i think the argument over housing and private profits is not about whether it’s legitimate that there should be private profits in building housing — of course there should! as with any sphere in which private contractors are engaged. 1/

but questions of to what degree housing supply should be *directed* by private profit incentives are, i think, legitimately much thornier. /fin

our absolute condition has definitely improved, mostly as a matter of technology. we have vaccines, electricity, indoor plumbing. we are still not overtly as caste based a society as we once was, though we are in danger of a lot of reversion there. 1/

i think you are much too complacent. technology will not revert, but it can immiserate as well as help. we are more surveilled, and along a variety of basic dimensions (like being able to skip town and start over) much more unfree than people in the past. 2/

pretty soon, technology may well be enforcing laws over which we have little democratic control with overt violence. it may start with armed drones surveilling the border, but it won't end there. 3/

we are not going to bring back full jim crow racial distinctions, but a multiracial precarious underclass is expanding and may be surveilled and policed and immiserated. we are bringing back the Fritz Lang Metropolis world that the New Deal averted. 4/

UAE is the model, but here as there, most people would have the status of guest worker. It wouldn't be confined to immigrants. 5/

You can always argue absolute condition is better, because technology. Unless we nuke ourselves (far from out of the question), we're likely in continuity to have less actual caloric deficiency than we had in the Gilded Age. 6/

But in welfare terms, I don't know that a decently fed (if ever insecure ex ante about just how) serf class (no doubt with formal but meaningless and unenforceable equality) qualifies as absolute improvement, at least relative to the non-serfs of that era. 7/

Even with the fucking HUGE tailwind of technological advancement, we are toying with shapes of society that would mean in absolute terms, one might prefer the outhouse and drafts of a 19th C New England town to the surveilled, climate controlled, propagandized present. 8/

Dignity and freedom matter a great deal to human welfare, and the path we're on erases it all. As I said, yes, I think you are too whiggish, too complacent. All the Kuznets curves — the original re inquality, the environmental version, the arc of justice version — have undone themselves. 9/

If we don't repair the direction, I think we may well be quite worse off in absolute terms, with technological change offset by various forms of crisis, conflict, or quiet coercion and subjection. /fin

lots of dimensions have changed. the gilded age emphasizes dimensions of inequality in wealth and its undermining of democracy and corruption of power. we are worse on those dimensions now, and that’s beginning to corrode some of the other improvements you point to. 1/

the arc of history did okay for a while, but it’s pointing in a dangerous direction. and i don’t think it will bend back toward any kind of justice or improvement of mass circumstance unless we address those core imbalances. /fin

I don't think we should be agnostic, to the degree balance is what we're after, tariffs just tax too much! (There might be other cases for tariffs, e.g. protecting defense-critical industries, even though even there I think there are better ways to go.) 1/

I like that your proposal is about trying to create a new set of international norms. I think that's critical. 2/

I think it's also critical, given the level of international discord and distrust, that deficit countries (who tend to find imbalance politically disagreeable, despite the consumption stimulus) have unilateral, non-discriminatory (ie non-bilateral) tools to insist upon balance. 3/

But while the actions are unilateral, internationally agreed norms should legitimate them, acknowledge imbalance as a problem and bless a suite of tools deficit countries can unilaterally deploy to address them. (As the original Bretton Woods accords did!) /fin