“Discrete Revolutions” in economics and democracy

The degrowth movement is a radical attempt to challenge our current economic system, arguing that its excessive focus on economic growth will ultimately harm people and the planet. Though the movement is strongly committed to the idea of global justice and decolonization of relations between the Global North and South, degrowth was conceived of and is largely debated in the North.

“[M]any people in the South are now dependent on the money flows that come from the North as payment for these products, just as they are often dependent on the provision of credit and remittances, the import of products and services for which countries in the South lack either the technological capacity or the patents, or access to currencies issued by countries in the global North.

These dependencies complicate the program of decolonizing the Global South by implementing degrowth in the Global North: attempting to eliminate unequal exchange relations by implementing degrowth in the North could, at least in the short term, create even greater calamities, at least without simultaneously addressing the structural problems at the global level. Thus, while degrowth scholars rightly argue that the existence of exploitative relationships to the detriment of the South should not be used as a fundamental argument against degrowth as such, the question of how exactly to overcome these dependencies in practice is an important one that degrowth scholars have not yet addressed sufficiently.”

“Close linkages between neoliberal think tanks and the dregs of the eugenics movement that lurk in certain dark and very online corners of academia” have permitted “ideas, concepts, and arguments to travel from the eugenics tradition into neoliberal thought and vice versa.” The two ideologies have an “elective affinity,” with shared concerns over population quality, the fate of Western civilization, and the maintenance of social hierarchies. “This is to say that certain motifs within each tradition resonate so strongly with those of the other tradition that adherents of the one are drawn to the other more or less organically.”

“Central to neoliberalism is the signally racialised view that material inequality, whether domestic or global, is a function of the inherent deficiencies of the deprived: the poor are poor because of their failure to be productive or entrepreneurial. And in assembling their defence of inequality, many neoliberals have gratefully drawn on work by eugenicists that claims to prove the existence of race differences in intelligence, personality, or productivity. This is why so many neoliberal intellectuals became interested in the race and IQ debate that resurfaced in the late 1960s. Likewise, the critique of the welfare state that sits at the very heart of neoliberal ideology is structured in ways that call to mind classical eugenicist concerns over charity.”

Countries around the world are experimenting with citizen juries in a context of increasing polarization and national populism on the rise. Martin Wolf of the Financial Times, Claire Mellier of the Iswe Foundation, and Nicholas Gruen, CEO of Lateral Economics and visiting Professor at King’s College London’s Policy Institute participated in a panel exploring whether citizens’ assemblies pave the way for the future of democracy. Gruen argued that citizens’ juries will remain marginal if they remain one-off events commissioned by, and then reporting back to governments. He presented the case for a standing citizens’ assembly to operate as a house of parliament. Rather than waiting for the government to accept this, an assembly can be privately funded, via philanthropy and crowdfunding. As it sits, it will showcase the transformative potential of this other, far more representative and constructive way to represent the people.

Mellier: “Are some topics too hot to handle [in citizens’ assemblies]? I don’t think so. It’s about the expectation of consensus. I don’t think that’s what they are about. They are actually about surfacing the deep hopes and fears and governing sentiments, and not expecting that we’re all going to come to an agreement. It’s about realizing that we can live together, and agree to disagree in a way that is respectful. That’s quite a profound difference.”

Wong challenges the common interpretation of the Chinese diaspora as a “model minority,” instead exploring the role of intergenerational melodrama in shaping second-generation children of Chinese immigrants. She emphasizes the psychoanalytic aspects of guilt and the struggles faced by individuals navigating familial dynamics shaped by historical trauma.

“Especially for those of us with parents who lived through some part of the Maoist era before emigrating to North America, it seems remiss not to consider how the psychic conditions of China’s turbulent second half of the twentieth century have distorted family relations in the diaspora. Under Mao’s infamous party purges, one season’s proletarian hero could become the next’s traitor; and by the time the Cultural Revolution was underway, many had learned that surviving always-shifting grounds for denunciation meant that one had better be the denouncer, rather than the denounced. It proved immaterial whether one was guilty or not of any moral crime; what mattered was whether one was seen to occupy the position of guilt or not. As with melodrama, Maoism leaves no room for reality checking: it “neither doubts nor justifies its right to be,” and it can imprison you in a role you would rather not have to play.”

Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens is a publishing phenomenon, but many experts are uncomfortable with the “popular science” book’s treatment of human evolution, criticizing Harari’s work for its lack of scientific rigor and empirical evidence. Harari’s central thesis is that Homo sapiens‘ dominance is due to our ability to believe in intangible concepts. Critics say that is an oversimplification that lacks nuance, accusing Harari of prioritizing storytelling over scientific accuracy. His views on AI and civilization’s end are aligned with tech moguls like Elon Musk but distract from more immediate AI-related issues like algorithmic bias.

“Harari is a techno-pessimist, if not a scientific catastrophist. His analysis of the scientific revolution is demoralizing for someone who—like me—has dedicated half of their life to trying to explain to the public the importance of science as a force for social progress. The historian sees science as a vector of European imperialism and the cultural homogenization of the modern world: he seems convinced that technology will end our species through genetic engineering and synthetic life. He also thinks that it’s likely that the human species will disappear within 100 years and that the planet will be inherited by artificial intelligence and cyborgs, hybrids of people and machines.”