Sunday, January 02, 2005

My Moral Awakening


The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Contributor: The Ends of the World as We Know Them

A society contains a built-in blueprint for failure if the elite insulates itself from the consequences of its actions. That's why Maya kings, Norse Greenlanders and Easter Island chiefs made choices that eventually undermined their societies. They themselves did not begin to feel deprived until they had irreversibly destroyed their landscape.

Could this happen in the United States? It's a thought that often occurs to me here in Los Angeles, when I drive by gated communities, guarded by private security patrols, and filled with people who drink bottled water, depend on private pensions, and send their children to private schools. By doing these things, they lose the motivation to support the police force, the municipal water supply, Social Security and public schools. If conditions deteriorate too much for poorer people, gates will not keep the rioters out. Rioters eventually burned the palaces of Maya kings and tore down the statues of Easter Island chiefs; they have also already threatened wealthy districts in Los Angeles twice in recent decades.


When I was in high school I was a great fan of Ayn Rand. In fact, I read her complete works from Atlas Shrugged to her essays in For the New Intellectual which, at 15, I thought was addressed to me. I liked the feel of her scheme as it seemed to me at the time: hard, intense and angular, achievement through energy and striving, power, glory and heroism. It was a gut feeling, a sensibility--I hated soft. I also believed that Capitalism, the untried ideal, if it were ever implemented would not only raise all ships but give me the chance to exert myself to the fullest and achieve glory.

Then one day when I happened to be awake during American History class, I learned about Market Failure. Mrs. Paul nee Miss Weiss (she got married during the term I was in her class) lectured on the Great Depression. She described how farmers plowed under mountains of grain while people in the cities were starving because it couldn't be any other way. If there were an oversupply of grain farmers wouldn't get a decent price for it and they would starve, so they buried it and everyone was worse off. That and all the other vicious circles ground round and round and things became worse still. It made perfect sense and absolutely no sense at all: all the stuff people needed was there--there was no shortage of food, land, water or natural resources but people were badly off and there was no way out. The disaster was man-made but couldn't, in any way that I could see, be unmade since everyone was behaving rationally.

That was when Morality grabbed me by the throat and shook me until until my eyes bugged out--like my lab worrying his stuffed koala. Before then, as an aspiring New Intellectual I thought I knew all about Morality and was convinced that it wasn't for me: Morality was a matter of making oneself worse off so that others could be better off and I didn't see any reason why I should do that. Mulling over this puzzle it seemed that everything I'd believed was washing away from under my feet: flawless rationality generated the most absurd, pointless waste and not just accidently but with the inexorable a prioricity of a proof in geometry. I realized that Ayn Rand was wrong. But I got a D in the course anyway.

It's still those man-made disasters that get under my skin. News of the tsunami in South Asia, dead children, villages destroyed doesn't grip me in the way that the stories of ongoing war, lawlessness and corruption that ruin people's lives and whole societies do. I remember reading somewhere that Indian pashas became fabulously wealthy because British colonialism freed them from the duty of burning up their resources through socially obligatory warfare. It's the nature of Nature, blindly irrational, to be red in tooth and claw. We can't complain, but just fight it for all we're worth. It's the irrational results of human rationality that haunt me.

The linked article from the NYTimes rehearses that theme--how nations and cultures collapse under their own weight, how the Norse in Greenland and the Mayan elite made rational self-interested decisions that destroyed them and wiped out their civilizations while, predictably, the Germans and the Japanese planned, regulated and flourished. Will we ever get it? The author bravely but without much conviction thinks that we might since, unlike the Mayan kings, Easter Islanders, Norse Greenlanders and Mangarevians we have the benefit of the Historical Perspective and his books.

I'm not convinced because I don't know many people who spend their time worrying about the Mangarevians or have a clue about the Historical Perspective. Most policy makers don't seem to get it either and even if they do they have to answer to voters who don't.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

I'm not an economist (too dumb at math) and don't have any a priori views about the limits of planning--seems to me that it's all an empirical question about how you organize things to get the best result. I do have a priori views about what the best result is--along the lines of maximizing effective freedom to attain preference satisfaction--but that's problematic and too hard work at this point to negotiate about it.

If centralized, planned economies produced the result I'd say fine--but manifestly they don't and in fact they're disastrous. If laissez-faire did I'd say fine but it can't, not only because of problems with commons like fisheries, ground and water pollution but because the luck of the draw leaves lots of people without many bargaining chips or options. Even when the market works, women and minorities, and people who are just stupid, incompetent, crippled, unlovely or unlucky get the short end of the stick.

It's really not clear to me that the costs of regulation, which restricts employers freedom to hire and promote whomever they please and to indulge their tastes for discrimination, outweigh the benefits of enforcing equal opportunity regulations for women and minorities, or that the cost in taxes to provide for people who are stupid, incompetent or unlucky outweigh the benefits to people who have just lost out in nature's lottery. I'm not even talking about fairness here--just maximizing.

Please note, I didn't make the interesting, controversial and thoroughly implausible claim that regulation was in and of itself a good thing. I just made the boring but I think plausible claim that the absence of all regulation isn't going to guarantee the greatest good for the greatest number.

Unknown said...

Is it really that much fun to pretend that you understand what the hell the German counter-enlightenment thinkers were saying? I don't pretend to understand this stuff or know many people who do. I do have a colleague who has actually read Marx but he seems to think that when correctly translated into English he turns out to be Rawls. The humanities are not dominated by people who're into German counter-enlightenment nihilism, contrary to the impression you may get from a few literati who've been adopted as public intellectuals.

When I say "freedom" however I was in fact talking about what I suppose Marx had in mind rather than political liberty which, along with basic resources, is a prerequisite for effective freedom. I mean capability as Sen understands it.

Political liberty is a prerequisite but doesn't go that far in promoting effective freedom or if you will capability because the operation of the free market de facto locks lots of people into situations where they don't have much capability. If I'm stuck in one (or two!) of those crappy jobs Barbara Ehrenreich describes in Nickel and Dimed in America I'm not free in any sense that contributes significantly to my well-being.

Everyone has to trade off some effective freedom some of the time for other goods, including more effective freedom at other times. I take plane trips to conferences and sitting on a plane is the quintessence of being unfree--trapped in a restricted space with very little you can do. But I can at least read and when I get out I'll have lots of fun. For most people work is like a daily 8 hour plane trip where, in addition they can't read, drink or take knock out pills to get through it because they're stuck doing repetitive tasks--scanning groceries, inputting data, etc. and there's no fun at the end of the day because they're brain dead, don't have the resources to do much and, if they're women, work a second shift.

You can't eliminate this shit work--someone has to scan those groceries, input that data, take phone orders, work on the assembly line and do routine clerical work--but you can fix it so that people can make trade-offs, invest in education at any time in their lives to get out, get a chance for advancement on the job, have a decent working environment and, at the very least, decent wages so they can have a few more options during their leisure time. That's what government regulations, income transfers and social programs are for because without government interference you get Walmart.

Unknown said...

I appreciate your personnel problems and I agree (and hit your link) that Ehrenreich's book is somewhat sensationalistic. Critics have noted that most women in the position she simulated would have a local support network, wouldn't be forced to live in motels and would probably stay put rather than moving around the country.

But Betty Dukes, lead plaintiff in the Walmart class action case, stable, hardworking, and a pastor in her church was quite a different kettle of fish. She's suing on behalf of 1.6 million women working at Walmart, many of whom were equally hardworking. Management denied them promotions and paid them low wages in spite of all their efforts because they could. This isn't a matter of personal malice or patriarchal conspiracy--it is the market working. If "women's jobs" are overcrowded and women don't have access to jobs outside of the pink collar ghetto, as they don't without the enforcement of equal opportunity regulations, then employers can hire them at low wages and deny them promotions.

More generally, firms like Walmart that hire lots of non-union unskilled labor can pay low wages and impose harsh conditions because high turnover doesn't cost them. There's an endless supply of cheap labor and the costs of hiring and training are low compared to the costs of providing the wages, working conditions and opportunities that would motivate workers to stay. No one is being mean--just rational.

Walmart is precisely the market working. It's efficient, it extracts the most work from employees at the lowest cost, and so can sell stuff for less so consumers, being rational, will shop there. No one wants Walmart but without government interference Walmart is what we're all going to get.

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