Gillum and Mound

Andrew Gillum Pulled Off the Upset of a Lifetime. Now Comes the Hard Part.

(NYTimes no mention of Bernie Sanders even though he backed Gillum)

Andrew Gillum makes history in Florida (CNN)

Resolving the Democrats’ False Choice by Josh Mound

What Democrats Must Do by Josh Mound

SWF free-for-all

Team Bruenig:

Peter Gowan, Carl Beijer, Ryan Cooper, (Steve Randy Waldman) David Dayen?, Mathew Lawrence, Josh Mound(retweeted)? Ben Spielberg

Team Konczal:

J.W. Mason, Henwood, Max Sawicky, Candian Mike Rozworski, (team MMT Raul, etc.)  Matt Stoller, Matthew Klein, Marshall Steinbaum retweeted?, Matt Yglesias

Sandbu on Nordic economies

What the Nordic mixed economy can teach today’s new left

Much of Scandinavia’s success is not rooted in direct state intervention

by Martin Sandbu 

8.28.18

The most predictable phenomena can also be the most surprising. Just look at the revival of “socialism” as a politically viable idea in the US and UK. 

Ten years ago, the global crisis laid bare the failures of financial capitalism. This gave the political left an opportunity to win support for its agenda. Yet almost every established centre-left party in the developed world bungled this shot at political dominance. 

Instead of a comeback, we seem to be getting a throwback. The only leftwing politicians to prosper have been those who reject the “third way” centre-leftism of the 1990s. In the UK, Jeremy Corbyn has taken over the Labour party with the support of a hugely expanded membership. In the US, Bernie Sanders’ socialist primary campaign gave Hillary Clinton a run for her donor class money in 2016. In recent local results, like-minded politicians Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib have won safe-seat Democratic party nominations to Congress. Polls show that about half of young Americans now favour “socialism” over “capitalism”. 

This has triggered a debate about what the new socialists mean by “socialism”. On one reading, it is just an aspirational label for Scandinavian social democracy, with policies such as universal healthcare or better conditions for workers. 

But some of its most thoughtful proponents argue in favour of socialism because it is opposed to capitalism. The political theorist Corey Robin, for example, advocates “socialism” because it makes workers free, while capitalism leaves them unfree. Such claims see socialism and capitalism as rival and incompatible systems. 

 This semantic difference matters politically. The either/or view may have made sense during the cold war. But even when the dichotomy was real, the Nordic countries were clearly arrayed on the capitalist side of the dividing line. To oppose “socialism” against “capitalism” is to refuse to learn from the experience of the societies that have probably come closest to the new socialists’ own ideals.

The Nordic countries have been called “mixed economies” precisely because they combine elements of socialism and capitalism: state and private ownership of the means of production; public regulation and market competition; redistributive taxes and wages determined by employers and employees. 

If the socialists of today ignore capitalism’s role in that mix, they fail to follow their own leading lights. Here are three lessons they should heed from the Nordic model, whether or not they call it “socialist”. 

First, it embraces globalisation. It was no coincidence that the Nordic mixed model emerged in countries with high exposure to international trade. Public understanding that trade brings prosperity, but that global fluctuations hit hard and unpredictably, increased support for the insurance elements of the Nordic welfare states. 

So if “socialism” it is going to be, it should be a socialism confident about economic openness. The US left’s opposition to trade deals weakens any affiliation it may try to claim with the Nordic model. So does British socialists’ seduction by “ Lexit” — the alleged leftwing case for escaping the rules that smooth trade between European countries. 

Second, while the Nordics’ economic egalitarianism is well known in broad terms, the detail is not. But the detail matters. The achievement of the Nordic model is something very specific: a highly compressed distribution of market wages (before taxes and transfers). In comparison, the distribution of wealth and capital income, and the degree of income equalisation through policy, is unexceptional. The Nordics succeeded not through maximal redistribution but by engineering an economy that did not need to overburden the state’s redistributive power. 

This leads to the third lesson. Much of the Nordic model’s success is rooted not in direct state intervention but in the finely balanced interplay between social organisations, especially in the labour market. Admirers appreciate the role of unions in the Nordic economies; they are less aware of the equal importance of coherent employers’ associations. 

A blinkered workers-against-bosses view of the world suggests anything that makes capital owners better organised must harm the interests of workers. The Nordic experience shows the opposite is true. Coherent organisation encourages employers to recognise how what may seem like a burden on an individual company benefits business as a whole. 

In Scandinavia, a compressed wage structure has been good for productivity. If it is expensive to use labour unproductively, and if high-skilled labour is relatively cheap, companies accelerate investment and quickly adopt new technology. Similarly, an organised employer sector helps workers, businesses and the government to adjust in the face of technological disruptions. If this is socialism, it is one that makes for a more flexible capitalism. 

The Nordics, then, give vindication to the insight of great liberal centrists of the interwar years: that wise government intervention is good for capitalism, and makes capitalism good for workers. Progressive centrism may have earned itself a bad name in the run-up to the crisis and its aftermath. But if socialists reject it out of purism, they will find their own goals frustrated as well.

DeLong and Anderson vs. socialism & Krugman on neolibralism

The New Socialists by Corey Robins

STEERING BY THE SOCIALIST IDOLS IN THE HEAVENS LEADS US TO SAIL NOT TOWARDS BUT AWAY FROM THE SHORES OF UTOPIA: (EARLY) MONDAY COREY ROBIN SMACKDOWN by Brad DeLong

Kurt Andersen

A tenured six-figure government job must be sweet, professor, but this is utopian silliness: “Under capitalism, we’re forced to submit to the boss. Socialists want to establish freedom from rule by the boss, from the need to smile for the sake of a sale.”

Capitalism, Socialism, and Unfreedom by Krugman

There is no alternative. The Democratic Party platform is as good as things can get.