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!!!

Neo-Liberalism, the free market and religion.. yeah right

There are those who state their opinions as fact. And then there are those who base their opinions on facts. I like to think that I am one of the latter. I have for quite some time been sitting on a series of views around neo-liberalism, free markets, and Christianity. Recent events on the political campaign trail have finally prompted me to go back to the notes I drafted some two months ago, and put fingers to keyboard.

This entire discussion of course has to be framed with the clear understanding that we all carry cognitive and emotional biases. Being aware of these may not reduce the degree to which we exercise them, and I am no different. Confirmation bias is perhaps the 'biggie' that we all need to confront, and all too often too few of us do.

That said, let's start with a look at the impact of neo-liberal freee market ideologies. The ideology bases itself largely on the work of Adam Smith that many derive from his book 'An inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations' (1776) in which he stated:

…THE INVISIBLE HAND…

[The rich] consume little more than the poor, and in spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity…they divide with the poor the produce of all their improvements. They are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, (my 'bolding') which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants, and thus without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society (again, my 'bolding'), and afford means to the multiplication of the species.

The Wealth Of Nations, Book IV, Chapter V, Digression on the Corn Trade, p. 540, para. b 43.

This is has been. taken as an underlying truth by many, a justification for action that is fundamentally selfish in nature. I would restate it this way: 'if we act in our own best interests we generate the best outcomes for everyone else too'.

Underlying theories of economics have been developed within what is termed the neo-classical school of economics. The 'trickle down' theory is one in particular that is often cited by the political right. It goes like this: if wealth is generated amongst higher income earners, or those with more wealth (these two things are different) then as a result of their spending of that additional wealth or income, this income is spread across the economy. Or put another way, if we provide economic largesse for the ealthy, then they will spend it (there seems to be an implication, what's more, that they will know the best way to spend) in a way that it spreads out across everyone else in the economy. It 'trickles down' from higher income earners t lower income earners. It is the subject of a concept called the 'income multiplier', a statistical calculation by which we can even calculate the extent of the increase in GDP that will result form that initial stimulus. The logic is impeccable. Love it. It's a shame it doesn't work. There's a further comment below on this.

The OECD, in a report date back in 2011, agreed that 'trickle down' is flawed, it doesn't actually work. Here it was, as reported in The Washington Post in December 2011. So it seems reasonable to suggest that in fact when you increase the incomes of high income earners, or the wealth of those with greater material wealth what you actually do is... increase the incomes of high income earners, or the wealth of those with greater material wealth. Those less well off receive little of no benefit from that. Interpretation: tax breaks for the wealthy do not actually benefit those less well off.

Keynesian economics even contains an interesting piece of theory about this, called the 'marginal propensity to consume'. That concept goes like this. If each of us is given an additional dollar (the 'marginal' or last dollar) then we will spend a set proportion of it. Those on low incomes will spend a high proportion of that dollar because they are currently struggling to make ends meet, to put food on the table etc, whereas those on high incomes will be motivated to spend less of t because they are already meeting a large proportion of their material needs. The MPC for lo income earners is greater than that for high income earns. So statistically speaking if Government gives an extra dollar to some one below the average wage more of that dollar will be spent back into the economy, so the economy will receive more stimulus than if that same dollar were given to someone on a higher income. Remember that this is likely to be both 'chunky' and messy' in its nature, and operates at the macro economic level. So there may well be individuals in the economy who do not behave this way, but statistically speaking this is what we ought to see. Interestingly, the Keynesian view is that that income multiplier I mentioned above will be greater when a financial stimulus is given to those on lower incomes. The multiplier is the reciprocal of that mpc. 

Then there is the argument that inequality acts as a great incentive for people to strive, to work harder, to be innovative, and this benefits the economy through increased economic growth. Again, the logic seems flawless. Yup, but .. nope., the data says this is not true. Increased inequality appears to reduce economic growth. So with greater inequality we are all worse off, even the wealthy. Here is the OECD repot on that one. 

Finally, the evidence on the impact of the impact of the past 36 years of neo liberal or free market economics in new Zealand is that our distribution of wealth has grown ever greater. We currently have the greatest gap between rich and poor that we have ever had. Here is a study commissioned by NZ Treasury that only spanned the period 1981 to 1996 showing the changes that occurred. 

There are in fact more fundamental flaws in the free market model too, flaws that strict advocates seem oblivious of. The market model makes asries of assumptions in order to work. For example it assumes:

• Perfect knowledge
• Consumer sovereignty, and
• Perfect mobility of resources.

We do not all have perfect knowledge on which to base decisions. I think markets magnify the imbalance of knowledge and power, because producers tend to have more knowledge than consumers. This is not a level playing field. This is one of the issues that lies behind the concept of market failure, and hence the need for government intervention. in markets. Perhaps one of the simplest examples of this is the need for consumer laws (our Consumer Guarantees Act, and our Fair Trading Act, to name just two). These exist because there is a power imbalance.

Another example of market failure: with goods that we term Merit goods, and Public goods (capitalised because those are proper nouns, names for the goods in economic theory), if left to the market the market will under provide. That is, you'll get less of these goods than is in the economy's best interests. Education is just one such Merit Good'. his isa classic argument for NOT using market provision for schools, and for not using a voucher system, I have written elsewhere about the impact of market provision on education outcomes in a professional blog post titled 'Why school competition isn't optimal'. These approaches further embed institutional racism at its worst.

So all in all, the free market economy has not served New Zealanders as well as we might like to think. My own interpretations based on this data are:

• Economic growth has been less than it might have been, because of the growing disparity between rich and poor
• We have continued to assume that discredited theories of trickle down and incentive are true when they are demonstrably not so
• We have created a growing underclass of poor, with what I would interpret to be a less economically just society. My suspicion is that this underclass is overly represented with Māori and Pasifika peoples.

Now, here's the thing that intrigues me. I am at a loss to know how one can be both a right wing, neo-liberal, free market, supporter, and also a Christian. I apologise to those of other faiths, as the Christian lens is the only one through which i can view this. My suspicion here is however that other faiths might well see things similarly. While not an overtly practising Christian, I was raised in a Christian environment, and learnt much about the faith and its values while working for 15 years in an independent school with an Anglican ethos. 

My understanding is that Christian values would have us:

• Look after those less well off than ourselves
• Protect the weak
• Use our actions rather than our words to support those less well off than ourselves.
• Treat others with aroha/love, and respect .. basically, whakawhanaungataga, manaakitanga

In my confusion, and my desire to clarify my thinking on this, I asked a friend and former colleague who is an Anglican minister what I am missing here. I could not understand how one could support the right, and also be a Christian. I hd put that down to my own limited knowledge of Christianity. He commented that I wasn't getting this wrong at all. He agreed. He suggested that had Christ been alive today, he would probably have been a 'rampant socialist'.

So in my opinion the impacts of the free market are such that they run counter to the values that ought to be a central part of Christianity (and, I suspect) of all of the other great faiths.

I cannot for the life of me understand how anyone professing to be a Christian can also support the political right, and the free market. Either they don't understand the free market, or they are oblivious to the evidence, or they don't understand Christian values, or they are being disingenuous, or any combination of these factors. That's my opinion.

What matters most?

What sort of society do we want to live in? Regardless of your particular persuasion - Christian or Atheist, Muslim or Hindu, this is a question you have either thought about, or ought to have thought about, at some time. And at Christmas time, as stories come out of children who have no Christmas, we see the national past-time of welfare bashing develop momentum ready for the post Christmas frenzy.

Like it or not, we have vulnerable people all around us. I believe the view that you can judge the quality of a society by the way it treats its most vulnerable members.

Apparently it is difficult to attribute the sentiment to any one person. For example:

"A nation's greatness is measured by how it treats its weakest members." ~ Mahatma Ghandi

"A society will be judged on the basis of how it treats its weakest members and among the most vulnerable are surely the unborn and the dying," ~Pope John Paul II

A decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilization.~Samuel Johnson, Boswell: Life of Johnson

All of these quotes I found with a simple Google search on http://askville.amazon.com/measure-civilization-treats-weakest-members-accurate-quote/AnswerViewer.do?requestId=4718239

It is with a paradoxical degree of irritation then that I read and hear some incredibly intolerant views expressed by others in society. News stories of those unable to help themselves regularly evoke responses that range from intolerance to outright belligerence with accusations that include 'idiots', 'bludgers', and other labels I'd rather not print. So how come we have vulnerable people in our society?

So, let's try to put some thinking straight. Here's one perspective.

A common view is that people at the bottom of the 'social heap' simply don't want to help themselves. That's interesting. It assumes that we are all the same. It assumes for example that we all have the same abilities, or the same personality profiles. It assumes that we have the same risk profiles, or the same 'intelligence' (whichever model you prefer to use to identify those measurable attributes that we call 'intelligence'). That's not just tricky, it's downright untrue. At the risk of lecturing, any attribute of a naturally occurring population is spread across that population in a normal distribution.

Without that we wouldn't have this:

or this:

But just as there are those at the top of the pile, so there are those at the bottom. That's why we see this:

and this:

I am not suggesting anything here other than that we don't all have the same capabilities. Some of us are born with more short twitch fibres than long in our muscles making us more suitable to one type of running over another. No amount of training is going to make a sprinter out of someone with the wrong muscle twitch fibres, for example. (See the work of Stephen J Gould in his book 'The mismeasure of man' for an alternative view about the normal distribution though).

There are also arguments abounding about 'nature vs nurture' and the impact of each on our development as adults. And of course there is the argument that birth doesn't have to define destiny, that any of us is capable of changing our position in life with the right application.

L

However, laying blame is the easiest response. You might even label it the 'lazy' response, but it doesn't help the situation in any way shape or form. 

Those in wheelchairs don't chose to be there. I'd also venture the generalisation that those living in poverty don't chose the live that way either. Don't get me wrong. I am not stupid enough to suggest that every person who lives in poverty is incapable of helping themselves. There are always those that choose not to help themselves. 

Consider the accusation that those at the bottom of our supposed social heap should get off the bums and work. Let's get them all to start their own businesses. Well, starting your own business requires a good idea, a huge work ethic, and a risk profile that accepts risk. 

How does that look? It depends on the personality type model that you use. Here's one:

There are many different models of personality type, and argument amongst psychologists on the validity of any or all of these too. The point is that we are different. Not all of us have a risk profile that lends itself to new ventures. There are those amongst us who are risk seekers. There are those amongst us who are more risk averse. It seems reasonable to assume that the willingness to accept risk will be distributed normally across the population, like any other attribute. Why have I never started up a business? I am relatively risk averse, simple!! For some of us simply changing jobs, or even accepting a job, is a 'risk' that pushes us too far.

If we talk about accepting employment from others, the economist might argue that there are no jobs for them, or that there is a mismatch between the skill sets of job seekers and the job market. We could equally argue that the drive, the 'get up and go' required to search out a job isn't equally distributed amongst us all.

However my argument is that we mustn't generalise across everyone in any of our artificial categories. As I said earlier, laying blame is the 'lazy' response, but it is not a helpful response. A more productive response might be, what can I do to help? How could I change the situation? Maybe I 'pay it forward' with a coffee for someone else in the coffee queue. Maybe I donate some long unused clothing to the City Mission. What matters in my opinion is that we generate a more caring society.

Every human being has value, every human being has talents and skills, every human being has something to offer to society. The bigger and more challenging question, the tough question, is how we get more and more of those at the bottom of our social pile to see their talents and skills? How do we encourage more and more people to be the best they can be, and make the best contribution they can to the society in which they live? And how do we care for those most vulnerable in our society?

"A nation's greatness is measured by how it treats its weakest members." ~ Mahatma Ghandi