Governos "socialistas" e liberdades civis

Há uns meses, o João Pereira da Silva no Facebook perguntava-me "diz-me lá o país que teve, ou tem (cada vez menos, graças aos santos) o partido socialista no poder e não tendeu/tende para o totalitarismo, redução, ou extinção do direito à propriedade privada e atropelo de todas as liberdades. Um só. E não menciones tendências de curto prazo. Valem as de decénios. Vê, por exemplo, o caso de Portugal: temos os socialistas no poder a maior parte do tempo no poder desde 1974 e estamos a dar passos largos para o controlo estatal da economia e o comunismo dentro de 50 anos, ou menos, se não aprendermos antes."; ao que respondi "Vou ter que fazer um estudo demorado sobre isso; critério: países que fossem democracias em 1995, desde 1995 até hoje tenham sido governados a maior parte do tempo por partidos da Internacional Socialista ou mais para a esquerda - como evoluiram no indice de liberdade económica da Heritage Foundation e no Indice de Liberdades Cívis da Freedom House (comparado com países que tenham sido maioritariamente governados por partidos liberais, democrata-cristãos ou conservadores); pode ser que tenha energia para fazer esse estudo e depois faça um post sobre isso" (isto começou até com uma conversa sobre o PS, portanto faz sentido usar como referência a Internacional Socialista)

Bem, cá vai a série de posts sobre isso :

A respeito dos dados da Freedom House, agora é muito mais díficil ir buscá-los se quiserem conferir o meu post, porque agora já nem os consigo encontrar navegando no site deles; mas pesquisando no google, encontra-se isto (o ficheiro - em Excel - com os indices dos países desde 1972 a 2016) e isto (a lista - também em Excel - dos países que eles consideram "democracias eleitorais").

Países que eram democracias eleitorais em 1995, com o índice de liberdade civis em 1995 e em 2016 (atenção que o índice da FH funciona ao contrário, quanto mais baixo mais livre; o "d" é subtraindo o índice de 1995 pelo de 2016, pelo que um "d" positivo significa mais liberdades civis):

	Liberdades Civis 1995	Liberdades Civis 2016	d
Albania	4	3	1
Andorra	1	1	0
Argentina	3	2	1
Australia	1	1	0
Austria	1	1	0
Bahamas	2	1	1
Bangladesh	4	4	0
Barbados	1	1	0
Belgium	1	1	0
Belize	1	2	-1
Benin	2	2	0
Bolivia	4	3	1
Botswana	2	2	0
Brazil	4	2	2
Bulgaria	2	2	0
Canada	1	1	0
Cape Verde	2	1	1
Central African Republic	4	7	-3
Chile	2	1	1
Colombia	4	3	1
Congo (Brazzaville)	4	5	-1
Costa Rica	2	1	1
Croatia	4	2	2
Cyprus	1	1	0
Czech Republic	2	1	1
Denmark	1	1	0
Dominica	1	1	0
Ecuador	3	4	-1
El Salvador	3	3	0
Estonia	2	1	1
Fiji	3	4	-1
Finland	1	1	0
France	2	2	0
Georgia	5	3	2
Germany	2	1	1
Greece	3	2	1
Grenada	2	2	0
Guatemala	5	4	1
Guinea-Bissau	4	5	-1
Guyana	2	3	-1
Haiti	5	5	0
Honduras	3	4	-1
Hungary	2	2	0
Iceland	1	1	0
India	4	3	1
Ireland	1	1	0
Israel	3	2	1
Italy	2	1	1
Jamaica	3	3	0
Japan	2	1	1
Kiribati	1	1	0
Kyrgyzstan	4	5	-1
Latvia	2	2	0
Lesotho	4	3	1
Liechtenstein	1	1	0
Lithuania	2	1	1
Luxembourg	1	1	0
Macedonia	3	3	0
Madagascar	4	4	0
Malawi	3	3	0
Mali	3	4	-1
Malta	1	1	0
Marshall Islands	1	1	0
Mauritius	2	2	0
Micronesia	1	1	0
Moldova	4	3	1
Monaco	1	1	0
Mongolia	3	2	1
Mozambique	4	4	0
Namibia	3	2	1
Nauru	3	2	1
Nepal	4	4	0
Netherlands	1	1	0
New Zealand	1	1	0
Nicaragua	4	4	0
Niger	5	4	1
Norway	1	1	0
Pakistan	5	5	0
Palau	2	1	1
Panama	3	2	1
Papua New Guinea	4	3	1
Paraguay	3	3	0
Philippines	4	3	1
Poland	2	2	0
Portugal	1	1	0
Romania	3	2	1
Russia	4	6	-2
Samoa	2	2	0
San Marino	1	1	0
Sao Tome & Principe	2	2	0
Seychelles	3	3	0
Slovakia	3	1	2
Slovenia	2	1	1
Solomon Islands	2	2	0
South Africa	2	2	0
South Korea	2	2	0
Spain	2	1	1
Sri Lanka	5	4	1
Saint Kitts and Nevis	2	1	1
Saint Lucia	2	1	1
Saint Vincent & Grenadines	1	1	0
Suriname	3	3	0
Sweden	1	1	0
Switzerland	1	1	0
Thailand	4	5	-1
Trinidad & Tobago	2	2	0
Turkey	5	5	0
Tuvalu	1	1	0
Ukraine	4	3	1
United Kingdom	2	1	1
United States	1	1	0
Uruguay	2	1	1
Vanuatu	3	2	1
Venezuela	3	5	-2
Zambia	4	4	0

Agora, para os países que eram democracias eleitorais em 1995, foi ver que partidos estiveram no governo de 1995 a 2016;

Partidos ligados à Internacional Socialista ou aparentados estão a rosa; partidos à esquerda da IS estão a vermelho; partidos liberais ou centristas (frequentemente ligados à Internacional Liberal) estão a azul claro; partidos conservadores, democratas-cristãos  (frequentemente ligados à União Democrática Internacional) ou nacionalistas estão a azul escuro; partidos não identificáveis ou governos de independentes estão a amarelo; governos militares que tenham existido pelo meio estão a cinzento, por vezes às riscas com outra cor nos casos em que o alinhamento ideológico do regime militar é bastante claro

Diga-se que a metodologia que segui pode ser muito contestável:

- Para coligações, optei, em regra, por classificá-las pelo partido do chefe do governo (e em países como San Marino ou a Suiça, que não têm um chefe de governo facilmente identificável, acho que usei o partido mais votado).

- Quando o governo muda a meio do ano, pintei cada ano com a cor do governo que esteve mais tempo, e, quando foi quase ela-por-ela, pelo governo da segunda metade do ano.

- Poderá-se questionar opções como os Democratas do EUA estarem a cor-de-rosa e os Liberais canadianos (que estão seguramente à sua esquerda) estarem a azul-claro; em parte é pelo critério da filiação internacional, e em parte porque nisto é mais relevante a posição relativa do que absoluta (isto é, os Democratas estão provavelmente muito mais à esquerda dos Republicanos nos EUA do que os Liberais à esquerda dos Conservadores no Canadá).

- O Congresso da Índia está a azul-claro, apesar de ter aderido à Internacional Socialista, basicamente porque em tempos esteve envolvido na criação de uma "internacional democrática" (supostamente entre a IS e a IL) e quando andei a pintar o gráfico nem sequer sabia da adesão à IS (de qualquer maneira, desde os anos 90 que o Congresso tem seguido uma politica de liberalização económica, sendo nalgumas coisas se calhar até mais liberais que a direita nacionalista do BJP - até faria mais sentido pintá-los de rosa ou de vermelho quando NÃO  faziam parte da IS, nos tempos de Nehru ou Indira).

- O governo de Manuel Zelaya nas Honduras foi pintado a vermelho, apesar de ser de um partido da IL; o motivo é que o seu governo colou-se bastante à Venezuela, e até foi sobretudo do seu Partido Liberal que veio o golpe que o derrubou.

- O Partido Democrático do Botswana agora está na IS, mas pintei o Botswana de azul-escuro porque durante décadas esteve na UDI (nem me admirava que a adesão à IS tenha sido por razões de geopolítica, para estar na mesma internacional que o ANC, a SWAPO e a Frelimo).

- Apesar de Duterte das Filipinas ser sobretudo elogiado, no resto do mundo, pela extrema-direita, a wikipedia classifica o partido dele como "left-wing", portanto está a vermelho.

Agora vamos lá ver como foi a evolução das liberdades civis em países que tenham tido mais de 11 anos de governos socialistas, em sentido lato:

	Anos de governo socialista	Liberdades Civis 1995	Liberdades Civis 2016	d
Albania	12	4	3	1
Argentina	16	3	2	1
Austria	15	1	1	0
Bangladesh	14	4	4	0
Barbados	22	1	1	0
Brazil	14	4	2	2
Cape Verde	15	2	1	1
Chile	13	2	1	1
Congo (Brazzaville)	19	4	5	-1
Costa Rica	14	2	1	1
Dominica	17	1	1	0
Ecuador	14	3	4	-1
Greece	13	3	2	1
Guinea-Bissau	22	4	5	-1
Guyana	22	2	3	-1
Haiti	15	5	5	0
Jamaica	17	3	3	0
Kyrgyzstan	12	4	5	-1
Lesotho	22	4	3	1
Lithuania	13	2	1	1
Mali	22	3	4	-1
Mauritius	22	2	2	0
Mongolia	15	3	2	1
Mozambique	22	4	4	0
Namibia	22	3	2	1
Nepal	18	4	4	0
Norway	13	1	1	0
Portugal	13	1	1	0
Sao Tome & Principe	16	2	2	0
Seychelles	21	3	3	0
South Africa	22	2	2	0
Sri Lanka	18	5	4	1
Saint Kitts and Nevis	20	2	1	1
Saint Lucia	14	2	1	1
Sweden	14	1	1	0
Trinidad & Tobago	12	2	2	0
United Kingdom	13	2	1	1
United States	14	1	1	0
Uruguay	12	2	1	1
Vanuatu	17	3	2	1
Venezuela	18	3	5	-2
Zambia	22	4	4	0

Ou seja, as liberdades civis aumentaram na Albânia, Argentina, Brasil, Cabo Verde, Costa Rica, Grécia, Lesoto, Lituânia, Mongólia, Namíbia, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Santa Lúcia, Reino Unido, Uruguai e Vanuatu; diminuíram no Congo-Brazzaville, Equador, Guiné-Bissau, Guiana, Quirgustão, Mali e Venezuela.

Mas, e se nos limitarmos apenas a governos socialistas mais hard-core? Vamos ver só pelos "vermelhos".

	Anos de governo socialista+	Liberdades Civis 1995	Liberdades Civis 2016	d
Argentina	13	3	2	1
Brazil	14	4	2	2
Congo (Brazzaville)	19	4	5	-1
Guyana	20	2	3	-1
Venezuela	18	3	5	-2

As liberdades civis aumentaram na Argentina e Brasil e diminuíram no Congo-Brazzaville, Guiana e Venezuela.

Atenção que estas variações (para cima ou para baixo) podem até não ter ocorrido num momento em que socialista estiverem no poder, mas penso que para ver a tendência a longo prazo isso não afeta muito (mesmo que tenha subido/descido com um governo não-socialista, se se manteve quer dizer que os governos socialistas posteriores não interferiram com essa subida/descida).

A dupla ameaça à democracia liberal

The Double Threat to Liberal Democracy, por Dani Rodrik:

Illiberal democracy – or populism – is not the only political menace confronting Western countries. Liberal democracy is also being undermined by a tendency to emphasize “liberal” at the expense of “democracy.”

Liberdade de expressão, "discurso de ódio", etc.

A Socialist Approach to Free Speech, por Samuel Farber (na revista Jacobin):

Following the Obama administration’s historic suppression of government whistleblowers, Donald Trump’s repeated attacks on the media, and controversies on college campuses nationwide, Timothy Garton Ash’s Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World is well-timed.

Garton Ash offers a wide-ranging exposition on the right to self-expression and a coherent defense of free speech from an explicitly liberal point of view. Socialist theory and practice has never satisfactorily established the place of free speech in the struggle for social transformation and in a future socialist society — all the more reason to seriously grapple with the challenge posed by Garton Ash’s new book. (...)

Garton Ash’s confusion over free speech and power becomes most clear in his defense of Larry Summers, the economics professor who was force to resign as president of Harvard University after suggesting that the “low proportion of women in science and engineering might result from innate differences in ability and inclination, as well as the pressures of family life and other factors.”

Garton Ash returns to John Stuart Mill to argue that Summers’s statement was intended to advance knowledge. He asks, “Was Summers trying to insult or demean women? Or was he, however provocatively, genuinely trying to advance scientific understanding? Looking at the evidence,” Garton Ash concludes, “I judge that it was the latter.” Aside from the fact that Summers’s statement rested at least partially on discredited theories of genetic difference, Garton Ash’s conclusion fails to adequately address the context in which Summers spoke.

As an economist, Summers has no credible expertise on gender difference. Further, the protests against his remarks did not imperil his academic freedom as a professor in economics, but rather his position of power as university president. From the protesters’ perspective, Summers had used his position against the interests of women. Contrary to what Garton Ash implies, this had nothing to do with freedom of expression, but rather with an expression of power.

The same confusion crops up when liberal pundits criticize student protests against political figures invited to speak on campus. Garton Ash misrepresents these demonstrations, imagining that they primarily occur when speakers are invited to defend their positions on some controversial matter. In fact, many of these protests take place when the person arrives to be honored by the university.

For example, in 2014 Rutgers University invited Condoleezza Rice to serve as commencement speaker and receive an honorary degree. Rice’s withdrawal in the face of student and faculty protest does not represent a defeat for free speech, but instead a small but real victory for those objecting to Rutgers’s decision to celebrate a figure who embodies American imperialist policies.

Similar considerations should apply to calls to rename Calhoun College at Yale University and the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University, institutions that honor well-known racists. Disputes about how institutional honors like these enhance their recipients’ reputations do not relate to free speech, but to the legitimation of power holders, and their political and cultural uses.

When we turn to public figures invited to speak about controversial topics, we must distinguish between racist persuaders and violent racist intimidators. People like Arthur Jensen, Richard Herrnstein, and Charles Murray, who propagate offensive racist myths under the guise of social science, are racist persuaders. Their pronouncements take place entirely within the realm of discourse, to which opponents can respond through rational discussion and careful refutation.

Other free speech rights, including the venerable traditions of picketing and heckling, stop short of using force to stop figures like these from speaking. Even the sharpest ideological struggle abides by implicit rules that social movements have occasionally violated when they have replaced persuasion with the use of force. This not only violates the speakers’ fundamental rights, but is also bad strategy. Protests ignoring the right to free speech alienate both the audience attending the event, whom protesters should be trying to win over, and those who wish to preserve free speech.

This differs from racist or antisemitic acts of intimidation perpetrated by organized groups with a history of physical violence. The 1936 march organized by the British Union of Fascists in the Jewish-majority East End of London illustrates this distinction. Oswald Mosley, the demonstration’s leader, did not intend to persuade the Jews living in that neighborhood to join their group. Rather, he wanted to terrify them. Nor did the American neo-Nazi group that applied for a march permit in the also heavily Jewish Chicago suburb of Skokie in 1978 set out to convert the residents, many of whom were Holocaust survivors, into Nazis. (...)

These same considerations should influence our analysis of the recent controversy surrounding Milo Yiannopoulos, whose appearance at Berkeley was canceled following a massive demonstration and the actions of a small group of fifty to one hundred people who engaged in the destruction of university property. His previous political record shows Yiannopoulos as a racist persuader of a particularly reactionary and obnoxious kind who, as we argued above, certainly requires that the protesting students exercise their free speech rights with massive picketing and heckling while respecting the principles of free speech, stopping short of a forceful suppression of the event.

However, some have claimed that Yiannopoulos had planned to reveal the names of undocumented students. Had he tried to do so, then the clash between him and the protesters would have moved to a different ground beyond persuasion, and the audience would have been entitled to shut him off immediately.

O Partido Republicano dos EUA e a imigração

Why did Republicans become so opposed to immigration? Hint: It’s not because there’s more nativism, por Margaret E. Peters (Monkey Cage / Washington Post; pode ser preciso abrir como "janela privada" no browser para aceder ao link):

To the surprise of some, the Republican Congress largely supports Trump’s restrictionist approach to immigration. Apparently Republicans are favoring their nativist base over their traditional allies in business. Why?

The Republican Party has long been the party of both business and nativists. For most of its history, the party’s business wing has reined in the nativists. But aside from a few individual industries, businesses overall are less interested in open immigration — freeing Republican members of Congress to cater to the nativists. It’s not that nativism is increasing; it’s that fewer businesses demand low-skilled immigrants.

The Republicans’ anti-immigration stance might make sense if nativism was on the rise. But contrary to conventional wisdom, nativism is not increasing in the United States. As you can see in the figure below, anti-immigrant sentiment reached its most recent height in the mid-1990s.

Recent surveys from Gallup show that more and more Americans are happy with the status quo — or even want more immigration. (...)

So why are nativists having so much success — arguably even turning into the swing vote for the president? As I show in my book, nativists have increased influence not because more Americans agree with them, but because most businesses no longer care about immigration. Increased globalization has changed the amount and kind of labor that most U.S. businesses need. (...)

As President Trump has noted, because of decreasing trade barriers, many U.S. manufacturing companies have closed — especially those that employed large numbers of low-skill immigrant workers. Those employers are no longer around to lobby for immigration. For the same reason, those U.S. companies that do rely on manufacturing have moved their factories overseas. Why should businesses fight to bring Chinese workers to the United States when they can move factories to China?

Furthermore, companies have increasingly automated production and so need fewer workers. The U.S. steel industry, for example, produces as much steel today as it did in 1960, but it does so with a third of its former workforce. Companies also stop lobbying for immigration when they need fewer workers because of automation.

[Via David Henderson / Econlog]

O capitalismo e o imperialismo segundo Schumpeter

Schumpeter’s two theories of imperialism, por Branko Milanovic:

Schumpeter’s theory is interesting for several reasons. It was formulated at the same time as Lenin’s and Luxemburg’s and clearly with the knowledge of the two. It reacts to the exactly the same events as theirs. It is different though and it was held by Schumpeter throughout his life. The key text for Schumpeter’s theory is “The sociology of imperialisms” (note the  plural) published in 1918-19. It is a very long essay of some tightly printed 80 pages in its English translation.  (...)

What Schumpeter says is the following. Imperialism, most purely defined, is “objectless”, that is, it is not directed against something or somebody that can be shown to impede one’s interest. It is thus not rational: it is a simple will to power. The canonic examples, according to Schumpeter, are Assyrians, Persians, Arabs and Franks (...)

Now, imperialism as such is atavistic and in contradiction with “normal” capitalism which is rational and individualistic and whose objectives can be much better achieved in peace and by peace. We should thus expect imperialism to diminish as capitalism becomes stronger. The least imperialistic are the most capitalistic countries like the United States. (...)

However, I think that an alternative reading of Schumpeter is possible, based on his own writings and view of capitalism.

In “Imperialisms…” Schumpeter allows that imperialism can appears in capitalistic societies. But there “we must evidently see [imperialistic tendencies] only as alien  elements carried into the world of capitalism from the outside, supported by non-capitalistic factors in modern life”. (p. 194).

But (and it is a crucial “but”) if capitalism is not the one of perfect competition and free trade but capitalism of monopolies then Schumpeter allows that “organized capital may very well make the discovery that the interest rate can be maintained above the level of free competition if the resulting surplus (my emphasis) can be sent abroad” (p. 200). “Organized capital” may realize that it has a lot to gain from having colonies.  (...)

In this description of the role of monopoly capital in fostering colonization and imperialism Schumpeter is hardly a hair's breadth away from Lenin and Luxemburg. Perhaps so, it could be argued, but these are, according to Schumpeter, special conditions of monopoly (“trustified”) capitalism that cannot be identified with “normal” or “usual” free market capitalism.

But this is not what Schumpeter says in [Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy]. There the point is forcefully made that the key feature of capitalism (what makes it grow) is innovation and that it is possible only if capitalism is monopolistic, or if it is not, innovation itself will lead to monopolies (...).

But if the normal form of capitalism is monopolistic, then the “normal” form of behavior of such capitalism is as forcefully described in “Imperialisms….”: trying to keep the domestic rate of profit above the “natural” level by exporting capital to colonies, aiming to control cheap labor and resources, and likely running into struggle and conflict with other monopolized national capitalisms. So this is the normal modus operandi of capitalism—according to Schumpeter.

The contention that perfect competition and free trade would be incompatible with imperialism becomes really irrelevant: even if the contention is valid, it refers to a textbook case of capitalism that, Schumpeter tells us, is bound to lose out and yield to a more dynamic and innovative monopolistic capitalism.

Putting these two things together then gives us a reformulated Schumpeter’s theory of imperialism which comes exceedingly close, nay is practically identical even in its emphasis on the low domestic rate of return, to classical Marxist theories of imperialism. Whether Schumpeter would be appalled, or whether he might have been aware of it, is relevant for la petite histoire. But it seems to me that the logical proximity of the two theories cannot be denied.

Rendimento Básico Incondicional versus empregos garantidos

Basic Income, not Basic Jobs: Against Hijacking Utopia, por Scott Alexander:

Some Democrats angling for the 2020 presidential nomination have a big idea: a basic jobs guarantee, where the government promises a job to anybody who wants one. Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders are all said to be considering the plan. (...)

I am totally against this. Maybe basic jobs are better than nothing, but I have an absolute 100% revulsion at the idea of implementing basic jobs as an alternative to basic income. Before getting into the revulsion itself, I want to bring up some more practical objections:

1. Basic jobs don’t help the disabled (...)

2. Basic jobs don’t help caretakers (...)

3. Basic jobs don’t help parents (...)

4. Jobs are actually a big cause of poverty (...)

5. Basic jobs may not pay for themselves by doing useful work (...)

6. Private industry deals with bad workers by firing them; nobody has a good plan for how basic jobs would replace this

Suppose someone does accidentally leave a stove on and burn down the soup kitchen. You transfer them to an agricultural commune and they crash the tractor into a tree. You transfer them to some kind of low-risk paper-pushing job, but they’re late to work every day and skip it entirely once or twice a week, and important papers end up tragically un-pushed. After a while, you decide they are too incompetent to add non-negative value to any of the programs on offer. What do you do with them?

If you fire them, then you’re not a basic jobs guarantee. You’re a basic-jobs-for-skilled-workers-whom-bosses-like guarantee. We already have one of those – it’s called capitalism, maybe you’ve heard of it. But a real solution to poverty would have to encompass everybody, not just people who are good at working within the system.

And if you don’t fire them, what’s your plan? (...)

Or transfer them to a job in a padded room putting blocks in stacks and knocking them down again, in a way that inconveniences nobody because nobody cares about it? Abandon all pretense at creating anything other than busy-work for poor people out of an all-consuming desire to make sure nobody can live comfortably unless they have spent forty hours of every week in boredom and misery? (...)

This isn’t speculation about some vague future. These questions get played out all around the country in our existing “government must take everyone no matter how little they want to be there” institution, ie public school." (...)

7. Private employees deal with bad workplaces by quitting them; nobody has a good plan for how basic jobs would replace this

And if you think this is a problem for the managers, just wait until you see what the employees have to put up with.

Some bosses are incompetent. Some are greedy. Some are downright abusive. Some don’t have any obvious flaw you can put your finger on, they just turn every single day into a miserable emotional grind.  (...)

In private industry, people cope by leaving their job and finding a better one. It’s not a perfect system. A lot of people are stuck in jobs they don’t like because they’re not sure they can find another, or because they don’t have enough money to last them through the interim. And this is one reason why poor people who can’t easily change jobs have worse working conditions than wealthier people who can. (...)

What about the people who can’t get any jobs besides the guaranteed basic ones? How do they deal with abusive working conditions?

Probably somebody will set up some system to let you quit one basic job and go to a different one in the same city. But probably it will end up being much more complicated than that. How do you deal with the guy who quits every job after a week or two, looking for the perfect cushy position? How do you deal with the case where there’s only one basic job available within a hundred miles? How do you deal with the case where everyone wants the same few really good jobs, and nobody wants to work at the awful abusive soup kitchen down the road? (...)

10. Basic income puts everyone on the same side; basic jobs preserve the poor-vs-the-rest-of-us dichotomy

Welfare users often talk about the stigma involved in getting welfare. Either other people make them feel like a parasite, or they just worry about it themselves. Basic jobs would be little different. There will be the well-off people with jobs producing useful goods and services. And there will be the people on guaranteed basic jobs, who know their paychecks are being subsidized by Society. In the worst case scenario, people complaining about workplace abuses at their guaranteed basic job will be told how lucky they are to have work at all.

Basic income breaks through that dichotomy. Everybody, from Warren Buffett to the lowliest beggar on the street, gets the same basic income. We assume Warren Buffett pays enough taxes that the program is a net negative for him, but taxes are complicated and this is hard to notice.  (...)

There will be people on basic income who have no other source of money. There will be people who supplement it with odd jobs now and then. There will be people who work part-time but who plausibly still get more than they pay in taxes. There will be people who work full-time and maybe pay more than they get but aren’t really sure. At no point does a clear dichotomy between “those people getting welfare” and “the rest of us who support them” ever kick in.

11. Work sucks

(...)

Either one of basic jobs or basic income could be potentially the costliest project the US government has ever attempted. Government projects usually end up cash-constrained, and the costliest one ever won’t be the exception. The pressure to cut corners will get overwhelming. It’s hard to cut corners on basic income – either citizens get their checks or they don’t. It’s simple to cut corners on basic jobs. You do it the same way Amazon does – you let working conditions degrade to intolerable levels. What are your workers going to do do? Quit? Neither Amazon nor government-guaranteed basic jobs need to worry about that – both know that their employees have no good alternatives.

Gathering a bunch of disempowered poor people in a place they’re not allowed to opt out of, with budget constraints on the whole enterprise, is basically the perfect recipe for ensuring miserable conditions. I refuse to believe that they will be much better than private industry; the best we can hope for is that they end up no worse. But the conditions in private industry are miserable, even for people with better resources and coping opportunities than basic jobs recipients are likely to have.

It would be unfair to make this argument without responding to jobs’ proponents points, so I want to explain why I don’t think they provide a strong enough argument against. These will be from the Sarris piece. I don’t want to knock it too much, because it’s a really fair and well-written piece that presents the case for jobs about as well as it can be presented, and any snark I might give it below is totally undeserved and due to personal viciousness. But it argues: (...)

iv) Without work, people will gradually lose meaning from their lives and become miserable

(...)

Social responsibility. Sense of purpose. Community. Meaningful ways to spend your time. This is some big talk for promoting jobs that in real life are probably going to involve a lot of “Do you want fries with that?” Getting a sense of purpose from your job is a crapshoot at best. Getting a sense of purpose outside your job is a natural part of the human condition. The old joke goes that nobody says on their deathbed “I wish I’d spent more time at the office”, but the basic jobs argument seems to worry about exactly that.

And let’s make the hidden step in this argument explicit. Everyone on basic income will have the opportunity to work if they want. In fact, they’ll have more opportunity, since people who hate working will have dropped out of the workforce and demand for labor will rise. So the basic jobs argument isn’t just that people need and enjoy work. The argument is that people need and enjoy work, but also, they are too unaware to realize this, and will never get the work they secretly crave unless we force them into it.

Ready Player One

Pareceu-me uma espécie "Matrix" + "O Senhor dos Anéis" (com uma pitadinha de nada de "Star Wars" e outra de "Indiana Jones e a Grande Cruzada").

Censura em versão Parceria Público-Privada

Prodding private companies into censorship by proxy is a dangerous government tradition, por Jesse Walker (Los Angeles Times, via Reason):

When YouTube, Facebook or Twitter cracks down on some form of expression — conspiracy theories, radical rants, terrorist propaganda — some of the targets inevitably complain that their freedom of speech is under attack. (This feeling of victimhood may be what sent Nasim Aghdam to YouTube headquarters, gun in hand.) There is a strong retort to this: These are private platforms with a right to decide what they publish. It is no more a violation of the 1st Amendment for YouTube to muzzle a channel (...) than it is for this newspaper to refuse to run a column calling for Minnesota to invade Wisconsin.

But what if a private platform suppresses speech because it’s afraid the government might otherwise step in?

Just as one effective end-run around the 4th Amendment is to ask private companies for data they slurped up on their own, the 1st Amendment can be sidestepped when officials pressure the private sector into self-censorship. The end result can be rules more restrictive than the companies would impose on their own — and more intrusive than the government could get away with if it tried to impose them directly.

Os falsos resultados nos inquéritos a adolescentes

'Mischievous Responders' Confound Research On Teens, por Anya Kamenetz (NPR):

Teenagers face some serious issues: drugs, bullying, sexual violence, depression, gangs. They don't always like to talk about these things with adults.

One way that researchers and educators can get around that is to give teens a survey — a simple, anonymous questionnaire they can fill out by themselves without any grown-ups hovering over them. (...) chool districts use them to gather data; so do the federal government, states and independent researchers.

But a new research paper points out one huge potential flaw in all this research: kids who skew the results by making stuff up for a giggle. (...)

"We were interested in the disparities between LGBT and non-LGBT youth in suicidal ideation, feelings of belonging, text-message bullying," he recalls. "One of our reviewers asked us, 'How do you know these kids are actually gay?' And giving some thought to it, we said, 'Let's figure out who those kids are.' "
Robinson-Cimpian and his co-author came up with a clever test.

They chose a set of answers on the survey — questions with responses that adolescents were likely to find funny, but ones that were statistically unlikely to be related to being lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender. Their height, for example.

The more of these way-off-base answers that someone gave on these questions, the researchers surmised, the more likely they were to be lying about being LGBT as well.

And they did find a correlation. For example, 41 percent of the students who claimed they were transgender also claimed to be extremely tall or short, and the same percentage also claimed they were in a gang.

This is important because researchers are often the most interested in minority groups, and so the undetected presence of a small number of jokesters can seriously mess up results.

In a 2003 study, 19 percent of teens who claimed to be adopted actually weren't, according to follow-up interviews with their parents. When you excluded these kids (who also gave extreme responses on other items), the study no longer found a significant difference between adopted children and those who weren't on behaviors like drug use, drinking and skipping school. The paper had to be retracted. In yet another survey, fully 99 percent of 253 students who claimed to use an artificial limb were just kidding

A sociologia dos tiroteios em massa

Isto é um artigo que eu já estava a algum tempo para postar, mas vou pô-lo agora porque acho que trata de um tema muito próximo deste:

The Sociology of Mass Shootings, por "Phil":

A different approach is adopted by Joel Cappellan in his PhD dissertation, submitted and examined in September 2016. This is the first properly full-length sociological study of the topic. As Cappellan notes, existing social science literature tends to look at individual risk factors instead of identifying it as a social problem that brings social forces into play. That isn't an invitation to crude sociological determinism, that shooters are helpless puppets of the forces animating them. The relation between context and agency is always complex, but never so rarefied that individual responsibility disappears. Nevertheless, there is social patterning, the shooters mostly share similar biographical characteristics and, yes, they tend to be men.

Cappellan advances two hypotheses: that low rates of social integration and social cohesion make populations more vulnerable to these sorts of attacks, and that media reportage boosts incidence and distribution of them. A review of cases 1970-2014 showed the hypotheses turned out not to be the case, in fact the opposite was true. Mass shootings are more likely in rural states with stable marriage rates and, interestingly, steady socio-economic status - profiles, Cappellan remarks, that bear more similarity to suicide rates than "normal" homicide.

This requires further work, of course. But really it shouldn't be that surprising. Marjory Stoneman Douglas is a middle American school. Sandy Hook is a middle American school. Columbine is a middle American school. What they appear to have in common is their situation in communities where social cohesion wasn't particularly frayed. Rather, the shooters were effectively outcasts within their communities. Nicholas Cruz, the latest name added to the roll call of infamy, was the stereotypical loner excluded from school. Adam Lanza hadn't left the house for three months prior to his attack, for which he planned methodically for. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were well known in their school for being weird, and were shunned and occasionally bullied. It seems the relationship between cohesion and exclusion is worth exploring in more depth, that from their standpoint the appearance of comfortable normalcy within sight but not within reach is a social tension that may (or may not) be a significant contribution to the making of a mass shooter.

O post é muito maior que isto, mas o que me chamou a atenção foi esta parte - de que o típico tiroteio em massa não ocorre no anonimato dos grandes centros, em localidades em que as pessoas não se conhecem, onde predominam as famílias desestruturadas, etc. Não, é ao contrário - é nas pequenas comunidades aparentemente unidas e coesas que surgem os atiradores em massa (embora eles próprios sejam indivíduos - por vontade própria ou por exclusão involuntária - socialmente isolados). Não sei bem o que se poderá concluir disso, mas talvez signifique que ser um "estranho" é pior numa comunidade de resto unida e coesa do que numa comunidade mais desestruturada; talvez a tal "multidão solitária", tão criticada por sociólogos e pensadores diversos, tenha um lado bom afinal?

Definam melhor "bullying", s.f.f.

Face às noticias que os colegas do atirador de Parkland, Florida, terão admitido que o ostracizavam e/ou que o "bullyavam" (esta conjugação verbal não existe, pois não?), e às réplicas estilo "right wingers are doubling down on the claim that young white men are entitled to friends, no matter how terribly they act towards said friends, and failure to befriend an awful young men should result in death", acho que seria boa ideia definir bem o que se quer dizer com "bullying", "ostracizar" e conceitos afins.

Já há muito tempo que vejo mensagens "anti-bullying" no Facebook listando coisas que supostamente são "bullying", e incluindo o item "pôr de parte"; acho que isso não faz grande sentido: se há uma pessoa que tem gostos ou interesses diferentes dos dos outros, não há muito a fazer - ou tenta-se obrigá-lo a participar nas mesmas atividades que os outros, se calhar pelo método de lhe fazer a vida negra até ele se "integrar" (e aí temos inequivocamente bullying), ou então segue-se o método do "vive e deixa viver / por um alho não se estraga uma alhada", isto é, os outros continuarem a dedicar-se às suas atividades e interesses preferidos, e simplesmente ignorarem o elemento "desviante"; mas se considerarmos que "pôr de parte" também é "bullying" não há solução - não há nada que se possa fazer com um colega "diferente" que não seja considerado "bullying", quer seja deixá-lo em paz quer seja tentar obrigá-lo a se integrar.

Ainda a este respeito, as expressões norte-americanos "popular" e "unpopular", muito usadas para referir a dinâmica social entre adolescentes e pré-adolescentes, são potencialmente enganadoras, já que levadas literalmente significariam que é uma questão de ter ou não muitos amigos, de ser ou não convidado para festas, etc. - mas (pelo menos guiando-me pelos filmes e séries de adolescentes nos EUA que passam na nossa televisão - até porque me parece que esses termos só são usados no contexto norte-americano) não me parece ser isso que signifique exatamente a dialética do popular/unpopular; sobretudo a expressão "unpopular" parece-me ser muito um eufemismo, nomeadamente pegando no que Paul Graham escreveu sobre o assunto: "Nerds would find their unpopularity more bearable if it merely caused them to be ignored. Unfortunately, to be unpopular in school is to be actively persecuted."

E agora regressando ao caso do atirador da Florida, o problema é que eu leio este artigo e fico sem perceber se os colegas faziam "bullying ativo" sobre ele (estilo baterem-lhe, chamarem-lhe nomes, fazerem-lhe partidas, roubarem-lhe as coisas, etc.) ou se simplesmente o punham de parte; a Emma González diz que o "ostracizavam", o que à partida pareceria mais no campo "pôr de parte", mas dá-me a ideia que a expressão "ostracizar" tornou-se ela mesma quase tão vaga como "bullying", não sendo de excluir que também seja usada em referência a algumas práticas de bullying ativo.

E isto é relevante sobretudo para a conversa do "entitled to friends"; se os colegas simplesmente o ignoravam, é um argumento válido, já que ninguém tem obrigação de ser amigo de ninguém (eu pelo menos sou bastante seletivo nas pessoas que aceito como amigos, quer seja na vida real, que seja em redes sociais); mas se eles faziam "bullying ativo" sobre ele, esse contra-argumento torna-se um disparate, já que o que estará aí em causa não é serem amigos deles, mas simplesmente não serem ativamente inimigos.

Nota - eu acho que sou um caso extremo de personalidade INTP / Eneagrama tipo 5 (um tipo psicológico que não é exatamente dos mais sociáveis); será que isso me leva a desvalorizar o sofrimento que ser "posto de parte" pode representar para algumas pessoas?

Liberdade de expressão e censura social/privada (II)

The Free Speech Dilemma, por Chris Dillow:

What role should social pressure play in the policing of free speech? (...)

Such social pressure has worked well in the case of David Irving. He should be legally free to deny the holocaust, but the rest of us are entitled – and correct – to treat his as a pariah.

I’m even relaxed about most cases of no-platforming. Nobody has a right to speak at (say) a students union, any more than I have a right to a column in the Telegraph. A right to speak does not give the rest of us an obligation to host you.

Nor does that right entail freedom from the consequences of exercising it. You have a right to speak, and the rest of us have a right to tell you forcefully that you’re talking shit or to ignore you.

In fact, if the marketplace of ideas is to work, bad ideas must be weeded out. This is done by vigorously opposing them.

All this leads me to think that we should police speech not with the law but with the force of others’ opinion – either shunning them or opposing them depending on context.

Except, except, except. Here are four counter-arguments:

- Some privately-provided platforms are so widespread and important that withdrawing them is, as Robert Sharp says, a form of “privatized censorship.” He’s talking of Facebook’s banning of Britain First. They deserve no sympathy, but there’s a slippery slope here: if Facebook can ban them, it can – as Robert says – also censor others.

- Private sanctions against speech we don’t like can be excessively harsh. For example, I wouldn’t want firms to be able to sack employees just because they have opinions their employers don’t like.

- There’s a point, perhaps not easily defined, at which vigorous and widespread opposition becomes bullying: was Mary Beard bullied after her (I think) ill-judged tweet about “’civilized’ values”? I’m not sure. But women are especially vulnerable to an ugly mob rule.

- John Stuart Mill had a point in warning us of the tyranny of the majority. This he wrote, is

more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough; there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them;

(...)

My point here is that we face a genuine dilemma. On the one hand, there’s much to be said for using social rather than legal sanctions against speech we don’t like. But on the other, those sanctions can be as excessive and misapplied as legal ones.

Em defesa da mudança da hora

Agora parece que é moda dizer mal da mudança da hora.

Pois eu acho uma maravilha – no Verão posso, depois do trabalho ficar mais uma hora na praia do que ficaria se tivéssemos a hora “solar” (que não é bem, porque já está meia hora adiantada, mas pronto…) o ano todo.

E não, não era melhor ficarmos sempre na hora de Verão (mais uma hora e meia do que a hora solar), porque assim tínhamos (bem, muitos já têm, mas seriam ainda mais) que ir para o trabalho ainda de noite no Inverno, e não se ganhava quase nada ao fim do dia, porque de qualquer maneira normalmente não há tempo – tanto “weather” como “time” – suficiente para se fazer qualquer coisa depois do  trabalho que requeira luz solar (frequentemente está frio, chuva, e de qualquer maneira anoitece cedo).

Sim, há quem diga que a mudança de hora afeta a saúde, mas também há quem diga que não; confesso que a mim custa-me a acreditar - em primeiro lugar, por experiência própria: nunca senti mais dificuldade em acordar nos dias a seguir a uma mudança de hora nos que em qualquer outro dia (mas pronto, admito que eu não seja estatisticamente significativo); mas sobretudo porque isso me parece difícil de conciliar com a nossa história evolucionária - durante (creio) dezenas de milhares de anos fomos caçadores-recoletores, uma atividade que frequentemente requeria grandes mudanças no horário de trabalho durante o ano e até durante a semana - mesmo há bocadinho estive a ver um documentário sobre os esquimós do Canadá a apanharem mexilhões, atividade que está muito dependente das marés (no caso deles, porque a maré cria "grutas" no gelo onde eles vão apanhar os mexilhões, grutas essas que se fecham quando a maré muda, em principio matando quem não saia de lá a tempo), pelo que imagino que a rotina diária deles mude bastante ao longo da semana conforme as marés (de certeza que não vão todos os dias à mesma hora à pesca); e depois uns milhares de anos como agricultores, uma atividade talvez mais regular que a caça-e-recoleção, mas também com mudanças de ritmo ao longo do ano (logo o clássico trabalhar de "sol-a-sol" em vez de "das tantas às tantas", que por si só implicaria que, pelos padrões modernos, a hora do levantar e do deitar estaria sempre a mudar ao longo das estações). Assim, custa-me a acreditar que tenhamos mesmo essa necessidade de nos deitarmos e levantarmos a horas certas (padrão de comportamento que me parece mais otimizado para assalariados numa sociedade industrial ou pós-industrial - por um lado dependendo muito menos dos ritmos da natureza, e por outro dependendo muito mais dos ritmos das outras pessoas, pelo que dá jeito termos horários sincronizados, ou pelos menos previsíveis - do que para humanos vivendo em estado natural) e que vamos ficar cheios de perturbações na saúde por causa da mudança da hora.

Admito uma exceção ao que escrevo - os trabalhadores por turnos, que têm que trabalhar ao fim de semana e por isso muitos terão menos uma hora de sono no dia da mundança de hora (nem me admirava que os tais estudos que indicam um aumento de problemas de saúde nos dias a seguir à mudança de hora estejam a ser inflacionados por dados referentes aos trabalhadores por turnos).

Liberdade de expressão e censura social/privada (I)

A Litany of the Ways In Which Facebook Corrupts the Spirit of Free Speech, por Robert Sharp:

Inciting violence and hate is what Britain First group appear to have been doing, so the Facebook decision to ban their page feels righteous. Good riddance? Nothing to see here? Move along?

Not quite. This development is still problematic and draws our attention to the unexpected role that social media plays in our politics. We have been discussing these problems for years without, in my opinion, coming any closer to solving them.

It is important to remember that this is not an example of state censorship. Facebook is a private company, and it is entitled to set its own terms of use and to enforce them as it sees fit. The Britain First Facebook page has no protection under Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights or the First Amendment to the United States constitution.

And that is the first problem, because no-one else’s Facebook page has such a protection either. Vast swathes of political discourse take place on Mark Zuckerberg’s platform. We treat it like a public square, but it is not. At any moment, the messages we post, and the networks we have built can be taken away from us.

Whatever mechanise that has been used to shut down the far right will be used to censor other groups. Campaigners will note the demise of the Britain First page and seek to have other pages similarly banned. Islamist groups and the Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists will be at immediate risk, but other kinds of political discussion will soon be targeted. Any legitimate political cause that contains militant elements, such as pro-Palestine or pro-Kurdish groups, could easily find their Facebook privileges are revoked when those who are ideologically opposed start gaming the complaint features.

This is privatised censorship. Individuals and interest groups can and will enlist the help of a billionaire to shut up people with whom they disagree. (...)

Our response to this cannot be “well, you can always go elsewhere”. Where exactly? MySpace? Friends Reunited? Independent websites (such as this blog) do not have the same networking opportunities and potential for ‘virality’ that the leading social media platforms offer. Social media is where our discourse happens now and all other content is filtered through these platforms. They are private spaces where we conduct very public politics. Denial of access to these spaces presents a huge barrier to expression for anyone thus suppressed. A single American company should not be the final arbiter on what organisations get to participate in British politics. We may think they have made the right call in banning Britain First… but even a stopped clock is right twice a day. (...) 

Another problem, most relevant internationally, is that social media platforms present a single point of failure. Recent history is littered with examples of governments seeking to block access to social media. Iran did so during the ‘Green Revolution’ protests of 2009 and Egypt did so during the ‘Arab Spring’ protests of 2011. During the London riots that same year, British members of Parliament
expressed support for the idea that the government might take social media services entirely off-line during times that suited them. I wrote a commentary on this idea at the time.

(...)

The counter to this threat is to distribute the network. Use different platforms or use technologies that do not require a centralised server like RSS or Mastodon. By spreading out we are harder to stop. We have known that this is important for nearly a decade, but everyone, including yrstrly, seems wedded to the corporate silos.

Protecionismo, direita e esquerda

Free Trade Shouldn’t Be a Litmus Test for Conservatism, por Paul Gottfried (The American Conservative):

According to a recent analysis in the New York Times, President Trump’s “isolationist” trade policy is “at odds with longstanding conservative orthodoxy about the benefits of free and open markets.” The reader is further told that the president is under pressure from his working-class base, which is obstreperously demanding that protectionist taxes be placed on imported steel and aluminum.

I say not so fast.

The Times presents the GOP base’s supposed impatience with free trade as a departure from almost sacred Republican beliefs, and free trade itself as a permanent conservative characteristic. Their evidence is that large corporations favor free trade while labor unions have generally been more protectionist.

But both assertions represent gross oversimplifications. Those who present free trade as a “conservative” position are skimming over whole chapters of the past.They conveniently overlook (or are totally ignorant of) the fact that well into the 20th century, American statesmen who could hardly be characterized as leftists—like Alexander Hamilton, Henry Clay, and William Howard Taft—were outspoken advocates of tariffs. (...)

In Europe, such non-leftists as Louis XIV, Frederick the Great, and Otto von Bismarck favored tariffs to protect the agricultural and commercial products of their countrymen.(...) England practiced free trade in the 19th century principally because it was the most advanced industrial nation with the largest supply of credit. When these conditions changed before the First World War, the English government reverted to protectionism. This change in England’s fortunes and views about trade provided the theme of a famous book, The Strange Death of Liberal England, by George Dangerfield, which was published in 1935. Not surprisingly, it was the Tories who were accused of giving the death blow to English free trade.

It is not often mentioned—but should be, for the sake of accuracy—that the major advocates of free trade in the 19th century were radicals like John Bright, Richard Cobden, and James and John Stuart Mill. Such free traders believed in extending the suffrage to women, and in various mechanisms for breaking down national barriers. Although the goals of these radicals have become mainstream positions by now, in the 19th century they certainly were not.

O novo modelo económico do Labour

The new economics of Labour, por Hilary Wainwright (introdução) e John McDonnell:

Shadow chancellor John McDonnell can usually barely breathe a word about nationalisation without setting off a media frenzy – so it’s strange that his most interesting comments yet on the subject passed with so little comment.

Speaking in London about the Labour Party’s new economics, McDonnell said: ‘We should not try to recreate the nationalised industries of the past… we cannot be nostalgic for a model whose management was often too distant, too bureaucratic.’ Instead, he said, a new kind of public ownership would be based on the principle that ‘nobody knows better how to run these industries than those who spend their lives with them’.

Maybe the media's silence on this profoundly democratic vision of public ownership is not so surprising : for it directly contradicts the attempt to warm up Cold War scares of a secretly pro-Soviet Labour leader whose public ownership plans are the first step towards imposing a Soviet style command economy onto the unsuspecting British people.

Now that the Czech spy stories have fallen flat – as false – we can discuss Labour's new democratic thinking more productively and maybe some of the media will pay attention; for this new thinking about public ownership opens up a rich seam of new economic thinking: beyond both neoliberalism and the post-war settlement. While neoliberalism says the market knows best, the Fabian-inspired model of the 1945 welfare state – while it has considerable merits – left workers with no role in the management of the newly nationalised industries. Beatrice Webb, a leading Fabian, declared her lack of faith in the ‘average sensual man’ (who can ‘describe his grievances’ but not ‘prescribe his remedies’) and wanted public industries to be run by ‘the professional expert’. In practice, this often meant the same old bosses from the private firms being brought back to run the public version, along with an few ex-generals or two.

Underlying Labour’s New Politics is a new and very different understanding of knowledge – even of what counts as knowledge – in public administration, and hence of whose knowledge matters. For industries to be run by ‘those who spend their lives with them’ means recognising the knowledge drawn from practical experience, which is often tacit rather than codified: an understanding of expertise that opens decision-making to wider popular participation, beyond the private boss or the state bureaucrat. As McDonnell put it, we need to ‘learn from the everyday experiences of those who know how to run railway stations, utilities and postal services, and what’s needed by their users’.