The colour analogy

In this 'dark age' of intense political and ideological contestation, it's inevitable that some people should express (again) a strong desire for universal ’truth’ in social and political life. Genuine ideologues are immune to such concerns: for us, discourses create narratives for our moral instincts and power is the explanatory variable which mediates between ideas and reality.

Centrists also have moral intuitions but often appear to lack confidence that the narrative justifications for their instincts provide sufficient epistemological certainty. Such 'skeptics' dismiss ideology as a social contruct unsuitable for ethical inquiry, but often end up replacing it with appeals to authority and nature in the form of scientism or 'realism'. Not all centrists are skeptics in this definition: many are ideological utilitarians who believe they can calculate optimum social outcomes. But in philosophical terms, the so-called skeptics argue that certain kinds of intuitions (i.e. their own) have ethical consequences because they can be demonstrated scientifically. 

This appeal to the empirical comes at a potentially dangerous time for the infant sciences of evolutionary sociology and psychology. For the first time, the social and biological sciences can offer coherent accounts of the origins and evolution of human culture. While the default philosophical position is that natural facts do not create moral ones, this distinction may be break down when culture is (correctly) understood as part of, rather than distinct from, the natural world. And it should worry the left that right-leaning centrists have noticed and begun to mis-apply cultural evolution to discredit and devalue other positions. To my mind, such people oversimplify the complex implications of cultural evolutionary theory, and in particular the idea of gene-culture co-evolution. This blog attempts to correct those misconceptions, and it does so using a device I'm rather fond of: the colour analogy. 

The colour analogy

The electromagetic spectrum is continuous and infinite; light can possess almost any wavelength and no wavelength is particularly differentiated from any other. Out of this infinite variety, we can think of the visible spectrum as those wavelengths which convery potentially useful information on a planet like Earth, which is composed of certain elements at certain temperatures. What this implies is that it's useful for agents to know, for example, that most plants are 'green'; but linguistic colour categories ike red, blue and green are arbitrary linguistic constructs with no basis in physics. Firstly, since wavelengths are continuous, where we draw dividing lines between categories is completely random (or so it seems). And secondly, we have no way of guaranteeing that two agents see a colour distinction in the same place. We can agree that a plant is the same colour, but experience that colour in relation to others completely differently.

For the sake of the further analogy, consider light's wavelength a natural, scientific fact and subjective categorisation of that colour (a cultural construct) as their social construction of its meaning. 

For a long time in the twentieth century, this insight was the central underpinning of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: the idea that language categories were essentially arbitrary, and moreover these arbitrary categorical differences altered how individuals perceived the world. Anthropologists showed how different cultures described and experience colour in vastly different ways, and historians also noted the relatively paucity of words and concepts describing colour in the ancient world. This was a view of culture and language at home with the then-dominant 'blank slate' thesis of human psychology and the strict separation enforced between biology and culture in the aftermath of the discrediting of Social Darwinism. 

Yet in 1969 (and in continuing work since), Berlin & Kay showed that there was an underlying pattern to all this diversity. Colour terms did not emerge randomly, but appeared to follow patterns that the researchers believed corresponded with economic and social development. First, a society distinguished between light and dark, then red, then yellow and green, then blue, then brown, and finally orange, purple and grey. There were exceptions within this pattern, of course: some variation caused by randomness, others by specific adaption to particular ecologies. But on the whole, Berlin & Key had discovered that colour terms evolved in a common way amongst humans, suggesting an underlying structural pattern. The following explainer from Vox does the topic some justice:

In fact, this universality amongst the human experience of colour may be hard-wired into our biology. Like all Old World primates, but unlike most mammals, humans are trichomats - with three types of colour receptors in our visual system attuned to short- (blue), medium (green), and long- (yellow-red) wavelengths. It would uncontroversial to assert that the particular combination of visual receptors found in our biology are the product of adaption to the natural environment through natural selection: being a trichromat at these wavelengths conveys an evolutionary advantage (in the form of electromagnetic data) at acceptable cost. Similarly, it should be uncontroversial to state that the way we use and analyse that data socially is subject to selection effects based on whether our categorisations of colour convey socially and environmentally useful information at acceptable cost. 

Gene-culture coevolution contains both these premises, but also something extra: the types of colour category that can emerge culturally are constrained by our common biological inheritance (and vice-versa). In other words, cultural variation and adaption is not infinite, but shaped by genetic factors common to all homo sapiens - cultural evolution is path dependent and part of that path is a universal biological inheritance. Any human society, pre-loaded with red, green and blue colour visual receptors and operating in an Earth-like natural environment will develop colour terms in a (relatively) predictable fashion depending on its level of social complexity. The same is true of all culture: tolerable variations in behaviour must be suited to a bipedal, social animal with consistent biological needs such as food, water and shelter.

Sex and Gender

Let's consider what these insights mean for social policy, choosing an example with clear biological and cultural elements. Opponents of so-called 'gender ideology', a.k.a. the completely obvious conclusion that sex and gender are different things and gender is socially constructed, argue that biological categoriesof sex create an inarguable moral case against culturally recognising non-binary genders. Yet sex, like light wavelength, is not a strictly binominal category: biological sex is made up of a number of different indicators (i.e. reproductive role, secondary sexual characteristics etc) each of which in turn encloses some degree of variation. When these variances are given weights and summed for a species like humans that reproduces sexually, we would likely see two clusters of sexual characteristics with distinct statistical peaks but some variation and potential for overlap. Not a binary, but bimodal. 

Scientists can treat these clusters of biological averages as distinct 'sexes', and we can think of our day-to-day ability to distinguish between them our 'sex receptors'. While gender roles are a social construct, evidence that even very young children are sensitive to sex differences in adults suggests that there is at least some part of our developmental biology that is tuned to probabilistically distinguish sex categories. Thus, most (but far from all) human societies have developed binary gender roles because the cultural evolution of gender is influenced (but not dictated) by sexual dimorphism. But what's important is that there is clearly no barrier to recognising additional gender(role)s or different ones or none altogether - plenty of cultures have done so.  As societies become more open and tolerant of individual self-expression and definition, we can and should re-examine our existing social categories of gender and be more tolerant of categorical innovation. This really isn't that hard! 

Moral Colours

So let's bring this back to moral philosophy. I've mentioned Jon Haidt, his Moral Foundations Theory, and my problems with both him and it before. Haidt is becoming something of a guru to centre-rightists and 'classical liberals', but I feel this is because he has drawn the wrong ethical conclusions from his own research (a risk for any scientist). To summarize briefly, Haidt and his collaborators posit that humans are equipped with modular cognitive capabilities relating to ethical and social reasoning. The most well-studied of which are our aversion to physical harm (i.e. 'care'); our biases towards fair outcomes (or 'proportionality'); mechanisms for resolving stresses caused by social hierarchy (i.e. 'loyalty'); a slider for resolving the Omninove's Dilemma (i.e. 'openness to experience'); and a sensor to avoid potentially harmful substances (disgust or 'sanctity'). All of these biological modules make sense for a social species operating in a potentially hostile environment, and can be demonstrated in human populations of all levels of social organisation. 

Where Santa Barbara-style evolutionary psychologists, Haidt and their respective followers go wrong, however, is to leap immediately from these universal biological constraints to ethical rules, without considering culture or evolutionary history as intermediary variables. They believe, like sex-essentialists, that science has provided them with universal and objective 'truths' that can and should form the basis for universal ethical philosophy. Because Popperian science provides standards of falsifiability and objectivity, they believe their ethical conclusions are superior to conventional philosophy and ideologies. But all they have done is cloak their naive intuitionism with a naturalist fallacy.

The correct response to such claims is not to keep human culture and ethics separate from biology, but to understand that biological and cultural evolution both partially (and validly) contribute to social norms and practices. In other words, we can accept Haidt's claim that certain moral instincts (with both genetic and environment-driven variability) are universal to the human species. But we must also recognise that these merely weight the sorts of cultural systems humans can develop and do not determine them. In philosophical terms, our evolved intuitions may provide a useful short-hand way of resolving simple ethical questions, but complex societies require more complex and nuanced rules. Cultural rules and norms must always contend with these intuitions and biases (as the behaviourial economists believe), but they work together as often as against one another. Whether genes and culture are complementary or antagonistic depends on the types of social problem a society is trying to solve. 

As is common with sorts of enquiry, it turns out that complex philosophical and ethical problems don't actually have simple solutions. Reasonable people can and will disagree about what the categories of 'right' and 'wrong' include, in much the same way as we might disagree on distinguishing 'purple', 'magenta' and 'mauve'. While evolutionary science may be putting the intuitive case on firmer foundations, a full appreciation of cultural evolution must also recognise and knowledge that ideologies and culture are no less adapted to solving the sorts of social problems we face as a society.

The Politics of Solidarity

This blog is a follow-up to my earlier rumination on "Identity Politics". In that piece, I expressed comfort with identity politics as a progressive practice, but some dissatisfaction with its theoretical underpinnings (putting me squarely in line with most of the socialist left). This piece offers a deeper dive into the underpinnings of the politics of solidarity, coming to stronger and firmer conclusions. 

Radicalism, then and now

My book, "Politics for the New Dark Age" presents in its early chapters an overview of liberalism using as a device the slogan of (parts of) the French Revolution (and later the French Republic): liberty, equality, and fraternity. Although right-libertarians may disagree, it is wholly uncontroversial amongst serious liberal philosphers (and many Marxist ones) than equality and liberty are twinned objectives. We cannot rigorously justify liberty without accepting an original position of equality, and we (non-authoritarian socialists) also accept that the ethical purpose of equality is to maximise individual liberty. The core blindspot of right-libertarianism is failing to recognise that under conditions of inequality some will always be more free than others. 

Fraternity, then as now, is a trickier propostion. In Chapter III, I argue for the need for the left to reclaim fraternity, and since the word and some of the concepts underlying it are potentially problematic, I will instead substitute "solidarity" in this blog to refer to the progressive version of the concept. In the book, I write that solidarity is "the sense of belonging we can find in sharing values with and trust in our fellow citizens", and argue that this trust finds expression through the laws, norms and institutions which bind a society together. Trust, as readers will know, is an important resource to solve collective action problems and we will return to it later.

Liberal philosophy, in attempting to reconcile the twin goals of liberty and equality, has on the main settled on equality of opportunity as its guiding principle. The egalitarianism of even left-liberals is what Elisabeth Anderson calls "luck egalitarianism": it attempts to correct for some forms of inequality, but only arbitrary differences in personal circumstance and not differences cause by 'choice'. If original conditions are equal and equality of opportunity exists, then social outcomes, even if unequal, are to be considered 'just'. What all liberals, from both the 'egalitarian' and 'libertarian' ends of the spectrum, share is an emphasis on methodological individualism and agency. In other words, once just rules, norms and institutions are in place, society should be blind in practice as well as theory to the consequences of individual choice. 

Needless to say, this is an incomplete theory of justice: the fairness of outcomes matters to individual liberty and happiness, and some material needs (housing, healthcare, food, clean air & water) are so important to our wellbeing that they have the status of fundamental right. Even liberals like Will Kymlicka have been forced to admit that the current approach is counterproductive, forcing the disadvantaged to engage in what he calls 'shameful revelation' in order to qualify for social sympathy (which contributes to the construction of a hierarchy of moral worth).  Yet Kymlicka's own support for multiculturalism is justified similarly: if a social group can demonstrate that the impartial application of law leads to an injustice in fact, then the law should craft special assistance or exemptions for members of that group.

Charles Taylor famously labels this 'the politics of difference' and the resulting hybridity between liberalism and identarian claims of culture leads to what I have called in the past the 'second form' of identity politics: adapting laws and institutions so that arbitrary differences such as race, gender and sexuality no longer systematically disadvantage individuals. It is dialectical middle ground between communitarians who hold that groups and cultures are ontologically prior to the individual; and liberals who seek to merely 'correct' for arbitrary differences in individual characteristics. The liberal fantasy is that everyone regardless of group membershio or disadvantaged status has a formal opportunity to 'rise to the top'; failing to question why we have a top or why people would want to be there in the first place. 

Socialism is liberalism plus structure

In a broad sense, the left (which I prefer to call socialist but which others may label differently) is liberalism plus structure. What I mean by that is we share with liberals a common foundation in humanism and much of the philosophy of the social contract. And to a point, we can also share their methodological individualism. Where we part ways, however, is by positing social structure as an intervening variable between individual choice and outcomes. To us, difference neutrality looks alot like taking sides in favour of the status quo. Feminists label the structure 'patriarchy', because it systematically differentiates between genders; I call it social and economic interdependence, because my focus is on how the nature of games creates collective action problems; anti-rascism activists similarly use the concept of systematic rascism. 

Iris Young provides a useful definition of structure: 

"Basic social structures consist [of] determinate social positions that people occupy which condition their opportunities and life chances. These life chances are constituted by the ways [social] positions are related to one another to create systemic constraints or opportunities that relate to one another . . . Structure[s] are constituted through the social organisation of labour and production, the organisation of desire and sexuality, the institutionalized rules of authority and subordination and the constitution of prestige. Structural social groups are relationally constituted, in the sense that one position in the social structure does not exist apart from differentiated relation to other positions."

Thus, as I write in Chapter VIII of my book, poverty only exists in relation to the standard of living of the rest of society (i.e. 'absolute' poverty is an arbitrary, albeit sometimes useful, category). Similarly, gender[s] does not exist objectively outside the social relations defined between them; and race is junk science but conveys powerful social advantages and disadvantages. Any individual's access to social goods in the context of these structures is distributed probabilistically, and so it is therefore analytically relevant to define groups by their collective advantage or disadvantage and to conduct activism on that basis - even if some individuals from a disadvantaged class have the opportunity to rise to the top. 

Laws, rules and institutions cannot be value-neutral because they are imbedded in deeper cultural and economic patterns. Laws, rules and institutions cannot produce just outcomes on their own because they are blind to these patterns or explicitly take them for granted (see: Gramsci). And as I have written before, people often experience a powerful backlash bias when these social relations are threatened. If individuals or groups need to claim disadvantage (or perjoratively: 'victimhood') in order to receive compensation for that disadvantage, the act of both claim-making and claim-granting merely re-enforces existing social patterns and fails to challenge the underlying base structure.

Critics of "identity politics" often fail to differentiate between the two sets of arguments. Challenging structural racism, the patriarchy, or the class structure of the economy is not a claim of victimhood and for special treatment: quite the opposite. It is an empowered attempt to change society so that structural inequality no longer exists. This is precisely why Marxists, who critique the class structure of society as being bad for the individual worker, were so often accused during the Cold War of being collectivists. And why critics of multiculturalism or feminism misinterpret claims for equality as attempts to secure special treatment: they are operating under complete different philosophical understandings. If structural inequality magically ceased to exist, we could all be some type of liberal. But it does, so we aren't. 

The Politics of Solidarity

As I write in Chapter IX, in a totally different context, "If the state is thought of only as a redistribution machine, we can blind ourselves to ways cooperative social institutions can prevent inequality from occurring in the first place. Better to stop inequality from growing than seek to cure it after it occurred." In that chapter I'm talking about the economy, but the principle applies equally to all forms of social hierarchy and structural difference. Redistribution does not generate social trust; in fact, it may be corrosive of it. Much better if we address our activism at the root causes of difference, recognising that formal equality of opportunity does not in and of itself generate egalitarian outcomes. So if right-wingers really don't like paying taxes or the recognising special group rights, then the only logical solution should be to join a union or cooperative, support feminism and the movement for black lives. 

And here we return at last to the concept of solidarity. If unequal and hierarchical structure is the problem, then the solution is solidarity that transcends that structure and undermines it. That's why sexism, rascism and other forms of discrimination, especially paternalistic versions thereof, have no place in any progressive movement. Solidarity means pursuing cooperative solutions to the problem of generating social trust, without which we cannot transform and prevent inegalitarian structural structures.  

Solidarity means trusting others in at least three important ways. First of all, it  requires working across group boundaries to build ties between social classes, rather than seeing politics as a battle for the scarce control of social resources (i.e. identarianism). Importantly, this acknowledges that deconstructing hierarchies will also be of benefit to those currently privileged by them. Secondly, it means trusting others' claims about the sources of their own disadvantage, and not expressing skeptical or paternalistic beliefs about the moral value of their claims. If an individual is unable to access their fundamental rights, the course of events leading them there are not relevant to the inquiry. Lastly, and most radically, it means trusting that if our fellow human beings are in need, that we should offer help, and not make judgements about their own capacity for or skill at autonomous decision-making.

Myths of the Old Order: The automation illusion (part two)

In today's blog, I will continue last week's discussion of the automation myth.

Chapter XII of my book, “Politics for the New Dark Age” provides a lay introduction to productivity, and its role in generating long-term growth. The fact of the matter is when it comes to the technological miracles promised by Silicon Valley, we can see them everywhere except in the economic statistics (the Solow paradox). Since the 1980s, labour’s contribution to economic output per hour work has remained flat, while the return on capital has grown by leaps and bounds. If labour productivity had continued expanding over the last forty years, we’d already be working shorted hours for higher wages. Instead, we have seen the opposite: low productivity, flat or declining real wages, and chronic levels of employment stress.

What’s really going on?

Automation, then, does not made us more productive. So what is it?  My answer is that the drive for automation now, as sometimes in the past, is capital intensification. Think of the difference between productivity and intensity like this: productivity increases output if either your workers or equipment become more efficient; intensity increases output when you add either more workers or more equipment to the production process. It is intensity rather than productivity gains that we have seen under neoliberalism: the outsourcing of labour, de-unionisation and greater labour uncertainty leading to modes of production that rely more and more on expensive capital equipment (including IP) and finance and less on labour input.

Capital intensification is not necessarily a bad thing: in the 1700s, capital needed to be concentrated out of the landed aristocracy and into the bourgeois banks in order to facilitate loans to the first factories (in both the trading and manufacturing sense of that word). Sometimes, productivity leaps do require capital to be concentrated. In an era of low labour productivity, when eighty per cent of labour worked farmland, capital intensification created new industries that in turn soaked up workers. It paid them for their increased productivity and expanded output to match, creating the middle-class consumer out of nothing and increasing prosperity for all. But that’s not what’s happening today, especially post-GFC. Consumer demand remains weak everywhere, and rates of return on expanded output are at historic lows. 

Automation in the modern era, then, is being driven by capital intensification in existing workplaces (especially wholesale, healthcare and other essential services). High levels of inequality mean that capital-owners have historic financial reserves and no productive outlet for investment. Governments bailed out the banks, keeping them flush, and in some places began a historic era of quantitative easing, literally showering banks and the corporate sector with cash in an effort to get them to invest in the real economy. Governments across the world are trying and failing to get corporations to spur growth by investing these savings, rather than using them to big up their stock proces and private wealth. The savviest businesses discovered that they could use this cheap credit, not to expand output, but to produce the same output using more capital and less labour. By doing so, they maintain or increase their share of profit in an era in which economies as a whole are growing slowly.

Automation is, therefore, a capital bubble (Chapter XIII of my book) that will only increase inequality and lead to further capital accumulation. It is for this reason that pushing tax cuts as a spur for economic growth (as governments in Australia and the US are trying to do) is catastrophically ill-timed on both a micro- and macro- level. Since new investments are normally tax-deductible, lowering marginal corporate tax rates will decrease the incentive to invest; higher tax rates increase the incentive for employing additional workers and equipment. At the macro-level, increasing the rate of corporate profit while impoverishing the social programs propping up what remains of consumer spending will only increase capital concentration, slow the economy and increase inequality. Why would governments do this?

Automation is leading to permanent job losses but is doing so for the same social and policy reasons that labour productivity has remained stagnant for forty years. Power in the workplace has shifted decisively in favour of capital (with government assistance) and employment is less secure than at any other time in a century or more. While a minority of those laid off will find new employment as technicians or programmers, the majority are being forced into the retail or ‘gig’ economy as low-skilled personal service workers: Walmart ‘greeters’ and Uber drivers, for example. Such jobs are not only less secure, lower paid and offer fewer benefits than the jobs they replaced, but actively alienate workers from one another and de-skill them, further reducing their collective bargaining power. 

Speculating about the future of work

While the service sector may be the most important part of a highly developed economy, transitioning everyone to a service sector job will not be our saviour from automation because not all services are high-productivity and high-wage. A totally service-dominated economy with flat levels of production and consumption would look very much like a feudal aristocracy. Those who control capital (once upon a time: land; now: financial assets) will live very handsomely indeed on the rents they extract. Everyone else will eek out an existence predicated on hierarchical personal service to such individuals: a true ‘trickle down’ economy. Not only would such an economy be technologically and socially stagnant, I argue it would be prone to potentially revolutionary social disruption.

Truly forward-thinking prophets (or fantasists) of the automation apocalypse warn us that the true threat to the contemporary economic and social order is not automation but AI. AI algorithms that will not only replace high-skilled service sector employees such as doctors, lawyers and teachers, but also manage capital better and more effectively than humans and produce cultural goods on their own. Quite frankly, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. True AI would lead to such a profound re-structuring of human life on Earth that the question of economic organisation might seem like a second- or third-order problem. 

An optimistic response to the possibility of hyper-competent decision algorithms is that it would increase the value of non-analytical, emotional and social skills that humans are likely to continue to hold and advantage in, a point Ezra Klein puts emphasis on. While I’m sympathetic to the argument that humanity has a unique social and emotional toolkit that would be hard for us to [reliably] replicate in an artificial intelligence, we presently compensate such skills poorly. The modern cult which privileges rationality as the basis of competence would have to change pretty dramatically, and if we could somehow create a discourse that privileged humanity’s social nature so highly, there would much better uses we could put it.

Policy consequences and responses

From my perspective, the policy solution for the automation dilemma is obvious. Increasing the labour share of income (either through higher wages or greater redistribution) would soak up additional production and create new demand so that the capital intensification of the last decade doesn’t go to waste. Increasing labour power and giving workers a democratic say over the workplace decisions that affect their lives is the best way to manage the transition to new forms of production: if automation is truly unavoidable, then let’s make it work for the many and not the few.

Unfortunately, the automation debate is not intensifying calls for democratising the means of production. Quite the contrary: the right is using it as a cudgel to threaten workers and the centre-left appears paralysed with indecision and fear. For centrists, the policy consequences of automation are expressed in terms of anxiety about its consequences for social stability and the political consensus underpinning the continuation of status quo policies of de-regulation and unrestricted trade. The reason for the sudden surge of interest in harebrained schemes like universal basic income is that the centre is looking for ways to buy off revolution and discharge its social responsibilities to the economic losers without having to re-examine or change the fundamental ways in which production is organised.

For the centre-left in particular, there is a second aspect to their obsession with the automation narrative. For well-educated elites in the public sector and media, there is a fantasy that if the working class comprises enterprising, globally-open “knowledge-workers” (like themselves) then it will also come to share in their elite culture. Under this narrative, elites don’t have to close the gap that has opened between themselves and the proletariat: instead, the workers will come to them. But they mistake labour flexibility for labour uncertainty, and their enthusiasm for using Uber is not necessarily matched by the desire of former manufacturing worker forced to drive a taxi for uncertain wages. The bourgeoise thought this way about the disciplining effect of manufacturing too; as did the feudal landlords and slaveholders before them. Sadly, while culture is in fact a function of economic patterns of production, so long as those production patterns contain exploiters and exploited, the interests of elites and the working class will remain divergent.

Marriage Equality: A quick and dirty guide to arguing against religious exemptions

So, the results of Australia's non-binding and unnecessary post vote 'survey' on marriage equality are in, and it's an emphatic victory for "Yes". Finally! What happens next, hopefully, is that a flawed but largely fine bipartisan bill will be introduced to Parliament, voted on, and undo the terrible wrong that was committed in 2004 when marriage was restricted to only hetereosexual couples (a moment that led me to almost turn in my ALP membership in disgust). On a personal note, gay rights has been an animating issue for me politically since I was a teenager in the 90s and finally, if belatedly, seeing this moment arrive feels like a great national and personal catharthis. 

But. This isn't over; it isn't over in the United States, and you can be sure the religious right is going to import much of the same politics into Oz in coming months and years. The first battle is going to be to stop parliament's hardline conservatives from inserting broad-ranging exemptions into the  bill that allow religious groups and others who express a 'moral belief' in the exclusivity of traditional marriage broad licence to discriminate. Without a bill of rights of our own in Australia, local progressives aren't practiced at making these sorts of arguments. So here's my quick'n'dirty guide to arguing against them. 

Five Ways They're Wrong

Liberal rights make a distinction between the public and private. People are free to believe and act however they wish in private, but the public sphere is a neutral space where no belief is privileged over any other. By asking for an exemption to a law of general application, people with moral beliefs are asking the state to privilege those beliefs, and thus violate its obligation of secular neutrality. Why do we make this distinction? Because . . . .

Rights are not unlimited. They extend only so far as they don't infringe on the rights and freedoms of others. People are free to belief and act however they wish; however, we live an an interdependent social setting where our actions affect others and we must take the rights of others into account if we recognise their equal human dignity. So, sorry, you can't unilaterally infringe the right of others to marry and found a family, or (if you're a social service provider) deny them their right to education, healthcare, housing and social support.  But what essential rights are infringed by cake-shop owners or wedding venues? Well . . . .

Everyone is entitled to protection from arbitrary discrimination in public life, including access to general goods and services in the marketplace. It is fundamental to the mutual recognition of human dignitty and equality that everyone is entitled to equal treatment, regardless of any arbitrary personal characteristic, including race, biological sex, gender expression and family structure. Protection from discrimination is a human right, and is embodied in a series of positive Australian Acts. We accept without reflection that market participants must not discriminate against persons of particular races or religions; sex and gender are no different.

But wait, they say, we need an exemption from just those discrimination laws! And exemptions to laws of general application may be justified if their neutral application leads to adverse or discriminatory consequences in fact. However, this is a matter of consequentialist weighing of harms against rights. For example, ministers of religion are exempt from an obligation to perform religious ceremonies in violation of their rites because that would constitute a direct infringement of their right to practice their religion freely. I can eve see an argument that churches and religious buildings be exempt from being hired for religious ceremonies outside their doctrine. On the other hand, we must weigh up the manifest harm of the denial of equal treatment to members of the community against the psychic 'harm' to the 'true believer', who has freely chosen to engage in market activities fundamentally unrelated to their exercise of religious freedom. For example, religious groups that own public venues discriminate when they use their private beliefs to exclude certain people from accessing their services. 

But wait, they say, forcing us into a neutral public stance threatens the ongoing viability of our community of belief! However while some liberal philosophers accept that the survival of a religious community sometimes justify special treatment, not a single one accepts that this extends to imposing restrictions on individuals 'external' to the community. In other words, a religious group is free to expel a homosexual couple from membership of its congregation (an 'internal' regulation), but cannot claim to regulate the rights and responsibilities of other members of the community with different views (which would constitute regulation external to its community). 

So there you go, five quick and dirty arguments to win the argument and make sure the Smith bill passes speedily and unchanged. 

Myths of the Old Order: The automation illusion (part one)

This series of posts will continue to examine myths or tropes that I hear repeated by people trying to make sense of the "New Dark Age" that is our fragmented social reality. If you have an idea for a trope to address, contact me on Twitter @Askews2000.

We begin with two narratives of automation. 

There’s a scene in “White People Renovating Houses”, the South Park Season 21 (!) premiere, in which a tiki-torch wielding mob of rednecks marches through the town, demanding the destruction of digital personal assistants such as Siri and Alexa. The episode was panned by critics, who thought the writers didn’t adequately skewer the presumed target of mockery (i.e. white nationalists). But what critics failed to understand is that white nationalists were not the intended target (that would have been too easy). They themselves were. Or rather, the narrative that fear of automation was driving the economic anxiety of Trump’s racist base. The incongruity between the recent facts (neo-Nazis in Charlottesville) and the explanation (fear of automation) is the point of the joke. 

As a historical counterpoint, there's a moment a third of the way into Sven Beckert’s magisterial history of capitalism, “Empire of Cotton: A Global History”, at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution in Britain when a few hundred ‘spinning jennys’ (machines for cotton weaving) begin to displace the work of hundreds of thousands of  artisans in the manufacture of cotton fabrics. Within a generation, automation had destroyed a global industry which had remained largely unchanged for a thousand years, and begun the “Great Divergence” by which the wealth of Western Europe eclipsed that of the rest of the world. Beckert describes the opposition and mob violence which was often visited upon the mills but which failed to ultimately prevent the radical transformation of land and labour relations they represented. 

Everybody’s talking about automation

Discussing automation, and its effect on social, political and economic relations, is a recurrent feature of 2017’s “New Political Dark Age”. There are new books, conferences, speeches, and essays on the topic almost daily; we must tackle the subject, we are told, to be taken seriously as a political and economic thinker. Automation, in this telling, is a miracle bestowed upon us by Silicon Valley, but which demands unemployment and political resentment as its price. It is both a moral good to be embraced and a governance challenge to be managed: the perfect talking point for a certain kind of forward-thinking technocrat. 

The automation narrative came [back] to the forefront of progressive politics during the Obama administration, by some accounts. And indeed, the topic reeks of Very Serious People  justifying their own failure to achieve lasting economic change while grappling for control of the narrative with radicals (i.e. the Sanders crowd) who see further compromises with the status quo as the problem. When you look into the issue, you find that almost every article, think piece or editorial  on the subject cites back to a famous 2013 Oxford paper, which found that 47 per cent of job categories defined the researchers were ‘at risk’ from automation. 

I don’t find that paper’s methodology particularly convincing, but smarter people than me have looked into it and come to two sorts of conclusions. Firstly, stating that automation will eliminate half the jobs in the economy is probably a wild over-estimate: the OECD have estimated that the true figure is closer to 9 per cent. Even so, those job losses won’t occur all at once, leaving plenty of time for workers to adjust, and are likely to be compensated for by new jobs created by automation. The automation problem is not, therefore, the total number of jobs in an economy but to whom those jobs are going to be distributed. Because if technological change is too quick, the prophets of automation say, then there’s no guarantee that particular people that lose their income will find a replacement.

Automation and inequality

When you boil it down, the automation narrative is similar to a moral panic: highly anecdote driven and largely divorced from any sense of historical perspective. It’s easy to talk about the installation of touchscreens at McDonalds, speculate about driverless trucks, and mourn the loss of analogue film to Snapchat. But we’ve been here before, and recently: people worried once upon a time that ATMs would replace banks, TVs would render cinema irrelevant, or that vacuum cleaners would lead to idle house-wives [sic]. McDonald's isn't even innovating: 'automats' were a thing as far as as 1895! Jason Furman, President Obama’s final Chief Economic Advisor, made this point quite well in a December 2016 presentation that still available online. The process of creative destruction is so inherent to material progress (see Chapter XII of my book) that, with the benefit of hindsight, we look back with bemusement at  luddites who feared steam-powered cotton spinning.

What really controls employment levels is the supply and demand for goods and services in the economy; the suppressed consumer demand caused by contemporary levels of inequality is what’s standing in the way of full employment, not technological churn. Increasing the productivity of labour and/or capital increases social output if and only if that output can be consumed. So technological progress doesn’t change the number of jobs in an economy, but it does change the skills those jobs require. Labour’s capacity to capture a share of the increased output and consume is dependent, in a wage-economy, on whether or not workers have the skills to work higher productivity jobs. If not, the share of profit capture by capital and high-knowledge workers increases while the labour share of income for already marginalised workers does the opposite, making inequality worse and dragging the economy. 

Furman was therefore correct to state that the problem with automation is not a risk of mass unemployment but of growing inequality. The Industrial Revolution made Britain’s merchant class fabulously wealthy, while impoverishing both peasants in India and smallhold farmers at home. When an industry goes extinct, there’s likely to be a mismatch between the demand for skills and those possessed by the existing labour force. Normally, the mismatch is resolved over time through retraining, the retirement of older workers and the entry into the market of new cohorts. This is the laissez-faire ‘attrition’ model of development and social equality; in the alternative, society can play an active role in controlling the pace of change through industrial policy, providing active support to retraining into new industries, or increasing redistribution in favour of those who can’t or won’t adapt to new patterns of work. This is how progressives deal with problems of inequality in all its forms. 

That concludes Part One, looking at the contours of the debate. Return next week for Part Two where we dive deeper into the economic and policy consequences.