THE SALUTARY FASCIST INTERLUDE:

What’s the Matter with Chile? : A review of The Chile Project: The Story of the Chicago Boys and the Downfall of Neoliberalism by Sebastian Edwards (Geoff Shullenberger, Winter 2023, American Affairs)

The Left, in Chile and abroad, has been blindsided by recent events, as evidenced by its inability to make sense of the failure of the new consti­tution, much less the rise of Kast. For its part, the surging Chilean Right, which now openly harkens back to the Pinochet era as a political ideal, has little to say about why so much of the public took to the streets in 2019 or why nearly 80 percent rejected the old constitution in the 2020 plebiscite. A more sober and insightful response to these questions comes from the Chilean economist Sebastian Edwards, who teaches at UCLA. His new book, The Chile Project: The Story of the Chicago Boys and the Downfall of Neoliberalism, was written to make sense of the 2019 estallido social and the subsequent ascent of Boric. But he takes the long view, returning to the economic policies of the Allende administration, then documenting in painstaking detail the controversial reforms of the “Chicago Boys”—the University of Chicago–trained economists who devised the neoliberal model imposed under Pinochet—and the modifications of this program after the return of democracy.

Edwards’s central aim is to account for what he calls the “Chile paradox.” “By 2015,” he writes, “Chile was the indisputable economic leader of Latin America.” How is it, then, that the country with “the highest income per capita, the lowest incidence of poverty, and the best overall social indicators” in the region witnessed a massive revolt on material grounds, the leaders of which demanded a total overhaul of the economic system? The answer cannot simply be that other modes of social well-being were sacrificed to the neoliberal ideal of growth at all costs. This was largely true in the period the neoliberal model was initially imposed under Pinochet, but most of the period of sustained growth was overseen by social democratic leaders who were deeply concerned with avoiding this exact pitfall, and governed accordingly. At the same time, given the coalescence of four-fifths of the public around scrapping the constitution, the revolt can’t be dismissed as ideological confusion or a fit of pique. Clearly something was and is deeply amiss in this apparently successful nation; the willingness of voters to support candidates nostalgic for the dictatorship is as conspicuous a symptom of this as was the earlier left-wing revolt.

In various ways, Edwards is uniquely well-positioned to interpret the history he sets out to chart. He is a member of one of the most illustrious old-money families in Chile. His forebears include the publishers of Santiago’s premier newspaper, El Mercurio, and the literary figures Joaquín Edwards Bello and Jorge Edwards. The latter served as Allende’s ambassador to Cuba, even as other members of the family were among those lobbying the U.S. government to assist in Allende’s overthrow. Sebastian, like Jorge, was evidently something of a black sheep in his largely conservative family. As he recounts, he studied economics at the Universidad de Chile, the more left-leaning of the country’s two most prestigious universities, supported the Socialist Party, and even took a job in Allende’s government while still a student. “After the coup d’état,” Edwards recounts, “our school was closed because, according to the military, it was a ‘nest of communist rats.’” He managed to avoid the misfortunes that befell other student activists after the coup—perhaps due to family connections—and transferred to the Universidad Católica, the more conservative of the two major universities. It was a fateful change of scene.

Starting in the 1950s, as Edwards explains, the Católica’s economics department had become the hub of an academic exchange with the University of Chicago. The program got its start from U.S. government efforts to fight the influence of communism abroad by instilling market-friendly views in economists in training. This was the birthplace of the “Chicago Boys.” Talented Católica economics students were given the opportunity to pursue further study at Chicago, the seat of Milton Friedman and Friedrich von Hayek. When Edwards joined the depart­ment in 1974, the Chicago Boys hadn’t made their name yet; on the contrary, they had toiled in relative obscurity for two decades, with free market ideals generally unpopular in an intellectual panorama still domi­nated by other paradigms. This situation in Chile reflected that in much of the world during the three decades after the Second World War, when Keynesianism was mostly uncontested.

Just a year before the coup in Chile, Friedman famously stated: “Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.” Left-wing intellectuals like David Harvey and Naomi Klein have often accounted for the triumph of neoliberalism in the 1970s by quoting Friedman’s words as an illustration of the movement’s playbook—the “shock doctrine,” as Klein called it. They have taken post-coup Chile as ground zero for the approach Friedman seemed to be advocating. In their simplest version, such accounts can take on a Manichaean, conspiratorial quality. Edwards, who through his deep connections to Católica and Chicago is well-acquainted with most of the people involved in Chile’s neoliberal reforms, offers a counterpoint to such narratives. His personal loyalties do not make him reticent to criticize the Chicago Boys’ policies or their complicity with the dicta­torship. Nonetheless, he argues that Chile’s neoliberalization was a far more contingent and internally conflicted process than is often understood.

Edwards’s qualified defense of the Chicago Boys begins with his highly critical account of Allende’s economic policies. Defenders of Allende tend to attribute the serious economic woes of his government to external meddling by the United States and internal sabotage by right‑wing elements. Without denying these were factors, Edwards argues that Allende’s policies failed for foreseeable reasons. Initially, the socialist government succeeded in its goal of increasing aggregate de­mand through government spending—a standard Keynesian aim, pur­sued in a particularly radical fashion. But the longer-term result was to cause inflation to surge to over 700 percent in the year prior to the coup. “What the Allende government engaged in,” Edwards writes, “decades before it got its name, were policies very similar to those touted by the supporters of Modern Monetary Theory”: in effect, print lots of money and pretend inflation isn’t a thing.

Edwards also offers an inside view of the Allende regime’s haphazard attempts to deal with the fallout through what he calls a “surrealistic system of price controls.” As a nineteen-year-old student, he was re­cruited to work in the government Directory of Industry and Commerce, which had the power to authorize or refuse requests for price increases from industry. With inflation rendering authorized prices almost instantly outdated, producers had to constantly submit new price requests, which were “promptly denied.” As Edwards remarks, “Any first year student would have predicted the results of this viciously circular process: massive shortages and a thriving black market for all sorts of goods.” The government responded by cracking down harshly on the black market, shutting down stores that failed to comply with official prices and confiscating their goods. These heavy-handed tactics became a drag on the government’s popularity.

It was in response to these mounting problems that some in Allende’s government began developing the secret project known as Cybersyn, which has recently become the subject of considerable scholarly and popular interest. Guided by the English management consultant Stafford Beer, Cybersyn was supposed to use cutting-edge cybernetic theory and the latest technologies—the telex and the computer—to determine the correct prices of every good in the country. The project has become attractive to those on the left today who imagine that new communication technologies might be used to develop a more intelligently managed economy than was viable in earlier socialist projects. But Edwards is dismissive of the oft-floated idea that Cybersyn could have remedied Chile’s deep economic woes if given more time. He recalls a meeting he attended, at which Beer was present, in which the impracticality of the project seemed evident even to the consultant on whose ideas it was based.

In other words, whatever errors the Chicago Boys themselves made once they had the opportunity to reshape Chile’s economy, Edwards is clear that they were right to believe that the path taken by Allende’s government could only lead to disaster.

Francis Spufford’s Red Plenty is an amusing look at why cybernetics is so unworkable.

NO ONE HAS IT HARDER THAN THEIR FATHER DID:

The weird thing happening to Republicans in D.C. should scare Americans everywhere (Stephen Moore, Nov. 13th, 2023, Fox News)

A weird thing is happening politically in Washington. This new wing of the GOP is adopting the declinist rhetoric of Sen. Bernie Sanders, saying that middle-class America has fallen behind over the last 40 years, and that all the economic gains have gone to the richest Americans and big corporations.

Except this argument about the last 40 years — the greatest period of wealth creation and technological advance in world history — is flat-out false. Actually, it may be hard to appreciate given the last three depressing years of COVID, lockdowns and then Bidenomics, but the last 40 years have been a golden age of prosperity for virtually every income group — including the middle class. Median family income reached $78,000 in 2020, which is $20,000 a year higher than it was in 1983. That’s about a 35% after-inflation increase over the period.

Those income measures don’t include the much wider availability of more non-cash benefits — such as health care coverage, more vacation, and 401k and other retirement benefits — that make middle-class families almost 50% better off than in the late 1970s. They don’t take into account the cleaner air and water, the vast improvements in combating diseases such as cancer and heart disease, the superiority of the quality of products we buy today, and the fact that virtually all Americans now have a device in their pockets that puts the whole world and the entire Library of Congress at their fingertips — with access that is virtually free.

THE CAPACITY TO EXERCISE FREEDOM:

Does Money Make You Happy? The Latest Research Might Surprise You: Evidence that money does, in fact, buy happiness continues to surface (Emma Kerr and Jessica Walrack, 11/17/23, US News)

Another study released in January of 2022 and led by Jon M. Jachimowicz, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School, explored the many ways money can be used as a problem-solving tool that results in more overall happiness.

In the study, 522 participants with incomes ranging from less than $10,000 to more than $150,000 tracked daily events and emotional responses for 30 days in a diary. The results showed that although there was no significant difference in the frequency of stressful events experienced by participants across income levels, money reduced the intensity of the emotional response to those events.

And on the whole, researchers determined that people with higher incomes report greater levels of life satisfaction.

“It’s not that rich people don’t have problems,” Jachimowicz told Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge publication, “but having money allows you to fix problems and resolve them more quickly.” He explains that income increases a sense of control which can mitigate the intensity of distress and lead to greater life satisfaction.

“Money provides people with a sense of autonomy and freedom to live the life they want to live,” Killingsworth says.

“It’s not necessarily because they’re buying fancier cars and having nicer meals, though they may be, but a lot of what money is doing is allowing them to carry out their intentions and desires as agents in the world as opposed to being overly constrained by resources,” he adds.

Thus, UBI.

TRUMPISM IS PERONISM:

What does Javier Milei’s win in Argentina mean to America? (Juan P. Villasmil, November 20, 2023, The Spectator)

Argentina’s major ill is inflation, not a shrinking manufacturing base or tremendous levels of immigration. He emerges as an antidote to a unique illness.

The US media has fixated on his opposition to state-funded sexual education and his pro-life position, but in reality, Milei’s election cannot be wholly understood through the lens of cultural preservation. He rose to prominence lambasting subsidies, taxes and tariffs. While a growing faction of the European and US right distances itself from the small-government-rocks consensus, Milei embraced it. He’s a self-described anarcho-capitalist who became a star for deriding statism. He’s more Ronald Reagan than Viktor Orbán, more Milton Friedman than Pat Buchanan.

For these reasons, it’s somewhat comical that many of the “let’s use state power to punish our enemies” folks in the US have celebrated Milei’s rise as if he were one of them.

THE rIGHT IS THE lEFT:

How a 1950s new left manifesto explains the 2020s new right (Jason Willick, September 5, 2022, Washington Post)

There are clear parallels between today’s populist right and the new left movement that exploded in the 1960s and 1970s.

C. Wright Mills, a sociologist at Columbia University, was that movement’s intellectual godfather. Consider a passage from his 1956 bestseller, “The Power Elite,” a polemical attack on the structure of America’s institutions that would inspire a generation of new left activists:

“[The power elite] are in command of the major hierarchies and organizations of modern society. They rule the big corporations. They run the machinery of the state and claim its prerogatives. They direct the military establishment. They occupy the strategic command posts of the social structure, in which are now centered the effective means of the power and the wealth and the celebrity which they enjoy.”

Today, that passage could easily appear in a populist-right publication such as the Claremont Institute’s the American Mind, which denounces the liberal “regime.” If uttered on Fox News or Newsmax, it might be condemned as an example of conspiracism or misinformation that sows discord and undermines confidence in institutions.

Mills, who died in 1962, didn’t use the term “deep state,” but an unaccountable bureaucracy was a major concern of the new left philosopher. “It is in the executive chambers, and in the agencies and authorities and commissions and departments that stretch out beneath them” where much policy is made, he argued, “rather than in the open arena of politics.”

Those making decisions were not chosen by ordinary voters: “Once, most of the men who reached the political top got there because people elected them up the hierarchy of offices,” Mills observed. “But of late, in a more administrative age, men become big politically because small groups of men, themselves elected, appoint them.”

When the rest of society rejects your politics it’s always convenient to have a conspiracy to latch on to.

THE DUDE ABIDES:

The World Spins On: “The Value of Herman Melville” (Daniel Ross Goodman, November 13th, 2023, Imaginative Conservative)

The quest to write the Great American Novel has long been the American literary equivalent of the mythical and historical quest for the Holy Grail. Writers ranging from Mark Twain to John Updike to many in between (Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, Roth, Morrison) have all staked their claim to this elusive prize. Among the perennial roster of contenders for this legendary status, there is a strong case to be made for Moby-Dick. No other novel captures the massive scale of monomaniacal ambition—and the all-too-frequent futility and frustration with which our ambitions ultimately meet—than Melville’s masterpiece about futility and frustration. The hunt for the elusive, uncatchable great White Whale is as American as the pursuit of fame, wealth, and happiness—goals which we will probably never achieve, but which something about our indomitable American idealism never allows us to desist from pursuing. But if the never-ending pursuit of the great white whales of fame, wealth, and happiness is particularly American, so is the multiethnic, multiracial, and multinational nature of the cosmopolitan crew of the Pequod. And so is the camaraderie and close male friendship of Queequeg and Ishmael. And so too is the perennial hopefulness symbolized by Ishmael’s having survived the wreckage of the Pequod and being rescued by the providential arrival of the Rachel. Melville’s great fictional anti-hero Ahab may fail in his pursuit of his Holy Grail, but Melville himself may have ultimately—albeit twenty-five years after his death—succeeded in the pursuit of his: the writing of, if not the Great American novel, at the very least the creation of the King Lear of American literature: our existentially bleak, yet preternaturally hopeful, grand American masterwork. As Dr. Sanborn, regarding the meaning of Moby-Dick, so powerfully puts it, even though “the ongoingness of the world can seem terrifying in its stolidity, its unresponsiveness to human concerns,” Ishmael survives. “The whale swims away. The world—which is, as it turns out, capable of bearing our psychic investments in it—spins on.”

IT’LL NEVER FLY, ORVILLE:

Scientists 3D print a robotic hand with human-like bones and tendons (RUPENDRA BRAHAMBHATT, 11/18/2023, Ars Technica)

In a VCJ system, along with a 3D printer, there is a 3D laser scanner that visually inspects each layer for surface irregularities as it’s deposited. “This visual inspection makes the print process fully contactless, allowing for a wider range of possible polymers to be deposited. We, for example, printed with thiol-based polymers because it enabled us to create UV-light and humidity-resistant structures,” Katzschmann told Ars Technica.

After the scanning, there is no mechanical planarization of the deposited layer. Instead, the next layer is printed in such a way that it makes up for all the irregularities in the previous layer. “A feedback mechanism compensates for these irregularities when printing the next layer by calculating any necessary adjustments to the amount of material to be printed in real-time and with pinpoint accuracy,” said Wojciech Matusik, one of the study authors and a professor of computer science at MIT.

Moreover, the researchers claim that this closed-loop controlled system allows them to print the complete structure of a robot at once. “Our robotic hand can be printed in one go, no assembly is needed. This speeds up the engineering design process immensely—one can go directly from an idea to a functional and lasting prototype. You avoid expensive intermediate tooling and assembly,” Katzschmann added.

Using the VCJ technique, the researchers successfully printed a robotic hand that has internal structures similar to those of a human hand. Equipped with touch pads and pressure sensors, the robotic hand has 19 tendon-like structures (in humans, tendons are the fibrous connective tissues that connect bones and muscles) that allow it to move the wrist and fingers. The hand can sense touch, grab things, and stop fingers when they touch something. (The researchers used MRI data from a real human hand to model its construction.)

In addition to the hand, they also printed a robotic heart, a six-legged robot, and a metamaterial capable of absorbing vibrations in its surroundings.

THE ACTUAL METRIC SYSTEM:

Much as it galls the French, English has become Europe’s cultural lingua franca (Tomiwa Owolade, 18 Nov 2023, The Guardian)

In 1871, the German chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, crushed France and annexed the territory of Alsace-Lorraine after the Franco-Prussian war. More than a decade later, Bismarck hosted the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885, which carved up Africa into European colonies, and spoke to the other European delegates in French.

The role French played in the past as the lingua franca of Europe has been replaced today by English. If two Europeans meet each other in any part of the continent, and they don’t speak the same native language, they will probably speak to each other in English.

FREEDOM IS UNWORTHY OF MEN:

Gentlemen and Chivalry in the Age of Steel (SCOTT HOWARD, NOV 18, 2023, Freemen News-Letter)

Of all the great works of the Western literary canon, one that too often goes unknown or undiscussed is the Enseignements of Louis IX, a letter to his son. The letter modeled for his son what it meant to be a good Christian king in his time. The letter speaks of virtue and sacrifice. It implores the next king to be just to all his subjects and to remember that they are all brothers of his in the eyes of Christ. In short, the letter preaches the virtues of a good Christian statesman.

Though we live in an era where Christian monarchs are few and far between, the lessons of Saint Louis’ letter remain relevant. It is not merely a portrait of a good statesman. The letter describes, in part at least, what it means to be a good gentleman in the Western tradition. The virtues of the gentleman—to be just and kind to those around you and to strive to be a good man in the face of all challenges—are principles present throughout the Western canon. […]

I will leave off with another quote to ponder, this time from James Russell Lowell, related to the crisis of modern man:

“It is man who is sacred: it is his duties and opportunities, not his rights, that nowadays need reinforcing. It is honor, justice, culture that make liberty invaluable, else worse worthless if it means freedom to be base and brutal.”

-James Russell Lowell, Letter to Joel Benton, 1876

Reminding men of their duties and opportunities—reminding them that their liberty requires tempering—is the first step towards resurrecting the gentleman.

Liberty is a social virtue; freedom an anti-social vice.

AN ACTUAL REPUBLICAN:

Has Nikki Haley Figured Out What No Other Trump Foe Could? The Ron DeSantis theory turned out to be wrong. (David Freedlander, 11/18/23, New York)

For months, the DeSantis campaign has been telling donors and party leaders that the answer is no: Haley is a vestige of the pre-Trump party, one that is far more open to free trade, foreign intervention, and reducing the national debt than the MAGA-fied populists who now make up the base.

Sold!