THE
PUBLIC
SCHOOL
TELIC ARTS EXCHANGE

this class has been scheduled!

Is there a finalized reading list for this class?

I am excited about this class...though sadly i wont be able to attend the first gathering. Can someone possible record the conversation?
Vlad aka Luther Blisset...

Dear All:

Really looking forward to getting started on this material. Feels like the timing for this class is just right. After the Continental Drift last weekend, which contained a number of related conversations on precarity, finance capital, speculative economy, neoliberalism, and the excesses of privatization; February’s TPS seminar on Immaterial Labor, where Jason Smith led a very rigorous discussion about Autonomia, as well as outside events like Brian Holmes’ presentation on neoliberal subjectivity at UC, Riverside on March 3, there seems to be a number of ongoing threads that can be extended through this class to give it richness and complexity.

The idea for the class is this: the current financial crisis has broadened and intensified an analysis of neoliberal economics as it has been and continues to be critiqued from the left. But these analyses are usually founded upon the refrain of positions taken up in secondary sources without any direct reference to the primary source material that helped establish and legitimize the economic logic itself. Many of us on the left--I include myself here--are quick to engage in a critique of neoliberalism without a deeper understanding of what that word actually means in its own native sense. Thus “Neoliberalism” often vaguely stands for anything that generally seems bad about our contemporary political, economic, and cultural situation; this tends to dilute the force of the critiques behind it. With this in mind, one might say that the objective of this class is to know your enemy, to work through some of the key primary texts and discuss the generative historical context of the development of neoliberalism by carefully attending to the writings of the Chicago School, a group that was instrumental in shaping the implementation of the economic doctrine in global economic and social policy ca. 1980.

I still think we should continue to read some secondary sources to fill in the critical analysis side of things, and this brings me to the other piece of fortuitous timing of the class. It so happens that the scheduling for this class falls on the exact same dates as Foucault’s weekly lectures on American neoliberlaism 31 years ago and which can now be read in English with the recent translation of The Birth of Biopolitics. Whether written in the stars or simply a serendipitous accident, it seems a perfect time to revisit Foucault’s lectures over the next three weeks, getting his read on neoliberalism in its incipient form.

So the reading for this first class on March 14 will be the following:

Michel Foucalut, The Birth of Biopolitics, pp. 215-237. (March 14th lecture)
Gary Becker, Human Capital, pp. 1-11.
Gary Becker, The Economic Approach to Human Behavior, Part 1, pp. 3-14

Next week we will read more Foucault along Hayek, Friedman, and possibly some more Becker and/or Andre Gunder Frank and perhaps something about the fascinating cultural history of the Chicago School in Chile. But this is all up for discussion.

All readings are on aaaarg of course.

Best,

Ken

Hi everyone,

Quick reminder that the clocks changed last night! See you all soon.

Hi Everybody,

Great start on Sunday. Really excited about the direction of the conversation.

It it seems that one of the main threads we thought it would be useful to follow into this Sunday's session would be the Chicago School's implementation of a new political philosophy of freedom and the free individual. Thus it makes perfect sense that along with the next Foucault lecture (March 21) the other primary readings for this week should be the three Friedman essays:

"The Power of the Market"
"The Relation between Economic Freedom and Political Freedom"
"The Role of Government in a Free Society"

and the one Hayek essay:

"The Use of Knowledge in Society"

Think it will be interesting to move from Becker, the technocrat, to Friedman and Hayek, the ideologues. That should be more than enough to cover in the next session, but I also posted two T.W. Shultz essays that we talked about reading, one on Human Capital and one on Disequilibria, which I mentioned during class. Jason you were particularly interested in reading some Shultz, so would you want to look over those and maybe recommend which might be better to supplement the Friedman and Hayek?? I'll do the same, so maybe you and I can post our thoughts by the end of the week.

The two Shultz essays are:
"Investment in Human Capital"
"The Value of the Ability to Deal with Disequilibria"

We also discussed a number of optional sources that might be worth looking at if you get a chance.

The Adam Curtis Documentary "The Trap" is an excellent expose neoliberal construct of Freedom.
You can find all three parts on my vodpod collection for the class:
http://vodpod.com/dinermode/neoliberalism
(you'll also find an interesting television interview with Milton Friedman in that collection).

If you watch Curtis--or even if you don't--I highly recommend a seminal essay of political philosophy on the concept of freedom by Isaiah Berlin, "The Two Concepts of Liberty."

Other suggestions for next week that came up:

The earlier lectures on German neo-liberalism (Feb 7 and 14)
David Harvey "A Brief History of Neoliberalism"
Harvey "From Fordism to Flexible Accumulation"
Naomi Klein "The Shock Doctrine"
Brian Holmes "Is it Written in the stars" (on Black-Shoals and disequilibria)
http://brianholmes.wordpress.com/2009/11/06/is-it-written-in-the-stars/
Brian Holmes' talk at UC, Riverside "Neoliberal Appetites"
http://brianholmes.wordpress.com/2010/03/03/neoliberal-appetites/

Take a look at any of that that piques your interest, but the core texts will be the Foucault (March 21), the Friedman, and the Hayek.

All on aaaarg of course, unless link is given above.

Looking forward to next week! --Ken

I'm paraphrasing but Ken asked about pioneers of cybernetics writing any sort of critiques of on the field. I posted an essay by Norbert Wiener I think is relevant to this question.

http://a.aaaarg.org/text/11149/men-machines-and-world-about

It starts out as a history of the field but the last two pages are especially critical.

Sorry to post again but did we decide on a time for this Sunday's class?

don't know about the time yet. the other class is going to try and push back their time so we can stay at the noon slot.

will keep everyone posted.

Hi Ken, hi everyone:

Really enjoyed last Sunday.

Ken, I would love to check out some of the Schultz texts. I don't think they are posted yet, though? could be my incompetence in searching.

That said, if we have the Foucault and the Friedman and Hayek, plates could be full. Maybe I could try to read one of these Schultz texts and summarize in two minutes? Like homework...

Also, I would love to get a better handle on the idea of "productive consumption" as Becker had it, which would include activities as seemingly unproductive as "sleep" and "relaxation."

But, yeah, let's read the ideologues and junta advisors.

Cheers,
JS/Clootz

hi everyone,

class will be held at the previously scheduled time of noon.

see you all sunday.

-c

Hi All,

Solomon, thanks for the Wiener post.

Jason, I doubled checked and the two Shultz articles are, in fact, posted. Let me know if you have a problem accessing them. Yeah, I think we do have a full plate for Sun; I was only suggesting that you glance at them to see what might be worth reading down the line. I am at UCLA special collections right now trying to get ahold of Andre Gunder Frank's critique of Neoliberal economic genocide in Chile. I'll try to access and post as a PDF before our meeting on the 28th. Think it could make for an interesting read.

Productive consumption is a also a very interesting thread, I'll see what I can dig up on that.

--Ken

Hi Ken,
I just found the Schultz texts. Will read the one from 1961, cited explicitly in the Becker, as starting point. Let's see if it's readable.
--Jason

Hi Everybody,

Another thoughtful class. I've decided to focus on the Valdes, and then try to focus on the Andre Gunder Frank response if I can access it in time. I'm having trouble uploading the whole text at the moment because of the file size and so far have only posted the introduction on Aaaarg.org. But will work on resizing the rest so that you can have the other 3 chapters by tomorrow. Will update you soon on that status, for now you can at least get started on the intro.

More soon,

Ken

Hey All:

Okay, all the reading has now been posted to aaaarg for this week. I looked over André Gunder Frank's letters to Arnold Harberger and Milton Friedman and they are amazing documents, which I think will enrich the discussion next week, so let's add those to the list along with the intro and first three chapters of Valdes' Pinochet's Economists. And of course the March 28 Foucault lecture will also be fore next week. A few more pages than last week, but reading that will move faster, I think.

For additional background reading, I've also added Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine to the aaaarg list, the appropriate sections of Chile of course.

See you on Sun,

Ken

Hello Ken, everyone -

This is a great class, brilliant resources, I am inspired and impressed to see such work going on. It would be nice to hear a recording of the session, but I understand that may not be desirable for those actually doing it!

For the pursuit of the topic, what seems most important is the so-called "public choice theory" of Buchanan and Tullock. I was first alerted to it in one of Curtis's films (must be The Trap) and I still haven't read the primary texts. It has spawned a veritably galaxy of technical literature, because it offers a calculus for itemizing the return on investment in public services. It claims in particular to show when "rent seeking" is going on, ie private appropriation of public funds - and that extremely strong argument has been wielded very extensively to get rid of welfare-state programs. The question of how to invest in society as a whole, and even more, how to argue that investing in the health, education and well-being of certain groups redounds to the benefit of society as a whole, has really been knocked out of the water by public choice theory.

It turns out that most of Buchanan's work is available online. The two key books seem to be these:

The Calculus of Consent (w/Tullock)
http://www.econlib.org/library/Buchanan/buchCv3.html

The Demand and Supply of Public Goods
http://www.econlib.org/library/Buchanan/buchCv5.html

Have a good class this Sunday and let us know what your conclusions were!

best, Brian

I found an interesting editorial from the wall street journal last month about Chile.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870341130457509357203266541...

"Milton Friedman has been dead for more than three years. But his spirit was surely hovering protectively over Chile in the early morning hours of Saturday. Thanks largely to him, the country has endured a tragedy that elsewhere would have been an apocalypse."