Harvard University Press Blog

On Burnout Today with Christina Maslach and Michael P. Leiter

In The Burnout Challenge, leading researchers of burnout Christina Maslach and Michael P. Leiter focus on what occurs when the conditions and requirements set by a workplace are out of sync with the needs of people who work there. These “mismatches,” ranging from work overload to value conflicts, cause both workers and workplaces to suffer. In our interview, the authors discuss the current state of burnout in the workplace as well as the reaction to their book.

 You both have been researching burnout in the workplace for a long time. What has been the biggest workplace or management style change you have observed over the full scope of your research? 

While the pressure has increased in many workplaces, others have striven to become more respectful, considerate settings for their people. They do not always succeed in these endeavors, but values of respect and inclusion have become more salient over the decades during which we have been working on burnout. This shift is important because workplace culture plays a major role in shaping experiences at work. 

We know that, since hybrid work is so new, you are reluctant to comment on it without in-depth study, but anecdotally, how do you think this will inform your research going forward?

A big lesson learned from the pandemic is that the job can change. It doesn’t have to be “it is what it is.” And if the job can change, it could change in many innovative ways to create a better work environment for workers to do good work and feel good about it. We must learn from what worked well during the pandemic and what did not.

To some extent, hybrid work increases employees’ sense of control. First, they can exercise more choice in where and when to work. Second, they have less performative pressure when they are working. On management’s end, hybrid work requires managers to have a clearer idea of what exactly they expect from people, to develop trust in employees’ commitment to meeting those expectations, and to articulate clear rationales when they require people to come to a work location. In-person work no longer goes without saying.

But hybrid work is not perfect—it can raise issues of fairness when it is unevenly implemented. Given the various types of work people do and differences in the extent to which work is tied to a specific location, one size will not come close to fitting all. This means that we should also be thinking about other ways to improve the matches between people and their jobs.

When you speak to employees and leaders about the causes of chronic burnout, what is something you say that often surprises them?

The common response is often stronger than surprise. In fact, it is often considered a “game-changer.” What we say is that burnout is not simply a flaw of the worker, but of the workplace. And that means it is not enough to simply fix the worker—the workplace needs to be fixed too. The worker fix tells employees that it is entirely up to them to cope and be resilient, which is often understood as code for putting up with the way things are. The workplace fix requires better management of chronic job stressors that actually cause burnout.  

 How about something you have heard from them that was surprising?

We used to hear that “burnout is a good thing, because it means workers will quit on their own, and I don’t have to fire them.” But recently, we heard a CEO say, “I never worry about my bright, young staff working from home—but I do worry about them living at work.”

With a new book out, you are talking about burnout a lot—does it leave you feeling hopeful or not?

Definitely hopeful! Our book seems to be providing more of a common language for all levels of employees within a workplace, so that everyone can find ways to get on the same page in terms of identifying workplace mismatches and figuring out better solutions.

At our talks about the book, our focus on addressing mismatches seems to be resonating with people. The huge changes to the way people work that occurred during the lockdown phase of the pandemic have increased awareness of the extent to which work can be done so differently than it used to be done.

 

The Burnout Challenge: Managing People’s Relationships with Their Jobs has been recommended by Forbes, Bloomberg, the Financial Times, and Arianna Huffington, who called it “Vital reading for today’s and tomorrow’s leaders.”

Order your copy of The Burnout Challenge »

Schelling the Trailblazer

Books influence us in untold ways, and the ones that influence us the most are often read in childhood. Harvard University Press Senior Editor Julia Kirby is reminded of this on the anniversary of the birth of one of this country’s most celebrated economists.

This month would have brought Thomas Schelling’s one-hundredth birthday—and he got closer to seeing it than many mortals. The Nobel laureate economist died just five years ago, after a brilliant career as both a scholar and an advisor to US foreign policy strategists. What better day to dip into his classic work, The Strategy of Conflict, itself now sixty years old but still relevant and a lively read.

Schelling’s breakthrough contribution was his application of the then-novel framework of game theory to the realm of Cold War decision-making. He saw in the dynamics of geopolitics many situations where adversarial nations were in conflict but at the same time held interests in common—and where a zero-sum mentality would not yield the most effective moves. Today, as Russia’s massing of troops on its border with Ukraine has analysts guessing, and Joe Biden prepares for a probable summit with Vladimir Putin, Schelling’s Strategy of Conflict remains a useful model for parsing the possibilities.

For me, however, there’s another book that also comes to mind whenever Schelling’s name is mentioned. It’s certainly not an HUP book, or anything you would find on a syllabus, but Schelling made a habit of mentioning it. According to his wife, Alice Schelling, whenever he was asked about books that had influenced his own thinking, he responded without pause: Smoky the Cow Horse.

It sounds like a joke of an answer—most anyone would have expected him to name a work like Games and Decisions by Howard Raiffa and R. Duncan Luce—but Schelling really meant it. Will James’s 1926 book about a colt was just the kind of tear-jerking tale, offered in a tough cowboy twang, that could go straight to the eight-year-old Schelling’s heart and get him thinking. I’ve always recalled this fact not because it is whimsical but because it strikes me as truer than any other response I have heard to the question, “What book influenced you most?” Purely on logical grounds, the books one encounters earliest have the greatest potential for impact in the long term. Path dependency being what it is, early choices open up channels for further exploration in certain directions, while pushing alternative paths to the shadows. Way leads on to way, and one’s thinking and character are formed on the journey that follows.

Alice Schelling said her husband recalled reading Smoky as “the first time he understood empathy for other human beings.” It’s possible to imagine the path from that moment to his ability, first, to be an effective negotiator, and later to see averting nuclear crisis as a matter of imagining what your enemy might be thinking you were thinking.

Schelling’s youthful devotion to Smoky came to mind recently when I had the pleasure of editing Susan Engel’s wonderful book The Intellectual Lives of Children. The impetus for the book was Engel’s realization that, while over a century of work has gone into the study of cognitive development in children, the focus of that work has always had a major blind spot. It concerns itself with children’s acquisition of knowledge—the mastery of language, skills, and information needed to function in the world—but ignores the fact that children also generate ideas of their own. An important part of their cognitive development is learning what to do with those notions—how to explore them, how to refine them, how to communicate them—and this is intellectual work that we could be doing much more as adults to support.

In a book rich with stories, Engel even includes one of another economist, one of her colleagues at Williams College, whose innovative work also involves applying ideas from one discipline to another. Roger Bolton advanced the idea that a community’s economy gets a boost when its members have a “sense of place,” rooted in its geography. Engel’s interest is in Bolton’s boyhood memories of engineering complex water systems in the road outside his farmhouse, after a heavy rain had turned the dirt to deep mud. Clearly, reading books is not the only activity that hones a person’s ability to engage with ideas.

By the time HUP issued its 1980 paperback of The Strategy of Conflict, the book was a widely acclaimed classic, but Schelling in his preface to the new edition singled out one person’s reaction to it as especially gratifying. John Strachey, a British economist and parliamentarian who had also served his country as war minister, sought him out during a visit to Harvard to express “how much this book had done for his thinking” but did not mention any fine point of its reasoning. As Schelling recalls:

“I tried to guess which of my sophisticated ideas in which chapters had made so much difference to him. It turned out it wasn’t any particular idea in any particular chapter. Until he read this book, he had simply not comprehended that an inherently non-zero-sum conflict could exist. He had known that conflict could coexist with common interest but had thought, or taken for granted, that they were essentially separable, not aspects of an integral structure. A scholar concerned with monopoly capitalism and class struggle, nuclear strategy and alliance politics, working late in his career on arms control and peacemaking, had tumbled, in reading my book, to an idea so rudimentary that I hadn’t even known it wasn’t obvious.”

In that moment of Strachey confessing his debt in all “modesty and dignity,” I suspect Schelling realized that he had achieved something akin to Smoky the Cow Horse’s effect. Often, authors can’t imagine in what ways their work will cause readers to rethink things. But whether a reader is influenced early or late in life, the course alteration can be profound. As Schelling concluded his preface, “You never know what will come of writing a book.”

Book club spotlight: The Color of Money

The Vivian’s Door Initiative is inspired by the courage and legacy of the late Vivian Malone Jones. She was the first African American to graduate from the University of Alabama and was responsible for ending the segregation of public universities in the state of Alabama. Vivian’s courage and will power to create change for her brothers and sisters of color inspired the creation of a nonprofit project called Vivian’s Door.

In March 2020, Vivian’s Door started a book club: their first pick was The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap by Mehrsa Baradaran. In June, over 50 people joined the online discussion of the book. Here, some of the members reflect on the impact of reading the book and what it’s taught them.

“This book by Professor Mehrsa Baradaran was the best book we could have chosen, not knowing that we faced many external forces beyond our control, like COVID-19 and racial equality protests throughout the country, the world, and a looming economic recession. The book was a good read, and we had 100 people in the book club all reading along and engaging in powerful conversations during these unprecedented times. It moved, touched, and inspired them to understand their history, reach out to their community, and become more engaged in supporting black businesses. It taught me more black history than I had ever learned from anywhere else and made me a more persuasive communicator and champion for growing strong black businesses to create wealth in marginalized, low-income, and underserved communities.”

—Janice Malone

 

 

 

 

 

“This book is riveting, insightful, and impactful. Every Black man and woman in America should read and beware of the content it holds.”

—Antwan Taylor

 

 

 

 

 

 

“The Color of Money was an eye-opening book, and, honestly, I wished I would’ve read it earlier in life. It taught me so much more black history than I ever had in school and motivated me, even more, to keep working hard for my community.”

—JaVaughnae Malone

 

 

“Professor Mehrsa Baradaran totally transformed the way I viewed wealth in America, especially the growing wealth gap in the Black community. I went through a range of emotions as I read her book, The Color of Money. I hate to sound melodramatic, but this book changed the way I look at socioeconomics and Black wealth in our country.”

—Freddie D. Stokes

 

“The Color of Money is a must-read; its historical significance can never be underrated, it delivers an educational guide to understanding the wealth gap between black and white America, how it happened, when, why, and its long-lasting effects on the black community.” —Robert E. Clopton, Sr.

 

 

 

“What I learned from the book that was key to me is how black banking and businesses may not be the answers we think they are due to white flight, redlining, and how these instances of segregation economically impact our community, creating a system where our areas are continuously low in overall wealth and the ability accumulate wealth.”

—Shannon Treadwell

 

 

 

 

 

“In this book, I have learned about money multipliers, motivational factors to bank with black owned banks, and most importantly how every little step in the right direction is securing a better future for my children. A special thank you to the author for this timeless wisdom that will truly enrich all generations, regardless of race.”

—Tiffany Harris

 

 

 

 

Thanks to the members of Vivian’s Door for providing their thoughts and comments.

Q&A with Thomas Piketty, author of Capital and Ideology

Thomas Piketty’s bestselling Capital in the Twenty-First Century galvanized global debate about inequality. In his audacious follow-up, Capital and Ideology, he exposes the ideas that have sustained inequality for the past millennium, reveals why the shallow politics of right and left are failing us today, and outlines the structure of a fairer economic system. We caught up with him to ask about his new book and to discuss the politics behind the long history of inequality.

Capital in the Twenty-First Century was an unusually ambitious book. What prompted you to write another major book so soon?

I’ve learned a lot since the release of Capital in the Twenty-First Century. I was invited to countries about which I knew little, met new researchers, and participated in hundreds of debates. All these exchanges pushed me to renew my reflections. To summarize Capital briefly, it showed how, in the twentieth century, the two world wars led to a very strong reduction in the inequalities inherited from the nineteenth century. I also pointed to the disturbing ascent of inequalities since the 1980s. But the book had two main limitations. The first is that it was very Western centered. In this new book, I widen my scope: I examine the history of “ternary societies” [organized into three classes: nobility, clergy, and workers] and societies of owners or proprietors, but I also study slavery societies, colonial regimes, communism, post-communism, social democracy, the case of castes in India, and inequality regimes in Brazil, China, and Russia. The second limitation is that Capital only scratched the surface of the deep question of the ideologies that support inequalities. It was a black box that I decided to open.

What is the fundamental argument you’re making about these ideologies?

I tell the story of many unequal regimes, and the conclusion that emerges is that dominant ideologies are always much more fragile than we imagine. Inequality is a political construction, not the product of “natural” forces of the economy or technology. Every society needs to tell itself a plausible story to show why inequalities are acceptable, to justify the organization of social groups, and to explain the nature of property, borders, the tax system, and education. Revisiting this story allows us to see our current ideologies from a different perspective. We often have the impression that inequalities from the past were necessarily unfair and despotic and that those of the present are necessarily meritocratic, dynamic, open. I do not believe a word of it. Macron's “leaders in the rope line,” the job creators of Trump, the glorification of fortune whatever its number of zeros: all this speech is as religious in its way as traditional and explicitly religious justifications for inequality.

In your account, history has lurched from one regime of inequality to another, but you’re nonetheless optimistic. Why?

History shows that it is impossible to predict the evolution of regimes of inequality. Take Sweden: we sometimes like to say that the Swedish social model feeds on a very old culture, going back to the Vikings. In fact, Sweden was for a long time an extremely unequal country. The census system until 1911 stipulated that the owners of the biggest fortunes could have up to one hundred votes per person! Political mobilizations have transformed the country. If someone had predicted in 1910 that Sweden would become a social democratic country, nobody would have taken it seriously. That’s why I do not believe that the current system is indestructible or cannot be transformed.

If inequality has been rising since the 1980s, why haven’t political parties mobilized to reduce it, as they did after World War II?

The main political parties have radically changed since the 1980s. In the social democratic era that followed the war, the poorest and least-educated classes identified with parties of the left, whether Democratic, Labour, Socialist, Communist, or Social-Democratic. But in the age of hyper-capitalism, parties of the electoral left ceased to make improving the lot of the disadvantaged their main focus. Instead, they turned their attention primarily to serving the interests of the winners in the educational competition. Left-wing political parties and movements turned themselves into representatives of the highly educated. We now have political systems dominated by two elites: what I call the wealthy “merchant right”—the Republicans, the Conservatives, and so on—and the highly educated and generally prosperous “Brahmin left,” represented by the Democrats, Labour, and Social Democrats. The least advantaged no longer see themselves in the electoral left. This has left an opening for nativists and other opportunistic politicians to seek their support. But this may be changing, even in the United States, as catering to the highly educated does not reflect the egalitarian values of an important part of the Democratic electorate.

You conclude the book with a series of recommendations for economic and social reform, which include the adoption of German-style co-management of businesses.

The real challenge of our societies is that of power: there has been a capture of economic power and politics by private money. I sketch in the book a form of “participatory socialism,” the opposite of hyper-state Soviet socialism, which led to disastrous results. Co-management offers this possibility. Only Germany and the Nordic countries have followed this path since the 1950s, but the Labour Party in the United Kingdom and the Democrats in the United States have begun to reflect on it. In Germany, employees are allocated half of the voting rights on the board of directors for large companies. In Sweden, it's a third, but this also applies to smaller companies. Such a system has made it possible to have less excess than elsewhere in the payment of executive salaries and a better investment in employees. I propose to go further, by limiting the voting rights of the largest shareholders to allow smaller shareholders to enter the game and form coalitions with employees.

You also want to reform property tax so that it funds a “universal endowment of capital”? What’s that?

Currently, half of the population inherits nothing at all. I imagine a kind of “legacy for all.” At the age of 25, all people would receive a capital endowment of something like 120,000 euros, which represents 60 percent of the average wealth per adult in France. This could be used to buy your home: this would stop society being divided between those who pay rents—often generation after generation—and those who, also over the generations, own and receive rents. It would also encourage people to create a business and motivate employees to buy shares in their company. This would be financed not only by the proceeds of the inheritance tax but also by a progressive tax on net wealth. This new form of progressive property tax would ensure the permanent circulation of property and guarantee that very large wealth holdings do not perpetuate themselves.

Another area you focus on is education.

If we look for an explanation for the halving of the rate of economic growth since the 1990s, I suggest we should be interested in educational underinvestment. Education expenditure has stagnated in all developed countries while the number of students has risen sharply.

Do you consider the book a blueprint for getting beyond capitalism?

We can’t promise the abolition of capitalism without debating long and hard about precisely what will be put in its place. I try to contribute to that debate.

You’ve said in French interviews that you prefer this book to Capital in the Twenty-First Century.

Yes. I think I’ve made some progress and that this new book is much better. If you read only one of the two, please read this one!

5 Questions: Kim Clausing on Open: The Progressive Case for Free Trade, Immigration, and Global Capital

With the winds of trade war blowing as they have not done in decades, and Left and Right flirting with protectionism, leading economist Kimberly Clausing forcefully shows how a free and open economy is still the best way to advance the interests of working Americans in her new book Open: The Progressive Case for Free Trade, Immigration, and Global Capital. We asked her a few questions about the book to help us navigate the debates currently convulsing national and international economics and politics.

We're living in a time of political polarization, but many on the left and the right are in agreement in their hostility to globalization. Is this agreement misleading? Are they concerned about the same things?

Those that are hostile to globalization are often worried about legitimate concerns: the difficulty of supporting a family in today’s marketplace, the fiercely competitive nature of labor markets, and the sense that future generations may be left behind by forces they cannot control. Both groups are skeptical of trade agreements that they view as putting business interests before workers’ interests, and they are inclined to blame foreign competition for many of the difficulties facing workers.

In America today, while these themes are seen on both the left and the right, there are still differences. The right is far more skeptical of immigration than the left, and more likely to view foreign workers as a threat. The left is far more skeptical of international business than the right; they are more likely to be concerned about too much power in the hands of multinational corporations.

What would you say each side is missing?

There are three crucial arguments that both sides need to carefully consider. First, while the worries of American workers are very real, global markets are not the sole force responsible for the present state of affairs. Many other factors are more important, including dramatic technological change, increased market concentration (i.e., more companies with “market power”), changes in social norms, and changes in policy.

Second, global markets come with benefits for workers that are insufficiently celebrated. We all are heavily reliant on trade as consumers, but beyond that, trade is also an integral part of our work lives in positive ways; some workers have jobs that produce exports, and many other workers rely on imports as key parts of their production process. Immigration has been a great strength of the U.S. economy in the past, and it is absolutely a great strength at present. Immigrants spur innovation, entrepreneurship, and job creation, and they provide skills that are not easily found in the native population. Immigrants also ease the budget pressures of our swelling retirement-aged population.

Third, curbing global integration is more likely to harm than help American workers. Tariffs are regressive taxes that fall much more heavily on the poor than on the well-off. Trade barriers and trade wars create new labor market “shocks” that cause job loss and hardship; both farmers and auto workers risk losing jobs. Trade wars also alienate our allies, distancing us from important partners that we need to address issues like climate change and tax competition. Finally, America and its workers will be stronger with more, not less, immigration.

Most of us are familiar with arguments in support of free trade from right of center. You think there are good reasons why those on the left should also support it. Could you explain?

As just described, curtailing globalization is a foolish policy response to the problems of American workers. And, importantly, it distracts us from far easier and more effective ways to help workers. For example, consider the new tax law that just took effect in 2018. That law will create additional deficits of over $1.5 trillion (over ten years) in order to pay for tax cuts that mostly benefit those at the top of the income distribution, and the bill provides egregious new loopholes (such as the pass-through deduction) that make our tax system both less equitable and less efficient.

A far better approach would be to genuinely support workers with changes in tax policy. For example, expanding the earned income tax credit and providing wage insurance for displaced workers would be great first steps in that direction. Investing in workers through adequate funding of infrastructure, research, and education is crucial. Expanding the safety net to make health insurance more secure is an essential step. In contrast, the tax bill moved in the opposite direction by repealing the individual mandate to purchase health insurance, an important pillar of the Affordable Care Act.

In terms of economic policy, we can do a lot better. Protectionist trade policies, and the gratuitous blaming of immigrants, are not only wrong on their face, but they also distract us from urgent economic policy priorities.

But you're not complacent about the effects of globalization. You admit it has real victims. Is the question for you, then, not whether or not there should be globalization, but what sort of globalization we should have and how to change or compensate for it?

Exactly. We should remain open to the world economy, but there are many important policy steps that we can take to make our global economy more compatible with the needs of workers, responding to decades of wage stagnation and surging income inequality.

As one step, we can also work to foster better trade agreements that counter policy competition and address areas that require global cooperation. But many key responses are steps that the United States can take on its own. We can do a far better job supporting workers and communities by making investments in workers, infrastructure, and education. We can reform the tax system to make sure that growth in national income benefits nearly all Americans. This means lower taxes for those at the bottom, and it also means higher contributions from those at the top, but careful reforms can reduce the gimmicks and shenanigans that litter our present tax system, creating more tax revenue at reasonable tax rates. And, importantly, we can pursue a better partnership with the business community, where we address undue market power and encourage transparency and social responsibility on issues like taxation and labor. The business community, in turn, will benefit from open markets and fair, simple regulations and taxes.

Are you optimistic that we can shape globalization so that it serves progressive, as well as more conservative, goals?

At present, political polarization is a big hurdle. In the book, I have a few starter ideas for how to combat that. Foremost, it is important for policy makers and thinkers to focus on pragmatic policy options that respond to the needs of workers without turning to extreme or counterproductive solutions. Raising barriers and walls are steps that are likely to harm American workers. Socialism (defined traditionally) is not a remotely viable solution, but there are many smart, reasonable things we can do to help workers and keep America economically strong and open.

Jonathan Lusthaus and His Obsession with Cybercrime

Jonathan Lusthaus has just published Industry of Anonymity: Inside the Business of Cybercrime, a fascinating account of the lives of cybercriminals and the vast international industry they have subversively created. We asked Jonathan about how he got interested in this unusual, yet important field.

While Industry of Anonymity is a labor of love, it is also a product of luck. In a different reality, it might never have been written. When I moved to Oxford to begin a Masters program in the sociology department many years ago, I was set on researching religious violence. Unfortunately, the work I wanted to do didn’t match the research strands among the faculty. In a classic student conundrum, I was quickly forced to come up with a new dissertation topic at short notice.

As it happened, just before the deadline for announcing topics, the former Guardian and BBC journalist Misha Glenny came to Oxford to give a talk. A well-known author on organized crime, Glenny was writing a new book on cybercrime at the time. That project would become Darkmarket, and the sneak preview we were treated to opened my eyes to a world I had never considered before.

Cybercrime – something I had figured as a purely technical phenomenon – involved people. These people communicated with each other, worked together and traded products on large online marketplaces. There was a secret world here, an undiscovered economy. I sensed immediately that I wanted to explore and map this new underground economy that seemed to be hidden from sight.

Luckily, I was in the perfect department to do this. Following scholars like Diego Gambetta and Federico Varese (who would become an inspirational doctoral supervisor), one of the strengths of Oxford sociology is the study of extra-legal governance. This examines how groups outside the control of the state, such as criminals and insurgents, regulate their own dealings. They can't rely on the courts or the police, so they have to develop their own institutions of governance.

Cybercrime presented a fascinating sociological puzzle: how do cybercriminals manage to cooperate together on a wide scale? It would seem that criminals, and anonymous ones at that, don’t make great business partners. You ostensibly can’t beat them up if a deal goes wrong. Yet we were seeing increasing levels of collaboration taking place, and later I would come to the realisation that a fully-fledged cybercrime industry had formed. How was this happening? Answering this question became the heart of my research. 

One of the first people I interviewed for this project asked me whether I would continue working in the cybercrime space after my masters. At the time, I was starting out and hadn’t really thought about it. But he told me that this was a fascinating and hugely important area, with tremendous opportunities and one that I should stick with.

After I finished my masters and the pilot research on which this book would be built, I realized that this interviewee was right. I had become obsessed with the topic of cybercrime. I had begun researching this topic with no knowledge of cybercrime and no contacts at all. I wanted to change this and interview the most knowledgeable people I could find – whether from law enforcement, private sector or cybercriminal backgrounds. If I travelled to a country, I wanted to do research on cybercrime while I was there. I knew this was an enormous topic, and an enormously important topic. And I knew that one day it would become a book.

After seven years of fieldwork, this passion had taken me to Russia, Ukraine, Romania, China, Nigeria, Brazil and more. I have interviewed 238 people, including some leading former cybercriminals. I have visited the sites where key historical events took place, such as a conference held in Odessa by some of the pioneers of the cybercrime industry. I have moved from the periphery of the topic towards its heart, and had an amazing adventure along the way.

This journey confirmed my view that the human dimension of cybercrime is vital to understanding the challenge and seeking solutions to fix it. Cybercrime is not just a technical phenomenon but one that is driven by people. Its victims are also people. By focussing on the technical, many can simply turn away and chose not to address the problem. It is complex and ultimately mystifying. But when we have a better understanding of how cybercrime affects us in personal terms and how the attacks stem from people in different parts of the world, we are in a much better position to engage people and make progress in addressing the threat.

Is Postal Banking Coming?

United States Senator for New York Kirsten Gillibrand has just introduced major new legislation to create a Postal Bank, which would establish a retail bank in all of the U.S. Postal Service’s 30,000 locations. As detailed by the Senator’s announcement, the Postal Bank “would effectively end predatory payday lending industry practices overnight by giving low-income Americans, particularly communities of color and rural communities, access to basic banking services that they currently don’t have. The lack of access to traditional banking services makes it nearly impossible for low-income Americans to escape the cycle of poverty because they are often forced to spend large percentages of their income to cash their paychecks or pay back high-interest predatory payday loans.”

Mehrsa Baradaran, author of How the Other Half Banks: Exclusion, Exploitation and the Threat to Democracy, has worked closely on this issue with both Gillibrand and Senator Elizabeth Warren. As Baradaran details in Gillibrand’s announcement, postal banking was once a great service to the American people, and can be so again:

Postal banking was America’s most successful experiment in financial inclusion. Today, there are many communities across the country that are banking deserts. The only financial service providers are fringe lenders and check cashers whose business model relies on the poor paying more for banking services than anyone else. This is a threat to our democracy. Yet post offices serve all of these communities regardless of cost and without exploitation. Postal banking can provide safe, accessible, and much-needed financial services to the most struggling communities in our country. It will make it less expensive to be poor.

Below, Baradaran details the predations of the fringe lending industry and the promise of postal banking:

Facebook Interruptus

In Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age, Bernard Harcourt assays the deeply troubling implications of pervasive surveillance in our age of lives lived online, and the degree to which we willingly trade our privacy for the fleeting rewards of digital affirmation. To Harcourt, a professor of law and political science at Columbia University and the author most recently of The Counterrevolution: How Our Government Went to War Against Its Own Citizens, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s appearance before Congress last week was a pageant that will do nothing to address the perilous dynamic of our society of exposure. Meaningful reform will come only when we recognize the libidinal allure of today’s digital platforms, as Harcourt explains below.

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The Facebook hearings last week were quite the spectacle. Mark Zuckerberg deftly deflected his inquisitors and misled them, while share price rose 4.5% in a single day. Senators and representatives postured for their constituents and got free prime-time media exposure. Privacy experts crowed and gloated that they had always been right, but unfairly ignored. The media and the Internet harvested abundant costless content. And social media lit up, abuzz. Between the schadenfreude and the glee, and the plain-old gawking and goggling, everybody seemed to pleasure themselves. It was win-win—except, perhaps, for the ordinary digital subjects who were left high and dry: pleasantly entertained, but totally exposed.

In the end, the Facebook hearings were nothing more than another tantalizing but anxious digital distraction. The greatest paradox, perhaps, is how much personal data and digital exhaust we all emitted and how many digital traces we shed watching Zuckerberg and simultaneously fretting over our privacy.

If anything, the Facebook hearings confirm the dreadful bind in which we find ourselves: social media and the Internet companies have us all in the palms of their hands because the digital experience itself is so seductive, consuming, and self-gratifying. Their Faustian business model works because their platforms tap directly into our pleasure centers and trigger deep reward circuits. Seeing our selfies online, tracking our likes and shares, counting our followers and retweets—these stimuli are almost more reinforcing than food or sex. We find ourselves going from one digital platform or device to another, swiping and clicking, pressing the levers like a rat in Skinner’s box, desperately seeking more stimulus and gratification.

And unless and until we come to grips with the place of desire and of our libidinal and at times narcissistic urges in relation to these new digital technologies, we won’t make any progress, we won’t get anywhere. Yes, the #DropFacebook campaign just gained Susan Sarandon and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. But the vast majority of the users of Facebook—as well as Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, etc.—will stay put because these platforms satisfy their desires, provide the gratification, and remain the easiest way to enjoy social relations today, even when they do make us anxious about our privacy.

The fact is, power circulates differently in the digital age, and the social media powerhouses have tapped deep into our pleasure centers and egos. The dark analogies to George Orwell’s 1984 or to Foucault’s “panopticon” just do not capture the present moment, nor will they alone stop us from sharing and liking.   

Today, we are no longer being coerced to give up our privacy, as Winston and Julia were by Big Brother. We are no longer confined to a panoptic cell, naked before the all-seeing guard tower. There is no telescreen forcibly anchored into our apartment walls. Instead, today we share our personal information jubilantly, out of love and desire, and for self-affirmation. We post selfies on Instagram, status updates on Facebook, screeds on Twitter. We invite Echo into our homes. We build personal websites open to all. And it feels so good, it’s so pleasurable, that even when we are warned about how much of our private information the social media and Internet companies have, we cringe but go on.  

The Rule of Code vs. The Rule of Law

Many compare the emergence of the blockchain to the arrival of the internet, and anticipate a corresponding transformation in communications, business, and individual freedoms. In Blockchain and the Law, new this month, Primavera De Filippi and Aaron Wright examine both the profound opportunities the technology presents and the legal and even ethical challenges it poses. In the brief excerpt below, they consider possible paths away from our current crossroads between the rule of code and the rule of law.

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When Satoshi Nakamoto released Bitcoin to the world, he had a clear idea in mind, which was reflected in the message he included in Bitcoin’s genesis block:

The Times 03 / Jan / 2009
Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks

Nakamoto released the Bitcoin network in the middle of a financial crisis, as a reaction to an unstable international banking system. In doing so, he gave birth to a new currency—one controlled not by any government or central bank but only by cryptography and code.

As a global and decentralized payment system that operates without centralized control, Bitcoin held out the hope of newfound economic freedom for those dubious of governmental authority. Early Bitcoin adopters subscribed to the notion of vires in numeris (strength in numbers), a motto emphasizing the fact that, when it comes to money, only math can be trusted.

But Bitcoin was only the first step in a much grander vision. Shortly after Bitcoin’s release, technologists began to realize that the true potential of Bitcoin—the real innovation—was its underlying data structure: a blockchain. While Bitcoin offered the ability to replace the role of central banks and eliminate the need for financial institutions, blockchain technology could be applied more generally to reduce the need for middlemen in many sectors of the economy. Whenever a trusted authority is necessary to coordinate social or economic activity, blockchain technology could provide the necessary infrastructure to replace this activity. The roles of banks, financial institutions, stock exchanges, clearinghouses, content providers, online operators, and even governmental systems could all be modeled by a set of protocols and code-based rules deployed on top of a blockchain-based network.

Blockchain technology presents some risks, however. The technology supports technological systems and decentralized applications that operate independently of any centralized institution or trusted authority. They implement their own internal systems of rules, which often ignore or attempt to circumvent traditional systems of control. Unlike other technological constructs currently deployed on the Internet, these decentralized systems and applications can be governed almost exclusively by the rules of code.

The Internet had already raised a fundamental tension between the rule of law, based on geographical boundaries, and the rule of code, based on topological constructs. The regulation of “cyberspace” lies at the intersection between these two normative systems—which can either cooperate or compete with one another, depending on the circumstances at hand.

At the outset, legal scholars thought that the rule of code would ultimately prevail on the Internet. With code, people could implement their own systems of rules, enforced by a technological construct that operates outside of any legal jurisdiction. This is what inspired a number of technology activists to believe that cyberspace was an unregulatable space that governments did not have the right or ability to control—as opposed to the “meat space,” which is mostly governed by the rule of law.

Eager to bypass the politics of enclosure and control enacted by governments and corporations, these groups believed that the Internet would foster new normative systems, which would facilitate the free flow of information and promote political and cultural autonomy. The Internet marked the beginning of a new paradigm for regulation—one where regulation would be applied through the rule of code, with power dynamics that differed significantly from those of the physical world. Over time, however, governments recognized and embraced the potential for the rule of code to maintain the rule of law on the Internet. Governments have extended their control by requiring that intermediaries change their code to maintain and respect jurisdictional laws.

With the advent of Bitcoin and blockchain technology more generally, we are poised to witness a new wave of decentralization and new calls that the world will—once again—be governed by the rule of code. Echoes of the first Internet wave permeate the discourse around blockchains, with claims that blockchain technology will lead to greater individual freedom and emancipation, as these early technology advocates initially aspired to. Blockchain technology is viewed as a new opportunity by many cypherpunks and decentralization advocates, who see it as a new means for people to liberate themselves from the tyranny of governments and corporations—in ways that are quite reminiscent of the Internet’s early days.

Making Sense of Neoliberalism

Most people would likely claim a general understanding of neoliberalism as a movement of laissez-faire principles aimed at ensuring free markets and an “unfettered” economy. In Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, one of the first intellectual histories of the movement, Quinn Slobodian shows that, in the beginning, neoliberalism was actually about shielding the economic world from the political world—about protecting the global economy, not freeing it. For Slobodian, neoliberalism is ultimately less a theory of the market or economics than of law and state, and his work gives us a much clearer sense of how the old world of empire gave way in the twentieth century not to a quasi-libertarian world of markets but to international institutions that were highly active in prescribing trade policies and rules about competition. Below, Slobodian introduces his study, and recounts its origins in a late-1990s moment when passion could often outpace understanding.

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If I had to give this book an origin point, it would be almost 20 years ago, at the 1999 protests against the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle. For people who don’t know much about it, a famous coalition of “teamsters and turtles,” meaning environmentalists along with labor unions, students, anarchists, old hippies, and assorted others shut down the meeting and shook the organization to its core. Despite the director-general’s famous call to “re-brand” in the early 2000s, the WTO hasn’t completed a negotiating round since. So, the protest was a big deal.

I was a junior in college in Portland at the time, a few hours south of Seattle, and for reasons mostly to do with laziness and ennui, I didn’t go. I remember watching the protests on our small box TV with a coat hanger stuck in the back with the sinking feeling that “oh no, a world historical event is taking place that I passed on to watch some Lars von Trier movies on VHS.”

My friends and classmates felt activated, painting huge papier-mâché fists and strapping them to their backpacks, filled with certainty. Myself, I felt demobilized and filled mostly with disorientation.

The 1990s were a weird time to come of age. Middle class North American white kids like me were profiting from everything that went under the decade’s buzzword of globalization but also saw it as something ominous, sometimes verging on evil. We were the Adbusters generation. My sixteen-year-old sister was printing small stickers attacking McDonald’s viscerally. I wrote and photocopied a zine that said on the cover in block letters: OPEN YOUR EYES.

But open them to what exactly? The world economy was like the Nothing from my favorite childhood film, The Neverending Story, an anonymous, faceless force that seemed to swallow everything in its path, extinguishing particularity; it Coca-Colonized, to use a term of the time, squashed dreams of global modernization and turned the Third World back into a labor colony to make our stuff.

Before there was fake news there were what I saw then as fake needs, created by advertising and the mind control of the blizzard of logos—the swooshes and stripes that now adorn the cool kids in Berlin and Brooklyn. Back then we were all little Frankfurt Schoolers, or Frankfurt Pre-Schoolers, distrustful of irony though we were steeped in it, seeking elusive authenticity, wanting to unveil, unmask, expose, and upend—in my case, preferably from my desk, typewriter, and the warm chairs of the library.

So this book came out of a simple question that germinated at that time: why would anyone defend the great Nothing of the world economy, the power that forced the hands of democratically elected governments, anonymously imposed new rules and strictures and only rewarded us with what I saw in my adolescent mind as a disposable culture that would choke us all with plastic, garbage, and refuse before I even had a chance to die a natural death. (Capturing some of the melodrama of the time here).