What’s wrong with a new, lovely almshouse in London employing a research director and housing academics to diffuse its model not only in London, not only in England, but around the Commonwealth and world?
One of the signature problems of capitalism is its geography, as exploitative and expropriative capitalists rely on a very few financial law centers–London and New York City–to securely craft their asset claims, and, if needed, to enforce those asset claims (Pistor 2019). This means that these metropoles are agglomerations of global financial rents, just as oil states, from Saudi Arabia to Texas, are agglomerations of rents from non-renewable fuels. Whether based directly upon financial rents or oil and gas rents, these domineering rentier capitols or cores are built on, with, and to reproduce rarified economic conditions that by the accumulative and exclusionary nature of proprietarian capitalism do not exist elsewhere on this Earth.
One of the means by which this inequality is reproduced is that by virtue of the accumulated resources exclusively secured by these rentier cores, they become associated with prestige and merit. Rentier cores are exporters of best practices, policies, infrastructure and institutional models. As a matter of course with all inegalitarian ideology reproducing inequality, the context and the conditions under which the rentier capitols’ practices, policies, infrastructure and institutions are formed are mystified, including by being packaged in technocratic style. Thus, they constitute Counterenlightenment knowledge and not Enlightenment science.
By contrast, an Enlightenment scientific contextualized comparativist approach to policy, infrastructure, and institutional varieties and innovations is just that: contextualized, not mystified. This contextualization helps moderate the export of meritocratic, prestige rentier innovations and models that distort priorities and planning, and so disrupt and disorganize communities and societies that are exploited and expropriated, rather than centers of rent accumulation. Certainly rentier cores accumulate human capital in addition to financial and social capital. An emphasis on scientific contextualization can allow rentier-core innovations and models (or aspects thereof) to be considered in capitalism’s tributaries alongside innovations and models from societies (such as the Nordic social democracies) that have attempted to stem exploitation and expropriation and foster the circulation of wealth. Disseminating and adapting/adopting social democratic policy innovations in tributary hinterlands is the essence of responsible governance. Rentier-core innovations may then be rigorously, judiciously compared and analyzed, and potentially adapted within regions without premier access to rents so that capitalist tributary societies can build capacity and prevent policy and planning distortion, preventing the disruption and disorganization that aids the accumulation of inequality and its prodigious miseries.
Case studies:
Today’s Guardian has a news story, replete with attractive photos, that is an advertisement for a luxurious almshouse (retirement complex). Obnoxiously named Appleby Blue, the luxury almshouse is well designed. It’s not clear how much it costs for retirees to buy or rent an apartment in this almshouse, but behind the news story/advertisement is a drive to move the elderly out of whatever valuable London real estate they inhabit and into multi-unit, aging-adapted housing.
In London’s rentier-core policy model, luxury real estate developers are required to set aside funding for religious charities to employ in building and managing housing that profit-maximizing market actors will not provide. Providing wrap-around support to its financial core, this heavily-exported model assigns responsibility for managing the local problems of capitalism to religious institutions, the operational budgets of which are funded by the public. Where luxury penthouses built in this arrangement sell on the market for $20M pounds each, the almshouse cost $25M pounds to build.
In the task of managing Appleby Blue, the religious charity also promotes the model, including by employing an in-house head of research, ‘whose role is to initiate these kinds of partnerships and disseminate their findings beyond academic circles. “We don’t just want the research to be published in a peer-reviewed journal that only academics read,” she says. “We want it to inform and influence others in the housing and ageing sector, to really understand not only how to help people live longer, but to live well for longer”’ (Wainwright, O. 2023. “”Live better, live longer: The retirement home that’s more like an alpine spa.” The Guardian, November 1).
Not only does this model almshouse employ a research director, it houses (embeds) two university aging researchers. With business school researchers, the almshouse research director has produced a study suggesting that seniors survive longer in communal living. That’s a contribution to a growing scientific consensus linking conditions supporting human attributes (like sociability) to human health outcomes. (For a sociologist with a passion for biology, I feel exasperated even writing that sentence. Only in capitalism would we have to science our way to that knowledge.) It’s likely beneficial to export the finding that in wealth-accumulation cores, communal, age-adapted living extends the life of the elderly. Perhaps age-adapted, communal living will also be found to moderate dementia amongst the affluent in wealth-accumulation cores. But you probably don’t hire a research director and house two university researchers to stop there.
What does an almshouse or retirement home look like in a relatively impoverished tributary region? It’s also compact, communal living for the elderly. But perhaps it’s too compact. Perhaps there is no money for convivial, comfortable socialization spaces. Without the wealth, many humane and healthy attributes–such as care, respect, patience and mercy, intellectual stimulation and fun, walkability, green space, spacious but human-scaled architecture, insulated windows permitting interior fresh air and ample interior sunlight, insulation and comfortable temperature, sources of warmth, softness, non-toxic materials, cleanliness, and comfortable furnishings–are normally stripped down and stripped out of living spaces and work places. On the other hand, compensatory humane and healthy attributes more accessible in capitalist hinterlands–such as pleasant, healthy, lively and stimulating outdoor environments and activities–including balconies, companion animals, family visits, trusting relationships–may be underappreciated and underprovided where rentier core innovations are indiscriminately exported to, and stupidly imposed upon tributary hinterlands.
Moving valuable real estate is not the driver–or source of public revenue–in all tributary regions, as it is in rentier metropoles. What else would drive almshouse infrastructure, and what issues might these drivers entail? For example, the erection of tributary almshouses to house the elderly is much more likely to be driven by families’ need to work long hours to live, disruptive and health-damaging lack of control over their work, and consequent inability to care for aging family members who have already sustained the health damages inflicted by dehumanizing inequality. Commonwealth tributaries replicate the heavily-marketed financial core model of charity-provided retirement homes, but in the tributary there is insufficient overflow from FIRE (finance-insurance-real estate) rents to build cutting-edge design, healthy, humane housing for the aging, and the incidence of poverty is great. Instead, charities such as the Manitoba Lion’s Club are incentivized by the state to provide mass housing for the low-income elderly, fostering a business model culminating in the charity board of the patriarchal charity club repeatedly selling off housing assets on the commercial market to the personal gain of board members and their politicians. In this institutionalized graft machine, low-income elders and their families are abandoned to the resulting expensive, disruptive chaos. Conditions differ across geographic inequality, and different drivers produce different problems to be solved.
There is good, scientific reason to presume that the knowledge generated under rentier metropole or oil state conditions is keyed to those conditions and is of limited use outside those conditions. By exporting that knowledge with de-emphasis on those conditions, we hazard distorting knowledge, imposing inappropriate models as raw “innovation”, and wasting resources and incurring negative outcomes–such as leaking more wealth from the tributaries. Exported, technocratic and meritocratric rentier core knowledge can reproduce inequality and its manifold harms.
This problem could be seen in the pandemic, where New York City health authorities immediately demanded the lockdown of people in their homes in the city’s tributary hinterlands. While wildly inappropriate in many ways, this inegalitarian rentier-core technocratic reflex was authorized by the inegalitarian ideology of the militarized, patriarchal, population-management model from which “expert” pandemic policy was borrowed. A capacity to moderate Counterenlightenment knowledge dissemination with scientific knowledge–validly-contextualized comparativism–would have reduced the health and economic harms of pandemic policy, and allowed more effective, efficient, reliable, scientific policy formation. By moderating capitalist inequality and inegalitarianism, Enlightenment science would support political democratization.
Likewise, prestigious investment and management consultants regularly prescribe, to non-elite universities’ managers specifically, university management policies built primarily to expropriate securable assets to their wealthy clients. Yet these policies are diffused and adopted as managerial “innovation” neutral to place-based requirements, such as sustaining a university as a locally-accessible agglomeration of regional assets.
Knowledge dissemination is necessary but not sufficient. Importing policy and infrastructure models from the core regions of an inequality regime is not a particularly efficient approach. Importing policy and infrastructure models from the core demands high, critical analytical and democratic deliberation capacity in the importing community or institution. Often such capacity is disorganized in tributary regions, though for example some Rural Sociologists like Neal and Jan Flora and Stephen Gasteyer work to help tributary communities organize the dispersed local capacities required to research, assess, and adapt knowledge.
The formative context and conditions of model innovations must be scientifically interrogated to really understand what they are designed to do, the limits of what they are capable of doing, and how that is likely to impact the region (or social group) to which they are marketed and exported. A crucial variable in the conditions and context of so-called innovations is how they are built to sustain the geography of proprietarian inequality. We need to assess how management and policy models, and infrastructure exports, ameliorate–or reproduce–the manifold problems that cascade from inequality and unevenly beset the geographic, social gradient. That’s because inequality and inegalitarianism are the master problems of our time (Piketty 2020). If upon assessment, an inequality core model can be reasonably expected to counterproductively reproduce inequality problems in situ, its implementation would be predatory, and the next step would be to identify if it has any constructive principles or components that can be beneficially adapted in the tributary.
The Indomitable Neoliberals FC 