Category: Politics

All posts on what Bismarck called “the art of the possible”

Piketty on inequality

Previously, we discussed whether inequality of wealth or income is a problem in and of itself, or only insofar as it produces other undesirable consequences.

Thomas Piketty’s book Capital in the Twenty-First Century has received a huge amount of attention, and focuses precisely on the question of inequality. He has some interesting things to say on the subject:

In this book, I focus not only on the level of inequality as such but to an even greater extent on the structure of inequality, that is, on the origins of disparities in income and wealth between social groups and on the various systems of economic, social, moral, and political justification that have been invoked to defend or condemn those disparities. Inequality is not necessarily bad in itself: the key question is to decide whether it is justified, whether there are reasons for it. (p. 19 hardcover)

…

I belong to a generation that turned eighteen in 1989, which was not only the bicentennial of the French Revolution but also the year when the Berlin Wall fell. I belong to a generation that came of age listening to news of the collapse of the Communist dictatorships and never felt the slightest affection or nostalgia for those regimes or for the Soviet Union. I was vaccinated for life against the conventional but lazy rhetoric of anticapitalism, some of which simply ignored the historic failure of Communism and much of which turned its back on the intellectual means necessary to push beyond it. I have no interest in denouncing inequality or capitalism per se – especially since social inequalities are not in themselves a problem as long as they are justified, that is, “founded upon common utility,” as article 1 of the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen proclaims… I would like to see justice achieved effectively and efficiently under the rule of law, which should apply equally to all and derive from universally understood statues subject to democratic debate. (p. 31)

Piketty, Thomas. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. (Translated by Arthur Goldhammer) 2014.

Piketty defends the social sciences

Given this dialogue of the deaf [between experts with opposing views about inequality], in which each camp justifies its own intellectual laziness by pointing to the laziness of the other, there is a role for research that is at least systematic and methodical if not fully scientific. Expert analysis will never put an end to the violent political conflict that inequality inevitably instigates. Social scientific research is and always will be tentative and imperfect. It does not claim to transform economics, sociology, and history into exact sciences. But by patiently searching for facts and patterns and calmly analyzing the economic, social, and political mechanisms that might explain them, it can inform democratic debate and focus attention on the right questions. It can help to refine the terms of the debate, unmask certain preconceived and fraudulent notions, and subject all positions to constant critical scrutiny. In my view, this is the role that intellectuals, including social scientists, should play, as citizens like any other but with the good fortune to have more time than others to devote themselves to study (and even to be paid for it – a signal privilege).

Piketty, Thomas. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. (Translated by Arthur Goldhammer) 2014. p. (hardcover)

Jacobs’ four top requirements for cities

To generate exuberant diversity in a city’s streets and districts, four conditions are indispensable:

  1. The district, and indeed as many of its internal parts as possible, must serve more than one primary function; preferably more than two. These must insure the presence of people who go outdoors on different schedules and are in the place for different purposes, but who are able to use many facilities in common.
  2. Most blocks must be short; that is, streets and opportunities to turn corners must be frequent.
  3. The district must mingle buildings that vary in age and condition, including a good proportion of old ones so that they vary in the economic yield they must produce. This mingling must be fairly close-grained.
  4. There must be a sufficiently dense concentration of people, for whatever purposes they may be there. This includes dense concentration in the case of people who are there because of residence.

The necessity of these four conditions is the most important point this book has to make.

Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. 1961. p. 150-1 (hardcover)

McKibben’s conclusions in 2010

The momentum of the heating, and the momentum of the economy that powers it, can’t be turned off quickly enough to prevent hideous damage. But we will keep fighting, in the hope that we can limit that damage. And in the process, with many others fighting similar battles, we’ll help build the architecture for the world that comes next, the dispersed and localized societies that can survive the damage we can no longer prevent. Eaarth represents the deepest of human failures. But we still must live on the world we’ve created – lightly, carefully, gracefully.

…

But the greatest danger we face, climate change, is no accident. It’s what happens when everything goes the way it’s supposed to go. It’s not a function of bad technology, it’s a function of a bad business model: of the fact that Exxon Mobil and BP and Peabody Coal are allowed to use the atmosphere, free of charge, as an open sewer for the inevitable waste from their products. They’ll fight to the end to defend that business model, for it produces greater profits than any industry has ever known. We won’t match them dollar for dollar: To fight back, we need a different currency, our bodies and our spirit and our creativity. That’s what a movement looks like; let’s hope we can rally one in time to make a difference.

McKibben, Bill. Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. 2010. p. 212, 219 (softcover)

Jacobs of the sharp pen

There is a wistful myth that if only we had enough money to spend – the figure is usually put at a hundred billion dollars – we could wipe out all our slums in ten years, reverse decay in the great, dull, gray belts that were yesterday’s and day-before-yesterday’s suburbs, anchor the wandering middle class and its wandering tax money, and perhaps even solve the traffic problem.

But look what we have built with the first several billions: Low-income projects that become worse centers of deliquency, vandalism and general social hopelessness than the slums they were supposed to replace. Middle-income housing projects which are truly marvels of dullness and regimentation, sealed against any buoyancy or vitality of city life. Luxury housing projects that mitigate their inanity, or try to, with a vapid vulgarity. Cultural centers that are unable to support a good bookstore. Civic centers that are avoided by everyone but bums, who have fewer choices of loitering place than others. Commercial centers that are lacklustre imitations of standardized suburban chain-store shopping. Promenades that go from no place to nowhere and have no promenaders. Expressways that eviscerate great cities. This is not the rebuilding of cities. This is the sacking of cities.

Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. 1961. p. 4 (hardcover)

John Cook and Andrew Heintzman on fossil fuel divestment

Yesterday, The Globe and Mail published an encouraging article on fossil fuel divestment:

As University of Toronto student Ben Donato-Woodger recently said, “It is a structural injustice against young people to have people who won’t be paying the price make judgments that will harm the next generation. Failing to divest would be a clear act of not caring about their students.”

The article also points out how: “In the past five years, the TSX with all its oil and gas constituents has significantly underperformed the TSX 60 excluding fossil companies” and “Over the past 10 years, the performance is almost identical with or without oil and gas in the index”.

A Burnaby Mountain arrestee

[S]itting in that jail cell, I felt a weight lift from my shoulders. One that I was only partially aware that I have been carrying for years now. I am ashamed by Canada’s withdrawal from the Kyoto Treaty and our increasingly contemptible position on climate change. If these are the values of our society then I want to be an outlaw in that society.

Quoted in: Solnit, Rebecca. “Let’s leave behind the age of fossil fuel. Welcome to Year One of the climate revolution“. The Guardian. 23 December 2014.

Solnit on the climate crisis

Yet you have to be abysmally ignorant of history, as well as of current events, not to see that our country and our world have always been changing, are in the midst of great and terrible changes, and are occasionally changed through the power of the popular will and idealistic movements. As it happens, the planet’s changing climate now demands that we summon up the energy to leave behind the Age of Fossil Fuel – and maybe with it some portion of the Age of Capitalism as well.

Solnit, Rebecca. “Let’s leave behind the age of fossil fuel. Welcome to Year One of the climate revolution“. The Guardian. 23 December 2014.

McKibben on nuclear power

I routinely give speeches about global warming, and so I know from experience that one of the first three or four questions will be about nuclear power. A man – always a man – approaches the microphone and asked with barely concealed glee if building more reactors isn’t the “solution” to the problem. His thought, usually, is that I am an environmentalist, and hence I must oppose nuclear power, and hence aren’t I a moron. Which I may be, but in this case nuclear power mainly serves to illustrate the point I’m trying to make about the difficulty of changing direction quickly. It’s quite true that nuclear power plants don’t seem as scary as they did a generation ago – not that they’ve gotten safer, but other things have gotten nastier. I mean, if a nuclear plant has an accident, it’s bad news, but if you operate a coal-fired plant exactly according to the instructions, it melts the ice caps and burns the forests. Still, nuclear plants are frightening, in part because new ones spill so much red ink. A series of recent studies have found that the capital costs of new conventional atomic reactors have gotten so high that, even before you factor in fuel and operations, you’re talking seventeen to twenty-two cents per kilowatt-hour – which is two or three times what Americans currently pay for electricity.

And that’s if the plant gets built on time. “Delays would run the costs higher,” as one study put it, and nuclear plants are always delayed. Consider, for instance, what happened in Finland, where the country (thinking ahead, in a Scandinavian way) decided in 2002 to build a new nuclear power plant in an effort to cut carbon emissions. The New York Times called the choice prescient, and the right-wing Heritage Foundation heralded it as rational, but a more accurate adjective would have been pricey. It was supposed to be completed in 2009 but now won’t come online until at least 2012, and the original budget has gone up by more than half to $6.2 billion. A reporter visiting the site found the interior of the containment vessel “was lined with a solid layer of steel that was crisscrossed with ropy welds. On the surface someone had scrawled the word ‘Titanic.'” As a result of troubles like that, a 2008 report from Moody’s Investors Services concluded that any utility that decided to build a reactor could harm its credit ratings for many years. A Florida utility, in fact, predicted that even a six-month delay in its building plans could add $500 million in interest costs. And this was all before the great credit crunch at the end of the Bush administration. Bottom line: building enough conventional nuclear reactors to eliminate a tenth of the threat of global warming would cost about $8 trillion, not to mention running electricity prices through the roof. You’d need to open a new reactor every two weeks for the next forty years and, as the analyst Joe Romm points out, you’d have to open ten new Yucca Mountains to store the waste. Meanwhile, uranium prices have gone up by a factor of six this decade, because we’re – you guessed it – running out of the easy-to-find stuff and miners are having to dig deeper.

McKibben, Bill. Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. 2010. p. 57-8 (softcover, italics in original)

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