This sounds worth reading.
Even liberalism, Bregman argues, has become pessimistic, an ideology that is "all but hollowed out," with young people trained to "just be yourself" and "do your thing." That's probably an overstatement and a cliché. But there's probably also some truth to the idea that a lot of the controversies about safe spaces are the end result of a new emphasis on trying to make the individual feel maximally safe and accepted within the larger context of a world we've unconsciously come to accept as essentially unchangeable.
The welfare state is where Bregman sees the ultimate perversion of the utopian instinct. It's become "a grotesque pact between left and right," in which conservatives have spent a generation making sure people getting aid are punished and villainized as lazy and work-averse, while progressives have used public assistance as a way to lever more control over the lives of poor people who aren't trusted to make the right life choices.
Bregman thinks we should just give people money, no questions asked, and let them sort it out. His prescriptions are humorously simple. He quotes economist Charles Kenny, who notes "the reason poor people are poor is because they don't have enough money." And he tells the fascinating true story of that time that Richard Nixon – Richard Nixon! – tried to implement a law guaranteeing a basic family income for all Americans.
He also argues pretty forcefully that working longer hours makes us less productive and also more unhappy. At some point in the arc of industrialized countries, we end up working more and more hours just so we can acquire more and more stuff we don't need. More relaxing, less working and consuming – that's where we should be looking. So he proposes a 15-hour work week. I'm sure people here will hate the idea.
Well... not everyone hates their job. I don't. So a 15 hour work week would be something of a punishment for me. Then again, my working and free time cannot be so easily distinguished.
While I'm strongly opposed to scientists being politicians, I do favour a more scientific approach to politics : that is, evidenced-based and provisional. Do trials of ideas and see if they work. Ideologies often do start for good, sensible reasons, but they become crazy absolutes : maybe once upon a time you did need a militia to protect citizens from the British, maybe universal healthcare really wasn't affordable back in the day. Maybe even the poor really were just layabout scoundrels at one time who just needed a good clobbering. Probably not, but you never know.
Many issues already have a wealth of indirect evidence. Where they don't, such as UBI, conduct trials. Unfortunately this requires much less ideology-driven politics both from the electorate and the politicians themselves. Without getting both groups to accept a) the need for trials and more importantly b) the results of the trials themselves, nothing will happen. Perhaps we should make the search for truth an ideology in itself.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/taibbi-free-lunch-for-everyone-w481396
Lest we forget, liberal and conservative are merely adjectives. They always describe some aspect of a person's politics/world view: e.g. economic conservative. Edmund Burke kinda gives us some guidance on what that means. But liberal hasn't become pessimistic. I weary of those world-weary pundits whose stock in trade is caricatures and restatements of others' positions. Both the Democratic Party and the GOP in the USA are a troop of prostitutes: take the labels off them, at a practical level, they cannot be distinguished from each other.
ReplyDeleteWhen I'm discussing some policy with a political component, I always visualise a parabola in the first quadrant. The zeroes of this parabola are full government control and no government control: both are useless positions to take. But even thoughtful people tend to push the little circle along the route of the parabola in one direction or the other: they can't help it. We would hope the little circle would perch neatly at the zenith, but as the facts are proffered, the quarrel over the validity of that evidence tends to overwhelm the argument itself.
The little circle only rides at the zenith when that evidentiary hearing is a well-managed process. Perversely, if that argument is healthy, good policy can emerge from the process.
Yes, both political parties feature dystopian visions. But talk of immigrants with "scabies" - actually it's measles, uninoculated Mexican and Guatemalan children are measles vectors. As for overfished oceans and toxic greenhouse gasses, those too are well supported by the facts. Best to let all the facts into evidence.
There are no shortage of utopian visions. Let the entire history of science fiction point to this fundamental truth: when the SciFi authors got something wrong, it was usually because they hadn't dreamt big enough. It's what I call Engineer in a Box Syndrome. An engineer is a cat. Open a box or a suitcase, he'll climb right in and sit there happily. It is, after all, a "Problem Domain." He's not sposta sit in the goddamn box, he's sposta be building doors to get us out of the box.
The entire paradigm of Work is flawed. Ig the Flint-knapper didn't view his arrowheads and axes as Work Product. Ig was really good at knapping and was viewed as a treasured resource. He worked very closely with Og the Fletcher, whose kids would roam around in the woods, looking for the wayfaring tree, Viburnum lantana, so Dad and Ig could come out and inspect it, to see if it would be good for arrow shafts.
Ig and Og and their wives and children were fed by Hal the Hunter and his little band of merry men, who'd go out into the wild and return with game. They were utterly dependent upon their knapping and fletching skills. And Hal was proud to feed the clan, it gave him status.
Money didn't change much, it just made goods and services more interchangeable. But Work as we understand it emerged from the factory - and it will disappear just as quickly as the factory worker himself. We spent a great deal more time in the transactional, status based world of Ig and Og than in the Dark Satanic Mills. And we'll probably end up there again.