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Nancy Neiman, "Markets, Community and Just Infrastructures" (Routledge, 2020)
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Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts, and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello, everybody, and welcome to the New Books Network. I'm Marshall Po, the editor of the network, and today I'm very pleased to say we have Nancy Nyman on the show. I've known Nancy since Nancy 1986. 87.
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B
86.
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A
86, I think that's right. Yeah. We met in sunny California, and Nancy is a professor at Scripps College, also in sunny California, which is very nice. Yes. And we're going to be talking about her terrific book markets, community and just infrastructures. And it's from Rootledge and the Root Frontiers and Political Economy series, and it came out in 2020. I encourage you to go read it. Obviously, Nancy will tell you all about it and that will entice you to go read it. So thank you for being on the show, Nancy.
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B
Of course. Thank you for having me.
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A
My pleasure. So, to begin, tell us about yourself.
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B
Let's see, we met playing pickup basketball.
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A
We did. That's true.
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B
Yeah. I have been teaching at Scripps College for over 30 years, which is hard to believe. I originally went to graduate school to do a PhD in economics and became disillusioned pretty quickly, so I left after a year and switched into the political science program. And that's kind of important for the sort of trajectory of my career and and the background of this book. Right. Because a lot of the critiques I have of neoclassical economics come from a bit of an insider's view. So I think that's important. Yeah.
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30 years of one place.
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B
30 years. It's unusual. I never did the adjunct professor thing. I often say, like, being a college professor is literally the best job in the world. It's such a privilege. It can also be one of the most exploitative jobs in the world. Right. Like the divide between those who have to do adjunct teaching and get paid literally below poverty wages and tenured professors.
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A
Yeah, yeah.
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B
It really.
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A
Yeah, it's interesting. Our careers, very, very different. I actually. A friend of mine who's my age was describing. She said she moved a lot during the course of her professional life. And I said, I bet I've moved more. And so I counted it up. Actual moves. 47. Oh, I've moved 47 times. Yeah, I've been around. Well, some of it was just kind of for fun, you know, And. And, like, in college, I went and lived in various places.
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B
Yeah.
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Yeah. But, yeah, it was. I've. I have. I have a lot of experience sleeping in a lot of different places.
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B
I'm now doing research on nomadic animal herders in India. And so I think you're a nomad.
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A
I mean, well, you know, I think you may be right about that. That's right. Okay, so let's get to it. Why did you write this book?
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B
Ah, well, in the preface of the book, I say, I did it for my students, but I'm gonna. I'm gonna give you a little bit sort of broader explanation. I think we live in a broken world. I think this book is timely in the sense that climate catastrophe, mass incarceration, labor exploitation, racism, you name it, the list goes on. And I feel like the system that we have is failing us. And the problem is that not only do we not, I think, have the tools to fix it, I don't think we have a language to combat the dominant narratives about markets that perpetuate those injustices. Right. And so, like my. When I say I wrote it for my students, and I'll give you a grounded example here, my students are often, you know, in my political economy class learning about this stuff, and they're simultaneously taking econ classes. And, you know, there's a. There's a college across the street that is known to be quite conservative, and with a very large econ, thou shall go unnamed. I'll go unnamed. And my students will often say. And they. They call them econ Bros. But they will, they will get into arguments with the econ bros. And you know, the, the arguments that those folks trot out tend to be these universalistic, highly theoretical, you know, supply and demand and individual incentives. And you just don't understand how markets work. And you know, in some ways, you know, I really think it's, it's easy to argue from that perspective because you simply have to trot out these, these theories that are based on assumptions that are totally unrealistic, but the assumptions go unnamed. Right. And so, you know, from my students perspective, when they want to push back on this idea of market rationality and you know, individuals just following their own, you know, incentives, utility maximization, they have to come up with very specific examples and explain things in a way that is difficult. Right. And so I think this whole book is focused around something that I call the rationality of justice, which is.
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A
We'll talk about that.
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Yeah, really trying to show not just, you know, this, this justice horses, you know, efficiency thing or equity versus efficiency is such bs. Like, I really want to argue that the, the things we care about, those just outcomes are actually. And the, and the road to get to them is actually rational. So I'm sort of want to take back that language of efficiency and rationality, you know, in part because, you know, my students get told that they're knee jerks or that they just don't understand how markets work, whatever. And so I'm trying to, in this book give folks a language to understand. I feel like I do econ speak pretty well. Right. So in the language that folks who have been trained in that discipline can understand and identify with, I make an argument for the rational justice.
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A
That was very well said. I got that out of the book, by the way, and I have an example myself, which is not a small example of just what you're talking about. I will mention later in the book and this one I think you'll find a little bit, well, you may find it interesting, counterintuitive, but. So your book is part of a series called Frontiers of Political Economy. And the listeners to the New Books Network are obviously very bright bunch are very well educated, but maybe for my benefit. So I'm very bright. What is political economy and how's it different from political science and economics?
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B
Thank you. All right, so some people will just say it's interdisciplinary, it's bringing together those two disciplines. I, I don't really think that makes a hell of a lot of sense in part because I have sort of eschewed the disciplinary boundaries of both of those disciplines, anyway. Right. So I would like to go back, I go back to a sort of original definition, actually, let me say one thing first. The other, if you say political economy in academic circles, often the most, the assumptions that you do, public choice theory and public choice theory is basically.
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Is arcane. Let's just say that.
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Well, it's prominent. It is what most of the people were trained in political science departments, big research universities and political science department are filled with public choice theorists or sometimes called rational choice theorists. And what that means, and it's also relevant to what I'm doing in the book. Right. What it means is those people were trained in mathematics and economics methodology, and they basically just apply that model, that formal modeling to any political question. Right, right. So this idea of rationality, individual rationality, you can just like put it into a formula, make these unrealistic assumptions, and then, you know, spew out all of these policy proposals that get taken seriously. That's true both in political science and in economics. Okay, so what do I, how do I define it?
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Right. You're doing a different kind of political economy, though. But as a historian, I know the kind you're talking about, but go ahead.
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I don't say that the, the early historical. And as a historian, you may, you probably appreciate this definition of political economy is what, Adam Smith, Marx. Right. All of the original political philosophers, if you will, were political economists. Right. Why? Because those disciplines hadn't yet congealed. Right. And so they were really talking about the world we live in and examining how they sought things worked. Right. With respect to the study of wealth and power. So for me, you know, when I teach my political economy class, I tell my students, political economy is simply the study of the intersection of wealth. Right. That's the economy part and power, you know, and the study of wealth includes the study of markets, all of that. Sure, sure. So, but, but I really, you know, if I had to choose one of the definitions, it certainly would be Marxism. Right. In the 70s, if you, before public choice theory took off, if you said, I study political economy, you were a Marxist.
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Yeah, I can attest to that. Yes.
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B
Yeah. So, yeah, that's a long answer to a pretty simple question.
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Well, let me ask you. This is a little bit of a digression, but I remember even in college and I read this book, it was called the Worldly Philosop Philosophers, and it was by a guy named Heilbrunner or Heil something.
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B
Yeah.
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Do people use that book? That's a great book.
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He's I cite him in my conclusion. In fact, I don't know Smith and.
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A
Marx and Ricardo and has all these guys in it.
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B
Yeah, he's amazing. And you know where he taught? The New School. Right. But the New School is amazing because they don't actually believe in those disciplinary boundaries. So people can come in and teach like really amazing things and not be pigeonholed into. Right. So he taught there for years and years before he passed.
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Yeah. That's very interesting because that used to be one of the books that you really couldn't get through an undergraduate curriculum without reading. Like everybody read it.
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Like huge impact on me at Berkeley.
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Yeah, I remember reading it. Wow, this is really cool. Because narrative. It doesn't have an equation in it. Not one.
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No, no. And, and, and, and you know, I actually use other. His writings are amazing because, you know, he, he was really interested in how capitalist hegemonic ideology works. Right. And so clearly he's had a huge impact on me because in some ways, you know what I'm trying. This book is a counter hegemonic project. Right. It's trying to undo that dominant narrative against.
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A
Yeah. So let's continue along this thread of economic thought. And we've already rehearse a little bit of this material, but I'm interested in hearing you talk about it a little bit more about the history of present state of economic theory and particularly about economic outcomes which are important to you. You write.
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Yeah.
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Assessments of market outcomes tend toward the polemical, with capitalists and socialists, globalization advocates and anti globalization advocates, those on the political right and those on the political red, all facing off to argue the benefits and harms brought about by markets. I love these binaries because they're totally accurate. Within about 30 seconds of hearing somebody talk, you can tell which camp they're in. You don't even need to listen to.
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B
The rest of it.
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A
So can you talk a little bit about those binaries and how do they constrain our thinkings about markets? That's really from what I'm interested in.
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Yeah. I actually, I want to use a specific example that's not in the book because it's come up in my research since. But I think one of the problems. So you know, obviously on the right, you know, this notion that markets are going to be the solution to everything. For example, you know, I teach food politics now.
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Right.
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And it's interesting that, you know, most people agree, even left, right, whatever, that our food system's broken and certain. Right. Like, you know, we've got all this highly processed food, people are getting sick, blah, blah, blah. You know, I can sort of go through and name all those things. But the, the kinds of solutions that have tended to dominate. Right. Have been these campaigns that, and the campaigns are literally called like boat with your fork. And you know, so what that means really is the solution to any big market problem, right. Is just like consumers going out and, you know, exercising their beliefs. Injustice by buying things.
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Yeah.
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Right. And, you know, markets in some ways. And market incentives are what got us into, right. The extreme pursuit of profit. The, the power that large corporations have over public policy have gotten us into this problem. So the notion that just like consumers going out and buying the right things. Right. Is going to get us out of the problem is, is kind of messed up. But, but from the left, it's also problematic that there's this like, inherent avoidance of anything that smacks of markets or of rationality or incentives, right. Say you use the word incentives and you know, in lefty circles and it's really, it can be problematic. So I, I had this incredible interview in New York City with a woman who was actually hired in the mayor's office to oversee a change in the food system and to like, really, like, try to coordinate and bring together all these incredible community gardens and farmers markets and things that were going, right. And so, like, good for New York, good for actually investing in. They actually created a position. And you know, and she had come from the world of community organizing and she was telling me how difficult it is for her when she goes out to like, so there's a ton of money coming in to invest in these kinds of, you know, community gardens. That kind of thing is, is, is hot right now. And so these huge corporations are like, doing these grants and things. And the question is, who's getting the grants? Right. She wants the communities who have been investing in these neighborhood projects and these like, amazing things to, to get that money, but instead the money is going to people who are doing this high tech greenhouse stuff, like Elon Musk's brother. Really? Yes. And in places like Brooklyn and calling it like social justice, racial justice stuff, right? But here's the thing. She's, she, she's trying to get the community organizers who are doing the work to, you know, she's like, look, you need to learn how to write a grant. You need to figure, you know, there are things that you need to put in here. People should be paid for their work, right? And they balked at that. Right. That, this idea that, that sounds like a market, right? So I guess what I'm trying to say. And you know, clearly she believed this as well, even though she had my book. I really think that we need to stop thinking about markets as universalistic. Right. I think that markets and exchange are going to be with us and have been with us forever, and they're not necessarily prone inherently to just or unjust outcomes. But instead, and this is the infrastructures part, I'm trying to argue rather than the universalistic, that markets are embedded in these infrastructures. And when I say infrastructures, I don't necessarily mean roads and, you know, technology and all that. I mean ideological, cultural, political infrastructures that actually incentivize people within markets to do things that either end up promoting justice or exacerbating injustice.
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I see. Thank you very much. I can think of lots of cases in which markets did not actually serve mankind. And I can think of lots of cases in which the hatred of markets has not served mankind.
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Yeah. And, you know, are we talking about capitalist markets, neoliberal market? Like, what, what, what kind of market.
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Are we going to talk. Actually, it's funny. We're going to talk about that in just a second. I found one sentence in your book that allows us to talk about the whole book. One sentence. Okay, I did one sentence. And it follows right on what I just read. Yet not enough attention has been paid to analyzing the conditions. That's the first word. Under which markets. That's the second word. Result in just outcomes. That's the third word we're going to talk about. The whole book is right there in that sentence. Okay, let's talk a little bit about these conditions. Yeah, well, actually, we'll talk about. We'll talk about conditions in a little while. Let's begin with markets, because you were just talking about markets and just outcomes. What is a market?
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I mean, okay, you ask the simplest questions that are not actually so simple. So first of all, I do think that when we say the market, which is a phrasing that almost everybody uses and certainly economists use all the time. Right. That's clearly an abstraction. That is a. It's a fantasy. It's a metaphor. It's a. Right. Like what is the market? Right. So. So that's part of the issue is like when I say we need to stop thinking about markets as universal, that's part of the issue. Right. I mean, so many things can be markets. You walk down to the farmer's market. That's right. Like any, any place where there is exchange happening. Any place where there's, you know, People producing something and selling it. Right. I. And so, therefore, like, I actually don't think that we can live without markets per se. Right. It's just the question of, like, the people in those markets, what are they incentivized to do?
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A
It is a hard question. I'm not going to say it is it. I mean, I was reading your book, and it actually really prompted me to think about this question, and I determined. Well, this is only. My. What I thought about it, that it's the third in a set of three things. The most general is reciprocity. We do that all the time. We're just built for it. We're very cooperative. Right. But you don't have to exchange anything to do that. A handshake is reciprocity. Right. As simple as that. You and me talking is reciprocity.
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B
Yeah.
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Right. We're not exchanging anything, but. Well, we kind of are exchanging something, but it's costless. It's not in any structure that we can get. Right. Okay. And then right below that is what we would call. What's the word that I. What? No, it's just exchange.
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Yeah.
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I give you this, you give me that.
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That's bartering.
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Just exchanging. Like, we exchange stuff. Right. And then the smallest category, these are the biggest to smallest, is actually markets. That's the smallest one. The biggest one's reciprocity. That exchange the markets is small. Yeah, yeah. Right. It's kind of the way.
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B
I mean, this is. This is Carl Polanyi, right? Like, absolutely. And I guess I, I want. While that is a way to understand markets, I guess I want to dismantle some of the. The walls, the, you know, the, the. The ways in which we define markets as different from those other forms of social exchange.
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Right. Yeah, we're going to get to that.
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Yeah.
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You're not ever going to sell a handshake? Well, Donald Trump might.
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No, but. But some of what we do in what we more traditionally would think of as a market does bleed into those things. And the fact that we treat them as separate, like the market, like, literally. It was the enlightenment, Right. That's that. That walled off this idea of markets as separate from all those other things that we do. Like.
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A
Right, well, we're going to get to that. That's the conditions part. We're going to get to that. Yeah. So remember our sentence is. What was our sentence? I got to get it again, where to go. The conditions under which markets result in just outcomes. So the, the thing I'd like to talk about now is just outcome. Okay, so what are just and unjust outcomes? And how do you tell.
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B
Yeah, you know, it's interesting. I, I gave an early draft to a friend who's a philosopher, who's a pretty plain speaker, and she was like, you can't, you can't just assume what a just outcome is, but, you know, you need to explain, blah, blah, blah, you need to spend all this time. And I thought about it a lot and I thought, you know what? I actually don't want to spend a lot of this book thinking about defining what is just and what is not and doing that sort of thing that philosophers do. Right. So this is going to sound glib and I'll explain that it's not quite so glib, but there is part of me that thinks you know it when you know it, when you. Right. And so, for example, like it. It may not be a hundred percent of the people who agree that what we're doing with respect to the environment is unjust, but there are enough people in the world that I'm willing to just take that as a given. Right. That we're doing damage and that's a form of injustice. Same thing with mass incarceration. We're not going to get 100 buy in on that one. But, you know, I, I think that there's, there's enough, you know, I think that the, the issue of labor exploitation globally, there's so many examples that, where people will look at what's happening and there might be disagreement about how to address it. Right. There might be disagreement on whether it's the, the rule or the exception.
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Right.
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But. So I kind of go with the, the kinds of justice or injustice that I'm dealing with in the book, in the case studies are in fact structural racism, climate issues, patriarchy in the form of labor exploitation in Juarez, Mexico, where there's been tremendous violence against women. So, yeah, so I don't spend a lot of time defining what is justice, but those are, I mean, clearly I'm coming from a lefty perspective and I'm, I own that.
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A
Right. That's fair enough. The one, you know, the one that I, When I think about this question, the one that always comes to mind, especially in an economic contest, is income inequality or wealth inequality. Absolutely. Because the neoclassical types will be just like, there ain't no problem with that. None at all. In fact, it's good. The real, you know, it's a hierarchy of merit, man. That's what it is. And then the lefties are like, no way, man, that ain't gonna Happen. We don't do that.
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B
And here's the thing. I'm gonna tie this back to the neoclassical economics thing for a second because I don't know if you, if you're familiar with Thomas Piketty's book capital in the 21st century, but it is, it's, it made a huge splash.
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A
We had him on, we had him on the New Books Network.
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B
I know that, yeah, he's, he's, he's amazing. He's amazing. But here's the thing. He was. I, I forget if he was at MIT or Harvard, one of those places. Tenured professor. Right. In economics. But neoclassical economics dominates pretty much all of the study of markets in the US There are a couple of programs where, you know, you can, you might find a Marxist economist here or there. Right. But he literally left and went back to France to research and write that book because, and he says in his preface, because, you know, neoclassical economics is so dominant that he couldn't. And it's basically a book full of data. It's a massive.
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Yeah, so I've talked to people who've read it, and that's what they say, that he's hound.
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B
Yeah, yeah. And he's basically arguing that, let's just look at wealth inequality over time from the beginning of capitalism. And if you actually, you know, crunch the numbers from 160 countries, blah, blah. I mean, he has incredible data. It appears that wealth continues to get more and more unequal and we're heading in a direction that is catastrophic. Right. And that's just the data speaking. So, you know, I think, I think you're right. That's a huge issue. And, and I think it's an underlying one in my, in my book, in part, because the question is, why is there.
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A
Right. And this goes back to something, you know, to interrupt. Sorry to interrupt. But, you know, I, I go back and forth when I think about somebody like Jeff Bezos on the one hand, and I used to tell my students this, that far from being overpaid, he's underpaid. Think of what happened during COVID Amazon saved us during COVID And that guy and his team and all those hundreds of thousands of people he employed saved our asses. So that guy, we should pay him more. But then on the other hand, I'm like, the guy's worth a gazillion dollars. That's fucking weird, man. That's just weird. What is up with that? What do you do with a gazillion dollars? I don't know. Maybe I just, I make A decent salary. And I can't quite figure out what to do with all my money. What if I had a gazillion dollars? Buy a yacht. How many yachts can you have?
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B
Right.
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A
Does the next yacht increase your utility? I don't know, but there's something intuitively weird about it. And so it's, you know, I'm very interested in what you said about this kind of intuitive sense of just and unjust. And I think about evolutionary biology actually, when I think about these things because, you know, there are some such. We know actually from behavioral economists that we have this tendency to really dislike unfair things. We will, we will act out. We will. We will act against our interest when we see unfair things. Well, in other words, we will, we will sacrifice when we see unfair things. Now, this is only, this is only an experiment what happens in reality. But it happens in these experiments. They cook up.
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B
Well, that's a no. But also those experiments go the other way. Like, yes, people will give more than you know when they do those experiments. Basically, people get given pots of monies and then. And money and they have to decide like, you know, how much to spend on the public good and how much to spend on the. Right.
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On.
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On themselves. And, and yes, the outcome can be changed slightly depending on what the situation is that they see unjust outcomes. Right. But for the most part, those behavioral economists are assuming that people will give way less to the public good than they give. Right.
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A good hypothesis, if you. Yeah.
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Tend to be. And what's interesting is over time, it's not like the experiments that behavioral economists have done have actually changed the basic assumptions made in neoclassical economics.
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A
I don't know. It was a nothing burger in my world. I just really was like, okay, great. I already knew that. Thanks. Can we go on?
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B
Right. Well, and it's interesting that they. I mean, I say this in the book, but I just think it's so funny that the only group of people that have ever confirmed the hypothesis of behavioral economists about like, you know, rational individualism are Econ PhD students. When you do that, when you do that experiment on a group of Econ PhD students, they give the appropriate amount according.
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A
I mean, I can tell you without any doubt whatsoever, if you perform those. Those same experiments cross culturally, you'd get wildly different results. Wildly different.
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B
My whole point about different infrastructures. Right. Coming to that, markets are not universal because markets, remember, are just made up of individual action.
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A
Right. You take a bunch of students from the University of Chicago or like you and me. Yeah. You probably predict the outcome. But if you take somebody from Zimbabwe or Ulanba tour, you're going to get something different.
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B
Well, in fact, I, different assumptions. I have, I have a case study in Uganda that actually really cemented for me that. That difference.
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A
Yeah.
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And, and, and, and I think for me unveiled a bias that I was still holding that I didn't think I had.
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A
Well, okay, we're already talking about it, but now we can go on to conditions, which is really the meat of your book. Yeah, because.
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B
Okay. Yeah, yeah, go ahead.
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A
So what, what you say is there's this. Well, let me put it in, in my language. There's this thing, reciprocity. We do it naturally. Then there's this thing exchange, and then there are markets. And you're saying that's where people stop. But there's something behind the markets. There are assumptions that are made pre market, so to say, or below the market. And actually Emile Durkheim said this as well, I believe, but that they're never paid any attention to and God knows why. I imagine anthropologists pay attention to them, historians pay attention to them. Why economists don't pay attention, I don't know. And like I say, I have a good example of just what you're saying. Can you talk a little bit about that in terms of. You talk about community, individualism, that's kind of the binary use. You talk generally about these conditions and where they sit.
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B
Yeah, absolutely. But first I just want to sort of say something about the, like anthropologists. Like, like the people I'm, I'm most aligned with at this point are people in, in other disciplines. Right. In part because it's back to why I wrote this book. I actually think lots of people are critical of the things I'm critical of. Right. And lots of people have written about the pro. These problems. Right. And. But I think not very many of them are trained in neoclassical economics. Right. Not many of them did a PhD program at Yale and econ. And I think that's kind of where I'm entering the conversation by being able to make these critiques. But in the framework of that, like I actually want to speak to the economists, I want to speak to the econ students. Right. So yeah, so you know, it's a. I have a series of case studies of different infrastructural conditions under which.
- [36:06]
A
Market.
- [36:08]
B
Players, people will, will be incentivized to do things differently. So I'm going to give you a really a micro example, a micro case. So I go to this little village in Uganda outside of Mbale And I want to study this interfaith coffee cooperative because it's been very, very successful. And. And it's brought a lot of resources to this tiny little village, and yet it hasn't led to what sometimes is referred to as brain drain. It hasn't led to, you know, people leaving the village. It hasn't led to infighting. It hasn't led to, you know, it. The. It has strengthened the village. And. And that is not. I'm pretty critical of development projects that tend to, you know, enrich some individuals, right? Like micro financing and. And tends to, like, really tear apart the village. So I want to know, like, what's happening in this village and how does it work? And, you know, the coffee cooperative was what I originally went to study, but this micro case. So I'm. I'm sitting in this little guest house that I'm staying in and talking with this woman, Rebecca. So 100 years ago, these. These black Africans, right, convert to Judaism because their chief converted as a big fu to the British, right? He reads the Bible. He decides, hey, these people, that's what I want to be. It's a. It's a long story, but it's important because when Western Judaism discovers this little village, they become the sweetheart, right? And it's important because these women, very savvy in terms of entrepreneurship, start knitting these kiput, which are the Jewish skullcaps, right? That. And. And here's the thing. The market for those. Those kipot in. In the US is huge because people will buy 300 of them for a bar bat mitzvah, right?
- [38:43]
A
Go to a synagogue and you're not Jewish, you get one.
- [38:45]
B
No, exactly. So when people come to a bar of mutt, they're given away as party favors, and they're inscribed with the child's name and the date of the bar mitzvah, whatever. But imagine. Imagine the market, right, where there's a little village. So this. This woman Rebecca and some others start this women's knitting cooperative. And they're knitting hundreds and hundreds of these little skull cabs. And they're really cool, by the way. And when I sit down with her to ask her about how things work, you know, she's like, yeah, I can knit. She's ridiculously talented. And so fast. And, you know, in 10 minutes, she.
- [39:32]
A
Can knit one of these Michael Jordan of knitting sculpts. And.
- [39:37]
B
And by the way, it wasn't just the Jewish converts that started she. They included Jews, Christians and Muslims all in this same village, right? So while they could have made it Just about. Right. And kept for themselves that they. They knew. And here's where a belief in community is the infrastructure. Right? Like, the first decision they made was to share in the profits, which, you know, and partly because they did it to support their community. And so, you know, driving a wedge between people and by the way, like, across the border in Rwanda, not that far away, people killing each other for ethnic and religious differences. Right. So it's really important. But the thing that really, I don't know, unveiled my blind spot was I said to her, I just couldn't help it. And the economists in me came out and I said, well, how do you incentivize? You know, you knit so many and other women are knitting one a day. Right. How do you incentivize people to, like, knit more? Right. You do. You pay them according to.
- [40:57]
A
Right.
- [40:58]
B
I literally asked her that. And she looked at me. She didn't even let me finish the sentence. She looked at me. She's shaking her head. She's like, Nancy. And then I tried to explain again the incentive issue. She's like, please. She's like, I understand fully the incentive issue. She's like, but what you don't understand is the minute we start, yes, people might knit more, Right. We might make a little more money, Right. But in the end, it would destroy our community. It would lead to so much jealousy and. Right. Resentment. And the whole point of using this enterprise is to make money to support their building schools. They're building, you know, health clinic, along with the coffee cooperative. Right. And so it just clicked for me. It's like, wow, I'm looking at this. Like, if you just narrow in and make the assumption about individual incentives and the, the variable of community is nowhere in there, then you're not going to get it. Right. You're not going to get that this is rational. It is completely rational not to have that incentive mechanism.
- [42:23]
A
Yeah, I mean, I see exactly what you mean, and it is rational, given your. I think what economists would start talking about here is preferences. You have a preference hierarchy, and they got community up there, but they got profit down there.
- [42:37]
B
I'm so, I'm so glad you. You said that, because that will be the pushback that I've always.
- [42:44]
A
I know, I can hear them right now.
- [42:45]
B
Right, right. It's, you know, it's just part of your utility maximization. Right. Like your utility function has in it, you know, this like, community thing. Right. But the utility function is still your individual utility function and individual function maximization. So everything starts from the assumption of Individual identity, that, that you can only have these maximization equations based on each individual. Right. The problem is that what I've found over time is that we are not inherently right. Our identities are so inter, meshed, if we're healthy. Right. With our identity as part of a community, a network or whatever, that it really does not make sense. Right. To start from the assumption of individual rationality. That is a modern liberal concept. Right.
- [43:52]
A
I would agree with that. Yes, I think that's definitely true.
- [43:55]
B
And, and there are places where that is less now. I don't think it's just in places like Uganda. Like, I do think that there are intentional communities. They're intentional. There are places outside of, you know, places like a small village in Uganda that, where people also behave in those ways. I, there's a whole new, this is my, my new project. There's a whole new sort of set of studies about the commons. And they've coined a term, scholars have coined the term commoning as a verb. Right. That is, you know, I think that is the way out of the horrible bind that we have gotten ourselves into.
- [44:41]
A
Let me, I told you I had an example when I was reading your book. He came to me as example, and it's worth thinking about, I think, and it might be a little bit political, I don't know.
- [44:54]
B
Okay, tell me.
- [44:55]
A
It's the Soviet Union. Because in the Soviet Union they were all about just outcomes. That was the goal, just outcomes. And so what they did is they made sure that the range of salaries given to people was very, very narrow. No matter what they did, they fixed prices. So just as an example, I mean, to the Western, I remember when I first went there, like, you'll buy a bottle of beer and they had decided it was 10 kopecks. So it was literally on the bottle. Like, I mean, it was stamped in the bottle. Like they couldn't change the price. It was like that was it. That was how much it cost. They had decided that's what it costs. And they decided this is what these people deserve. And then, and the goal here was a kind of equalitarianism or egalitarianism, I don't know quite how to put it, but that's the direction they were going to do all these things. And this was the condition under which, and this is the interesting part, markets were created and emerged. And I say created. What they learned, at least on the consumer levels, they had to have markets because you can't decide what everybody wants. It's just not possible. You can't produce a goods package to speak like a neoclassical economics that everybody's going to love, just can't do it. It's not going to work. And, and so, so they said, well, we have to have some sort of market mechanism to do this. And they, they did that and they created markets. But since they had limited wages in certain way and they had decided they were going to fix prices, the markets were crappy. And you know what happened? Black market emerged immediately, like, boom. There.
- [46:30]
B
Don't get me wrong, I, I, I'm not that naive. I do understand there are market, market forces, quote, unquote, outplay.
- [46:39]
A
Right. But I was just thinking about this word conditions, and it really was, you know, and also here's an anecdote. I remember I was there in 1991 and I was talking to a guy who was hawking pizza, and some people were going into shops, buying bread and then coming out on the street and selling them for more than they bought them for simply because of scarcity. Okay, all right. They want to make more money and so they go get them from the shops. And this is just after communism had fell. And I said, you know, I said, I got an association with him. And he said, that's speculatia. He said, that's speculation. And I said, well, how's that different than just profit? Like they're just making a profit. And he said, no, no, no, no, no. Profit is speculation. All of it is speculation. Yeah. From his perspective, all of it was because he went to Soviet schools, he was raised as a communist, and like, all of it, if you're making money, you know, surplus value, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, speculation, bad. That's my example.
- [47:39]
B
Yeah, look, I don't, that, that does, it is polemical. Right. And that tends to be the example that folks point to of like, oh, well, socialism can't possibly work because the Soviet Union.
- [47:53]
A
Right.
- [47:54]
B
I, you know, the example I have in the book, which I think is much more apt, is Cuba.
- [47:59]
A
Go ahead, talk about that one, because I want to hear about that one.
- [48:01]
B
Yeah, yeah, and, and I think it's much more apt in part because the Cuban revolution was quite a bit different than the Soviet.
- [48:16]
A
Yes.
- [48:17]
B
And you know, and while of course, course, there are problems in every system, you know, I, I, when I went to Cuba, it seemed pretty clear to me that like, the everyday person on the street, like, they saw socialism as something that they truly believed in, that is the values of, and the, and the thing is, they have benefited in part. Right. There, there also has been like all kinds of market opening, but market Opening in ways that have always been cognizant of some of the worst unjust outcomes. Right. So when the Cuban government opens up multinational corporation investment in, In Cuba, they are very clear that not just anybody, not just any MNC can come in and. And invest. Right. They have to align with the values of. And. And I have to say. Right, that is. So that's not saying no market. Right. But it is saying, like, we have values that preempt. Right. How our. This is. This is the infrastructure in which our market is going to operate. They're not saying no markets. I think the, the Soviet Union's problem. Absolutely, I agree with you. You cannot do a command and control economy where you, you know, some central authority just decides how much of everything to. Right. Like there are. There's a value in how markets operate, but that doesn't mean that. That the markets have to take over. Right. Our, our beliefs and our values. And so, you know, I really think that the way that, for instance, the US Press the dominant narrative about Cuba and you know, that it's just never going to last. Right. Because it's not efficient. Because markets will eventually take over all of the Soviet Union. And they've been wrong. Right. Part of that is. Says more about our stuckness in neoliberal ideology than it does about the Cuban system. And that's kind of what that chapter is about, is it like, sort of reveals all of our ideological commitments. Right. And our inability to understand how Cuba actually functions.
- [51:02]
A
I think if you talk to a historian or a sociologist that does really empirical work on the ground, or an anthropologist, everything you say would just kind of be intuitive. And that would be. And that would be. Well, you know, these are different cultures. And of course you're going to have different assumptions. Like, what can we go? Like, we knew that, you know, but.
- [51:20]
B
I can see what's new is bringing together, I think the, the, a holistic critique.
- [51:29]
A
Yeah.
- [51:29]
B
Of the dominant narrative in the context of. Right. Like how we study markets.
- [51:36]
A
Yeah. It seems to me like an important, you know, important variable here would be how the community was formed. Because they're organic communities. They're not formed from above. And you used exactly the right word, command economy. That one was not formed from below. That one was imposed by people with guns.
- [51:54]
B
Absolutely, absolutely. And that's not. Right. Yeah, that's, that's not about. I think there's, There is actually a strong sense of community in. And I'll give you. Here's a. I'm gonna use Soviet Union, China, Cuba. Okay, let's Talk about community. In the Soviet Union, the imposition of that socialist system, communist system, right. Actually destroyed community. People would call their neighbors in, right. Would. Would write, rat on their neighbors. Like it.
- [52:33]
A
Yeah, I know.
- [52:34]
B
Total lack of like society broke down, right. So what I'm talking about is an infrastructure where society is strengthened. Right. Let's talk about China. China has out capitalists. The capitalists, right. China is now like, you can say it's a communist country. And, and it is certainly politically with respect to the power structure, but with respect to markets, it is hyper capitalist. Right. And what my students tell me who actually come from China is that it has led to a total breakdown of society, really. Right. Like people will walk by somebody who has collapsed, really. And not. Yeah.
- [53:18]
A
Like it just like in Northampton, Massachusetts, happens every day, right.
- [53:23]
B
And both, you know, well, we don't have to get into like the long explanation of why society breaks down, but I think I'm trying to flip the narrative and say, look, when there is a strong commitment to community, whether it's in a small village in Uganda or whether it's a strong commitment to a kind of socialism that spells care for each other, which most Cubans. Right. You won't get this from the US press, but most Cubans still buy into, right. Even if they're critical of some aspects of the government, whatever. Those infrastructures actually lead to market changes that don't destroy the education system, the health care system. That. Right. When, when Cuba was cut off overnight from Soviet oil, right. When the wall came tumbling down, right. They literally were able to move their agricultural system from 90% reliant on fossil fuels to only 10%. And they still are now only about 20%. So, you know, that's. That's held. How did they do that? They did it in very grounded community, right. They shifted these farms to, you know, community farms where people helped each other. They built rooftop gardens. They did. Like it wasn't an imposition from above. Did the government impose, you know, limits on what you could buy, how many chickens a week and all that, like out of the stat. Sure, right. But ultimately it really was community efforts, neighborhood by neighborhood, that made the difference for them. Surviving.
- [55:21]
A
I'm thinking, I'm thinking interestingly that it's possible and even in my own life to kind of code switch between these two things. Because I think of myself, I run a business, I have employees, we buy insurance, we have a 401k plan, blah, blah, blah. We're trying to maximize profit. I don't have any problem with that. I Do it. But I also belong to a church and it doesn't work like that. Not at all.
- [55:50]
B
Margaret, can I push back on the maximization of profit?
- [55:54]
A
Yeah. Well, let me tell you. Before you do, let me an argument that I often have with people who say, yeah, businesses are about maximization, profit. I'm like, that is such bullshit.
- [56:04]
B
Yeah. I don't buy it, man.
- [56:05]
A
The guys, the people that I know who are in business do not do it. Well, sure, it's good to have money, but you get the money so you can keep doing it because you think it's good.
- [56:14]
B
That's right. And do it. And you develop relationships with the people who you work with and you want to sustain their ability to have good lives like it. Nobody is saying that making money is a bad thing, but I do think that, that ultimately, and I'll go back to like the, the fatal flaw in economic thinking here, right? Why do we maximize income or utility or anything? Right? Income actually doesn't give you anything. It's a means to an end, right? And the end ultimately of those, like utility functions maximize whatever is happiness, welfare, right? When you ask an economist, well, what is utility? They will explain it in terms of, oh, well, that, that's our proxy for happiness satisfaction, blah, blah, blah, right? And so if you're maximizing profit and by only focusing on maximizing profit, doing things that undermine happiness, by cutting community ties, by making you feel like shit, by, right. Whatever it is, then you're kind of undoing. So, like, I really think it is rational certainly to make money to get the things that you need, but also to do things in a way that promotes a sustainable, just outcome. Because ultimately that is what is going to feed our souls, right?
- [57:56]
A
Or contributes to. Actually, in Buddhism, which I've also studied a little bit, there's a thing called right living that's, that's one of the. One of the steps along the path, right. Number four, or I don't forget which one it is. But right living, you need to choose the right living, and that does not include dealing heroin to local kids. That is not right living. You cannot do that. And where's the right work? I can't remember what it is. I mean, it is right work. I don't remember. But anyway, the notion is that you should do something that benefits others. You shouldn't be doing something that harms others in a market or any sort of exchange situation. And there's spiritual value to that, definitely. And that's. I think this generalizes nicely because the people that I know in business. And I know a lot of them now, you know, they, they, many of them don't do it just to make money. They just don't. And they do it because they either like doing it or they think that it's good for the world or they, Something like that, you know, and, and they're not. You know, they're just not. I know the case in the new Books Network. There are opportunities we pass up because I, I don't want to deal with these people because I don't think what they're doing is good. I won't be specific, but I'm not going to do it.
- [59:06]
B
Absolutely. I, Look, I, I think that's where the issue, the, the one case study that we didn't talk about was what is Mexico? And, you know, it's like the case of globalization gone horribly wrong. Right. But. But ultimately, because this speaks to what you were talking about, about why people go into business. Like, I, I think when globalization looks like something where the money, the, the, the big companies come in and have no connection to the country or the community or the local, right. Then the pursuit of profit to no end is the only incentive. Right? Because there is no connection to place. There is no connection to people. They're distanced from it. And, and so, you know, I really do think you're right. When you talk to small business, people in. That are embedded in communities, like, honestly, even if they're conservative, like, yeah. It's very clear that they run their businesses in ways that, like, well, wait a minute. We're part of the community. We can't do that. Right?
- [60:22]
A
Yeah. I mean, my local bank, esb, it's a small bank, East Hampton Savings bank, they do all this stuff with the community. And maybe if you're cynical, you could say, well, they're doing it to improve their image, which will improve their bottom line. Maybe you could do that. But I actually know these people, and they're not. So banking there for 15 years.
- [60:43]
B
Right. Because they're part of the community. Right. Whereas when, you know, Coca Cola does a campaign about clean water and, you know, and puts, yes, like hundreds of thousands of dollars into promoting clean water in some small village. But they're. In the meantime, they're destroying.
- [61:01]
A
Right.
- [61:02]
B
The water infrastructure and all the other like.
- [61:05]
A
Right, right, right. Let me ask this before we go, which was a kind of a final. I don't know if it's a final question or not. I'm enjoying this a lot. Is there an issue of scale here? Does it work better small than large? You know, because like, if you think about it, people say it's like families are kind of socialist. Right? They kind of are. And then the larger the organization, the less socialist it looks.
- [61:24]
B
Right. This is Friedrich too.
- [61:26]
A
Yeah, right.
- [61:28]
B
Look, one of the critiques of the way this book is laid out is that it's not scalable. My cases are like these individual one off kind of cases. And that's fair. But. But I also think I'm arguing against a universalistic approach to begin with. Like, I don't think all solutions are going to look similarly. I'm saying that, you know, how markets behave depends on context. And those contexts, every community is different, every place is different. So. But we are also facing a behemoth of a problem, for sure. Right. And so in the last chapter, I point to some examples of, of scaling that don't necessarily give up the values. Right. That I'm right. And I think the Mondragon cooperative system in the Basque country is a good example. It's a. There are some massive MNCs that produce cars and all kinds of other things that export abroad. Right. That system, and it is a system, has scaled and has scaled successfully. But what have they done? They understand that you can't just be a single cooperative in a sea of capitalism, right. Without also having a financial institution that shares your values, without also having health care institutions and all. Right? So they have, you know, built this incredible system of solidarity and cooperation and not a small one, right. And so, like, I think it's a really good example of what can happen. And you know, in the last huge global recession, one of their car company actually went under. It was. So it's not like they, like, it's not like they weathered the storm on some level better than capitalist right organizations, but in fact the community did because when all those unemployed auto workers, right, needed work, all of the other industries, some of which were countercyclical, right. They were probably producing booze, I don't know, but something. All the worker cooperatives.
- [64:22]
A
That was funny. That was really funny.
- [64:26]
B
All surfers voted to actually take pay cuts in order to make room to bring in workers from these unemployed industries. And so as a community, they weathered the storm extremely well. Once, once the industries were back on their feet, then people went back to work. But. Right. Like that doesn't happen. And ultimately it's rational.
- [64:56]
A
I see what you're saying. I'm thinking of since you mentioned workers getting fired and unemployment and things like this, I don't know a lot about it, but for example, in France, it's actually very hard to fire anyone. Now, this is not exactly organic. It's the state saying that you can't do this, but it is part of French culture they don't like. I mean, in the United States, labor law is pretty much, if your employer wants to let you go, you're done. That's it. In France, it ain't like that. They start from a different place, I think.
- [65:29]
B
Okay, I'm just. Let me just push back for one second. Right. Because that, you know, we're back to this like. Oh, this command and control thing that really is kind of inefficient and doesn't work. That's the, that's. I think.
- [65:41]
A
I didn't say it was inefficient. Well, but it does produce something. It produces. It produces, but less unemployment.
- [65:52]
B
Yeah. But I also want to push back in the US Right? On this idea that, that markets, free, like, you know, free markets actually determine things. Right. Because I think we're blind to the fact. And I guess this is going back to Polanya, really. We're blind to the fact that governments, our government has always been tremendously involved in the market. Right. It's just like on whose behalf? Right. So with respect to employment law. Right. When you have people coming in, for instance, on these like temporary work visas, right. Especially for agricultural work.
- [66:35]
A
Yeah.
- [66:36]
B
They, they are actually tied to an employer. And so if that, they come in, they're tied to an employer, the employers can exploit the hell out of those people. And, and they don't say anything because they. Because the state is basically supporting that exploitation. Why? Because if they don't work for that employer, if they choose to quit, that's a free market thing. Right. Because being exploited, then they will be deported.
- [67:03]
A
They'll be deported.
- [67:03]
B
Right. So we have a system that actually also is super inefficient, promotes exploitation not in the name of the market, but actually interact through intervention. Right. Through government intervention.
- [67:16]
A
It's a little bit like indentured servitude in the 17th or 18th century.
- [67:20]
B
It's exactly that. And, and by the way, I'm laddling.
- [67:25]
A
But it is not funny.
- [67:26]
B
It's, it's, it's mostly imposed on people of color. So when I use the terminology racial capitalism, that's what I mean.
- [67:34]
A
Yeah, yeah. No, I'm. Yeah. I'm reminded I've done a lot of home renovation in various. Since I moved 47 times in Washington D.C. i renovated this apartment and there's a Home Depot not exactly in my neighborhood, but I drive there and there was always a crowd of these Mexican guys and they were just waiting to be picked up. You know, I talked to them, actually, the ones that spoke English. I'm like, how does this work out for you? And they're like, well, you know, it's dicey, but. And ICE knows about us, but they're letting us stay here. It's a long time ago, by the way. Ice, now I pick them all up.
- [68:07]
B
People knew that things are nuts.
- [68:11]
A
Yeah. So it was tough for those guys. I knew it was tough. Anyway, thank you very much, Nancy. We've run out of time. Well, we've gone over time. This is so interesting. We have, we have a traditional final question on the New Books Network and that is what are you working on now?
- [68:30]
B
Yeah, I am. So as I said, I've moved into food politics. I've become really interested in researching this like global food sovereignty movement, which is a lot about peasants pushing back on this global system that's pushing them off their land and creating all kinds of chaos. And that took me to India to study these migrating animal herders. They call themselves Maldari. And they also identify with the global food sovereignty movement because their livelihoods are being threatened by the enclosure of the commons, basically the, you know, the industrialization that's happening in the countryside, the exclusionary conservation that's happening, and a lot of bias against these nomadic folks on the part of the government. And so I've been mapping their changing routes and really they're kind of in some ways the canary in the coal mine. Right. They're the first to be hit by climate change. I work in Gujarat, India, which last year broke the global record for an all time temperature high. It's dicey. And part of it is that the grasslands are being destroyed. And part of the reason why the grasslands are being destroyed is that these people who care for the commons are being, are being marginalized and pushed off. Right. And so it's another kind of example like the infrastructures of justice. Right. Where like the, the exploitation of these people is also going to lead to all of our ruin. Right. So, so yeah, well, good luck with that project.
- [70:45]
A
You get to travel to cool places and meet cool people. That's good, right?
- [70:49]
B
Yeah.
- [70:49]
A
I had to go to, I got.
- [70:50]
B
To, I got to go to the.
- [70:51]
A
Soviet Union in Russia. It's a nice place. I like, I like, I like pretty cool, nice people. But you know. Anyway, Nancy Dimon, thank you very much for being on the show today.
- [71:02]
B
Thank you, Marshall. I really appreciate our say.
- [71:04]
A
Thank you.