Political scientist Margaret Levi has served as CASBS director since 2014. She discusses the need to explore the morals which underlie our economic systems.
Margaret Levi
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Moral Political Economy Project
‘Free to Choose’ Milton and Rose Friedman
‘Bowling Alone’ Robert D. Putnam
Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences
@casbsstanford on twitter
John Markoff: Let me start by asking you what led to the Moral Economy Project. What were the threads that sort of caused you to put it together?
Margaret Levi: There were multiple threads in causing me to put together the Moral Political Economy Project. One is my own personal deep interests and convictions and commitments. So I'm a political economist, and I have thought hard and deep not only about labor issues but also about the way in which capitalism has evolved. Over time, and that it's not just one thing, and that it changes. And because of my own concerns about what's going on politically in not just this country but in the world, which I think is a reflection of a transformation once again in the cap— both the capitalist system, and that then leads to strains with the kinds of institutional arrangements that we have to regulate our economic system. And so it seemed to me like a very good moment, and CASBS is very well situated to take advantage of that moment to rethink, or to think and generate new ideas about— or not necessarily new ideas, it might be consolidating some ideas that are already out there, if they are, about what the next big model of the political economy should look like.
John Markoff: And I was thinking about in your think piece, the working paper, you traced this trajectory that was from laissez-faire to Keynesianism to neoliberalism and sort of then the question of course is what's next? But I also then thought, well, how much does this have to do with American traditions versus European traditions? Because I began to wonder whether a lot of the sort of notion of a moral economy isn't sort of implied in the social democratic experience in Europe.
Margaret Levi: Well, I think every, every, every economy has a moral piece to it. Every economy, no matter where it is, has some set of values that are embedded within it that it's trying to achieve. The Chinese economy does, Chinese idea of an economy does, of a political economy. The Swedish and Norwegian and, you know, the social democratic vision is different than the neoliberal vision. There were contestations that happened after the Second World War about what the right model was, and there were at least three. There was the Soviet model, there was the sort of American-British, in fact, whole European model, and then there was this model that came out of India that was thinking about being something in between the two. Interesting. So, you know, there have always been— every single model is a moral— so the larger thing is called moral political economies because we really do want to signal that there are multiple possibilities out there.
John Markoff: But it seems with the ascendancy of neoliberalism in America that the notion of morality and economy, it becomes implicit or it gets submerged, doesn't it?
Margaret Levi: That's right.
John Markoff: Because there is this view that it's just this market, this sort of —perfect thing.
Margaret Levi: Well, it does get submerged, but it didn't start off submerged. So if you think about von Hayek, who— The Road from Serfdom— I mean, there's a whole set of values there about why he doesn't like big government and big— certain kinds of big think, because it leads to fascism and to Nazism. And Friedman's Free to Choose— I mean, those are the two big, big, big players in the creation of neoliberalism in terms of the thinkers. And Free to Choose is about but putting on a pedestal one set of values as opposed to another set of values, right? So, yes, it then became implicit as if this is value-free, but in fact it never was value-free. And Friedman plays both sides of the fence on that one. But I think if you— I mean, anybody who's looking at it objectively sees that there are values embedded in there, like there are in every political economy.
John Markoff: Before I go too far down that path, I wanted to sort of ask you to sort of see, to step back and say, how does this project fit into your vision of CASBS and CASBS's role? Just sort of as a general, where is CASBS going kind of question.
Margaret Levi: So one of the things that I think CASBS is uniquely or relatively uniquely capable of doing is to think beyond the short term and to think in terms of a much longer term. I'm not mean— I don't mean science fiction like 1,000 years from now or even 150 years from now, but to think beyond the next 5 to 10 years, to really think about the next generation, let's say. And to think about that in ways that are informed by the best of social science and other thinking that's out there, and bring those people together. We have a capacity to attract people who are those kinds of thinkers, and to link that with other thinkers who are not necessarily academics, or not just journalists like yourself, but futurists like Paul Saffo, or people in Google, or, you know, Yael, who I was just having lunch with, you know, who come from different places and different ways of thinking about the question, so that we're all in it together to generate new research, the research that needs to be done use the best of the research that has exist, also generate the kind of thinking that leads to new research and leads to new policy practices. So I see all of our projects sort of have to meet those, the big— not necessarily every single workshop, because those can have a very specific purpose for some finite end, but certainly anything that gets entitled a project and is supposed to be multi-year and ongoing should have those kinds of characteristics. I saw this one as exactly fitting within that framework.
John Markoff: You picked technology as a theme, and I was also thinking about, in your first paper, you talked about from the Industrial Revolution to the Green Revolution. Is there a trajectory to, was there a reason related to the theory why you picked technology as the focus point?
Margaret Levi: Yeah, the choice of technology, this is one of the working groups that came out of the first meeting. So there was an earlier meeting in May that brought together about 20 or 25 people to think about where to go with this and how to do it. The model is really the Mont Pelerin Society in many ways, which was what the neoliberals did, was created by von Hayek, and he was the first president, and Friedman ultimately became the president of it. It was a group of economists who were opposed— what brought them together was their opposition or critique of Keynesianism. Not necessarily that they had a clear vision. In fact, they argued with each other like crazy. They had somewhat different views. But it did lead to supply-side economics and to neoclassical theory in its neoliberal variant. And there was a great book written by Angus Burgin called The Great Persuaders, which I read partially. I believe it was recommended to me by Larry Kramer from Hewlett Foundation, president of Hewlett Foundation, who was— at the same time I was thinking about this moral economy project and whether we should go forward with it, he was creating a whole area of program on Beyond Neoliberalism and wrote a wonderful think piece that you should read if you haven't, or a projection that he sent to the board and then became the sort of guidelines for this. And part of our funding is coming from that project, from that Hewlett project. So the technology piece came out of that first meeting, that we needed a series of working groups to take the ideas forward, and one of them was a focus on technology, and for several different reasons. One is for the reason you highlighted, that if you think about the history of capitalism, and therefore the history of the moral political economies that have been created to help regulate capitalism or to help us know how to act within capitalism, the form of— the dominant form of capital is absolutely and the way in which work is organized and what the technology looks like is absolutely crucial. So you mentioned laissez-faire, but you can go back before that and finance capital becomes very important, industrial capital before that is really important. So as these transformations in the way in which capital is organized and what constitutes the major productive mode change, so does the mo— so does the framework for dealing with it have to change. So technology's crucial to that, but it's also framing the way we think and how we interact. So it's crucial at another level as well, which was part of why the working group existed.
John Markoff: I wonder, you know, your citing of sort of the roots of neoliberalism and how it sort of intentionally emerged is really interesting to me, and I was wondering, given that there's so much activity, intellectual activity around Silicon Valley now around artificial intelligence and ethics, whether something might emerge from that. I mean, that's happening on the industrial side, basically. You're trying to bridge this. Maybe you're just starting, but maybe that is a point at which new ideas will come for the kinds of models that you're looking for might emerge from.
Margaret Levi: Well, I'm hoping so. I mean, you will recall that we put in a proposal to the initiative that Knight Foundation runs, manages, that comes out of Hoffman money and Amager money and others, to think about the ethics and governance of AI. And we framed it as within a moral political economy framework. How do we think about these issues? And I think that that initial proposal helped propel my ideas and a few others of us. But it wasn't sufficient to respond to the questions that they are concerned about, because we didn't have it figured out enough. We didn't convince them that that was the right way to go yet. Or maybe they're just doing something else. It doesn't matter. But I think that is absolutely where we have to go. I mean, this has to be a framework that is in interaction with the people who are developing AI and other forms of technological change. AI isn't the— as you know, as you have taught me, is not the only game in town here.
John Markoff: One of the things that's accompanied the rise of neoliberalism, one of the things that you've studied, is the decline of unions. Right. It came up a little bit during that workshop, and I I wanted to sort of ask, you know, will unions come back in this new model, or are there other ways of organizing people who work besides the conventional or traditional union movement?
Margaret Levi: I think what has to come back is not necessarily unions. That may be a form of organization that was very much tied into a former another technology and another productive mode. But does have to come— we do need intermediary associations that are being able to mobilize people and allow them to express voice and demands and articulate their own values that are— that actually have a place in the society the way unions did. So right now we see a lot of forms of people organizing, but it's pretty— it's not to make concrete demands, it's to make diffuse demands. So we don't have a way of interacting with the political system right now between the voices of people who feel that they're being harmed in the political system. And so finding intermediate associations, this is another form of— we've We're now bowling alone. I mean, that's what some people— I mean, that's how Putnam would put it. But we need something that's— so part of this model and this practice that we're developing has to be thinking about how do you give workers voice in this kind of world? How do you give people who are demanding certain human rights a voice in this kind of world? Right? We've individuated it or we've turned it into these really amorphous mass claimants.
John Markoff: Out of the working group process, do you see a path forward? What's the next step for the Moral Economies Project?
Margaret Levi: Well, I think there are a couple steps. One is, my utopian ideal is that we'll actually generate something that replaces neoliberalism. I don't know what it'll be called, Maybe it'll be called Markovian. Big new idea. Probably not. But, I mean, there might be someone amongst us who, you know, epitomizes a set, writes a great book that epitomizes a set of ideas. I think in this world that's probably less likely than it's going to come out of some kind of collaborative effort and will have some kind of different name that'll epitomize what is critical about it. It might be some new form of communitarianism. I don't know, but that would be the best outcome, to actually generate something that is so— that catches people's imagination, actually speaks to the issues that have to be spoken to, and gives people a path forward, both those who are in government and those who are in the economy and those who are in the more general civil society. Before that, more immediate steps would be a variety of white papers or books or articles that really express some of the thinking as it's emerging and developing in order to create a better conversation.
John Markoff: I remember now, not only was there the Port Huron Statement, which was connected to the student movement, actually sort of launched it, but later there was the Triple Revolution paper that came out of in response to automation. I mean, this was what, in the early '60s, I believe. And so we're at that juncture already.
Margaret Levi: That's right, so we need those kinds of statements. Which is far short of actually coming up with Keynesianism again or something else.
John Markoff: Well, this is good. Thank you for the introduction. Yeah.