Brad DeLong's Egregious Moderation

Silby on Ian Ayres: "What Is Happening Is Fine Because If Something Very Different Were Happening That Something Would Be Good"

Insert Economist Joke Here: So much wrong in such a short paragraph:

Students at University of California schools have been protesting the decision of the Board of Regents “to raise undergraduate fees — the equivalent of tuition — 32 percent next fall.” But higher tuition, if it is accompanied with higher financial aid for lower- and middle-income students, improves equity

This, the start of a longer article by Ian Ayres at the Freakonomics blog of the New York Times, continues the argument about equity and tuition to reach triumphantly the conclusion that “By increasing the effective tuition for some of our wealthier students, we might be able to reduce the price for some of the less wealthy.” In other words, the tuition raise could be a good thing.

Reading it, I boggled. It’s a particular kind of context-and-responsibility-free analysis, shorn of everything except the preconceptions and assumptions of a particular discipline, that actively reduces the quality of the debate by giving one position the cover of a seemingly scholarly analysis. Is it likely that California, in the midst of a massively catastrophic fiscal situation, with a horrendously dysfunctional state government, will raise the amount of financial aid for state students? Or that the federal government, also facing serious fiscal issues and with a certain level of dysfunction of its own, will step into that absence?

Really?

So essentially, the argument is that the tuition raise might be a good thing if this almost certainly impossible thing happens along with it. That’s not reasoning, that’s “and a pony” logic.

That’s not even considering the myriad other problems with the argument. Is it possible that there could be other definitions of equity rather than economic that a university might be seeking with low up-front tuition? Is it possible that the lower-income students might be thrown off by the intimidation factor of high up-front price and simply not apply at all? Is it possible that having high tuitions at the state colleges in California will further erode the sense of ownership that Californians have in their state system and lead to a continuing spiral of budget cuts and tuition increases? I don’t know, but I rather suspect that all of those issues are worth considering.

Also worth considering is the idea that those who are public voices simply because of their reputation for acuity would do well to live up to that reputation.

I wish for that, and a pony.

Daniel Larison: The Serious People And The Fringe

Eunomia » The Serious People And The Fringe: [I]t is somewhat misleading to refer to Palin as being on the “lunatic fringe.” Lunatic? Maybe. But whatever else her views are, they are definitely not on the fringe. In practice, as Scoblete notes, it is the advocates of a settlement freeze who are on the margins and the supporters of continued settlement in the territories who actually make policy. This is the way it has been for decades. Of course Palin’s statements on the subject are formulaic and betray her ignorance of the “basic nuances of the conflict.” First of all, she is repeating what her advisors and allies have told her to say about these things, and she is keeping her lines as simple as possible. What matters to her hawkish allies and her loyal followers is not whether she understands the issue. For these people, understanding and nuance are obstacles to be overcome. What matters is whether she adopts the correct pose. In this case, she has to strike the pose of being unflinchingly, reflexively supportive of Israel, and so she takes a maximalist position that secures her reputation as reliably “pro-Israel.” It makes no difference if the maximalist position she takes is actually worse for Israel in the long term. She has established the appearance of respecting Israel’s “rights” to do whatever it wants in contrast to an administration that her backers believe has been “bullying” Israel.

As a matter of internal Republican Party and movement politics, what Hounshell describes as lunacy is the consensus view on the right. This is why Huckabee’s earlier dabbling with neo-transferism isn’t the least bit surprising. We should also be a bit wary of invoking the authority of “serious people.” I think it is true that informed people understand why continued expansion of settlements is detrimental to the long-term interests of all parties, but after the last decade of terrible foreign policy guidance by self-proclaimed “serious people” there is hardly anything more damning one can say about something than to say that “serious people” embrace it.

There is a problem in hiding behind policy consensus and dismissing those outside it as an irrelevant fringe, and this is that the consensus gets important things wrong with remarkable frequency. Hawkish interventionists were able to create the (false) impression that 9/11 happened because America was too wedded to geopolitical stability and was too willing to tolerate authoritarian governments in the Near East, and then the lazy establishment consensus allowed itself to be dragged along with them to support an unnecessary and disastrous war. Establishment consensus views on Iraq and its weapon programs were wrong; consensus support for the bombardment of Lebanon and the Gaza operation was also wrong; the “serious” bipartisan consensus in favor of NATO expansion has been disastrously wrong. The trouble with Palin’s views on settlements and Israel-Palestine is not that they are on the fringe, but that they are as deeply misinformed about political realities in the region as so many of the consensus views mentioned above. As with all of those, it is the ill-informed and ideologically-driven position that prevails when it comes to policy decisions.

Isaac Chotiner: Palin And Huckabee Will Never Be Serious

Palin And Huckabee Will Never Be Serious: Ross Douthat's column in today's New York Times makes the perfectly sensible point that Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee have decided to use their fame to become bigger celebrities, rather than more policy-oriented, serious public figures. Huckabee hosts a (perversely enjoyable) television show on Fox News, and Palin has a new book out (or so I've heard). Douthat writes:

For Palin, the serious path required at least serving out her term as governor before returning to the national stage. For Huckabee, it could have involved anything from starting a think tank to running for the Senate in 2010. For both, it would have meant wedding their political identity to ideas as well as attitudes.So far, they’ve chosen celebrity instead.... But they were the wrong moves if either wanted to become president someday. Huckabee’s gabfest is a weekly reaffirmation of the rap that he’s too lightweight for the Oval Office. Palin has sealed her identity as a culture-war lightning rod: she can inspire hysteria from liberals (ably catalogued in Matthew Continetti’s “Persecution of Sarah Palin”) and adulation from conservatives (visible at every stop along her book tour), but she’s unlikely to persuade anyone in the middle to trust her with the reins of government.

Douthat then contrasts them to Obama, who did not allow his celebrity status to get in the way of his wonkishness and seriousness.

The first problem with this argument is that, er, Palin is unlikely to become a policy wonk because she is not very smart. What's more, Douthat's argument is tautological. Sure, it would be nice for the GOP if Palin and Huckabee were interested in policy. But if they were interested in policy, then they would not be so appealing to the GOP base. In other words, the problem is that a large part of the right has no interest in a policy wonk, and sneers at intellectuals and elites and the types of people Douthat would like to see running the party. A candidate who was interested in learning the ins and outs of the welfare state and health care policy is unlikely to ever achieve Palin/Huckabee levels of popularity with the grassroots. 

Matt Taibbi: Yes, Sarah, There is a Media Conspiracy

Yes, Sarah, There is a Media Conspiracy: The press corps that is bashing her skull in right now is the same one that hyped that WMD horseshit for like four solid years and pom-pommed America to war with Iraq over the screeching objections of the entire planet. It’s the same press corps that rolled out the red carpet for someone very nearly as abjectly stupid as Sarah Palin to win not one but two terms in the White House. If there was any kind of consensus support for Palin inside the beltway, the criticism of her, bet on it, would be almost totally confined to chortling east coast smartasses like me and Glenn Greenwald and Andrew Sullivan.

What the people who are flipping out about the treatment of Palin should be asking themselves is what it means when it’s not just jerks like us but everybody piling on against Palin. For those of you who can’t connect the dots, I’ll tell you what it means. It means she’s been cut loose. It means that all five of the families have given the okay to this hit job, including even the mainstream Republican leaders. You teabaggers are in the process of being marginalized by your own ostensible party leaders in exactly the same way the anti-war crowd was abandoned by the Democratic party elders in the earlier part of this decade. Like the antiwar left, you have been deemed a threat to your own party’s “winnability.”

And do you know what that means? That means that just as the antiwar crowd spent years being painted by the national press as weepy, unpatriotic pussies whose enthusiastic support is toxic to any serious presidential aspirant, so too will all of you afternoon-radio ignoramuses who seem bent on spending the next three years kicking and screaming your way up the eternal asshole of white resentment now find yourself and your political champions painted as knee-jerk loonies whose rabid irrationality is undeserving of the political center. And yes, that’s me saying that, but I’ve always been saying that, not just about Palin but about George Bush and all your other moron-heroes.

What’s different now is who else is saying it. You had these people eating out of the palms of your hands (remember what it was like in the Dixie Chicks days?). Now they’re all drawing horns and Groucho mustaches on your heroes, and rapidly transitioning you from your previous political kingmaking role in the real world to a new role as a giant captive entertainment demographic that exists solely to be manipulated for ratings and ad revenue. What you should be asking yourself is why this is happening to you. Even I don’t know the answer to that question, but honestly, I don’t really care. All I know is that I find it extremely funny.

Matthew Yglesias: The Celebrity Party

Matthew Yglesias: The Celebrity Party: Ross Douthat observes that Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee emerged from the 2008 election as the two conservative figures with some charisma and enthusiastic followers, but “both had the same Achilles’ heel: They seemed unready for high office, and owed their appeal more to personality than to substance.”

This meant that both faced the same post-election choice. Did they want to take their newfound eminence seriously? Or did they want to cash in on their celebrity? For Palin, the serious path required at least serving out her term as governor before returning to the national stage. For Huckabee, it could have involved anything from starting a think tank to running for the Senate in 2010. For both, it would have meant wedding their political identity to ideas as well as attitudes.

I think this is all pretty much right. And as Douthat goes on to argue, there are a number of right-of-center policy wonks who’ve tried to articulate some kind of meaningful response to the nation’s problems, only to be ignored. But is he right that “there are substantial political rewards awaiting the politician who becomes the voice of an intellectually vigorous conservatism?” I’d like to think he is. But it also seems to me that going all the way back to the rise of George W. Bush in 1999 we’ve seen the conservative movement tending to fetishize stupidity and put forward the notion that there’s something actually un-American about being thoughtful, having respect for scholarship, or incorporating any kind of nuance into your discussion.

9/11 served to intensify this and for a while turned it into a mainstream attitude. The idea that the country was just kind of screwed to have a dim bulb in office amidst a national crisis was too much to handle, so instead The New York Times started running articles saying “many Democrats who once dismissed Mr. Bush as too naive and too dependent on advisers to steer the United States through an international crisis are now praising his and his advisers’ performance. Some are even privately expressing satisfaction that Mr. Gore, who tried to make his foreign affairs experience an issue in the campaign, did not win.” That moment has, fortunately, waned somewhat in the mainstream. But not, I think, in the conservative movement.

Ezra Klein on the Fundamental Unseriousness of John McCain

Ezra Klein: Sarah Palin's ghostwriter gets hold of John McCain's web site: The front page of John McCain's web site reads:

I remain committed to opposing any bill that puts your health care decisions in the hands of government bureaucrats while adding more than a trillion dollars to our country's deficit. Taxpayers simply cannot afford this government takeover of our health care system and this is our opportunity to put an end to it.

That's interesting, I guess, but what about the bill being considered by the Senate, which cuts $130 billion from our country's deficit and leaves health-care decisions exactly where they are now, wherever that might be?

Alan Blinder on Minor Initiatives to Show that the Government Cares About Unemployment

Alan Blinder: How Washington Can Create Jobs: I'd start with the Hippocratic oath: "First do no harm." A premature withdrawal of monetary and fiscal stimulus could pull the rug out from under the nascent recovery. Yes, the mammoth federal budget deficit is both appalling and unsustainable. But this is not the time to shrink it by raising taxes or cutting spending. Yes, the Federal Reserve must eventually "exit" from its hyper-expansionary monetary policy. But this is not the time to look for the door.

That said, "first do no harm" is not enough. What comes second?

Two big ideas for job creation are under active discussion: a tax credit for new jobs, and direct public-service employment. Were the unemployment rate at 5%, I would oppose both. The tax credit invites gaming, e.g., creating phantom jobs to grab the tax benefit; and we do not particularly want more people on the public payroll. But the unemployment rate is 10%. In deep recessions, sensible governments do things they would never do at full employment. So let's consider the merits and demerits of the two ideas.

Direct public-service employment is straightforward. As long as the new government jobs do not compete with the private sector, the net job creation should be one-for-one. So hire people to repair parks, not shopping malls. And if we restrict ourselves to low-wage jobs, the cost will not do grievous harm to the budget. For example, at an average all-in cost of $30,000 a year, one million new jobs would cost $30 billion.

What's the downside? Well, any public expenditure does add to the deficit at a time when the deficit is already huge. Furthermore, despite much rhetoric to the contrary, the U.S. remains a "small government" country, especially at the federal level. With total federal civilian employment around 1.4 million, it is inconceivable that the federal government could find sensible uses for a million new workers. So, realistically, most of the program must be funneled through the states.

What about a tax credit for new jobs? That option has two obvious advantages. Every new job would be in the private sector, where at least some would become permanent. And since it's a tax cut, it might garner some votes from Republicans, who will shriek "socialism" at public-sector employment.

How many new jobs could such a tax credit actually create? And what is the jobs bang for the taxpayer buck? The answers depend on many factors, but two stand out: the response of private-sector hiring to a lower after-tax wage (what economists call the "elasticity of labor demand"), and the degree to which businesses can successfully game the system.

Economic research gives us a pretty good handle on the former. In normal times, a 10% reduction in after-tax wage costs, which is a reasonable benchmark figure to contemplate (e.g., a $5,000 tax credit for a $50,000 job), should boost employment by roughly 4%. That would amount to about 5.5 million net new jobs, which sounds great.

But hold on. First, lots of jobs that would have been created even without the tax credit would receive the credit anyway. For those jobs, there is no bang, only bucks. Second, by increasing the demand for labor, the tax credit will drive up wages (which is nice), which will in turn kill some jobs (not nice). All things considered, reasonable estimates of the budgetary cost per job created are comparable to the cost of public service employment. (And both are much lower than the cost per job of the big stimulus package.)

Unfortunately, we know much less about gaming the system. That worries me. Apart from outright fraud, there are three major ways (and many minor ones) for firms to exaggerate the number of new jobs created in order to receive the tax credit.

One is to fire Peter and hire Paul. This problem can be fixed by awarding the tax credit only for net increases in headcount above, say, last year's base. A second gimmick is replacing one full-time worker by two half-time workers. That loophole can be plugged by applying the tax credit to total payroll costs, rather than to headcount. Both of those fixes should be made. But they will render the tax credit irrelevant to many firms that cut back their employment sharply during the recession.

And what about new firms, which have no "last-year's base"? Excluding them would make many of the economy's new jobs ineligible for the tax credit. But if we allow new firms to claim the credit, clever people will create new firms in droves—at least on paper. And that's the third big way to game the system: by turning the XYZ Company into the X Company, the Y Company, and the Z Company. Because of this concern, when Congress instituted a new jobs tax credit in 1977 it split the baby by giving new firms half the credit.

All this is a bit worrisome. Tax credits would require assiduous drafting (keep the lobbyists out of the room!) and extremely careful administration by the IRS. The more I dwell on these things, the better direct public-service employment sounds.

But as the jobless recovery drags on, two things have become clear: First, neither the tax credit nor public-service employment is a panacea. And second, with employment still declining and another massive stimulus package out of the question for budget and political reasons, we will probably have to choose one of these options soon.

Tyler Cowen: Let Them Come to Berlin

Marginal Revolution: Berlin memories: I first visited Berlin in 1985, while traveling with Randall Kroszner.  We drove to West Berlin by car and we were terrified for the few hours we were underway in East Germany.  Randy did not drive over the speed limit once.  I was hardly a communist sympathizer but still I was unprepared for the day trip to East Berlin.  I saw soldiers goose-stepping down one of the main streets.  In the stores old ladies yelled and swung their brooms at me.  Many buildings still had bullet marks or bomb damage from World War II.  In a restaurant we ate a rubber Wiener Schnitzel and shared a table with an East German family; they did not have enough trust in their government to speak a word to us.  I was unable to spend my mandatory thirty-mark conversion on anything useful; I carried back some Stendahl and Goethe but didn't want the Lenin.  This was in the capital city in the showcase of the communist world.   

My biggest impression was simply that I had never seen evil before.

In the summer of 1990 I stayed in a dorm in East Berlin.  Everyone seemed normal.  Cute girls smiled.  Yet there were few signs of modern German life as a Westerner might understand it; it was as if I had stepped into an alternative science fiction universe.  The Vietnamese ran the street markets and Russian still mattered.  

In 1999 I heard an emotional performance of Fidelio there and most of the audience cried.

I like spending time in Berlin.  But I am never sure I like Berlin itself, West or East.  Berlin is Germany being imperial.  Berlin is Germany looking toward the east.  Today Berlin is Germany pretending it is normal, while not yet having a new identity.  Here is Kurt Tucholsky (in German) on Berlin.  Here is a silly quotation about Berlin:

Berlin combines the culture of New York, the traffic system of Tokyo, the nature of Seattle, and the historical treasures of, well, Berlin.

Here is the Berlin Sony Center.  Here is the Reichstag.  Here is the Jewish Museum.  Here is Knut, from the Berlin Zoo.

Paul Krugman: Obama’s Trap

Obama’s trap - Paul Krugman Blog - NYTimes.com: Back in the first few months of the current administration, when I was writing piece after piece urging the new administration to adopt a more aggressive economic policy, what I had very much in my mind — and wrote about on a few occasions — was the possibility of a sort of political economy trap. If unemployment continued to rise, I feared, Congress wouldn’t draw the right conclusion — that we needed more stimulus. Instead, the verdict would be that Obama’s economic policies weren’t working, so we needed to do less. And high unemployment would also lead to Democratic electoral losses, further undermining the ability to act (since the fact is that today’s GOP is the party of economic ignorance). The result would be a persistently depressed economy, and a fading out of Obama’s promise.

I really, really wish I had been wrong about this — and for a while, as banks seemed to regain their footing and stocks went up, it looked as if the administration’s softly, softly policy might work out after all. But on the things that truly matter, above all jobs, reality has played out even worse than I feared. Today the unemployment rate passed 10%, a sort of brutal milestone.

The thing to do, I guess, is to keep making the case for doing more; in particular, we can hope that centrist Democrats will finally realize that timid economic policies are hurting their own electoral prospects. But it’s an uphill fight.

Who’s to blame? The buck stops with the president. But did his economic advisers make it clear to him that the proposed stimulus was way short of what the math suggested we needed, even given what was known in January? Or was Mr. Obama really led to believe that his stimulus proposal was as bold as he claimed it was?

I don’t know. But I’ve got a sick feeling about the whole situation.

Fred Halliday: What was communism?

What was communism? | open Democracy News Analysis: it is essential to look, without ambiguity, at the failure of communism, and not avoid the issue that too many retrospective analyses have avoided: the fact that its failure was necessary, not contingent. This system, denying political democracy and based on the command economy, did not just fail because of a false policy here or there, let alone because classical Marxist theory was abandoned. As even sympathisers like Rosa Luxemburg realised in 1917 itself, it was bound from the beginning to fail.  

It is common, and somewhat too easy, for defenders of Marxism in the contemporary world to argue that Marxist theory and communist practice were divergent, and that, hence, the theory bears no responsibility for the communist record. If by this question is meant whether another Marxism, a more liberal or "genuine" or "democratic" one, or, if you incline in the other direction, a more resolute, militant, disciplined one, could have prevented the collapse of the communist states then the answer is no.  

There were certainly, throughout its seventy-year history, choices for the Soviet system: the "new economic policy" (NEP) could have been continued after 1928, there could have been a different trajectory in the middle 1930s if Stalin not Kirov had been assassinated, or Nikolai Bukharin had become party leader; if Nikita Khrushchev had not been ousted in 1964; if economic reform, of a kind Mikhail Gorbachev was to attempt after 1985, might have begun twenty years earlier. And so on.

As for the final period, the Soviet system could certainly have continued for another generation, if another Soviet leader, a conservative like Grigory Romanov or Viktor Grishin, had come to power in March 1985 instead of Gorbachev. But, in the longer run, neither prevailing Communist Party of Soviet Union (CPSU) ideology, nor (in my view) any variant of the Marxist tradition remotely related to 1917, could have saved, let alone developed that regime. It had reached a dead end; but that aporia, although contingent in timing and form, was inevitable sooner or later.  

A force in its time

The revolutionary-socialist movement was not, however, some mistake, some aberrant illusion: it was at once a global movement of collective purposive action, across all continents, and a product of the structural tensions within the development of capitalism over the past two centuries. It is therefore pointless to begin a critique of it by seeing it as something that could, in its negative and positive features, have been avoided - or as, neo-liberal orthodoxy would claim, something that was just some historical illusion.

True, it had its illusions; but so does the capitalist ideology which posits that everyone can become a millionaire, the newly fashionable "well-being" fantasy that the process of ageing can be halted or reversed, or the irrational belief in divine beings, and afterlives, that much of humanity still espouses and, in many societies, east and west, tries to impose on others. Moreover, like these fantasies, socialism was also an inevitability, as much as the other features of the development of capitalist modernity - be they democratisation and scientific change, authoritarian capitalism, inter-state war, or colonialism.  

For that very reason, the revolutionary-socialist movement was, in its very illusions and delusions, itself a creature of its times, and of some of the chimeras that beset those times, not least a belief in a "science" of human evaluation and action. That there were, and to some extent, remain elements in the Marxist tradition that contributed not just to the revolutions, but to the particular, bloody and criminal, record of these regimes is especially the case with regard to four central elements of the communist programme:

• the authoritarian concept of the state
• the mechanistic idea of progress
• the myth of "revolution"
• the instrumental character of ethics.  

The four components

First, and as central to revolutionary Marxism as it is to the radical politics of the Islamic world, is the anti-democratic, Jacobin, theory of politics and of the "state": this, not the self-emancipation of the masses, or workers, or oppressed Muslims, is the core concept, indeed the core goal, of all modern revolutionary politics, secular or religious, from Lenin to Osama bin Laden.

Second, and equally central to modern revolutionary thought, is the supra-historical concept of "progress". Of course, it can, in certain ways, be defended: there has been progress in, for example, medical knowledge, or human wealth, or the development of capitalist democracy. This does not mean, however, that there is a destination of history, an "end" in the sense of a goal or telos, and of the kind implicit in most 19th-century thought. Even less does it imply that the pursuit of such a telos guides, or legitimates, political action and, in some cases, more than a few, the killing of people for being "reactionary".  

Third, and closely related to the myth of "progress" was the dangerous myth of revolution; not just "revolution", as a historical moment of transition, and a means of making the transition from one historical epoch to the other, but Revolution, indeed "The Revolution", as a historical myth, a cataclysm that was both inevitable and necessarily emancipatory.

Part of the rethinking of the socialist tradition has to be a re-evaluation of this myth, one almost as powerful and for sure as destructive in modern times as that of "nation". As with nations it is possible to make a distinction between what one may term "actually existing revolutions" (Russia, 1917, China, 1949, Cuba 1959, Iran 1979...) and the broader, ideological, myth: this latter myth, included within which was the idea of the 'irreversibility' of socialist revolutions, was shattered in 1989-91.  

The related myth, that somehow "Revolution" in the mythic sense remained possible within developed capitalism, was disproved long ago, arguably by the failure of the German revolution in the early 1920s, in my view in the failure of revolutions of 1848. What Marx termed "the sixth great power", in contrast to the five powers that dominated 19th-century Europe, became more and more confined to the semi-peripheral world. Yet the reality of revolutions as historical moments - inevitable and voluntaristic, emancipatory and coercive - is central to the history of the modern world. Not only did these revolutions transform the countries in which they occurred, but, by forcing the dominant classes in the counter-revolutionary states to reform, they in considerable measure transformed capitalism as well.

Fourth, underpinning these three ideas - "state", "progress", "revolution" - lay a key component of this legacy: the lack of an independently articulated ethical dimension. True, there was a supposedly ethical dimension - whatever made for progress, crudely defined as winning power for a party leadership, and gaining power for a, mythified, working class - was defended.

However, the greatest failure of socialism over its 200 years, especially in its Bolshevik form, was the lack of an ethical dimension in regard to the rights of individuals and citizens in general, indeed in regard to all who were not part of the revolutionary elite, and the lack of any articulated and justifiable criteria applicable to the uses, legitimate and illegitimate, of violence and state coercion. That many of those who continue to uphold revolutionary-socialist ideals, and the potential of Marxist theory, today appear not to have noticed this, that they indeed reject, when not scorn, the concept of "rights", is an index of how little they have learned, or have noticed the sufferings of others.  

History's verdict

Communism failed and was, given its internal weaknesses as well as the vitality of its opponents, bound to do so. However, it should not be forgotten that this attempt to escape the conventional path of capitalist development was for a time remarkably successful, not least in the ideological and military challenge it posed to the west but was in the end forced to capitulate, and to do so almost without a semblance of resistance. If nothing else, the communist collapse deserves careful study from the perspective of those who believe in elite-led or state-dictated social and economic development. This is certainly one "lesson" of communism. 

There is, however, another aspect of communism, of equal importance, that is too easily overlooked in triumphalist post-1989 accounts in the west. Communism was, as much as liberalism, itself a product of modernity, of the intellectual and social changes following on from the industrial revolution and of the injustices and brutalities associated with it - in the industrial revolution, whose early impact on the city of Manchester was described by Friedrich Engels so vividly in 1844, in the cycles of boom and slump that culminated in the 1930s, and in the violence of colonial occupation, exploitation and war. If Engels were to return today, to the shanty-towns of most Asian, African and Latin American cities, and not a few cities in the developed world, he would not be so surprised.