Foucault on freedom

Interesting take by A.M. Rizvi:

Capitalism thrives on creating desires and multiplying them. Without the constant production and multiplication of new desires the capitalist system would dry up. It is important for the continuous production and reproduction of the system that each and every element of the system must keep ‘desiring’ more and more. The movements that turn into movements of safeguarding people’s rights and base their struggles on the charters of demands really enhance the functioning of the capitalist system (unless the demand is unconditional dissolution and overthrow of capitalism itself - the impossible demand). This is because they work on the false premises that capitalism suppresses desires. Foucault’s turn, in his later work, to the aesthetics of existence that would be based on voluntary asceticism and disciplining desires, was in part a response to this realisation (Foucault, 1988a).

Looking forward to swimming in Foucault this semester.

Right from Wrong

Currently enjoying Michael Sandel's lecture series on justice. How do we know - what is the right thing to do?

This is the first hour-long lecture/discussion of a 12-part series. In this episode Sandel and students from Harvard university talk about pushing a fat man off a bridge to save lives and the merits of cannibalism. If only my Philo 1 prof were as engaging or interesting. Enjoy.

Morality in the 21st Century

The latest guest on Philosophy Bites is American moral philosopher Susan Neiman. In this short podcast she discusses morality in the 21st century.

Neiman suggests that fundamentalism may well be a reaction to this period's unbridled consumerism, that in effect those yearning for a return to the fundamentals reject that the end-all and be-all of life is to amass as many consumer goods as possible. How then can one search for a meaningful life other than what advanced global capitalism permits? Neiman suggests a re-examination of the Enlightment period and the values it has to offer. The other choices would be to settle for a nostalgia in pre-modernity or the cyncisim of the postmodern where nothing is of value, which implies nothing is worth doing. Neiman says the the most crucial element of the Enlightment project is the idea of progress, that is, it allows one to be self-critical, to build from those critiques and move forward.

Suffering

The conventional wisdom goes, going through hardship makes us good people. Philosopher Julian Baggini doesn't seem to think so. So how did this nugget of wisdom become conventional? Baggini has a proposition:

Why then do so many persist with the idea that suffering is good for us? The religious need to, of course. If suffering is not, on balance, a good thing, then there can be no benevolent creator in charge of this show. But even without a theological motivation, the thought of so much suffering without redemption can be almost intolerable. Believing it has a point can be the only way to make life bearable.

Being Human

To deny the body its due is to deny an essential aspect of the human condition. While we are beings of reason and of will, these are tempered by the materiality of hunger and pain. Who we are and what we believe are products of the conditions in which we live. Our values – the things we value, are shaped by our material circumstances. To illustrate, a Canadian might not think twice about leaving leftovers in a restaurant. A Filipino would. Food does not comprise a substantial percentage of a person’s income in Canada. It does in the Philippines. And so, Filipinos value food more than Canadians – and behave in ways that reflect this value.

Interrogating the voters’ motivations for voting a certain way, Cocoy is disturbed by the reasons given by the poorest - “Feed us. That’s the only thing that matters. We don’t’ care whether you steal. We don’t care about your fight. Just feed us.”

He writes, “What I think this survey tells us is that right here, right now, more and more Filipinos are focusing on the material, the bodily needs, rather than the big picture.” Indeed, this may be true. But this reasoning has a logic all its own. Those who suffer hunger will make rational decisions - food and comfort now will weigh more than a nebulous future. When one makes do with P200 a day for example, what is the point of living beyond the mere moment?

Also, valuing a president who “cares for the poor” more than one who is “not corrupt/clean” reflects two things – the condition of powerlessness and quasi-feudal values.

The powerless will not think to question the actions of the powerful. The inhabitants of Tondo will not think it their place to question whether Manny Villar has behaved according to the dictates of the law. What is the point when they cannot do anything about it anyhow? All they will care about is that Villar, the quasi feudal lord, will provide as he sees fit. This system of patronage does not only exist between politicos and the many poor. It is endemic in our entire political system.

It is good to dream the impossible dream. But surely, we all must temper idealism with a little bit of humanity.

Surely, a Place for Critical Philosophy

Still the greatest influence in the critical perspectives of my field, Prof. Duncan Foley reminds me why I found Marx fascinating.

Is Marxism Relevant Today? from Committee on Global Thought on Vimeo.

(Around 20:00)

"The other thing that I'd like to say about Marx, at least from my own reading...is that he problematizes reality in the following sense. We have an awful tendency to sort of putter along, get up in the morning, get dressed and assumed that the way things are is somehow the way things have to be. Actually, mainstream economics goes further than that and has a big strength that says the way things are is the best way things can possibly be. Marx when he was a young man wrote a piece called 'For the Ruthless Criticism of Everything Existing' and he lived that out and wrote that out to a very considerable degree. And the more you read Marx, the more, I hope, you will be drawn to find the world we live in extremely puzzling, extremely problematic, extremely strange as to why it is just the way it is. And why the things happen that do happen."

Surely, in the short history of modernity and global capitalism, this is not as good as it gets.

Clarity from the Left

Epistemological rifts, far from the domain of those who make it their business to study how we know, are significant once their implications in the real world become apparent. I do not claim to have any intimate knowledge of these rifts among leftists in the Philippines. Given this caveat, let me explain the utility of asking questions such as those I have asked Kapirasong Kritika.

Like any student, we often frame reality through the lenses of our discipline. The existence of disciplinary myopia is a human limitation we cannot possibly overcome. We are not omniscient. Neither are we omnipresent. The postmodern intervention is useful in this aspect. Let us acknowledge that the things we know and believe are a sum of our own limited human experience.

Now, science is a human endeavor that aims to build knowledge. Scientists have their theories and hypotheses and aim to test them through experiments. Through rigorous methodologies scientists have proven many things we now know to be true. It is absolute truth that gravity exists. It is absolute truth that once we throw a rock up in the air it will fall back to earth. This is true back in Isaac Newton’s time. It was true a thousand years before that. It will be true a thousand years from now, given that the Earth continues to exist.

Now, what is the difference between a piece of rock and Aling Juana, proprietor of a sari-sari store? Well, while Aling Juana’s physical components may not significantly alter in the course of her lifetime, given she does not meet an accident that will deprive her of limbs or any one of her senses, will her attitudes and beliefs remain the same? It is true today that Aling Juana hates mangoes. This is her attitude. There are many reasons why she hates mangoes – all uniquely her own. The consequence of her belief will drive her not to ever purchase mangoes. Theory translated into action. Will she continue to hate mangoes tomorrow? Who knows? In twenty-four hours a thousand things could happen that might change her mind. That is the difference between a rock and Aling Juana. It is the difference between the study of inert, non-sentient objects and the study of human subjects.

I am reticent to accept willy-nilly any body of knowledge claiming to have the answers to problems besetting the human condition. Largely, this comes from my own positioned study of critical political economy. There are many theories to explain why the Philippines is poor compared to, say, the United States. Can any one theory or any one body of knowledge claim to have the absolute truth as an answer? A RESOUNDING YES animated the ideology of a whole generation of decision-makers among the powerful who sought to shape the world. Theirs was the fool-proof answer to the developing world’s poverty. This failed ideology, as Kapirasong Kritika will probably be familiar with, comes from the discipline of economics – a science of human beings that pretended to have the exactness of the most numeral of sciences – physics. Their claim to absolute truth led to the immiseration of millions around the world. The ill effects of this ideology’s prescriptions, KK will agree, can still be felt today.

I think KK will also agree that there are many ways to interpret the unfolding of politics at any level. He will agree that the dominance of one interpretation over one is necessarily a political struggle. A useful postmodern intervention is this acknowledgment. “Theory is always for someone and some purpose” writes political economist Robert Cox. The science of his vaunted predecessor, to which he and a whole generation of other scholars including this one owe much, is bound by its historical specificity. Karl Marx is not omniscient and omnipresent. He sought to uncover ‘laws’ of Capitalism much in the same manner that his contemporaries sought to uncover ‘laws’ explaining the natural world. As I said, a rock is not a human being. A collection of human beings – in a societal unit such as a country for example – will not be forever cemented in one mold. “Classes” in the specific historical context of nineteenth century Britain cannot be made to function as concept in twenty-first century Philippines. It is testament to Marx’s brilliance that much of his contribution to the body of human knowledge has withstood the test of time. A century and half since the publication of his oeuvre Das Kapital, millions upon millions of events have transpired to change the conditions in which Capitalism, his object of study, functions. For this reason, and as good historical materialists, we need to be critical of these changes.

I have written countless times about the depoliticizing tendencies of biting the postmodern apple hook line and sinker. If everything is relative, as postmodernists say, then what can we believe in? And if we believe in nothing, what do we fight for? I believe that there are certain absolute truths pertaining to the human condition that will apply to all human beings regardless of hue, gender or creed. For example, I hold true that all human beings deserve to live in dignity. My politics will stem from a belief in this truth claim. Now this relates to a value system to which Kapirasong Kritika and I can inter-subjectively agree.

Inequality and Democracy

From Michael Sandel's last Reith lecture, A New Politics of the Common Good, he mentions why inequality poses a danger to the democratic project.

The real problem with inequality lies in the damage it does to the civic project, the common good. Here's why. Too great a gap betwen rich and poor undermines the solidarity that democratic citizenship requires. As inequality deepens, rich and poor live increasingly separate lives. The affluent send their children to private schools...leaving urban public schools to the children of families who have no alternative. A similar trend leads to the withdrawal by the privileged from other other public institutions and facilities...This trend has two bad effects - one fiscal, the other civic.

First, public services deteriorate as those who no longer use them become less willing to support them with their taxes.

Second, public institutions...cease to be places where citizens from different walks of life encounter one another. Institutions that once gathered people together and served as informal schools of civic virtue have become few and far between. The hollowing out of the public realm makes it difficult to cultivate the sense of community that democratic citizenship requires.

On Philippine Democracy, read also:
The Philippines' Low Intensity Democracy
In the Grip of Electoralism
Castrated by Vacuous Argument for the Sake of Vacuous Argument
Simulating Governance

And on the Filipino's withdrawal from the public sphere:
The Depoliticisation of the Filipino and the Marketisation of Everything

The De-politicizing Tendencies of the Hyperreal

As we spend many of our conscious hours in virtuality, there is a temptation to overstate the importance of goings-on in cyberspace. I say yes, swim in the text, but keep your head above the liquidity and the unmoored relativity of language.

Marocharim, in his posts The Slacker Effect and Mona Lisa Overdrive, questions the triumphalist tendencies of social media over the realm of the real. In a nutshell, he does not think that ‘cyberactivism’ is a substitute for agency in the real world. I will be the first to agree with him, but I do not think that agency in either world need be mutually exclusive. Isn’t the divide between the real and representation artificial? And do they not mutually bleed into each other?

But do let us acknowledge the de-politicizing tendencies Marocharim has pointed out. Here the battle is drawn between the Word and the Flesh - the materiality of modernity and the fluidity of postmodernity.

The debate between structuralists (modernists) and post-structuralists (postmodernists) is not new. The first rests on the certitude that there is truth to be known and all knowledge builds foundations to seek truth. Politics then proceeds from this quest. For example, it is true that that Democracy is a good way of governing a self-ascribed community. It is ‘good’ because it rests on principles of equality and justice. Equality and Justice are truths that rest on the material. They are universal values that must be sought and upheld by all humankind.

The second school has attempted to unravel many of the claims of the modern era. Post-structuralists argue that there is no truth – at least no single version of it. Democracy, at least the dominant version of it, they will argue, is a construct unique to the history of a specific place and time. The specificity which lays claim to universality is a dominating and destructive act. While the work of post-structuralists is useful in revealing the heretofore hidden modes of control and domination in knowledge, the uncertainty this has unleashed has destroyed many of the bases from which we as subjects act. If we are unsure about the values ‘equality’ and ‘justice’, whether it is good or bad given the specificity of this place, time and context, what would motivate us to act? What makes us political?

Another triumph of modernity is placing history in a linear continuum, thus the belief in ‘progress.’ One progresses from point A to point B to point C and so on. Implicit in progression is an assumption that point B, is ‘better’ than point A. Thus we can conclude that progress has eliminated slavery. Slavery is bad. Equality is good.

These are some controversies, for decades still unresolved, between the modern and the postmodern, between the Flesh and the Word.

So let us go back to the earlier problematic posed. Is agency or conscious action in the ocean of texts, that is, the cyberworld, a substitute for conscious action in the real world? Obviously not. It is good (see, I’m making a modernist argument here) to acknowledge the limits of cyberactivism. It is good to acknowledge that the Word will not, by itself, transform the world. A simple reality check will alert us to the fact (again a modern invention) that there are still places in this country with no electricity!

Before we become dispirited about the inherent limits of the Word, let us not forget those who read and write it. To read and write constitute conscious acts. To read and write about politics are political acts. But it is important to note that these are beginnings, not ends in themselves.

Eschewing Complacent Realism

Political philosopher David Estlund, on status-quo defenders' fear of Utopian thinking:

I haven’t settled whether perfect people would need laws, courts, police or other hallmarks of normal political conditions. I’ve mainly questioned why that question is supposed to matter. The point isn’t that political theory positively ought to assume moral perfection. It will pay at this point to remind ourselves of the polemical situation. A political theory gives an account of justice, authority, legitimacy or some other central normative political value, and is confronted by an objection on grounds of realism: we all know people won’t act in the ways this theory says that justice, or authority, or legitimacy depend upon. I have argued that it is an adequate reply to point out that the theory never said they would. It only said that there would be no justice or authority or legitimacy unless they did.

And so it pays to ask normative questions, that is, questions about how things ought to be. Read the rest of Estlund's article here.

Michael Sandel on the Moral Limits of Markets

Political philosopher Michael Sandel delivered his Reith Lecture recently. Are there some things which should not be sold? Do we need to think of ourselves less as consumers and more as citizens?

You'll find the 43-minute lecture here. You'll find the transcription here.

If you're unsure about committing almost an hour of your time, here is the short version. I highly recommend that you listen to the short version first!

Liberation

From Waking Life. "The quest is to be liberated from the negative."

Doomed to Leisure

The violence of mass consumption is a slow burn. It sticks to the skin and slowly eats away at the flesh. An array of objects and symbols subject the person in a battery of seduction. The senses are bombarded with loud, garish ploys designed to gain attention, engage in play and finally to seal the transaction. It picks away at your body, leaving none but bone.

Consider the conspicuous image of the girl, red-mouth puckered, sporting the shiny lip gloss. One is assaulted by her pixie eyes, her supple skin and that mouth ready to perform. The violence is in rendering in the victim a lack. That is, of pixie eyes and supple skin rendered perfect by the magic of image manipulators. A woman needs that lip gloss. A man needs that girl. Purchase to fulfil that mass of unarticulated desires.

Consider the image of a grinning heterosexual couple on a green field, flanked on either side by playing children and that dream house. So and so Realty is ready to gift you your dreams. All that you must want. All that you have worked for and have saved monies for is plastered on the giant wall. The anxieties of the norm slice through your fragile ego, articulating your lack, your deviance.

Consider the gadget framed in the vitrine. The shiny metallic glint signals to you the untold pleasures that can be had playing with it. You enter the store and play the simpering suitor, admiring it, caressing it as its pimp sings you its praises. It was created to cater especially to your needs, needful creature that you are. And you must have it to take home to play.

The phantasmagoria of consumption colonises all of the public domain, from one end of this metropolis to the other. Upon entering these churches both extravagant and small, one is forced to genuflect, to lay supplicant to the play of spectacle, to the blaring noise of sounds bouncing off shiny coated floors and walls. The faces of other worshippers are laid bare by harsh fluorescent lights. All are zombie-dead, sheep herded by things that facilitate movement from one space of consumption to the next. The MRT, the roadways, the escalators, the civilised spaces of this city - habitable, walkable, driveable – all lead to these places of worship.

Frankly, I am sick of all this.

-----

Read also The Depoliticisation of the Filipino and the Marketisation of Everything and In Response to Resty O.

The Depoliticisation of the Filipino and Marketisation of Everything

It begins with the Self - the subject at first born free then subsequently shaped and subsumed by its environment. The political is born of the bargaining of conflicting desires of individual selves. The political dies in the event where all desires are harmonised. Anti-politics it is called. While conflicts remain in the realm of the real - manifesting in actual wars, in petty crimes, in the overburdened justice system - they take a backseat to the realm of the unreal, that seething mass of collectivised desires, fed by the basest insecurities of our ego.

The siren call of self-realisation is impossible to resist. The call is heeded in those gigantic structures that litter the urban landscape. In these sanctuaries of hyperconsumption we engage in highly ritualized masturbation. The Self abuses the commodified body - that blank canvass to adorn, to modify, to pamper. To satisfy the self-perpetuating hunger for ego-stroking, the Self must sell its labour to the market, earn enough to reproduce itself its life and its lifestyle, then quickly return to the leisurely activities with which to prop its ego.

Individualised selves comprise this atomised urban society. They are in general young, hip and cosmopolitan. Now a good majority are plugged in to the globalised economy, their body clocks ticking in disharmony from the local, their id swimming in deterritorialised tastes and norms. For this class of selves, the facade of the public are inconvenient barriers that must be transcended, for collectivised desires always reside in the realm of individual private consumption. The public sphere is an anomaly, a paean to a collective identity, an anathema to the autonomous Self.

This, however, does not preclude social relations between Selves. However these relations can only be mediated by market relations. Friendships, loves, kinship are entangled in the web of monetisation. Social relations are at base motivated by the need to quench the thirst of the fragile ego, which can only be satisfied by the currency of money, that symbol of power and capacity in this late stage of modernity.

In the peripheries and interstices of urban centres, there reside masses of bodies unrecognsible. Undifferentiated, inconsequential, eking sustenance from the dregs of the urban centres' wealth-creating machine. These non-Selves are unable to self-articulate and are thus rendered mute. Like garbage and stray animals on the streets or politicians on television, they are background decoration of the public. To avoid seeing the often ugly morass of these bodies and the facade of public institutions - the articulated Self rarely ever ventures in the public sphere. It prefers to inhabit the private sanctuary of its labour and its leisure. It prefers to extenuate social relations with other Selves similarly bent on satisfying collectivised desires of consuming mass-produced objects and mass produced culture, to realise its increasingly mass-produced Self.

My Worldview

A cool quiz from Chris Williams. I'm a postmodernist. No surprise there.

You Scored as Postmodernist Postmodernism is the belief in complete open interpretation. You see the universe as a collection of information with varying ways of putting it together. There is no absolute truth for you; even the most hardened facts are open to interpretation. Meaning relies on context and even the language you use to describe things should be subject to analysis. Existentialist 81% Cultural Creative 81% Postmodernist 81% Romanticist 56% Materialist 50% Modernist 50% Idealist 31% Fundamentalist 31%

Zeitgeist

If we don't start shifting our focus on CARP reform soon (where the Church is an ally) I might finally turn from a tolerant agnostic to a raging atheist!

And now I come across the film 'Zeitgeist' floating on the internet. The first part is a fascinating account of how the Christian religion drew much inspiration from astronomy, astroogy and the study of the natural world. Because 'religion' for some reason (err, lack of reason?) develops an unquestionable infallibility because, well, it is religion, we never hear of accounts such as this one. If we offer a class on the history of Christianity, either we gain a deeper appreciation and understanding of faith or we all convert to something else. I'm betting on the latter.

This FASCINATING stuff. Not for the faint of heart.

I am Harvey Dent

I believe in signposts. While I know I craft my future, because I have a choice, there is still a part of me that feels the cosmos aligns itself once in a while to show me where to next.

I stepped out of the perfect allegory today. Almost three hours of Chris Nolan's philosophising brilliantly packaged in a multi-million dollar Hollywood summer flick. Batman's good battling with Joker's evil. Batman's order duking it out with Joker's chaos. And Harvey Dent, caught in the middle. The ordinary bloke who struggles to do good. Two-face, he is called. He has in him both the capacity to be heroic and to do harm.

I got an important call today. A call to arms. Is this it? Time to climb down my cherished Ivory Tower - where it is safe, far above the din below. From where I perch the bigger picture is clear. Goodness and order are crystal. But the reality on the ground has long been beckoning. On Monday begins the end. I am afraid reality up close might look uglier than expected. Time to test your mettle Sparks. Time to grow a pair. Butch asks me why I am scared shitless. I tell him I fear not reality. I fear myself.

On both interviews I did my best to dissuade them not to take me. In what job interview do you admit your inexperience? In what job interview do you admit knowing nothing? On feeling intimidated? On being way in over your head? And still they took me. Butch says it might be because I am young. Not quite jaded. Not yet battle-weary. Still full of bright shining light.

Stay the course Sparky. Stay the course no matter what.

Meaning

Although I was on campus at 6am this morning, I couldn't bear to go up to my department. I remember too well the events of Monday, and the idea of spending an hour and a half alone wasn't very appealing.

In my classes I gave the requisite pep talk to my students. That yes life is hard but we must continue the battle. It is in the fight that we know ourselves truly - and we come to grips and learn to live with our strengths and our weaknesss. Hopefully it is also in the fight that we find meaning. That we are not here, occupying space, merely to eat, shit and breathe.

There were a few of us who responded to the invite of the former dean to pray for LT's passing. Flanked by two colleagues from my department, I was a few minutes late. They had already started the ceremony, but the secretary ushered us in and gave us a prayer pamphlet. It was a long prayer - one obviously meant to redeem the soul of someone who has wilfully taken his life. I did not know LT well. He only came to class a handful of times. And yet I was truly saddened by his death. The prayer was awfully repetitive. We must have said his name dozens of times. It was saying his name that made me cry. One moment there was a living being. And another there was none. Where has he gone?

It is moments like these where I am glad I have not made my final decision not to believe. And yet I knew, even as I said the words along with everyone else, that I was not praying for LT. Yes, I was paying my respects, but I also understood that the ceremony was for us who are still living. To reassure us that he has gone to a better place. Thankfully the ambiguity of an agnostic allows flirting with such a notion. The ceremony was also to assuage us of our guilt. The rational part of me knows that I could not have done anything to stop what happened. And yet there is a also a part that feels strangely complicit.

Confronted with death, it is unsettling not having any anchor onto which to frame the loss. A devout Christian will have faith in God - that embodiment of Truth under which all of life's events are subsumed. In God such a loss becomes rational - it has meaning. His death was God's plan. He will go to a better place. The rationalisations of the faithful give hope.

I remember a lengthy talk with a friend I left in Oz, a devout Baptist. Being the snob intellectual that I am, I still cannot reconcile intelligence with religiosity. And yet she is without a doubt brilliant. After this talk, filled with plenty of sobbing, I understood that her religion allowed her to function. I had since become more sensitive of the faithful, having also become fast friends with a devout Muslim. I also lived with a young atheist. How uncomfortable was one dinner conversation when we were all sitting at the dinner table. Whilst I did not believe in any of their religions, I thought it was worth defending their right to believe as they chose.

What of my own philosophy? I have no faith in god. Humanist that I am, I have faith in people. In redeeming myself, and in wishing redemption for others, I see reason. I see meaning.

Zen

For the couple of dozen of you who read my blog, thank you for coming with me on this journey. I apologise that my blog posts of late reflect my crisis of id. My emotional intelligence quotient has been failing me. I cannot self-diagnose and thus I cannot specify what is wrong.

I have resolved not to blog for a while. Writing used to be therapeutic. These days they serve to feed this crisis. However I will still endeavour to contribute to Filipino Voices. Thank you for bearing witness.



"If we try to block the stream or resist it, it will simply go around, without a pause, it will find its own way. This way is like a fallen leaf moving along in a stream. If you allow the stream to carry you, its strength becomes yours. You are one with nature. Without clinging, without attachment, leaving the past behind. Living in this moment..."

"...The search for self-realisaiton is powered by our anxieties and our fears which feed our ego, causing our frustration with our daily life. Selfishness, jealousy, anger, hate, which unconsciously serve to protect us. And in doing so, set us in opposition to everyone and everything. To awaken to this realisation is the practice of zen."

Why Do Some Countries Remain Poor While Others Grow Rich?

This is a question that has never stopped nagging me since the very first time I left this country eleven years ago. It is one thing seeing it on television growing up, it is another being in the First World yourself. Explanations by the likes of F. Sionil Jose - which basically say we are poor because of our culture - is simply unsatisfactory. Being a materialist, I believe culture (i.e ways of doing) is fundamentally determined by the material circumstances (i.e. the environment). The question of whether culture produces reality or reality culture is something that I have agonised over for quite a while now.

See:

Are We Poor Because We're Lazy or Lazy Because We're Poor?
In a Wowowee State of Mind
The Philippines as Open Pussy Country?
Excising Cinderella, Maria Clara and Inang Maria From Our Minds
AbsurdiTV

In explaining poverty I prefer being a materialist. In getting this politico-socio-economic unit out of poverty I prefer not being overly deterministic (i.e. we can still make choices that are not necessarily constrained by the economic).

Here is Dani Rodrik, an author I have only read, not heard or seen, delivering a short presentation that attempts to answer this question. I am surprised at how unassuming the man is. And how humble.



In the end its simple. Get the economics and politics right. And culture? Ah. Its probably that sticky, gooey glue that is lodged in between.

Outline:

1. Global income distribution
2. Decomposing global income inequalities to within - and between-countries components
3. Understanding why some countries produce so much more output per worker than others

Important points:

"Would you rather be rich in a poor country or poor in a rich country?"

- Most of Rodrik's students would rather be rich in a poor country. But in actuality, the poor in a rich country are better off.

- World inequality has gone from almost exclusively a "within" country to mostly "an "across" country phenomena.

- What produces GDP per worker?
a) factor endowments - natural resources, people
b) "efficiency factor" - how these endowments are organised in a society

a+b = total factor productivity

What accounts for the differences across countries? Factor endowments or Efficiency?

Illustration: Turkey vs. US factor productivity. Turkish factor productivity is only 1/3 of US. Why?

- Economic Dualism in Turkey: a modern industrial sector (high productivity) and a traditional agricultural sector (low productivity)

What are the social and structural bottlenecks that keep the two sectors from closing the gap in productivity?

a) Poor institutional environment - government effectiveness, political stability, over-all, regulatory mechanisms, "rule of law" (i.e. predictable, consistent) (the organisation of society)

b) Macroeconomic instability and overvalued currency - an overvalued currency tends to lower labour productivity. An environment with a competitive (i.e. low) currency value tends to move labour and capital to the more productive parts of the economy.

c) "Innovation" doesn't necessarily mean heavy investments in R&D. Innovation in a middle income country is success in removing the impediments to the structural transformation of the country.

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What needs to be done is to organise society in a such a way that maximises wealth production per person - this is the economic part. How to do this 'organisation' is fundamentally political and bounded by our culture.

Oh. And I will take Rodrik's explanation over Jose's any day.