More Stuff and Fewer People To Share It With

Here's a dynamic that I think shapes a lot of politics in the West right now, though I am going to focus on here in the UK. I think this dynamic arises from the interplay of two facts about widespread voter preferences, and then another fact about the world more broadly. I suspect this dynamic is basically perennial, and it has just become more salient to me because it appeared much more salient later on in my life - I came of age in the high-growth-and-expectations thereof world of Britain in the late 90s through the crash, which suppresses this dynamic to a considerable extent. But I can't prove that so will just focus on the present. Finally, more generally, I won't be able to prove any of these points here, but I will try and provide links to indicate the sort of stuff that makes me think as I do. Obviously in something as far reaching as this I am far from expert on any particular element, so if I am wrong mea culpa, but you will at least see why I think as I do.

Ok enough preamble, to the substance! The first fact is that a large section of the electorate are very motivated by the prospect of having more stuff -- sounds obvious, right? But let's be a bit more specific -- people in Britain perceive the level of poverty to be rising, here (and elsewhere) they are dissatisfied with inflation (see also section 3 here) and pessimistic about the country's prospects for growth, and in the UK especially (but not uniquely) all this is exacerbated by the the massive difficulty of finding housing somewhere you want to live.

So when I say "people want more stuff" I do not mean that, say, there is some budding proletariat consciousness in the UK wherein the people cry out for control over the means of production. Alas, no. Rather, I mean they simply want access to more goods. People want to be able to afford a decent place to live, and they don't like the idea that their country is going to become poorer. (Note that all of this is consistent with various levels of actual ability to consume; it's not straightforwardly about how rich or poor they themselves are now - though clearly that will be related.) So far as there is more to this than just consumer class consciousness, it's perhaps worth noting that people are also persistently unhappy about the level of wealth inequality and the differences in status and power they see as attending to that. Given that (just as was foretold) increasingly the only way to get ahead in the UK (and other places) is to inherit property, this is presumably a trend we will also see increase. But I think a picture I get from the various things I have seen in surveys of British public attitudes, is that while there are indeed concerns about inequality, on the whole what is most reflected in our collective political behaviour (and we may think about why it is that only certain sorts of concerns get uptake) relates to worries about cost of living.

Now, I have belaboured what I think is a fairly intuitive and obvious point just to stress how much what follows next should not be taken to be an obvious corollary of that, even though in fact they go together. Which is, second fact about voter preference: people also want to share the stuff with fewer people.

We see this in multiple spheres. For instance, it is once again a minority position to think immigrants will have a positive effect on the economy, even though when you ask people about specifics they become more nuanced (basing these claims on this). Hopping over to the US for a moment, we see that Trump acts on the basis of some supremely vague yet passionately held opinion that international trade represents giving away a bunch of your stuff and not getting equivalent value in return. Cutting foreign aid budgets is a go-to move of populist right wingers (along with cowards desperate to appease them) across the rich nations because, well, its popular. And it's likewise a perennially popular rhetorical move to distinguish "strivers" versus "scroungers" or "shirkers" who we need to cut off from access to our welfare state. More theoretically, I find insightful Eric Schliesser's analysis, according to which many voters took the lesson of the 2008 crisis and its aftermath to be that you need to have Your Guy in power to ensure that when it comes time to decide who has to take a hit, they'll ensure The Others are cut out rather than you.

Now, it is very important for understanding contemporary politics to realise that "fewer people to share with" is not randomly or evenly applied. It is not that we have a desire for some Thanosian randomisation - a snap disappears the unlucky, after which the remaining lottery winners may divide the spoils among themselves. No, some people are taken to be worthy of support, and others suspicious. Quite how that division is made will depend on your flavour of politics, but it is always a moralised and highly ideologically-laden choice. Nor are people fully consistent. Ask them about deporting immigrants on welfare and they're all for it, but when it turns out that means little old lady pensioners with a compelling human story behind them then suddenly you have ministers losing their jobs over the Windrush Scandal. So I think that while there is a persistent desire to ensure fewer people are sharing the more stuff we want, there is not a coherent and agreed-to-be-morally-defensible principle about how we choose who gets to enjoy the "more stuff" and who gets got rid of to ensure the "fewer people".

(As an aside, I am not claiming that these twin desires are all that move people politically. For instance, there is a small in terms of proportion of the public, but disproportionately impactful due to being well placed in the media, number of British political movers and shakers who are very very moved by anti-trans politics. I do not think this is best explained by being amalgamated into these trends. Even re more directly related issues - some concerns about migration are more to do with culture and ethnicity than any directly material matter, for instance. There's just more than one thing going on in national life at any given time.)

In fact, as I was writing up this blog post this Labour MP (Jonathan Hinder, MP for Pendle and Clitheroe) in some sense did me the favour of outlining an unusually stark and harsh version of the idea. Because on his slightly more grim vision we are actually going to have less stuff -- explicitly! So, for instance, he thinks we should have fewer universities handing out fewer degrees; and this point he accompanies with some nice posturing about how we in higher ed are a powerful lobby he's standing up to -- brave soul that he is. And, likewise, he says:

 “A lot of liberal commentators and academics will say we don’t have enough of [insert profession here] to build the houses we need – the need for which is partly due to huge immigration. So immigration needs to stay high so that we can have the people over to build those houses. It’s a circular, absurd argument.”

So when he's outlining the case for his own vision he says we'll have fewer schools, less education, and fewer houses! But of course, to compensate, the hope is that there will be so many fewer people to share it with that the remaining populace come out ok. I think a line in the article well captures the general idea, wherein Hinder remarks that there is “nothing economically left-wing” about high levels of immigration. Quite so - as long as one understands that what being desirably "left wing" amounts to here is securing proportionally more of the stuff for an appropriately reduced set of people.

So the dynamic that I think is driving present politics arises from the fact that you cannot have both of those things. The ways of having less people are also ways of having less stuff. And, contrary to Hinder's tacit degrowth ideology, nor is there any practical way of shrinking the population faster than you shrink the pie, so as to be left with more stuff to share among the rest of us. We don't have the infinity gauntlet. Nor does the mass cleansing violence fascists dream of actually deliver the outcomes they claim, even setting aside its moral horror. Hinder, of course, does not want a Thanos snap, and probably does not want anything so gauche as mass violence either, beyond the more normal routinised violence of anti-immigrant measures and border policing. But violence-lite shall not, in any case, deliver national prosperity. There is simply not actually a viable option for satisfying these public desires.

Migrants tend to be working age people who put in more than they take out. Trump's views on trade are simply inane and will make the whole world poorer. Attempts to means-test access to benefits are, just like even more onerous attempts to sort "shirkers from strivers", actually more expensive than universal welfare. And, more diffuse though it may be, if workers can be divided up by race or gender or cetera then so divided they can be conquered. Collective action gets the goods, lack of solidarity comes with a material cost. Some of those last might be putting a lefty spin on it, but I think most of these other points are in line with more centre-left liberal thought - e.g. while it's obviously a bit provocative in various ways, I take it that Matt Yglesias is getting at some similar things in his book One Billion Americans. 

Basically, I think that we can achieve stuff by working together, that the tendencies of our species-being are to engage in free and productive labour on the one hand and then to truck, barter and exchange on the other, all of which tends to general prosperity and the commonweal. There are lots of problems in how we arrange our productive activities, which result in problems in how the results thereof are distributed, but none of them change the basic fact that: we can do more when we work together, and the various attempts to ensure there are less people to share with really involve making there be less people we are cooperatively engaged with. The world can be positive sum, if we let it.

And the funny thing about the UK is that we have more or less locked ourselves into some of this. According to our government's fiscal rules the state's ability to borrow to invest is tied to how much the Office for Budget Responsibility forecasts we shall grow our economy. But the Office for Budget Responsibility consistently sees our projected economic growth as positively tied to our level of immigration (see e.g. Chart E here). So if you A ) think the UK would benefit from any state investment in things like infrastructure (or housing!) to invigorate our long-stagnating economy or improve our fraying social safety net, and B ) will not countenance raising taxes (perish the thought!) to fund aforementioned investment, then... welp. Our government binds itself by these fiscal rules while also promising to cut net migration while "kickstarting" growth, relying on the fact that most of the public don't realise it's talking out of both sides of its mouth!

In any case, I think this disastrous dynamic has diabolic and deleterious consequences. While this is not, I suppose, unique to our age, there is in any case now a huge political advantage in being willing to lie constantly. Voters want a combination they fundamentally cannot have. You can tell the public that your government will make them poorer but satisfy the demand for Fewer Undesirables, or you can tell the public that your government will make them richer but they have to play nice with foreigners. These are honest positions, and messages that a talented orator might be able to sell. But so long as your public culture permits dishonesty then you will have a huge advantage over both those people if you are willing to simply promise more stuff and fewer people to share it with. Witness the rise of Farage, Trump, Le Pen.

Dealing with this would require either changing the public's desires, changing their mind about what is possible, creating a public culture that punishes dishonesty (to be directly effective this would require also doing the previous - but habitual liars tend to be dishonest about more than one topic), or changing the relationship between people and productivity.

As far as I can tell the leftist response is mainly to try and change the public's desires, convince them not to want fewer people. Whereas the more centre-left liberal, think Matt Yglesias and others, response does a bit of that but focuses more on trying to persuade people that sustained productivity is really only possible with permitting more people to be around working and living with you. Barely anyone has really gone for the approach of trying to create a public culture that punishes dishonesty, though I guess France barring Le Pen from running on grounds of her committing embezzlement can be seen as a version of that if you squint a bit. 

All of these approaches have their merits, but they are all exceedingly difficult. Absent some huge dramatic event with fairly unambiguous causes/consequences (this is what the Schliesser post linked above is about) mass public learning is hard to bring about. Such learning doesn't tend to happen on the time-scale of electoral cycles. And wealthy powerful agents are fairly invested in being able to constantly lie and will fight against anything that threatens this prerogative - witness the British press' response to the Leveson Inquiry.

So instead the political mainstream has adopted a two tiered response of trying to appease the desire for fewer people just enough to scrape by politically while at the same time performing some miracle or another to will growth into being despite that. And the problem is this doesn't work twice over. First, the attempts to accommodate the desire for fewer people fail and instead just promote the exclusivist desire. You don't win the support of an appeased public, you construct a more reactionary public. And, of course, it's not like they actually get fewer people as a result of this - they cannot, if I am right, since if they actually did they would see an economic slow down for which voters would also punish them (witness Trump's popularity plummeting and his rhetorical pivot into trying to sell people on having less stuff). So we are stuck in a cycle of ever intensifying performative cruelty from the political mainstream, as they try and ward off a public either frustrated that they are not getting the fewer people they were promised or frustrated that they are still not seeing the material gains they were told to expect.

Second, the economic miracles won't happen. The Uk government's recent "pivot to AI" seems to me a move of desperation, the hope that there is some miracle cure that will supercharge the productivity of labour so as to help us escape this cycle. Well, colour me sceptical - I think Labour high ups do not believe this on grounds of evidence, but out of sheer wishful thinking. If only this were true, if only there was some way of making some change on an electorally relevant timescale wherein we could actually generate more stuff without needing more people, and without even needing to find some way to cut out the Undesirables! If we wish hard enough, maybe we can make it happen?

It won't. This is delusion. Trump et al at least enjoy the political gains of lying to the public; Starmer et al shall suffer the ruin that comes to those who lie to themselves.