Do market failures in insurance markets represent a sea change in the order of governmentality

Been reading Foucault's lectures from 1979.  I'm in a section where he carefully goes through the characteristics of the neo-liberal regime of governmentality, in particular the German form of this or Ordo liberalism.  To summarize a couple of key concepts, the principles of a market economy and competition form the principle of government, whose purpose in the German system is to intervene to uphold the conditions for pure competition.  The social policy of this order is to extend the principle of the enterprise throughout society, and all members of society consider themselves enterprises and direct their energies towards building the assets that allow them to control risks through mechanisms such as insurance. 

Insurance is a surprisingly central element in neo-liberal governmentality as described by Foucault and his followers.  I certainly have found it to be a surprisingly strong force, as you can see in some of my earlier posts.  Insurance is used as the model for providing essential services such as health care, income in retirement.  When you think about it for a minute, it is a weird model.  In essence, you make a bet with another party--they bet you won't get sick or wreak your car, or you bet that the stock market will do better than inflation.   

You can buy insurance on almost any contingency.  Responsible individuals, families, organizations, and companies get insurance.  Being fully insured is an aspect of being well-governed. 

What happens then when you hear stories that insurance is no longer available?  Maybe you can't buy policies to protect your property in Florida.  Health insurance carriers dwindle in some places. Do these market failures represent an unraveling of the neo-liberal order.  It is based on individualizing rather than socializing benefits and risks.  If we are seeing an increase in places where insurance markets no longer operate, it seems to me that we might be entering a post-neoliberal stage.  It might not be a very good stage.  It could be one in which there is no individual escape from disaster, but also no socialization of risk and benefit.  

I don't know if the cases add up to a trend, but won't the early stages look like some possibly isolated anomalies?  Or perhaps one can use the case study of specific failures in insurance markets to understand what this post-neoliberal phase might look like.    

Languid Apocalypse

Sometime last year, it's been months, I finally saw the movie On the Beach.  It's the story about the time period after nuclear war has destroyed most human life, and people in Australia may be the last ones alive, waiting for the radiation to reach them but also hoping they might be spared. No one really knows what will happen. In addition to the locals, Gregory Peck is the captain of an American sub that survived the conflict and has made its way to the continent.  It's from 1959, in black and white, directed by Stanley Kramer who did a lot of other "social" movies during the 50s and 60s like Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, and it stars Ava Gardner, Tony Perkins, and Fred Astaire.  A big name cast. 

While the plot is framed by unfathomable violence, I don't think it shows at all.  It's all context.  In some ways, very little happens.  People wait, and go about a life that is winding down.  There are parties, trips to beach, but with the loss of the rest of the world, there is less and less to do.  Hope for the best, but even that seems wasted energy. In the end the inevitable occurs, and the plot concerns each character deciding how to say goodbye to everything and everyone they've known.

What comes to mind watching this movie is its languidness.  It is slow and quiet.  The sunny landscapes of Australia exude warmth.  Slow down, rest in the shade.  But otherwise it isn't too different from life in the desert. 

It seemed fitting and foreshadowing for our time of creeping apocalypse.  Climate decay and political disintegration come on a little at a time.  Sure there are outbursts like January 6, but more of the decline comes a bit at a time, small points at which there seems less and less left to do. One more seat lost, one more local law overturned. The Republicans split Nashville up between several districts they control, and from that point on we just aren't even part of what goes on in Washington. It's a story about people from other place.  Even many of the dramatic moments of climate change take the phenomenological form of a slowing down.  Las Cruces, NM had 47 consecutive days over 100 degrees last summer.  Existing within that involved adapting, and much of that required slowing down.  Don't walk too far.  Don't go too fast.  Wait until the sun goes down.

One trope in climate discourse is when a person talked about the observable dire consequences of these changes, but ends by saying they are an optimist and then pull out something that might be a basis for hope.  An artefact like On the Beach makes the case that what seems to be happening is happening, even if the action of what is happening is indiscernible from the background context. 

I experience these two decay patterns--social and political life and climate--as part of the same phenomenology.  I suppose Jared Diamond would say climate drives the social and political fraying.  But they are so intertwined, aren't they. If we were to do anything, we would need some sort of organized social response.  I'm reading Foucault's 1979 lectures on neo-liberalism, where he outlines the emergence of forms of governmentality that establish the market as the organizing principle of the State, its source of legitimacy.  While there was a time when one might point to the successes of that principle--the German post-war "miracle"--it is hard to see the market doing anything but driving the radiation closer and closer to the last pockets of survivability.  The progress is slower in our lives than even in the languid fiction of On the Beach, so that much harder to feel.  But you need to feel it outside the dramatic events of the latest tornado or insurrection, but in the background changes.  Or maybe that's the blessing.  The fruit trees will still bloom until they don't.  

The Right Sort of Laughter

Taking advantage of COVID isolation to finish some reading, including Nidesh Lawtoo's The Phantom of the Ego (Hopkins 2013).  This work focuses on the idea of mimesis as it was developed by several modern writers (Nietzsche, Conrad, D.H. Lawrence, and Bataille) as the force that drives the formation of self and society.  I wrote some initial thoughts here in December.  One idea that runs through the discussion of mimesis is the role of sacrificial violence in forming community, that communities form around the shared experience of directing violence at some "other," a scapegoat. I had some trouble with that--I always associated community with something good and comforting. 

I missed this before, but in this book Lawtoo ends up offering a way out, which is to distinguish between the mimesis of violence and the mimesis of laughter--that there are infectious experience that bind people in positive ways.  He also points to the affective connection between child and mother as another example of a positive sharing.  Give it a thought, and you can see if everywhere, even in something as mundane as advice on public speaking, where you start with a joke to make a connection with the crowd (still crowd psychology). I know I feel much more connected with people when we are laughing, and with the people who are quick to laugh. 

One caveat is that Donald Trump's crowds share laughter as well as anger.  He invokes the mimesis of violence when he gets a crowd to chant "lock her up" or invites the crowd to turn on journalists, and laughter when he makes jokes about his rivals.  I don't know if Hitler made jokes, but I can imagine he might.  But Trump for sure taps many possible sources of contagious identification.  

All laughter is not the same, nor are all jokes.  My step child much prefers comedy over drama, and watches lots of stand up specials.  We'll watch them together sometimes, and some of them work for me, others don't.  At one point it dawned on me that I much prefer comedians who make fun of themselves or their group, and that comedians making jokes about others strike me as sour and unfunny.  Trump's cracks are always about others, designed to distinguish him and his crowd from others. His only moments of self-deprecation are hollow feints.

I don't know if the distinction between self-identifying and other-directed humor can be maintained firmly or distinguished absolutely in all cases. I'm not sure I believe anything in life has a firm boundary, certainly not something rooted in language.  A parent can make jokes about being a parent, but what about making joke about your child. Parents are so thoroughly implicated in their children's lives that maybe it always has an element of the joking self.  The joke about the kid is often really a joke about the parent's reaction to the kids, or about how much they feel inadequate to their role as parent.  What about with spouses?  That seems like an area that can creep over into sourness, but where maybe the best jokes make fun of the spouse making the joke.   

Article on Accounting and Legitimacy in Hatfield School journal

 I had my first peer-reviewed paper published in the Hatfield Graduate Journal of Public Affairs: Accounting's Problematic Relationship to Legitimacy.  The article is a little dense--I really should have used section headings--but it contains one set of the building blocks for work I've been doing since. 

Embedded labor value in the Bible

At church today, in our session on Christianity and co-ops, we read a passage from James 5

Come now, you rich, week and howl for the miseries that are coming upon you. Your riches have rotted and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver have rusted, and their rust will be evidence against you and will eat your flesh like fire. You have laid up treasure for the last days. Behold, the wages of the laborers who mowed your fields, which you kept back by fraud, cry out; and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts. (James 5:1-4, RSV)

What's fascinating to me in this passage is that it basically describes the way the labor of workers is inscribed in goods and wealth, and that whatever exploitation occurred is fully captured there.  It may not be visible--it looks like a pile of gold and silver, but James looks at it and "behold," sees the hours put in, the wages associated with those hours, and the surplus value extracted or held back. 

This puts me in mind of alternate accountings.  Accounting measures value, and part of value is the effort put into production of the goods or service by people, the residue of the total value they produced less what was paid out to them.  Conventional accounting does not show this, but converts everything to dollars and cents which are abstracted from the physical value and physical conditions of the creation of value. 

I'm finally reading Tony Tinker's Paper Prophets, considered the origin for emancipatory accounting more fully elaborated by Sonja Gallhofer and Jim Haslam in Accounting and Emancipation.  Tinker describes several examples of alternate accountings provided by Ernst Mandel in his Treatise on Marxist Economics: a blacksmith caste in an Indian village which has land holdings and requires outsider who want their services to work the land for a number of hours equivalent to the time required to make the object they need; a Middle Ages Japanese village with a system of cooperative agriculture where villagers balance accounts with each other based on labor time; and a couple of others where the accounting system measures labor time. 

Tinker's point is that these aspects of the good or service can be tracked and made visible. Burchell, Clubb and Hopwood's landmark 1985 article discussed a time when conventional accounting moved in that direction by adding statements on value-added to financial reports (a short-lived experiment in Britain wiped out by the arrival of Thatcher). To me, the writer of the epistle was seeing through the surface of the treasure hoard to not just the effort put in, but the trauma and injustice there.  That would be go a step further, and I think Tinker does get there, I just haven't gotten that far in the book. 

This passage in the Bible would lead you not just to account for the effort put in, but to capture the qualitative, spiritual and moral dimensions of the hour of effort.  Was the labor hour one produced by a prisoner, a slave, or someone asked to work at danger to themselves?  This seems technically doable.  Not sure where you'd get a chance to give it a try and see what it ends up looking like.  

 

Burchell, S., Clubb, C., & Hopwood, A. G. (1985). Accounting in its social context: Towards a history of value added in the United Kingdom. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 10(4), 381–413

Gallhofer, S. & Haslam, J. (2003). Accounting and Emancipation: Some Critical Interventions (1st ed., Vol. 3). Routledge

Tony Tinker (1985). Paper Prophets: A Social Critique of Accounting.

The Sacred Canopy and the Bankruptcy of Religion

Sometime in the Summer of maybe 2019, in what was a different era in my professional life and for all of us, I started on a project to look into ideas of de-growth and low growth economics. Among the books I assigned myself was Tim Jackson's Prosperity Without Growth. Jackson is a British economist working on sustainable economics. I gather he's got a pretty high profile--Prince Charles wrote the foreword to the book. I started the book, it didn't catch me up too much, started a Ph.D. program, etc. But I finally went back and finished it this week.

The main reason to go back to this was because we're doing a study in church on co-op economics with our pastor's husband who is working on the idea through the Wendland-Cook Program at Vanderbilt Divinity School. Their basic hypothesis is that there is a deep connection between Christianity and cooperative economics. 

After going through quite a bit of analysis about the grip a growth imperative has on society and economics, and its detrimental effects, Jackson arrives at a vision of an economic focused on service to others--really care for other--rather than on throughput of materials. Then we talks about where we can see this sort of economy:

Perhaps surprisingly, the seeds for such a transformation already exist, often in local, community-based initiatives or in social enterprise: community energy projects, local farmers' markets, slow food cooperatives, sports clubs, libraries, community health and fitness centres, local repair and maintenance services, craft workshops, writings centres, outdoor pursuits, music and drama, yoga, martial arts, mediation, gardening, the restoration of parks and open spaces. (p 143)

The list is probably peculiar in several ways--it includes forms of organization and general activities for one thing--but for now note that it does not include churches.  Which exist in create number, involve great numbers of people, and should be about service to others. 

Then to explain what it would take to move from a society of growth and affluence to one that defines prosperity as "the ability to flourish as human beings" (p 212) he talks about the need for a framework that gives meaning and identity, and "relates our temporal existence to some higher 'sacred' order" (p 214).  Money and goods have become that in a consumer society, and do a very poor job of providing that spiritual and psychological support and ground. You would expect religion to come in here, but not for Jackson:

Religion may offer some defence against his threat [of a meaningless void that threatened to overturn our hopes and derail our best intentions]. But what should a society do, when religious belief is harder to come by? Or when its intellectual foundations have been shaken? Or when its manifestation entails increasingly fundamentalist (and inhuman) ideals? Is it so unlikely to suppose that some of these vital social functions are taken on by consumerism itself? (p 214)

So for Jackson, religion doesn't have credibility.  It's not really worth considering.  Contrary to the argument in our Sunday program, churches aren't prime examples of a service and care economy,  I do in fact disagree with that, and for me churches leap out as organizations Jackson should look at.  It could be that he's in England, and maybe he just thinks of the Church of England and its large bureaucracy--but then again, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, blurbed Jackson's book.

While I see the promise in making this connection, I do wonder if the church has damaged itself so much that it cannot play this role outside of a small band of devotees, and that it cannot form the basis for large numbers of people to change their relationship to growth and consumption.  The church broadly defined does shoot itself in the foot regularly, and has significant branches that stake out position that aggressively feed the fires of dead-end consumption.  There's some groups out there trying to make different connections, but at this point I don't know if we're talking about a handful of people with Twitter accounts, or something with more and growing tendrils. Can they build enough muscle to take religion out of bankruptcy? 

Tim Jackson (2017). Prosperity Without Growth: Foundations for the Economy of Tomorrow (2nd ed).      

The subsidiary status of language

Last year I got introduced to the idea of mimesis as a political and psychological phenomenon. I was more familiar with the way the word has been used in aesthetics to talk about art's ability to copy nature, but in political theory in political theory it describes an unconscious identification with a crowd or a mimetic leader that trumps political discourse and reason. I'm spending more time with this idea right now in Nidesh Lawtoo's book The Phantom of the Ego. Lawtoo traces the idea back to Plato, with his distrust of the actor or rhapsode's ability to arouse the passions of listeners/viewers, but really starts with modern development of the idea in Nietzsche, who criticized the effect as practices by Wagner, who had a "magnetic" effect on followers. 

The discussion of mimesis brought up the discovery by neuroscience of mirror neurons, which cause people to mirror or experience sensations of others. It's a fascinating idea, but it seems like the specific cases where these neurons fire might not explain the range of mimetic effects. Nietzsche observed effects more broadly, arguing that it was a predominant mode of existence the ego gets surrendered to the influence of the crowd and to the influence of persuasive figures.

My take on language philosophy such as Wittgenstein--maybe not the best informed take--is that it becomes very difficult to identify how common meaning can be achieved. In an encounter long ago with Paul DeMan, me and some undergraduate colleagues, after a long dinner challenging him on the slipperiness of meaning, in the end asked how a simple conversation is then even possible and he answered something along the lines that communication nevertheless does occur. It could be that it is all mimesis. A mirroring, surrendering the ego in order to identify with the other or something beyond, through which comes implicit agreement on meaning, or near meaning. 

Starting with the Reagan era, I was struck by how little words themselves mattered, replaced by communications that privileged images, juxtapositions rather than logic. When I went to business school, a professor there, Tom Mahoney, gave me some reading assignments before classes started. One book was about South African termites (I think it was The Soul of the White Ant by Eugene Marais). It took me many years to understand why he assigned that, but I think I get it now. The book was particularly interested in the way termite colonies coordinate activity in complicated ways without language or obvious signals. As I recall it is done through chemical releases. Tom wanted me to think about the way coordination in human organizations escapes reduction to simple techniques, the mystery of it. Nevertheless, communication occurs. In his novel The Overstory, Richard Powers describes the work of Suzanne Simard, who found that trees emit chemicals as a form of communication among themselves about dangers and environmental changes. 

All of these describe different non-verbal forms of communication--visual images, pheromones, chemicals, mirror neurons. It's a battery of mechanisms that may be less visible but more effective than words. In the world today, the power of mimesis is primarily threatening. Everything points to Trump and versions of Trump in every country. My wife and I went to bowl game this week, and the sense of contagious anger was palpable with every disputed call. Even the moments of joy had a violent, angry quality. Any ruling or result that went against the home team (this was effectively a UT home game) got people around us to talk to each other, about how the fix was in with bias against the home team and incompetence bordering on criminality. The more furious emotions seemed to have more ability to replicate themselves around us. 

Mimesis also seems like compassion. Mirroring should also be able to inspire care for others. The trick with mimesis may be to set up situations that allow room for compassion and avoid or deflect furor. 

If mimesis is so critical to communication which nevertheless occurs, can administrators use mimesis to build the institutional community? Instead of more traditional tools? Alongside them? 

Language still matters. If you've ever graded student writing, you will see students using words that seem to fit but you can't help thinking they chose not because of the precise connotations of the word, but because the word makes them seem smart or hip. My stepson used the word "praxis" this morning in a context where "political action" would have sufficed, but praxis sounded more sophisticated. The ability to make those distinctions should matter, but it is not obvious in what context. That fine use of words will not by itself rule the day.

Self-enclosure of the commons close to us (part 5 of 4)

Just as I was wrapping up my little series on the way insurance as an instrument of governmentality insinuates itself into local decisions, I ran across an article by David Bollier about Ivan Illich and the commons, which provides another way of talking about what we do when we act as good, well-governed subjects. What follows depends completely on Bollier's piece, and I need to go to the source, but the ideas connect too closely with what I was just writing on governmentality for me to wait.  No way I'll be able to do justice to Illich or Bollier.  

For Illich, the commons was "that part of the environment which lay beyond [people's] own thresholds and outside of their own possessions, to which, however, they had recognized claims of usage, not to produce commodities but to provide for the subsistence of their households" (Bollier quoting Illich). Classic examples include the organization of pre-modern communities in Britain, where manorial tenants shared grazing rights.  Another key idea for Illich was the vernacular domain, which is "the realm of everyday life in which people create and negotiate their own sense of things – how they learn about the world, how they find meaning and spirituality, how they manage the resources they love and depend upon" (Bollier). It is importantly a non-market domain.  

I see the commons as the informal spaces where people are allowed to be active and engage in the work of the vernacular domain. I think of spaces where friends, associates and I have been able to engage in creative and communal activities.  For instance, the HotHouse in Chicago opening up for panel discussions on a Saturday afternoon. One of my favorites was the space Stuart McCarrell had in Wicker Park.  He owned a building at the corner of Damen and North, the Lodge Hall, where he had the offices for his engineering company but also housed an independent press and provided storage for artist associates. For a time my friend Warren lent me a key to the building, and I was able to go there late at night to woodshed and write music.  I went up to the open top floor, which was filled with stage sets and costumes from independent theatre and dance productions over the years.  The building was old, and it breathed.  You  had to love its location--it backed on the El, the building across the El housed the Busy Bee, a venerable Polish restaurant, and across the street were the Coyote Building and the Flatiron Building.  These buildings served as locations for a beautiful temporary commons, the Around the Coyote festival. Every imaginable space was opened up for artists to show their work and throw together experimental projects and temporary installations, and you wandered from one space into the next and then the next. It seemed endless in a good way. A deep well.  

Downtown Presbyterian Church's art studios have some quality of the commons.  And we have in our best times embraced the church as commons, and let space all over the building be used for concerts, performances, exhibits, discussions, and planning. Churches have a long history of being a commons, with open doors and offering sanctuary. The commons quality has been contested for sure.  Notably during the 80s when the Sanctuary movement would have opened churches to refugees from conflict in Central America.  My understanding is that a former minister of DPC, Rev. Hogan Yancey, was forced out for sympathy to these ideas.

Historically, the commons such as land where all members of a village shared grazing rights gives way with modernism to enclosure, through which common land and resources are split up, each parcel or piece established as the property of an individual. Ownership documented in a legal deed, rights defined by contract. What was a common resource became one person's capital. And the owner of that capital would need insurance to protect their ownership and rights.   

The insurance negotiations at DPC would have us in effect enclose the art studios, remove any trace of the commons. What is interesting to me is that the process entices us to do it to ourselves.  The impulse is already there among (like a reverse Spirit of God)--the impulse for clarity, for good business-like practices, for modeling responsible subjecthood. It is not imposed, but comes about through a collaboration within this disciplinary system, within this risk dispositif. We experience a kind of solidarity within the disciplinary system--we are being responsible together--at the same time we truncate other forms of solidarity. 

When one thinks of enclosure of the commons, you think of elites seizing resources, but I believe there has always been this element of action upon the self.  Nietzsche saw human potential arising from "imposing a form on onself" (Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals).  While Bollier says "Enclosure is not an abstraction. It's the great, unacknowledged scourge of our time," and I don't disagree with that--I mourn the loss of these spaces--it's important to recognize the extent to which most of us collaborate in the process. 

Stuart McCarrell died in 2001, not long after I was the beneficiary of his radicalism as second nature. I'm sure that the Lodge Hall got sold on his death and has been converted into private residences. I don't know where I would go to practice today. But to honor Stuart, let me give you one of his poems.  Stu was best known in Chicago as first a buddy to Nelson Algren and then a champion for his work. (Algren is a story for another time, but everyone should at least read Chicago: City on the Make, and a good source for information is the doc by Dennis Mueller, Ilko Davidov, and Mark Blottner, Nelson Algren: The End is Nothing, The Road is All.)     

Nelson Algren

I gave the city what it needed:
compassion, humor, rage.
I saw her suffering, struggling,
dancing on a noisy, smoky stage.
But the decades grew greedy, dark--
the battles seemed vain.
Cruelty, callousness ruled
and mocked at the pain. 
I turned a wry joke here,
a lusty one there,
to ease the anguish
and tame the terror.
So now, to their taste,
each reader can choose
soft flecks of laughter, 
or hard midnight news.

Stuart McCarrell, from Voices, Insistent Voices (Xenia Press)

David Bollier. (2013)  "Ivan Illich and the Contemporary Commons Movement."  https://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-08-05/ivan-illich-and-the-contemporary-commons-movement/