• „the number of specialists has fallen by 90% since the 1950s, and at least 40% in the last decade alone“
• „supermarkets […] now sell 97% of our food, with four chains accounting for 76%“

Research is cited showing that „after the arrival of a big supermarket, participation in local charities, churches, campaign groups and even voting declines sharply“.

The more immediate effects are a diminishing choice of products, especially in the „real“ sense of things like local varieties of produce as opposed to different toilet paper colors.

Together with pressure on producers (called monopsony in the article) the dominance of big chains means a monopolization of business. As the „Red Tories“, a conservative UK thinktank finds, the grocery sector is largely closed to to new entrants.

This problem seems to me apparent in all sorts of industries and areas of business — the free market naturally leads to bigger and bigger agglomeration both in terms of huge companies and geographical specialization (e.g. 90%+ of footballs (for soccer) produced in Pakistan, similar number of laptops assembled in China, …), indeed reminiscent of the worst days of Soviet planned economy and similarly damaging to the environment and vulnerable to changes in demand or geopolitical events.

The question that frequently comes to my mind when I read this kind of thing is: we like to think of the free market in analogy to evolution. But while we can observe stunning diversity in nature, we have the opposite development in economy. I think on simple but probably central answer is: Nature has very powerful negative feedback in the form of parasites, whose role for evolution is I think widely underrated at least among non-professionals (non-biologists). With increasing population and dominance of a species in a certain area come dramatic increases in vulnerability to predation and especially parasites maintaining the balance, while business almost only knows size benefits.

Would it help to try and implement something similar for businesses? Some sort of progressive business taxation? Should antitrust regulation be stronger and act earlier? Or is centralizing business the way after all, but in public ownership?

The core argument is about how money came to be — which in most economic textbooks is explained as a logical development from a barter trade system, where you have to find somebody with a complementary need and offer in the marketplace. But this assumption about our economic past is soundly refuted by actual anthropological and historical research. It is very fascinating to follow the research as to what are actual probable pathways to money usage. And how economic activities were organized before that tells us a lot about how the economic system shapes even deep-rooted human qualities. The bottom line there is that behavior in accordance with „Homo Oeconomicus“ models probably only really came about after markets were invented. And it is because economists cannot (or don’t want to) imagine a human being with different ways of decision-making that they persist on the „money developed from barter trade“ myth despite solid evidence to the contrary. This is, again, in the service of not acknowledging the own status as a „reflexive“ social science which not only describes but also strongly influences human behavior and social processes.

So, first of all, how did people go about their business before money was around?

Anthropologists gradually fanned out into the world and began directly observing how economies where money was not used (or anyway, not used for everyday transactions) actually worked. What they discovered was an at first bewildering variety of arrangements, ranging from competitive gift-giving to communal stockpiling to places where economic relations centered on neighbors trying to guess each other’s dreams. What they never found was any place, anywhere, where economic relations between members of community took the form economists predicted: “I’ll give you twenty chickens for that cow.” Hence in the definitive anthropological work on the subject, Cambridge anthropology professor Caroline Humphrey concludes, “No example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described, let alone the emergence from it of money; all available ethnography suggests that there never has been such a thing” [2]

A gift economy (even though that should not be read to imply selflessness) was probably the most common modus operandi among people who had established relationships, with rough judgments of equivalence between different kinds of goods:

a. The great flaw of the economic model is that it assumed spot transactions. I have arrowheads, you have beaver pelts, if you don’t need arrowheads right now, no deal. But even if we presume that neighbors in a small community are exchanging items in some way, why on earth would they limit themselves to spot transactions? If your neighbor doesn’t need your arrowheads right now, he probably will at some point in the future, and even if he won’t, you’re his neighbor—you will undoubtedly have something he wants, or be able to do some sort of favor for him, eventually. But without assuming the spot trade, there’s no double coincidence of wants problem, and therefore, no need to invent money.

b. What anthropologists have in fact observed where money is not used is not a system of explicit lending and borrowing, but a very broad system of non-enumerated credits and debts. In most such societies, if a neighbor wants some possession of yours, it usually suffices simply to praise it (“what a magnificent pig!”); the response is to immediately hand it over, accompanied by much insistence that this is a gift and the donor certainly would never want anything in return. In fact, the recipient now owes him a favor. Now, he might well just sit on the favor, since it’s nice to have others beholden to you, or he might demand something of an explicitly non-material kind (“you know, my son is in love with your daughter…”) He might ask for another pig, or something he considers roughly equivalent in kind. But it’s almost impossible to see how any of this would lead to a system whereby it’s possible to measure proportional values. After all, even if, as sometimes happens, the party owing one favor heads you off by presenting you with some unwanted present, and one considers it inadequate—a few chickens, for example—one might mock him as a cheapskate, but one is unlikely to feel the need to come up with a mathematical formula to measure just how cheap you consider him to be. As a result, as Chris Gregory observed, what you ordinarily find in such ‘gift economies’ is a broad ranking of different types of goods—canoes are roughly the same as heirloom necklaces, both are superior to pigs and whale teeth, which are superior to chickens, etc—but no system whereby you can measure how many pigs equal one canoe. [3]

The most common actual barter on the other hand is in long-distance trade, where people knew which goods the other party had, and that they had something to offer themselves which the others wanted. Graeber makes the argument that for that instance, there is no need to invent money when you can instead operate on the basis of „traditional fixed equivalences“. Instead, money would make you much more vulnerable to being robbed, and indeed it seems the Phoenicians, famous long-distance traders of the Classic World, adopted money usage very late.

And even in such trade among non-familiar groups, a social aspect seems to have been at least as important as the economic one:

The second example is the Gunwinngu of West Arnhem land in Australia, famous for entertaining neighbors in rituals of ceremonial barter called the dzamalag. Here the threat of actual violence seems much more distant. The region is also united by both a complex marriage system and local specialization, each group producing their own trade product that they barter with the others.

In the 1940s, an anthropologist, Ronald Berndt, described one dzamalag ritual, where one group in possession of imported cloth swapped their wares with another, noted for the manufacture of serrated spears. Here too it begins as strangers, after initial negotiations, are invited to the hosts’ camp, and the men begin singing and dancing, in this case accompanied by a didjeridu. Women from the hosts’ side then come, pick out one of the men, give him a piece of cloth, and then start punching him and pulling off his clothes, finally dragging him off to the surrounding bush to have sex, while he feigns reluctance, whereon the man gives her a small gift of beads or tobacco. Gradually, all the women select partners, their husbands urging them on, whereupon the women from the other side start the process in reverse, re-obtaining many of the beads and tobacco obtained by their own husbands. The entire ceremony culminates as the visitors’ men-folk perform a coordinated dance, pretending to threaten their hosts with the spears, but finally, instead, handing the spears over to the hosts’ womenfolk, declaring: “We do not need to spear you, since we already have!” [9]

In other words, the Gunwinngu manage to take all the most thrilling elements in the Nambikwara encounters—the threat of violence, the opportunity for sexual intrigue—and turn it into an entertaining game (one that, the ethnographer remarks, is considered enormous fun for everyone involved). In such a situation, one would have to assume obtaining the optimal cloth-for-spears ratio is the last thing on most participants’ minds. (And anyway, they seem to operate on traditional fixed equivalences.)

How did a need for money actually arise, then, and how could it happen? There are two answers — first as unit of calculation that was hardly ever handed over physically for long-distance trade and use in most notably temple bureaucracies. For this reason they usually took the form of equivalencies between „a common long-distance trade item [and] a common subsistence item“, e.g. silver and grain. Second, and to me quite surprisingly, it probably developed out of the legal system, where there was a need for specifying the appropriate compensation for material and moral offenses:

For example, Welsh and Irish codes contain extremely detailed price schedules where in the Welsh case, the exact value of every object likely to be found in someone’s house were worked out in painstaking detail, from cooking utensils to floorboards—despite the fact that there appear to have been, at the time, no markets where any such items could be bought and sold. The pricing system existed solely for the payment of damages and compensation—partly material, but particularly for insults to people’s honor, since the precise value of each man’s personal dignity could also be precisely quantified in monetary terms.

Here’s how Graeber sees the concept of Homo Oeconomicus as our natural state (which is implicit in the assumption that trade before money could only have taken the form of barter) refuted by these findings:

[…] it goes back precisely to this notion of rationality that Adam Smith too embraced: that human beings are rational, calculating exchangers seeking material advantage, and that therefore it is possible to construct a scientific field that studies such behavior. The problem is that the real world seems to contradict this assumption at every turn. Thus we find that in actual villages, rather than thinking only about getting the best deal in swapping one material good for another with their neighbors, people are much more interested in who they love, who they hate, who they want to bail out of difficulties, who they want to embarrass and humiliate, etc.—not to mention the need to head off feuds.

Even when strangers met and barter did ensue, people often had a lot more on their minds than getting the largest possible number of arrowheads in exchange for the smallest number of shells.

See the barter story above for illustration of the last point. The final argument is what all this implies for the role of Economics as a science, which is basically my old idea about necessary but mostly absent „reflexivity“:

At this point, it’s easier to understand why economists feel so defensive about challenges to the Myth of Barter, and why they keep telling the same old story even though most of them know it isn’t true. If what they are really describing is not how we ‘naturally’ behave but rather how we are taught to behave by the market—well who, nowadays, is doing most of the actual teaching? Primarily, economists. The question of barter cuts to the heart of not only what an economy is—most economists still insist that an economy is essentially a vast barter system, with money a mere tool (a position all the more peculiar now that the majority of economic transactions in the world have come to consist of playing around with money in one form or another) [10]—but also, the very status of economics: is it a science that describes of how humans actually behave, or prescriptive, a way of informing them how they should?

In a way, this really is an old argument: Whenever somebody tries to tell you a certain way of going about things, from gender roles to economic activities and social structures, is „natural“, they probably have an interest in you not looking for alternatives too hard. The sad thing is that they sometimes might not even be aware of this themselves, because their benefiting from the status quo is part of their unquestioned privilege.

(See the original article for all the references in [brackets])

This randomness is of course the source of what we often deplore as procrastination, but I’m realizing it can also set free creativity, by presenting side by side concepts that seem only very loosely related at first. So here is my starting point, a very insightful remark on what difference it makes if we speak about Capitalism or Free Market Economy, from John Kenneth Galbraith, Canadian-American economist and author, published in the article Free Market Fraud in The Progressive magazine in 1999:

Let’s begin with capitalism, a word that has gone largely out of fashion. The approved reference now is to the market system. This shift minimizes–indeed, deletes–the role of wealth in the economic and social system. And it sheds the adverse connotation going back to Marx. Instead of the owners of capital or their attendants in control, we have the admirably impersonal role of market forces. It would be hard to think of a change in terminology more in the interest of those to whom money accords power. They have now a functional anonymity.

He goes on to denounce many instances where we (as a society as well as our appointed specialists on that matter, economists) fail to see the power workings of the „Free Market Economy“ and especially its influence over the government.

This argument, including its reference to how the public discourse about the issue is confused by objectivist language, could come straight out of a sketch-book of my own critiques of Capitalism (see NeuerPlan, „new plan“), even though the article is very short, and mostly stays on common knowledge grounds using the american military industry as its main example. (Oh I wish I’d come around to completing my own series of critique begun long ago!)

Now, this thought is not new to me in itself, but became more urgent when I came across a definition of Fascism that has some authority, coming from the Italian self-described „philosopher of Fascism“ Giovanni Gentile and being endorsed by Mussolini:

Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.

(This, by the way, is quoted from the FAQ of the „Political Compass“ where you can localize yourself and some historical figures politically on the dimensions of „Economic Left/Right“ and „Social Libertarian/Authoritarian“. The FAQ is much more interesting than the actual test, though.)

And the suggested consequence, that increased influence / merger of corporate interests and government leads onto the continuum of fascist politics, is pretty plausible to me. And reminded me of a (only partly humorous) postcard I found when I was in Stanford almost three years ago, which features a summary of „Early Warning Signs of Fascism“ (claiming to be from independent research on actual fascist regimes, but according to a quick search more plausibly just written down in an Op-Ed in 2004, itself still worthy reading and considering):

The argument, which the author (Laurence W. Britt) also put forward in his book „June, 2004″ is that in the Bush era, America was visibly moving in that direction. How implausible is it to assume that again, corporate interests‘ hold of the government had a role to play in this?

True to my current randomness, and to end on a more cheerful tune on this sunny Sunday afternoon, here a cartoon of Capitalisms core problem by Dan Perjovschi.

I liked watching the first few classes of Robert Sapolsky’s „Human Behavioral Evolution“ course at Stanford from 2010, which are available for free on iTunes U (yes, you need iTunes). Even though the pointedness and entertainment of his arguments can be a little too much for a European audience, I highly recommend it for everybody who wants to fill in gaps in his or her understanding of evolution. And for people who consider themselves solid on the basics, I recommend a 20-minute summary of the criticism of evolutionary biology, at least as it is perceived and used by the public. I’m talking about the last 20 minutes, starting at 1:14, of the lecture 3 — Behavioral Evolution II (April 2, 2010). Here is a brief summary:

Sapolsky argues that evolutionary theories are criticized in three basic assumptions that they rest on, which he calls:

• Heritability (of behavioral traits)
• Adaptiveness (of every feature of organisms)
• Gradualism (of the evolutionary process)

The main problem with the heritability assumption is, of course, that things are very muddy on the actual genetic/molecular level if you try to point to genes that are causal to certain behavioral trends. But (as I would add) this could be dismissed as a temporary problem, waiting for advances in the science involved. Nobody doubts the general role of the brain in causing our behavior just because our knowledge of the brain regions and processes involved is still very rudimentary.

Much more important to me, then, is the critique of the adaptiveness assumption. It has been argued (and Sapolsky himself is mostly convinced, as am I) that many observable features of organisms (including many behavioral features) are merely „spandrels“ (from architecture as „space between arches“), meaning they are there only as unavoidable by-products of something that evolution is really about. This has, for instance, been famously shown for the evolution of human chins as a by-product of our „shortened muzzle“, after interesting theories on the adaptive value of chins had been put forward. And that leads to another important critique of the adaptiveness arguments: They are mostly what Sapolsky calls „Just-So-Story-Contests“ — finding the most convincing story to explain why something is (and has to be) the way it is.

What was really new to me was the argument against the assumed gradual way in which evolution takes place, and which is the foundation of the famous idea that small advantages pay off over time. Actually, there is evidence pointing towards a more stepwise evolution, long phases of relative stability interrupted by short, drastic episodes of change, a theory called „punctuated equilibrium“. As a result, the element of constant competition which feature so centrally in our „narrative of evolution“ has to be revised, with its importance reduced drastically. And that’s quite a revolution, especially to the layperson’s perception of (social) evolution.

And I’m very happy that in this context he even discusses the political side of evolutionary theories of (human) behavior. Coincidentally, the dominant model of evolution, focussed on constant competition, was put forward by a number of white southern (US) male researchers, while the challenges and modifications come from researchers from the more politically liberal North-East of the US, called „Marxist“ by Sapolsky. And he mentions sociobiologists form the former Soviet Union who have developed models of evolution more focussed on the interaction with difficult external living conditions rather than the competition within a species, called „abiotic selection“. Whoever wants to claim that science is just progressing on its path of objective truth, with random imperfections that will be smoothed out over time, good luck

The range of social issues he mentions which are justified as „natural“ through the dominant understanding of evolution is broad, from male domination to social hierarchies, aggression and sexual coercion.

I am very impressed that somebody who so obviously enjoys looking at human behavior through the evolution glasses sides on most points with the critics who argue for keeping the researchers own interests, world-view and ideology in mind, and who modify the dominant image of evolution in ways that very much change the implications for our (human) social life that are commonly drawn. And I’m very curious how he will live up to that standard in the classes to come.

The idea is to, as a social scientist, be aware of the impact of one’s theorizing in the „object“ studied, and also of the fact that you are subject and object of your theories at the same time, because as a social (and in our times also unavoidably economical) being you are always also explaining your own behavior. Let’s have more of that, and more serious!

But this is a good start. The topic chosen as a humorous exercise in the article by Ariel Rubinstein titled „Freak-Freakonomics“, published in Economists’ Voice in 2006, is the hugely popular 2005 book „Freakonomics“ by Levitt and Dubner, which I partly read and (I think like Rubinstein) both enjoyed and felt a little uneasy about.

Let’s start with his definition of the problem of lacking reflexivity:

The book gives expression to the economic worldview that sees people as “economic agents,” responding to mainly material incentives (though in keeping with the new behavioral economic approach, the book also recognizes the existence of additional
psychological motives). This worldview seeks a simple explanation for the behavior of human beings that is consistent with their aspirations to attain a goal, attributing high importance to money and status and low importance to moral values. All human beings are seen as economic agents, except for one group of angels looking down at the world from above: the economists.

So, what happens if you look at this profession, that likes to comment on economic dealings from above, through their own glasses? Among readable detours, you can find a sting like this in Rubinstein’s text — why do economists earn more than mathematicians?

The chapter is inspired by Freakonomics’ discussion of the question of why “the typical prostitute earns more than the typical architect” (106). The comparison between architects and prostitutes can be applied to mathematicians and economists: the former are more skilled, highly educated and intelligent. Moreover, just as Levitt has never encountered a girl who dreams of being a prostitute, I have never met a child who dreams of being an economist. Like prostitutes, the skill required of economists is “not necessarily ‘specialized’” (106), so why do economists earn so much more than mathematicians?

Here, I offer a new explanation for the salary gap between mathematicians and economists: many economists are hired to justify a viewpoint. In contrast, I have never heard of mathematicians who proved a theorem to satisfy their masters.

Ouch! But I can’t help seeing a certain truth in this satire. And another example for what can go wrong in (economic) science, looked at as an economic activity:

Chapter 4: what do grocers and economists have in common? The title of this chapter competes with “What Do Schoolteachers and Sumo Wrestlers Have in Common?” (19). The chapter will begin with the findings of the study I will conduct on my grocer’s invoices. Eight out of fifty will be erroneous, including seven in the grocer’s favor and one (with a trivial error) in my favor.

I do not agree with Levitt, who asks “Who cheats?” and responds: “Well, just about anyone, if the stakes are right” (24). My grocer is not a cheater. But grocers, like economists, make mistakes, even without being aware of them, with a tendency to favor their own interests. The grocer wages a struggle for survival against the big supermarket chains and hopes for a large bill. The economist struggles for his professional advancement and wants his findings to confirm his hypothesis. In economics, there is no tradition of checking data and repeating experiments. In the few cases in which I conducted experimental research, I myself felt the pressure not to search further at a stage in which the experimental results went in my favor and to check findings seven times when they appeared not to support the assumptions I was sure were correct. All this should convince me to place no greater faith in an economist’s findings than in my grocer’s tally.

I very much appreciate the open relating of personal experience on top of the (convincing) economic argument. And there are very good examples of (probably, if not assumed to be consciously misleading) exactly that happening to the Freakonomics authors in the article. Pretty blunt mistakes revealed through simple re-analysis by Rubinstein.

Another, final, argument about experts turned on the „other“ expert — himself:

Levitt writes: “The typical expert … is prone to sound exceedingly sure of himself. An expert doesn’t so much argue the various sides of an issue … That’s because an expert whose argument reeks of restraint or nuance often doesn’t get much attention. An expert must be bold if he hopes to alchemize his homespun theory into conventional wisdom” (148). It is possible to suspect that this paragraph refers to Levitt: an expert, who is sure of himself, who presents a view other than his own only to disprove it, and who is brave enough to touch upon a subject like the right to abortion. But this paragraph is written in the book in disparagement of other experts (in “parental sciences”).

I wish somebody did that for every economic (and, of course, psychological, where this virtue is known more in theory than practice) publication. And I wish it would become common practice to reflect on your own perspective, motivations and resulting limitations for your results.

To finish with a „real-world“ (as opposed to the mostly for-entertainment character of Freakonomics) example of the topic which I’ve found particularly striking for a long time now: Milton Friedman. He proclaims a very general distrust for people caring about something else than their own interest. In the economic sphere this is popularized by his „four ways to spend money“ (from a Fox News interview in 2004, also somewhere on youtube):

There are four ways in which you can spend money. You can spend your own money on yourself. When you do that, why then you really watch out what you’re doing, and you try to get the most for your money.

Then you can spend your own money on somebody else. For example, I buy a birthday present for someone. Well, then I’m not so careful about the content of the present, but I’m very careful about the cost.

Then, I can spend somebody else’s money on myself. And if I spend somebody else’s money on myself, then I’m sure going to have a good lunch!

Finally, I can spend somebody else’s money on somebody else. And if I spend somebody else’s money on somebody else, I’m not concerned about how much it is, and I’m not concerned about what I get. And that’s government. And that’s close to 40 percent of our national income.

In the political sphere, he is famous for arguments for a very very small government (military and law enforcement), arguing for instance like this (from the introduction to his 1962 book „Capitalism and Freedom“, via Wikiquote)

Government is necessary to preserve our freedom, it is an instrument through which we can exercise our freedom; yet by concentrating power in political hands, it is also a threat to freedom. Even though the men who wield this power initially be of good will and even though they be not corrupted by the power they exercise, the power will both attract and form men of a different stamp.

Now, in this deep distrust for people’s willingness and/or ability (usually rather the willingness, called „incentive“) to further somebody else’s good, we are still for some reason to believe that the person putting forward these arguments, Milton E. Friedman, has the common good in mind, rather than his own or maybe that of a circle of friends. How does that make sense?

Not to me. Pretty much amounts to a logical contradiction. Either his argument is flawed, as in at least himself has to be excluded from the general assumption of self-interest. Or his argument cannot be trusted, for it is self-interested…

And in any case, I very much belief that his radical free-market arguments benefit some people and disadvantage others. And he (and people emotionally or financially relevant to him) would certainly be on the „right“ side of this.

Obama has been told by Israel-firsters in the US that his position on moving rapidly to a two-state solution endangers his ability to fund-raise among Jewish Americans (who provide a vastly disproportionate amount of money for political campaigns, estimated as high as 65% among Democrats) and therefore could imperil his campaign for a second term.

A quick research on Wikipedia contrasts this with the percentage of the US population identifying as of Jewish religion: 1.7% (by the way making them the leading non-Christian faith, excluding Atheists I suppose).

Now, there unfortunately is no source for Informed Comments numbers, but this is stunning. At the same time, the claim that the percentage of donations from Jewish Americans is especially high among Democrats would illustrate that the Israel question is not what motivates them the most. I remember a fascinating and disturbing discussion (more of a lecture actually) with a self-proclaimed „New York Jew“ back in California who told me that even though he is at odds with pretty much everything the Republicans stand for, he still votes for them because they are the only party with clear sight on Israel and „Islamo-Fascism“. It seems that, luckily, most of the people who share his faith don’t share his beliefs.

Anyway, another example of how money distorts politics, giving power to marginal interests. Unfortunately not as easy to solve as the ones relating to corporations, where a law limiting election-related spending seems like a pretty good idea to me. It has unfortunately recently been abolished by the Supreme Court.

The first one deals with power of the masses, and why they so often don’t use it:

NOTHING appears more surprizing to those, who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few; and the implicit submission, with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers. When we enquire by what means this wonder is effected, we shall find, that, as FORCE is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion. It is therefore, on opinion only that government is founded; and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments, as well as to the most free and most popular. The soldan of EGYPT, or the emperor of ROME, might drive his harmless subjects, like brute beasts, against their sentiments and inclination: But he must, at least, have led his mamalukes, or prætorian bands, like men, by their opinion.

Wow! After elaborating this opinion into opinions of interest and right, the latter again in right to power and right to property, the quote finishes with a paragraph about the relationship between power and property that absolutely stunned me, because I feel it anticipates much of what my „NeuerPlan“ line of thinking criticizes in our modern Capitalism-Democracies:

A Government may endure for several ages, though the balance of power, and the balance of property do not coincide. This chiefly happens, where any rank or order of the state has acquired a large share in the property; but from the original constitution of the government, has no share in the power. Under what pretence would any individual of that order assume authority in public affairs? As men are commonly much attached to their ancient government, it is not to be expected, that the public would ever favour such usurpations. But where the original constitution allows any share of power, though small, to an order of men, who possess a large share of the property, it is easy for them gradually to stretch their authority, and bring the balance of power to coincide with that of property.

Apart from the obvious implications concerning, e.g., the upper 1%‚s political influence, I think this can be easily extended to make understandable how corporations extended their reach from the beginnings of this legal institution to the elimination of restrictions on their spending in political campaigns in the Citizens United Supreme Court decision.

PS: Concerning the first quote, I find a small comment on the original post quite interesting, as well as a link provided there:

This leaves open, of course, how anyone, subject or mamaluke, learns the opinions of their fellows regarding rights and interests; but this is one thing public political action is for.

Wealth begets power, which begets more wealth. During the savings-and-loan scandal of the 1980s—a scandal whose dimensions, by today’s standards, seem almost quaint—the banker Charles Keating was asked by a congressional committee whether the $1.5 million he had spread among a few key elected officials could actually buy influence. “I certainly hope so,” he replied. The Supreme Court, in its recent Citizens United case, has enshrined the right of corporations to buy government, by removing limitations on campaign spending. The personal and the political are today in perfect alignment. Virtually all U.S. senators, and most of the representatives in the House, are members of the top 1 percent when they arrive, are kept in office by money from the top 1 percent, and know that if they serve the top 1 percent well they will be rewarded by the top 1 percent when they leave office. By and large, the key executive-branch policymakers on trade and economic policy also come from the top 1 percent. When pharmaceutical companies receive a trillion-dollar gift—through legislation prohibiting the government, the largest buyer of drugs, from bargaining over price—it should not come as cause for wonder. It should not make jaws drop that a tax bill cannot emerge from Congress unless big tax cuts are put in place for the wealthy. Given the power of the top 1 percent, this is the way you would expect the system to work.

This is immediately followed by a description of what inequality does to society, and what the distorted representation of interests does to politics (apart from creating rules that sustain itself):

America’s inequality distorts our society in every conceivable way. There is, for one thing, a well-documented lifestyle effect—people outside the top 1 percent increasingly live beyond their means. Trickle-down economics may be a chimera, but trickle-down behaviorism is very real. Inequality massively distorts our foreign policy. The top 1 percent rarely serve in the military—the reality is that the “all-volunteer” army does not pay enough to attract their sons and daughters, and patriotism goes only so far. Plus, the wealthiest class feels no pinch from higher taxes when the nation goes to war: borrowed money will pay for all that. Foreign policy, by definition, is about the balancing of national interests and national resources. With the top 1 percent in charge, and paying no price, the notion of balance and restraint goes out the window. There is no limit to the adventures we can undertake; corporations and contractors stand only to gain. The rules of economic globalization are likewise designed to benefit the rich: they encourage competition among countries for business, which drives down taxes on corporations, weakens health and environmental protections, and undermines what used to be viewed as the “core” labor rights, which include the right to collective bargaining. Imagine what the world might look like if the rules were designed instead to encourage competition among countries for workers. Governments would compete in providing economic security, low taxes on ordinary wage earners, good education, and a clean environment—things workers care about. But the top 1 percent don’t need to care.

Looking at the similarity of this situation with what stirred public anger to the point of revolution in Arab countries, his conclusion is:

The top 1 percent have the best houses, the best educations, the best doctors, and the best lifestyles, but there is one thing that money doesn’t seem to have bought: an understanding that their fate is bound up with how the other 99 percent live. Throughout history, this is something that the top 1 percent eventually do learn. Too late.

Sounds pretty improbable, but then, that’s what everybody would have said about the „Arab Sping“ before it happened. And I think there is a lot of anger in the American society, just that the powers right now do a god job at directing it away from its real cause, and solution.

What I didn’t know is that with Brazil and Mexico, two rather big newly industrializing countries are implementing on a large scale programs that transfer cash to the extremely poor, on conditions that mostly center around caring for your and your children’s health and education. And they seem to do a surprisingly great job at reducing poverty:

Today, however, Brazil’s level of economic inequality is dropping at a faster rate than that of almost any other country. Between 2003 and 2009, the income of poor Brazilians has grown seven times as much as the income of rich Brazilians. Poverty has fallen during that time from 22 percent of the population to 7 percent.

Contrast this with the United States, where from 1980 to 2005, more than four-fifths of the increase in Americans’ income went to the top 1 percent of earners.

The scientific evidence linking positive developments in the countries to these programs seem to be sound, even though I didn’t have time to search or read any primary literature:

The idea’s other purpose — to give children more education and better health — is longer term and harder to measure. But measured it is — Oportunidades is probably the most-studied social program on the planet. The program has an evaluation unit and publishes all data. There have also been hundreds of studies by independent academics. The research indicates that conditional cash transfer programs in Mexico and Brazil do keep people healthier, and keep kids in school.

The anecdotic, journalistic evidence sounds very convincing too:

When I traveled in Mexico in 2008 to report on Oportunidades, I met family after family with a distinct before and after story. Parents whose work consisted of using a machete to cut grass had children who, thanks to Oportunidades, had finished high school and were now studying accounting or nursing. Some families had older children who were malnourished as youngsters, but younger children who had always been healthy because Oportunidades had arrived in time to help them eat better. In the city of Venustiano Carranza, in Mexico’s Puebla state, I met Hortensia Alvarez Montes, a 54-year-old widow whose only income came from taking in laundry. Her education stopped in sixth grade, as did that of her first three children. But then came Oportunidades, which kept her two youngest children in school. They were both finishing high school when I visited her. One of them told me she planned to attend college.

For remaining questions, e.g. regarding if these programs can work in even poorer countries and on smaller scale (yes), or in developed countries like the US (maybe), with corrupt and weak governments (pretty good) and if they benefit the surrounding society as well (quite strongly) I highly recommend reading the whole article and also a follow-up article answering readers‘ comments. You also get interesting specifics on the fine-tuning that makes the programs work so well, like this:

There are caps on the benefits, so it does not encourage larger families — in Mexico, for example, three children is the limit. More important, education for girls is the most effective contraceptive. The more educated the mother, the fewer the children.

Die EFSA, meint darum Sarah Häuser, Chemieexpertin der Umweltorganisation BUND, sei „regelrecht unterwandert“. Die im September noch einmal bestätigte Entscheidung der Behörde zur Unbedenklichkeit von BPA zeige „deutlich, dass die interessierte Industrie dort mehr Gehör findet als unabhängige Forscher.“ Diesen Eindruck bestätigt auch Andreas Gies, Fachmann für Umweltchemikalien beim Umweltbundesamt (UBA). Die EFSA stütze sich fast ausschließlich auf Studien, die von der Industrie bezahlt seien und „die Finanzierung bestimmt das Ergebnis“, klagt Gies.

Die Argumentation der EFSA treibt laut dem Toxikologen Gilbert Schönfelder von der Berliner Charité wilde Blüten:

Im Tierversuch sei nachgewiesen, dass BPA die Fruchtbarkeit mindern und das Erbgut verändern könne. Darum sei es „nicht akzeptabel“, dass die EFSA-Experten mehr als 80 Studien über BPA-Funde im menschlichen Blut aus der Bewertung ausschließen und so die tatsächliche Belastung im Alltag unterschätzen, klagt er. Zur Begründung heißt es in den EFSA-Gutachten, die Messungen seien ungenau und mit den bekannten Aufnahmepfaden nicht erklärbar – nach Meinung von Schönfelder eine unhaltbare Argumentation. „Wenn die Daten der Hypothese widersprechen, dann muss die Hypothese zurückgewiesen werden, nicht die Daten“, forderten er und vier weitere Toxikologen.

Nachdem insgesamt die Hinweise sehr stark sind, dass die Geldgeber einen großen Einfluss auf die Ergebnisse von wissenschaftlichen Untersuchungen haben, wüsste ich wirklich gerne, wie der zustande kommt. Ich bin jemand, der grundsätzlich ungern böse Absicht unterstellt. Aber wenn es daran nicht liegt, müsste das nicht heißen, dass die wissenschaftliche Methodik so schwach ist, dass sehr subtile Vorannahmen und Motive der Forschenden derart durchschlagen können? Keine schöne Vorstellung.