Perhaps one day investors and traders will have a biometric contraption connected to their computers. It could scan the prefrontal cortex of the brain, determine testosterone levels and measure sweaty palms in microseconds before warning you not to make a trade. Or today’s research could result in drugs that make people more rational. “Within a few decades, performance-enhancing drugs will be part and parcel of our world,” says Hersh Shefrin, a professor of behavioral finance at Santa Clara University. “Right now it’s science fiction, but science fiction often becomes science.”104
But of course, not everyone is a Wall Street trader or a major-league baseball player; but conveniently, the average person doesn’t need to wait around for such science fiction scenarios to come to fruition. Performance enhancement is already part and parcel of our world. Existing neuroenhancers, from the prescription serotonin selective reuptake inhibitors (Prozac) to the off-label uses of drugs such as Ritalin, Adderall, modafinil, or Provigil, are widely used as neuroenhancers by those with access to compliant physicians, to give the lagging brain that extra kick. “Daddy’s Little Helpers” have found a wide market as cognitive enhancements, when mere “human capital” can’t do the trick. And they have received the endorsement of the tributaries of the Neoliberal Thought Collective:
[The think tank employee Nicolas Seltzer said that using neuroenhancers] “is like customizing yourself—customizing your brain . . . It’s fundamentally a choice you’re making about how you want to experience consciousness.” Whereas the 90s had been about the “personalization of technology,” this decade was about the personalization of the brain . . . I asked him if he had any ethical worries about smart drugs. After a pause, he said that he might have a concern if somebody popped a neuroenhancer before taking a licensing exam that certified him, say, as a brain surgeon, and then stopped taking the drug. Other than that, he couldn’t see a problem. He said that he was a firm believer in the idea that “we should have a fair degree of liberty to do with our bodies and our minds as we see fit, so long as it doesn’t impinge upon the basic rights, liberty and safety of others.” He argued, “Why would you want an upward limit on the intellectual capacities of a human being?”105
This enchantment with the freedom to cannibalize the self is the signal characteristic of everyday neoliberalism. As Talbot says, “It’s not the mind-expanding sixties anymore. Every era, it seems, has its own defining drug. Neuroenhancers are perfectly suited for the anxiety of white-collar competition in a floundering economy.”106 Enhancement and alteration are the duty of every entrepreneurial agent in a world of unremitting competition and product uncertainty.
Once the body is analogized to a firm, then every so often it needs to be reengineered like a firm, rendering it more lean and mean, which includes takeovers (hostile or otherwise), mergers, spinoffs, divestments, and “going public.” Mergers under this regime look like implants, transplants, and other surgical enhancements; divestitures look like the sale of organs, blood, and gametes. Of course, the neoliberals had nothing to do with developing the actual physical/medical processes, which long predated Mont Pèlerin; where the thought collective has made its crucial contribution has been through its insistence upon submission of these activities to dedicated market considerations, and in promotion of a proactive ethic of remaining open to elective amputation, extraction, and prosthesis. Entrepreneurial selves are far more likely to submit to corporeal alteration if they don’t feel stigmatized by the asymmetric sacrifices made by those corresponding bodies undergoing divestment. Dependence upon Titmuss-style “gift economies” is therefore stridently derided, and dark hints have been routinely mooted that attempts to build reconstructive institutions upon “altruism” only make things worse—say, blood contamination during the early phases of the HIV crisis. Conversely, the destitute are praised as prospective “professional donors.”107
The ultimate in corporeal spinoffs is the parturition of a new child; but in the neoliberal era the process has been segmented, streamlined, and outsourced in order to produce a more flexible bodily experience. The old-fashioned intimacy of the sexual act can be separated as much as the self wishes from the mechanics of reproduction: one can purchase sperm and/or eggs optimized for genetic excellence; one can dispense with copulation through in vitro fertilization; one can even outsource the carrying of the child to term through contract surrogacy.108 What better index of the fragmentation of the self than to open up biological reproduction to a ménage à trois (or à quatre or cinq)! The oldest profession and the newest are joined in the upending of the most basic building block of cosmology in human societies: that of matrilineal or patrilineal descent. Surrogacy plays havoc with the whole idea of kinship or genealogy, creating all sorts of virtual relationships for which the language lacks common nouns.109 As in so many other instances, what the neoliberal self loses in continuity, it gains in convenience. This is not some unfortunate by-product of technological development, it is a direct consequence of the neoliberal fragmentation of the self; and neoliberals have rushed to incorporate all the corporate innovations crash-tested elsewhere into the surrogacy relationship. For instance, the fastest-growing segment of the surrogacy market is offshore outsourcing of the carrying of embryos to wombs for rent in developing countries. Furthermore, “major lenders have begun to enter the parenthood market, offering separately tailored products to those seeking infertility treatments . . . the entrance of repeat-payer lenders offering specialized fertility credit products is likely both to increase the size of the parenthood market and alter the market’s structure.”110
The market for organs and surrogacy already exists; but the beauty of the long march of neoliberalism is that it transforms the push for its expansion into a permanent revolution of the self. In the ethics community, there has been much hand-wringing over the idea that, as genetic testing and manipulation improve, one can anticipate that customers will combine their flexible gestational activities described above with detailed genetic engineering of human children, leading to a world of designer offspring. All the palaver about healing disease and human suffering is a sideshow compared with the real objective of commercialized science, which is to empower the affluent to play God in defining their own pedigree to accommodate their individual tastes. But the beauty of twenty-first-century neoliberalism is that it thinks not one, but three moves ahead in the game of custom-made selves. As has been recently pointed out, designer children are only an imperfect way station on the path to a perfectly flexible self.111 Why lock those children into a corporeal cage that they may themselves not like, or themselves seek to transform according to good neoliberal entrepreneurial imperatives? The ultimate goal of genetics is therefore a DNA upgrade: the ability to freely alter yourself at will at the ribonucleic level.
An artificial chromosome could be loaded with chemical switches that allowed specific genes to be turned on or off at will, simply by taking a pill containing the right chemical trigger for activation or deactivation. In addition, the entire chromosome could itself be designed in such a way as to allow it to be turned off selectively in a person’s sex cells—thereby insuring that the construct would not be passed on to the next generation . . . One would get the best of both worlds: genetic alterations that affected all cells within a person’s body, but that could still be tinkered with or completely shut down at any point in a person’s lifetime.112
This is the true terminus of the neoliberal self: to supplant your own mother and father; to shrug off the surly bond ratings of earth; to transform yourself at the drop of a hat or the swallow of a pill; to be beholden to no other body but only to the incorporeal market. It doesn’t matter if the procedure actually lies within the bounds of contemporary scientific possibility, because it is the apocalypse and the Rapture of the neoliberal scriptures.
Where’s the Rest of Me?
Not many people can be bothered to actually read Hayek or Buchanan or Milton Friedman or (even) Ayn Rand; but a whole lot more people drink fair tra
de coffee from time to time, watch Big Brother or Jerry Springer; have a Facebook page they desultorily update; contemplate whether to buy insurance; find themselves short until payday; are worried enough to check their FICO score; spring for a lottery ticket at the checkout; feel conflicted at the sight of a scruffy panhandler; worry about the foreclosure sale down the street; commiserate with friends over what to think about the British summer of riots in 2011; take medication to lose weight; or anguish over whether to visit a fertility clinic. In these thousand and one little encounters spread over a lifetime, the average person begins to absorb a set of images, causal scenarios, and precepts that begin to add up to something approaching a worldview. What is significant about these brushes with neoliberalism on a granular scale is that one need not be affluent, nor have a college degree or be an autodidact, to become infused with a vision of the self that is besotted with the narcissism of a thoroughly unmoored personality, unhinged aspirations oblivious to layers of social determination. Indeed, the modern conception of agency bequeathed by the Neoliberal Thought Collective has become so intently self-centered that it has a tenuous grasp upon the very existence of something called “the economy,” which assumes the divine attribute of being simultaneously everywhere yet, in practice, nowhere. We are encouraged to believe we are so “free” that no one can really control our lives, and yet the terminus of this freedom is a peculiar sort of solipsism. As one famous neoliberal economist put it:
There has been a fundamental shift in the balance of power between consumers and salesmen over the last generation and it points in the direction of consumers. The quality and quantity of “interior” pleasures is higher than ever before, so many people shift more toward these very cheap entertainments. Because of this rise of interiority, we’re saving money on our learning and entertainment and we’re also telling ourselves more stories . . . If you are looking to create your own economy, what role should stories play in the process?113
Clearly, the role of all the stories is to keep your attention acutely focused upon yourself. The worse things get, you must not engage in rage, remonstration, or “stoicism,” much less communal support; instead, the space spanned by your consciousness becomes the perimeter of the “economy,” which is no longer about what you may make, but consists exclusively of the stories you tell about yourself. Your vigilance must never waver from its focus upon the center of your own little universe. If you encounter some difficulty in comfortably inhabiting your own little cubbyhole, there is always someone else who will tell you how to succeed at it, for a modest fee. Conjure the confidence fairy! The contemporary financial crisis collapses to a temporary aberration between your ears. Let them buy cake! If only you, the consumer, would rouse yourself to spend more! (How many times have you heard that?)114
This has to be one major reason the neoliberals have emerged from the crisis triumphant.
4
Mumbo Jumble: The Underwhelming Response
of the Economics Profession to the Crisis
In the aftermath to the worst economic crisis of capitalism since the Great Depression, many people understandably have grown weary of accounts concerning recent forms of suffering visited upon various categories of the populace. Some disgruntlement can be attributed to the influence of the neoliberal theater of cruelty described in the last chapter, though one cannot altogether discount garden-variety disaster fatigue. More than four years out, what seems really to have captured the imagination of the general public are instead ripping sagas of those intrepid souls who managed to come through the crisis unscathed, impervious to the damage done all around them. One nice example is Michael Lewis’s The Big Short, which Amazon at one time listed as one of the top best-selling books on the crisis:1 therein he relates the stories of a bunch of misfits and contrarians who managed to make substantial fortunes by betting against the securities derivatives that everyone else had found so seductive in the run-up to 2007. If Lewis’s plucky Boys Behaving Badly could have bucked the headwinds so handily, then why not the rest of us?
I would like to explore a different, but similar saga of another band of brothers who appear to have emerged from the crisis unscathed, even though their behavior before and after the crisis was less than exemplary. This particular clan did not exactly get rich off the crisis, but contrary to all rational expectations, did not suffer from it, either. They appear to have evaded all responsibility for having fostered the conditions for the crisis to materialize, and subsequently have been upheld in much of the public press as solid repositories of wisdom, or at least prophets of prosperity. The group I scrutinize here is the contemporary orthodox, or “neoclassical,” economics profession. Although its intellectual center of gravity can be found in the U.S., the story I impart has turned out to be more or less global in scope and character. The economic orthodoxy is (still) strikingly intellectually homogeneous across Europe and the Americas, even though it now recruits from a much more diverse geographical catchment area. Neoclassical economists, having worked hard to convince the world that everything was hunky-dory circa 2005, and concurrently having invented the rationales and the theories behind the financial time bombs that went off across the landscape, don’t seem to have suffered one whit for the subsequent sequence of events, a slow-motion train wreck that one might reasonably have expected would have rubbished the credibility of lesser mortals. Individually and collectively, they have only become more dominant in academia and in government. No one among their number was fired for incompetence; no one was forced to endure status degradation ceremonies. Economists were not drummed out of their government posts. No departments of economics were closed as cost-saving measures. You have to hand it to the New York Times—their reporter sensed there would be no reprisals and no mass recantations among the elect as early as March 2009.2 Indeed, contrary to all initial expectations, neoliberal economists have only elevated their public profiles and consolidated their occupation of the glittering heights since 2007. The 2011 Bank of Sweden Prize bestowed upon Thomas Sargent and Christopher Sims was exemplary of this particular culture of effrontery, this hegira from all reckoning, a big middle finger brandished at anyone who dares disparage orthodox macroeconomics. This looks like the sort of invincibility that makes for really popular comic book heroes, or embattled dictators who pronounce from the parapet that “there is no alternative.”
But wait: escaping scot-free is not equivalent to having evaded all controversy and condescension along the way. The task in the next few chapters is to explore this tepidly tempestuous phenomenon within the contemporary economics profession: professing a fairly narrow set of doctrines with zero tolerance for heterodoxy before the crash, and then appearing clueless during the crash, they set upon one another with a barely restrained nastiness in the immediate aftermath. Once that grew old, instead of calling a truce and opening up their intellectual horizons by entertaining alternative accounts in reaction to events, they hastily reinstated the status quo ante and closed ranks after an interregnum, only to emerge with their positions and authority relatively unscathed.3 Granted, there have been one or two concessions to the squaminous mobs outside the gates, but they were so minor as to pass almost unnoticed. It has been a thrill ride worthy of a quick-tempo disaster movie (think Speed or Black Hawk Down), and topped only by the Houdini-esque escape of the bailed-out bankers.
Although it is usually a travesty to distinguish sharply between sociological and conceptual issues when seeking to comprehend a thought collective, for purposes of exposition we shall imperfectly divide our inquiry into issues of professional and personal behavior of the economics profession in this chapter, and postpone consideration of specific doctrinal claims that were made in the heat of the crisis to the next chapter. While generic denunciations of economists after the crisis are a dime a dozen, we shall break ranks to go out of our way here to name names, disclose affiliations, and recount statements that the protagonists may now wish they had never uttered. We shall scour their vitas and interrogate
their employers as well. It will not be unexpected that our rogues’ gallery will be built upon a subterranean connection between the Neoliberal Thought Collective and the economics profession.
Churls Gone Wild
Economists did not manage to comport themselves with much dignity during the crisis.4 Normally so quick off the mark to ferret out and expose irrationality in others, they have conspicuously been loathe to recognize a pandemic of bizarre behavior within their own ranks. One could evoke the untenable straddle of economists through the crisis by pointing to an incident that may also have occurred at a university near you, and juxtaposing it to some later developments. I have been informed of a (tenured) professor of economics at my own school, the University of Notre Dame, who, while teaching advanced macroeconomics in spring 2009, was importuned by some of his students to discuss the crisis that was then breaking out all around. After all, if you can’t examine and debate a current economic crisis in a macro class, then wherever should you expect to learn about it in a modern university? Yet the students were curtly informed that it wasn’t on the syllabus, and there was nothing about it in the assigned textbook, and the instructor therefore did not wish to diverge from the set lesson plan. And he didn’t.
Now, contrast this with our predicament in 2012. All around, from the most rabid Hayekian on the right to the polemical Joseph Stiglitz on the “legitimate left,” almost every economist enjoying a modest public profile now proclaims that the crisis clearly demonstrated that his own favorite economic theory was right after all, and consequently, there is no need to call for any thoroughgoing revisions to economics.5 More astounding, the public press and the blogosphere had taken to uncritically repeating this wisdom verbatim, but had begun to have second thoughts. In one high-profile case, the Queen of England felt impelled to query the economists at the LSE in November 2008 as to why no one in the profession had warned of the crisis. After a fluster of indecision, the economists at the British Academy wrote back to the monarch suggesting she was mistaken: they had been on top of events all along, although there may have been a wee failure of imagination.6 Or in another instance, when I attended the widely reported and lavishly appointed inaugural meeting of the Institute for “New” Economic Thinking, funded by George Soros, in Cambridge in April 2010, I was struck that (by my estimate) roughly 70 percent of all the presentations were devoted to the argument that existing neoclassical economics most emphatically need not be replaced, nor even much revised in dealing with the crisis. No one was caught unawares, they insisted; no one was forced to reconsider their commitments, to hear them tell it now. If this was New Thinking, one trembles to contemplate what Old Thinking had looked like.
Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste Page 21
