Neoliberal Fantasy

Geoffroy Le Collier de Misère

Under a neoliberal framework, the criminogenic and anti-social effects of poverty must be denied and/or re-conceptualized as failures of institutions such as schools, criminal justice, corporate polluters, or government.
 
While corruption at various levels in each of these institutions is clear, they are the mere band-aids of a capitalism that refuses to reckon with poverty.  What’s more, this capitalism has strong levers over each of these institutions via lobbying and other forms of political capture, making even their attempts at triage ineffective at best.
 
But the neat trick neoliberalism does, in vainly trying to reconcile itself with free market conservatism, is allow for basic assumptions about property and employment.
 
Conservatism: poverty is caused by choice

• no need for institutions to begin with.

Neoliberalism: poverty is caused by institutional failures

• If we had good institutions, poverty would be erased.

 
Each assumes that our underlying economic system is either good or good enough, with varying degrees of quality institutions.
 
Yet even in this perfect world, we still have massive wage inequality and poverty.  Good schools, quality policing, racial, religious and gender harmony, strict environmental regulations will still not impede the fact that our economy runs on poverty level wages.  The experience of poverty might be a little better - healthcare, small class sizes with social supports, humane policing, environmental hygiene.  But capital will be so limited for so many that their housing will still be restricted to certain neighborhoods.  Spending will be limited and therefore stress high due to precarity.  Expendability will be high as low specialization/skills means their labor will be easily replaceable.  Political advocacy will be low due to social ostracism intrinsic to the economic devaluation of their work. 
 
All of this raises stress and promotes indignation towards those born to more capital who live as if their worth is greater due to all the privileges life has subtly afforded them. 
 
Wealth provides exponential access to agency.  Paying rent, investing, taking vacations, sending your happy kids to college, having nice things, not worrying about pollution or crime.  And if your wealth comes from your own labor, a great sense of pride reinforces one’s sense of worth, or social praise within one’s skin.  And should you require any additional help in reinforcing pro-social instead of anti-social behaviors, all these added reinforcing stimuli are available as well.
 
If human freedom can be limitedly defined as access to reinforcement, a certain level of relative  capital is by far the determining factor in this phylogenic growth across the lifetime.
 
From William Baum’s Understanding Behaviorism:
 
A group's culture consists of operant behavior shared by the group members, acquired as a result of membership in the group, and transmitted from one group member to another. Evolution of culture occurs in a manner parallel to shaping of operant behavior and biological evolution—by variation coupled with selective transmission. In cultural evolution, the pool of cultural practices possessed by a society, analogous to a gene pool, is the culture pool. The traits that produce culture are behavioral specializations, imitation, and social reinforcers and punishers. The replicators of culture (practices) are the activities of group members passed along by imitation and instruction. They include nonverbal practices like dietary selection and manufacturing, and also verbal practices like stories, sayings, and rules. Practices of social reinforcement and punishment are fundamental replicators of human culture. Group selection and cultural group selection resulted in evolution of cooperative breeding and other cooperative activities
 
This basic process is fundamental to our phenotype and so will exist in every social system.  But a social system that radically reduces wealth inequality so as to maximize access to reinforcers to the most number of people is the most just according to a moral principle of a human right to freedom and dignity.  To the extent that any system devalues this access, it is consequently immoral.

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