Ein guter Weg gepflastert mit Rückschlägen

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In einem brillant geschriebenen Artikel (siehe unten) warnt uns Peter Schmidt, Präsident des Deutschen Arbeitgeber Verbands, davor, dass wir im Begriff seien, das reiche Erbe, das uns unsere Vorgängergenerationen hinterlassen haben, leichtfertig zu verspielen.

Ich bin nicht so pessimistisch wie Schmidt. Und zwar gerade, weil ich seine Prämisse teile:

Der natürliche Drang des Menschen, die Begrenzungen des Hier und Jetzt zu überwinden – dieser natürliche Drang hat sich zu allen Zeiten Bahn gebrochen. Kreativität, Neugier, Forschungsdrang: dies alles ist dem Menschen mitgegeben.

Dieser natürliche Drang enthält die Überlebensformel des Menschen. Wie ich in Theorie und Praxis ausführe, enthält unser Planet nicht einen einzigen Rohstoff, nicht eine einzige verwertbare Ressource. Es sei denn, der Mensch wandelt seine Umwelt dank dieses natürlichen Drangs um, so dass aus den gleichgültigen Requisiten der Natur Ressourcen werden, die ihm das Überleben und einen wachsenden Wohlstand ermöglichen.

Natürlich sind wir vor Rückschlägen nicht gefeit. Freilich, ist die Bandbreite der Rückschläge eng genug — wofür eine freiheitliche Gesellschaftsordnung sorgt, — könnte man sogar sagen, dass wir uns den Fortschritt durch Rückschläge sichern. Denn in einer offenen Gesellschaft sind unterschiedliche Auffassungen von der richtigen Politik — nicht anders als der wissenschaftliche Dissens oder der Wettbewerb unternehmerischer Visionen, übrigens auch der Heilverfahren —, ihrerseits ein Ressourcen-Pool, aus dem wir das Material schöpfen, das unserer Gemeinschaft zugleich Stabilität und Anpassungsfähigkeit verleiht. Und was sind die politischen Erfolge unserer Gegner, wenn nicht Rückschläge für uns? Während umgekehrt unsere Opponenten Zeichen unseres Reüssierens als Rückschläge erleben.

Solange robuste Bedingungen der Freiheit herrschen — siehe Das Paradoxon der Freiheit (2) —, solange unsere Gesellschaft politisch offen und somit lernfähig und korrigierbar bleibt, solange dürften wir uns in einem Korridor des Erfolgs bewegen, der zwar volatil ist, aber immer schön nach oben führt — jedenfalls nicht auf Dauer nach unten.

Peter Schmidt erinnert uns zu Recht daran, dass menschliche Schöpferkraft an Bedingungen gebunden ist:

Inwieweit er diese Eigenschaften auch wertschöpfend und nutzbringend einbringen kann hängt aber in starkem Masse von den gesellschaftlichen und politischen Rahmenbedingungen ab.

Auch ich sehe uns von drohenden Rückschlägen vermeintlicher und wahrhaftiger Art umgeben. Ich teile einige von Schmidts Befürchtungen; für besonders bedenklich halte ich die politische Steuerung "wissenschaftlicher" Inhalte (global warming) und die Schwächung demokratischer Kontrolle (in der EU oder hierzulande durch den Schulterschluss einer großen Koalition), denn dies rührt ans Herz einer freien Gesellschaft. Dennoch meine ich, dass sich diese unguten Trends nicht zur Auflösung der Offenheit unserer Gesellschaften verdichten. Zum einen scheitern die fehlgehenden Maßnahmen über kurz oder lang an der unerbittlich richtenden Zweckrationalität einer freien Gesellschaft (sowohl die Energiewende als auch die EU stehen für meine Begriffe vor einer Umkehr). 

Ich muss dabei an meinen Unternehmer-Freund denken, der auf der Fahrt in seine Firma Brandreden gegen den Kapitalismus hält, um den Rest des Tages damit zu verbringen, seine Bilanz zu optimieren und möglichst hohe Gewinne einzufahren.

Zum anderen bringt der sich in mehreren Dimensionen abspielende Wettbewerb einer freien Gesellschaft eine unentwegt erneuerte Vielfalt an Alternativen und neuen Trends hervor, denen gegenüber auch jene von uns zu Recht oder zu Unrecht als Rückschläge apostrophierten Sachverhalte keineswegs immun sind. 

Während frühere Epochen geprägt waren von dem unbedingten Willen, die Mühsal des Daseins zu überwinden, zu forschen und auszuprobieren, "mit heißem Bemühn" hinter die Geheimnisse der Welt zu kommen und Risiken als notwendiges, aber nicht behebbares Übel hinzunehmen hat sich die Grundeinstellung in den beiden letzten Generationen grundsätzlich gewandelt.

Hier vertrete ich eine abweichende Einschätzung. Vor allem, was die Frage eines grundsätzlichen Wandels betrifft. Zwar weist Schmidt völlig zu Recht auf betrübliche Erscheinungen hin. Legte man es jedoch darauf an, könnte man auch eine große Zahl an vielverheißenden Entwicklungen ins Feld führen.

Es erweist sich mehr und mehr, dass die Wissenschaft sich nicht mundtot machen lässt durch politischen Druck. Auf dem ganzen Kontinent zeigt sich die Öffentlichkeit imstande, der verordneten Euro-Harmonie zu widerstehen. In den Bereichen, mit denen ich mich zurzeit beschäftige, glaube ich ebenfalls willkommenen Wandel zu erkennen: das Monopol der Neoklassik in den Wirtschaftswissenschaften gerät ins Wanken, unermüdlich unterlaufen von konstruktiven Neuentwicklungen, etwa im Bereich der Geldtheorie und der Makro-Ökonomie — übrigens alles Ansätze, die ausgelöst werden durch die Rückschläge, mit denen der Status Quo uns peinigt.

Und da ich gegenwärtig an einem Manuskript zum Thema Freiheit und Politik arbeite, will ich die pauschale These nicht unwidersprochen lassen, wonach Politiker realitätsfern und inkompetent seien und daher ihr Gewicht zugunsten spinnerter Illusionen in die Waagschale legten.  

Journalisten und Politiker, also Menschengruppen die von der realen Arbeitswelt meist maximal entfernt sind und deren betriebswirtschaftlicher und wissenschaftlicher Ausbildungsstand – ebenfalls zumeist – eher rudimentär ausgeprägt ist, erträumen sich ein wenig hilfreiches Bild von Industrie 4.0. Gepaart mit der üblichen Hysterie, die allem Neuen gegenüber heute üblich ist, werden Risiken überfokussiert und der Angst eine Schneise geschlagen.

Natürlich gibt es Politiker, auf die diese Charakterisierung zutrifft, aber das ist nicht die ganze Story. Eine Technokratisierung der Politik hilft nicht weiter. Der Expertenkult ist ein Holzweg. Nicht, dass ich Schmidt zeihe, ein Anhänger technokratischer Politik zu sein. Ich möchte lediglich hervorheben, dass wir Politik vor allem deshalb brauchen, weil es große Fragen gibt, die uns alle angehen, in denen aber keiner von uns Experte sein kann, und aus gutem Grunde jeder ein Recht haben sollte, seine Interessen und Auffassungen einzubringen. Vielleicht erfüllt sie ihre Aufagbe mehr schlecht als recht, aber in einer freien Gesellschaft nimmt die Politik den Charakter eines Entdeckungsverfahrens an, nicht anders als der wirtschaftliche Wettbewerb — ein Entdeckungsverfahren, das seine Berechtigung aus dem Unwissen zieht, das uns allen gemein ist, und das wir nur durch offene, alle einschließende Kommunikation zurückzudrängen vermögen.

★★★

Hier der vollständige Text von Peter Schmidt, den ich hier entnehme:

Als Buzzword, zu gut deutsch Schlagwort, bezeichnet man einen Ausdruck, mit dem beim Zuhörer um besondere Beachtung gebuhlt wird. Noch sprechender scheint der synonyme Ausdruck catchword: mit Worten fangen. Einlullen also.

Zu den wesentlichen, derzeit gebräuchlichsten, Buzzwords zählt zweifellos Digitalisierung. Im Kontext mit Begriffen wie Industrie 4.0, connected enterprise und unzähligen Abwandlungen dazu werden Unternehmer als auch Verbraucher vor eine Nebelwand gestellt der bangen Frage: bin ich für die neue Zeit gerüstet?

Für den deutschen Mittelstand dürfte die Antwort lauten: viel besser, als man glauben sollte und oftmals selbst vermutet.

Wie das?

"Digitalisierung" – entkleidet von allen Voodoo-Kostümen, mit denen es gerne ausstaffiert wird, bedeutet ja nichts anderes als: Rationalisierung durch Technik.

Rationalisierung war das Bestreben des Menschen, seit es Menschen gibt. Der Faustkeil war möglicherweise die erste Rationalisierung. Mit seiner Hilfe überwand der Mensch die Beschränkungen der eigenen Hand. Er konnte härter und gezielter zuschlagen, war weniger verletzungsanfällig, konnte sich besser wehren gegen die Unbill der Natur.

Es würde langweilen, all die Millionen weiterer Stufen auf dem Weg des Menschen "nach oben" aufzuführen. Auch Computer und Informationstechnologie sind letztlich nichts anderes als weitere solcher Stufen.

Der natürliche Drang des Menschen, die Begrenzungen des Hier und Jetzt zu überwinden – dieser natürliche Drang hat sich zu allen Zeiten Bahn gebrochen. Kreativität, Neugier, Forschungsdrang: dies alles ist dem Menschen mitgegeben.

Inwieweit er diese Eigenschaften auch wertschöpfend und nutzbringend einbringen kann hängt aber in starkem Masse von den gesellschaftlichen und politischen Rahmenbedingungen ab.

Während frühere Epochen geprägt waren von dem unbedingten Willen, die Mühsal des Daseins zu überwinden, zu forschen und auszuprobieren, "mit heißem Bemühn" hinter die Geheimnisse der Welt zu kommen und Risiken als notwendiges, aber nicht behebbares Übel hinzunehmen hat sich die Grundeinstellung in den beiden letzten Generationen grundsätzlich gewandelt.

Risikoaversion und – korrelierend zu einem immer geringeren Bildungsstand im naturwissenschaftlichen Bereich – auch völlige Unfähigkeit zu einer angemessenen Risikobeurteilung bestimmt den politischen und medialen Raum und hat zu weiten Teilen auch den ideellen Mainstream der Bevölkerung erfasst. Wer wüsste nicht aus eigenem Erleben im Freundes- und Verwandtenkreis, dass Globuli und Wünschelrutengänge deutlich mehr "klammheimliche Bewunderer" haben als es einer aufgeklärten Gesellschaft gut täte? Dass Physik, Biologie und Chemie weitgehend unter dem Generalverdacht stehen, den Menschen von der Natur zu entfernen – so irre es auch sein mag in einer Zeit, in der Menschen die längste Lebenserwartung haben seit es unsere Spezies gibt.

Machen Sie doch spaßeshalber einmal das Experiment, in Ihrem Bekanntenkreis nachzufragen, wie viele Menschen noch wissen, dass ohne CO2 Leben auf dieser Erde unmöglich ist. Es kann ein Erweckungserlebnis werden.

Journalisten und Politiker, also Menschengruppen die von der realen Arbeitswelt meist maximal entfernt sind und deren betriebswirtschaftlicher und wissenschaftlicher Ausbildungsstand – ebenfalls zumeist – eher rudimentär ausgeprägt ist, erträumen sich ein wenig hilfreiches Bild von Industrie 4.0. Gepaart mit der üblichen Hysterie, die allem Neuen gegenüber heute üblich ist, werden Risiken überfokussiert und der Angst eine Schneise geschlagen.

Auf diese Weise haben wir schon viele Zukunftsindustrien, wahrscheinlich unwiederbringlich, verloren – Gentechnik als Beispiel ebenso wie die Elektrochemie.

Es scheint nicht überzogen, die alte Volksweisheit im Hinblick auf den Erhalt von Vermögen auch auf den Zustand unseres Landes zu übertragen:

"Der Opa erstellt's, der Vater erhält's,
beim Sohn verfällt's".

20. April 2016

Freddie Freeloader

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Aus dem Album Kind of Blue von 1959 - ein Klassiker des Jazz: Freddie Freeloader.

Politics Does Not Make Us Worse (2/3) - A Counterplea in 13 Theses - From the 2014 Archives

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Continued from here.

4.

But do we really want to live in a world where politics is so important to our lives that we cannot help but be politically involved? Many, both on the left and the right, answer yes. A politically engaged citizenry will not only make more decisions democratically but also be better people for it. From communitarians to neoconservatives, there’s a sense that civic virtue is virtue—or at least that individually we cannot be fully virtuous without exercising a robust political participation. Politics, when sufficiently unconstrained by crude individualism and sufficiently embraced by an actively democratic polity, makes us better people.

If I grew up and lived a life facing no prospects of punishment and other forms of resistance constraining my behaviour, it would be rational and natural for me to steal, kill, and lie, just when it suits me, and do a lot of other things that under the real circumstances of my life I find abhorrent and would never engage in. Politics is about organising, defending, enforcing, and changing the constraints that we must observe while living with other human beings. Sure, tradition and other evolutionary processes play an important role, but man is always faced with the challenge to establish and enforce by conscious effort the values and taboos that are to count as socially pre-eminent. People cannot take a permanent holiday from working on the normative frame by which they live.

There are no super-markets with products on their shelves like a can of "being nice to everyone" or a bottle of "total mutual agreement in America."

The forms of political participation are multifarious (especially in a civil society), they can be expected to be the result of reasonably efficient structures such as a division of labour among more or less politically active members of the community; and, most importantly, participation ought to be open for every citizen inclined to join the competition for political influence. It is not unreasonable to assume that an open access political order tends to constrain and induce people to treat each other as if being better people than they would be in a society less concerned with the individual's desire to be involved in her community's political sphere.

It is mankind's lot to live in a world where politics is so important to our lives that we cannot help but be politically involved. We cannot change that condition, but we can hope that he who so desires will be free to get involved in politics. No less than the free market, politics is all about competition; you must get engaged and fight hard to get your objectives recognised and acted upon as intended.

Some of the political apathy that people remark upon may indeed be regrettable, but a lot of it is to be welcomed, as it is an indication that the political system works reasonably well—thanks to hard workers, so called politicians and their supporting staff, that practice political participation in a way which leaves us more content than we are willing to concede. Apathy, indifference, and passiveness are more often than not silent signs that the political division of labour works - tolerably well.

However, a political system where high levels of active mass political participation are not required, leaving people free to pursue other goals, there is much scope for gripe and discontent among the consumers of politics. In a word: you cannot have low levels of mass political participation without systematic and chronic attacks on the fairness and effectiveness of the political system - which is one of the lasting imperfections in politics. More direct democracy has limits of feasibility, and testing them often entails far more harm than the grumbling of politics' impassive clients.

• In a bad political system, you must put up with politicians who do not always do what you want.

• In a good political system, you must put up with politicians who do not always do what you want.

Yet, there is a huge difference between both systems.

5.

Yet the increasing scope of politics and political decisionmaking in America and other Western nations has precisely the opposite effect. It’s bad for our policies and, just as important, it’s bad for our souls. The solution is simple: when questions arise about whether the scope of politics should be broadened, we must realistically look at the effects that politics itself has on the quality of those decisions and on our own virtue.

We might need a new epithet to describe the propensity of the malcontent partisan to regard his complaints as bangs in a chain reaction inexorably leading to a dystopian state bad for our souls.

How about the domino illusion?

True, there are dominoes that fall, but they do not fall in a perfect and fatal cascade, some remain erect, some are being picked up again, and new ones are set up as well. In paragraph 3 above, I have already tried to convince my readers that the increasing scope of politics and political descisionmaking in America has aspects to it that no one of us would want to miss. So this is a real option, too: politics may increase in scope, and the world is getting better for it. It is not helpful to ignore this important fact. Indeed, there can be no good political theory that does not take cognizance of the full range of significant effects achieved by politics.

As for

the effects that politics itself has on the quality of those decisions and on our own virtue

I have noted in paragraph 4:

an open access political order is an important prerequisite for conditions that constrain and induce people to treat each other as if being better people than they would be in a society less concerned with the individual's desire to be involved in her community's political sphere.

6.

Politics takes a continuum of possibilities and turns it into a small group of discrete outcomes, often just two. Either this guy gets elected, or that guy does. Either a given policy becomes law or it doesn’t. As a result, political choices matter greatly to those most affected. An electoral loss is the loss of a possibility. These black and white choices mean politics will often manufacture problems that previously didn’t exist, such as the “problem” of whether we—as a community, as a nation—will teach children creation or evolution.

I am tempted to coin another term - the ice-berg fallacy, i.e. for the full picture one must dive deeper, the top of the ice-berg is not the whole story. Politics is concerned with political scarcity, meaning: it is about coping with the socially destructive potential of mutually exclusive partisan positions. In other words, the discreet outcomes that the authors claim to be the unwarranted product of politics are often residuals of social tensions that cannot be resolved by other means, such as market transactions. I am in favour of nuclear energy. And you are not. What next?

Admittedly, politics can be used to create discrete outcomes of a deplorably reductionist kind, reducing for instance the competitive processes in the world of management to an artificial either-them-or-us-issue as in decreeing a female quota for executive boards. But then, I challenge any comer to show me, how free markets can get rid of such inordinate politicisation. Again, we need to engage in politics to keep politics within reasonable bounds. There is no escaping politics.

Also, what appear to be binary choices (either him or her, either this or that policy) are often better understood in the context of the large hidden ramifications that qualify and counterbalance the seeming dichotomy: each candidate must take into consideration the multifarious views and interests of the electorate; her programme and actual politics will reflect a wider spectrum of constraints, ambitions and demands than fit into a neat dichotomy.

The politician appears dishonest precisely because she must try to do justice to differing and competing positions within the electorate. Before and after being elected, the politician will have to take into account other institutions of the democratic culture (apart from the elective mandate): authorities, courts, all kinds of associations, all sorts of committees etc whose purpose it is to expose her to wider efforts at exercising influence and exerting control over the politically powerful incumbent.

In a society with democratic mass participation in politics, people are influencing each other all the time through exposure to debate, changing and competing views, and practical encounters in the processes of political competition and cooperation. The truly dichotomous choices are embedded in an environment of permanent mutual control, adjustment, and compromise - everyone is free to enter the competition and seek out her opportunities to contribute to supervising, shaping the visions of and cooperatively participating in the political processes.

The system creates winners and losers, but they are not always the same people; sometime this party wins, sometimes it loses; such competition certainly does not leave a gilded trail of neat solutions happily endorsed by everyone, but it does produce a trust ultimately recognisable by the public's general peaceful tolerance of the political system.

7.

Oddly, many believe that political decisionmaking is an egalitarian way of allowing all voices to be heard. Nearly everyone can vote, after all, and because no one has more than one vote, the outcome seems fair.

But outcomes in politics are hardly ever fair. Once decisions are given over to the political process, the only citizens who can affect the outcome are those with sufficient political power. The most disenfranchised minorities become those whose opinions are too rare to register on the political radar. In an election with thousands of voters, a politician is wise to ignore the grievances of 100 people whose rights are trampled given how unlikely those 100 are to determine the outcome.

We have just seen that far more opinions and interests have been taken into consideration in a complex process that leads among other things in the end also to a number of dichotomous choices (say, abortion or pro-life).

While the very rationale for engaging in politics is to handle intransigent antagonisms, of which no society can be free, in order to do so politicians - in a resilient democracy - must of necessity be open to compromise and middle-of-the-road-positions, and much of their work before and after getting elected will be heavily constrained by the rule of law and other institutions of a democratic open access society. In fact, it will be in the interest of the politician to comply with and support such institutions, rather than undermining them all of the time.

So the authors' general assertion is not true: Once decisions are given over to the political process, the only citizens who can affect the outcome are those with sufficient political power.

Democracy as an entire culture of practices and institutions has evolved to protect people with highly differential degrees of political power.

To make this point, I like to remind people that president Obama is far from being the richest man in America, and Bundeskanzlerin Merkel is so weak - thanks to our democratic culture - she cannot even dispossess a small baker by political fiat to have her bakery-chain (if she had one) take advantage of his shop's good location and attractive clientèle.

But outcomes in politics are hardly ever fair. Can there ever be a world where it is not possible or not endeavoured by any one to reproach others for being unfair? What world do the authors propose to establish, where outcomes are hardly ever unfair? Are they not really coquetting with some kind of nirvana fallacy?

"Fairness" - that is one of those infinitely stretchable words. Again, politics is called upon to manage human affairs precisely when people find it hard to achieve congruency of opinion, as when there are diverging ideas of what may count as "fair."

As for minorities, one can certainly observe very small groups achieving disproportionate political influence, while other minorities may be lacking any clout. There are countless reasons for that. By the end of the day, in an open political order, however, impact is ultimately a matter of resolve, perseverance, skill - and luck - but not primarily a function of the number of activists hoping to attain political weight.

As Chris Berg writes poignantly:

Democratic institutions ensure that if you want to alter policy, you have to convince your fellow citizens that change is desirable.

And, because any single vote will not change an election outcome, you have to convince a very large number that your cause is so important they should make an expressive, personal, "irrational" stand at the ballot box.

The futility of voting means that democracy resists sudden radical change. This is a good thing.

So many people who complain that the "system" is rigged are in truth complaining that most other citizens don't agree with them.

The reason why many minorities, and indeed, majorities, may not feel to be represented as they wish, is not that people are being oppressed, i.e. denied the exertion of political influence, but the fact that they judge the opportunity costs of political engagement far too high to give up alternative preferences. Which, in turn, I would tend to interpret as indicative of a broad popular concurrence with the present political division of labour among population and political activists.

Continued here.

Politics Does Not Make Us Worse (1/3) - A Counterplea in 13 Theses - From the 2014 Archives

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I continue to hark back to posts marking the long way that I have travelled since 2012 in understanding that freedom only works when the zoon politikon - the political animal - meets conditions where she can fully emancipate herself.  Freedom is not like a rail-road network ensuring that people are consistently guided toward the public good, as if on rails corresponding to libertarian principles, the rule of law, and the self-contained logic of markets. In fact, freedom is far more fluid, resembling a delta of fast changing stream-beds, where the flux is finding its course by adapting to a persistently mobile phalanx of banks and counter-currents. Rather than being based on stable regimentation, freedom depends on a game of mutual adaptation which includes all members of society. Everyone is entitled to affect with their interests and ambitions everyone else. The fluidity of the order is embodied in the equally dispersed right to be politically active. Freedom is highly political.

 ★★★

Thus, I argue in

Why It Is Not True That Politics Makes Us Worse - Thirteen Conjectures on Politics (1/3):

Aaron Ross Powell and Trevor Burrus, research fellows at the CATO Institute, have written an article entitled Politics Makes Us Worse. Below I shall comment on each of the thirteen paragraphs of which their article consists. Powell and Burrus are making many valid points, but they spoil their take by over-generalisation, which is the cardinal defect underlying the libertarian presumption against politics. In that way, the arguments displayed in Politics Makes Us Worse are almost a mini primer containing many of the central misconceptions of politics entertained in libertarian circles.

First, it is in order to comment on the title the authors have chosen: Politics Makes Us Worse. It can be inevitable, and in some cases even useful, to introduce phrases that come over more strongly than the wider message they are intended to support - like in a socially well-understood exaggeration (like "Americans are great people.")

Such is the case with the title of my present post - I do not believe that politics makes us better; rather I think politics can make us better, but it also can make us worse. Moreover, politics may have functions and trigger effects that do not relate to the issue of people becoming better or worse. Hence, in the text I qualify the title's bait.

The authors do not make any such qualification whatsoever. I am therefore entitled to take the statement - politics makes us worse - as an absolute. And precisely therein lies the difficulty with their position, which is representative of the attitude maintained by a large number of libertarians. In the below text, the authors' phrasings are

indented and completely in italics,

followed underneath by my comment (without emphasis):

1.

Increasing the sphere of politics leads to bad policy and increased vice.

By and large, the freer a country, the more likely it is to allow political engagement by any citizen interested in such activity, increasing the sphere of politics compared to a closed access society where the privilege of participating in politics is reserved to a small ruling elite. It appears that the absence (as in Mabutos's Kongo) or the retraction (as in Nazi Germany) of such freedom leads to increased vice, rather than the other way around.

An interesting special case might be provided by a class of countries that do not have a democratic political order, yet enjoy the status of favourites in the eyes of many libertarians, such as Hong Kong or Singapore. To begin with, the absence of a Western-type democratic political order does not mean that politics, with all its pluses and cons, is not happening in such countries. The relevant processes may be less familiar to the Westerner, naturally more opaque, or it may be the case that in order for the political goings-on to become more transparent to an observer, she must seek intimate and enduring participation in the social life of the respective countries.

Furthermore, I strongly suspect that Hong Kong and Singapore have benefited from other people having done politics in their stead - namely the British people, who exported practices and institutions of a modern civil society to these two places. Excellent conditions for commercial advancement (enabled by the imported model of a modern Western civil society) combined with an impoverished population eager to take advantage of the opportunities to grow materially more comfortable, the people of Hong Kong and Singapore may have had low demand for democratic politics for a number of decades. They certainly had strong governments whose political orientation and political decisions were decisive for the economic success of both places. Indubitably, politics has made Hong Kong and Singapore better (places to live in).

2.

Even if we try to ignore it, politics influences much of our world. For those who do pay attention, politics invariably leads in newspapers and on TV news and gets discussed, or shouted about, everywhere people gather. Politics can weigh heavily in forging friendships, choosing enemies, and coloring who we respect.

What the authors want their readers to focus on is a part of politics fraught with problems and unpleasant challenges: the divisiveness in politics, the ways in which politics creates division, and enhances or exploits it.

What the authors do not see is that politics is the only way in which we can hope to deal with issues that drive us apart.

What the authors do not see is that we cannot ignore politics - understood as dealing with the inevitable fundamental disagreements that the social order of a viable community must come to grips with.

Politics communicates, resolves or attenuates strife resulting from the manifold sources of significant disagreement among human beings. Bashing politics in total is like rejecting tragedy and drama in human affairs as a needless luxury willfully created by the bored and playful.

Of course, try as we may, we cannot ignore politics - it is part of the human condition. Of course, politics influences much of our world - which is full of dissent and potential for oppression and violence that needs to be kept under control. The compromises of politics will tend to be imperfect, because the more fundamental disagreements among human beings will not go away, when our political arrangements help us to avoid the crassest, bloodiest, and especially destructive forms of battle.

3.

It’s not difficult to understand why politics plays such a central role in our lives: political decision-making increasingly determines so much of what we do and how we’re permitted to do it. We vote on what our children will learn in school and how they will be taught. We vote on what people are allowed to drink, smoke, and eat. We vote on which people are allowed to marry those they love. In such crucial life decisions, as well as countless others, we have given politics a substantial impact on the direction of our lives. No wonder it’s so important to so many people.

Does political decision-making really increasingly determine so much of what we do and how we're permitted to do it? Can we do less and are we more regimented and patronised than in 1965, in 1912, or in 1860? By what metric?

Is it not the case that we are living in zones of reduced freedom and other zones of increased freedom, many of which may not be easily netted, if this is possible at all? I suppose, as drivers we may be considerably more regulated today than in 1912 - but is this not largely an appropriate response to mass transportation, and a large contribution to personal freedom? Have the regulations to which mass transportation has led been brutally imposed upon us by political decisionmaking, or is it not rather the case that countless institutions of a free society, from the legal world, to the media, to the many events and practices that make up our political order have allowed millions of us to exercise influence on the process by which such regulations get formed?

The source.

To be continued here.

Stretch Goals

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Step back and think about the most important things in your life—but how to do it effectively? Here is an approach that might appeal to you:

Most people use to-do lists simply as ways to keep track of their tasks - an exterior memory device, in other words.

But studies show that the most productive people use (and write) to-do lists differently. Productive people use to-do lists as devices that force them to think about their PRIORITIES, rather than simply keeping track of tasks.

This often occurs because productive people force themselves to write to-do lists with their biggest, most important goals at the top of the page. Within psychology these are known as 'stretch goals', and usually they are the kinds of things we write at the bottom of a to-do list (if we write them down at all), and then promptly never look at again. But productive people put those stretch goals front and center, at the top of the page, where they will see them every time they glance at their to-do list.

And then, they do something else that makes the to-do list into a 'contemplative routine', they regularly ask themselves if what they are doing right now lines up with their stretch goal. If it doesn't, they shift to another task. And they also force themselves to re-write their to-do lists everyday, and force themselves to ask 'is my stretch goal from yesterday still my most important task today? Or have I learned something new that ought to cause me to shift my priorities.'

In other words, productive people don't simply use to-do lists as memory aids. Instead, they transform them into contemplative devices, and they make to-do list writing into a contemplative routine, that forces them to think about their priorities, and that forces them to ask themselves, throughout the day, 'is what I'm working on right now really the best use of my time?'

The source. (I can't properly link to the text—which is a short piece at Quora by a certain Charles Duhigg, New York Times staff writer and author of Smarter, Faster, Better.

Competition for Freedom -- Efficiency, In Terms of What? -- From the 2015 Archives

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As I happen to be working on the relationship between freedom and politics, I excerpt the below conclusion for its relevance with respect to the role of politics in a free society. However, the article is of more comprehensive interest in understanding liberty.

★★★

Depending on goal-defining tastes and preferences, maximum efficiency can be at work in human societies that are oriented toward very different moral ambitions. You can be efficient at searching out and killing Jews. You can be efficient at searching out Nazis and keeping them from doing nasty things to people.

Freedom is not unaffected by this.

Any manifestation of a free society is the result of forces competing more or less consciously for the prevalent meaning or practice of freedom.

I would argue that the purpose of freedom is to create a playing field for the competitive design and development of freedom.

To make sure I am not accused of circular reasoning, let me rephrase the last sentence:

The purpose of robust conditions of freedom is to create a playing field for the competitive design and development of alternative arrangements of specific freedoms compatible with robust conditions of freedom.

Owing to differing initial conditions, tastes, and preferences, two countries may come up with different specific arrangements of restrictions and freedoms, having derived them from respecting the same robust conditions of freedom.

Every human being is subject to his own characteristic of loyalties and traditions, group affiliation, inventiveness, acumen, local conditions, life circumstances, values, endowments and cost perceptions/scenarios. In a world where freedom comes at a price, different people can be expected to lay out different scenarios for listing and prioritising traits of freedom that they wish to invest in as private actors, as political principals, or as political agents.

For all those, who believe that shared decision-making (politics) is a deluded aberration from freedom as fully producible by market transactions, they ought to consider that economic scarcity and the attendant need to ration possessions, goods, and services produces political scarcity, the lack of value-unanimity and the attendant need to ration the implementation of ideological desiderata in society.

As she frees people to practice ideological autonomy, freedom is more productive of political scarcity - measured as the number of different views that may be expressed and practically pursued - than any other societal arrangement. Therefore, freedom must also be the project that ensures the peaceful pursuit of pluralism. In a word: freedom is a political enterprise - for more see Freedom as Method, Harm Principle, Benefit Principle, and the Good Politician.

★★★

The entire article:

Competing for Liberty (6/6) - Coercion, Real Weath, and Efficiency:

1. Freedom as Real Wealth

As we have seen in Competing for Liberty (3/6) ... , Stigler suggests that freedom ought to be measured in terms of real wealth, i.e. the maximisation of the set of desirable opportunities open to an individual. If by real wealth we mean purchasing power in an exchange economy, we face two difficulties.

First, it is conceivable that a person with less purchasing power may be able to maximise the set of opportunities desirable to him to a larger extent than a person with more purchasing power (happy pauper vs. desolate billionaire). Second, Stigler's proposition does not contain criteria that filter out opportunities that we do not wish to be available under a regime of freedom.

If by real wealth we simply mean utility, i.e. maximising freedom is the same as maximising real wealth and the latter is the same as maximising utility (personal satisfaction in the broadest sense), freedom again loses

• specific meaning, especially the ability to exclude meanings that we positively do not associate with freedom - for instance, the ability to torture children -, and in addition

• ascertainability,

for not only is it often impossible to ascertain whether a person is actually maximising utility, but it is for the person in question often impossible to know whether she is actually maximising utility -- maybe it would have been better for her to become a computer scientist rather than a teacher of English.

No doubt, freedom in the classical liberal sense will tend to increase real wealth in accordance with both denotations of the word - purchasing power and utility maximisation. That is, freedom tends to make us more wealthy, and she tends to expand the choices at hand as well as the scope we have to choose freely from alternatives.

But these benefits of freedom depend on the type of acts of coercion that we treat as admissible and those that we suppress.

2. Coercion as an Inverse Index of Freedom

Liberty has a purpose:

the simultaneity of

• peace,

• productivity,

• maximal personal autonomy as equally applicable to all members of the community, as well as the best possible support of

• human collaboration, and

• human cooperation.

Obstacles to the attainment of this bundle of simultaneous purposes to which freedom is geared may be regarded as forms of illegitimate coercion, which in turn, may be removed or prevented by the kind of coercion that is legitimate under a regime of freedom.

We cannot achieve freedom by successfully excluding the possibility of damaging storms, insect infestation, and other acts and events that lie outside the purview of human interaction. Freedom is a set of rules concerning the legitimate forms of conduct among human beings. Thus the kind of coercion to be minimised and the kind of coercion admissible under a regime of liberty is confined to certain characteristics of human behaviour capable of being addressed by laws and other rules.

3. Freedom as Efficiency

While freedom is not real wealth, but can momentously foster the generation of real wealth (see first section), she demands efficient execution. Freedom is attended by efficiency, but she is not conterminous with it. We will and ought to strive to achieve freedom as efficiently as possible.

In suppressing certain repudiated forms of coercion by other legitimised forms of coercion we seek to be efficient in achieving the underlying objectives, the bundle of purposes that define freedom.

Most importantly, efficiency is a facilitating practice, whose moral quality is exogenous to it. Whether or not we wish a practice to be pursued efficiently, indeed at all, depends on the use to which the efficient practice is put.

Depending on goal-defining tastes and preferences, maximum efficiency can be at work in human societies of very different moral ambitions.

Freedom is not unaffected by this.

Any manifestation of a free society is the result of forces competing more or less consciously for the prevalent meaning or practice of freedom.

I would argue that the purpose of freedom is to create a playing field for the competitive design and development of freedom.

To make sure I am not accused of circular reasoning, let me rephrase the last sentence:

The purpose of robust conditions of freedom is to create a playing field for the competitive design and development of alternative arrangements of specific freedoms compatible with robust conditions of freedom.

Owing to differing initial conditions, tastes, and preferences, two countries may come up with different specific arrangements of restrictions and freedoms, having derived them from respecting the same robust conditions of freedom.

Every human being is subject to his own characteristic of loyalties and traditions, group affiliation, inventiveness, acumen, local conditions, life circumstances, values, endowments and cost perceptions/scenarios. In a world where freedom comes at a price, different people can be expected to lay out different scenarios for listing and prioritising traits of freedom that they wish to invest in as private actors, as political principals, or as political agents. 

For all those, who believe that shared decision-making (politics) is a deluded aberration from freedom as fully producible by market transactions, they ought to consider that economic scarcity and the attendant need to ration possessions, goods, and services produces political scarcity, the lack of value-unanimity and the attendant need to ration the implementation of ideological desiderata in society.

As she frees people to practice ideological autonomy, freedom is more productive of political scarcity - measured as the number of different views that may be expressed and practically pursued - than any other societal arrangement. Therefore, freedom must also be the project that ensures the peaceful pursuit of pluralism. In a word: freedom is a political enterprise - for more see Freedom as Method, Harm Principle, Benefit Principle, and the Good Politician.

See also Competing for Liberty (1/6) - Libertarian Paternalism and the Contestability of Freedom, and Competing for Liberty (2/6) - Harold Demsetz on "The Meaning of Freedom."

More Potholes

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Related to Potholes Happen Everywhere:

I have ventured the below thought in a comment on The Stupidity of Libertarian Privatised Road.

It appears to me that there has been virtually no progress in the quality of road surfaces during my lifetime of more than 50 years. I may be wrong. But roads of all kinds, including those with unchanged traffic frequency, seem to deteriorate in unchanged intervals.

If my observation is correct, could it be that there is not enough competition in that area?

Could there be an element of crony capitalism involved? But then, is it conceivable that even certain elements of mutual (crony?) accommodation between the government and the private sector may be inevitable and part of the best package, part of the (all in all) lower costs of not privatising road making compared to a more libertarian solution?

At any rate, in view of the fact that road making is such a ubiquitous phenomenon, involving citizens on innumerable levels (private, communal, municipal, regional, national), I suspect, it is the very freedom under which the involved live that makes the system tilt away from libertarian illusions toward the more reasonable practices that we generally observe. In short: free people choose state involvement in the building of roads.

Kapiert? (1) -- Kreditvergabe und Krise -- Steven Keen

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Ökonomie-Nobelpreisträger Jo Stiglitz beklagt sich über die unzureichende Kreditvergabe der Banken, worin er einen Hauptfaktor für die wirtschaftliche Stagnation in den USA sieht.  Die Banken seien zu zögerlich bei der Weiterreichung von Einlagen in Form von Krediten an Investoren und Konsumenten, die mit dem geliehenen Geld endlich wieder Projekte finanzieren könnten, die dringend für die Ankurbelung der Wirtschaft benötigt werden.  

Steven Keen widerspricht Stiglitz, dem er einen Irrtum unterstellt. Stiglitz nämlich stützt sich auf eine Theorie (loanable fund theory), wonach Banken Finanzintermediäre seien, d.h. sie sammeln Gelder bei ihren Kunden ein, um sie an andere Kunden mit entsprechendem Kreditbedarf weiterzuleiten. 

Doch Steve Keen ist der Auffassung, dass das Bild von den Banken als einer im geschilderten Sinne Geld durchreichenden Institution grundlegend falsch ist.

Die Kreditvergabe der Banken ist nach Steve Keen nicht abhängig von der Bereitschaft der Bankkunden, ihrem Institut Geld zu überlassen, welches sodann zur Finanzierung von Krediten weiterverwendet werden kann. 

Vielmehr haben die Banken, dank staatlich eingeräumtem Emissions-Privileg, die Möglichkeit, Geld aus dem Nichts zu schöpfen - und zwar durch den Akt der Kreditüberlassung. Die Kreditvergabe ist gleichbedeutend mit Geldschöpfung ex nihilo. 

Wenn eine Bank die Bonität eines Kunden als ausreichend für die Gewährung eines Kredits ansieht, kann sie die benötigte Kreditsumme von sich aus ins Leben rufen, um sie dem Kunden auf seinem Konto gutzuschreiben. Das ist ein Vorgang, der absolut losgelöst ist von irgendwelchen Geldzuflüssen seitens anderer Kunden.

Der "Witz" der Sache besteht nun darin, dass die Initiative, die zur Kreditvergabe Anlass gibt, nicht bei den Einlegern und der laut Stiglitz angeblich deren Mittel durchreichenden Bank liegt, sondern bei den Kreditnehmern. Die Bank mag noch so viele Mittel von Sparer-Kunden eingesammelt haben, wenn keine Kunden zu ihr kommen, die den Wunsch haben, einen Kredit aufzunehmen, dann wird die Bank eben auch keinen Kredit ausreichen können.

Nun ist es aber so, dass die Nachfrage nach Krediten zurzeit sehr gering ist, weil sich über Jahrzehnte ein enormer Schuldenberg in der Privatwirtschaft angehäuft hat. Die Bilanzen der betreffenden Firmen und Haushalte laden nicht gerade dazu ein, neue Kredite zu beantragen. Sie haben schon genug damit "zu kämpfen", ihre bestehenden Verbindlichkeiten zu bedienen und allmählich abzubauen.

Solange die Privatwirtschaft mit einem derartigen Mühlstein an Schulden beladen ist, sei, laut Steve Keen, nicht damit zu rechnen, dass sich die wirtschaftliche Aktivität beleben werde. Es ist gewissermaßen eine Patt-Situation entstanden. Die Wirtschaft braucht einen Privat-Sektor, der bereit ist zu investieren, und dazu gehört eben auch die Kreditaufnahme, wohingegen die privaten Wirtschaftsteilnehmer gerade dazu nicht in der Lage sind, wegen des hohen Schuldenbergs, den sie angehäuft haben.

Steve Keen schlägt vor, das Patt zu durchbrechen, indem der Staat einen umfassenden Schuldenerlass in die Wege leitet, der die Bilanzen der Haushalte und Firmen wieder frei putzt von den lähmenden Verbindlichkeiten, so dass endlich wieder wirtschaftsbelebende Projekte verstärkt in Angriff genommen werden können. 

Quelle.

Chapter on Politics (6) -- Pre-Modern and Modern -- Preliminary Conclusions

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Continued from here.

From Anthropocentric Freedom to Sociogenic Freedom

The politics of freedom is the art of restricting any particularistic freedom to establish a more efficient set of admissible moves in a comprehensive game of mutually compatible personal freedom.

Freedom-regarding politics is a refinement of anthropocentric freedom enriching it with restraints that enable the spread of large margins of personal autonomy to all members of the community. 

Building Effective Trust - From Violence to Peaceable Dissent

By effective trust, I mean behaviour among humans that exhibits the characteristics of mutual trust. I add the qualifier "effective" to highlight the fact that we are dealing here with trustful behaviour that is not undergirded by sentiments of trust prompted by personal acquaintance.

Building resilient networks of effective trust is the great challenge to human communities that tend toward populousness, exceeding considerably the average size of hunter-gatherer tribes.

People may fail to establish a relationship of mutual trust because they dislike one another. Equally, being strangers, they may simply not have an opportunity to build mutual trust. Yet, in a populous society they may be required to act as if they trusted each other. Many people have neighbours they do not know, share a large part of the day with collaborators with whom they interact at arms-length; we vote for strangers to rule us; we share pavements and roads populated with people who have an unfriendly disposition, perhaps being even dangerous and inclined, if uninhibited, to rob or damage us otherwise. Yet, most of the time, we behave as if we felt trust for one another.

In traditional society, custom and proximity drive trust and effective trust among its members. Indubitably, the repression of anthropocentric freedom — and thus, the impossibility of sociogenic freedom — is a dominant feature of trust building in pre-modern society. Subjugation and violence playing a significant role in ensuring a community's stability and cohesion. In small tribal groups, vitally depending on each member, the element of repression will tend to be stronger than the element of violence, except for encounters with alien groups. Such encounters tend to be extremely violent, with mortality rates a great deal higher than those recorded in modern warfare. In the face of insufficient means to build effective trust with outsiders, the choice is between avoidance or annihilation. Aliens are an existential threat, materially as well as culturally. Functioning as a group depends upon strict cultural conformity, any deviation from it calls into question the identity upon which group survival appears to be predicated.  

Politics - Pre-Modern and Modern

By contrast, in modern individualistic societies, effective trust is achieved in large measure by institutionalising orderly dissent. Every individual is a culture, if you like. Making cultures clash is inevitable. So there is pressure to turn such clashes into civilised events.

In order to contain distrust and violence, to build effective trust and ensure peaceful coexistence, politics in pre-modern societies is geared toward thwarting runaway dissent. Under such circumstances, enforcing a hierarchical, culturally rigid order is the mainstay of political manoeuvring. Societies are trapped in an inefficient equilibrium, where suppression and exploitation of the majority by a small elite of coalising holders of power (who are at the same time seekers of economic rents) is the farthest one can get away from debilitating anarchy. It is the best of all possible worlds, at the time. Before freedom emerges.

What cannot be emphasised enough is that politics—as we contemporaries of the free liberal nation states of the West take it for granted—is the very essence of freedom. Freedom is not the actualisation of some utopian blueprint or vision of, say, a market-based society, but the successful organisation of mass dissent. 

Beyond the broadest strokes by which we may indicate the contours of freedom, the meaning of liberty is indeterminate, contingent upon competitive outcomes and unknown future findings. Liberty is based on the right of every mature person to form her own image of society and the ideals that should prevail in it. It is a way of recognising the human condition that makes each one of us see the world from a different individual perspective. Freedom is the liberation of diversity of opinion. She is an evolutionary adaptation whose strength lies in exploiting the potential that harbours in a population allowed to act upon their multiple perspectives. It is incumbent upon the politics of freedom to orchestrate the raw resources of pluralism in an age that has released the individual from tribe, clan and caste, even the family; liberated it from any authority spiritual or otherwise whose credibility and absolute power depends on  incapacitating the individual's ability to question it.

Quote of the Day (5) - Oscar Wilde on the Secret of Life

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The secret of life is to appreciate the pleasure of being terribly, terribly deceived. – Oscar Wilde

I have a different version to offer: The secret of life is having fun at what one must do. In the absence of any meaning in life, we humans, "slaves of our passions," as David Hume famously put it, benefit much from a talent or special dexterity, if you have it, to enjoy the activities at the centre of your life.