I’ve sworn off talking about what I do, in place of just doing it; but can’t resist this. Clay, in his continuing metamorphosis toward being the James Randi of the web; has a new piece up debunking some digital-divide myths. In it he points to an interesting idea – Dynamists vs. Statists.
“Virginia Postrel, in her book “The Future and Its Enemies”, (ISBN: 0684862697) suggests that the old distinctions of right and left are now less important than a distinction between statists and dynamists. Statists are people who believe that the world either is or should be a controlled, predictable place. Dynamists, by contrast, see the world as a set of dynamic processes”
This is great! It give us all another axis of definition to argue about! I like it because it reminds me of alignment in D&D… I was always chaotic-good… and now I guess I’m a “Big-Dynamist” IA… Heheh.
Petafloptimism 
hmmm, isn’t that the same as “conservatives” (statists) and “liberals” (dynamists)?
I’ve always preferred the less politically-charged “progressive” myself.
No, the interesting thing about Postrel’s formulation is that it explains the alignment of the anti-trade left and the nationalist conservatives. The anti-globalization movement is made up of protectionists and environmentalists, anti-immigrant racists and anti-sweatshop protesters, and the only thing they all have in common is that they all feel that the market should certainly not be allowed to operate without strong and guiding intervention.
Meanwhile, the libertarians and pro-immigration left think that the movement of people through the world should be freer than it is today. So dynamism and statism provides a better lens to study those otherwise strange bedfellows.
-clay
I don’t think I can top Thomas Frank’s glorious debunking of Postrel’s polarisation, which as an intellectual carve-up is not that different from Robert Pirsig’s hippy-chic dynamic/static polarity, and certainly not that different to Nietzsche’s classic (if rather adolescent) distinction in /The Death of Tragedy/ between Apollonians and Dionysians:
“…so lopsidedly does she heap praise on her ‘dynamists’ and shower abuse on her ‘stasists’ that one feels they might more appropriately be labeled ‘saints’ and ‘the worst assholes ever.’ The motley assortment of blowhard politicians, environmentalists, and griping naysayers who make up the ‘stasist’ camp are not only elistists in the usual market-populist sense (they believe in expertise, they’re skeptical of the market, and hence they’re hostile to the tastes and preferences of the people) but they seem to have profoundly evil designs on the world. Postrel charges them with despising beach volleyball and with secretly wishing to ‘forever yoke the world’s peasants behind a water buffalo’… It is a scheme for understanding history so daft it’s worth of John Perry Barlow himself.
“But Postrel’s object isn’t to understand the subtleties of history. Nor is it really to equate business with democracy, although that is, of course, an important theme. Her goal is to lay claim to the one idea that Americans hold in even higher esteem than democracy itself: the future. ‘The central question of our time,’ she writes, ‘is what to do about the future.’ Should we take the route of the fiendish ‘stasists’, with their government regulation, their lousy clothes, and their killing fields? Or should we follow the ‘dynamists’, those true believers in human promise? (who turn out when Postrel names them mainly to be captains of industry, management theorists, and Republican politicians.) The decision is easy to make: in fact, it’s been made for us. We can’t follow the ‘stasists’ to the future, because by definition /that’s not where they’re going/. Since ‘the future’ and ‘free markets’ are essentially the same thing, the wish to restrain the latter is to set oneself fully against the former. ‘Stasists’ are thus, in addition to all their other crimes, ‘enemies of the future’.”
(/One Market Under God/, pp. 342–343, if you’re interested.)
In short, it’s rubbish. It’s a self-confirming (and, more critically, a self-aggrandizing) formulation. And it neglects the small fact that plenty of the tenets of the anti-globalisation movement are, in fact, closer to Adam Smith’s brand of ameliorist Lockean capitalism than the corporate proto-imperialism that’s truly celebrated by Postrel and her ilk.
Not to mention the fact that the dynamic/static divide is better regarded as a symbiosis, embodied in Saussure’s linguistic concepts of ‘langue’ and ‘parole’: ‘rule’ and ‘performance’, the semantic and pragmatic. Without ‘langue’, ‘parole’ cannot function; without ‘parole’, ‘langue’ cannot develop. And the two are in constant flux, which is why transitional states are the truly important ones.
So, I respectfully call bullshit.
A fair cop on Postrel’s OTT libertarianism, though I think you can understand why I don’t take Thomas Frank too seriously. No matter how much he may want markets to be somehow separated from democracy, there is the uncomfortable fact that all democracies are market economies. Two generations of social theorists haved tried to explain this away, including Frank, Robert Heilbroner and Robert Dahl, but in the end, they were defeated by what Dahl sighingly sums up as the ‘unambigously clear’ evidence for the link between the market and democracy. (Well, Dahl and Heilbroner were defeated, but that’s because they are actual economists, not cultural critics, who do not have to take numerical evidence into account.)
More importantly, though, I will defend the dynamist/statist split as being more than saints and assholes. With the victory in the Cold War, and the vanishing of a communist alternative from most of the world, the market issues have in many ways been settled in the present term, but the management of cultural change has not.
The dynamist/statist split is like that old line about “Everything that is not forbidden is permitted” vs “Everything that is not permitted is forbidden.” Its a useful way to characterize, for example, the UNDP vs the Grameen Bank in their strategies for delivering telephone access to the poor, because whatever your feelings for VP may be, the market has done a far better job of getting telephones run than any number of NGOs, and Postrel’s description of how market solutions succeed where state solutions don’t seems a useful construction in explaining that success.
So as far as respectfully calling bullshit goes, I think that the vague formulation about Sassure and transitional states is a not-great addition to tools for thinking about getting telephones into the hands of the poor. The ‘transitional states’ would only be the important ones if they worked better at improving people’s lives through e.g. provisioning more phones than other kinds of states, but in this case, the statistics show a bias towards one axis here, namely the dynamic one.
To put it in the form of a more positive challenge, how would you characterize the difference between Poland’s economy and Brunei’s, or Egypt and Kuwait’s? Could you do it without resorting to using the word ‘dynamic’ or one of its synonyms?
Would statist-vs-dynamist be similar to Hofstede’s universalism-vs-particularism?
One is dependent on circumstances, while the other wants to assume some grand unifying rule can be applied.
Clay, I’m not enamoured about having this discussion on Matt’s turf, but anyway. I think that any ‘static/dynamic’ polarisation is bound to valorise excessively the dynamic, and I do think that in taking Postrel as your muse for that piece, you’ve been suckered into a bit of sloppy thinking.
Look, for instance, at the current Slashdot thread on mobile phone adoption around the world, and you’ll see that on the one hand, the market has routed around state provision of land-lines in Eastern Europe through the growth of mobile phone use; on the other hand, that growth has been facilitated by the state imposition of GSM standardisation. Had the same ‘dynamic’ forces applied in Europe as in the USA, I suspect that Jozef Pole would still be waiting for his land line.
My response isn’t a ‘vague formulation’, Clay, unless you regard linguistics as vague, because what I’m saying is that you need to approach these interactions like those of a language; and that kind of approach, which sees value in the grammar as well as the pragmatics, seems a little more constructive than your rather uncharacteristic embrace of facile polarities.
One last thing (and it is a last thing, as I have more important stuff to deal with right now): I find it hard to believe that these ‘dynamists’ are going to ‘get telephones in the hands of the poor’ around the world when they seem incapable of getting healthcare into the hands of more than a tenth of the US population. Once they’ve done that, and achieved something that the ‘stasists’ appear to have managed with fewer problems, I’ll start taking them seriously.
Nick,
I think you’re being a bit sloppy yourself (or at least too emotive) in making an elision between provision of telephones and healthcare. Telephony is clearly a market, regardless of state intervention such as deciding on GSM, whereas no market democracy has yet managed to prove that healthcare can be better managed completely outside of state intervention.
Perhaps, to further confuse the dynamic/statist definition, we have to ask – at what point do dynamic markets start to get static? When do the waters stagnate? After dynamic forces assist the creation of an initial market, when do statist forces have to step in to rationalise the effects of that market’s dynamism? Seeing as France Telecom might be renationalised, this is a very current problem (and i’m fully aware that i’m starting to elide ‘statist’ into ‘state’).
I don’t see it as such, Matt. I’d go as far as saying that telephony /becomes/ a market. in certain contexts and at particular points of saturation — that is, when only extraordinary circumstances prevent basic provision — but until then, in the particular situations that Clay’s piece describes, it functions as a utility, akin to the provision of fresh water, electricity, and yes, healthcare. Which doesn’t mean that there are no market elements involved in its provision (I still remember the cost of making a two-minute call from rural Nepal ten years ago) but that it’s not truly commoditised: the village phone is like the village well.
I certainly don’t accept that ‘telephony is clearly a market’, if I’m right in taking your ‘clearly’ to imply that ‘marketability’ is something immanent to the technology. Telephony is clearly a market in those places where it has /become/ a market, but that’s not really saying anything about telephony, as I think you yourself imply in your last paragraph.
[And Postrel says ‘stasist’, not ‘statist’. Though the implication’s clear enough: in black/white polarisations, someone’s got to be the blackguard. Right, I’m done.]
I’ve always preferred the less politically-charged “progressive” myself.
Ah, there’s nothing so free of political charge as a term for your own ideology that implies the other guy’s against progress.