All posts by Mikael M. Karlsson

Equity and the Pareto Principle: Does the Pareto Principle Have Moral Force?

Article (double blind peer review), ,

Preface

This heretofore unpublished paper is now nearly 23 years old.[1] It was written at a time when what is here called “Pareto thinking” was often expressed in public debate—particularly political debate—in order to justify recommendations of policy or particular political decisions; and it was also used more widely to defend the propriety of certain commercial transactions. Vilfredo Pareto, or something called “the Pareto Principle”, might or might not have been mentioned in these connections.

I daresay that many of those who enunciated “Pareto thinking” had never even heard of Pareto himself. But what they had in common was that they thought of what is herein called “the Pareto Principle” (whether or not they thought or spoke of it under that name) as a carrying with it a kind of moral or equitable mandate that favored, or even demanded, the implementation of one or another policy decision or justified one or another commercial transaction—a mandate somehow grounded in the science of economics.

Strictly speaking, at the focus of my discussion in the paper was and is what might be more properly called the “Pareto Efficiency Principle”, which is different from Pareto’s so-called “Principle of Factor Sparsity” or “80-20 Rule”. The latter is less familiar among ordinary folk, but is also referred to as the “Pareto Principle” by political economists.

As a principle of what economists call “efficiency”,[2] Pareto’s principle may be applied either to efficiency in production, which is not discussed in the paper, or to efficiency in allocation. As indicated to my reference to policy decisions and commercial transactions—vehicles for the distributive allocation of benefits (goods and services) and burdens (costs and privations)—it is the latter that is discussed in the paper. Since it is easier to give examples based upon commercial transactions, the paper refers more often to them than general policies; but all of the examples are tied to the question of the “Pareto efficiency” of some allocative action.

Now, an astute peer-reviewer of this submission has doubted that any actual economist would view the Pareto Principle as carrying with it any normative mandate or approval for any policy or transaction—any claim that a policy or transaction that is Pareto is something that ought to be implemented or carried out. It is a principle of efficiency, this reviewer emphasizes, not a principle of equitable allocation or of normative merit, and this is something, the reviewer insists, that an economist would know. I am not sure to what extent ostensibly “Pareto” thinking is still commonly employed as a tool in economic rhetoric as it certainly was so when this paper was written, but there are indications that it has not disappeared.

Sean Ingham[3] has remarked, in an encyclopedia entry on “Pareto-optimality”[4] (often equated in economics text books with “Pareto-efficiency”), that:

Economists typically find Pareto-optimality to be extremely plausible—indeed, indisputable—as a condition that good laws, policies, and allocations must satisfy, although few would claim that it suffices to make a law, policy, allocation of commodities, and so on, good.

I find this statement fuzzy in some respects, but it is at least a claim that economists “typically” view Pareto-optimality as an “indisputably” necessary condition for the “goodness”—or let us say the propriety—of various allocative instruments, even if it is not sufficient. Ingham certainly finds that, with respect to Pareto-optimality, it is not unusual for economists to “lapse into their normative mode”, as the celebrated economist, Uwe E. Reinhardt (1937-2017), worded it when he issued this warning to his students in a Princeton University economics course in 2016:

When economists or other policy analysts lapse into their normative mode – that is, when they pretend to be using scientific methods to suggest what ought to be done and what is or is not “efficient” or “welfare enhancing” –  a red warning light should go on in your mind. There is always the chance that you are being addressed by someone knowingly and cleverly playing politics in the guise of science, or by someone commissioned by an interest group to structure information felicitously, toward a desired end – that is, by someone insufficiently respectful of the limits of economics as a science. Finally, there is always the chance you are face-to-face with an economist who has never been properly taught or, in any event, has never fully grasped the meaning of the word “efficiency” within economic analysis.[5]

Taking Reinhardt at his word, we can grant to my reviewer that by an economist who is knowledgeable, clear-minded, and honest, Pareto efficiency per se will not be thought or said to carry a justification or claim of propriety for allocative measures that support or tend toward it.[6] Given these background remarks, I now turn to the body of my paper.

I.

Despite the fact that the Italian economist, sociologist and philosopher Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923) is frequently named in passing as an important thinker—in particular, as a foundational thinker in microeconomics—a surprising number of contemporary economists—not to mention policy makers—are apparently unfamiliar with some of his signature ideas. Among the vulgar, Pareto’s only real legacy is the so-called “Pareto Principle”,[7] which was originally advanced as a principle of “efficiency” pertaining to—among other things—commercial transactions within a free market. Roughly speaking, the idea is that in an unrestricted market, “rational agents”, pursuing their own interests, or policy makers, supposedly pursuing the public good, would engage in transactions, or policy decisions, which yield Pareto improvements.[8] A Pareto improvement is a change which makes at least one person better off and makes no one worse off. And since rational agents in an unrestricted market prefer to make transactions in that way, a free market[9] will tend toward Pareto optimality, or so contemporary Pareto fans believe. A situation is said to be Pareto optimal if there is no way to change it that would represent a Pareto improvement.[10]

II.

In the recent climate of “free-market liberalism”, Pareto thinking has been widely applied by politicians and legislators in decision- and policy-making on a larger scale; it has, for many, become their credo, or at least their cover story. For it is vaguely implied that Pareto improvement, and convergence upon Pareto optimality, must be a good thing. It certainly sounds as if making at least one person better off while making no one worse off must be a good thing—the thing to do, whenever possible.

In their moralistic moments, certain economists and policy-makers would like us to understand that the pursuit of Pareto optimality is what really is best for everyone;[11] although when gripped by the scientific mood, these same people may be heard to assert that sound scientific and practical thinking should keep clear of moral concepts like “good”, “right” and “just”—these simply express subjective emotions—and should rely upon more tangible and measurable (and supposedly objective) notions like “preference” and “choice”. Then, Pareto allocative optimality is defended as the convergence point of what rational actors would pursue, individually and communally, in an unrestricted marketplace, free of coercion. Anyone who opposes a Pareto-driven approach is thus thought to have declared himself the enemy of individual autonomy and free choice, and the friend of coercion—although of course no “value judgement” is implied in asserting this!

III.

I believe that there are many reasons why one should not be drawn into this sort of Pareto euphoria, but most of those reasons will be left out of my present discussion. In this brief piece, I will not examine Pareto optimality, which has been the focus of much critical work, but will be primarily interested in the idea of Pareto improvement, which is in any case the more fundamental of the two notions. What I am going to ask is whether there is an imperative of morality or normative merit supporting Pareto improvements. As the term “imperative” indicates, I am asking a deontological question: a question about obligation or duty.

I will examine the strong deontological statement, which says, of a prospective action A:

(P) A ought to be done if and only if doing A would make someone better off and make no one worse off.

 

This deontological version of the Pareto Principle can thus be broken down into two claims:

(P1) If doing A would make someone better off and make no one worse off, then A ought to be done.

(P2) A ought to be done only if doing A would make someone better off and would make no one worse off.

(P1) says that an action producing a Pareto Improvement is a sufficient condition for its being normatively mandated, while (P2) says that an action leading to a Pareto Improvement is a necessary condition for its being so.

Now the question whether P could even possibly hold as a mandate of morality or normative merit is dependent upon how we understand the notion “better off”. One way to understand it is in terms of the satisfaction of wants or desires, so that it could be formulated as follows:

(Pw) A ought to be done if and only if doing A would result in at least one person’s wants being more fully satisfied and would not result in anyone else’s wants being less fully satisfied.

But this again requires further specification as to which wants are being considered. The wants in which economists have been interested are immediate or present wants at the time of a possible exchange, and this is sometimes called, technically, a person’s interest. Certain economists, at any rate, evidently subscribe to the technical definition: [12]

Y is in S’s interest =def. S wants Y

This technical sense of one’s “interest” is highly misleading; it is, in my opinion, an unfortunate terminology. That is because the more normal and natural idea of something’s being in one’s interest is not at all the same thing as its being wanted. Thus, a small child may want to play in a busy street, but that is not at all in the child’s interest. Someone may, at a given moment, want to smoke a cigarette but may not even think himself that doing so is what is in his interest.

I will not use “being in one’s interest”, therefore, in its artificial, technical and very misleading sense, but will stick to speaking of wants, when that is what I mean. Returning, then, to (Pw): suppose we think only of the wants that a person may have at a given moment. Then, I think, (Pw) loses any plausibility as a moral imperative. This is related to the fact that I am unconvinced that the satisfaction of anyone’s immediate want is per se (i.e., just because it is someone’s want) of any value.

I note here, parenthetically, that if we do not restrict the wants referred to by Pw to those that a person may have at a given moment, then Pw provides no clear instruction; even misguided instruction. Since we can want a thing at one time and not at another, and wants are fickle and often transitory, then Pw is not only subject-relative (goods are only goods-to-someone), but time-relative: to be a good to someone at t is to be desired by that person at t. It is often very difficult to discern what people might want at the moment of an allocative decision or transaction, but what they might want, or not want, later on, or “in the long run” is even more opaque, not least to the people themselves. And so it will be highly uncertain, even positively indiscernible, what the supposed normative mandate requires.[13]

At any rate, the question whether the satisfaction of anyone’s immediate want is per se of any value is a fundamental one and I think one over which there is deep disagreement. It is related to a wider disagreement about human nature and the character of human life. The tradition associated with Hume (and perhaps Hobbes) maintains (or simply assumes) that goods are created by wants or desires.[14] That is, something is a good, to someone, if and only if that person desires it. To be a good, to someone, is to be desired by that person.

IV.

There is, however, another tradition, which denies that something is a good, to someone, if and only if that person desires it. In modern philosophy, its most powerful exponent is Kant. Kant thought—among other things—that there were goods, or values, whose worth was entirely independent of anyone’s wants or desires. And he thought, moreover, that we could recognize and commit ourselves to these values, that we could be moved to pursue them, whether or not we had any desire for them. This last part is a motivational theory.

The Humean motivational theory is different. According to it, one is moved to pursue only what one wants or desires. In Hume’s language, all motives are passions.[15] This Humean motivational theory benefits from the great elasticity of the idea of a desire or a passion. Thomas Reid complained about Hume that he used these terms—desire and passion—simply to refer to any motivational state. If this is done, then of course Hume’s motivational theory will be bound to be true. But it will be true just by definition; the notions of desire and passion (or want) will lose any independent substantive content. We will not have made any interesting discovery to the effect that desires, or wants, or passions, as independently characterizable states of mind, have a causal influence on our actions—are motives—and indeed the only motives according to Hume.

The Humean point of view would be interesting if we had an independent characterization of wants, desires and passions, and could argue plausibly for the non-definitional thesis that these things, and only these things, motivate.

Now, as regards the question of self-interest and benevolent action, we can consider alternatives to the Humean motivational theory (in its substantive, non-definitional form). If I act benevolently, i.e. in the sense of promoting the interests of others, must it be because that is what I want or desire? Or because this is in any interesting sense in my interest? Perhaps so, but it is not clear. What is clear is that the motive upon which I act will always be my motive. This isn’t enough, I think, to bring my action under my interest. In any other sense (i.e. other than that I always act on my motive), it seems easy to name examples of actions that I might perform which are not in my interest, actions which it is clear to me are not in my interest. It also seems easy to name examples of actions I perform without wanting or desiring to do them. One may wish to deny or explain away these examples, and that may be possible; but one will have to be very careful not to be simply stretching the meaning of “desire” or “interest” to fit the case. What’s wanted is a carefully worked out characterization of these terms.

V.

Returning to our main theme, it seems to me that people’s interests are a more plausible basis for a Pareto-based normative imperative than are their immediate wants. I think that the mere fact that something is wanted or desired gives no basis for normative obligation, not even presumptively. The reason is that desires can be for things which are utterly trivial, or which are contrary to people’s interests (not least, the wanter’s), or which are simply malign. So, I don’t think that the fact that someone has a yen to drink a can of paint (to take an example from Donald Davidson), or to crack their knuckles, or to have sex with a certain other person creates any obligation upon anyone to bring about the fulfillment of these desires. It is where wants are attached to genuine interests or needs—or at any rate to something of a different character than mere wants—that obligations may possibly be created.

Now I said that I thought that interests would be a more plausible basis for a Pareto imperative than wants. When I say this, it should be clear that I am not using “interest” in the technical way explained above. Something is in a person’s interest if it improves her life, is good for her, makes her genuinely “better off”, whether she happens to want it or not.

If this be granted, it may nevertheless be thought that a person’s interests come down to what he wants or desires all things considered, and in the long run: “all things considered”, because a person may have various conflicting wants, so fulfilling some at the expense of others may not be in his interest (e.g. if the ones fulfilled are valued less than the ones that aren’t); “in the long run”, because what one wants now may lead to unforeseen, and undesired consequences: consequences not desired by that person himself later on, when they come to light. So the idea is that interest is determined by desire, but not—or not merely—by immediate, individual desire.

Many (among them Thomas Reid and John Stuart Mill) have found this persuasive, but I do not. For if a person has a distorted or limited perspective, he may conceivably fail to build a genuinely fulfilling life for himself even though in his life, his actual desires are fulfilled all things considered and in the long run. A person may have a set of desires which is not the best set that he could have had, or even a very good set. And it makes perfect sense to say that his interest would have been better served—he would have been better off—had he had a different set of desires. So a couch potato, or a Gamma in Huxley’s Brave New World, would have been better off with a different set of ideas than those they actually have. And even if many of those different desires had been unfulfilled, a person’s life might have been better than in his actual life where all of his desires are fulfilled.

J.S. Mill warned that we should not confound the two very different ideas of happiness (as he called it) and contentment. Contentment is the state where one has no, or few, unfulfilled desires. It is a kind of desiderative Pareto point. Happiness—by which Mill meant not a state of mind, but well-being—living a good life—is a different thing.

My argument so far may be questioned, or objected to, at many points. But if we accept at least temporarily, for the sake of further discussion, that if (P) holds as a moral imperative, we must understand “better off” to mean genuinely better off (all things considered and in the long run, whatever that comes to). What it does not come to is merely having one’s desires fulfilled.

That said, I want to stick in a word in favor of wants and desires—or perhaps, better, preferences in the sense that economists like to use this term—as metrics for being better off. A person may not have a good idea about what would make her better off; and her preferences may not be in accord with her real interests. This metric of preferences is therefore imperfect and incomplete. But in general (although rebuttably), individual people are, or should be taken to be, the best judges of their best interest or what would make them better off. Preferences are the most important general metric we have for this; and in practice, in a society with an enlightened citizenry, it is the metric upon which it is best to rely as a general rule. But it is not the only metric and it does not carry absolute privilege. And when the limitations and imperfections of this metric (not least the way in which it is bound to function in a morally dysfunctional society) are overlooked or denied the standard of preferences may become malicious.

VI.

Now, how does (P) come out as an imperative of normative merit in allocation-making, given what I will call the strong reading of “better off”? Let us consider (P1) and (P2) separately. Together, we recall, they add up to (P).

(P2) is, at least, unconvincing as an imperative of that kind. For (P2) says that an action A ought to be done from the point of view of normative merit only if doing A would make somebody better off and would make no one worse off. But it seems quite clear that we often have obligations which, if carried out, will make at least some people worse off, for instance, the moral obligation to hire the best qualified candidate for an academic job, which will (or might) make less qualified candidates worse off.[16] More dramatic cases involve the morally necessary sacrifice of some people in cases of war or shipwreck, but it is the relatively banal examples which are the most telling. There is practically no choice that we make which does not make someone worse off to some extent: certainly no large-scale or political policy decision will be of that kind. But many such choices and decisions are morally defensible and indeed even obligatory.

Here we should pause for a moment to notice the general inapplicability of the Pareto approach to large-scale decision-making, not only from the deontological, but even from the more strictly and narrowly economic and political points of view. The approach makes a fair amount of sense in its primary application, which is to the isolated commercial transaction: Fred and Roger decide in a free and uncoerced manner to exchange x for y; since they both agree freely to the exchange, both of them must think that they will be better off for making it, and neither will think himself worse off. But here our attention is restricted only to those who make the transaction, Fred and Roger, leaving out of account any others who may be affected by it (for instance, Shalimar the slave-girl might be the y which Roger exchanges for Fred’s sum of money x; and she might be made much worse off by the exchange). Economists commonly refer to such considerations as “externalities”. When a theory is such that, in application, “externalities” are bound to matter much more than the parameters posited by the theory, then it is the validity of the theory that is thrown into doubt, rather than the factors categorized as externalities.

As soon as we move from the narrow consideration of the preferences of the transaction-makers taken in isolation, to include the preferences (not to mention the genuine interests) of third parties affected by a transaction, we quickly get an idea of just how few transactions there are which actually make no one worse off. Taking all affected parties into account, the number of real Pareto improvements is vanishingly small, even for individual transactions; for large-scale policy-making decisions, I cannot think of a single real case. The realization of what even a small transaction may mean for third parties also raises serious questions about the Pareto approach as a panacea for those who value individual autonomy and free choice.

VII.

At any rate, having disposed of (P2) as a plausible moral imperative, we are left with (P1). This says that if an action A would make someone better off and no one worse off, then A ought to be done. This, too, has evident problems.

For instance, two alternative actions, A and A’, might be actions of the kind described, but of benefit to different persons. Say that by doing A, some person S would be made a bit better off and no one worse off; but by doing A’, S’ would be made much better off and no one worse off. Then, evidently, there would be no moral imperative supporting A. And if a perceptible alternative A’ would make everyone much better off and no one worse off, then, certainly, if there is anything that ought to be done, it would evidently be not be A. Suppose now that A’ would make most people much better off, but would make a few people a bit worse off. Then if there is any normative mandate, it would seem, once again, not to attach to doing A—insofar, that is, as the foundation of this imperative is supposed to be that of making people better off.

However, in favor of (P1), it might be maintained that it is, nevertheless, what is sometimes called a prima facie moral imperative. In other words, if an action represents a Pareto improvement on the strong reading of “better off”, it is something that arguably ought to be done, although one which may be overweighed by other moral obligations: for example, the obligation to make the existing allocative landscape tolerably just.[17]

With the caveats included, I have no particular objection to offer to this, and I cannot see that even Kant would need to have one, given a suitable understanding of “better off”. But it will then be one principle among many, and one of meager significance since (1) so few of the possible actions that we might take lead to Pareto improvements of the kind imagined by the devotees of this principle and since (2) its normative input will be so heavily qualified and so easily overweighed by conflicting considerations of propriety.

VIII.

Before closing, I would like to add some remarks about the Pareto Efficiency Principle as a normative principle. Part of the cover story of contemporary economics, in its several “mainstreams”, is that any such principle is non-normative. My peer-reviewer sought to disagree with me by saying that no proper economist would think of Pareto’s principle as carrying a normative mandate applicable to allocative decisions. I suppose that Pareto himself would resist thinking of it as such. “It is a principle of efficiency,” my reviewer insisted, “not a normative principle or moral imperative.”[18] Actually, my reviewer, in saying this, was more in agreement with me than in disagreement. (But the disagreement is important.)

To begin with the agreement, what I was critiquing was interpreting the Pareto Efficiency Principle” as carrying a mandate for implementing certain allocative decisions or policies, or at least as carrying a recommendation favoring their implementation. Now my reviewer maintained, in agreement with me, that this should not be done, and opined that no proper economist would do so. I maintained, however, and still maintain, that this was done by a variety of policy makers and economists to support the pretense that these recommendations were issued by science, and therefore respectful of Weberian Wertfreiheit. “Efficiency” is widely claimed by those economists who reflect upon their modus operendi, to be a non-normative matter; but their commitment to this claim is belied by their at the same time using Pareto-efficiency as a reason justifying certain allocative decisions as the “right” ones—and even as the normatively mandated ones—to make, without any arguments that back up the drawing of such inferences from the “fact” of efficiency.

Reihardt, in the lecture text cited earlier (see footnote 5) cites Kenneth Arrow’s observation that

A definition is just a definition, but when the definiendum is a word [like “efficient”] already in common use with a highly favorable connotation, it is clear that we [economists] are really trying to be persuasive; we are implicitly recommending the achievements of optimal states [such as Pareto-optimality][19]

In other words, despite their dutiful protestations, economists who appeal to “efficiency” as a justifying reason for implementing certain allocative decisions without any further supporting argument, have turned “efficient” into a normative term and left Wertfreiheit in the dust. That way, they avoid revealing their supporting reasons, which might appear odious if exposed to the cold light of day. Reihardt himself says, in that same lecture text, that:

Honorable economists will always be quick to apprise their audiences and clients of the distributional impact of proposed policy changes. Alas, the real world is full of “seasoned economists” who do not, either because they wish to push their own ideology, or because they are paid to abstract conveniently from the distributional consequences of proposed policies  –  e.g., proposed health reforms or trade policies. “This policy is efficient,” they may loudly proclaim, adding inaudibly under their breath “abstracting from distributional effects, of course.” Sadly, some policy makers buy this stuff, either because they innocently believe the economist, or because they find it profitable or ideologically soothing to do so.

I suspect that Pareto himself was rather in the forthright camp, which is why he is anathema to a large number of political economists who admire his scientific work but dislike the way in which he wanted to see it applied.

Whether or not we turn out to agree with it, we should take seriously Reinhardt’s view that (quoted earlier in footnote 5), that:

Modern applied welfare economics may look like objective science, because it typically is cloaked in mathematical symbols or graphs. At its core, however, economic welfare analysis is but one particular distributive ethic. It is just one of many different moral doctrines.[20]

And Reinhardt says, rather open-mindedly to his Princeton University students:

You may or may not buy that particular distribute ethic. Whether or not you do may possibly depend on—you guessed it—your wealth and ability to offer high bid prices for things.

IX.

What will by this time be apparent to moral theorists or, indeed, to anyone who has thought carefully and systematically about such matters, is that the Pareto Principle, as a Consequentialist moral norm for decision-making, invites comparison with more familiar Utilitarian principles. A good Utilitarian is, I think, bound to conclude, that the Pareto Principle, which is in an obvious way Utilitarian in spirit, has no independent authority but can be given weight as a moral norm to the extent, and only to the extent, that it is sanctioned by more fundamental (and overarching) Utilitarian principles. The arguments given above against the weight of (P1) and (P2) are, at bottom, Utilitarian arguments. It is, however, questioned by more deontological thinkers, whether any kind of Utilitarian theory is capable of giving a satisfactory account of normative obligation or, in words I have used here (echoing Kant), of “normative imperatives”. No position is taken on that issue in this paper. Rather, an argument concerning the limitations of the Pareto Principle as a moral norm is framed within the general theoretical context of Utilitarian, or at least Consequentialist, reasoning to which the Pareto Principle itself belongs. In other words, the Principle is critiqued on its home ground, so to speak. The exploration of the deeper questions concerning allocative imperatives would obviously require a great deal more time and space than I have at my disposal here. And for extraneous reasons, I wanted to keep Vilfredo Pareto in focus throughout. In short, my objective in this paper is relatively modest, but not, I think, trivial. Deeper discussion of the issues raised here must await another occasion.

 

Endnotes & references

[1] Originally composed as a lecture text under the title, “Equity and the Pareto Principle—Does the Pareto Principle Have Moral Force?”, presented to students and teachers at the SOCRATES Intensive Program, “Equity versus Efficiency in Political and Economic Decision-making”, University of Rennes I, 16-26 July 2000 and, within the same period presented as an invited paper to the Department of Philosophy of the University of Rennes 1, 24 July 2000. Revised for presentation under the title, “Does the Pareto Principle Have Moral Force?”, to the Department of Philosophy of the University of Genoa, 10 April 2001 and much later lightly revised for presentation to the Seminar of the Faculty of Economics, University of Iceland, 25 February 2011. Subsequently submitted to Nordicum-Mediterraneum in response to a call for papers on Vilfredo Pareto to be published in commemoration of the centenary of Pareto’s death on 19 August 1923 and revised in response to critiques made in blind peer review.

[2] A principle rather than the principle, since economic “efficiency” may be characterized in other ways than Pareto’s, although few alternatives are discussed.

[3] Sean Ingham is (or was when he contributed the entry) an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Georgia and evidently a regular contributor to various respectable encyclopediae.

[4] The Encyclopedia Britannica on line; see https://www.britannica.com/topic/Pareto-optimality

[5] The source for this is a lecture text, or handout, entitled “The Concept of ‘Efficiency’ in Economics” that has very recently come into my hands. The main lesson is 18 pages, followed by three appendices, two pages on “The Efficiency of Production”, six pages on “How Economists Bastardized Benthamite Utilitarianism and Became Shills for the Well-to-Do”, and one page on “The First and Second Theorem of Optimality in Welfare Economics”, where he references Kenneth J. Arrow, “Uncertainty and the Welfare Economics of Medical Care”, American Economic Review, December, 1963, pp. 942-943. The conclusion of the second appendix reads as follows: “Modern applied welfare economics may look like objective science, because it typically is cloaked in mathematical symbols or graphs. At its core, however, economic welfare analysis is but one particular distributive ethic. It is just one of many different moral doctrines.” This is not worded as a claim about contemporary economics generally, nor is it a claim about the Pareto Efficiency Principle as such. But it reflects an orientation that is very close to my own, and Reinhardt’s discussion of the uses of Pareto’s Efficiency Principle make a number of the critical points made in this paper and more. Unfortunately, Reinhardt seems never to have published his lecture text, leaving room for Nordicum-Mediterraneum to publish mine. It does make me wish that I had been fortunate enough to be a student in his classes.

[6] And note that this does not rule out all arguments that the correctly demonstrated Pareto efficiency of an allocative measure could support normative claims of that sort, even if I am skeptical concerning that possibility; but that is a separate matter.

[7] As noted in the Preface, I have in mind what might be more properly called the “Pareto Efficiency Principle”.

[8] It should be noted that Pareto did not believe that those making allocative decisions acted as rational agents; indeed, he was profoundly skeptical concerning the rationality of economic actors. Thus, Pareto‘s Efficiency Principle was not understood as a descriptive principle, giving a description of the behavior of economic actors, but as a rational standard, and thus a normative principle although not thereby a principle of equity or moral propriety.

[9] A “free market” is nowadays widely understood to mean one in which exchanges and transactions are unrestricted or unregulated. As the economist and economic historian,  Michael Hudson, likes to point out, this is not what Adam Smith meant by the term, although Smith is often cited as its originator. By a “free market”, Smith meant a market free of control by rentiers. Without worrying about Smith, even brief reflection suggests that no market can really be unregulated. What a market is is precisely a venue for the sale and exchange of goods and services, activities that proceed according to certain rules. It is a theatre of contractual exchange, and contracting is defined, and bound by, rules. Moreover, the ideologues of what they call the “free market” insist that free market exchanges must be voluntary, by which they mean uncoerced, but they appear to be blind to the fact that that in itself is a regulatory requirement.

[10] Paul Samuelson (1915-2009), “likely the most influential economist of the latter half of the 20th century“ according to The Economist, described allocative efficiency, in a glossary, as “A situation in which no reorganization or trade could raise the utility or satisfaction of one individual without lowering the utility or satisfaction of another individual. Under certain limited conditions, perfect competition leads to allocative efficiency. Also called Pareto efficiency.”

[11]Even if it comes out much better for some than for others.

[12]The attraction of this definition is partly the antecedent, (supposedly) “Humean”, persuasion of many people that all goods and values are the creatures of wants or desires—as discussed below—and partly the attempt by economists to be “scientific”. Although at first blush a “want” or “desire” might seem to be the kind of internal, subjective, emotional state of mind that many economists think of as unworthy of the attention of proper science, the use of “wants” as a metric may be thought acceptable to the extent that “wanting” can be defined operationally, by reference to what people select in the marketplace: to put it crudely, if you bought it, you wanted it.

[13] The matter of “long run” interests is touched upon in a later section of this paper.

[14] As far as Hume is concerned, I have maintained that this is not actually Hume’s view, however often it may be attributed to him. See my “Reason, Passion and the Influencing Motives of the Will” in Saul Traiger, ed. The Blackwell Guide to Hume’s Treatise (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 235-55. In an earlier version of this paper, I claimed that Adam Smith belonged to this same tradition, but, upon reflection stimulated by a peer reviewer, I find that it is unclear whether or not Smith followed this supposedly-Humean doctrine.

[15] Unlike the view of goods commonly attributed to him (see discussion above), this view is pretty certainly Hume’s actual view.

[16] Here, my peer-reviewer objects that I do not use the notion of “worse off” in the way that an economist—or perhaps Pareto himself—would understand it. In the context of Pareto-guided allocation, a person’s being made “better off” or “worse off” by an allocative decision must be understood in terms of his ex ante “endowment”—that is, what he has or lacks prior to the allocative decision’s being made. Prior to the hiring decision, none of the candidates for the job had the job; thus, possession of the job was not a part of any of their “endowments”. The successful candidate is made “better off” by the hiring decision, since having the job was added to her endowment; but, since nothing was subtracted from the unsuccessful candidate’s endowment, he is not made “worse off” by the hiring decision, the reviewer explains. In response to this point, I could withdraw the example, for there are plenty of others available to illustrate my point; indeed, some are given in the sentence that follows. But I think that it is important to say something about the reviewer’s critique of the example, because it is important to the strategy of defending Pareto efficiency as the touchstone to “good” or “proper” allocative decision-making. From Pareto’s perspective—and I believe that this can actually be attributed to him as well as to the community of economists—an allocative decision is an “improvement” in the landscape of allocations if it adds to the endowment of at least one person while not subtracting anything from anyone else’s endowment. The endowments in question are those existing at the time that the allocative decision is implemented. This entirely—and deliberately—ignores the question of how the existing landscape of allocations, that is to say, of “endowments” was reached or whether it is defensible per se in terms of, say, the general welfare. An overall situation that is Pareto-optimal (maximally Pareto-efficient) can be outrageous from the standpoint of social or economic justice and inefficient in terms of the functioning of society (with “efficiency” understood in an ordinary, common-sensical, way. This is masked by the predication of allocative “improvement” or “optimality” upon “endowments” whose credentials are left deliberately unscrutinized. A further point to make with respect to my reviewer’s critique of my mundane (and indeed, familiar) example, is that there is no principled way of describing what is, or is not, in a person’s “endowment”. For instance, prior to the hiring decision, might have considered his endowment to include an opportunity for gaining employment, which was then lost when someone else got the job. Would we not all understand what was meant were he to complain that, “She got the job at my expense”? My reviewer defines the endowments in the example in a way that is at odds with the “satisfied preferences” view of being made “better or worse off”: the successful job candidate had one of her preferences fulfilled and none thwarted by the decision. The unsuccessful candidate had none of his preferences fulfilled, but one thwarted. This points to a certain indeterminacy, and even perhaps to a certain disingenuousness, in the use of the “existing endowment platform” for the assessment of allocative decisions.

[17]I imagine, in fact, that we would have what Kant described as imperfect duties, which are even weaker than indicated here; but I aim here to keep the discussion as simple as possible. Whether there are actually such “Pareto duties”, whether they would be what some theorists call pro tanto, as opposed to prima facie duties, perfect or imperfect, and so on, are issues which it would take a much larger space to address.

[18] This is a paraphrase, but I believe that I do not distort the meaning.

[19] Citation to Kenneth Arrow, “Uncertainty and the welfare economics of medical care,” American Economic Review, 1963; p. 942. Bracketed material added by Reinhardt and by myself.

[20] This ethic is clearly not restricted to applied welfare economics; but it is there that any such ethic is most directly relevant to the allocation of benefits—goods, services, and wealth—i in its real social, political and technocratic context.

Flavio Baroncelli: A Personal Recollection

Conference proceedings (double non-blind peer review), , , ,

This memoire begins, as it must, by recounting some of the facts about the academic life of a good friend—too early departed and profoundly missed—Flavio Baroncelli.1

 

Flavio the Academic: A Brief Curriculum

Flavio was born in Savona on January 15th, 1944. He attended the University of Genoa and completed his laurea degree in 1969 with a dissertation on David Hume, written under the supervision of Professor Romeo Crippa. Between 1969 and 1975, Flavio worked as Crippa’s assistant and in 1976, in the light of independent research conducted in the U.K., published his first book, Un inquietante filosofo perbene – Saggio su David Hume (A Disquieting, Respectable Philosopher – Essay on David Hume; Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1976).Between 1974 and 1977, Flavio taught History of the Age of Enlightenment at the University of Trieste, returning to Genoa in 1977 to teach History of Modern Philosophy. He was co-founder, with Gianni Francioni, of the journal, Studi settecenteschi, and worked together with Giovanni Assereto, Franz Brunetti, Salvatore Rotta and other historians of the Enlightenment.In the early 80’s, Flavio’s examination of the cultural and political processes of modernity caused his attention to shift towards the ideological and social aspects of inequality and poverty. In 1983 he and Giovanni Assereto co-authored a book entitled Sulla povertà, idee leggi e progetti nell’Europa moderna (On Poverty. Ideas, Laws and Projects in Modern Europe; Genova-Ivrea: Herodote), whose content is indicated by its title.

In 1981, Flavio was appointed Full Professor in Moral Philosophy at the University of Calabria, returning once more to the University of Genoa in 1982 as Full Professor in Moral Philosophy.

In the early 90’s, his interests shifted once again towards issues in contemporary political philosophy: the theory and practice of toleration, the causes and evils of racism, the standing of liberal theory vs. the communitarian challenge, and the faults and virtues of “political correctness”. Along with many journal articles on these topics, he published two books: Il razzismo è una gaffe. Eccessi e virtù del “politically correct” (Racism Is a Gaffe. Excesses and Virtues of the “Politically Correct”; Rome: Donzelli, 1996) and Viaggio al termine degli Stati Uniti. Perché gli americani votano Bush e se ne vantano (Voyage To the Limits of the United States. Why the Americans Elected Bush And Boast About It; Rome: Donzelli, 2006).Il razzismo è una gaffe is an analysis of political correctness as a cultural phenomenon. Flavio explains how it came about in the United States and examines the main debates that it generated. The first part of the book, which is mainly reconstructive, paints a very illuminating fresco of the cultural and political processes behind the battles around speech codes on American campuses and their reception in Italy. In the second part of the book, through a very deep analysis that resorts to the conceptual tools of moral and political philosophy and pragmatics, Flavio defends political correctness as a way to achieve a fairer and more tolerant society, notwithstanding its excesses and faults. To Flavio’s surprise and delight, this book was adopted as an introductory text in sociolinguistics in more than one university course in Italy.In his last book, Viaggio al termine degli Stati Uniti, Flavio follows a formula very similar to the one used in the preceding book: he intertwines a narrative description of a long trip to the United States (written in Little Rock, Arkansas, where he was intermittently treated for the protracted illness that ultimately killed him) with philosophical reflections on the opposition between the liberal culture and the neo-conservative culture that was at its apex at the time.

In 2006, Flavio changed the institutional disciplinary area of his professorship to political philosophy.

Flavio died on February 20th, 2007, at Saint Martin’s Hospital of Genoa after a long battle with leukemia. He was in his 64th year2.

 

Flavio the Philosopher

Flavio Baroncelli was a formidable philosopher, albeit an unusual—and even “disquieting”—one. His work is well known in Italy, but little known in other countries. The obvious explanation for this is that Flavio wrote and published almost exclusively in Italian. And that was no accident, for he knew English well and could easily have written much more in English in order to raise his international profile. But for Flavio, the Italian language was a basic philosophical instrument. He employed a great deal of straightforward (and clever) analytical argument. But he also argued (like Nietzsche) by means of humor, irony, story-telling and various forms of linguistic artistry. For this, he needed Italian, in which language he was a master craftsman.

Flavio understood and cultivated the rhetorical aspect of philosophical writing. He seems not to have viewed rhetoric and reasoning as disjoint enterprises, in the manner of Socrates (who also viewed them as antagonistic enterprises), but rather as intersecting. Of course he understood that rhetoric could be malignant, but, like Aristotle, thought that there was also benign, or constructive rhetoric—rhetoric with a legitimate, and thus rational, persuasive force. His admiration for Hume was in large part based upon his appreciation of Hume’s skill as a rhetorician, but what he valued was Hume’s employment of constructive rhetoric, while he rejected Hume’s all-too-frequent descents into sophistry.

In a short piece that recently appeared in English translation, “Rawls and Hume: A Fable” (tr. Gillian Parker),3 Flavio imagines a conversation between Hume and Rawls upon the latter’s arrival at the Elysian Fields. Hume there is made to remark to Rawls that “rhetoric really isn’t your strong point”; and this is meant as a criticism. More specifically, Flavio’s Hume chastises Rawls for having “invented a ridiculous term”—the original position—to describe a “simple and brilliant idea”. Part of constructive rhetoric consists in the apt, lucid and illuminating choice of terminology. On the other hand, Hume is made to chastise himself for being unable to make his own account of justice sound appealing “except by adulterating, by subjecting to the most bombastic propaganda, the psychological mechanisms available to me”.4 This is the sort of rhetoric for which Flavio had little tolerance.

The philosophical methodology that recognizes rhetorical, or perhaps one should say, aesthetic, modes of rational persuasion is indicative of a deeper commitment that Flavio shared with Hume. Humean scholars tend to call this “sentimentalism”, a label Flavio would surely have resisted. But whatever one calls it, the idea is that there is a shared human nature which is at once discursive and sympathetic. Rational appeals may be made discursively or sympathetically; it may even be difficult to view these two elements as entirely distinct. As I understand Flavio, this was his view; and I perceive it to be Hume’s as well. Indeed, I think that this was Hume’s main appeal for Flavio. Flavio felt that the Socratic (or ancient Greek) disjunction between reason and sentiment—or between reason and sympathy—was a false one: one that distorted the nature of human rationality. It was therefore that Flavio rejected all forms of traditional rationalism. In the fable of Rawls and Hume mentioned earlier, Hume confronts Rawls in the following manner:

There’s something I just don’t get; for instance, resorting to practical reason for stability seems odd to me, a sort of oxymoron, because I’m used to thinking it’s the passions that create a minimum of stability, of similarity between us . . . as well as a semblance . . . of brotherhood. . . . [F]or the last two hundred years now you’ve been ashamed of having an idea of human nature and pretend you can do without it, but what’s the result? That you, for example, . . . try to restrict the things for which you require mutual consent, as if all you were worried about were restricting the grounds on which someone different from you could say no, while in this way you actually exclude the grounds on which someone different from you could say yes.5

Of course, Flavio is here speaking for Hume; but I believe that he was also, in this place, speaking for himself.Both Flavio and Hume treated philosophy as a human activity, situated in history, culture and tradition. It addresses itself to people who have the shared nature mentioned above, who have specific traditions and concerns, and who, in any particular discussion, share a certain language which resonates with their beliefs, emotions and sympathies. Rationalism, on their view, attempts to address bloodless wraiths—parodies of the human being. It is exaggeratedly discursive, ahistorical, unsituated, and liable to slide into fanaticism.While one can never, I think, fully appreciate Flavio as a philosopher without reading him in Italian (for the reasons I have explained), I believe that understanding the way in which he conceived and practiced philosophy can help those who read him in other languages (and it is to be fervently hoped that his works will be widely translated) to appreciate his work6.

 

Flavio the Humanist

Flavio identified himself as a philosopher, and he was, indeed, a philosopher by any standard. But he was perhaps even more a humanist.If you conceive and practice philosophy in Flavio’s way, you are almost necessarily drawn to humanistic subjects and are less concerned with the analytic-synthetic distinction or the question whether it would be possible for something to be red and green all over. Flavio began his philosophical researches in the history of modern philosophy; but even in that period, it is clear that what interested him most was the significance of philosophical movements and they way they shaped Modernity: the way they influenced the manner in which people understood themselves, one another, and human relationships (especially moral and political relationships). What did Modernity have to offer in the face of poverty? In the face of war? In the face of racism and oppression?

These are the things that Flavio thought and wrote about—and he cared what philosophy could say about them and wanted philosophy to have a positive and wholesome influence. And of course he moved on from thinking about the significance of modern philosophy for the human condition (Locke, Smith, Hume, Kant) to thinking and writing about the significance of contemporary philosophy (Rawls, Walzer, Rorty and others). His movement from the history of philosophy and the history of ideas into moral and political philosophy was inevitable and inexorable.

Flavio’s humanism found expression in his intense activity as a contributor to various Italian national magazines and newspapers, such as La Voce, Village, Il diario della settimana and Il Secolo XIX. His writings there focussed almost exclusively upon cultural, social and political issues, and he was an insightful and incisive critic of the contemporary scene. Unlike many such critics, he eschewed all forms of fanaticism, while at the same time offering scathing critiques of the beliefs and practices that conduce to human misery.Flavio’s humanism also expressed itself in research. He co-directed various research projects at local and the national level, sponsored by the Italian Ministry of Universities. Particularly important projects were The Ethico-political Philosophical Lexicon in the Italian Culture of the Eighteenth Century (part of a larger project for the creation of an internet library of the Italian culture, Biblioteca Italiana Telematica), and the work on Equal Respect: Its Nature and Its Normative Implications for Institutions, co-ordinated at the national level by Salvatore Veca.

 

Flavio the Human Being

Flavio’s philosophy and philosophical humanism were of course reflections of the soul of Flavio the man. Like the author of this memoire, Flavio was in certain respects a superannuated hippy. He was, after all, 24 years old in 1968. There were no doubt many earlier occasions; but the only time that I actually saw Flavio dressed in a dark suit was when I paid my respects to him, or rather to his earthly remains, in the hospital morgue. He most often appeared at the university dressed in blue jeans and a sports shirt. He confronted people on a social, intellectual and emotional basis—not a sartorial one.

And Flavio was a biker! Of course, many if not most younger Italians are devotees of scooters and cycles, but Flavio continued to ride and travel on his motorcycle long after most of his colleagues had moved over to their more comfortable Lancias (or whatnot). In 1988, Flavio had a serious motorcycle accident while traveling in Turkey that incapacitated him for more than a year and kept him from teaching and research. Right up until his death, he suffered from pain in his foot and leg that made it difficult for him to walk for long distances and sometimes kept him in bed.

Flavio was not a softie. He set severe standards for himself and others but was generally (although not always!) gentle in applying them. Humor, irony and sometimes sarcasm were his weapons, rather than aggression or intimidation.

He was typically adored by his students and had the ability to get them deeply engaged in philosophical questions. A class with Flavio did not end when everyone left the room; some of his classes may never end, even now that he’s gone.

The highlights of Flavio’s personal life were his marriage to Annalisa Siri and the adoption of Gurol, their Turkish son. I met them both at the hospital on a very sad day in February, 2007. In 1997, Annalisa had arranged for my own son to participate in cancer research at the institute where she worked as part of his medical education. This was an indirect consequence of my cooperation with Flavio in the Erasmus program, discussed further below.

During his long, final illness, Flavio was often unable to work at the university. His colleagues missed him and his influence in university affairs, and they were mostly in denial about what from the outside looked clearly like a terminal sickness. “When is Flavio going to come back to work?” one of his close colleagues complained; “We need him!” Of course, I had no answer.

The final period of Flavio’s life was unfortunate for more reasons than one. He had had to spend a number of years caring for his aged, and rather difficult, father, which prevented him from traveling and, often, from working as he wished. And when at last liberated from the duties of a faithful son, he became aware of the illness that eventually ended his life.

Being unable to travel was a serious loss for Flavio. He was fascinated by the similarities and differences among peoples and nations and relished international contact in a way that could not be fully served by the Internet. In 1991-92 he was an honorary fellow at the Department of Philosophy of the University of Wisconsin in Madison, and he was a Visiting Professor at the University of Iceland (1994), Glasgow University (1994) and the University of Bergen (1996). He was also instrumental in organizing Erasmus exchanges for students and colleagues in philosophy.It was through the Erasmus program that I first met Flavio; and it was also through this program that he visited—and became a friend of—Iceland.

We went together with a group of students to a country retreat in mid-winter. Ever the speculator about human motivation, Flavio gazed wonderingly out of the window of our bus at the bleak, frozen landscape. “What did those people think when they came here?” he asked, referring to the settlement of Iceland, which began in 874. “What could they have been thinking of?” He also warned me, “I hope that you are not sleeping with me in the same cabin. I snore like a bear!” He did snore a bit, but not really with bear-like intensity (as I imagine it).

The Icelandic students were as inspired by him as his Italian students, and discussions continued far into the night. Flavio arranged to send students, and a number of colleagues to Iceland, and to receive Icelandic students and colleagues in Genoa. Eventually, others took over this work, but the lively interchanges between the University of Iceland and the University of Genoa continue.

Socrates described philosophy as a preparation for death. But Socrates viewed the body as a kind of prison for the soul, and daily life (and perhaps even human intercourse generally) as a distraction—at least so Plato tells us. Socrates looked forward to bodily death as a liberation of the soul. This was not Flavio’s view. For Flavio, as I maintained earlier, human nature was inseparably discursive, sentimental and sympathetic, with human rationality encompassing all of these elements. This, I maintained, was a Humean vision. Flavio did not understand himself as a soul imprisoned in a body; and he reveled in human intercourse. Despite his fable about a meeting of Hume and Rawls in the Elysian Fields, Flavio did not (I think) believe in an afterlife, any more than Hume did. Even if Flavio had believed in an afterlife, he would surely have wanted to put it off as long as it was possible to live fulfillingly in an earthly life: a life of language, culture, history, society—and in short what I have twice referred to as “human intercourse”. I know from our personal conversations that Flavio—long before he became terminally ill—was disquieted by death. He was afraid of contracting breast cancer, as had one of his male relatives. Philosophy for Flavio was not a preparation for death; it was a preparation for continuing, deepening and advancing the dialogue.Flavio faced illness and death bravely, and was able, despite weakness and pain, to write out of his experience a remarkable book (Viaggio al termine degli Stati Uniti); but I doubt that he “went gentle into that good night”; and why should he have?

 

Flavio Altogether

I have given a somewhat kaleidoscopic recounting of Flavio as a human being. This was the only way I could think of to present him to the reader, not as an academic, but as a person of flesh and blood.

But what unified the kaleidoscopic Flavio was his curiosity about the human animal and about human relations and his passionate hope that people might grow to treat one another better than they do. This curiosity and hope guided his personal life, his interaction with friends, students, and colleagues, his choice of a career, and his philosophical humanism: the honed instrument of his life pursuit.

We have now lost the bodily Flavio, but the spiritual Flavio lives on—not in the fifth dimension, but in Flavio’s own way, in this world. He lives on as long as we remember him, study his work, and are moved by his influence. We will be the better for it.

 

Endnotes

1 I express my special thanks to Valeria Ottonelli, who helped me to collect together some of the essential material concerning Flavio’s life and work.

2 A bibliography of Flavio’s most important work can be found here:

1975 Un inquietante filosofo perbene. Saggio su David Hume, La Nuova Italia, Firenze
1977 Blaise Pascal, Solitudine e storia, antologia degli scritti, scelta, introduzione e note di F. Baroncelli, La Nuova Italia, Firenze
1980 Pauperismo e religione nell’eta moderna (con G. Assereto), «Società e storia», n. 7, 1980
1981 Tra Locke e Smith. Alcune immagini del rapporto col “povero”, «Studi Settecenteschi», n. 2
1982 La droga, il sesso, l’Iliade e l’Odissea in Piacere e felicità: fortuna e declino. Atti del 3° Convegno tra studiosi di Filosofia Morale (Chiavari – S.Margherita Ligure, 15-17 maggio 1980), a cura di Romeo Crippa, Liviana, Padova, pp. 247-63.
1983 (con Giovanni Assereto) Sulla povertà, idee leggi e progetti nell’Europa moderna, Herodote, Genova-Ivrea
1985 Contro la carità discreta. Misericordia, raziocinio e volontà di non sapere in una polemica cinquecentesca sulla povertà, «Materiali per una storia della cultura giuridica», XV (1985), 1
1987 D. Hume, Scritti morali, traduzione, introduzione e note a cura di F. Baroncelli, La scuola, Brescia
1987 I filosofi e la pace. Atti del 5° Convegno tra studiosi di Filosofia Morale in memoria di Romeo Crippa (Sanremo, Villa Nobel, 13-15 dicembre 1984), a cura di F. Baroncelli e M. Pasini, Ecig, Genova
1987 Corpo e cosmo nell’esperienza morale. Atti del 4° Convegno tra studiosi di Filosofia morale (Pietrasanta, 30 settembre-2 ottobre 1982) a cura di Romeo Crippa, edizione a cura di F. Baroncelli e D. Rolando, Paideia, Brescia
1989 Suicidio e garanzie. Riflessioni a proposito di un libro recente, «Materiali per una storia della cultura giuridica», XIX (1989), 2
1993 L’incerta fortuna della critica all’immaginazionismo di James Augustus Blondel, «Studi Settecenteschi»
Cinici e scimmie. Osservazioni sull’anti-etnocentrismo di Montaigne e Rousseau, «Materiali per una storia della cultura giuridica», XXIII (1993), 1
1994 Il linguaggio non offending come strategia di tolleranza, «Materiali per una storia della cultura giuridica», XXIV (1994), 1
1995 Razzismo e verità, «Ragion pratica», III (1995), pp. 79-97
1996 Il razzismo è una gaffe, Eccessi e virtù del “politically correct”, Donzelli, Roma
1997 Giustizialismo, «Ragion Pratica», n.7, pp. 119-137
Post-fazione a Lysander Spooner, No treason n.6. La costituzione senza autorità, ed. e trad. di V.Ottonelli, Il Melangolo, Roma
Etica e razionalità. Un finto divorzio?, «Materiali per una storia della cultura giuridica», XXVII (1997), 1, pp. 230-260
Il riconoscimento e i suoi sofismi, in F. Manti (a cura di), La tolleranza e le sue ragioni, pp. 120-147.
1998 Il riconoscimento e i suoi sofismi, «Quaderni di Bioetica», pp. 120-147.
Come scrivere sulla tolleranza, «Materiali per una storia della cultura giuridica», XXVIII (1998), 1, pp. 49-68.
2000 Razzismo e correttezza politica: la riscossa della natura, in Mezzadra, I confini della globalizzazione, Manifestolibri, Roma
Giudizio, giustizia, giustizialismo, in S. Nicosia (a cura di), Il giudizio. Filosofia, teologia, diritto, estetica. Carocci, Roma, pp. 320-339.
2001 Liberalismo e multiculturalismo in Liberalismo e società giusta, a cura di M. Marsonet, Name, Genova
Le quattro indegnità dei liberali irresoluti. Teoria politica, XVII (2001), pp. 23-47
Il chiliagono della politica mondiale e la povertà della nostra immaginazione, «Ragion pratica», 16 (2001), pp. 135-138
La tolleranza dell’errore e del disvalore, in V. Dini (a cura di), Tolleranza e libertà, Eleuthera, Milano, pp. 257-276
2005 L’onore dei Labdacidi: religione, politica e familismo nell’ Antigone di Sofocle, in M. Ripoli – M. Rubino (a cura di), Antigone. Il mito, il diritto, lo spettacolo, pp. 21-44
2006 Viaggio al termine degli Stati Uniti. Perché gli americani votano Bush e se ne vantano, Donzelli, Roma.

3 Published in Emilio Mazza & Emanuele Ronchetti, eds. New Essays on David Hume (Milano: FrancoAngeli, 2007), pp. 259-63, and originally presented in Italian at the seminar “La filosofia è politica”, held in honor of John Rawls at the University of Milan, 31 Janary 2003.

4 “Rawls and Hume: A Fable”, p. 260.

5 “Rawls and Hume: A Fable”, p. 261.

6 Others who know Flavio’s work may think differently than I about how it should be understood. This piece reflects my personal view, and should at least be of help to those who have yet to encounter Flavio’s philosophy.

Free Speech, Freedom of the Press, and the Tapestry of Lies

Conference proceedings (triple non-blind peer review), , , , , , , , , , ,

Those who know his work will recognize here my debt to John Pilger, journalist and documentary film-maker, who has both informed and inspired me.[1] 

 

 

On December 7, 2005, sixty-four years to the day after the Japanese attack on the American at Pearl Harbor, Harold Pinter, recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, gave his Nobel Lecture, ” Art, Truth & Politics”. Here is an excerpt from that speech. “In 1958,” Pinter said, “I wrote the following:”

 

‘There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.’

 

“I believe that these assertions still make sense,” Pinter continued, “and do still apply to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?“

 

Pinter went on to say this:

 

… language in art remains a highly ambiguous transaction, a quicksand, a trampoline, a frozen pool which might give way under you, the author, at any time.

 

But … the search for the truth can never stop. It cannot be adjourned, it cannot be postponed. It has to be faced, right there, on the spot.

….

Political language, as used by politicians, does not venture into any of this territory since the majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed.[2]

 

As every single person here knows, the justification for the invasion of Iraq was that Saddam Hussein possessed a highly dangerous body of weapons of mass destruction, some of which could be fired in 45 minutes, bringing about appalling devastation. We were assured that was true. It was not true. We were told that Iraq had a relationship with Al Quaeda and shared responsibility for the atrocity in New York of September 11th 2001. We were assured that this was true. It was not true. We were told that Iraq threatened the security of the world. We were assured it was true. It was not true.

 

The truth is something entirely different. The truth is to do with how the United States understands its role in the world and how it chooses to embody it.

….

I spoke earlier about ‘a tapestry of lies’ which surrounds us. President Reagan commonly described Nicaragua as a ‘totalitarian dungeon’. This was taken generally by the media, and certainly by the British government, as accurate and fair comment. But there was in fact no record of death squads under the Sandinista government. There was no record of torture. There was no record of systematic or official military brutality. No priests were ever murdered in Nicaragua. There were in fact three priests in the government, two Jesuits and a Maryknoll missionary. The totalitarian dungeons were actually next door, in El Salvador and Guatemala. The United States had brought down the democratically elected government of Guatemala in 1954 and it is estimated that over 200,000 people had been victims of successive military dictatorships.

 

Six of the most distinguished Jesuits in the world were viciously murdered at the Central American University in San Salvador in 1989 by a battalion of the Alcatl regiment trained at Fort Benning, Georgia, USA. That extremely brave man Archbishop Romero was assassinated while saying mass. It is estimated that 75,000 people died. Why were they killed? They were killed because they believed a better life was possible and should be achieved. That belief immediately qualified them as communists. They died because they dared to question the status quo, the endless plateau of poverty, disease, degradation and oppression, which had been their birthright.

 

The United States finally brought down the Sandinista government. It took some years and considerable resistance but relentless economic persecution and 30,000 dead finally undermined the spirit of the Nicaraguan people. They were exhausted and poverty stricken once again. The casinos moved back into the country. Free health and free education were over. Big business returned with a vengeance. ‘Democracy’ had prevailed.

 

But this ‘policy’ was by no means restricted to Central America. It was conducted throughout the world. It was never-ending. And it is as if it never happened.

 

The United States supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War. I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, and, of course, Chile. The horror the United States inflicted upon Chile in 1973 can never be purged and can never be forgiven.

 

Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries. Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy? The answer is yes they did take place and they are attributable to American foreign policy. But you wouldn’t know it.

 

It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest.[3] The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.[4]

 

What Pinter was talking about is nothing new. In December, 1917, between David Lloyd George, Britain’s prime minister during much of the first world war said to C. P. Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian, “If people really knew the truth,” the prime minister said, “the war would be stopped tomorrow. But of course they don’t know, and can’t know.” And if you investigate war reporting, at least from the nineteenth century to the present, you will find that insofar as any country engaged in war has a public that can be reached by what we now refer to as “mass media”, that public has been lied to about war: cynically, deliberately, and over and over again.[5]

 

In weaving this tapestry of lies, the mass media—from Pravda, to the New York Times, to London’s Mirror to Þjóðviljinn (now deceased) and Morgunblaðið—have, over time and considering different examples, variously complicit. (I mention only newspapers here; but radio and television have been equally complicit. A major vector for complicity is the so-called “news services”, such as the Associated Press and Reuters, upon which other mass media largely rely for content.) Each new war provides politicians and managers with new lessons about how potential embarrassment (i.e. the revelation of truth to the public) in the media can be avoided and the media rendered complicit in weaving the tapestry of lies. In some places, as we know, the media are simply controlled by governments. But, in general, the Western media, treasuring their “press freedom” or “freedom of information”, largely control themselves and may easily be granted their freedom as they present little danger. The public is equally complicit being for the most part thoroughly uncritical insofar as it can rise above its boredom with the news: Pinter speaks of the “vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed.” For this purpose, the public, by various devices, must be kept moronized, and this effort seems to have thoroughly succeeded in the United States. It has succeeded less well in Europe, and less effort has been directed to it, politicians being aware that there are limits to how far you can moronize an educated population a significant part of which consist of the still-living remnants of nations that were all-too-recently decimated by war.[6] Yet, it goes surprisingly well, and politicians can afford to wait until enough of those for whom the destruction of their nations is still a living memory to die off and let the powers that be get on with their business.

 

My audience here might ask, “OK, but what does this have to do with us? Our politicians have kept us out of wars, not pushed us into them. We do not live in a police state. We have freedom of speech here, and no one is hounded, persecuted or punished for saying whatever they want. Some of our news is censored, or self-censored, by our government or by our media themselves, but this is only light censorship, done for reasons that most of us agree with, and there are no signs that this is eroding press freedom. We don’t swallow American propaganda—or Russian, or British or Qatari—whole, as you can see from the widespread opposition here to the latest murderous suppression in Palestine and the widespread support here for a ‘yes’ vote in Scotland. Our public is pretty well educated and not entirely uncritical.”

 

All of this is true, dear friends; and it is to be hoped that we Icelanders sincerely appreciate the fact that, as far as these matters go, we live in a paradise as compared with most of the world. Yet we have not kept ourselves far enough distanced from the tapestry of lies and are vulnerable—and complicit. For we unfortunately have a weak Fourth Estate. Our media are docile, politically subservient and thus manipulated—perhaps most of all self-manipulated—and are not dedicated to what is required, at least in a supposedly democratic nation, in the way of getting truth to the public of the sort that is needed in order for the electorate to exercise rationally the power that is supposedly vested in it.

 

Although technological developments are rapidly changing things, mass media—ours and others—are, broadly speaking, conduits for four different kinds of things: news, opinion (including especially editorial opinion), entertainment, and advertising. Upon entertainment I will not comment here, although such comment would be relevant.

 

Advertising is mainly for the purpose of selling goods and services, although politicians and policies are also “sold” through advertising—witness the recent Scottish independence election. In this case, if we are to have a vigilant and independent Fourth Estate, two things must be secured: first, that advertising must not be allowed to be false, misleading or disingenuous, and second, those who advertise—and thus support the media financially, the new generation of “free” newspapers surviving entirely upon this—must not be allowed to influence news reporting. If we want a free press, or free media, these two things must be policed by the media themselves, but self-policing and self-regulation are notoriously weak in most areas where it is spoken of.[7] In any case, Icelandic media have in no way come close to meeting their responsibilities in these matters. Most of them serve particular political parties and particular lobbies and are therefore compromised in advance with regard to the policing of advertising; but in fact party-independent media do not do much better. To the extent that these two requirements are not met, media are complicit in weaving the tapestry of lies spoken of by Pinter.

 

Opinion is the area in which media are entitled to be partial to some particular set of views or mouthpieces for party politics. Yet, again, there are two things that are necessary if we are to have the kind of responsible Fourth Estate needed to serve a democracy. First, such opinion as is channeled to the public by the media may not be built upon falsehoods, misrepresentations or even upon deliberate omissions. There are many matters, even in the sciences, that are controversial or uncertain; and where opinion builds upon it, it will take on the uncertainty or controversial nature of the foundation upon which it is built. Opinion that has no foundation should not be transmitted by the media, and I do not see that freedom of opinion or freedom of expression extend inherently to it[8] although we may choose to grant them. But more pertinently, opinion whose foundation is uncertain or controversial should not be transmitted by the media under the pretense that its foundation is firm and may be taken for granted. For example, if an editor or politician speaks in favor of certain political actions or policies on the basis of the idea that “markets are self-regulating”, it should at least be made clear that this idea is not established. And if someone supports imposing sanctions on the Russian Federation in response to the shooting down of Malaysian flight MH 17, it should be made clear that has not been established that the Russians had anything to do with that tragic incident. Otherwise, the opinions transmitted are fraudulent, and the media become again complicit in weaving the tapestry of lies. In this connection, we should keep in mind that Iceland’s descent into financial crisis was in large part a media failure; and its possibility of being drawn, one way or another, into the American-NATO agenda for a European war is not negligible (a matter of which most Icelanders seem blissfully unaware.) The responsibility for not transmitting fraudulent opinion rests with the media themselves, and if they cannot control it—noting that such fraudulent opinion may come from their advertisers, political associates, editors or owners—then that invites external control. The freedom of opinion or of expression that I am sure we all support may extend to false or stupid opinion, as John Stuart Mill argued, but I cannot see that it inherently extends to fraudulent opinion.[9]

 

The second demand is that despite the fact that the media are entitled to be partial as regards opinion, there must—if we are to have a Fourth Estate that serves a democracy as it should—be a forum in the mass media for a suitable variety of opinions in controversial matters. The mass media are the vehicle through which various relevant opinions reach the public, and the publication of opinion is meant to be influential upon policymakers, legislators and the electorate. This is perfectly legitimate—indeed, required in a democracy—insofar as the influence comes from the content of the opinion laid before the public for consideration. But if the influence simply comes from the exclusion of serious contrary opinion, or from the public’s being barraged by one kind of view while opposing views are, or by using other tricks of “public relations”—terrorizing the public is currently a popular one—then this is not legitimate. It is perhaps all right for one medium to be thoroughly one-sided, but it is not all right if the national media, taken together, are thoroughly one-sided. Otherwise, national media become complicit in weaving the tapestry of lies. They certainly were in the recent Scottish independence referendum, where the views and arguments of the “yes” group were given little media presence, while the “no” group enjoyed a media barrage and a studied, anti-“yes” terror campaign conducted by leading politicians.[10] In my judgment, the Icelandic media do practically nothing to meet the first of these two demands, while the second demand is served haphazardly and superficially—the “alternatives” are generally restricted to the rather simplistic positions advanced by the political parties. Certainly, there is no systematic effort made by the Icelandic media to secure collectively what is known as “balance”, never mind intelligent balance.

 

Finally, but most importantly, nothing that is not conscientiously verified should be transmitted as news—or at least the sources and degree of verification must always be made clear. Furthermore, it is the responsibility of news media to obtain and transmit the information that “the public needs to know” in order to exercise the power that is said to reside in it in a democratic polity. Freedom of the press is not the freedom to misrepresent or distort what is reported as fact, whether by falsification, irresponsibility as to verification, by selectivity or by omission.[11] In many jurisdictions, witnesses in cases before a court are made to swear to tell “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth”, and news reporting that is not dedicated to exactly that is the principle loom on which the tapestry of lies is woven, even when the lies themselves originate from outside of the media.[12] The American President Obama gave a speech to the United Nations General Assembly the other day that as far as I can see consisted of little more than a mass of egregious lies and misrepresentations.[13] I think personally that politicians and officials should be forbidden by law to lie to the public. For serious lies, including lies of omission and misrepresentation, they should be driven, by law, from office and perhaps even imprisoned, for it is through such lies that the greatest harms to individuals, nations, and mankind come about.

 

There is of course no chance at all that legislators—our dear politicians—will ever make laws that take politicians to task for lying, but one can dream. If anyone asks whether this would be a violation of the principle of free speech, my answer is no. Let us consider for a moment some of the more important limitations on the freedom of speech. It does not license perjury. It does not license libel or slander. It does not license academic misconduct, that is, the falsification or fabrication of data or results in a scientific or scholarly report. It does not license false advertising. It does not license falsification of a tax return, application for insurance, or mortgage application; indeed it does not license any sort of fraudulent misrepresentation. It does not license identity theft. It does not license expert testimony that is purposely false or misleading or in reckless disregard of the truth (as for example the infamous report of Frederick Mishkin and Icelandic collaborators on the stability of Icelandic banks[14]). And so I maintain that it does not license political lying. Thus, in terms of “rights”, the way is open, I believe, to insist that politicians not lie (and to do something about it if they do).

 

As things stand, however, our mass media are our only protection from the lies, concealments and distortions peddled by our politicians, and the media can only protect us by exposing those lies for what they are, not by transmitting them as news. It is perfectly straightforward news to report Obama’s speech—he did give that speech—and even to reproduce it verbatim. But this is only part of that news; it needs also to be reported, and explicitly documented, that the speech consisted of lies, if it did. Politicians should not be able to transmit lies to the public—sometimes the global public—through the laziness, gullibility, incompetence or complicity of either newsmen or the media that employ them. This has to do with the ethics not only of newsmen but of the mass media as such. And it, too, could be, in principle, rightly backed up by law (as it is partially by the laws of libel). Freedom of the press does not extent to fraudulent news reporting any more than the freedom of speech extends to political lying.

 

The Icelandic media do not come out well on this score. Since most of them are in cahoots with, or manipulated by, one or another political party, they are uncritical of political lies, at least of their crony politicians. And they devote little effort to insuring non-fraudulent news reporting in any case. They are not assiduous at providing the public with the truths that it needs to know in order for Icelandic democracy to function as any kind of genuine democracy, and they are complacent in the face of all of the tricks that are pulled on the public in order to keep it in ignorance. For instance, when some “scandal” erupts in the news, as happens with upsetting frequency, the first thing that a critical reader should ask herself is, “What is going on that they don’t want me to pay attention to?” Scandal-mongering is one of the standard ways in which the reporting of news is rendered fraudulent, a diversion. Our politicians, and many of our economists, declare that “they didn’t see our financial crisis coming”, and sometimes add that no one could have done so. But even if we believe that they didn’t see it coming (which I don’t), we would all have seen it coming if the news media had done the job that they must be expected to do in a democracy. Does anyone remember the legislation that was passed from 1985 onward in order to allow the “asset stripping” of our savings banks (a project that succeeded, by the way)? Did anyone ever know about it in the first place? Was it reported? Was it discussed? Do you think that it was too complex for the average person to understand? Do you think that this kind of omission supports the democratic control of policy or is in the public interest?[15] Thus are our news media complicit in the weaving of the tapestry of lies.

 

Most of the media exist as private corporations, engaged in news reporting, opinion, advertising and entertainment with the aim of turning a profit. There are of course also state media, but they are run in much the same way as private media, not least because they draw upon the same pool of personnel. This situation may be as it should be, but the way in which the media have come to function in society and politics needs to be squarely faced and better taken into account. Like hospitals, insurance companies and courts, there are certain standards that the media must be made to meet, despite (and not least on account of) temptations that may lead them in other directions.

 

The institutional framework of the media must also be regulated so as not to undermine the demands of their meeting those standards. For instance, the media corporations should not wind up in too few hands. In Italy, Silvio Berlusconi is the controlling owner of most of the major Italian media corporations and is doubtless for that reason Italy’s most powerful politician. The U.S. media have concentrated in very few hands, and international media moguls, like Rupert Murdoch, own a large number of large media corporations globally. The few controlling owners of mass media all have their own personal and political agendas and become the non-elected controllers of national policies. The idea of a media-controlled democracy doesn’t pass the laugh test, especially when the media are themselves controlled by parties whose interests do not run with those of the public (although they can perhaps cozen the public into thinking otherwise in the short run). What I am saying here must be familiar to everyone in my audience and almost banal. Yet, nothing is done about this and the concentration of the media into an ever-smaller number of hands continues. This may seem to be less of a problem in Iceland than in some other places, but we must consider the utter dependence of the Icelandic media on a small number of outlets for all foreign news; and there is nothing in place that would prevent Rupert Murdoch from buying up all of the Icelandic private media before the end of this week.

 

In particular in Iceland, news reporting must be made to conform to the standards of truth, rather than to the interests of party politicians or to any other interests than those of supplying the public in a democratic society with the truths it needs to know in order to make up its mind and exert its influence in our struggle with the present and our course through the future. For, as George Orwell pronounced: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”[16] It would be nice to think that our media will autonomously with these standards, through a respect for democracy and an ambition for professionalism. But at any rate, we, the public, should demand this, whatever our particular political persuasions may be.

 

As far as budding journalists are concerned, I’ll close with a quotation from the famous American news anchorman, Dan Rather, when explaining in an interview taken by John Pilger why he had failed in his role as a journalist in the case of the Iraq war (the last one, now there’s a new one):

 

. . . I have said, whether those of us in journalism want to admit it or not, then, at least in some small way, fear is present in every news room in the country. A fear of losing your job, a fear of your institution – the company you work for – going out of business, the fear of being stuck with some label, “unpatriotic” or otherwise that you will have with you to your grave and beyond, the fear that there’s so much at stake for the country, that by doing what you deeply feel is your job will sometime be interference; all these things go into the mix.  But it’s very important for me to say, because I firmly believe it: I’m not the Vice-President in Charge of Excuses, and we shouldn’t have excuses. What we should do is take a really good look at that period and learn from it. And, you know, suck up our courage.[17]


[1] Invited lecture presented at the international conference, “Tjáningarfrelsi og félagsleg ábyrgð – Kenningar og útfærsla” (Freedom of Expression and Social Responsibility – Theory and Practice), held at the University of Akureyri on 29 September 2014 and arranged by the Media Studies program and the Faculty of Social Sciences. Those who know his work will recognize here my debt to John Pilger, journalist and documentary film-maker, who has both informed and inspired me.

[2] Emphasis added.

[3] These are the most powerful lines in Pinter’s speech and have been frequently quoted, not least by John Pilger.

[5] For this history, see the film by John Pilger mentioned in footnote 17, below.

[6] Some of these people, particularly the Germans, actually learned something from the Second World War, but, as I go on to indicate, the now-up-coming generations seem to be as clueless as their pre-war ancestors.

[7] Some instances in which the media have “policed” themselves have been as abusive and repressive as any government would be. See, for example, Paula Cruickshank, “42 Seconds That Sullied Helen Thomas—and New Media”, that can be found at:

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2013/07/31/42_seconds_that_sullied_helen_thomas_–_and_new_media_119431.html

This article, incidentally, quotes several interesting clauses from the (U.S.) Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics, the content of which I believe it would be wise for our own journalists to incorporate into their ethical code. Birgir Guðmundsson informs me that some such has been proposed but that Icelandic journalists have not been willing to adopt.

[8] In the sequel, I call this “fraudulent opinion”.

[9] There is a difference between what is false and what is falsified, or what is unsubstantiated but pretends to be substantiated.

[10] The use of media terror campaigns is well known and a standard device of politicians, as Hermann Göring famously pointed out. In an interview in his cell in Nuremberg on January 3rd, 1946, Göring said “. . . the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship. . . .?[T]he people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.” (emphasis added). In Scotland recently, the threat was that of financial ruin; in the Cold War, the threat was the awful, lurking Russian hordes. Today, people in California are apparently terrified of being beheaded by militant Muslims. In short, Göring knew what he was talking about. Of course, as I indicate below, the media should warn the public of genuine threats, as they often do not (as for example, the obvious and verifiable threat of the collapse of the Icelandic banks in 2008, or, earlier, the riskiness of buying DeCode stock); but they should not uncritically communicate the threats manufactured for mass consumption by politicians and demagogues.

[11] In this paper, as the reader should easily understand, I use the term “lie” as an abbreviation for all of these sorts of misrepresentation.

[12] It is perhaps important to emphasize that it is often not possible to discern the truth; and in certain cases there may be no truth to discern, although I draw the reader’s attention to the opening passages of Pinter’s Nobel speech. Obviously, the media cannot be expected to arrive at the truth in such cases. But what it can do is to inform its audience either that the truth cannot be discerned or that there may be no truth to discern. The important thing is not to represent things to be more or less evident than they are and to educate the public.

[13] Speech of 24 September 2014; full text available here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/barackobama/11119048/Full-text-of-Barack-Obamas-speech-to-the-UN-General-Assembly.html

The then-Secretary-of-State, Colin Powell, delivered an even more egregious fabrication to a plenary session of the UN Security Council on February 5, 2003, concerning Saddam Hussein’s supposed collection of “weapons of mass destruction”. The media did not do their job—it would have been easy enough to expose this fraud for what it was—and Powell’s ploy worked so well that it was doubtless an inspiration to Obama. The fraudulence of Powell’s performance has been richly documented. As for Obama’s speech, one has to assess the few kernels of information about current events that may be considered reliable, or tentatively reliable, in a morass of propaganda, channeled by the media, the like of which has been rarely seen. These few items reveal Obama’s speech to be thoroughly fraudulent.

[14] Frederic S. Mishkin and Tryggvi T. Herbertsson, “Financial Stability in Iceland” (Reykjavík: Icelandic Chamber of Commerce, 2006). The report is available at: http://www.vi.is/files/555877819Financial%20Stability%20in%20Iceland%20Screen%20Version.pdf

Warnings from competent sources—including Fitch, Merrill Lynch (rather ironically) and the Danske Bank—were coming from all directions at the time. But without having to understand any technicalities, it was clear that the banks were so highly leveraged (i.e. had issued loans that far surpassed their assets) that any small contraction in the interbank credit market (practically inevitable) would cause them instantly to collapse.

[15] The first real analysis of this process that I know of appeared not in the media but in an MA thesis in sociology by Þorvaldur Logason, Valdselítur og spilling: um spillingarorsakir hrunsins á Íslandi 2008 (University of Iceland, 2011). The Icelandic National Broadcast (RÚV) ran a short program in 2013 about the projected publication of a book (yet to be published) based upon the thesis, which is how I learned about the matter. Þorvaldur says that there was some minor media coverage around 2001-2002, which certainly passed me by. But this dangerous attempt to appropriate the assets of the savings banks should have received intensive, analytical coverage. Suppose someone thinks that Þorvaldur’s analysis and critique was mistaken. The point remains: there should have been detailed coverage and a public discussion. By 2008, it was far too late.

[16] George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-four, Part 3, Chapter 2. This book, originally published in 1949, is available in many editions and is in the process of entering the public domain.

[17] Transcribed from the sound track of John Pilger’s documentary film, “The War You Don’t See” (2011). The film (along with most of Pilger’s other films) can be viewed at http://johnpilger.com/videos and is highly recommended for anyone interested in the responsibility that attaches to the freedom of the media.