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Upward mobility and the generational economy

This massive income mobility study has drawn considerable attention. Here’s a partial summary:

The team of researchers initially analyzed an enormous database of earnings records to study tax policy, hypothesizing that different local and state tax breaks might affect intergenerational mobility.

What they found surprised them, said Raj Chetty, one of the authors and the most recent winner of the John Bates Clark Medal, which the American Economic Association awards to the country’s best academic economist under the age of 40. The researchers concluded that larger tax credits for the poor and higher taxes on the affluent seemed to improve income mobility only slightly. The economists also found only modest or no correlation between mobility and the number of local colleges and their tuition rates or between mobility and the amount of extreme wealth in a region.

But the researchers identified four broad factors that appeared to affect income mobility, including the size and dispersion of the local middle class. All else being equal, upward mobility tended to be higher in metropolitan areas where poor families were more dispersed among mixed-income neighborhoods.

Income mobility was also higher in areas with more two-parent households, better elementary schools and high schools, and more civic engagement, including membership in religious and community groups.

Regional variation in the U.S. turns out to be enormous:

In previous studies of mobility, economists have found that a smaller percentage of people escape childhood poverty in the United States than in several other rich countries, including Canada, Australia, France, Germany and Japan. The latest study is consistent with those findings.

[ . . .]

Yet the parts of this country with the highest mobility rates — like Pittsburgh, Seattle and Salt Lake City — have rates roughly as high as those in Denmark and Norway, two countries at the top of the international mobility rankings. In areas like Atlanta and Memphis, by comparison, upward mobility appears to be substantially lower than in any other rich country . . .

There was already ample reason to be skeptical of direct comparison between America and Europe; or rather between America and European countries. One finds it hard to imagine that the demographic, economic, geographic, and social state of tiny Denmark, with less people than metro Atlanta, is in any meaningful way apposite to the immensity of that same profile of the whole of America. Meanwhile, internal American comparison seems more promising. A remarkable opportunity presents itself for the enterprising scholar to compare Detroit and Pittsburgh, for instance.

There is also the flipside of high income mobility: folks fall down the scale. As a purely relative measure, mobility could very well be an indicator of the evanescence of prosperity. The study attempts to isolate for upward mobility only; but it is vital to keep this dark side of mobility in mind. Only a fool forgets that wealth and affluence once gained, is never perfectly secure. The dissipation of prosperity across generations is, perhaps, no less interesting (if rather more morbid) than its augmentation. Readers who are also parents: reflect, personally, on whether you are prepared to sacrifice some dynamism in your children’s economic future, for a larger share of stability and security.

For indeed anxiety about the preservation of wealth and security has become the unstated spring of politics in the West. Detroit is only the most dire example of the crisis.

Advanced industrial economies preserve wealth in large part by means of a highly complex and differentiated financial system, which when operating properly facilitates the investment of the accumulated capital of the older generations, into the productive activities of the rising generations. When this generational economy breaks down, when productive activities dwindle or languish, and capital is drawn into the onanistic vortex of usury: that’s when the dark, morbid side of mobility casts a shadow over all things.

Now, there are undoubtedly many intricate paths of causality here; but I am going to insist that the most basic cause of a dwindling of the productive activities of the rising generations, is a sheer dwindling of the rising generations. Even the most productive of activities will not support a prosperous intergenerational economy if there aren’t enough people in the rising generations to undertake those activities sufficiently. Societies of men must reproduce that they might produce. But the real challenge lies in this: reproduction on the level of individual families is destructive of productive capacity. According to Jon Last’s excellent What to Expect a professional wife will give up something close to a million dollars in lost earnings, should she decide to stay home and care for a child from birth until 18 years of age. That’s a staggering loss of income for a family, one that is only partially mitigated by any part-time work which imposes new fixed costs for day-care.

A rational politics must reckon with these matters — no less than it must reckon with city geography, education and public transportation. The sexual constitution is inevitably bound up with our political economy by the elusive but powerful undercurrents of mores, scruples, habits, traditions, and customs.

But the old verities endure, as even this mobility studies adumbrates. The best path to gaining and retaining affluence is: being born into an intact, two-parent household, attending a good school, completing school and marrying before conceiving children, going to church, and engaging in the civic life of your community.

Comments (99)

"the real challenge lies in this: reproduction on the level of individual families is destructive of productive capacity."

But see this from Allan Carlson over at FPR...

(by "capitalism" Carlson implies late/industrial capitalism, not free markets, as is evident if one reads the entire piece)


~~Capitalism also excels in leveling natural institutions — most notably, the family itself. Writing in the 1930s, Schumpeter could point to data showing that marriage, family life, and parenthood meant ever less to men and women. Tumbling marital birthrates and “the proportion of marriage that produce no children or only one child” were the clearest signs of this revolution in values. This revolution derived, he said, from capitalism’s “rationalization of everything in life,” the embrace by persons in the capitalist era of an “inarticulate system of cost accounting” that exposed “the heavy personal sacrifices that family ties and especially parenthood entail under modern conditions.” This sharp decline in a desire for children left already functionless homes with even less value.~~

If one were so inclined this might lead one to believe that industrial capitalism's chickens are coming home to roost, demographically speaking.

http://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2013/07/economic-smackdown-porchers-vs-austrians


Actually, one could give a good utilitarian argument for having children. The Chinese, for example, have always considered children to be an investment in their own future; hence, the difficulty the Communist govt. has had in enforcing the one-child policy.

Cost-benefit analysis may be cold-hearted, but there is no necessity for it to be short-sighted. One need only ask all those childless couples who is going to sit by their deathbeds, who is going to be their patient advocate when they are old and ill, who is going to come by and see that they are getting enough to eat, to get some extremely good reasons, even from a "selfish" perspective, for having children when they are young.

I know of an elderly woman right here on my street who has been able to remain in her own home in some rather startling circumstances: She has broken bones and been completely bedridden on more than one occasion. She is unable to leave the house at all. She is bent over almost double.

Why has she not gone to a nursing home? Because she has so many children in the area. She has gotten the in-home care she needs and has even been able to keep her small dog during these difficult years. She is a regular stop on our Christmas caroling rounds.

In fact, though one _can_ put this in terms of "investment," the truth is that it is a matter of human connection. It's the natural flow of love from one generation to the next. Given that God made man, however, it is unsurprising that that natural flow of love should have material advantages both to the individual and to society as a whole and that thwarting it should result in loneliness, unhappiness, and societal breakdown.

There is no good reason to believe that people are somehow made incapable of seeing these things by "capitalism."

"Given that God made man, however, it is unsurprising that that natural flow of love should have material advantages both to the individual and to society as a whole and that thwarting it should result in loneliness, unhappiness, and societal breakdown."

Very true. But it is also true that when the quest for material advantages in a society supercedes the desire to maintain that natural flow of love the result will equally be "loneliness, unhappiness, and societal breakdown." The more a culture cares about "stuff," the less it will care about people. And modern capitalism does nothing if not promote unending acquisition of "stuff."

Hence it should not be surprising that capitalism, having spent decades undermining the family, now finds itself facing a shortage of the very "human resources" that enable it to maintain its productivity.

Well, again, I simply don't agree that the free market is merely or chiefly about grabbing stuff in some short-sighted way, like foolish children. I think it's about, among other things, people's making myriad decisions based on their perceptions and estimations of advantage and disadvantage. There are manifold advantages to having kids. I just discussed some of them. Why assume that people in general are too stupid to know this? I think a lot of people _do_ know this instinctively, and I think that what has broken down that perception has been a promotion on the part of lots of powerful people (certainly, some of them wealthy business owners and advertisers, but many more through the government schools) of a particular view of the world and of sex that is, ultimately, quite stupid even from a "selfish" perspective. I consider that the use of the term "capitalism" for everything that wealthy businessmen ever do or promote is misguided and confuses our cultural and historical analysis.

"I simply don't agree that the free market is merely or chiefly about grabbing stuff in some short-sighted way, like foolish children."

Yes, but we're not talking about free markets simply understood, but about corporate/industrial capitalism as a system. If you read Carlson's piece in its entirety he makes that distinction, basing his understanding in part on the work of economist Wilhelm Roepke. Corporate capitalism wants us to behave as short-sighted foolish children, as a means of increasing profits. Why do you think they promote preference maximization, the exaltation of the appetive will?

That's going to be pretty stupid for them, too, though. If society breaks down, that ain't too good for business. Are some businessmen foolish in that way anyway--promoting the kind of irrationality that leads to societal chaos for the sake of short-term profit? Of course. After all, we have commercials for casinos all over the place here in Michigan. (To give but one example.) Is there some entity called "corporate capitalism" that is identifiably and in general foolish in that way? I doubt it very much.

The very wealthy do not have to worry too much about low-level societal chaos. They know which side their bread is buttered on, and have it covered.

Corporate capitalism is not an "entity" but a system. As such it has certain tendencies. Are there exceptions? Absolutely. But the thing as a whole is simply a machine for generating profit, and thus cannot in any true sense be "principled." Its tendencies, despite the exceptions, are toward wealth generation period, and there are no internal mechanisms whereby the system can delineate between moral and immoral lines of trade. Hence there are no means within the system itself to prevent the production and sale of anti-traditional products, or the use of anti-traditional motifs or methods in its advertising of otherwise indifferent products. This inherent amorality undermines tradition, including the traditional family, in any number of ways, as agrarians, distributists, and traditional conservatives have been arguing for decades.


Is there some entity called "corporate capitalism" that is identifiably and in general foolish in that way?

I'm going to indulge a brief conjecture and say that the most rarefied level of finance capitalism has indeed, by and large, embraced sexual disorder systematically. But I'd set down the caveat that the "most rarefied level of finance capital" is a pretty small segment of the finance industry as a whole, and tiny fraction of the whole of American capitalism.

The irony of NM's position is one we all know: The virtuous businessman, mixing frugality and generosity in proper degrees, wisely ascertaining the character of markets, competitors, clients, etc., is very likely succeed in a free market environment. It's when massive intervention vitiates the reward of virtue that vice often begins to dominate. A friend of mine once spoke of how strange it felt to him, coming out of work in a big bureaucracy of a major American city, to suddenly be cast among people (in the private sector) who are largely ethical in their conduct.

I may have enough distributist sympathies to leave Lydia queasy at times, but I'll be durned if my skepticism of finance capitalism, corporate capitalism, crony capitalism or any old form of capitalism, induces me to embrace the pernicious lunacy that seems to pour out of the liberal, progressive, technocratic mind.

"I'll be durned if my skepticism of finance capitalism, corporate capitalism, crony capitalism or any old form of capitalism, induces me to embrace the pernicious lunacy that seems to pour out of the liberal, progressive, technocratic mind."

True for me as well, but partly because I see the two things as flip sides of one another.

"that the most rarefied level of finance capitalism has indeed, by and large, embraced sexual disorder systematically. But I'd set down the caveat that the 'most rarefied level of finance capital' is a pretty small segment of the finance industry as a whole, and tiny fraction of the whole of American capitalism."

Not sure how you can say this given, say, the nature of today's TV, both in its programming and its advertising.

NM, that last sentence is just a pulverizing non sequitur. What has TV to do with finance capitalism?

It's not exactly "Joe's Pizza" that's sponsoring Jersey Shore.

Or producing it, for that matter.

At most you've just added broadcast entertainment to the list of depraved industries. Still a small fraction of the economy.

Its tendencies, despite the exceptions, are toward wealth generation period, and there are no internal mechanisms whereby the system can delineate between moral and immoral lines of trade.

Yes and no. I myself tend to think that what is immoral tends to be destructive as well; hence, bad business practice in the long run. (Look at slavery as a good example. But perhaps that invites too much of a digression.) However, I'm willing to grant that to see that in some given instance one might have to take a *really* long-term view, so long-term that some particular set of people might not live to see or to suffer from the destructive downside and hence might not have to take it into account in their personal calculations.

Hence there are no means within the system itself to prevent the production and sale of anti-traditional products, or the use of anti-traditional motifs or methods in its advertising of otherwise indifferent products.

That doesn't seem terribly controversial. Tentatively, I'd agree with that statement.

This inherent amorality undermines tradition, including the traditional family, in any number of ways,

I don't agree with that.

Look, there is _no_ system of barter and exchange, etc., that is inherently moral. It's like complaining that Middle C is not inherently blue. No kidding. Tell us something else we didn't know. And just as you can't get some interesting conclusion about music and art from the truism that Middle C isn't inherently blue, so here. You can't get anywhere from the statement that there is nothing "inherent" about "capitalism" that somehow magically forces people not to use immoral advertising motifs or what-not.

It's _people_ who are moral or immoral. Given the fall of man, often immoral.

I'm quite happy to advocate various laws to rein in the immoral tendencies of man. Heck, I wish we could go back to the days of the movie board of censorship, so long as the same standards were applied as used to be applied then. Which unfortunately they wouldn't be. (Nowadays, if you had a board of censorship on movies, they'd let all the F-bombs through and insist on censoring out the Muslim terrorists because that would be "Islamophobic." It would be anti-censoring.)

And, to get back to Paul's original post, such laws might just help to get people out of poverty.

I'd also advocate getting rid of all sorts of totally evil laws that are gravely harming people, especially the poor.

But as for "capitalism," I'd like to see more of its power released to provide jobs and positive rather than perverse incentives. See Walter Williams and Co. for concrete ideas on this subject.

"you've just added broadcast entertainment to the list of depraved industries. Still a small fraction of the economy."

Not when you consider who is financing and sponsoring the "entertainment."

"there is _no_ system of barter and exchange, etc., that is inherently moral"

Perhaps, but the system will be more moral than amoral when the parties involved actually have a stake in the humanity of the transaction and are not simply trying to hose each other.

~~You can't get anywhere from the statement that there is nothing "inherent" about "capitalism" that somehow magically forces people not to use immoral advertising motifs or what-not.~~

Oh, but you can. You can get to the point where you grasp the fact that, to put it simply, big business is not the conservative's friend, because of the inherent amorality of the system, which tends to undermine traditional cultural manifestations such as the family. Large corporations are increasingly hostile to what we hold dear, yet we continually bow and scrape to the very system that props them up and enables them in that regard.

Look, Schumpeter wrote about it, Weaver wrote about it, Kristol pere wrote about it, Daniel Bell wrote about it. Call it "creative destruction" or "cultural contradiction" or whatever. Fact is, capitalism has an inherently destructive side. That today's conservatives pay it scant attention, if they acknowledge its existence at all, doesn't change that fact.

Paul,

Sometimes it's hard to tell whether or not a writer has employed sarcasm and/or sly humor when writing on the internet, but for what its worth, I picture you with a smile on your face when you wrote this sentence:

"A remarkable opportunity presents itself for the enterprising scholar to compare Detroit and Pittsburgh, for instance."

Nice Marmot,

To insert myself once again into the endless debate between you and Lydia concerning "capitalism" or "a market economy", I actually read your first quote (the one from Carlson) and found myself somewhat sympathetic. I would quibble with his timeline -- I suspect that it was the industrial revolution itself and all of the attendant material benefits that have blinded many of us to the importance of spiritual values and made children less "valuable" (you don't need all those farm hands around to help out).

But like Lydia, I think the "solution" to this problem lies not in killing the goose that lays the golden egg but in using government wisely simply to promote the common good as an old-fashioned Christian legislator (probably out of the late 19th Century) would understand the concept -- a Constitutionally limited federal government, local and State laws employed to regulate harms to civic order and morals, etc. Maybe I'd throw in some laws banning usuary, properly understood, since Paul has been persuasive on this matter! Just the basics. Let creative destruction keep on destroying and bringing its bounty to all; we will always turn to God (and ministers and priests) to remind us of what is really important in life ;-)

P.S. This is just silly: "Perhaps, but the system will be more moral than amoral when the parties involved actually have a stake in the humanity of the transaction and are not simply trying to hose each other." As Lydia tried to point out to you, but apparently you were too busy with your latest "Front Porch Republic" screed to pick up your Bible and re-read the story of Cain and Able -- two gents who knew each other well and had a "stake in the humanity" of their transactions but still managed to "hose each other" in a manner of speaking -- we all can sin against our neighbor and brother and there are real people working for large corporations who are trying to do their jobs well just like the people at small businesses. Look, when I go into McDonald's; or better yet like today when I went into Chick Fil-A, the folks there were only trying to serve me a decent product and no one was trying to "hose me" -- as a business it was doing what markets are set up to do -- provide a consumer (me) with options to buy food from producers and select one I like (Chick Fil-A) and enjoy a meal I don't have to cook myself for lunch. It's a great system!

~~I suspect that it was the industrial revolution itself and all of the attendant material benefits that have blinded many of us to the importance of spiritual values and made children less "valuable"~~

I see. And the I.R. of course had nothing to do with the rise of corporate capitalism...

I suggest you read Carlson's piece in its entirety.

"Let creative destruction keep on destroying and bringing its bounty to all; we will always turn to God (and ministers and priests) to remind us of what is really important in life"

And the total separation of morality from economics is complete. Yet somehow it magically works out for everyone's good! We've got to have a name for this schmaltz: how about Pollyanna-economics? I can almost hear the angels singing. Must bring a tear to Fr. Sirico's eye...

the system will be more moral than amoral when the parties involved actually have a stake in the humanity of the transaction and are not simply trying to hose each other.

This was a perfectly sound statement until that last phrase, which by its egregious implicated imputation converted the whole thing into nonsense.

The idea that all business contracts, or even most of them, are comprised of the legal maneuvers of sharps trying to "hose each other," suggests a kind of morbid innocence of actual businessmen and business operations at which we can do little more than sigh. The related idea that sharps bent on hosing each other will be turned from their stratagems by mere additional human contact, suggests the sort of morbid optimism Chesterton frequently skewered.

Nevertheless, I am prepared to agree with NM's statement, should he consent to withdraw the outstanding silliness of the last phrase. It is on balance true, I think, that a "system will be more moral than amoral when the parties involved actually have a stake in the humanity of the transaction."

Sorry to be flip, but it's just that I see real people getting hurt by capitalism's destructive side, not just economically but spiritually, when Big Business promotes anti-Christian and anti-family ideas that have both direct and indirect negative effects on the culture. To hear so-called conservatives simply brush this aside as if it's nothing is rather off-putting, to say the least. At least the older variety of those on the Right were able to acknowledge this and take it into consideration when thinking about economics.

~~The idea that all business contracts, or even most of them, are comprised of the legal maneuvers of sharps trying to "hose each other," suggests a kind of morbid innocence of actual businessmen and business operations at which we can do little more than sigh.~~

My father was a small businessman; I grew up in the milieu of small business, and recognize that he always tried to deal fairly with customers, suppliers, etc., and that the majority of small businessmen do the same. However it does seem to me rather obvious that the bigger a business becomes the less apt it is to be able to maintain humane transactions, esp. those with other big businesses. This is what I was getting at.

The silly sneer at Fr. Sirico also belies any notion of reasonableness in NM. Really, it does. NM, y'all need to stop letting your inner extremist show through.

Getting back to the main post, I was much struck by this:

The researchers concluded that larger tax credits for the poor and higher taxes on the affluent seemed to improve income mobility only slightly.

Whaddaya know.

What all of the things in the main post tell me is the intractability of human problems and the way that they come back to personal responsibility. They can't be engineered away externally.

However it does seem to me rather obvious that the bigger a business becomes the less apt it is to be able to maintain humane transactions, esp. those with other big businesses.

It doesn't seem obvious to me at all, especially given how undifferentiated and undefined "bigness" actually is. Does the Chick-Fil-A in Jeff's allegedly schmaltzy example count as Big Business? Does the local Goodyear franchise that handles the maintenance of my vehicles, and has repeatedly demonstrated to me the firm's integrity, count?

A lot of big business operates through various franchise structures, so that the local firm is hardly inhuman and distant, but rather composed of local labor and local management, even sometimes local ownership.

One wonders how much direct experience NM has with the internal workings of truly large corporations.

"What all of the things in the main post tell me is the intractability of human problems and the way that they come back to personal responsibility. They can't be engineered away externally."

Yes, and neither can original sin be whisked away by the supposed magical forces of the market. Avarice does not become a virtue just because lots of people engage in it.

My reference to schmaltz had nothing to do with Chic-Fil-A, a company that I respect quite a lot. It had to do with Singer's picture of capitalism as producing naught but a cornucopia of delights.

Since 1993 I've worked for three large companies -- first two large national insurance firms, and then currently, a Fortune 500 medical industry corporation, which I've been with for 11+ years. And having grown up in Pittsburgh, I've seen firsthand the depredations wrought by irresponsible steel, coal and chemical companies (and yes, unions and bad local government too!) I didn't exactly just fall off a turnip truck.

"The silly sneer at Fr. Sirico also belies any notion of reasonableness in NM. Really, it does. NM, y'all need to stop letting your inner extremist show through."

That's rich, coming from someone who will bend over backwards and then perform all manner of acrobatics in order to defend her economic ideology. It's not me who's the extremist.

Fr. Sirico has simply taken his former sexual libertarianism and applied it to economics. Par for the course, as the two are joined at the hip, being instances of the deification of the autonomous appetitive will.

I didn't exactly just fall off a turnip truck.

Good to hear! The often over-generalized nature of your comments sometimes leaves a different impression.

Yes, and neither can original sin be whisked away by the supposed magical forces of the market.

Well, when I or anyone else asserts that it can, you can tell us we're wrong, then, 'kay? Not that any of us ever have asserted anything of the kind. In fact, I recall explicitly denying any such thing in this very thread.

Fr. Sirico has simply taken his former sexual libertarianism and applied it to economics. Par for the course, as the two are joined at the hip, being instances of the deification of the autonomous appetitive will.

Wow. Any time someone like me, with sympathies for free market economics, has a brief moment of thinking there might be some possible rapprochement between oneself and the Front Porch types, the Catholic Crunchies, the distributists, I recommend this procedure: Just utter the words "Acton Institute" or "Fr. Sirico" and watch the venomous fury start flying. They nearly splutter. Their statements become, to put it mildly, over-the-top. I've seen it more than once and with more than one interlocutor. And then one realizes that, no, there is no rapprochement possible.

NM,

"And having grown up in Pittsburgh, I've seen firsthand the depredations wrought by irresponsible steel, coal and chemical companies"

But presumably you never saw all the good those companies did for the area? You know, like all the jobs that supported families, the products they produced used by millions, etc. Talk about "Pollyanna-economics".

I think you need some nuance in your thinking -- try this on for size as a start:

http://www.intercollegiatereview.com/index.php/2013/07/15/does-capitalism-destroy-culture/

Ya see, here's the thing. I'm perfectly willing to grant that corporations/corporate capitalism do a lot of good. As an engine for wealth creation it is unmatched, and this wealth brings much good.

The problem is that the engine also brings a lot of negatives. Your unwillingness to examine this side of capitalism makes you the unnuanced one, I'd say. I've read Hayek, Hazlitt, Mises, Sowell, etc. Have you read, say, Weaver, Lasch, Bell, or Medaille?

"I didn't exactly just fall off a turnip truck."

In these trying times, it is very hard to find a turnip truck from which to fall off of. In these days of relativism, most turnips want to insist on bring rhubarbs and whose to argue?

That realization, alone, should qualify me to be in a rarified class of economists :)

The Chicken

...insist on being rhubarbs...

Sigh, if you're going for humor, at least spell it correctly :(

The Chicken

A lot of heat and little light in this discussion, I have to say. Being legitimately on the fence in these matters makes that plainer to me, maybe, than it is to the participants.

Anyway, it seems to me that the essential question is not whether corporations are often destructive of tradition, craven, callous, self-seeking, or what have you--I take it as obvious to everyone that they are--but whether they are specially so, more than other institutions of human make. What is the (non-anecdotal) evidence for that claim? Also, it should be clarified what we mean by "creative destruction." What is being destroyed, exactly, in this process of wealth creation? It seems to me that what defenders of capitalism mean by "destruction" is the abandonment of practices and structures that are less efficient than the ones constantly being generated by the pressures of competition.

The problem that critics like NM are pointing out is that tradition--as well as organic, localized civic institutions--are inefficient, at least apparently so and at least over the short run, when compared to the more strictly rationalized approaches to the distribution of information, power, and resources that characterize what NM is calling "corporate capitalism." For example, in the world of finance, large institutions prefer everything to be fungible and interchangeable, divisible into the smallest possible undifferentiated units. This is one reason they are such big promoters of the zero-parent family, that is, the family in which men and women both work full time. Predictability and efficacy demand that men and women be regarded as not estranged in essence, but as interchangeable. That this makes wages much lower is a bonus but not, I think, the main motivator.

However that might be, we have to face the stark truth that, as one contributor here once wrote (it has stuck in my head ever since): Preservation of the nation requires some level of economic inefficiency. Conservatives seem to fear that once the discussion turns to how much economic efficiency is too much, that they have then given the game away. (It happens that liberals, we notice, have a similar horror at any discussion that forces them to contemplate just exactly how much government is too much, in concrete terms, which is why they will refuse ever to permit any debate over the scope of government to reach that point.) Much of what they defend is trade as such--they imitate de Soto on this point--rather than the international free trade regime as we know it. Most conservatives will accept that there is some price to pay in commodities prices for, let's say, maintaining the integrity of the border. But they are not willing to extend the thought much beyond that, or at least, not in short blog posts and columns.

I write all this in the uncomfortable knowledge that all my instincts go the other direction. Being a child of the Cold War, it is hard not to think of "conservatism" as identical with Reagan's admirable defense of markets. And I would like to see, as I said, some more evidence--not just abstract arguments--presented that "corporations" are more destructive of tradition by necessity than, say, the State. As I said, though I once had strong convictions on these matters, I am realizing that my convictions may have been mistaken, and were not based on much more than my instincts and my background, as well as my loathing of the obvious fraudulence of Marxism and every kind of economically-oriented leftism, which is so transparently about empowering the modern bureaucratic state and eliminating all free associations that might rival it.

I suggest you read Carlson's piece in its entirety.

I made a fair stab at reading it in its entirety, but I fell into a morass of false or at least misleading characterizations that simply don't do what Carlson intends, and kind of got bogged down.

the spread of capitalism has depended on forced centralization and the power of the modern state for its effective operation... ” A central bureaucracy, backed by an efficient “minister of the police,” was needed to standardize weights and measures, destroy local restraints on trade, enforce contracts, protect shipping, collect debts, and guarantee an open labor market.

Oh come now. It is "force" in the sense of forcing centralization and collectivizing to
enforce contracts;
"destroy" local restraints on trade;
protect shipping;
guarantee an open labor market?

How is that again? Pirates use force to grab shipping illegally and immorally, so when you use the threat of overwhelming violence against pirates you are using "force" to..."force" collectivizing? Yeah, right. Or, again, using the power of the police to say "when you sign a contract you have to live up to it." That's forces people to sign the contract to begin with? The Romans didn't practice that sort of force? If there were "local restraints on trade" that were not RESTRAINTS OF FORCE themselves, (and I don't have a clue what the forced ones would even be), how is it FORCE that is responsible for collectivizing to remove restraint, to, shall we say, FORCE people to stop being forced to do something they wouldn't choose to do freely? The last one is so laughable it just doesn't bear scrutiny: an open market is OPEN, dammit, making sure that people aren't forced to work on a farm or in a factory because their dad did isn't FORCED anything at all. You might as well say that using law to take away the custom which forced the serf to till the land his father worked (merely by result of his being born there) FORCES the serf to move elsewhere to work. Carlson's description is just wrong.

Concentrations of economic power, be they personal or corporate, inevitably buy political power. This used to come through simple bribes; today these entities buy political power through “bundled” campaign donations, the threat of negative advertising, and the promise to elected officials or state regulators of lucrative future employment.

This would have been much more convincing if Carlson had employed mechanisms that are used by most capitalists most of the time, instead of ones that are more or less limited to only some players. There are, simply, lots and lots of capitalists who don't do those things. (Admittedly, there are plenty who do.) He also should have thrown in the ONE mechanism that is inherent to capitalism as a "system" (such as it is, see next comment): the threat of the business man to take his business elsewhere, or to not locate his business in this district, if he doesn't get concessions from government, or at least "fair treatment" (as he defines it, of course). All the other mechanisms have always been employed by thems that gots in order to move/persuade/threaten thems that decides. Nothing new there, certainly not a mechanism new to corporate capitalism. In any case, this form of pressure only applies to the LARGE business, not to the ones that employ 30 or 40 or 80 people. But the latter are, also, perfectly good examples of taking people out of their homes and putting them to work somewhere else than the bosom of the family. Like my uncle's restaurant that employed about 50 people, and could run 3 large wedding receptions at the same time.

Corporate capitalism isn't properly speaking a "system" at all, but rather a concatenation of somewhat similar practices employed frequently by similar parties often enough to identify trends and tendencies. There are, however, in every case (whether corporate or government) counterexamples that are not doing something in "violation" of the system even when they are not employing the same tactics or practices, so there is no inherently "policing" mechanism of "the system" that forces them, except the one that has plagued mankind since the beginning: if you don't play dirty, the guy who does play dirty has an upper hand. The reality was well known enough long ago for Jesus to comment on it.

Going back to Carlson's characterization of the Industrial Revolution,

The most important of these, and the one most often forgotten, has been the wrenching apart of the workplace from the place of residence. Prior to industrialization, the vast majority of people — well over 90 percent — lived and worked in the same location, be it a peasant or family farm, a fisherman’s cottage, a nomad’s tent, or an artisan’s shop.

Well, sure, when agricultural labor produces on the order of 10% surplus over its own sustenance, you better have about 90% of the population doing it. EVEN SO, history has been replete with towns and cities in which most of the people within the walls did NOT grow the bulk of their own food and source of clothing and lumber (or bricks). Specialization and towns are inherently bred together, whether the tanner, miller, blacksmith, miner, soldier, or dye-maker. What Carlson describes is, more probably, the not-yet-mature agricultural landscape of a frontier society, where they have yet to accumulate the accoutrements of civilization. The THINGS that, as the coalescence of much primary labor, make other activities of labor more productive, such as the saw mill. There have always been soldiers, and they have never lived upstairs from their work.

Yeah, somebody pretty much loses me when he starts deploring the enforcement of contracts. I mean, sure, if the contract is, "I promise to burn myself to death if you will agree to give my family the insurance money," then that's a contract that shouldn't be enforced. But more generally, security of contract is one major reason why America is not a Third World country. It's extremely important.

Also, anyone who feels nostalgic for "the nomad's tent" or the peasant farm is suffering from...the wrong kind of nostalgia. That kind of talk always brings on in me an irresistible attack of C.P. Snow:

Industrialization is the only hope of the poor. I use the word ‘hope’ in a crude and prosaic sense. I have not much use for the moral sensibility of anyone who is too refined to use it so. It is all very well for us, sitting pretty, to think that material standards of living don’t matter all that much. It is all very well for one, as a personal choice, to reject industrialization – do a modern Walden, if you like, and if you go without much food, see most of your children die in infancy, despise the comforts of literacy, accept twenty years off your own life, then I respect you for the strength of your aesthetic revulsion. But I don’t respect you in the slightest if, even passively, you try to impose the same choice on others who are not free to choose.

Another point here is that in the fullness of time the information culture and the flowering of industrialization has brought us back full circle. What is making "working from home" possible once again? Why, it's those darned electronic gadgets.

Let me add that as far as business favoring the two-income family for reasons of efficiency, I tend to doubt this. There are manifest inefficiencies about the full inclusion of women in the workforce. It's just that it's politically incorrect to talk about them. Women tend to take more leave. There's a reason why the federal government had to force on businesses the requirement of holding a job open for three months of family leave. The family leave can be taken by men as well, but the rationale given for it at the time was _explicitly_ a feminist ideological rationale--to force businesses to do something they would not otherwise do in order to accommodate women who wanted to take a few months off when they had a baby.

Female workers are more likely to be lost to attrition, and so forth. Businesses have generally swallowed all of this, but it took a while. At the outset, the cutthroat capitalists were criticized _not_ for favoring familial breakdown by way of women in the workforce. To the contrary. They were criticized for favoring a "masculine model" in which workers were devoted to their jobs, never tried to work from home, were willing to work overtime at the drop of a hat, and never, never took time off because one of the kiddos was home from school sick. All this was said to disfavor women, and in fact it fit better with a traditionalist model of gender roles in which there was an at-home mother to take care of these problems, take the children to their appointments and their lessons, and the like. The business world has been reformed partly by ideology embraced for independent reasons by those in power and partly by government imposition, led by feminists whining about the alleged fact that women make only n (lesser amount of money) for every dollar earned by men.

So, no, it isn't at all obvious to me that even the evil corporate capitalism is inherently favorable to having both parents work.

Then, of course, there's the broader fact that our societal experiments (loudly promoted long ago by Communists) in communal child-rearing, aka daycare, have _not_ proven to be models of effectiveness, quality, and efficiency. Even when it comes to education, the "inefficient" home schooling model has proven surprisingly effective, even in an important sense efficient at turning out well-educated children, while the mass education system flounders. But of course home schooling requires a parent at home to do the work. So to the extent that childcare and education are themselves products, it would simply be foolish to overlook the fact that these products can often be produced at their highest quality and at extremely low cost by mothers who do not work outside the home.

Sage,

I like this comment (did Maximos make it way back when?) very much:

"However that might be, we have to face the stark truth that, as one contributor here once wrote (it has stuck in my head ever since): Preservation of the nation requires some level of economic inefficiency."

My endless debates with libertarians on the internet are essentially over this one point. And I'm perfectly willing to concede other 'inefficiencies' (if that's what you want to call them) with respect to all sorts of markets that I think are immoral or shouldn't exist in the first place (e.g. IVF). But there is a wide gap between North Korea and Singapore and where we should be on that spectrum is what we are arguing over.

Even when it comes to education, the "inefficient" home schooling model has proven surprisingly effective, even in an important sense efficient at turning out well-educated children, while the mass education system flounders. But of course home schooling requires a parent at home to do the work. So to the extent that childcare and education are themselves products, it would simply be foolish to overlook the fact that these products can often be produced at their highest quality and at extremely low cost by mothers who do not work outside the home.

That's very true. But the scale matters too. If one mother is taking care of 2 kids at home and schooling them, the balance of economic value is a lot different than if the same mother is taking care of 6 kids and schooling them. In pure terms, if it costs $6000 per year per kid for day care and about $12,000 per year per kid for school (that's probably about what the government pays), you can figure that about 186,000 per kid up to age 18. That's about 372,000 for 2 kids, or about 1.1 million for 6. Obviously, it makes a lot more economic sense for a mom to spend 18 years providing 1.1 million of value to the (household and total) economy than to spend the same 18 years providing 372,000 to the economy.

That's aside from the perspective of moral development, adequacy of the child emotionally, psychologically, and as a prepared adult (productive) member of society, of course.

I once came across a future fiction story in which a stay-at-home parent was paid by society for the value of their services. I don't think the author thought through the social ramifications, but the idea was interesting. Imagine if society decided to re-imburse the stay-at-home married parent, not at full price, but 4/5 of the price of the cheapest "regular" day care locally available, on the same moral basis of providing day care subsidies (either direct or tax-incentive based). Not that I am suggesting that government should be arranged this way, mind you, just imagining the implications. A big part of how society runs is defined around how families "make sense" out of the expenditure of effort to raise kids.

Part of what's hard to figure into that economic model, Tony, is the quality of the education. Here I'm not at the moment talking about moral education (though in a sense that has utilitarian and economic value as well, in the form of, e.g., avoiding out-of-wedlock pregnancies and fatherless children) but just the education quality. My bet is that *especially* in the K-8 years, where kids are learning basic skills and not taking highly advanced math classes (for example) the sheer educational quality is a good deal higher than that in the public schools, so the economic comparison should be adjusted accordingly.

As for paying parents to stay home, I realize you're not actually suggesting it, but I believe it would change society in chiefly negative ways. For example, my impression is that European countries that do that for x number of years then have a kind of *overwhelming* expectation that the mother will go back to work thereafter. It's pretty much unheard of for the mother to stay at home for the entirety of the children's growing up years. So it's a kind of trade-off. Two years (or whatever) of paid leave followed by nearly irresistible social pressure to get with the program and send your kid back into the arms of the state system. I even seem to recall vaguely one situation where it was suggested in a European context that a woman should have to pay back the government for her educational grants if she didn't "use the degree" by getting out into the public workforce. So such policies generally are not pro-family, and in a way I see how they would not be. I don't, myself, want to be beholden to "society" for pay (which will be taken to equal permission) not to work outside the home. I prefer to be left alone by the Powers that Be.

~~it should be clarified what we mean by "creative destruction." What is being destroyed, exactly, in this process of wealth creation? It seems to me that what defenders of capitalism mean by "destruction" is the abandonment of practices and structures that are less efficient than the ones constantly being generated by the pressures of competition.~~

This is true, but as you imply it does not take into consideration the abandonment/destruction of practices and structures which are not reducible to matters of efficiency and quantity. Modern economics, having abandoned the moral concerns of classical/Christian "economy" and become almost entirely a numbers game related to wealth-getting (chrematistics), has no interest in such intangibles. It is as if the quality of a household could be judged solely by its bank statements and checkbook.

~~I would like to see, as I said, some more evidence--not just abstract arguments--presented that "corporations" are more destructive of tradition by necessity than, say, the State.~~

I think it might be more accurate to say that in certain regards corporate capitalism is more destructive of tradition than the State. The State has the potential to be more destructive overall because of its coercive power. But when you think about today's Leviathan, it is in fact an amalgam of the two, what some have called "state capitalism" or "the market state." This, I'd say, is the most threatening of all, as it combines the corrosive cultural effects of modern capitalism with the coercive power of the State. It's the modern manifestation of Belloc's "servile state."

"I am realizing that my convictions may have been mistaken, and were not based on much more than my instincts and my background, as well as my loathing of the obvious fraudulence of Marxism and every kind of economically-oriented leftism, which is so transparently about empowering the modern bureaucratic state and eliminating all free associations that might rival it."

This is evidence of the false binary so much in play today: if one rejects corporate capitalism one must of necessity lean Left. As numerous writers have demonstrated, such is decidedly not the case.

Snow's summary is a version of a similar binary: anyone who finds problems with industrialism wants everyone to return to the farm! Got to, say, FPR or Solidarity Hall, read a half dozen essays at random, then come back and then try to deny that such criticisms are simply inane.

~~What is making "working from home" possible once again? Why, it's those darned electronic gadgets.~~

Of course the cow on the coffee-table is that this version of "working from home" requires one to be not at all independent, but instead entirely dependent on "the grid" -- at the mercy of huge faraway companies that produce electricity, etc., and ultimately dependent on the petroleum industry. Not exactly Jefferson's independent yeoman farmer.

It's funny, NM. On the one hand, you say that Snow's is a caricature, that you don't want everyone to return to the farm. On the other hand, when I point out the resurgence of working from home as a benefit of the continued movement of capitalism, invention, etc., your instantaneous reaction is that this isn't an "independent yeoman farmer." Well, voila! Who said it was an independent yeoman farmer? Y'know how much back-breaking work goes into being a farmer? Not to mention being a farmer's wife. Life that isn't "dependent" on all that technology, on electricity and so forth, is not just beautiful and idyllic. Lots of people don't _want_ to be independent farmers living without all that nasty "dependence" on electricity. Deal with it.

I also note the goalpost shifting. The original complaint was that evil capitalism separates the place of work from the home. When I point out that evil capitalism is once more bringing them together, the grumpy response is that that isn't good enough, because it only counts if it can be done off the grid! Or something like that. Good grief.

Not to mention that solar panels will be taking us off some of that dependence electric power companies. And there is (probably at least 30 years out) early indicators of other esoteric power sources (think quantum tunneling) that could be completely revolutionary for at-home power.

NM does have a point about destruction: the market driven business has a direct interest in finding the most efficient way of achieving the goal they are already producing at X expenditure of effort, and pretty much by definition any increase in efficiency to X - N effort implies (eventually) either a reduction in the price of output goods or a reduction in the number of laborers, or both as equilibrium is re-established. (Initially the N amount should be pretty close to pure profit.) That reduction in the number of laborers has an untoward impact on the human part of the equation that is irreducible. Humans are not mere units of labor. They have families that cannot "efficiently" turn off their stomachs, or stop getting educated, while Dad finds a new job.

My "solution" to that, (which isn't a solution but merely a re-stating of the problem) is that the properly determined "price" of the achievement of a labor-saving improvement in efficiency includes finding suitable work for the workers displaced, or training them for new types of work. But generally, by and large, most companies don't feel like they can (or should) afford to carry that cost on their balance sheet, they cost-shift that to "society" by laying off the workers, letting unemployment insurance handle about a third of the drop in income for the worker, and let him shift for himself at finding a new job. The costs are there, just they come out of a different set of accounts.

I don't know how to reverse that situation and push them to putting that cost on their balance sheets without government involvement - which is kind of where unemployment insurance came from to begin with. The only half-baked idea I have is this: in one entity I have worked with, they gave away bonuses for improvements in operating procedures, improvements that were measurably beneficial in terms of costs and profits. The person responsible got a bonus tied to the amount of cost savings, something like up to 25% for 2 years. I think the idea of the 2 years (instead of "however long we use your technique") is that eventually within the industry a new technique simply becomes the standard way of doing business, and somewhere within 2 to 5 years everyone else copies the new "most efficient" way of doing it, equilibrium is achieved at a new price-cost level, and everyone is back to the same amount of total profits on the same amount of effort - just more goods produced. Seems to me, then, a proper perspective on the bonus is that the company views the bonus as the inherent cost of becoming more productive, and take it out of the new profits. Well, on the very same basis, can that be extended to the costs of finding new work for the displaced workers - it's just part of the cost of finding that new efficient method? That the initial profits gained from (for a while) still being able to charge X for the product but requiring only X-N to provide it (before industry equilibrium comes in) is owed at least in part to the displaced workers? How to make that point of view uniform within business? No idea.

Honestly, I don't believe we can get anything like a clear view of the "true cost" of the displacement of workers by new technologies without taking such a huge number of factors into account that it would be impossible. After all, lots of people might actually be _better_ suited for the new job created. Think of all the physically lacking geek-types who were underemployed in a world of horse-drawn carriages and hand-pumps and now have more jobs in a world of cars and computers. Then there's the fact that the worker is himself a user. He has to retrain but also may very well at some point in his life have a good use for the new technology that temporarily put him out of the job. Then there are all the potential down-sides of attempts to "fix" or even stop the movement of manpower. For example, suppose we tried to prop up the horse-drawn carriage business so all those people wouldn't be put out of work. Or even worse, outlaw the newborn auto business. Wellll. Yeah, that would have its downside. Including a lot fewer people employed and fed, in the long run.

What the complaint amounts to is that things change. People decide to change things and to do them in new ways that they find to work better. And this requires employees to change as well. That is only a "feature of capitalism" insofar as it is a feature of allowing the world to change and allowing people to do things in ways that seem reasonable to them rather than artificially fixing a given point in time in place. No alternative to allowing things to change and allowing people the freedom to develop and enjoy new and better technologies has the slightest attraction for me, and honestly, I think it shouldn't for anyone else, either.

Honestly, I don't believe we can get anything like a clear view of the "true cost" of the displacement of workers by new technologies without taking such a huge number of factors into account that it would be impossible.

That's true enough, but the same can be said about the "true cost" of no-fault divorce or any number of things are destructive of basic social bonds. The costs are incalculable precisely because they deal with things that are "down deep." From a traditionalist standpoint, it seems like the inability to quantify the social damage done by something ought to be considered a lesser-order objection.

(Again, I'm playing devil's advocate here because I'm mostly listening--my ideas and instincts are actually on the "pro-capitalist" side of the debate, whatever that means.)

Yes, I think we need to allow things to change for the better / more efficient / more productive also. I don't agree with the Amish approach at all - that the only change to allow is the change that they are certain will not disrupt other things more than is anticipated and planned for. I was only talking about the cost of that change.

Some of the costs are truly indeterminable - the effects society-wide that ultimately change where people live, buy food, etc. Some of the costs are certainly and directly calculable - the costs of modifying a major plant tool to take into account a new step in the process. And certainly some of the costs are somewhat in between. The costs of an old employee being trained on the new machine are surely determinable. The costs of an old employee being let go having to re-train for a completely new job (and need for income in the meantime) are somewhat less determinable, but not absolutely unascertainable. (It doesn't matter, in computing how much the cost is, in asking who is paying the cost, the two are separate questions.)

I think the usual approach to take is that the society-wide effects have to be borne by society-wide cost-sharing. The purely internal costs to the company for re-tooling are borne purely by the company. And the costs of retraining (and intermediate support) for the former employee for a new job seem to be in a middle area. If they are borne solely by the company, it seems harsh. If they are borne solely by society, it seems like externalizing the company's changeover to a new (more profitable) process. What seems to me likely to be true is that there is a moral reality that somehow the "efficiency" of the market prescribing a changeover to a more productive process needs to include within it the cost of providing for the needs of the person whose job is changed. It seems directly contrary to the rationality of the capitalist system (a system based on the surplus of the capital investor and the labor of the non-investor) that the ENTIRETY of the cost should be borne by the laborer, who by definition is not presumed to have surplus capital to invest in re-training. Nor does it seem likely that the entirety of the cost should be borne solely by society at large, even before society is clear that the new process is truly more efficient and will be truly beneficial.

Yes, a person needs to exercise responsibility in thinking ahead for his career choice and pathway, and take reasonable steps to ensure he is orienting himself toward a market-based rate of income. But nobody can successfully plan through all the possible changes and account for them. If a person spends 100,000 on an education to become a train engineer, (going 30,000 into debt) and finds out 5 years into his career that new technology is about to make trains obsolete, there is no way he could have reasonably foreseen this obsolescence and planned for it. The quirks of innovation are, by definition, not foreseeable in detail, so even though we know the job market will look different in 10 years we don't know exactly how. That sort of indeterminacy means that it cannot possibly be solely the individual employee's responsibility to plan for his job obsolescence and re-direct his efforts to a different career before hand. That sort of foresight doesn't exist. So it cannot be an "efficiency" of the market to expect it. Which means, I think, that the more immediate & direct negative effects (i.e. costs) of the innovative profit-bearing changes must principally be borne out of the profits thus generated - i.e. out of the location of what is surplus as such - rather than on the shoulders of the foresight of the individual laborer.

That's true enough, but the same can be said about the "true cost" of no-fault divorce or any number of things are destructive of basic social bonds. The costs are incalculable precisely because they deal with things that are "down deep." From a traditionalist standpoint, it seems like the inability to quantify the social damage done by something ought to be considered a lesser-order objection.

Hmm, Sage, that seems to me to be an odd comparison. Obviously, no-fault divorce can be seen to be an evil *in itself*. We can also talk about the societal cost of it, but we have to start by talking about the wrongness of it in itself. It's always a bit of a chancy business to argue that something is wrong _entirely_ because of its "societal cost." But if Company A changes to a new process and no longer needs as many employees, so some employees have to shift to a different line of work with some entity other than Company A, that's not evil in itself in anything like the same sense.

A point I would make to both you and Tony is that if the employer does not change his process, he may end up having to lay off workers for more brutal reasons--simply because he is being out-competed by a company that has changed the manufacture (or whatever) process. Hence, his loyalty to such employees as he can retain may dictate the change for him as well. This isn't just a matter of changing for the sake of stocking up more profit in some Rich Guy's mattress.

This last point also seems to speak to Tony's question as to whether perhaps there should be some mechanism in place to _require_ the company somehow to count part of the cost of helping its employees to find new jobs elsewhere as "factored in" to the efficiency to the company of changing its procedures. It seems to me artificial to postulate that the company just has surplus "sitting around," as it were, which was the end and goal of changing its processes, and that it could and perhaps should "have to" use part of this surplus to help its employees move on. That may well just not be the case at all.

I think there really has to be some level at which we stop ourselves from saying, "Who should bear this cost?" as though there is a single Platonic answer, and what deviates from it is per se injustice. My own opinion is that that is a highly artificial way of thinking, at least where there is no obvious _wrong_ being done. Obviously, if a doctor is negligent, it makes sense that he "should" bear the cost of the rehabilitation of the patient, through the doctor's malpractice insurance. But that is because of the negligence. Where what is happening is simply a function of no one's doing any wrong but of natural and understandable choices all around, then there really is such a thing as individual bad luck of various kinds, and to say that there "shouldn't" be or that individual bad luck "should" be mitigated by someone else seems to me highly problematic. No doubt many will be horrified by my putting it that way. But it seems to me simply incorrect either to say that an individual _should_ bear the cost of his own, hopefully temporary, bad fortune or rough time (no one is blaming him for it, after all, that's why we call it bad fortune) or that someone else _should_ bear that cost. There's just no "should" about the matter at all, either way. We can't make a world in which nothing difficult ever happens to anyone, and there isn't always someone to blame. In the nature of the case, the individual and those immediately responsible for him (friends, family, church family) will end up bearing the cost of getting him through the tough time--for job loss as for, say, loss of health. That kind of ad libbing, difficult though it is, actually makes for a humane society in a way that calculations and rules don't.

I also have a lot more that I could say, Sage, about your above comment about "efficiency," but I think it would be better put into a stand-alone post. Do note my comment about the allegation that somehow business will intrinsically favor male-female fungibility. Businessmen are no more stupid than anyone else, hence no less able than anyone else to notice that men and women _aren't_ identical. Nowadays, businessmen, like most other people, have had their common sense warped or eradicated by ideology in the educational system and the media, but not _because_ they are "capitalists." And they used to factor those gender differences into their calculations (hence, discriminate against women) because of considerations of efficiency, until they were told that this was evil and/or that they must not do so.

~~Life that isn't "dependent" on all that technology, on electricity and so forth, is not just beautiful and idyllic. Lots of people don't _want_ to be independent farmers living without all that nasty "dependence" on electricity.~~

As we used to say in high school, NSS.

The reason I mentioned the farm is because it's probably (at least potentially) the most truly independent of the professions (nothing fosters independence like the ability to raise your own food) and thus is nothing like working at home while still being utterly dependent on the grid.

~~Nowadays, businessmen, like most other people, have had their common sense warped or eradicated by ideology in the educational system and the media, but not _because_ they are "capitalists."~~

By the media, I take it you mean public television and NPR? Because the rest of the media obviously have no capitalist ties. No connections between big business and the media...none at all!

Where what is happening is simply a function of no one's doing any wrong but of natural and understandable choices all around, then there really is such a thing as individual bad luck of various kinds, and to say that there "shouldn't" be or that individual bad luck "should" be mitigated by someone else seems to me highly problematic. No doubt many will be horrified by my putting it that way. But it seems to me simply incorrect either to say that an individual _should_ bear the cost of his own, hopefully temporary, bad fortune or rough time (no one is blaming him for it, after all, that's why we call it bad fortune) or that someone else _should_ bear that cost. There's just no "should" about the matter at all, either way. We can't make a world in which nothing difficult ever happens to anyone, and there isn't always someone to blame.

Well, I can see a difference between bad luck, which more or less is unavoidable in the broad sense because it is unforeseeable (that's why it is "luck" or "chance"), and being on the short end of the stick on your career because some engineer discovered a way to make a machine do your job. In the latter case, although nobody intended for the "misfortune" to land on you specifically because of who you are, they certainly intended and planned for the effect of doing you out of a job, that's the whole point of the evolution. There is certainly design involved, which is not "luck", and the intent was to reduce the amount of labor needed in your job.

It seems to me artificial to postulate that the company just has surplus "sitting around," as it were, which was the end and goal of changing its processes, and that it could and perhaps should "have to" use part of this surplus to help its employees move on. That may well just not be the case at all.

There may be no surplus lying around in some instances, but in the ideal case there is. If widget A takes 100 to produce with 10 hours of labor and it sells for 120 on the open market, and Bob comes up with a labor-saving technique to produce the same widget with 9 hours of labor and it costs 90 to produce, then (for a short while) it still sells for 120 and there is the base profit of 20 plus a new "windfall" profit of 10. Eventually the market will achieve an equilibrium at a lower price, somewhere near 110 after all the other competitor's adopt the new process, but for the early period Bob's company will reap a windfall profit. That's just the nature of the improvement in productivity.

Later in the evolution, while the rest of the industry is changing, there may indeed be little windfall profit lying around for the later companies to have for retraining. That's true. That, however, is MORE LIKE LUCK in the sense originally proposed. For that reason, I think, one legitimately and reasonably prepares for change in general by such things as unemployment insurance. Insurance is appropriate where you can foresee that SOME will be susceptible to a loss, but there is no way of predicting WHICH ones will. One might suggest that the employee himself should have his own purchased unemployment insurance, except that there is no good way for the insurer to tell that he is "being laid off" rather than "lazy as a dog" from the mere fact that he isn't working.

I was not, by the way, urging that the "should" is one that belongs to the political sphere, with a state enforcer. In general, I avoid that direction. I was speaking in the moral sense, the very same sense that insists (with Pope Leo XIII and later popes) that when capital and labor cooperate to produce a product at a profit, a portion of the profit should go to the capital investor. So also should a portion of the profit go to the laborer at least in the form of appropriate wages. All I am saying is that where ingenuity provides a change that improves the output of labor / capital to reduce needed labor, a portion of the improvement should be used to re-orient that labor to an effective location in the market.

Admittedly, there is no clear avenue to ENFORCE the "ought" that does not crimp the open market, any more than there is to force people to pay just wages or to sell fairly (not lying about the product, for example) without disrupting the free market. Most such practices and transactions are not governed by direct oversight, and that's generally a good thing. So the kind of "ought" I was referring to is one that, if it is applied at all, is or at least could be internal to the entrepreneur or manager's motivations primarily, not external.

NM, once more, you are "webbing." There is nobody like you for not being able to stick to a subject. I said that the people in question were not themselves confused feminists because they are "capitalists." I was answering a *specific issue* Sage raised as to whether the goal of efficiency intrinsically favors feminism and the fungibility of the sexes. You are simply wanting to change the subject and talk about whether money-makers and "capitalists" ever participate in messing up the culture. Well, duh! Who ever denied that they do? Good grief. That has precisely zip to do with whether there is something specific to the business enterprise or to some entity (which I question the very existence of) called "corporate capitalism" that magically and by its very nature moves people in immoral directions.

Frankly, Sage and Tony do a better job than you do of bringing up interesting issues in this vicinity. You can't seem to keep your mind on any single line of argument for more than two sentences at a time. And you seem incapable of telling when you have been answered on any sub-point or caught walking into any punch, either.

Well, I can see a difference between bad luck, which more or less is unavoidable in the broad sense because it is unforeseeable (that's why it is "luck" or "chance"), and being on the short end of the stick on your career because some engineer discovered a way to make a machine do your job. In the latter case, although nobody intended for the "misfortune" to land on you specifically because of who you are, they certainly intended and planned for the effect of doing you out of a job, that's the whole point of the evolution. There is certainly design involved, which is not "luck", and the intent was to reduce the amount of labor needed in your job.

Yes and no. I imagine that most businesses would like to grow. One way to think of it would be that, ideally (if we're going to talk "ideally") you keep the same number workers, retrain them internally, but produce more widgets for the same amount of labor cost or produce a wider line of products altogether, thus increasing profits. Nobody gets fired, everybody gets a greater measure of de facto job security (from the growing status of the company), and some people, maybe even Bob, get raises.

No, that doesn't always happen. For one thing, Bob's skill set may not be such as to suit him for the other jobs available in the company. But you'd be surprised. My mother was one of the most technophobic people I can imagine. I cannot envisage her ever having wanted a computer at home, for example. But she learned to use one for her job after she reentered the workforce in the 80's.

I can in theory imagine circumstances where an employer really is going to make a windfall and in some sense ought, out of loyalty to faithful employees, to keep them on for a time though they are less productive while they find another job. Loyalty is a complex business and works in both directions. We can also dream up circumstances in which employees in some sense ought to stay on with a company that has done well by them though they could take more lucrative employment elsewhere. And sometimes, unfortunately, such personal loyalty doesn't develop at all, in either direction. This is not always uniformly the employer's fault, either.

But to my mind, none of those matters are issues of something called "capitalism." They are human issues. Difficulties--a need to lay someone off or an employee's need to take a new job--can arise for all sorts of reasons, including general economic downturns.

For the most part, I think that the goal ought to be simply to have a healthy economy, which will produce more jobs, though there may have to be job changing in the process.

Very interesting post, Paul.

Globalization and Third World immigration will continue to lower the living standards of the West.

And sometimes, unfortunately, such personal loyalty doesn't develop at all, in either direction. This is not always uniformly the employer's fault, either.

But to my mind, none of those matters are issues of something called "capitalism." They are human issues. Difficulties--a need to lay someone off or an employee's need to take a new job--can arise for all sorts of reasons, including general economic downturns.

I respect loyalty in both directions, and I think that many employers do, as well as an awful lot of employees. It's one of the reasons I never could buy the theory, mentioned in comments past, that "modern" employers are all going to a model of "change your job description or get out" after 5 years. It just doesn't fit with what I see.

Setting aside for the moment widespread economic downturn (about which no employer can do much), it seems to me that it IS part of capitalism as a notionally appropriate human ordering of economic life to think through the effects of increasing profits by improving productivity of the labor / capital you have. If the market is not yet saturated for a product, and you increase productivity by increasing the output of the CURRENT labor / capital in use, you can increase profits by increasing the number of things produced and sold. That depends on there being room for the market to enlarge because there is unmet demand. If, on the other hand, the market is saturated, you cannot simply sell more products at the same old price, the only way to increase profit with better productivity is to decrease the cost of producing the same number of items - when you improve productivity (output per unit of labor+capital) you decrease the amount of labor involved. You lay someone off (or you find them a different job in the company, but that requires assuming you have some OTHER line of activity that is not full up on labor).

Economists all talk about the cycle of laying people off and their finding a new job as a sort of *mechanism* for the market finding the "right place" for the worker given the new reality of a changed marketplace for labor. This is "the market in action finding the best use of labor". This is, unfortunately, only a partial view of the human reality. If a company closes a whole production line (because its other 6 lines in 3 other factories can now handle the load with the improved process), even the absolute BEST employees on the closed line, whose skills are fully employable in other jobs, can take quite some time finding that new job. The amount of time and effort for the top-notch employee who is still fully employable in the current economy to search for and get that new job that fully employs his capacity is, fundamentally, an inefficiency of the market - he is not producing anything during that time even though he is capable of doing so. If the only way he can get a new job that employs all of his skills is to move, that represents another inefficiency of the market, - he uses up resources in order to become available as a productive employee again.

I think that most economists are willing to identify these negative effects economic, these "costs" of the employable worker locating good work for his skills, as part of the more or less abstract "costs" of the marketplace doing its right thing in moving labor to the right place. That's fine, but if capitalism is a HUMAN ordering then that cost has to take into account the humanity of the worker who is a producer. If a certain amount of downtime between jobs is just "part of" the market functioning appropriately in sifting labor supply and demand, then a certain amount of downtime between jobs should be compensated for as part of the price of hiring labor when you find the right laborer for a specific job. That could come in the form of (a) a significant portion of wages intended specifically for the worker to be able to set it aside in savings for when he will be laid off; (b) unemployment insurance that covers the "in between times"; or (c) severance pay that covers. Maybe there are other ways of doing it. But whichever way we manage it, since the worker is human rather than a robot, and cannot simply turn off all his "demand functions" during the downtime, the needs of the worker during the in-between period must be accounted for in the market's pricing mechanisms for labor.

According to Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum, the ideal relationship between capital management and labor (in terms of pricing labor) is that the laborer - assumed to be intelligent, trained for a productive job, and energetic - earn enough for the company that the company can satisfactorily pay wages that would include not only enough for him and his family to live on day-to-day, but also enough for him to set some aside (being careful and thrifty) to enable the worker to provide for: (1) retirement; (2) illness; (3) to own his own home; and (4) lastly, if he sacrifices and scrimps, to become a capitalist himself in some small degree by saving something to invest. If we think that there is no reason, in capitalism as such, for the employer to cover the employee's down time during a lay off, then we would perforce require a fifth item above as an additional portion of ordinary wages: (5) savings for the inevitable down time when he has to find a new job due to employer-based decisions.

I suspect that plenty of employers would like to claim that THEY DO pay enough for all 5 of the above. I think the reality is short of that. Certainly in typical blue-collar jobs, the amount paid does not clearly cover all 5. In a typical situation, the employee has social security to provide about 1/3 to 1/2 of needed retirement income, and he can save more in an IRA only by taking money out of other accounts, such as for health care, or money for continuing education. In the 2000s, many financial advice-mongers said that a person should normally build up and have on hand about 6 months-worth of income for "eventualities", including injury or lay-off. That is clearly inadequate in today's world, where it can easily take 2 years to find a new job. (Even before the crash in 2008, the typical period was well over 6 months). The result being many people have to take lesser jobs at lower pay, jobs that DON'T USE their full range of skills, which is just another way of saying that the market is NOT functioning efficiently in their respect. Even if you assume some of them need to re-train for some other job, it is often impossible to tell which ones should, and more to the point the cost of retraining (and financial support during) requires a commitment from the worker to new costs, a commitment that he cannot know he needs to make without FIRST testing the market for 6 months and finding out he cannot get a job readily, and even after he commits to re-training, he can never be certain whether if he had just continued looking for another month he might have landed a perfect job without retraining. There is a certain amount of irreducible "wastage" in the process, even when the economy is healthy and there are jobs for almost everyone. If that inefficiency has to come out of the pocket of the laborer who has not been paid for it, the market is not running properly as a human arrangement.

If that inefficiency has to come out of the pocket of the laborer who has not been paid for it, the market is not running properly as a human arrangement.

I have to admit that I have no intuition to that effect at all, because I find all of this far too abstract to generate any firm "shoulds." For example, your 1-5 do rightly include all sorts of eventualities that have nothing to do with the job or with the employer's getting a more efficient process. The employee could be in a car accident and be disabled for a couple of years or even permanently. Many employers do offer severance pay, and as you say, most employees can succeed in saving for a number of months that they may be looking for a new job. Whether that is for _enough_ months (or years) does not seem to me to be some sort of problem of the employer's, per se. I would tend to say that a person who has to support himself or even more his family shouldn't be planning to be off of work entirely for two years! At that point, yes, he _does_ need to be willing to take a "less perfect" job more quickly and if necessary keep looking around in his spare time. But as you yourself admitted, the two years is partly a matter of our present economic downturn, which means it isn't part of a healthy system. (I don't think anyone would/should call our present economy healthy.)

I certainly have nothing against unemployment insurance, especially private unemployment insurance. And I would say that the more unregulated and booming the economy, the more people--be it employees or employers--can afford it.

~~~I said that the people in question were not themselves confused feminists because they are "capitalists." I was answering a *specific issue* Sage raised as to whether the goal of efficiency intrinsically favors feminism and the fungibility of the sexes. You are simply wanting to change the subject and talk about whether money-makers and "capitalists" ever participate in messing up the culture. Well, duh! Who ever denied that they do? Good grief. That has precisely zip to do with whether there is something specific to the business enterprise or to some entity (which I question the very existence of) called "corporate capitalism" that magically and by its very nature moves people in immoral directions.~~~

This statement betrays your inability to see the connections between corporate capitalism, consumerism, and cultural degradation. You (rightly) blast the educational system and the media for their roles in the diffusion of feminist thought, yet ignore the part that corporate America plays in that diffusion. Ditto every other sort of cultural corrosion.

Sarah Palin finds fault with big oil in Alaska, certain conservatives/Republicans from the Midwest express dissatisfaction with Big Agri, similar folks from WV and KY have issues with the coal companies. Rust belt conservatives will shake their heads over certain behaviors of the steel and chemical industries. But they are unable to take the logical next step, which is to say, "Uh, maybe there's some sort of trend here." Being ideologically committed to the deification of economic "choice" they are blind to the idea that perhaps there is an inherent problem with corporatism itself that tends to produce these effects, rather than their being isolated, unconnected instances.

Deification of the appetitive will necessarily produces moral degradation in a culture, no matter in what area that deification plays itself out. If you elevate "choice" to the highest good, then the objects of those choices will of necessity be relegated to mere preferences. This is just as true when it comes to money as when it comes to sex, since both avarice and lust are deadly sins. "Freedom's just another word for lots of things to buy," as someone once wrote, capturing exactly the spirit of today's consumerist culture.

Until the mainstream right in this country sheds its worship of choice and the associated bootlicking of corporate America, it can have nothing to say about cultural degradation. Apparently the only choice that "devours itself" is the choice related to what happens between the sheets. But make a deity out of economic choice, and somehow that new god remains not only beneficent, but positively docile!

Note again this quote from Marion Montgomery:

"As a secular fundamentalist religion, [Modernism’s] guiding principle is that each intellect is autonomous and therefore sovereign, an independent nation unto itself, out of which faith devolves a destructive pragmatism whose end is the satisfaction of appetitive desire—whether the appetite for abstract power or for material indulgence. The sacrificial victim to this end, the victim of this termite destruction: whatever is. But the anarchic necessity to this sovereign intellect is that the object to be overwhelmed is whatever is not its own autonomous consciousness. Thus creation becomes the unexamined provender to the appetitive sovereignty of the alienated person….That object under destruction…is the body of creation, which body includes nature and nations, things and persons." ~~~ Marion Montgomery, "Consequences in the Provinces: Ideas Have Consequences 50 Years After"

Contemporary conservatism has accepted this aspect of modernity but believes it can avoid the destructiveness of this pragmatism by limiting it to economic matters. But if Montgomery is correct then there can be no bracketing out of economic desires from the "appetite for material indulgence" that he speaks of. Preference maximization is preference maximization whether it is related to money or sex. The belief that it can be encouraged in one area without it leaking over into others is hopelessly naïve.

yet ignore the part that corporate America plays in that diffusion.

Well, that's a straw man, since I have _explicitly acknowledged_ that role repeatedly. It's just that I don't reify something called "corporatism" and endue it with the magical power to make people evil. I think people do a good enough job of that all on their own!

they are blind to the idea that perhaps there is an inherent problem with corporatism itself that tends to produce these effects, rather than their being isolated, unconnected instances.

False dilemma. Maybe some of us think that the common factor is human nature and the peculiar evils that human beings in general are tending to embrace right now rather than this thing called "corporatism" that has this invisible tendency.

Let's please also remember that _some_ of these "behaviors" are explicitly enabled by a Big Government which is an absolute sine qua non of their occurring. When you find someone claiming to be me endorsing the GM bailout (for example), please ask where Lydia is and what the person impersonating her has done with her body.

*Human beings* will grab what they can get from powerful entities, such as government. If there are sweetheart deals to be had, there is nothing inherently *purifying* about owning a big corporation such that those in big corporations are going to *refrain* from grabbing sweetheart deals. Corporate managers are as fallen as anyone.

For example, your 1-5 do rightly include all sorts of eventualities that have nothing to do with the job or with the employer's getting a more efficient process. The employee could be in a car accident and be disabled for a couple of years or even permanently.

Mainly, the 1 to 5 factors approximate what Leo was representing as the appropriate way to think about the way labor should be compensated out of the revenue of the new product. For example, if a system is a system for humans, and if humans are by nature generally going to live past the point where they are capable of working, then compensation for their working years has to cover income for their non-working years. Anyone who says "that has nothing to do with the job" is saying the job is only about "units of labor" instead of about humans. The same goes for wear-and-tear on the body that make it unrealistic for a person to do steel mill work the last 10 years they might have been able to work in an office (had their career taken them to an office instead). It is the same basis (well, similar, though at one remove) for saying that a job needs to provide the compensation for a father to raise a family on - for that is where the next generation of labor comes from, after all. All possible jobs? No, absolutely not - expecting McD's burger flipping to provide even full and total independent support for a single person is unreasonable, so such "family wage" jobs are necessarily limited to higher capability. But society as a whole, and employers especially, have an obligation to aim for arranging many of their job "units" to be capable of supporting a family, so that there are plentiful jobs that (if a person wants to acquire the skills and demonstrates the capacity) he CAN readily support a family. It does no good (as a social whole) to say "well, if the family cannot get by on his one job, he can get a part time job", that effectively is just as bad as the 14-hour sweat shop days of the early industrial revolution, even if no one job requires that 14-hour day. Intentional segmentation (actually, bastardization) of jobs into 20-hour and 25-hour per week functions that "justify" the employer not paying benefits because "we don't give benefits to those who don't work full time" (regardless of the fact that the job itself demands the sort of responsibility of a family-man type of worker), is contrary to that principle.

If capitalism is in principle a system of arranging effective use of saved surplus by human labor, and if it is even in theory capable of being formulated as a MORAL human system, then it must be capable of being formulated in a way that takes appropriate cognition and measure of the human part of the productive equation, including human nature, which means including human familial nature. If, on the other hand, "to be a capitalist businessman" is not any kind of a calling to pay attention to the human side of his labor "units" but rather just just plain make a profit already then basic capitalism isn't a HUMAN arrangement at all but a mere mathematical, or mere mechanical device. That is, it isn't really specific for human society. I think the former is true, that capitalism is capable of a specifically human formulation. Part of the reason I believe that is that the increase in productivity we see as the pride and glory of the system REQUIRES human ingenuity, creativity. That is, it is a result of humans using their God-given creativity to co-create with God new wealth for the betterment of humans here on earth, a specifically human goal.

NM, I have no idea what you mean by "corporatism" in your above comment. Maybe I am dense, but I cannot think of a meaning for it that registers as (a) something real, and (b) would have the effects you are attributing to it.

I am not saying that executives of corporations are not to blame for many of the ills we see. I am just saying that I don't see how that can be called something like "corporatism" that helps us at all. Are you suggesting that corporations shouldn't exist? Or that they shouldn't have X, Y, or Z rights or powers? What is it about corporations that becomes "corporatism"?

Tony, your comments on the human costs associated with the market call to mind a book which you would probably find interesting: Economic Compulsion and Christian Ethics, by Albino Barrera. Barrera is a priest, theologian and economist who teaches at Providence College.

Sorry for the less-than-specific use of 'corporatism'. I simply meant it as shorthand for corporate capitalism.

I think your penultimate post is quite good. One issue I have with modern capitalism is that the sheer size of many of the corporations hinders or prevents the human aspect of the system from taking any sort of preference. Related to this is the reduction of economics to chrematistics; when in the past economics was viewed as a fully-orbed humane science, it has now largely been reduced to number-crunching, again leaving out the human element.

Short on time now -- more later.

The reason I mentioned the farm is because it's probably (at least potentially) the most truly independent of the professions (nothing fosters independence like the ability to raise your own food) and thus is nothing like working at home while still being utterly dependent on the grid.

Your farmer is still highly dependent for energy unless he has spent a lot of money buying solar panels and backup batteries for his farm house and relies on farm animals for heavy labor. Or exploits the heck out of migrant workers to do it all by hand. Otherwise, someone has to provide him the gas or diesel his vehicles use and the electricity he consumes. Though again, he could just choose to live like the Amish.

"Your farmer is still highly dependent for energy unless he has spent a lot of money buying solar panels and backup batteries for his farm house and relies on farm animals for heavy labor."

Correct, which is why I said "at least potentially." The early agrarians, and later ones as well, were quite wary of the way modern farming methods fostered dependence on entities outside the farms' localities. The agrarian ideal would be to limit one's dependence on them as much as possible. Of course, the "get big or get out" mentality made this very difficult.

While doing a google search for a book review I stumbled across this. It's quite good, and summarizes the way I tend to look at these issues. It does have some discussion of corporations and problems associated with their size, and how they might be rectified.

http://www.catholicbusinessethics.org/2012/11/lateran-university-conference.html

Actually, Whittaker Chambers, who was in some ways very "agrarian friendly" and much of whose writing on these topics would probably warm the distributists' hearts, made no bones about using machinery and electricity on his beloved Maryland farm. As he saw it, it was necessary, and he was unapologetic about it. He has an entire chapter on his farm in _Witness_, a very eloquent chapter, and he discusses the farm in other places throughout the book. He and his family worked extremely hard physically and were definitely trying to uphold the ideal of a family farm. But he had no intention of trying to return to being independent of such things as electricity and combines. As he saw it, to do so would have _undermined_ the very ideals he was trying to promote, because he wanted to be able to leave sustainable farmland to his children and their families.

One has to admire Nice Marmot's doggedness, if nothing else. In any case, his side is winning the war. Reaganism is deader than dead, though Republicans have yet to discover that. The various local and craft movements have been defeating the corporate giants all over the place, though whether they can produce anything sustainable beyond boutique tourism remains to be seen.

This might be a purely generational thing. The Republican base is largely made up of old cold warriors looking to mobilize to defeat the Reds, or their current incarnation of Islamic Terrorism, as well as win the culture war at home. This naturally leads to promoting economic efficiency above all else, as that is part of how wars are won. The vast majority of young people, say under 35, don't care about any of this.

What I see as the main problem with the FPR type movement is a sort of blase disregard about private property. Not so much that they don't believe in it, but that they often seem to consider it rather beside the point. This is part of why they get lumped in with the Left, the other parts being that the Reagan Revolution has run out of steam and sunk into the reactionary abyss and the paranoia that comes from being repeatedly betrayed.

Nice Marmot is right about one thing though--corporations are not conservative. I've been in them for a while now, and they are very much on board with the left's agenda except where it would be ruinous for them. It's not inherent to corporations though; corporations are basically like government bureaucracies with the same forces dragging both of them leftward.

Yes, I know that chapter well. When it comes to use/non-use of machinery, etc., much depends on the nature of the farm itself, how much help one has, and other such things. It varies from farmer to farmer, and farm to farm. What works in one area may not work in another, and so on.

The general agrarian ideal, if you can call it that, doesn't have to do so much with the quantity of use or non-use of technology, but with the limitation of dependence on it.

It's not inherent to corporations though; corporations are basically like government bureaucracies with the same forces dragging both of them leftward.

Matt, we don't always agree here at W4, but this is very well-put and is something I've been trying to say over and over again but have not succeeded before in putting so succinctly. Very good.

The general agrarian ideal, if you can call it that, doesn't have to do so much with the quantity of use or non-use of technology, but with the limitation of dependence on it.

Modern technology is quite necessary to maintain the population we have today. Limiting it would mean making the production and distribution of sufficient quantities of food to feed urban and suburban areas impossible. You need all of that technical infrastructure to supply our just-in-time food market and without it, mass starvation is inevitable. This is inevitable whenever you have a massive population growth and concentration.

Yes, there really is no way to use modern technology in so basic an area as farming without being dependent on it! (Giving up your combine isn't like giving up your personal ipad.) In a sense, Chambers makes this quite clear. He used it _because_ he needed it and to the _extent_ that he needed it, which meant pretty much by definition that his farm was dependent on it.

As further evidence, I'd like to point out that at its peak Rome was around 1m residents in size and required a whole vassal state (Egypt) to bridge the gap in food production for Latium, Rome in particular. The pre-modern farming techniques were insufficient to get enough cheap food into that region without risking a starvation-induced revolt.

Yes, but that's because we allowed ourselves to get into that predicament in the first place. Short-term efficiency was emphasized without regard for long-term sustainability.

"What I see as the main problem with the FPR type movement is a sort of blase disregard about private property. Not so much that they don't believe in it, but that they often seem to consider it rather beside the point. This is part of why they get lumped in with the Left"

Actually, FPR types have a very high view of private property, so much so that they believe the economy should be based on it, rather than on cash, or on other more abstract forms of property. See the article to which I provided the link above (the one from Lateran University).

NM, I would remind you that Mike is talking about population. So have I, on repeated occasions. This brings one back to a tongue-in-cheek comment made about GKC, I believe by Shaw, something to the effect that the extremely small-scale life Chesterton idealizes would be possible for everyone only if the birth control Chesterton deplores were put into practice universally. Since I assume you join me in not wishing the world's, or America's, population to be significantly less than it is, and not wishing that America had put the brakes on its population long ago just so that a much smaller population could all live in picturesque, pre-industrial, small hamlets (not that that would be so nice as it sounds, either, even for the smaller population), you should perhaps refrain from letting the word "sustainability" roll off your tongue so readily.

"It's not inherent to corporations though; corporations are basically like government bureaucracies with the same forces dragging both of them leftward."

On one level this is true. But on a higher level one must remember that they exist to make money, and that it's not so much that they're being dragged leftward, as it is that they are following the path of least resistance to their goal of wealth-accumulation, and traditional beliefs, practices, etc., basically either get steamrolled, or are subjected to the death of 1,000 cuts in the process.

There are, of course, individual companies that are an exception to this, ones that try to buck the trend. But the overall movement of industrial/corporate capitalism is to follow the money, tradition be damned.

~~Since I assume you join me in not wishing the world's, or America's, population to be significantly less than it is, and not wishing that America had put the brakes on its population long ago just so that a much smaller population could all live in picturesque, pre-industrial, small hamlets (not that that would be so nice as it sounds, either, even for the smaller population), you should perhaps refrain from letting the word "sustainability" roll off your tongue so readily.~~

The queen of false dichotomies strikes again. Who says that "sustainability" implies small, picturesque hamlets? Certainly not me.

NM, it was _you_ who responded to Mike T's point about population by talking about sustainability and "not getting ourselves into that predicament." I maintain that your response is difficult to interpret in any way other than as an endorsement of limiting population growth, either voluntarily or otherwise! That was, after all, Mike's point to which you were responding. Heck, that would be something to raise eyebrows even if you want people to live in large, ugly towns instead of small, picturesque hamlets! Whatever, as far as aesthetics, but the point is that you said we shouldn't have "gotten ourselves into this predicament"--y'know, as Mike was describing it, the predicament of being dependent on technology because we don't want people to starve, given our population. Once again, please try to keep your eye on the ball, argumentatively.

The predicament I was referring to was the farming predicament, not some mythical one concerning population. I would have thought that was apparent by my reference to short-term efficiency vs. long-term sustainability. One generally doesn't think of "efficiency" and "sustainability" in reference to population, unless you're a eugenicist or a UN theorist. I don't think it's me who doesn't have my eye on the ball!

NM, you wrote in response to Mike. You shd. realize that when you write in response to someone, people take you to be, y'know, responding to what the person said. His _whole point_ was about feeding our population and the need for large farm machinery. I would like to think that you realize that we cannot feed the population of the United States without precisely the dependence you deplore on technology and machinery. Not to mention the grueling life that would be dooming farmers to, as well. (You don't make it clear as to whether you would ideally like to see us pushing plows behind oxen or what.) But Mike's point was that we need large-scale farming because we have a large population. That _was_ his point. Either you agree with it or you don't. What you _seemed_ to be saying was that you _agree_ that we can't feed this many people without the dependence you deplore but shouldn't, somehow, have gotten ourselves into that predicament! Now you say that was not what you were saying. But in that case I don't know what you were saying, since population was deeply connected to the point he was making concerning the need for dependence on machinery.

Another area of dependency on large-scale works is water. In the modern world, you cannot farm even small farms without irrigation, and you cannot get the water without dependency on pulling it in without large works. Even the Romans depended on aqueducts. The entire capacity of agriculture in the western part of the US (south of Portland) depends on pulling water from one place and putting it where you want it - which requires dependency on large-scale works and not on local, small holdings. Certainly almost all of California would remain its semi-desert, worth little except growing figs in oases. Even in my part of the country, in the rainy east, you would need at least 10 acres of land (and its water) to expect to reliably farm 1 acre, (to deal with frequent semi-droughts) and plenty of people on a 5-acre plot are (by zoning) limited to 4 bedrooms in building because of water limitations.

Short-term efficiency was emphasized without regard for long-term sustainability.

Yes, because long-term sustainability, such as over 3 and more generations, simply cannot be foreseen adequately, one way or another. NOBODY could have predicted, in 1970, that from 1980 to 2000 the actual total usage of fresh water in gallons (not merely per capita) would decrease, even while standard of living AND the population increased. Nobody knows whether suburbs are sustainable, though we can make value judgments about whether they SHOULD be sustainable on other grounds.

There is another area of caution about "everyman" being his own small farmer / gardener. In the "good old days" of ancient Greece and Rome, the only way men of substance could have sufficient leisure to pursue higher things, like art, music, philosophy and mathematics, was by the energy of OTHER men undertaking the hard work of farming - slaves and serfs and such like. Euclid and Sophocles and Aristotle, Cicero and Virgil and Boethius, did not farm their land themselves. As you move into the medieval period, it remains true that men do not have time for leisure except where men learned to differentiate and specialize their labor into different crafts and classes. The miller didn't need to farm, he spent his time milling. The stone-cutter didn't work a farm, he worked in stone. The very existence of cities, (without much in the way of suburbs) attests to the fact that significant portions of the populations did not raise much of their own food. And yet, it is ONLY in cities, ONLY in developed economies of differentiated jobs, that widespread schools and universities ever existed. Higher learning, higher pursuits, require sufficient wealth to be free from some of the day-to-day pursuit of your daily bread.

This is not to say that every man who studies should be exempt from labor, of course not. Certainly there are some trade-offs, and one of them is that hard labor itself teaches one the value of time for leisure to pursue better things. But they are better things. And frankly, without job differentiation and developed tool use, men don't have enough leisure to be able to study.

Anecdotally, my family has undertaken gardening quite a bit over the years. What with weather issues, poor soil (not from over farming), disease and other problems, we have NEVER produced enough fruits and vegetables to pay for the raw materials we put into it, much less the time and labor. Even when the plants survive and produce successfully, the total amount and variety - even in season - would be pitiful compared to the amount of fruits and vegetables recommended for our family, so if we were dependent on the garden for our produce during that period we would have a poor diet. That's in the good years, at the right times of the year.

Tony, that last comment of yours--I'm thinking of the section on leisure and the pursuit of the arts, learning, and so forth--highlights the fact that it it's _not_ industrialism or capitalism as opposed to agrarianism that ignores intangible Goods! On the contrary, those economic developments _enable_ intangible Goods. The yen for people to be "off the grid" to be "independent of technology" and the like is actually functionally *at odds with* a great many intangible Goods, if that yen could be put into practice on any large scale, yet those with agrarian and distributist leanings usually simply do not recognize this.

Boy, you guys don't seem to be familiar with modern agrarian thought AT ALL. These objections can all be answered (although perhaps not to your satisfaction) but frankly it would take me way more time than I have to go down the line and attempt to respond to them, and partial answers will only cloud things further. If you're truly interested there are things you can read -- actual books!, and not just the odd internet essay.

I have stayed out of this debate, but I do want to chime in and point out that we need to be careful about being too esoteric, and also too glibe. And I will once again remind everyone that economics and material factors do have practical consequences vis a vis behavior. There is a difference between culture and economics, but the two factors are still intertwined.

And I will also recommend Carlson as an agrarian to read, particularly for his willingness to use stats at least a little rather than rely on qualitative analysis alone.

Indeed, Roepke emphasized the transformative power of the private garden. As he wrote, the keeping of a family garden “was not only ‘the purest of human pleasures’ but also offered the indispensable natural foundation for family life and the upbringing of children.” In praising the “Magnetism of the Garden,” he told the story of a friend who was showing the family gardens of several workers to a “dogmatic old-time liberal;” some think this was Ludwig von Mises. In any cause, Roepke continued: “on seeing these happy people spending their free evenings in their gardens,” the laissez-faire liberal “could think of nothing better than the cool remark this was an irrational form of vegetable production.” Roepke retorted: “He could not get it into his head that it was a very rational form of ‘happiness production’ which surely is what matters most.”

I begin to think that what makes up the agrarian movement, as distinct from the thinking of libertarians, distributists, subsidiarists, and others is that THEY LIKE GARDENING. Period. I don't particularly like gardening. My family did it when I was growing up, I participated with my fair share - and I never cottoned to it. I have done it as an adult, put in a fair amount of effort, and I never really take much delight in it at all. You cannot get much "happiness production" out of a back-breaking activity that you would just as soon leave to someone else while you did something that you DO enjoy, such as math.

If you took all the people that live in cities, put them in a house on 2 acres and gave them all the training they needed in back-yard farming, I wonder how many would still be doing it (more than just a half-dozen plants) 20 years later from choice. My guess is less than 30%, probably less than 20%. Gauging from the number of people around me who do have 1/3 acre to 2 acres who DON'T garden significantly, that seems pretty indicative. Plenty of people find their desires in other pursuits. (Unless you count lawns as gardens! In that case, we already live in an agrarian society.)

A point I made elsewhere is that if people do like gardening, then the market provides for that. There are gigantic sections of big-box stores devoted to gardening. It's a booming business. One thing the market does is to allow people to separate their reasons for doing things. Inasmuch as they just want tomatoes to eat, they are likely to buy them at the best price at the local store. Inasmuch as they want to garden for the love of it, as a "form of happiness production," they'll have their little local garden and not worry about whether it's an efficient way to produce food for themselves. People make these decisions, and the market responds to them. But it remains a _fact_ that little back yard gardens aren't going to feed the mass of the population of the U.S. (Btw, I've recently learned that Roepke was a quasi-Malthusian and was very concerned about population growth. Carlson himself points this out, with some frustration. Myself, I don't think it's a coincidence. Roepke may have realized that small populations were the only populations, if any, who would be fed by small-holding methods.)

The predicament I was referring to was the farming predicament, not some mythical one concerning population. I would have thought that was apparent by my reference to short-term efficiency vs. long-term sustainability. One generally doesn't think of "efficiency" and "sustainability" in reference to population, unless you're a eugenicist or a UN theorist. I don't think it's me who doesn't have my eye on the ball!

And my point, that you didn't seem to refute, was that technology is actually necessary in order to scale up production in densely populated regions with any hope of sustainability and morality in the production. Without modern agricultural technology, which humanity is extremely dependent upon, conservatively 3b people would starve to death within a year. By the time the dust settled, you'd see the wholesale annihilation of the rain forests and many other ecosystems as the pig ignorant of farming urban poor rushed out into the country side where possible to grow whatever they can.

Rome and Egypt is a great example of what happens when you have unchecked family growth and pre-modern agriculture. Maybe you can say that all of those Romans should have practiced marital celibacy strategically in order to keep the population in check, but that's about the best you can say about controlling their situation since Italy could not feed itself at that point.

"Without modern agricultural technology, which humanity is extremely dependent upon, conservatively 3b people would starve to death within a year. By the time the dust settled, you'd see the wholesale annihilation of the rain forests and many other ecosystems as the pig ignorant of farming urban poor rushed out into the country side where possible to grow whatever they can."

Which is a point that W. Berry makes ad infinitum, even arguing that the American agricultural system's dependence on petroleum constitutes a grave national security concern. What I'm getting at is that agriculture did not need to become as dependent as it is on "modern agriculture technology" to be productive. In a certain sense the "Green Revolution" contained a measure of over-optimism in the ability of technology to solve the world's food problem in the long term. This optimism, while a definite positive in the short run, hindered a realistic long-view take on agriculture.

With that I'll close. Clownish critiques of the "they just like gardening!" sort are not worth responding to, esp. from people who seem to have no familiarity with the pertinent literature.

What I'm getting at is that agriculture did not need to become as dependent as it is on "modern agriculture technology" to be productive.

What you are arguing is a hypothetical point without showing any evidence. I've pointed to the historic example of Roman Italy being dependent upon Egypt because their pre-modern food production and transportation system made them incapable of cost-effectively producing enough food locally.

In a certain sense the "Green Revolution" contained a measure of over-optimism in the ability of technology to solve the world's food problem in the long term. This optimism, while a definite positive in the short run, hindered a realistic long-view take on agriculture.

True, but that is non sequitor to your point. Pre-modern techniques demonstrably did not scale to a growing population beyond a limited point. A city like New York, metropolitan DC, Los Angeles, let alone Mexico City or Tokyo could not exist at that scale without modern techniques.

Back to your point:

The predicament I was referring to was the farming predicament, not some mythical one concerning population. I would have thought that was apparent by my reference to short-term efficiency vs. long-term sustainability. One generally doesn't think of "efficiency" and "sustainability" in reference to population, unless you're a eugenicist or a UN theorist. I don't think it's me who doesn't have my eye on the ball!

Or one is simply smart enough to note that a population of any size from 1 man to 100 million men has certain minimal caloric requirements that must be multiplied over 365 days a year and failure to meet said caloric requirements means someone will starve. It's only a hop and a skip over from that to where you ask what is required to make sustaining a non-starving population in humane conditions possible. Then suddenly you have an "oh f#$%..." moment and realize your farming methods may be insufficient to meet those requirements. Really, no eugenics required. You may not be in the camp of the eugenicists, but in terms of prudential civilization management you are rubbing elbows with the late French royal family who failed to grasp the simple concept of "starving peasantry = socio-political upheaval."

I'm not making my point clear enough, I guess. But frankly, this is tiring, and I said I was closing, so I will. I'll refer you to Berry's The Unsettling of America if you wish to pursue this line of discussion. It doesn't lend itself to combox-legnth brief summary.

You could at least throw out some points about how you would have sustainable farming, safe population growth and not resort to immoral tactics like labor exploitation and eugenics. From where I sit, the historic example is pretty clear that population growth is capable of exceeding farming production and transportation capacity regardless of the level of technology. Rome adapted through systematic exploitation of cheap, slavish labor. We use modern technology. I have yet to see a third way in history that suggests that short of natural measures like natural disasters and war keeping a population in check that farming techniques won't have to scale with the population come hell or high water.

Believe it or not, I'm actually sympathetic to the issue of being too reliant on technology and many of the critics of corporate capitalism. However, where you attach tablets outright, I prefer to see a culture that disseminates and distributes an understanding of the underlying technology and its productive uses. Just to use one example you've railed against in the past.

Well-managed small farms tend to be more productive per acre than large ones when diversity is taken into consideration, since the giant agribusiness-type farms are generally monocultures. They are also less dependent on technology, petroleum and other outside inputs, and they pollute less. But due to the huge influence of Big Agri in the USDA small farming gets very little attention from lawmakers. The legislative and market push against small farming makes it a difficult venture. What I'd like to see is a much more level playing field so that those who'd like to farm small wouldn't have the Monsanto/ADM/USDA machine ranged against them. Given the chance I think that a thousand 300-acre farms would prove more productive than 30 ten-thousand acre ones, without as many negative results.

That would be an interesting arrangement. What you need is a massive assault on the patent system (break Monsanto's back) and a phased elimination of farm subsidies coupled with protective tariffs (how to cripple agribusiness). Most modern capitalist thinkers seem to be moving against the patent system as a form of government favoring of business interests masquerading as property rights. Even those who haven't tend to want to scale it back radically due to the inability of the government to hire sufficient qualified experts to ensure a baseline of quality standards (ex almost every software patent is pure garbage).

The farms themselves may not be as dependent upon petroleum and technology for production, but beyond the farm the dependency is identical. So don't expect any gains for agrarians there. You are either going to be dependent upon truckers or rail lines because many metropolitan areas are simply too dense now to have all of their food production done nearby.

The use of technology could, however, get around that. For example hypothetically an old skyscraper could be gutted and refitted with sufficient hydroponics that it could function as a large scale, multi-level farm within a major city like NYC. This is where we differ, I guess. I see literally no difference between dependent upon primitive tools and advanced tools except where one can be said to have no capacity to repair or build new tools.

Even those who haven't tend to want to scale it back radically due to the inability of the government to hire sufficient qualified experts to ensure a baseline of quality standards (ex almost every software patent is pure garbage).

Yeah, I really had to barf when I read about a tax attorney getting a patent for writing up a "neat" tax trick - a loophole, if you will. That we have to pay taxes is bad enough, but getting a government-approved monopoly on how to gimmick the government out of ordinary taxes (so only those licensed can use the trick) is pretty damn stupid.

A friend of mine recently got a patent for a game he invented, took him over 20 years mental work to come up with a solution to the underlying math problem. The initial patent application was rejected out of hand, and his attorney said "don't worry, that's just the initial move, they ALWAYS reject the first application, we just have to move into the appeal / second round." From the "reason" given for the rejection, it became clear that the patent examiner didn't even remotely understand the game, not even a little, may not even have read it. The third round was with an examiner who finally understood what he was reading, and it was granted.

And I have at least as much disgust of Monsanto's patent infringement lawsuit win against a farmer whose corn was found to have Monsanto's modified genes, when the farmer never made a single effort to plant corn with those genes - the result was entirely accidental. I can't believe that the farmer didn't have an adequate defense by just saying "whatever corn I have that has Monsanto's genes, it is Monsanto's failure to keep it's genes to itself, it's their own damn fault, not mine."

I am generally against long-term farm subsidies of all types, but especially ones that play to big business in a way that hampers small business. Seems absolutely crazy to help establish a rich, powerful faction that will skew government at the expense of the smaller guy.

I'm against actual farm _subsidies_, but I learned several years ago, much to my surprise, that some people use that word in a really strange way to include something that I would never have suspected: The interlocutor in question said that it is a farm _subsidy_ for a farm business to be able to take its ordinary business expenses such as shipping costs and deduct them from its gross profit to calculate its net, taxable profit, insofar as those shipping costs are for shipping beyond some pre-set local radius of the physical location where the food is raised. Now, that is just _not_ what I think most people would understand by a "subsidy." The gas a company spends for its shipping is obviously a normal and necessary business expense. Deducting it from its taxable income is business as usual as much when it is being used to ship two miles as two hundred miles. The ability to treat that as a business expense doesn't magically turn into a subsidy when the distance is farther than x.

I would oppose the proposal that we not allow tax deduction from gross income for such shipping expenses anyway, even if I were told that it would "encourage localism." The proposal is a poor one in itself. But attempting to bolster it by the terminological sleight of hand of calling anything else a "farm subsidy" is just misleading.

With that caveat, I'd be happy to see what perhaps I should call subsidy-subsidies go bye-bye. Er, for the small farmers, too, by the way.

Off topic, but here's one for Lydia's shoebox of reasons why some jobs are appropriate for men and some for women. Even a male cop would likely be facing manslaughter or second degree murder charges here.

I am sympathetic to the localist's objection to society underwriting the cost of sending food far away, but like you I wouldn't call it a "subsidy". Not properly. Not while we consider roads to be open to the free use of all. If we were to restrict roads or free movement, or charge tolls for their direct use, maybe that would clear up the matter, but as long as we allow people to use roads freely for personal and business use, it isn't a subsidy that business use them. If public roads are non-toll for private and business use, then they are PART OF the level playing field, and using them to transport things far makes sense for business if transporting them far brings a profit.

I don't know the outer boundaries of the "normal and necessary" business expense deduction, but in the absence of a direct subsidizing action by someone else, you would think that any expense a company actually pays out to accomplish its business in such a way as to bring in an ordinary profit would be "normal and necessary." (By which "ordinary" I don't mean to include things like the benefits of bribes or kickbacks, which, though they may bring in a "profit", do so by skewing the market or regulatory environment unnaturally, of course.) If the only possible way that could be profitable is the margin between the expense deducted and the expense not-deducted, I suppose there is a possible argument that the tax savings from the deduction is, itself, the entire "profit" and that would be objectionable. But the objection should then be about using a deduction impermissibly, not about "receiving a subsidy".

But I don't think that's typical: Suppose Product A costs the farmer 12 to produce, and will sell for 15 locally. Normally the farmer will deduct costs of 12 and declare profit of 3 which is taxable. Now suppose that he can instead sell it at 18 at a distance, and it costs 2 to ship the distance. Absent concerns of localism, he will deduct costs of 14 and declare a profit of 4 that is taxable. The marginal profit from selling it at a distance is 1, the difference between 4 and 3. As long as the tax rate is less than 50%, the so-called "gain" from reduced tax by deducting the 2 shipping is less than the REAL gain of 1 from selling at 3 higher than he can get by selling it locally. In this case, (as long as the tax on the 2 shipping is less than 1 real profit), the farmer would still gain a profit even if he had to pay the 2 shipping and not deduct it, so it would still be the rational business decision to engage in without the tax benefit of the deduction. That means that it is a NORMAL AND NECESSARY part of the business of making the best buck he can from his farming.

Obviously, the exact details in individual cases relies on the ratios of shipping costs to profits to be had by selling at a distance to the tax rate. But the mere fact that it is quite feasible, in ordinary business, to make a profit by selling at a distance without using any tax benefits, makes the decision to do so part of "normal and necessary", I would think.

Related to this discussion, this was just posted at the University Bookman site:

http://www.kirkcenter.org/index.php/bookman/article/crowding-out-virtues/

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