things to read about the protests against white supremacy

Posted on June 8, 2020 by Peter

But as an historian of black social movements, my view is that as widespread and destructive as the 1968 rebellions were, neither their size nor the challenge they posed to the American political system approached what the U.S. has seen over the past two weeks. …
More than the number and size of the protests, though, what makes the 2020 uprisings unprecedented are the ways that they have pulled together multiple currents within the U.S. protest tradition into a mighty river of demand for fundamental change in American society. …
The point is not, as others have argued,* that it is the level of involvement of whites in the protests that distinguishes them from previous high points of anti-racist protest. There is in fact a long history of white support for, and participation in, black protest movements. …
[What is distinctive is the reform agenda.] Despite, or perhaps because of the protests’ decentralized and leaderless nature, they have managed to put on the table the broadest and most comprehensive set of social and economic reforms since the Poor People’s campaign that followed on the heels of Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968.
Matthew Countryman, “2020 uprisings, unprecedented in scope, join a long river of struggle in America“

I want to emphasize that I think white Americans have gone through quite radical changes in their attitudes, and that we’re talking about a more likely 25 percent of Americans who are hardcore racist, but I think most Americans have quite decent views about race.
But sociologists have argued that while some whites may have liberal views, a lot of them are not prepared to make the concessions that are important for the improvement of black lives. For example, one of the reasons why people have been crowded in ghettos is the fact that housing is so expensive in the suburbs, and one reason for that is that bylaws restrict the building of multi-occupancy housing. These bylaws have been very effective in keeping out moderate-income housing from the suburbs, and that has kept out working people, among whom blacks are disproportionate, from moving there and having access to good schools. Sociologists have claimed that while we do have genuine improvement in racial attitudes, what we don’t have is the willingness for white liberals to put their money where their mouth is.
Orlando Patterson, “Why America can’t escape its racist roots” [Not a good headline, because his piece is quite optimistic]

The situation is dire. The causes for personal anger many. In my own case, incandescent rage has blocked my capacity to think for several days. For me, prayer helps.
There is something we can do.
First, choose peace. Revolution never succeeds unless it rides on the back of a deeper commitment to the process of constitution. The goal has to be to build. These things can be done only on the basis of a commitment to peace. We need a better normal at the end of this. Not a new normal, a rinse and repeat of the old but with face masks. We need peace. …
Second, choose self-government. Societies can resolve their problems through only one of two mechanisms: authoritarian decision or self-government. Self-government delivers the sturdier foundation for human flourishing — a foundation that permits people to craft their own life courses and develop their full potential. To choose self-government, however, means to choose the institutions of collective decision-making. Voting, running for office, working through committee processes to identify and implement policy solutions. …
Third, channel the energies of protest directly into governance even through our imperfect institutions. We need a transformed criminal-justice system. Yes, it is good that the officer who knelt on George Floyd’s neck has been criminally charged. But the problems we face are not solved one case of police violence at a time. We need a systems-level goal.
Here is what we should choose: reduce our reliance on incarceration from 70 percent of the sanctions imposed in our criminal-justice system to 10 percent. This is not utopian. …
No justice, no peace, we often say. It’s also true, though, that without peace, there is no justice.
Danielle Allen, “The situation is dire. We need a better normal at the end of this — and peace”

*including me, on Saturday evening, during a 5-minute interview on KCBS-San Francisco.

learning from Memphis, 1968

Posted on June 3, 2020 by Peter

This clip from Eyes on the Prize* shows the first and only moment in the career of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. when a march that he led involved violence. He had to be ushered away in a car and left Memphis. When he returned, he gave perhaps his greatest speech, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” (April 3, 1968) in which he prophesied his own death.

In this, his final speech, he describes the historical moment: “The nation is sick, trouble is in the land, confusion all around. That’s a strange statement. But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough can you see the stars.”

He decries media coverage of the movement:

Let us keep the issues where they are. (Right) The issue is injustice. The issue is the refusal of Memphis to be fair and honest in its dealings with its public servants, who happen to be sanitation workers. [Applause] Now we’ve got to keep attention on that. (That’s right) That’s always the problem with a little violence. You know what happened the other day, and the press dealt only with the window breaking. (That’s right) I read the articles. They very seldom got around to mentioning the fact that 1,300 sanitation workers are on strike, and that Memphis is not being fair to them, and that Mayor Loeb is in dire need of a doctor. They didn’t get around to that. (Yeah) [Applause]. Now we’re going to march again, and we’ve got to march again

He lays out a strategy that includes boycotting white-owned companies and “strengthen[ing] black institutions.” He says, “I call upon you to take your money out of the banks downtown and deposit your money in Tri-State Bank.”

And he makes the case that a massive nonviolent protest movement–in which the sheer number of nonviolent protesters overwhelms both the police and any citizens who use violence–is powerful. It is not (I would say) powerful in the sense of being moving and rhetorically effective, like a “powerful” song or speech. It is powerful in the sense that it seizes the ability to determine outcomes. The Birmingham movement compelled the Civil Rights Act; Selma compelled the Voting Rights Act. “And there was a power there which Bull Connor couldn’t adjust to, and so we ended up transforming Bull into a steer, and we won our struggle in Birmingham.”

King gave this speech in the evening of April 3, despite a thunderstorm and his own deep qualms about speaking in Memphis. The next day, he was murdered. Riots, uprisings, insurrections (or whatever you want to label them) began across the country. And on Nov. 5., 1968, Richard M. Nixon won a national election that has been attributed to white backlash.

A few observations:

– The backlash was in no way the responsibility of the Civil Rights Movement. The causes included King’s assassination, the police and the FBI, media frames, and a racially biased majority. In Memphis and elsewhere, the Civil Rights Movement was doing what it had to do. To take a phrase from the “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” blaming the protesters for the backlash would be “like condemning a robbed man because his possession of money precipitated the evil act of robbery.” As King wrote in The Atlantic in 1967, “Let us say it boldly that if the total slum violations of law by the white man over the years were calculated and were compared with the lawbreaking of a few days of riots, the hardened criminal would be the white man.” We must “keep the issues where they are”: on the injustice, not responses to it. On the other hand, 1968 was a year of defeat, and it’s important to strategize about how to win instead of losing.

– Mass nonviolent movements are miraculous. They defy predictions about human behavior based on self-interest, limited information, and powerful emotions. They are also fragile–easy to disrupt with agents provocateurs, misinformation, and violent responses. King fully grasped that a mass nonviolent uprising is a kind of rupture in ordinary history. It is a moment when a better future suddenly becomes visible in the present. That is why delaying it can easily kill it. In the “Letter,” he writes that time can be made “an ally of the forces of social stagnation.” Therefore, “We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood.”

– 2020 seems similar to 1968, yet different in important ways. Nixon was a far more skillful than Trump at exploiting backlash. He made the maintenance of racial hierarchy appear respectable by acting like a sober statesman. Trump is the face of white supremacy but happens to be grievously wounded by the pandemic, which would have been a threat to him even if he hadn’t grotesquely bungled it. (Sheer chance often determines outcomes in human events.) The country has also become more diverse: whites constituted 88% of the US population in 1970 versus 72% in 2020. On the other hand, the virus does make it harder to sustain nonviolent protests that are big enough to marginalize the police and violent individuals. People who would be relatively likely to maintain nonviolent discipline are also relatively likely to stay home to avoid the pandemic. Finally, the media landscape is far more fragmented, so that some Americans can see police rioting against innocent protesters while others see a nation devolving into crime. It is hard even to assess who is seeing what, let alone change the balance.

*Shearer, J. Stekler, P. (Director). (1990). The Promised Land [Video file]. PBS. Retrieved June 3, 2020, from Kanopy.

the shrinking field of vocational education

Posted on May 29, 2020 by Peter

Before you look at the graph …

What subjects do you think have become more or less prevalent in US high schools since the late 1980s?

If we measure the percentage of all high school teachers who are assigned to each major subject, this is the pattern:

Almost all the subjects were similar in 1988 and 2012, except that vocational education dropped a lot and health/physical education shrank by a bit. The other subjects all gained about the same amounts at the expense of those two.

It isn’t worth showing the trends for most of those subjects by year, because the lines would be pretty flat. But here is the proportion of vo-tech teachers for all the years in the survey.

Posted without a comment, except to say that this may surprise people who think that some of the arts and sciences have expanded at the expense of others.

My analysis of U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Schools and Staffing Survey (SASS), “Public School Teacher Data File,” 1987-88 through 2011-12; “Private School Teacher Data File,” 1987-88 through 2011-12; and “Charter School Teacher Data File,” 1999-2000.

a civic silver lining?

Posted on May 28, 2020 by Peter

Thanks to the Former Members of Congress Association, I joined Former Member Dennis Ross (R-FL) and mayors Nan Whaley (D-Dayton), Francis Suarez (R-Miami) and Marty Walsh (D-Boston), for a discussion of civic engagement during the pandemic.

I particularly appreciated Mayor Walsh’s eloquence about respecting poorly-paid work. His point expanded into a broader discussion of how to get everyone involved in the “public work” of rebuilding our community and country. On that topic, see “War Is a Poor Metaphor for This Pandemic” by Harry Boyte and Trygve Throntveit in Yes!.

I learned a lot from the mayors. I ended up thinking that the attitudinal effects of the pandemic may well be positive. We may care more about each other and feel more motivated to work together on public goals. The fact that the crisis is widely (although inequitably) shared will provide an opportunity to bring Americans together. However, the economic impact on civic life is very worrying.

To that last point, the Federal Reserve system recently surveyed a mix of local organizational leaders (two thirds of them from nonprofits) about the impact of the pandemic. “Nearly 2 out of 3 respondents (66%) indicated demand for their services has increased or is anticipated to increase, and more than half of the respondents (55%) noted a corresponding decrease or anticipated decrease in their ability to provide services.”

This chart from the Fed. paper is particularly significant:

the Coronavirus information commons

Posted on May 27, 2020 by Peter

In Wired, Natalie Chyi offers an excellent list of ways that people are fighting misinformation–and promoting reliable and useful information–during the pandemic:

Neighborhoods are creating Slack groups and communities are coming up with mutual aid spreadsheets to coordinate aid and support each other. … Local geographies have been reconstructed in online spaces, most notably as students are rebuilding their universities within Minecraft. … . Volunteers on Wikipedia have been working tirelessly to ensure that the site serves reliable and up-to-date information, especially surrounding the virus. Students are compiling master lists of summer internship updates, cancellations, and opportunities across various industries. Groups are creating crowdsourced libraries of resources tailored to the unique needs of everyone from mourners to remote workers to policymakers. New online platforms have been created for specialists like doctors, engineers, and scientists to find and contribute their expertise to ongoing relief projects. Thousands of Covid-19 related open-source projects are popping up, with the source code and documentation freely available to enable their use. Some focus on software, like code for a hospital impact model developed by the University of Pennsylvania; others on hardware, like instructions for 3D printing medically-approved masks and other critical supplies.
Finally, knowledge previously locked behind paywalls or intellectual property protections has been made available to the public for the purposes of fighting the pandemic.

Chyi credits Elinor Ostrom and Charlotte Hess for the idea of an information commons (itself an application of Lin Ostrom’s ideas to the special case of information), and she cites me to the effect that “this form of collective action and participation of place-based knowledge strengthens communities by giving them a shared sense of identity, understanding, and trust.” Incidentally, the whole book by Ostrom and Hess, Understanding Knowledge as a Commons (2007) in which my chapter appears is–fittingly–online and free.

Navigating the Pandemic webinar series

Posted on May 26, 2020 by Peter

Tisch College of Civic Life is launching an eight-part weekly webinar series this summer aimed at supporting students, including the Class of 2020—and the Tufts community generally—during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Navigating the Pandemic: Knowledge, Resilience, Civic Purpose and Engagement will be offered on Wednesdays, 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. ET, starting June 10. It draws on the expertise of Tisch College faculty and staff, Tufts faculty in a variety of academic disciplines, and experts from Boston-area universities, hospitals, and community nonprofit organizations.

“We have developed this webinar series to help mitigate the sense of isolation and unsettledness many students are experiencing,” said Deborah Donahue-Keegan, Tisch College senior fellow and Department of Education faculty member. She is leading the effort with Tisch associate dean Peter Levine.

“We are offering a way for students to stay connected to the university community and to each other over the summer,” she said. “We also want to help students acquire more knowledge and skills in order to navigate conflicting information and misinformation regarding COVID-19.”

“The pandemic is confusing and unpredictable,” said Levine. “For some, it can be isolating, damaging, and even tragic. As a major research university, Tufts offers a wealth of resources to learn about the disease and its social impact and how to take care of ourselves, help others, and be civically engaged during the pandemic.”

Webinar topics will include:

emotional resilience in the face of trauma and uncertainty
civic engagement and voting
dispelling COVID-19 misinformation with science
the public policy and economic implications of the pandemic
physical health and nutrition
building and maintaining connections

The weekly seminars for undergraduate and graduate students are free. Those who attend at least six of the sessions and submit responses to questions at the end of each session attended will qualify for a certificate of completion. The panel discussions will be broadcast via Tisch College’s YouTube channel and will be recorded to ensure access for the entire Tufts community.

“This effort reflects Tufts’ commitment to promote social emotional resilience and well-being skills across the university,” said Donahue-Keegan. “This webinar series is one of many ways we strive to foster the development of such skills in service of fostering civic purpose, agency, and ethical civic engagement.”

For more information and to sign up, go to https://tischcollege.tufts.edu/navigating-pandemic-knowledge-resilience-civic-purpose-and-engagement.

the pivotal significance of reparations for the American left

Posted on May 21, 2020 by Peter

About one in four Americans supports reparations for slavery. There is a racial split on that question, with up to three in four African Americans–but only 15% of whites–in favor.

If you think that justice demands reparations, you should support them. You might not make reparations your main criterion for choosing candidates in a given political contest, because you might vote on other grounds, but you should endorse proposals that you believe are just.

Here I want to address a different issue. I’ll offer an explanation (not a justification or a critique) of the importance of reparations in the mentality of left-leaning Americans.

I think that many Americans on the left are torn between two political positions, each coherent on its own but in tension with the other:

1. A strong version of New Deal/Great Society liberalism and/or social democracy, in which the nation-state intervenes assertively in the economy to promote equity and environmental sustainability. This stance is compatible with enthusiastic support for voting and democratic processes. It requires a lot of trust in the state and a willingness to entrust state actors with the ability to, for example, investigate how much wealth (not just annual income) you have, which schools your kids will attend, and which health treatments will be paid for, given data about your body.

Martin Luther King, Jr., provides a classic statement of this view when he recalls the launch of the Great Society: “A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor — both black and white — through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings.”

2. A deep suspicion of the United States government as white-supremacist, patriarchal, and colonialist: as a continuous entity that has played a leading role in genocide, enslavement, and apartheid, in part because those policies have sometimes been popular among the white majority of the country.

It’s debatable what positive program follows from the second position, but in practice, it can mean support for local initiatives, nonprofits, women- and minority-owned businesses, and autonomy at the neighborhood level. Malcolm X provides a classic text for this view:

The white man, the white man is too intelligent to let someone else come and gain control of the economy of his community. But you will let anybody come in and control the economy of your community, control the housing, control the education, control the jobs, control the businesses, under the pretext that you want to integrate.
… we haven’t had sense enough to set up stores and control the businesses of our community. … But the political and economic philosophy of black nationalism…the economic philosophy of black nationalism shows our people the importance of setting up these little stores, and developing them and expanding them into larger operations. Woolworth didn’t start out big like they are today; they started out with a dime store, and expanded, and expanded, and expanded until today they are all over the country and all over the world and they getting some of everybody’s money. …
So our people not only have to be reeducated to the importance of supporting black business, but the black man himself has to be made aware of the importance of going into business. And once you and I go into business, we own and operate at least the businesses in our community.

Note that this position is compatible with certain forms of libertarian thought but not with social democracy.

It is not embarrassing to be drawn to two incompatible views. The social world is complicated, and there are good reasons in favor of many positions. However, when you feel the pull of two incompatible ideas, a deciding factor becomes very important.

Reparations play that role for the American left. If the United States government were to pay reparations, that would tilt many left-leaning people from the second position to the first: from Malcolm to Martin, if those labels are helpful. The impact would be especially strong if Congress and the president decided to pay reparations of their own volition–not by grudgingly negotiating with a social movement–and if the payment were substantial.

The underlying theory here is similar to Homer-Dixon et al (2020). An ideology is a complex system that consists of numerous ideas with logical links among them. It cannot be described adequately by placing it on one left/right spectrum, nor even several such continua at once. It is not a point in logical space but a structure of ideas.

In complex systems, we frequently see multiple equilibria, and specific nodes have surprisingly large impact because of their location. A single node can tilt the system from one equilibrium to another.

My conjecture is that reparations plays such a role in the system of the ideology of the American left. Left-leaning people may not rate it as the most important issue. They may not even endorse it whole-heartedly. But it (perhaps uniquely) can tilt them from a libertarian equilibrium to a social-democratic equilibrium.

This is an empirical conjecture for which I do not have data. To test it, we would have to explore the epistemic network of left-leaning Americans, either by analyzing large bodies of text or by surveying individuals about their ideas and perceived connections among their ideas.

public webinar on a Civic Silver Lining

Posted on May 20, 2020 by Peter

the Biden-Trump polling gap

Posted on May 19, 2020 by Peter

I have been watching these lines for months:

The gap is very steady, which means that every time Trump moves up, so does Biden–at the expense of undecideds–and vice-versa. By way of contrast, this is how the 2012 election looked:

Granted, the scale is even tighter in the 2012 graph than in 2020, and the length of the trend is longer. Still, we saw points when the lines converged, crossed, or moved apart.

Likewise in 2016:

Or 2008, according to Gallup’s polling:

Henry Enten does better and compares Biden/Trump 2020 polling to historical trends going back to the beginning of polling. He says, “The steadiness in the polls is record breaking. Biden’s advantage is the steadiest in a race with an incumbent running since at least 1944.” Enten adds: “all the [national] polls taken since the beginning of 2019 have [Biden] up 6 points.” He means an average of six points, but that has a small standard deviation. The Real Clear Politics chart, reproduced above, suggests that the full range has been 4-10 points.

The consistency of this gap is noteworthy in an extraordinarily tumultuous period, marked by impeachment, a competitive Democratic primary campaign, a global pandemic, and the worst economic decline since 1929. Donald Trump’s own support has risen and fallen–although only within a five-point range. Biden has had his own ups and downs: near defeat in the primary, a serious accusation of sexual impropriety. Yet the gap between the candidates has been virtually unchanged since December.

Polls this far out are not necessarily very predictive. National polls don’t map exactly onto Electoral College outcomes. Polls conducted now include all adults or self-described “registered voters”; actual voters will be a subset of those. Turnout in 2020 is particularly hard to predict given the practicalities of voting in what may still be a pandemic.

But all these caveats are about whether the graph foretells the result in November 2020. Even if it doesn’t, it tells a very interesting story about now. As Matthew Continetti writes:

It is not foolish to suppose that these world-shaking events would affect the presidential election. On the contrary: One would expect a dramatic swing toward either the incumbent or the challenger. But look at the polls. Not only has there been no big shift. There has been no shift. … Neither good nor bad news has an effect.

I think that almost all Americans have formed such firm and well-anchored beliefs about both Trump and Biden that even epoch-making events don’t shift us. We already have enough information to judge these men, whatever the news throws at us. By six percentage points, we like Biden more than Trump.

(By the way, Biden also leads in battleground states’ averages: by 3 points in WI and NC, by 4 in NV and FL, by 7 in PA and NH, and by 8 in Michigan. That would bode well for an Electoral College win, if we want to get into forecasting November.)

the neo-feudalism thesis

Posted on May 18, 2020 by Peter

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. I’ve superficially encountered the terms “neo-feudalism” and “refeudalization” and read a few relevant works, e.g., Jodi Dean’s “Neofeudalism: The End of Capitalism?” in the May 12 edition of the LA Review of Books and Robert Kuttner’s “The Rise of Neo-Feudalism” in the March/April American Prospect. I know my Habermas (who proposed a thesis about neo-feudalism in 1962 that still attracts attention). Years ago, I made a somewhat serious study of actual feudalism as I tried to understand and assess Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation. But I have missed everything else in this debate–so caveat emptor.

The basic idea is that capitalism has not continued as such, nor has it transformed into socialism, as the Marxian left predicted. Instead, it has morphed into a new system that resembles feudalism in important respects. If this is true, it means that the left should stop opposing neoliberalism or late capitalism, because those are not the reigning systems of the day. And the center-right should stop defending capitalism, because it’s gone.

Definitions would be helpful. I start with these:

A market is any venue in which individuals choose whether or not to exchange goods or services that they own for things that other people own. Markets seems almost ubiquitous–for example, they are found in communist states, inside bureaucracies, and in a huge range of cultures. Market choices are never without constraint and necessity. Nevertheless, it is a mistake to doubt the genuine experience of choosing whether or not to exchange what you own for something you want.

Feudalism–at least in its European medieval version–was a political/economic system in which land represented the vast majority of wealth and was not actually understood as marketable. Although people sometimes traded land for land or land for goods, such exchanges were frowned upon and made difficult. Most people were born with an inalienable link to a specific place. Whether you were a peasant, a lord of a manor, a higher lord, or a sovereign, you had both obligations and rights with respect to particular acres. Your name even incorporated that place: you were from it if you were a commoner, and of it if you were gentry. The gentry did not own demesnes as they owned carpets and tables; they held their places as their “seats.”

Rights and obligations were massively unequal; feudalism was hierarchical. However, a peasant had inalienable rights (e.g., to take firewood from the manor’s commons); and even the king had many feudal obligations. Status came in shades and degrees.

Meanwhile, government in the Weberian sense–the legitimate use of violence–was profoundly decentralized. The lord of the manor was a landlord but also the law. The king was a higher law but had very little capacity for governing anyone outside the royal court itself, unless assisted by feudal vassals who had interests of their own. Parliaments emerged as places where sovereigns bargained with local leaders (lords, bishops, and towns) because they could not govern on their own.

Capitalism is a system in which the most important assets are heavily “capitalized”: subject to investments that make them highly productive. Although farms can be capitalized, the classic example is a factory or manufacturing plant. Thanks to concentrated physical, intellectual, human, and social capital, a factory produces an impressive flow of goods. Because it is complex, it requires a bureaucracy to operate. Therefore, a capitalist economy requires firms, not just individuals coming to market with things they privately own.

As a matter of definition, capitalism involves investment in these productive assets. Some people can live from the proceeds of such investments. Other people are paid to work in a capitalized industry. That distinction produces two classes (at least in Marxian theory–in reality, lines may blur).

Capitalism is incompatible with feudalism because feudalism’s refusal to allow a market for land and agricultural labor prevents investment. Also, capitalism cannot operate efficiently when governance is decentralized in the way we see under feudalism, with many independent rulers wielding legitimate force and making discretionary decisions in their various domains.

Capitalism is, however, compatible with a range of political institutions. The US republic, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and today’s one-party People’s Republic of China have all been capitalistic. Capitalism can certainly co-exist with political systems that involve equal legal rights, democratic elected governments, and even social welfare systems. In fact, some people think that the most robust and sustainable capitalist systems (for better or for worse) are also democratic, liberal, and at least mildly socialistic.

It would appear that a world dominated by Google, Facebook, Apple, Airbnb, Uber, and the like is still capitalistic. It certainly isn’t feudal in the classical sense, with barriers preventing people from exchanging the most important goods and with inherited status prevailing over contracts. But it might have certain features that make it different from high capitalism and might dimly resemble feudalism.

First, the capitalism that Marx and Engels observed involved great masses of people working in the most productive firms. These workers constituted the proletariat. Today, the most powerful companies in the world don’t employ many people. Google has 118,000 employees and about $1 trillion in market capitalization (measured before the current downturn). That approaches $10 million in capital per employee.

Imagine that Manchester, England, had become the powerhouse of the British Empire with cotton mills that employed … a few hundred workers in total. Engels would have needed a different theory.

To put it a different way, in 1850 it seemed as if most people were being recruited into the “armies” of workers who labored for the most important firms in the world. In 2020, a minuscule proportion of the world’s labor force is employed by the biggest companies.

Second, we are “governed” (in the full sense of that word) by a whole set of overlapping and decentralized rule-makers. Nation-states make rules, but so do companies. They establish and enforce elaborate terms that regulate their employees, contractors, and customers. Kuttner provides examples:

Gated residential communities, such as Disney’s Celebration, are privately controlled municipalities that make and enforce their own laws. Private mercenary armies, such as Blackwater (now rebranded as Academi), are hired by the Pentagon so that their “soldiers” will be less accountable for what might otherwise be war crimes. Eminent domain, the inherent public prerogative to claim private property for a public purpose, has been commandeered by private developers. And courts—the ultimate embodiment of law in a democracy—have been privatized by the vast expansion of compulsory arbitration.

Speaking for myself: I am OK with polycentrism, with layers and overlapping Venn diagrams of power. I believe very strongly in pluralism or a mixed economy, in the sense of a society that incorporates different kinds of institutions, with different logics and incentives. I am not a statist socialist, because I observe that systems in which the nation-state monopolizes power simply enrich the rulers and their families; they do not deliver the equity they promise. It is no coincidence that the sons of Chinese revolutionaries are now capitalist princelings.

Therefore, the very fact that centers of governance have proliferated doesn’t bother me. But one question is whether centers of governance have actually consolidated instead of ramifying. Whereas millions of firms previously established law-like rules within their own domains, now Google makes rules for billions of people. From a global perspective, the fact that most of the world’s most powerful organizations have headquarters on the coast of the USA between San Jose and Seattle is also a worrying sign of concentration. These firms may compete, but their cultural capital, norms, and social networks overlap.

Another question is whether we have preserved robust forums in which to debate whether power has been allocated appropriately. (Surely not.)

A world with consolidating centers of power and a weak public sphere doesn’t sound to me like feudalism, but like something new and bad.

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