The limits of “design ethics” under capitalism

victoriasgarroLeave a comment

Working as a product designer in media for the past five years, I’ve witnessed the topic of “design ethics” raised at industry conferences, presentations, and meetups. Yet I’ve noticed that in our discussions, designers rarely mention the economic context within which we design. We hold up examples like news feeds promoting fake news and financial apps encouraging users to trade the riskiest stocks and we ask: how might we design better? Conventional discourse presents these unintended consequences of our work as technical problems: how might we design and code ethically, while maintaining profitability and growth? (Perhaps the most well-known example of this framing is The Center for Humane Technology’s “The Social Dilemma,” which confuses correlation with causation by attributing negative mental health and political trends to technology, with no mention of technology’s place in capitalism.)

We will not solve problems of authoritarianism, racism and xenophobia, misinformation and addictive technology, mental health and public health, or climate change with design ethics. While designers should thoroughly consider the consequences of our work, the problems facing the design and technology industry are not ones of individual bad actors (though some exist). Rather, we must acknowledge that design decisions are economic decisions––and in our current economic system, the economic interests of individuals often conflict with their social consequences. Technology firms are not cultural or ideological actors, but “economic actors within a capitalist mode of production…compelled to seek out profits in order to fend off competition” (Srnicek 2017, 3). If we truly want to design ethically, we must first consider how technology is embedded in capitalism. Our ability to make technology work better for society as a whole depends upon our willingness to reorder our priorities and redefine value as more than profit maximization.

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We Need to Talk about Economics

plbds2 Comments

By Paulo L. dos Santos and Noé Wiener

What’s Wrong with Economics? The title of economic historian Robert Skidelsky’s latest book captures well a prevailing mood of popular disaffection with the dismal science. Many have come to associate the discipline with specific lines of political partisanship—including forms of market fundamentalism and the politics of austerity. Economics has also been widely criticised for its failure to grapple with actual, urgent economic problems. Within academic circles, the discipline has become widely regarded as insular and dismissive of the contributions other fields of social and historical inquiry make to the study of economic life. Among the public at large, the credibility of the discipline as a whole has faced considerable scrutiny, even while individual contributions by dissenting economists are widely debated and generally well received.

Recent political developments like the rise of the Movement for Black Lives and the #MeToo movement have helped broaden the sense of crisis in economics; encouraging examination of the discipline’s deeply problematic relationship with realties of race, gender, and other elements of people’s social identity. As a number of critics have noted, the problems are reflected most obviously in the profession’s basic institutional composition, which is grossly unrepresentative. In the United States women account for only 14 percent of full professors in PhD-granting departments. Of all doctorates conferred in the academic year 2015–2016, only 1.29 percent were conferred to Black or Latina women. This dismal performance was significantly worse than the 3 percent average across all STEM disciplines. That same year, only 3.6 percent of all full economics professors at PhD-granting institutions were Latino; a meagre 1.6 percent were Black.

The problem is also evident in prevalent attitudes and values among economists. Casual racism and misogyny among leading economists appears to have few or no repercussions. A 2019 survey of academic economists by the American Economic Association found that nearly half of Black economists reported being targets of discrimination in the profession. It also found that “only 45 percent of all . . . respondents (regardless of race) believed economists who are not White are respected in the field.” When the work on the economics of racial stratification by scholars like William Darity and Darrick Hamilton was finally included in the alphanumeric classification system for research topics in economics, it was placed in the last, residual category, “Z – Other Special Topics.” Recent work by Alice Wu uncovered evidence that these attitudes are prevalent among economics students, while work by Valentina Paredes, Daniele Paserman, and Francisco Pino found evidence suggesting that economics programs both attract and cultivate bigotry.

What has so far received comparatively less attention are the ways these attitudes are embodied in the basic concepts and analytical tools that most contemporary economists use to understand the world. Yet it is over this terrain that the discipline’s problems with issues of social identity prove most harmful to society at large.

The frameworks at the heart of contemporary economic thinking reflect analytical choices that ultimately betray the social position and outlook of those developing economic theory. In all of these choices, contemporary economic thinking has created a stilted conceptual terrain where it is easy to ignore or downplay the economic expressions of systemic inequities by social identity and class. This is evident in some of the discipline’s core analytical stances, like what is and what is not considered as economic activity, and in its rejection of social categories like gender, race, and class as useful in the analysis of markets and economies. It is also evident in the ways most economists think about the nature of discrimination, its relationship to market competition, and the statistical measurements of its effects on economic outcomes.

Given the outsized influence economics exerts across all fields of social inquiry and policy, these biases exert an insidious, conservative influence over public thinking and over the very framing of debates about those iniquities. Countering this influence requires understanding these biases, which in turn requires engagement with a few foundational methodological and technical issues in economic analysis. In what follows we draw on contributions by many critically minded economists and political economists, and on some of our own recent work, to contribute to a conversation among social scientists and political actors about these biases and about how they may be overcome.

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The Uncomfortable Opportunism of Global Development Discourses

pbehuriaLeave a comment

Since the 2008 financial crisis and the end of the Millennium Development Goals, academics and practitioners working in ‘development’ have been groping for a new development paradigm. Yearning for the end of neoliberalism and stumped by the rise of China, academics hopped on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) bandwagon to call social scientists to think ‘globally’ beyond national-centric analyses. This was, of course, a noble goal – no different from the motives of the hopeful SDGs. New ‘Global Development’ proponents argued that we must think globally and relationally, surprising some within development studies that this had not been happening already (think Dependency theory).

As Development Studies departments found themselves new names and new networks were established, some academics took the opportunity to stake claim over the meaning of Global Development. New scholarship argued that a new Global Development paradigm would rescue us from development studies’ oppressive past, which obsessed over distinguishing between a backward developing world and a utopian ‘developed’ heaven. They reasoned that this was necessary because the ‘South’ was actually rising in comparison to the ‘North’ on the basis of growth and human development indicators. But in presenting this trend as a paradigm shift, these scholars misdiagnosed the problem. They presented the entire ‘South’ as rising, failing to isolate China’s rise and obscuring the fact that countries may have experienced very different trajectories.

In a Forum section that appeared in Development and Change, the case for Global Development was subjected to open debate. The case for Global Development is based on ‘converging divergence’, which suggest that there is increasing convergence between the North and South while there is increased evidence of sustained within-country inequalities (divergence). This elaboration of ‘Global Development’ selected 1990-2015 as the time series within which convergence was identified in terms of growth, health and education. The paper was roundly criticised for its sloppy use of indicators. For example, generalisations of wellbeing were based on the widely-criticised (in every intro to development studies course) Human Development Indicators. In selecting the time period 1990-2015, the paper implies that convergence resulted from the implementation of market-led policies, implicitly condoning neoliberalism, as Andrew Fischer argued. Of course, such claims stand directly opposed to the experiences of most countries in ‘the South’ where structural adjustment and the legacy of market-led reforms has limited prospects for structural transformation.

The paper was also criticised within the Forum on several other counts (see Jayati Ghosh’s contribution for example). For their part, Global Development proponents acknowledge most criticisms. However, they refuse to nuance their claims of converging divergence. They replied that the study was a purely empirical exercise and converging divergence was a stylized fact. It is as if selecting which data you use, as well as the time period, is not a choice.

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If the Washington Consensus was really over, what would that look like for development strategy?

RRowden3 Comments

If it still looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck – then it probably still is a duck.

Recent years have witnessed a notable re-embrace of the state’s role in the economy, leading some to declare that the set of free market economic policy reforms widely known as the Washington Consensus has come to an end.

First popularized by U.S. President Ronald Reagan and U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, the Washington Consensus policies offered a set of policy guidelines for developing countries, many of which were struggling with high debt and high inflation at the time. These free market reforms included trade and financial liberalization, privatization, deregulation, the removal of capital controls, fiscal austerity (cutting public spending) in order to achieve strict targets for maintaining low inflation and low fiscal deficits, the adoption of independent central banks, and deregulating restrictions on foreign investment, among others. Broadly speaking, the policies sought to roll back the role of the state in the economy and unshackle the animal spirits of the free market. In the 1980s, adopting the policies became binding conditions for developing countries to receive debt relief and new lending by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, in the 1990s, the policies served as the basis for World Trade Organization (WTO) membership rules – and ever since then, the policies have become a cornerstone of the curricula in economics departments at universities across the world.

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Philosophy as if the world mattered: critical development studies and the work of Tony Lawson

jamorganleedsbeckettacukLeave a comment

No reader of this blog needs reminding that positivism retains a powerful grip on development studies. Not because every theorist, researcher and department carries a card or flies a flag self-identifying as positivist, but because positivist concepts of what knowledge is and how it is assessed continue to dominate, in so far as these have captured the concept of ‘science’. As Ingrid Kvangraven’s critique establishes, one need look no further than the dominance of random control trials (RCTs) for evidence of this. While there are many specific problems one might identify with RCTs, such as the capture of policy by what can be researched using RCTs rather than by what may be more significant as structural causes of poverty, perhaps the fundamental one is the model form, which stands behind RCTs. It is this that lends authority to RCTs, as it does to many other branches of economics.

Tony Lawson is probably the best known critic of mainstream mathematical modelling and in a recent interview he reprises his argument. Lawson is a ‘critical realist’ and ‘social ontologist’ and his, and other critical realists’ argument, is deceptively simple. All knowledge claims involve assumptions about the nature of the world, what and how it might appropriately be investigated. Whether this is acknowledged or not this presupposes a theory of reality or being (an ontology) and an orientation to knowledge (an epistemology). Philosophy thus has an important role in making these assumptions explicit and in exposing them to critical scrutiny to address their plausibility, consistency etc. Such philosophy does not replace the sciences or social sciences, but rather ‘under-labours’ for or supports their endeavours and is itself subject to critique in this context.

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The partnership trap in the Indonesian gig economy

Arif Novianto3 Comments

In the last three months, there have been three strikes by gig workers in Indonesia. Problems related to harsh working conditions, injustice, and the decline in the welfare of gig workers became the main issues in the three strikes. The biggest strike was carried out by GoKilat couriers (delivery service from the Gojek platform company) for 3 days on 8-10 June 2021 involving nearly 1,500 couriers or almost 80% of active couriers on GoKilat. A day later, couriers from Lala Move went on strike spontaneously for three days by mass deactivating accounts on their platform application.

Prior to the two strikes above, on April 6, 2021, a strike was carried out by Shopee Express couriers for 1 day in Bandung, Indonesia, involving around 1,000 couriers. The Shopee Express courier strike was motivated by a cut in the payment they received. The new rules reduce courier revenue from 2,500 rupiah (US$0.17)/package to only 1,500 rupiah (US$0.10)/package and that is the only income earned by the couriers. In other words, they did not earn basic income equal to the minimum wage in the province where they work. Moreover, they did not have health insurance, decent working hours, overtime pay, leave /holiday rights, and severance pay. The working conditions were worse due to the fact that the vehicles (motorcycle) used are theirs and they had to pay fuel cost.

With such a wage system, to be able to earn the minimum wage in Bandung City in 2021 of 3,742,267 rupiah (US$263.16) per month for instance, couriers have to deliver 2,495 packages monthly—not including fuel and maintenance costs they have to pay. It means that they would have to deliver about 104 packages per day to the customers. If, on average, a package is delivered in 10 minutes, they need 17 hours per day, far above the decent 8 hours work day. This oppressive work system for gig workers is possible and there is no prohibition from the Indonesian government, due to the courier’s status as an independent contractor or “mitra” (partner) for the platform company, instead of labor.

The precarious and uncertain working conditions stem from the misclassification of their employment status. Companies classifies them as “partners”, so that they could avoid the obligation to provide the minimum wage, health insurance, overtime pay, severance pay, 8 working hours per day, and holiday rights if they were labor, although the working relationships between the companies and their couriers represents the employer-employee relationships as there are shift work for the couriers, work control by the companies, requirements in recruitment such as contracts of employment, and the companies unilateral rules established by the companies.

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Neoliberalism and global development before and after the Washington Consensus: Agricultural credit at the World Bank

Nick BernardsLeave a comment

We’ve witnessed a revival of debates about the Washington Consensus and the future of neoliberalism in recent months. Recent increases in public spending have led several commentators to conclude, or lament, that decades of neoliberal consensus have been shattered. Much of this debate is misguided, rooted in a mistaken dichotomy between ‘states’ and ‘markets’, and a corresponding conception of neoliberalism as primarily involving a reduction in the role of the former. Efforts to rehabilitate the Washington Consensus, meanwhile, rely on flimsy and heavily ideological counterfactuals.

In this post, I want to take up another angle on this question, asking: what is ‘the market’ in practice? In particular, I take a closer look at the emergence of the idea that ‘interest rates should be market-determined’. This was a core tenet of the ‘Washington Consensus’ in John Williamson’s original formulation. It was also, historically, a key argument of neoliberal economists. From the early 1970s, several influential pieces (e.g. McKinnon 1973; Shaw 1973) urged the deregulation of interest rates, arguing that while usury caps were intended to assist small farmers, they wound up forcing banks to concentrate on relatively low-risk loans to government or large-scale industry.

In practice, though, the relatively simple proposition that ‘interest rates should be left to the market’ invited a whole range of difficult questions and political challenges.

In a recent article in New Political Economy tracing the history of World Bank agricultural credit programmes (Bernards 2021), I show how neoliberal approaches to development have never really involved ‘shrinking the state’ and unleashing markets so much as fraught and failure-prone efforts to figure out who and what should be governed by, and how to construct, markets.

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The Techfare State: The ‘New’ Face of Neoliberal State Regulation

alibhagatLeave a comment

By Ali Bhagat and Rachel Phillips

A recent article in the New York Times takes aim at ‘How Big Tech Won the Pandemic’, highlighting how in the last year alone, Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Facebook posted a combined revenue of more than $1.2 trillion. While the pandemic has resulted in the loss of both work and life the world over, companies like Amazon have managed to expand their warehouses and their cloud computing infrastructure—and reaped unprecedented profits in the process. As the Times put it, ‘the pandemic created a peculiar economy that benefited some people and industries, including in technology, even as it battered others.’ 

But as many commentators have pointed out, the explosive growth of the tech giants must also be understood in relation to more overtly political conditions. It may be true that the technology industry has maintained a liberal, progressive, and socially equitable visage throughout the pandemic, even as it has subtly extended its multi-tentacled reach into new physical and digital spaces. Indeed, we know by now, that Big Tech has long thrived on regulatory evasion and the exploitation of legal grey areas and this is a dominant reading within critical political economy which has been at pains to point out how laissez-faire regulatory environments—particularly in the United States—have allowed the tech industry to sniff out and exploit new sources of profit, including those that have arisen as a result of the COVID-19 crisis.  

In this literature, then, the tendency is to assume that it is an absence of state intervention that has underpinned the technology industry’s growing economic (and political) power. With our conception of techfare, however, we aim to push beyond these explorations of how Big Tech evades state control. Instead of focusing on state absences, we set out to highlight an equally significant dynamic: how the technology industry has become deeply entwined with the activities of the neoliberal state. 

Our research agenda is centred on one key question: how has the dramatic post-2008 growth of the American technology industry interacted with—and been shaped by—the neoliberal regulatory projects that have prevailed during this time? In pursuing this question, we focus on one pivotal arena of neoliberal statecraft in which Big Tech companies increasingly participate, but where their presence has gone largely unnoticed: the disciplining of the relative surplus population, particularly through consumer debt, policing, and imprisonment. 

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