WE STILL HAVE PARIS

Tomorrow, after two years, Susie and I will return to Paris. It turns out we do not need a PCR test to get into Paris but we will need an antigen test to get back into the United States, always assuming that something does not change while we are there.  We return in three weeks, on July 20. I am already ordering in my mind the dishes I shall have at our favorite restaurants.

 

As I think I have mentioned, we will be selling the apartment to a couple who formerly rented it and since they are buying it furnished and intend to rent it out themselves, we will be able to go back to essentially the same pied-à-terre (only without the 40 volume set of the works of Marx and Engels in German, which I shall ship home.) We have owned the apartment for 17 years and in that time we have been to Paris 35 times or more. We will not go to museums and tourist attractions, although we will probably have lunch at the Musée d’Orsay.

 

I am afraid my long early morning walks are a thing of the past.  But they are inscribed in my memory and I can see each of the streets as clearly as if I were on them.  For reasons that are beyond my comprehension, sometimes I can get on my blog when I am in Paris and sometimes I cannot, so I do not know whether I will be posting from there. If I am unable to, then I will be back in touch with you all when I return.

 

The political news from France is no better than it is here and since I am unable to do much about the world from either location, I plan simply to take a vacation from anxiety and enjoy Paris one more time.

INSTITUTIONAL RACISM

The comments on my recent posts have prompted me to say something about the meaning of the phrase “institutional racism” and its synonym “structural racism.” These phrases were introduced into discussions of public policy to capture the fact that there are some bureaucratic or institutional or structural features of a society that systematically disadvantage certain groups – racial or gender or ethnic or otherwise – entirely independently of the conscious or unconscious beliefs, attitudes, and intentions of individuals who occupy defined positions in social structures and institutions. This notion can be traced back at least as far as Marx’s analysis of capitalism and probably farther still.

 

The idea is that in a bureaucratic system facially neutral rules which are administered in a consciously and deliberately neutral fashion can sometimes, despite this apparent neutrality, operate to produce results which in other circumstances might be produced by the deliberate discriminatory intentions of biased individuals.

 

Let me give three examples, two from my own personal experience, the third an extremely important case about which I wrote at some length in my book Autobiography of an Ex White Man. In 1992, I was appointed codirector of a little Institute at the University of Massachusetts and managed to raise almost $1 million for a program I designed. The program was intended to help minority high school students in the city of Springfield, Massachusetts to come to the University. The Massachusetts Board of Education had laid down a number of admissions requirements for students coming to the University, one of which was that they were to have completed four years of high school mathematics. There were a number of high schools in Springfield, one of which was in the predominantly black and Latino neighborhood of the city. Many years earlier, teachers concerned about the lack of mathematics preparation of middle school students entering this high school had decided to divide the first year mathematics course into two parts and teach it in the freshman and sophomore high school years. This was done out of a genuine concern for the education of the students and in time became simply a routine part of the curriculum in that high school. Students eager to attend the University of Massachusetts 20 miles to the north dutifully took four years of math, but when they came to apply for admission, they discovered that their four years, which they had successfully completed, only counted as three and therefore they were not eligible for admission. I discovered that a very good support organization for Hispanic students on the UMass campus had begun the practice of offering a summer school course in fourth year high school mathematics so that students from that high school could be offered provisional admission to the University conditional upon their completing this required fourth-year in the summer before they were due to enter. Everybody involved in this process at both the high school and the university level was enthusiastically in support of the educational ambitions of the students but what had begun in years past as a positive accommodation to the needs of a group of underprepared middle school students had become a structural impediment to the higher education ambitions of that same group of students. The actions of the on-campus student support office was thus what has come to be called “affirmative action,” meaning by this phrase not a relaxation of the standards but an affirmative accommodation to a structural disadvantage that had come to be built into the educational system.

 

I became aware of my second example several years later when I took over the newly established program in Afro-American Studies at UMass. In those days, and perhaps  to this day for all I know, the Mellon Foundation offered a large number of very attractive fellowships for students applying to graduate study in the Arts and Sciences. Since I was perpetually in search of money to support our graduate students, I became very excited when I learned of these fellowships and was puzzled that none of our graduate students had won one of them. When I investigated a little further, I discovered why. The Mellon Foundation, purely for bureaucratic reasons, required that applicants for the fellowships take the Graduate Record Exam when it was given in September rather than what it was given in December. At elite colleges and universities which routinely sent students on for graduate study, it was customary for promising students to be spotted in the junior or even sophomore year and to be encouraged to think about postgraduate study. Their advisors tended to know about the Mellon fellowships and counseled their students to take the GRE in September. But at second and third tier schools and also in the historically black colleges and universities this structure of support tended to be absent and it was not until the senior year that students doing quite well would be encouraged to apply for doctoral programs. By the time that encouragement occurred, the September GRE had already been given so the students took the December GRE, which meant that they were ineligible for the Mellon fellowships. When I learned all of this, I called the Mellon Foundation. The person to whom I spoke assured me – and I believed her – that the Foundation was eager to have African-American students apply but she was completely ignorant of the reason why students from historically black schools almost never did. I tried to persuade her that the Mellon Foundation should affirmatively reach out to those schools and urge them to have their promising students take the September GRE’s but she seemed to think that that would somehow violate the principle of neutrality with which they operated.

 

My third example is quite important and has very broad implications for the economic disadvantages experienced by African-American families. In order to illustrate it, I constructed an elaborate hypothetical numerical example which I laid out in detail in my book and which I will not try to repeat here. As everybody I am sure knows, black household income is significantly lower than white household income, even correcting for level of educational attainment, but the gap has been narrowing in recent decades and we can hope that it will continue to do so. The gap between the wealth of black families and white families is absolutely astonishing and is so much greater than the income gap as to be seemingly incomprehensible. Shades of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, it is all too easy to blame this gap on the social dysfunction of black families or on the absence of strong character or whatever. Here is a somewhat different explanation of at least some of that gap which points to the effect of what I have been calling institutional or structural racism.

 

Particularly in the lower economic half of American Society, the principal unit of family wealth is the equity in a privately owned home. In a family which has owned its home for several decades, this can amount to some hundreds of thousands of dollars. Three quarters of a century ago or more, the American government adopted deliberate tax policies aimed at encouraging private home ownership. The Federal Housing Authority guaranteed home mortgage loans. The Internal Revenue Service permitted families to deduct both the interest on a home mortgage loan and the state and local real estate taxes from federal income tax returns, a deduction that dramatically reduced the amount of tax families owed. In the early days after World War II, the FHA in its published guidelines overtly and deliberately discriminated against black families seeking to own homes, with the result that relatively few of them were able to buy homes like the white families with equivalent incomes. Eventually, many decades ago now, this discriminatory policy was abolished and it has been easy for those unsympathetic to the economic problems of black families to point to this fact as evidence that it is no longer the case that there is any discrimination built into the housing market. (Let me forestall the obvious comments at this point by saying that I am not at all denying the existence to this day of deliberate, overt, blatantly racist discrimination against black families seeking to own homes. I am trying to explain how even in the absence of such attitudes something that can be called structural racism or institutional racism can become built into a bureaucratic system.)

 

In the example that I constructed in my book, I followed two men, one black and one white, who came out of the Army in 1945 each with a small nest egg of $500. I then asked what the result would be over 30 or 40 years in the wealth of the two men as they married, got jobs paying exactly the same wage, had two children each and lived their lives. It was quite easy to show that the white family, by virtue of having been able to buy a house, ended up 30 or 40 years later with considerable wealth in the form of equity in the house, equity which they could access through home loans or remortgaging to underwrite their children’s college education. The black family, earning exactly the same income but paying rent and therefore unable to accumulate equity, was quite unable to underwrite their children’s educational ambitions. Forty years later, ignorant and thoughtless observers trying to understand why the white children had college educations and good careers and the black children did not would appeal to all sorts of fanciful theories about black family values and deferred gratification and whether or not the mothers listened to Mozart while they were pregnant whereas the real explanation was the natural consequence, a generation and a half later of deliberately discriminatory institutional practices that had long since been eliminated but whose structural consequences persisted.

CRT

One of the anonymati asks for a simple explanation of Critical Race Theory in a thousand words or less! Well, fortunately, there is an excellent entry on the subject in Wikipedia which will save me a great many words. What is now called critical race theory has its distant origins in the work of the Frankfurt School. As I would have explained to my students if Columbia had agreed to let me teach the course I proposed, the work of the Frankfurt School was, among other things, an effort to unite the insights of Marx and Freud. At the same time, the failure of genuine socialist revolutions to materialize in the first half of the 20^th century led many European scholars to try to understand the non-economic, bureaucratic or institutional or “structural” determinants of political developments in mature, or as we old unrepentant lefties used to say, late capitalism. They thought that what came to be called “economic determinism” could not adequately account for the world they saw developing around them.

 

As the work of European scholars made its way to America, notably in the work of W. E. B. DuBois (who studied for a while with Max Weber), it underwent a series of changes to take account of the effect of race in American history, economy, and politics – a subject about which Marx had little or nothing of any interest to say.

 

Marx himself had understood that the personal tastes, biases, interests, or desires of individual capitalists had very little to do with the overall shape of the development of capitalist economies, but he did not adequately appreciate the institutional or bureaucratic constraints that shaped economic developments.

 

Putting all this together in the American context led to the development of the notion of institutional racism, a concept absolutely essential to an understanding of American society which all Republicans and a great many Democrats find it impossible to grasp. As I spent many pages in my little book Autobiography of an Ex White Man discussing this subject, I will not repeat myself here.

 

All of this was imported into legal theory at a time of considerable ferment in that field by, among others, Derrick Bell, during the time that he was a professor of law at Harvard.

 

If you now go to the Wikipedia article, which can be found here, you should be able to get a pretty rich and complex understanding of the development of the field called Critical Race Theory.

BUT WHAT ABOUT THAT SWIVEL CHAIR?

But what about that swivel chair? Socialism may be all very well and good, very high-minded and all of that, but can it produce the goods? Let us be clear: when I talk about socialism I am not referring to a romantic return to an earlier time when we all kept chickens and used outhouses and sang folksongs and wore sandals and lived in little cottages with candles while we read poetry to one another and searched our inner selves. I am asking whether there is some way to move beyond the current advanced stage in the development of private ownership of the means of production in order to achieve genuine economic equality and collective democratic decisions about how to invest the surplus generated by our productive efforts.  As I pointed out in the first post of this little series, there are already developments within capitalism that are preparing the way for movement beyond. The divorce of legal ownership from day-to-day management is already well advanced. We are all mesmerized by Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Bill Gates – more of them in a moment. But for the most part, the functional operation of a modern capitalist economy has been separated from the legal ownership of capital.

 

It is quite obvious that democratically elected governments are capable of doing an efficient job of deploying capital for collectively agreed upon purposes. Private entrepreneurs may be selling seats in space capsules at fancy prices, but let us not forget that the first people to walk on the moon were government employees. Higher education in the United States is an odd mixture of private and public enterprise, but in many advanced capitalist countries the great universities are public institutions and it is really only the Catholic Church that clings to private higher education for otherworldly reasons. The cars we drive are made for profit by private corporations, but both in the United States and abroad the roads on which they drive are made and maintained by governments.

 

Private ownership of the means of production distorts what is made and consumed in ways that are personally profitable but socially undesirable. As I have observed before, because it is possible to get rich producing inexpensive well-made well-designed clothing, even the poor look good when they go from job to job trying to make enough to pay the rent. But for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with social welfare, expensive housing is profitable to produce while well-designed, well-made inexpensive housing is not.  Hence the rich are comfortably housed and the poor are not, even though these days when the two mix and mingle on public streets it may be difficult to tell one from the other. Why is public housing so poorly designed? Would it not be possible for government to produce well-designed housing? This is really two questions masquerading as one. Is it possible and is it politically acceptable in a capitalist economy? I will simply offer my opinion, which is that it is possible but that for political reasons public housing must be a blight on the landscape.

 

What about innovation? Are we really going to leave it to bureaucrats to pick and choose which ideas for new products on the production lines are to be funded? Is the world of the socialist future to become one vast bleak landscape of motor vehicle registry offices? Even sandals and candles and outhouses would be better than that!

 

Well, let us be honest about this. These days, ambitious innovative types who want to start a new company do not often acquire the capital by cheese paring, as in the old self-congratulatory early capitalist fairytales. They go to banks or equity funds.  Some way would have to be designed to capitalize lenders with public funds.  And to encourage socially valuable greed, which is to say entrepreneurial innovation, the terms would have to be such that successful innovators could become reasonably rich.  The problem is not that successful innovators become rich – and of course with taxation we can limit just how rich they become. The problem is what Piketty calls patrimonial capitalism, which is to say the ever greater accumulation of inherited wealth.

 

Will innovators sit on their hands if we deny them the opportunity to leave what they make to their children? I think the answer is no but quite obviously I cannot be certain about that. That is one of the as yet unanswered questions that a transition to socialism would have to confront.

 

But what about that swivel chair? Well, if it is made by craftspeople in a small privately owned and managed company, all well and good. If it is made by a huge international Corporation like IKEA, then that may be government owned. I seriously doubt that the chair would swivel less well if that were the case.

 

I have just scratched the surface but before I close I want to emphasize once again the central organizing idea behind this speculative post. If we want to know what socialism will look like, we must first ask what changes are already taking place within capitalism. To that we must add that the direction of further development will be determined not by armchair speculators like myself but by the collective decision-making of democratically chosen representatives. Does that pose problems? You bet it does! Are those problems greater than the problems we now have and live with in a capitalist economy? I do not think so, but then, I only have one vote.

 

 

HERE i GO AGAIN

A reader of this blog sent me the following message:

 

“Obviously, you are highly committed to socialism.  What, however, seems to be the perennial problem is that despite 150 years of socialist thought and practice, it’s not at all clear how it would actually work.  We all know what communism is, having seen it in the Soviet Union, the Eastern European satellite states, China, etc.  We all know what social democracy as practiced in Western Europe is, i.e., capitalism with a political commitment to a fair degree of redistribution.

 

But what would a socialist economy and polity look like?  One hears vague phrases like “economic democracy” and “community control” but never any reasonably precise description of how it would function.

 

As I look across my room at the new swivel chair I recently purchased I see chrome, leather, plastic and thread brought together, as well as the shipping and financial transactions that were associated with my purchase and the underlying legal framework for such transactions.  I don’t want to fetishize the “miracle of the marketplace,” but well, the chair is there, and I don’t see what the process would be under socialism that would produce the same result.

 

Am I missing something?  It doesn’t feel like I am asking for too much from proponents of a political and economic system.”

 

It certainly does not seem like too much to ask, so instead of replying by email I promised I would try to say something useful on this blog. But I warned not to expect too much because I have nothing more than suggestions to offer, certainly not a blueprint or even a coherent plan of action.

 

Let me begin by reminding everyone of how little Marx himself had to say about the subject. As I have several times noted, he wrote more than 5000 pages of detailed analysis of capitalism as he observed it, principally in England, but scarcely as much as 100 pages about socialism. Besides describing socialism as collective ownership of the means of production, he said almost nothing about how a socialist economy and society would function. There is a reason for that, of course. Marx believed, correctly in my judgment, that fundamental changes in the organization of an economy come about as a consequence not of command decisions by a government or ruling clique but rather internally as a consequence of the decisions of large numbers of individuals engaged in various aspects of that economy. We all recall his striking metaphor – the new order developing in the womb of the old.

 

It is for this reason that every time I try to address this important question I start by describing the major changes I see taking place within contemporary capitalism rather than by following the practice of those thinkers whom Marx described dismissively as Utopian Socialists.

 

Capitalism has changed dramatically in the more than century and a half since Marx published volume one of Capital. Aside from the explosion in productivity which makes our world as different from that of Marx as his world was from that of Adam Smith, I can see at least four fundamental developments internal to capitalism whose significance we must try to understand before we can even begin to answer my reader’s pointed question.

 

First, the internationalization of capitalism that was already underway in Marx’s day has now been brought virtually to completion, as any of us here in the United States can tell simply by reading the tags on the things we buy and discovering how many of them were made in China. This is not simply a matter of imports and exports. The production process itself of individual goods has been internationalized so that, for example, it is impossible these days to purchase a car every part of which has been made in the same country.

 

Second, as I have frequently observed, the ownership of privately owned capital has been to an extraordinary extent divorced from day to day management of its use in production, through the introduction of the limited liability joint stock corporation, and the public sale and trading of shares of stock on markets widely accessible to investors who have no functional relationship to the private corporations of which they are in theory partial owners.

 

Third, modern governments around the world play important roles day – to – day in the private corporate economy, shaping it through fiscal and monetary policies, saving it from its moments of self-destruction, bending it to the service of politically determined ends, all without invading or violating the fundamental private ownership of the means of production that is the core fact about capitalism.

 

Fourth, the private ownership of capital results in a steady irresistible accumulation of privately held wealth that dwarfs even the enormous budgets of modern imperial states. Because this wealth is passed on from generation to generation – because it is, as the French say, patrimonial – certain individuals and families become incomprehensibly rich, rich as it used to be said beyond the dreams of avarice.  This wealth is the financial representation of the cumulative product of the labor of billions of men and women who, however, have no more control now than they did in Marx’s day over how that product will be used.

 

But what of my readers new swivel chair? Will it still be available in a socialist economy or will we just sit around on tree stumps eating peaches and cream? More tomorrow.

GETTING OLD

I think I mentioned that Susie and I are going to Paris at the end of this month and that we have decided to sell our apartment. Happily for us, a former renter is buying it and she plans to let us rent it from time to time, even though I warned her that I would be bringing home my complete 40 volume set of the works of Marx and Engels in German. For the past week or so I have been absorbed in assembling all of the documents I need for the Parisian notaire.  A notaire in France is, as I understand these things, a lawyer who handles various legal and financial transactions but is not certified to argue in court. For that you need an avocat.

 

As I have been fussing with files of documents going back to when we purchased the apartment in 2004, I was struck again by the effect that aging has on me. Physically, of course, I am not the man I once was and even when I was I was not that hot, but that is not what I find most striking. Rather, it is the fact that although my mind is as clear as it ever was it just takes me a lot longer to do things and I can no longer do many things at the same time, as I once could.

 

I think back to the seven years I spent at Columbia University from 1964 to 1971. I was 30 when I started there and 37 when I left. During those seven years, in addition to carrying the not very heavy Columbia teaching load and other duties, I also taught summer school three times, I taught extra courses during term time at City College (twice), Barnard, City University, and Hunter College, I co-authored one little book, wrote four others, edited eight books, and in the latter years shared in the caring for two little boys, all while going to an analyst on the Upper East Side three or four times a week. The weird thing is that I do not recall feeling pressured or burdened by all of this.

 

Meanwhile, I find myself brooding constantly about the incipient fascism I see growing up around me in the land of the free and the home of the brave. I will try to say something about that in the next few days even though there is obviously next to nothing I can do about it.

EARLY MORNING THOUGHTS

As I have on various occasions observed, when it comes to changing the world it takes a great deal of effort to make even a very small change and an enormous amount of effort to make a slightly larger change. But when it comes to thinking about the world, it is no more difficult to think about everything than it is to think about just something. Consequently, philosophers tend to think about everything.

This morning as I was taking my walk at 7:15 my mind turned, as it does from time to time, to Lorenz curves and Gini coefficients. A Lorenz curve is a graphical device that can be used to represent visually the unequal distribution of income in a society. The Gini coefficient or index associated with a Lorenz curve is a numerical summation of the information portrayed in the curve. You can find a simple Wikipedia explanation of the matter here.  A Gini index ranges between zero for a society of perfectly equality and 1 for a society of perfect inequality (which is to say a society in which nobody gets anything except for one person, who gets everything.)  The larger the Gini index, the more unequal the society.

 

The Gini index of the American economy has risen dramatically since the 1970s, indicating a marked increase in income inequality. The Gini index of the United States is currently estimated as a bit more than .41. By comparison, the Gini indices of France and Germany are slightly above .31. Sweden, Denmark, and Finland are even less unequal than that.

 

I have often observed, I do not know how many times on this blog, that since I went to college in 1950, the proportion of adult Americans with a college degree has risen from 5% to roughly 33%. Fully 60% of young Americans now enroll in college, only 55% of those making it all the way to the degree (55% of 60% is 33%, of course.) So the striking increase in the proportion of the population with advanced education has gone hand-in-hand with increased income inequality. That simple observation should put paid to the fantasy that education is the solution of which inequality is the problem.

 

I am all in favor of eliminating the racial, ethnic, and income inequalities in the distribution of higher education in the United States (slightly more women than men have college degrees so gender inequality is not a problem), and I have in my small way done what I could to advance the elimination of those inequalities but if every quantifiable subset of the American population exhibited the same rate of successful higher educational attainment, it would do absolutely nothing to reduce the overall inequality in the distribution of income.

 

It was at about this point in my perambulatory musings that I stopped thinking about everything and started focusing on where my feet were going, something that is required of those of us who have Parkinson’s.