Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

http://www.newstatesman.com/business/2013/07/late-capitalism-and-ends-sleep-jonathan-crary-sleep-standing-affront-capitalism

by mgunes • 12 years ago

50 52 12 years ago

newstatesman.com

pnathan4• 12 years ago

I find it interesting that there's this continual barrage of articles and thinkers taking swings at capitalism; often they offer some vaguely Marxist-sounding critique (not that I'm up on Marx or his intellectual descendants).

Isn't there any other economic critiques of the current Way Of Things outside of using the anti-capitalist bogeyman?

karmajunkie• 12 years ago

Are you sure that it isn't just that most people are conditioned to consider anything anti-capitalist to be Marxist in nature?

icebraining• 12 years ago

I don't know about the barrage of articles, but at least in 24/7, the author cites Marx multiple times.

gnarbarian2• 12 years ago

well what else is there? We tend to think of economic systems as falling somewhere along the one dimensional axis between Marxism (no private property allowed) and Capitalism (everything is private property). What other axis are you suggesting?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_system

pnathan4• 12 years ago

I can't speak to most people: I'm personally aware there are multiple systems besides "Marx" and "Adam Smith". I would suspect that most people with at least a Wikipedia level of awareness of economic systems know this.

kybernetikos• 12 years ago

Well there are a lot of pro-capitalist critiques of the current Way Of Things doing the rounds too.

tormeh• 12 years ago

Well, the critique seems to really be leveled at pure capitalism, as opposed to just capitalism in general. I guess it's the lack of regulation to prevent a rat-race to the bottom of quality of life that is the issue.

pjc50• 12 years ago

Quite a lot of Marx's observations of the problems in capitalism are valid, if oversimplified and oddly phrased.

The two problems with Marx are (1) he was writing ~150 years ago and things have changed in industrialisation and (de)colonisation; and (2) his proposed solutions and those of his immediate followers were found to fail badly.

This does not necessarily invalidate subsequent leftwing economics. However, use of Marxist language and terminology is usually the sign of a crank. It really needs updating for the present world and modes of discussion.

Ygg22• 12 years ago

    > I find it interesting that there's this continual 
      barrage of articles and thinkers taking swings at capitalism;

Why is it unusual? Crises of recession and slow comeback have made people wary of it. The future, most western and/or rich states are moving towards, seem to be one inhospitable for most humans (a caste system based on money/power).

If you see the current system being bad for you, why wouldn't you critique it? And why wouldn't you use/mention the oldest critique of it? Especially parts that have been validated.

It's a bit like saying, "Listen I'm going to talk about Parsers, but completely ignore anything written about parsers, before 2009. I'm especially going to ignore Dragon Book."

pnathan4• 12 years ago

I'd like to see serious engagement with the subject rather than dismissal of the current state (such as you've done in your first paragraph). If it's so bad for people (it's not, in general - check out the Gates Foundation Letter from 2014), then we should be looking to improve it, not throw it out.

It's also interesting that circa the '30s, the capitalist/democratic system was also being tossed into the popular junkheap in favor of centralised/dictatorish systems. I don't mean to say this is like that, but there's a fun little similarity there on the surface.

zenogais4• 12 years ago

There is no "anti-capitalist bogeyman", not even really sure what such a phrase means. Certainly to ignore capitalism in a critique of present conditions is to miss the facts that capitalism is (A) A fairly recent re-organization of the material conditions of existence and not something fundamental to human nature or society and (B) A direct cause in many large-scale catastrophes unfolding in the present. You can find critiques that attempt to refute (B) and look elsewhere for the source of problems (eg. the state, lazy individuals, and so on), and many have, you can look to such writers as Ayn Rand, Tim Ferris, Michael Ellsberg, for a start. Having read Marx and the later critical theorists as well as these pro-capitalist writers I can say that the case against capitalism is fairly damning and well-supported. The case for it being much weaker and always falling back on some sort of "hand of the market" type mysticism at some point from what I have seen.

AnimalMuppet2• 12 years ago

While capitalism has serious problems, it actually produces objectively better results than most of the alternatives. (Capitalism with some state socialism on top seems to be the only alternative that does as well or better.)

If you dispute my statement, can you show another system that produces objectively better outcomes than capitalism?

veganarchocap4• 12 years ago

The fact that you're referring to 'capitalism' in context of the present day, indicates to me that you have misunderstood Capitalism, with all due respect.

There is no 'damning and well-supported' case against Capitalism, if there is then I'm yet to find it (and believe me I've been looking). There is however a damning well-supported case against what many wrongly refer to as Capitalism i.e Corporatism.

There is absolutely no 'mysticism' to the market, it's very quantifiable. Theory of subjective value, marginal utility, subjectivism, individualism etc. The likes of Menger, Rothbard, Mises, Hayek, Spooner and co have written hundreds of thousands of pages detailing every last aspect of human/value interaction. But the core tenets are pretty simple. Certainly no mysticism or ambiguity.

goodcanadian• 12 years ago

Well, you certainly generated a lot of debate. I sort of hate to be a pedantic, but I think a lot of the trouble comes from a misuse of terms. Capitalism is not the same as free market, and free market is not the same as laissez faire. Capitalism means that individuals can own the capital (land, factories, money) and can get a return from that capital. We allow this because the profit motive (greed) creates a pretty good (though certainly not perfect) allocation of resources. It does, however, lend itself to rent seeking behavior, which is pretty clearly not ideal for the economy. Anyway, my point is, when talking about the short comings of capitalism, it is important not to conflate the term with free market economics. Good capitalists will actually be anti-free market as monopolies mean they can make more money (ultimate in rent-seeking). Our system is not simply capitalist nor is it simply free market. It is far more complicated than that.

ArkyBeagle2• 12 years ago

Well said. I don't know why, but it's easier for me to think in terms of mercantilism vs. capitalism. If you're Hudson's Bay and it's 1800, you have a license to print money in the North American fur trade. And if you're G.E. , it's 1985 and the product is jet engines...

ArkyBeagle2• 12 years ago

There's a school of thought that hold that what bugs us about capitalism isn't really capitalism. It has a kernel of truth while still being a "no true Scotsman" thing.

We do not regularly separate profits ( which are derived from consumer surplus ) and rents ( which are not ) , which leads to much confusion. There may be less confusion this way than if we try to understand what is or is not a rent.

dredmorbius5• 12 years ago

There are a lot of holes in modern mainstream economic thinking, a large number of which are actually pretty old. We've been having what are fundamentally the same economic debates for 2000+ years, largely over fairness of pricing, wages, equity, and control, as a survey history such as Roger E. Backhouse's The Ordinary Business of Life details.

In the 20th century, the three major challenges to free-market capitalism as espoused by Adam Smith and his followers have been the Great Depression of 1929-1940, the environmental and oil shocks of the 1970s, and the "Great Recession" of 2007 onwards.

The Depression raised the question of whether or not the free market was itself self-correcting, and the answer is generally accepted as a pretty emphatic "no". It wasn't until massive amounts of government-induced spending, partially through the New Deal, but largely as part of World War II and post-war reconstruction efforts (e.g., the Marshall Plan) that the economy really got off the ground again, and even through the 1950s and 1960s, there was concern that the malaise of the 1930s would return.

What happened instead were a series of environmental and safety concerns -- Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, Ralph Nader's Unsafe at Any Speed, and more so the question of whether or not the modern post-Industrial Revolution age was sustainable: the Club of Rome's Limits to Growth.

These were immediately followed by peaking of US domestic oil extraction in 1971, and the first effective middle-east oil embargo from the recently-formed OPEC (several earlier attempts had been made, notably during the Suez crisis of the 1950s, but US domestic extraction could take up the slack). It was also a decade in which the last vestiges of the gold standard were removed from most major world currencies (the Swiss Franc continued through the 2000s), with the cancellation of the Bretton Woods agreement, unilaterally, by the US.

The turbulent 1970s turned into the prosperous 1980s and 1990s, which some attribute to opening up of the North Sea, Alaskan North Slope, and offshore Gulf of Mexico to oil development. Crashing oil prices are thought to have played a major role in the collapse of the former Soviet Union, long dependent on its oil exports for hard currency.

There were also massive political shifts underway. Within the US, the previously white-Democratically-dominated South was split amongst a now black Democratic and white Republic party, while moral and other issues were used to create unity amongst an otherwise increasingly class-divided Republican party elsewhere. Labor unions lost a huge amount of power both due to general decline among US manufacturing companies (particularly automobiles, steel, and other heavy industry), as well as federal action (the 1980s air traffic controllers' strike and dissolving of the union by President Reagan).

While real returns on business investment were falling (look up Deloitte's Center for the Edge study "The Shift Index"), financial wealth creation was increasingly coming from the financial sector itself, and asset inflation of securities and later, real estate (itself driven by securities return demands).

There has been economic growth, mostly in the BRIC nations: Brazil, Russia, India, and China, but most especially in the latter two, with growth in China quite simply blowing away any previous economic revival anywhere, including the post-WWII European and Japanese recoveries. Unfortunately for economics, the growth in India and China has come largely with an almost precise parallel growth in primary energy consumption, a huge portion of that exceptionally dirty coal (in both traditional particulate, smog, and heavy-metal pollution as well as CO2 emissions). Much of the "economic decoupling" of growth from primary resource consumption in the rest of the world disappears if you factor India and China back into the equation.

Then came the 2000s: the dot com collapse, the Bush tax cuts (favoring the wealthy markedly), two unfunded wars, peak oil in 2006, the housing (asset) bubble, 2007 global financial crisis, and growing inequality worldwide.

To put it bluntly, conventional economics predicted little if any of this. The models of the Limits to Growth types appear to be playing out, though with some variance (the post-oil embargo efficiency improvements and reduced oil consumption, as well as fracking and other "enhanced recovery" petroleum extraction methods have pushed back the net fossil hydrocarbon liquids by 5-15 years). The criticisms of Marx, Malthus, Toynbee, and others over the inequality of capitalism have resurfaced with a vengeance. Claims of a "new" economy or "information" economy are proving largely illusory. The Web 2.0 economy is largely funded by advertising, the bulk of which are FIRE (finance, insurance, and real estate) and electronics consumables themselves, as well as exceptionally liberal central bank monetary policy.

And the critics of economics are mainstream: you'll find articles questioning received wisdom in the Financial Times, Economist, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and elsewhere. Critics include Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Krugman, James Galbraith, Steve Keen, Herman Daly, and a handful of others -- hardly the bulk of the profession, but some key thinkers.

And as others have noted, "anti-capitalist" is at best a label of convenience applied to a system that could be characterized by a great many things. I've called it the economic orthodoxy (as opposed to heterodoxies). Salient characteristics include free markets, laissez-faire (according to some), corporatism, financialization, globalization, commoditization, computerization, automation, extraction, nonsustainability, and others.

All of which tends to be a bit of a mouthful. There's also a fair bit of disagreement among critics on just what the most relevant elements of failure are (as is typically the case -- it's easy to agree that you don't like the old boss, harder to select a new boss you happen to agree on).

waps4• 12 years ago

Thank you for this insightful comment. It really was a joy to read.

To some extent I feel you are avoiding the basic question, though. What do you think the solution is ? The only real argument in favour of capitalism is simply that it has survived where other systems have not. Natural selection.

Granted, economic systems haven't always failed for "good" reasons. Some were conquered. Others built an economy based on oil, and oil ran out. Others strip-mined colonies. Islam built it's civilization on slavery, and can be said to be a continuation of Rome (mostly of the bad parts of the Roman empire, but ...). But, like natural selection, there are no good and bad reasons, hell, there aren't even really (known) reasons at all, and it doesn't really matter "whose fault it is", they failed, and when they failed, that was the end of the road. Capitalism, by contrast, has risen from the ashes more times than a drunk pyromaniac phoenix.

The vast majority of critiques on capitalism are simply expressing a refusal to change (in some cases ironically). In a way, it's a form of conservatism, even if different from what we usually call conservatism. Or, in some cases, much worse : an attempt to resurrect dead societies (like the many attempts at resurrecting the caliphate we see now, hell, those even fight like the Roman empire did, which frankly justifies killing them all in my humble opinion, but ...). But sadly[1], there's a reason these societies died (and in the vast majority cases, like the islamic one for example : good riddance). If you resurrect them, that reason will simply surface again, and kill them in the cradle.

Right now we are in a boom phase of capitalism, and yes, it looks like we may be at the end of the boom (then again, it's looked like that for 10+ years now, and before that we had 1980, 1972, the cold war, 40-48, 30-40, 14-18, "revolutionary" Europe, and so on and so forth, and all of those look to me much, much worse than our current situation. So to some extent I feel inclined to say to people complaining about the economy "big fucking whoop". But it certainly is getting a little bit worse. On the other hand today, I can name 50+ things that could easily resurrect economic growth, and only one of them needs to happen. We could discover a useful fusion principle, we could find a way to mine plate-edge methane gas, we could find a way to produce really cheap solar panels (we're not too far from making that happen, actually), we could ... If you ask me "what could anyone have done to avoid what's coming" in 1938 or 1912, I'd have said "other than changing the religion/ideology of a great many people overnight, nothing can be done". Most societies never even tried to dig themselves out of the hole they dug for themselves. Certainly the Ottoman empire, for example, "deserved" what was coming to it. So did the kingdom of France. So did ... Most of these civilizations had people working in them that had at least the seeds of a solution to their problems, and, generally speaking, they killed those people. I'm pretty confident in saying that we are currently not doing that.

Anyway, I may be rambling a bit here. My question is simple : what is the way out of the current conundrum ? If history is a guide, the way out is simply a huge war, a new superpower, and a new dollar, and more capitalism. That's what happened to Spain, Britain, Portugal, ... and that's what fixed their versions of financial industry stupidities. I will agree that it looks like the US is getting buried in financial industry stupidities as well, but ... In history two economic systems have lasted really long times : slavery, and capitalism. The choice seems obvious to me.

[1] I say sadly out of nostalgia. But having read stories from the Roman empire, medieval China, from the Colonies, from the Ottoman empire (I talked to the grandfather of an Armenian immigrant. That was enlightening, especially the parts about the supposed "tolerance" of the Ottoman empire. By that standard Hitler was a saint), stories from 19th century Europe (hell, my granddad actually told me some stories his dad told him about what life was like in France between the revolution and WWI), I'd say it is a very good thing indeed that you can't resurrect societies.

pnathan4• 12 years ago

Thank you for your survey. I appreciate it.

chippy• 12 years ago

As I write, another article on the front page of Hacker News is entitled: "This is what Tesla owners are doing while you sleep"

http://blog.opower.com/2014/07/this-is-what-tesla-owners-are...

"While you are in bed dreaming about how some day you too might own an electric car, many EV owners are doing something dramatic; something unusual..."

wmf• 12 years ago

If sleep is a luxury, it stands to reason that Tesla owners are getting plenty.

waps4• 12 years ago

What does this article have to do with capitalism ? When you go right down to it communism, socialism, even mercantilism are all trying to maximize productivity and consumption. I think it's probably the one thing all economic systems agree on. Hell, even natural selection agrees on that.

So is sleep an affront to them all ?

zenogais4• 12 years ago

I was gonna try, but it's a lot of work to even begin deconstructing all the parts of this that are simply incorrect or ahistorical.

crpatino• 12 years ago

What does this article have to do with capitalism ? When you go right down to it communism, socialism, even mercantilism are all trying to maximize productivity and consumption.

Yes, a hundred times yes!!!

I think it's probably the one thing all economic systems agree on.

There I will have to disagree. The three examples you provided are modern (post Enlightenment) economic systems. I am sure there are more examples along the world history, but it is far fetched to say it is common to all systems.

Hell, even natural selection agrees on that.

Strongly disagree. Every instance of rapid growth in nature either finds a balance with the larger ecosystem or self destroys (by causing severe, though not necessarily terminal, damage to the larger ecosystem). Think cancer. Think the introduction of exotic species into isolated ecosystems. Think the depopulation of the Americas during the XV and XVI century due to European diseases.

So is sleep an affront to them all ?

In a way, yes. At the end of the day, power means access to limited resources. Besides the obvious cases (access to actual raw materials), time is a limited resource for every human being. But you can expand in a way your life span by having other people do what you want instead of what they want. Ultimately, there is a hard limit on how much this vicarious life extension is available: Num_people_under_your_control * 24_hrs_per_day / biological_needs_factor. Given than people usually need in the ballpark or 8 hrs of sleep per day, this is the single largest component of biological_needs_factor.

Be it a capitalist robber baron, a communist dictator, or a mercantilist king, they get more power by having their people sleep less and work more... up to a point.

waps4• 12 years ago

There I will have to disagree. The three examples you provided are modern (post Enlightenment) economic systems. I am sure there are more examples along the world history, but it is far fetched to say it is common to all systems.

I'd like to know a few examples of that. You know, a long time ago I visited one of the interior countries in Africa, and got an up-close experience of what's probably the closest thing to original human settlements I'm going to see in my lifetime. They know about the modern world, and they've got some kids that left for the city and learned French. So you can talk to them.

When you look at these people, you would swear that "laid back lifestyle" doesn't quite cover it. They do the bare minimum necessary to survive, and a little bit to get comfortable. As the locals say, they will never amount to anything. And, frankly, these people are right. They will never build (granted, maybe not never ever, but ...).

So you might think. No economy ... no pressure, right ? Wrong.

You see, they are acutely aware of the land's carrying capacity. So they have a choice :

1) don't have kids (or not more than their group can take). Result : neighbouring tribe that didn't see the light comes over, kills all the men, and uses the women and children to expand. Besides, you may have noticed, sex is fun. Kids are fun. And I guarantee that any argument for abstinence will fall on deaf ears.

2) Have kids, and while they don't know the math behind it, they are aware that they'll exceed the carrying capacity of their land in a matter of time (incidentally, you may want to avoid visiting tribes that are close to this limit, don't worry, they'll place markers at the edge of their territory and tell you. Don't ignore them, and if you suddenly see a number of people appear on a ridge, turn fucking back).

BTW: the problem with option 2 is that destructive behaviour can delay the point where they do run out of resources, at a great cost. You see, when the land can't normally support them anymore, they can burn it, which gives them access to a great amount of meat. It's simple : you burn a piece of forest (surprisingly, doing this well takes a surprising amount of skill). You have archers cover the sides of it. Animals who are normally unreachable either try to escape, taking their chances with the archers, or they burn. In both cases : Food ! Of course, at some point, everything is burned. The next step : war (if successful : the tribe splits up, because social structures don't last when groups are 50+ kilometres apart, if unsuccessful, well, we all know what happens in that case).

So truth be told, that system is absolutely trying to maximize productivity and consumption.

Strongly disagree. Every instance of rapid growth in nature either finds a balance with the larger ecosystem or self destroys (by causing severe, though not necessarily terminal, damage to the larger ecosystem). Think cancer. Think the introduction of exotic species into isolated ecosystems. Think the depopulation of the Americas during the XV and XVI century due to European diseases.

This is not true. You forget how natural selection works. There's lots of different tactics. Take rabbits for example. No biologist ever is going to call any rabbit population anywhere on the planet balanced. And you do have a point, rabbit populations breed themselves into extinction daily. Cats do the same. In theory the whole thing should end in a "natural balance", somehow it never does.

The way life survives is simple. Natural selection :

1) multiply, and use it to try a million new things

2) 99.99% of them die off

3) use the remaining 0.01% to GOTO 1

So the purpose of natural selection most definitely is to use bubbles to their maximum advantage. Yes, some species have a slowdown factor built in, but not a very big one.

The reason nature uses bubbles ? If you don't someone else will. And then, you get to deal with all the after effects of strip-mining the bubble, yet you did not get the advantages during the strip-mining that could have allowed you to expand into areas that aren't so heavily effected by the after-effects of the bubble.

kyllo• 12 years ago

The really important thing this touches on, IMO, is that people who are "poor," are not just cash poor or asset-poor, but also time-poor, and as a result they are increasingly sleep-poor. Because a unit of a poor person's time is worth very little money, they have to sell so much of it just to pay the bills, that it encroaches upon the time they have available for sleep. Being sleep-deprived drains a person's energy, causing them to work less efficiently, which helps perpetuate the vicious cycle of poverty.

zenogais4• 12 years ago

I think that even more important is that this provides an explanation for the obsession with getting less sleep that seems particularly pernicious in start-up culture, but is noticeable elsewhere as well. It goes beyond merely worrying about the health consequences. It is human biology representing an affront to longer working days and increased productivity.

tedks2• 12 years ago

Interesting first comment:

This caused conflicts with those who had the idea work consisted of doing as little as possible for the most finanical reward. Liberals.

The idea of a "work ethic" (a contradiction in terms if there ever was one!) is so pervasive in most people's minds that they label people who have appropriate capitalist values (i.e., work is a competition between the boss and worker; each attempts to maximize value for minimal cost) by their political enemies.

blaze33• 12 years ago

Of course there's going to be conflicts when people have "appropriate" values while their "enemies" have "pervasive" ones.

tedks2• 12 years ago

Pervasive means "common". I'm not sure if this is what you meant (it does sound like "perverse" and if you're not a native english speaker I can see how the mistake could be made).

But of course your statement is correct either way. Interesting how both sides see themselves as lone warriors against a sea of villainy.

erdle• 12 years ago

Highly recommend reading this book. It's actually a fairly quick read and is a bit of a departure from his other works and areas of interest.

Also not mentioned in the article, Crary co-heads one of the best independent publishers, Zone Books. And every book is beautifully and minimally designed by the legendary studio of Bruce Mau.

Disclosure: author is my wife's grad school advisor.

veganarchocap4• 12 years ago

Well for a start, by definition we don't have Capitalism, so any article referring to 'current day Capitalism' has missed what Capitalism in its true essence is about. The simple act of free trade, property rights and self-ownership is what Capitalism is. What people refer to now as Capitalism, is in fact Corporatism, which of course has its own set of deeply serious problems.

The trouble with everyone bashing 'Capitalism' now is that people draw a false parallel between 'Capitalism' and 'Corporatism' and run a mile in the opposite direction and adopt quite predictable Marxist views.

If we're going to get into Marxism, this was a man who never had a real job... he mooched off of his factory owning friends (so a complete hypocrite) and took advantage of a maid working in his families service and brought about a child of whom he never cared for. He isn't a good role model, and couldn't even live by his own views.

Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

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