The "hereditarian left", if they exist, are just luck egalitarians and that's still not OK

My initial reaction to Ezra Klein and Vox repeatedly slapping down Sam Harris for openly flirting with race realism was to grab the popcorn and stay far, far away. So too with the New York Times and other publications continuing to platform writers 'just asking questions' about the social policy implications of the science of behaviourial genetics. But I decided to draw a line when the well-respected evolution blog "The Panda's Thumb" published a piece on 29 March arguing that debating the discourse of genes and IQ was 'science denialism' akin to climate change denial or fear of vaccines. This is not merely academic. Global warming denialism and refusing to vaccinate children put lives at risk: what precisely is at stake when it comes to the genetic basis of intelligence? 

My primary target for today is not Charles Murray or the identarian alt-right. Instead, it's nominal liberals like Steve Pinker; atheist Sam Harris; self-avowed socialist Freddie DeBoer; rationalists like Scott Alexander; the writer of the "Stumbling and Mumbling" blog; and right-libertarian pseudo-intellectual rags such Quillette. These writers are largely white men, 'classical liberals' who attempt to rationalise social inequality that's at odds with their own sense of meritous privilege. I'm going to call such people the 'hereditarian left' (a term I'm aware was first coined by Murray and then endorsed by Pinker) who combine some personal good faith with a quixotic determination to naturalise social differences in terms of genetics and intelligence. 

Note that the hereditarian left, with its focus on genes and intelligence, is not the same thing as the "Darwinian Left" (Peter Singer). Darwinian selection has wide applications to the study of culture and organisations, as my colleagues in the Cultural Evolution Society will tell you. Nor am I taking aim at all sociobiologists, evolutionary psychologists and behaviourial economists, fields that often produce valuable insight into what it is to be human without attempting to naturalise social differences between us (although not all are so innocent).

Vox's expert witness Paige Harden has proposed the following elements of a polite hereditarian consensus. Quote:

1. The idea that some people are inferior to other people is abhorrent.
2. The mainstream scientific consensus is that genetic differences between people (within ancestrally homogeneous populations) do predict individual differences in traits and outcomes that are highly valued in our post-industrial, capitalist society.
3. Acknowledging the evidence for #2 is perfectly compatible with belief #1.

But Harden's exhortation against drawing moral conclusions (#1) on the basis of scientific findings (#2) is somewhat undermined by her own research team's explicit focus on philosophical matters and social policy. The distinction of scientific 'is' from philosophical 'ought' is important in theory but permeable in practice: as part of the current controversy, Panda's Thumb noted fascinating research that progressives are more likely to think negatively moralised social differences have a genetic origin and less likely to think positive ones do, whereas conservatives are more likely to think advantageous social traits have genetic basis. Harden makes the same point: the way people make judgements about behaviour affects how they talk and write about other genetically determined traits such as obesity or psychological disorders. The naturalist and agent biases are present in all of us: as a social species, we can't help but form judgments about social consequences based on scientific observations.

"The Argument"

I'm going to argue that even Harden's hereditarian formulation has no place in the egalitarian left. But first, we need to cover what the argument is, and is not, about. The premises of the genes and intelligence argument are routinely stated like this:

1. There are differences between individual people in their status, wealth, and power.
2. The achievement of high status, wealth, and power is a consequence of the possession of intrinsic [intellectual] ability.
3. Intellectual ability can be assessed by a set of tests loosely called “IQ tests,” which measure [general] intelligence on a one-dimensional scale.
4. IQ test performance (and therefore intrinsic intelligence) is largely inherited genetically.

Note that my source on this is a lecture by biologist Richard Lewontin in *1983* - predating Murray and "The Bell Curve" by a decade. Yet this formulation is commonly repeated by hereditarians, notably by Harris when interviewing Murray. Every one of these points is contestable to some degree or another: the biological reality of 'g' (general intelligence) is undetermined, we don't know how genes influence intelligence apart from the fact that there may be hundreds that make tiny contributions; intelligence testing only measures a particular subset of socially-valued tasks; and high IQ is no guarantee of success (just ask Malcolm Gladwell). But this is where Vox's merry band of wonks leads us astray: by focusing the debate on the scientific validity of the premises they miss the broader implications being drawn by readers. Moreover, the mainstream scientific view of these premises has evolved with the evidence and it’s not out of the realm of possibility that every one might be proven correct. 

The main problem is that these premises cannot be put together to construct any sort of meaningful, much less socially and politically just, conclusion. Heritability, in particular, just doesn't do what most people thinks it does: heritability only tells us what percentage of the variation in the expression of a trait comes from its genotype. It conveys no useful information about the variance between populations and says nothing about how a trait responds to environmental intervention. Even highly heritable traits (e.g. height, disease susceptibility) can be easily modified by varying environmental conditions (e.g. diet, medical treatment). Moreover, heritability of a trait tells us nothing about the direction of the genetic influence: it's naive Progressivism (with a capital "P") to assume that environments only exert a negative influence on trait development and that genes encode the ideal (Platonic) form of a person. 

And what sort of conclusions are drawn from these premises? Well largely primarily, racist, sexist and classist ones! As a socialist and a Rawlsian liberal, I prefer not to think in terms of race or ethnicity. I have written about the dispossession of native peoples (here, here, here, and here), but the construct of 'race' differs from society to society and as an Australian I'm not qualified to offer a view on the structural disadvantages faced by, for example, French Canadians, the descendants of slaves in the Americas, or Christians in Syria. All I can do, in solidarity, is to listen to and privilege the perspective of those that have such experience. It goes without saying, however, that Vox & crew are on the money in tearing apart genes as a causal factor in differential group outcomes: Klein in particular puts the issue in its historical and social context very well. 

The Default Hypothesis or the "Fundamental Principle" that racist hereditarians add to points 1-4 above is that whatever factors influence intelligence differences among individuals will also influence average differences among groups. But this hypothesis is invalid and false. The division of traits that are distributed on a spectrum into categories is almost alway arbitrary and socially contingent (i.e. ethnic groups are social constructs); trait differences within any human category are almost certainly many orders of magnitude greater than differences between them; and to ignore the role of social hierarchies (and the effects of history, culture and power) in generating and perpetuating group difference is gross scientific negligence of the highest order. No one who argues a connection between race and difference does so in good faith: by choosing to actively perpetuate racial hierarchies they earn their appellation as racists.

What is equality, anyway?

I don't think the "hereditarian left" (in the sense outlined at the top of this piece) are racist. They are however, deeply misguided liberals. In positing that genes and intelligence play a causal role in constructing social hierarchies, but ruling out making judgments about individual moral responsibility for social outcomes, the 'hereditarian left' are constructing an argument within the framework of 'luck egalitalitarianism'. This is well trodden philosophical ground. Rawlsian liberals have often struggled to justify economic redistribution in the face of the choice-centred, libertarian critique. Luck egalitarians accept a 'meritocratic' framing of inequality but are more nuanced about their conclusions, and argue that arbitrarily distributed, undeserved or 'natural' disadvantage should to be compensated at the expense of those who benefit from undeserved or 'natural' advantages. Luck egalitarianism puts the 'hereditarian left', if they exist, in good in good liberal company, but it's still not a defensible philosophical position for anyone who sees themselves as a democrat or a socialist.

"[Since] the capacities needed for responsible choice—foresight, perseverance, calculative ability, strength of will, self-confidence—are partly a function of genetic endowments  . . .  the imprudent are entitled to special paternalistic protection by society against their poor choices.  Equality of fortune says that such victims of bad luck are entitled to compensation for their defective internal assets and internal states. The chief appeal of equality of fortune to those of an egalitarian bent lies in this appearance of humanitarianism. Equality of fortune says that no one should have to suffer from undeserved misfortune and that priority in distribution should be given to those who are blamelessly worst off." 

I was curious to note at least one reactionary commentator citing Elizabeth Anderson's "What's the Point of Equality?" to peg Harden [accurately] as a luck egalitarian (Anderson's definition is the one used above). As a fan of Anderson, I don't recognise the version of her views presented in that blog. Anderson is strongly critical of luck egalitarianism and its paternalistic and disrespectful approach to the worst off in society. Anderson argues that to require the disadvantaged to display evidence of blamelessness and personal genetic inferiority in order to receive assistance reduces them to grovelling at the feet of their 'betters' and involves the state making judgements about the moral and genetic qualities of its citizen that are deeply disturbing, to say the least:

"Suppose their compensation checks arrived in the mail along with a letter signed by the State Equality Board explaining the reasons for their compensation: 

To the stupid and untalented: Unfortunately, other people don’t value what little you have to offer in the system of production. Your talents are too meager to command much market value. Because of the misfortune that you were born so poorly endowed with talents, we productive ones will make it up to you: we’ll let you share in the bounty of what we have produced with our vastly superior and highly valued abilities." [Hey look, it's a UBI!]

Anderson's objections, however, are not merely consequentialist (i.e. expressed in terms of reducing the happiness of the worse-off). Rather, Anderson identifies the defect with luck egalitarianism as its failure to uphold equal respect for the dignity of all citizens. Meritocratic liberalism bases its distributionary principles on the pity elites feel for the less fortunate and their fear of the envy of the latter of the success of the former - a pattern of noblesse oblige that has a familiar stench to any progressive. People lay claim to the redistribution of resources in virtue of their inferiority, not in virtue of their equal rights and dignity. She argues: 

"Egalitarianism ought to reflect a generous, humane, cosmopolitan vision of a society that recognizes individuals as equals in all their diversity. It should promote institutional arrangements that enable the diversity of people’s talents, aspirations, roles, and cultures to benefit everyone and to be recognized as mutually beneficial. Instead, the hybrid of capitalism and socialism envisioned by luck egalitarians reflects the mean-spirited, contemptuous, parochial vision of a society that represents human diversity hierarchically, moralistically contrasting the responsible and irresponsible, the innately superior and the innately inferior, the independent and the dependent.""

Anderson's view (one I share) is that the preferable position is 'democratic egalitarianism' in which everyone stands in a relationship of equality with everyone else. She writes that this means everyone is entitled to participate in decision-making, to be recognized an someone to be listened to respectfully, and that no one need bow and scrape before others or represent themselves as inferior as a condition of having their voice heard. Anderson's vision of equality is compatible with democratic socialism but not luck egalitarianism: it aims to equalise all those social goods necessary for one to be recognised as fully equal (this is where human rights are derived). Democratic equality is what Anderson calls a relational theory of justice: it is fundamentally concerned with the relationships within which goods are distributed, not only with the distribution of goods themselves. Justice, in this view, is a property of a society and its structures, not the moral desserts of individuals. 

"Equality of fortune would offer compensation to those with low talents, precisely because their innate inferiority makes their labor so relatively worthless to others, as judged by the market. Democratic equality calls into question the very idea that inferior native endowments have much to do with observed income inequalities in capitalist economies. The biggest fortunes are made not by those [with the most merit] but by those who own the means of production."

Anderson concludes that the distribution of natural endowments is not a matter of justice, what society does in response is. We cannot make genetic differences the basis for continuing to exclude the worst-off from recognition as full participants in the economic and political life of society. Drawing an analogy with physical impairment, Anderson points out that what the disabled find objectionable is not their different abilities, but that everyone else has rigged the system in ways that leave them with no place in it. People, not nature, are responsible for transforming the diversity of human beings into oppressive hierarchies. 

Conclusion

I am sympathetic to the attempts of these liberal men and women to understand the causes of inequality, and to work to ameliorate the discomfort I'm sure it makes them feel. The policy prescriptions of luck egalitarians may be misguided and counter productive, but at least their heart is in the right place. What I cannot abide, however, is statements such as that by Freddie DeBoer that genetic variance in intelligence creates the 'strongest possible argument' for socialism. Democratic equality cannot be constructed on the basis of luck egalitarianism - whether of genes, race, sex or any other grounds used categorise and divide us. Drawing social conclusions from the science of intelligence, in any form, is just not OK. 

Climate Change broke the neoliberal consensus, too

We began my interview last week on the "Connected & Disaffected" podcast talking about political polarisation: what is it, where it's come from, and whether or not we should fear it. My contention in the interview was that the Global Financial Crisis, and to a lesser extent the Iraq War, broke the post- Cold War hegemony of the neoliberal ideological consensus. In other words, the cultural quasi-equilibria characterised by the dominance of neoliberal narratives about society and the economy proved to be no longer fit for its structural environment. As a result, formerly marginalised social narratives are (re-)emerging, an experience that is deeply disconcerting to a generation of people socialised to believe there is no alternative. 

One point from my notes that I didn't get to make in the interview was that climate change was the third and final nail in neoliberalism's coffin. I don't talk about environmental issues often on this blog: I'm not an environmentalist by nature and am generally content to let the experts come up with pragmatic fixes. As I write in Chapter XVII of my book, "Politics for the New Dark Age", I'm interested in the natural environment primarily as a source of free public services that marginalised people (especially) rely on to survive. I'm interested in how the exploitation and privatisation of the environment fuels the unjust accumulation of wealth by the powerful, and how the distribution of environmental harms of that exploitation often falls hardest on those already disadvantaged (see: Naomi Klein). In other words, I'm not the sort of person who declares that climate change is the greatest moral challenge of our times. 

A perfect little problem

Once upon a time, climate change was the perfect problem for the socially-conscious neoliberal. A potentially existential external threat, it has several elements that appealed to the technocratic elite: expert scientific evidence was required to establish the case for action; cooperation between states necessitated vast and complex international negotiations; domestic solutions envisaged creating a new freely-traded market commodity without changing the economic status quo; and there were opportunities to 'educate' the masses about their consumption patterns and nudge them to make 'better choices'. I think it's fair to say all these methods failed one way or another. We're already blowing past the climate targets we set just four years ago; barely half of US adults believe human activity causes climate change; and most of the rise in consumer energy prices has been caused by price-gauging privatised monopolies, not investment in renewable power. 

These failures are the result of the neoliberal worldview, and they should demoralise and delegitimise those techniques for anyone serious about social policy. 

• Experts are not a magic bullet. And scientific facts are not social facts. As I write in the early chapters of my book, governance is about making value judgements. Despite what utilitarians believe, there's no technocratic formula that will calculate the most ethical way in which to distribute wins and losses. Scientists have established the inevitability of potentially irreversible climate change to a virtual certainty, yet that fact alone tells us nothing about what we should do about it. People intuit this: the best studies show that expert evidence has no effect on public opinion about climate change policy. In fact, relying on appeals to scientific authority has only led the powerful opponents of climate action to develop sophisticated techniques to muddy the waters, conduct personal attacks on scientists and discredit the very idea of expert knowledge. So, good job on that one, neoliberals. 
• And then there's the wonkiest of wonk ideas: carbon trading. Why impose a new tax on pollution when we can create a complex new form of private property traded on indecipherably complex financial markets? Oh, and because this property right will be an artificial creature of state regulation, the price and quantity of carbon permits will be easily manipulated by lobbying interests on behalf the very industries that emit the most carbon. Australia's carbon trading scheme - while effective - was so convoluted and unpopular that the conservatives managed to repeal it FIVE YEARS AGO. As Democrats in the US have discovered with healthcare policy, when voters don't understand a public programme it's absurdly easy for opponents of regulation to portray it as a paranoid right-wing fever dream. Better simpler, direct policies that are easy to understand - and harder to attack. 
• Finally, when all collective solutions fail, neoliberalism tells us that fighting climate change is ultimately a matter of individual responsibility. And since individuals have every incentive to free ride in a collective action problem they have no power over, why we simply need to educate people to make choices contrary to their own rational self interest! I've written before why this kind of 'education' strategy is counterproductive: it creates new hierarchies of knowledge and hides existing hierarchies of power in such a way to generate increased resentment and anxiety from the have-nots. People don't want cheap energy because they're bad people who don't understand climate change: they want cheap energy because they're resource constrained and want one fewer stressor on their daily lives. Middle class neoliberals aren't better or smarter people because of their 'green energy choices', they're using their existing wealth to invest in a social signifier of status. South Park had this one down in 2006.

What's left unsaid

Y'know what's not on this list? The classical sort of central government action traditionally used to solve environmental problems. The same sorts of programs that actually have been implemented and are making the biggest difference in saving us from potential climate catastrophe. Where's China's central planning body setting national targets for solar energy expansion that have made it the world's largest manufacturer of solar cells? The public investment in basic science that led to Australian universities developing modern photovoltaics in the first place? The unilateral government decisions, like Angela Merkel's to close Germany's nuclear power plants, that leads to the market embracing renewables virtually overnight? The basic role of national industry policy in directing subsidies away from the fossil fuel industry and towards more environmentally friendly forms of power generation? The answer is that neoliberalism made these sorts of policy responses literally unthinkable. 

Solving collective action problems requires collective decision-making through national institutions (i.e. governments). As is true of social and economic dilemmas, so too of environmental ones. Nations that are on track to meet their targets under the Paris Agreement are going to do so on the back of their existing competence with industrial management and economic planning. Laissez-faire states without a tradition of government intervention in the economy, like Australia, are least likely to meet them. If you want to save the environment, you're first going to have to take a deeper look at how our societies and economies are structured. Ultimately, I'm with Naomi Klein on this one: our economic system and our relationship with the natural environment are so intrinsically linked that hoping for meaningful action on climate change under neoliberalism is self-defeating. 

Consider that my message for the voters in Batman. 

A 'Voice' for Indigenous Australians (Part 4): The Egalitarian Alternative and Conclusion

I'm on vacation over the Christmas break. But that doesn't mean the blogging has to stop. I've queued up a four-part series on the contemporary debate in Australia over an Indigenous 'Voice' to parliament. You can find Part One here, Part Two here, and Part Three here. Needless to say, the usual caveat applies: the views expressed this paper are the author’s own and do not reflect the views or positions of the Commonwealth Government or its agencies. 

Is showing material disadvantage necessary?
Although political representation has intrinsic value, claims for differential treatment are often (at least for most liberals) predicated on the demonstration of material harm caused by the neutral application of law. The numerous ways in which indigenous Australians are materially disadvantaged has been catalogued in detail by the "Closing the Gap" reports: Child mortality for indigenous Australians is more than double the national average; educationally, indigenous children are judged on average to lag more two years behind their peers at age fifteen; in 2014-15, indigenous employment rates were twenty percentage points below the national average; and indigenous adults die on average 10 years earlier than their peers.

Although Australia lacks the overt history of enslaving minority communities in the manner that occurred to First Nations and African-Americans in the United States, the overall contemporary pattern of systemic racism is similar. A July 2017 report by the Australian Law Reform Commission (‘ALRC’) found that indigenous Australians are massively overrepresented in the prison population (27% of the total). Aboriginal men are eleven times more likely to be incarcerated than the national average, and Aboriginal women fifteen times. The ALRC found that indigenous offenders were more likely to be sentenced to jail time for minor offences as the rest of the population, and noted the disproportionate impact of alcohol prohibition laws, access to justice issues and juvenile detention on remote indigenous communities.

Prima facie, these differential social and economic outcomes establish a case for special representation for indigenous Australians. That is particularly the case given the extensive federal power over indigenous communities (particularly post-intervention) and the direct correlation between past and present government policies and these differential outcomes. However, there is an alternative view. One that argues that group representation rights are not sufficient to prevent these differential outcomes, which are infringements of fundamental economic and social rights on their own terms. The remainder of this entry will be dedicated to that argument, while standing by and ultimately re-affirming the ‘in principle’ position that adequate political representation requires special indigenous representation. 

An Egalitarian Alternative . . . ?

The left-leaning British philosopher Brian Barry has argued against Kymlicka’s multicultural compromise, instead favouring greater direct recognition and enforcement of second-generation economic and social rights. If indigenous peoples experience systematic racial discrimination, or their rights to housing, education or adequate healthcare are not being adequately met, he would no doubt agree that they have a genuine claim for rectification. But this claim arises from the way in which the state and society more broadly fail to uphold the access to economic rights and privileges that members of the majority culture enjoy. The social purpose of the two arguments – improving outcomes for indigenous Australians – are similar, but their reasoning differs. For Barry, if these material differences cease to exist (and they should), then the need for differential treatment would also expire. 

He writes:
“[W]e have to qualify the statement that classical or ‘difference-blind’ liberalism cannot countenance any deviation from universal rights. For there may be cases where a system of group-based rights for those suffering from systematic disadvantage will be a way of helping to meet the egalitarian liberal demand . . . However, special treatment for members of disadvantaged groups is justifiable only so long as the inequality persists. The objective of special treatment for disadvantaged groups is to make the need for that special treatment disappear as quickly as possible."

Barry’s argument has both specific and general consequences for the Australian case. In the first instance, persistent evidence of indigenous deprivation in terms of well-established economic and social rights calls for what Levy’s typology of claims labels ‘special assistance’ – additional resources to help a minority community achieve the same standard of living the majority can access unaided. Indeed, this has largely been the approach of sympathetic Governments in Australia: additional welfare spending, assistance for housing construction, incentives for doctors and teachers to work in remote areas, and a focus on indigenous economic development. Yet this public investment over many decades has seemingly done little to change the fundamentally unequal place of indigenous Australians in public life. 

But his position has another, more general, implication for Australia. Barry would argue that if a neutral law does not produce egalitarian outcomes then it’s the law, not the outcomes, that needs reform. Australia is both politically liberal by custom and, compared to the OECD average, rather economically egalitarian. But this implicit goodwill disguises many pockets of both authoritarian policy and deep economic inequality. The purpose of a Bill of Rights is not to guarantee rights that the majority already enjoys as a matter of custom, but tools through which marginalised groups can challenge and claim equal treatment from society.

I agree with Barry’s premise that if Australia instituted a comprehensive Bill of Rights, which included robust protections of economic and social rights and institutional machinery to ensure compliance, much (but not all) of the disadvantage experienced by indigenous Australia could be levelled. A (de minimis) constitutional prohibition on racial discrimination, for instance, would improve the law for all Australians, even if it did end up benefiting indigenous Australians disproportionately. 

Yet that would not answer the case as to whether differential representation was appropriate. Advocates for ‘second generation’ rights such as Barry often say that that human rights must be understood as a cohesive whole; but we can turn this argument around and note that improved living conditions for indigenous Australians would be meaningless without effective political representation. Liberalism recognises the autonomy of the individual not only as a right but as an intrinsic good. It holds that, given equal material circumstances, the non-autonomous individual is worse off than a free one. Indigenous Australians suffer from many material disadvantages: a legacy of state oppression and family disruption, economic and geographic marginalisation, and prejudicial attitudes from the minority culture. But what they have now told us, in no uncertain terms, is that they want their autonomy back as well. They want a Voice and they want to have that Voice heard. 

Conclusion: Towards a multinational Australia

Ultimately, I come down on the side of supporting special representation rights for indigenous Australians, even if there were no material disadvantage shown (contra Barry) and even if negotiating reasonable accommodations for indigenous interests imposed additional governance costs and risks. Barry is partially right: there are other things Australia can do and should do: a binding prohibition against racial discrimination, a comprehensive Bill of Rights, additional financial assistance for remote communities. But the history of Government support for, and intervention into, indigenous communities in Australia has demonstrated that no amount of additional financial assistance nor paternalistic control is able to sustainably resolve the systematic and structural disadvantage faced by those of indigenous heritage. 

On the facts, there are persistent features of indigenous communities in Australia – their small size, geographic dispersion and economic marginalisation – which prevents their members from securing meaningful political participation and representation of their interests. Self-determination would not be a magic bullet. But democracy demands that those who are affected by collective decisions get to have a say in making those decisions. We have no other choice. 

A 'Voice' for Indigenous Australians (Part 1): Setting the scene

I'm on vacation over the Christmas break. But that doesn't mean the blogging has to stop. Over the next four weeks, I've queued up a four-part series on the contemporary debate in Australia over an Indigenous 'Voice' to parliament (which I originally submitted for my coursework this semester). Very few people back home seem to be paying attention to the latest twists and turns in our country's (mis)treatment of its indigenous population. Needless to say, the usual caveat applies: the views expressed this paper are the author’s own and do not reflect the views or positions of the Commonwealth Government or its agencies. 

Setting the Scene

In June 2017, Australia’s Referendum Council (a bipartisan body of indigenous representatives and experts) issued its final report to cabinet recommending constitutional amendment to grant indigenous Australians and Torres Strait Islanders a representative body that would serve as their ‘Voice’ to parliament . That recommendation arose out of a summit at Uluru earlier in May, at which assembled indigenous representatives stated urgent reform was needed to realise indigenous Australia’s ‘rightful’ claims to self-determination and political representation. The Statement was the product of lengthy consultations between a government insistent on purely symbolic recognition of indigenous Australians, and an indigenous movement seeking effective constitutional protections against racial discrimination.

In a joint statement announcing cabinet’s rejection of the Council’s recommendation, Prime Minister Turnbull and Attorney-General Brandis responded that the proposed system of special indigenous representation would violate the principle of equal political rights. The Government claimed that “democracy is built on the foundation of all citizens having equal civic rights” and differential representation was inconsistent with this ‘fundamental principle’. Labelling the proposal ‘radical’ and divisive, the Government’s position was that it “undermined the universal principles of unity, equality and “one person one vote”.” It argued that electing indigenous MPs from ordinary electorates was a preferable path to enhanced representation. 

These two narratives display fundamentally contrary notions of what rights are in a liberal democratic state, who may claim them and why. In Levy’s well-known classification scheme, the Uluru Statement is a claim not for self-determination but for differentiated representation rights. The key question is whether special group rights to political representation are inconsistent with the formal electoral equality of all citizens in a democracy. Whereas indigenous Australians claim parliament is blind to their interests, the Government’s case is that this difference-blindness is a feature, not a bug. Further, satisfaction of indigenous Australians’ claims, they argue, would create difference by making some citizens more equal than others. 

This series will argue that this debate is a novel development in the ongoing conflict over indigenous citizens’ place in the Commonwealth. The debate is moreover an unfamiliar for the voting public, who operate in a legal and social environment characterised by the absence of legally protected rights or even an implicit liberal discourse. It is unusual for Australian politicians, used to operating without the constraint of a domestic Bill of Rights, to make philosophical claims about liberalism democracy and this creates additional challenges for indigenous activists unused to engaging with such claims. 

The Politics of ‘Recognise’: From Beginning to End

For the last thirty years, indigenous Australians appear to have focused their political and social advocacy on what Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has called the politics of recognition. Taylor argues that the nonrecognition or misrecognition of identity by others constitutes a form of harm or oppression, and that group identity claims are best understood as claims to reduce or ameliorate this harm. Using a constructivist understanding of identity, Taylor argues that since the individual sense of self is developed through dialogue with others, failure to receive equal recognition from others generates harmful individual and social stresses and the internalisation of an inferior or demeaned identity. 

Taylor’s primary critique against the universalism and difference-blindness of the liberal ideal is that it ignores the way that identities shape the individual experience of law. While most left-leaning, egalitarian liberals will accept that differential (material) outcomes may justify differential treatment, the politics of recognition implies that differential identities require differential treatment. This critique is often coupled with the observation that liberalism is rarely difference-neutral in practice, but rather acts as a hegemonic and colonising culture. Taylor (and others) have argued that minority cultural groups in fact have a shared interest in their continued survival as a group , an interest that may be at odds with the majority culture. 

In 1992, the shift from a discourse of self-determination towards a discourse of recognition began when the High Court decided Mabo v Queensland, establishing three legal facts: first, that indigenous Australians had been in sovereign possession of Australia at the time of conquest; secondly, that indigenous Australians had a body of law and custom which continued to be practised; and lastly, that British sovereignty did not entirely extinguish the legal rights and privileges established by that body of law. After two centuries of attempted genocide and assimilation, the nascent politics of recognition initiated a strong backlash from conservative Australia. 

In 1999, conservative Prime Minister John Howard put up a referendum question, asking voters to insert a preamble into the constitution honouring “Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, the nation’s first people, for their deep kinship with their lands and ancient and continuing cultures”. Howard’s motives were mixed at best; a constitutional monarchist who had risen to power opposing native land rights, his main objective may have been to insert a ‘poison pill’ into the simultaneous vote on a Republic. The referendum’s failure led to the establishment of Reconciliation Australia, a government body which a decade later would organise the ‘Recognise’ campaign. In the meantime, Howard abolished the existing indigenous representative body (‘ATSIC’, in 2004) and initiated the Northern Territory National Emergency Response (‘the intervention’, in 2007) which stripped indigenous communities of their autonomy, imposed paternalistic social controls (especially on welfare recipients), and flooded communities with federal police and bureaucrats. The intervention also suspended the application of the Racial Discrimination Act (‘RDA’), which has led the UN to repeatedly express concern. The intervention is still in effect in 2017. 

With successive governments unable or unwilling to politically challenge the substance of indigenous policy, they increasingly came to rely on symbolism and gesture. Prime Minister Rudd’s well-known Apology to Australia’s Indigenous Peoples changed little, and regular “Closing the Gap” reports dutifully trace the ongoing stagnation in indigenous Australians’ standards of living. Perennial culture clashes, such as over the dual celebration of Australia Day as ‘Invasion Day’ by indigenous people, highlight the ongoing frustration of both sides. In this context, the bipartisan plan to hold a second referendum on recognition of indigenous Australians in the constitution must have seemed like the ideal circuit-breaker. 

Indigenous Australians disagreed. Indigenous communities overwhelmingly rejected a statement of acknowledgement on the basis that it failed to offer substantive, structural reform. According to the dissenting statement of former conservative Minister Amanda Vanstone, attached to the Referendum Council report, while (majority) Australians “understand the importance of . . . recognition’ she had been surprised to learn that ‘indigenous Australians do not attach [to it] the same importance . . .and in fact reject it.” While indigenous groups were also strongly supportive of a constitutional prohibition on racial discrimination (to stop the Government suspending the RDA at will), the final Uluru Statement dropped it as a demand after the Government declared it unfeasible and some activists claimed it failed to go far enough. 

Next week, in Part 2, we'll look at the philosophy of liberal multiculturalism, and what it has to say about representation in a liberal democracy.

Myths of the Old Order: The automation illusion (part two)

In today's blog, I will continue last week's discussion of the automation myth.

Chapter XII of my book, “Politics for the New Dark Age” provides a lay introduction to productivity, and its role in generating long-term growth. The fact of the matter is when it comes to the technological miracles promised by Silicon Valley, we can see them everywhere except in the economic statistics (the Solow paradox). Since the 1980s, labour’s contribution to economic output per hour work has remained flat, while the return on capital has grown by leaps and bounds. If labour productivity had continued expanding over the last forty years, we’d already be working shorted hours for higher wages. Instead, we have seen the opposite: low productivity, flat or declining real wages, and chronic levels of employment stress.

What’s really going on?

Automation, then, does not made us more productive. So what is it?  My answer is that the drive for automation now, as sometimes in the past, is capital intensification. Think of the difference between productivity and intensity like this: productivity increases output if either your workers or equipment become more efficient; intensity increases output when you add either more workers or more equipment to the production process. It is intensity rather than productivity gains that we have seen under neoliberalism: the outsourcing of labour, de-unionisation and greater labour uncertainty leading to modes of production that rely more and more on expensive capital equipment (including IP) and finance and less on labour input.

Capital intensification is not necessarily a bad thing: in the 1700s, capital needed to be concentrated out of the landed aristocracy and into the bourgeois banks in order to facilitate loans to the first factories (in both the trading and manufacturing sense of that word). Sometimes, productivity leaps do require capital to be concentrated. In an era of low labour productivity, when eighty per cent of labour worked farmland, capital intensification created new industries that in turn soaked up workers. It paid them for their increased productivity and expanded output to match, creating the middle-class consumer out of nothing and increasing prosperity for all. But that’s not what’s happening today, especially post-GFC. Consumer demand remains weak everywhere, and rates of return on expanded output are at historic lows. 

Automation in the modern era, then, is being driven by capital intensification in existing workplaces (especially wholesale, healthcare and other essential services). High levels of inequality mean that capital-owners have historic financial reserves and no productive outlet for investment. Governments bailed out the banks, keeping them flush, and in some places began a historic era of quantitative easing, literally showering banks and the corporate sector with cash in an effort to get them to invest in the real economy. Governments across the world are trying and failing to get corporations to spur growth by investing these savings, rather than using them to big up their stock proces and private wealth. The savviest businesses discovered that they could use this cheap credit, not to expand output, but to produce the same output using more capital and less labour. By doing so, they maintain or increase their share of profit in an era in which economies as a whole are growing slowly.

Automation is, therefore, a capital bubble (Chapter XIII of my book) that will only increase inequality and lead to further capital accumulation. It is for this reason that pushing tax cuts as a spur for economic growth (as governments in Australia and the US are trying to do) is catastrophically ill-timed on both a micro- and macro- level. Since new investments are normally tax-deductible, lowering marginal corporate tax rates will decrease the incentive to invest; higher tax rates increase the incentive for employing additional workers and equipment. At the macro-level, increasing the rate of corporate profit while impoverishing the social programs propping up what remains of consumer spending will only increase capital concentration, slow the economy and increase inequality. Why would governments do this?

Automation is leading to permanent job losses but is doing so for the same social and policy reasons that labour productivity has remained stagnant for forty years. Power in the workplace has shifted decisively in favour of capital (with government assistance) and employment is less secure than at any other time in a century or more. While a minority of those laid off will find new employment as technicians or programmers, the majority are being forced into the retail or ‘gig’ economy as low-skilled personal service workers: Walmart ‘greeters’ and Uber drivers, for example. Such jobs are not only less secure, lower paid and offer fewer benefits than the jobs they replaced, but actively alienate workers from one another and de-skill them, further reducing their collective bargaining power. 

Speculating about the future of work

While the service sector may be the most important part of a highly developed economy, transitioning everyone to a service sector job will not be our saviour from automation because not all services are high-productivity and high-wage. A totally service-dominated economy with flat levels of production and consumption would look very much like a feudal aristocracy. Those who control capital (once upon a time: land; now: financial assets) will live very handsomely indeed on the rents they extract. Everyone else will eek out an existence predicated on hierarchical personal service to such individuals: a true ‘trickle down’ economy. Not only would such an economy be technologically and socially stagnant, I argue it would be prone to potentially revolutionary social disruption.

Truly forward-thinking prophets (or fantasists) of the automation apocalypse warn us that the true threat to the contemporary economic and social order is not automation but AI. AI algorithms that will not only replace high-skilled service sector employees such as doctors, lawyers and teachers, but also manage capital better and more effectively than humans and produce cultural goods on their own. Quite frankly, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. True AI would lead to such a profound re-structuring of human life on Earth that the question of economic organisation might seem like a second- or third-order problem. 

An optimistic response to the possibility of hyper-competent decision algorithms is that it would increase the value of non-analytical, emotional and social skills that humans are likely to continue to hold and advantage in, a point Ezra Klein puts emphasis on. While I’m sympathetic to the argument that humanity has a unique social and emotional toolkit that would be hard for us to [reliably] replicate in an artificial intelligence, we presently compensate such skills poorly. The modern cult which privileges rationality as the basis of competence would have to change pretty dramatically, and if we could somehow create a discourse that privileged humanity’s social nature so highly, there would much better uses we could put it.

Policy consequences and responses

From my perspective, the policy solution for the automation dilemma is obvious. Increasing the labour share of income (either through higher wages or greater redistribution) would soak up additional production and create new demand so that the capital intensification of the last decade doesn’t go to waste. Increasing labour power and giving workers a democratic say over the workplace decisions that affect their lives is the best way to manage the transition to new forms of production: if automation is truly unavoidable, then let’s make it work for the many and not the few.

Unfortunately, the automation debate is not intensifying calls for democratising the means of production. Quite the contrary: the right is using it as a cudgel to threaten workers and the centre-left appears paralysed with indecision and fear. For centrists, the policy consequences of automation are expressed in terms of anxiety about its consequences for social stability and the political consensus underpinning the continuation of status quo policies of de-regulation and unrestricted trade. The reason for the sudden surge of interest in harebrained schemes like universal basic income is that the centre is looking for ways to buy off revolution and discharge its social responsibilities to the economic losers without having to re-examine or change the fundamental ways in which production is organised.

For the centre-left in particular, there is a second aspect to their obsession with the automation narrative. For well-educated elites in the public sector and media, there is a fantasy that if the working class comprises enterprising, globally-open “knowledge-workers” (like themselves) then it will also come to share in their elite culture. Under this narrative, elites don’t have to close the gap that has opened between themselves and the proletariat: instead, the workers will come to them. But they mistake labour flexibility for labour uncertainty, and their enthusiasm for using Uber is not necessarily matched by the desire of former manufacturing worker forced to drive a taxi for uncertain wages. The bourgeoise thought this way about the disciplining effect of manufacturing too; as did the feudal landlords and slaveholders before them. Sadly, while culture is in fact a function of economic patterns of production, so long as those production patterns contain exploiters and exploited, the interests of elites and the working class will remain divergent.