La crisis sigue siendo política, no económica

El "Casino Capitalism" lo desataron los políticos: Reagan fue el que dio el pistoletazo de salida de la desregulación y Clinton, con su brazo económico Summers, la puntilla. Bush consagró la política del goteo (hay que dejar que los ricos ganen más para que sus fortunas permeen hacia abajo). Pero no hay que olvidar los respectivos congresos, los cientos de representantes del pueblo que discutieron, redactaron y aprobaron la rendición de la política a la especulación financiera. Ahora, en estos precisos momentos, la dimensión política de la situación creada enturbia incluso el juego limpio económico tal como lo expone Stiglitz en su artículo "Jugar con el planeta":

"En los últimos años hemos visto dos de los grandes riesgos, pero hemos hecho poco para controlarlos. Según algunas personas, la forma en que se manejó la última crisis puede haber aumentado el riesgo de un colapso financiero en el futuro.

Los bancos demasiado grandes para quebrar y los mercados en los que participan saben ahora que pueden esperar rescates si tienen problemas. Como resultado de este riesgo moral, esos bancos pueden pedir créditos en condiciones favorables, lo que les da una ventaja competitiva que no se basa en un rendimiento superior, sino en la fuerza política"

Looking for Today's Roosevelt

If you are a politician and would dear to pronounce a speech like this today: please, launch yourself.

Franklin Roosevelt’s Address, October 1936

"We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace–business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.

They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.

Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me–and I welcome their hatred."

The whole speech is in the link.

Naive Realism

Population density. Data from the G-Econ project, Yale University

There are innumerable recommendations for surviving current crisis. I propose naïve realism.

Think for a moment that there were 2 billion people in the world in 1940; that we are now 6 and will be 8 billions inhabitants in the world in 2050. Sum to it that our planet can not possibly feed that amount of “animal spirits” (Keynes). John Gray insists (see “Homo Rapiens and Mass Extintion”, 2002, in his last book Gray’s Anatomy, Allen Lane, 2009) that the “plague of peole” is not going to reach the “Era of Solitude” (Wilson), when humankind would be alone because all the rest of animals have been killed, nor the eradication of humankind (Lovelock): The future is going to be a combination of genocide, war, epidemic, natural destruction and the sort of generalized social collapsed that has taken place in post-Comunist Russia.

Just as we do everyday, that we live knowing that we are going to die, we have to choose what kind of life we want to lead in a world that is condemmeded to change radically and violently in the next future. I call it naïve realism, adapting slightly Keynes' “naïve optimism”. Gray puts it this way: "From a human point of view, this may be a discomfiting prospect; but at least it dispels the nightmare of an age of solitude".

What architects and artists should do in such a situation?. Well, maybe to preserve the aesthetic as a value, as some of them have always done: the harmony of the aesthetic experience is the only way humans experiment their subjective unity authentically. There is nothing more we can do, but we should not do either anything less.

Fundamentalismo de mercado

Se suele reservar el término "fundamentalismo" para la religión, pero es que la economía hoy se ha vuelto religión. En un artículo reciente sobre las nuevas tendencias del mercado laboral, uno de los blogeros más populares de España, Enrique Dans, declaraba en El País que:

"el mercado de trabajo no tiene por qué ser democrático"

En este contexto se entiende por democrático lo igualitario o simplemente lo justo. Sólo caben dos posibilidades: o bien esta postura se enmarca en la fe ilimitada en la justicia inmanente del mercado o, en el peor de los casos, en la spenceriana máxima de la supervivencia de los más aptos (que en el mencionado artículo son los que tienen dinero para pagarle a las agencias de colocación para que promuevan su CV). En cualquier caso todo, absolutamente todo lo que sucede dentro de una democracia es democrático pues está sujeto al estado de derecho, hasta los delitos, ya que incluso ellos están contemplados en el ordenamiento jurídico. Otra cosa es que la libertad, que la democracia garantiza y regula, haya permitido excesos que necesitan corregirse a la luz de deflaco global reciente.

Es cierto que el fundamentalismo del mercado ha contaminado el centro de nuestra sociedad casi sin darnos cuenta. Ahora toca regular esta situación para retrasar todo lo que se pueda la próxima crisis: en ello están todos los gobiernos (democráticos y no democráticos) en estos momentos.

Unos días más tarde, en el mismo periódico, Marcos Peña, presidente del Consejo Económico y Social de España ponía las cosas en su lugar con respecto al mercado y el trabajo en otro artículo:

"La centralidad financiera viene necesariamente acompañada de la depreciación del valor del trabajo. Del valor central por antonomasia. Del valor que ha cohesionado y estructurado nuestras sociedades."

Y se pone realmente serio cuando advierte:

"Se trata de un asalto que asedia, no sólo a las personas, sino también a todas las instituciones que las representan, y, en primer lugar, a los partidos y los sindicatos. Instituciones que, los más benévolos, en el mejor de los casos califican de retardatarias, de obstáculos del pasado que entorpecen el rápido disfrute del placer inmediato, primario, único: el lucro."

A propósito, en el mismo artículo Peña recomienda El Avaro de Molière, protagonizado por Juan Luís Galiardo en el María Guerrero de Madrid. La cultura es lo que tiene: a todo le saca punta.

Principles against poison

Yes, I know that I have already linked Ouroussoff's article in a recent post. The thing is that I have read the article again (thanks to a reader of the blog from New Zealand) and have decided to give it its own space.

The most "delirious era in architecture" is not going to be over just like that: years, maybe decades will be needed to overcome this "poisonous cocktail of vanity and self-delusion" (Ouroussoff).

By the way, have you notice that there is a consensus about "desintoxication" (see post under this) and "poisons" in the realm of contemporary form creation...?

Mirar para otro lado

The newspaper of Segovia has published and article of mine (in Spanish) that relates the financial and the architectural crisis. The main idea is that the utopia did not started with Fukuyama's "end of the history" but with the oil embargo of the OPEC in 1973. There are two more articles on the subject that are specially interesting: Joe Nocera points out in The New York Times the fallacy of the rationality of markets and Ignacio Sotelo, in El Pais, explains (in Spanish too) the differences between current crisis and the 1929's crack.

Global or Western Crisis?

Photo by El Adelantado de Segovia

There is not a better way of coming back to work (and reality) than to plunge into the Hay Festival in Segovia. Global Crisis: is the world economic system out of control? was the event held on Friday.

At the beginning, the moderator Adam Austerfield (LSE) said that people blame them (economists) for the crisis, and that that was unfair. I agree that economists are not the only to blame as almost everybody finds extremely difficult to think about the way we all think. The root of the crisis is exactly there: current western mentality in which we all are involved.

This crisis is consequence of thinking that mathematics, which is at the base of economy, is able to solve human problems stand-alone. On Friday, in Segovia, the ideal of humanity as a balance between rationality, ethics and aesthetics was truly far away: while the public used their chance asking where to put the money, Danny Quah, the expert in economics from the LSE, simply recommended the Golf Countries without the slightest sign of regret.

This crisis will be solved, no doubt. But the risk of not rectifying our mentality is going to be the prevalence of the political version of the Gresham Law John Gray exposed in his False Dawn: bad capitalism is going to expel good one. By the way, Gray thinks that this is not just another crisis but the fall of USA just as the Soviet Union did when the Berlin Wall came down. Here is the article at The Guardian in which he says so few days ago.