Here’s a good example of where assumptions made in social scientific research can render the conclusions useless:
We find anecdotal evidence suggesting that governments in poor countries have a more left wing rhetoric than those in OECD countries… A possible explanation is that corruption, which is more widespread in poor countries, reduces more the electoral appeal of capitalism than that of socialism
It would be hard to find a more ideologically loaded set of starting points for comparative political science research. At Catallaxy, Jason Soon suggests that “this might explain Latin America”. Well, if we’re going to make such sweeping generalisations, this might explain some of the phenomena that create such political and social chaos in one of the Latin American countries that consistently elects corrupt right wing regimes, and the reasons why voters in less disordered Latin American states have been very keen to support left and social democratic regimes:
LA LOMA, Colombia - The bus had just left Drummond Co. Inc.’s coal mine carrying about 50 workers when gunmen halted it and forced two union leaders off. They shot one on the spot, pumping four bullets into his head, and dragged the other one off to be tortured and killed.
In a civil trial set to begin Monday before a federal jury in Birmingham, Ala., union lawyers have presented affidavits from two people who allege that Drummond ordered those killings, a charge the company denies.
Multinationals operating in Colombia have admitted paying right-wing militias known as paramilitaries to protect their operations. But human rights activists claim the companies went further, using the fighters to violently keep their labor costs down.
Similar allegations have been made about the “enterprise zones” in Mexico, and you could multiply the instances through not just Latin America over time and place, but also in the history of violence against unionists in the USA. Why should there be some sort of unquestioned assumption that capitalism itself is a pristine essence and violence and corruption are only particulars that can be explained away, when in fact empirical evidence shows that industrialisation has often been associated with corporate sponsored or condoned repression and violence?
In actual fact, particular political cultures in Latin America are very distinct - and the forms of left wing regimes that have come to the fore in the last decade are as well - from the social democrats in Chile through Chavez’ Bolivarian revolution to Lula’s much more syndicalist inspired tradition. But what is common across Latin America among many people is a belief that unfettered capitalism is not a good thing, whether the responses to this are reformist or revolutionary. To assume that people in Latin America whose consciousness of the real impact of industrialisation is very much at the forefront are some sort of dupes who can fall for rhetorical tricks really is patronising - after all, Westminster democracy in Britain and its settler colonies was surely at its liveliest when labour movements and parties drew directly on the lived experience of workers labouring under regimes of unregulated industrial capitalism.
Way to miss the point, Mark. How is your example of capitalists funding militias inconsistent with the thesis that Latin America has had bad problems with its brand of crony capitalists and this has turned them off capitalism period? How is this patronising? And are you denying that these repressive tactics being able to go unaddressed are somehow unrelated to corruption as well?
And about capitalism being associated with violence, how come we didn’t hear about any such abuses in Singapore and Taiwan for instance?
And where exactly is the loaded assumption here Mark? The point isn’t that capitalism in Latin America was rosy, it was shiite. No one is disputing that. How many Latin American companies can you think of that are in the same league as the major US, Japanese or Scandinavian countries? I suspect this has something to do with the legacy of a sort of landholder-plantation culture in latin America dependent on resource rents and slave labour and dismissive of bourgeois virtues and industrial and financial capitalism. I believe that if, for instance, the South has won the US Civil War and went on to shape the enterprise culture in the US, it would have ended up like Latin America. I think the confluence between this setting for Latin American style capitalism played a part in the trajetory of its development leading exactly to the sort of repressive-crony capitalism you’ve described, which turned everyone else who wasn’t a landlord into a member of the Left.
Great abstract! From anecdotal evidence it appears that capitalist rhetoric doesn’t flow to poor countries and here’s a possible explanation. But please feel free to overvalue the empirical evidence, and put it on the same footing as the results of a well-designed and scrupulously conducted study, accept the appearance as fact and ignore any alternative possible explanation. You know you want to.
Here’s another possible explanation for the failure of capitalist rhetoric to penetrate poor countries - socialist rhetoric has a significant cost advantage in the (global) “free market of ideas”. What these people are crying out for is cheaper capitalist rhetoric!
Certainly your capitalist rhetoric would have to be a good deal cheaper than the $5 a pop NBER charges for on-line delivery of its papers. Particularly when the packaging makes it very clear that serious analysis is not included.
Nice going Gummo, omitting the rest of the abstract.
And incidentally Mark, note the reference to the model which does not impute any particular propensity to Latin American voters to be dupes. It’s a general model which says - given these conditions and this outcome, it’s understandable for rational voters to react the way they do. Are you going to drop the ‘patronising’ charge? Given it’s a neoclassical model it’s highly unlikely that they have created some arbitrary Latin American bias toward being ‘duped’ - it’s a general model thay is meant to explain voter reception to capitalism.
Soon says:
“And about capitalism being associated with violence, how come we didn’t hear about any such abuses in Singapore…”
Geoffry Robertson QC documents a case in his book “The Justice Game” about Catholic monks being taken in for torture by the police because they suggested Singapore had a poverty problem. Robertson represented the monks.
The Singaporean state tortures and/or jails anyone who could cause a ripple in its Capitalist City State. It doesn’t have to do this much nowadays because people know better than to rock the boat.
Jason - the point, as I think I made clear with my reference to American history, is that industrialisation has often been associated with violence and repression at particular stages of its development - and not just in Latin America. Though I do appreciate the points you’re making about the relationship between corruption and crony capitalism in comments here, I didn’t see the reference to Latin America you made without further comment in your post as particularly enlightening.
Where I’m questioning the value of the assumptions made in the article itself is the invalidity of “capitalism” as a construct - it’s too gross for international comparison as the actual nature and trajectory of capital is highly variable across cultures and places, and highly variable across time.
I also find attempts to explain voting behaviour across countries unsatisfactory if they ignore the variance in political culture and electoral systems.
‘Repressive crony-capitalism’? Is there another kind in third world countries?
This research doesn’t explain why Latin America has taken a leftward turn, when other improverished and highly corrupt parts of the world haven’t.
There are probably a few other factors at play also, not just perceived ‘corruption’. In Bolivia, for instance, protests against the privatisation of water were not solely a result of corruption:
Also, the election of centre-left Socialist party candidate Michelle Bachelet probably is not well-explained by ‘corruption’, isolated from the context of Chile’s history.
It could be that the capitalism that Latin Americans have experienced is simply more brazen in shafting the majority, than the sort of capitalism we might find here. To reduce the issue to one of ‘corruption’ implies that there could have been some other kind of capitalism, perhaps one in which Latin American workers forgot they were farming and going down mine shafts for nothing more than a bit of loose change, and whereby they would have ’seen the light’ and warmly embraced this ‘non-corrupt’ capitalism.
Who decreed that is is a “fact”?
Does any of this folderol explain anything besides:
1. Prejudice sometimes masquerades as scholarship?
2. Some folks will accept any tripe that appears to confirm their funny little notions?
It certain doesn’t explain Latin America or any other real place on the actual human-inhabited Earth.
(But it does shine an unflattering light upon neoliberals.)
Jason,
Unless those otiose sentences are saying something like “opinion polls” (or some other survey of people’s attitudes) “in these countries show that where voters see high levels of official corruption, they tend to vote for left wing governments. Which is a bit tough on the good capitalists who have to suffer for the bad behaviour of others”, they’re complete nonsense.
As for the last sentence - well, if any country does have a flourishing market in political favours and various other services offered under the rubric “corruption” the problem isn’t merely one of a “negative ideological externality”, since the resources going into the bribery and subornation sector of the economy aren’t available for more productive uses.
Of course it’s possible that, if we examined this without presupposing that influence peddling was necessarily a bad thing, we’d find that the benefits of so-called “corruption” far outweighed the costs.
But Mark’s argument is open to a similar objection, if anything I think the problem with his system is worse. Assuming that Mark’s argument is that all early forms of capitalism are equally bad whether in the US or SE Asia or Latin America, why do the US and former British colonies in SE Asia embrace capitalism so much more than Latin America?
Answer:
1) they aren’t equally as bad. Henry Ford was ridiculed for raising the wages of his workers (http://ideas.repec.org/a/ucp/jlabec/v5y1987i4ps57-86.html) He wasn’t doing this out of charity - he did it to reduce turnover. the sort of capitalism that was developing in the US was more robust in its competition than what has developed in latin America. As a result capitalists were more disciplined and forced to be innovative. In countries where capitalists can rely on slave labour or whatever, they become lazy and less innovative.
2) one reason they aren’t equally is bad is the existing legal infrastructure in place. Generally former British colonies which draw on the common law including commercial law of their former colonists facilitate better forms of capitalism where competition is more likely to be channelled into profit maximisation through product development than lobbying for special privileges. The british were also far more likely to set up their colonies properly before letting them have their independence and the ability to appeal to the Privy Council for instance guaranteed an outside arbiter and led to better ‘rule of law’ which again leads to a more competitive Schumpeterian form of capitalism than the variety that is dependent solely on plucking fruits with cheap labour.
No, that’s not my argument, Jason. I said that it might be if we were staying in sweeping generalisation territory! I’m aware that it’s open to the same objections, which is why I was pointing out an argument that liberals would be ideologically unsympathetic with has the same flaws as one which meshes with liberal ideology. Both are false.
Your second argument is also open to empirical falsification - in Latin America with the Caribbean countries and Guyana, and in many African countries.
Note also that I qualified all my statements eg:
However, I’m sure it would be valid to look to the reasons for this in the experience of capitalism in Latin America - based on comparative and historical study attuned to the nuances and not to generalised constructs like the ones supposedly able to be independent and dependent variables in the paper.
“We find anecdotal evidence suggesting …” can be translated into plain English: “The people we hang around with thought …, so we looked for evidence that would back us up. “
Harlan County USA. 1976 Academy Award winning documentary. Great bluegrass music too. http://www.dvdverdict.com/reviews/harlancountyusa.php
Thanks for the link, GregM.
On films about violence and unionisation in America, you can’t go past John Sayles’ superb Matewan, which is now on dvd:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093509/
According to a story in Saturday’s Age, ‘capitalism with Chinese characteristics’ is also showing a violent side.
And what the bloody hell are we, chopped liver?
Interesting discussion, but one thing I’d say is: the history of Latin America is so peculiar (Lawd, don’t I know it!), and has so many unique and frankly bizarre factors which defy any attempt to measure for control effect , I’m not sure it’s very useful as a petri dish in which to test concepts of universal validity.
Yes, that’s my point as against Jason’s, j_p_z. Even the term “Latin America” is a massive generalisation!
“Even the term “Latin Americaâ€? is a massive generalisation!”
Oh, I wouldn’t go *that* far.
Yeah, but aren’t the social sciences abounding with universal theories of one sort or another? Noam Chomsky’s ‘universal grammar’, Keynes’ macroeconomic models, Marx’s class theory etc etc etc …
You’d have rather impoverished disciplines if you stripped away all the theories with universal pretensions. So why slam these NBER guys for their “generalised constructs” when everyone else is doing it?
One other point. Mark states above that “industrialisation has often been associated with corporate sponsored or condoned repression and violence”. Fair enough. But it’s also been associated with massive socialist sponsored or condoned repression and violence. Ask a kulak.
Exactly, Paulus, I couldn’t agree more.
On your point about “universal” theories, that’s probably the wrong choice of term, and the sort of evidence that you would want to find for Chomsky’s theory is quite different from what you would want to find for Marx’ theories. There’s nothing wrong with broad propositions about capitalism and its effects, but if you’re purporting to generalise across cultures and to do so through mathematical modelling, you need to specify the content of the variables properly. That’s just basic methodology. I think you’d get further testing this sort of proposition using historical case studies, but I’d still object to the terms in which the hypothesis is stated.
Any explanatory theory that didn’t attempt to be at some level “universal” would be useless. All that would be left would be anecdote and impression.
Latin America does suffer from crony capitalism. But, significantly, much of the violence (including of course the example cited by Mark) has been visited in the name of North American capitalism. This would seem to imply that it’s not a question of variations in corporate culture, but a variation in the way corporations depending on whether they can get away with it. BTW, Jason, surely you’re aware of the famous incident when Henry Ford hired thugs to beat up unionists (including Walter Reuther)?
Ah…but there I go again, banging on with my universal theories.
Robert, I seem to remember quite a lot of early modern violence in South America being visited upon everyone in the various causes of the King, Christ, and Ignatius Loyola, but maybe that’s just my fixation with Iberians and colonialists.
Also, contra what seems to be a great deal of anti-latinocolonial feeling, the Portuguese colonised places like Macau and Goa, as peaceful and honestly-run havens of mutual trade as you’ll ever find.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to the canidrome.
Like the dogs, do you FdG?
Robert, sorry - have to call “bollocks” when I suspect it. Wot -
That abstract translates to ‘in places where capitalism stinks unusually badly, people are more prone to look for alternatives’. Commonsense really - it says nothing about the in-principle merits of capitalism or its alternatives.
I’d criticise the article more because it uses high-falutin’ language to try and disguise the fact that it very ponderously tries to demonstrate the bleeding obvious. A very common feature of mediocre work in the social sciences.
Andrew, heard of FDI? And insufficiently developed capital markets? Where do you think most of the corporate activity in South America has traditionally been financed from?
Oh, as a BTW that story about Drummond hiring death squads, if true, shows Drummond to be not merely wicked but incredibly dumb. I’m not disbelieving it on those grounds, though - corporations are run by people and people are capable of being incredibly dumb.
In the short run, they’ll have a demoralised workforce. As mining is a capital-intensive industry having poor-quality labour will cost them far more in lost capital productivity than they could possibly gain from low wages.
In the long run, it’s just begging for expropriation.
Less likely to happen in Colombia than elsewhere, dd, because it’s a narco-state propped up by the US government (despite all the rhetoric, the elites are as tied in with the narcotics biz as the insurgents).
Spain and the rest of Europe, Mark.
How could anyone possibly suggest that US capital had ever sponsored violence in Latin America? What an extraordinary notion! Can I support it? Maybe we could just grab a Chilean, a Guatemalan, an El Salvadoran off the street and ask them.
And if you don’t believe me (or them), how about Smedley Butler - the most highly decorated General in the USMC, speaking in 1931:
But, no doubt, this is no longer the case. The peons are all peacefully extracting aloe vera from cactus for the body shop these days.
Really, GregM?
Check out the 12th slide in this powerpoint:
http://www.eclac.cl/noticias/paginas/2/14012/ForeigninvestmentJLM-rev25-04-06.pdf
You’d want to check the country by country stats as well (Mexico, for example, where the “enterprise zones” are, has a very high percentage of US FDI due to NAFTA), but I’m sure you can google as easily as I can.
On Robert’s point, anyone who’s read any Latin American history at all would know that he’s right.
pffft. could there be anymore rhetorical questions asked in a blog thread?
Could there indeed? Is the Pope a musical German rodent?
As they say over at The Government Gazette, what do you think?
What DD said. In spades.
And to add a personal note here (unlike joke strocchi, I’ll try and keep it germane to the thread), I grew up in a genially corrupt crony-capitalism third world ex-British colony where the pronouncements and actions of elected tribal rulers with their mates’ hands in the till blended very smoothly in practice with the left wing mise en scene of pumping tax dollars back into their own local communities until, if ever, they could be self-sustaining.
It was all small, cheap and cheerful and no one really got hurt or burnt (until lately). But as that whacko textiles executive, Fred Engels, noted, at a certain point a quantity becomes a quality.
Latin America slid way through that waypoint several generations ago. As did the US, on a different and highly entertaining Cecil B DeMille scale from about the Civil War onwards. Does any other country in the world so blatantly name some of its most expensive military purchases after the guys whose main claim to fame was porkbarrelling their electoral districts and political and financial backers to build the bloody things?
Pure socialist and capitalist rhetoric have surprisingly much in common. They both promise a better world if only everyone will play by the rules,. In reality, everyone bombarded by such messages either knows, has heard of and/or does cheat and take short cuts whenever they can get away with it.
The main difference between great shell games like Enron and the USSR (or Ken Lay and Fidel Castro - they seem have run their respective mobs in very similar ways.) was just matter of style and bullshit. But what they had in common was an attitude - “one of us, not one of them”.
Latin America just happens to manifest this particular infection in a more florid and colourful way than most other geo-political groupings. Oh those zany crazy South Americans. Good music though.
Nevertheless they do seem to be getting their shit together at the moment.
Why Chile would pick an agnostic moderate socialist like Michelle Bachelet after that nice Mr Pinochet I’ll never know.
That’s something of a raw nerve over at Catallaxy, where certain alleged libertarians *not all of them, mind, and not Jason* like to claim that Pinochet’s victims are as nothing compared to his wonderful friendship with Mr Friedman, etc…
http://catallaxyfiles.com/index.php?s=pinochet&searchbutton=Go!
On the contrary Kim, they’re claiming Milton only less than an hour with the saviour of South America. It’s an embarrassing claim but I’m sure it was quality time.
Thanks for the correction, anthony. I knew those massive stoushes at Catallaxy over Pinochet were about *something*.
Shorter Strocchi:
Both Jason and Mark are barking up the wrong tree, as most liberals do because they have a naive and narrow theory of human nature and cultural structures. Socialism and capitalism are ideological institutions.
Latin America’s problems are ethnological, not ideological. Pre-modern tribalism and post-modern gangsterism combine to thwart modern nationalism.
Reform should grow from the bottom up, emphasising civic social norms (transparency, accountability) in small business and local government. Bolster IQ in the individual and build trust into the institutional.
Not-shorter Strocchi:
The debate between Left-liberals like Mark and Right-liberals like Jason has a naive and threadbare look to anti-ideological recovering liberals like myself. Both talk about the institutional structures without much reference to individual natures.
The average IQ of the S. Americas is mid-80s. The thing to explain about Southern America is not how poor it is but how much richer it is than you would expect, given its hideous antiquity, volatile socio-biological mix unpleasant conquerors.
The smartest economic policy the Southern Americas ever cooked up was geographicly locating near Northern America. Those damn Gringo dollars tend to spill over the border, much as Wet-Backs swim accross the river.
Both libertarian capitalism and egalitarian socialism are institutions of the liberal Enlightenment that evolved in tandem with the individuals who internalised values of modern civic society. They dont neccessarily travel well to regions where the people’s natures and cultures are still hankering for pre-modern ethnic community.
Unfortunately the political trend south of the Rio Grande seems to be to combine the worst of capitalism and socialism to benefit which ever ethnic gang happens to claw its way to the top at the time.
THe Southern Americas will not benefit from ideological forms of capitalism (”Washington Consensus”) or socialism (”Cuban Model”??!!!). Ideological institutionals depends on ethnological individuals.
Their first priority for Southern Americas is to get their ethnological problems sorted out. Be helpful, by elevating the IQs of the market-subordinate low-status native masses. Not be harmful, by avoiding pogroms of market-dominant high-status elites.
Happy Rev.
Much as I support the arguments in Marks post - especially about the multiplicity of ‘left wing approaches’, the Bachelet/Lagos example actually supports this crude poverty = corruption = socialism equation more than you might think.
The big political issues in the last couple of years have been about the Transsantiago (a public transport system in Santiago) and ChileDeportes (sort of Chiles equivalent to the AIS, I think.) Both issues have corruption angles, the latter much more clear cut.
OTOH, this could be attributed to the 15 odd year rule of,if not one party, then one political persuasion (centre/left) I saw a book in the store the other day touting this thesis…time to go, etc… parallels to oz are intriguing
This situation, and particularly the weakness of the opposition, can be directly traced back to the Pinochet years. Not to mention that this corruption has been killing Bachelet in the polls - unfairly so AFAICT, because much is Lagos’ legacy- and if the opposition can put up a credible non-corrupt alternative theyll have a good chance…but thats a fairly big if
Jack - seems that the ‘South Americans’ are putting the Washington Consenus to bed, themselves.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/10/AR2007051001718.html
Im not sure if this is such a strong argument as it appears. Maybe its just that I dont have a good sense for IQ levels, but this figure gave me a much more negative reaction than the data actually warrants. O rmaybe its because the study this figure is based on benchmarked Britain at 100.
First of all Australias average is 98. (though wiki says 96)
Secondly I think you’ve underestimated the South American score. Within the selection of results displayed on the wiki page, only a few come in under 85 (Guatemela 79, Ecuador 80) Brasil and Mexico are at 87, Colombia at 88 and Peru at 90. Uruguay and Argentina are at 96 right behind Australia. Not as much as i though but by my maths that comes to an average of 87/88 putting South/Central America roughly 10 behind Australia and 20 behind Hong Kong, apparently the smartest nation on earth.
Theres a couple of articles which reference the 85 percent statistic, which presumably comes from some abstract or press release that was put out by the authors of IQ and the wealth of nations. Maybe they rounded it down. Of the nations not included I would guess Chile would increase the average significantly, while some of the equatorial nations would bring it down.
Of course the whole premise of rating people via IQ’s is open to question as well as the statistical validity of the authors data.
Fittingly for this thread, one commentor at amazon labeled the book garbage in garbage out, questioning the quality of the data (though Steve Sailer gives a decent defense.)
At Nature’s Heredity journal they called it “not so much science, then, as a social crusade.”
What id like to know is whether IQ results correlate with say the Human development Index, or even GDP. This study claims to show that IQ results are positively correlated to secondary enrolment and negative corrolated to agricultural work. Given this I really wonder about Jack’s statement
There certainly seems to be a race on between the World Bank and private lenders.
But where are they racing to? A World bank report (linked in the linked post) suggests that of the private capital is going to the poorest nations and a large amount to the emerging countires in Eastern Europe.
Umm, link