Loomnie

John Comaroff thinks not:

Once upon a time, anti-neoliberal theory posited an opposition between state and the free market, arguing that the antidote to the latter lay in the active intervention of the former. But the opposition is false, just another piece of the detritus of the modern history of capital. As states become mega-corporations (Kremlin, Inc.; Britain, PLC; South Africa, Pty Ltd.; Dubai, Inc.) all of them, incidentally, branded and legally incorporated – they become inextricably part of the workings of the market and, hence, no longer an “outside”, an antidote or an antithesis, from which to rethink or reconstruct “the neoliberal paradigm”. Which, in part, is why government is increasingly reduced to an exercise in the technical management of capital, why ideologically-founded politics appear dead, replaced by the politics of interest and entitlement and identity, three counterpoints of a single triangle. And why the capillaries of neoliberal governance seem so firmly entrenched in the cartography of our everyday lives, there to remain for the foreseeable future. To the degree that any future is foreseeable.

The article is worth reading in full.

I think that basic economics, the way it is taught today, tends to give people reflexive pro-free market, anti-government positions — positions that arenot held by people with a deeper exposure to economic thinking. When your understanding of government finances is based on reading the newspaper, it’s somewhat eye-opening to come to college and learn that free markets lead to maximum societal welfare and taxes impose a deadweight loss on society — the pictures are so simple and compelling. That’s why a little bit of economics makes you more likely to be a Republican.

But when you learn more about principal-agent problems, information asymmetries, and so on, you learn that those simple pictures are simplistic to the point of being misleading. That’s why Joseph Stiglitz argues in Freefall that understanding economics is crucial to understanding why free markets often lead to suboptimal outcomes. The problem isn’t knowledge per se; it’s a little bit of knowledge.

The morals of this? If you want to be an economist make sure you stay and get a PhD in it.

From The Baseline Scenario.

Some Nigerians are complaining about the BBC documentary Welcome to Lagos because, they say, it is not balanced.

I have not seen the second in the series so I can’t really say much about that. The first, though, in my opinion, does not leave any gap that needs to be filled by any fair and balanced reporting.

It is a story about a dump and its dwellers, and how they manage to eke out a living, create a semblance of a government, and work towards achieving much more than they already have.

I would actually find it distasteful if the documentary had brought a bit of the Lekki side of life in order to show that there is more to Lagos than dumps. That would indeed smack of tokenism, and most likely remove from the main thrust of the documentary by drawing attention to the things that the dump-dwellers do not have. It might also end up portraying them as victims, something that the documentary was very careful not to do.

The other question here would be whether the story would in any way be advanced by showing those other sides. I doubt it.

The documentary depicts an important part of Lagos that is almost never talked about. For that, we should be grateful.

Britain
I would assume that it is an insult to the British audience – for whom the documentary is primarily intended – to believe that they do not know that there is more to Lagos than dumps. Really.

There are complaints that there are Brits who live on garbage. Oh yes there are, and I could almost bet that there are documentaries on them. Probably prepared by or for the BBC. But that is not the issue here.

The issue here is that this is the story of Olusosun and not a documentary comparing it with dumps in other parts of the world. I am sure that anyone who is interested in doing a documentary on that topic – a comparison – would be able to get some funding for that.

This documentary is one that I am the better for having watched.

Libertarianism
One take on this that I find really interesting is the description of life on the dump as libertarianism in action:

Not only did the scavengers sell on any rubbish of any value, but a market arose to satisfy their own needs; the tip had a café and even a manicurist. And at the nearby cattle market, every part of the cow except the hair was used for profit; even the blood that would otherwise drain away was scooped up and turned to chickenfeed.

In this sense, we saw the free market in its perfect form: sole traders exploiting every tiny profit opportunity; the minute division of labour; hard work, energy and entrepreneurship; the lack of any waste.

We also saw that the market policed itself. The scavengers claimed that they trusted each other – though whether this was because market transactions bred bourgeois virtues, or because they threatened to burn to death suspected thieves, was unclear. What was clear, though, was that they didn’t need the state to solve their disputes.

Interesting.

From the ASA blog, by Keith Hart: For Marcel Mauss, the years 1920-25 were packed and fruitful. His political party and the Left in general had a real shot at winning power in France and did so in 1924. Two-thirds of his occasional political pieces (Écrits politiques) were written in this period. He was able to relaunch his group’s journal, Année sociologique, by the period’s end, contributing to it his most famous essay, on The Gift. He suffered some reverses at this time, including a serious illness, but remained optimistic for both political and intellectual regeneration on a social scale that was increasingly international in scope.

He began serious work on a book dealing with the main political currents of the day, nationalism and socialism. His interest in the American “potlatch” was expanded by the publication of Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific in 1922, confirming his belief that competitive gift-exchange was endemic in Melanesia and Polynesia, as well as elsewhere. And the Institut d’ethnologie was formed in 1925 with Rivet, Lévy-Bruhl and Mauss himself in charge.

In the late 1920s, things began to unravel on all fronts. Mauss’s personal standing as a savant grew inexorably; but his party suffered political reverses, its newspaper and journal folded, the cooperative movement foundered and the Année sociologique could not continue. Mussolini’s appropriation of the “nationalization of socialism” must have raised doubts about Mauss’s own political programme. His closest friend, Henri Hubert, died in 1927, compounding Mauss’s loss of family and colleagues during the war.

The years 1920-25 stand apart for the energy and fulfillment they brought. Mauss himself kept a sort of Chinese wall between his academic and political interests; so it is not so surprising that the two have been kept apart, especially in the Anglophone world, where his political writings are virtually unknown. He allowed himself one public attempt to bridge them, the concluding chapter of The Gift. Even so, the essay itself does not provide an effective intellectual link between the two compartments of Mauss’s life. Read in full.