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ECONOMICS

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FINANCIAL ECONOMICS
Financial economics are empirically correcteven weaker models work with economic rationality Cowen 01 (Tyler, Department of Economics George Mason University, How Do Economists Think About Rationality?; http://www.gmu.edu/centers/publicchoice/faculty%20pages/Tyler/rationality.pdf, [JJ]) Financial economics has one of the most extreme methods in economic theory, and increasingly one of the most prestigious . Finance concerns the pricing of market securities, the determinants of market returns,
the operating of trading systems, the valuation of corporations, and the financial policies of corporations, among other topics. Specialists in finance can command very high salaries in the private sector and have helped design many financial markets and instruments. To many economists, this ability to "meet a market test" suggests that financial

economists are doing

something right . Depending on one's interpretation, the theory of finance makes either minimal or extreme assumptions about rationality. Let us consider the efficient markets hypothesis (EMH), which holds the status of a central core for finance, though without commanding universal assent. Like most economic claims, EMH comes in many forms, some weaker, others stronger. The weaker versions typically claim that deliberate stock picking does not on average outperform selecting stocks randomly, such as by throwing darts at the financial page. The market already incorporates information about the value of companies into the stock prices, and no one individual can beat this information, other than by random luck, or perhaps by outright insider trading. Note that the weak version of EMH requires few assumptions about rationality. Many market participants may be grossly irrational or

systematically biased in a variety of ways. It must be the case, however, that their irrationalities are unpredictable to the remaining rational investors. If the irrationalities were predictable, rational investors could make systematic extra-normal profits with some trading rule. The data, however, suggest that it is very hard for rational investors to outperform the market averages. This suggests that extant irrationalities are either very small, or very hard to predict, two verydifferent conclusions. The commitment that one of these conclusions must be true does not involve much of a substantive position on the rationality front.

TEXBOOK ECONOMICS
Textbook economics work best-solve economic problems Jacobides and Winter 10 (Michael G Jacobides London Business School mjacobides@london.edu Sidney G Winter The Wharton School, U of Penn winter@wharton.upenn.edu; June 2010; UNDERSTANDING CAPABILITIES: STRUCTURE, AGENCY AND EVOLUTION; http://www2.druid.dk/conferences/viewpaper.php?id=501809&cf=43, [JJ])
An important theoretical question posed by such examples is whether they are usefully thought of As manifestations of economic rationality. They certainly do involve agency or intentionality. They certainly draw on the energy of pecuniary motivation, otherwise known as profit seeking. Although these attributes would suffice for many people to establish the affirmative answer on economic rationality, there is a need for caution here. The

formal rationality that is expounded in the

textbooks and explored in the research efforts of many disciplines is essentially a story about getting the right answer to a given, sharply defined problem . In contexts where the actors specific objectives might be unknown (e.g., attitudes toward risk might be unknown, even if the profit seeking motive can safely be assumed), it basically becomes a story about the internal consistency of the different answers to a hypothetical set of related problems. Discard that
consistency meaning, fundamentally, the transitivity relation on preferences and you throw away rationality itself, as it is defined in economics and in other fields devoted to the practice of rational actor theorizing.

LENS
They have it backwards a strong economy is a perquisite to security the capitalist system is key national influence Zarate 12 senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for
The United States is unprepared to play this new geo-economic game. Our

Terrorist Financing and Financial Crimes (Juan C. Zarate, 5 January 2012, Needed: A national economic security lens, CBS News, http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-215_162-57353278/needed-a-national-economic-security-lens/)//KP

current approach to economic security abroad reflects a reticence to meld political and economic interests, something Secretary of State Clinton has begun to highlight. This underscores a long-standing structural divide between national security policies and the role of the U.S. private sector in the international commercial and financial system. The most
egregious examples are in Iraq and Afghanistan. American blood and treasure have been spent to establish security and functioning economies, but

American companies and interests are often left on the sidelines as Chinese, Russian, and other countries' companies profit from oil, mineral, and other sectors. U.S. economic reach and influence has been taken for granted as a function of the free trade paradigm that the United States helped establish and the competitive advantages of U.S. companies against foreign competitors. This is now in jeopardy , with not only economic advantage but international influence at risk. As the Venn diagram of economic and national security overlaps ever more exactly, the United States should craft a deliberate strategy that aligns economic strength with national security interests. Needed: National economic security lens The intelligence community
should prioritize collection and analysis to focus on the global landscape through this national economic security lens. Our homeland security enterprise should be focused less on defending against specific actors and more principally on protecting and building redundancies in the key infrastructure and digital systems essential for national survival. Law enforcement and regulators should have access to beneficial ownership information for investments and companies formed in the United States. International alliances should be recast to ensure key resource and supply redundancy, while trade

deals should be crafted to create new opportunities for influence and economic advantage. The proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership trade accord endorsed by President Obama is a major step in the right
entanglement in a globalized environment that would make it patently unwise for countries to try to weaken the United States. We

direction. We should reconsider doctrines of deterrence - to account for the challenges of attribution in cyberspace as well as the opportunities of

should view the relationship between government agencies - like the Overseas Private Investment Corporation and US AID - and the private sector as core to the promotion of U.S. interests, creating alliances based not just on trade and development but on shared economic vulnerabilities and opportunities. In doing this, we must reaffirm our core principles. We are neither China nor Russia, nor should we create structures that move us toward a state authoritarian model. On the contrary, we should remain the vanguard of the global free trade, capitalist system , while preserving the independence of the private sector and promoting ethical American business practices. We should not retreat from the globalized environment we helped shape but instead take full advantage of the innovation and international appeal and reach of American business and technology. In the 21st century, economic security underpins the nation's ability to project its power and influence. The United States must remain true to its values but start playing a new, deliberate game of geo-economics to ensure its security and take advantage of rapidly emerging vulnerabilities and opportunities.

US ECON
Collapsing economic order breads conflict not the other way around Shuman and Harvey 93 Director of the Institute for Policy Studies; founder and President of the Energy Foundation
(Michael H. Shuman; Hal Harvey, October 1993, Security Without War: A Post-Cold War Foreign Policy, Westview Press)//KP

U.S. security planners understood at the beginning of the Cold War that sound economic policies could prevent war. They remembered Versailles, where a $33 billion reparations bill was imposed on Germany after World War I and brought to

power a popular demagogue who promised to repudiate these humiliating debts Adolf Hitler. John Maynard Keynes resigned in protest from the British negotiating team at Versailles presciently predicting that [b]y aiming at the destruction of the economic life of Germany, [the Treaty] threatens the health and prosperity of the Allies themselves. U.S. security planners were determined not to make the same mistake after World War II.

Through the stewardship of General Douglas MacArthur and the generosity of the Marshall Plan, the United States helped rebuild the economies of Japan and Western Europe and, in doing so, created a prosperous economic order. But that order was built upon the global primacy of the U.S. economy. Today, Pax Americana is breaking down, and the absence of a new economic order to replace the old one is causing resentment, conflict, and disorder. Outraged by Tokyos restrictions on imports of U.S. auto parts, computers, and ric e, Americans
for new conflicts. U.S.

have demanded retaliatory trade barriers and demolished Japanese cars with sledgehammers. The crushing burden of foreign debt is destabilizing young democratic governments in Latin America. The lure of quick profit is drawing thousands of companies into the arms trade and sowing the seeds

security planners must now examine all these connections between economics and war, and devise new policies at home and abroad that increase the chances for peace. Todays economic order must be strengthened with a package of debt relief for the Third World, a corporate code of conduct, a regime of fair trade, and a new approach to development assistance. And economic conversion of arms factories and military institutions must move
forward on a planetary scale.

ECONOMIC RATIONALITY

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Economic rationality cant be applied to human behavior or the political realmfalse presumptions Kaplan 08 (Jonathan Kaplan, Associate Professor at Oregon State University, Philosophy of Biology, Philosophy of Science and Political Philosophy; Economic Rationality and Explaining Human Behavior: An Adaptationist Program?; THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF INTERDISCIPLINARY SOCIAL SCIENCES, VOLUME 3, NUMBER 7, 2008, http://people.oregonstate.edu/~kaplanj/Econ&Adapt.pdf,[JJ]) The application of economic models to human behavior in non-market arenas (and indeed, to individual decision-making in some markets) has long been criticized for both the assumptions these applications make about the

causes of human behaviors and for the methodologies employedinthe models attempts to explain human behaviors.Varoufakis, for example, has criticized these applications of economic rationality on the grounds

that consistency between the explanation given by economic rationality and actual behaviors should not count as good grounds for assuming that those explanations are correct (1998); Rosenberg(1979)suggests a similar criticism, noting that the consistency between a formal theory and a particular data set is not evidence for the theorys explanatory power if the theory was designed to fit that data set. Dupr has criticized these attempts to explain human

behavior for their focus on individual behaviors and acts, as well as for the way in which any predictions that fail to be supported by empirical research can be (and often are) explained away by changing the assumptions made about, for example, the preferences and beliefs of the actors (1987, 1998a). Sen has criticized the use of rational choice theory for both its assumption that a single utility function even could guide choices in many different arenas (1977) and for depending upon the idea that individual actions can be considered apart from the broader contexts in which they occur (1997). Green and Shapiro have argued that the application of rational choice theory to the political realm has been broadly unsuccessful , claiming (in part) that the reason these applications have been unsuccessful is that the explanations for behaviors are created posthoc; they complain that it is assumed that actions are guided by rational choice, and the preference and reasoning required to fit the action to the model are then derived (1994, see also Shapiro 2000 for a popular account of this critique which extends it to other domains). Taken together, these and similar sorts of critiques (which, of course, have themselves been attacked by supporters of economic rationality) point towards a number of questionable assumptions made and methodological practices employed when economic rationality is used in attempts to explain human behaviors. Critics accuse practitioners of

making (at least) the following assumptions about human behaviors: 1. Human activities can be usefully considered to be assemblages of separate actions; these individual actions can be usefully considered to have been undertaken more or less independently of each other; 2. Human rationality is powerful enough, and the constraints on its action

limited enough, that these actions can be assumed to be the result of agents rationally aiming towards some end; that is,it can be assumed thatthe actions are utilitymaximizing for the agent. Critics further accuse attempts at using economic rationality to explain human behaviors of employing the following questionable methodologicalpractices: 1. Consistency between an observed action (or pattern of actions) and a
particular story which accounts for its rationality with respect to the agents preferences, beliefs, and goals is considered to be sufficient for accepting (at least preliminarily) the hypothesis that the behavior in question is in fact the result of a rational decision (whether conscious or unconscious). 2. Any failure of a particular story about the rationality of a

particular behavior (an observed in consistency) leads immediately to the search for another account of the behavior which makes it out to be (economically) rational (rather than anexplorationof alternate accountsof

thebehavior in question); 3. Any failure of a particular action to be optimal from the standpoint of the agents local preferences and utility is accounted for by evoking trade-offs with other preferences; these claimed preferences are rarely subject to rigorous testing. These assumptions and methodological practices resemble the assumptions and methodological practicesthatGould andLewontin criticized as constituting the adaptationist program in their classic The Spandrels of San Marco and Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme (see Box 1).This should not, in one sense, be surprising; both adaptationism and the above interpretation of economic rationality in microeconomic theoryrely on extremal principles that is, in each case it is assumed that there is some (one) thing that is being maximized by the system

described by that theory (see Rosenberg 1979). Adaptationists assumed that natural selection worked on the phenotypes
of members of populations to maximize fitness, and that other influences on the average phenotypes of

thepopulationsinquestionwerenegligible;similarly, microeconomic theory supposes that people aim to maximize the satisfaction of their preferences (their utility) and that other influences on their actions are negligible. In the case of microeconomic

practice, the style of reasoning that these assumptions and methodological practices generate are most stark in works which attempt to apply rational choice theory to arenas of human behavior that are not traditionally thought of as market-oriented.However, these same assumptions and methodological practices can be seen used in more traditional accounts of market behavior, such as those found in basic text books in microeconomics, as well. Again, there is a striking

parallel to adaptationist reasoning here.Adaptationism first came under sustained attack when its techniques were applied to human behaviors (see Pigliucci and Kaplan 2000, Lewontin 1979), but recognitionof theproblematicnatureof the adaptationist assumptionsinthese less-traditional cases(human behaviors) led to the realization that those assumptionswerewide-spread and too often ill-defended in more traditional cases(ordinary phenotypic traits). While the application of assumptions and techniques of economic rationality to human behaviors in nonmarket arenas has been controversial,the application of these assumptionsto traditional market arenas has generally not been. However, as will become clear below, the problematic nature of the assumptions in non-market arenashasbeguntoinspire the re-evaluation of the models even in more traditional market arenas turning first towards the kinds of assumptions that appear in traditional microeconomic texts, the introduction ofKrebssA Course in Microeconomic Theory (1990) states that the actor chooses from some specified set of options, selecting the option that maximizessomeobjective function, thatis,that consumers have preferences that are represented by a utility function, and they choose in a way that maximizestheirutilitysubjecttoabudget constraint (Krebs 1990 4, emphasis in original).

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Economic rationality is the best way to evaluate peoples decisionstheir cards still assume rationality at its simplest forms Montero 13 - DPhil, University of Oxford (Tiago Montero, Starlings uphold principles of economic rationality for delay and probability of reward, February 8, 2013, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23390098, JL)
We argue

that rationality principles, understood as the demand for logical consistency in preferences, should remain an integral and indispensable feature of predictive theoretical

models of behaviour both because they support the logic of the models and because our data show that they do hold in the demanding tests we describe. This can be expanded to assert that, for a given state of a decisionmaker and its environment, predictive models can safely include the assumption that choices will display properties such as transitivity. If either the subjects or their environments are not held constant, then

rationality is not being tested. Some recent theoretical contributions consistent with this view have not made this defence of rationality explicit. For instance, it has been shown that intransitivity in preference between food sources may

be adaptive if the subject is driven by the experimental procedure to infer differences in the state of the world when presented with different choices [31,35]. However, such differences in preferences still express rationality (i.e. transitivity) in terms of the subjects maximand (i.e. Darwinian fitness) and are in fact expressions of statedependent rationality once the information driving the agents behaviour is included, as it s hould, in the description of its state. In our view, reports that both human and non-human decision-makers systematically breach rationality

principles ([1,2,18], but see also [20] for an alternative view) should not promote the demise of Homo economicus or non-human equivalents, but be instead used to explore and illustrate how the rationality/optimality approach used by both theoretical economists and behavioural ecologists applies to real-life agents. In a
parametric series of quantitative tests, we corroborated that the behaviour of captive starlings actually does fit the demands of wellestablished economic rationality principles [9,12]. Starlings choices between multiple options differing in either delay to or probability of a food reward complied with strong stochastic transitivity and with the principle of independence from irrelevant alternatives, regardless of the added options richness relative to a target option pair. We did not use alternatives differi ng in more than one dimension simultaneously. Such tests are complicated because the scaling of utility (or preference) to physical dimensions probably includes nonlinearities when different properties are traded against each other [1,3,6,18,32]. Demonstrations of full rationality in unidimensional choices such as those shown here and results obtained in transitive inference experiments across multiple species that are consistent with these results [4248] suggest that rational choice, rather than its opposites, is widespread, and should be the foundation from which to interpret observations of logically inconsistent behaviour. Our view is that most

reports of apparent violations of logical decision principles in non-human studies result from failing to follow preconditions for their validity, such as constancy of the agents physiological or informational state, or lack of satiety effects from the commodity [10,27,2931,35,36]. Variations in preference following

variations in subjects energetic reserves, or when the testing conditions allow subjects to infer differences in their circumstances, are perfectly consistent with evolutionarily normative, rationality-based theoriesas is clear from Houston et al. [31] and Houston [26]. This matters because if it were convincingly shown that when necessary conditions are controlled, logical principles do not apply to decision processes, the foundation of normative modelling in behavioural biology would melt away. This is relevant to decision-making across multiple taxa, including humans, and

highlights the value of integrating decision research across economics, psychology and biology.

Critiques of rationality fail humans economize and are rational even if their psychological motives arent economic rationality is distinct and can be observed Foldvary 1/21/13 lecturer in economics at Santa Clara University California, research fellow at The Independent
Institute, commentator and senior editor for The Progress Report, and associate editor of Econ Journal Watch (Fred E. Foldvary, 21 January 2013, Economic Rationality, The Progress Report, http://www.progress.org/2013/fold804.htm)//KP

The concept of rational action is a frontier of economic theory. The new field of behavioral economics combines economics and psychology to analyze actions that seem to be irrational. For example, people value health and long life, yet they smoke and eat unhealthy food. A related field, b ehavioral finance, examines psychological and emotional traits that prevent people from making wise investments. Perverse

psychological biases include anchoring to past prices and facts, the bias of weighing recent events too highly relative to the more distant past, being overly confident in ones abilities, and following the herd to a cliff. Neoclassical economics often assumes th at people are purely self-interested and always seek financial gain, and that therefore altruism is irrational, whereas as Adam Smith and Henry George wrote, human beings have two motivations: self interest and sympathy for others. Since people get satisfaction from serving others, it is incorrect to label altruism or actions based on subjective views of justice as irrational. The Austrian school of economic thought has a different perspective on rationali ty. The Austrian economist

Ludwig von Mises

envisioned human action as inherently rational. A person has unlimited desires and scarce resources. Human beings economize, seeking maximum benefits for a given cost, or minimizing costs for a given benefit. At any moment in time, a person ranks his goals, ranging from most to least important. He
chooses the resources to achieve the most important goal at some moment, then the second most, and so on, until his gains from trade have become exhausted. This is the inherent rationality of human action. The

trades with others as well as trade-offs among ones own resources. For example, if your goal is to eat delicious food, you trade the
money you value less highly for food you value more highly. Economizing man seeks to maximize the utility, i.e. the importance and satisfaction gained, from ones resources. Note that economic rationality involves means rather than ends or goals. If a person chooses to drink so much vodka that he gets drunk and then gets sick, there was a reason for doing so, and at that time, he believed that this would maximize his utility. Utility theory does not pass judgment on peoples goals. Utility theory analyzes the means to an end, whatever that end may be. The man who gets drunk may later regret his action, but rationality has to be based on human action at the moment it occurs. At that moment, his knowledge, emotions, and desires lead him to make a particular choice. At a later moment, he may have different knowledge, emotions, and desires -- too bad, because we cant go back in time. The action was utility maximizing at that time, even if it turns out to be bad in the future.

process of satisfying ones ends involves exchange,

Rationality in economics is different from rationality in psychology . A psychologist may judge getting drunk as an irrational desire, but an Austrian-school economist recognizes that values are purely subjective, and he takes any particular desire as just data, and economic rationality does not apply to data. Economic rationality has three criteria: 1. A rational person has a sound functioning mind. He generally observes and understands reality. We all have incomplete knowledge, and many people hold false beliefs, and rational people may have differing interpretations of observations. But people substantially out of touch with reality, such as due to drugs or dementia, are beyond the domain of economic analysis. 2. Rational people economize. Economic theory is based on maximizing benefits and minimizing costs.
Economics does not claim that all people necessarily economize, but if they do not do so, they are not rational, and we send them to the Department of Psychology to analyze, since economic theory can only analyze rational action. 3. The

preferences of rational persons are consistent. For example, if one prefers an apple to a banana, and a banana to a cantaloupe slice, consistent preference implies that one prefer an
apple to a cantaloupe slice. If not, then that person is irrational, and economists send him to abnormal psychology for analysis, since economic theory does not apply to inconsistent preferences. Given that meaning of economic rationality, what

about the perverse psychological biases? Overconfidence is consistent with rationality, since the person is not directly observing what is not there, but interpreting and misjudging his ability as more potent that it turns out to be. A
rational person may believe that a black cat brings bad luck, without any evidence, but the rational person does not see himself surrounded by black cats which dont exist. We call religious belief a faith because it is not based on verified evidence, but religious people are nevertheless rational. term quasi-rationality for action that is objectively sub-optimal, but to an economizing man, the future is always uncertain, knowledge is always incomplete, and beliefs cannot all be based on personal evidence, so action is quasi-rational only with hindsight, and not at the moment of choice. Likewise,

Merely believing in what is not observed does not imply irrationality. Behavioral economists sometimes use the with recency bias and anchoring, people weigh some facts and events too much, but again, this is a matter of interpretation rather than direct observation. Suppose somebody buys a financial asset for $50
and the price later falls to $40, and he does not want to sell, because he does not want to experience a loss. In fact, he has already lost $10 per share, and the optimal financial decision has to ignore what he paid, and focus only on expected future risks and yields, but the person anchored to a past price is also weighing in the emotional trauma of acknowledging a loss, so he is still rationally maximizing utility even when keeping a share of stock that is going ever lower. Likewise the smoker is rational in, at the moment of choice, choosing the immediate pleasure (or avoiding the pain of withdrawing from smoking), over the long-run desire for good health. There

are tradeoffs between short-term pleasure and long-term goals, and choosing the short-term pleasure is not irrational, because ones subjective value at that time is for the pleasure. Economic psychology has also analyzed the mental process of choice, concluding
that much of what we think of as reasoned choice is really induced by subconscious feelings. Much of what we do is based on habit. But even with complete determinism, it is still the case that, at

every moment in time, a person thinks and feels that he is weighing costs and benefits to optimize utility, and that state of mind constitutes free will and rational action. Therefore the claim of behavioral economics and behavioral finance that people do not act rationally is based on a psychological rather than economic meaning of rationality. So long as people can generally observe and believe reality, and they economize to achieve ends, and their preferences are consistent, they are rational, even if they do what they later realize was foolish. We can well call destructive government policy irrational, but that is a different meaning of rationality than what applies to a choice made by an individual person. The paradox of humanity is that our actions are based on reason, and that human action is rational, yet collectively human beings engage in war, environmental destruction, and economic waste that is inconsistent with the desire of most to live
peaceful, prosperous, happy lives.

Rational models are the best falsifiability and empirical success Moffatt 11 Assistant Professor at the Richard Ivey School of Business (Mike Moffatt, 4 September 20122, Behavioural Ecnomics and the Rationality Assumption in Economics,

Worthwhile Canadian Imitative, http://worthwhile.typepad.com/worthwhile_canadian_initi/2011/09/behavioural-economicsand-the-rationality-assumption-in-economics.html)//KP There is a temptation for non-economists to answer any question that puzzles economists by simply declaring "people are irrational!" "Why are prices so much higher in Canada?" "PEOPLE ARE IRRATIONAL!" "What explains the equity premium puzzle?" "PEOPLE ARE IRRATIONAL!" etc. There are two reasons why the rationality assumption is popular in economic modelling: It works an awful lot of the time, in that it is a good predictor of human behaviour. It provides models which are falsifiable . I will explain with the use of an example. Suppose consumers are choosing between five options: A,
B, C, D, E. Given what we know about consumer preferences, costs, and benefits, we predict that consumers should always choose A. However, it turns out only

80% of the time they are choosing A, and 20% of the time they are choosing B. If we assume must be some cost to choosing A or some benefit to choosing B that we have not accounted for. We can find candidates for that cost/benefit and test if it makes a difference. If we believe there's a factor X that is a hidden cost to choosing A, we can compare situations where factor X exists and where it
consumers are rational, then there it is in play.

doesn't. If our theory is correct, we should expect to see consumers choose A when the factor is not in play, but choose B to a much greater degree when

This provides the falsifiability we need - we can actually test our theory. We can use a number of methods - we can run laboratory experiments or we can collect data from real-world situations where the cost is both present and not present. Contrast this with simply saying "people are irrational!". There's no insight, plus there is no falsifiability - it "explains" everything. If we want to introduce non-rational behaviour, we need to be specific and we need our explanation to be falsifiable. In our A, B, C, D, E example, there could be explanations such as: The number of options overwhelm consumers, and causes them to make a mistake. One or more of C, D, E is providing some form of framing effect that makes B appear more attractive than it actually is. If we have a framing effect, replacing one of 'C', 'D' or 'E' with 'F' should reduce the frequency of people choosing 'B'. If this is not occuring, then we can conclude that it is not a framing effect. We could then try removing one of 'C', 'D', or 'E' and see what that does to the frequency of people choosing 'B'. This provides us with the falsifiability we require. We also have discovered not just that people are irrational, but something about the ways people make a decision. Caveat: I happen to agree with
my former Professor Jeff Smith when he states: Fourth, it irritates me when people equate rational behavior with an assumption of costless information processing. It seems to me that the correct way to proceed is to incorporate a cognitive budget constraint into the optimization problem. It is hardly rational to spend huge amounts of costly cognitive resources to solve some problem when a quick, cheap but slightly wrong heuristic is available Our models should reflect this and, more broadly, we should not treat clearly irrational behavior as the benchmark of rationality. This requires learning a bit of psychology and/or neuroscience in order to get the budget constraint right. A

fair bit of what might be classified as 'irrational' behaviour is simply useful heuristics that occasionally fail. As such, I think the border between rational behaviour and irrational behaviour is very blurry. When building our models, the distinction between rational and irrational is irrelevant. What matters is that are models are a good predictor of human behaviour and they are falsifiable. Economic rationality works --- its inevitable and key to policymaking McKenzie 10 (Richard B., Professor Emeritus of Enterprise and Society School of Business at the University of California, Irvine, Predictably Rational?: In Search of Defenses for Rational Behavior in Economics, Chapter 9, SpringerLink, Deech) Nevertheless, there can be a rationality of a sort and an economics of a sort so far as wants are determined and to the extent that people can and do contemplate the relative merits of alternative courses of production and consumption. Behavioral psychologists and economists have more recently documented many imperfections in human rationality, and its derivatives, decision making, and behaviors (see Chap. 6), but neoclassical economists should neither consider such findings unexpected nor deny them. Oddly, as will be seen in Chaps. 10 and 11, the behaviorals findings should even be welcomed as a reason dtre for the economics as a course of study and method for thinking and deducing insights about real-world human behavior . The standard defense of perfect rationality in economics is Milton Friedmans

statement: In order to make testable predictions , we must abstract from the real world the models of behavior. Assuming complex forms of rationality, or just less than perfect rationality, can complicate thinking with no necessary improvement in the fruitfulness of the theory. There are four other major lines of defense for continued use of rationality as a theoretical tool of analysis. First, economics or, for that matter, any other discipline necessarily provides a partial view of life because of the sheer complexity of life especially, at the sophisticated levels of modern humans with the great diversity of human motivations and with their enormous opportunities for self-improvements. Second, in matters of drawing up contracts and constitutions, an assumption of perfect rationality on the part of people or an assumption of people leading lives of homo economics can provide institutional protections against some peoples worst inclinations . Third, the premise of perfect rationality can be productively used as a means of improving business and consumer decision making. Fourth, because peoples thinking and rational decision making are less than perfect as well as complex, the premise of perfect rationality makes economic analysis possible.

POLICYMAKING
Economic rationality is key to effective policymaking McKenzie 10 (Richard B., Professor Emeritus of Enterprise and Society School of Business at the University of California, Irvine, Predictably Rational?: In Search of Defenses for Rational Behavior in Economics, pg. 1-20, SpringerLink, Deech) Third, rationality is a means by which rules for maximization of utility or profit can be deduced. Rationality functions as instruction on how people who are, perhaps, innately inclined to be less than fully or perfectly rational can become more rational; they can make decisions more efficiently (but not with perfectly efficiency), or can better (not perfectly) advance their utility and profit interests. Thus, rationality has, in this regard, a strictly normative intent; it advises people (students, consumers, and business managers and owners) on what they should do or how they should act in competitive market settings where their decisions can affect their costs and revenue through time, their market survival, and their assets long-term value. This function of rationality helps explain why economists spend so much time laying out the axioms of rationality, and their implications, to their students and why their lectures and writings take on a tone of advocacy for the adoption of the economic way of thinking. (If people, including economics students, were as rational as economists assume, there would be no need for economics instruction, an issue discussed with greater care in Chap. 11). Fourth, rationality confined to maximization of self-interest narrowly defined (without regard for the welfare of others) is a means by which institutions and policies can be devised to promote the general societal welfare, with the intent of protecting people from the others narrow self-interest-directed behavior. (This is a perspective on rationality developed at greater length in Chap. 5, drawing on the work of Geoffrey Brennan and James Buchanan [1985]). For example, markets grounded on enforced property rights can be seen as institutional settings for directing the energies of self-interested individuals toward the promotion of societal welfare. Constraints on governments (the majority decision-making rule, for example) can be used to protect people generally from the self-interest-directed efforts of political operatives misuse of government power. Likewise, terms of private contracts can be used to protect people from others exclusively self-interest-directed, opportunistic behavior.

PREDICTIONS
Economic rationality is critical to effective predictions --- enables good policymaking McKenzie 10 (Richard B., Professor Emeritus of Enterprise and Society School of Business at the University of California, Irvine, Predictably Rational?: In Search of Defenses for Rational Behavior in Economics, pg. 1-20, SpringerLink, Deech) First, rationality permits the conceptualization of precise and unique equilibriums which are a cornerstone of testable predictions primarily regarding the directional changes (but not their magnitudes) in market outcomes with the possible intent of recommending policy controls (or decontrols) of institutional (most often, market) settings. In this regard, rationality allows economists to do science , with the predictions made about very narrowly defined behavioral outcomes involving production and consumption decisions about specified goods, not just the broad outlines of patterns of outcomes within which the content of the patterns is left undefined or ill-defined. A key issue here in assessing the value of rationality lies with the extent to which predictions regarding directional changes are confirmed or rejected with empirical evidence, often requiring sophisticated statistical techniques to be deemed compelling. This use of rationality leads to strictly positive (or what is) economics, which offers economists opportunities to comment on the alignment of consequences of specific existing or proposed policies with their backers professed intentions. Second, the concept of rationality permits economists to discuss choices as a process by which economic opportunities are exploited in movements toward equilibrium. A key issue from this perspective is the extent to which group dynamics, market imperfections, and institutional and policy constraints prevent or encourage the exploitation of economic opportunities and lead to welfare enhancements or detriments. In this way, rationality serves to explain how improvements are realized (as in discussions of trade flows that follow the law of comparative advantage), but can also lead to testable predictions (for example, the assignment of property rights can boost incomes through improvements in the creation, care, and

maintenance of resources).Third, rationality is a means by which rules for maximization of utility or profit can be deduced. Rationality functions as instruction on how people who are, perhaps, innately inclined to be less than fully or perfectly rational can become more rational; they can make decisions more efficiently (but not with perfectly efficiency), or can better (not perfectly) advance their utility and profit interests. Thus, rationality has, in this regard, a strictly normative intent; it advises people (students, consumers, and business managers and owners) on what they should do or how they should act in competitive market settings where their decisions can affect their costs and revenue through time, their market survival, and their assets long-term value. This function of rationality helps explain why economists spend so much time laying out the axioms of rationality, and their implications, to their students and why their lectures and writings take on a tone of advocacy for the adoption of the economic way of thinking. (If people, including economics students, were as rational as economists assume, there would be no need for economics instruction, an issue discussed with greater care in Chap. 11). Fourth, rationality confined to maximization of self-interest narrowly defined (without regard for the welfare of others) is a means by which institutions and policies can be devised to promote the general societal welfare, with the intent of protecting people from the others narrow self-interest-directed behavior. (This is a perspective on rationality developed at greater length in Chap. 5, drawing on the work of Geoffrey Brennan and James Buchanan [1985]). For example, markets grounded on enforced property rights can be seen as institutional settings for directing the energies of self-interested individuals toward the promotion of societal welfare. Constraints on governments (the majority decision-making rule, for example) can be used to protect people generally from the self-interest-directed efforts of political operatives misuse of government power. Likewise, terms of private contracts can be used to protect people from others exclusively self-interest-directed, opportunistic behavior.

Fifth, rationality can be used for deducing what Friedrich Hayek (1967, pp. 1718) characterized as patterns of outcomes or ranges of possibilities within which the detailed content (for example, the exact goods consumed) would not and, for that matter, could not be known: Although such theories do not tell us precisely what to expect, it will still make the world around us a more familiar world in which we can move with greater confidence , that we will not be disappointed because we can at least exclude certain eventualities. It makes it a more orderly world in which events make sense because we can say in general terms how they hang together or are able to form a coherent picture of them (Hayek, 1967, p. 18). The details of the content of these patterns are unknown because economic values have subjective foundations and because outcomes must emerge from a multitude of people interacting in ways that can be

known only to the people doing the interacting who themselves do not always know what they want until they see how others are acting and responding to the interactions. Besides, economic actors do not seek to maximize the goods bought and sold in market places, which can have objective, measurable dimensions, but rather, the more elusive and subjective ends, subjectively evaluated goals that require goods as inputs. And --- even if we dont win humans are rational, treating them like they are enables effective predictions McKenzie 10 (Richard B., Professor Emeritus of Enterprise and Society School of Business at the University of California, Irvine, Predictably Rational?: In Search of Defenses for Rational Behavior in Economics, pg. 1-20, SpringerLink, Deech) Friedman seems comfortable with the assumption of given and fixed wants on several grounds, two of which can be mentioned briefly here (a longer treatment of Friedmans defense of conventional neoclassical methodology will be reserved for Chap. 9). First, Friedman believes in the benefits of disciplinary specialization, with economists being narrowly concerned with and achieving disciplinary research economies from limiting their analytical efforts to tracing out the consequences of any given sets of wants, along with the consequences of changes in external, environmental constraints on choices, principally changes in the prices and costs of the goods, as well as changes in peoples incomes and wealth (1962, p. 13). Never mind if people are not as fully or perfectly rational as economists assume. Friedman posits, as a matter of scientific necessity , that the legitimacy of and justification for this abstraction (that people maximize or act fully rationally) must rest ultimately, as with any other abstraction, on the light shed and the power to predict what is yielded by the abstraction (1962, p. 13). While hardly matching Stiglers and Beckers enthusiasm for human rationality, Friedmans view of economic science exhibits an element of an irrational passion for dispassionate rationality, at least partially because he does not consider analytically internal, evolutionary or neurobiological constraints on peoples ability to act rationally, other than to dismiss, or not be sidetracked by, such constraints. But then Friedmans view of the best scientific method must itself be grounded in some form of actual rational, maximizing behavior on the part of real-world people. Otherwise, his focus on as if behavior would appear to be arbitrary and to disconnect any testable hypotheses from any real human motivation. If we can assume that people have some rational capacity, Friedman argues that economists might as well use a simple, precise, and wellunderstood behavioral premise, or one that can be construed as sufficiently good approximations of human behavior, when it works for the purpose at hand rather than a more imprecise and complex one that might not improve predictions even when the complexity adds considerable analytical costs (1962, p. 15). Besides, science is a process of first deducing a hypothesis and testing it. If the hypothesis is not rejected by evidence (hypotheses can never be proved), then it is accepted until some better hypothesis is put forward. As Friedman explains in his Nobel lecture (in his discussion of the initial acceptance of the Phillips curve hypothesis and its eventual rejection), [T]he body of positive knowledge grows by the failure of a tentative hypothesis to predict phenomena the hypothesis professes to explain; by patching up of that hypothesis until someone suggests a new hypothesis that more elegantly or simply embodies the troublesome phenomena, and so on ad infinitum (Friedman, 1976, p. 267). Rationality key to making predictions McKenzie 10 (Richard B., Professor Emeritus of Enterprise and Society School of Business at the University of California, Irvine, Predictably Rational?: In Search of Defenses for Rational Behavior in Economics, Chapter 4, SpringerLink, Deech) *We do not endorse the use of gendered language Marshall felt justified in assuming narrow human motivations partially because he understood that economics was, at its core, a partial view of human life17 and because he repeatedly stressed

how economics, for the most part, narrowly focused a study of men as they live and move and think in
the ordinary business of life and chiefly concerned with those motives which affect, most powerfully and most steadily, man 's conduct in the business part of his life (1890, Sect. I.II.1), with those revealed actions that most readily yield to monetary measurements,18 and with those classes of people business people (mainly men) most likely to be deliberate in their calculations of courses of action, not to the unbusiness-like classes (1890, Sect. I.II.1 and P.4). While Marshall never uses the modern terms of rational, rationality, or rational behavior, his analysis, which focuses on people equating at the margin to maximize their net gain, had all the markings of modern neoclassical static analysis. However, it is equally clear that Marshall stands, in time and analytical approaches, astride the motivational methods of Smith and contemporary neoclassical economists who adhere with fervor to rational precepts. He was clearly willing to narrow the human motivations in his analytics. At the same time, his self-interest-directed analytics was constrained on all sides. The subjects maximizing behavior was constrained not only by the forces of competition, but also by nonself-interest motivations. Clearly, Marshall was Smithian in another important regard: Marshall insisted that as the analysis moved away from the study of commercial dealings and into the study of small groups and personal relationships, the potential contributions of economics would likely break down, partially because the underlying assumption of maximization of personal gain would dissipate and partially because behaviors would become less regular and money dealings among people less prominent. Hence, economic predictions, based on the force of motives, would be less subject to testing, robbing the discipline of its claims to being a science (1890, Sects. P.3, I.III. 4, III.III.18, V.V.9). At every step, Marshall insisted that although economics was a science, it should not be compared with physical sciences

such as physics or astronomy that allowed, because of the law of gravity, very exacting predictions that could be tested with equal empirical exactness. Rather, the laws of economics should be compared with those governing the tides, where predictions of the daily rises and falls are inexact, but tolerably acceptable , and subject to improvement with refinements in theory and statistical tests.19

FALSIFIABILITY
Any alternative to economic rationality is non-falsifiable McKenzie 10 (Richard B., Professor Emeritus of Enterprise and Society School of Business at the University of California, Irvine, Predictably Rational?: In Search of Defenses for Rational Behavior in Economics, pg. 1-20, SpringerLink, Deech) Maximizing behavior must, to modern economists who use the phrase, be largely comparable to (although not necessarily exactly the same as) rational behavior (which implies some optimum organization of behavior). If one is not able to choose consistently among known and ordered wants, then it is hard to see how maximum and optimum have meaning. Both rational behavior and maximizing behavior mean that people cannot have everything they want, which means that more is preferred to less of things that have positive value and less is preferred to more of things that have negative values. Thus, rational/maximizing behavior implies that people make conscious choices emerging from deliberations over the values and relative benefits of alternatives, deliberations that typically have been more or less completed when economists commence tracing out the consequences of any given set of wants. This position suggests, again, that what is often of central concern to economists in the Friedman, Stigler, and Becker methodological traditions are the testable predictions involved in the directional changes in equilibrium. From this perspective, rationality is useful as a tool of analysis for thinking through how and why people get to equilibrium and then, when constraints change, how they reestablish equilibrium in a predictable and testable manner. In moving to equilibrium, cost benefit analysis is essential and unavoidable. To economists, the cost of doing, buying or consuming one thing, A, is the value of the alternative, B, which would have been taken had A not been available. Rational behavior, then, implies that the value of the alternative taken is always greater than the cost, until equilibrium is reached. At that point, the marginal cost of the last unit produced equals (or comes as close as possible to equaling) its marginal value.6 Given that cost is defined as the value of the highest valued option not taken, then to say that the value of A is greater than its cost can be restated to mean that the value of A is greater than the value of B.7 If the value of A is truly known to be more than the value of B, with both subjective assessments at the volition of the chooser, and A and B are the only two goods available, it is hard to imagine circumstances under which B would be chosen.

INEVITABLE
Economic rationality is biologically engrained --A) Evolution McKenzie 10 (Richard B., Professor Emeritus of Enterprise and Society School of Business at the University of California, Irvine, Predictably Rational?: In Search of Defenses for Rational Behavior in Economics, pg. 21-33, SpringerLink, Deech) As it is argued in Chaps. 7 and 8, discussions of rationality are often focused on the appropriate choices of methodologies, as if peoples and economists choices over such matters are unconstrained. Actually, as will be seen, evolutionary forces of long ago have seriously constrained our methodological choices for understanding human behavior as well as the alternatives that we consider viable choices. The human brain now may very well be structured so that we (individual actors in market and nonmarket settings and economists who study people in such settings) seek to find some semblance of order amid the pervasive apparent disorder or nonorder, if not chaos, of everyday life. Through evolution, human beings may have developed the presumption of rational/maximizing behavior as one method to ferret out a sense of order from all the behavioral noise we observe, with the methods having fitness and survival value. After all, we can detect ourselves often making the kinds of costbenefit/maximizing decisions that the actors in economic models are assumed to make. In earlier evolutionary epochs, people did not have computers or the statistical and laboratory methods by which to undertake meaningful inductive, scientific research to determine how and why people do, what they do, and nor did they have the time to undertake such studies. Deductive, rationality-based reasoning was then far more cost-effective, and rationality may have developed as an effective heuristic by which people could develop a sense of order to behavior. B) Animals McKenzie 10 (Richard B., Professor Emeritus of Enterprise and Society School of Business at the University of California, Irvine, Predictably Rational?: In Search of Defenses for Rational Behavior in Economics, pg. 1-20, SpringerLink, Deech) Experimental economics does strongly suggest that animals, even rats and pigeons, will tend to consume preferred goods over less preferred goods.8 Field evidence has shown that ants and termites appear capable of minimizing and maximizing behavior, within their limited capabilities. Although scout ants might search for food in something of a random pattern as they seek to discover food sources, the following ants going to and from any discovered food source tend to make the path as straight as practical, cutting corners and taking short-cuts when they can detect at a distance the chemical trails on the routes to the food sources (Tullock, 1994). Self-interest inevitable McKenzie 10 (Richard B., Professor Emeritus of Enterprise and Society School of Business at the University of California, Irvine, Predictably Rational?: In Search of Defenses for Rational Behavior in Economics, Chapter 4, SpringerLink, Deech) Perhaps, taking a more charitable view of his economic modeling, Ricardo dropped Smiths expansive view of human nature for the same reason Frederic Bastiat (18011850), a French classical economist and satirist, gave for narrowing his analytical focus to the force of selfinterest . Bastiat acknowledged that people could be motivated by religious sentiments, paternal and maternal affection, filial devotion, love, friendship, patriotism, and politeness, but relegated the study of such motivations to the moral realm. Political economy, Bastiat insisted, was narrowly focused on the cold domain of self-interest (1850, Sect. 2.19): This fact is unfairly forgotten when we reproach political economy with lacking the charm and grace of moral philosophy. How could it be otherwise? Let us challenge the right of political economy

to exist as a science, but let us not force it to pretend to be what it is not. If human transactions whose object is wealth are vast enough and complicated enough to constitute a special science, let us grant it its own special appeal, and not reduce it to talking of self-interest in the language of sentiment. I am personally convinced that recently we have done it no service by demanding from it a tone of enthusiastic sentimentality that from its lips can sound only like hollow declamation (1850, Sect. 2.19). Without material damage to his argument, Bastiat felt he could exclude from consideration the nonself-interest motivations, because in the main the discipline he sought to develop was concerned with the interactions of people who stood at an emotional, social, and geographical distance from one another. As Smith had argued, to seek the cooperation of others at a distance (the butcher, the brewer, or the baker), people had to enlist the only motivation that would work cost effectively, self-interest . In Bastiats words, What does it (political economy) deal with? With transactions carried on between people who do not know each other, who owe each other nothing beyond simple justice, who are defending and seeking to advance their own self-interest. It deals with claims that are restricted and limited by other claims, where self-sacrifice and unselfish dedication have no place. Take up the poet's lyre, then, to speak of these things. I would as soon see Lamartine consult a table of logarithms to sing his odes (1850, Sect. 2.19). Even if rationality isnt true, people will strive to be economically rational Schnellenbach 5 (Jan, Model uncertainty and the rationality of economic policy: An evolutionary approach, Journal of Evolutionary Economics, 15(1), pg. 101-116, March, Proquest, Deech) *We do not endorse the use of gendered language Most of the assumptions made regarding individual behaviour stem from a cognitiveevolutionary theory of economic policy-making, developed by Alfred Meier and associate researchers.9 Under conditions of model uncertainty, it is natural to assume not maximising behaviour in the strict neoclassical sense, but something closer to satiscing behaviour , as was introduced by Simon (1957). The point is that the individuals objectives still call for maximisation of their goal variable in the sense that a higher degree of goal-attainment, if deemed possible, would be preferred over a lower degree. But under uncertainty, we cannot expect economic agents to invest in knowledge-gathering activities until they are in a position resembling the omniscient, welfare-economic observer. Instead, we have to assume that the individual builds a subjective model of the causal relationships governing those parts of the economy that are relevant for his decision problem. If the decision that follows from such a model does not disappoint his expectations, then he will stick to this model. If, on the other hand, the results are utterly disappointing, then he will revise his model and look for superior problem-solving routines or, alternatively, he may come to the conclusion that his earlier level of aspiration was unattainably high and needs to be lowered.

AT BEHAVIORAL APPROACH
Behavioral approach doesnt challenge economic rationality and marginalizes the rationality model Strauss 08 (Kendra-Oxford University Centre for the Enviroment,Banking on property for retirement? Attitudes to housing wealth and pensions; http://www.geog.ox.ac.uk/research/transformations/wpapers/wpg08-04.pdf, [JJ])
There is growing body of literature on pensions that documents seeming deviations from the strong model of economic rationality (which underpins rational choice theory)(see, for example, Choi et al. 2001; Choi et al. 2003; the edited collection by Mitchell and Utkus 2004; and Strauss 2008c for a summary). Much of the work in this area builds on the research carried out by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky on decision-making under conditions of uncertainty; they identified such traits as risk

aversion, inconsistency in discount functions, susceptibility to framing effects, and inefficiency in the use of information as norms in their studies of economic decision-making (Clark and Strauss ups, documenting the associated psychological biases of framing, anchoring, and forms of mental accounting in which people keep track of, and respond to, gains and losses in different ways. Shiller (2007) has gone further, developing a theory of the recent boom in house prices in the US that rests on a

Kendra Strauss Draft 8 2007). Although the behavioural program of research into housing decisions is less well developed, the work of Brunnermeier and Julliard (2006) analysed the role of the money illusion in fuelling house price run-

psychological model in which a feedback mechanism or social epidemic encourages the widespread perception that owneroccupied housing represents an important form an investment. As I have argued elsewhere (Clark and Strauss 2007; Strauss 2008c), there are two principal limitations inherent in these behavioural approaches: they do not

fundamentally challenge the normative model of rationality that underpins approaches to economic decision-making, and they marginalise the role of context. In other words, individuals are still fundamentally cast as autonomous, utility maximising agents rather than people with complex identities who experience and perform multiple forms of social and cultural embeddedness. This perpetrates an ontological separation between the spheres of economy and culture/society.
The constraints that these limitations impose on the theorisation and interpretation of research relating to attitudes and behaviours associated with economic decision-making are, I would suggest, evident in quantitative approaches

to understanding how individuals understand owner-occupied housing in relation to retirement savings. These constraints and limitations need to be acknowledged if the desired goal of close dialogue between economic and social, quantitative and qualitative research is to be achieved in the context of the evolving body of research on housing.

ECONOMIC PREDICTIONS

GOOD

2AC
The failed predictions of recent years was a result of bad political policies and ideologies economic theories had the answers Krugman 1/6/13 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics, Professor of Economics and International Affairs at the
Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, Centenary Professor at the London School of Economics, and op-ed columnist for The New York Times (Paul Krugman, 6 January 2013, The Big Fail, The New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/07/opinion/krugman-the-big-fail.html?_r=3&)//KP
Its that time again: the annual meeting of the American Economic Association and affiliates, a sort of medieval fair that serves as a marketplace for bodies (newly minted Ph.D.s in search of jobs), books and ideas. And this year, as in past meetings, there

is one theme dominating discussion: the ongoing economic crisis. This isnt how things were supposed to be. If you had polled the economists attending this meeting three years ago, most of them would surely have predicted that by now wed be talking about how the great slump ended, not why it still continues. So what went wrong? The answer , mainly, is the triumph of bad ideas . Its tempting to argue that the economic failures of recent years prove that economists dont have the answers. But the truth is actually worse: in reality, standard economics offered good answers, but political leader s and all
too many economists

chose to forget or ignore what they should have known . The story, at this point,

is fairly straightforward. The financial crisis led, through several channels, to a sharp fall in private spending: residential investment plunged as the housing bubble burst; consumers began saving more as the illusory wealth created by the bubble vanished, while the mortgage debt remained. And this fall in private spending led, inevitably, to a global recession. For an economy is not like a household. A family can decide to spend less and try to earn more. But in the economy as a whole, spending and earning go together: my spending is your income; your spending is my income. If

everyone tries to slash spending at the same time, incomes will fall and unemployment will soar. So what
bigger, and even cutting rates all the way to zero wasnt nearly enough. At that point governments

can be done? A smaller financial shock, like the dot-com bust at the end of the 1990s, can be met by cutting interest rates. But the crisis of 2008 was far

needed to step in, spending to support their economies while the private sector regained its balance. And to some extent that did happen:
revenue dropped sharply in the slump, but spending actually rose as programs like unemployment insurance expanded and temporary economic stimulus went into effect. Budget

deficits rose, but this was actually a good thing, probably the most important reason we didnt have a full replay of the Great Depression. But it all went wrong in 2010. The crisis in Greece was taken, wrongly, as a sign that all governments had better slash spending and deficits right away. Austerity became the order of the day, and supposed experts who should have known better cheered the process on, while the warnings of some (but not enough) economists that austerity would derail recovery were ignored. For example, the president of the European Central Bank confidently asserted that the idea that austerity measures could trigger stagnation is incorrect. Well, someone was incorrect, all right. Of the papers presented at this meeting, probably the biggest flash came from one by Olivier Blanchard and Daniel Leigh of the International Monetary Fund. Formally, the paper represents the views only of the authors; but Mr. Blanchard, the I.M.F.s chief economist, isnt an ordinary researcher, and the paper has been widely taken as a sign that the fund has had a major rethinking of economic policy. For what the paper concludes is not just that austerity has a depressing effect on weak economies, but that the adverse effect is much stronger than previously believed. The premature turn to austerity, it turns out, was a terrible mistake. Ive seen some reporting describing the paper as an admission from the I.M.F. that it doesnt know what its doing. That misses the point; the fund was actually less enthusiastic about austerity
than other major players. To the extent that it says it was wrong, its also saying that everyone else (except those skeptica l economists) was even more wrong. And it deserves credit for being willing to rethink its position in the light of evidence. The

really bad news is how few other players are doing the same. European leaders, having created Depression-level suffering in debtor countries without restoring financial
confidence, still insist that the answer is even more pain. The current British government, which killed a promising recovery by turning to austerity, completely refuses to consider the possibility that it made a mistake. And here in America, Republicans confrontation over the debt ceiling a deeply illegitimate action in itself to demand

insist that theyll use a spending cuts that would drive us back into recession. The truth is that weve just experienced a colossal failure of economic policy and far too many of those responsible for that failure both retain power and refuse to learn from experience. Economic predictions are accuratethey are also improving as times go on Douglas w. Hands 84 (Department of Economics University of Puget Sound, What Economics Is Not: An Economist's Response to Rosenberg Source: Philosophy of Science, Vol. 51, No. 3 (Sep., 1984), pp. 495-503 http://www.jstor.org/stable/187496,JL)

the "predictive weakness" (p. 297) of modem economics and the discipline's inability (or lack of desire) to "improve its predictive content" (p. 301). This failure to generate successful predictions and to improve the few predictions which are made is taken as an empirical fact about even the most applied economic theories. No evidence is provided, or even suggested, to support this empirical claim. Rosenberg certainly needs to provide evidence for the ubiquitous predictive failure of applied economic theory. Such criticism is by no means "well known" or "standard" in the literature on economic methodology. It is "standard" to argue that economic theories are
1. Economic Predictions. Much of Rosenberg's discussion is directed toward explaining insulated from direct falsification that they are built on inadequate behavioral foundations and that in their most abstract form they fail to yield predictions or even to systematically connect up with applied theories which might yield pre- dictions. But

systematic predictive failure is not a standard methodological criticism of applied economic theory. The reason why such predictive failure is not a standard criticism is quite simple: Rosenberg has exaggerated the extent of this failure. Predictive failure is simply not the ubiquitous fact of modem economic theory which Rosenberg assumes. While nowhere near the standards of the best natural science, applied economic theories (both micro and macro) do generate an ocean of successful predictions , on everything from the impact of trucking deregulation to the demand for consumer credit. Rosenberg's claim that economic predictions have not "improved" (p. 301) with time is also exaggerated. While there is always room for more improvement, modem macro econometric models provide extraordinary accuracy relative to pre-World War I1 business cycle models. Where substantial errors do occur, such as the inability to predict the inflationary impact of the OPEC induced supply-side shock, the models are improved so that failures of the same type are less likely to reoccur.3 Rosenberg even goes so far as to argue that more predictively successful alternatives currently exist (at least in the micro domain) and are neglected, ostensibly because of an irrational professional attraction to intentional and extremal views of human behavior. He tells us that even if a more predictive theory were available: "it is not likely to actually deflect practicing economists from their intentional extremal research program . . . the reason is that they are not really much interested in questions. Readers of earlier drafts of this paper noted that while Rosenberg is faulted for not providing specific examples of "failure," the above discussion does not provide specific examples of "success." Examples of success abound in any copy of an applied economics journal, a Federal Reserve Bulletin, or any other publication specializing in applied economics.

FALSIFIABLE
Economic theories are falsifiable and grounded within empirical data Gradwohl and Shmaya 13 (RONEN GRADWOHL & ERAN SHMAYA are Professors at the Kellog School of Management @ Northwestern University; Tractable Falsifiability; http://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/research/math/papers/1564.pdf, [JJ])
Popper's notion of falsifiability

is a foundational concept in philosophy of science that has been influential in economic theory . According to Popper, a theory is scientific something could potentially occur that would contradict the theory's assertions. That is, if a theory is false, then there is some observation that conflicts with a prediction of the theory. The scientific assertions of a theory
are then those that, if wrong, can be demonstrated as such. The concept of falsi ability is illustrated in the following quote of Albert Einstein: \No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong." What does it mean for an experiment to prove Einstein wrong? Such an experiment produces an outcome that is incompatible with some prediction of Einstein's theory. Note, however, that theories are rarely formulated as collections of predictions, but by a set of laws which possibly include some unspeci ed parameters, from which the predictions of the theory can be derived. Thus, to prove Einstein wrong, i.e. to

falsify his theory, one has to provide an experimental outcome and an argument that shows that the theory predicts that this outcome should not have occurred. In this paper we propose an additional desideratum to Popper's notion of falsi - ability: If a theory is wrong, then there should be an experiment or an observation that demonstrates this incorrectness by means of a \short" proof. Without this
additional requirement, it could be that there exists a false theory and experiments whose conclusions con ict with the theory, but such that these conclusions cannot be shown to contradict the theory in a reasonably short amount of time. We call a theory

that satisfies Popper's notion and our additional requirement tractably falsifiable. A good analogy to bear in mind is that of a court of law. Imagine a plainti claiming that some theory is wrong. The burden of proof is on the plaintiff , and he must produce some body of evidence against the theory. This evidence includes observations from the world and an argument that these observations contradict the theory. The

court, in turn, has a protocol specifying the procedure for viewing evidence and examining arguments, after which it issues a verdict. Our main point is that the court is bounded in the amount of time it can allocate to the case. Therefore, any protocol specifying procedures must terminate in a \short" time: We rule out a situation in which the plainti 's argument that the evidence contradicts the theory and the court's evaluation of this argument will only terminate after the universe no longer exists.

Economic theories are the only falsifiable method Gradwohl and Shmaya 13 (RONEN GRADWOHL & ERAN SHMAYA are Professors at the Kellog School of Management @ Northwestern University; Tractable Falsifiability; http://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/research/math/papers/1564.pdf, [JJ]) Our definition of a theory identifies a theory with its predictions. This approach, which is already strongly influenced by Popper's falsifiability stipulation, takes observable objects as primitive. Different theories make different predictions about relationships between these same observables, as in the examples of rational choice and choice by multiple rationales mentioned above. Economic theories t this framework well, since the observables, such as choices and prices, have (or at least are assumed to have by economic theorists) a well-defined meaning independent of the economic theory. In contrast, this approach is not suitable for formalizing physical theories since \physical observables"

are such as weight, time, electric current are already theory laden: they change their meaning from one physical theory to another, a point which is central in Pierre Duhem's (1954) argument. Our paper is related to a recent paper of Chambers et al. (2010). They call a theory \completely falsifiable" if, whenever the theory is incorrect, there exists some data set that falsifies it. Chambers et al. (2010) emphasize the requirement that the data set that falsifies a theory be finite. A typical example is the theory that the

choice of an agent can be rationalized by a real-valued utility function, as opposed to a linear order. In this case, if the underlying set of alternatives is infinite, it may be that observed preference will admit no such rationalization but no finite data set will reveal this. Our notion of tractable falsifiability is more restrictive: Not only do we require that the data set that falsifies a theory be finite, we also require that the plaintiff be able to prove the falsification quickly. Consider
again the theory that an agent's choice can be rationalized by two linear orders. This theory is completely falsi able in the sense of Chambers et al. (2010): Even if the domain of alternatives is in nite, for every choice function that cannot be

rationalized by a pair of linear orders over alternatives there is always a finite set of choices that

cannot be rationalized. However, as we already mentioned, this theory is not tractably falsi able, since it may be the case that there is no short proof that this data set has no rationalization: The plaintiff can produce evidence (a nite data set), but he has no quick way to show that this evidence is indeed inconsistent with the theory's predictions.

CRISIS RHETORIC K

LINK

ETHICAL CRISIS
No link and turn - they critique crisis manipulation our affirmative is an example of an ethical crisis our rhetoric is key to public legitimacy and leadership
Kiewe 98 Associate Professor of Speech Communication at Syracuse University, and editor of The Modern Presidency and
IMPLICATIONS Crises

Crisis Rhetoric (Amos Kiewe, The Crisis Tool in American Political Discourse, Politically Speaking: A worldwide Examination of Language Used in the Public Sphere, Praeger Publishers 1998, p.88-89)//KP

are not alike. The inception of crises varies, their topicality is diverse, and their management attests to the rhetorical crisis come to life discursively by the participants in a public drama, whether they include the president, the public, and/or the press. Crises are communicative entities because the very term implies a perception of extraordinary events. The definitions of crises are rhetorical screens or lenses through which certain events are articulated.
and political skills of a given president. For presidential scholars, the important consideration is the rhetorical nature of crises. A Crises are special events, distinct from the routine. The modern presidency, save for few exceptions, has transported the crisis tool into a convenient means instead of an end to be confronted. As illustrated in this chapter, some presidents take advantage of a crisis situation and exemplify superb leadership qualities, whereas others fail to respond properly to a critical situation. Some can find an opportunity in a crisis situation, and others manufacture a crisis. All

situations and issues that presidents confront are conceivably prone to crisis manipulation. Because crisis rhetoric is not altogether different from routine rhetoric , a generic configuration that divides crises into categories would do little in comprehending crisis situations. The distinction to be made, and thus the more proper test for assessing the viability and strategic use of presidential crisis rhetoric, is the ethical one. Regardless of the varied nature of the many crises that presidents confront, the essential question to ask is whether or not the crisis in question is ethical. In an ethical crisis, the nations viability is clearly threatened , the consequences are detrimental, immediate actions are called for, urgency is clearly needed, the situations gain quick public legitimacy, and presidential leadership is acute. A manufactured crisis lacks these qualities because it smacks of opportunism of various sorts. Precisely for this reason the perception of urgency and drama and the growing reliance on rhetorical means the modern presidency has found crisis rhetoric an attractive formula for leadership. Like
the analogy of the boy who cried wolf, too many wolf crises will blunt the nations ability to recognize a real crisis when i t arrives.

GOOD

CHANGE
Effective crisis rhetoric creates the impetus for structural reform and deinstitutionalizes harmful policies Hart* and Tindall 9** *Professor of Political Science at The Australian National University, Professor of Public
Administration at Utrecht University, adjunct professor at the Australia New Zealand School of Government; **Ph.D. candidate at the Research School of Social Sciences, The Australian National University (Paul t Hart; Karen Tindall, Understanding crisis exploitation: leadership, rhetoric and framing contests in response to the economic meltdown, Framing the global economic downturn: Crisis rhetoric and the politics of recessions, The Austrian National University Press 2009, p. 21-23)//KP
Dramatic episodes in the life of a polity such as financial

crises and major recessions can cast long shadows on the polities in which they occur (Birkland 1997, 2006; Baumgartner and Jones 1993, 2002; Lomborg 2004; Posner 2004).1 The sense of threat and uncertainty they induce can profoundly impact peoples understanding of the world around them. The occurrence of a large-scale emergency or the widespread use of the emotive labels such as crisis , scandal or fiasco to denote a particular state of affairs or trend in the public domain implies a dislocation of hitherto dominant social, political or administrative discourses (Wagner-Pacifici 1986, 1994; Howarth et al. 2000). When a crisis de-legitimises the power and authority relationships that these discourses underpin, structural change is desired and expected by many (t Hart 1993). Such change can happen, but not necessarily so. In fact, the dynamics and outcomes of crisis
episodes are hard to predict. For example, former German Chancellor Gerhard Schrder miraculously emerged as the winner of the national elections after his well-performed role as the nations symbolic crisis manager during the riverine floods in 2002, yet the Spanish Prime Minister s uffered a stunning electoral loss in the immediate aftermath of the Madrid train bombings of 2004. Former US President George W. Bush saw his hitherto modest approval ratings soar in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, but an already unpopular Bush Administration lost further prestige in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Likewise, public

institutions can be affected quite differently in the aftermath of critical events: some take a public beating and are forced to reform (the National Aeronautics and Space Administration [NASA] after the Challenger and Columbia shuttle disasters); some weather the political storm (the Belgian gendarmerie after its spectacular failure to effectively police the 1985 European Cup Final at the Heysel Stadium in Brussels); others become symbolic of heroic public service (the
New York City Fire Department after 9/11). The same goes for public policies and programs. Gun-control policy in Australia was rapidly and drastically tightened after the 1996 Port Arthur massacre in Tasmania. Legislation banning dangerous dogs was rapidly enacted in the Un ited Kingdom after a few fatal biting incidents (Lodge and Hood 2002). And 9/11 produced a worldwide cascade of national policy reforms in areas such as policing, immigration, data protection and criminal lawfor good or bad (cf. Klein 2007; Wolf 2007). In

other cases, however, big emergencies can trigger big investigations and temporarily jolt political agendas but in the end do not result in major policy changes. What explains these different outcomes? Most scholars writing about the nexus between

crises, disasters and public policy note their potential agenda-setting effects, but have not developed explanations for their contingent nature and their variable impacts (Primo and Cobb 2003; Birkland 2006). The emerging literature on blame management has only just begun to address the mechanisms determining the fate of office-holders in the wake of major disturbances and scandals (Hood et al. 2007). This literature suggests that

the process of crisis exploitation could help to explain the variance in outcomes. Disruptions of societal routines and expectations open up two types of space for actors inside and outside government. First, crises can be used as political weapons. Crises mobilise the mass media, which will put an intense spotlight on the issues and actors involved. To the extent that they generate victims, damage and/or community stress, the government of the day is challenged to step in and show it can muster an effective, compassionate, sensible response. At the same time, it might face critical questions about its role in the very occurrence of the crisis. Why did it not prevent the crisis from happening?
crisis moving forward. Those

How well prepared was it for this type of contingency? Was it asleep at the wheel or simply overpowered by overwhelming forces outside its sphere of influence? In political terms, crises challenge actors inside and outside government to weave persuasive narratives about what is happening and what is at stake, why it is happening, how they have acted in the lead-up to the present crisis and how they propose we should deal with and learn from the

whose narratives are considered persuasive stand to gain prestige and support; those who are found wanting can end up as scapegoats. Second, crises help de-institutionalise hitherto taken-for-granted policy beliefs and practices (Boin and t Hart 2003). The more severe a current crisis is perceived to be, and the more it appears to be caused by foreseeable and avoidable problems in the design or implementation of the policy itself, the bigger is the opportunity space for critical reconsideration of current policies and the successful advancement of (radical) reform proposals (Keeler 1993; Birkland 2006; Klein 2007). By their very occurrence (provided they are widely felt and labelled as such), crises tend to benefit critics of the status quo: experts, ideologues and advocacy groups already on record as challenging established but now
compromised policies. They also present particular opportunities to newly incumbent office-holders, who cannot be blamed for present messes but who can use these messes to highlight the need for policy changes they might have been seeking to pursue anyway. The

key currency of

crisis management in the political and policy arenas is persuasion. More specifically, this study presumes that crises can be usefully understood in terms of framing contestsbattles between competing definitions of the

situationbetween the various actors that seek to contain or exploit crisis-induced opportunity space for political posturing and policy change (cf. Alink et al. 2001). 2

CREDIBLITY
Rhetoric isnt key, timing is crisis communication is key to maintaining credibility Hart* and Tindall 9** *Professor of Political Science at The Australian National University, Professor of Public
Administration at Utrecht University, adjunct professor at the Australia New Zealand School of Government; **Ph.D. candidate at the Research School of Social Sciences, The Australian National University (Paul t Hart; Karen Tindall, Chapter 1. From market correction to global catastrophe: framing the economic downturn, Framing the global economic downturn: Crisis rhetoric an d the politics of recessions, The Austrian National University Press 2009, p. 3-4)//KP
These are questions in which issues of fact, speculation, values and interests are intimately intertwined. Policymakers will grapple with these problems in their own minds, particularly when situations are fast moving, uncertain, ambiguous or when different bodies of evidence and advice seem to pull them in different directions. At the same time, however, policymakers

can seldom afford to wait until they really know whats going on before communicating about it publicly. In the case of economic turbulence, for example, markets, media and mass audiences will be talking about the issues constantly, and if the voices of key leaders are absent from those debates, governments will be on the back foot and will in effect lose credibility. Risk and crisis communication is a tricky
business in any sectorwitness the recent dilemmas regarding the global swine flu outbreak: how should one respond to and talk to the public about a virus with ominous potential but whose current manifestations are quite mild? Such communication is especially tricky in the world of finance and economics. If, as is often observed, economics

is essentially about psychology, then the ill-considered use of terms such as crisis, recession or depression by authority figures can generate self-fulfilling prophecies. That is a scary thought in an age when truly massive capital flows can be redirected across the world in a matter of seconds. If, however, key economic or political elites maintain an upbeat, business-as-usual facade when public sentiment is already heading south, they might look out of touch, inept or impotentwhich will create a backlash in markets in a different way. Talking up the economy makes sense for public leaders only when there is at least some basis in fact and when the intended audience has not already made up its mind in the other direction. Timing and the tone of conveying both good and bad news about the
economy in an overall climate of uncertainty and anxiety are, therefore, crucial.

PREVENTION
Crisis rhetoric needed to prevent economic turbulence from spiraling downward 08 recession proves Boin 9 associate professor at the Public Administration Institute, Louisiana State University (Arjen Boin, Crisis leadership in
terra incognita: why meaning making is not enough, Framing the global economic downturn: Crisis rhetoric and the politics of recessions, The Austrian National University Press 2009, p. 310-311)//KP
How did leaders fare during the global financial crisis? Surprisingly, perhaps, most survived the period under study; there were a few changes in the ruling party following elections held during the crisis, but it is not clear how the electoral outcomes relate to the actual management of the crisis. The

lasting impression that emerges from this book, however, is of a group of leaders that stumbled and fumbled in their pursuit of an ever-escalating crisis. The starting position of all leaders was similar: they downplayed or denied that there was a crisis. They thus placed the burden on those who sought to convince the public that there was a crisis. This initial defensive position would greatly limit their room for rhetorical manoeuvring. In their subsequent descriptions of the evolving crisis, the leaders under study used very similar wordings: they pointed to outside forces and spoke of very challenging, unprecedented timesthe worst since the Great Depression. They admonished people not to panic: we are well placed to manage these times, much better than other countries, as the fundamentals of our economy are strong. And, of course, they promised that we will come out better than we were . They also displayed a strong
tendency to moralise: many could not resist the temptation to blame the US system (US leaders, in turn, could not hide a hint of satisfaction when the European economies took a nosedive). When more and more financial institutions disclosed their toxic assets, the

blame quickly shifted to greedy banks and their bankers. The leaders seemed constantly behind the curve: by the time they recognised that there was a crisis, it had already spun out of control. After they failed to talk up the economy, they failed to talk down the crisis. When they were finally ready to admit that the situation was bad, they
Internetor in different venues (parliamentary debates, informal conversations, op-ed pieces). It could also mean that leaders

were forced to emphasise how strong the fundamentals were in fear of adding fuel to the fire. An intriguing observation of this book is that the selected media apparently showed little interest in the speech acts of these leaders. The newspapers, in other words, did not recognise any news value in the meaning-making efforts of political leaders. This could mean that leaders make meaning through different medialocal media, television and the

were not trying very hard to offer a distinct interpretation of eventsone that would deviate from the tired rhetoric described above and would therefore generate news. A reading of the chapters suggests that leaders were caught in a prisoners dilemma. If all leaders are trying to make meaning of the same event, it becomes dangerous to offer radically different interpretations (especially if everyone is aware that their statements can directly affect the process of
crisis escalation). Timely and realistic assessments of existing vulnerabilities, evolving problems and escalating downturns can, after all, chase away investors, drive down the currency and sink the stock markets.

URGENCY
Crisis rhetoric good encourages decisiveness and expediency Kiewe 98 Associate Professor of Speech Communication at Syracuse University, and editor of The Modern Presidency and
Crisis Rhetoric (Amos Kiewe, The Crisis Tool in American Political Discourse, Politically Speaking: A worldwide Examination of Language Used in the Public Sphere, Praeger Publishers 1998, p.80-81)//KP

The president is the symbolic embodiment of the nation, and his role is that of chief communicator. In the age of imageexecutive, the president is seen continuously addressing constituencies at locations where the scene has become an integral part of the governing process. Because the visual and the visceral have become the main vehicles for political action, the political process has become an unfolding drama whose primary features are persona and narrative (Jamieson, 1992: 15 22). One area that significantly illustrates the acute function of discourse in presidential politics is crisis situations. In

crisis situations, the discursive in presidential politics is magnified, both in its presence and absence. Crises are sociorhetorical constructs that call for extraordinary action and resources. A crisis situation frames an issue, an event, or an occurrence as urgent, unusual, and in need of a quick solution for the resumption of normality. Crises are communicative entities because they require adherents for a given perception to prevail and to legitimate action. Crises can be real or manufactured, believable or not, serious for some and not-so-serious for others. The presidency might need to confront political crises of various sorts, including social, religious, economic, constitutional, and international. Crises have no limitation on subject matter, nor do they fall neatly into categories. An international crisis is not necessarily the opposite of a domestic crisis, as one can aid or obviate the other . An economic crisis can turn into a leadership crisis, and an insoluble or difficult process can reach a quicker solution if a situation is defined as critical , whereby routine processes are replaced by the expedient and the decisive. A survey of presidential crisis rhetoric since World War II reveals a preference for crises defined by the president and an aversion to crises
defined by others (Kiewe, 1994). Presidents do well when they are in control of the crisis definition. They do not like to react to crisis definitions constructed by others, such as the opposition, the media, or the public. Presidents have been known to construe crises as political tools used manipulatively as the means for other ends (e.g., Lyndon B. Johnson and the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, Richard Nixon and his many crises). When

crises are defined by others than the president (President Bush and the recession of 1990 1992), presidents often confront legitimate issues and warranted concerns. Yet, reacting to crises is a position that takes the initiative and the
active role away from the president. Different categories of crisis rhetoric do not necessarily translate into specific types of presidential behavior. Indeed, attempts to categorize crisis rhetoric into international or domestic, ceremonial or deliberative, consummatory or justificatory (Cherwitz and Zagacki, 1980 Dow, 1989; Windt, 1973), suffer from strict adherence to generic orthodoxy that leaves no room for the more varied, flexible, and fluid nature of crisis rhetoric. I go so far as to claim

that crisis rhetoric is not altogether different from

routine rhetoric except for the element of urgency inserted into the situation.

AGAMBEN

AT EXCEPTION
Agamben fails at explaining why this exception is happening now and what to do about it any alternative fails Colatrella 11 teaches Government at University of Maryland University College, Europe (Steven Colatrella, May 11, Nothing
Exceptional: Against Agamben, Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies, Vol. 9, No. 1, http://www.jceps.com/PDFs/09-105.pdf)//KP

Agamben therefore seeks to explain the present danger to civil liberties, the risk of special powers being taken over by governments declaring states of emergency, the increasingly common turn to delegated democracy through authoritarian methods by only formally elected leaders and the risk of physical repression by state power even in liberal democratic countries. Despite its insight, however, I think that this way of understanding is disastrously mistaken. For the test of theories of this sort should be simple and twofold: 1) does the theory tell us why this is happening when it does and where it does? 2) And does it tell us what to do about it? I think Agambens analysis fails utterly on both counts and therein lies the danger in its growing influence as a way of understanding the undoubted rise in political repression and authoritarianism around the world. Part of the appeal of a theory like Agambens to radical intellectuals is its sophistication. That Agemben is erudite is undoubted, as his extensive knowledge of arcane facts
of Roman legal history indicate. But while he has added dimensions that no less talented thinker, certainly myself included, could have come up with, originality, despite

its undoubted academic virtues, is not a reason for a theory or explanation to be convincing to others. Rather an explanation of historical or political phenomena must address the first question I pose: why? Why now and not later or before? Why in this place and not the other? Why the differences in degree between places or times? Why is this group under attack and not another one? 7 Missing in Agambens work and by extension given his influences, in Arendt, Schmitt, Foucault and Nietzsche and their varying approaches to the autonomy of the political is any understanding of the relationship between politics and economics , or of class forces in historical outcomes, and any link between civil liberties and guarantees to and control over livelihood. This failure leads to the great weakness of any analysis based on the autonomy of politics its total inability to explain why something is happening rather than to show us that it is. The failure, in other words, to explain the timing of political and social changes, and therefore to explain them in any way that is useful. Why are some people being reduced to homo sacer now? And why those particular people? Why is there a state of exception being declared in this country but not that one, and why now and not later, or why once but not now, or why potentially but not in reality? Why is a
discourse of biopolitics, or of changing methods of social discipline and control emerging in a given century instead of in another? If it is the result of modernity or the Enlightenment, how do we explain these in turn? I believe that asking past few decades as a rich era of theoretical innovation, leads

such questions in what has presented itself over the us to see that there has instead been an impoverishment of historical and theoretical imagination and explanatory power. Further, I believe that it can be shown that the idea of the autonomy of politics is at the heart of this impoverishment, stemming from reliance on Nietzsche, Arendt, and worst of all Schmitt as theoretical influences. If democracy and liberation lack appropriate theoreticians and theories it is our job to produce these, not to go looking for the possibility of an intellectual detournement of the categories of misanthropic, Nazi or even in the more benign case of Arendt liberal
elitist approaches to understanding the modern world. Ones boredom with the relative superficiality or lack of sophistication of say, Rousseau, Condorcet, or even Jefferson, and ones desperation to escape the straight -jacket of an orthodox Marxism or the stifling dialectic of Hegel does not excuse the damage done when we come to disastrous conclusions through mistaken analysis of the most vital political processes. Instead, we

have a responsibility to provide the best explanation we can for why something is happening , in the interests not only of better understanding it, always valuable for its own sake, but also to answer that second question I pose the one that goes beyond the merely academic or intellectual what can we do about it? This question, which moves us from theory to practical action in the world, shows us the further value of the first question and the importance of answering it well. It is true that a bad explanation could still result by luck or through our good political experience or common sense individually or collectively in an adequate response in action. But a good explanation is at worst going to do us no harm in enhancing our own understanding of what we are faced with and we ourselves are doing in response, but may in fact help us in formulating strategy together so that we can maximize our effect and even turn the situation to our advantage.

Agamben fails to understand inherent class struggle his own paradigmatic examples collapse in on themselves ensuring liberty and democracy is key to avoiding the homo sacer and state power Colatrella 11 teaches Government at University of Maryland University College, Europe (Steven Colatrella, May 11,
Nothing Exceptional: Against Agamben, Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies, Vol. 9, No. 1, http://www.jceps.com/PDFs/09-1-05.pdf)//KP

In failing to take into account the expropriation of the slave, the enclosure of the commons, the expropriation of the peasantry and the burning of the witch, the occupation of the colonizeds lands, the IMF Structural Adjustment Program and the repression needed to impose it against resistance, hasnt Agamben also failed to provide his own theoretical framework with the tools needed to explain the survival or death of the Jew in the Nazi camp, his own paradigmatic example? If we find, as Isabella Clough-Marinaro has, that the camps for Roma in
Italy today are classic examples of homo sacer, right down to publicly exposed showers on concrete enclosures surrounded by barbed wire, neednt we try to understand what these new horrors have to do with the rolling back of the welfare state in Europe?; with the attack on employment and wages?; with the intensified exploitation that includes that of the undocumented immigrants and the public discourses demonizing them?; with the increased law and order regimes, campaigns against crime that criminalize the Roma, the undocumented and other minorities that have allowed the Italian military to be deployed in the streets to keep an eye on the population; with the creation of such scapegoats to divide the working class exactly at such a time of attack on hard-won social gains? Agamben, as Clough-Marinaro demonstrates, is

indispensable to help analyze the camps in the first place, but I would argue that he is of nearly no help at all to help us strategize about what to do about them, because he doesnt understand what any of it has to do with class relations, relations of expropriation, exploitation and class struggle against these. And that means he cant understand what the latter has already accomplished and what it has yet to accomplish. To understand this, we need to understand the welfare state itself as it has developed. To do that we need to understand democracy, which in turn requires us to think about the state, as Agamben calls on us to do, but to do so in a way that goes beyond the drama of the state of exception to include the historical accomplishments of the class struggle, particularly those other two categories, democracy and the welfare state.
useful to make clear my differences with Agambens approach. Modern

While this is not the place to enter into a full discussion of these issues, which I address elsewhere35, a brief summary of my argument on democracy is

democracy is part of what Polanyi calls the double movement36 of expropriation and the establishment of the self-regulating market and the efforts by society to defend itself from this process. Modern democracy is born from the English and French Revolutions37, from the anti-slavery movement in the US, and from the labor and socialist movements in Europe38. Mass democratic movements that have furthered this process have been fought either to retard the separation of the people from the land and access to means of production and subsistence, or to provide new guarantees of meeting these needs and providing livelihood to those already expropriated and now exploited. Put differently, the commitment of ordinary people to democracy comes from their need and desire to use it to do something; democracy is an instrument of popular classes to defend and extend their interests. If, as I have argued, citing various authors work to the point, the protection of individual rights, avoidance of becoming homo sacer, and prevention of the state of exception required material foundations, those material foundations have, in modern times, required political protection. The modern democratic class struggle, the establishment of democracy and its extension, remain, along with defending or reestablishing control of subsistence and means of production directly in the hands of the people (the commons), the best means of avoiding the fate that Agamben warns us about . This means that the toofacile dismissal of all legal, democratic or constitutional protections, hard-won by generations of struggle, that appear in his analysis that the state of exception is already unexceptional but rather the rule, disarms the very efforts needed to protect us from the state power. The democratic movements have broken down the sterile and false separation between the oikos and
the polis argued for by Hannah Arendt40, and the similar separations between everyday life and social reproduction and public life, between zoe and bios. This is not by chance: slave plantations were private homes; the family enterprise studied by Marx was considered virtually an extension of the owners household; the needs of working families for subsistence or health care, or the infant mortality rate, unwanted pregn ancies and their impact on

It was the accomplishment of the modern workers and womens movements, of modern democracy, to change this state of affairs. Agamben sneeringly dismisses, indeed scarily demonizes this accomplishment as biopolitics: What comes to light in order to be exposed apud Westminster is, once again, the body of homo sacer, which is to say, bare life. This is modern democracys strength, and at the same time, its inner contradiction: modern democracy does not abolish sacred life
womens lives and the mortality rate of women in childbirth were all considered private affairs, not public or political ones. but rather shatters it and disseminates it into every individual body, making it into what is at stake in political conflict. And the root of modern democracys secret biopolitical calling lies here: he who will later appear as the bearer of rights, and according to a curious oxymoron, as the new sovereign subjectcan only be constituted as such through the repetition of the sovereign exception and the isolation of corp us, bare life, in himself. If

it is true that law needs a body in order to be in force, and if one can speak, in this sense, of laws desire to have a body,

democracy responds to this desire by compelling law to assume the care of this body.41 Agamben goes on to argue, incredibly, that the very right of habeas corpus by requiring the sheriff to exhibit the body of the accused undermines the liberty of the accused, an interpretation unique in the thousand-year history of habeas corpus rights whose defense has quite rightly underpinned many oppositions to Bush administration tactics in the War on Terror, and whose history has recently been provided a radical defense and
materialist interpretation by Linebaugh already cited.

BIFO

1NC
Economics are not rationalthe theory of economic rationality is based in neoliberal economics that encourage profitability over sustainabilitythat triggers economic collapse and transition wars Bifo 11 (Franco Berardi is an is Italian Marxist theorist and activist in the autonomist tradition, whose work mainly focuses on the role of the media and information technology within post-industrial capitalism, After the Future , 09/20/11, http://www.sok.bz/web/media/video/AfterFuture.pdf, [JJ])
More than ever, economic

rationality is at odds with social rationality. Economic science is not part of the solution to the crisis: it is the source of the problem. On July 18th 2009 the headline of The Economist
read: What went wrong with economics? The text is an attempt to downplay the crisis of the Economics profession, and of economic knowledge. For neoliberal economists the central dogma of growth, profit and competition

cannot be questioned, because it is identified with the perfect mathematical rationality of the market. And belief in the intrinsic rationality of the market is crucial in the economic theology of neoliberalism. But the reduction of social life to the rational exchange of economic values is an obsession that has nothing to do with science. Its a political strategy aimed to identify humans as calculating machines, aimed to shape behavior and perception in such a way that money becomes the only motivation of social action. But it is not accurate as a description of social dynamics, and the conflicts, pathologies, and irrationality of human relationships. Rather, it is an attempt at creating the anthropological brand of homo calculans that Foucault (2008) has described in his seminar of 1979/80, published with the title The Birth of Biopolitics. This attempt to identify human beings with calculating devices has produced cultural devastation, and has finally been showed to have been based upon flawed assumptions. Human beings do calculate, but their calculation is not perfectly rational, because the value of goods is not determined by objective reasons, and because decisions are influenced by what Keynes named animal spirits. We will never really understand important economic events unless we confront the fact that their causes are largely mental in nature, say Akerlof and Shiller (2009: 1) in their book Animal Spirits, echoing Keyness assumption that the rationality of the market is not perfect in itself.

Akerlof and Shiller are avowing the crisis of neoliberal thought, but their critique is not radical enough, and does not touch the legitimacy of the economic episteme. Animal Spirits is the title of an other book, by Matteo Pasquinelli (2008). Pasquinellis book deals with bodies and digits, and parasites, and goes much deeper in its understanding of the roots of the crisis than its eponymous publication: Cognitive capitalism emerges in the form of a parasite: it subjects social knowledge and inhibits its emancipatory potential (Pasquinelli 2008: 93). Beyond the computer screen, precarious workers and freelancers experience how Free Labor and competition are increasingly devouring their everyday life (Pasquinelli 2008: 15). Pasquinelli goes to the core of the problem: the virtualization of social production has acted as the proliferation of a parasite, destroying the prerequisites of living relationships, absorbing and neutralizing the living energies of cognitive workers. The economic recession is not only

the effect of financial craziness, but also the effect of the de-vitalization of the social field. This is why the collapse of the economic system is also the collapse of economic epistemology that has guided the direction of politics in the last two centuries. Economics cannot understand the depth of the crisis, because below the crisis of financial exchange there is the crisis of symbolic exchange. I mean the psychotic boom of panic, depression, and suicide, the general decline of desire and social empathy. The question that rises from the collapse is so radical that the answer cannot be found in the economic conceptual framework. Furthermore, one must ask if economics really is a science? If the word science
means the creation of concepts for the understanding and description of an object, economics is not a science. Its object does not exist. The economic object (scarcity, salaried labor, and profit) is not an object that exists before and outside the performative action of the economic episteme. Production, consumption, and daily life become part of the economic

discourse when labor is detached and opposed to human activity, when it falls under the domination of capitalist rule. The economic object does not pre-exist conceptual activity, and economic description is in fact a normative action. In this sense Economics is a technique, a process of semiotization of the world, and also a mythology, a narration. Economics is a suggestion and a categorical imperative: Money makes things happen. It is the source of action in the world and perhaps the only power we invest in. Life seems to depend on it. Everything within us would like to say that it does not, that this cannot be. But the Almighty Dollar has taken command. The more it is denied the
more it shows itself as Almighty. Perhaps in every other respect, in every other value, bankruptcy has been declared, giving money

the power of some sacred deity, demanding to be recognized. Economics no longer persuades money to behave. Numbers cannot make the beast lie down and be quiet or sit up and do tricks. At best, economics is a neurosis of money, a symptom contrived to hold the beast in abeyance. Thus economics shares the language of psychopathology

inflation, depression, lows and highs, slumps and peaks, investments and losses. (Sordello 1983) From the age of the enclosures in England the economic process has been a process of production of scarcity (scarcification). The enclosures were intended to scarcify the land, and the basic means of survival, so that people who so far had been able to cultivate food for their family were forced to become proletarians, then salaried industrial workers. Capitalism is based on the artificial creation of need, and economic science is essentially a technique of scarcification of time, life and food. Inside the condition
of scarcity human beings are subjected to exploitation and to the domain of profit-oriented activity. After scarcifying the land (enclosures) capitalism has scarcified time itself, forcing people who dont have property other than

their own life and body, to lend their life-time to capital. Now the capitalist obsession for growth is making scarce both water and air. Economic science is not the science of prediction: it is the technique of producing,

implementing, and pushing scarcity and need. This is why Marx did not speak of economy, but of political economy. The technique of economic scarcification is based on a mythology, a narration that identifies richness as property and acquisition, and subjugates the possibility of living to the lending of time and to the transformation of human activity into salaried work. In recent decades, technological change has slowly eroded the very foundations of economic science. Shifting from the sphere of production of material objects to the semiocapitalist production of immaterial goods, the Economic

concepts are losing their foundation and legitimacy. The basic categories of Economics are becoming totally artificial. The
theoretical justification of private property, as you read in the writings of John Locke, is based on the need of exclusive consumption. An apple must be privatized, if you want to avoid the danger that someone else eats your apple. But what happens when goods are immaterial, infinitely replicable without cost? Thanks to digitalization and immaterialization of

the production process, the economic nomos of private property loses its ground, its raison detre, and it can be imposed only by force. Furthermore, the very foundation of salary, the relationship between

time needed for production and value of the product, is vanishing. The immaterialization and cognitivization of production makes it almost impossible to quantify the average time needed to produce value. Time and value become

incommensurable, and violence becomes the only law able to determine price and salary. The
neoliberal school, which has opened the way to the worldwide deregulation of social production, has fostered the mythology of rational expectations in economic exchange, and has touted the idea of a selfregulation of the market, first of all the labor-market. But self-regulation is a lie. In order to increase exploitation, and to destroy social welfare, global

capitalism has used political institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization, not to mention the military enforcement of the political decisions of these institutions. Far from being self-regulated, the market is militarily regulated. The mythology of free individuals loyally competing on the base of perfect knowledge of the market is a lie, too. Real human beings are not perfect rational calculating machines. And the myth of rational expectations has finally crashed after the explosion of the real

estate mortgage bubble. The theory of rational expectation is crucial in neoliberal thought: the economic agents are supposed to be free to choose in a perfectly rational way the best deal in selling and buying. The fraud perpetrated by the investment

agencies has destroyed the lives of millions of Americans, and has exposed the theoretical swindle. Economic exchange cannot be described as a rational game, because irrational factors play a crucial role in social life in general. Trickery, misleading information, and psychic manipulation are not exceptions, but the professional tools of advertisers, financial agents, and economic consultants. The idea that social relationships can be described in mathematical terms has the force of myth, but it is not science, and it has nothing to do with natural law. Notwithstanding the failure of the theory, neoliberal politics are still in control of the global machine, because the criminal class that has seized power has no intention of stepping down, and because the social brain is unable to recompose and find the way of self-organization. I read in the New York Times on September 6th 2009: After the mortgage business imploded last year, Wall Street investment banks began searching for another big idea to make money. They think they may have found one. The bankers plan to buy life settlements, life insurance policies that ill and elderly people sell for cash, depending on the life expectancy of the insured person. Then they plan to securitize these policies, in Wall Street jargon, by packaging hundreds of thousands together into bonds. They will then resell
those bonds to investors, like big pension funds, who will receive the payouts when people with the insurance die. The earlier the policyholder dies, the bigger the return, though if people live longer than expected investors could get poor returns or even lose money. Imagine that I buy an insurance policy on my life (something I would absolutely not do). My insurer of course will wish me a long life, so Ill pay the fee for a long time, while he should pay lots of money to my family if I 113die. But some enlightened finance guru has the brilliant idea of insuring the insurer. He buys the risk, and he invests on the hope that I die soon. You dont need the imagination of Philip K. Dick to guess the follow up of the story: financial agents will be motivated to kill me overnight.

The talk of recovery is based on necronomy , the economy of death. Its not new, as capitalism has always profited from wars, slaughters and genocides . But now the equation becomes unequivocal. Death is the promise, death is the investment and the hope. Death is the best future that capitalism may secure. The logic of speculation is different from the logic of spectacle that was dominant in late-modern times. Spectacle is the mirrorization of life, the transfer of life in the mirror of spectacular accumulation. Speculation is the subjugation of the future to its financial mirror, the substitution of present life with future money that will never come, because death will come before. The lesson that we must learn from the first year of the global recession is sad: neoliberal folly is not going away, the

financial plungers will not stop their speculation, and corporations will not stop their exploitation, and the political class, largely controlled by the corporate lobbies, is unwilling or unable to protect society from the final assault. In 1996 J. G. Ballard (1996: 188) wrote: the most perfect crime of all when the victims are either willing, or arent aware that

they are victims. Democracy seems unable to stop the criminal class that has seized control of the economy, because the decisions are no longer made in the sphere of political opinion, but in the inaccessible sphere of economic automatism. The economy has been declared the basic standard of decision, and the economists have systematically identified Economy with the capitalist obsession of growth. No room for political choice has been left, as the corporate principles have been embedded in the technical fabric of language and imagination.

Vote negative to reject the economic rationality of the 1ACThe affs unsustainable neoliberalism causes wars in Latin America-turns the case Bifo 11 (Franco Berardi is an is Italian Marxist theorist and activist in the autonomist
tradition, whose work mainly focuses on the role of the media and information technology within post-industrial capitalism, After the Future , 09/20/11, http://www.sok.bz/web/media/video/AfterFuture.pdf, [JJ])
Activism has generally conceived the process of subjectivation in terms of resistance. In his book dedicated to Foucault, Gilles Deleuze speaks about subjectivity, and identifies processes of subjectivation and resistance: Is not life this capacity to

resist force? (Deleuze 1988: 77). I think that it is time to ask: what if society can no more resist the destroying effects of unbounded capitalism? What if society can no more resist the devastating power of financial accumulation? The identification of the subject with resistance is dangerous in a certain sense. Deleuze himself has written that when we escape we are not only escaping, but also looking for a new weapon. We have to disentangle autonomy from resistance. And if we want to do it we have to disentangle desire from energy. The prevailing focus of modern capitalism has been energy, the ability to produce, to compete, to dominate. A sort of Energolatria has dominated the cultural scene of the West since Faust to the Futurists. The ever growing availability of energy has been its dogma. Now we know that energy is not boundless. In
the social psyche of the West, energy is fading away. I think that we should reframe the concept and the practice of autonomy from this point of view. The social body has become unable to reaffirm its rights against the wild

assertiveness of capital, because the pursuit of rights can never be dissociated from the exercise of force. When workers were strong in the 1960s and 70s they did not restrict themselves to asking for their rights, to peaceful
demonstrations of their will. They acted in solidarity, refusing to work, redistributing wealth, sharing things, services and spaces. Capitalists, on their side, do not merely ask or demonstrate, they do not simply declare their wish, they enact if. They make things happen, they invest, disinvest, displace, they destroy and they build. Only force makes autonomy possible in the

relation between capital and society. But what is force? What is force nowadays? The identification of desire with

energy has produced the identification of force with violence that turned out so badly for the Italian movement in the 1970s and 80s. We have to distinguish energy and desire. Energy is falling, desire has to be saved

nevertheless. Similarly, we have to distinguish force from violence. Fighting power with violence is suicidal or useless, nowadays. How can we think of activists going against professional organizations of killers in the mold of Blackwater,
Haliburton, secret services, mafias? Only suicide has proved to be efficient in the struggle against power. And actually suicide has become decisive in the history of our time. The dark side of the multitude meets here the loneliness of death. Activist culture

should avoid the danger of becoming a culture of resentment. Acknowledging the irreversibility of the

catastrophic trends that capitalism has inscribed in the history of society does not mean to renounce it. On the contrary, we have

today a new cultural task: to

live the inevitable with a relaxed soul. To call forth a big wave of withdrawal, of massive focus of social transformation is creative singularity. The existence of singularities is not to be conceived as a personal way to salvation, they may become a contagious force. Yes we can, the
dissociation, of desertion from the scene of the economy, of non-participation in the fake show of politics. The crucial headline of the campaign of Barack Obama, the three words that mobilized the hope and political energies of the American people in 2008, have a disturbing echo just one year after the victory of the democratic candidate. These words sound like an exorcism much more than like a promise. Yes we can may be read as a lapse in the Freudian sense, a sign coming from the collective subconscious, a diversion from the hidden intuition that we can no more. The mantra of Barack Obama has gathered the energies of the best part of the American people, and collected the best of the American cultural legacy. But what about the results? So far Obama has been unable to deal with the global environmental threats, the effects of the geopolitical disaster produced by CheneyBush, the effects of the powerful lobbies imposing the interest of the corporations (for instance, of the private health insurers).

When we think of the ecological catastrophe, of geopolitical threats, of economic collapse provoked by the financial politics of neoliberalism, its hard to dispel the feeling that irreversible trends are already at work inside the world machine. Political will seems paralyzed in the face of the economic power of the criminal class. The age of modern social civilization seems on the brink of dissolution, and it is hard to imagine how society will be able to react. Modern civilization was based on the convergence and
integration of the capitalist exploitation of labor force and the political regulation of social conflict. The regulator State, the heir of Enlightenment and Socialism has been the guarantor of human rights and the negotiator of social balance. When, at the end of a ferocious classstruggle between work and capital but also inside the capitalist class itself the financial class has seized

power by destroying the legal regulation and transforming the social composition, the entire edifice of modern civilization has begun to crumble. Social Darwinist ideology has legitimized the violent imposition of the law of the strongest, and the very foundations of democracy have been reduced to rubble. This accelerated destruction of tolerance, culture and human feelings has given an unprecedented impulse to the process of accumulation and has increased the velocity and the extent of economic growth throughout the last two decades of the 20th century. But all this has also created the premises of a war against human society that is underway in the new century. The war against society is waged at two different levels: at the economic level it is known under the name of privatization, and
it is based on the idea that every fragment and every cell of the biological, affective linguistic spheres have to be turned into profit machines. The effect of this privatization is the impoverishment of daily life, the loss of sensibility in the fields of sex, communication, and

human relationships, and also the increasing inequality between hyper-rich minority and a majority of dispossessed. At the social level this war is waged in terms of criminalization and in-securization of the territory and of economic life. In large areas of the planet, that are growing and growing in extent, production and exchange have become the ground of violent confrontation between military groups and criminal organization. Slavery, blackmail, extortion, murder are integral parts of the lexicon of Economy. Scattered insurrections will take place in the coming years, but we should
not expect much from them. Theyll be unable to touch the real centers of power because of the militarization of metropolitan space, and they will not be able to gain much in terms of material wealth or political power. As the long wave of counterglobalization moral protests could not destroy neoliberal power, so the insurrections will not find a solution, not

unless a new consciousness and a new sensibility surfaces and spreads , changing everyday life, and creating Non-Temporary Autonomous Zones rooted in the culture and consciousness of the global network.
Full employment is over. The world does not need so much labor and so much exploitation. A radical reduction of labor-time is necessary. Basic income has to be affirmed as a right to life independent of employment and disjoined from the lending of labortime. Competence, knowledge, and skills have to be separated from the economic context of exchange value, and rethought in terms of free social activity. We should not look at the current recession only from an economic point of view. We must see it essentially as an anthropological turning point that is going to change the distribution of world resources and world power. Europe is doomed to lose its economic privilege, as 500 years of colonialism are ending. The debt

that Western people have accumulated is not only economic but also moral: the

genocide has to be paid now, and its not going to be easy. A large part of the European population is not
beginning of the end of the Western domination that was the premise of the modern capitalist system. A

debt of oppression, violence and

prepared to accept the redistribution of wealth that the recession will impose. Europe, stormed by waves of migration, is going to face a growing racist threat. Ethnic war will be difficult to avoid. In the US, the victory of Barack Obama marks the

wave of nonidentitarian indigenous Renaissance is rising, especially in Latin America. The privatization of
basic needs (housing, transportation, food) and social services is based on the cultural identification of wealth and wellbeing with the amount of private property owned. In the anthropology of modern capitalism, wellbeing has been equated with acquisition, never with enjoyment. In the course of the social turmoil we are going to live through in the coming years, the identification of wellbeing with property has to be questioned. Its a political task, but above all it is a cultural task, and a psychotherapeutic one too. When it comes to semiotic products private property becomes irrelevant, and in fact it is more and more difficult to enforce it.

The campaigns against piracy are paradoxical because the real pirates are the corporations that are desperately trying to privatize the product of the collective intelligence, and artificially trying to impose a tax on the community of producers. The products of collective intelligence are immanently common because knowledge can neither be fragmented nor privately owned. A new

brand of communism was already springing from the technological transformations of digital networks, when the collapse of the financial markets and neoliberal ideology exposed the frailty of the foundations of hyper-capitalism. Now we can predict a new wave of transformation from the current
collapse of growth and debt, and of private consumption as wellbeing. Because of these three forces commonality of knowledge, ideological crisis of private ownership, mandatory communalisation of need a new horizon is visible and a new Will and voluntarism of an avantgarde, and on the paranoid expectations of a new totality was defeated at the end of the 20th century and will not be resurrected. A

landscape is going to surface. Communism is coming back . The old face of communism, based on the totally new brand of communism is going to surface as a form of necessity, the inevitable outcome of the stormy collapse of the capitalist system. The communism
of capital is a barbarian necessity. We must put freedom in this necessity, we need to make of this necessity a conscious organised choice. Communism is back, but we should name it in a different way because historical memory identified this particular form of social organization with the political tyranny of a religion. The historical communism of the 20th century was based on the idea of the primacy of totality over singularity. But the dialectical framework that defined the communist movement of the 20th century has been completely abandoned and nobody will resurrect it. The Hegelian ascendance played a major role in the formation of that kind of religious belief that was labeled historicism. The Aufhebung (abolition of the real in favor of the realization of the Idea) is the paranoid background of the whole conceptualization of communism. Inside that dialectical framework, communism was viewed as an all encompassing totality expected to abolish and follow the capitalist all encompassing totality. The subject (the will and action of the working class) was viewed as the instrument for the abolition of the old and the instauration of the new. The industrial working class, being external to the production of concepts, could only identify with the mythology of abolition and totalization, but the general intellect cannot do that. The general intellect does not need an expressive subject, such as was the Leninist Party in the 20th century. The political expression of the general intellect is at one with its action of knowing, creating, and producing signs. We have abandoned the ground of dialectics in favour of the plural grounds of the dynamic of singularization and the multilayered co-evolution of singularities. Capitalism is over, but it is not going to disappear. The creation of NonTemporary Autonomous Zones is not going to give birth to any totalization. We are not going to witness a cathartic event of revolution, well not see the sudden breakdown of state power. In the following years well witness a sort of revolution without a subject. In order to subjectivate this revolution we have to proliferate singularities. This, in my

humble opinion, is our cultural and political task. After abandoning the field of the dialectics of abolition and totalization, we are now trying to build a theory of the dynamics of recombination and singularization, a concept that is clearly drawn from the works of Flix Guattari, particularly from his last book, Chaosmosis. By the word singularity I mean the expression of a never seen before concatenation. The actor of this expression can be an individual, a collective but also an event. We call it singularity if this actor recombines the multiple flows traversing its field of existence following a principle that is not repetitive and referring to any preexisting form of subjected subjectivity. By the world singularity, I mean an agency that does not follow any rule of conformity and repetition, and is not framed in any historical necessity. Singularity is a process that is not necessary, because it is notimplied in the consequentiality of history neither logically nor materially. It is the emerging of a self-creative process. Rather than a swift change in the social landscape, we should expect the slow surfacing of new trends: communities abandoning the field the crumbling ruling economies, more and more individuals giving up their search for a job and creating their own networks of services.

The dismantling of industry is unstoppable for the simple reason that social life does not need industrial labor anymore. The myth of growth is going to be abandoned and people will look for new modes of wealth distribution. Singular communities will transform the very perception of wellbeing and wealth in the sense of frugality and freedom. The cultural revolution that we need in this transition leads from the perception of wealth as the private ownership of a growing amount of goods that we cannot enjoy because we are too busy purchasing the money needed for acquisition, to the perception of wealth as the enjoyment of an essential amount of things that we can share with other people. The de-privatization of services and goods will be made

possible by this much needed cultural revolution. This will not happen in a planned and uniformed way, this will rather be the effect of the withdrawal of singular individuals and communities, and the result of the creation of an economy of shared use of common goods and services and the liberation of time for culture, pleasure and affection. While this process expands at the

margins of society, the criminal class will hang on to its power and enforce more and more repressive legislation, the majority of people will be increasingly aggressive and desperate. Ethnic civil war will spread all over Europe, wrecking the very fabric of civil life. The proliferation of singularities (the withdrawal and building of NonTemporary Autonomous Zones) will be a pacific process, but the conformist majority will react violently, and this is already happening. The conformist majority is frightened by the fleeing away of intelligent energy and simultaneously is attacking the expression of intelligent activity. The situation can be described as a fight between the mass ignorance produced by mediatotalitarianism and the shared intelligence of the general intellect. We cannot

predict what the outcome of this process will be. Our

task is to extend and protect the field of autonomy, and to avoid as much as possible any violent contact with the field of aggressive mass ignorance. This

strategy of non-confrontational withdrawal will not always succeed. Sometimes confrontation will be made inevitable by racism and fascism. It is impossible to predict what has to be done in the case of unwanted conflict. Non-violent reaction is obviously the best choice, but it will not always be possible. The identification of wellbeing with private property is so deeply rooted that a barbarization of the human environment cannot be completely ruled out. But the task of the general intellect is exactly this: fleeing from paranoia, creating zones of human resistance, experimenting autonomous forms of production based on high-tech-lowenergy production whilst avoiding confrontation with the criminal class and the conformist population. Politics and therapy will be one and the same activity in the coming time. People will feel hopeless and depressed and panicking, because they are unable to deal with the post-growth economy, and because they will miss the dissolving modern identity. Our cultural task will be attending to those people and taking care of their insanity, showing them the way of a happy adaptation at hand. Our task will be the creation of social zones of human resistance that act like zones of therapeutic contagion. The process of autonomization has not to be seen as Aufhebung, but as therapy. In this sense it is not totalizing and intended to destroy and abolish the past. Like

psychoanalytic therapy it is rather to be considered as an unending process.

2AC
Alt cant solveeconomic rationality is inevitable and is inherent in decisionmaking Murrel 91 (Peter, Dept of Econ @ Univ of Maryland; Can Neoclassical Economics Underpin the Reform of Centrally
Planned Economies?; Journal of Economic Perspectives- Volume 5, Number 4-Fall 1991 -Pages 59-76; http://econweb.umd.edu/~murrell/articles/Can%20Neoclassical%20Economics%20Underpin%20the%20Economic%20Reform.p df, [JJ]) Unless one maintains the assumption of a complete set of Arrow-Debreu futures and risk markets, the use of neoclassical rationality leads to violation of the assumption of informational decentralization that is most often used to propound the virtues of markets. To understand the merits of decentralization, there is no choice but to assume

that agents' decisions are based on less than thorough-going rationality. Decision-making under bounded rationality seems to be inherent in entry and exit decisions . There is simply no theory of the comparative properties of different economic systems under conditions of bounded rationality. Nelson (198 1) makes this point forcefully in his discussion of the relevance of
neoclassical welfare economics to an assessment of the strengths of private enterprise.

Rational choice goodpredictions prove

Green 02 (Steven L., Professor of Economics and Statistics Chair, Department of Economics Baylor University; Rational
Choice Theory: An Overview; Prepared for the Baylor University Faculty Development Seminar on Rational Choice Theory, May 2002,business.baylor.edu/steve green/green1.doc; [JJ])
Defenders of the rational

choice approach e.g., Becker (1976) -- argue that the approach is useful because it tends to generate non-tautological predictions. Suppose a scholar wants to account for some observed phenomenon P. For
carefully. In fact, many such theories can be constructed. Importantly, however,

example, P might be the fact that wage rates paid to workers (after adjustment for inflation) tend to rise during good economic times [expansions] and fall during bad economic times [recessions]. It is generally quite easy to develop a theory T that predicts P, especially for someone who has studied P

it is generally not good scientific practice to use the same data to both formulate and test a hypothesis or theory. If so, all theories would be confirmed. Instead, good methodology will develop a theory T that not only predicts P, but that also has other predictions Q1, Q2, Q3, Ideally, many of these predictions will be observable that is, one should be able to determine if Q1, Q2, Q3 . do or do not in
it to be wrong. This is not to say that rational choice theorists are pristine with respect to this requirement. The

fact occur. If these predictions are not observed say not Q1 (~Q1) is observed rather than Q1 the theory may be judged inadequate and either revised or discarded. If I may be allowed a lapse into imprecise language, a theory can never be right if there is not at least some possibility in the first place for

history of economic thought is no doubt full of bad theories (bad in the sense that one or more key predictions are not consistent with the data) that have been saved by ad hoc modifications. It is to say that proponents of the rational choice approach contend that ad hoc theorizing and the resulting empty tautologies may be less prevalent with their approach than with other approaches. I certainly agree that the rational choice method does in fact tend to generate many testable predictions, and in Sections 4 and 5 below I discuss several illustrative examples. Despite the fact that advocates of
this issue carefully. I believe the rational extension of the idea of novel confirmation.

rational choice theory justify their approach in this way, I know of no study that explicitly compares methodologies along these lines. Is it really the case that rational choice models have more non-tautological implications than the models implied by other approaches? I am not sure anyone has examined

choice methodology is gaining in popularity not just because it tends to generate lots of observable predictions, but also because it tends to generate novel predictions. This is an

Philosophy cant explain economic rationality Cowen 01 (Tyler, Department of Economics George Mason University, How Do Economists Think About Rationality?;
http://www.gmu.edu/centers/publicchoice/faculty%20pages/Tyler/rationality.pdf, [JJ])

Philosophers , on the other hand, commonly believe that economic logic focuses on instrumental rationality, as exemplified by a Humean ends-means logic. That is, economics focuses on how to use means to achieve given ends, but cannot judge the quality or rationality of those ends. Philosophers have put forth alternative notions of rationality, including practical reasoning, procedural rationality (do our mental processes for forming values
make sense?), and expressive rationality (do we have the right ends or values?). From a philosophic perspective, economic

rationality is only one very small part of rationality, and for this reason economics appears radically incomplete as a "final theory of the world," whatever its other virtues may be.3 I approach the rationality postulate from a differing

perspective. In particular, I stress that there is no single, monolithic economic method or approach to rationality. Labor economists, finance theorists, experimental economists, and macroeconomists, among others, all think of rationality, and use the rationality postulate, in different ways. I explicate modern economic method by searching out and identifying the differences across fields, rather than forcing everything into an account of the underlying unities.

Economic rationality is falsifiable and the best explanation of the economy Cowen 01 (Tyler, Department of Economics George Mason University, How Do Economists Think About Rationality?;
http://www.gmu.edu/centers/publicchoice/faculty%20pages/Tyler/rationality.pdf, [JJ]) 1. Description In this view the rationality postulate describes individual behavior and has

definite empirical

implications. These implications are in principle falsifiable . For the time being, and perhaps forever, the rationality postulate best describes economic behavior. Note that this view

may attach varying substantive meanings to the empirical content of the rationality concept.4 2. Transitivity only Some economists believe that rationality requires only the postulate of transitivity of preference. Transitivity, in this context, stipulates that if A is preferred to B, and B is preferred to C, then A is preferred to C. In other words, preferences can be represented by a global rank ordering. Typically it is left open whether transitivity must always be satisfied, or if we require only that transitivity is true "often enough." Note that the transitivity only view can be a special

case of the first "descriptive" view, at least if we interpret transitivity as an empirical property rather than a logical one. 3. Tautology Any and all behavior can be described as rational, provided we are willing to manipulate the theory enough to avoid any testable implications. The rationality postulate therefore involves no substantive commitment to any empirical claims. A strong version of
this view postulates that rationality is a useful tautology, while a weaker view postulates that it is an arbitrary use of terms offering no particular advantage. 4. Pragmatic, or useful organizing category This view rejects foundationalist approaches to rationality. We do not necessarily know exactly what the rationality postulate

does or means. Nonetheless economists who use the rationality postulate come up with better work and better ideas than those who do not. It is a useful heuristic for the economist. The

rationality postulate is part of a research strategy for generating new ideas, regardless of its descriptive or logical status. 5. Normative Individuals are not always rational, but rationality is an ideal that we should strive to achieve. Economic theory can be used to improve the quality of decision-making. Note that this approach can be combined with any number of more substantive commitments to what rationality means.

STEIGLER

2AC
No truth-value to any of Stieglers argumentsNo alt solvencyno outline as to what action needs to be taken. Gratton 10 Assistant professor of Philosophy at the University of San Diego (Peter Gratton, Taking Care of Youth and the Generations, August 4, 2010, http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/24441-taking-care-of-youth-and-the-generations/, JL)
But I stop short when Stiegler argues we are creating a generation of "I-don't-give-a-damners." Isn't this complaint the same as it ever was? Newspapers, mass paperbacks, radio, television, the Internet, and so on, were all going

to turn us into a pack of hedonists incapable of doing anything other than making the next purchase. Stiegler repeats these age-old attacks almost verbatim, seeming to have missed an entire era of media studies since Marcuse and Adorno were last seen shaking their fists at the "culture industry." This is not to suggest that Stiegler is incorrect about the pernicious shaping of human desires -- marketers who aren't creating desires don't last long. But neither the culture industry nor its consumers are as homogeneous as Stiegler suggests. Heidegger's analysis of Stiegler is calling for a "reenchanting" of this video-televisual world, just what "enchanted" world is he referencing? On what basis could he begin to presume such masses are not caring, not "giving a damn," about their lives and the lives of others? The "battle for intelligence," which he calls "noopolitics," must be won lest, he says, there be the "liquidation of 'democratic maturity' and 'democratic responsibility,' that is, populism" (53). If the people aren't paying attention, he warns, "a few will always think for themselves," citing Kant

everydayness takes one only so far. To argue that those going online are becoming passive and pacified, all but unconscious beings, is a claim strange to be found in the work of one who writes about the pharmakon (the poison and cure) of writing and then assumes newer technologies could be doing nothing but poisoning the minds of the young. This brings me to the politics of the book. Since

approvingly, and these few will be responsible for "spread[ing] the spirit of a rational appreciation for both their own worth and for each person's calling to think for himself" (40). With rampant "technologies of stupidity," there is a threat that "it might become literally impossible to (re)educate those organologically conditioned brains that have become prone to incivility and delinquency" (35). Time, he literally argues, is running out (182-3). What, then, is to be done? Stiegler's answer is

unapologetically a return and reinvigoration of the institutions of the third Republic: bourgeois families (one wonders, though he doesn't say, who will be caring for all those children no longer attached to their gaming devices), reading-focused schools, and a republican form of government anchored in a united Europe. The "work of forming attention undertaken by the family, the school, the totality of teaching and cultural institutions,
and all the apparatuses of 'spiritual value' (beginning with academic apparatuses)" will in turn be supported by a new political economy outlined in his other works (184). Failing to demarcate republicanism and democratic theory (he claims Kant as a proponent of the latter[6]),

Stiegler walks haphazardly into the whole problem of

political representation . Depicting the "people" as a mass of attention-deficit addled "immature" non-citizens duped by the mass media, incapable of Kantian-style enlightenment and thus unable to govern themselves, he seems not to have considered what or who is to be given such rights of "taking care." From Plato to Heidegger and beyond, it's time to attend to another image of the people than as in thrall to Sophistic doxa and media imagery. In other words, isn't there something strange about a book that talks about "caring for the youth" that robs those very youth of any autonomy, of any
thought, as Stiegler defines those terms? Taking Care is notably silent on just what they/we think of the changes being wrought during their/our lifetime; don't worry, he suggests, they'll take care of you.

Stieglers argument is methodologically flawedno evidence for his assertions about technology and capitalism Gratton 10 Assistant professor of Philosophy at the University of San Diego (Peter Gratton, Taking Care of Youth and the Generations, August 4, 2010, http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/24441-taking-care-of-youth-and-the-generations/, JL)
For those whose attention is waning, Internet consumers that you are, let me cut to the chase: Stiegler is right to attend to the need to reinvigorate "deep attention," but this work itself shows superficial attention to

the myriad issues under discussion. For example, he argues, "the United States suffers massively from attention deficit disorder," which both sets up

much of his analysis and is demonstrably wrong .[2] He also cites several times the number of

hours of media the average American consumes, and then simply presumes that this results in lowered "attention" spans.[3] Following the chain of argument, he then claims that such inattentiveness inexorably leads to rising levels of "juvenile" delinquency. Thus, the future is dim indeed, as I suppose these "incivil," "restless" masses have their own children, and the script of Mike Judge's film Idiocracy (2006) plays itself out. Yet rates of such "delinquency" in Western Europe and the United States are down precipitously over the last twenty years (definitional claims aside),[4] while at the same time literacy rates continue to go up (not of minor pertinence here),[5] just as the threshold has been crossed, according to Stiegler, between televisual technologies (movies and TV) and "numerical" programming (computers, cell phones, etc.). Perhaps the main victim here of televisual culture is Stiegler himself, who seems to have simply taken for granted media reports about AD/HD, showing little evidence for any research on his own , which I suppose has the upshot of providing an indirect proof for the problem he describes. He rehashes truisms about the rising levels of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity
Disorder (AD/HD) without noting the vast differences among the many "attention deficit" disorders, or that it involves neurological processes besides those related to temporal retention; nor does he seem to have spent time with sufferers of AD/HD, who would quickly belie a number of his assumptions. He seems not to have thought at all about the historicity of "mental" illnesses and the question of when they could ever be said to arise, not a small point when claiming that AD/HD is wholly contemporary (190). Moreover, Stiegler

seems not to have considered that there may be anything other than technological

reasons for the rise of AD/HD, not least that we are paying more attention to attention: isn't this attention paid to attention problems itself a sign that, perhaps, "our" civilization is not wholly inattentive yet? That perhaps our problem, given the amount of drugs dispensed for AD/HD, is precisely because we continue, at all costs, to want to fit children into the disciplinary modes he argues Foucault had wrongly focused on, or simply for the reasons of creating a market, thus literally paying attention? That perhaps, for these reasons, we are paying too much attention to attention, to having our kids and adults sit still and face foreword in the types of classrooms Stiegler argues for? At the least, in a book that admonishes the masses, the "I don't-give-a-damners,"
for not performing Enlightenment self-critique, these questions should be addressed .

No Alt solvencyanalysis of the libidinal economy is wrong Morin 11 - Professor of Philosophy, University of Alberta (Marie-Eve Morin, Bernard Stiegler, For a New Critique of Political Economy, December 10, 2011, http://www.c scp.org/en/2011/12/10/bernard-stiegler-for-a-new-critique-of-political-economy.html,JL)
So after

claiming that his predecessors have ignored the problems of political economy, Stiegler lays claim to
as political economy (he also neglects the debates and contributions of the

their work on libidinal economy

Frankfurt School, the Situationists, and the Autonomia group, among others). Given this inconsistency, it seems that Stieglers only clear objection is that they speak as if nothing new had happened in political economy since 1945. This would

explain his tendency to utilise and incessantly repeat buzzwords that suggest analogies between

economics and his pharmacology of desirelike toxicity, commerce, credit, investment or bearish tendenciesthough they obscure his analysis rather than clarify it. Whatever his take on French philosophy, the
value of his critique of political economy rises or falls on its treatment of Marx and Marxist categories. First, he argues
that grammatisation is a condition of proletarianisation. On Stieglers account, Plato is the first philosopher of proletarianisation, insofar as he shows (in the Phaedrus) that the exteriorization of memory is a loss of memory and knowledge. (29) Grammatisa tion results from techniques of breaking down memory and knowledge into discrete grains that are isolated from the continuum of cognitive retention and protention. These techniques make possible the capture of desires and processes of individuation and transindividuation (collective subjectification) by the culture industry, which, Stiegler argues, turns these desires and processes toward short-term investment (libininal and economic) rather than long-term investment. Grammatisation, he argues, proletarianises human activity because it produces short-circuits in the transindividuation process, by orienting our desires and activities around ever shorter and more discrete horizons. (35) As we know from Marxs Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, proletarianisation cannot be equated simply with exteriorisation. Invoking The German Ideology, Stiegler argues that exteriorisation (as grammatisation) is the root of the technical question, that is, the question of this production of self by self in which the human consists (30), but he does not address Marxs crucial distinction between objectification (Vergegenstndlichung) and alienation or externalisation (Entfremdung or Entuerung). For Marx, objectification is the result of human practices, which mediate human needs, social relations, and the social metabolism of natural environments, while alienation is the result of specific historical social relations determined within capitalism. Without this distinction, it is possible to jump from the techniques of externalisation of writing to digital techniques of memory storage as if these transformations were determined by an unbroken historical continuum. One can make epochal claims, for instance, about cellular phones The spread of industrial hypomnesic apparatuses causes our memories to pass into machines, in such a way that, for example, we no longer know the telephone numbers of those close to usas if before them nobody had ever used address books. (30; compare this to Agambens comments in What is an Apparatus?, Stanford University Press, 2009, 16) More importantly, Marxs distinction between objectification and alienation allows us to grasp what is specific about social relations within capitalism, as well as the role of class struggle within these relations. Class struggle is entirely absent in Stieglers discussion of proletarianisation and his theory of crises. Drawing on Marxs analyses about the stultification and tediousness of industrial work, Stiegler argues, on the basis of the

proliferation of techniques of grammatisation, that today all aspects of social life are captured by processes of proletarianisation. (39) Certainly we can accept the claim that technological innovation transforms social relations and functions to immiserate workers rather than liberate them, but Stiegler explicitly empties his concept of proletarianisation of any class content; it becomes a problem of techniques of memory and knowledge, for producers, consumers, and all other sociological groups (he defines the proletariat as those economic actors who are without knowledge because they are without memory: their memory has passed into the machine that reproduces gestures that the proletariat no longer needs to know). (35) Stiegler never answers the question of how the critique of techniques of memory and knowledge tell us anything about proletarianisation as a process of expropriation of surplus-value and accumulation by dispossession. He does, however, wax nostalgic about the charms of the petty bourgeoisie, who unlike the working classcould emancipate itself from the pure necessity of reproducing its labor power, and can therefore liberate itself from pure negotium, that is, from completely calculable exchange. (6465) With such pleasures, who needs to speak of liberating the working class? If Stiegler can manage to empty proletarianisation of its class content, we should not be

account of the recent crisis prioritises technological and moral solutions rather than political ones: technics becomes the central stakes of political economy, which in turn becomes a question of sociotherapy. (36)
surprised that his On his account, the financialisation of capital is the most recent of techniques, like the pharmakon of writing, that can shortcircuit living and anamnesic memory. (79) Stiegler attempts to show, in one of those moments when his analogies obstruct a clear analysis, how the struggle against the tendential fall in the rate of profit thus induces a tendential fall in libidinal ene rgy, which reinforces the speculative tendency of capital, that is, its disinvestment. (89) He argues that consumerism, the first sustained solution to the tendential fall in the rate of profit, produces the fall in libidinal energy, short-circuiting the long-term investments of desire. A widespread dictatorship of short-termism is the result. (57) The cause of the crisis, then, is carelessness (incurie), brought on by short-term thinking, when one scoffs at the economic as well as social consequences of profitable decisions. (80) Given that he reduces structural crises to motivations such as carelessness (85), it should come as no surprise that Stiegler is a reformist in the last instance, calling for a sociotherapy to cultivate long-term horizons in transindividual relations and for laws and regulations to prevent the more harmful aspects of capital accumulation. (99101 and 108) Stiegler

is emblematic of a conservative French republicanism masquerading as radical theory: political questions, on his account, are subordinated to technological questions, and reformism replaces popular struggle. In sum, for Stiegler, the system carries risks, but these can be corrected if we just care enough, that is, if we create the proper institutions to handle our investments, libidinal and otherwise . When Stiegler argues that new apparatuses of production of libidinal energy must be conceived and instituted his examples are, embarrassingly enough, the ecclesiastical institution and its care-ful [curieux] inhabitant, the cur [and] the school and its master, the teacher. (108) If this is a new critique of political economy, then long live the old critique! Combating capitalism today requires analysing
how neoliberalism is a project of re-entrenching capitalist class power, as well as conceptualising how the techniques of this project (expropriation, privatisation, financialisation, accumulation by dispossession, and the uneven deployment of production across the global north and south) serve to reinforce that goal. For this task, there are more tools in Marxs contributions than in Stieglers.

Their impacts are inevitablethe media age has transformed our brains making alt solvency impossibleIts Steiglers argument Iveson 12 - PhD from the Centre for Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths (Richard Iveson, Rewiring the Brain or, Why our Children are not Human, October 2012, Parallax, Vol. 18, No. 4, p. 121-125)
Psychotechnological systems, argues Stiegler, are the key technologies of hyperindustrial societies of control . Hence, whereas for Stiegler the key question centres upon education leading to maturity, the media world by contrast is fixated
upon gaining control of youth's psychic and social apparatuses from the youngest age (p.132). Such

systems of control serve only to short-circuit the psychic system, however, resulting in the explosion of attentiondeficit disorder, infant hyperactivity, and cognitive-overflow-syndrome we see today. Ultimately,

maintains Stiegler, desire itself collapses (p.42). In this way, attention is reduced to retention, a regression of intelligence for which the programming industries and mass media are to blame. Television in particular, writes Stiegler, has irresistibly ruined the public education systems instituted in the 1880s along Aufklrung ideals, to the extent that democracy in the West has now been subsumed by a telecracy, which, with the programming industries as its armed wing, seeks only to control social behaviour by adaptin g it to immediate market needs (p.58). Moreover, this process has been accelerated by the emergence of new media, leading to the hypersolicitation of attention (p.94). This control process serves to remove individuals from participation in the critical process of collective intelligence, a removal characteristic of what Stiegler, after Marx, terms proletarianization. Psychotechnologies, in other words, eliminate the very thing that defines the human, that of critical consciousness . As a result, the new shortterm state of attention without consciousness they inaugurate necessarily constitutes an entirely different form of being. Stiegler refers to this as a state of vigilance, a form of being characteristic of wild animals (p.78). The programming industries, in short, rewire the human, purging it of its exceptional cerebral plasticity so as to produce instead an animalistic nervous system forever enclosed within strict neurological limits (pp.968). The post-human, therefore, is a (psycho)technologically produced animal, subject only to the short-term satisfaction of drives without desire. This, suggests Stiegler, is the future, and that future is

(almost) now, consciousness having being reduced to a grammatized stream by the transformation of formalized machinic processes, as well as by devices recording and manipulating the information stream (p.147). This rewiring, moreover, is no simple metaphor. Television and new media, Stiegler insists, irrevocably restructure the

synaptogenetic circuits of children subjected to them at an early age. The evidence invoked to back up this claim is, however, very thin. Nevertheless, Stiegler takes it as proven that such rewiring inevitably results in an irreversible inability to attain maturity at the neurological level (pp.747). The herd that is the next generation, in short, will thus be physiologically unable to heed Stiegler's warning and to take responsibility. Rather, by the time today's children grow up, it will already be too late. For Stiegler, signs of this process are everywhere . In
place of the social formation of intelligence, we find only the most minimal human subject, which increasingly delegates its attention to automata that then become its captors, meters, gauges, warning signals, alarms, and so on (pp.1001). While, on the one hand, we can no longer recall our own telephone numbers or how to do simple arithmetic, on the other we transfer control of all our financial, military and medical decisions to various software applications. As a result, there can be no singular internalization of the collective and social memories of humanity, and thus no possibility of creating new long circuits of transindividuation. Instead, machines calculate us: attention engines take the place of attention itself, and thus substitute for the subject (p.100). There is, however, something of a hysterical

edge to Stiegler's stricture regarding the toxicity of television and new media, which recalls similar apocalyptic warnings that have accompanied the emergence of every new media form, not excluding the printed book. It is an attack moreover, as John Hutnyk points out in a recent article, Proletarianization or Cretinization, which depends upon a largely undifferentiated concept of the long-circuit that takes no account of the specificities of place . Moreover, Stiegler appears not to consider the possibility that, what for him is only ever a delinquency of youth in need of correction, might instead constitute a basis for resistance and struggle against market controls. Thus, writes Hutnyk, whereas Stiegler's diagnosis tends all too readily to render the masses a passive object of
capture, perhaps instead we need more delinquents, civil unrest, a revolutionary call to attention in the constitution of a dialectic in which the distraction of attention may actually be a refined and critical inattention'.2 Stupidity too, insists Hutnyk, can be pharmacological.

The Alt get co-opted by the rightjustify eugenics and use stieglers policies as a disciplinary tactic Richard Iveson 12, PhD from the Centre for Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of
London, October 2012, Rewiring the Brain or, Why our Children are not Human, Parallax, Vol. 18, No. 4, p. 121-125
According to Stiegler, we are forever engaged in a battle of intelligence for maturity, a battle concomitant with the hist ory of humanity (p.29). Today, however, this battle has been transformed into the life or death struggle of humanity itself. Unless things

change rapidly, Stiegler insists, humanity as we know it will be destroyed, displaced by a dystopian, posthuman future whose inhabitants would be incapable not only of heeding Stiegler's warning, but of even reading it. Proclaiming himself thus a prophet of and from potentially the last generation of mature adults, Stiegler seeks to hastily recall us to rational critique
before the new media has its way and irretrievably restructures the connections which constitute intelligence so as to render such constitution impossible (p.33). To instaurate critique, however, is no easy matter. It is not simply a question of educational

reform, but of a revolution that impacts upon every level of society and beyond, intervening ceaselessly even at the neurological level. Moreover, a revolution by its very nature offers no guarantees. As Stiegler admits, the remedy he prescribes might also turn out to be the worst kind of poison. Indeed, one can all too easily envisage the appropriation of his discourse in the service of a right-wing defence of family values, and even in a renewed eugenicist discourse which (by way of A Clockwork Orange) deems synaptic rewiring a remedy for delinquency within a regime of enforced care.

Making universal care the foundation of politics causes mass violence Michael Dillon 5, Professor in the Department of Politics, Philosophy and Religion at Lancaster University, May 2005, Cared to Death: The Biopoliticised Time of Your Life, Foucault Studies, No. 2, p. 37-46
The key point of dispute with Ojakangas concerns the self-immolating logic of biopolitics. Not bare life that is exposed to an unconditional threat of death, he says in the introduction to his paper, but

the care of all living is the

foundation of biopower . (emphasis in the original). Ojakangas says: Foucaults biopower has nothing to do with that [Agamben] kind of bare life. I agree. Foucaults biopolitics concerns an historically biologised life whose biologisation continues to mutate as the life sciences themselves offer changing interpretations and technical determinations of life. This biologised life of biopolitics nonetheless also raises the stake for Foucault of a life that is not a biologised life. So it does for Agamben,

but differently and in a different way. 24 For Foucault, the biologised

life of biopolitics also raises the issue of a life threatened in supremely violent and novel ways. So it does for Agamben, but again differently
and for the same complex of reasons. 25 In contesting Agamben in the ways that he does, Ojakangas marks an important difference, then, between Foucault and Agamben. That done, perhaps the difference needs however to be both marked differently and interrogated differently. I have argued that there is a certain betrayal in the way Agamben reworks Foucault. There is however much more going on in this betrayal than misconstruction and misinterpretation. There is a value in it. Exploring that value requires another ethic of reading in addition to that of the exegesis required to mark it out. For Agambens loathing of biopolitics i s I think more true to the burgeoning suspicion and fear that progressively marked Foucaults reflections on it than Ojakangas account can give credit for, since he concentrates on providing the exegetical audit required to mark it out rather than evaluate it. In posing

an intrinsic and unique threat to life through the very ways in which it promotes, protects and invests life, care for all living threatens life in its own distinctive ways. Massacres have become vital. The threshold of modernity is reached when the life of the species is wagered on its own (bio) political strategies. Biopolitics must and does recuperate the death function. It does teach us how to punish and
who to kill.26 Power over life must adjudicate punishment and death as it distributes live across terrains of value that the life sciences constantly revise in the cause of lifes very promotion. It has to. That is also why we now have a biopolitics gone geopolitically global in humanitarian wars of intervention and martial doctrines of virtuous war. 27 Here, also, is the reason why the modernising developmental politics of biopolitics go racist: So you can understand the importance I almost said the vital importance of racism to such an exercise of power. 28 In racism, Foucault insists: We are dealing with a mechanism that allows biopower to work. 29 But: The specificity of modern racism, or what gives it its specificity, is not bound up with mentalities, ideologies or the lies of power. It is bound up with the techniques of power, with the technology of power.30 In thus threatening life, biopolitics prompts a revision of the question of life and especially of the life of a politics that is not exhaustively biologised; comprehensively subject to biopolitical governance in such a way that life shows up as nothing but the material required for biopolitical governance, whether in terms posed by Foucault or Agamben. Emphasising care for all living - the

promotion, protection and investment of the life of individuals and populations elides the issue of being cared to death. Being cared to death poses the issue of the life that is presupposed, nomologically for Agamben and biologically for Foucault, in biopolitics. Each foregrounds the self-immolating logic that ineluctably applies in a politics of life that understands life biologically, in the way that
Foucault documents for us, or nomologically, in the way that Agambens bare life contends. When recalling the significance of the Christian pastorate to biopolitics, Ojakangas seems to emphasize a line of succession rather than of radical dissociation. One, moreover, which threatens to elide the intrinsic violence of biopolitics and its essential relation with correction and death.

Society wont abandon growththeir alternative fails Richard Douglas 10 Peer-reviewed climate scholar (published essays on the philosophy and politics of climate change denial, Future Ethics, pg. 206,JL)
In the case of environmentalism the need for a readymade replacement paradigm to be available before the existing dominant paradigm is abandoned would seem to be especially important. This is because the core principle of environmentalism, that there are limits to growth, implies certain lessons, regarding the limitations of technological power and ultimately human mortality, such that it naturally provokes a strong response of denial and wishful thinking. Without an adequate replacement world-

view which is able to successfully address such concerns, to make sense of and offer consolation for them, it is simply inconceivable that society as a whole will reject the paradigm of unending economic growth which environmentalism attacks. So it is that, while in the last four decades environmentalism has won a significant popular acceptance for the idea that there are severe problems with this paradigm, it has made relatively slow progress in transforming political and economic organization: the replacement ideas it offers are not adequate for the job they have to do. Economic rationality is ethical self-interest motivates individuals toproduce security and protect the rights of otherssolves war and environmental collapse Dag Aasland 9 Proffesor of Economics at the university of Agder (Ethics and Economy: After Levinas, pgs. 65-66,JL) Business ethics, in the sense of ethics for business, illustrates this: its perspective is that of an enlightened self-interest where the constraints that are put on the individual, thanks to the

ability to see the unfortunate consequences for oneself, postpone the war, in a direct or metaphoric sense of the word (ibid.: 70-71). This enlightened self-interest forms the base not only of the market economy, but also of a social organization and manifestation of human rights,
and even of some ethical theories. It is a calculated and voluntary renunciation of ones own freedom in order to obtain in return security and other common goals (ibid.: 72). The fact that economic, political and legal theories appeal to

enlightened self-interest does not imply, however, that we should discard them. Nor should we reject
proclamations of human rights, legal constraints of individual freedom and, for that matter, business ethics, even if they are based on an enlightened self-interest. It is rather the opposite: such institutions and knowledge are

indispensable because the primary quality of the enlightened self-interest is that it restricts egocentricity. Our practical reason (which was Kants words for the reason that governs our acts, where the moral law is embedded as a principle) includes the knowledge that it can be rational to lay certain restrictions on individual freedom. In this way practical reason may postpone (for an indefinite time) violence and murder among people. This has primarily been the raison-dtre of politics and the state, but it is today taken over more
and more by corporate organizations, as expressed in the new term for business ethics, as corporate social responsibility and corporate citizenship (see chapter 2). Thanks to this postponement of violence provided by politics and

economic rationality, people may unfold their freedom within the laws and regulations set up by society
(Burggraeve, 2003: 77).

Technocracy is good is benefits consumers towards efficient outcomes and maximizes utility Andreas Chai 5 - Evolutionary Economics Unit at the Max Planck Institute for Research into Economic Systems (Mengers theory of imaginary goods and the historical emergence of British medical experts, http://www.tagung05.unibonn.de/Papers/Chai.pdf,JL)
For Menger, all things are subject to the laws of cause and effect (Menger 1950:51). But which cause and which effect? A fundamental prerequisite to understanding why people consume certain things is to first comprehend how they learn to associate these things to certain consequences, and how the strength of such associations change over time. Rather than define a good as anything that is exchanged on a market, he defined a good as anything that can be causally associated with the servicing of human wants (Menger 1950:2). In this way, what is and what is not a good is not constant or set over time, rather things can loose their goods characteristics according to what consumers know, learn and do (Menger, 1950:56). Acts of consumption can

become complex since a thing does not need to serve a human want directly in order to be considered a good, rather it can become a indirect good by serving as a input into a transformation process which results in
the production of final goods (Menger, 1950). This is problematic because whether or not such a indirect good is used successfully depends on not only its objective characteristics but on the consumers ability to use and transform it as well as the other higher order goods that are simultaneously used in the transformation. For example, a consumer may know how to operate a mobile telephone which may be in perfect working order, but if she is outside the networks range, the phone is useless to the consu mer. Similarly, if the consumer does not have the adequate knowledge to engage in a mobile phone contract, the phone will remain a thing rather than a good. Menger also recognized that the duration it takes to consume is not just a costly input, but al so complicates the act of discerning what the causal associations are between goods and observed effects (Menger, 1950:68). Hence,

complexity increases the possibility of consumers making errors and mistakes in their decisions.

In this way, the degree of complexity which the consumer faces exponentially increases the more goods she uses and the more knowledge and command these require, as well as the time taken between engaging in a transformation and observing its results. Juxtaposing his approach to both the neoclassical and institutional methods of studying consumption change, there are simultaneously some interesting similarities and notable differences to observe. Both Lancaster (Lancaster, 1966) as well as Stigler and Becker (Stigler and Becker, 1977) make an important start in capturing the transformative nature of consumption by specifying that utility is not a direct function of market goods consumed, but rather a function of final goods which are produced from market goods. This enables scholars to study how consumption patterns change with the introduction of new goods (Bianchi, 2002). However some problems still exist. While a transformation does occur, it is not one that addresses how a thing becomes a good, since the model starts with specifying given goods that can be changed with full certainty into final goods (Ruprecht, 2002). Furthermore, these models do not fully take into account the impact of increasing complexity that results from an increase in the number of inputs used. Other than perhaps affecting how much time it takes to consume, the actual number of inputs used, their complexity and how they relate to each other are not explicitly accounted for. Indeed the way such models treat time as just another input is itself questionable (Steedman, 2001). In this sense Menger seriously challenges economists to study consumption as a phenomena that is not just related to price and income effects, but also related to how consumer actually learn to consume and make associations between goods and their effects. In comparison to institutionalist approaches, Mengers system atic examination of consumption via the law of cause and effect bring into question their tendency to simply rely on social influences to explain the nature of consumer behavior (Trigg, 2001). Yet at the same time, Menger does recognize that certain institutions

do play an important role in guiding consumer behavior. Specifically, he suggests that the scientific knowledge that comes with economic development improves consumers welfare by

promoting those consumption technologies which are in some sense relatively more objectively accurate(Menger, 1950:53). Such progress will essentially wipe out those goods that are consumed on pretenses that are essentially false, such as aphrodisiacs, love potions and amulets. These he labeled imaginary goods and argued that they occur when 1) attributes are erroneously ascribed to things
that do not really posses them, or 2) when non-existent human needs are mistakenly thought to exist. Notably, in the first category he mentions the majority of medicines administered to the sick by peoples of early civilization and in the second category he mentions medicines for diseases that do not actually exist (Menger 1950:53). Without doubt, experts play an important

role in influencing contemporary consumption patterns. Studying how consumers react to information from

other consumers and experts has been widely explored both in the optimizing framework (Akerlof, 1980;Banerjee, 1993;Bikhchandani et al., 1992;Conlisk, 1980;Nelson, 1970;Rosen, 1981) as well as from a more heterodox perspective (Cowan et al., 1997;Mokyr, 2002;Morlacchi, 2004;Rogers, 1962). Beyond economics, many scholars point out that how agents coordinate learning is not only vital to understanding economic behavior, but also to accounting for how civilizations evolve and function in general (Bandura, 1986;Richerson and Boyd, 2004). Continuing Mengers concern for how consumers cope in increasingly complex environments, it has been postulated that the growing predominance of service industries reflects a greater role for experts in forming low level consumption preferences (Earl and Potts, 2004). Consequently such conditions have been argued to both stimulate and require greater coordination between supply and demand (Langlois and Cosgel, 1998;Scitovsky, 1976).

Stiegler cant measure individual emotional reactionsdata cant be generalized Paul Saurette 6 Associate Proffessor of Political Studies at the University of Ottawa (You dissin me? Humiliation and post 9/11 global politics, Review of International Studies (2006), 32, 495522)
Investigating the role of humiliation in global politics is not, however, an easy task, and it is important to note a number of potential methodological challenges and solutions. For even if we do not accept the arid behaviouralist model of the social sciences, attempts to study and explore the influence of emotions and other psychological factors of interpersonal dynamics and interactions do face

significant difficulties. It is not easy, even theoretically, to isolate specific emotions or other psychological considerations from one another. The emotional realm is, as it were, fuzzy. People are rarely self-conscious of the full slate of factors that are driving their thinking, their decision-making and their actions. In particular, individuals rarely explicitly monitor the precise emotions they feel and are perhaps even less able to accurately analyse their impact. Moreover, even if they are able to monitor and accurately analyse the impact of their emotions, they often do not want to openly express their influence. These difficulties are multiplied when we try to examine not only individual or interpersonal dynamics, but instead much more complex intergroup dynamics. For then we need to overcome not only the difficulties of understanding multiple individuals. We also need to consider the ways in which groups might also be said to experience and embody these emotional dynamics in ways that are more than simply the sum of its individual parts. And this situation is complicated even further when the situation is overtly political and thus individuals and groups have many reasons not to reveal the real impact of certain emotional and psychological elements even if they were able to correctly analyse them in a group setting.

ECONOMIC SECURITY

GENERAL

AT NEOCLEUS
Neocleous uses a generalizing ahistorical approach thats in itself formulated in the name of security Dayan 9 Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at the New School for Social Research, lecturer at Amsterdam University College (Hilla
Dayan, Critique of Security: Review, Canadian Journal of Law and Society, Volume 24, Number 2, Project Muse)//KP
The book's main grievance is that the

fetish of securityvery broadly defined to include security both in the economic and in the political senseis the root of anti-democratic measures, massive repression, and socio-economic injustice. In chapter 3, which deals with the relationship between social and national security, the overriding argument is that liberal democracies are, almost by definition, security states in the worst possible sense. The United States in particular is held responsible, given examples such as the New Deal and the Marshall Plan, for enforcing economic security intertwined with political and military interests on "the whole world, [which] was to be inclded in this new, 'secure' global liberal order" (p. 103). In this account, the desire to sustain a capitalist socio-economic order is
portrayed as not much different from either the security obsessions of, for example, Israel and the apartheid regime of South Africa (p. 63) or the policies of any European welfare state. This

is a strikingly ahistorical approach that bundles up highly complex social, economic, and political systems into a generic straitjacket. Because of this overly generalizing line of argument, Critique of Security does not add much to the insights of critical theory dating back to the 1970s, which has already dealt extensively with authoritarian practices and tendencies of liberal-capitalist orders.2 Moreover, it curiously ignores the fact that earlier post- or neo-Marxist critiques of the liberal-capitalist order have been formulated primarily in the name of securitythe demand to secure and protect the status of workers, women, minorities, and the environment, for example.3 Especially under the current conditions of insecurity generated by a global financial crisis, Neocleous' attack on welfare security seems misplaced or incomplete. The interesting tension between popular and progressive demands for security from the ravages of capitalism, on the one hand, and security as a project of protecting the capitalist order, on the other hand, is not dealt with at all. Instead, the author pleads with us to simply eliminate the desire for security from our lives, or, in other words, to [End Page 291] throw the baby out with the bathwater. Still, Critique of Security serves as a useful reminder that demands for

collective protection from the conditions generated by the systemic failures of the capitalist system must be accompanied by a sober re-evaluation of the limits and responsibilities of the state and its capacity to abuse power, especially in times of economic and political crisis and insecurity. It is atimely contribution that raises questions about the current responses by states to the global economic crisis. Now that all state resources are pulled and stretched to put capitalism back on track, whose security is really protected?

Neocleous critique is too radical its counterproductive and undermines its political capacity - only the perm solves Nunes 12 Research Fellow at the department of Politics and International studies of the University of Warwick (Joo Nunes,
August 2012, Reclaiming the political: Emancipation and critique in security studies, Security Dialogue Vol. 43 No. 4, Sage Journals)//KP
Meanwhile, the problematization of securitizing practices is seen to confirm a wider malaise with the very idea of security. The continuum between the critique of securitization (in specific cases) and the critique of security (in itself) is present in a recent statement by Ole Wver, in which he highlights the inevitable effects of any securitization in the form of a logic of necessity, the narrowing of choice, the empowerment of a smaller elite (2011: 469), before arguing that the concept of security is Schmittian, because it defines security in terms of exception, emergency and a decision (2011: 478, emphasis in original). In fact, a profound distrust towards security is present in the work of Michael Dillon, who understands

security as a generative principle of formation (1996: 127), a register of meaning that entails a politics of calculability, closure, exclusion and violence. Dillon (1996: 130) identifies within Western thought a metaphysical politics of security that makes politics a matter of command; membership of a political community a matter of obedience; love synonymous with a policing order; order a function of discipline; and identity a narcissistic paranoia. Similar concerns are present in the work of Didier Bigo, for whom security is a liberal political register that strives to make the world calculable, makes a fantasy of homogeneity and seeks the end of any resistances or struggles (2008: 109). Mark Neocleous (2011: 186) takes these concerns in a more radical direction by linking security to fascism . In the works of these authors, one can identify a tendency to see security as inherently connected to exclusion, totalization and even violence. The idea of a logic of security is now widely
would probably be disagreement over the degree to which this logic is inescapable,

present in the critical security studies literature. Claudia Aradau (2008: 72), for example, writes of an exclusionary logic of security underpinning and legitimizing forms of domination. Rens van Munster (2007: 239) assumes a logic of security, predicated upon a political organization on the exclusionary basis of fear. Laura Shepherd (2008: 70) also identifies a liberal and highly problematic organizational logic in security. Although there

it is symptomatic of an overwhelmingly pessimistic outlook that a great number of critical scholars are now making the case for moving away from security. The normative preference for desecuritization has been picked up in attempts to contest, resist and unmake

security (Aradau, 2004; Huysmans, 2006; Bigo, 2007). For these contributions, security cannot be reconstructed and political transformation can only be brought about when security and its logic are removed from the equation (Aradau, 2008; Van Munster, 2009; Peoples, 2011). This tendency in the literature is problematic for the critique of security in at least three ways. First, it constitutes a blind spot in the effort of politicization. The assumption of an exclusionary, totalizing or violent logic of security can be seen as an essentialization and a moment of closure. To be faithful to itself, the politicization of security would need to recognize that there is nothing
natural or necessary about security and that security as a paradigm of thought or a register of meaning is also a construction that depends upon its reproduction and performance through practice. The exclusionary and violent meanings

that have been attached to security are themselves the result of social and historical processes, and can thus be changed. Second, the institution of this apolitical realm runs counter to the purposes of critique by foreclosing an engagement with the different ways in which security may be constructed. As Matt McDonald (2012) has argued, because security means different things for different people, one must always understand it in context. Assuming from the start that security implies the narrowing of choice and the empowerment of an elite forecloses the acknowledgment of security claims that may seek to achieve exactly the opposite: alternative possibilities in an already narrow debate and the contestation of elite power.5 In connection to this, the claims to insecurity put forward by individuals and groups run the risk of being neglected if the desire to be more secure is identified with a compulsion towards totalization, and if aspirations to a life with a degree of predictability are identified with violence. Finally, this tendency blunts critical security studies as a resource for practical politics. By overlooking the possibility of reconsidering security from within opting instead for its replacement with other ideals the critical field weakens its capacity to confront head-on the exceptionalist connotations that security has acquired in policymaking circles. Critical
scholars run the risk of playing into this agenda when they tie security to exclusionary and violent practices, thereby failing to question security actors as they take those views for granted and act as if they were inevitable. Overall, security is just too important both as a concept and as a political instrument to be simply abandoned by critical scholars. As McDonald (2012: 163) has put it, If security is politically powerful, is the foundation of political legitimacy for a range of actors, and involves the articulation of our core values and the means of their protection, we

cannot afford to allow dominant discourses of security to be confused with the essence of security itself. In sum, the trajectory that critical security studies has taken in recent years has significant limitations. The
politicization of security has made extraordinary progress in problematizing predominant security ideas and practices; however, it has paradoxically resulted in a depoliticization of the meaning of security itself. By

foreclosing the possibility of alternative notions of security, this imbalanced politicization weakens the analytical capacity of critical security studies, undermines its ability to function as a political resource and runs the risk of being politically counterproductive . Seeking to address these limitations, the next section revisits
emancipatory understandings of security

The alternative fails to change the institution its just wishful thinking Kobzar 9 member of the faculty in the Department of Social Science at York University (Olena Kobzar, September/October
2009, The canon is the solution, Radical Philosophy, Reviews Section, p. 58)//KP
Had Neocleous chosen to engage directly this debate about the legacies of the pre-capitalist state system, it is unlikely he would have been so quick to identify the modern security discourse so unequivocally with what he posits as some rather abstract requirements of capitalism. Still, his own counsel of how we should respond to this security discourse is certainly worth considering. In his conclusion, he calls

on us to be bold enough to be open to debate, to be brave enough to accept that insecurity is part of the human condition and to tolerate the uncertainties, ambiguities and insecurities that come with being human. What we need to do, he avows, is to fight for an alternative political language and to develop a new political language more adequate to the kind of society we want. One is tempted in the circumstances to remind Neocleous of the oft-cited line from Marxs Theses on Feuerbach where he chided the so-called Young Hegelians for the practical inadequacy of their contemplative materialism: The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in a various ways; the point is to change it.
This particular charge follows upon an earlier admonition Marx has penned as he tried to come to terms with his own intellectual forbearers in A Contribution to the Critique of Hegels Philosophy of Right: The

weapon of criticism cannot in any case replace the criticism of weapons, material force must be overthrown by material force. Perhaps it is a telling symptom of just how entrenched the liberal discourse of security has become that so eloquent a Marxist censor of the capitalist order as Neocleous no longer imagined it possible to identify the social forces that might oppose it but instead fastens on the strategy of critique and normative wish as the way forward

The alternative fails to change the institution its just wishful thinking Kobzar 9 member of the faculty in the Department of Social Science at York University (Olena Kobzar, September/October
2009, The canon is the solution, Radical Philosophy, Reviews Section, p. 58)//KP
Had Neocleous chosen to engage directly this debate about the legacies of the pre-capitalist state system, it is unlikely he would have been so quick to identify the modern security discourse so unequivocally with what he posits as some rather abstract requirements of capitalism. Still, his own counsel of how we should respond to this security discourse is certainly worth considering. In his conclusion, he calls

on us to be bold enough to be open to debate, to be brave enough to accept that insecurity is part of the human condition and to tolerate the uncertainties, ambiguities and insecurities that come with being human. What we need to do, he avows, is to fight for an alternative political language and to develop a new political language more adequate to the kind of society we want. One is tempted in the circumstances to remind Neocleous of the oft-cited line from Marxs Theses on Feuerbach where he chided the so-called Young Hegelians for the practical inadequacy of their contemplative materialism: The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in a various ways; the point is to change it.
This particular charge follows upon an earlier admonition Marx has penned as he tried to come to terms with his own intellectual forbearers in A Contribution to the Critique of Hegels Philosophy of Right: The

weapon of criticism cannot in any case replace the criticism of weapons, material force must be overthrown by material force. Perhaps it is a telling symptom of just how entrenched the liberal discourse of security has become that so eloquent a Marxist censor of the capitalist order as Neocleous no longer imagined it possible to identify the social forces that might oppose it but instead fastens on the strategy of critique and normative wish as the way forward

LINK

NO LINK
No link they critique history of economic diplomacy security measures are no longer dictated by economics Zoellick 12 former World Bank president, senior fellow at Harvard Universitys Belfer Center for Science and International
Affairs, and distinguished visiting fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics (Robert Zoellick, November 2012, The Currency of Power, Foreign Policy, http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/10/08/the_currency_of_power?page=0,0)//KP
time the United States will not get its act together, so others had best attend to them." Carr's insight -- that the Earlier this year, Bob Carr, Australia's foreign minister and a longtime friend of the United States, observed with Aussie clarity: "The United States is one budget deal away from restoring its global preeminence." He added a caution: "There are powers in the Asia-Pacific that are whispering that this

connection between economics and security will determine America's future -- is sound and persuasive. Yet ever since the rise of "national security" as a concept at the start of the Cold War, economics has become the unappreciated subordinate of U.S. foreign policy. Today, the power of deficits, debt, and economic trend lines to shape

security is staring the United States in the face. Others see it, even if America does not. Carr, a student of U.S. history, would probably not be surprised to learn that his warning echoes words drafted by Alexander Hamilton, America's first Treasury secretary, for President George Washington's farewell address: The new nation, Hamilton urged, must "cherish credit as a means of strength and security." Ironically, it took an admiral -- Mike Mullen, then chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff -- to recall Hamilton's warning about the link between credit and security. Mullen seized attention not by pointing out a danger to the fleet, but by telling CNN, "The most significant threat to our national security is our debt." Mullen's observation should not come as a surprise, because strategists in uniform often look to history as their laboratory. They also have to match means and capabilities to achieve ends. Officers at staff colleges may be inspired by the exciting chapters on Napoleon Bonaparte's bold campaigns, but the astute also discover that the key to Britain's victory in the Napoleonic Wars is found in the dry accounts of the budgets of William Pitt the Younger, the chancellor of the Exchequer and prime minister. By restoring Britain's credit after its costly imbroglio with the American colonies, Pitt enabled his country to fight a long war -- and even repeatedly finance coalition partners -- without choking Britain's economy. In contrast, consider

the foreign-policy debates of this U.S. election year. Journalists and commentators expound about wars and rumors of wars, political leaders and upheavals, human rights and duties to intervene, missiles and their defense. All serious and important topics. But how about a question on the eurozone crisis that threatens the integration of Europe, one of the 20th century's greatest security-policy achievements and America's closest ally and partner? What about America's connections to growth in East Asia, where economics is the coin of the realm? The reply is that these topics concern economics, not foreign policy! America's security strategists seem to have lost the ability to integrate the two. Their perspectives on economics do not extend much beyond sanctions policies and paying for defense budgets. At best, the role of economics is assumed, not analyzed. We scarcely understand its effects on power, influence, diplomacy, ideas, and human rights. At worst, economic problems have become a justification for a "come home, America" isolationism. And economists -- absorbed with mathematical models and debates about quantitative easing and stimulus policies -- are content to operate in their separate universe. Some, on the left and the right, disparage the role of economics in foreign policy as crass
commercialism, narrow business interests, or, worse, affording undue influence to bankers. Others view international economics and trade policy as narrow specialties involving technical negotiations that just aggravate domestic constituencies. Yet this

separation of economics from U.S. foreign policy and security policy reflects a shift from earlier American experience. For its first 150 years, the American foreign-policy tradition was deeply infused with economic logic. Unfortunately, thinking about international political economy has become a lost art in the United States. How did this happen?

AT IMPACT TURNS
Securitization empirically succeeds methods are in need of constant evolution Caldwell and Williams 12 Professor of political science at Pepperdine University; associate professor of political
Ken Booths

science at Pepperdine University (Dan Caldwell; Robert E. Williams Jr., Seeking Security in an Insecure World: Second Edition, Rowaman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. 2012, p.258-260 )//KP

1979 book entitled Strategy and Ethnocentrism noted the failure of most security analysts to take adequate account 0f differences among cultures. In the Cold War context in which Booth was writing, the Western emphasis on rationality as the foundation 0f nuclear deterrence theory was an especially striking example of this problem. Almost a decade later, however, scholars were still noting the pitfalls of ethnocentrism due to
American dominance of the eld. However much Western policy makers and scholars may have become sensitive to the problems po sed by the difficulty of seeing beyond their own cultural constructs, we suspect that ethnocentrism

may be an even greater problem today, in the middle of an ongoing struggle against mostly Muslim terrorist organizations, than it was during the Cold War. If our conclusions to this point have been correct that seeking security today requires countering threats from nonstate actors, recognizing threats that are transnational and, consequently, indivisible in character, dealing with the problems of unintended consequences, and operating in parts of the world that are especially unfamiliar to most of us in the West then the ability to understand and even to empathize with those in other cultures is more important than ever before. What policy makers, analysts, and even entire societies
understand by security varies more than we ordinarily acknowledge, with the variations relating to political, social, techn ological, and other circumstances. The is so because political

meaning of security differs across cultures, but within a culture it is also subject to change over time. This and social differences affect what societies desire to protect, because technological advances alter the types of threats that must be protected against, and, most importantly, because the very subjectivity of the concept of security ensures that individuals in different situations will value social goods and assess threats differently. The concept of security, to put it simply, is socially constructed. To the extent
that security studies" has some common content that transcends political and cultural differences in the world, the inuence of the privileged elites in the world must be credited. Certainly, the fears of male defense intellectuals discussing security at an arms control seminar in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the early 1960s were quite different from the fears of Congolese women living through revolution and ethnic conict in that same period. Not surprisingly, security studies in that era paid little attention to threats facing women in Africa. Circumstances, in large measure (but with some input from psychological factors), determine what we fear. Many feminists, noting the greater vulnerability of women to acts of sexual violence and physical abuse, have suggested that feminine conceptions of security differ from masculine conceptions as a consequence. Because men are generally free from the fear of sexual violence and physical abuse, male-formulated notions of security manifest no concern for security as freedom from fear of sexual assault. Similarly, security as dened by academics and strategists living and working in liberal democra cies has tended to ignore the possibility that the state may generate fear among its own citizens. As we noted in chapter 11, since

World War II, developing states have been the scenes of most of the world's violent conflict. Much of that conflict has been intrastate and
form of insecurity that most of the world actually experiences. As Mohammed Ayoob has observed, the

interethnic. This in itself should alert us to the divergence between our ethnocentric concern wit h insecurity dened in terms of external threats and the

weak states are internal in character" and are characteristic of the early stages of stale matting? A sophisticated understanding
of security must take such considerations into account, particularly if concern for human welfare characteristic of human security or concern for complementary strategies characteristic of cooperative security is part of the mix. Perhaps even more important than our ability to understand the impact of different circumstances on the way security is dened is the ability to assess our own circumstances accurately. Th e long litany of threats described in this book or in the threat assessments produced by many governments around the world may suggest not only that we live in an insecure world but that the problems we face are insoluble. In fact, on the world, including Europe,

primary security concerns of

many fronts there are reasons for optimism. In many parts of where the two most destructive wars in history occurred within a span of thirty years, war has become unthinkable. Conicts between democracies are routinely resolved without resort to force. While intrastate war continues to claim tens of thousands of lives each year in the developing world, elsewhere humankind seems to have achieved some success in understanding and addressing the causes of war. There are, today, fewer nuclear weapons stockpiled in the worlds arsenals than at any time in the last
half-century. The United States and Russia continue to acknowledge a shared responsibility to reduce and, more importantly, secure their stockpiles of weapons and fissile material. The

vast majority of the world's states have pledged that they will never attempt to acquire nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons; many are active in efforts to deny the troublesome minority of statesand all nonstate actorsthe ability to acquire weapons of mass destruction. There has been signicant progress in the light against infectious diseases. The spread of HIV/AIDS has slowed. The
eradication of malaria appears to be a real possibility. States, international governmental organizations, and nongovernmental organizations are working together to prevent and treat diseases among people who have never witnessed a vaccination program or visited a medical clinic.

There is cause for optimism, but not for complacency. Seeking security in an insecure world has always been an extraordinary challenge. Threats evolve, sometimes very rapidly; measures devised to enhance security will, in time, become ineffective. Think of the impact of the invention of gunpowder on castles and city walls, or of the appearance of drug-resistant diseases on vaccination programs. The natureand numberof the threats we face is part

of the challenge, but so is our interdependence. More than ever, the security of people all over the world is intertwined. This fact compels us to think creatively about security.

IMPACT TURNS

AMERICA GOOD
Engaging Latin America and promoting our economic institutions is the only ethical option all others break conflict and insecurity Goldgeier and Volker 13 Dean of the School of International Service at American University; Executive Director of the
McCain Institute for International Leadership at Arizona State University *Goldeier and Volker were the co-chairs of the bipartisan task force that created this report, other individuals contributed to the report (James Goldeier; Kurt Volker, March 2013, Setting Priorities for American Leadership: A New National Security Strategy for the United States, Project for a United and Strong America, http://www.nationalsecuritystrategy.org/pdf/pusa-report-march-2013.pdf)//KP
I. Americas Role in the World A nation of unique capacity and responsibility

The United States remains the single greatest economic, military, and political power in the world. It has a unique ability to mobilize actions by allies and friends and to project force and influence on a global scale. Through its own commitment to democratic
values, its protection of human rights, freedom, economic opportunity, and justice, and its capacity for adaptation and renewal, the United States continues to inspire efforts to realize these values in societies around the world. For years to come,

no other nation can play this role. The world is not a passive and neutral playing field, but one in which competing views and interests are constantly being pressed. US interests are continually being challenged. The United States is often a principal target of other nations and groups grievances and a global reference point around which some organize their own actions. In other cases, events are
driven purely by local and regional dynamics having nothing to do with the United States, yet nonetheless, have a significant impact on US values and interests. In this environment,

a lack of active US leadership can lead to a steady erosion of US interests. The United States not only has the unique ability to lead, but an imperative to do sofor the protection of its own national interests and values, as well as for the advancement of democratic values, human development, and security around the world. The protection of these values in turn reinforces the long-term security and well-being of the United States. While no other nation can exercise such global leadership, the United States is by no means the only global actor, nor
does it have unlimited resources. The United States must apply its considerable capacities in ways that mobilize and complement the efforts of others, creating a sustainable long-term approach that both confronts short-term crises and shifts the broader playing field in the direction of US interests and values. With the enormous financial pressures facing the United States and its allies,

there is a strong temptation to scale back Americas role in the world. But in view of the challenges to US values and interests around the world, any short-term savings would come at significant long-term cost. The imperative is to engage strategically and proactively. Enduring values and interests The United
States has enduring national security interests that have shaped the countrys role in the world throughout its history. Thes e interests include: the security of the United States and its citizens, as well as its allies and partners; and the economic vitality of the United States and the global economy. But the distinguishing feature of Americas global role since its founding has been its broad-based conception of national security the belief that the advancement of an open, rules-based international order that promotes universal values of liberty, democracy, human dignity, and economic freedom is essential to the security and economic vitality of the United States. Indeed, the benefits for the United States would more than compensate for the potential loss of relative power that might result in such a world.

In the long term, Americas aim must be a strong and vibrant nation, leading a world of peaceful, democratic states working cooperatively to establish a more secure, just, and prosperous global community.
II. The Strategic Environment A world with serious and disparate challenges More people today live under systems that are democratic, market-driven, and respect human freedom than in any previous period in human history. Millions have been lifted out of poverty, and the number of people dying in conflicts worldwide is at a historic low. In these crucial respects, human living conditions have improved, and the United States remains in an extraordinarily strong position globally. Nevertheless,

the challenges confronting US interests and values in the world remain substantial and complex. These challenges range from a full spectrum of security threats to economic, environmental, ideological, political, and humanitarian challenges. Actors who seek to undermine a cooperative international systemfrom ideologically driven extremists to corrupt authoritarian leaderschallenge the efforts of states seeking to expand liberal norms and values. In addition, the widespread perception of a war weary and economically weakened United States power is dispersed among individuals, startups, movements, NGOs, groups, and rising powers. Increased movement of people, information, and resources has empowered transnational
the hands of governments, militaries, and large corporations, today

increases the propensity of those with alternative agendas to pursue such agendas aggressively. Three fundamental shifts are serving to transform the geopolitical landscape: Impacts of globalization. The age of the internet has ushered in an unprecedented empowerment of individuals and small actors. Whereas in the past, power was concentrated in

organizations seeking to gain power in weak and failing states. These new actors, interconnected on a national and global level, can often mobilize faster and have greater impact than traditional actors. This massive redistribution of relative power has great potential for good, but has simultaneously introduced unprecedented risk. The unfolding legacy of the Arab Spring. Developments in the Arab world are among the most significant geopolitical changes since the fall of the Soviet Union. The demand for change has unleashed a historic struggle: authoritarian dictators seeking to cling to domination; militant and extremist groups seeking to replace democratic systems of law with their own ideological tyranny; and a new generation of Arab citizens demanding greater freedom, justice, and accountability in the face of these two unpalatable alternatives. The results of this struggle will have a profound effect on regional and global security, on democracy and human development in the Arab world, and on US values and interests for generations. The rise of Asia. Both in terms of its increasing economic influence and its nexus of important strategic challenges, the rise of Asia constitutes a fundamental global shift. Global trade and economic flows are increasingly growing with respect to Asia. Hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out o f poverty and now drive Asias burgeoning middle class societies. But while Chinas embrace of market-oriented capitalism has propelled its economic rise, its autocratic regime and increasingly assertive military posture have raised consternation across the region. Indias dynamic and growing middle class holds great promise, while a nucl eararmed North Korea continues to fuel regional tensions. At

United States faces a broad and diffuse set of strategic challenges that include: A full spectrum of security threats: ideological extremists, including terrorists operating out of the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia, often with regional or global ambitions; proliferation of weapons of mass destruction to state and non-state actors; cybersecurity threats from major powers and networked groups and individuals; fragile and failed states creating conditions for threats to American interests and humanitarian crises; and drug-fueled crime and violence in Latin America. Political violence and suppression of human rights. Despite positive long-term trends, democratization efforts have suffered real setbacks in recent years, and regimes around the world continue to abuse
the same time, the

human rights with little accountability. This includes the many still functioning dictatorships (in open conflict, as in Syria) or in the tyranny of armed groups acting in largely ungoverned territories (such as in parts of Africa and Asia). This repression of basic rights sows the seeds for future instability and conflict and for further challenges to American long-term values and interests. While the United States faces mounting fiscal debt challenges and an uncertain economic recovery, Americas allies in Europe and Asia are also struggling from their own serious economic

Fragilities and disparities in the international economic order.

Economic power is shifting rapidly to Asia, including to non-democratic societies and stateowned mega-enterprises. The growing global economy has produced an unprecedented demand for scarce resources including water, energy, and certain raw materials. New technologies contribute to major movements in productivity, jobs, and wealth. The ability of the major democratic, market economies to sustain a level, rules-based global economic playing field is under strain. Energy and climate. The growing global economy has also led to massive growth in energy consumption. One consequence is that increasing CO2 emissions, particularly among developing countries, far outweigh any potential for moderation in emissions in Europe and the United States. Clean energy technologies are currently unable to compete effectively against low-cost, high-emission fuels. The prospect of longterm changes in climate that this can introduce has the potential to significantly increase global economic and security challenges and undermine the stability of some governments and societies. In addition, growing demand for fossil fuels has empowered hostile regimes in Iran, Venezuela, and elsewhere. III. Core Principles Navigating this strategic environment, the United States should be guided by three core principles: 1) A foundation of American strength To
problems. be effective in exercising a global leadership role in support of a liberal, democratic world order, the United States must maintain its own core strength. In the first instance,

this means strengthening its national economy so it can play a leading role in promoting a liberal global economic order through rules-based institutions. In parallel, this also means maintaining the worlds most capable military and national
security apparatus. It means consciously working to maintain effective, interoperable capacities with allies and partners around the world. Finally, it means using our limited resources wisely and to the greatest effect, by choosing where and how to expend them, and in leveraging the complementary resources of allies and partners. 2)

A proactive US global leadership role Because of its unique capabilities, global interests, and influence on the actions and expectations of others, the United States must play an active, day-to-day role in shaping events, consistent with long-term values and strategy. It is not sufficient only to react to events as they emerge. The United States must work with other like-minded nations to shape common action on a global agenda. It must be prepared to commit resources behind common action, and focus on implementation of policy, while urging others to do the same. The United States must also seek to work with those with whom it disagrees to advance long-term values and interests, even if those nations or groups in the end choose not to support common efforts. 3) The advancement of universal values The United States must actively work to advance a liberal, democratic world order. This means a world in which people choose
free market economics.

their own governments, and in which those governments in turn are accountable to their people, committed to the protection of human rights and freedom, the rule of law, and

It is a world in which nations engage in trade and investment on a level playing field and resolve their differences peacefully. Often we sacrifice the advancement of this kind of world order in favor of other perceived, short-term interests. The result perpetuates problems, rather than resolves them and raises the cost of resolving them even higher in the long-term. Advancing such a liberal, democratic world order requires rhetorical support, to be sure, but also tangible and sustained actions. It includes supporting pro-democracy groups, assisting emerging democracies, protecting and working together with long-standing democratic
allies, pressing international institutions to insist on democratic values, and in extraordinary cases, using military force to stop grave human rights abuses. IV. Investing in Core Capacities

In order to maintain a foundation of American strength and pursue a robust leadership role, the United States must organize its economic, military, and diplomatic resources in more strategic ways. Over
the past two decades, annual US expenditures on national security (including defense, foreign assistance, and diplomacy) have consistently been in the range of three to five percent of GDP. While we do not advocate any change from these basic levels, what we do advocate is a more strategic use of these resources. Core, long-term national

A strong economic foundation is the prerequisite for sustaining American global leadership. Part of this requires tackling Americas mounting debt levels. As stated by a former chairman of the
investments should focus on five key pillars: A. Economic Vitality

Joints Chiefs of Staff, the single-biggest threat to our national security is our debt. American dependence on foreign governments that hold large amounts of U S debt, including China, only reinforces the importance of this challenge. In the immediate term, a more robust economy would put us on a more fiscally sustainable track. But sustaining the resource commitments that advance our long-term national security interests will require a serious bipartisan effort to reduce the national debt. A second key component is competitiveness. As other nations join the rising global economy, they are investing in education, infrastructure, technology and more. The United States still retains core advantages, most importantly in the areas of governance, innovation, rule of law, higher education, and entrepreneurship. Other nations, even those currently enjoying rising prosperity, may eventually encounter obstacles relating to business climate, corruption, aging populations, and the rising demands of an educated middle class. Nonetheless,

the United States must do better in investing in its own productivity and competitiveness. Finally, the third component of economic vitality is the global environment in which the United States competes. A competitive US economy requires a level playing field in order to generate long-term success for American citizens and, ultimately, to sustain the investments necessary for advancing national security. This should include continued efforts to expand free trade through bilateral, regional, and global arrangements
. B. Preeminent Military Capabilities Maintaining the US militarys global preeminence is vital to both protecting American v alues and interests and providing the infrastructure for integrating the efforts of other allies and partners. Clearly, the United States pays disproportionately for this global security structure. US defense spending is triple that of our European allies combined and six times that of China. Yet a strong military is necessary for the pursuit of US interests with respect to allies and adversaries alike. As the United States brings its deficits and debt under control in order to assure economic vitality, it will need to absorb some reductions in defense spending. The defense establishment itself can be far more efficient; though reductions that are too severe and lack a clear strategy risk undermining Americas military preem inence. US defense cuts should go hand-in-hand with a strategy for strengthening Americas defense capabilities in the long-term. To defend American security interests and ensure the widest range of strategic policy options, US military forces must maintain the ability to: deter any potential military rival and defeat any potential adversary by maintaining a significant qualitative military superiority; retain a US presence overseas sufficient to anchor regional stability, partner with allied military forces, and serve as hubs for contingency operations; protect the global commons, including the maritime, air, and space domains, as well as cyberspace; conduct counterterrorism operations around the globe as necessary; curb nuclear proliferation; conduct operations, when necessary, to prevent mass atrocities and halt abuses by predatory states, carry out disaster response, emergency evacuation, crisis management, and postconflict stabilization. When necessary to conduct military operations, the United States should seek to act in concert with allies, while preserving the capacity to conduct successful operations on its own, anywhere

Strong Allies and Partners It is essential to the United States that our allies and partners have strong, healthy economies and defense
in the world. At the same time, the United States should help expand the capabilities of allies and partners by providing equipment and training, and through joint exercises and capacity-building activities. C.

capacities, giving them the means to contribute to addressing global challenges. Europe remains crucial to our common efforts to manage global challenges. NATO is the principal vehicle for structuring US security relations with Europe, as well as other non-European partners taking part in common operations. Ensuring its continued vitality

should remain a top priority for American leaders. Likewise, the United States should continue to invest in strengthening the US-EU relationship, particularly in areas where EU members have delegated responsibility to collective EU institutions. The United States should also continue to give priority to alliance relationships in the Asia-Pacific region, where support for our security partnerships is at an all-time high and much could be done to integrate our capabilities bilaterally using NATO standards as a guide. Similar efforts are needed with our security partnerships in the Middle East, particularly given the threat from Iran. And the United States must sustain a comprehensive upgrade in our

The United States should also continue to support efforts to enhance the capacity of regional organizations, such as the Organization of American States, the African Union, and ASEAN, to address regional challenges. Finally, the United States should continue to engage
partnerships with democracies rising in power and influence, such as India, Brazil, Indonesia, and Turkey. major powers through inclusive institutions including the UN. Given the veto power and frequent intransigence of Russia and China, the UN Security Council will continue to pose serious challenges for advancing core values but it remains an important forum for pursuing cooperative action. The G-20 has proven useful for discussing key economic issues, though it often lacks the like-mindedness necessary for concerted action. At the same time, the United States will need to look to complementary venues for engaging likeminded nations to advance democratic values and shared interests. It must also enhance partnerships with non-state actors, including NGOs and private sector entities that are influential and that support goals consistent with US interests and values. D. Effective US Foreign Assistance

US foreign assistance has been a core element in advancing American values and national security interests for decades. Although often the target of budget critiques, foreign assistance can be more cost effective than other means for advancing American values and interests. When applied effectively and in concert with public and private partners, it can prevent crises and avoid the need for more costly humanitarian interventions at a later stage. For this potential to be realized, foreign assistance must be closely aligned with and reinforced by broader US goals and strategies. Foreign aid should include humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, security assistance and training that expands the capabilities of allies and partners, training aimed at preventing human rights abuses and harm to civilians, and assistance for democracy development. Such aid should prioritize sustainable models of economic growth, and not merely provide relief. As with
the goals of the Millennium Challenge Corporation, such aid should reinforce good governance, local ownership, private sector development, and investment in citizens. US government-funded support should be viewed as only one source of economic engagement that can be effectively leveraged. Private sector trade and investment flows dwarf government-sponsored assistance efforts.

The United States should actively work to partner with the private sector, foreign donors, charitable organizations and others in order to increase coherence in economic engagement and to generate sustainable, multiplier effects.
V. Challenges and Opportunities On

E. Effective Global Public Engagement With the distribution of power and information that characterizes the internet age, foreign governments are but one group of interlocutors

that the United States will need to influence, support, and, in some cases, oppose. Internet and social media users, global and local TV, radio, print, and internet media, NGOs, civic activists and organizers, and business leaders are all critical to the advancement of democratic values, to the process of change and development in societies, and to the shaping of global political, economic, and security developments. Activists in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya have fostered more change in the Middle East in three years than governments have in fifty. The United States must invest in the tools necessary to exercise influence within this broadening of global participation. The objective should be to reinforce the broader aims of US national security strategy as a whole, i ncluding the advancement of liberty, democracy, human dignity, tolerance; economic freedom; and the rule of law. This requires continuous, active messaging in multiple venues and contexts in order to build support for core values. Yet messaging itself does not go far enough: the United States must counter disinformation, offer recognition and support to those who support core democratic values, and push back on those who seek to limit freedom of expression and communication.

the basis of these core principles and investments in core capacities, the United States should choose carefully where and when to invest its efforts abroad. The United States does not have the resources or ability to solve every crisis that emerges. A steady focus on long-term prioritiesshaping of the global environment; promoting democratic development and a free, fair, and open global economic system; and maintaining strong security structures anchored on relationships with regional allies should underpin US national security. Such investments have the greatest potential to build long-term global security and well being, benefiting all nations including the

crises ave the potential to cause great human harm, to reshape regional and global development in unpredictable ways, to realign power relationships, and to derail even the best laid strategies. It is imperative, therefore, for the United States to contend with crises as they emerge, deciding whether and how to address them in ways consistent with its long-term objectives.
United States, while also ensuring capacities sufficient to deal with crises as they emerge. Crisis management should be a subset of these larger goals. Nevertheless, often push their way to the top of the foreign policy agenda regardless of strategic designs. They h but also an opportunity for long-term strategic advancement. Near-Term Challenges

Too much engagement can tie down resources without strategic gain; too little engagement can allow crises to upend years of strategic progress within a short period of time. With these considerations in mind, national security issues can be categorized in two ways: challenges that the United States has no choice but to address, and opportunities the United States chooses to pursue because of their long-term potential for positive impact. Many issues will have an element of both an immediate crisis that must be addressed,

The United States currently faces a wide range of serious challenges. From managing difficult relations with Russia and China, to countering narcotics cartels in Mexico, to advancing prospects for Israeli-Palestinian peace, US policymakers have a long list of issues on which they will need to be prepared to engage. But there are a handful of immediate crises and challenges that require near-term and high-level focus. These include: 1. Preventing Iran from achieving a nuclear capability. Preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear-armed power must remain at the top of Americas national security agenda. 2. Preventing reversals in Afghanistan stability.

Even without nuclear weapons, Iran has supported terrorist and other extremist groups, threatened neighboring states, attacked American interests, threatened Israel, and is both undermining Iraqs fragile democracy and supporting Bashar al-Assads brutal effort to remain in power in Syria. A nuclear-armed Iran could be emboldened in its pursuit of all of these actions, feeling it can deter international efforts to push back vigorously on Iranian policies. Diplomacy, globally applied sanctions, and further international pressure on Iran to abandon its pursuit of a nuclear weapon all remain the essential, immediate courses of action. That said, the use of force must remain on the table as a last resort. Since 2001, US goals for security in Afghanistan and for curtailing the impact of extremists in Afghanistan, and more broadly, northern Pakistan, have depended principally upon US led military and intelligence activities. Despite major remaining challenges from corruption to governance to domestic security, this effort has been successful to some degree. The effort to enhance Afghan capacities and leadership is critical to withdrawing US and other coalition forces. The full transfer to Afghan leadership and significant reduction in US and other military forces by the end of 2014, by definition, entails certain risks, both in terms of security and human rights, including the rights of women and girls. No matter what form this residual international presence takes in Afghanistan beyond 2014, it will be essential for the United States to give full support to these arrangements and to the financing and function of the Afghan government. The United States will also need to retain tactical flexibility, including the possibility of increasing assistance or the US presence in response to threats and challenges as they emerge.

3. Rebuilding cooperation with a moderate, civilian-led Pakistan. Pakistan faces extraordinary internal challenges and

divisions that both threaten the stability of the country and create dangers for the broader region. Extremists based in Pakistan could pose an even greater threat should they regain a stronghold in Afghanistan. The risk that such groups could spark conflict with India remains high. All of this is made more dangerous by the fact that Pakistan is armed with nuclear weapons. The United States depends upon Pakistan in its efforts to bring about stability in Afghanistan, yet rem ains threatened by Pakistans own instabilities and the support by at least some elements of the Pakistani security establishment for extremist organizations. As intractable as these problems appear, it is essential for the United States to develop a strategy for improving cooperation with Pakistan while seeking to diminish the threats emanating from Pakistani territory. This should include strengthening the development of Pakistans civilian institutions, supporting regional and global trade links to help support a growing ent repreneurial middle class, and actively cooperating with the Pakistani military. The United States should use its economic and military assistance to incentivize cooperation and oppose efforts made against US interests and values. The US policy of drone strikes in Pakistani territory needs to be far better coordinated with these broad goals in order to avoid undermining US interests in a moderate and responsible Pakistan. Preventing an attack on the United States, US allies, and US interests abroad remains a top priority. While al Qaedas capacities have been diminished, the fall of Arab dictators has provided greater operational freedom for affiliate groups in areas such as Syria, Yemen, the horn of Africa, the Sahel, and the Maghreb. Preventing al Qaeda and similar groups from toppling weak governments in Africa and establishing bases for unfettered training and operations in ungoverned areas is of paramount importance. The United States must continue to carry out direct attacks against such groups, together with allies, while working over the long-term to strengthen governance and economic development and

4. Countering terrorist threats posed by al Qaeda and similar organizations.

5. Halting the killing, rebuilding a post-Assad Syria, and stabilizing its neighborhood. The crisis in Syria has presented an appalling humanitarian catastrophe, strengthened radicalized groups within Syria, and
help steer disaffected youth away from violent extremism.

risked a wider clash between Iranian-sponsored militias and al Qaeda-affiliated extremists. The potential for regional spillover is serious, and governments and populations in Turkey, Jordan, Iraq, Israel, and Lebanon could be at risk. Together with European and Arab allies, the United States must consider more assertive optionsincluding potential military optionsto stop the killing, provide humanitarian relief, ease the removal of Assad from power, prevent a descent into civil war, and help the Syrian people rebuild stability and governance. . If Eurozone markets should destabilize, the United States as well as Europe would suffer serious financial and economic consequences. Ultimately, only the members of the EU, and especially the member nations of the Eurozone, can set the terms and provide the resources required to maintain stable markets and banking systems in Europe. That said, the United States has a vital role to play in encouraging decisive European steps to resolve the crisis, and in contributing to financial market confidence as such steps are taken. The United States should support and contribute to an IMF role as part of a wider, European-led, sustainable process. . Armed with nuclear weapons, the totalitarian regime in North Korea constitutes a major source of regional tensions that could escalate very quickly. Pyongyang has threatened and indeed taken steps to transfer its nuclear technologies and is developing ballistic missile systems aimed at Japan and eventually the United States. The leakage of nuclear weapons or fissile material in the event of a crisis on the peninsula would be potentially catastrophic. Diplomacy has produced few results with Pyongyang, but cooperation with allies in Northeast Asia and prioritization of the issue with China is essential if North Korean nuclear capabilities are to be contained and eventually rolled back. Strategic Investments and Opportunities While seeking to manage immediate crises, in several areas that will contribute to shaping a global environment that supports US values and interests. Pursuing these opportunities is a long-term proposition that requires solid foundations including broad bipartisan backing, multi-agency coordination, steady funding streams, cooperation with allies, partnerships with the private sector and

6. Supporting the EUs efforts to stabilize the Euro-zone

7. Reversing North Koreas nuclear program

the United States should prioritize strategic investments

Bolstering the rules-based global market economy. At a time when the established, developed economies are suffering from weak economies and fiscal imbalances, it is imperative to invest in the institutions and structures of a rules-based global, liberal, market economy. This should include pursuit of free trade and open market initiatives, such as the TransPacific Partnership and a Trans-Atlantic single market. Such US led regional initiatives could help shift momentum toward more open trade globally. The United States should also work to strengthen and creatively use the key institutions underpinning global economic
nongovernment actors, and active engagement with civil society. The most important of such investments include: 1. Cooperation and Development, and Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation.

governance, including the G-20, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, World Trade Organization, World Intellectual Property Organization, Organization for Economic

There must be a clear focus and determination to use both carrots and sticks in encouraging rising powers to play by the rules, rather than to seek unilateral advantage through privileged arrangements and neo-mercantilist behavior. 2. Advancing energy security and alternative technologies. The alternative technologies, and international efforts to reduce such emissions should be a priority, consistent with the need to sustain US economic growth. The United States should play a leading role in encouraging emerging economies to adopt lower emission power production, while recognizing that market forces will primarily determine fuel consumption patterns. 3. Supporting democratic transitions, tolerance, and human development in the broader Middle East and North Africa. The Arab Spring represents an
simultaneously investing in research and development of new technologies. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions through improved efficiency,

United States should launch a major, integrated domestic and foreign policy initiative to bolster relative energy independence for itself and allies; expand free-market trading of energy supplies; reduce energy costs in the US economy; gradually reduce the funds that extractive energy sales provide to nondemocratic and/or hostile powers; and invest in alternative energy technology development so that such technologies ultimately become cost competitive with respect to traditional hydrocarbon based fuels. This initiative should include developing environmentally sustainable North American based energy resources, particularly shale gas and oil sands for both domestic and export markets, while

unprecedented and irreversible change in the broader Middle Eastone where ordinary citizens are demanding a middle path between authoritarianism and extremism. This period of transition presents extraordinary short-term dangers, from civil war to radical Islamists imposing their politicized version of religion to attacks on US citizens at home and abroad. Promoting more just, representative, tolerant, and economically growing societies presents the best chance for moving beyond the decades of repression, conflict, and radicalization that have plagued the region for decades. The United States needs to continue mitigating short-term security risks, while increasing its support for civil society institutions and long-term democratic reforms. An essential part of this investment is womens education and empowerment in society, as well as rel igious freedom and dialogue. Such an approach should set forth an overarching framework of development in the region, integrating public sector, private sector, and NGO initiatives. 4. Addressing Chinas rising power. While the United States will remain the worlds largest s ingle economy and dominant global actor for decades to come, China represents the most significant rising economic force in the world. Fundamental differences between the United States and China on issues of democracy, human rights, regional security, and certain aspects of global market economics persist. US policy should incorporate a strategic blend of engagement, balancing, and deterrence. Engagement measures should focus on increased trade and investment, student exchanges, language training, research and development, energy and climate, and regional cooperation. At the same time, the United States must prioritize pressing for greater political and religious freedom within China. In addition, reducing the potential for future conflict will also require bolstering security partnerships with key allies in the Asia-Pacific region and maintaining our forward military presence in the region. The United States should seek to forge new partnerships with important regional powers such as Indonesia and Vietnam and foster trade and economic ties that help to produce a trans-Pacific institutional architecture aimed at advancing open markets and liberal norms. 5. Bolstering a strategic partnership with India. The consolidation of a wide-ranging strategic partnership with India can bolster long-term prosperity and security for both the United States and India. Our two nations share a convergence of strategic interests, agree on the fundamentals of democracy and human rights, and have a growing economic partnership. Yet India still struggles with its legacy of non-alignment and statist economic management. The United States should continue to deepen relations centered around a strong, global, liberal economic order, while working to create a preponderance of democratic power and values in Asia with the US-India partnership increasingly at its core. 6. Establishing an Africa-focused prosperity initiative. Despite persistent poverty, disease, and conflict in major parts of Africa, the continent is experiencing new economic growth and modernization, as well as burgeoning and globally connected middle class societies. While assistance programs should continue to remain a crucial part of US engagement, the United States should launch a new framework to expand free trade, entrepreneurship, and private-sector investment, all of which can help provide the economic underpinnings necessary to advance sustainable growth, reduce poverty, and expand educational and economic opportunities. Such an initiative should recognize that aid-driven development is no longer preeminent, and the successful deployment of US government resources will depend on the extent to which it

7. Promoting a prosperous, secure, and democratic Western Hemisphere. The United States should place renewed priority on working with democratic, market oriented governments in Latin America to bolster prosperity, expand economic participation, and improve social integration. This should include efforts to expand trade and investment, while assisting governments in their efforts to combat narcotics trafficking, terrorism, and the erosion of democratic societies. Ultimately, while security assistance remains essential, broad societal participation in new economic growth is the most powerful tool in overcoming the systemic challenges that produce crime, violence, drugs, and migration. VI. Conclusion There are a myriad of other important issues on which the United States must remain engaged beyond those discussed above. What is essential is that facing limited resources, the United States must make choices and engage strategically. The issues identified above represent either those crisis areas where the United States has no choice but to engage, or alternatively, where it can make strategic investments to help shape the global playing field long into the future. A national security strategy
mobilizes private investment and private sector led growth.

that focuses on these critical challenges and investmentswhile based on the core principles of advancing a liberal democratic order and a proactive American global leadership roleoffers the best opportunity to assure the long-term security and prosperity of the United States, its citizens, and the global democratic community.

RE-SHAPING GOOD
Turn the U.S. must reshape the plastic economic order to attain lasting peace and leadership Indyk and Kagan 1/17/13 Vice President and Director of Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution; senior fellow in
the Center on the United States and Europe in Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution (Martin Indyk; Robert Kagan, 17 January 2013, Big Bet: A Plastic Moment to Mold a Liberal Global Order, The Brookings Institution, http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Research/Files/Papers/2013/1/big%20bets%20black%20swans/a%20plastic%20moment%20 to%20mold%20a%20liberal%20global%20order.pdf)//KP
As you enter your second term, the

state of the world is remarkably unsettled. The leading powers are beset with economic crises or are in various states of political transition or gridlock. The Middle East is in a state of political upheaval. Tensions are rising in East Asia. The worlds institutions, whether the United Nations, the G-20, or the European Union, are weakened and dysfunctional, and seem to be pulling apart in the absence of concerted leadership. The liberal world order established after the Second World War characterized by a free, open international economy, the spread of liberal democracy, and the deepening of liberal, peaceful norms of international behavior is fraying at the edges. It is a time of uncertainty and instability for the world, and for the United States; but it is also a moment of opportunity. Almost a century ago, when the United States entered the
First World War, the philosopher John Dewey observed that the world was at a plastic juncture. He and many other progressiv es believed that the unsettled world of their day offered the United States and the other democratic powers a chance to remold the international system into something better. Americans walked away from that challenge and would embrace it only after a second catastrophic breakdown of world order. Today, we

are at another plastic juncture. Will America turn inward and away from an increasingly messy world? Or will we launch a new effort to strengthen and extend, both geographically and temporally, the liberal world order from which Americans and so many others around the world have benefited? The answer depends very
much on how you choose to make use of your next four years in office. Unfortunately, there is not a lot to show for your first four years. In many respects, this is understandable. The economic crisis that you inherited made steady concentration on foreign policy more challenging. The two wars you inherited in the Greater Middle East had been bungled by your predecessor and cost the United States dearly, both materially and in terms of reputation. You began to restore that reputation through your own global appeal and the efforts of your Secretary of State. You have done especially well in raising Americas profile and deepening our engagement in East Asia. However, so far it is hard to list many durable accomplishments. Most of the major challenges are much as you found them when you took office, or worse: from the stalled Middle East peace process and turmoil in the Arab world to Irans continuing march toward a nuclear weapons capability to Chinas increasing a ssertiveness in East Asia. Your understandable preoccupation with reelection has left much of the world wondering: Where is the United States? For all the talk of American decline from certain quarters, the

United States is actually well-positioned for a new era of global leadership. If you can strike the difficult but necessary compromise with Congress that begins to address Americas fiscal crisis, the United States could well emerge as among the worlds most successful and dynamic economies. America enjoys unique advantages in the international economic system: a natural gas revolution that promises soon to make it a net-exporter of energy, a superior university education system and an open and innovative economy that continues to attract the worlds best and most creative young minds. On the international stage, the United States remains the only world power with global reach, uniquely capable of organizing concerted international action and serving as a source of security and stability to nations and peoples facing threatening neighbors. Recommendations: How then to take advantage of this plastic moment to mold the changing global order to best serve the United States and humankind? We believe that in the next four years you will have a unique opportunity to shape a multilateral global order that will continue to reflect American liberal values and progressive ideals. This will require your sustained attention, personal engagement, and direction of the national security agencies of the U.S. government . The reward could be a transformational and lasting impact on the international system, which will redound to the benefit of future generations. In the security realm, your primary big bet must be to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapons
capability. It is hard to imagine a bigger blow to the international security order than the collapse of the nonproliferation regime that would follow Irans successful acquisition of nuclear weapons. Conversely, if you can succeed in achieving meaningful curbs on Irans nuclear weapons aspirations and reinforce this by negotiating another nuclear arms reduction agreement with Moscow, you will do much to strengthen non-proliferation and nuclear disarmament as a fundamental pillar of the new liberal global order. In East Asia, your primary big bet should be on promoting a regional order that encourages China to develop in a peaceful and productive direction. You have already formulated a credible strategy; now you will need to encourage Chinas new leadership away from greater reliance on military power in favor of continued economic and political development at home and increasing economic and political integration abroad. This will mean continuing to deepen Americas Asian alliances, especial ly with the new leaderships in Tokyo and Seoul; building new partnerships with the nations of the region; and playing a major role in supporting regional cooperation. You should ensure that the rebalancing effort in East Asia goes beyond the military to include all aspects of America n power. With India, the worlds largest democracy and the other major rising power in Asia, you have laid a strong foundation but the next four years will be critical in building a partnership that can serve as another pillar of the emerging liberal geopolitical order. Strengthening

the liberal economic order needs to be a higher priority in your second term. Concluding free trade agreements with the AsiaPacific region and Europe would boost U.S. exports and global economic recovery while promoting a broader consensus on the necessary standards to promote free trade and investment in the global economy. Building the infrastructure and putting in place the policies necessary to export American natural gas to key allies and partners,

especially in Europe and Asia, will help reduce their dependence on Russia and Iran. Leveraging

Americas hydrocarbon bonanza to encourage more effective efforts to counter climate change can help promote a greener global order. Strengthening the liberal political order will require increased efforts to enlist the support of emerging democracies. Nations like Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, South Africa and Turkey have become
increasingly influential economically. But they are struggling to find their identity as democratic powers on the international stage and, in some cases, are punching below their weight. Some

are drifting toward a worldview that actually undermines the liberal nature of the global order. At the same time, powerful autocracies like Russia have staked out positions at the United Nations and elsewhere that are antithetical to liberal values on the issue of Syria, for instance. These autocratic powers need to understand that if they continue their obstructionism, the democratic international community will increasingly move on without them and they will be isolated. In your first term, you were reluctant to make democracy a centerpiece of your foreign policy. However, with revolutions in the Arab world and political changes in Burma that you have supported, it is time to place the United States once again at the vanguard of the global democracy movement. This is not only because democracy is consonant with American values. In the Middle East, in Russia and parts of Eastern Europe, just as in Burma and the rest of Asia, the United States has strategic, political and economic interests in the spread of stable, liberal democracies. Although democracies can be fractious, and in times of transition unstable, in the end they are more reliable supporters of the liberal world order which Americans seek. The United States needs to do more in support of the difficult
struggle for democracy in the Arab world too, including holding the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood government to democratic standards, and more actively leading the effort to shape a positive democratic outcome in Syria and preventing it from descending into chaos or becoming a haven for jihadists and Iranian proxies. Americas relationship with Russia needs to be shaped by strategic arms agreements as well as by respect for the desires and aspirations of the Russian people. You should work to steer Russia in a positive direction, strengthening where you can those forces in Russian

society that favor economic and political modernization. Finally, the United States needs a global strategy. It cannot focus on one critical region to the detriment of others. While you were absolutely right to increase American attention to the vital region of the Asia-Pacific, the United States cannot and should not reduce its involvement in the Middle East or in Europe. Since

the end of the Second World War, the United States has played the key security role in all three regions at once; there is no safe alternative to that. This is particularly true in the Middle East, where many nations look to the United States for both protection and
assistance. But even Europe deserves continued American attention and involvement. Everything the United States wants to accomplish in the world can be better accomplished with the help and cooperation of its European allies. Conclusion: At

the end of World War II, the United States led the way in shaping an international political, economic, and security order which, for all its flaws, served the American people, and much of the world, remarkably well. Much is changing in todays world, but the basic requirements of American foreign policy have not. Your
great challenge is to seize this plastic moment and apply your leadership to the preservation and extension of the liberal global order for future generations.

Foreign policy must be re-connected with economic interests its key to reinventing capitalism and restoring peace Zoellick 12 former World Bank president, senior fellow at Harvard Universitys Belfer Center for Science and International
Affairs, and distinguished visiting fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics (Robert Zoellick, November 2012, The Currency of Power, Foreign Policy, http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/10/08/the_currency_of_power?page=0,0)//KP
PHASE 3: Globalization's Promise and Perils The deeper, wider union and launched its own currency. Just as importantly, China,

end of the Cold War reunited Europe. The European Community became a India, and other developing countries moved from planned socialism and import-substitution schemes to market competition. Over a decade, the number of people engaged in or actively affected by the world market economy surged from about 1 billion to four or five times that. Information technology swept ahead. Capital raced around the globe. Rather than the world economy of Bretton Woods, the earlier
era of globalization before World War I -- with its large movements of capital, trade, and people, spurred by new technologies in transport and communication -- seemed to offer a closer parallel. Yet the developing countries alike, was

adaptation to markets on a truly global scale, integrating developed and bound to be complicated and disjointed. It was. In the late 1990s, countries in East Asia and Latin America faced harsh financial blows and painful restructurings. Almost all are now stronger for the experience. But the recovery strategies of some developing countries planted the seeds of a new problem: "imbalances" -- whether of savings, reserves, trade accounts, or other dimensions. Developing economies in East Asia saved and exported more, and the United States and some European countries increased borrowing, consumption, and imports. Interventions to lessen the value of Asian currencies constrained their imports and expanded exports. Some economists maintain that the low prices of goods available from new suppliers led central bankers to persist in easy monetary policies for too long, risking widespread asset-price inflation, especially in real estate markets. Then the bubbles burst. The institutions of the international economic system adapted incrementally, often with difficulty. The economic
firefighting of the IMF and World Bank made them principal targets of an anti-globalization movement in the 1990s. The continuing boom almost put the IMF out of business. Unfortunately, neither international nor domestic supervisors of financial markets kept up with the innovations -- or the

frauds and foolishness that inevitably come with long boom periods. The WTO added many new members. The trading system even withstood terrorist attacks -- and fears of more. But the travails of the WTO's Doha Round of trade negotiations, launched in 2001, signaled a new challenge. The traditional developed economies wanted the middle-income countries -- China, Brazil, India, and others -- to assume more responsibility for lowering barriers to trade, while all would offer special treatment for Africa and the poorest. The major developing economies, in turn, pointed to their large numbers of poor people and wanted to maintain the privileges of what WTO practice refers to as "special and differential treatment." This debate reverberates not only in trade, but in monetary affairs, investment, development, energy, and the environment. The

9/11 attacks concentrated America's attention on terrorism, homeland security, and the long wars that followed. Yet the connections of economics to the new security threats are also strong. When al Qaeda targeted the United States, it aimed for the World Trade Center -- its twin towers the symbols of American capitalism -- as well as Washington. In addition to shock and destruction, the terrorists wanted to strangle economic and political freedom. As Osama bin Laden boasted in 2004, his aim was "bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy." Even as America fought in Iraq and Afghanistan and against terrorist threats around the globe, other forces of history did not stand still. China, India, and other emerging economies began to change the landscape of power. The failed political and stunted economic systems of North Africa and the Middle East sparked
II economic experience. Global

upheavals that will shake the region for a generation. PHASE 4: After the Crash The crash of 2008 has ushered in a fourth phase of the post-World War

financial capitalism now faces a new crisis -- of credit, conduct, and even confidence. After harsh blows, the advanced economies are struggling to reduce debt and revive jobs and productivity through structural reforms. Unemployment is up. Confidence is down. Protectionism is rising. Publics are anxious. Politicians are struggling. Conflicts and tensions within and between countries are building. Developing economies have

been hit too, though many have fared relatively better. In a profound shift, the 60-year leadership of developed economies is in question. Will the eurozone and the historic success of Europe's peaceful integration survive -- and with it, Europe's influence in the world? Will the high-growth developing countries overcome the so-called "middle-income trap" to become high-income countries and "responsible stakeholders" in an international system that has benefited them -- but that they did not design? Will the poorest -- the "bottom billion" -- have an opportunity to prosper too, or will they be breeding grounds for transnational insecurities? Will the new political systems of the Middle East and North Africa lead to new economic policies for inclusive growth and peaceful integration into the world economy? Will and internationally -- in

the United States show leadership -- at home reviving its core economic strength while simultaneously leveraging those capabilities through an activist economic diplomacy? Will the United States connect its foreign economic policy with security interests in freedom of the seas, open skies, and protection of cyberspace? FOREIGN MINISTER CARR'S warning about America's need to resolve its budget mess is correct: The United States must restore its credit, both for its own health and to enable it to lead. But the United States does not need just any budget deal. It needs one that rebuilds the fundamentals of long-term growth. It needs to limit government spending. It needs to encourage private-sector innovation and productivity. It needs inclusive growth that empowers all its citizens to fulfill their potential. It needs to revive a free trade agenda that has stalled in recent years. It needs to favor
in reinforcing ways. Strong, debt would halt the burdening of future generations to pay for current excesses. Greater

makers over takers. By restoring America's credit and reviving growth, the next president and Congress would add to the country's power and influence

sustainable growth would boost public and private resources, while disciplining the public resources would pay -- not borrow -for vital purposes, starting with national defense, but also including the public goods of education, research, infrastructure, and the environment. A comprehensive budget and growth deal would also remove the weight of costly uncertainty from the private sector. Success at home would strengthen America's standing around the world as a can-do country with the means, ideas, and willpower to reinvent capitalism yet again. In his classic study, The World in Depression, 1929-1939, the economist Charles Kindleberger argued that it was critical for one major power to take the lead in shaping an international economic system. This power could not dictate, but instead needed to invest in encouraging a shared approach to trade, capital flows, currencies, and reliance on markets. Kindleberger described how during the Great Depression, the United States had the means but not the will to lead, while Britain had the will but no longer the means. If the United States does not lead now, who will?

ECONOMIC FOCUS GOOD


No link and turn the Cold War prioritized military might reconciling this different is key to conflict resolution and leadership Zoellick 12 former World Bank president, senior fellow at Harvard Universitys Belfer Center for Science and International
Affairs, and distinguished visiting fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics (Robert Zoellick, November 2012, The Currency of Power, Foreign Policy, http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/10/08/the_currency_of_power?page=0,0)//KP

This race through U.S. foreign economic policy is not intended to suggest that the American system was all about peaceful commerce. To the contrary, even if the connection was driven by interests and not explicit planning, the economic and security policies worked hand in hand. These interests were infused with a healthy dose of what those generations called spreading "civilization," and what we call "values." With trade and the flag came missionaries and their schools. After the
defeat of the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, the United States pragmatically used its share of the indemnity imposed on China -- which the United States had opposed -- to found Tsinghua University in Beijing and fund scholarships for Chinese students to attend universities in the United States. As the United States settled its home continent around the opening of the 20th century, a debate arose about expansion to territories beyond U.S. shores. Some

wanted markets or coaling stations, and others sought to carry "civilization" to foreign peoples. Some simply wanted to keep strategic places out of the hands of others. But "imperialism" did not sit well with
many Americans, who proudly recalled that their new nation had freed itself from old empires. The U.S. war with Spain in 1898, precipitated by conflicts over Cuba, led the United States to acquire the Philippines (for $20 million) to keep the islands from being grabbed by others whose fleets were hovering -- but the United States did not take Cuba. President Theodore Roosevelt stirred up a revolt in Panama so he could build a canal that linked the two great oceans, commerce, and fleets of the U.S. Navy. America's

foreign economic policy also helped spur early interest in international law -- what we now call "rules-based systems" -- to resolve disputes. The United States was
an active participant in the 1899 Hague Conference and lent its support to a convention to resolve disputes peacefully through third-party mediation, international commissions, and a Permanent Court of Arbitration. Secretary of State Elihu Root negotiated arbitration treaties with 25 countries early in the 20th century. The

decades that followed continued the pattern of melding U.S. economic interests with foreign policy and security policy. "Dollar diplomacy," as historians have dubbed the strategy, sought to support U.S. enterprises in Latin America and East Asia through what we now call transnational actors -- but in
those days were railroad and mining engineers, bankers, and merchants. In World War I, Britain shrewdly played on the U.S. commitment to neutral rights on the seas to draw President Woodrow Wilson to its side against Germany and its U-boats. After the war, reacting against what the United States viewed as the old European politics of perpetuated hostilities, America withdrew from European military security. Yet even during

the 1920s and 1930s, the United States relied on banker-statesmen to negotiate debt and reparations to revive broken economies. To secure peaceful seas, the United States even launched the idea of global naval arms control in the 1920s. Reeling from the Great Depression, however, America withdrew from the world economy, enacting the Smoot-Hawley tariff wall to block imports and subverting a last-gasp effort for international economic cooperation at the 1933 World Economic Conference. Political-military isolationism followed. Then came 1941, and the United States again learned, through harsh experience, that economics and security were linked. The United States had imposed embargoes on the sale of petroleum and scrap iron to Japan in response to Japan's invasion of China and its threats to Southeast Asia. Imperial Japan responded with a surprise attack, in part to secure its sources of oil and raw materials. The United States, caught unprepared, paid a terrible price. WORLD WAR II AND the opening of the Cold War led to a sharp break in the American foreign-policy tradition. At least that is the impression left by the masters of mid-20th-century security studies. In their narrative, the dawn of the nuclear age and the face-off between communism and the West required a new approach: a national security strategy. The traditional aims of amity and commerce seemed quaint and outdated in a world of superpower confrontation and containment. For the
political freedom, economics became a resource factor -- and the handmaiden of the strategic policy process. The U.S. National Security Act of 1947 is full of references to new offices to mobilize people and resources for total war. Yet the act did not even make the Treasury secretary a statutory member of the new National Security Council. Ever since, the U.S. government has struggled to integrate economics into its national security strategies. The

first time, the United States maintained a large conventional army, a significant part based in Europe, with hundreds of thousands of other troops fighting in Asia over decades. Instead of Milton Friedman's idea that economic freedom is an end in itself and an indispensable means toward achieving

transformation of U.S. foreign-policy priorities signaled a change in the training of the stewards of American foreign policy. The new specialties were Soviet studies, political-military affairs,
defense policy, and eventually Middle East policy. Short of homegrown talent on the central front, America even outsourced security strategy to immigrants from continental Europe --Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski -- who had grown up in a world of threat and the complications of balancing power in Eurasia. Now,

we need to rewrite economics back into the narrative of the Cold War and all that follows. We need a fuller appreciation of the links between economics and security to match the times. The world continues to struggle through a global economic crisis that began in the United States. Fears, fragilities, and failures fuel tensions within and among countries. Leaders are under protectionist and

nationalist pressures -- in trade, but also regarding currencies, investments, resources, and the oceans. These

frictions risk a downward economic spiral and even conflict. Because the United States has not faced up to its economic problems at home, its voice on international economics does not carry, its power has waned, and its strategic designs drift with the currents of the day's news. Without healthy economic growth, the United States will be unable to lead. Just as dangerously, it will lose its identity on the global stage if it loses its economic dynamism. America's unique strength is the ability to reinvent itself

SOLVES FAILING STATES Turn economic engagement and security is key to stop escalation from failing states and terrorism Caldwell and Williams 12 Professor of political science at Pepperdine University; associate professor of political
Due in part to the vestiges of colonialism, developing

science at Pepperdine University (Dan Caldwell; Robert E. Williams Jr., Seeking Security in an Insecure World: Second Edition, Rowaman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. 2012, p. 219-223 )//KP

states at the present time face a number of threats so daunting than they can result in collapse. Failed states, in tum, can pose a signicant threat to the United States. In fact, in the 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States, the George W. Bush administration argued that for the rst time in history, weak states posed more of a threat to the United States than strong states. The conclusion of a study cosponsored by the Association of the U.S. Anny and the Center for
Strategic and International Studies states: One of the principal lessons of the events of September 11 is that failed states matter not just for humanitarian reasons but also for national security as well. If

left unattended, such states can become sanctuaries for terrorist networks with a global reach, not to mention interactional organized crime and drug traffickers
who also exploit the dysfunctional environment. As such, failed states can pose a direct threat to the national interests of the United States and to the stability of entire regions. What

causes state failure? First and foremost is poverty and the need for economic development. As former State Department advisor Meghan OSullivan has noted, Poor socioeconomic conditions are seen not just as being of

humanitarian concern but also as having security implications that extend beyond a single countrys borders. Second, many de veloping states suffer from an absence of national unity. Colonial powers often set boundaries solely on the basis of natural barriers, such as rivers and mountain ranges, with little or no consideration of social groupings. Thus, Nigeria contains the Muslim Hausas in the north and the Christian Ibos in the south; these groups fought a vicious and bloody civil war in the l970s. Similarly, Rwanda was populated principally by two tribes, the Hutu and the Tutsi; the killing sprees that resulted have been described in chapter I I. This problem is not limited to Africa. Yugoslavia contained three main ethnic groups, Croats, Serbs and Bosniaks. Modern Iraq must contend with both ethnic and religious divisions: ethnic Kurds occupy the north. Sunni Muslims dominate the central part, and Shia Muslims are a majority in southern Iraq. The degree to which these three groups can get along will be an impo rtant factor shaping Iraq's future. A third problem of developing states concerns industrialization, urbanization, and secularization. As the eminent British historian Sir Michael Howard has noted, in developing states industrialization has led to urbanization, with the resulting breakdown of traditiona l authority and the destruction of cultures rooted in tribal rule and l and tenure? The resulting loss of identity and instability can have signicant effects on a country and the surrounding region. There are also the related problems of overpopulation, hunger, and public health. One

of the principal dangers of failed states is that they can become sanctuaries for the opponents of international order. United

Nations special envoy Lakhdar Brahimi has argued that the events of September 11, 2001, were a wakeup call, [that caused man y people] to realize that even small countries, far away, like Afghanistan cannot be left to sink to the depths to which Afghanistan has sunk." Failed states can serve, and have served, as bases of operation for terrorist groups; this was the case with both Sudan and Afghanistan for Al Qaeda. The area of the world with the greatest number of actual or potential failed states is Africa, and the threat from African failed states is very real. As Professor Lisa Cook has observed, Given the long-established pattern in which extremist

groups, including Islamic militants, prey on impoverished economies and failed states, Africa seems a natural breeding ground for terrorism." The United States and, more broadly, developed
Western states can respond to this threat in several ways. First, African leaders who assist their citizens and the war against terrorism should be supported. Second, efforts

to reduce poverty and strengthen the economies of African countries should be continued and strengthened; the African Growth and Opportunity Act and the Millennium Challenge Account are two recent efforts to
do this. Third, HIV and AIDS are crippling African countries, and efforts must be continued and strengthened to address this modern-day plague. In 2009, 1.3 million people died of AIDS; 1.8 million new HIV infections occurred in sub-Saharan Africa." The dislocations caused by this disease, as well as by malaria, tuberculosis, and other infections, contribute to societal instability. Fourth, Africa is already unstable; there is a great need to maintain peacekeeping forces in a number of conicts, most notably Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Sudan. The 9/11 Commission commented on the importance of failed states: "In the twentieth century, strategists focused on the worlds great industrial heartlands In

the twenty-first century, the focus is in the opposite direction, toward remote regions and failing states. PROSPECTS FOR INCREASING ECONOMIC SECURITY For decades at least, people in developed states have recognized the need to assist developing countries for both altruistic and self-interested reasons. As Joseph Nye has argued, Investments [in economic

development] are a clear case of coincidence between self-interest and charity." Developing countries have also recognized their need for development. In I955, twenty-nine Asian and African countries met in Bandung, Indonesia, and declared that they were not aligned with either of the Cold W ars two superpowers, the United States or the Soviet Union. In I964, seventy-seven states called for the creation of the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). This development caucus within the UN is still known as the Group of 77" even though its membership ha s grown to 131 states. Two so-called South Summits of the Group of 77 have occurred, the rst in 2000 in Havana, Cuba, and the second in 2005 in Doha, Qatar. Among the principal objectives of the Group of 77 are trade, monetary and institutional reforms, economic modernization, greater freedom for labor migration, the elimination of economic coercion, development aid, and debt relief. Developed

states can attempt in several deferent ways to prevent developing states from failing and thereby posing a greater threat. First, developed states can invest directly in developing countries. In the 1990s, Western banks invested a great deal of money in Latin America, and it was not unusual for prots to be in the double digits. Such direct foreign investment could also
be risky, however. When questions were raised in 1994 about the stability of' the Mexican economy and government, foreign investors called in their loans and withdrew their money. This led to a serious economic crisis. The

United States and the International Monetary Fund came up with a fifty-billion-dollar bailout package (including twenty billion dollars from the United States). The Mexican bailout proved to be a great success story; Mexico paid the United States back ahead of schedule, and the U.S. Treasury made five hundred million dollars in interest. Importantly from the
American perspective, the government of Mexico did not collapse, an event that would have had profound and serious security consequences for the

United States had it occurred. A second initiative that the developed world can take to prevent the failure of states is economic aid. Such aid can be measured in absolute or relative terms. Using the former measure, the United States leads the world as the country that grants the most aid in dollars28.3 billion dollars in 2009. However, if aid is measured as a percentage of the donor coun trys gross national product (GNP), the picture changes dramatically. At the Monterrey Financing for Development Conference in 2002, the world's economically developed states promised to move toward the goal of donating 0.7 percent of their gross national incomes to economic aid. Only ve countries in the world have met this target: Sweden (1.12 percent), Norway (1.06 percent), Luxembourg (1.01 percent), Denmark (0.88 percent), and the Netherlands (0.82 percent). The

United States currently devotes 0.2 percent of its gross national income to economic aid, one of the
lowest percentages of any advanced industrial state. The United States has traditionally allocated aid primarily on political rather than on humanitarian grounds. In keeping with this political orientation, the United States allocated most of its economic aid in the 1960s to South Vietnam; after the I979 Camp David peace accords, more than 50 percent of U.S. aid went to Israel and Egypt; most recently, large shares of U.S. development assistance have been going to Iraq and Afghanistan. Joseph Nye has called attention to the self-interested rationale for providing economic aid to developing countries:

"There are many reasons for development assistance by wealthy countries, but one is to deprive terrorist leaders of such arguments by showing that
our policies are aligned with the long-term aspirations of the poor?"

SOLVES COOP SECURITY


No link and turn the aff focuses on human and cooperative security thats key to addressing terrorism, conflict, and environmental problems Caldwell and Williams 12 Professor of political science at Pepperdine University; associate professor of political
science at Pepperdine University (Dan Caldwell; Robert E. Williams Jr., Seeking Security in an Insecure World: Second Edition, Rowaman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. 2012, p. 256-258 )//KP
As we have noted throughout this book, the

traditional view of security centers on the state. The perspective that puts national security front and center considers the central threats in the international system (and therefore the principal concerns of security studies) to be threats to the sovereignty, the territorial integrity, and the political and economic systems of the state. It is also state centered in that it views states as the primary sources of threats. Seeking security in the twenty-first century requires attending to national security, because state-based threats to states still exist. We have just noted the concerns raised by the People's Republic of China. North Korea poses a serious threat to the stability of East Asia due to its economic instability coupled with its ongoing nuclear program. Failed states, as we noted in chapters 10 and 11, pose a different kind of state-based problem, but one that is nonetheless very serious. Because the traditional paradigm does not adequately address the various security threats that we have examined, it is important to go beyond national security. Our conclusions lead us to suggest that human security and cooperative security must be part of any comprehensive approach to security in the century ahead. The concept of human security emerged in the early 1990s
to bring together several distinct efforts to widen the traditional security agenda. Unlike national security, human security focuses on the individual human being rather than the state. It also includes a range of threats to human welfare that go well beyond the traditional focus on defense against aggression. Kofi Annan, the former UN secretary general, described human security in these terms: Human

security, in its broadest sense, embraces far more than the absence of violent conict. It encompasses human rights, good governance, access to education and health care and ensuring that each individual has opportunities and choices to fulll his or her potential. Every step in this direction is also a step towards reducing poverty, achieving economic growth and preventing conict. Freedom from want, freedom from fear, and the freedom of future generations to inherit a healthy natural environmentthese are the interrelated building blocks of hn1nanand therefore national security. Human security has its conceptual roots in international humanitarian law, international human rights, the concept of humanitarian
intervention, and the dual concepts of economic development and human development. As with human rights, the adjective human signals a move not only toward thinking about the individual but toward concern for humankind as well. Human

security, in other words, is simultaneously individual security and universal security. The structure of the international system complicates efforts to address many of the most serious problems we have discussed in this book. Sovereignty means that each of the two hundred states in the system is free to address (or to ignore) global warming or human trafficking or terrorism, as it sees fit. This feature of the international system makes transnational threats particularly difcult to address. The failure of one state to reduce HIV/AIDS infection rates poses a threat to other states. The failure of one state to curb greenhouse gas emissions or to stop the destruction of rainforests has a negative impact on all states that are attempting to address global warming. Furthermore, nonstate actorsterrorists, arms traffickers, nuclear scientists willing to sell their services to the highest bidder exploit differences among states and operate in the gaps of the international system. These facts argue strongly for seeking security through the methods presented in the cooperative security paradigm. Cooperative security, as we noted earlier, seeks to bring states together in ways that address the weaknesses of the international system as it is currently constituted. It approaches security as something to which all states are entitled and that can only be gained by mutual efforts. By treating security as a public good, it establishes the understanding that all states have a common interest in promoting a shared system of security and that free riders must be brought into a cooperative framework. Cooperative security requires a degree of multilateralism that was absent from U.S. foreign policy during the administration of George W. Bush. President Obama has moved the U.S. toward more cooperative approaches in international affairs, but a variety of factors, including domestic political pressures and fiscal
constraints, have limited the degree to which the U.S. can pursue an active multilateral agenda.

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