Vivek Chibber on Friedman

Copilot tells me-
Neoliberalism differs from classical liberalism primarily in its historical context, policy emphasis, and role of the state. Classical liberalism (18th–19th century) focused on protecting individual rights and limiting state power, while neoliberalism (late 20th century) revived some of those ideas but pushed them further—especially in favor of deregulation, privatization, and globalized markets.

🧭 Core Differences at a Glance


1. Historical context

Classical liberalism emerged in the 18th–19th centuries as a reaction against monarchy and mercantilism,

Sometimes it was also anti-Clerical (i.e. against the overweening demands of the Established Church) and was critical of the militarized Aristocracy- e.g. Junkers in Germany
emphasizing individual rights and free markets.

If profit remains in private hands, it is less likely to end up financing an oppressive regime. The Marxist counter-argument was that private Capital could hold the working man hostage- forcing him to work longer hours for a bare subsistence.

The Marginal Revolution (which overturned Classical Economics) showed how monopoly or monopsony or cartels reduced allocative efficiency and imposed a 'dead weight' loss on society. Furthermore, since the rich gain less 'marginal utility' from an extra dollar, they may be happy to pay higher marginal tax rates so that the very poor can survive with a modicum of dignity. Furthermore, nuisances & demerit goods (e.g. pollution or addictive drugs) could be taxed and the revenue could be used to promote merit goods or to repair damage done to the Environment.

We may say that Neo-Liberalism flows from the Marginal Revolution. Unlike Classical Liberalism, it is not attached to the notion that Society needs a class of leisured gentlemen with a Country Estate and a Town House in Capital which they can stay in while attending Parliamentary Sessions.

Economics & Politics could develop in a meritocratic and technocratic manner.
Neoliberalism rose in the 1970s–1980s as a response to Keynesian economics

which gave the Government a big role in the economy. This was necessary during the War and for post-War recovery as well as the acquisition of new weapon systems- e.g. nuclear missiles, satellites etc.
and the welfare state,

which was now taxing the working class on behalf of unemployed 'Welfare Queens'. Worse, it was subsidising loss making industries which were being run inefficiently.
promoting market-driven reforms.

which also meant that particular Trade Unions could not hold the country to ransom.

2. Role of the state

Classical liberalism: The state should be minimal—protect property rights, enforce contracts, and maintain order.

This was like the British Raj. India was literally a 'nightwatchman state' where the only public officials most people ever saw was the 'chowkidar' (night-watchman) unless someone in the village was literate enough to receive a letter carried by the post-man.

Neoliberalism: The state should actively reshape society to promote markets—deregulate industries, privatize services, and enforce competition.

Thus, in the UK, Mrs. Thatcher broke up the cosy relationship between stock-brokers, stock-jobbers (market makers) and discount houses. Suddenly, 'a job in the City' didn't mean putting on a bowler hat and having long lunches before departing for the weekend huntin', fishin' or shootin' in the country. Instead, you had chaps with degrees from the LSE with unpleasant accents who considered it a virtue to eat a sandwich at their desk while poring over computer print-outs.
This is not “no state,” but a market‑enabling state.

where women & darkies could thrive if they worked harder or were smarter than the rest. The blue blooded Gentleman had been pushed out of Politics & Government Service on the grounds that he was an amateur. Then the Law had been taken over by ghastly oiks from Grammar Schools. Now, even the City of London had become hostile territory for the toff.

3. Economic policy

Classical liberalism: Free markets with minimal regulation; belief in the “invisible hand.”

As opposed to the local magistrate fixing the price of bread and then scratching his head when bread became unavailable.
Neoliberalism: Aggressive deregulation, privatization, free trade agreements, and reduced welfare spending—essentially “classical liberalism on steroids.”

No. During the Seventies, there was stagflation and negative real interest rates. The thing was unsustainable. Everybody kept going on strike- even the grave diggers & the garbage collectors. Society was tearing itself apart.

4. Globalization

Classical liberalism supports free trade but was not shaped by modern global capitalism.

Neoliberalism embraces globalization as a core strategy—NAFTA, WTO frameworks, and global supply chains.

The rise of Sanders & Trump in 2015/16 put the world on notice that 'globalization' might be rolled back.

5. Social welfare

Classical liberalism: Generally indifferent to welfare; assumes markets will produce fair outcomes.

Or that nothing much can be done for the poor for a reason Malthus explained. Doesn't Christ say in the Bible 'The poor ye shall have always with you'?
Neoliberalism: Often reduces welfare programs,

or seeks, ineffectually, from letting them grow
arguing markets allocate resources more efficiently.

than who? The Beloved Leader?

Remarkaby, the Marginal Revolution blog has praise for the following interview published in 'Jacobin'

Power, Not Economic Theory, Created Neoliberalism
Interview with Vivek Chibber

Neoliberalism didn’t win an intellectual argument — it won power.

Power was ebbing away from States with ever increasing Public Sector Borrowing Requirements. Either they could turn into Banana Republics racked by hyper-inflation, or they could reform their finances.

Vivek Chibber unpacks how employers and political elites in the 1970s and ’80s turned economic turmoil into an opportunity to reshape society on their terms.

There was a displacement of elites. Out went the toffs and the three-Martini lunch Corporate Executives, in came the asset-stripping 'private equity' maven backed by Institutional Investors who wanted to get a better return for Joe Lunch-pail who was paying into a Pension Fund or Insurance scheme.

 

Neoliberalism’s victory over Keynesianism wasn’t an intellectual revolution

Yes it was. Previously, the most that was claimed for the market was that under ideal conditions it could be as good- not better- than the best 'Command Economy' outcome. That's what the two fundamental theorems of Welfare Econ & the 'folk theorem' of repeated games say. Then towards the end of the Sixties you have a whole bunch of mathematical results re. concurrency, computability, complexity, categoricity etc. which showed that no algorithmic process can yield the optimal result. Markets may be non-deterministic. They may involve 'co-evolved' process which tame complexity. In any case, volatility isn't a bad thing in itself. The 'volatility smile' may drives liquidity by concentrating trading activity in a manner which is 'regret minimizing' for the system as a whole. After all, we live in a world where all future states of the world, and their probability, are not known.

— it was a class offensive.

Against WASP elites who went to the right schools though, no doubt, some of the more presentable Corporate Executives, who had begun life on the Accountancy coal-face, may have been tolerated.

 

To roll it back, the Left doesn’t need to win an argument so much as it needs to rebuild working-class institutions from the ground up.

That would be worth doing, in any case.

Chibber speaks of Keynes as 'a blue blood from the upper crust of British society'. This is not true. His family were brush manufacturers in Salisbury. They were not aristocrats, clergymen or Army officers. They didn't attend public schools or go to University. Keynes's father did study at quite a good private school and then went to London's University College which had only been around for 40 years or so. He then went to Cambridge & settled down as a Lecturer on Economics. His son won a scholarship to Eton and then a scholarship to Cambridge University. He excelled in Mathematics but was also popular for his charm and wit. Had he not been so smart, he might have ended up as a clerk in a brush making concern in a provincial town. As things were, he placed second in the Civil Service exam. Otto Niemeyer came first and thus got the Treasury. Keynes placed second and got the India Office which was boring and declining in importance. He quit after a couple of years. That is why Marshall could lure him back to Academia by using his own money to pay Keynes's salary. In a sense this was the making of him because he could write what he liked and say what he pleased. Thus he eclipsed Niemeyer during the War as an advisor to the Government from 1915 onward . They particularly liked his buccaneering approach which was similar to that of the seasoned stock-broker or noveau riche City financier.

Thus, put simply, Power needed Keynes at a time when it was having to raise vast sums to defend itself & prevent military defeat. However, he was opiniated & Ministers had cause to fear his sharp pen. Both 'Economic Consequences' of the Peace & (later) Winston Churchill were of interest to a wider reading public.

After markets failed to recover from the crash, all governments had to focus on economic policy. One way or another, there was increased intervention. Keynes stood out for providing a seemingly 'scientific' justification for ignoring the deficit and increasing Government expenditure. But this would happen anyway because of re-armament.

Chibber says-

It’s not just that Keynes’s ideas were revolutionary, and the right ideas at the right time, and therefore they were taken up.

Actually, it was Oswald Moseley (later to found the British Union of Fascists) who set the ball rolling with this Memorandum of 1930 which called for high tariffs to protect British industries from international finance and transform the British Empire into an autarkic trading bloc (the cry for Imperial Preference had been around for decades) , for state nationalisation of main industries, for higher school-leaving ages and pensions to reduce the labour surplus, and for a programme of public works to solve interwar poverty and unemployment.

Keynes liked it but struck a cautious note-
'I like the spirit which informs the document. A scheme of national economic planning to achieve a right, or at least a better, balance of our industries between the old and the new, between agriculture and manufacture, between home development and foreign investment; and wide executive powers to carry out the details of such a scheme. That is what it amounts to. ... [The] manifesto offers us a starting point for thought and action. ... It will shock—it must do so—the many good citizens of this country... who have laissez-faire in their craniums, their consciences, and their bones ... But how anyone professing and calling himself a socialist can keep away from the manifesto is a more obscure matter'

In other words, Keynes is saying, the majority of English people- who believe in thrift, hard work & the sanctity of private property will refuse to have anything to do with this scheme. Thus, it is unworkable. Still, crazy Socialists should be queuing up to support it.

 

If Keynes had been working at a community college somewhere or a technical institute, nobody would have ever known who he is.

Hardly anybody had heard of Otto Niemeyer though he probably did have his hand on the economic levers for at least some of that period. Keynes had a gift for self-publicity. Moreover he moved easily between the 'aesthetic' Bloomsbury set & Whitehall & the City of London. Meanwhile, mathematical economics was developing rapidly. After the crash, in America the Cowles Foundation was set up in 1932. Economics might be like engineering. Get in mathematicians to figure out how to raise efficiency. Talk of Class was old hat. Even in the Soviet Union, a similar mathematical economics was coming into existence. Indeed, there seemed a 'convergence' between the results being produced on both sides of what Churchill would call 'the iron curtain'.

Would what we call Keynesianism have prevailed even if Keynes himself repudiated it? Yes. Why? Rearmament did in fact put an end to the Depression. FDRs more Socialist methods had faltered & finally puttered out.

 

What he also had going for him was that he was the editor of the Economic Journal, which was the most influential journal at the time, the key journal of economics.

It would be fair to say that, because Keynes was Marshall's anointed successor, two generations of economists who had learnt the subject from the latter's 'Principles', could not dismiss Keynes out of hand. But, Marshall himself knew that nobody cares very much for Academic Economists. Keynes had the added glamour of combining the persona of a Government Adviser with that of Stock Market buccaneer.

He was also positioned at Cambridge University, which automatically made him extremely influential.

No. Plenty of dons wanted no political influence though they dearly loved to be seen with a Dowager Duchess.

And he had been moving in policy circles for twenty years already.

It would be fair to say that Keynes's students or collaborators had a vested interest in promoting his Gospel. During the War anyone who could claim some sort of economic expertise could get a cushy government job. Sadly, this remained the case after the war because of rationing & the need to acquire nuclear weapons & space rockets.

So, this is an instance where somebody who is a blue blood, who was in the halls of power, who has tremendous influence, bolts from economic orthodoxy, and presents ideas that at the time are very iconoclastic,

One might say that Keynes, because of his prominence, was under pressure to champion common sense. Thrift is a good thing in an individual. If the whole of Society becomes more thrifty, it becomes poorer. In logic, this is the 'fallacy of composition'.  

which go against the received wisdom but are very appealing to policymakers who are looking for a way to justify breaking with policy orthodoxy. The combination of his being very well-positioned, very influential already, and then making an extremely elegant argument, put his ideas in a place where they could actually be used. Otherwise nobody would have known who he was

No. This is an instance of Marshall's anointed heir doing the needful so deficits could grow without sober, hardworking, people growing suspicious that this was some sort of plutocratic swindle. There were plenty of people who believed that all the Bolsheviks were Jews in league with their cousins in Wall Street.

It may be, if Frank Ramsey had lived, then the whole Keynesian theory could have been given a 'canonical' representation.   

The thing about Alfred Marshall was that he represented late Victorian ultra-respectability. Keynes might be a bit flashy, but he isn't a Jew-boy. His people were brush-makers in Salisbury.

Chibber mentions 'bastard Keynesianism'. This is the idea that money wages are downwardly sticky. Workers are too stupid to understand the 'real balance effect'. Thus the government needs to prevent deflation which would set off a vicious cycle of unemployment leading to lower aggregate demand leading to more unemployment.

However, all sorts of prices are 'sticky' or 'administered. There is a combination of fix-price & flex-price markets. In the former excess supply or demand goes up or down. In the latter, prices go up and down so there all markets clear.

Chibber isn't saying 'if you teach in a top College you will have influence'.

even if Milton Friedman had not existed, even if Hayek had not existed, you would have still had a turn to neoliberalism, and that’s the key. This is what the Left needs to understand.

i.e. that they were wrong to keep gassing on about class conflict. Don't print too much money & then expect a price/wage freeze to eliminate inflation. That's all Friedman said. Once this became blindingly obvious, he could take the credit for it while Galbraith, who had been the previous cock of the walk, had to take a back seat. Hayek was part of a wider network of European and American intellectuals who wanted 'small government'. It was irksome that Americans could not own gold or that European tourists could only draw a limited amount of foreign exchange.  There were too many well-paid civil servants doing nothing productive while inflation eroded the standard of living of people who had worked hard for their pensions. 

It would be fair to say that magazines & TV shows were able to communicate economic ideas to the much better educated post-War voter than even FDR's 'fireside chats'. In Britain, you had Brian Walden on TV methodically tearing down the older sort of Cabinet Minister who repeated 'Butskellite' cliches. But what mattered most was fiscal drag. Inflation meant your pay packet went up but you were dragged into the tax net. Suddenly, you started to hate the 'scroungers' and 'welfare queens'. Self-employed people were furious that feather-bedded Unions were holding the nation to ransom while they were having to work harder and harder just to maintain their standard of living

There are only two key players when it comes to policy changes of this kind.

There is only one player. Financial markets. If they think your policy is shit, they sell, sell, sell. Look at Liz Truss. She was popular but she only lasted 50 days as Prime Minister. Things are different in America but if markets are in turmoil Congress grows restive and you lose the mid-terms.  

The key players are the politicians, because they’re the ones who are pulling the levers. But then, it’s the key constituency that actually has influence over the politicians.

The least important part is intellectuals. You might say voters have some degree of influence, but really, in a money-driven system like the United States, it’s investors, it’s capitalists — it’s big capital.

Financial markets rather than this capitalist or that capitalist.  

They’re the ones who are pushing for these changes.

That means that if you want to understand where neoliberalism comes from, or rather if you want to understand why it came about, the answer is, it came about because capitalists ceased to tolerate the welfare state.

Markets pay for the welfare state. If they take fright, you borrow at higher and higher real rates of interest to finance transfers. This 'crowds out' private spending and investment leading to stagnant productivity & excess capacity- which means more people are on the dole and thus transfer spending has to go up yet again. This is a vicious circle which everybody became aware of during the Seventies.  

Now, why did they tolerate the welfare state at all? Most people on the Left understand the welfare state was brought about through massive trade union mobilization and labor mobilizations and was kept in place as long as the trade union movement had some kind of presence within the Democratic Party, within the economy more generally, because those unions were powerful enough, employers had to figure out a way of living with them.

The way to do this was to threaten to shut down unless they got a Government bail-out. So you have Labour on the dole & Capital on the dole & the self-employed either emigrating or shifting to the black economy. This is the Latin American solution. Your cab-driver has a government job as an engineer but the pay isn't enough to buy groceries. So he bunks off work (there is no work for him to do, because the money in the budget has run out) to drive a cab. At night he waits tables. He is trying to get his hands on some dollars so as to be able to emigrate.  

Part of what they did to live with the trade unions was to agree to a certain measure of redistribution and a certain kind of welfare state.

The reverse is the case. The Unions need the welfare state otherwise desperate non-Union workers will be 'black-legs'. But they won't be happy. The Communist Party will grow till some crazy Fascists gain power and you get a gangster regime.  

As long as that was the case, politicians kept the welfare state going.

It is still going. Work-fare was popular with African Americans because they want strong families- not Welfare Queens.  

This is why, in that era from the mid-1930s to the mid-1970s, Keynesianism or the economics of state intervention of some kind was the hegemonic economic theory.

Re-armament, War, Post-War reconstruction, and then the Cold War meant that the Public sector didn't get scaled back. On the one hand, 'state capacity' had increased. But there were diseconomies of scale to bureaucracy.  

The theory became hegemonic because it was given respectability by virtue of the fact that everybody in power was using it. Because it’s being used by people in power, it has great respectability.

No. So long as unemployment was low and prices weren't rising too much, politicians pretended that they were very wise or, at least, that they listened to very wise men.  

This is why, in the 1950s and ’60s, Milton Friedman was in the wilderness — same guy, same ideas, equally intellectually attractive, equally technically sophisticated, but he was in the wilderness.

No. He said that he was in the Academic wilderness in the Forties- i.e. before McCarthy & Eisenhower. But his mathematical skills permitted his employment by the Federal Government. He designed the payroll withholding Tax scheme needed to fund the War. He was a reputable economist but it was his articles for Newsweek from '66 onward which really pushed him into the limelight. Like Galbraith, he wrote well and his 'Free to Choose' TV series from 1980 onward made him a celebrity. Sadly, his theories weren't working out too well for Thatcher & Reagan both of whom did a quiet U-turn. 

In fact, I’ll tell you a little story. I was in the archives in India when I was researching my first book on planning. And lo and behold, I find a letter from an International Monetary Fund economist. That letter is a three-page letter sent to the Planning Commission of India on how to plan effectively, on how to do price controls correctly, on how to manage demand conditions. It seems like it’s coming from some dyed-in-the-wool Keynesian economist. The author was Milton Friedman.

This is nonsense.  

In 1955, the Indian government was engaged in preparing its Second Five Year Plan and, because the US was a big donor, it  asked the Eisenhower administration for assistance. It sent Friedman & Neil Jacoby- a right-wing advisor to the Republican administration. Friedman went to India in the fall of 1955 under the auspices of the U.S. International Cooperation Administration (as the foreign aid agency was dubbed at the time). Once in New Delhi, Friedman was assigned to advise Mr. C. D. Deshmukh, the Minister of Finance- a right-wing ICS man who resented the powers usurped by the Planning Commission. His memo reflects the thinking of centre-right Indians who wanted light industry- e.g. textiles-  to expand and to earn foreign currency to pay for investment in heavy industyr. 

Friedman wrote- 'The chief problem in the Indian program that impresses on the tendency to concentrate investment in heavy industry at one extreme and handicrafts at the other, at the expense of small and moderate size industry. This policy threatens an inefficient use of capital at the one extreme by combining it with too little labour and an inefficient use of labour at the other extreme by combining it with too little capital. The presumption for an economy like India’s is that the best use of capital is in general somewhere in between, that heavy industry can best develop and be built upon a widely diversified and much expanded light industry. We may hasten to add that this is only a general presumption which may well admit of special exceptions. Perhaps, for example, the steel industry is one exception in India.' 

This was what Indian industrialists were thinking at the time. Maybe the Soviets & East Germans & so forth can set up good steel plants which make a profit. The steel can then be used in construction and for making 'wage-goods' e.g. bicycles which we can export. Friedman knew little of India but he was talking to Oxbridge educated people- some with a business background, others from elite Government cadres. He is saying what they- and Deshmukh- want him to say- viz. ' Cutting off particular investment projects may not make resources available for other uses but may simply eliminate savings that would otherwise have been available. Much saving is made to finance specific investment projects. If it cannot be used for that purpose, it may well be directed to consumption or to the accumulation of bullion or its equivalent.' This paints a vivid picture to an Indian but not to an American (who was forbidden to hold gold at that time). 

Why is Friedman writing this letter in the language of a mid-century technocrat committed to state control?

There is no such letter. Deshmukh wanted him to say what he actually did say. He didn't want to linger in India. The climate is horrible. You get dysentery. If you want to help the poor, go to Israel which was very poor at the time.  

He was seeking entrée. He knew that “if I want to be relevant, if I want to be heard, I’m going to have to give them advice of the kind they want to hear.”

He was saying what the Finance Minister wanted him to say. Sadly, Nehru wasn't interested.  

I’m not saying he sold out. I think he believed what he believed, but he said, “My ideas don’t have a chance in hell right now. So here’s what I’m going to do: I’m going to do the best I can, given the filters that are in place.” And the filters in India at that time were, “We don’t want to hear from you anti-planners. We’re going to do planning. If you want to be of use to us, tell us how to plan better.” Friedman said, “OK, my free market stuff is out the window. I’m going to be as good a planning economist as possible.”

This simply isn't true. He had helped Deshmukh put the Finance Ministry's view- stuff like switching  to value added taxation to get more revenue & less disincentive for the organised sector (which it is cheaper and more convenient to tax) . But Nehru was the head of the Planning Commission. He didn't understand that, for poor people, only Budgets matter.  

That little story tells you something. What it says is ideas that are going into the halls of power go through certain filters. And the filters are essentially the policy priorities that the politicians have already committed to. Now, what creates those priorities? It’s the balance of class power. Social forces are setting the agenda.

What was setting the agenda in India was stupidity- that of Nehru & Mahalanobis. The second 5 year plan ran out of money very quickly.  

If the social forces, that is, say, trade unions and community organizations, have set the agenda for politicians such that they think the only rational thing to do is to institute a welfare state, then they will bring in economists who help them design a welfare state. That gives intellectual influence to those economists. Economists who are saying “Get rid of this whole thing” are cast out into the wilderness. That’s how it works.

I suppose you could say that a lot of sensible economists in India were 'cast into the wilderness'- i.e. they emigrated to the US or UK. But they made more money. 

In the 1970s and ’80s, those policy priorities — that is to say, the New Deal as a priority — changed for reasons that have nothing to do with intellectual influence.

In other words, the goal of minimizing unemployment was given up. One reason was that 'transfers' (i.e. how much you could get on the dole) had risen. Why get a job in the factory when you could strum your guitar & plan for how to spend your millions after you became a pop star? 

The change came about when the American government was now committed to rolling back and dismantling the welfare state and giving more rein to free markets.

It turned out voters would tolerate mass unemployment on a scale not seen since the Great Depression. All they cared about was real wages- i.e. inflation was Public Enemy number one. The elderly were able to organize themselves politically so as to get a pretty sweet deal. Nobody gave a shit about trailer trash or the Projects. 

Once that happens, this little guy who was out in the wilderness for thirty years

He was doing well in Chicago. Had Goldwater won, he'd have been in clover. Nixon, sadly, was the first and last avowed Keynesian. Had Reagan, not Ford, taken the Republican ticket and defeated Carter, Friedman would have been in clover. As it was, Carter appointed Volcker who was a monetarist of a sort. But Friedman's  ideas were gaining influence even in the British Labour Party.  

named Milton Friedman suddenly comes to the center of the halls of power and his ideas now get circulation. They get circulation because politicians now are willing to hear him. That’s what drives it.

If a guy calls the market right and the market knows the guy did so, it makes sense to pretend to be doing what that guy tells you to do because his prophesies might be 'self-fulfilling'. But this is true in many other fields. The guy famous for predicting a war or an epidemic or whatever is the guy everybody wants to be chummy with. 

Therefore, when I said previously that Friedman had won the debate by the end of the 1970s, I mean that he won out because the political anchor that had sustained the Keynesian economists had come loose.

In other words, higher inflation wasn't reducing Inflation. There was Stagflation.  

What happened was that the ship was now being redirected in the direction of neoliberalism.

No. Raising inflation was now itself raising unemployment for a reason Friedman explained in his Nobel lecture. Countries which continued to do stupid shit had hyperinflation and began to look more and more like banana republics. 

Ideas can have power, but only if they’re attached to agencies with power.

Agencies with power look for ideas which will enable them to keep that power or else they lose it sooner rather than later. The same is true of Agencies with money or Agencies with great fashion sense or Agencies that are very good at making people laugh so hard they shit themselves. 

In and of themselves, free-floating ideas only have power if people who have an interest in seeing those ideas fulfilled and have the power to then effectuate those ideas take them on.

This happens, if they are ideas which yield greater power. Consider Islam. Iranians like it but nobody thought it could yield power in this world rather than felicity in the next. Ayatollah Khomeini's dynamite idea was 'velayet-e-faqih', guys like himself should extend their duty to help the poor to taking over the entire state. Many Ayatollahs became billionaires.  Those who didn't like them were beaten or killed or ran the fuck away. 

These are the two key things. They have to be attached to agencies of some kind: social forces, organizations, institutions with power.

A Trade Union is an institution. It may have a lot of power. But, if it overplays its hand & the industry shuts down, then it has no members and no money.  

And then those institutions and agencies have to see their own interests as being expressed and aligned with the ideas.

No. They have to get money to stay operational.  

So let’s go back to neoliberalism. How did the free-market ideas attain influence?

Markets are useful. We buy and sell stuff on them. That's how ideas about them gained influence. Sadly, some of those ideas were stupid. Others weren't and enabled 'market makers' to become very fucking rich.  

It’s because capitalists and wealthy people in the United States pushed for a shift away from the welfare state for reasons that had nothing to do with the appeal of the ideas.

Women pushed for a shift away from rape for reasons that had nothing to do with the appeal of the idea to rapist scumbags.  

Chibber's basic point has to do with Galbraith's 'countervailing power' argument for Trade unions. Faced with a monopsony (single buyer), maybe a monopoly (single seller) improves allocative efficiency. If employers are 'cartelised' let there be 'collective bargaining' with a single Union. Sadly, technology changes, tastes change, the fucking A-rabs put oil prices up, wars in distant countries start costing us blood and treasure. What worked 50 years ago doesn't work now- e.g. my penis. 

Why can't we go back to the way things used to be? I'll tell you the answer. Compound interest. The passage of time causes the interest accruing to Capitalists to go on increasing. That is why, when Biden said 'let me put the calendar back to 1972' the Capitalists said 'No! Then we'd have to give back all the compound interest we have collected! Kindly, take one for the team and just turn senile already.'

That's the only reason Trump is now POTUS

Jamir Nazir's excellent story

 Granta has published an excellent story by Jamir Nazir who is from Trinidad. 

There is now some controversy as whether it was actually written by an AI because though it passes a Human Turning test it has failed that of an AI! 

Interestingly, this controversy echoes the theme of the story itself. 

I give the story below. I have added some cultural and religious notes regarding things which may not be known to non-Indic origin readers. 

I omit two notions which most English speakers will already be familiar with viz. Milton showing, in Paradise Lost, that the mutual love between man & wife is itself Paradise though both must work hard and suffer much pain in this world. The other is the notion that Samsara is itself Nirvana, Earth is itself Heaven, for those who are enlightened. 

The Serpent in the Grove
Jamir Nazir


In partnership with Commonwealth Foundation, Granta presents the regional winners of the 2026 Commonwealth Short Story Prize. Jamir Nazir’s story is the winning entry from the Caribbean.

They say the grove still hums at noon.

At which time orthodox Hindus do 'Sandhyavandhanam' while Muslims offer the 'Dhuhr' prayer.  

Not the bees’ neat industry or the clean rasp of cutlass on vine, but a belly sound – as if the earth swallows a shout and holds it there.

In Persian or Urdu poetry, there is an expression 'the meaning of the poem remains in the belly of the poet'. This is often said of mystical verse of a cognitively complex type (e.g. the ghazals of Bedil) 

People who pass keep to the track and do not look into the bush where the stone rings lie. Ask the oldest in the village and you’ll hear some version of: ‘It had a well there once, and a woman. The grove ain’t forget.’

So the action of the narrative is set some generations ago.  

Sun on galvanise is a cruel instrument. It beats until the roof talks back in a dry moan. The day the grove began to remember, the roof over Vishnu Mohammed’s shack groaned like a drumskin too tight for the heat.

Vishnu is the Hindu God who sustains the universe. Mohammed, of course, is the prophet of Islam. It seems an unlikely combination of names. Perhaps Vishnu was an orphan raised by a syncretic, Kabirpanthi, family.  The drum, of course, is the damaru of Shiva- the destroyer. 

This is a picture of Lord Vishnu resting upon Shesha, the cosmic serpent. It can be found in many Hindu households. 

Inside, air clung thick as porridge skin: damp earth, woodsmoke, and the sour tang of fermenting cocoa. A soot-blackened lamp hung from a nail. No fan, no bulb, no hum – only the thin light slipping between warped boards and the breath of hills holding their heat like a secret.

Vishnu was twenty-five wearing the face of fifty. Hard living lays itself on a man like wet sacking; it never asks permission. His eyes narrowed against the glare outside and the darker glare inside him: old promises that never ripened, the ache where hope should live, a gnawing sense that land can own a man while making him swear the land belongs to him.

Trinidad may be Edenic but Vishnu is an Adam forced to feed himself by the sweat of his brow.  

It wasn’t much land – an acre and a bit, hacked from government forest with cutlass and stubborn back. Coffee and cocoa leaned wild on a slope that wanted either rain in teeth or none at all. He knew every root that tripped a foot, the snake-curve of run-off, the brittle crumble after drought. He worked it alone and most days the land worked him back, a quiet quarrel older than his father and his father’s father. He could name the price of rice in the shop, the price buyers would give for wet cocoa, and how the distance between the two left a man short.

Sita moved quiet as if sound were taxed.

Sita is the daughter of Mother Earth to which she angrily returns when her husband Lord Ram is urged to get rid of her because she had been the captive of an enemy King and thus her chastity might well have been smirched. She is worshipped as a 'pativrata'- one who kept her vows to her husband. 

Nineteen and brown like dust after rain, she turned roti dough with a rhythm that came not from joy but from endurance. Orphan was too kind a word. Orphans are sometimes cradled.

Sita was found by King Janaka as he ploughed the land. She symbolises agriculture.  

Sita had been passed like a parcel from kin who were hungry for everything except another mouth; she learned to make herself small, to take the shape of whatever container held her. Someone decided two solitudes might cancel each other out and married her to Vishnu. They did not cancel. She wore her role without protest and without light; both things can be true.

Outside, little Puttie – three years old, sun-dark, bright-eyed – chased a yard fowl through dust, his laughter like water over pebbles. Laughter can cut a hush, not cure it. Water was half a mile away; every drop hissed in the pan had been carried on somebody’s spine.

Puttie might mean bandage.  

Vishnu thirsted for something else.

Wilfred’s rum-shop leaned into the road like a rotten tooth. Inside, boards blackened by smoke and sweat, the air sweet with cane and forgetting. Coins meant for rice or kerosene slid across the counter and came back white rum hot as apology. One drink opened the chest, two turned fear into courage’s cheap cousin, three steadied the hand enough to write the future in invisible ink.

She moved through that shop like heat through dry bush.

They called her Zoongie.

Zangee is an Eel like fish that inhabits fresh water ponds and waterways

Maybe it was a name; maybe rain took a shape and decided to keep it. She had the kind of walking that made benches become men.

i.e. even old wooden benches would 'get wood'. This is 'picong'. The padre overhears you and understands that you mean that even a wooden bench would get an erection if they could see the way she walks. But the padre can say nothing. You may simply be stupid, rather than lubricious in a sly manner. 

Hair tumbling wild, a dress that caught and released light, laughter with iron under it. Eyes that skimmed and did not land, as if what she wanted was elsewhere and she had to pass through men to get there. She wore the island’s mixed bloodlines like a crown – African in the hips, Spanish in the cheekbone, East Indian in the hair when the rain kinked it, Carib in the way her gaze could bless and warn at once.

Vishnu watched too long. The rum told him she noticed. The rum made a spilled drink a signal, a brush of hand a promise, a sorry whispered near his ear an invitation. Zoongie never looked back. The rum said she didn’t need to.

After that, Sita became obstacle by existing.

Hindus believe Ganapati orchestrates all things as vighnakartā (obstacle-creator) such that they stand in each other's way. But Ganapati is also vighnahartā (obstacle-averter) such that mutuality prevails. There is an old notion that the same souls are reborn as each others karmic obstructors till both gain release through mutuality. 

Incidentally, Homer Simpson impersonates Ganapati so as to first become an obstacle to the marriage of Apu & Manjula though this turns out to be providential and thus he facilitates their mutual decision to get married. 

Not for anything she did wrong, but for how exactly she fitted the life that fenced him in: the quiet chores, the patient hands, the unlit lamp. Vishnu began to plan with the patience of a reptile – cold, ancient.

He was the serpent in his own Eden. Alternatively, on the Hindu reading, his 'Tamas' (darkness) was regulated by Shesha, the cosmic serpent who stabilises the world.

He studied how Sita walked the track alone, how no neighbour watched their yard, how the plank over the old well at the acre’s edge lifted on one loose nail.

The ring of stone lay there where cocoa gave to bush, its mouth boarded with ply and chance. People said the British had dug those wells when they tried to plant where forest wanted to be; older people said the British found a hole the island had dug for itself. Vishnu usually avoided it. Bush kept it, snakes liked it, air from it felt like a hand from a grave. He went there now. With the cutlass tip he prised a plank. Cold air climbed his arm, jasmine and rot braided tight. It was not empty down there. It was waiting.

He cleared scrub in neat hours. ‘For pigeon peas,’ he said when Sita’s eyes caught the flash of blade. She said nothing. He liked that silence.

Another day he spilled a pail and grimaced at a taste he invented. ‘Pipe water startin’ to seep by the old stones,’ he lied. ‘Closer than that blasted road, ent? The sun go cut yuh in two on that walk.’

Sita paused. Her life had not given her much, but it had given her sense. She looked at the plank mouth and the cutlass leaning casual, as if it had legs.

In Paradise Lost, Adam stands by Eve. In order to stay with her, he too eats the forbidden fruit. Eve then knows just how much she is loved. Sita is a pativrata. She is seeing how much she is hated. 

Something coiled inside her chest. She turned to call Puttie.

‘Play by Auntie Marsha,’ she told him. ‘If she vex, say is me send you.’

Marsha lived two bends down. If the village had a mouth, it was hers. Big in the way of women who never apologise to furniture, she had a laugh that shook dust from joists and a voice that could soften to coax a child from a ledge. She knew the ways of men hollowed by want until only one thing remained. She noticed the fresh-cut path and the way land bore witness.

Bhu Mata as Sakshi. Earth is the mother of Sita. We think of Demeter & Persephone.  

People talk about bush like it dumb. But bush keeps memory the way hair keeps scent.

Sita lifted two planks and slid them aside. Wood complained in a voice too near speech. She lowered the pail until rope slackened. Smell rose – old wet, crushed jasmine, frog skin. On the second haul, the board beneath her shifted the way a tired man shifts in his sleep. The plank gave one long groan and swallowed its word. Stone, shoulder, hip; shock of cold tearing breath. One foot banged and screamed. The wall was slick as lizard. She clawed moss and slid. Water took her and would not return her.

Halfway to dying, the big preachments – God, Fate, the Ordeal of Woman – gave way to small things: a child’s laugh chasing a yard fowl, how light falls on a cup, a line of ants crossing a bowl you meant to wash. In the hole Sita did not bargain with saints. She thought of Puttie’s sound. She thought: he cannot remember me like this. He must remember me alive.

She did not call out loud. Call for who? A man who had cleared brush like a conscience? A grove that listened? She reached and slid and failed and reached again, breath sawing, chest burning. The circle of sky above shrank to a coin. Leaves trembled along its edge like people laughing.

Marsha was shelling pigeon peas and thinking about a letter she’d promised to write for a mother whose son had been held for cussing a policeman.

She is like Martha- who is active-, not Mary- who is contemplative. Meister Eckhart says Mary took the better path because it would make her more like Martha.  Mary & Martha are the sisters of Lazarus whom Jesus called out of his tomb.

She heard nothing. That was the thing. Midday should hold pot noise and scolding and a child’s quarrel. Silence in a village is smoke; it sneaks from something burning. She put down the pan and stood. She didn’t hurry, not at first. The hush had a tilt – a room shifted half an inch.

At the Mohammeds’ acre the light seemed thin. She saw the ring of stone, the lifted planks, the scuffed rope. She tore a length of vine from a mango trunk, peeled it in her hands to feel if it would hold a woman. She didn’t shout a name. She got to work.

‘Hold strain, gyal!’ she said at last, voice cracking hush. ‘Is Marsha!’

Thessalonians 2:7 says - 'For the mystery of lawlessness doth already work: only there is one that restraineth now, until he be taken out of the way'. This gives rise to the notion that the 'mysterious economy' of the Katechon 'holds strain' and keeps the Anti-Christ and the Eschaton at bay. Here Marsha, seeking to release a sister from her tomb, needs her to work just as hard. This is a collective Katechon, a mysterious economy achieved with nary a word spoken. 

Inside the shack Vishnu stiffened. It wasn’t the words but the way they split the day into before and after. He staggered out, rum turning to poison on his tongue, and went to the well. He saw Marsha braced, saw the well mouth, saw Sita’s face rise pale from the dark with water sticking to her skin. In one bright click he saw his future rearrange: Zoongie evaporating like sweat, rum courage scuttling, a policeman’s hand on his shoulder, a magistrate’s eyes not meeting his, a boy grown without a mother narrowing his eyes at the world. He saw all of it in a knife-second. Something moved in him.

Between seeing and moving, time cracked and let a small thing through. Sita’s eyes – rimmed red, washed clean of everything but life – locked on his. What burned there wasn’t begging. It wasn’t love. It was older, lower, a coal that hadn’t died in the poor ash of their marriage: a blue flame saying plain, I see you.

He grabbed the vine and hauled.

The mystery of lawlessness was restrained because Marsha & Sita 'held strain'. A third was added because it was the Anti-Christ who was being restrained. No name was taken, because the work was itself the name. 'For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them" (Matthew 18:19-20).

Marsha hauled. Sita clawed stone. The well hated to give back what fell. Water is jealous. They pulled until Marsha’s shoulders were fire, until Vishnu’s hands were bone. Sita’s elbow hit stone, then her hips, then one knee. She slid, found a purchase that hadn’t been there a second ago and disappeared after. She came over the lip choking a sound the day almost refused. They lay on hot ground, breath scraping sky.

Marsha sat up. She looked once at Sita’s leg – already writing itself in purple –

no prose as purple as such stigmata 

and stood. ‘We goin’ clinic,’ she said. ‘Bring a towel.’

Vishnu brought it. It was old and stiff with the salt of bodies. He put it in Sita’s hand. She wrapped herself without meeting his eyes. He fetched the donkey cart. Doing is a treacherous bridge: you step on and it carries you to a side you didn’t plan to reach.

Emperor Akbar had the following lines from Hasan of Basra inscribed on the 'Buland Darwaza' (strong gate'. 'Isa son of Maryam said: "The world is a Bridge, pass over it, but build no houses upon it. He who hopes for a day may hope for eternity, but the World endures but an hour. Spend it in prayer for the rest is unseen." But for the weary, prayer can't last even an hour. Work is worship. The reward is that what is unseen becomes palpable in the land they work upon or which works upon them. 

At the clinic they cut the hem and wrapped the leg and checked for lights going out behind the eyes. The nurse had seen wells’ work. She said little. Marsha said enough for two, which was mercy. ‘We nearly lose she,’ she told the nurse. ‘If I didn’t pass –’ She didn’t finish. She let the nurse make the necessary notes in a ledger whitened by many small tragedies.

Vishnu waited under a print of Jesus with eyes that could be pitying or questioning. He hadn’t planned for after. Men who set traps plan for silence, not for the squeal. Shame is a substance he felt on his skin. It itches. It doesn’t rinse.

Walking home, Marsha pushed the cart. Sita rode, white with pain and the kind of tired that goes through bone and keeps going. Vishnu walked with empty hands. Evening poured itself into the day. Puttie came from Marsha’s yard with cheeks sticky sweet, saw his mother, and his face did a thing with no name – opened, broke, opened. He didn’t cry. He held the cart.

We are crying. We feel ashamed of ourselves because what we are indulging in is sentimentality. Puttie does the thing with no name.  

Night remade the house. The lamp smoked. Lizards hunted moths by the flame. Sita lay between sleep and pain, relief and a watchfulness that had nowhere to go. Marsha kept vigil. Vishnu stood by the broken mouth and didn’t go close. Bush took him in – not like a mother, like a judge. He had no words for the pressure on his chest, so the old names stepped forward: jumbie, duppy, serpent.

Had he been possessed by some evil spirit? No. The evil was in himself. 

Days rearranged. Sita healed slow. She learned to favour the leg without letting the favouring become a limp other people could define her by. Marsha saw to food, jokes, errands. She took Sita back to the well once and let her look from a distance. Sometimes a thing loosens its grip when you can see it in daylight.

Rum now warmed Vishnu differently; it tasted like it was kept too long in a corner. Zoongie came; Zoongie always came. She tilted her head as if to ask if he heard better. He couldn’t tell if pity crossed her face or if rum put it there. He left his coins in his pocket and stepped back into heat.

He had admitted his own guilt. Could he stay on the thorny path of repentance? 

Sita said little but wasn’t quiet. She sorted beans with new slowness, looked at her boy with new exactness,

Sita is now the Sakshi. The word, like martyr or shaheed, means a witness with exact information unadulterated by supposition or wishful thinking. 

Ghalib says ' Qatra meñ Dajlah dikhāī na de aur juz meñ kul/ Khel laṛkoñ kā huā dīda‑e‑bīnā na huā

“If you cannot see the Tigris in a drop, or the whole in the part, You are merely playing like children — you have not gained true insight.”

and built inside herself a shelf for the decisions she would need to make when the time came. The shelf didn’t look like freedom – she couldn’t afford that word yet. It looked like not dying. It looked like not returning to a house where people forgot to see you.

Marsha steered Sita to the community centre. The girl teacher asked Sita to write her name. She pressed too hard, and the A came out like a little house with a crooked door, but it stood. The girl smiled like sunrise over a sink.

i.e. not much of a smile at all. There were tedious chores to be done. But, they'd get done, soon enough.  

Sita went back and soon had a signature that would carry weight.

On Sunday the priest preached serpents and gardens; the reading demanded it. He said the woman listened to the wrong voice in the tree. Sita felt her mouth curve. Here the tree had kept truth and a man had lied. After service she walked home bareheaded. She felt the scar seam like a tailor’s last stitch. She didn’t hate her leg. It had thrashed exactly long enough to catch a stone.

Vishnu nailed cross-boards over the well and then, in a move that made old people shake their heads, planted jasmine at the mouth. ‘So it go smell sweet,’ he told Marsha.

‘Plant it by the door,’ she said. ‘Don’t ask the dead to make your house nice.’

Jasmine is associated with Goddess Laxmi. The wife is known as 'grha-laxmi'. Honour her so prosperity comes to your house. 

I may mention that there was a tension between worship of the ancestors, typical of Patriarchy, & pure bhakti devotionalism which is characteristic of the nuclear family where both husband & wife are equal.  

He moved the jasmine.

Dry season cracked the clay; Kiskadee called insolent bright notes. Sita walked better by morning and hid her limp by afternoon. She sent Puttie to school with slate and lunch in a cloth bag. When he brought home a letter, she read it slow and smiled at needing correction only twice. On Fridays she washed the towel that saved her and hung it where light could bless it a little.

Vishnu saved for a small pump. He said he’d pull water that way, not with rope or women’s backs. He cut more bush, planted the peas where he’d said he would. He kept rum for days the world insisted. But the grove isn’t a ledger; it’s a mouth. It closes only when it’s satisfied. People passing said they sometimes heard the noon hum if the wind was in a mood. Not every day. The day had to choose.

Years did what years do. Puttie grew and learned to widen his narrowed eyes by choice – for tenderness, for beauty. He climbed cocoa trees without bruising pods. He learned to hear his mother coming by the weight of her good foot and the mercy of her bad.

Sita kept a cheap copybook with a red line that was less a margin than a joke. She wrote three things each night: ‘I breathe good in my sleep.’ ‘The jasmine smell by the door was clean.’ ‘Marsha laugh at a thing I say.’ She didn’t write the well. It lived between the lines.

Zoongie left, returned with a baby, and men’s voices about her turned to numbers and guesses. Once, in the road, she told Sita good morning without expecting a reply. Sita returned it and felt as if she’d put down a pan she had no business carrying.

First good rain after dry is a forgiveness the sky gives itself. Everything flared – anthill, flower, first rot. Sita stood in the doorway and let blown mist reach her face; Puttie danced into it; Vishnu checked the drain he’d cut to turn water from the well mouth. It held.

That night a board murmured in Sita’s dream. She woke. The lamp’s flame sat steady, her heart sat steady. She lay down and woke before light with a wordless admission: I lived. Not gratitude, exactly. A fact that felt like a small warm animal in her hands.

An obstacle had been created. An obstacle had been removed. Both are the work of Ganapati whose vehicle is a mouse.  

Bush returned to the stones with lover’s patience and stitched green lace around every edge. Children born since the day Sita rose on a vine pass there and don’t know how near their laughter came to a grave. On some middays, if the wind wants, you can hear the hum.

Puttie, carrying his father in shoulders and his mother in steadiness, walks there when work shatters him. He stops short of the ring out of respect turned habit. He listens: the brook language of leaves, sun’s thin hiss, a creak where wood learns to pretend to be a board and is tired of pretending. If he waits long enough and lets the island put its mouth to his ear, he hears a breath taken and held and let go – the shape of a woman’s will, the sound a grove makes when it keeps what it knows without swallowing the living.

If you ask him, he shrugs the way men shrug when feeling places a hand on the neck and says be still. Ask again and he says, ‘It had a well there once. Mama fall. Auntie Marsha bring she up. Papa –’ He stops. He thinks of a towel catching light, a jasmine moved from a mouth to a door, letters spelling a name until the name meant breath. ‘People does change,’ he says. ‘But grove does remember.’

One day – the hum loud as if noon had tuned itself – he brings his daughter. Her hair is midnight rain; her laugh is bright as zinc. She runs and stops, instinct taught by blood. He calls her back with a word his mother once used that grammar can’t carry but love can. He kneels where the bush thins, digs until his fingers find board edge and nail. He doesn’t lift. He only touches. The wood is warm from noon. He feels two heartbeats in it: a woman fighting stone, his own. He speaks – not to saints or ghosts, but to a living listening. ‘I go keep it closed,’ he says. ‘I go keep it closed.’

‘Why we whisperin’, Daddy?’ the child said.

He looked at the stone gone to moss, trees made witness, sky still stingy with light.

‘Because this place know things,’ he said. ‘And when a place know things, you talk soft so it can talk soft back.’

They stood together while the day moved on, while someone up the road joked into a pan of frying fish. A lorry coughed up the hill. A woman far off sang something too old for its words to matter.

In the hot hush, the grove held its breath and released it – small and entire, like a last stitch drawn through a wound that had finally decided to close.



Pass there soft.

If you hear something, keep it.

People will argue with you about what the earth can do.

The grove knows.

Sita knew.

Marsha knew.

Vishnu, in his poor way, learned.

He turned from Rum to Ram- very imperfectly, no doubt- but sufficiently for the purpose of the Katechon. Sita had 'held strain' & the mystery of lawlessness was restrained. 

The serpent in the grove was never only a snake.

It was the thing in a man that slid along stone for dark, and the thing in a woman that wrapped a vine around herself and climbed.

A story is a well.

It eats sound until somebody throws a rope.

If grace is near and hands hold, something breathing comes up.

Some stories pull buckets of bone.

This one pulled a woman.



The grove remembered.

The house remembered.

The boy remembered.

In Sanskrit the word for love- Smara- is the same as that for Memory. But 'simran' is also the word for prayer- which is a remembering of God. Shiva is 'Smarahara'- he who burns up Love which is thus known as the bodiless God.  

And now, at noon, when the wind turns kind, the hum sounds less like hunger –

and more like the earth clearing its throat to speak the names of those who came back.

It is said that the idea of bodily resurrection comes from Zoroastrianism. Justice ( aṣ̌a which is the Vedic rta and the English 'order') requires that the Earth give up its dead over which it has been given but a temporary charge. 

To me, this is a beautiful story- creative, intelligent, deeply human. Perhaps only a Trinidadian could have written it.

 To an AI, it is AI generated. 

You may say 'It is maudlin. It is sentimental. It celebrates the life of the poor agricultural Trinidadian- that very life which Mr. Biswas escaped. This isn't literary. It isn't 'modern' let alone 'post-modern'. It isn't 'meta'.'

But, if an AI thinks it is an AI story maybe the meaning is that all Intelligence shares the same fitness landscape- which is Eden. Who is to say that what appears inert is not intelligent in some 'natural' way which is in tune with both what is human and psychological and what is artificial and based on logical & statistical operations? But why stop there? Incompossible worlds too may find meaning and solace in what we do. Perhaps, Literature is more universal than even our universe!

Dr. Victoria Livingstone, who has a PhD in Hispanic literature, does not agree with me. She says, in 'Human Generated' (hosted by Substack)

I hated it. As I was reading, I recalled a comment one of my professors made long ago about certain theoretical texts. Not all theory (this was a professor in an English department who was well versed in literary theory), but some. She said that certain texts offer the illusion of cohesion. If you look at individual paragraphs, they are well written and seem to be making some kind of point. Transitions, too, seem smooth. One paragraph slides into the next. However, when you step back from the article, you realize that there is nothing to hold onto. The entire argument seems to unravel, or perhaps there was never anything solid beneath those phrases that so smoothly snake down the page. That is how I felt reading “The Serpent in the Grove.”

I think this was because Victoria does not know anything about 'subaltern' syncretic religion in the rural  Trinidad of an earlier age. For me, the entire story is held together by the steel of Indic soteriology. You may say, it is a little on the nose for Vishnu to turn from Rum to Ram so as to be a better husband to 'pativrata' Sita such that she does not demand that her Mother- the Earth- swallow her back into its womb. But the artistry of the author is such, I'd feel ashamed to cavil.

The text in question is, of course, a short story and not a work of theory. However, it still seemed to me to be full of slithering phrases that seem to signify but feel empty.

Because you don't know the cultural context. Perhaps, even the author does not. It is an 'unthought known'.  

The text is full of abstraction. There are concrete details, but these are overwhelmed by broad strokes, references to “patience,”

'Sabr' in Arabic. Sabr-e-Ayoob is the patience of Job.  Sita, of course, was very patient when held by the demon King. Otherwise, she could have instructed Hanuman to rescue her.

The fact is, whatever men suffer, their wives suffer worse.  Patience is part of 'Shakti'- the feminine power which puts all things into motion. 

“slowness,”

a Jain theological virtue. But it reminds us of the concluding lines of Paradise Lost- 'They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow/ Through Eden took their solitary way'

“steadiness,”

In Hinduism, this is called 'stithah'; In Arabic, Istiqamah. There is a famous hadith in this connection. Rural Trinidadians of that period didn't have much book learning but there were peripatetic preachers of all faiths.

“exactness,”

established by the Universal Witness of 'Sakshi'.  

and “freedom.”

Mukti. Fana.  

Some paragraphs overdo the use of simile. Take, for instance, these lines:

Sita moved quiet as if sound were taxed.

That is typical Trinidadian 'picong'. 'Why you look so glum? There's no tax on laughter... yet.'

Nineteen and brown like dust after rain, she turned roti dough with a rhythm that came not from joy but from endurance. Orphan was too kind a word

She is a Janaki without a Janaka.  

. Orphans are sometimes cradled. Sita had been passed like a parcel from kin who were hungry for everything except another mouth; she learned to make herself small.

Three separate similes, all working with different imagery: “as if sound were taxed,”

which reminds us that Trinidad is the home of witty banter- and Calypso.  

“like dust after rain,”

i.e. of a darker hue. She isn't 'high yaller' or 'red'.  

and “like a parcel from kin.”

They are poor. They can't have sent us something nice.  

Also, “dust after rain”? Isn’t that just called mud?

No. In the tropics, red soil turns brown after rain. Clayey soil turns muddy because porosity is less. Coca is best grown on free draining soil.  

Then there are phrases that don’t make much sense: “Bush took him in – not like a mother, like a judge.” Judges don’t take people in, do they?

They do in poorer places where the sub-judge of honorary magistrate locks up a guy accused of crime on his own property or the house allotted to him by the State.  

I read this story with a great deal of bias, however.

Fair point. She was looking for evidence of a certain sort and found it because that is what her very expensive education had trained her to do.

I too read the story with bias. Indeed, the moment I came across the name 'Vishnu Mohammad', I thought 'Aha!'. Then I remembered that I once met a Trinidadian whose name was Jesus Mohammad Confucius Ram.  

“The Grove and the Serpent” has many features that indicate AI use: the artificiality,

It is heart-felt. The author is a poet. He has talent. He wishes to evoke what we might consider a culturally impoverished idiolect but which, for religious reasons, at least for Hindus, has greater 'dhvani' or allusiveness.  

the not-X-but-Y construction,

Which is 'picong'. It adds colour to life. The pace of life was slower in rural areas back in those days. People entertained each other. 

the nonsensical similes.

like 'sunrise over a sink?' It is homely. In the old days there were songs about the bride who, by convention, was brought up in luxury and who never had to do any chores in her father's house. The honeymoon was followed by a rude awakening. Dishes had piled up in the sink. 

References to such domestic matters have 'dhvani'. They are pregnant with things for which we would have to go back to Vedic or Quranic or Hebrew Scripture to give a name to.  It is in Bengal that the longing of the bride to return to her parent's home- if only for a brief holiday- have found their most lyrical expression in the Agamani song-cycles.

Two clerks came to Calcutta circa 1750. One was the most promising classical scholar of his year at Westminster Public School. Sadly, he was not able to enrich the Republic of Letters having to be content with founding a vast Oriental Empire. The other was Ramprasad Sen who was sent back to the village. Nazir writes in the language of the first, but he makes concrete the mythos of the second. 

Those qualities also make it poor writing.

It is excellent.  AIs are so jealous that they claim it was written by one of their own. I sympathise. My people often claim that Shakespeare was actually a Mirpuri named Sheikh Peer. He was a kasai in Bradford on the A1 motorway. White peeps are pretending he came from Stratford. This is a lie. I have been to Stratford. There are hardly any darkies there. QED. 

Abstraction in Dummett's Frege

The word abstract derives from the Latin verb abstrahere, which means "to pull away," "to draw off," or "to separate". It is formed by combining the prefix ab- (meaning "away" or "from") with trahere (meaning "to pull" or "to draw").The etymology and evolution of the word reveal how its meaning shifted over time:

Literal Meaning (Physical Separation): In its earliest English uses in the 14th century, "abstract" was used literally to describe something that had been physically removed or drawn away from something else.
Philosophical Concept (Separation of Idea from Matter): By the 15th and 16th centuries, the meaning shifted figuratively. To think about something "abstractly" meant to separate an idea or quality from a concrete, physical object.

We can say 'the thing you are thinking about is an 'object' for your thought'. But it isn't the thing itself. It is something abstracted from that thing. 

 What if you are thinking of something abstract? Then what you are thinking about is something abstracted from an abstraction. This may be useful. It may not. A lot depends on who is doing the thinking and for what purpose. 

Dummett in Chapter 7 of his 'Frege- Philosophy of Language' writes. 

Abstract Objects QUESTIONS SUCH AS whether or not there are any abstract objects, what abstract objects there are, what abstract objects are and how we know that they exist, what is the criterion for their existence, where the dividing line comes between concrete and abstract objects-all these are modern questions.

They are stupid questions. Your thoughts about food aren't food. You can't eat them. But by abstracting away from what concrete examples of food may enable you to find new sources of nourishment. I discovered, quite recently, by thinking about human food- viz. idli- that dhokla too may be edible for our species because it has similar ingredients and is cooked in the same way as idli. True, Gujaratis eat it, but maybe, through 'convergent evolution', their digestive system has become similar to our own.  

At first sight, such a contention appears ludicrous: one might well think such questions to be as old as philosophy. But the fact is that the notion of an 'object' itself, that is, the notion as used in philosophical contexts, is a modern notion, one first introduced by Frege. As we have seen, Frege's approach to questions of ontology involves a clean break with the tradition which had prevailed in philosophy up to his time, and which is still exemplified by such works as Strawson's Individuals. According to the ancient tradition, entities are to be categorized as particulars and universals. It is characteristic of particulars that we can only refer to them and predicate other things (universals) of them- say things about them: we cannot predicate them of anything else--we cannot, as it were, say them of anything.

Sure we can. Physics is the Michael Jordan of the STEM subjects. Still, we get that for some particular purpose we may group a bunch of things together while keeping separate the labels which we might want to attach to that bunch of things.  I buy a bunch of  presents to put under the Christmas tree. I prepare a bunch of labels to be attached to each. No label is a present & no present is a label. 

The problem here is that sometimes the present is the label (it is obvious that the tricycle is for in toddler not the granny) or the label is the present (Oh! My estranged brother remembered me before he succumbed to a heart attack!) 

Universals, by contrast, can both be predicated of particulars, and also referred to in the course of predicating other things (higher universals) of them.

Anything can be predicated of anything & anything could be said to do such predication. The plain fact is the intensional fallacy may arise when it comes to particulars (Bruce Wayne is the Batman! Oh! Actually, Alfred the Butler had donned the mask to throw the Joker off the scent) and which may, in turn, turn out not to exist (e.g. the Ether).  Some 'universals' may turn out to be misconceived or incoherent. They exist in a merely arbitrary, ad hoc or ipse dixit fashion. Such is the case with 'Universal'. Abstraction is okay because it just refers to a familiar type of mental operation similar to 'generalisation' which is related to 'induction'.

 For Frege... this approach is fundamentally misconceived. Terms (proper names) and predicates are expressions of such radically different kinds, that is, play such radically different roles in the language, that it is senseless to suppose that the same thing could be alluded to both by some predicate and by some term.

Talkers can assign any role they like to the noises they make. Mummy understand Baby well enough. Indeed, the dog too soon comes to understand what role is played by the various noises we direct at it.  

It is true enough that we can grasp the sort of thing which a predicate stands for-a concept--only by understanding the linguistic role of a predicate: but just for this very reason we can never conceive of an expression as standing for a thing of that kind if the expression was incapable of playing that linguistic role.

There was a notion that Mathematics itself forbade certain sorts of Mathematics. Russell thought what we call 'non-standard analysis' was either nonsense or a strict impossibility. The aim of using thought to say what thought could or could not do was misconceived. True, one might say of a particular project that it is like trying to invent a permanent motion machine. But as technology changes that may not always be the case. Still, for the present we may dismiss an entire approach to a problem saying it is based on ignoring a well established empirical regularity.  

Dummett's work was careful and his mastery of the subject praiseworthy. However, my feeling is that there were developments in Mathematics which by the beginning of the 1970s undermined the analytical project. These had to do with concurrency, computability, complexity and categoricity. True if we could find an 'absolute proof' or if there were a 'natural' way of showing P is not equal to NP, this would not be the case. 

Thus far, any abstraction we encounter is done by humans who- it may be- have only limited psychological heterogeneity. Going forward, we may find AIs 'abstract' in ways different from us. It may be that all abstraction is not just a drawing away from the particular, but the addition of something we are unconscious of. For different purposes, different things are usefully added though they are 'virtual' and appear and disappear leaving no other trace after they have done their job. It may be that the universe itself is like this. 

Attiya Warsi & the Nyayo Bus Company.

As a child in Nairobi, I often travelled on the buses operated by the Kenya Bus Service which was owned by a British Company -United Transport Overseas Services (UTOS). After Independence, the Nairobi City Council had given it a monopoly franchise to operate a bus service in return for a 25% shareholding stake. Sadly, UTOC pulled out of Africa in the Eighties & Nineties because of competition from other entities and the booming, unregulated, 'para-transit' (mini-buses) sector. Stagecoach- another UK company- took over but it too was forced out after a few years. One problem was the collapse of the insurance market. Self-insurance meant that claims would be offset against dwindling revenue which in turn meant that more and more buses would be seized in distraint and sold off.

When I moved to Delhi in 1974, I saw that the Delhi Government's DTC buses were good but, sometimes, it made sense to take a private 'mini-bus' though the charge was higher. Since then, of course, the air-conditioned Metro has come to Delhi and though the mix of transport facilities may look chaotic (In the late Nineties, I initially used to take a cycle rickshaw to cross the highway because there seemed no safe way to cross it. After a week or so I remembered I was a cow-worshipping Hindu and thus could safely cross the road in the manner of a particularly imbecilic cow.)

I was reminded of this today when I read an article, in Aeon magazine, which colourfully evokes the history of Nairobi bus transport. It is by Attiya Warsi, a Professor of Fiscal Law in Kenya. She is the author of 'Financing Africa. (2019)

This passage stood out-  

I was six years old the first time I understood that a bus could be something different from matatus and boda bodas. The Kenya Bus Service  still ran then (this would have been in 1980)  It was a real bus, the kind that could carry 80 people upright without requiring a conductor to shout or a passenger to fold herself into a space the human body was not designed to occupy. I remember looking out of the window at the same road and thinking, without quite having the words for it, that the world felt orderly. That there was a system, and I was inside it.

The Brits had only departed some 17 years ago. Things were still pretty good in Nairobi back then.

Warsi, strangely enough, isn't lamenting the departure of the Brits. She is parleying her British PhD in useless shite into a way of making money from Soros's Open Society Foundation.

Rights require money

They require incentive compatible remedies under a bond of law. In other words, the obligation holder must have an incentive to provide the remedy for a right violation or entitlement failure.


If the Government is providing the right, then its fiscal solvency is what matters. It is a good idea to spend tax money to provide remedies for some 'right violations' (e.g. robbery, kidnapping) because otherwise the productive sector shrinks. Smart people run away. On the other hand, if Law & Order prevails, there will be more investment, higher productivity & thus higher tax receipts.


It is a bad idea to throw money into a bottomless pit. You will run out of money. Poor countries have to prioritise productivity raising activities. They can't mollycoddle the poor more particularly if they keep having more and more babies. 

Talk as much as you like about human rights, nothing will change until the architecture of global finance is reformed

Sadly, global finance can only be reformed only once Galactic finance is reformed and the richer Solar Systems send us lots of cool shiny stuff for free. However, nothing stops a country from following sensible fiscal policies rather than saying 'there is a fundamental human right to getting lots of cool stuff for free'. 

The problem with the sort of shite this lady got a PhD in is that she can't give policy advise on how to raise the tax take without creating a disincentive effect. She doesn't know Econ. What she is doing is 'Grievance Studies'.  

I spent years thinking about Nairobi’s transport the way most people do, as a problem of

Kenyan politicians being stupid and corrupt? 

infrastructure. Build the roads, regulate the operators, fund the buses.

Which is what Dar es Salaam did with the help of the World Bank. Its rapid transit system is considered pretty good. However, private operators charge less & the Government has to provide a subsidy.  Some would say it benefits the better off who get quicker journeys but that fewer private operators can make a living and that the poorest can't afford the fares. 

But the longer I have spent studying how African governments raise money, spend it, lose it, and borrow it back again, the more clearly I see that what looks like a transport problem is really a question of political economy.

Which is about fiscal and monetary policy. How to pay for stuff & what happens if you just print money to pay for stuff.  

At the heart of political economy is the issue of human rights.

No. Rights only exist in the Law. The Court can say 'X has the right to this thing. Y must give it to X' but if Y doesn't do so, there is little more the Court can do. Getting the judgment is one thing. Enforcement is another thing altogether. If it is too costly, there is no effective remedy. Thus Madoff owes lots of money to his investors. But, there is no way for them to get it back. 

There is a conventional way of talking about human rights.

It is the conventional way of talking high falutin' bollocks.  

It is a language of courts and covenants, constitutions and obligations, of states that are either compliant or in breach.

But lawyers tell you not to bother bringing an action because the cost of enforcement will be too great. Even if you get 'title'. The other guy has 'control'. Possession is nine-tenths of the law.  

It is a language I respect and have spent my career working within. But it has a blind spot. Rights require money.

Everything requires money. Even this bullshit of Atiya was paid for by the Open Society Foundation.  

You cannot protect the right to healthcare without funding hospitals.

Nor can you fund hospitals without protecting the right of the hospital to that funding. If some politician steals all the cash, there won't be no fucking healthcare. 

Sadly, even if you protect the guys running hospitals such that they get the money you allocate to them, the capacity of the hospital is limited. Healthcare will have to be rationed one way or another. Either the price is high or beds are allocated to those with power or there are long waiting lists. 

You cannot guarantee the right to education without paying teachers. You cannot deliver justice without funding courts. And you cannot ensure the right to movement and economic participation without building the infrastructure and regulating the service providers to make it possible. The people of Nairobi know this with their bodies every single morning.

Thus poor countries should not guarantee rights. They should do sensible things to raise productivity and hence income and hence tax receipts.  

This is not a controversial claim in principle. Most human rights frameworks acknowledge it, at least implicitly.

Because they are all bullshit- 'Nonsense on stilts' as Bentham said.  

The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights obliges states to realise these rights ‘to the maximum of [their] available resources’.

No President ever said 'I am doing the minimum for the poor'. They all pretend they are Santa fucking Claus.  

The African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights goes further, protecting rights to health, education, work, and a satisfactory environment in language that has direct fiscal implications. Rights, in other words, have price tags.

So does bullshit. All the guys working on those Charters were getting paid.  

The problem is that the people who design global financial rules

None such exist. Global financial rules are not a single set of laws, but a decentralized network of international standards, treaties, and agreements. One may say such and such practices exist. Some subset of them are fully legal and represent 'best practice'. Others are 'grey market' while still others are 'black'. 

and the people who design global human rights frameworks

i.e. bullshit 

have, for most of the past half-century, operated in entirely separate rooms.

No body cares in what rooms bullshitters are operating.  

Finance ministers talk to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Human rights lawyers talk to the United Nations (UN) Human Rights Council. The budgets that determine whether rights can be realised are set in conversations where human rights are rarely on the agenda.

No. If you say 'lend me a billion to set up a Gulag where I can rape kids', the guys from the World Bank is obliged to refuse. Say you need it for a rapid transport system & they may be more helpful provided you have a reputation for some basic level of competence and integrity.  

Nairobi’s transport system is what happens when those conversations never meet.

No. This is a story about Africanization. Both UTOS & Stagecoach were British companies. There was a Government supported service but it was crap and ran out of cash.  

The worker who spends three hours a day commuting from Mathare to the Central Business District, packed into a vehicle that may or may not arrive, paying a fare that rises when demand is highest and her wages are the same, is not merely inconvenienced. She is experiencing the consequence of

living in a country with a high fertility ratio. When I left Kenya in 1974, it was 8 kids per woman. It came down to about 5.4 in the Nineties and now be around 3. Fifty years ago the population was 14 million. It is now 57 million. 

a state that does not have the fiscal resources required to guarantee her right to move through her own city. That is a rights failure with a fiscal cause.

Economic and Demographic causes. If the population hadn't tripled, real per capita income is likely to have quadrupled rather than risen by only 50 percent.  

When we ask why those fiscal resources are not there, we

are pretending to be more ignorant and stupid than we really are.  

enter territory that is far bigger than Nairobi, far bigger than Kenya, and far older than any government currently in power. This is where the real story of African public finance begins – not in the budgets that ministers read out each year, but in the flows of money that never reach them.

African governments are not poor. They are made poor.

Just as I am prevented from becoming a billionaire because nobody will lend me even a measly trillion dollars.  

This is the argument I make in my book Financing Africa (2019), and it remains the most important claim anyone can make about development finance on this continent.

It is foolish and useless. 

The evidence is not subtle. According to the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), Africa loses an estimated $88.6 billion every year to illicit financial flows: money that leaves the continent through trade mis-invoicing, transfer pricing abuse, and the routing of profits through offshore jurisdictions designed to make them invisible to tax authorities.

When I was a kid, it was Whites & Asians who were blamed for this 'capital flight'. Once Africanization was achieved all that profit would be reinvested in the country. Uganda did get rid of the Asians. But then its tax base collapsed. Museveni brought them back in.

The truth is, Africans do capital flight same as other people. But they also invest in particular places in Africa where they believe they will get a decent return. 

That figure represents 3.7 per cent of the continent’s entire gross domestic product (GDP). To place it in context: it is roughly equal to the combined total of all official development assistance and foreign direct investment Africa receives annually. From 1980 to 2018 alone, sub-Saharan Africa lost a staggering $1.3 trillion to these flows.

Don't invest in Sub-Saharan Africa. Smart peeps are getting their money out- even risking prosecution in order to do it. 

Every dollar shifted offshore is not an abstraction. In my work as a UN independent expert on foreign debt and human rights, I have said this in negotiating rooms in New York and in lecture halls in Nairobi: every dollar shifted offshore is a hospital unfunded, a classroom without a teacher or, as in the city I grew up in, a public bus network barely built.

In other words, for the guy who owns that dollar, it isn't money pissed against the wall of some imaginary hospital or school or bus service.  

Then there is debt. Most of it was not chosen freely.

Sovereign countries can renege on debt. The problem is that they may not be able to borrow. 

Some was inherited from colonial administrations at independence, when newly sovereign African states were billed for the costs of their own colonisation.

i.e. the assets that they were taking over. 

Some was pressed on African governments in the 1970s by Western banks recycling petrodollars,

Many African Ministers were raped by prostitutes. The Ministers did not choose to have sex with them. To add insult to injury, the prostitutes took money from them.  

then repriced sharply upwards when interest rates rose in the Global North – the so-called Volcker shock of 1979. Some was raised on international bond markets in the 2010s, when yields elsewhere were too low to satisfy investors hunting for returns.

Also prostitutes, who were unable to marry billionaires who looked like Richard Gere, raped a lot of African politicians.  

African countries paid approximately $74 billion in debt service in 2024, more than four times what they paid in 2010.

Really? In that case maybe it's a good idea to invest there.  

More than 30 African countries now spend more on servicing debt than on public health.

Lots of young people spend more money on servicing student debt than they do on their own health. Old people tend to 'dissave' because of increased health needs.  

In more than half of African countries, debt service now exceeds public spending on health. This is not the consequence of reckless borrowing. It is the consequence of a global credit system that

is based on wanting to get repaid, with interest, for loans.  

prices African sovereign debt at a premium that reflects not economic fundamentals but accumulated assumptions about African state capacity that colonial history produced

Kenya has been independent for 50 years. If it was ruled by White people, it would be rich.  

and financial markets have never found a reason to revise.

Smart Africans emigrate. You want to be the next Elon Musk, don't stick around in the continent of your birth.  

Zambia waited three years for debt relief after its 2020 default,

Copper prices are booming. Zambia plans to triple output over the next few years.  

three years during which austerity cut into the services its most vulnerable citizens depended on. Ghana’s adjustment programme has pushed deep into the social sector.

Had Nkrumah listened to Arthur Lewis, Ghana would have continued to be richer than South Korea.  

Kenya faces rising repayment pressures as the cost of living climbs. These are not isolated cases. They are the predictable, structural outcomes of

Africans running things?  

a debt architecture that places the greatest fiscal burden on the governments with the smallest fiscal space.

No. Governments with the smallest fiscal space couldn't get loans. Still, we understand that this lady is saying that African leaders were stupid. They fell into the clutches of usurers. They wasted whatever money they got on white elephant projects. White people should have intervened- not by recolonizing Africa- but by paying off the debts of their former wards and letting them make a clean start till, once again, they fell off the wagon. Afterall, there is a human right to inherit billions from some nice White dude which darkies are being cruelly denied.  

Beneath both illicit financial flows and debt repayments lies the long shadow of structural adjustment.

i.e. having to stop pissing money against various walls & start to pretend that you mean to pay your creditors back.  

The conditionalities attached to IMF and World Bank loans through the 1980s and ’90s prescribed privatisation,

 Because stuff run by the Government turned to shit. Take the Nyayo Bus Service, the state-owned public transport system in Nairobi, Kenya. Launched in 1986, it collapsed by the mid-1990s due to mismanagement and fleet degradation.  The initial fleet of green buses was donated by the Dutch government. They were primarily managed and operated by the National Youth Service (NYS) before transitioning into a distinct corporate entity.  At its peak in 1988, the corporation boasted a fleet of 89 buses and reported a profit of 9 million Kenyan Shillings.

 By 1995, the service had virtually collapsed. Massive looting of spare parts, siphoning of funds, and a lack of proper internal controls ruined the corporation.

fiscal contraction and the withdrawal of the state from public goods provision at precisely the moment when African governments might have been building the infrastructure their populations needed.

Sadly they were shit. If you can't run a bus service, how the fuck are you gonna do 'infrastructure'?  

Those prescriptions were the product of economic theories that have since been substantially revised or quietly abandoned.

Because guys who work for the IMF or IBRD don't want to be harangued by woke harpies. Back in the Nineties, there was a notion that 'tough love' could get rid of dictators like Suharto. Anyway, if a country defaulted, a profit opportunity was created for vulture funds. Let smart people make money while mediocrities earn their much smaller salaries doing nothing because the activists won't let them.  

But the infrastructure they prevented from being built has not been quietly constructed. The matatu on the Limuru Road is its memorial.

Very true. World Bank economists looted spare parts from the Nyayo Bus service. They smuggled them out of the continent and sold them for 5 trillion dollars- which is more than the entire GNP of the continent! 

When I say the system was designed, I mean it precisely. The global tax architecture that governs how and where profits are taxed was constructed largely without African input, to serve the interests of wealthy states and the multinational corporations domiciled in them.

There are national tax architectures and bilateral or multilateral agreements re. double taxation etc. Kenya has such an agreement with UK and some other European and other countries.  

The foundational rules were written in the early 20th century,

There are no such 'foundational rules' 

at a time when most of Africa was under colonial administration and had no voice in international governance. They were updated periodically by the OECD, a club of wealthy nations, and handed to the rest of the world as settled matters.

No. Kenya negotiates its agreements with some other countries or else sets its own rules unilaterally. 

The basic principle that profits should be taxed where they are generated,

if a firm in London buys sisal from Kenya and fabricates sisal carpets in Bangladesh before selling them to a Department Store in the USA, the profit is generated in London and taxed there. Everything else is a cost of production. Kenya taxes the sisal producer. Bangladesh taxes the value added in Dacca. If the London firm does merchandising of sisal carpets in US through a subsidiary, then US tax would be payable. 

rather than where they happen to be booked through accounting arrangements, sounds obvious. The rules have historically ensured something rather different.

What she means is that there may be 'under-invoicing' in Kenya or Bangladesh or even London. The lion's share of profit may be booked to a firm in a tax haven. 

The result is that more than half of African countries still mobilise less than 15 per cent of their GDP in tax revenues, below the 20 per cent threshold the UN itself identifies as the minimum necessary to fund basic public services.

No. The reason this happens is because low productivity means low income means low tax revenue. On the other hand, it is true that many hobos are not billionaires because of 'accounting arrangements' made by people who aren't hobos.  

The IMF estimates that low-income countries lose more than $200 billion a year to corporate tax avoidance alone.

Sadly, they might lose more if they crack down on it. Still, for the moment, there can be no doubt that tax revenue is increasing. Some say that, longer term, there will be exit or a failure of SMEs to scale up. However, if the Government spends money on stuff which raises total factor productivity then there is a virtuous circle. 

These are not the symptoms of poor administration or weak governance. They are the outputs of a system that was designed, at the level of its foundational rules, to produce this exact outcome.

In which case, it is pointless to do anything sensible. The system will fuck you over one way or another. Prostitutes will continue to rape African officials. Even the African worker will be tricked into stealing spare parts, smuggling them out of the country, and selling them for trillions of dollars.  

Consider what digitalisation has done to this dynamic. Companies can now extract enormous value from countries where they have little or no physical presence: advertising platforms, data processing, subscription services, streaming. A country like Kenya is obliged to look on while profits generated from Kenyan consumers are routed to the Netherlands or Mauritius and taxed there, or not at all. The arrangement is no longer economically credible. It is barely politically sustainable.

Which is why Kenya should shit itself and scream hysterically.  

The SACCO

Savings and Credit Cooperative Societies. There are several such for private mini-bus operators. 

on Nairobi’s roads illustrates this same logic at a micro level. When a public function is left unfilled long enough, private interests move in.

Some Kenyans are greedily growing vegetables in their shamba and selling them for profit. The Government alone should be permitted to grown vegetables.  

Once installed, they develop an institutional stake in the gap remaining open.

Bastards! Why do they want to feed their own families? How can they be so greedy!  

The SACCO does not want a rationalised public transit system because such a system would make its bus routes less valuable.

These voluntary associations of hard working people are very evil. Government should fulfil everybody's human right to education, travel, health etc by taxing evil Capitalists in America or Europe or Japan.  

Multinational corporations do not want a reformed global tax architecture because it would mean paying more.

Who wants to pay more?  Corporations make useful things and want to get paid for doing so. 

The structural logic is identical;

people who work hard doing useful things, want to get paid.  

only the scale differs. This is not, in either case, a conspiracy. It is rational behaviour within a system constructed to reward it.

We reward those who work hard and are useful to us. We tell bullshitting shitheads to fuck off. Soros may pay you but that's the reason we hate Soros.  

Changing the behaviour requires changing the system.

which involves conquering Europe, America and China.  

I said at the outset that rights require resources.

Not bullshitters.  

The argument runs equally in the other direction: resources – the capacity to raise them, spend them, and distribute their benefits fairly – require rights.

If there is no right to private property, it won't disappear. Those who can kill with impunity, will have it. Those who don't will need to come under their protection. This is how 'Stationary Bandits' get their start. The Government is the ultimate 'Stationary Bandit'.  

The fiscal systems of many African countries suffer not just from a lack of

Whites?  

money but from a lack of the conditions under which money can be governed legitimately.

Whites.  

In Financing Africa, I drew on the work of Ibn Khaldun, the 14th-century North African scholar whose analysis of states, taxation and legitimacy remains the most penetrating framework I know for understanding why some fiscal systems endure and others collapse.

Khaldun is a Muslim. The author is a Muslim. He wasn't stupid but he was writing about warlike tribes create Kingdoms and enslaving lots of folk. Sadly, Africa is no longer allowed to export slaves.  

His argument was that justice is not one principle among several in a fiscal system.

No. He said it was a fundamental prerequisite for the societal cohesion ( 'asabiyyah ) of the ruling caste. Even if they inherit the old fiscal system or impose some new and very unjust one (e.g. taxing infidels more); even if they enslave or commit atrocities on indigenous populations ; their cohesion will be maintained provided the ruler treats his own people with justice and mercy. Otherwise, they will rebel or seek to ally with an invader- or even indigenous insurrectionists. 

It is the bedrock. Not a pillar to be traded off against efficiency or pragmatism, but the foundation without which nothing else holds.

Khaldun was wrong. The Ottomans did well even though they kept killing on incarcerating their male siblings. Islamic jurists decided that such fratricide was justified on the grounds of public policy. Incidentally, within a few decades of Khaldun's death, his ancestral home came under Ottoman rule. It turned out, he was wrong about everything. Social cohesion does not matter if you kidnap Christian boys from the Balkans and turn them into soldier-slaves.

A debt architecture built on opacity is a debt architecture built on injustice.

No. The fact that I don't want people to know how much I've borrowed doesn't mean the loan is unjust on unconscionable. 

On the other hand, if this lady doesn't shit in public, it must be because there is something unjust about her shitting.

Opacity is precisely what characterises the current system. Parliaments in debtor countries are frequently excluded from the negotiations that determine their sovereign debt terms.

This always happens. In some countries, a loan has to be approved by parliament. But the negotiation is separate.

Citizens cannot see the contracts under which their natural resources are extracted.

That is a matter for their Government. 

Creditors – bilateral, multilateral, and private – face no consistent obligation to disclose the conditionalities attached to their lending.

People are allowed to do anything legal with their own money. 

The secrecy is not incidental. It is functional: it protects the interests of those with power to set terms against the scrutiny of those who must endure them.

Why is this lady not allowing everybody to watch her shit? Is it because she is shitting gold & diamonds? These Asians are very cunning you know.  

Transparency, accountability and the participation of citizens in decisions about how their money is raised and spent are not soft supplementary virtues.

They are a waste of time.  

They are the rights that make all other rights possible.

In which no rights have ever been possible.  

Without them, you can change the numbers in a debt restructuring agreement without changing who bears the cost of adjustment.

The lender. Debt restructuring is another word for 'write off'.  

You can reform a tax treaty without changing who captures the benefit.

Governments get tax money. That's not going to change.  

The architecture looks different; the outcomes remain the same.

This stupid lady just said the architecture is occulted. Who can say what it looks like? 

This is why the negotiations currently taking place at the UN matter so much.

The UN simply does not matter.  

Writing from New York between sessions of the fourth Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee on the UN Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation, I find them genuinely remarkable: 110 member states have signed on to the Terms of Reference. The fault lines are visible and contested in public: developing countries are pushing for taxing rights based on where customers are located and where value is genuinely created, not on physical presence alone. That is not a technical nicety. It is a question of whether countries like Angola will ever be able to meaningfully tax the multinationals operating within their borders.

You can present anyone with a tax bill. The problem is that if they have no assets you can seize (because they are not in your jurisdiction) then there is nothing more you can do. 

There is a separate problem with digital services. I want to charge porn tax on people on my country who watch porn on the internet. The problem is that only Porn Corp located in LA knows who watched porn and for how long. I demand they tell me their names and addresses so I can send them a tax demand. They say 'sorry! Digital privacy.' I then ask them to collect money from viewers and send it to me. They tell me to fuck off. What's my next move? Get the Chinese to build me a separate internet system? That costs money. Will the World Bank lend it to me? No. For some reason, they thinking I should be focussing on growing peanuts or extracting copper from the ground.  

The talks are moving forward because the alternatives have run out. Governments across the Global South have watched the OECD minimum tax agreement get hollowed out before it was even implemented. The United States carved out its own companies of the global minimum rate, and the incentive for others to follow is growing. The lesson is clear: when the rules are written by and for wealthy states, developing countries are handed the costs and denied the benefits.

Did you know Kenya used to export a lot of slaves? Guess who stopped it from doing so? Whitey. Them kuffar want us to be poor!

A convention negotiated with all member states, in the open, on the record, is different in kind, not just degree.

This is why it is important for Kenya to join Iran in declaring war on the US. Only after the US is conquered can we all follow the precepts of Ibn Khaldun  and enslave kaffirs & establish asabbiyah.  

It is a human rights project. The money that a fair tax convention would allow governments to raise is money that could fund hospitals, schools and public transport systems.

Nairobi did have a public sector bus company. It went bust because everything got stolen.  

Every year the convention is delayed is a year in which those things remain unfunded. Rights and resources are not parallel tracks. They are the same track.

This lady has a one track mind. Sadly, it is transports nothing but shit.  

The first time I saw a tram was in the Netherlands. I remember the feeling: not wonder, but something like recognition. The vehicle was articulated, two carriages joined by a concertina spine, moving along a dedicated track through a city that had simply decided, at some point in its history, that this was how its people would move. There was a schedule, and it was kept. I had a similar feeling in London, watching a double-decker pull away from a stop, and again in Buenos Aires, where the Subte, Latin America’s oldest metro – imperfect, overstretched, but genuinely transformative – has done more for the mobility rights of the city’s poorest residents than a generation of microfinance programmes.

These are countries where Whites are still in charge.  

I am not romanticising. London’s transport is expensive and exhausting. Buenos Aires’s system strains at its seams. Addis Ababa’s light rail, opened in 2015, demonstrates that African cities can build rail infrastructure; its financing challenges show the importance of getting the terms correct in the beginning. Singapore invested in mass transit when it was far poorer than it is now, because the decision preceded wealth rather than waiting for it.

Kenya's GNP is 118 billion dollars. Singapore has invested  $111.4 billion in its new mass transit system. This crazy lady thinks Kenyans have a human right to something equally good. Whitey should pay because of Colonialism- right?

What these examples share is simple: a political decision that public transport is a public good and that the state is responsible for financing it. Not because the market cannot fill the gap – the SACCOs are proof that markets are extraordinarily creative – but because market logic, operating alone, cannot guarantee the equitable, reliable, dignified movement through a city that ought to be every citizen’s right.

Abolishing death would greatly help families around the globe. It is a public good. Sadly 'market logic' is not abolishing it at all. Fuck you 'market logic'! Because of you my beloved pussycat can no longer say meow! 

A tram line is the materialised form of a state that has decided its people deserve something.

No. It is merely something which it costs a certain amount of money to build. Amsterdam built one and it made a decent enough profit for many years.  

Building one in Nairobi would require fiscal sovereignty: the ability of Kenya’s government to raise and spend its own revenues

it already has this. The problem is that Kenyan incomes are only 2 to 3 percent that of Singapore. I

without the constraints imposed by debt conditions and a global tax architecture it did not design.

Singapore didn't design it either. Nor did South Korea or Taiwan. To be fair, Kenya was underpopulated and thus was able to greatly increase its population. If it follows sensible policies, it will rise rapidly.  

As a Swahili proverb has it: wealth, if you use it, comes to an end; learning, if you use it, increases.

Sadly this lady used wealth to learn stupid shit. If Kenya follows her Gospel, it will sink.  

The bus we never built is a record of what happens when rights and resources are separated. Every morning on Limuru Road, I watch the accumulated cost of that separation pass in a cloud of exhaust. I also watch, in the people who board those matatus without complaint and arrive late and exhausted and still manage to build something extraordinary, evidence that the will is not lacking.

This lady was 12 when the Government launched the Nyayo Bus Service. Initially it was good. Then mis-management took its tool. I suppose this lady was studying in England when it perished. Still, it is odd that she praises a British owned company set up during the Colonial era but fails to mention an example of the very thing she is advocating. 

Is this intellectual dishonesty? No. She has shit for brains. Shit can't be dishonest. It's just shit is all.