Creativity: is it the answer to Techno-feudalism?

A friend recently sent me this link to a Times Radio interview with  Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis in which he discusses his contention that traditional capitalism, and social democracy, are dead. 

It is being replaced by what he describes as 'techno-feudalism'. The rise of the online giants Amazon and Facebook see a massive rise in the incomes that economists describe as 'rent' ("In neoclassical economics, economic rent is any payment to the owner of a factor of production in excess of the cost needed to bring that factor into production." Wikipedia), an accumulation of wealth that is not affected by the output of goods and services in a traditional sense, an income that rises (and falls) with no significant impact on operating costs. The net result is the accumulation of increasing levels of wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer people, and the rise of a new economic elite which he thinks of in much the same way as we might imagine the feudal lords of the middle ages and the era of feudalism.

We seem to be seeing increasing evidence of the use of this wealth to influence political outcomes that benefit that elite (it seems difficult to believe that these donations are made for purely altruistic reasons) while ignoring the remainder of society. Surely if people in general are well cared for, then even the wealthy benefit? The OECD refutation of the trickle down effect, and their view that higher levels of economic inequality reduce potential economic growth, support that contention.

I am not a political analyst, but it does seem to me that in some parts of the world (including in Aotearoa New Zealand) we are seeing the pundits of neo-liberalism, those who believe that our wealth and wellbeing are the result of individual effort only, gaining political power. Some of that support comes from those who will only ever work for someone else, who will only ever work for a living. That feels a little like the metaphorical turkeys voting for an early Christmas.

What are the rest of us to do? Apparently we don't work hard enough; the catch cry is 'if you only worked harder, you too could be a millionaire'. Try telling that to the nurse who pulls 60-80 hour work weeks, or the teacher who regularly does 70 hours in a week, with no weekends.

How do we cope? What can we do in the face of such seemingly unassailable economic power?

Perhaps our ultimate act of rebellion is to indulge our creativity, to find our creative voices, in whatever field we need in order to feel more fully human. I wonder if in doing so we gain sufficient separation from the techno-elite to be able to shrug them off, to exist in a world not dominated by Amazon or Facebook, or our iPhone or laptop (yep, I see the sublime contradiction in me typing this on a laptop, and posting it on a blog connected with a 'tech giant'). The question is, can we use the technology in a way that liberates rather than enslaves? Can we crawl out from beneath the power, the command, of our techno-feudalistic overlords?

What a fascinating thing to try and think through. Good luck!!

The hidden malice beneath right wing education policy

 As we head into the 2023 general election, it is worth paying some attention to the education policies of the political parties. I feel a great deal of concern over the general thrust of the policies of the right: ACT and National. Their free market view of education has a particularly odious flavour to it, one that warrants exposure.

The ACT policy in particular encapsulates the general right wing philosophy that the market knows best. Every child gets an allowance -a 'voucher - (well the parents actually) which they then take to their preferred school. This creates the funding for each school. The philosophy here is that communities will be attracted to the best schools, and those are the schools that will survive while those that do not attract parents and children will fail, and disappear. Social Darwinism applied to education, as 'bad' schools are weeded out, and good schools flourish.

I think that the philosophy is flawed on many levels. Is there really a market? Theoretical markets operate on the basis of a series of assumptions. Here are just three of them:

• Everyone has perfect knowledge (so all parents know exactly what goes on in schools, how they operate, etc)
• There are so many producers (schools, in this case) that adding one more or taking one away will have no noticeable effect on the market.
• All resources are perfectly mobile, so a failed school is closed, and can instantly be shifted to a different location. Similarly whānau and tamariki will shift to wherever they need to to be able to attend school.

Really? Not one of those assumptions holds true in education (or in almost any market in the real world, I suggest). Parents rarely know what goes in any school. They make judgements based on their biases, their preconceptions, about a school, about a neighbourhood, about people. They create' winner' and loser' schools based on those biases, they create a self fulfilling prophecy. I've written my arguments about the myth of equal opportunity here.

But that's not the most odious thing about this model. It assumes that there will be winner and loser schools, and so there must ipso facto be winner and loser akonga, rangatahi, tamariki, whānau. Statistically speaking, in Aotearoa we know that the winners will almost always be those from higher income families, and the losers will mostly be those from lower income families, or from Māori and Pasifika whānau. This means that a significant portion of our population is condemned to educational under achievement by virtue of the proposed nature of the structure of education. That view is morally bankrupt in my opinion. It also lacks all economic sense. At a time when we need every human being to be creative, to be a critical thinker, and a productive member of society, we cause inestimable damage to the economy, and to our material standard of living, by condemning a significant proportion of our young people to educational underachievement.

The policies of the right also miss a fundamental attribute of markets. Buyers and sellers in any market do not, contrary to the theory, have equal market power. Transactions are not a win/win scenario. I wonder if too many of these social transactions are a zero sum game: for every win there is a loss? That would mean that for every child admitted to one of these supposed 'high performing' schools, another child has to attend one of the supposed 'low performing' schools. Why would you thank that is a good thing to do?

These policies also miss what I believe from experience to be an important attribute of education. It is not a competitive activity but a collaborative one.  Teachers and schools produce better outcomes when they collaborate. Educational impact is in my opinion a gestalt concept: the whole is more than the sum of the parts. I have spent most of my 44 year career working in education, concluding my time as Tumuaki of a successful middle sized urban secondary school. It was a school that I know many in the community might have labelled as a bad school. Yet it wasn't. It was a good school, and during my seven year tenure we proved that. It was a fabulous school, with wonderful young people, and an amazing talented staff. You can read about our journey as a kura here. I'd like to think that I pulled my weight as leader, that I played my part in the success of the kura, its teachers, its rangatahi, its whānau. My point is, maybe I know a thing or two about what makes schools successful.. maybe, as do most Tumuaki and kaiako in fact. And maybe, just maybe, we collectively know a thing or two more than politicians about what makes schools successful.

None of that means that we can't do better. As Maya Angelou said: “Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.” Politicians need to stop meddling. They act as if they are Captain Kirk on the bridge of the USS Enterprise giving that classic command: "Make it so, Mr Sulu". 

(Source: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/william-shatner-how-star-trek-helped-save-pows-vietnam-1196492/ accessed 11.09.2023)

Some politicians seem to believe that they know more than educators (both practitioners and academics) about education, and that they know how to solve the problems.  

BUZZZZZ ....  that's the big red 'buzzer of doom right there.

They do not ... education is as complex a field as any. The arrogance implicit in these policy positions is gobsmacking. 

And while the National party policy does not explicitly mention vouchers, the likelihood of a coalition means we are likely to see at the very least the return of charter schools. And the National Party policy does espouse a return to what it calls rigorous standardised testing, a return that will mean that, as my former colleague Henry used to say, 'we spend too much time weighing the pig and not enough time feeding it'. No amount of testing will improve educational outcomes. What will is a reduction in poverty and inequality, the nurturing of school environments and climates that are built on strong positive relationships, and the resourcing of kura and kaiako so that they can continue to improve, and to do their jobs.

Education must not be treated as some sort of political football. The cost is too  great. A far better approach is to empower the profession to improve, and to resource it accordingly. LISTEN to what the profession is saying. And beware false prophets (you could be forgiven for spelling that 'profits' in this context). Education must not be abandoned yet again to the neo-liberbal mantra, a mantra that has overseen a dramatic increase in inequality in Aotearoia since the 1980s, and accordingly seen the biggest push ever towards educational inequality.

Yes we can do better in our teaching of reading, and mathematics. But that doesn't mean that the politicians know how best to do that. Resource us, we know how. Give teachers time in their day to upskill, to learn how best to teach reading, for example. In my experience tea hers rarely sit their saying 'why the *** would I change?'. They are normally sitting there saying 'what does that look like, what will. I be doing, and when will I have time to do it?" Stop undermining the teaching profession. Stop blaming teachers, and start resourcing them. These are people who care.. deeply .. about young people. These are people who thrive on the success of those young people. No teacher gets up in the morning saying "well, I think I'll ** over that kid in my year 10 class today". 

And HOW DARE YOU condemn young people to educational failure just because they were born on the wrong side of the tracks!!!

Why 'equality of opportunity' in the free market is a myth

 We hear it often, don't we, especially from the neo-liberal right. 'We don't believe in equality of outcome', we believe in 'equality of opportunity', and 'as long as we all get the same opportunities that's all we can do, after that it's what we each make of the opportunities'. The idea is described as 'Social Darwinism', described via a simple Google search as:

Social Darwinists believe in “survival of the fittest”—the idea that certain people become powerful in society because they are innately better. Social Darwinism has been used to justify imperialism, racism, eugenics and social inequality at various times over the past century and a half

But I argue that equality of opportunity is a myth, it has never existed. I have two underlying arguments for this position:

1. The flawed underlying assumptions of the market, and
2. The inevitable bias and prejudice of human nature

The assumptions of the market:

Those who proclaim the power of the market and its efficacy in solving our economic problems I suggest most often do not know let alone understand the underlying assumptions on which their market theory is built. The market concept began life with what is called 'perfect competition'. That is the basis for the market and for it to work, a series of assumptions are made about the world, all founded on a rationalist view of the world, of life, and of society. The assumptions are:

1. Homogeneous product: that is, all producers sell identical products, you cannot tell the difference between an item from producer 1 and producer 1001
2. There are many sellers, in fact so many that the entry or exit of any one producer will have no noticeable impact on total production, and so on price 
3. There are no barriers to entry or exit for any producer 
4. All market participants have perfect knowledge, that is, everyone (both buyers and sellers) knows everything they need to know to participate in the market
5. All resources (physical resources, natural resources, human resources) are perfectly mobile. Pick up your factory building and move it from Tamaki Makaurau to Bluff, shift those 47 whānau from Whanganui a tara to Māwhera, instantly transform the oil refinery to producing flour, you get the picture
6. All producers are price takers, that is, they cannot determine market prices
7. Consumers  have market sovereignty, that is, the choices of consumers send signals to producers that then determine what is produced. So persuasive advertising doesn't exist in this world.

All of these factors ought to mean that there are no power imbalances. Consumers and producers carry equal weight of power. Workers and employers carry equal weight of power. The rich and the poor carry equal weight of power. 

Now, I don't know about you, but I've yet to see any part of the world where all of those assumptions exist, well where any of them exist actually.

Economics then morphs the model to what it calls imperfect competition (also covering the extremes of oligopoly, duopoly, and monopoly), and to the concepts of market failure (presumably those states where the market assumptions begin to break down). The economics of market failure is the real killer. It would for example suggest that government intervention is warranted whenever producers do not meet the full costs of their production, as the market requires all costs to be factored into production if we are to attain 'allocative efficiency' in the market. So economics would espouse 'polluter pays' policies, which would see farmers paying all of the costs for their methane and CO2 emissions, and drivers paying all of the pollution costs of driving their cars. We have entered the dark world of spill over costs or externalities.

I have yet to se the right wing market pundits proclaim such an idea.

We can go a step further and say that the model assumes rational behaviour from all market participants, and that's several hundred years of economic theory right there.

This brings me to the second issue.

Human bias and prejudice:

Regardless of how we are raised, regardless of our world or life experiences, every one of us carries bias and prejudice in our heads. I understand that there is an evolutionary psychology argument that we have evolved to fear difference purely because it might represent a threat to our 'group' and its survival.

In a column in the NZ Listener (January 28-February 3 2023) Marc Wilson in a Psychology column titled 'Us and them' wrote:

"According to the American Psychology Association's APA Dictionary of Psychology 'prejudice' has two closely related meanings. The second is shorter: "any preconceived attitude or view, whether favourable or unfavourable." The lengthy first definition feels like a more specific elaboration of the second: that prejudice comprises negative emotional, cognitive, and behavioural attitudes towards people based upon their membership of some group. Racism then is prejudice based on racial grouping etc."

I suggest that for those with sufficient money to live comfortably, there may well be a prejudice against those who struggle financially. "Lazy ***'s", "Need to get off their """"s", "I managed to get rich from hard work, there's no reason why they can't do the same".. I suspect we've heard them all. I wrote this poem when thinking about this issue:

So what? The free market is a nonsense. There is no such thing in the real world, so the idea that the free market gives the best allocative solutions to our economic problem is a nonsense. Further, all societies are riven with bias and prejudice. It's an implicit part of the 'human condition'. This means that everyone does NOT get a ' fair suck of the sav', everyone does NOT have equal opportunity.

In short, thinking that all we have to do is give everyone equal opportunity is an utter nonsense.

We come back to the ultimate question: what sort of society do we want to live in? I believe it was Gandhi who was reputed to have said "we can judge the quality of a society by the way it treats its most vulnerable members"? 

Putting our faith in the free market will, I reckon, result in inequality as everyone does NOT get equal opportunity. The free market as portrayed in text books is a myth, yet all too often those on the right worship it as a 'utopia', holding firm to the belief that it actually exists. 

Equal opportunity is. a'myth'. What sort of society do we want to live in?