Browsing PBH By Articles

Dynamics In Quantifying Human Unhappiness

The Article: The Political Economy of Unhappiness by William Davies in the New Left Review.

The Text: For the majority of its history, Britain’s National Health Service has scarcely ever considered the specific health needs of working people, other than those of its own staff. Almost by definition, the NHS was originally dedicated to supporting people who were outside of the labour market—new mothers, children, the sick, the elderly and the dying. British doctors issued ‘sick notes’, certificates that were given to patients, informing their employers that they were unable to work. But in recent years policy-makers have begun to challenge these assumptions, along with the binary split between health and illness, economically productive and economically needy, on which they rested. In 2008, a review of the health of Britain’s working-age population was published jointly by the Department of Health and the Department of Work and Pensions. Most strikingly, it calculated that the annual cost to the British economy of health-related absence from work was £100bn, only around £15bn less than the entire cost of the NHS.

‘Wellbeing’ provides the policy paradigm by which mind and body can be assessed as economic resources, with varying levels of health and productivity. In place of the binary split between the productive and the sick, it offers gradations of economic, biological and psychological wellness. And in place of a Cartesian dualism between tasks of the body and those of the mind, blue and white collar, proponents of ‘wellbeing’ understand the optimization of mind and body as amenable to a single, integrated strategy. One of the leading influences on the UK government’s work and wellbeing programme, Gordon Waddell, is an orthopaedic surgeon whose book The Back Pain Revolution helped transform policy perspectives on work and health. Contrary to traditional medical assumptions—that ‘rest and recuperation’ are the best means of getting the sick back to work—Waddell argued that, in the case of back pain, individuals could recover better and faster if they stayed on the job.

Waddell’s findings suggested that, even where work is primarily physical, medical and economic orthodoxy had underestimated the importance of psychological factors in determining health and productivity. Being at work has the psychological effect of making people believe themselves to be well, which in turn has a positive effect on their physical wellbeing. Hardt and Negri argue that, while ‘immaterial’ or ‘cognitive’ labour still only accounts for a small proportion of employment in quantitative terms, it has nevertheless become the hegemonic form of labour, serving ‘as a vortex that gradually transforms other figures to adopt its central qualities’. Waddell’s work is a case of this transformation in action. The emerging alliance between economic policy-makers and health professionals is generating a new consensus, in which the psychological and ‘immaterial’ aspect of work and illness is what requires governing and optimizing, even for traditional manual labour. In place of the sick note, a new ‘fit note’ was introduced in 2010, enabling doctors to specify the positive physical and mental capabilities that a patient-employee still possessed and which an employer could still put to use.

There was another, more urgent reason for the new policy paradigm. As labour has become more ‘immaterial’, so has the nature of health-related absence from work. Some £30–40bn of the annual £100bn lost to the UK economy through health-related absence was due to mental-health disorders. Around a million people in the UK are claiming incapacity benefit due to depression and anxiety. Figure 1 indicates the gradual ‘dematerialization’ of incapacity over recent years. The turn towards ‘wellbeing’, as a bio-psycho-social capacity, enables employers and healthcare professionals to recognize the emotional and psychological problems that inhibit work, but also to develop techniques for getting employees to improve their wellbeing and productive potential. Even more than back pain, mental illness is considered to be better treated by keeping people in work, than absenting them from it. In contrast to a neo-classical or utilitarian perspective, which would treat work as the opposite of utility, many economists also now argue that work is a positive force for mental health, and that unemployment causes suffering out of any proportion to the associated loss of earnings.

Depressive hegemony

Depression is the iconic illness in this respect. Indeed, we might say that if ‘immaterial’ labour is now the hegemonic form of production, depression is the hegemonic form of incapacity. Typically, depression is characterized by a lack of any clear clinical definition; indeed it is often defined as anything that can be treated with anti-depressants. Depression is just sheer incapacity, a distinctly neo-liberal form of psychological deficiency, representing the flipside of an ethos that implores individuals to act, enjoy, perform, create, achieve and maximize. In an economy based in large part on services, enthusiasm, dynamism and optimism are vital workplace resources. The depressed employee is stricken by a chronic deflation of these psycho-economic capacities, which can lead him or her to feel economically useless, and consequently more depressed. The workplace therefore acquires a therapeutic function, for if people can somehow be persuaded to remain in work despite mental or physical illness, then their self-esteem will be prevented from falling too low, and their bio-psycho-economic potential might be rescued. Many of the UK government’s strategies for reducing incapacity-benefit claims and health-related absence focus on reorienting the Human Resources profession, such that managers become better able to recognize and support depressed and anxious employees. Lifting the taboo surrounding mental illness, so as to address it better, has become an economic-policy priority.

In the early 1990s, the study of the psychological effects of unemployment was the catalyst for a new and rapidly expanding branch of neo-classical economics: happiness economics. Together with the concept of wellbeing, happiness—sometimes referred to as ‘subjective wellbeing’—provides policy-makers with a new analytical tool with which to measure and govern economic agents. It represents one prominent attempt to cope with the ‘crisis of measure’ that arises when capitalism’s principal resources and outputs are no longer solely physical, yet still require economic quantification in order to be valued. At an aggregate level, concern for the happiness of entire nations, and the failure of economic growth to improve it, has inspired political leaders to demand new official ‘indicators’ of social and economic progress, which account for this intangible psychological entity. President Sarkozy’s ‘Stiglitz Commission’ on the measurement of national progress made headlines around the world, while the Australian, American and British statistical agencies are already collecting official data to track national happiness levels. The gap between growth in material and psychological prosperity, known as ‘Easterlin’s Paradox’ after a 1974 article on this topic by economist Richard Easterlin, is soon to receive official endorsement.

Unhappiness has become the critical negative externality of contemporary capitalism. In addition to the policy interventions already mentioned, the New Labour government introduced an Increasing Access to Psychological Therapies (iapt) programme, to make Cognitive Behavioural Therapy more widely available via the NHS. Richard Layard, an economist at the London School of Economics appointed by Blair as the UK’s ‘happiness tsar’, stressed the economic significance of this programme, urging that it be expanded further in response to rising unemployment. The sheer inefficiency of depression, and the efficiency of CBT in tackling it, is demonstrated by Layard in a paper making the ‘business case’ for spending more public money on talking cures. CBT, and policy enthusiasm for it, is controversial amongst psychotherapists and psychologists, many of whom view it as a ‘sticking plaster’ which conceals mental illness, at best for limited periods of time. Yet, by virtue of being clearly time-limited—a course of CBT can last a mere six sessions—and output-oriented, it is amenable to an economic calculus in a way that traditional psychoanalysis or psychotherapy are patently not. Programmes for getting unemployed people back to work in the UK now offer CBT courses, in an effort to re-inflate their desire to overcome economic odds.

Thinking pleasure

Continue Reading

Examining The Legacy Of Tony Judt

The Article: Tony Judt: A Cooler Look by Dylan Riley in the New Left Review.

The Text: Accolades continue to be piled upon the historian Tony Judt, following his untimely death in August 2010. For the Guardian, he was ‘a fearless critic of narrow orthodoxies’, ‘a great historian’, ‘a brilliant political commentator’. For the New York Review of Books, ‘a source of inspiration’, who sought to ‘embrace difference’—‘like Isaiah Berlin’—within historical accounts that were ‘harmonious, convincing, and true’; like Camus, Blum and Aron, Judt knew what it was to bear the intellectual’s ‘burden of responsibility’. To the Economist, he was ‘erudite and far-sighted’, ‘a meticulous intellect’—‘an intellectual with a capital I’. More circumspectly, the New York Times saluted his ‘deep suspicion of left-wing ideologues’. In June 2011 a Paris conference, jointly organized by the NYRB and ceri SciencesPo, celebrated Judt’s ‘scholarly rigour, elegance of style and acuteness of judgement’. Morally, he was ‘fearless’, ‘prophetic’, a new Orwell; intellectually, he was ‘formidable’, possessed of a ‘forceful lucidity’; as a historian of French political life, happily ‘inoculated against the revolutionary ideas that had been the stock in trade of the intellectual engagé’. To what extent are these plaudits confirmed by a sober examination of Judt’s work, held to the normal scholarly standards of intellectual coherence and empirical plausibility? What follows will offer an evaluation of his writings, as the necessary precondition for an adequate assessment of his contribution as historian, publicist and scholar.

Tony Judt was born in 1948, the son of Jewish immigrants, and brought up in lower-middle-class circumstances in London’s south-west suburbs. ‘Coming from that branch of East European Jewry that had embraced social democracy’, he would explain, ‘my own family was viscerally anti-Communist.’ Educated at a small South London private school, he served as national secretary of a Labour Zionist youth organization before going up to King’s College, Cambridge in 1967. Post-graduate study took him to the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he seems to have acquired his life-long distaste for Marxist intellectuals; and thence to southern France, where he undertook doctoral research on the history of French socialism in the Var. His first two books would draw extensively on this work: La Reconstruction du Parti Socialiste, 1921–1926 was published in Paris in 1976; Socialism in Provence, 1871–1914, a ‘study in the origins of the French left’, appeared three years later. The mid-70s was a time of heightened establishment concern in France at the prospect of a joint Socialist–PCF election victory, in the aftermath of the Portuguese revolution. This background informs the central preoccupation in both Judt’s books with why France had failed to produce a reliable social-democratic party, on the Anglo-Nordic model. Unlike its solidly anti-Communist counterparts, the British Labour Party or German sdp, the Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière (SFIO) had never quite shed the lexicon of Marxism and still appealed to a notion of socialism even after 1945, when its political practice was otherwise quite ‘acceptable’. The themes of his doctoral research would prove to be central to much of Judt’s subsequent career.

1. THE FRENCH LEFT

Judt’s first book, The Reconstruction of the Socialist Party, examined the re-establishment of the SFIO after its historic split at the 1920 Congress of Tours, where a large majority of the delegates had opted for the Third International and moved to found the Parti Communiste Française. In Judt’s view, it was the presence of a militant PCF to its left that forced the SFIO leadership to compensate for its reformist political practice with verbal commitments to socialism. The SFIO rank and file insisted that the party ‘remain what they had made it’; any attempts to dilute its message would have played into the hands of the PCF. As Judt put it:

The way was narrow: a too marked rapprochement with the PCF could allow the more radical and rigid party to destroy it, but too sharp a break from the communists could lead to the loss of elements who had remained in the SFIO only on the condition that it retained a revolutionary Marxist position.

The 1920 split had not cleanly separated reformists from revolutionaries, as happened in other northern European socialist parties after the Bolshevik Revolution; instead, a section of the left remained with the rump SFIO led by Léon Blum, constituting a majority of its membership. Apart from a small, right-wing faction, all the SFIO delegates rejected collaboration in bourgeois governments and advocated the dictatorship of the proletariat. Judt reported that Socialist mayors were obliged to get party approval before inaugurating Monuments to the Fallen, a sharply divisive issue for the party in the aftermath of the Great War. The SFIO leadership initially hung back from rejoining the reconstituted Second International, preferring to support the Union of Vienna, the ‘2.5 International’ established by the Austro-Marxists, although it duly signed up in 1923. Rank-and-file attitudes exercised a decisive restraint on the SFIO’s parliamentary leadership: in 1924 Blum and his fellow deputies were obliged to lend only external support to the Radical government under Edouard Herriot—as it pursued a programme of austerity at home, imperial war in Morocco and military occupation in the Ruhr—since the party membership would not tolerate full participation. Here was an example of the high price paid by the SFIO for the ideological ‘rigidity’ necessary for its survival, given the ever-present pressure from the left exercised by the PCF.

Continue Reading

What Occupy Wall Street Can Learn From The Arab Spring And Los Indignados

From the far right to the far left, anti-Wall Street activists across the nation have been fodder for equal amounts of primetime praise and condemnation. Many attribute the movement’s accelerated popularity to shared economic suffering and frustrations coupled with the web and mobile-centric social mobilization movement that swept through Egypt in the height of the Arab Spring and drifted north onto Spanish soil the following summer.

Unsurprisingly, as both the media and Occupy Wall Street (OWS) try to derive distinct meaning from the multifarious movement, some misleading comparisons are being made between the 21st century American attempt at national protest and the spring and summertime predecessors in Spain and the Middle East. However, these movements have operated within their own spheres stemming from specific national economic and political contexts. If they continue to falsely analogize many aspects of the Spanish acampadas and the Egyptian protests to what is currently happening in Wall Street without fully understanding and learning from their unique circumstances, the Occupy Wall Street Movement will fail before it can even come to fruition.

While the claim can be made that Egyptians and Americans are both fighting against government corruption, some of the more salient facts pertaining to Egypt suggest more contrasts than comparisons. For example, thirty years of continuous emergency law that allowed for the suspension of constitutional rights, legalized censorship, increased police powers, and sentencing to indefinite imprisonment without reason left many Egyptians suffocating at the hands of the unscrupulous Mubarak regime.

As Mubarak and his National Democratic Party cronies enjoyed Egypt’s wealth (Mubarak and his family’s net worth ranges from $40-$70 billion), approximately 40% of the population lived on around two dollars a day. Furthermore, with the number of new people entering the job force annually at about 4%, a college graduate was ten times likelier to be unemployed than someone who only completed elementary school. Coupled with an absurdly high inflation rate of 12.8%, the outlook was not only grim, it was fatal.

As a result, most Egyptians rightfully distrusted the Mubarak government. In 2010, Transparency International rated Egypt’s Corruption Perceptions Index as 3.1, with a score of “0” being completely corrupt and “10” being very clean (for comparison’s sake, the United States is nestled safely between Belgium and Uruguay with a 2010 score of 7.1). The Egyptian people had enough.

Continue Reading

Occupy Wall Street As Confronting Democratic Crisis

The Article: The Fight for ‘Real Democracy’ at the Heart of Occupy Wall Street by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in Foreign Affairs.

The Text: Demonstrations under the banner of Occupy Wall Street resonate with so many people not only because they give voice to a widespread sense of economic injustice but also, and perhaps more important, because they express political grievances and aspirations. As protests have spread from Lower Manhattan to cities and towns across the country, they have made clear that indignation against corporate greed and economic inequality is real and deep. But at least equally important is the protest against the lack — or failure — of political representation. It is not so much a question of whether this or that politician, or this or that party, is ineffective or corrupt (although that, too, is true) but whether the representational political system more generally is inadequate. This protest movement could, and perhaps must, transform into a genuine, democratic constituent process.

The political face of the Occupy Wall Street protests comes into view when we situate it alongside the other “encampments” of the past year. Together, they form an emerging cycle of struggles. In many cases, the lines of influence are explicit. Occupy Wall Street takes inspiration from the encampments of central squares in Spain, which began on May 15 and followed the occupation of Cairo’s Tahrir Square earlier last spring. To this succession of demonstrations, one should add a series of parallel events, such as the extended protests at the Wisconsin statehouse, the occupation of Syntagma Square in Athens, and the Israeli tent encampments for economic justice. The context of these various protests are very different, of course, and they are not simply iterations of what happened elsewhere. Rather each of these movements has managed to translate a few common elements into their own situation.

In Tahrir Square, the political nature of the encampment and the fact that the protesters could not be represented in any sense by the current regime was obvious. The demand that “Mubarak must go” proved powerful enough to encompass all other issues. In the subsequent encampments of Madrid’s Puerta del Sol and Barcelona’s Plaça Catalunya, the critique of political representation was more complex. The Spanish protests brought together a wide array of social and economic complaints — regarding debt, housing, and education, among others — but their “indignation,” which the Spanish press early on identified as their defining affect, was clearly directed at a political system incapable of addressing these issues. Against the pretense of democracy offered by the current representational system, the protesters posed as one of their central slogans, “Democracia real ya,” or “Real democracy now.”

Occupy Wall Street should be understood, then, as a further development or permutation of these political demands. One obvious and clear message of the protests, of course, is that the bankers and finance industries in no way represent us: What is good for Wall Street is certainly not good for the country (or the world). A more significant failure of representation, though, must be attributed to the politicians and political parties charged with representing the people’s interests but in fact more clearly represent the banks and the creditors. Such a recognition leads to a seemingly naive, basic question: Is democracy not supposed to be the rule of the people over the polis — that is, the entirety of social and economic life? Instead, it seems that politics has become subservient to economic and financial interests.

Continue Reading

Bigger Than Left And Right

The Article:

The Text: I was surprised, amused and annoyed all at once when I found out yesterday that some moron-provocateur linked to notorious right-wing cybergoon Andrew Breitbart had infiltrated a series of private e-mail lists – including one that I have been participating in – and was using them to run an exposé on the supposed behind-the-scenes marionetting of the OWS movement by the liberal media.

According to various web reports, what happened was that a private “cyber-security researcher” named Thomas Ryan somehow accessed a series of email threads between various individuals and dumped them all on BigGovernment.com, Breitbart’s site. Gawker is also reporting that Ryan forwarded some of these emails to the FBI and the NYPD.

I have no idea whether those email exchanges are the same as the ones I was involved with. But what is clear is that some private email exchanges between myself and a number of other people – mostly financial journalists and activists who know each other from having covered the crisis from the same angle in the last three years, people like Barry Ritholz, Dylan Ratigan, former regulator William Black, Glenn Greenwald and myself – ended up being made public.

There is nothing terribly interesting in any of these exchanges. Most all of the things written were things all of us ended up saying publicly in our various media forums. In my case, what I wrote was almost an exact copy of my Rolling Stone article last week, suggesting a list of demands for the movement. I said I thought having demands was a good idea and listed a few things I thought demonstrators could focus on. Others disagreed, and there was a friendly back-and-forth.

So I was amazed to wake up this morning and find that various right-wing sites had used these exchanges to build a story about a conspiracy of left-wing journalists. “Busted. Emails Show Liberal Media & Far Left Cranks Conspired With #OWS Protesters to Craft Message,” wrote one.

Breitbart’s site, BigGovernment.com, went further, saying that the Occupy Washington D.C. movement is “working with well-known media members to craft its demands and messaging while these media members report on the movement.”

The list, the site wrote, include:

…well known names such as MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan, Rolling Stone’s Matt Tiabbi [sic] who both are actively participating; involvement from other listers such as Bill Moyers and Glenn Greenwald plus well-known radicals like Noam Chomsky, remains unclear.

Continue Reading