J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 213

The ca.-1870 Disjunction Between Production and Distribution

In the world as it stood in 1870 there was seen to be a huge disjunction between the growing effective economic power of the human race and the proper distribution of this potential wealth to create a prosperous and happy society. That science, technology, and organization could wreak miracles had become commonplaces. Best friends Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels probably put it best in 1848:

The business class, during��� scarce 100 years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature���s forces to [hu]man[ity], machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground���what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?���

However, the benefits of greater human power to harvest fruits from nature and organize persons did not trickle down.

There were, broadly speaking, as of 1870 three views about why it did not trickle down and what, if anything, ought to be done about it:

We have already noted John Stuart Mill���s view: The problem was the Malthusian one���that people, especially ���the unproductive���, had too much freedom to have children and to draw on the public for support. The solution was to ���the increase of mankind shall be under the deliberate guidance of judicious fore sight���. The state... provid[ing] that no person shall be born without its consent������ and to provide unemployed workers��� prisons for those bankrupt and broke: ���support��� accompanied with��� restraints on their freedom... restricted indulgence, and enforced rigidity of discipline������

Opposed to this was Karl Marx���s view: that the problem late not in human nature but in human societal arrangements. What was needed was to realize the German-style idealist philosophical understanding of human liberation that would be attainable with the broad prosperity from a society run on British-style classical-political economy Ricardian-socialist lines brought into being by a French-style political revolutionary overthrow of the old r��gime. And, Marx believed, the Logic of History would get us there. First, the market economy run for the interest of a business class that also controlled the levers of normal politics would see the economy become more productive and productive capital grow, and:

extends the division of labour���the application of machinery��� the more do��� wages shrink���. Small businessmen and��� people living upon��� interest��� [are] precipitated into the��� working class.��� Thus the forest of outstretched arms begging for work, grows ever thicker and thicker, while the arms themselves grow ever leaner and leaner���

And this would, Marx believed, inevitably trigger a political-societal reaction:

Further socialisation of labour��� takes a new form���. One capitalist always kills many. Hand in hand with this��� develop��� the cooperative��� labour process, the conscious technical application of science, the methodical cultivation of the soil, the transformation of the instruments of labour into instruments of labour only usable in common���. Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital��� grows��� misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the working class��� disciplined, united, organised by��� capitalist production itself���. Centralisation of capital and socialisation of labour��� become incompatible with their capitalist exterior shell. This shell is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated���

There was a third view, however: the view that there was nothing wrong with human society as it stood toward the end of the 19th century. This was the view of, say, Herbert Spencer and his Social Statics���that what appeared to be the defects of society has it then stood were actually necessary forms of social discipline in order to guide the upward evolution of the human race. Andrew Carnegie���by then no longer the hungry child of a penniless handloom weaver but a plutocratic steelmaster���put it in a nutshell in 1889:

What were��� luxuries have become��� necessaries of life. The laborer has now more comforts than the landlord had���. The landlord has books and pictures rarer, and appointments more artistic, than the King could then obtain. The price we pay for this��� is, no doubt, great���. The employer of thousands is forced into the strictest economies��� [in] the rates paid to labor��� friction between the employer and the employed, between capital and labor, between rich and poor���. The law of competition��� is here; we cannot evade it; no substitutes for it have been found; and while the law may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is best for the race, because it insures the survival of the fittest in every department���

The theorists of the 18th Century Enlightenment had rejected justifications of inequality based on the inheritance of caste���fictionalized descent from the Norman knights who had conquered England for William the Bastard or the Frankish warriors who had conquered Gaul for King Clovis the supposed grandson of Merovech���for the equality of all before the law, and careers open to the talented. 19th Century utilitarians had argued that the distribution of even property should be calculated by a benevolent government so as to produce the maximum sum of utility���achieve the greatest good of the greatest number. And they rejected the idea that property rights and equality under the law were in any sense sacred inasmuch as ���the majestic equality of the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread������

But then the pendulum swung back again. The social darwinists came up with new justifications of inequality, based on privation and poverty as Lamarckian and Darwinian sorting mechanisms that were necessary to drive the upward evolution of the human race. Hence all was for the best in this the best of all possible worlds���and the more it appeared in the surface to be not the best, the more it was.

Few social darwinists indeed were ever willing to take their logic to the end of the streetcar line. Few were willing to conclude, with Andrew Carnegie, that although the privation of the unfit poor was useful, the luxury and the dissipation of the rich were not: once one had demonstrated one���s fitness by becoming rich the only appropriate use of wealth was to give it away to advance the public good rather than to either consume it or bequeath it, for ���he who dies rich dies disgraced���. For most the justifications were another cycle in the ideological justification that those who are rich should hold what they have: what John Kenneth Galbraith described as ���the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness���.

The contest between these three views���and diluted and blended variants of them���is a principal part of the history of political economy and economic policy. Marx���s belief that History would bring a superior social system and allow the productivity made possible by the advance of knowledge and investment to be distributed to create a truly human world is no longer credible. Mill���s fear that humanity would be unable to organize itself to master its destiny because of resource scarcity proved false with respect to population, but may prove true with respect to energy use and global warming. And there are still many���or at least a few with very loud voices���who hold that if the world of today has a problem, it is that distribution is not unequal enough.

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Imprisonment by Malthus and "Negative Liberty"

At the start of the Long 20th Century John Stuart Mill, Britain���s leading economist, leading moral philosopher, and one of its leading imperialists and rulers of the empire as a former India Office bureaucrat, was putting the finishing touches on the final edition of the book that people then looked to to learn economics: Principles of Political Economy, with Some of Their Applications to Moral Philosophy. His book and his thought gave due attention and place to the 1730-1870 era of the British Industrial Revolution. Yet in the year 1870 he looked out on what he saw as a poor and miserable world. ���Hitherto���, he wrote, looking at the world and at the Great Britain and Ireland of his day:

it is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day���s toil of any human being. They have enabled a greater population to live the same life of drudgery and imprisonment, and an increased number of manufacturers and others to make fortunes. They have increased the comforts of the middle classes...

Denser populations, more and richer plutocrats, a larger middle class���those were all the fruits Mill saw of the 1730-1870 Industrial Revolution. Humans in 1870 were still, he saw as he looked at his world and his country, under the harrow of Malthus: There were few resources, too fertile a population, and too slow technological progress for the world to be anything other than constantly near the edge of famine.

Whatever possibilities for a better world existed in the womb of better technology were stillborn because of greater human numbers and the resource scarcity thereby generated. One word in Mill���s paragraph stands out: imprisonment. The world Mill saw was not just a world of drudgery���where humans had to work long and tiring hours at crafts and tasks that came nowhere near to being sufficiently interesting to engage the full brainpower of an East African Plains Ape. The world Mill saw was not just a world in which most people were close to the edge of being desperately hungry, and were justifiably anxious about where their 2000 calories a day were going to come from next year���or net week. The world Mill saw was not just a world of low literacy���where most could only access the collective human store of knowledge, ideas, and entertainments partially and slowly. It was a world in which humanity was imprisoned: not free, in a dungeon, chained and fettered.

That is how things were back at the start of the long twentieth century.

As an aside, this observation by founding libertarian Mill makes me think that most libertarians today who draw heavily on the Oxford inaugural lecture of Isaiah Berlin (1958): Two Concepts of Liberty https://tinyurl.com/dl20180618g, with its claim that ���negative��� and ���positive��� liberty are in ���direct conflict���, fundamentally misconstrue the libertarian project���or, at least, have no warrant to call themselves intellectual descendants and comrades of John Stuart Mill, and fail at some fundamental level to grasp what Mill thought the libertarian project was. Berlin���s definition that ���I am normally said to be free to the degree to which no man or body of men interferes with my activity��� the area within which a man can act unobstructed by others������ is one in which Mill���s use of the word imprisonment makes no sense at all...

#slouchingtowardsutopia #outtake


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Outtake from Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic Histor...

Outtake from Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Long Twentieth Century: The Dire Absolute Poverty of the Globe in 1870 https://www.icloud.com/pages/0-ZwSIf-ES3dfIBtF_dW_DBmQ: You need to understand three things to grasp the state of the world economy in 1870: that the drive to make love is one of the very strongest of all human drives, that living standards were what we would regard as very low for the bulk of humanity in the long trek between the invention of agriculture and 1870, and that the rate of technological progress back before 1870 was glacial, at best...

#slouchingtowardsutopia #outtake

For all the Trumpists, language and argument is not an at...

For all the Trumpists, language and argument is not an attempt to understand the world and persuade others but rather an attempt to destroy understandings of what is and to dominate others: Gabriel Schoenfeld: Trump Supporters Say the Darndest Things: "Readers may not be aware but before Roger Kimball became a fanatical acolyte of Donald Trump, he was a fanatical hater... bitterly complaining of the rallies where Trump 'encouraged a whipped up crowd to extend their right arms in Nazi-like salute while pledging allegiance to the Great Leader'.��� Many more such depictions of our 45th president as an aspiring f��hrer can be found in the prolific output of this eminent conservative intellectual.... To judge by his response to my review of Hanson���s book, Kimball seems to have forgotten that he specialized in such Nazi references... right up until the moment he abruptly switched from worrying about the impending Trump Third Reich to hailing Trump for his 'salubrious and morally uplifting' presidency. I don���t believe it is an ad hominem argument to raise questions about the quality of a mind that would produce such extraordinary gyrations...

#noted

One of my hobbyhorses: a "semi-skilled" worker is an unsk...

One of my hobbyhorses: a "semi-skilled" worker is an unskilled worker with a union: Kate Bahn sends us to: Byron Auguste: Low Wage, Not Low Skill: Why Devaluing Our Workers Matters: "Such jobs require optimizing time tradeoffs, quality control, emotional intelligence and project management. They are not low skill, but they are low wage. Why does this matter? When we stereotype or lazily assume low-wage workers to be �����low skill,��� it reinforces an often unspoken and pernicious view that they lack intelligence and ambition, maybe even the potential to master ���higher-order��� skilled work. In an economy that is supposed to operate as a meritocracy���but rarely does���too often, we see low wages and assume both the work and workers are low-value...

#noted

Note to Self: South Australia: In South Australia I...

Note to Self: South Australia:

In South Australia I was born.

Heave away! Haul away!

In South Australia, 'round Cape Horn.

We���re bound for South Australia.

Heave away, heave away

Oh heave away, you rolling king,

We're bound for South Australia.

And as you wollop round Cape Horn.

You'll wish to God you've never been born.

I wish I was on Australia's strand. ���With a bottle of whiskey in my hand.

In South Australia my native land. ���Full of rocks, and fleas, and thieves, and sand.

I see my wife standing on the quay ���The tears do start as she waves to me.

I'll tell you the truth and I'll tell you no lie; ���If I don't love that girl I hope I may die.

And now I'm bound for a foreign strand, ���With a bottle of whisky in my hand.

I'll drink a glass to the foreign shore ���And one to the girl that I adore.

As I walked out one morning fair.

'Twas there I met Miss Nancy Blair.

I shook her up and I shook her down.

I shook her round and round the town.

I run her all night and I run her all day.

And I run her until we sailed away

There's just one thing that's on my mind.

That's leaving Nancy Blair behind.

Port Adelaide's a grand old town.

There's plenty of girls to go around.

A glass of rum in every hand.

And an extra bottle for the shantyman.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Australia_(song) | https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/03/south-australia.html

#tceh #shoebox #outtake #notetoself

The Lighting Budget of Thomas Jefferson: DeLong's Morning Coffee

Morning Coffee Podcast: The Lighting Budget of Thomas Jefferson: Should the U.S. fall into recession soon, the Federal Reserve will have very little room to loosen policy to cushion the downturn. This is a large asymmetric risk. The right way to manage an asymmetric risk is to buy insurance: the Federal Reserve should be buying recession insurance. It is not. This is a substantial problem...

8:02: https://delong.micro.blog/2019/03/17/the-lighting-budget.html | https://delong.micro.blog/uploads/2019/708e9b89bf.mp3

https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/02/the-lighting-budget-of-thomas-jefferson.html

#morningcoffee #podcast #economicgrowth

Mark Bauerlein (2006): On Michael B��rub��: Weekend Reading

I wonder if Mark Bauerlein has become a Trumpist? Yes indeedee, he has���not anti-anti-Trump, but the Full Monty: "President Trump is the only one who can stop the left now": Mark Bauerlein (2006): On Michael B��rub��: "An assigned essay topic that was claimed by a conservative student to be anti-American, a claim rightly judged by B��rub�� a silly exaggeration. Still, the tendentiousness of the question is plain. Here is the final sentence: 'Analyze the U.S. constitution (original document), and show how its formulation excluded [the] majority of the people living in America at that time, and how it was dominated by America���s elite interest'...

...And here is B��rub�����s comment:

If students of American political science are not introduced to the contradictions underlying the foundation of a revolutionary democratic nation that practiced slavery and restricted the vote to landowning men, they are being miseducated.

What B��rub�� considers good history registers with conservatives quite differently. They note the emphasis on exploitation and hypocrisy, along with no chance to argue otherwise. The Founding���s positive side is glossed over as if it were false ornament. And as for miseducation, the historical significance of the Constitution isn���t primarily that it legalized ���exclusion��� and ���class domination,��� but rather that a group of men acculturated to exclusion and domination should have conceived a system of government and a set of rights from which free and oppressed people have drawn inspiration for two centuries. The assignment, then, asks undergraduates to take a partial and politically loaded viewpoint on the Founding. If we want full historical context, by all means bring in the inequalities and injustices of the time, but let���s not obscure the extraordinary moral and political breakthrough represented by the document.

That B��rub�� accepts such assignments as straightforward history goes a long way toward explaining why conservative criticisms appear unbalanced or cynical. The liberal outlook, especially regarding race and gender, has seeped into and saturated the curriculum so much that questioning it looks not like a new venture into the marketplace of ideas but like a violation of civility. This makes it almost impossible for conservative reformers in higher education to question, much less alter, the curriculum.... When substantive points are recast as lapses in decency, outsiders have no chance of gaining a seat at the table.... Here, he overlooks the situation, because, I think, the aggressive actions of David Horowitz and others have raised the threat level.

What���s Liberal About the Liberal Arts?, the major statement on the issue by a major academic voice, never outlines the most important aspect of any educational program, its curriculum. On the evidence of its arguments, we may safely assume that in spite of all the publicized assaults from the outside (such as the Academic Bill of Rights) and all the humiliating episodes on the inside (such as Ward Churchill), the humanities remain tied to a liberal outlook���not to liberal personnel, but more deeply to liberal values and pedagogies...

#weekendreadings #orangehairedbaboons #moralresponsibility

Weekend Reading: William Freehling: Secessionists at Bay

Weekend Reading: William Freehling: Secessionists at Bay pp. 128-9: "One episode at Monticello illustrates the master's [Jefferson's] genius at evasion. Sally Hemings, Monticello's most celebrated slave, put Jefferson to the test as few trustees have been tested. No trustee more successfully evaded his examination. Most historians, emulating Jefferson's contemporaries, have narrowed the Sally Hemings issue to one question: Did Jefferson sire her five mulatto children? The circumstantial evidence does not serve Jefferson well. Hemings, whitish daughter of Jefferson's father-in-law, was long a household servant within the Big House. Jefferson was always in residence nine months before she gave birth. Jefferson manumitted some of her children and freed no black without a Hemings connection...

...This evidence, to some, will always convict Jefferson. Others will urge that these circumstances could point towards other member(s) of Jefferson's white family as sire(s). Furthermore, the fact (at last a fact!) that Jefferson's father-in-law sired Sally Hemings perhaps explains why only Hemingses were manumitted.

This futile debate over circumstances obscures the undebatable point about dissimulation. Jefferson never faced or resolved the moral mess in his mansion.... And morass miscegenation was, as Jefferson defined morass, the most 'unnatural' morass infecting the 'natural aristocracy'.

As Jefferson knew, miscegenation, however common in the Old South, was not commonly that luxuriant in southern Big Houses. Multiplying mulattoes were also uncommonly 'obscence' in so uncommon a mansion as Monticello. This was supposed to be the utopian Big House, the model on the mountain for an adoring South to emulate. A morally enlightened trustee would have had to act, however unpleasant the action...

Jefferson preferred to avoid the unpleasant.... Jefferson chose to do nothing. Or, more accurately, he probably never allowed himself to think about the choices.... Jefferson's love of balanced surfaces and inclinations to forget unbalanced foundations explain why he failed almost as much as manumitter as he failed as Sally Hemings's trustee. That 'almost' is crucial. Jefferson freed some 10% of his over 100 slaves. 10% per generation could water down slavery. So, too, Jefferson's voluntary surrender of 10% of his property shows some commitment. Latter-day intellectuals who can see only commitment to slavery might ask themselves how often they have sacrificed 10% for their ideas...

#history #weekendreading

Weekend Reading: Garry Wills (1974): Uncle Thomas���s Cabin

Weekend Reading: Garry Wills (1974): Uncle Thomas���s Cabin: "It should be clear, by now, what fuels the tremendous industry [Fawn Brodie] poured into her work���her obsession with all the things she can find or invent about Jefferson���s sex life. Since that life does not seem a very extensive or active one, Ms. Brodie has to use whatever hints she can contrive. In particular, she reads practically the whole Jeffersonian corpus as a secret code referring to what is presented as the longest, most stable, most satisfying love in Jefferson���s life���that with Sally Hemings...

...Ms. Brodie is confident that Jefferson shared her own obsession with Sally, and all his later references to slavery, Negroes, manumission, or miscegenation are read as direct or indirect expressions of his feeling for her. Guilt, torment, and conflict are interlineated through all his writings to make his soul quiver in tune with la Brodie���s. Yet there is no scrap of evidence for this passion, except perhaps the fact that he retained Sally at Monticello after stories about her had been widely circulated. Still, what was he supposed to do? Kill her? Freeing or selling her would make her more likely to talk, or to be tricked into talking. It was safer to keep her nearby. She was apparently pleasing, and obviously discreet. There was less risk in continuing to enjoy her services than in experimenting around with others. She was like a healthy and obliging prostitute, who could be suitably rewarded but would make no importunate demands. Her lot was improved, not harmed, by the liaison.

Her offspring seem, by Jefferson���s own theory, to have been legally white (i.e., with one white parent in all three preceding generations)���without, of course, ceasing to be slaves. Ms. Brodie had earlier written that this consideration may have freed Jefferson from his own strictures on miscegenation; but now she thinks it added to his burden of remorse over the inability to recognize and educate his only sons. Both considerations are gratuitous. What concerned Jefferson as a result of miscegenation was the degrading of the citizenry���s stock; and his bastards by Sally were like those that could have been born from any white prostitute���not legitimate, not heirs, not property holders, not citizens. He let those children who could ���pass��� run away, and did not seek to find them. The rest he freed in his will. The arrangement was convenient to him, and imposed no new burdens on his slaves.

This is not a very romantic light in which to view Jefferson; but he was not a romantic fellow....

Ms. Brodie tries to reconstruct the touching love of the great philosopher for his unlettered mistress���but it seems unlikely that Jefferson went to Sally for ���reflection��� instead of ���sensation.��� He led a severely compartmentalized life, and had a constant absorption in the economy of its arrangement. He resented intrusions on his time and energy, avoiding so far as possible the duties of plantation hospitality. He was shy with women of his own social class; he married late, and never remarried; his awkward lunge at a friend���s wife and his stilted semi-courting of Maria Cosway reveal him in uncharacteristic moments.

Sex and love would be disordering elements in a life rigidly ordered���unless a sane division of his appetites and affections could be worked out. It is the kind of solution he sought in every other aspect of his crowded yet minutely scheduled activity. Some will find this picture of Thomas Jefferson unattractive���but Ms. Brodie proves that the attempt to construct one more to the liking of today���s romantic daydreamers involves heroic feats of misunderstanding and a constant labor at ignorance. This seems too high a price to pay when the same appetites can be more readily gratified by those Hollywood fan magazines, with their wealth of unfounded conjecture on the sex lives of others, from which Ms. Brodie has borrowed her scholarly methods...

#fortheweekend #history