Observations
I wonder how many officials are employed to replicate what could be done much more efficiently (including more cheaply) and effectively by price mechanisms. I wonder how many are employed as a result of the employment of other officials to suppress price mechanisms.
There is something to class analysis, if only because folk in similar situations with similar beliefs will tend to react in similar ways. The problem with much class analysis (particularly of the Marxist variety) is that it not only turns tend to into will-as if members of classes are clockwork toys-it further postulates a unity of action and interest that rarely exists. Even in cases where the interests of individuals within a class are not in conflict, there is the normal difficulty of collective action that all share the benefits whether or not they go to any effort-a problem of coordination that applies to any social group. (If, however, coercive power to enforce such coordination is supplied-by a ruler, state or some other body-then joint action becomes much more likely.)
So class is something we should look to as one of the sources of patterns within human societies. But for much the same reasons as we might look to sex, language group, religion or any other commonality that affects our circumstances as sources of such patterns. Describing members of a class as acting together (as distinct from similarly) requires very clear evidence.
The term neoliberal is typically used by contemporary academics to signal their own ideological distance from the phenomenon being discussed. They thereby become committed to analysing economically liberal reforms in terms of pathology, for otherwise, what benefit is served by signalling their ideological distance from it? The term itself is a barrier to information and accurate analysis and produces work that is pathological in both senses.
The tendency to first analyse the group of societies that have produced the freest, most democratic, most prosperous, most long-lived inhabitants in human history in terms of pathology is itself pathological. An intellectual and scholarly pathology explicable in terms of mutually-reinforcing status claims. This does not, of course, mean that such societies are without social pathologies, merely that, even less than most human societies, such should not be the first assumption.
Humanities and most social science academics are the social group most insulated from the consequences of their ideas and most likely to fall into worship of their own moral good intentions, untrammelled by consideration of consequences. The result is that they are the group least likely to be a collective source of good sense about the world. But this is a point that Adam Smith (who referred to the well-endowed university as a sanctuary in which exploded systems and obsolete prejudices find shelter and protection after they have been hunted out of every corner of the world) and Edward Gibbon (Oxford dons sunk in port and prejudice) both expressed centuries ago.
There is something to class analysis, if only because folk in similar situations with similar beliefs will tend to react in similar ways. The problem with much class analysis (particularly of the Marxist variety) is that it not only turns tend to into will-as if members of classes are clockwork toys-it further postulates a unity of action and interest that rarely exists. Even in cases where the interests of individuals within a class are not in conflict, there is the normal difficulty of collective action that all share the benefits whether or not they go to any effort-a problem of coordination that applies to any social group. (If, however, coercive power to enforce such coordination is supplied-by a ruler, state or some other body-then joint action becomes much more likely.)
So class is something we should look to as one of the sources of patterns within human societies. But for much the same reasons as we might look to sex, language group, religion or any other commonality that affects our circumstances as sources of such patterns. Describing members of a class as acting together (as distinct from similarly) requires very clear evidence.
The term neoliberal is typically used by contemporary academics to signal their own ideological distance from the phenomenon being discussed. They thereby become committed to analysing economically liberal reforms in terms of pathology, for otherwise, what benefit is served by signalling their ideological distance from it? The term itself is a barrier to information and accurate analysis and produces work that is pathological in both senses.
The tendency to first analyse the group of societies that have produced the freest, most democratic, most prosperous, most long-lived inhabitants in human history in terms of pathology is itself pathological. An intellectual and scholarly pathology explicable in terms of mutually-reinforcing status claims. This does not, of course, mean that such societies are without social pathologies, merely that, even less than most human societies, such should not be the first assumption.
Humanities and most social science academics are the social group most insulated from the consequences of their ideas and most likely to fall into worship of their own moral good intentions, untrammelled by consideration of consequences. The result is that they are the group least likely to be a collective source of good sense about the world. But this is a point that Adam Smith (who referred to the well-endowed university as a sanctuary in which exploded systems and obsolete prejudices find shelter and protection after they have been hunted out of every corner of the world) and Edward Gibbon (Oxford dons sunk in port and prejudice) both expressed centuries ago.