Rephrasing my critique of Sen

My previous post was a bit stream-of-consciousness, and I think I have a more comprehensible version somewhere in my brain. In a nutshell: I think Sen is too individual-oriented. His theory has no room for the fact that individual freedoms do not exist in a vacuum: they often conflict with each other. Given the nature of resource and power inequality in our world, if we were to try to magically give everyone freedom of self-determination, those with more resources and power would quickly infringe of the freedoms of those with less.

Or, to borrow an idea from a classmate, Sen seems to view freedom as a sort of public good, non-rivalrous and non-excludable. But any structural or power analysis would lead to the conclusion that freedom acts more like a private good: consumption of the good does reduce its availability for others. To believe otherwise would indicate either an extraordinarily optimistic view of human nature or a complete blindness to systems and structures.

Why does this matter in practice? Because changing what we measure from income to freedoms (or, to put it into indicator-ese, from GDP to HDI [for example]) isn’t enough. It’s a step in the right direction. But the world of development indicators and development practice needs an additional level of analysis, one that considers unequal power relationships and offers methods for mitigating or minimizing them.

Flying Whale

A Step-by-Step of Hayes’ letter

Flying Whale has asked me to explain my take on Hayes’ letter in a bit more depth–both what makes it great and what keeps it from being even better.  So here goes:

On the good side:

The unqualified apology in the first sentence.  She doesn’t apologize if the cartoon offended anyone, she apologizes for publishing it.  Period.  And then at the end, she writes:

We erred and we’re sorry – not because of your response, but because we were wrong and would’ve been wrong even if nobody had said so.

She rehashes what the cartoon depicted without spin and writes that the problematic interpretation of the comic is an “easy” one, about as far away from accusing those who complained of “reading too much into things” as you can get.

She doesn’t offer those defending the comic a blank check of gratitude.  Rather, she challenges them to learn from this experience alongside the paper they were defending, writing:

And to those defending us: While we appreciate some of your arguments on our behalf, ladies and gentlemen, suggesting that someone was “asking for” rape is misguided and precisely the problem here.

And, best of all, this segment:

Women are so often told vicious little cautionary tales: “Don’t go walking alone in the dark, or you’ll get raped.” “Don’t wear short skirts, or you’ll get raped.” “Don’t get drunk, or you’ll get raped.” None of the women I know were raped because of something they did or didn’t do; they were raped because someone they trusted betrayed that trust.  Now, I’m angry with myself because [it’s] as if I’ve betrayed them and every other survivor of sexual assault.

First, an Amen to calling out those “vicious cautionary tales.”  But beyond that, the act of rape isn’t what creates a culture of rape.  It’s all the other seemingly less extreme things that–to use Bruininks’ words–condone or encourage sexual violence.  Here, Hayes’ makes that rhetorical connection, using the exact same vocabulary to describe men who rape and her actions in publishing the comic.  Rhetorically, she acknowledges that they’re connected to one another.

So let me emphasize one more time how great I thought the letter was.  But since you asked, there are a few things I didn’t like quite so much.

Hayes’ writes:

I am particularly angry with myself …While I’ve never been raped or sexually assaulted, one of my close friends was raped about two years ago.

The implication here is that she should have seen why the comic was problem because her good friend was raped.  There are a lot of reasons why that comic should never have been published.  Whether or not the editor personally knew someone who had been raped is not one of them.

In continuing to talk about her friend’s experience:

She never ended up reporting the incident to the police. I will never be persuaded that not reporting it wasn’t a mistake.

Hayes knows the details  the situation and I don’t.  But I don’t think its helpful to imply that a survivor should always go to the police.  There are lots of really really good reasons not to that don’t have anything to do with being in denial about whether or not you were raped.

And saving the worst for last, Hayes writes:

I’ve always been fortunate in that my male friends, coworkers and acquaintances are and have always been decent people. None of them would consider forcing themselves on another person.

I doubt that’s true.  Statistically, it’s unlikely.  And besides, it’s foolish to think that Hayes would even know whether a friend or coworker–never mind acquaintance–had ever perpetrated a sexual assault.  But more importantly, she’s saying that sexual assault doesn’t happen in her community.  But we know sexual assault happens in every community.  To say it doesn’t is to commit the same act of denial she accused her friend of in the paragraphs prior.

So.  That was a quick and incomplete run through, but I hope it makes my thinking a little more transparent.  Additions or challenges welcome.

Jonas

Taking a moment to celebrate progress II

It’s hard to celebrate progress in the struggle against the rape culture of college campuses when a fraternity at Yale takes their pledges past women’s dorms shouting “no means yes, yes means anal” and university newspapers obliviously (?!) bring rape into their sex position of the week, but I think this apology is a really, really good one.

Maybe I’m naive, but I think real learning happened here.  Overdue learning, but learning nonetheless.

Read the whole apology.  Again, like Bruininks’ letter, it isn’t perfect.  But we’d all do well to bring that much humility and learning to every apology we make.

Jonas

Taking a moment to celebrate progress

This is a heavy post to jump back in with.

The opening of the semester at the University of Minnesota saw three sexual assaults at fraternity houses in the first three weeks of school.  The letter that President Bruininks wrote was, honestly, better than I would have expected.  Excerpt below:

The recent allegations of sexual assault in the University community underscore both the awful impact of these actions on the victims and the responsibility we share for ensuring the safety of all our students, faculty, staff, and visitors. As president, I am deeply concerned and saddened by these reports, and my heart goes out to all who have experienced the physical and emotional impact of such violence. The University of Minnesota does not tolerate violence of any type anywhere on its campuses, and we will continue to take swift and decisive action, not only to investigate all such allegations, but also to provide support services to all those affected by sexual violence and make clear to everyone that sexual violence in any context is unacceptable.

We should acknowledge the existence of this problem in our culture—but we should also acknowledge the programs already in place to address it. The University’s Aurora Center provides support services and sexual and relationship violence education and prevention programs to all members of the University community. The Star Tribune recently highlighted the admirable efforts of a student group called Men Against Gender Violence, which seeks to communicate that most men do not participate in sexual violence, to confront those who do, and to address the behaviors that may passively condone or encourage sexual violence.

I want to personally thank all survivors of sexual violence who have exhibited incredible courage and reported their assaults.

Honestly, the letter surprised me.  I’ve come to expect a certain script from these kinds of letters–which often obligatorily acknowledge isolated incidents of sexual assault, but refuse to acknowledge the larger trend they are part of.

But to Bruininks’ credit, he didn’t.  He acknowledged how hard it is for women to report assaults.  He didn’t ask the university community to withhold judgment until law enforcement had time to investigate.  He didn’t implicitly blame the survivors who came forward by suggesting that women should use caution when drinking at parties (which several of the media stories did).  And he highlighted a student group whose founding is based on the fact that sexual violence is primarily perpetrated by men.

That’s four points in my book.

It’s not a perfect letter.  He acknowledged that sexual assault is a “problem in our culture,” but certainly didn’t dwell there long.  And he didn’t name that all three assaults were reported to have happened at fraternity houses.

But part of stubborn hopefulness is naming progress when we see it.

Jonas

What’s missing from Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach

I first read Amartya Sen’s Development as Freedom in undergrad 8 years ago or so. I thought it was brilliant, and I was never presented with any coherent critiques of Sen’s “capabilities approach”: that we should be looking at various kinds of freedom (not just political freedom and civil rights, but also freedom to make an adequate living, freedom to avoid premature death, etc), not just economic measures, as indicators for development. On its own, Development as Freedom is a cogent and well-argued plea for a more inclusive approach to development.

Rereading parts of it now, I can see what the critiques are (and a quick Google search of the literature largely confirmed my suspicions). I still think that Sen’s sophisticated reframing of the means and ends of development to focus on a vast array of human freedoms is incredibly useful. In his book, Sen doesn’t really provide any framework for action, but I do think that his redefinition what it is we should be measuring is a significant step forward. The capabilities approach seems much more holistic and humane than any traditional approach based solely on economic indicators.

That said, the step Sen doesn’t take is as important as the one he does. Sen offers no critique of the systems that have resulted in the unfreedoms he makes such a passionate case for fixing. In emphasizing individual agency and capabilities as the necessary unit of change, he seems to leave out any analysis of the structures that have caused underdevelopment and unfreedom. How are we to give people the freedoms they deserve without looking first at the systems, structures and institutions that perpetuate their unfreedom?

This is not to minimize the magnitude of Sen’s contribution to development thought – but I do think that it is necessary to expand the capabilities approach such that it does not merely look at agency in a vacuum, but also addresses larger macro-level concerns.

Steelworkers FTW WTF

I was in the middle of a busy period of life when a month ago, the Steelworkers submitted a 5,800-page petition urging the Obama administration to file a WTO case again Chinese subsidies for green technologies. I just found out about it today. I got really pissed off.

The way USW is going about this is completely backwards. They’re accusing China of engaging in “illegal practices that stimulate and protect its domestic producers of green technology, ranging from wind and solar energy products to advanced batteries and energy-efficient vehicles.” This is a double whammy. Not only does it reinforce the frame that domestic industrial policy is bad and legitimizes the use of the WTO to attack such policy (and why the hell would USW want to advance that frame?!), it also is a slap in the face for climate activists who would probably like nothing more than to see China, the world’s leading greenhouse gas emitter, invest in developing cleaner technologies.

To add insult to injury, this is all also completely hypocritical, since USW, as a founding member of the Blue-Green Alliance, would love to see massive U.S. investment in the domestic green economy. It’s a classic case of kicking away the ladder: denying developing countries the policy tools we want to be able to use ourselves.

What’s interesting is the Blue-Green Alliance statement on the USW petition. It’s decidedly lukewarm and avoids condemning China as an enemy engaging in “unfair practices.” I wonder what the politics behind the scenes here must have been like. In any case, I suspect this is a more useful position for progressives to adopt:

Today’s Section 301 petition filed by the United Steelworkers underscores the importance that the United States act quickly to take advantage of the job-creating opportunities of the clean energy economy. Every day America delays action is another day that China capitalizes on jobs created in the production of clean energy technologies that could and should be developed, manufactured, and installed in the United States.

This looks pretty different from USW’s condemnation of China using legitimate policy tools to promote their industries. There’s still the requisite vaguely nativist language, but instead of blaming China for doing what we should be doing, it puts the onus on U.S. policymakers to create our own industrial policy for the green economy – WTO legality be damned. This is a useful frame that USW has undermined: instead of thinking about what is and isn’t legal under the messed up WTO rules, we should be thinking about what policy goals we want to work towards, and if the WTO rules need to be changed to allow them, we should campaign for WTO reform.

(As an aside, interestingly, this week the Brookings/AEI green economy proposal came out, and even if it’s not something progressives can get behind, as Dani Rodrik pointed out, if this isn’t an industrial policy proposal, nothing is. And this coming from AEI!)

USW’s is exactly the kind of stance organized labor needs to not be taking in a modern world characterized by increasing interconnectedness and potentially imminent environmental catastrophe. We need a less provincial labor movement and more of a global working class consciousness in order to get anything done. Somewhere, Frances Fox Piven is saying, “I told you so.”

Addendum from Daryll Ray

A couple years ago I saw a panel on which Daryll Ray, one of the co-authors of the report I cited in my last post, elaborated on his thoughts on ag subsidies. These are among the most interesting points in my notes, and in Econ 101 lingo to boot:

We have been subsidizing agriculture since the very beginning, as a society. We’ve always had specific agriculture programs – land distribution, land grant universities, extension services, all designed for agriculture to shift the supply curve to the right. Generally we shift it faster than the demand curve, and prices go down. In other industries, consumers buy more or producers produce less and prices go back up. In agriculture it doesn’t work that way. Consumers buy the same, prices stay low, producers produce more (farmers don’t produce enough to have an influence on the market; the only thing they can do is produce more), and prices get lower. We “fix” by direct payment to producers. This is not a real adjustment.

He concluded: “It is unrealistic to assume that just because we don’t like the program we have right now, that we don’t need a program. We need a program that keeps prices more consistent and at higher levels… if we don’t do that, it’s naive to think our farmers will reduce production and prices will rise globally. It doesn’t work that way.”

The demonization of agricultural subsidies

I am currently in a development class in which it has become very fashionable to bash rich-country agricultural subsidies as a major cause of developing-country poverty. While I don’t think this anger is misplaced, I do think there is some unacknowledged complexity here, and that simply getting rid of all rich-country subsidies is a dangerous thing to wish for. Today I spoke up to briefly highlight that I don’t think we should be saying all rich-country subsidies should be completely eliminated. It was not a popular thing to say. I wrote a follow-up to clarify my point and I thought it might be instructive to cross-post it here. So, here goes:

I wanted to clarify what I said about agricultural subsidies today, which was perhaps a bit too controversial to present in a 15-second soundbite at the end of class. I was not in any way trying to defend U.S. ag subsidies as they exist today, nor the U.S. farm lobby, nor the various methods the North has used to keep the global South from implementing their own subsidies or tariffs. We tend to demonize subsidies, but I don’t think the problem is that they are inherently bad, but instead that they’ve been implemented poorly, in ways that are hugely harmful. Even worse, the global North has prevented the global South from using many of these kinds of subsidies. But implemented properly, subsidies can and should be useful policy tools – just like tariffs and industrial policy.

I think the extended argument about just how subsidies should be used (which I was foolishly trying to make in two sentences earlier today) is summed up best in this paper: Rethinking U.S. Agricultural Policy: Changing Course to Secure Farmer Livelihoods Worldwide. The basic problem statement here is that low ag commodity prices are currently benefiting agribusiness but hurting farmers everywhere. U.S. direct-payment subsidies are an attempt to make up for these depressed prices (a misguided and harmful attempt, since they are a reinforcing mechanism that keeps prices artificially low), but the global South either cannot afford such subsidies or are inhibited from implementing them. So low ag prices are trouble for farmers in the North but a matter of life and death for those in the South.

But the solution isn’t to get rid of all ag subsidies in the North – this is a fundamentally free-market approach that will not actually significantly increase prices, because many agricultural commodities don’t respond to market signals in a traditional way. (Farmers don’t quickly respond to a drop in price by producing less; instead, they often produce more to try to make up for lost income.) By this logic, getting rid of subsidies wouldn’t help those in the South, it would seriously hurt those in the North, and it would turn the entire ag sector over to the mercy of free-market forces, which we know don’t work particularly well for either the global South or for farmers anywhere. The paper goes on to outline alternative subsidy programs (not direct payments to farmers) which would manage production and return ag prices to a more reasonable level.

I’d encourage anyone interested in the issue to take a look at that paper, which is pretty unique in that it not only provides a diagnosis of the problem but also gives concrete policy recommendations. It’s been a major force in shaping how progressive activists think about agricultural trade in the neoliberal era.

How Labor is (Part of) the Problem in Building an American Left

Today I got to see Frances Fox Piven (distinguished professor of sociology and political science at CUNY; outgoing president of the American Sociological Association; author of this among many other things) give a talk with the above title and thesis. The argument was simple: organized labor in the United States is overly bureaucratized and institutionalized and run by extremely risk-averse leaders divorced from the rank and file. As a result, it has failed to adapt to the new realities of work presented by today’s globalized (and, in the U.S., deindustrialized) world.

Piven’s talk started with outlining three theorized sources of worker power: market power (ie when labor is scarce); political power (electoral influence); and strike power. Globalization, the argument goes, has eroded all three of these sources of power, although she also argued that the erosion of strike power has also been a product of unions shooting themselves in the foot. But, Piven says, the new global economy is a double-edged sword: it also presents brand-new possibilities for worker power, which the labor movement has completely failed to grasp.

The increasingly complex global chains of production, Piven claims, create opportunities for small pools of workers to exercise greatly magnified power over global capital. There are bottlenecks in the system where striking workers can shut down entire industries. But such actions would be extremely disruptive, and institutional labor would be unlikely to support them, and might even work to undermine them. Unions, she says, have become oligarchical, with leadership acting more out of self-preservation than the interests of the membership (much less the working class as a whole), and with damaging ties to the Democratic party as well as, in some cases, firms themselves.

Overall her argument seemed to be that unions have become too self-interested and parochial and what is really needed is a true working class consciousness. Her example was this: at a meeting between SEIU and COSATU (South Africa’s largest labor federations), the SEIU rep said, “We represent our members – that’s our job.” The COSATU rep replied, “We represent the working class. That’s ours.”

What troubles me is that both of the possible new pressure points that Piven highlighted – the above-noted bottlenecks in the global production chain, as well as the organizing potential of the huge new pool of place-based domestic service workers that cannot be outsourced – would seem to require pretty massive institutional support. It seems to me that workers striking to shut down a global production chain would be met with excessive and potentially lethal force, depending on where they were based. Such an action in the developing world would require a strong transnational movement to support them. And I would think that such an action in, say, the United States – a dock worker’s strike was her example – would still require some major institutional support. And how are domestic service and retail workers going to organize without union support? Perhaps I’m just having a major failure of imagination, but it seems that some pretty powerful institutional support is going to be needed if we are to overcome Wal-Mart’s anti-union strategies and actually organize those workers.

I posed this to Piven in the form of a slightly muddled question – if not from institutionalized unions, from where is the impetus for organizing going to come? – and I didn’t find her answer particularly convincing. She reiterated that such unions simply won’t support disruptive actions, and then basically stated that bottom-up movements from workers (both unionized and nonunion) are what’s really needed. She later used the immigrants’ rights rallies and the “Day Without Immigrants” of a few years ago as an example: the oppressed population organized themselves, spontaneously, without support from major institutions until the ball was already rolling.

I don’t know. That movement hasn’t really been sustained. How does the kind of sustained bottom-up movement needed for something as audacious as shutting down a global production chain happen without some kind of transnational labor movement or global class consciousness? Can you have a truly effective anti-systemic movement that arises without institutional support? Was the pre-9/11 anti-globalization movement an example, or does it fall apart under scrutiny given that it did enjoy support from some pretty institutionalized entities, despite its decentralized nature?

Piven emphasized that truly insurgent movements are largely unpredictable. They just happen when people get sufficiently pissed off about being oppressed, and simultaneously empowered because they’re talking to one another about it. So if these things are really so ad hoc and unpredictable, how does someone trying to organize for social change try to tap into these sources of discontent and resistance?

Paul Collier, fair trade, and useful idiots

I just (finally) read Paul Collier’s The Bottom Billion, which was… interesting. I liked his analysis of “traps” that the LDCs (to use the WTO’s parlance for Collier’s “bottom billion” countries) face – the natural resource trap, which is Collier’s slightly retooled version of the resource curse, the trap of being landlocked, the trap of falling into a cycle of civil wars or military coups, and the trap of corruption and bad governance in a small country. I even found his hyper-interventionist philosophy pretty good food for thought.

He’s got a paragraph on the problem with the fair-trade commodity movement that I think is pretty great, and clearly written:

The price premium in fair trade products is a form of charitable transfer… the problem with it… is that it encourages recipients to stay doing what they are doing – producing coffee. A key economic problem for the bottom billion is that producers have not diversified out of a narrow range of primary commodities… They get charity as long as they stay producing the crops that have locked them into poverty.

In other words, fair trade commodities are better than non-fair trade commodities, but it’s not a systemic solution. Fair trade is a stopgap, and one that might actually make it more difficult in the long-run to get where we want to go.

So there’s that, which I appreciated. But then, when Collier gets to talking about trade and investment policy, he gets all sad-eyed that the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) fell through, and misty-eyed about the benefits of trade liberalization. He also starts sounding like The Economist circa 2000, writing off anyone who thinks the neoliberal trade model is problematic as simpletons who just don’t understand trade policy. What’s weird is that this seems a bit self-contradictory. Collier readily admits, as we saw above, that diversification of a country’s economy, particularly into manufacturing, is necessary for economic growth. He even admits that the bottom billion countries probably need trade protections from Asia in order to achieve this goal, conceding the point that free trade means that the poorest countries are unable to create viable domestic industries.

Then, he says things like “Today’s useful idiots campaign for trade barriers,” and that anyone opposed to trade liberalization must be a “confused Christian, infiltrating Marxist, or [cynical] corporate marketing executive.” Apparently, in Collier’s world, there are no sentient economists (or activists, or NGOs, or policymakers) that believe infant-industry protection is a reasonable policy tool. Except perhaps when he advocates for it himself?

Flying Whale