ANS -- INTERPRETING THE "AUSTERITY" FOLLY

Here is a very interesting idea, not quite fully developed, by Andy Schmookler, whom many of you will recognize from previous posts, and who is running for congress in his state (I believe it's Virginia, if I remember right.)  It is about the economy and the impulse to sacrifice, especially to sacrifice someone else, and how this impulse to sacrifice seems dominant even when it is provably counter-productive.  It's short.
Find it here:  http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=303813666305986&set=a.230022150351805.58794.229965547024132&type=1
--Kim


Andy Schmookler for Congress

INTERPRETING THE "AUSTERITY" FOLLY

In the following, I'm building on a well-developed foundation built, stone by stone, by Paul Krugman. In the following, I'm also disregarding what political people have told me is the appropriate kind of communication to come from someone running for Congress. I want to say it because it is interesting, because it may illuminate something deep, and because trying to understand such things is part of who I am.

Krugman has been watching with a combination of outrage and bewilderment the triumph of a policy of "austerity" not only in the United States but also in Europe (including the Cameron government in the U.K., and the policy decisions of the European Central Bank) in the face of this economic crisis.

Austerity is precisely the wrong thing to be doing. It makes the crisis worse. Witness how Cameron's policies are damaging the British economy.

Yet the austerity regime lives on, supported by what Krugman calls "zombie" ideas that somehow will not die despite all the evidence and theoretical models that show that they are counter-productive, and that they don't make sense.

Krugman eventually came to see it is a function of economic analysis being overwhelmed by some kind of impulse to see it all as a moral drama. The decision-makers have decided that the necessary response to the crisis is for there to be pain and suffering. Strangely, or not so strangely, their image of the proper way for pain to pay for the misdeeds of the past, in this morality play, is to see to it that OTHER people than the decision-makers are the ones to suffer.

Here's where my own small contribution comes in.

For 45 years, I've wondered about the meaning of "sacrifice" in the history of religions. I studied it first, when I was 20, when I wrote a thesis on the PSYCHOLOGY OF HEROIC TRAGEDY. The question has arisen a number of times since then: why is it that in so many religions, from different cultural traditions, through the millennia, the idea of sacrifice has played so central a role?

I am not sure that I've got any answer that wholly satisfies me. I'm still wondering what it is in human beings, or in such a large subset of them, that has this impulse that when things go awry --or in order to keep things from going awry-- the way to make or keep things right is to perform a sacrifice.

But here is what I do feel ready to say, without certainty but with an intuitive feeling about it: I believe that this insistence on austerity that Krugman notes is a manifestation in our own civilization of that impulse that led Greeks to slay bulls upon the altar and that led the Aztecs to sacrifice living human beings to their gods.

I am persuaded, with Krugman, that these policies are irrational, for they make things worse. And for otherwise intelligent people to ignore the economic evidence of their errors and pursue such a policy, the impulse to sacrifice (often someone else) when times are insecure must be very powerful.

In the U.S., this sacrificial austerity is combined with other forms of scapegoating the vulnerable. But that's because, unlike the other democracies, our political system is infected with additional dark impulses close to the heart of power-- impulses like rage and sadism, going after those least able to defend themselves.

But this austerity folly is not at all limited to the United States. And indeed, under President Obama, the United States has responded to the economic crisis more constructively than many of the Europeans.
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