Doughnunt Economics: For Well-born Activists

In the rarified heights that I live I had never heard of Doughnut Economics: 7 Ways to Think Like a 21st Century Economist by Brit academic Kate Raworth until last week when I encountered the book in a used book store. It's a manual for well-born women activists like this one.

Yuan Wang arrived at Oxford University to study economics. Born in China and raised in Yorkshire... [she] was determined to make a difference in the world.

She thought that economics was the way to do it, but soon got "frustrated."

She found the theory -- and the maths used to prove it -- absurdly narrow in its assumptions.

She found that there was a huge disconnect between the economic theory she was being taught and the real world "visible in the gulf between the preoccupations of mainstream economic theory and growing real-world crises such as global inequality and climate change."

Ms. Wang is a stand-in for author Kate Raworth who "is an economist focused on exploring the economic thinking needed to address the twenty-first century's social and ecological challenges." There isn't an "Early Life" section in La Wik's piece on her, but she describes herself as a former "London schoolgirl." Another website says she was raised in Surrey, a wealthy suburb of London, the daughter of a businessman and a florist.

My take is that well-born young women in the world today all want to get into "activism" working for some NGO. So I experience Doughnut Economics as a manifesto for their world-saving faith.

But what is this "doughnut" Raworth is talking about? It is a world model, rather like the Solar System model we are all brought up to believe in (Image By DoughnutEconomics - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=75695171).

The idea is that the outer ring of the doughnut is an "ecological ceiling of planetary pressure that we should not go beyond" and the inner ring of the doughnut is a "social foundation of well-being that no one should fall below."

You can see that this is almost a perfect view of the universe from the perspective of an educated elitist that wants to make a difference in the world. If there is a global ecological problem then global-minded ecological activists should be tasked with policing the ecological ceiling and solving the problem. If there is a social problem, social activists should be tasked with policing the social foundation and solving the problem. All with manipulations of the economic system through taxation, subsidies and government force. It's another top-down secular-religious fantasy in the tradition of rich-kid Marx and rich-kid Engels and their determination to make a difference.

Yes, what is the meaning of "life, the universe, and everything" from the perspective of a Yuan Wang or a Kate Raworth? Look no further than the Doughnut.

To make it "real simple" know that if we are predicted to penetrate the "Ecological Ceiling" then the ruling class activists must intervene. If we are reported to have fallen through the "Social Foundation" then ruling class activists must intervene. All roads lead to Rome.

The interesting thing is that Yuan Wang and her generation of well-born activists seem to think they are rebelling against the ruling class. In the wake of the 2008 economic crisis, Wang and "her fellow rebels" all over the world got together to demand that economics "catch up with the current generation." Economics needed to deal with the challenges of the 21st century, "from financial stability, to food security and climate change."

I'll believe that when I see it.

But what is it that Raworth and her well-born activists want to do?

1. Change the goal from GDP to "meeting the human needs of every person within the means of our life-giving planet.
2. See the big picture and move from the hydraulic "Circular Flow" model of Paul Samuelson and the "neoliberal" faith in "the efficiency of the market, the incompetence of the state, the domesticity of the household and the tragedy of the commons" to "the power of the market, the partnership of the state, the core role of the household and the creativity of the commons.
3. Nurture human nature and move from a vision of "rational economic man" to a vision that is "social, interdependent, approximating, fluid in values and dependent upon the living world."
4. Get savvy with systems, moving from supply and demand curves to systems thinking and feedback curves. Go from "control levers" to an "ever-evolving complex system."
5. Design to distribute, going beyond redistributing income to "exploring ways of redistributing wealth."
6. Create to regenerate. Don't think of a "clean" environment as a luxury good, but build build clean into the entire economy.
7. Be agnostic about growth. Nobody has created the dangerous diagram of the long-term path of GDP growth. It may be hard to give up growth as an economic goal.

Actually, many of these ideas make sense. The devil, of course, is in the details. Will the noble activists insist that they and only they are allowed to direct traffic. And in regard to the "dangerous diagram" of GDP growth, how about this, from my usgovernmentspending.com?

Isn't it interesting. It shows that growth is slowing in the US and Europe and Japan, while China and India are in the exponential phase of growth, with China showing a slight indication of slowing down after its meteoric growth since 1978. But Kate Raworth says that we are merely focused on growth. I wonder why.

We'll see, in the next exciting installment of this series on Doughnut Economics. Of course, there is bound to be a disconnect between me and Raworth. Her story of economics goes through Quesnay, Marshall, Samuelson, and introduces Kuhn's paradigms, Goffman's "framing," Korbyski's a-model-is-only-a-model, Lakoff's demand for "an alternative frame," e.g., "tax justice" to counter "tax relief."

My story of economics goes through Adam Smith to Marx. Then to Menger, Jevons and Walras in the marginal revolution and Bagehot on central banking. Then to von Mises and Hayek and supply-sider Arthur Laffer. And to me your Keyneses and Samuelsons and MMT advocates are fools and knaves, tools of the globalist ruling class. Like I assume Kate Raworth to be.

And what I want to know is how come little Yuan Wang didn't know about Walter Bagehot and his understanding of central banking and thus did not know that the 2008 crash was all about the ruling class ignoring the advice of Bagehot after the Crash of 1873? Hey Kate Raworth: Didn't you teach her the central banking facts of life?

Governing When "The Natives are Restless"

I guess I understand why the Biden administration decided to go full emergency on COVID. Government is nothing unless it has a war to fight. 

And if you've just lost a war, what better than to start a new one, and replace the dastardly Taliban with dastardly anti-vaxxers as the Enemy, the Other du jour.

But, on the other hand, I'd say that we are getting definite signs that "the natives are restless." That was supposed to be the line of the British colonial administrators when the native hordes in their dominions became uncomfortable under British rule.

We see college kids chanting "eff Biden" at college football games; we get mothers shouting at Biden at his photo-ops. And last night I heard about unruly passengers on an Alaska Airlines flight who weren't being properly obedient on the masking front. Bit of a problem on the natives front?

But here's a take. I was to dinner with my liberal neighbors last week and they were clearly feeling angry about vaccination resisters. So maybe Biden's COVID emergency is just about nailing down his base.

Of course, when your political acts are about solidifying your base rather than attracting moderates, it suggests that there might be a bit of a cock-up on the governing front.

And that is the question that keeps returning to me. Why? Why did the Democrats in 2021 think they had to go pedal to the metal with every single progressive initiative from climate change to systemic racism. And with a bare majority in Congress.

Seriously. Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer and Joe Biden are political veterans going back decades. You would think they would be the adults in the room holding back the over-enthusiastic young'uns. But they are not. 

Why not? Are the old'uns just going along for the ride? Has the Democratic Party has got to the point where if you don't go full Woke you are toast? Or are we just seeing the internal logic of the progressive movement, that there must always be a new program, with new loot and plunder, because without some new bauble to dangle before the voters you are nothing?

See, if I were president I would be trying to get the economy back on track, trying to normalize it as much as possible after the disruptions of the past year and a half that have hurt many millions of ordinary Americans -- but not well-to-do Americans like me. I would be thinking that, yeah, educated Americans that can work from home are doin' fine. Welfare state recipients that live from government checks are doin' fine. But ordinary Americans in the middle, they are the ones whose lives have been disrupted by the COVID lockdowns and restrictions. I would be telling my supporters: look, I want to enact your stuff, but we can't do it until we fix the economy.

I don't see any recognition from our rulers that they care about this.

And that is really weird because if there is Rule One in politics it is to make sure that the voters know that their leaders "care about people like me."

And I would say that the one kind of voter that the current Biden administration shows, by its actions, that it does not care about is the ordinary middle-class voter, the sort of voter that is easily seduced by politicians like Trump.

Has the Democratic Party just flat given up on voters like that? Are they completely consumed by pandering to their own base? Have they developed a new strategy where ordinary middle-class Americans are the new Other that all good people oppose, because racist-sexist-homophobe?

I naturally assume that the Democratic leaders and their acolytes know what they are doing, and that there is a deep cunning in what they are doing.

But what if they are not cunning? What if they are blindly reacting to the day's events and hitting out blindly because they really don't know what they are doing?

Surely, that can't be the case. Can it?

Straight White Males Not Going to College

I'm sure we've all seen the latest on college entrants, that girls are in the majority and white males are not signing up, not much. From The Wall Street Journal:

At the close of the 2020-21 academic year, women made up 59.5% of college students, an all-time high, and men 40.5%, according to enrollment data from the National Student Clearinghouse, a nonprofit research group. U.S. colleges and universities had 1.5 million fewer students compared with five years ago, and men accounted for 71% of the decline. 

And working-class white males are the cause of the decline.

In The American Spectator Scott McKay goes into details of what is wrong, including wokism and female teachers all the way through that tend to regard boys as "bad girls who need to be managed." And there is power.

Drunk on the power and money their predecessors left them, and unfettered by any accountability that politicians (at state schools) and donors should have imposed on them, they decided a couple of decades ago that they were to be the molders of a brand new kind of American. 

 But do you know? I think that there is less here than meets the eye.

I don't think that anyone is really thinking about what they are doing. They are just picking up the Zeitgeist and going with it.

If you read a book by any liberal, what jumps off the page is the assumption that the way of liberals, as of right now in 2021, is the eternal way of the Universe. It is not that other ways are marginalized; it is just that nothing exists except the liberal way.

Now occasionally someone has a strategic idea in education, like Horace Mann and the common school. He had been to Germany and liked the system there, and also, as an upper-class Transcendentalist, liked the idea of educated kids away from the middle-class Puritanism and Catholicism of their parents.

Then, at the turn of the 20th century, leading minds thought that children should be educated in high school to be good factory workers.

And then people thought that women should be educated just like men.

And then, after World War II and the GI Bill, people thought that everyone should go to college.

Then, after the Civil Rights era, people thought that minorities should go to college.

Now, with the Woke Era, we have everything being turned into a Woke Revival.

And, because almost all education is non-profit, government-funded, we have the problem of all government programs that they are loot and plunder for the supporters and you can never reform them.

I think that we should think of education more as if it is the US in Afghanistan. Where, it turns out, we have been teaching young girls how to be modern 21st century woke feminists. Hoo boy. In other words, the people in charge have No Idea.

Personally, I think that the sooner education crashes and burns the better. Then we can build an emergent system, driven by the needs and the culture and the beliefs of each of us, based on home-schooling and pod schools and micro schools, parental authority, child labor connected to a new apprenticeship system paid for by corporations, men teaching boys, and on and on.

But not run by the government: run instead by parents.

Because the way of the centrally organized top-down culture of ruling-class orthodoxy is the way of disaster -- don't you think Joey S, and Mao Z.D.?

As we will soon find out.

Political Chemistry: Organic and Inorganic

Over the last few years a few things have surprised me on the politics front. Why? Because they didn't look like they were ruling-class approved. 

What am I talking about? I am talking about the Tea Party that emerged in early 2009 in response to a call by CNBC reporter Rick Santelli from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange for a "tea party". Although La Wik wants us to believe that it was a Republican Party thing, my recollection is that it basically confused the GOP bigwigs. And Nancy Pelosi called it out as "AstroTurf," because that's the only politics she knows.

So I say that the Tea Party was "organic;" it was an emergent phenomenon that came out of the natural and organic opposition of ordinary middle-class Americans to the Obama administration's agenda.

But most US politics is "inorganic." It is top-down, regime-approved and supported. You know, like Black Lives Matter.

I'd say that Trump Car Parades and Trump Boat Parades are "organic." They were organized, at least originally, by Trump supporters on Facebook. Now, in the last week, we have Eff Biden chants at college football games. And we have angry moms confronting President Biden at photo-ops. I suspect that these are populist, spontaneous, "organic" eruptions, not GOP-planned and executed.

And I suspect that the January 6 Capitol Hill Riot was mostly organic. I suspect there was quite a bit of FBI informants and lefty activists egging the rioters on. But the guy with the fur cap, the guy lounging at Nancy Pelosi's desk: you would never see a left-wing protest like that. Instead, you would see earnest 20-something women in the House Chamber with placards and a chant.

Any time you see something called a "riot" it is not regime-approved: probably organic. Any time you see something called a "peaceful protest" or even a "mostly peaceful protest" it is regime-approved: probably inorganic.

The point is, of course, that ruling-class supporters all think that the regime-approved street action is the genuine Voice of the People: the "oppressed peoples" of which you've heard tell. But if you are not a regime supporter then you see fake everywhere you look.

I was to a neighborhood dinner a few nights ago and one of the women there had the liberal party line on everything. She couldn't understand how all of a sudden we were all "divided."

Of course. You wouldn't understand if you lived in the ruling-class bubble. But if you were a racist-sexist-homophobe like me, and you believe the following:

1. Politics is division
2. Government is war plus loot and plunder
3. There is no such thing as justice, only injustice

Then you would think that people who have been excluded from the councils of power, people who are on the losing end of government, would very possibly think that the system was rigged against them, and start to organize.

Very likely these people would not be organized by some ruling-class clique, because whether you are Inner Party or Outer Party you wouldn't really know or care what the "outs" were experiencing. As in The Hunger Games, life is good in the Capitol.

My point is that if you are a ruling class worth your salt you have your ear to the ground and you make adjustments to keep the natives from getting restless.

But, it seems to me, our present ruling class doesn't know, or doesn't care, that the natives are restless. Maybe it is because internal Inner Party politics is so fraught right now that the current Inner Party leaders are running scared: they are reacting to the lefty extremists because they fear for their jobs and power. E.g., fixing the 2020 Democrat presidential nomination to keep Bernie Sanders from winning.

All I am saying here is that my ear is tuned to sounds of "organic" spontaneous eruptions from ordinary middle-class Americans.

And I think the volume turned up a notch in the last week or so with the Eff Biden chants at college football games and the angry folks raining on President Biden's photo-ops.

To be continued.

Race Reality vs. Colorblindness

On the one hand Jason D. Hill writes that whites invented blackness. And Dennis Prager appeals to the notion of colorblindness as the moral ideal.

On the other hand, the ZMan demands race realism.

Those who deny the reality of race are on one side of the great divide, while those who accept biological reality are on the other side of the divide. There is no middle ground. Those who think culture is a manufactured good are on the side of biology deniers, while those who think culture is the product of biology and time are on the side of the realists.

Well. Obviously, I would say, there are physical differences between humans. Humans that lived for millennia in West Africa clearly are physically different from e.g., people that lived for millennia in the high plateaus of East Africa. Humans feel comfortable around people that are like them. They feel uncomfortable around people physically different from them.

But equally, people who are physically alike can differ sharply on ideas and politics. They can enroll themselves into different groups and end up hating each other, much as people who are physically different can hate each other.

And people that are physically unlike can join together and experience a sense of belonging and togetherness similar to that experienced by people that are physically alike and closely related.

I think that the really-real is the attachment to kindred. Humans naturally trust the people closest to them in blood relation. (But they can also get really angry with close relations).

That is why I have come up with the notion of "fake tribalism." Yes, it is reality that people form themselves into the tribe of the kindred. But according to La Wik, a clan is a subset of a tribe.

Clan:

A clan is a group of people united by actual or perceived kinship[1] and descent. 

Tribe:

The concept is often contrasted by anthropologists with other social and kinship groups, being hierarchically larger than a lineage or clan, but smaller than a chiefdom, nation or state.

See what is going on here? Right away, with "clan," we are getting into "perceived kinship." That is what poker players call a "tell."

Let us go with La Wik's hierarchy of clan, tribe, chiefdom, nation. Obviously, I would say, the farther you go from actual local kindred, the more likely the kinship is "perceived" or, more likely, made up and "fake."

If even a clan involves possible "perceived kinship" then all the group designations represent perceived kinship as well as biological kinship.

And that is what I believe. I believe that the natural feeling of groupishness that obtains among people that are closely related can be exploited by political, religious, and cultural leaders to mold humans into an artificial group.

This obtains in particular when men join together in an army to fight some enemy. Men who have fought together experience each other as brothers forever after.

Oh, and "fraternal associations" like the Masons and the Elks are based on an artificial sense of brotherhood that obtains among men that do things together.

But let us get back to practical politics, and winning elections and all that rubbish.

I would say that for conservatives and Republicans the smart thing to do is to accept subnational identities, like black and Hispanic and Jewish and Chinese, and a glorious thing is diversity. But then encourage everyone to think of themselves as Americans, people of all kinds that come together to celebrate the last best hope of mankind on Earth.

There is cunning in this notion. Because while our liberal friends celebrate racial and gender differences, they hate the nation of America. There's gotta be a opportunity in that as big as all outdoors.

Yes, let's be real about race. But let us not forget that you can get humans to feel and act upon all kinds of perceived connection other than race.

Learning from the Astor Place Riot

Wat? What in the world was the Astor Place Riot of 1849? I'm glad you asked.

I only learned about the Astor Place Riot in New York City a couple of days ago while reading Shakespeare in a Divided America by James Shapiro, a Columbia English professor.

Did you know that about the only entertainment in 1850 America was the playhouse? And that all classes went? And that the Big Thing was Shakespeare, which all classes enjoyed. For instance, did you know that California gold miners liked to recite Shakespeare of an evening?

And the leading actors of the day were rock stars. And they had feuds with each other.

In the case of the Astor Place Riot there was a Brit actor and a Yank actor. La Wik:

Its ostensible genesis was a dispute between Edwin Forrest, one of the best-known American actors of that time, and William Charles Macready, a similarly notable English actor, which largely revolved around which of them was better than the other at acting the major roles of Shakespeare.

Macready's  Brit Macbeth was a mincing take. Forrest's All-American Macbeth was a rough tough hombre. Here's is La Wik's intro on the riot:

The Astor Place Riot occurred on May 10, 1849, at the now-demolished Astor Opera House in Manhattan and left between 22 and 31 rioters dead, and more than 120 people injured. It was the deadliest to that date of a number of civic disturbances in Manhattan, which generally pitted immigrants and nativists against each other, or together against the wealthy who controlled the city's police and the state militia.

I get the impression, from La Wik and from Shapiro, that riots were a pretty normal feature of urban life in the 19th century.

But now I will get to the point.

The point is that, reading about New York City in the mid 19th century it seems pretty clear to me that it has a two-class politics. There was the lower-class, part native-born Americans -- e.g. "nativists"-- and part immigrant Irish and Germans. And then there was the middle and upper class.

Whereas in our time we have the over/under politics of the educated Gentry, with the educated elite successfully selling the lower class with the idea that they are their "allies." In its crudest form this over/under political formula is the Allyship notion of the Allies sticking up for the Oppressed Peoples against the White Oppressors.

And it made me think that maybe the staged riots of the present day, sponsored by the ruling class, are better than the unstaged, visceral riots of the 19th century.

In other words, I am saying that the "mostly peaceful protests" that are carried out by well-born products of our glorious universities should be regarded in the same light as the bear-baiting of olden times: boys will be boys and men like a bit of rough trade.

But when you have the nativist lower class and the immigrant lower class combining into a deadly riot -- ostensibly about Shakespeare but really as a way of thumbing their noses at the ruling class -- well, I think that I prefer the modern three-class culture and politics where the upper class struts and frets pompously and conceitedly around acting as though they were the best thing in the world for the oppressed peoples instead of a bunch of idiots that Literally Know Nothing and are Making Things Worse.

And really, what this country needs is a responsible and patriotic ordinary middle class sensibly organized into a nationalist and patriotic party of the middle class that sensibly balances the political scales against the poseurs of the educated upper class. And, needless to say, it is a middle class that gradually enrolls members of the lower class into the national community of the middle class as soon as they are ready to shed their subordinate status as victims and become ordinary responsible One Hundred Percent Americans.

So what I am saying is that we should not grumble about the vile and unjust gentry class that has split this country apart and Made Things Worse. We should go forward with joy and with a spring in our step, luxuriating in the glory of the America we know and love and the possibility of what America might become after the inevitable humiliation and defeat of the delta-minus morons that currently rule us.

We should laugh and sing at our liberal friends, pat them on the head and tell them that they can't help it, having been Good Little Boys and Good Little Girls that learned to hate and to fear as they were carefully taught from year to year in their dear little ear.

And every now and then we should speak to the Little Darlings of the liberals, the "oppressed peoples" of which you've heard tell. And we should ask them whether the liberals are really helping them, or whether they are Making Things Worse.

See, getting the Little Darlings to grow up into One Hundred Percent Americans takes time. Look at the white working class: the liberals abandoned them after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but it has taken them fifty years to take down the FDR pictures on the wall and start organizing Trump Car Parades.

Why should it take blacks any longer to realize that they have been had?

Or ordinary women to realize that have been bamboozled into supporting the agenda of upper-class women snobs?

I think we can see that Hispanics are naturally moving out of the Democratic orbit as they move into the middle class.

But whatabout gays? And trans? And they/them? Well, they are all educated class twerps: we don't need to worry about them.

By the way, I was to a dinner with the neighborhood liberals lately, and boy, do they hate Ron DeSantis, Governor of Florida.

And who, you may ask, taught my liberal neighbors to hate and to fear Ron DeSantis? I couldn't possibly say.

What Does a Culture of Real Criticism Mean?

In yesterday's post on The Emergence of Criticism I discussed the utter novelty of a society in which criticism was genuinely tolerated.

Normal human society has one myth and one religion and if you don't agree you are a problem.

I interpret this not as a scandal but as a profound understanding of pre-scientific society. In other words, before humans had a developed system of understanding and predicting the common events of life, it was perfectly serviceable to have myths and legends and evil spirits to explain things. If you don't have Newtonian mechanics, what are you supposed to do in the matter of understanding and prediction?

But then, after humans have developed a serviceable system of mechanical prediction, what are we supposed to do about the myth and legend and evil spirits system that got us here for the previous 100,000 years, or however long humans have had conscious minds that could gussie up myths and legends and evil witches.

Obviously, we have to think about it.

Obviously, I would say, humans need a myth that explains the meaning of "life the universe, and everything" for the time being, and we always will.

But, it probably isn't a good idea to burn witches and heretics at the stake or send saboteurs and wreckers to concentration camps. Or imprison mostly peaceful protesters at the January 6 riots for six months while they await trial, or until they agree to cop a plea.

Yesterday I pondered Bryan Magee's idea that Marxism makes complete sense, because the idea of a world in which everything is not tied down by a saving myth -- as proposed for the Era of Criticism -- is too terrifying to contemplate.

Now, our Founding Fathers imagined a cunning solution to this problem, for their time, with the separation of church and state. In that way, in the United States of the time, no one Christian sect could make itself the state church. Of course, when it came to the Irish Catholics in the mid 19th century the political punks of the time -- I mean you Horace Mann -- decided to do an end run around the Catholics with gubmint common schools that would use the Protestant Bible. But God said to the Irish, "first build the school, then the church," and it was so, and the Irish nuns ran the best schools in the nation for the next century.

In our day the end-run Horace Manns are the lefty activists that are too stupid to understand that their activism and their cancel culture amount to an establishment of wokey religion: worse, a combination of religion and politics that we have learned to call totalitarianism, and as such a very present danger to the Republic and in simple terms a monstrous and evil injustice perpetrated on all Americans that don't worship at the church of Woke.

And the worst thing of all is that the wokeys have No Idea. They have No Idea that their activism is really a religion. And they have no idea that politics leads directly to injustice, do not pass Go. And they have No Idea that the conjunction of their activist politics and government is totalitarianism, straight up. No Idea.

I think that the answer lies somewhere close to elevating the Culture of Criticism to a Holy Writ. It is interesting, of course, that our lefty friends believe that their Critical Race Theory does just that.

It is comical, really, that in fact the lefty implementation of critical theory in fact does the opposite, and far from being a genuine critique of the ruling class and the ruling narrative is is fact a cunning way of bullying all narratives critical of our present ruling class out of the public square.

But here's the thing. The point of Popper's notion of falsification and the notion of knowledge -- beginning with a problem that requires the imagining of new theories and their testing and probable falsification -- is that in the modern world the path of the single myth and narrative fails every time it is tried, Joey S, and Mao Z.D.

The only way to avoid disaster and killing fields and utter failure is to abandon the Single Narrative notion and let a thousand ideas bloom, and set forth the idea that the only way forward is by trying things out and correcting the errors and then doing the whole thing over again.

And that means the end of political supremacy and cancel culture and "disinformation" findings and naming and shaming and shunning, and marches through the institutions and faculties that are 95 percent liberal and silly woke girls in publishing houses deciding not to publish "controversial" authors.

Not because it is wrong, but because, you silly ignorant liberals, it will end up in disaster for you and your ideas.

Why do you fools and knaves not get this?

It seems to me that the key to all this is that Americans be taught to believe that wokism is a religion. And that wokeys be put on the rack until they agree that their beliefs are a religion, and as such must not be established in the government as a state religion.

So let's do it.