Morning Thoughts on Teaching Democracy and Markets
Two things come together this morning. First, this tweet from a few days ago:
And this comes together for me because I've been thinking through how to teach my students about geography - what does thinking geographically provide them? How does thinking geographically give them a richer sense of understanding the world?
So one way of thinking about (capitalist) markets is that they're placeless - that (if people talk about them at all) they operate somewhere above us. Because markets are everywhere, they're also nowhere in particular. This in incomplete for a variety of reasons. So instead, if I were to give this lecture to students, I'd begin this way:
(Capitalist) markets are embedded within a set of uneven and unequal relationships. These relationships take a variety of forms: There are the social relationships in a given place (one person has more money than another; one person has more knowledge than another and can turn that to their benefit; one person has more social or cultural cachet than another and is able to trade on that cachet; one person has greater political or legal authority than another and can thus set the terms of exchange). But there are also a set of uneven material relationships: One place has more wood, another place has more coal, another place has more water, etc. And then there are a set of temporal relationships (people carry out business in the present in relation to a past that places certain obligations on them, perhaps shaped by certain kinds of path dependencies, but also oriented toward a particular expectation about the future).
So the economic activity that's characteristic of markets produces at least two things: profit (for a person in a specific place in a particular temporal moment); and externalities of all kinds. But what seems to be key about the world in which we live is that those externalities are displaced through a variety of mechanisms. They can be socially displaced (in engaging in a given economic activity in a time and place, we're not aware of how these activities impact those around us - the experience of the services sector, for example); they can be spatially displaced (i.e., globalization, which seems to be premised at least in part on the idea that it's bad to pollute the environment here but if it happens somewhere else to provide us with consumer products, well, that's just the cost of doing business); and they can be temporally displaced (and here we can think about debt as a way of managing the future, but also climate change).
What does this have to do with democracy? I wonder about the world in which I grew up - a world in which the expansion of markets was assumed to be linked to the expansion of a particular kind of democracy - and this kind of democracy was one that was especially adept at shifting (socially, spatially, and temporally) the costs, limits, and exclusions that were built into that democracy. So it's something I've been thinking about as I listen to Allen talk about her deep love for democracy - this remarkable commitment to it as a system for enabling human flourishing.
Meanwhile: Woke this morning to a world draped in dew. When I opened the front door to take our dog for his morning bathroom circuit, the warm damp air of the house flowed onto the porch and cooled on the glass panes. Or: How these ostensibly invisible parts of our lives suddenly shift state and become tangible in the world. On to morning writing.
And then also an interview with Danielle Allen ("An inspiring conversation about democracy") that I started listening to this morning:the idea in the 90's was that democracy was inherent to capitalism bc of choice, competition, and all that adam smith shit. therefore globalization would naturally export democratic ideals. then china went and became an economic powerhouse without democracy and whoopsy.— ☕netw3rk (@netw3rk) October 7, 2019
And this comes together for me because I've been thinking through how to teach my students about geography - what does thinking geographically provide them? How does thinking geographically give them a richer sense of understanding the world?
So one way of thinking about (capitalist) markets is that they're placeless - that (if people talk about them at all) they operate somewhere above us. Because markets are everywhere, they're also nowhere in particular. This in incomplete for a variety of reasons. So instead, if I were to give this lecture to students, I'd begin this way:
(Capitalist) markets are embedded within a set of uneven and unequal relationships. These relationships take a variety of forms: There are the social relationships in a given place (one person has more money than another; one person has more knowledge than another and can turn that to their benefit; one person has more social or cultural cachet than another and is able to trade on that cachet; one person has greater political or legal authority than another and can thus set the terms of exchange). But there are also a set of uneven material relationships: One place has more wood, another place has more coal, another place has more water, etc. And then there are a set of temporal relationships (people carry out business in the present in relation to a past that places certain obligations on them, perhaps shaped by certain kinds of path dependencies, but also oriented toward a particular expectation about the future).
So the economic activity that's characteristic of markets produces at least two things: profit (for a person in a specific place in a particular temporal moment); and externalities of all kinds. But what seems to be key about the world in which we live is that those externalities are displaced through a variety of mechanisms. They can be socially displaced (in engaging in a given economic activity in a time and place, we're not aware of how these activities impact those around us - the experience of the services sector, for example); they can be spatially displaced (i.e., globalization, which seems to be premised at least in part on the idea that it's bad to pollute the environment here but if it happens somewhere else to provide us with consumer products, well, that's just the cost of doing business); and they can be temporally displaced (and here we can think about debt as a way of managing the future, but also climate change).
What does this have to do with democracy? I wonder about the world in which I grew up - a world in which the expansion of markets was assumed to be linked to the expansion of a particular kind of democracy - and this kind of democracy was one that was especially adept at shifting (socially, spatially, and temporally) the costs, limits, and exclusions that were built into that democracy. So it's something I've been thinking about as I listen to Allen talk about her deep love for democracy - this remarkable commitment to it as a system for enabling human flourishing.
Meanwhile: Woke this morning to a world draped in dew. When I opened the front door to take our dog for his morning bathroom circuit, the warm damp air of the house flowed onto the porch and cooled on the glass panes. Or: How these ostensibly invisible parts of our lives suddenly shift state and become tangible in the world. On to morning writing.
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