alternative isn't better. Either way it's the 'little man' who ends up paying through the nose. The article mentions how war time economy is evidence how the society can do whatever it wants, and implies this should be done during peace time too. And then later in the article mentions how war time leaves the economy heavily indebted. So you can do the same during peace time - take on as much debt as needed to do everything. The issue with this approach is that this increases the money supply, effectively debasing the currency. Due to the Cantillon effect, the first people to use the new money will be able to spend it at 'old value', while people further down the line will get less and less value out of it. If you're wealthy enough, you can short the currency by taking out debt, and buying assets. If the assets are yield bearing (dividend, rent), your income automatically adjusts for increased money supply. If you depend on your wage, tough luck, wages are last to adjust, so you just keep silently getting poorer. So there's no free lunch. Either explicitly or implicitly, the poorest pay the most. I don't think that's a predicament though. It's just that the answer likely doesn't lie in the extremes. A prudent enough government should be able to navigate this by not devaluating the currency too much, yet also taking on reasonable amounts of debt to fund the functions with the highest ROI.
aaa_aaa 3y ago
Austerity is result of reckless state money printing and waste.
Synaesthesia 3y ago
The book "The Capital Order" by Clara Mattei is recommended. Subtitle is "How economists invented austerity and paved the way to fascism". It's a study of WW1 and the early 1920s from an economic and social POV.
aa1234556 3y ago
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rightbyte 3y ago
It is funny. For like 4 or 5 years ago I would have waived away the article as communist hallucinations. But somehow covid made me realize that we don't live in a market economy, but rather have a central power that benefits the rich via monetary policy and lower tax. It is the same realization as when I stopped consider the GNU guys paranoid crackpots.
andsoitis 3y ago
> Capitalism gave rise to a value system that teaches us to find meaning in our work; yet millions are employed in low-paying, soul-crushing jobs. Many philosophies throughout history emphasize finding meaning in your work: - Ikigai: discover your reason for being, which is at the intersection of passion, mission, vocation, and profession. It is not just about yourself, but contributing to the world and bringing joy to others - Stoicism: while not solely focused on work, Stoicism emphasizes finding purpose and virtue in whatever situation you find yourself in, including approaching work with a sense of duty and striving to contribute to a greater good, even if the task itself is mundane - Confucianism: stresses the importance of hard work, diligence, and skill in all aspects of life, incl. work. Emphasizes fulfilling your roles and responsibilities in society with excellence, finding meaning and respect through well-performed work - Protestant work ethic: sees work as a moral obligation and way to glorify the Christian god. Encourages hard work, diligience, and productivity, finding meaning through creation & contribution to society through labor - Existentialism: encourages individuals to create own meaning in life, incl. through their work. Involves taking responsibility for your choices, pursuing authentic goals, and engaging authentically with your work.
- mjdiloreto 3y ago
  Yes, people often have a shocking misunderstanding of historical attitudes, and attribute modern sensibilities to people way too far back in time. They obviously also haven't read Marx, who literally argued the exact opposite. He believed Capitalism caused "alienation" in the worker, preventing him from finding meaning in his work. Prior to capitalism people were highly skilled artisans, or subsistence farmers, who almost universally found meaning in their work. So capitalism did not "give rise to a value system that teaches us to find meaning in our work", the value system was already there. Capitalism just prevented the values from being fulfilled in the workers' lives.
  - andsoitis 3y ago
    Maybe. The fact that these old philosophies place so much emphasis on finding meaning in work could also (and likely, in my opinion) suggest that finding value and meaning in work does not come automatically, especially since there are physical, economic, and cultural constraints on what any one of us is able to do, and so they needed call it out specifically to engender that ethos. Putting it differently, scapegoating capitalism for preventing people from finding meaning in work seems like a shallow analysis to me. It is not like factory workers or blakcksmiths from the past who were more interested in other things (making music, say), would agree that they were fulfilled.
slibhb 3y ago
I got most of the way through this and found many things to disagree with. I started to write a reply and then I read this part: > Expertise is, in a certain sense, a bourgeois concept, a by-product of the ideological imperative to organize our lives and activities in a rational way. God help anyone who takes this shit seriously. I don't know when, if ever, austerity is called for (even Paul Krugman has called for deficit reduction in certain circumstances: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/10/opinion/us-budget-deficit-interest-rates.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/10/opinion/us-budget-deficit...). But this review is dripping with ideology to the point that it's genuinely disconcerting.
- 0thgen 3y ago
  In a college poetry class, I learned that literary analysis isn't about being "right" (what did the author actually intend to say?), but instead, being "interesting" (what's a cool way of framing this?). Any subjective interpretation is valid if it's thought-provoking. I think that is the mental framework with ideology-saturated economic opinion pieces like this one. I don't think they care about being right. Instead, the goal is to make cool, edgy, story-book-good-vs-evil narratives independent of empirical validity ("any subjective interpretation is valid if it's thought-provoking")
  - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
    I think there's a bit more to the background mental framework. Postmodernism (as best I understand it) says that all truth claims aren't actually about truth. Those who believe such things need not concern themselves with whether the facts support their position. So far I'm restating what you said. But postmodernism says more. It says that truth claims aren't actually about truth, but are assertions of power. Those who believe such things are likely to have that intent when they write. Keep that in mind when you evaluate what they say.
    - 0thgen 3y ago
      Makes sense. And the extent to which human communication is embedded with latent assertions of power is an empirical question, which seems more a question for science than philosophy
cs702 3y ago
The title is linkbait-ish and the author is ideological, but the book reviewed in the OP, "The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism," by Clara Mattei, is truly worth a read. Recommended by economists as different as Tyler Cowen and Thomas Pikkety, the book won Best Book of the Year by the Financial Times. Ignore the OP's review of the book. Instead, read the book itself: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo181707138.html https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo181707... https://www.amazon.com/Capital-Order-Economists-Invented-Austerity/dp/022681839X https://www.amazon.com/Capital-Order-Economists-Invented-Aus...
m0llusk 3y ago
Marx hasn't been around for a while. With the corporate world sucking so hard on government teats, in the US and Europe in particular, austerity has a more distributed but still intensely negative impact. I strongly recommend Mark Blyth's book Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea as a more modern and nuanced take on what is going on.
throwawaymaths 3y ago
State profligacy in the era of Central banking is an anti Democratic strategy to boost capital too. You borrow money, which increases the money supply, stealing value from everyone through inflation. This hurts the poor the worst, and benefits the rich, who rely on debt for capital instruments (the value of the debt, which is nominal, is reduced over inflation). Then you spend that money on contractors (even when it's used for social services).
hammon 3y ago
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snapplebobapple 3y ago
Hacker news needs a butthurt marxist flag.... Yet another butthurt marxist misinterpretting (among other things) the fact that free markets evolve into oligopolies to mean twar the whole system apart. The correct interpretation is that we screwed up going full rehnquist and nerd our antitrust enforcement to move back nearer to what it was doing pre rehnquist supreme court.
sershe 3y ago
I come to HN for tech news and recently I get a heaping of 100% political, 100% partisan, non-tech-related drivel that is not even news - it's just opinion blog. I'd apply it to both sides, but I only see one side on HN: Dear leftists! Can you please take your propaganda and fuck off to reddit, twitter/X, or wherever?
sergioisidoro 3y ago
From a European perspective, I would not say it's antidemocratic if parties who are pro-austerity get elected while being transparent about their policies. However in my opinion, there is a great lack of "class consciousness" from the people who vote for these parties, in a sort of Stockholm syndrome, or because people easily fall prey to the sensationalist idea that you can apply household economics to macro-economics.
- mhitza 3y ago
  > However in my opinion, there is a great lack of "class consciousness" from the people who vote for these parties After those voted come to power, nothing prevents them from flipping on their agenda. I've seen it happen countless times, and probably so did you. If only there were mechanics (a la Liquid Democracy) to recast votes in collective actions without the initiative of the government, but by way of constitutional rights. Politicians would be more interested to keep themselves aligned to their electorate, or lose their comfy job before their term would normally end. Politician as a career, and unconditional 4 year terms seem like a problem imo.
- CM30 3y ago
  But do people generally vote for parties based on their attitude towards the budget/austerity plans? Because my experience is that the big parties in most countries cover so many topics in their political agendas that people are voting for them for all manner of different reasons. Sometimes it's the social/moral aspect that they care about more than the economic one, and sometimes vice versa. It's unlikely any conservative will vote for the more left leaning party based on a dislike for austerity, and vice versa.
- wesselbindt 3y ago
  Democratically elected parties can transparently enact anti-democratic policies. If my local democratically elected fascist transparently has "do not allow group x to vote" as an intended policy, then that policy is anti-democratic, even though it may be popular. The argument the article makes is not that austerity measures are unpopular, it's that they're anti-democratic.
- 3y ago
germandiago 3y ago
I would say there are two problems here that are different: intervention as it stands can regulate in favor of a few groups of people. More intervention can easily lead to more corruption. As for austerity: reasonable people do not spend beyond what they have and if they do they do it in reasonable ways: things with an expected return on investment and with limited, calculated risk. Yet what I see is increasing intervention and out of control debt. Starting from these two premises... I do not think austerity is antidemocratic in itself. What I see is that a high degree of intervention ends up doing a cost transfer to normal people. But that would be a problem of hyperregulation, not from austerity itself IMHO. After all, I would say the correct philosophy is to spend what you have and measure the risk every time you go beyond that. Sometimes you have less, sometimes you have more, but I would not advice any person, business or state to go out of control about this. However, a state incentive is different from the former two, since they continuosly transfer costs by the force of law to unrelated people. Namely, I do and you pay, be it by friends regulation or by direct expenses and taxes increases.
- throwawayqqq11 3y ago
  I think you are very wrong. You are mixing regulation, intervention and austerity, which is so broad, it cannot provide a distinct explanation for the declining public services, which enforcing regulations is a part of, btw. Budget cuts set a hard upper bound on the reach of public institutions. Nothing else you mentioned achieves this.
  - germandiago 3y ago
    Regulation and intervention is what defacto can loot us. It is harmful that someone comes and says: we are going to get 65% of what you earn and put more public workers and invest in two business from my friend. Regulation is what allows your friend have free competition if conveniently tweaked... austerity is not democratic? It is democratic looting or chosen by a few only? All these topics are closely related if you think of it a bit beyond the surface. In my experience, talking about Spain, I am not sure where that upper bound of expenses you talk about is. In EU according to the rules debt should not be over 60% of GDP. Spain is over 110% and after covid they did not cut back to the normal expenses...Every spanish owes over 30.000 euros in debt... I mean each of them, all ages. Any reasonable person could tell you that here health system and public education are degrading at the same time the taxes go up steadily.
inglor_cz 3y ago
Few democratic countries can manage their finances well. Switzerland comes to mind. But the general experience is that if the population can vote itself more money and services at the cost of a) either someone else, or b) growing national debt, they usually will. We are well down the same road in Czechia. Europe has a very long history of banking, but at the moment when the Euro was created, most of the obliterated national currencies were weak, reflecting distrust towards their overlords. Switzerland, the country with the strongest national currency in Europe, never felt compelled to join the bloc. Historically, authoritarian countries tend to go bankrupt over war expenses, democratic countries over handouts. The British pound was strongest at the time when the country was somewhat semi-democratic, neither-nor. But that is a very unstable configuration. Pick your poison.
- vladms 3y ago
  What would be "well managed finances"? The objective is to improve the living, not how you manage the money. At all points in history most of people were trying to do "things at the expense of someone else" (colonialism, feudalism, etc.). Borrowing and not repaying is one of the most reasonable ways to do that - I think it's a clear improvement from killing/enslaving people, so I think it's an improvement.
  - inglor_cz 3y ago
    The objective is to improve the living without worsening it in the long run. Andreas Papandreu, the king of Greek debt, is long dead, but debt that he ran up is still saddling the young Greek generation. The artificial living standard growth which resulted from his reckless borrowing helped him getting reelected several times, but the guy died in 1996 and now people who even weren't alive back then are carrying the burden of his electoral success that was bought by unsustainable spending. One of the insidious properties of national debt is that it comes at cost of people who aren't born yet. They are in no way represented in the democratic process, but they shouldn't be ignored either. We understood so much at least with regard to environment (albeit the implementation is far from perfect), we should do the same with regard to finances. Compared to death and outright enslavement, bankruptcy is better, but it is a choice between Black Death and some treatable cancer. We should strive for better.
mjburgess 3y ago
"Democratic control over economics" looks like people voting for more services and lower taxes. Austerity occurs when the cost of government borrowing becomes so high governments are would be functionally unable to operate in the medium term without brining it down. After the finance crash the UK was increasing it's debt load at something like 200bn GBP/yr, iirc. A rate that credit-nervous markets wouldnt sustain cheaply. Austerity is the way the ideologues talk about the consequences of economic collapse without having to learn anything. What you never hear from them is alternative policies that address the specific economic problems periods of austerity are solving. You hear instead about ever more elaborate abstractions that ever less map on to any observed reality.
- iamflimflam1 3y ago
  Austerity was an absolute disaster for the UK. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_government_austerity_programme https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_government_aust... > Most macroeconomists now agree that the austerity programme pursued by the Coalition Government in its first two years was both too severe and unnecessary and set back the economic recovery which was underway in the first half of 2010. The Office of Budget Responsibility confirmed that the austerity programme reduced GDP, while the Oxford economist Simon Wren-Lewis has calculated that the Coalition Government's austerity programme cost the average household £4000 over the lifetime of the Parliament and severely damaged those public services which were not ring-fenced.
  - disgruntledphd2 3y ago
    > set back the economic recovery which was underway in the first half of 2010 This was really obvious at the time. The economy was recovering slowly, and then the Tories got elected and induced a recession. It kinda amazes me that this wasn't obvious in advance of their actions, but whatevs.
    - iamflimflam1 3y ago
      It was very much an ideological driven cost cutting exercise.
epups 3y ago
I appreciate the review, especially in making connections between fascism and economic policy. Historically, fascists had support from powerful economic groups because of their ability to deliver on highly unpopular economic measures. The current state of politics in the West is that while (some) governments are not outright fascist, any pretense of them representing the political will of the majority of its population is crumbling. They serve a minority of very wealthy individuals much more than they do their general populace, and we accept that as fact. To play devil's advocate, however, I would argue that there is sound rationale for not allowing economic policy to be decided in an a purely democratic way. If everyone had equal vote in what the government should do monetarily, the result could quickly evolve to a disaster, which we have also seen in places where dictators try to appease to the population as a whole by subsidizing costs and wages.
abigail95 3y ago
This is nonsense, the opening paragraph isn't a contradiction, it's describing an equilibrium, and the difference between the actions of a single firm and aggregate demand/supply. This has been studied for over a century, why this being repeated uncritically in media?
linschn 3y ago
I'm a bit surprised to see this at the top of HN. Maybe the US is still asleep, and the Friedman fanboys have not read that yet. This look like a good book and I am likely to buy it. From a systems standpoint it is quite obvious that capitalism tends to concentrate wealth in the hands of those who already own capital. Piketty showed the historical data agree with that: as long as growth is less than capital rewards, wealth concentrates. We need a systemic solution to that, and that can't happen with représentative democracy. We need direct control of the means of production by those who make them work. This means stronger unions, but also platform régulations, as users are unpaid knowledge workers giving away their data in exchange for a service, an exchange so one-sided and highly beneficial to the platforms that states are losing their sovereignty to the platforms. See bratton's The Stack to know more.
- abigail95 3y ago
  The article has a pretty good example of what happens if you let a bunch of people seize the power to do that. Representative democracy is a powerful check against a lot of bad things. I don't care if you feel you aren't being paid for your data if it means I'm allowed to vote on whether I'm allowed to start a business or not.
- mjburgess 3y ago
  Wealth concentrates because of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preferential_attachment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preferential_attachment -- it has nothing to do with "capitalism" -- an era which contains historically unprecedented periods of comparative wealth equality. The only processes known to make substantial impacts on this process involve mass death. Write a simulation yourself, it's relatively trivial. You'll find PA a force of nature which little can overcome. 2x0 is still 0, 2xbillion = 2billion And thus from equal starting points and equal chances inequality becomes ever more extreme. Rutheless redistribution on the scale of a small tribe might, within that tribe, work for a time. But wars between tribes fix this 'temporary reprieve' -- since tribal power follows PA. There is no known policy, at least none i'm aware of, which can preserve the tiny populations needed for equalising redistribution which at the same time prevents them from preferetnailly attaching to each other.,
thriftwy 3y ago
When run unchecked, capital will happily suck all the money from the economy and into its coffers, and the fun thing is, it has no idea what to do next. Next it would very likely invest these money in the worst possible way and cause a big crash. Think about is like of a centipede instead of sentient creatures at work. It does not know what to do once it eats its leaf. We know it's going to morph but the thing is oblivious to it itself.
- 0thgen 3y ago
  I think the iffy reasoning your committing here is the anthropomorphization of complex systems. Similar to the error of describing darwinian evolution as having a "goal" We should probably describe economic systems as massively complex distributed interactions rather than thinking of them as organisms with monolithic intentions and goals
  - thriftwy 3y ago
    We cannot describe the thing you are referring to. We are quite poor at contemplating "massively complex distributed interactions". It's all noise to us.
    - 0thgen 3y ago
      agreed
ETH_start 3y ago
Ridiculous. Working class != labor unions. Militant labor unions murdered numerous members of the working class who dared to cross their picket lines.
- hef19898 3y ago
  As did capitalist strike breakers.
  - ETH_start 3y ago
    The strike breakers were sent in to break up the violent strikes that were killing replacement workers who crossed the picket lines.
okokwhatever 3y ago
It scares me a lot that modern economies don't understand yet the worst tax on citizens is the Inflation tax. Still can't understand why we're still trying to make things work after centuries of failures. Obviously monetary base expansion to support non austerity policies is the biggest inflationary factor.
- sofixa 3y ago
  What is your solution against inflation? The gold standard was proven not work, and it still saw inflation.
  - pi-e-sigma 3y ago
    Gold standard wasn't great but in hindsight it actually worked better what we have now.
    - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
      Well, it worked better at preventing inflation. It led to some really nasty financial collapses, though, and what we have now works better at preventing those.
      - pi-e-sigma 3y ago
        It never led to any financial collapse though. It just prevented ballooning the money supply that could be used as a temporary work around. "If only we could printed more money we would have been fine!". So the gold standard wasn't the cause of the issue at hand, it just prevented _some_ type of a fix. The deflationary nature of the gold standard is something working long-term only, it can't flair up all of sudden. Unlike inflation. Besides I have an issue with this mantra that "small inflation is good for the economy" but somehow _small_ deflation being the end of the world.
        AnimalMuppet 3y ago
        > It never led to any financial collapse though. If the Panic of 1879, the Panic of 1897, and the Great Depression don't count as "financial collapse", sure. I don't think that I agree with your definitions, though.
MrPatan 3y ago
The non-austere "Free stuff for you! Vote for me!" political strategy has worked pretty well while technology improvements has made stuff faster than politicians can give it away. But it's a precondition. If technology ever stops improving at this rate, we're going to have a hard time, and no amount of words will change that fact. To be for free stuff and at the same time be for degrowth, decel, limit resource use, etc.... seems naive to say the least.
- isilofi 3y ago
  Also, politicians can get more and more creative at excessive spending, at some point even outspending any kind of economic growth. And even if they don't outspend, at some point inflation comes along and kicks things over the edge.
waihtis 3y ago
modern democracy is a sham anyway. lets examine a recent large crisis we had in Finland - the border crisis, in which Russia systematically weaponized migrant waves - where the democratically elected government was initially unable to act with any measures on, because it would've been in violation of a UN convention which was agreed on in the 60's. This was one of the most prolific decisions to be done in the 2020's and yet we could just barely enforce the will of the people over the interests of extragovernmental groups. Now imagine the thousands of small decisions being done which the average voter has no transparency into. A good start to real democracy would be completely outlawing lobbying, NGO's, think tanks and other garbage organizations who's only raison d'etre is subverting the peoples right to their own governance.
- actionfromafar 3y ago
  But it did work, and in proportion to the threat the migrants posed, it didn't take that long. Following agreed upon international conventions is also important to a country in the long run.
  - waihtis 3y ago
    Barely working in 1 case in a 1000 is hardly a good track record, plus the border is about to reopen again in 4 days because appeasing the UN is more important than national safety
    - hef19898 3y ago
      You do know, that a simple border closure wouldn't do anything anything against a Russian invasion?
      - lupusreal 3y ago
        Being a member of NATO is Finland's most important safety measure against that. And what are you even talking about, he didn't suggest that closing the border was necessary to prevent a military invasion. The national security threat it addresses is an unregulated influx of migrants handpicked by Russia to cause trouble for Finnish society, to punish Finland for joining NATO. But I guess now you're going to act shocked and offended that anybody could think these migrants could be a problem for Finland. No doubt they're truly a blessing, Finland should be happy to have them, and Russia is actually inadvertently doing Finland a favor, right?
louwrentius 3y ago
With all the temporary embarrassed and actual millionaires here on HN I'm not so sure that this article will go over well. Most people who are into this space are doing relatively well, but then remember that more than 60% of Americans can't spare 400 dollars for an emergency and this simple fact shows how absolutely bonkers the whole system is. You may be free to say hateful things if that's your definition of freedom, if we define freedom as having the means to develop your true potential or just do things you like sometimes without a constant feel of existential threath, that's what I call freedom.

175 points by robtherobber 3y ago

rsp1984 3y ago

The opposite of austerity, stimulative spending (by printing money), has also been argued, by similar groups, to increase inequality due to the inflation of asset prices. Which way, left-leaning man?

ilikerashers 3y ago
Austerity also causes increases in asset prices. The UK property market is a good example so I'm not sure your point holds.

say_it_as_it_is 3y ago

Voting to fire people working in government to lower costs is antidemocratic? In government, you aren't even fired but retired, allowing you to collect your pension and benefits. It's as humane a practice as it can be while addressing financial responsibility. It's undemocratic to continue growing in perpetuity and not be held accountable to those who pay for it.

jgilias 3y ago

Ok, austerity bad, but the alternative isn't better. Either way it's the 'little man' who ends up paying through the nose. The article mentions how war time economy is evidence how the society can do whatever it wants, and implies this should be done during peace time too. And then later in the article mentions how war time leaves the economy heavily indebted. So you can do the same during peace time - take on as much debt as needed to do everything. The issue with this approach is that this increases the money supply, effectively debasing the currency. Due to the Cantillon effect, the first people to use the new money will be able to spend it at 'old value', while people further down the line will get less and less value out of it. If you're wealthy enough, you can short the currency by taking out debt, and buying assets. If the assets are yield bearing (dividend, rent), your income automatically adjusts for increased money supply. If you depend on your wage, tough luck, wages are last to adjust, so you just keep silently getting poorer. So there's no free lunch. Either explicitly or implicitly, the poorest pay the most. I don't think that's a predicament though. It's just that the answer likely doesn't lie in the extremes. A prudent enough government should be able to navigate this by not devaluating the currency too much, yet also taking on reasonable amounts of debt to fund the functions with the highest ROI.

aaa_aaa 3y ago

Austerity is result of reckless state money printing and waste.

Synaesthesia 3y ago

The book "The Capital Order" by Clara Mattei is recommended. Subtitle is "How economists invented austerity and paved the way to fascism". It's a study of WW1 and the early 1920s from an economic and social POV.

aa1234556 3y ago

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rightbyte 3y ago

It is funny. For like 4 or 5 years ago I would have waived away the article as communist hallucinations. But somehow covid made me realize that we don't live in a market economy, but rather have a central power that benefits the rich via monetary policy and lower tax. It is the same realization as when I stopped consider the GNU guys paranoid crackpots.

andsoitis 3y ago

> Capitalism gave rise to a value system that teaches us to find meaning in our work; yet millions are employed in low-paying, soul-crushing jobs. Many philosophies throughout history emphasize finding meaning in your work: - Ikigai: discover your reason for being, which is at the intersection of passion, mission, vocation, and profession. It is not just about yourself, but contributing to the world and bringing joy to others - Stoicism: while not solely focused on work, Stoicism emphasizes finding purpose and virtue in whatever situation you find yourself in, including approaching work with a sense of duty and striving to contribute to a greater good, even if the task itself is mundane - Confucianism: stresses the importance of hard work, diligence, and skill in all aspects of life, incl. work. Emphasizes fulfilling your roles and responsibilities in society with excellence, finding meaning and respect through well-performed work - Protestant work ethic: sees work as a moral obligation and way to glorify the Christian god. Encourages hard work, diligience, and productivity, finding meaning through creation & contribution to society through labor - Existentialism: encourages individuals to create own meaning in life, incl. through their work. Involves taking responsibility for your choices, pursuing authentic goals, and engaging authentically with your work.

mjdiloreto 3y ago
Yes, people often have a shocking misunderstanding of historical attitudes, and attribute modern sensibilities to people way too far back in time. They obviously also haven't read Marx, who literally argued the exact opposite. He believed Capitalism caused "alienation" in the worker, preventing him from finding meaning in his work. Prior to capitalism people were highly skilled artisans, or subsistence farmers, who almost universally found meaning in their work. So capitalism did not "give rise to a value system that teaches us to find meaning in our work", the value system was already there. Capitalism just prevented the values from being fulfilled in the workers' lives.
- andsoitis 3y ago
  Maybe. The fact that these old philosophies place so much emphasis on finding meaning in work could also (and likely, in my opinion) suggest that finding value and meaning in work does not come automatically, especially since there are physical, economic, and cultural constraints on what any one of us is able to do, and so they needed call it out specifically to engender that ethos. Putting it differently, scapegoating capitalism for preventing people from finding meaning in work seems like a shallow analysis to me. It is not like factory workers or blakcksmiths from the past who were more interested in other things (making music, say), would agree that they were fulfilled.

slibhb 3y ago

I got most of the way through this and found many things to disagree with. I started to write a reply and then I read this part: > Expertise is, in a certain sense, a bourgeois concept, a by-product of the ideological imperative to organize our lives and activities in a rational way. God help anyone who takes this shit seriously. I don't know when, if ever, austerity is called for (even Paul Krugman has called for deficit reduction in certain circumstances: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/10/opinion/us-budget-deficit-interest-rates.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/10/opinion/us-budget-deficit...). But this review is dripping with ideology to the point that it's genuinely disconcerting.

0thgen 3y ago
In a college poetry class, I learned that literary analysis isn't about being "right" (what did the author actually intend to say?), but instead, being "interesting" (what's a cool way of framing this?). Any subjective interpretation is valid if it's thought-provoking. I think that is the mental framework with ideology-saturated economic opinion pieces like this one. I don't think they care about being right. Instead, the goal is to make cool, edgy, story-book-good-vs-evil narratives independent of empirical validity ("any subjective interpretation is valid if it's thought-provoking")
- AnimalMuppet 3y ago
  I think there's a bit more to the background mental framework. Postmodernism (as best I understand it) says that all truth claims aren't actually about truth. Those who believe such things need not concern themselves with whether the facts support their position. So far I'm restating what you said. But postmodernism says more. It says that truth claims aren't actually about truth, but are assertions of power. Those who believe such things are likely to have that intent when they write. Keep that in mind when you evaluate what they say.
  - 0thgen 3y ago
    Makes sense. And the extent to which human communication is embedded with latent assertions of power is an empirical question, which seems more a question for science than philosophy

cs702 3y ago

The title is linkbait-ish and the author is ideological, but the book reviewed in the OP, "The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism," by Clara Mattei, is truly worth a read. Recommended by economists as different as Tyler Cowen and Thomas Pikkety, the book won Best Book of the Year by the Financial Times. Ignore the OP's review of the book. Instead, read the book itself: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo181707138.html https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo181707... https://www.amazon.com/Capital-Order-Economists-Invented-Austerity/dp/022681839X https://www.amazon.com/Capital-Order-Economists-Invented-Aus...

m0llusk 3y ago

Marx hasn't been around for a while. With the corporate world sucking so hard on government teats, in the US and Europe in particular, austerity has a more distributed but still intensely negative impact. I strongly recommend Mark Blyth's book Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea as a more modern and nuanced take on what is going on.

throwawaymaths 3y ago

State profligacy in the era of Central banking is an anti Democratic strategy to boost capital too. You borrow money, which increases the money supply, stealing value from everyone through inflation. This hurts the poor the worst, and benefits the rich, who rely on debt for capital instruments (the value of the debt, which is nominal, is reduced over inflation). Then you spend that money on contractors (even when it's used for social services).

hammon 3y ago

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snapplebobapple 3y ago

Hacker news needs a butthurt marxist flag.... Yet another butthurt marxist misinterpretting (among other things) the fact that free markets evolve into oligopolies to mean twar the whole system apart. The correct interpretation is that we screwed up going full rehnquist and nerd our antitrust enforcement to move back nearer to what it was doing pre rehnquist supreme court.

sershe 3y ago

I come to HN for tech news and recently I get a heaping of 100% political, 100% partisan, non-tech-related drivel that is not even news - it's just opinion blog. I'd apply it to both sides, but I only see one side on HN: Dear leftists! Can you please take your propaganda and fuck off to reddit, twitter/X, or wherever?

sergioisidoro 3y ago

From a European perspective, I would not say it's antidemocratic if parties who are pro-austerity get elected while being transparent about their policies. However in my opinion, there is a great lack of "class consciousness" from the people who vote for these parties, in a sort of Stockholm syndrome, or because people easily fall prey to the sensationalist idea that you can apply household economics to macro-economics.

mhitza 3y ago
> However in my opinion, there is a great lack of "class consciousness" from the people who vote for these parties After those voted come to power, nothing prevents them from flipping on their agenda. I've seen it happen countless times, and probably so did you. If only there were mechanics (a la Liquid Democracy) to recast votes in collective actions without the initiative of the government, but by way of constitutional rights. Politicians would be more interested to keep themselves aligned to their electorate, or lose their comfy job before their term would normally end. Politician as a career, and unconditional 4 year terms seem like a problem imo.
CM30 3y ago
But do people generally vote for parties based on their attitude towards the budget/austerity plans? Because my experience is that the big parties in most countries cover so many topics in their political agendas that people are voting for them for all manner of different reasons. Sometimes it's the social/moral aspect that they care about more than the economic one, and sometimes vice versa. It's unlikely any conservative will vote for the more left leaning party based on a dislike for austerity, and vice versa.
wesselbindt 3y ago
Democratically elected parties can transparently enact anti-democratic policies. If my local democratically elected fascist transparently has "do not allow group x to vote" as an intended policy, then that policy is anti-democratic, even though it may be popular. The argument the article makes is not that austerity measures are unpopular, it's that they're anti-democratic.
3y ago

germandiago 3y ago

I would say there are two problems here that are different: intervention as it stands can regulate in favor of a few groups of people. More intervention can easily lead to more corruption. As for austerity: reasonable people do not spend beyond what they have and if they do they do it in reasonable ways: things with an expected return on investment and with limited, calculated risk. Yet what I see is increasing intervention and out of control debt. Starting from these two premises... I do not think austerity is antidemocratic in itself. What I see is that a high degree of intervention ends up doing a cost transfer to normal people. But that would be a problem of hyperregulation, not from austerity itself IMHO. After all, I would say the correct philosophy is to spend what you have and measure the risk every time you go beyond that. Sometimes you have less, sometimes you have more, but I would not advice any person, business or state to go out of control about this. However, a state incentive is different from the former two, since they continuosly transfer costs by the force of law to unrelated people. Namely, I do and you pay, be it by friends regulation or by direct expenses and taxes increases.

throwawayqqq11 3y ago
I think you are very wrong. You are mixing regulation, intervention and austerity, which is so broad, it cannot provide a distinct explanation for the declining public services, which enforcing regulations is a part of, btw. Budget cuts set a hard upper bound on the reach of public institutions. Nothing else you mentioned achieves this.
- germandiago 3y ago
  Regulation and intervention is what defacto can loot us. It is harmful that someone comes and says: we are going to get 65% of what you earn and put more public workers and invest in two business from my friend. Regulation is what allows your friend have free competition if conveniently tweaked... austerity is not democratic? It is democratic looting or chosen by a few only? All these topics are closely related if you think of it a bit beyond the surface. In my experience, talking about Spain, I am not sure where that upper bound of expenses you talk about is. In EU according to the rules debt should not be over 60% of GDP. Spain is over 110% and after covid they did not cut back to the normal expenses...Every spanish owes over 30.000 euros in debt... I mean each of them, all ages. Any reasonable person could tell you that here health system and public education are degrading at the same time the taxes go up steadily.

inglor_cz 3y ago

Few democratic countries can manage their finances well. Switzerland comes to mind. But the general experience is that if the population can vote itself more money and services at the cost of a) either someone else, or b) growing national debt, they usually will. We are well down the same road in Czechia. Europe has a very long history of banking, but at the moment when the Euro was created, most of the obliterated national currencies were weak, reflecting distrust towards their overlords. Switzerland, the country with the strongest national currency in Europe, never felt compelled to join the bloc. Historically, authoritarian countries tend to go bankrupt over war expenses, democratic countries over handouts. The British pound was strongest at the time when the country was somewhat semi-democratic, neither-nor. But that is a very unstable configuration. Pick your poison.

vladms 3y ago
What would be "well managed finances"? The objective is to improve the living, not how you manage the money. At all points in history most of people were trying to do "things at the expense of someone else" (colonialism, feudalism, etc.). Borrowing and not repaying is one of the most reasonable ways to do that - I think it's a clear improvement from killing/enslaving people, so I think it's an improvement.
- inglor_cz 3y ago
  The objective is to improve the living without worsening it in the long run. Andreas Papandreu, the king of Greek debt, is long dead, but debt that he ran up is still saddling the young Greek generation. The artificial living standard growth which resulted from his reckless borrowing helped him getting reelected several times, but the guy died in 1996 and now people who even weren't alive back then are carrying the burden of his electoral success that was bought by unsustainable spending. One of the insidious properties of national debt is that it comes at cost of people who aren't born yet. They are in no way represented in the democratic process, but they shouldn't be ignored either. We understood so much at least with regard to environment (albeit the implementation is far from perfect), we should do the same with regard to finances. Compared to death and outright enslavement, bankruptcy is better, but it is a choice between Black Death and some treatable cancer. We should strive for better.

mjburgess 3y ago

"Democratic control over economics" looks like people voting for more services and lower taxes. Austerity occurs when the cost of government borrowing becomes so high governments are would be functionally unable to operate in the medium term without brining it down. After the finance crash the UK was increasing it's debt load at something like 200bn GBP/yr, iirc. A rate that credit-nervous markets wouldnt sustain cheaply. Austerity is the way the ideologues talk about the consequences of economic collapse without having to learn anything. What you never hear from them is alternative policies that address the specific economic problems periods of austerity are solving. You hear instead about ever more elaborate abstractions that ever less map on to any observed reality.

iamflimflam1 3y ago
Austerity was an absolute disaster for the UK. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_government_austerity_programme https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_government_aust... > Most macroeconomists now agree that the austerity programme pursued by the Coalition Government in its first two years was both too severe and unnecessary and set back the economic recovery which was underway in the first half of 2010. The Office of Budget Responsibility confirmed that the austerity programme reduced GDP, while the Oxford economist Simon Wren-Lewis has calculated that the Coalition Government's austerity programme cost the average household £4000 over the lifetime of the Parliament and severely damaged those public services which were not ring-fenced.
- disgruntledphd2 3y ago
  > set back the economic recovery which was underway in the first half of 2010 This was really obvious at the time. The economy was recovering slowly, and then the Tories got elected and induced a recession. It kinda amazes me that this wasn't obvious in advance of their actions, but whatevs.
  - iamflimflam1 3y ago
    It was very much an ideological driven cost cutting exercise.

epups 3y ago

I appreciate the review, especially in making connections between fascism and economic policy. Historically, fascists had support from powerful economic groups because of their ability to deliver on highly unpopular economic measures. The current state of politics in the West is that while (some) governments are not outright fascist, any pretense of them representing the political will of the majority of its population is crumbling. They serve a minority of very wealthy individuals much more than they do their general populace, and we accept that as fact. To play devil's advocate, however, I would argue that there is sound rationale for not allowing economic policy to be decided in an a purely democratic way. If everyone had equal vote in what the government should do monetarily, the result could quickly evolve to a disaster, which we have also seen in places where dictators try to appease to the population as a whole by subsidizing costs and wages.

abigail95 3y ago

This is nonsense, the opening paragraph isn't a contradiction, it's describing an equilibrium, and the difference between the actions of a single firm and aggregate demand/supply. This has been studied for over a century, why this being repeated uncritically in media?

linschn 3y ago

I'm a bit surprised to see this at the top of HN. Maybe the US is still asleep, and the Friedman fanboys have not read that yet. This look like a good book and I am likely to buy it. From a systems standpoint it is quite obvious that capitalism tends to concentrate wealth in the hands of those who already own capital. Piketty showed the historical data agree with that: as long as growth is less than capital rewards, wealth concentrates. We need a systemic solution to that, and that can't happen with représentative democracy. We need direct control of the means of production by those who make them work. This means stronger unions, but also platform régulations, as users are unpaid knowledge workers giving away their data in exchange for a service, an exchange so one-sided and highly beneficial to the platforms that states are losing their sovereignty to the platforms. See bratton's The Stack to know more.

abigail95 3y ago
The article has a pretty good example of what happens if you let a bunch of people seize the power to do that. Representative democracy is a powerful check against a lot of bad things. I don't care if you feel you aren't being paid for your data if it means I'm allowed to vote on whether I'm allowed to start a business or not.
mjburgess 3y ago
Wealth concentrates because of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preferential_attachment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preferential_attachment -- it has nothing to do with "capitalism" -- an era which contains historically unprecedented periods of comparative wealth equality. The only processes known to make substantial impacts on this process involve mass death. Write a simulation yourself, it's relatively trivial. You'll find PA a force of nature which little can overcome. 2x0 is still 0, 2xbillion = 2billion And thus from equal starting points and equal chances inequality becomes ever more extreme. Rutheless redistribution on the scale of a small tribe might, within that tribe, work for a time. But wars between tribes fix this 'temporary reprieve' -- since tribal power follows PA. There is no known policy, at least none i'm aware of, which can preserve the tiny populations needed for equalising redistribution which at the same time prevents them from preferetnailly attaching to each other.,

thriftwy 3y ago

When run unchecked, capital will happily suck all the money from the economy and into its coffers, and the fun thing is, it has no idea what to do next. Next it would very likely invest these money in the worst possible way and cause a big crash. Think about is like of a centipede instead of sentient creatures at work. It does not know what to do once it eats its leaf. We know it's going to morph but the thing is oblivious to it itself.

0thgen 3y ago
I think the iffy reasoning your committing here is the anthropomorphization of complex systems. Similar to the error of describing darwinian evolution as having a "goal" We should probably describe economic systems as massively complex distributed interactions rather than thinking of them as organisms with monolithic intentions and goals
- thriftwy 3y ago
  We cannot describe the thing you are referring to. We are quite poor at contemplating "massively complex distributed interactions". It's all noise to us.
  - 0thgen 3y ago
    agreed

ETH_start 3y ago

Ridiculous. Working class != labor unions. Militant labor unions murdered numerous members of the working class who dared to cross their picket lines.

hef19898 3y ago
As did capitalist strike breakers.
- ETH_start 3y ago
  The strike breakers were sent in to break up the violent strikes that were killing replacement workers who crossed the picket lines.

okokwhatever 3y ago

It scares me a lot that modern economies don't understand yet the worst tax on citizens is the Inflation tax. Still can't understand why we're still trying to make things work after centuries of failures. Obviously monetary base expansion to support non austerity policies is the biggest inflationary factor.

sofixa 3y ago
What is your solution against inflation? The gold standard was proven not work, and it still saw inflation.
- pi-e-sigma 3y ago
  Gold standard wasn't great but in hindsight it actually worked better what we have now.
  - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
    Well, it worked better at preventing inflation. It led to some really nasty financial collapses, though, and what we have now works better at preventing those.
    - pi-e-sigma 3y ago
      It never led to any financial collapse though. It just prevented ballooning the money supply that could be used as a temporary work around. "If only we could printed more money we would have been fine!". So the gold standard wasn't the cause of the issue at hand, it just prevented _some_ type of a fix. The deflationary nature of the gold standard is something working long-term only, it can't flair up all of sudden. Unlike inflation. Besides I have an issue with this mantra that "small inflation is good for the economy" but somehow _small_ deflation being the end of the world.
      - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
        > It never led to any financial collapse though. If the Panic of 1879, the Panic of 1897, and the Great Depression don't count as "financial collapse", sure. I don't think that I agree with your definitions, though.

MrPatan 3y ago

The non-austere "Free stuff for you! Vote for me!" political strategy has worked pretty well while technology improvements has made stuff faster than politicians can give it away. But it's a precondition. If technology ever stops improving at this rate, we're going to have a hard time, and no amount of words will change that fact. To be for free stuff and at the same time be for degrowth, decel, limit resource use, etc.... seems naive to say the least.

isilofi 3y ago
Also, politicians can get more and more creative at excessive spending, at some point even outspending any kind of economic growth. And even if they don't outspend, at some point inflation comes along and kicks things over the edge.

waihtis 3y ago

modern democracy is a sham anyway. lets examine a recent large crisis we had in Finland - the border crisis, in which Russia systematically weaponized migrant waves - where the democratically elected government was initially unable to act with any measures on, because it would've been in violation of a UN convention which was agreed on in the 60's. This was one of the most prolific decisions to be done in the 2020's and yet we could just barely enforce the will of the people over the interests of extragovernmental groups. Now imagine the thousands of small decisions being done which the average voter has no transparency into. A good start to real democracy would be completely outlawing lobbying, NGO's, think tanks and other garbage organizations who's only raison d'etre is subverting the peoples right to their own governance.

actionfromafar 3y ago
But it did work, and in proportion to the threat the migrants posed, it didn't take that long. Following agreed upon international conventions is also important to a country in the long run.
- waihtis 3y ago
  Barely working in 1 case in a 1000 is hardly a good track record, plus the border is about to reopen again in 4 days because appeasing the UN is more important than national safety
  - hef19898 3y ago
    You do know, that a simple border closure wouldn't do anything anything against a Russian invasion?
    - lupusreal 3y ago
      Being a member of NATO is Finland's most important safety measure against that. And what are you even talking about, he didn't suggest that closing the border was necessary to prevent a military invasion. The national security threat it addresses is an unregulated influx of migrants handpicked by Russia to cause trouble for Finnish society, to punish Finland for joining NATO. But I guess now you're going to act shocked and offended that anybody could think these migrants could be a problem for Finland. No doubt they're truly a blessing, Finland should be happy to have them, and Russia is actually inadvertently doing Finland a favor, right?

louwrentius 3y ago

With all the temporary embarrassed and actual millionaires here on HN I'm not so sure that this article will go over well. Most people who are into this space are doing relatively well, but then remember that more than 60% of Americans can't spare 400 dollars for an emergency and this simple fact shows how absolutely bonkers the whole system is. You may be free to say hateful things if that's your definition of freedom, if we define freedom as having the means to develop your true potential or just do things you like sometimes without a constant feel of existential threath, that's what I call freedom.