I was discussing why I think fixing what I’ve been calling bad economics matters with what I suppose must have been one those fabled radical leftist sorts online the other day, and I couldn’t help but notice some anti-democracy and anti-intellectual content I generally associate with the rather more common, at least here in the USA, radical rightist sort online. It really brought home that poor little democracy is fighting a two front war of survival right now against radicals from both political extremes, which given the games people play and the state of our disinformation technology may very well be the same group of people.
In case you’ve never read my blog before, the argument against democracy I’m most familiar with, the conservative and right wing one, I believe is based largely on bad economics, by which I mean ubiquitous misinterpretations of opaque neoclassical welfare economics one suspects was purpose built to support such misinterpretations. The argument from that end of the political spectrum is that democracy represents an unnecessary and really immoral opportunity for common folk to “interfere” with markets, “the Free Market,” “the Economy,” or some such intellectual construct. According to these people, democratic government is little more than a fancy version of mob rule, poor folk banding together to pick the pockets of rich folk and demand considerations they do not deserve as a matter of ethics.
The argument against democracy I was hearing from the radical leftist fellow online the other day was that one needn’t worry too much about addressing bad ideas including bad economics because attempting to win the hearts and minds of voters or at least the thinking portion of voters through reasoned argument was fundamentally misguided. In his view, the apparent acquiescence of voters in the system he feels abuses them is unreal and voting and hence democracy itself is basically a sham. Instead, in his estimation, there are underlying power relationship that will inevitably make things turn out a certain way regardless of what voters may think or believe, and those relationships support the power and position of what he referred to as the “class of capitalists.”
I have to say I found the left wing version of anti-democracy sentiment every bit as unappealing as I’ve always found the right wing version of anti-democracy sentiment, and for some of the same reasons.
First, once one gives up the ethos of democracy one opens the door to the sort of realpolitik shenanigans one finds currently most prominently in conservatives and right wing circles in which what matters is not truth but rhetorical effectiveness, the ability to manipulate others into going along with what one wants them to do, either because one believes that is for the best for everyone or for some other reason. Assessed according to that metric, there’s nothing wrong with bad economics that requires fixing. It’s a clever bit of rhetoric that gets the job done. It pulls the wool over people’s eyes quite nicely indeed. I’m opposed to such a viewpoint because I believe it represents an unacceptable level of hubris for any true intellectual and reasonable, mature person sincerely committed to the ethos of political democracy. There’s nothing special about what any particular person thinks. Ethics have a subjective quality based on moral sentiments and those can vary between people. The only sensible, justifiable, stable position, I believe, is that any society should reflect the ethics of those who live there. If one doesn’t like those ethics, one can work to change them, explain why one doesn’t like them, but one can’t simply elevate oneself to the position of ethical arbiter and then use any means necessary to get others to go along.
Second, when one stops thinking about ideas, and by extension individual people holding particular ideas and voting according to those ideas, one ends up with this unappealing view of people as unthinking and unimportant members of groups. In conservative and right wing circles, the groups are usually based on property ownership or economic power, so it’s virtuous rich folk against scheming poor folk. That scheme is based in my view on ignorance of how real distributional mechanisms work, what really accounts for differences in economic power or wealth, as well as questionable or at least unexamined distributional ethics. In certain left wing circles, the groups are apparently also based on ownership albeit not necessary the level of economic power, per se. So one supposedly has something called a “class of capitalists” that causes problems for I suppose must be the class of non-capitalists. The problem for me is that I’ve never been able to really figure out what the classes involved really are or relate them to the individuals I think cause actual problems because of their explicit or implicit endorsement of particular bad ideas. For example, it seems to me many workers and poor people may own stock these days, which I suppose must make them “capitalists” in some sense, and here in the USA at least many workers and poor people with or without stocks are sitting ducks for bad ideas and strongly oriented toward conservative and right wing politics. Similarly, we have some quite rich and economically powerful people who surely own stock, and must surely in any account qualify as “capitalists,” who support progressive causes liked a broad concept of social welfare, economic justice, egalitarian democracy, and other ideas generally associated with the left end of the political spectrum. It doesn’t seem entirely sensible to me to present a discussion of what’s wrong with our society and potential ways of fixing those problems that doesn’t account for the importance of ideas and the variety of individuals holding and espousing those ideas.
I suppose what I’m saying is I suspect there’s a parallel bad economics on the leftist side, based perhaps on misinterpretations of Marxian economics, that also involves opaque or questionable ethics and so on, and that may also lead to confusion and conflict.
All this is neither here nor there for me as far as this blog goes. I intend to concentrate on addressing what I recognize as bad economics based on misinterpretations of neoclassical welfare economics, which generates conflict and confusion especially in the form of conservative and right wing antipathy to political democracy. That’s what I know and can sensibly address. I’m not very familiar with other traditions of economic thought, but I do feel people who know about them should address bad economics originating in those traditions as well. Democracy needs friends right now. And when one replaces bad economics with good economics, common misinterpretations of neoclassical welfare economics with correct interpretations, when one truly understands how neoclassical welfare economics works, then one understands where and how the evaluation of economic systems and outcomes inevitably requires ethically controversial value judgments and thus, because of the subjective quality of ethics, implies the need for social decision making and, I would argue, political democracy.
