Don Patinkin vs D.D Kosambi

Money is a specific type of Credit- one that endangers the holder. Sometimes it is safer to bury it in the ground or disperse it in the ether. The existence of hordes of coin is evidence of 'exogenous shocks' involving physical danger- war, brigandage and the collapse of trading networks. They can tell the historian little about Social conditions- what Marxists call the mode of production- for ordinary people. Similarly, wealth effects resulting from changes in the economic aether or atmosphere- i.e. exogenous shocks affecting Uncertainty associated with the General level of prices and future economic activity- play no coordinating role for most people in a given Society. It is foolish to read very much into either coin hordes or 'real balances'. They are a matter of elite chrematistics not nuts and bolts economics.

The former mistake was made by Kosambi- a polyglot mathematician, potentially of the first rank, who somewhat ran to seed. The latter folly was committed by Patinkin who was similarly precocious as a mathematical economist. Like Kosambi, his historical scholarship, arising perhaps from his childhood immersion in yeshiva studies, had won praise and this is one commonality between them. This is because Kosambi's father- a Brahmin turned Buddhist monk (but one who continued to have sons!)- was a savant at Harvard and then a Professor at Leningrad before returning to India. Naturally, this paternal peculiarity affected the young polymath's trajectory.

The other is that both Kosambi and Patinkin were determined, or destined, to leave America for British colonies or ex-colonies- India and Israel respectively- where they would be forced to choose between the two types of radicalism familiar to them from their similarly elite American education and somewhat 'subaltern' ethnic or class origin.

 Patinkin had been taught by both Oskar Lange and Henry Simons. Would he chose Government control of the economy in which planners adjusted prices in response to excess demand or would he plump for a free market approach in which severe restrictions on monopolistic practices as well as Financial institutions featured?

Patinkin's solution was creative and remains of interest both to Marxists and mainstream economists because of the manner in which it integrated money into the theory of value. However, it had little importance for Israel because of the commanding role played by the Histadrut (the monolithic Trade Union which owned and operated many businesses) which was complementary to that of the Government. This meant the one overriding law of Israeli economics remained that though plenty of very smart economising was done, all laws of economics were cheerfully defied.

By contrast, Kosambi wasn't an economist and his historiography, when not wholly eccentric, was quaintly doctrinaire albeit in a belle letrrist sophomore fashion. Nevertheless, the fact is, after Independence, Kosambi could have been part of a 'free market' based Technocratic class- he was employed by the Tatas (a leading indigenous Business House) and involved in early work on the electronic computer. Interestingly, the Tata Institute did build a computer within a couple of years of the Fuji corporation in Japan. However, competition between Japanese Corporations- for example, NEC's success using transistors in 1959- meant that f.d.i became available to the Japanese Corporate Sector for R&D in integrated circuits and thus Japan, but not India, was able to cash in on the 'hardware' revolution. It must be said, however, that the more technocratic bent of the Japanese Ministry of Trade and Industry enabled the Corporate sector to gain foreign exchange to pay for initial licensing fees.

 Around this time, the Indians were trying to create a Technologically savvy cadre within the Government. Unfortunately the jealously of the old, mainly humanities trained, Civil Service killed off the program. This type of bureaucratic politics is part of the reason that people like Kosambi felt disillusioned. Perhaps there was a 'caste' aspect to such dramas. In particular, 'Brahminical attitudes'- i.e. a preference for lofty words rather than tangible results- may have been seen as the culprit.

 Kosambi had no faith in Atomic Energy- preferring Solar power- and perhaps he'd have been happier resigning from the Tata Institute and joining the Communist party. Had he done so it is likely that he would have soon got up to speed with developments in Soviet Economics- indeed, his original research interests might have enabled him to contribute and compete with the likes of Kolmogorov and Kantorovitch. More importantly, he could have put forward a devastating critique of Mahalanobis's Planning Commission's puerile Leontief type model and the absurd policy prescriptions that flowed from it. Thus, in the late Fifties, Kosambi could have been in the vanguard of a salutary challenge from the Left to Nehruvian bureaucratic Socialism. The sclerotic nature of Indian Marxism- Kosambi's initial contribution was a critique of the precociously geriatric Dange- could have been effectively contested by younger and smarter technocrats and mathematicians. The same point might be made of the Mahalanobis inspired academo-bureaucratic availability cascade we associate with the early Amartya Sen of 'Choice of Technique' and the 'Seb- Dobb thesis'. Such rank stupidity was apotheosized by Indira Gandhi's servile Planning Commission appointee- Sukhamoy Chakravarty- whom Sen blames for his own changing direction from Physics (where his nullity would have soon been apparent) to Economics (which is nullity incarnate).

Chakravarty's theoretical defense of the Mahalanobis model would have been easy for Kosambi to defeat in advance because he had the equipment to apply control theory to complex dynamic systems. Like Busemann, he understood that the associated Finsler spaces need not be locally Euclidean but rather could feature Minkowskian line segments.

The Mahalanobis model made absurd assumptions re. different classes of Capital goods or different types of Consumption dependent on whether a person is employed or not.  Thus its prescriptions were garbage in, garbage out. Both Capital and Consumption are complex processes. The Pontyragin principle as applied to an absurdly partitioned Reimann space can't say anything about optimality at all. But, considered on the Finsler space, Bellman's principle points to something we see in the real world viz. discontinuities arising from mimetic effects, or 'endogenous growth', constituting scandal-free geodesics which render complex dynamics tractable and productive. This answers Chakravarty's dilemma as to how to know when structural change has occurred and what to do about it because, from the start, a complex dynamic system is properly modeled as not locally Euclidean but Minkowskian and so, though there are discontinuities in the perceived statics, no scandal arises re. the dynamics. I'm sure there are far less stupid ways to say this but, historically, I imagine that Kosambi would have clarified similar points on his way to a more general conclusion. This could have completely changed the fate of Indian Marxist Historiography and Peasant Studies- unless of course R.S. Sharma was right and, for some phylogenetic reason, the Dynasty- even once Italian rather than Indian- can always create, by some magical power, not just sycophants but brain-dead serfs out of our indigenous jhollahwallah careerists. It is a small mercy that Kosambi didn't live to witness his own apotheosis at the hands of this feudal cult which claims him as its progenitor.

Could Kosambi have gatecrashed the Mandarins or Mad Hatter's Tea Party at the Planning Commission? I don't know. I recall reading of one Dr. Jayanti Dharam Teja- supposedly a nuclear physicist who had made a lot of money in the States in some high tech field- who managed to swindle even more money out of Nehru's Government. Could Kosambi- who attended Harvard- not have done something similar but of opposite social valency? I suppose not. He was never a rich man nor hankered after wealth, whereas, in New Delhi, it is money that talks.

Still, the Fifties was the time of 'Hindi-Chini bhai bhai' and Kosambi had made an impression on the Chinese- he'd even published a paper in that language. I believe he tried to get Chern a berth in Bombay at the Tata Institute. I image that sort of cosmopolitanism would have given the handsome and charismatic Kosambi some small edge in whatever politicking was required in New Delhi.

It may be that there were purely political forces militating against a rejuvenation of Indian Marxism- even at that early date. However, Kosambi's interest in ancient history might, under Party discipline, have enabled him to device a superior econometric approach to agrarian issues which would have been very useful in connection with planning for the Green Revolution. This may be a rosy eyed view. It may be that Indian Marxists were always senile shitheads concerned only with fucking over the peasants in the manner of Bukharin & Preobrazhensky's puerile ABC of Communism.

The fact that Kosambi neither embraced the free-market nor the Marxist option and thus had no coherent economic theory, probably has to do with his lack of like minded peers- the penalty he paid for leaving America, or- later on- losing the comradeship of Andrei Weil. By contrast, Patinkin had been drawn into the Cowles Commission and, later on, Israel was not as cut off as India from advances in the West.

In writing this, I am speculating as to what might have happened if Kosambi's professional life, post Independence, had been happier or more productive. I am also making some, no doubt, very simplistic assumptions which I'd better explicitly set down.

1) Patinkin's indoctrination in Hebrew and the Talmud inspired, as it did in Solomon Maimon, a distrust of facile 'harmonious construction' type reasoning. He was interested instead in disequilibrium and discontinuity. He chose practical Zionism- building a first world knowledge economy in a small third world country on a permanent war footing- precisely because the task seemed quixotic and in defiance of the Historicist logic of both Rabbi and Professor.
Kosambi had no similar indoctrination in Sanskrit or Mimamsa or Navya Nyaya. Even if he had, the fact is there is no similar doctrine in Hindu thought. All meaning can be a wholly chaotic permanent disequilibrium. For Buddhism, Reality itself is but momentary and though intentionality simply is; intensionality, being complex, is not.

 As a matter of fact, Kosambi's literary and historiographical researches were motivated by his great facility with languages and his retentive memory. Unfortunately, pride of caste overpowered him. He decided that the Brahmins had some magical power such that, though disparate in origin and geographically dispersed, they somehow managed to impose a exploitative system of social stratification across a vast swathe of land without any coercive power over and above their bare charisma.

2) Kosambi had better tools to understand disequilibrium and heterogeneity. We can now get an idea of how those tools yield a theory of far greater generality but, for that very reason, no predictive power or historicist content. In the Indian context, that was a good thing. The State could have developed a technocratic cadre which worked with selected 'Nationalist' Corporations in a manner that enabled productive investment to increasingly pay for itself rather than require a 'Sen-Dobb' type confiscation of surpluses from the pre-modern, or intermediate sector. In other words, endogenous growth was possible precisely because a more general, mathematically advanced, theory of the economy was part and parcel of rapid, Muth rational, endogenous growth. In the mid Thirties and again in the late Fifties, engineers and mathematicians could have put India on such a trajectory. In both cases this failed to happen because it seemed more urgent to fight some fundamental culture war which had to do with some past epistemic violence or humiliation. There was a puritanical element to this. Consumerism was simply considered to be wrong and evil and unsustainable. In Calvin's Geneva, goldsmiths and jewellers had to become watchmakers as conspicuous consumption was frowned upon. That was a good thing. The Swiss gained a high value added export. India's anti-Consumerism, by contrast, rejected even the utilitarian watch in favour of more Research Institutes and PhD programs churning out a parodic type of scholarship whose claim to salience arose out of shrill denunciation and aleatory vigilance against people buying nice stuff or eating something tasty or watching an entertaining movie or other such heartless atrocities committed against the poor and suffering whom we shall always have with us.

Israel and India are, of course, very different. Israel's small size, meritocratic ethos, and the extraordinary intellectual stature of its diaspora have enabled the much smaller country to take far greater strides. Bizarrely, an Indian like me now distrusts, or considers worthless, works by Indian origin Ivy League academics while still finding Israeli Indological works quite useful. Why? The Israelis will do some alethic research. The Indians will simply recycle worthless availability cascades and then play the race card.

I suppose Kosambi's somewhat bizarre Marxism simply reflected an obvious truth- Marxism is silly in a segmentary society. As for praising one's own caste- even by the back handed method of ascribing the power to brainwash others to it- well, in India, it helps pass the time.

In the end Don Patinkin and D.D. Kosambi- though highly rated by shite academics- will perhaps be remembered for negative accomplishments. Patinkin, despite being a first rate economist wasn't able to fuck up the Israeli economy very much. Kosambi too just beat around the bush rather than proclaiming the great truth of Indian Marxism- viz. India is a shithole. Always has been and always will be. Any other view is nothing but Hindu chauvinism and arrant consumerism and populist majoritarian fascism of a sort which only Indians- those evil little shits- need to be protected from so as to preserve the sub-continent as a vast and bottomless begging bowl.

Project Camelot 1965 & Blade Runner 2049

 In a giant, empty, decaying building which had once housed thousands, a single TV set hawked its wares to an uninhabited room. 

This ownerless ruin had, before World War Terminus, been tended and maintained. Here had been the suburbs of San Francisco, a short ride by monorail rapid transit; the entire peninsula had chattered like a bird tree with life and opinions and complaints, and now the watchful owners had either died or migrated to a colony world. Mostly the former; it had been a costly war despite the valiant predictions of the Pentagon and its smug scientific vassel, the Rand Corporation — which had, in fact, existed not far from this spot. Like the apartment owners, the corporation had departed, evidently for good. No one missed it,

Philip K Dick, 'Do Androids dream of electric sheep?'

The climactic showdown between Rutger Hauer and Harrison Ford in Blade Runner occurs in this empty decaying building not far from the old Rand Corporation Head Quarters in Santa Monica. Dick published the book on which the film was based in 1968. At that time the Rand Corp. was connected in the public mind with 'Dr. Strangelove' type Nuclear policy aiming at Mutually Assured Destruction as well as the ongoing war in Indochina. However, there was a third aspect to Rand's work which has since faded from public memory. This was its association with psychological warfare and counter-insurgency for which it recruited Psychologists and Sociologists and Area specialists. This was the notorious 'Project Camelot'- described as the Manhattan Project for the Social Sciences- which sought to turn American academics into 'engaged intellectuals' who would uncover the objective determinants of human behaviour as relating to social and political formations. In the words of Theodore Vallance

Project CAMELOT is a study whose objective is to determine the feasibility of developing a general social systems model which would make it possible to predict and influence politically significant aspects of social change in the developing nations in the world. Somewhat more specifically, its objectives are:

First, to devise procedures for assessing the potential for internal war within national societies;

Second, to identify with increased degrees of confidence those actions which a government might take to relieve conditions which are assessed as giving rise to a potential for internal war; and

Finally, to assess the feasibility of prescribing the characteristics of a system for obtaining and using the essential information for doing the above two things.^[38]

Project Camelot backfired when Latin American intellectuals became suspicious of its motivation. The Chilean Senate, in particular, denounced this thinly disguised attempt at 'imperialist intervention'.
Phillip K Dick was writing his book after this fiasco had come to light. At the time, it did appear that the Social Sciences could be used to prevent costly wars abroad- like the Vietnam quagmire- but, if so, why not at home to manage dissent and 'manufacture consent'?

 Blade Runners use advanced technology to identify androids who, it seems, lack a specifically human capacity for empathy which is expressed in love for and the desire to nurture all organic life-forms. Clearly, such a technology could also be used to identify potential troublemakers who are not susceptible to the normal emotional and moral restraints enforced by family relationships, institutional ideologies or organised religion.       

Blade runners use their bounties to buy real as opposed to electric sheep. They can also connect up electronically with a suffering Christ like figure named Mercer. Thus humans are identified by not just empathy but also a participation mystique of a spiritual kind. This does not mean that they are happy or good. They have to use electronic means to stabilise their moods. Stay at home wives- entombed in what Betty Friedan had called the feminine mystique- are depicted as at the end of their tether. Meanwhile, a large section of the population are condemned to second class status as 'chicken-heads' because they have been damaged by fall-out and are considered intellectually sub-par.

Androids exhibit sociopathic traits, but so do some humans. Indeed, sociopathy may correlate with outstanding success in competitive fields. 'Chicken-heads', however, are full of empathy- though it brings them only more suffering.

Dick's conclusion is that humans can reverse time, reverse entropy- like the Christ like Mercer who
was killed for bringing the dead back to life. How? Forgiveness, Mercy, Penitence- these are human faculties we all possess- which can do what even the God of Aristotle can not, viz change the Past.

The Blade Runner has killed and been unfaithful to his wife with an android who vindictively slaughters his sheep. Yet his wife is a comfort to him at the end of his terrible day.

"Do you think I did wrong?" he asked. "What I did today?" 

"No." 

"Mercer said it was wrong but I should do it anyhow. Really weird. Sometimes it's better to do something wrong than right."

 "It's the curse on us," Iran said. "That Mercer talks about."

"The dust?" he asked.

"The killers that found Mercer in his sixteenth year, when they told him he couldn't reverse time and bring things back to life again. So now all he can do is move along with life, going where it goes, to death. And the killers throw the rocks; it's they who're doing it. Still pursuing him. And all of us, actually..."

Project Camelot was discontinued by President Johnson in 1965. Yet it appears that the US backed coup in Chile eight years later was motivated to some degree by a computer program called POLITICA which counselled the killing of Allende. Interestingly, Allende's regime had relied upon a Cybernetic system to coordinate the economy- it featured a futuristic control room with Star Trek type tulip chairs- but this 'Cybersyn' program was junked after the coup.

Chile was something of an exception. The truth is the scandal surrounding Project Camelot did not deter similar operations in Brazil or Colombia or Peru being successfully carried through. Nor did Social Science funding decrease. In 1968, the National Science Foundation had its charter rewritten so as to place the Social Sciences on a par with the Natural Sciences. However, by then, there was a new mood on the campuses of America and Europe. The 'baby boomers' were coming of age and were determined to live life on more ample terms than could be envisaged by a bunch of behavioural scientists or predicted by a computer.

Philip K Dick was a hero to this new generation. They may not have understood the Gnostic element to his thinking but shared his suspicion of the organs of government and the bland corporations which manipulate them. Yet, this 'Me' generation too back-traced. By the time Ridley Scott's film came out, there was an obsession with Japanese competition which has since faded away only to be replaced with a fear of China. Gender relations too had changed. The scandal that Harrison Ford's love interest is programmed to fall in love with him is not confronted. Instead the focus shifts to whether he is himself a replicant. In any case, he is little better than a chicken-head genetically unworthy of witnessing 'attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion'. The androids, in Scott's film, on the other hand, are Promethean- they challenge their maker. In Dick's book, though the android is programmed to have an affair with the hero, she is still woman enough to act vindictively against his prize possession.

What of Blade Runner 2049? Critics have raved about it. But what does it actually say? I must admit I couldn't make sense of it. The objectification of women crosses a line. I suppose the film is about 'hybridity'. Androids can breed with humans. If this fact becomes known, then the entire social structure- predicated on android servility- will be called into question. There is one other possibility. If androids can make more androids, with or without human help, they may become the master race. In this scenario, the rugged macho male might be little more than a sperm donor manipulated by a female android with the right software program. The problem here is that we are speaking of a purely political process- a game about whether sociopathic humans run things through bland Corporations or whether inhuman androids do so on the basis of superior software. The outcome scarcely matters. The one plot twist features the hybrid child who turns out not to be the hero but a woman who makes the artificial memories which stabilise android behaviour. The hero's self-sacrifice reunites her with her father and, it may be, she forgives him for what might have felt like his abandonment of her. Perhaps a new type of memory can be fabricated on the basis of what happens next. But we are given little guidance as to what that might be.

In Dick's book there is a sort of shared artificial memory- that of Mercer being assailed by stones and rocks- which mediates the hopelessness of an Earth in the clutches of an entropic death spiral. In Scott's movie there is a Promethean grandeur to the androids' agon with their human maker. In Denis Villeneuve's film there are gorgeous visuals and Gosling doing what Gosling does in every recent movie we have seen him in. But what is it that he does? Perhaps this flop will alert producers that they need to find something else for Gosling to do than sleep-walk through yet more victories of style over substance.

Dick's book was, in its own way, a monument to '68 when bare breasted German students put Adorno to flight with a shower of flower petals and Parisian students raised up flagstones, like the Communards, but with the slogan 'under the pavement- the beach!' A feature of this world wide unrest in which students were in the vanguard was a Lysistrata like protest by women against a macho military industrial complex which, like Moloch, demanded an increasing tribute of young lives.

 It seemed something had gone wrong in the relationship between the sexes and the entire planet was imperilled as a result. Why? The Social Science had turned sociopathic. The Humanities were turning into the sub-humanities. Paideia had been weaponised.

Scott's movie, in '82, vividly depicts American fears of being eclipsed by the Pacific Rim. Its homage to the film noir tradition is based on the challenges faced by an American masculinity no longer bolstered by the military-industrial complex. In December of that year, unemployment peaked at over 10 % - the highest it has ever been since the Great Depression. Why? Voodoo economics. Social Scientists were now little better than witch-doctors.

What social reality does Villenueve's movie reflect? I notice a lot of scary looking immigrants speaking strange languages. Even the androids are having babies. Soon they will out breed us. Trump had better build that Wall before it is too late! Everything else is just fake news or clickbait Junk Social Science. The City on the Hill remains hidden. Camelot is as Nineveh and the Eternal Feminine a toppled statue of cyclopean scale. Maiuetics has misfired. Misology is a universal inheritance. The minotaur has outgrown his labyrinth. Memory is a thread whose Ariadne is herself manufactured.

If Light is a disease of matter

If Light is a Disease of Matter & Grief its own Glutton

& we cast lots for the schmatta of the Lamb dressed as mutton

Since we're all Smart & there's no such thing as Sin

 God is just a fart- why hold it in?

Envoi- 

Prince! Caesar's cross our risen Christ would yet insult

But for Dawkins & Dennett's catacomb of a cult.

Danielle Allen's crazy Game Theory

This is Danielle Allen talking about her book 'Cuz' in the LARB. 

Another imperative shaping this book’s construction and its presentation of causality comes from the nine years I’ve spent on the Pulitzer Prize board, which means reading a ton of investigative journalism, as well as a fair amount of nonfiction emerging out of investigative journalism. Gradually I’ve noticed an interesting pattern in which a huge amount of writing in this genre has the same causal structures built into it. Take, for example, investigative journalism on childcare centers where children get abused or neglected, or on eldercare facilities where sexual abuse of elders occurs. You can end up reading any number of studies where vulnerable people get abused and fall through the cracks. The causal story structuring 85% of the writing in this field suggests that such abuse plays out because the government hasn’t regulated these sectors enough. A standard solution follows: we need more government regulation of childcare centers or more government regulation of eldercare centers or more government regulation of how nonflammable mattresses get produced. But if we truly acted on all these calls for regulation coming out of investigative journalism, I think we would have a state at a level that we cannot even imagine.

Allen is assuming that regulations can only be enforced by a Regulatory Agency funded and staffed by the State. The problem with such Agencies is that they may be 'Captured'- i.e. rendered ineffective or manipulated into creating monopolistic profits by creating an artificial barrier to entry- or else impose high compliance costs in a corrupt manner.
One alternative is for Industries to self-regulate so to avoid becoming a repugnancy market. The other is for Consumer groups to exercise a countervailing power through litigation and public 'naming and shaming'. Quality certification is frequently done by wholly private organisations or those funded by the industry in question.
In all these cases some amount of Regulation can improve outcomes without necessarily giving rise to a costly bureaucracy or expansion of the State.

Allen does not understand the concept of correlated strategies in Game Theory. Regulations are public signals which improve the outcome for everybody. They reduce administrative costs. They roll back the State. Why? They permit Civil Society to burgeon and thus 'internalize' negative externalities which previously had to be policed. Where local authorities are empowered to enforce different laws, subsidiarity based Tiebout sorting further improves allocative efficiency and allows for 'endogenous growth' of a particularly valuable type. Capacitance diversity increases globally thus rendering the system as a whole more robust.

So as I began to research this book, I thought about which core causal story might most writers come at it from. I knew, going in, that I had to present more complexity to this causal story than “Somebody ought to do something,” or “If there had been a regulation everything would have worked out fine.” But I also knew that, precisely because one kind of causality so dominates our writing landscape, if I wanted to represent different forms of causality, I would have to find and adopt different writing techniques. So one approach I found really useful comes out of economic game theory, with its ways of thinking about equilibrium states, where incentive structures generate patterns of behavior that stay in equilibrium, and where you also can track phase shifts from one equilibrium to another.

Phase shifts occur in networks or cellular automata where all agents, or monads, obey a mindless rule. Game theory is quite different because there are cooperative strategies, which however may not be stable. Eusocial mechanisms make them so. Allen's own subject was valued because it represented a rational and secular, as opposed to Revealed Scripture based, approach to such mechanism design.

I had a moment of discovery when I realized that this sequence of acceleration in Michael’s life, when he went from very small, not super frequent thefts to really violent acts, provides one of those phase shifts. I sensed that if I could find and trace these phase shifts in Michael’s equilibrium, then I could get to a different answer about causality, and so that’s what I did. But then I also needed to write that process. So I don’t know if you remember this one passage…

The prose all of the sudden keeps repeating the word “shift.” 

Exactly. Thank you for your careful reading. I use this image of a vacuum tube getting whisked up. I had to find images that convey this new way of thinking about causality that economics has delivered to us, but which has not yet appeared much in nonfiction. I had to try to render causality differently in nonfiction. Again that effort lies beneath this whole book.

This is bonkers. A 15 year old gets hold of a gun. Guns are cool. So are cars. Within a couple of weeks of getting hold of a gun, his crime spree culminates in an attempted car-jacking. Unfortunately, the middle aged geezer he is trying to jack grabs the gun and shoots him in the neck.
Young adult Fiction and films have been showing this 'phase shift'- which involves crossing a threshold for violence- since before I was born. This is a story about thrill seeking and pop culture. This particular 15 year old probably watched rap videos featuring cool young punks brandishing pistols. He had probably viewed countless car chases on TV growing up. Being a well built, personable, young man, he felt he was the hero in his own gangster rap video. He was jacking a car at gun point and the next thing that would happen would be a car chase with the cops featuring all the usual cinematic tropes, till he finally ditches the smoking hulk of a vehicle and walks away looking cool.

So now to the substance of this causality. As I traced the history of our drug market’s own equilibrium shifts, it became increasingly clear how much we all focus our analytical powers specifically on the world that we can see (that is, on the state).

WTF? We can't see the State. Its functioning is wholly opaque which is why K street makes so much money. We can see the street. In some neighbourhoods, having a gun and being known to have jacked a car is going to get you laid and make you popular. In others... not so much. Everything depends on the street you grow up on. That's why people pay a lot of money to move from one type of street to another. That's economics.

But tracing Michael’s phase shift, situated in a different world, helped me finally to see that other world with its own equilibrium, its own incentive structures generating different kinds of behavior. That particular thinking process finally made the parastate visible to me.

15 year old kids don't constitute a 'parastate'. There was no equilibrium which Michael was 'discovering' because there was no rational self-interest or genuine money motive. This was about thrill seeking and looking cool. An 'affluenza' plea would have got him a suspended sentence with some mandatory counselling at a 5 star rehab facility. But, Michael's Mom wasn't affluent and his Uncle, who may have been, doesn't seem to have helped much.


Michael wasn't high at the time he committed the crimes for which he was sentenced. Something else had disinhibited him. What? It may have been the intoxicating presence of other young people he was trying to impress. Or it may have been his own imaginative power which could picture himself as a ruthless gangster in so compelling a manner that he acted as one. Allen tell us her cousin 'had a mild proclivity for theft'. That was before he got hold of a gun and went on a crime spree.
He had a good physique and was popular with his peers. He thought he'd make a good armed robber but it turned out he was mistaken- he was crap at gun play. At his age, I  had a mild proclivity for being a nerd because of the kind of street I grew up on. I imagined myself as being good at maths. I started borrowing some elementary texts from the library on subjects like tensor calculus. But, it turned out, I was crap at maths. I could pass the easy sort of maths exams we have in Econ but would never develop any creative insights into the techniques I was mindlessly applying. I had to content myself with the prison of junk social science and the malaise of physics envy. At some stage, I encountered structuralist French psilosophy which features pseudo-mathematical bullshit. I buggered it to buggery in my prison cell. My fate was sealed. My poetry is at best shite staining the socio-proctologicial digit of many fingered Time. It has nothing to do with our intersubjective reality. At best it is ontologically dysphoric. At worst, it is paranoid or dyspeptic.

The same can be said of Michael and of his transgender lover who- in the troubadour or  ghazal tradition- was also his assassin. Their reality was orthogonal to that of quotidian house-keeping or governance.

Allen prefers to romanticise her cousin. She thinks this loser was part of a 'para-state'. This is bonkers. Michael's attempt at being a gangster was as ineffective as my attempt to become a proper nerd. It is the common fate of the vast majority of teenagers. Almost all of us have to settle for the equivalent of being glorified accountants rather than path breaking Mathematicians. From the Romantic point of view, Michael was fortunate. He found both Love and Death in the same cell-mate. But, in Jail there were no guns- so Thanatos was more inaccessible than Eros. In the 'hood there were too many guns- so, sooner rather than later, he received, from his inamorata, a bullet not a billet doux. He was lucky. His forehead is stamped with, not the mark of Cain, but that of Adonis and those who consider his Love 'transgressive' are but Caiaphas custodians who bar themselves from his, and Dante's, damaged but therefore the more beloved, bride of Christ.

Allen nevertheless insists there is some invisible para-state in which her cousin was a 'player'. Why? It is her inverted 'family romance' such that she herself is not the daughter of a legal luminary but some deadbeat, abusive, loser Dad. Thus she says-

And it shouldn’t surprise us that this parastate remains hard to see.

Are you kidding me, Allen? Are gang members with their prison tatts and low slung pants and rolling perp walk really so invisible? The reason Michael sported no such insignia, the reason he remained your beloved 'Cuz'- actually your little brother you lovely woman who has stooped to the folly that is 'Social Science'- is because the kid was never a gang banger. He couldn't be coz he had the love of his own 'Cuz'. Yes, he thought guns were cool same as I thought tensor calculus was cool when I was 15. But, God be praised!, he was crap at gunplay, same as I was crap at fucking over poor people using Amartya Sen type shite algebra or econometrics or Kaushik Basu level stupid Game Theory. Michael didn't hurt his own people. He didn't even hurt you. He gave you a way out. He dragged no one down with him. He is a martyr to a great, a universal, truth- viz. gender dysphoria is something real. Transgender people deserve love. If the Ayatollah's of Iran can show empathy for them and make their path easy, why not the most Christian community in America- that of the African Americans, which has brought the Joy of the Gospel into the hearts of even worthless shitheads like me?

The Greek Church- which you know about coz u know from Greek- makes a distinction between akrebia and oikonomia. The former is rigid and rule based and deterministic. The latter is flexible and spontaneous and ultimately based on agape and affection and empathy and quiet tears for what might have been not ponderous tomes noisily advertising a wholly bogus type of scholarship.

But first I went around for a while asking economists: “Where should one look for the economics of the black market? How can we see it? How can I find it?” and so forth. Sudhir Venkatesh, for example, has studied the black market.

There is no black market for jacking cars simply as a matter of thrill seeking. Nobody gets paid for doing so. Sudhir Venkatesh studied gangs which made money out of crime. He didn't study thrill seeking delinquents on a gun toting crime spree.

Steven Levitt has done some work. But there’s just not a lot, and there’s not much because this market remains illegal.

Economists have no trouble studying an illegal market. It's just that its cheaper to acquire statistics and more funding is available, from the industry in question, for research into legal markets.

So here a huge paradox comes into view. We can see and we can model the state’s legal operations, and collect all this data about it, but our methods inevitably will miss this whole other quite significant world. We don’t have data from it. We don’t research it. It remains inaccessible to social science. We only can see what it causes through some of its symptoms. That’s why I give the image of the great white whale basically concealed beneath the surface. Every now and then it shows a fin or tail or something. We have to try and define its submerged shape from these pieces we can see.

Sheer nonsense! We can't see and model the state's legal operations because they are opaque and preference falsification arises. No politician or judge or civil servant is going to admit they acted from an impure motive. By contrast, a guy already doing time will quite happily, for a small consideration, lift the lid on motives and modes of operation in his branch of enterprise. The criminal world is hugely legible. There is no false consciousness- that is why gangster films are so popular. Everything occulted or occluded in the legal world is rendered unambiguous in the criminal domain. In the former, the member of the price fixing cartel, or insider trading network, keeps up the pretence that everything was personal, nothing was business. In the latter, the opposite pretence is required- the sociopath assures his victim 'it's not personal'- because no one wants to do business with a murderous nutjob.

Organised crime wishes to establish its rationality. The killer wants to display an economic motive and link it to a self defence type plea. The alternative is to evoke the horror of the mark of Cain.

Sudhir had no difficulty getting the 'Black Gangster Disciples' to trust him and lay bare the workings of their organisation. He could spend a life time embedded with the Justice Department or the D.E.A without getting any similar insights. Why? False consciousness and bad faith are ubiquitous under Agent Principal Hazard. Preference Falsification based Availability Cascades obfuscate all discourse.  

So once I began to gain some sense of structure for the world that Michael had started to participate in (the name for that structure is “gangs”), I needed to understand how this particular world intersected with everything else.

But Michael wasn't in a gang. He says he had pals who were in a gang but he was 15 and new to the neighborhood. The fact is, had he been a gang member, he would have had back-up. The middle aged guy who took his gun off him and shot him would not have dared to make the attempt if he'd seen a proper thug in gang colours backed up by his homies.
Gangs don't just jack random cars. They understand supply and demand. At any given time, the chop shops will only buy specific vehicles. There is a division of labour even in armed robbery. The bosses are looking for team work and efficiency. These are not the qualities Michael had at 15. After he came out of prison, he had an established rep and, because he was a big guy with a good personality, he was trusted to deal for a gang. But at 15 who would have trusted him with product? Which chop shop would have taken a car he brought them? These are volume businesses.

Once you start to think through the economic structures of the drug market, from production, to supply chain, to distribution at the wholesale level and then the retail level, you discover this 100 billion-dollar business that the state seeks to combat by attacking street-level distributors.

The state is not combating a 100 billion dollar business. It is drawing a rent from its interessement in it. There have been countless TV serials and films which show that the street level distributor may be being supplied by policemen. Higher up gangsters may have senior officials on their pay-roll. Everyone knows this. Why doesn't Allen?

Of course the people who run this 100 billion-dollar business won’t just give up their control of its street-level distribution.

Why not? The triads used to run Shanghai. Then the State put bullets in their heads. The street-level distribution disappeared. Bullets in the head, or the likelihood of the same, are very effective. This is common knowledge.

They develop structures of power or authority through violence (also through systems of sanctions and rewards) to keep control.

Which is why shooting them in the head is a good idea. Duterte is winning his war on drugs. But does it pay to win? Surely the state is better off taking a percentage of the profits? Time will tell.

That dynamic, that fight between the state and the parastate, traps so many of our young people. And once you start to see that structure, a heck of a lot of stuff makes sense that may not have made sense previously.

There is no fight. The truth is, poor people should fuck up their own communities so nice neighborhoods can have better drugs for their parties. Also drug rehab is actually quite a spiritual thing- if you have the money. 

The war on drugs, coupled with racially disparate enforcement of that war, has distorted our society to the point that we cannot imagine a world without extensive use of imprisonment, more imprisonment than the world has ever seen, and plenty of imprisonment for what are essentially health issues, not criminal-justice issues. As a result of our overbroad criminalization practices, and our abandonment of the idea that a criminal-justice system should both make victims whole and prepare wrongdoers to contribute positively to society, we have doomed, by now, at least two generations of young men of color, and therefore we have doomed people of color more generally.

Allen knows her cousin didn't go to jail for anything drug related. The boy liked guns but he was bad at handling them. Nobody wanted to punish him. Society just wanted to warehouse him somewhere he couldn't get shot or shoot anyone. Once he was released, he did deal drugs but that was cool. He had matured and was businesslike in his approach. It wasn't drugs or the state or the gangs that did for him. He was shot by the transgender lover he'd met in jail.

Young people like Michael had higher life expectancy and physical health in prison than on the streets. That's why their own community votes for politicians who promise to keep them locked up.

In our criminal-justice system, we use incarceration for 70% of the sanctions we impose. In Germany that rate is 6%, and in the Netherlands it is 10%.

Because neither Germany nor the Netherlands has a gun culture. 15 year old Hans isn't pulling a gun and trying to jack every passing BMW.

There are completely different ways to approach criminal justice, and we don’t even have space in our minds to consider them. If you narrate the facts of Michael’s crime to people, and ask them how he should have been punished, and add the constraint that they can’t use the term “prison,” it is almost impossible for most people even to begin to address this question.

Because we know Michael had low life expectancy on the streets. Prison was the safest place for him.

Yet it is in fact possible to punish wrongdoing and work to re-socialize wrongdoers without relying on prison. Germany and the Netherlands prove this case. We have to open up space in people’s minds for such ideas. I would get down on my knees and beg everyone to read this report by the Vera Institute: Sentencing Practices in Germany and the Netherlands.

Michael died because he was released from prison. He was good at knocking out his lover, but she was better at stabbing and shooting him. In the end, her bullet was faster than his fist.

Allen knows very well that the three things her family and community could have done (and may actually have done) to safeguard Michael were
1) Demonise guns. Teach that guns are from the Devil. Campaign for Gun Control.
2) Demonise gangsta rap as utterly satanic and wholly alien to the pious and hard working heritage and ethos of African Americans
3) Collectively mount a 'due process' challenge to the Criminal Justice system by proper economic studies showing statistical bias.

Allen won't demonise guns in her book because that would enrage a powerful vested interest group. Nor will she say anything against gangsta rap because that's the sort of thing Fox News might pick up. As for the third alternative- it was something her Dad ought to have been doing all along instead of sucking up to the Reaganites.

Allen has a bizarre view of the Law. She doesn't understand that it is a system of defeasible reasoning which can be gamed. She thinks it is Magic.

She says-

Laws construct incentive structures around which social equilibria form.

This is utterly mad! How can the Law construct an incentive structure? Incentives are economic. A 'competitive' Nash Equilibrium is generally inferior to a correlated equilibrium where a public signal is sent. Once such a correlated equilibrium becomes Schelling focal, then and only then is there a demand that it be inscribed in the Law books. No doubt, some 'discoordination games' featuring rent-seeking also get inscribed- but those laws are not incentive compatible or allocatively efficient. They will be increasingly costly to enforce. By contrast, Laws reinforcing a corrleated equilibrium, or such as would arise in a repeated game of a particular type, tend to become less and less costly to enforce and have a falling excess burden.

These social equilibria then come to anchor cultural practices (for instance, cultures of violence), which further entrench the problematic equilibria.

Utter nonsense! Cultural practices don't have any anchor at all. That is why people of different ethnicities living under the same Laws and interacting in the same Economic way nevertheless have completely different cultural practices. The Hasidic Jew and the Sanaatan Hindu may have electronic shops next door to each other. They may both obey the same laws and do business in an identical way. But their cultural practices are very different.

But at the heart of the problem is laws that have generated misguided incentive structures.

Allen is talking about laws- like 'three strikes'- which were generated not by 'misguided incentive structures' but  by Referendums or the Preference Falsification associated with electoral politics. Naturally, these laws are incentive incompatible! It would be a miracle if they weren't.

And the human tragedy that we have created in this country is so profound that I don’t think it’s particularly helpful to spend time looking for contradictions or inconsistencies in the conservative position or in the progressive position. I think we ought to look past those partisan divides toward more fundamental questions about justice and human flourishing, and squarely face the fact that with our laws we have built a society that makes it considerably harder for many, many people to thrive.

Wow! Allen really doesn't get that a lot of people- not just coloured people- in America have the cards stacked against them from the get go. Why? The principle America was founded on was that you should get to live in a mansion while other people do the dirty work. Picking cotton was bad enough. Now, the need is for cheap teenage truck-stop whores. The American Dream is Harvey Weinstein. Ask the pussy-grabber in chief. Or don't. He's just lowered your taxes. Give him a pass. Everything is the fault of the Law. It creates misguided incentive structures. Politicians aren't to blame at all. Which lets us off the hook for having elected them. Also, for writing self-regarding tosh while pretending to care deeply for the less fortunate. After all, Game theory features 'phase shifts'- rational beings suddenly turn into a liquid or a gas or, in the case of Allen's book, a moist scholastic turd.

Was some other outcome possible? Yes. Allen could- by a plain, not modish, reading of Greek and Latin- have arrived at the epiphany of another 'Cuz'- viz. 'Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world."

Sin being but Social Science for any who can read as well as Tarsus' Saul.

Von Neumann, gifting Econ an axiomatic Game Theory, was, on his death bed, tortured by what Godel was not. Paranoia re. secular food did for the good Christian, by means of inedia not his false theodicy. The agnostic Jew died taking Pascal's wager.

The Law is but Love's shadow. It vanishes at the same moment that all things become lights. Which will happen for you, Allen, coz, we fondly believe, your cuz was never a 'gangsta'. He was good looking and charming and had a tremendous imagination. He cherished your love.  His theodicy is massively confirmed by the success of your book. Love pays its debts though it may have died long ago.

The world is a bridge- the saying is attributed to Christ by Hassan of Basra- pass over it, build no houses on it. There is another bridge narrow as a thread and sharper than a knife. Kabir says that the thread will wear away but the knot remains. Love is the bond that redeems itself in full only so as to bind across Worlds.

Chuka Umunna's disastrous embrace of Varoufakis's Vanity Politics.

A British politician- Chuka Umunna-  has praised a speech by Varoufakis in which he says-

– allow me now to speak as a Marxist. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx says, “ The communists are being blamed or accused of wanting to take nationality, ethnicity, national pride away from the majority”. And he says, “Well, workers have no country. You cannot take away from them that which they do not have.”

Marx was writing at a time when German workers were subjects not citizens while most Russian workers were outright serfs. Even in England, most workers did not have the vote and Trade Unions were considered to be criminal 'conspiracies against trade'.

By 1870, some things had changed. The 'iron law of wages' (i.e. that they can't rise above a bare subsistence for Malthusian reasons) had relaxed.

Thus Marx wrote-
“But the English bourgeoisie has also much more important interests in the present economy of Ireland. Owing to the constantly increasing concentration of leaseholds, Ireland constantly sends her own surplus to the English labour market, and thus forces down wages and lowers the material and moral position of the English working class.

And most important of all! Every industrial and commercial centre in England now possesses a working class divided into two hostile camps, English proletarians and Irish proletarians. The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life. In relation to the Irish worker he regards himself as a member of the ruling nation and consequently he becomes a tool of the English aristocrats and capitalists against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over himself. He cherishes religious, social, and national prejudices against the Irish worker. His attitude towards him is much the same as that of the “poor whites” to the Negroes in the former slave states of the U.S.A.. The Irishman pays him back with interest in his own money. He sees in the English worker both the accomplice and the stupid tool of the English rulers in Ireland.

This antagonism is artificially kept alive and intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short, by all the means at the disposal of the ruling classes. This antagonism is the secret of the impotence of the English working class, despite its organisation. It is the secret by which the capitalist class maintains its power. And the latter is quite aware of this.

But the evil does not stop here. It continues across the ocean. The antagonism between Englishmen and Irishmen is the hidden basis of the conflict between the United States and England. It makes any honest and serious co-operation between the working classes of the two countries impossible. It enables the governments of both countries, whenever they think fit, to break the edge off the social conflict by their mutual bullying, and, in case of need, by war between the two countries.

England, the metropolis of capital, the power which has up to now ruled the world market, is at present the most important country for the workers’ revolution, and moreover the only country in which the material conditions for this revolution have reached a certain degree of maturity. It is consequently the most important object of the International Working Men’s Association to hasten the social revolution in England. The sole means of hastening it is to make Ireland independent. Hence it is the task of the International everywhere to put the conflict between England and Ireland in the foreground, and everywhere to side openly with Ireland. It is the special task of the Central Council in London to make the English workers realise that for them the national emancipation of Ireland is not a question of abstract justice or humanitarian sentiment but the first condition of their own social emancipation.”
Letter of Karl Marx to Sigfrid Meyer and August Vogt, 9 April 1870

Clearly Marx understood that free entry of migrants lowers wages and destroys solidarity such that the Labour movement has less countervailing pressure against monopsonistic Employer cartels . 

It also reduces pressure for reform or progressive politics in the country the migrants leave. Since the young Pole or Hungarian or Greek can migrate in search of higher wages, the regimes in these countries, whether 'Left wing' or 'Right wing' are more sclerotic and chauvinistic than ever before.

Marxists may have been Internationalist in their politics but it was only in the sense that the Labour movement of each country would support the working class of every other to gain more power so as to improve the lives of the workers of their own country.

It is true that some Warsaw pact countries had 'guest workers' from poorer Communist countries. Thus Vietnamese workers could earn some money in East German factories and send this money home to help out their own people. However, East Germany did not give citizenship to these Vietnamese or Mozambicans or what have you. Many were unceremoniously thrown out when no longer needed. This was perfectly in line with Marxist thinking.

The E.U never meant for free movement of factors of production to undercut wages or reduce democratic pressure on National Governments for sensible and progressive policies. It was believed that capital was inherently more mobile than labour and thus the more technologically advanced or market oriented countries would be exporting capital goods and financial, managerial and entrepreneurial services to the former Warsaw Pact countries which they would pay for with cheap manufactured goods.

Thus the Labour Party under Tony Blair threw open the doors to unrestricted East European immigration (which Germany, more cautiously, did not do) in the belief that the numbers involved would be relatively small and thus pose no threat to British wages or the provision of Social Housing, Public Health etc. 

Brexit has lowered the value of the pound- which deters migrants who need to send money home to help their families- and is likely to reduce British standards of living- more especially in relation to the public provision of Housing, Health, Education etc.  This by itself will reduce all but the most desperate European migrants. This is what Corbyn is banking on. Once migration is perceived as a Tory, not Labour, blunder (more particularly if a Norway type Brexit occurs such that free movement stays in place) the working class will return in force to the Labour party so as to preserve the N.H.S and maintain a Social safety net.

This is not Varoufakis's view. He says-

There is a very good leftwing Marxist argument in favour of the transnationality that the single market and indeed the European Union is putting forward. Remember that Marx was in favour of Zollverein – the German customs union of 1834. Why? Because he said he thought that it would speed up the capitalist process, and that without this development, you would not have the technologies essential for socialism.

The Zollverein did not involve migration driving down wages. 'Technologies essential for socialism' developed in mercantilist England and, later on, in Protectionist America and Germany and Japan and so forth.
America and Germany had explicitly racist immigration or Nationality criteria. So did Sweden at its most Socialist. Britain clamped down on free Commonwealth migration despite having 'over-full' employment almost 60 years ago. By the Seventies it was clear that such migration put downward pressure on wages. The Left resiled from 'Internationalism' in this respect while the Tories- who had presided over unrestricted coloured immigration in the Fifties- pretended they would be even stricter in this regard.

Varoufakis- who was the President of the 'Black Student's Alliance' at an English University almost 40 years ago- may genuinely want unrestricted coloured migration. He says-

where borders have come down, even if they have come down for neoliberal reasons, for reasons that fit the agenda of big business, we should maintain the absence of those borders. We do not put them up. And we try to extend freedom of movement beyond the European Union to Pakistan, to South Africa." 

There you have it. Varoufakis thinks, firstly that the English worker isn't English at all because Marx said so in 1848, and secondly that England should 'extend freedom of movement to the Muslim world and sub Saharan Africa.

The handsome British M.P, Chuka Umunna- at one time considered a possible future Prime Minister- has praised Varoufakis's speech.

One begins to understand why, for the Labour party, it was a case of Corbyn or Never Win. No working class- however enlightened and unprejudiced- will vote for its own immeserisation through unrestricted immigration.

Varoufakis explicitly states That there is going to be a significant, substantial diminution of the living standards of the working class and Britain in general there is no doubt. 
He does not believe post-Brexit Britain will allocate resources more efficiently and thus make productivity gains which can translate into higher real wages.
In this context, it makes sense to restrict immigration to only those who will contribute much more in taxes than they would cost the exchequer in terms of Health care and Housing and so on. So, Britain has no choice but to impose highly selective migration controls and do away with 'Universalist' or Human Rights based entitlements. Previously the argument was that Britain was rich and could afford to be generous. But, Varoufakis says, now there is no doubt that Britain will be much poorer. Generosity is off the table.

Varoufakis does not understand that it is enough to say- 'Britain will be a lot poorer'- without putting a precise number to how much poorer it will be. 'Significantly and Substantially' poorer is enough for people to get the message and put away their cheque books and harden their hearts.

But put no numbers to that process, because those numbers of statistical or econometric prediction are absolutely scientifically irrelevant without a large sample.

This is not the case. Sample size does not matter. What matters is if the prediction of a model is correct or not. Science is about predictive power.

If you have a small sample, you can’t make any predictions worth their salt, and here we have a zero sample.

We always have a zero sample about future data. Yet Scientific theories stand or fall on the basis of how well their predictions correlate with data sets which will come into existence only in the future.

Previously, there has never been a case of a country coming out of the single market, out of the European Union. Logic may indicate that there is likely to be a substantial cost. But let us not attempt to turn around the debate in Britain on the basis of scare-mongering and estimates of costs that are not worth the paper they are written on.

Why not? Either Varoufakis has some reason for asserting Britain will be 'significantly and substantially' poorer or he no reason for it. If his reason is Economic and he isn't lazy, he can quantify his assertion. If his prediction is proved right, his reputation as an Economist will rise and his model will be more widely adopted. It could become the basis of a Muth Rational policy solution- i.e. one which everybody could accept as based on 'objective reality'.

What is Varoufakis's reason for believing Britain will be poorer? He doesn't say. We can only assume it is because he thinks Britain will get stuck with a 'Norway solution'- i.e. free entry of E.U workers will continue. But, unlike Norway, Britain doesn't have a huge Sovereign Wealth fund to cushion living standards. Furthermore, learning Norwegian carries little advantage. Spending some time in an English speaking country, however, is a valuable work skill. Ceteris paribus, Britain is more attractive to migrants than Norway.

Varoufakis isn't satisfied that a Britain which keeps getting poorer nevertheless should have unrestricted migration. He wants more.

'When I say Norway + – what is the plus? Well, people including some of my comrades in this country and in this party, say to me that the problem with the Norway solution and the difficulty the Labour Party has in supporting it, is because it turns Britain into an EU rules-taker.This of course is correct – this is the price you have to pay for being inside a transnational market. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Britain does not have to be an EU rule-taker if it strikes a Norway-style agreement.
Allow me to be very specific in three areas here. One is labour market standards and protections for wage labour. Secondly, environmental standards and the protection of the environment. Thirdly, financial regulation. Nothing stops Britain in a Norway-style agreement from setting for itself and for any company working within the United Kingdom, higher regulatory standards for the City of London, higher environmental standards, higher minimum wages and higher standards for defending wage labour.
So instead of thinking of the EU single market rules as the ceilings: think of them as the floors! And think of Labour as the party that will campaign out there for improving the environmental standards, labour standards and financial regulation standards of Brussels and Frankfurt.'

Wonderful! Britain can impose stricter rules than Europe! But rules are costly to enforce and comply with. Who will pay those costs? A 'significantly and substantially' poorer Britain. 

Varoufakis's 'Norway plus' solution is that the great mass of the British people should accept significantly lower standards of living so as to benefit the better off- including migrants whose families have made no fiscal contribution to the capital costs of setting up this Utopian rule-set. High minimum wages with unrestricted entry means, at the margin, that locals lose out to more talented or better educated migrants. Higher environmental standards means lower living standards and life chances for the indigenous though, no doubt, an amenity is provided to the visiting foreigner- not to mention, the plutocrat with his shooting Estate and Country Mansion and so forth. Tighter financial regulation means lower returns for British savers while a less risky class of assets is created for foreign portfolios without any associated cost.

Varoufakis isn't satisfied with 'Norway plus'. He wants unrestricted entry for not just Europeans but everybody else. Why has Chuka Umuna endorsed this nutjob? What is the point of a Labour party which tells working people- who are barely getting by as it is- that they must reconcile themselves not just to being much poorer as time goes by but also to shouldering, in perpetuity, the burden of creating a Society where only migrants get a free ride?

Bhaavavivek & the Higg's boson

Bhaavavivek said to Love's non-zero Higg's type field

Yours is but a convention so brides might yield

As does the tempered wind to the shorn lamb

Though no babe is born of Agape's sham.

Envoi- 

Prince! Shunyata is a saddle point ; Bhavachakra a rut

 Liberation a Rebellion, its Chakravartin a nut.

Lili Loofbourow and the problem with 'third wave' Feminism.

 Lili Loofbourow is a Ph.D. candidate at UC Berkeley working on Milton. Yet she writes-

Back in the 17th century, the conventional wisdom was that women were the ones with the rampant, undisciplined sexual appetites.

Since Loofbourow is writing in English, obviously she means 'the conventional wisdom in England' was such and such. Is there a single English writer or other authority of the period who actually believed women, as a matter of empirical fact, were more lawless in their loves and egregious in their sexual appetites? The answer is no. Some people said that most women would, in a sly manner, seek sexual gratification. Some pointed at individual cases of prostitutes who boasted of enjoying several sexual encounters every hour. In the latter case, there was a mercenary angle to this. The prostitute in question was advertising her services. In the former case, there was nothing 'rampant' about female, as opposed to male sexual delinquency, precisely because it was sly.

Conventional wisdom, in the seventeenth century, was that women valued secure relationships and were prepared to show greater, not less, fidelity in order to achieve this. Why? This reflected the true condition of society. But why did society show an asymmetry between male and female promiscuity? The answer is that the costs of female promiscuity were much higher for both legal or cultural as well as purely biological reasons. Though males and females stood about the same chance of contracting a STD, it was women absorbed the entire risk associated with pregnancy. Many died in childbirth. Unwed mothers faced social and economic sanctions. Poor pregnant women were whipped out of parish after parish till they collapsed and gave birth on the road. Why? The cost of raising the babe would fall upon the parish in which the poor woman gave birth. Not unnaturally, women responded by becoming wary of sexual entanglements.

By contrast, it was known that, in lawless areas, a woman on her own was more likely to be receptive to an advance. However, the reason for this was obvious. Such a woman stood a better chance of survival if the man she encountered, who would otherwise have been her assailant, thought she might keep any resulting baby. The sexual behaviour of women in conquered countries in the 1940's shook up any 'conventional' ideas in this regard. The truth was too obvious to require spelling out. Incidentally, after the 'Rape of Berlin', there was no pi-jaw about 'Right to Life'. Abortions were on demand.

The 'sexual revolution' of the Sixties was associated with better birth control and a relaxing of sanctions against female promiscuity. Improved health care and fiscal and economic changes also played a part. At one time it was thought that 'Welfare Queens' in America were actually gaining through promiscuity and by rearing children of unknown fathers.

Since then, it has become apparent that even if absent fathers are identified and made to pay, still the cost of child rearing falls disproportionately on women.

Economic theory suggests that this is a good thing because everybody benefits if women are a little more choosy than men.

Biology too appears to have arrived at the same evolutionary conclusion. As Lili points out 'bad sex' for men means lack of pleasure; for women it means pain or even permanent or life threatening injury.

That things have changed doesn't mean they're necessarily better. These days, a man can walk out of his doctor's office with a prescription for Viagra based on little but a self-report, but it still takes a woman, on average, 9.28 years of suffering to be diagnosed with endometriosis, a condition caused by endometrial tissue growing outside the uterus. 

Lili has chosen a bad example. Endometriosis is a complicated matter and not easily self diagnosed. Failure to achieve or maintain an erection is something one remembers, or is frequently reminded of.

Lili's next point is predicated on the assumption that in America, money does not matter, culture does. Men will spend a lot of money to enhance pleasure. So will some women- they too buy and use Viagra. Poor women- who do exist in America, though perhaps not in Lily's social circles- often have to choose between paying for medical treatment and putting food on the table. This has nothing to do with culture. It's about money.

 Or, since sex is the subject here, what about how our society's scientific community has treated female dyspareunia — the severe physical pain some women experience during sex — vs. erectile dysfunction (which, while lamentable, is not painful)? PubMed has 393 clinical trials studying dyspareunia. Vaginismus? 10. Vulvodynia? 43.Erectile dysfunction? 1,954.
That's right: PubMed has almost five times as many clinical trials on male sexual pleasure as it has on female sexual pain. And why? Because we live in a culture that sees female pain as normal and male pleasure as a right.

America's scientific community has been driven by money- not culture. Successful scientists and medical professionals buy sports cars and mansions, they don't form string quartets or poetry circles.

There's money in limp dicks because a lot of old men have a lot of money. By contrast, a lot of women who experience sexual pain are struggling to earn enough to pay the rent and put food on the table.
Most such women are completely invisible and unrelated to hegemonic 'culture'. Is this their fault? No. The leadership or hegemonic role of culture in America is related to the sort of article Lily is writing which mentions 'Seventeenth Century conventional wisdom' and is informed by the works of John Milton. It is wholly detached from political economy.
Lily is doing a PhD on a Dead White Male. She is pretending that this can change 'culture'. Perhaps it can. But that won't change the American Political Economy. It will merely make hegemonic culture a little more elitist and a little less accessible.

Does American hegemonic culture see 'female pain as normal'? No. It considers female sexual pleasure as something which enhances the experience for the male. That is why it opposes female genital mutilation. Indeed, in the classic Seventies film, 'Deep Throat', it even invests the epiglottis with the properties of the clitoris. More recently, there is a cult of anal sex- which I read about in glossy magazines in my Dentist's waiting room. What I don't read about in such magazines- and what is signally missing from Lily's article- is the plight of poor women under the American Health system.

Such poor women can compete with rich women in one area- providing sexual services to wealthy men. If poor women aren't treated for medical conditions which make sex painful for them then, at the margin, they erode less of the rent currently enjoyed by those within the charmed circle of the hegemonic culture- the sort of people who deconstruct John Milton rather than service johns at the truck stop.

Lili pretends that it is hegemonic culture which tells women to put up with sexual pain in return for some more or less likely benefit of a material or positional kind. If so, women should reject hegemonic culture and go in for Political Economy. They should not waste their time on John Milton but organise to use their voting power to improve Health outcomes and Economic opportunities for their entire gender. In other words, women should kick 'post modern' Feminism to the curb and go back to good old fashioned 'second wave' Feminism which focused on changing Laws and Institutions.

Lily ends her article thus-

But next time we're inclined to wonder why a woman didn't immediately register and fix her own discomfort, we might wonder why we spent the preceding decades instructing her to override the signals we now blame her for not recognizing.

Women everywhere can immediately understand economic and biological signals. The old feminism was about changing the Politico-Economic system so that these signals would change. This meant higher wages, better jobs, more quality medical treatment, better division of child care duties and domestic labour and so forth.
Sadly, that old fashioned feminism- which focused on changing the Law and the incentive structure- was abandoned in favour of 'deconstructing' culture- teachers have wasted decades talking that brand of tripe- as though culture mattered to any one- and pretending that it was 'culture' which told women to have painful or humiliating or unsatisfying sex.

I wish we lived in a world that encouraged women to attend to their bodies' pain signals instead of powering through like endurance champs. It would be grand if women (and men) were taught to consider a woman's pain abnormal; better still if we understood a woman's discomfort to be reason enough to cut a man's pleasure short. 

Pain during sex correlates biologically with lower reproductive fitness which in turn can effect socio-economic outcomes. Since orgasm changes the vaginal environment in a manner favourable to sperm, it is entirely possible that there is a strategic reason for gender dimorphism in this respect. A culture based on science- not paranoid pomo nonsense- could certainly send public signals so that a superior correlated equilibrium is arrived at- i.e. everybody benefits if women do so disproportionately in this regard. As a matter of fact, this sort of scientific culture has greatly changed male behaviour even in developing countries with fundamentalist religious movements. By contrast, PhD's on ' Milton and seventeenth-century theories of eating and reading' are wholly worthless. They enfeeble the critical faculties and result in utterly foolish articles like this one.

Perhaps Lili will end up teaching rich kids at some fancy College in between writing articles for rich people. She will harm her students unless she learns to embrace a scientific culture that isn't stuck in the Racist, Elitist, Europe of some bygone Age.