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<!-- you can have any number of categories here --> [[Category:Unlearning Economics]] [[Category:Unclassified Criticisms]] [[Category:How Libertarian Ideas And Attitudes Are Spread]] [[Category:The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger]] [[Category:Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class]] [[Category:The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism]] [[Category:Libertarian Apologetics]] <!-- 1 URL must be followed by >= 0 Other URL and Old URL and 1 End URL.--> {{URL | url = http://web.archive.org/web/20170628222259/http://www.pieria.co.uk/articles/in_defense_of_leftiness}} <!-- {{Other URL | url = }} --> <!-- {{Old URL | url = }} --> {{Old URL | url = http://www.pieria.co.uk/articles/in_defense_of_leftiness}} {{End URL}} {{DES | des = "Over the past few years, there have been some big hitting books from the left criticising inequality, capitalism and 'free market' economics or neoliberalism. Naturally, these books have received a lot of criticism from the right. However, sometimes it seems that this criticism is overzealous: an attempt not merely to question the book, but discredit it entirely, and accuse the authors of various misrepresentations of facts and people along the way." Examples from ''[[The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone]]' by Kate Pickett & Richard Wilkinson, '[[Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class]]' by Owen Jones, and '[[The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism]]' by Naomi Klein. | show=}} <!-- DPL has problems with categories that have a single quote in them. Use these explicit workarounds. --> <!-- normally, we would use {{Links}} and {{Quotes}} --> {{Quotations|Right Hook: The Tactics of Conservative Criticism|quotes=true}} {{Text | Over the past few years, there have been some big hitting books from the left criticising inequality, capitalism and 'free market' economics or neoliberalism. Naturally, these books have received a lot of criticism from the right. However, sometimes it seems that this criticism is overzealous: an attempt not merely to question the book, but discredit it entirely, and accuse the authors of various misrepresentations of facts and people along the way. Now, while it's true that some arguments or ideas are essentially 'just wrong', and that some proponents of certain ideas can be intellectually dishonest, the frequency with which these accusations are made is alarming, and I believe they are often mistaken. In this post I'm going to look at three books that I believe have received such treatment: The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone by Kate Pickett & Richard Wilkinson, Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class by Owen Jones, and The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein. I'm going to review the books and some of the criticisms they've received in the hope of leveling the debate, and showing that they are far more credible books than the reviews might have you believe. The Spirit Level As anyone who's been around in politics for the past few years will know, The Spirit Level (TSL) is a book that caused quite a stir with its claim that inequality is the root cause of many Bad Things (hereafter referred to as 'The Spirit Level Relationship' or TSLR; I will also refer to the authors as 'W & P'). The authors go through the data, finding negative correlations between inequality and numerous social indicators: across time, between countries and between US states. They also discuss the mechanisms through which inequality might cause these problems, typically relating inequality to stress and status. For example, people who have low material and job status suffer from higher stress and as such are more prone to health problems; similarly, young people with a low status are more likely to get involved with gangs and crime as a way of emulating some sort of career progression or finding an identity. Since its release, the book has received heavy criticism from the right - three rebuttals were produced, all of which claimed to have discredited the research. Naturally, W & P have responded to the criticisms, and the debate continues. Critics generally have much to say on the issue of causality. The idea that W & P simply confuse correlation and causation could not be held by anyone who has read the book properly, so I will not discuss it. However, there are also more substantive criticisms of W & P's purported causal links, such as the charge that W & P are too vague, and switching between inequality, status and stress without really nailing down the causality. For example, Christopher Snowdon, author of The Spirit Level Delusion, believes that W & P may show that stress and low status cause illness, but they have not shown it is inequality which causes this stress. He argues that W & P "fail to demonstrate that inequality is linked to either the mechanism (stress) or the outcome (disease)." He points out that one of their purportedly status-related illnesses, heart disease, is not actually correlated with inequality. However, while this may be true, heart disease is far from the only mechanism W & P outline, and they do show that both inequality & stress are related to alcohol abuse. They also cite UNICEF children's report, which explores causal links between inequality, stress and health thoroughly for children, and discuss the Whitehall Reports, which do something similar for low paid, low status civil servants. W & P also highlight a couple of quasi-experiments which are consistent with TSLR, such as the changes in inequality and health outcomes post World War 2 in the US and Japan. It's true that W & P sometimes leave the discussion less complete than it should be, but overall, their discussion of causality is far more credible than is sometimes made out. The criticisms of W & P's regression analysis often focus on the cross country data. However, in my opinion, the strongest points in the original are not related to the overall cross country regressions. First, W & P repeatedly point out that TSLR is strong within similar groups of countries: Scandinavia, the English speaking countries and Spain/Portugal (as well as the PIGS as a whole, if you check) all seem to confirm the relationship. Second, the critics pay little attention to the data from US states, where all but one (crime) of TSLRs hold. Third, W & P have pointed out that the health relationships (which are among the most contentious) have also been shown to hold with multivariate analyses within the provinces of Russia, Chile, China and Japan. If I were a critic, I would pay more attention to these areas, where 'all else is equal', as they are far more important pieces of evidence. In any case, the criticisms of the cross-country data can be overblown. A frequent criticism is of the measures W & P use. They use the 20:20 ratio measure of inequality, which compares the incomes of the rich and poor directly, but critics such as the Tax Payer's Alliance (TPA) claim that if you use different measures of inequality such as the Gini coefficient, TSLR disappears. However, the authors have cross checked their data against both the UN and OECD Gini, as well as the alternative 10:10 ratio, and found that most (though not all, particularly with the OECD Gini) of their findings remain statistically significant for every measure. Furthermore, W & P stick to internationally comparable measures for other data, such as mental illness, where differences in legal tolerance and reporting methods can render comparison difficult. Inevitably, there are some areas where the critics simply fall into the trap they often accuse W & P of: cherry picking and bad statistics. W & P have argued - and it bears repeating - that while they stick to their chosen methodology throughout TSL, the criticism has a decidedly ad-hoc feel to it, which detracts from its coherence. The methodology of the health section of the TPA report fits this description. First, the data for the measure of inequality they use is unavailable for 9 out of their 26 countries, simply too big a gap for the analysis to be credible. Second, they use inappropriate health measures, such as cancer (which W & P have explicitly argued is not correlated with inequality), and alcohol/tobacco use (which again is not correlated with inequality) rather than abuse (which is). Another seemingly bizarre recurrence is when critics make out the exclusion or inclusion of a particular country is some sort of trick, but fail to note that including it scarcely alters TSLR. This is true of Slovenia in general, Singapore with respect to mental illness, and so forth. Peter Saunders' criticism in particular was so poor that he received his own rebuttal from an independent author, Hugh Noble, who was basically forced to give Saunders a statistics lesson, focusing on two major points. First, Saunders' reason for removing certain 'outliers' was not only statistically unjustified in the first place; he was completely inconsistent, removing some countries but not removing others which were even larger 'outliers'. Second, Saunders' multivariate regressions used variables that were not 'independent', something that any statistician will know completely undermines the analysis. More generally, Noble notes that even though a great fuss has been made about how the USA inflates W & P's results: "No one...has been able to show that the statistical data about the USA is actually wrong. The USA is a very unequal society and it is afflicted by a plethora of social problems." Lest people think that Noble's approach is one-sided, he goes on to note several problems he has with TSL, many of which I agree with (such as the idea that increasing equality will benefit rich people directly - a losing battle if there ever was one). Overall, the most authoritative summary of TSL debate was the independent Rowlingson Report. This concluded that "there is a correlation between income inequality and a range of health and social problems", but that causation was of course far harder to establish and further research was needed. Rowlingson also made the interesting point that "some research suggests that inequality is particularly harmful after it reaches a certain threshold", an idea that surely warrants investigation. The report includes a pertinent quote from Chris Jencks, which sums up the debate quite well: "the social consequences of economic inequality are sometimes negative, sometimes neutral but seldom – as far as I can discover – positive." The critics may give reason to doubt some of W & P's methods and conclusions, but they do not alter this overall picture. Chavs In Chavs, author Owen Jones argues that media caricatures and opportunistic politicians have helped shape the image of the British working class as feckless, scrounging criminals, or 'chavs'. We direct a level of ire toward this people that would be unthinkable were the word 'chav' replaced with 'black', 'gay' or even 'pleb', which alone shows how unacceptable it is. Yet this vilification of 'chavs', combined with the fact that many of us consider ourselves 'middle class', obscures the simple fact that a majority of people in the UK fit a fairly reasonable definition of working class, and, on top of this, these people are not work shy louts. A lot of the conservative criticism of this book seems to miss the point. "Chav is not commonly understood as shorthand for working-class; it is shorthand for violent, work-shy louts who ruin perfectly good neighbourhoods", writes Tim Stanley. But why do we have a shorthand for these people when they are in poor neighbourhoods, but not when they are in middle class or upper class neighbourhoods? Stanley reckons that anyone can be a chav, but I've not often seen, say, the Bullingdon Club referred to as such. 'Ordinary' people who commit crimes are simply called...criminals, or perhaps 'bad eggs', or even something less affectionate, but they do not earn their own collectively derisory term. There is also no doubt that, while some may use the term chav sparingly, overall it helps to tarnish entire communities, as so aptly demonstrated by the media treatment of the Kidnapping of Shannon Matthews. Jones does not defend the working class as chavs; he says that they have been charactised by it, and their reality has been obscured. Critics such as Stanley argue Jones is "simultaneously conflating and defending the working class and chavs", and questions the need for the "anachronistic" idea of a 'working class' at all. Yet Jones spends a substantial amount of time discussing what the concept really means. He defines 'working class' in the (loosely) Marxist sense as somebody who has to work for another to get by, though he also adds that it is less applicable to professionals, who have a lot of control over their working lives. Jones makes it clear that the popular 'we're all middle class now' myth is simply not reflected by the facts: around half the British work force are in low pay, menial, often insecure jobs. However, the decline of unions, coupled with the increasingly atomised nature of this work, has thwarted attempts to restore working class solidarity. For some, Jones' treatment of the working class essentially robs them of autonomy, and paints them as gullible to politician's propaganda, unable to fend for themselves. This is really a superficial reading that is generally only achieved by quoting Jones' arguments selectively. For example, Peter Cuthbertson characterises Jones' position as "[the working class] may say they want welfare reform and an end to mass immigration, but don’t take that at face value". Yet Jones notes that many of the people he interviewed were incredibly clued up about the real nature of problems such as housing shortages, and viewed even their own opposition to immigration in a similar way that Jones did: an unfortunate, second-best solution to a much bigger problem. It's true that when talking about income, employment and so forth, Jones tends to emphasise the systemic aspects such as the decline of industry in local communities, but this is something that even critics such as Cuthberson do not deny is a major factor, and is virtually impossible for individuals to control. On the other hand, when Jones is talking about people themselves, he goes to great lengths to praise them, precisely in the name of combating the 'chav' caricature. For instance, Jones places a lot of emphasis on the pulling together of the people of Dewsbury after Shannon Matthews was kidnapped, and warns that it is dangerous to lump the 'working class' together, as they are obviously a diverse group of people. Conservatives often seem to think that even mentioning class is a patronising attack on 'aspiration', but pretending the UK is some sort of 'meritocracy' in the face of the evidence Jones presents to the contrary is simply deluded. As Jones points out, it is simply a fact that some people will always have to do 'working class' jobs: clean the streets, drive the buses etc. These jobs are, in fact, the most important jobs in society, and attempts to improve the lot of the people who do them as a group, instead of encouraging them to 'escape' is recognition of this fact, not - as Brendan O'Neill puts it - anything to do with making sure they "know their place" (remember: under socialism, everyone would have to the shit work!) Thankfully, unlike the other books in this post, the initial wave of criticism does seem to have been displaced by a more reasoned approach from both sides. The Economist, to its credit, gave a fair review of the book, noting that although sections on Thatcherism might be disputed by some, and a large amount of evidence was "inevitably...subjective and anecdotal", the central point of the book was "depressingly difficult to argue with". Even some of the aforementioned reviewers I have linked to have acknowledged there is at least a grain of truth to the 'chav' hypothesis; if they could overcome their priors about class and meritocracy, they might be more sympathetic overall. The Shock Doctrine Out of all 3 books, the reactions to this one were easily the worst. If you were to believe these reviews - and before reading the book, even I was somewhat taken in by them - the author, Naomi Klein, was a polemicist, a liar, a hack, or even - as one delightful commenter put it - "a cunt". Klein's hypothesis was that disasters - both natural and man made - were often harnessed to push through unpalatable neoliberal economic reforms, to the detriment of many. This, combined with her attacks on Milton Friedman, did not sit well with 'free market' advocates, who generally see themselves as on the side of freedom. The book was therefore attacked quite vehemently by the libertarian right. Sadly, these attacks were far less intellectually sound than Klein's book . They often accuse Klein of failing to meet decent intellectual standards, then completely fail to state her arguments correctly, sometimes flat out misrepresenting her position. Tyler Cowen's review made a number of clear misrepresentations - such as the idea that Klein says Margaret Thatcher conjured up the Falklands invasion to push through her 'free market' reforms - and Cowen actually failed to state the hypothesis of the book correctly, glibly summing it up as "free markets aren't popular". Similarly, this review by Johan Norberg is basically a review of the first chapter, which is admittedly overcharged, but isn't particularly important overall. Norberg's main accusation is that Klein often quotes Friedman out of context, but this can only really be upheld if you ignore that the vast majority of the quotes she uses are reproduced in full at various points in the book. It is common for Klein's reviewers to fail to engage the arguments she makes, instead preferring to repeat their priors at her. One such example is in Norberg's review, where he makes the typically superficial point that Chile didn't succeed because it didn't go far enough with its 'free market' reforms. This idea is buried by Klein in chapter 2, where she points out - a conclusion that I also came to independently - that the sectors which remained state owned or sponsored were successful, while those that were deregulated blew up. Similarly, Cowen's review makes the superficial point that history, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, shows how 'free markets' are superior. This ignores two things repeatedly pointed out by Klein: first, the fact that people former communist countries were not really interested in "free markets" but democracy (government and worker); second, the numerous instances where 'free markets' and free people have been in direct conflict. One of Klein's most contentious points revolves around the role of Milton Friedman and his Chicago School colleagues in the 1973 coup d'etat in Chile, which overthrew Salvador Allende's democratically elected government and put in place a brutal dictatorship led by Augusto Pinochet. The new regime implemented neoliberal reforms, and many 'free market' economists - known as the Chicago boys -served as its economic advisors. Friedman himself visited Chile, and wrote a letter recommending certain policies to General Pinochet. Many have criticised Friedman and the Chicago school based on such a seemingly close relationship with such an oppressive regime, but they have defended their role as a purely technical one unrelated to the oppression. Once more, Klein's actual position is apparently unbeknownst to her reviewers, as she is well aware of economist's position and addresses directly at multiple points in the book, most notably in a chapter subtitled "How An Ideology Was Cleansed of Its Crimes". Economists can think of themselves as, in Friedman's words, "physicians" if they want (Klein notes the irony of Friedman's choice of analogy, given the types of "physicians" employed by the Chilean regime), but physicians help people directly, whereas economists took part in imposing policies directly against a people's will. Klein argues persuasively that the purported firewall between economic and politics is false, and since no critic I have seen engages her arguments directly, I'll go over them briefly to remove all doubt. Economists and policymakers - particularly Chicago-school types - as well as the powerful interests behind them, were simply all too willing to see their policies imposed under brutal conditions. Friedmanite economics, itself largely devoid of context and built on an abstract 'blank slate', lent itself to the desire for an economic laboratory with no pesky political opposition in the way, a mentality expressed by many Chicago school adherents. This inevitably meant that the reality of Chile - and other Latin American countries - was that "free market" policies required brutal regimes, something admitted by government officials. Don't like this kind of argument? Well, don't take mine or Klein's word for it: listen to Milton Friedman! According to him, if you try to shape society according to your vision, "you will ultimately have to order people what to do". Friedman had a typical 'capitalism is the neutral baseline' implicit in his words, but the fact is that his logic applies to his vision, too. For example, in order to cut wages and worsen working conditions, unions had to be forcibly broken up: their leaders disappeared, tortured, murdered. All leftist opposition had to be forcibly eliminated: protests dispersed, socialist parties broken up. As Klein documents, there was also a war against culture and ideas: books were burnt; revolutionary music had its parent copies destroyed; university students and professors were arrested and shot. In Chile in particular, the relationship between the reforms and oppression was even worse than this: the 'Chicago boys' had an incredibly close relationship with Pinochet, helping to plan his coup and rushing to print out a report cataloging their policy prescriptions on the day the coup took place. Some of them were actually investigated for fraud years later due to their involvement in the widely profitable speculative bubble following Pinochet's reforms. (In fact, many of the pioneers of 'free market' reforms all over the world found themselves in deep water with the law later on). The problem here is, as is often the case, one of framing. The academics first see Friedman's idealised, coercion-less economy and then cannot understand what that has to do with Klein's examples, so assume she is misrepresenting them. Meanwhile, Klein first sees poverty, economic and physical destruction, and mass murder and torture. She then looks to the source of these ideas, where she is confronted with armchair academics and their lofty theories, seemingly blind to the atrocious ends for which these theories have been utilised. Klein is, understandably, no more bothered by economist's theories than a journalist documenting a collapsed bridge would be about the minutiae of civil engineering. Lastly, Klein's overriding theory of the 'shock' is not something she just plucked from the air and, in the words of John Willman, used "to draw together disparate phenomenon". In fact, Chileans themselves drew parallels between the torture used by Pinochet and the economic evisceration, with one noting that all things considered, the latter was actually worse. The 'a crisis is an opportunity' idea was explicitly circulating among policymakers and those at economic conferences: John Williamson even spoke of engineering "pseudo-crises" in order to push through his preferred economic reforms, mostly ones that had nothing to do with the crisis at hand. Similarly, Milton Friedman himself suggested that Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans was an "opportunity" to push through reforms to privatise schools, a plan which went ahead. I could go on; there are many more examples of such thinking among those in power. People like Willman and Friedman can argue that their idea of a 'shock' is purely academic, but the reality is far more severe, and they don't help by sticking their fingers in their ears. Conclusion It's clear that a certain type of criticism - often that which makes extreme claims about discrediting an idea, or about its originator's intellectual honesty - suffers from the same problems it purports to be fighting. This is pervasive, and goes beyond these 3 books: critics of Noam Chomsky, Marxists, Michael Moore, Hugo Chavez, Climate Science, economist John Maynard Keynes and many have fallen into this trap. It undermines debate, distracts from worthwhile criticisms, and can actually perversely strengthen the target of the criticism, who will simply claim (somewhat correctly) that they are being targeted ideologically, not substantially. Now, while I am defending 'the left' from 'the right' in this post, I am not suggesting it is a one way phenomenon, and I expect I am probably guilty of such an approach at times. In any case, whatever the cause of this and whichever side does 'it' more, it seems people need to learn to think twice before dismissing the arguments of the other side outright, particularly if said dismissal relies on second hand claims. I'd say chances are that if a particular thinker or book is kicking up a storm among your opponents, it's not because they are moronic liars, but - just maybe - because the book has some compelling arguments that are worth your time. }}
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