The great majority of people throughout most of human history have precariously been able to subsist. (See Level 1 below.) A great divergence began just over two centuries ago. Global life expectancy at birth has more than doubled and abject poverty as a percentage of the population has declined.
The average life expectancy at birth used to be about 30 years. That doesn't mean no one lived to old age. One in four children born alive died before their first birthday, so the average life expectancy at birth was skewed downward. But life expectancy at every age has been improving, especially over the past century.
The researchers at Gapminder have constructed this informative chart showing anticipated improving economic status over the next twenty years. (These numbers attempt to account for changes in the value of "a dollar" over time and across national borders.) Each block equates to 100,000 people. As you can see, the population is larger in twenty years, but a higher percentage of people have moved rightward on the continuum to greater prosperity. Many people find these numbers too abstract. What does this mean in practical terms? Gapminder has constructed this helpful chart to describe what life is like at the four levels.
You can learn more about these four levels here.
Three truths. The world has become profoundly better in recent generations and is on an improving trajectory. There is much suffering and injustice as vast room for improving our world. We can make the world a better place.
New voting laws around the country are not a response to voter fraud. How do we know? Because there is no credible evidence of consequential voter fraud anywhere in the country.
The new voting laws are in response to voter turnout, especially turnout of the "wrong kind" of voters. The laws do not mention ethnicities in their explicit language, but the voting barriers are made more significant for minorities. This brings us to Critical Race Theory.
Critical Race Theory looks at how racism has, directly and indirectly, influenced the legal system to perpetuate racial disparity – like maybe rigging the voting system in favor of white people without saying so. And now you know why one political party, which I used to loosely call home, is so animated in its opposition to Critical Race Theory.
From researchers Steven A. Altman and Phillip Bastian:
Despite recent trade turbulence, the ratio of gross exports to world GDP is still remarkably close to its all-time high. Even after falling from a peak of 32% in 2008 to 29% in 2019, this measure of global trade integration is still 20% higher than it was in 2000, twice as high as it was in 1970, and almost six times higher than in 1945. ... Globalization can go into reverse—as demonstrated by the trendlines between the 1920s and 1950s—but recent data do not depict a similar reversal. ...
[T]he world is—and will remain—only partially globalized. Globalization can rise or fall significantly without getting anywhere close to either a state where national borders become irrelevant or one where they loom so large that it is best to think of a world of disconnected national economies. All signs point to a future where international flows will remain so large that decision-makers ignore them at their peril, even as borders and cross-country differences continue to make domestic activity the default in most areas.
Economist Timothy Taylor reviews the report and offers other insights: What's Happening with Global Connectedness in the Pandemic?
Confederate monuments were the product of a campaign to rewrite history, not to preserve it.
There were few Confederate monuments in the thirty years after the Civil War ended in 1865. Placement of monuments came in two waves, the first much larger than the second. One wave began at the turn of the last century and the other began about 1956 (See chart).
Source: There are certain moments in US history when Confederate monuments go up
First Wave
The first sustained wave of monument placement began in the late 1890s, peaking in 1911, and then tapering off to lower rate of placement in the 1920s and early 1930s. Why this spike?
By the 1890s, Confederate veterans were dying off and Southern elites feared younger generations would lose the “right” perspective on the history of the Civil War. The “Lost Cause” movement began to take root in the South as a response. The mission was to recast the Confederacy as a heroic and just attempt a preserve Southern way of life while minimizing the experience and impact of slavery.
The United Daughters of the Confederacy was birthed in 1894. Organized by daughters and granddaughters of the Southern elite, they set out to promote the Lost Cause narrative through textbook writing, children’s programs, and the erection of monuments promoting the Lost Cause. Their financial and political clout gave them considerable influence, especially in the formerly Confederate states.
In 1896, the Supreme Court handed down its Plessy vs Ferguson ruling, institutionalizing the Separate but Equal doctrine. By 1914, Less than twenty years later, all Southern states and most Northern cities had enacted laws segregating people.
From 1902 to 1907, Tom Dixon wrote a popular trilogy of novels from 1902-1907, targeting the “unfair” treatment of the South in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” fifty years earlier. The middle novel, “The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan,” was the inspiration for D. W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation” in 1915, glorifying the Klan and employing deeply racists troupes. It was the first true blockbuster movie. Not coincidentally, 1915 was the birth of the Second Ku Klux Klan. By 1922, the Klan had a million members, possibly as many as five million by 1925, and millions more in sympathy. Lynching was prevalent all through this period as were race massacres like the Red Summer of 1919 and the Tulsa massacre of 1921.
Second Wave
The United Daughters of the Confederacy began to lose steam in the 1920s and from the mid-1930s to the mid-1950s monument erection mostly subsided. But another smaller spike in from about 1956-1965. What happened here?
In 1954, in Brown vs the Board of Education, the Supreme Court overruled Plessy vs Ferguson, effectively delegitimizing segregation. The Civil Rights Movement came into its own at the time. Up went more monuments to persevere the ethos of the Lost Cause and white supremacy, dropping off after 1965 and the passage of civil rights legislation. The financial and political clout to promote these efforts was not as powerful by this date.
Conclusion
The great majority of Confederate monuments were never a product of some high-minded project to help us holistically remember the past. They were the product of concerted effort to rewrite the past with the Lost Cause narrative. They were integral to waves of white supremacy that swept America, attempting to whitewash the past and intimidate people of color. They have no business standing in places of honor in our public spaces. Their removal aids in the remembrance of history, not its neglect.
For a short history of the United Daughters of the Confederacy and their role in promoting the Lost Cause and Confederate monument placement, view this video.
In mid-April, Bill Bennett said COIVD-19 is no big deal. Projections showed 60,000 deaths, about the same as the flu. Our stringent "stay-at-home" measures were unnecessary. It is faulty reasoning on several counts. As I noted of Facebook, “We didn’t lock down the country to try to prevent 60,000 deaths; we locked down the country to limit deaths to 60,000 (or whatever the ultimate toll is).” (See The Absurd Case against the Coronavirus Lockdown)
Through March 31, the tally of COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. was doubling every three days. Had that rate continued, there would have 275,000 deaths by April 21. Instead, we had 40,000. The doubling rate has stretched to nine days. We flattened the curve. We do not know the exact rate at which deaths would have multiplied had we not acted but it is certain it would have been much higher. Slowing the fatalities prevents medical facilities from becoming overwhelmed and ensures that each new hospitalized victim gets optimal care, thus dampening the fatality rate over the course of the pandemic.
Furthermore, the 60,000 flu deaths represent the total for an entire year. In the U.S., COVID-19 is barely two months old. This is like looking at a baseball player’s strikeout totals for the previous season, comparing them with his total strikeouts for his first month of the following year, and upon seeing they are about the same, conclude he is doing okay. What will the death count comparison be like a year from now?
Finally, it is invalid to compare deaths officially attributed to COVID-19 to the Center For Disease Control’s flu death total.(1) The reported flu deaths are calculated using an algorithm.(2) Over the last six years, the number of flu deaths officially coded as such (direct or comorbidity) ranged from 3,448 to 15,620 (See Jeremy Samuel Faust.) The CDC believes flu deaths are underreported for a variety of reasons. Instead of official tabulations, they take the number of flu and pneumonia hospitalizations and report a percentage of them as flu deaths. According to Faust, the result is about six times more flu deaths than the officially reported number each year. (Faust is critical of CDC methods, believing it significantly overstates the death total. I have no way of evaluating that.)
Recent analysis indicates the official COVID-19 count is a significant undercount. Using average numbers of deaths up to a particular point in the year from recent years, analysts are finding sharp rises in the number of deaths where COVID-19 outbreaks have occurred. Yet, the officially reported COVID-19 deaths are accounting for only half the increase in deaths. That suggests the true COVID-19 impact may be much higher (double?) than the official account. (See here)
As of today, May 5, we have 70,000 officially reported deaths. So if you want to make legitimate comparisons, it is 70,000 versus about 9,500 for officially reported deaths. Using algorithms to capture unreported deaths, the comparison is more likely something like 100,000+ deaths to 60,000 deaths. And this is comparing COVID-19’s first quarter to an entire flu season.
COVID-19 is not just the flu.
1 “Official.” A CDC database tracks COVID-19 deaths reported through official channels. Their provisional death count in the National Vital Statistics System shows almost 40,000 COVID-19 deaths. They note that it can take weeks for deaths to make it into the NVSS. The numbers for past weeks are revised as the data is received. The National Notifiable Diseases Surveillance System is the source for the numbers we typically see in the media and an up to date report of confirmed and probable deaths. That total stands at about 70,000 today. I am using this number as the “official” count. (Source: Did the CDC Significantly ‘Readjust COVID-19 Death Numbers’?)
2 Center for Disease Control, Frequently Asked Questions about Estimated Flu Burden. "How many adults die from flu each year?: Flu deaths in adults are not nationally notifiable. In order to monitor influenza related deaths in all age groups, CDC tracks pneumonia and influenza (P&I)–attributed deaths through the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) Mortality Reporting System. This system tracks the proportion of death certificates processed that list pneumonia or influenza as the underlying or contributing cause of death. This system provides an overall indication of whether flu-associated deaths are elevated, but does not provide an exact number of how many people died from flu. As it does for the numbers of flu cases, doctor’s visits and hospitalizations, CDC also estimates deaths in the United States using mathematical modeling. CDC estimates that from 2010-2011 to 2017-2018, influenza-associated deaths in the United States ranged from a low of 12,000 (during 2011-2012) to a high of 79,000 (during 2017-2018). The model used to estimate flu-associated deaths uses a ratio of deaths-to-hospitalizations in order to estimate the total flu-related deaths during a season." The site offers links for those wanting more detail.
Two months ago, the New York Times uncritically ran an article claiming billionaires pay lower tax rates than the bottom half of American earners. (I see this and related pieces circulated by my progressive friends.) The unsubstantiated and yet to be reviewed data came from economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, a tease to promote their soon to be released book. Their claim is contrary to other economic entities that monitor and study taxation. Once the book was released, the methodology became public. The methodology conflicts with the methodology they used themselves just a couple of years ago in peer-reviewed research.
I am not a tax expert but I have tried to follow the discussion. Econofact gives one of the best brief summaries on the claim. (Are Taxes (And Also Spending) Progressive?) A couple of observations:
“In their book, Saez and Zucman reach conclusions that are at odds with a variety of previous studies. … What explains the difference? Relative to previous estimates, the current choices and assumptions made by Saez and Zucman generate higher estimates of income among high-income households, and of taxes on low-income households.”
“Considering only positive tax payments gives an incomplete picture of the tax system. Some taxes are “refundable” and actually offer credits, such as the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and the Child Tax Credit (CTC). These credits can create negative tax liability for households. For example, if a household pays $1000 in a given year but receives $1,500 in an earned income tax credit, on balance, they have paid negative taxes. Conventional analyses count programs such as the EITC and the CTC as negative taxes, but Saez and Zucman exclude these credits from their analysis, making the tax system look more regressive than other studies show.”
Taking this a step further, assume you have an income of $10,000 and tax credits that net you $5,000. You have $15,000 to spend. Assume the local sales tax is 10%. You pay $1,500 in local sales taxes. But these economists don’t count the credits. So the tax rate is effectively 15% because the denominator by which you divide $1,500 is $10,000, not $15,000. It artificially inflates the tax burden even more. They do other "unique" things like count health insurance premiums as taxes.
On a further note, these two economists are key economic advisors to the Elizabeth Warren presidential campaign and this book was written and released to give support to her political objectives, not as scholarly analysis.
I am not defending billionaires or the present tax system. A factual claim was made concerning billionaires and taxes. Is it true? Outside of these two economists, writing with a clearly partisan objective and using unorthodox methods, there is no support for the claim. A disdain for billionaires and passion about inequality does not make the claim true.
The Keynesian Revolution and Our Empty Economy: We're All Dead (Quotes are from the e-book version.)
Is economics value-free? Can it be? Economics emerged alongside other social sciences in the nineteenth century, aspiring to apply the scientific method to the study human behavior. Economists draw a distinction between positive and normative economics - positive being descriptive and normative being prescriptive. The latter requires value judgments, making it beyond the realm of science. While an economist may wish to offer his or her perspective on what should be done, economics eschews prescriptive behavior. But is that the way economics works?
In The Keynesian Revolution and Our Empty Economy: We're All Dead, Dr. Victor Claar, professor of economics at Florida Gulf Coast University, and Dr. Greg Forster, Director of the Okonomia Network at Trinity International University, argue the story economists tell about themselves does not match reality. Simply reading the book title, one might assume this is another installment in the ongoing battle between Keynesianism economics and other economic theories. It is not. The authors say something transformative happened in the 1930s with the rise of John Maynard Keynes’ economics, misshaping the discipline. Virtually the entire discipline (including the free-market Chicago school and Austrian economics) battles about means to end from within the Keynesian framework. The authors conclude with thoughts on a reforming agenda but first take us on a rich historical journey.
“Economics” Before the Nineteenth Century
Until the nineteenth century, “economics” was part of moral philosophy - political economy more specifically. Philosophers and theologians made normative appeals for economic behavior. Human existence has ultimate purposes. They inseparably connected their normative prescriptions to teleological realities. The authors identify a succession of three ethical paradigms related to economic thought over the millennia.
Nature paradigm – Classical philosophy. “What sets classical thought apart is the idea that nature has purposes, and human excellence consists in fulfilling those purposes.” Wisdom comes from correctly understanding nature and its purposes. From this wisdom, we shape our daily affairs, including economic activity.
God paradigm – Judeo-Christian theology. “It began with the assumption that human beings are created by and under the authority of God, and are placed both within and over nature by God. Their economic needs and behaviors are structured by God’s design in creation and are being restored to that design through the redemption of the world in Christ, so conformity to God and his purposes was their standard for economic thought.”
Reason paradigm – Born in Enlightenment philosophy. “It began with the assumption that human beings are rational, and their economic needs and behaviors can be understood and arranged rationally, so conformity to reason and its purposes (they understood ‘reason’ to include moral reason, including teleology or purposes) was their standard for economic thought.”
Claar and Forster revisit these three historic paradigms throughout the book, demonstrating their normative and teleological components in contrast with Keynes emerging philosophy in the 1930s. The authors identify a fourth paradigm with Keynes, the Consumption paradigm. So how did the Consumption paradigm emerge?
The Beginning of Modern Economics
As scholars labored to establish economics in the late nineteenth century, there was substantial intra-disciplinary conflict about how to proceed; differing on what roles historicism, theory, and science should play. (The book gives some great history.) John Neville Keynes, John Maynard Keynes’ father, assumed the role of peacemaker. He popularized the “positive versus normative” frame and worked to move scholars beyond endless squabbling toward productive research, thereby gaining credibility for the discipline.
Despite these ambitions, economics was not born in a vacuum. From the 1890s up into World War I, societal gatekeepers saw themselves as stewards of a moral and cultural order, envisioning evermore progress and human improvement in keeping with the Reason paradigm. Decades before, John Stuart Mill had introduced homo economicus, human beings as rational, utility calculating machines. Mill and these later economists retained at least a sense of the progress teleology, even as they begin to apply the scientific method to evaluating behavior. Homo economicus was a knowingly simplified anthropology, but with research, one might imagine revision and nuance could be brought to bear over time. A variety of social changes in years prior to and through World War I rocked confidence in the progress narrative, leaving the discipline adrift. Enter John Maynard Keynes.
The Keynesian Revolution
We frequently view John Maynard Keynes as a tedious academic. In reality, Keynes was a core member of the highly influential Bloomsbury Group in London, a collection of intellectuals and artists including Leonard and Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, Clive and Vanessa (Woolf) Bell, Duncan Grant and Lytton Strachey. They embraced, in Keynes words, an “immoralist” philosophy devoted to pursuing pleasure. “Though they weren’t sure what the highest forms of pleasure might be, their sense was that they could be found only among their greatest loves—in intimate relationships and in things like the arts, theater, and music—rather than in more pedestrian forms of enjoyment.”
The Bloomsbury Group was disdainful of traditional values. This included values like diligence, frugality, self-control, found in the Reason paradigm. Wealth accumulation and consumerism were dehumanizing influences obstructing pursuit of pleasure. However, they believed only a select few were capable of pursuing pleasure the way they envisioned. A materialistic bourgeois existence was the best for which the rest of humanity could hope. It was the task of the elite to shepherd the masses toward this end as the elite went about their higher pursuit of pleasure. Claar and Forster walk us through how Keynes’ economics reflects this philosophy but I will jump to a couple of takeaways for sake of brevity.
The most revolutionary effect of Keynes’ influence is his reshaping of means and ends. Mill introduced homo economicus as a rudimentary construct to aid in economic inquiry, not a characterization of human essence. Within Mill’s construct was an assumption that we will rationally discern and pursue certain ends. Reason is the means for choosing between various courses of action in achieving those ends. These ends include teleological ends.
Keynes retains the idea of homo economicus but with substantial revision. With Keynes, there is no teleological purpose to guide economic behavior. “Animal spirits” drive human behavior, not reason in pursuit of meaningful action. Reason is how each individual can best satisfy animalistic desire. Consumption to meet these desires takes center stage. For Keynes, homo economicus is not simply a methodological construct. It is an anthropological given. We must base economic policy on this premise.
In the General Theory [Keynes seminal book), economics abandons its nineteenth-century ambition to moral neutrality. It no longer seeks a place alongside chemistry and physics as a detached, disinterested, purely positive observer. It becomes, once again, a practical discipline with a moral vision.
But now the moral vision is radically different. Instead of the virtue, piety, or the progress of humanity, the moral vision of the General Theory is an animalistic homo economicus whose only economic goal is to satisfy his own consumption appetites. …
Another aspect of Keynes’ influence is his introduction of “the economy.” Prior to Keynes, economics was microeconomics. It was focused on how individuals, firms, and other players make decisions. Keynes introduced macroeconomics, with its focus on aggregate economic phenomenon for a nation or other large societal entity - money supply, interest rates, aggregate employment, gross domestic product, and so on. Macroeconomics came to dominate the discipline to the point that when people hear “economics” today they think of macroeconomic concepts.
For Keynes, “The economy” is a machine-like entity employed by elites like himself and members of the Bloomsbury Group in transmuting humanity to an elevated state. Keynes was sympathetic to socialist aims but he writes:
It is not the ownership of the instruments of production which it is important for the State to assume. If the State is able to determine the aggregate amount of resources devoted to augmenting the instruments and the basic rate of reward to those who own them, it will have accomplished all that is necessary.
The authors note:
Keynes shares Marx’s goal of giving the state control over our economic lives, which is to say, over all the most intimate and important decisions we make. He just thinks the state can accomplish this control without seizing ownership of assets.
The authors paraphrase Keynes’ view this way:
In an ideal state, we would ‘transmute’ human nature, raising people not to care how much money they end up with after playing the “game” of money-making. However, for now we need to keep the game going. If we stop, we’ll have nothing to eat; the economy runs not on productive work but on satisfying consumer appetites. Thus it is the responsibility of government to keep the game going. Keeping the game going involves all the players being highly motivated and playing to win—“strongly addicted to the money-making passion.” The wise and prudent statesman will therefore “manage” human nature, keeping it in a state of socially beneficial greed , rather than attempt to “transmute” it toward real selflessness, at least so long as we live in the current state and not the ideal state.
Keynes has a vision of where he wants to take feckless humanity. His superior wisdom and that of people like his Bloomsbury peers will lead us there. Pragmatically, it must be done with manipulation. Moreover, some will never be transmuted. Keynes had an answer for that. He was chair of the British Eugenics Society from 1937-1944. He deemed eugenics to be most important branch of sociology.
Keynesianism and Its Rivals
Claar and Forster explain Keynes was not particularly eloquent in expressing his ideas. Articulate acolytes popularized his economic constructs. Paul Samuelson, Nobel economist and author of the leading economics textbook for decades, was probably the most important figure in advancing Keynesian ideas. However, these advocates made substantial qualifications to give us what we know as Keynesianism today.
The Keynesian advocates muted Keynes’ crusading vision and reclaimed the idea of economics as value-free science. However, they continued to embrace the view that people are bundles of appetites driven by animal spirits – Keynes’ version of homo economicus. The goal should be to maximize consumption, enabling people to satisfy their appetites. Economists should guide the economy machine in these pursuits. This was the Consumption paradigm. It effectively institutionalized Keynes homo economicus while eschewing teleological judgments.
The Chicago School (and the older but smaller Austrian School) emerged as the primary competition to Keynesian economics, rejecting Keynesian interventionism in favor of free market systems. They offered resistance to “economics” as purely about large aggregate concepts and called for greater attention to microeconomic decision making. Claar and Forster write:
However, the attention-grabbing conflict between these schools conceals a deeper uniformity. Both counter-revolutions accept most of the key elements of the Consumption paradigm. Most importantly, they accept Keynes’ redefinition of the purpose of economic systems: to maximize consumption possibilities. They also accept Keynes’ redefinition of Mill’s homo economicus, which lay at the heart of the new focus on maximizing consumer satisfaction—they accept the instrumental rather than substantive understanding of rationality, and they accept the reversal of the relationship between gaining wealth and enjoying wealth.
The Keynesian constructs became so dominant that even schools that emerged to challenge aspects of Keynesian economics have internalized core Keynesian concepts.
The Consequences
The consequences extend well beyond an intra-disciplinary dispute. To a degree unparalleled by other social sciences, economics has succeeded in exerting influence over public policy and commerce, which has had ripple effects into other societal institutions. With varying degrees of resistance, homo economicus is largely how we institutionally treat our existence.
The problem, the authors would argue, is that we are not homo economicus. Human beings are meaning makers. We see ourselves inside of teleological narratives. We want not only to experience pleasure but also to participate in activities with lasting significance. We have not only have consumption preferences but also production preferences. The impact of homo economicus is a world with greater prosperity but that is largely vacant of meaning. In an existential sense, “we are all dead.” This lack of meaning has people restless and increasingly impatient with societal institutions. A consequence is the rise in populism ranging from Donald Trump to Bernie Sanders, amassing power by feeding on palpable anger and frustration.
The empty economy produces polarization, because our daily economic activities no longer convey meaning and purpose (leaving us to seek those things in extreme movements) and because our daily economic activities no longer establish shared, public moral commitments (leaving us convinced we have no common ground with our neighbors).
A Way Forward
“What would it look like to study economics on the assumption that people really do have higher purposes in life, but that we need not agree about everything concerning those purposes?”
The authors argue that the way forward is to escape the Consumption paradigm with its “animal spirits” anthropology, and revisit teleological and anthropological assumptions. We may not thoroughly agree on every value across nations and cultures, or even within them, but our values have much more in common than we may think. Some things are good whether everyone chooses to do them.
* People have production preferences as well as consumption preferences, including a desire to participate personally in the production of the intrinsically good. A sustainable economic life must account for both types of preferences (production and consumption) at the individual and cultural level.
* Production preferences can also be understood as stewardship preferences, meaning a desire to leave the world with more intrinsic good than it had when we arrived. A sustainable economic life must account in complex ways with the long-term time frames within which people make cost-benefit calculations, at the individual and cultural level.
* People are substantive reasoners who have the right and responsibility to discern the intrinsic good for themselves and participate personally in its production. A sustainable economic life must make this personal process of discernment and participation, not impersonal aggregate metrics, the goal of economic policy and discourse.
To conclude the book the authors write:
In the long run, we are all dead—but life will go on when we are gone. We all know this, and in our economic lives we do not always behave as shallow, short-term consumers who don’t care what we leave behind. If the discipline of economics wants to understand economic behavior as it really is, it must come to terms with the moral reality of human life. To ignore normative and teleological realities is to ignore the human, and to ignore the human is strange way to conduct a scientific study of how humans behave.
If we do not care what kind of world we are leaving, our economic systems will continue to be wracked by moral anxiety and the outrage it produces. Nationalists and socialists have their own reasons for wanting to block any movement toward a moral renewal that would restore confidence in our systems, but the rest of us should be seeking such a renewal with all the energy that the urgency of our situation demands. A return to economic vitality must begin with a restoration of confidence in our economic systems and practices, on the basis of a sustainable moral consensus for a pluralistic society.
We love economics. We love it because it matters—a lot. Tough new questions that overturn old certainties are already being asked in the discipline. We look forward to finding out what comes next.
Assessment
In short: teleology matters. Claar and Forster pack a lot into this book. My summary only scratches the surface. It is well worth the read for both economists and for those who think more broadly about economics and values. While I work to be conversant with economics and the history of economic thought, I am not an expert in either of these fields. People with better bona fides will have to evaluate the veracity of details presented in this book. Yet based on what I do know, the overall argument rings true to me.
The history of how the Consumption paradigm came to dominate economics - with economists simultaneously fixating on consumption and claiming to be value free - is helpful. There is no way to do social science without anthropological models and value assumptions. Economics is no exception. Homo economicus may be useful as a methodological tool for aspects of economic research but it us insufficient as a model for grasping the complexities of human decision-making. I do not think that economics has so much rejected teleology, as it has uncritically embraced a teleology that is inadequate and subhuman.
I sense a discussion has been building on this topic in recent years. As with other social sciences, there seems to be an ongoing clash between those who pursue a grand unified theory and those who prefer more modest research into micro-level behavior from which larger models of human behavior can be derived. Economics, unlike other social sciences, is unique in that “economics” and the concept of “the economy,” a machine that can be directed toward particular ends by skillful elites, has gained considerable credibility in broader society. That likely makes challenges to macroeconomic models more difficult but the importance of economics in policy making also underscores the importance of getting underlying models of humanity right.
I think the most critical point the book makes is that “we are all dead.” Human beings have desire for the transcendent, to be a part of something meaningful, to pass on a legacy. Teleology matters. To use the authors’ words, there is a production preference as well as a consumption preference. The Consumption paradigm is dehumanizing in that it robs people across economic strata of meaning-filled work. Resurrection of meaning in daily life will have to come from moral institutions outside of economics but we cannot realize that ambition of understanding human decisions without economics. If economics is a study of human behavior, can it be said to be to accomplishing its mission if it ignores the production preference aspects of human decision-making?
I appreciate the authors’ advocacy for finding common ground on teleology across human cultures. Maybe a first step is for those of us invested in moral institutions to clarify our own values. As someone who has invested decades of service to Mainline Protestantism, it strikes me that there is profound need for Christian theology to genuinely and respectfully engage economics, and to move away from what all too often is a sophomoric and adversarial posture. Repeatedly I encounter theologians and Christian thought leaders pontificating on economic issues, demonstrating they have not made the most rudimentary attempts to grasp basic economic concepts or to represent those concepts faithfully. That is a conversation for another day. For now, we have this thought provoking tome by Claar and Forster to serve as a point of engagement. It is well worth the read.
The chart below is based on maternal mortality rates, the number of women per 100,000 who die from pregnancy-related causes in a year. The first bar shows how many women die each year while the second bar shows how many would die if they had Europe’s living standards. What conclusions would you draw?
The global rate is 216, while the European rate is 8. The global rate is 27 times higher! About 290,000 women die each year because they do not have the living standards of the most affluent countries.
I would hope this would spark a sense of injustice. Something is wrong with a system that creates such a disparity in outcomes. Surely, we must upend this inequitable system and replace it with something just.
Now look at the second chart. What conclusions would you draw?
Prior to 1800, the global maternal mortality rate was 900. Today it is 216! It has dropped by 75%. By historic standards, this borders on miraculous. Something is right about a system that radically improves human well-being. How can we preserve and extend the improvement? (Note: The global rate dropped steadily from 385 in 1990, to 216 in 2015. The trajectory continues rapidly downward.)
A holistic view of human well-being will take into consideration this chart, including all three bars.
Some observations.
First, without the systems that developed over the past two centuries, we would have a more equitable maternal mortality rate. No place on earth would have a rate of 8 deaths OR of 216 deaths. We would still have a very equitable world of 900 deaths. Is that “equality” preferable to the 8 vs 216 inequality of today? I do not think many would agree. The 8 vs 216 differential is a good thing relative to the historic alternative.
Second, that some locales have a rate of 8, points to the possibility of a world where this level of well-being spans the globe. Justice requires that what we pursue this equitable outcome. We must be looking back to understand what brought us to where we are and we must be discerning about obstacles block this objective going forward.
Third, I am using maternal mortality rates as a symbol of broader improvement in human well-being in recent generations, sometimes called the Great Divergence. Appreciating this great divergence from human history neither requires us, in some consequentialist way, to a) embrace all that has developed in the past couple of centuries nor b) to refrain from asking rigorous questions about justice going forward. There have been profound injustices and inequities in the world of the past two centuries. There obviously are today. And yet, the Great Divergence happened and it continues. Lack of historical context and blindness to trajectories, can lead us to snap-shot-in-time views that inspire us to well-intentioned but destructive actions, destroying good in the process. Keep what works and adjust with discernment. Neither revolution nor complacency will do.
Population control is sometimes championed as a way to fight climate change. Bernie Sanders recently raised this idea. The world population is growing. There are 7.7 billion people today. There will be nearly 11 billion in 2100, according to United Nations estimates. Extra people mean extra CO2 emissions. While two children per woman may seem reasonable, women in the poorest countries can average five or sex. Sanders and others believe this excess fertility is why the world population is growing. Fewer children will mean less CO2. Unfortunately, this perception is decades out of date.
We are already at “peak children.” Globally, there are 680 million children under the age of five. U.N. projections show a peak of 700 million about 2060. There are projected to be 650 million children in 2100, less children than there are today. Yet the overall population will grow by nearly 50%. How can that be? It is the compounding effect of people already born that will drive population growth over the next century, not excessive birth rates.
Trends in Fertility
Assume women have two children over their lifetime. They replace themselves and one other. Population size will be stable from generation to generation. (The actual replacement fertility rate for an affluent nation is 2.1 children per woman.) Throughout history, the total fertility rate has been six or seven children. One quarter of children died before their first birthday. Another sizable percentage died before age five. Of those who made it past five, many died before marrying and having children. High fertility rates ensured a couple of children would survive to continue the family.
As affluence emerged and health practices changed (first in Europe and then spreading elsewhere) more children survived into adulthood. We needed fewer births to perpetuate a family but it took a while for customs related to fertility to adjust downward. That lag between declining death rates and declining fertility rates is what led to the population explosion that began two centuries ago. That growth accelerated into the twentieth century and continues into its final stages today. As recently as the 1960s, the global total fertility rate was as high as five children per woman.
Today, the global total fertility rate is about 2.4 and dropping, but the rate is not evenly spread throughout the world. Europe, the Americas, China, Japan, and other regions have fertility rates below the replacement rate, well below it in many nations. A handful of smaller poor countries have fertility rates of five or six, but they also have some of the highest child death rates. The world average is fast approaching the 2.1 replacement rate. However, because the global fertility rate has usually been higher than the replacement rate for most of us now living, it means the cohort of people born one year is usually larger than the cohort of people born the previous year. So let us think about what that means for the future.
The Compounding Effect in Future Fertility
To keep things simple, assume going forward that we birth the same number of children each year, the death rate stays the same, and no one lives past one hundred years. Now say there are 100,000 people age 100. By next year, all will have died. The group that was 99 will now be 100. Because more of them were born, there will now be, say, 105,000 people 100 years old. After two years have passed, the new group of 100 hundred year old people will be the people who are 98 years old today. They will be a still larger group. That will continue for one hundred years.
At the other end of the age continuum, we have the largest number of children ever born in a year and the largest age cohort alive. A year later, this youngest age cohort will replace a smaller cohort a year older than them. But keep in mind that for the next forty-five years the number of women of childbearing age will be increasing each year. Therefore, each year the total fertility rate will need to fall slightly more below the replacement rate if the population is to stabilize. It can then rise to the replacement rate after forty-five years. This will continue until 2120 when each age cohort is the largest age cohort that has ever existed for that age. This is the primary driver of population growth going forward but there is at least one other key factor. (Clearly, I am oversimplifying to illustrate my point. We are not down to replacement rate fertility, so there is still some marginal population growth due to “excess” fertility.)
Furthermore, actual global death rates are not constant. They are dropping. People are living longer. So not only is each age cohort larger than the one before, it is living slightly longer than the one before. This too contributes to population growth over coming decades.
Therefore, we would need considerably less than replacement-rate fertility to limit global population growth substantially. In fact, there are credible projections of a population peak at fewer than nine billion. Demographers once assumed transition to low fertility and death rates would stabilize at about the replacement rate. Instead, the fertility rate has dropped well below replacement rate in nearly every affluent nation, in some cases nearly one child per woman. From the narrow view of CO2 emissions, this may look like a good thing. From a holistic standpoint, many social scientists are troubled. Depopulation can be as destructive to human well-being as overpopulation.
The Depopulation Problem
A vibrant society needs a critical mass of productive workers relative to its dependents (primarily children and the elderly.) This is the dependency ratio (dependents divided by workers multiplied by 100). With excessively low fertility rates, it is possible to have a great imbalance with a large number of seniors and too few workers to provide for society. We have already seen that current UN projections say we will have nearly the same number of children now as in 2100 but the overall population will be nearly 50% larger at eleven billion. That growth is a consequence of a burgeoning number of elders. A smaller population of nine billion may mean fewer total people but an even worse dependency ratio.
Modest help may come from lengthening the number of years people work or a higher participation rate in the work force for working age people but at some point that will be insufficient. Then consider the possibility of medical breakthroughs that cure cancer or dramatically reduce heart disease. That means more people living longer, intensifying the dependency ratio imbalance.
As an ever shrinking number of people (potentially a minority of the population) is expected to support everyone else, improvement in living standards will begin to stall and possibly reverse, making the world ripe for any number of societal dysfunctions. It will not take eighty years for this challenge to become real. Japan is already struggling with these issues. China is already headed down this road. One can envision China opening up to immigration from the remaining regions with the highest fertility rate and investing there resources in growth economies, but if every nation is headed to fertility rates well below the replacement rates, that is only a temporary fix. The dependency ratio for a world with eleven billion people is already seen as a challenge. The only way to get a peak population under nine billion people is to achieve fertility rates well below replacement rates substantially intensifying the dependency ratio imbalance just a generation or two down the road. (For more detail see the Brookings' piece, How will we cope when there are too few young people in the world?)
Decoupled Economic Growth
At the most basic level, climate policy needs to be about economic growth decoupled from CO2 emissions. Population growth is one issue driving this need for economic growth. But also consider people are advocating for a $15 living wage for every worker in the United States. That would put nearly every US worker in the top 10% of wage earners in the world. Meanwhile, despite astonishing improvements in human well-being around the world and the dramatic reduction in extreme poverty, there are still hundreds of millions of people in extreme poverty. A couple billion more have more stable lives but still live well below standards we would consider tolerable. If it is a matter of justice that everyone in the US has a $15 an hour living standard, then it is only just that all citizens of the world have something approximating that standard. The only way that happens is through economic growth. Measures like population control are shortsighted and potentially calamitous. The principle mission is decoupling economic growth from fossil fuel consumption, along with other disruptive measures like decoupling land use from agricultural production.
Worldwide, there were 12.6 million deaths for children under five years old in 1990. As of 2017, there were 5.4 million. Keep in mind that the world population grew by 50% during this time. Had death rates continued at the 1990 rate, there would have been about 19 million childhood deaths.
(Where in the world are children dying.)
One of most important observations (among many) from the late Hans Roslings’ Factfulness:
When a population is not growing over a long period of time, and the population curve is flat, this must mean that each generation of new parents is the same size as the previous one. For thousands of years up to 1800 the population curve was almost flat. Have you heard people say that humans used to live in balance with nature?
Well, yes, there was a balance. But let’s avoid the rose-tinted glasses. Until 1800, women gave birth to six children on average. So the population should have increased with each generation. Instead, it stayed more or less stable. Remember the child skeletons in the graveyards of the past? On average four of six children died before becoming parents themselves, leaving just two surviving children to parent the next generation. There was a balance. It wasn’t because humans lived in balance with nature. Humans died in balance with nature. It was utterly brutal and tragic.
Today, humanity is once again reaching a balance. The number of parents is no longer increasing. But this balance is dramatically different from the old balance. The new balance is nice: the typical parents have two children, and neither of them dies. For the first time in history, we live in balance. (pp. 87-88)
Demographers refer to this as the Demographic Transition – the move from high fertility and mortality rates to low fertility and mortality rates. A few centuries ago, living standards in some regions began to rise via technology, specialization of labor, and extensive trade. That trend dramatically accelerated about 250 years ago with the Industrial Revolution. Fewer people died young and more people lived to old age, but the fertility rate lagged in its decline. The population explosion of recent generations was due to this lagging decrease in the fertility rate relative to the falling mortality rate.
The Demographic Transition began in Europe but we have seen it repeated in every part of the world in recent generations. The global fertility rate is now below 2.5 children per woman, down from 5.0 fifty years ago, and heading toward “balance” at 2.1 children within about twenty years.* Furthermore, life expectancy at birth in recent generations has risen from about 30 years throughout human history to 72 today – in excess of 80 in some affluent countries.
Every time I reflect on these numbers, I think of Isaiah 66:20, where Isaiah describes the new creation:
Babies in Jerusalem will no longer live only a few days. Old people will not fail to live for a very long time. Those who live to the age of 100 will be thought of as still being young when they die. Those who die before they are 100 will be considered as having been cursed by God.
We are approaching that reality. The world we live in today was positively Utopian until the past generation or two.
We did not get here by being content to die in harmony with nature. We decoupled from nature. We become radically more innovative and productive. The key to future well-being and the welfare of the planet lies in greater decoupling – climate friendly fuels, environment friendly production, more productive agriculture, and the eventual transition to endlessly recycled materials. It must be a world where everyone experiences abundance through their participation in networks of productivity and exchange. That is what "living in balance with nature" truly is.
(Note: At replacement rate fertility, the global population will grow from about 7.7 billion to between nine and eleven billion by century’s end. The children born in 2020 will likely have children at about the replacement rate. However, the population born in 2010 is larger than the coming 2020 population, and the population born in 2000 is larger than 2010’s. If all these age cohorts simply replace themselves in the next few decades, the population will continue grow but at a decelerating rate.)
I recently rediscovered this excellent blog post I read last year, The problem with “critical” studies. Joseph Heath's observations about the term neoliberal are spot on. This explains why I have ever met one, and likely neither have you.
"For instance, I had noticed a long time ago that the term “neoliberal” functions as the most important piece of cryptonormative vocabulary in critical studies. For those who don’t know, here’s the basic problem with “neoliberalism.” It’s a made-up thing. It’s just a word that Foucault popularized, to talk about economic ideas that he didn’t really understand. There is no group of people out there who actually describe themselves as a neoliberals. Because of this, there are no constraints on what it can refer to, and there is no one to answer any of the criticisms that are made of it. Compare that to terms like “conservative” or “libertarian.” Because there are real people who call themselves “libertarian,” if you write something that criticizes libertarianism, an actual libertarian might write back and contest what you say. With “neoliberalism,” on the other hand, you can say whatever you want, without any fear that a real-life neoliberal will write back and contest your claims – because there are none. As a result, people who use this term in their writing are basically announcing, up front, that their intended audience is the left-wing academic echo chamber. After all, if they wanted to engage with people outside that chamber, they would have to address one or more of the ideologies that are actually, and self-consciously, held by people outside that chamber. (In this respect, people who criticize neoliberalism are the cowardly lions of academia. If you think you’ve got what it takes, why not go out and find an actual right-winger to argue with?)
The fact that there are no self-identified neoliberals in the world does, however, have one desired consequence. Use of the term limits one’s audience to those who share the underlying normative judgment, allowing academics to feel completely unanimous in their belief that neoliberalism is a bad thing. As a result, no one ever feels obliged to say what is so bad about it."
(Photo: Wikimedia Commons)
Theologian David Bentley Hart just wrote an op ed Can We Please Relax About ‘Socialism’. The byline says “Only in America is the word freighted with so much perceived menace.” As he frames it, socialism is simply about creating a more equitable economy, not about recreating the Soviet Union or Venezuela. This is what people like Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez are promoting.
What Hart is describing is social democracy, not socialism. Democratic socialism is the systematic transformation of capitalism (private ownership and market exchange) into socialism (state ownership and control of the economy), while social democrats embrace capitalism, looking for ways to make it more equitable. Social democrats and democratic socialists may dovetail on some incremental policies but they have divergent missions.
Let’s assume Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, and others want a more equitable market system of government. Let’s go further and agree to Hart’s questionable protest that this is all socialism means. Hart acknowledges that “socialism” is a freighted word. Why are they using a freighted word to describe their position? People promote similar policies all over the world without using this language and have done it for generations in the United States. They choose the word precisely because it is inflammatory. They are populist demagogues.
Trump and the Freedom Caucus go out of their way to frame things in a way that maximizes enemy outrage while communicating to the base that they are the reasonable ones at war with the crazies. That is why Sanders, AOC, and Hart say “socialism.” In their communication strategy, the hyperbolic Fox News response to “socialism” is not a bug. It is the objective. It maximizes the ire of their enemies and stokes the commitment of their base. As with Trump, the specific policy prescriptions are not serious, but serve to antagonize enemies and keep a base, giving them power from which to accomplish other agendas.
Hart is wrong about Europe. While there are cadres of democratic socialists throughout Europe, there are no democratic socialist governments. There are a great many social democracies. “Socialism” is not a widely embraced term. Sweden experimented with democratic socialism from the 1970s to the 1990s before returning to their present social democratic capitalism. Furthermore, Scandinavian countries are among the most free-market countries in the world. Their generous social safety net is oriented around capitalist self-interest, not a sense of altruism. They designed their nets to maximize the productivity of people in their capitalist economy. This is not Democratic Socialism.
The Democratic Socialists of America, to which Sanders and OAC give allegiance, has as their stated aim, not the creation of a more equitable capitalism, but the incremental and systematic replacement of capitalism with socialism. So, while I have no doubt the Fox family goes to hyperbolic lengths to stoke fears, their base criticism is legitimate. This is the left’s Tea Party/Freedom Caucus moment. The answer to our problems is a winsome person who can mobilize a sizeable majority to embrace prudent solutions, not another populist fringe to counter the right’s populist fringe. Unfortunately, all I read of Hart is an audition to be a Franklin Graham or Jerry Falwell, Jr., in the Left’s version of the Freedom Caucus.
(If you want to be more informed about comparative economic systems I would recommend this excellent piece by economist Timothy Taylor, Capitalism with Scandinavian characteristics. This Finnish-American offers insights on the role of the welfare system in Nordic countries, What Americans Don’t Get About Nordic Countries. And from Denmark's prime minister, Denmark's prime minister says Bernie Sanders is wrong to call his country socialist.)
Throughout human history, 90% of people have lived at a subsistence level - at or under what economists today call the extreme poverty line. Between 1820 and 1980, that percentage shrank by half to 44%. Between 1980 and 2005, it halved again to about 22%. During the next ten years it has more than halved to less than 10%. Keep in mind that while these percentages were shrinking, the global population grew from 1 billion to 7+ billion.
That is all well and good but I find most people don't relate well to statistics. Is there some way to visually capture what this means in concrete terms?
Gapminder has an excellent graph that gives a sense of what it means to move from extreme poverty. The left column is indicative of how the extreme poor live relative to the features listed on the left. The second column is indicative of the life to which emerged.
The graph is also instructive in that it divides living standards into four levels. For many of us who went to school in the 1960s to 1990s, our tendency has been to see a binary world - developed and undeveloped, first world and third world, rich and poor, the West and the rest. That has ceased to be the case. It has been on a trajectory away from a binary world all during our lifetimes. At the bottom of the graph you will see seven yellow human figures. Each stands for one billion people. Most of the world is now concentrated in the middle and moving upward, or to the right in this chart. The percentage of people in level one is now well below one billion and shrinking rapidly.
Gapminder Dollar Street has some visited 264 families from across the world and taken photos of their homes and belongings. The links to photos of the households are arranged in columns like the chart, allowing you to walk through the homes and get a sense of what it means to live at various living standards. It is an excellent resource.
I continue to reflect on the hype in the U.S. about "democratic socialism." I think most people who use the term are saying they want a market economy with a greater emphasis on social justice (open to varying definitions) and the promotion of basic human well-being. When pressed to give an example, they typically point to Scandinavian economies. Yet these countries do not consider themselves socialist in the least. In fact, Sweden embraced a move toward true democratic socialism from the 1970s until the mid 1990s. Standards of living dropped, debt went up, and the overall economy fared poorly. They have now embraced market economics while providing a carefully crafted welfare system. People truly committed to democratic socialism, while appreciating some features of Scandinavian economies, find them an unsuitable compromise. These countries might be characterized as social democracies but they are not democratic socialist. As the Democratic Socialists of America party makes clear, they seek the eventual elimination of capitalism (market exchange and private ownership) through democratic means over time. These Scandinavian economies are at best a step along a progression to an ultimate socialist end. I think it is important to be clear about our terms but I my concern runs deeper.
I just came across an excellent piece about comparative economic systems, Capitalism with Scandinavian characteristics. It is written by economist Timothy Taylor. You may know him from the Great Courses class on economics. Taylor tackles some of the issues I just raised and more. But I particularly resonate with the closing paragraph of his piece.
"It seems inaccurate to me to label the Scandinavian model of capitalism as “socialism,” but arguing over definitions of imprecise and emotionally charged terms is a waste of breath. What does bother me is when the “socialist” label becomes a substitute for actually studying the details of how different varieties of capitalism have functioned and malfunctioned, with an eye to what concrete lessons can be learned."
Bingo! My concern with the "democratic socialist" label is not a predilection toward etymology. We need to be clear about what we mean. If your vision is something akin to Nordic capitalism (aspects of which I find very positive), using terms like "socialism" and "democratic socialism" does not advance productive discussion.
Please read Taylor's piece. Good stuff!
Interesting infographic from McKinsey Global Institute. For details read Globalization in transition: The future of trade and value chains.
This article, Here's the difference between a 'socialist' and a 'Democratic socialist' has been circulating as an explainer as to why “democratic socialism” is different from socialism. Democratic socialists merely believe a range of services – like health care and education – should be provided by the government. People circulate this article as evidence that people who suggest that democratic socialists want to end private property and usher in a state-run economy, are either fear-mongers or ill-informed. Did they read the article?
As the economist author notes (and as any standard dictionary will tell you) socialism at its core is state control of the economy and the virtual elimination of private property. Democratic socialism is committed to the ultimate socialist ideal but works to achieve it incrementally through democratic processes. I want to point out two quotes from the article, highlighting a key word in caps:
“In the present day, "Democratic socialist" and "socialist" are often treated as interchangeable terms, which can be confusing given Democratic socialists don't necessarily think the government should IMMEDIATELY take control of all aspects of the economy.”
“As the DSA's website states: "At the root of our socialism is a profound commitment to democracy, as means and end. As we are unlikely to see an IMMEDIATE end to capitalism [i.e., market exchange and private ownership] tomorrow, DSA fights for reforms today that will weaken the power of corporations and increase the power of working people."”
Immediate means not now but eventually. Democratic socialism has state control of the economy and abolition of private property as its end game. Democratic Socialists of America say so in their own words! And fully-realized socialism inescapably leads to totalitarianism, not democratic.
Despite having sympathy with the notion of a greater state role in some aspects of meeting basic needs, I will adamantly contest socialism. Market exchange is paramount to generating and sustaining human well-being. It is what has led to the “great divergence” from a world where the overwhelming majority had a subsistence existence during short difficult lives, into a world where extreme poverty is on the verge of elimination. Life expectancy has more than doubled in recent generations and indicators of well-being are improving on nearly every front. Furthermore, I’ll say that the freedom to own property, to truck and trade, to partner with others in productive enterprises, and to reap the rewards is a basic human right. Not absolute but a right nonetheless.
Advocating for a social safety net that cares for the most vulnerable is a matter of social justice. Advocating for private stewardship of property and market exchange is as well.
We have seen that life expectancy has been improving all across the planet. It is one of the most important measures of well-being. Yet most people think of income when they think of prosperity. Rightly so. Income is correlated with other factors that allow us to move beyond surviving to thriving.
The common refrain we hear today is “The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer." It is widely repeated. It is a sentiment that often finds its way into the unison prayers of confession in congregations of my tradition. N. T. Wright, a theologian whose work I’ve found very helpful, writes:
And now we have the new global evils: rampant, uncaring, and irresponsible materialism and capitalism on the one hand; raging unthinking religious fundamentalism on the other. As one famous book puts it, we have ‘Jihad versus McWorld.” (Whether there is such a thing as caring capitalism, or for that matter thoughtful fundamentalism, isn’t the point at the moment.) …. It doesn’t take a Ph.D in macroeconomics to know that if the rich are getting richer by the minute, and the poor poorer, there is something badly wrong. (Simply Christian, 8)
It also doesn’t take a Ph.D. in macroeconomics to verify such claims either. ;-) The truth is much more complicated than this declaration and certainly is not true if we take the long view of multiple generations. What can we say about per capita income on an historic basis?
Comparing income across eras is difficult. Inflation and other variables make direct comparison impossible. Furthermore, comparing contemporary currency-based economies to barter economies will not do. Economic historians have developed a concept called “purchasing power parity” (PPP) to aid in this process. The value of a dollar at a fixed point in time is chosen and the value of income at all other points in time is pegged to the purchasing power of the fixed dollar. For our purposes, we will be using a PPP measure of “2011 International Dollars” (I$). Annual per capita Gross Domestic Product (the total market value of all final goods and services produced within a given country in a given period of time, usually a year) will be used as a proxy for income.
Not all economists agree on how to achieve parity between the present and more distant eras. Angus Maddison, one of the foremost authorities on this topic, suggested that about I$1,000 per capita (using 2011 dollars) is a subsistence level of income and was typical of subsistence living prior to the industrial revolution. However, economist Brad Delong, who has done his own analysis, claims:
“A large proportion of our high standard of living today derives not just from our ability to more cheaply and productively manufacture the commodities of 1800, but from our ability to manufacture whole new types of commodities, some of which do a better job of meeting needs that we knew we had back in 1800, and some of which meet needs that were unimagined back in 1800.” (Brad DeLong)
Therefore, DeLong puts historic subsistence living at a lower level, but both scholars end up with similar income estimates in recent eras. Here is the change over the last 2,000 years using Maddison's estimates.
The following chart shows their estimates between 1700 and 2015:
You can see that the growth accelerates beginning in the early nineteenth century. Many have suggested that the industrial revolution began not long after 1750 and it is true that many inventions came into being not long after that time. However, there was a lag time of a few decades between the advent of various technologies and the placement of them into productive use. Maddison argues for a beginning point of 1820 (as do other economic historians.) Whichever the case, keep in mind that the world population grew more than sixfold from less than 1 billion to more than 6.6 billion from 1750 to 2000 during this explosion in per capita income.
So in the aggregate, we can see that growth in worldwide per capita income is astounding. But how broadly spread is the economic expansion?
Alongside life expectancy, a second measure of prosperity demographers frequently use is the child mortality rate. The child mortality rate is the number of children that die between birth and their fifth birthday, per 1,000 live births. Because the first years of life are when human beings are most vulnerable, their ability to survive the first years of life says a lot about the state of their society; thus the significance of the child mortality rate.
So what can we say about this measure of prosperity throughout human history? Here are estimates of the infant mortality rate (deaths by age one) typical of social scientists and economists who study these issues:
In the year 1000, the average infant could expect to live about 24 years. A third died in the first year of life. Hunger and epidemic disease ravaged the survivors. By 1820, life expectation had risen to 36 years in the west, with only marginal improvement elsewhere. (Angus Maddison, Contours of the World Economy, 1-2030 AD, 69)
Before industrialization, at least one out of every five children died before reaching his or her first birth day; that is infant mortality measured as the number of children dying before the age of one, typically exceeded 200 per 1,000 live births. … In the United States, as late as 1900, infant mortality was 160; …” (Indur Goklany, The Improving State of the World, 27)
Estimates are that child mortality were over 40% prior to 1800.
Let's look at the change in the child morality rate for the last 200 years:
Globally, that is drop from 40 children per 1,000 to 4 children per 1,000. This graphic compares various nations at 1800, 1950, 1990, and 2013.
Note that the 2013 child mortality rate for all but a few small lagging countries is lower than the rate for all but a few of the wealthiest countries in 1950. The worst country in 2013 has a rate half that of the best country in 1800.
This is not to say that every nation, or every region within a nation, or every subgroup within in a nation, have prospered equally well. Still, there is dramatic improvement in all regions of the world.
During the 1990s, there was a small increase in the rate for the former Soviet nations but that trend has turned positive again. There are disparities between Anglos and non-Anglos in the United States. The African AIDS epidemic has been harmful. Other regions face other challenges. Yet the overall trend is dramatically downward.
Using child mortality as measures of prosperity, the world is far more prosperous than it has ever been and the gap is narrowing between the top and bottom rungs of the global social ladder. Again, most of this change has occurred over a time when the total world population grew sixfold, from less than 1 billion in 1800 to about 6.6 billion today!
So as we look at the trajectory of change in the world, we find an unprecedented rise in prosperity. It is uneven improvement but every corner of the planet has improved and the gap between top and bottom nations is closing.
Next we we will look at economic issues.
Demographers commonly use life expectancy rates as a measure of societal well-being. Life expectancy is the number of years someone is expected to live at the time they are born based on actuarial science. Long life is a universal indicator of prosperity across cultures and time. It is an important measure to demographers because achieving it requires a complex mix of variables, like a sustained nutritious food supply, a sanitary and safe environment, relatively little disease, absence of war, and a stable society.
So what can we say about this measure of prosperity throughout human history? Here are estimates of two social scientists and economists typical of those who study these issues:
For most of its existence, homo sapiens lived in far-flung hunter-and-gathering communities, each of which was quite small and barely able to reproduce itself. Life expectancy at birth was hardly twenty-five years on average, and those persons who survived childhood often died violently, in combat with other hunters, at relatively young ages. (Robert William Fogel, The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism, 48)
For much of human history, average life expectancy used to be 20-30 years. By 1900, it had climbed to about 31 years … By 2003 it was 66.8 years. (Indur Goklany, The Improving State of the World, 31)
To put the last statement by Goklany in perspective lets graph the estimated life expectancy on a chart:
If we show only the last 250 years we get a clearer picture of what has happened:
Using life expectancy as a measure of prosperity, the world is far more prosperous than it has ever been. The gap is narrowing between the top and bottomof the global community. More amazing, most of this change occurred over a time when the total world population grew sixfold, from less than 1 billion in 1800 to about 6.6 billion today!
This is not to say that every nation, or every region within a nation, or every subgroup within in a nation, has prospered equally well. AIDS has been devastating in regions of Africa. War and discord has harmed some nations. Yet over the past forty years, we see broad improvement in the world. Keep in mind that the global population nearly doubled during this time:
The trajectory of change is an unprecedented rise in prosperity. It is uneven growth but every corner of the planet has improved and the gap between top and bottom nations is closing.
Next we look at infant mortality rates.
Is the state of world getting better or getting worse? How would you answer that question? What indicators would you use?
For Christians, our mission is to seek the greatest shalom possible in the world, always cognizant that shalom in its fullness will only be recognized at the consummation of the new creation. But how would we measure shalom?
Isaiah 65:17-25 is a statement of what the ancient Hebrews understood to be the fullness of shalom.
17 For I am about to create new heavens
and a new earth;
the former things shall not be remembered
or come to mind.
18 But be glad and rejoice forever
in what I am creating;
for I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy,
and its people as a delight.
19 I will rejoice in Jerusalem,
and delight in my people;
no more shall the sound of weeping be heard in it,
or the cry of distress.
20 No more shall there be in it
an infant that lives but a few days,
or an old person who does not live out a lifetime;
for one who dies at a hundred years will be considered a youth,
and one who falls short of a hundred will be considered accursed.
21 They shall build houses and inhabit them;
they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit.
22 They shall not build and another inhabit;
they shall not plant and another eat;
for like the days of a tree shall the days of my people be,
and my chosen shall long enjoy the work of their hands.
23 They shall not labor in vain,
or bear children for calamity;
for they shall be offspring blessed by the LORD --
and their descendants as well.
24 Before they call I will answer,
while they are yet speaking I will hear.
25 The wolf and the lamb shall feed together,
the lion shall eat straw like the ox;
but the serpent -- its food shall be dust!
They shall not hurt or destroy
on all my holy mountain, (NRSV)
Several themes jump out from this characterization of a world restored to shalom. There are some very practical and specific features:
The New Testament version of the new creation expands this vision even further. In the New Testament, God makes his dwelling with humankind and there is eternal life. But it seems to me that if we look at the features of shalom in this Isaiah, we can get a good sense of whether or not the world is moving in the right direction.
Especially interesting about this Isaiah passage is the direct reference to infant mortality rates and life expectancy. Social scientists frequently turn to these measures for an overall sense of societal welfare. Why? These two indicators serve as indirect indicators of other societal realities. Many other social variables (i.e., adequate food, health care, environment, social stability, healthy social institutions, low crime) must be positive in order for these two variables to be positive as well.
What is particularly interesting is that every time I hear sermons on this passage, the emphasis is on the declining state of shalom in our world. One sermon I heard a few years back lamented rising inequality, AIDS, poverty in Africa, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and polar bears drowning due to melting ice (the last one was in the prayer of confession.) In my Presbyterian tradition, the prayers of confession frequently include lament of our greed and threatened destruction of the plant. I routinely read theologians on social media who decry "neoliberalism" and the deepening dystopia into which it is leading our planet. Public theologian Brian McLaren characterizes the present world order as a “suicide machine.” Is this an accurate assessment?
The most common trait I find in these assessments is that they are usually thoroughly subjective. They are without context and without awareness of empirical realities. Do not misread me here. I am not saying we are without need of confession. Evil is at work in the world and within us. But what if we collectively found a way to double life expectancy, make infant mortality rare, virtually eliminate extreme poverty, reduce global income inequality, and radically reduce the number of deaths due to war. Would we not celebrate? Yes. The historically reality is that all things have happened or are on the way to happening! Yet I do not believe I have ever heard a sermon extolling and celebrating the profound and unprecedented improvements we have seen in global well-being.
I want to offer some thoughts on how we might measure shalom, at least from the perspective of physical and material well-being. I'll write several posts in the coming days that look at key indicators. As you will see, my conclusion is that are we are living in an era of unprecedented expansion of global shalom.
That is in not say we are at some Francis Fukuyama-like “End of History” moment, but the idea that global well-being is in decline is indefensible. Unprecedented positive change is underway and has been for some time. Yet there are still more than billion barely touched by these world events. There is so much more that needs to happen. We have learned a great deal and need to learn a great deal more. In my estimation, the biggest threats to continuation of these advances are radical populist movements from the right and left, disconnected from facts and history. We need to be informed about the true state of the world before we go about joining movements to "fix" it. We need to lift up achievements as morale builders and learn lessons from successes as we press ahead on the journey.
I hope you will join me for some conversation.
Alice Dreger's "Galileo's Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Science," is one of the most refreshing books I have read recently. Dreger is a professor of clinical medical humanities and bioethics at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine. Nearly twenty years ago, Dreger became an activist for the rights of intersex persons. She fought to change the prevailing practice of surgically altering babies to "rectify" ambiguous genitalia, a practice that science suggested was too risky relative to the outcomes and raised a great many ethical questions. Motivated by varying convictions, surgeons were ignoring science. But before long, Dreger found herself advocating for scientists against activists on another intersex issue. The activists ignored science and attacked scientists when research potentially contradicted activists' strongly held convictions. This book is Dreger's reflections on what she learned from these experiences. I expect to publish a review of the book shortly. For now, I want to post three power sections from the book. (All emphases in the original.)
This quote comes as she is reflecting on her experience talking with researchers at the University of Missouri who had been targeted because of controversial research findings
The story I had been told about Mike Bailey and Craig Palmer and so many other white straight male scientists accused of producing bad and dangerous findings, the story I had willingly heard as an academic feminist in the humanities, was that these guys were just soldiers of the oppressive establishment against which we good guys had come to fight. They came from old dogma about human nature; we came from progress and social justice, and we had to win. But here I was faced with the fact that not only were these scientists politically progressive when it came to things like the rights of transgender people and rape victims, they were also willing to look for facts that might get them in hot water. They very much cared about progress in social justice, but they cared first about know what was true.
That didn’t mean that these scientists (or I, or anyone else) existed without bias. It didn’t mean their work wasn’t shaped and sometimes tainted by politics, ideologies, and loyalties. But it did mean they tried to adhere to an intellectual agenda that wasn’t first and only political. They believed that good science couldn’t be done by just Ouija-boarding your answers. Good scholarship had to put the search for truth first and the quest for social justice second.
In Missouri [University of Missouri, Columbia], I realized that there’s a practical reason for this order: Sustainable justice couldn’t be achieved if we didn’t know what’s true about the world. (You can’t effectively prosecute and prevent rape if you don’t understand why, where, and how rape happens.) But there was also a more essential reason for putting the quest for truth first: it was who we scholars were supposed to be. As the little prop plane flew from Columbia, Missouri, toward the sunrise, of this I was sure: We scholars had to put the search for evidence before everything else, even when the evidence pointed to facts we did not want to see. The world needed that from us, to maintain – by our example, by our very existence – a world that would keep learning and questioning, that would remain free in thought, inquiry, and word.
Nevertheless I knew many of my colleagues in the humanities would disagree. I could practically hear them arguing against me, as if they were seated all around me in those cramped fake-leather seats, yelling to be heard above the churning propellers. We have to use our privilege to advance the rights of the marginalized. We can’t let people like Bailey and Palmer say what is true about the world. We have to give voice and power to the oppressed and let them say what is true. Science is as biased as all human endeavors, and so we have to empower the disempowered, and speak always with them.
Involuntarily shaking my head, I argued back: “Justice cannot be determined merely by social position. Justice cannot be advanced by letting ‘truth’ be determined by political goals. Only people like us, with insane amounts of privilege, could ever think it was a good idea to decide what is right before we even know what it true. Only insanely privileged people like us, who never fear the knock of a corrupt police, could think guilt or innocence should be determined by identity rather than facts. It isn’t perfect, but look what it has gotten us: antibiotics, an explanation and a treatment for AIDS, reliable histories of the Holocaust, DNA-based exonerations of those falsely accused of crimes, spaceships on the surface of Mars – hell, the plane we’re flying in now.
Where would we be, I wondered, if the pope had ultimately won out over Galileo, if he succeeded in using his self-serving Catholic identity politics to forever quash Galileo’s evidence that the ancients and the Bible were wrong about the Earth? Power plays as morality plays, whether by popes or feminists, are just that – plays. I longed for the real world, longed to pick apart each history to know what’s true, to have my work judged by others, to find evidence that an idea is right or wrong. (136-138)
This passage comes from the end of the last chapter.
I want to say to activists: If you want justice, support the search for truth. Engage in searches for the truth. If you really want meaningful progress and not just temporary self-righteousness, carpe datum. You can begin with principles, yes, but to pursue a principle effectively, you have to know if your route will lead to your destination. If you must criticize scholars whose work challenges yours, do so on the evidence, not by poisoning the land on which we all live.
To scholars I want to say more: Our fellow human beings can’t afford to have us act like cattle in an industrial farming system. If we take seriously the importance of truth to justice and recognize the many forces now acting against the pursuit of knowledge – if we really get why our role in democracy is like no other – then we really ought to feel that we must do more to protect each other and the public from misinformation and disinformation. Doing so means taking on more responsibility to police ourselves and everybody else for accuracy and great objectivity – taking on with renewed vigor the pursuit of accurate knowledge and putting ourselves second to that pursuit.
I know that a lot of people who met me along the way in this work thought I’d end up on one side of the war between activists and scholars. The deeper I went, however, the more obvious it became that the best activists and the best scholars actually long for the same kind of world – a free one.
Here’s the one thing I now know for sure after this every long trip: Evidence really is an ethical issue, the most important ethical issue in a modern democracy. If you want justice, you must work for truth. And if you want to work for truth, you must do a little more than wish for justice. (261-262)
These two paragraphs are near the end of the epilogue.
The problem is an old one: People don’t really get that good intentions can’t save you from hell. So long as we believe that bad acts are committed only by evil people and that good people do only good, we will fail to see, believe, or prevent these kinds of travesties. Nowadays I feel as though 90 percent of my time talking to academics and activists is spent trying to convince them of this: The people who are against you are not necessarily evil, and your own acts are not necessarily good. That’s why we still need scholars and activists. It’s not easy to see what’s what in the heat of the moment, and we need people pushing for the truth and justice if we’re going to get both right.
But most people I run into aren’t like us humans. Most people I meet seem convinced that the goodness of their souls will keep them from committing bad acts. When they look back at history, they don’t see what we historians see – dumb tragedies. They see simple moral dramas, with predictable characters enacting easy stories of good and evil. They don’t understand that the Nazis probably didn’t think they were “Nazis.” (275-276)
Powerful food for thought.
Were Slaves Immigrants? Yes. If that answer troubles you, please hear me out.
Ben Carson touched off a firestorm this week when he referred to slaves as immigrants. (Barak Obama has done the same several times.) The uproar has been that equating slavery and immigration minimizes the horrors of slavery. I have engaged in a number of social media discussions on this topic. At the crux of the matter is volition. Are people brought to a place against their will immigrants? Merriam Webster Dictionary:
Immigrant - “a person who comes to a country to take up permanent residence.”
Volition is not part of the definition. As any demographer will tell you, populations grow (or decline) via three factors: births, deaths, and migration. When looking at a particular locale, people who come to that locale are immigrants. People who go from that locale to another are emigrants. Births and immigration grow the population. Deaths and emigration shrink it. It is a closed system. Volition is not part of the equation.
I am in agreement with concerns about minimizing slavery and I worry that statements by Carson and Obama risk doing that. As Jemar Tisby writes, a generous reading of Carson’s characterization is that “African slaves endured unimaginable hardship to carve out a life for themselves and their descendants.” I think that was indeed the intent but it is challenging. Framing slaves as rough equivalents of people who bought a ticket on a boat to come to America in search of a better life minimizes slavery. Both were immigrants but with very very different stories. The desire to present African-Americans as other than simply victims while embracing the horrors of slavery is a tough needle to thread in the space of a few words as both these men were trying to do.
This article from October 2015, asks, Are We Recycling Too Much?
Our study made the first known attempt to combine these various costs and benefits into one analysis to estimate what recycling rate is best. Our conclusion was that recycling up to 10% appears to reduce social costs, but any recycling over 10% costs the environment and the economy more than it helps. The environment and economy suffer as we transport some recycled materials to destinations as far afield as China.
These provocative results certainly require confirmation from future independent and objective research before broad policy goals can be adjusted. Also, many of the benefit and costs associated with waste disposal and recycling vary across regions of the country and world, and thus optimal recycling rates may also vary. For example, we used municipal cost data from Japan for this study because the United States and most European countries do not keep such data.
But if these results hold for other developed countries, then society should collectively rethink how to approach recycling.
And
But the substantial environmental benefits outlined above of using recycled materials in production vary substantially across materials. Aluminum and other metals are environmentally costly to mine and prepare for production. Paper, too, is costly to manufacture from raw sources. But glass and plastic appear relatively easy on the environment when manufactured from raw materials.
These differences are vital. Although the optimal overall recycling rate may be only 10%, the composition of that 10% should contain primarily aluminum, other metals and some forms of paper, notably cardboard and other source of fiber. Optimal recycling rates for these materials may be near 100% while optimal rates of recycling plastic and glass might be zero. To encourage this outcome, a substantial subsidy offered only on those materials whose life cycles generate positive environmental benefits should be applied.
The article illustrates once again that whether we are talking tax cuts, living wages, rent control, tariffs, or recycling, good intentions unsupported by empirical evidence can be counterproductive.
Last night, the president said there are 94 million people "out of the labor force" needing a job. No.
The number of people wanting a job is about 14 million people.
Let us do the math:
Who are the 88 million adults not wanting and not looking for a job? Some examples:
The president said 1 in 5 working prime working age adults (25-54) are not working. Well, yes. This includes:
The unemployment rate for this age segment is 4.1%, which means 1 in 25 people who want a job and are actively looking for a one are “not working.”
The number of people without a job and wanting one, whether they are looking or not, is about 14 million people. Trump overstates the problem by nearly seven-fold. (94/14=6.7) He has been called on this repeatedly, yet he continues to repeat a faulty number that would flunk a high school economics student. One of two things is true. A) He is incredibly ignorant of the most basic of economic concepts and is unwilling to listen to correction, or B) he is being willfully and cynically deceitful. (Some of his mistakes can likely be attributed to off-the-cuff remarks that, while inaccurate and unwise, may just be mistakes. This issue has been raised multiple times.) Neither bodes well for becoming a swap-draining renewal president.
Sources:
The following quote comes from Runaway World: How Globalization is Reshaping Our Lives. It was written in 1998, by British sociologist, Anthony Giddens.
What Globalisation is, and whether it is in any way new, are the focus of intense debate. I discuss this debate in Chapter I, since much else hangs upon it. Yet the facts of the matter are actually quite clear. Globalisation is restructuring the ways in which we live, and in a very profound manner. It is led from the west, bears the strong imprint of American political and economic power, and is highly uneven in its consequences. But globalisation is not just the dominance of the West over the rest; it affects the United States as it does other countries.
Globalisation also influences everyday life as much as it does events happening on a world scale. That is why this book includes an extended discussion of sexuality, marriage and the family. In most parts of the world, women are staking claim to greater autonomy than in the past and are entering the labour force in large numbers. Such aspects of globalisation are at least as important as those happening in the global-market place. They contribute to the stresses and strains affecting traditional ways of life and cultures in most regions of the world. The traditional family is under threat, is changing, and will change much further. Other traditions, such as those concerned with religion, are also experiencing major transformations. Fundamentalism originates from a world of crumbling traditions.
The battleground of the twenty-first century will pit fundamentalism against cosmopolitan tolerance. In a globalising world, where information and images are routinely transmitted across the globe, we are all regularly in contact with others who think differently, and live differently, from ourselves. Cosmopolitans welcome and embrace this cultural complexity. Fundamentalists find it disturbing and dangerous. Whether in the areas of religion, ethnic identity or nationalism, they rake refuge in a renewed and purified tradition – and, quite often, violence.
We can legitimately hope that a cosmopolitan outlook will win out. Tolerance of culture diversity and democracy are closely connected, and democracy is currently spreading world-wide. Globalisation lies behind the expansion of democracy. At the same time, paradoxically, it exposes the limits of democratic structures which are most familiar, namely the structures of parliamentary democracy. We need to further democratize existing institutions, and to do so in ways that respond to the demands of the global age. We shall never be able to become the master of our own history, but we can and must find ways of bringing our runaway world to heel. (3-5)
This short collection of essays has stuck with me ever since I first read it years ago. As I have reflected on the American political scene of the past two years, the insights of this book have become ever more prescient. I see the rise of Trump nationalism as a reactionary response to globalization. (This is not conservatism vs progressivism as we have recently understood them.) It is the death throes of the 20th Century world order. It may be short-lived. It may last a generation. But I suspect that it is ultimately doomed. Over the long-haul, globalization is an inescapable dynamic. However, that does not mean that great harm to human well-being and to the planet will not happen during these death throes.
Since at least the 18th Century, we have seen an unprecedented improvement in human well-being, accelerating through the 19th Century down to the present, spreading around the world. But we should not forget that this improvement was punctuated by a retreat from globalization, resulting in two destructive world wars bracketing a global depression. One hundred years from now, I suspect global human well-being will have made substantial strides over our present living standards. I think globalization is virtually inevitable because we have amassed enough information and experience to see that a globalized world, for all its present vagaries and challenges, is the path to mutual common good. What is much less clear is what happens in the short term. I suspect that this is the biggest turning point in world that most of us now living will ever experience.
It is easy to become obsessed with challenges and threats we see before us today. It is easy to lose sight of the bigger picture and to see the tremendous good that is happening in the world. Here are six social indicators pointing to improving quality of life for billions around the globe. Setbacks and momentary reversals are certain but increasingly the challenges we face are of our own making; like tribalism and authoritarianism. Let us be vigilant in addressing the challenges we face without losing sight of the bigger picture.
Satirist and humorist Douglas Adams, probably best known for The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, once wrote:
"Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty- five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things."
We tend to view our era as a time of unprecedented change while assuming the world before our birth was virtually stagnate. In fact, rapid radical change has been the norm for at least the past few centuries. The case can be made that the generations living just prior to our generation experienced changes every bit as disorienting as ours.
I recently came across this graphic from The Atlas of Historical Geography of the United States, published in 1932. Look at these maps showing the improvement in travel times from New York 1800 to 1930.
I remember first coming across similar maps in Allan Pred's Urban Growth and the Circulation of Information: The United States System of Cities, 1790-1830. Pred demonstrates that not only did travel times shrink but the cost per mile of travel shrank as well.
Early in the nation's history, most travel was by water. We built cities on major waterways. Most states in the eastern half of the United States have a major river or the ocean as a boundary. This meant that each state had access to the water transportation super highway. Travel by land was exceedingly difficult. There were few roads. It took days to reach even nearby cities by stagecoach and each night meant fees for food and lodging that were not part of the stagecoach price. You had the labor of a driver spread across a few people. The cost of travel for even short distances could consume a week or more of wages for a typical working person. Only the wealthy and merchants could afford such travel.
I believe it was Pred who said travel from New York to Pittsburgh did not typically take a route across Pennsylvania. It involved boarding a boat in New York, sailing down the east coast around Florida to New Orleans, and then navigating up the Mississippi and the Ohio to Pittsburgh. Boats could handle far more people per trip, required no extra lodging expenses, food was generally provided on board, and laborers per person was much smaller. Water travel was far also more energy efficient and thus less costly.
As turnpikes and canals were built, and with the advent of the steamboat in the 1820s, travel times shrank and so did the prices. Depending on travel destinations, Pred shows the cost of travel per mile between 1800 and 1840 dropped by 50-90%. Railroads shrank distance and dropped costs even more. Today, we can fly from New York to Los Angeles in a few hours for one or two day's wages for someone earning around the US median Salary.
The world continues to change in significant ways but let us not fool ourselves into thinking that our age is the first to encounter sweeping technological and economic changes.
[Note: If you have an interest in American economic history, you really need to investigate the interactive Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United States.]
You may also find this clip by Louis C. K. sums up well our lack of appreciation.
For most Americans living today, there has been a presumption that our children's lives will be more prosperous than own. The American Dream, whatever particularities might include, has always included this assumption. It is virtually a social contract. Is the idea that most of our children will have a more prosperous life than we did really valid?
Robert Gordon, economic historian at Northwestern University, released a book earlier this year, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War. Gordon's mammoth tome documents changes in the American standard of living over the past 150 years. His research leads him to conclude that not all innovations are equally significant in improving living standards. During the period from 1870-1970, a wave of technological and social innovation emerged that radically improved worker productivity, and therefore improved our standards of living. There has been innovation since 1970 but most of it, apart from communication and entertainment, has been an extension and a deepening of the innovations that occurred prior to 1970. The period from 1870 to about 1920 was a period of development and implementation of innovations that began to have full impact after 1920. Gordon estimates the average annual growth rate in output per hour like this:
1890-1920 = 1.50%
1920-1970 = 2.82%
1970-2014 = 1.62%
For those familiar with American history, you will remember that income inequality was quite high going into the 1920s. Inequality shrank steadily and substantially over the next fifty years, until the mid-1970s. This corresponds with Gordon's estimates of rapidly improving worker productivity. Since the 1970s, there has been slower growth and the growth is more related to capital investment than to improving worker productivity. We have seen income inequality grow since the 1970s.
Gordon is doubtful that we will ever again have a convergence of innovation like we had from 1870-1970. This, combined with certain demographic headwinds, will make sustainable high growth improbable for present generations. I hope to write more about this in coming days but this graphic posted by William Easterly on Twitter caught me eye. It comes from an article by David Leonhardt, The American Dream, Quantified at Last. I take it as more evidence consistent with Gordon's thesis.
“Increasing mobility has left us uprooted and disconnected from communities in America.” This is a common refrain going back at least 100 years. Think of the song following World War I that asked how are you going to keep them down on the farm once they have seen gay Paree’? The lament of increasing mobility is a compelling narrative except for one minor problem: Mobility has been declining for decades.
Sociologist Claude Fischer writes:
The evidence that mobility has declined is more robust for roughly the past 65 years, thanks to annual census-bureau mass surveys. Around 1950, about 20 per cent of Americans changed homes from one year to the next. In the 1980s, under 18 per cent did. By the 2000s, under 15 per cent – and now we are approaching annual moving rates of only 10 per cent. About two-thirds of movers do not go far, relocating within the same county, and the frequency of such local moves has dropped by about half since the Second World War. The proportion of Americans who move across county and state lines is considerably lower, but that rate, too, has dropped substantially, from about 6.5 per cent in the 1950s to under 4 per cent now.
This trend toward staying in place has accelerated since 2001. … (The Great Settling Down)
Why the decline in mobility?
So what is the cause? My best guess is that the greatest single factor in the great settling down was the increasing physical and economic security of US life.
Thanks to a growing and stabilising economy, spreading affluence, vastly improved public health, the establishment of government institutions from policing to business regulation, and all sorts of ‘safety net’ programmes over several generations – from Social Security to federal disaster assistance – fewer and fewer Americans have been forced to move because of unemployment, floods, the death of a breadwinner, and so on. Greater security also helps account for an apparent shift from the 19th to 20th centuries in who was likeliest to move.
I have done extensive work on tracing my ancestors. I have traced every line back to at least my third great grandparents, most of who were born in the early 1800s. I know more about some than others but the part that has always intrigued me is how much they moved. I would estimate that the majority lived in at least three different states and in more than five counties over their lifetimes. I suspect most people who have identified American ancestors this far back have similar stories. But I have also noticed one anomaly.
My great grandmother, Augusta (Holmes) Kruse was born in Dekalb County, Missouri, in 1870, the year after her parents had moved there from Plymouth, Massachusetts. Her ancestors go back to seven of the Mayflower passengers and include many other people who arrived shortly thereafter. Her family had stayed in place for nearly 250 years. Her maternal grandfather, Ebenezer Pierce, was seaman who owned ships and sailed the world. Her mother had been to finishing school in Boston. Her grandfather Holmes was an accomplished carpenter. These were not exceptionally wealthy people but they clearly had stable comfortable lives. Her parents moved west because of her father’s health. Augusta married my great grandfather, Carl P. Kruse, who had emigrated from a small town in Denmark where his family had lived for generations and where his father had served in the Danish Parliament. Because of the population explosion in Denmark, farmland was scarce, and wanting to farm, Carl came to America.
Most of my other family lines consist primarily of farmers, miners, and laborers. Ancestors in these families seemed to be constantly on the move. This anecdotal analysis of my family history seems consistent with what the author is describing.
Demographers talk of migration in terms of push and pull factors. Push factors are those that make the status quo more unbearable to maintain. Pull factors are those that promise relatively better circumstance than the status quo. It would appear that in past generations, push factors might have played a bigger role; things like war, drought, local economies gone bad, and the like. However, as America has become more prosperous, there have been fewer pushes pushing fewer of us. Migration is more about positive pulls.
The “settling” of America is one more piece of evidence about an improving world in terms of material well-being. But as the author notes, we still have challenges to social cohesion. While improved transportation and communication may not have made us more inclined to move, it may have reshaped who we choose to interact with in our communities. And as the global economy reshapes the work we do, the trauma of regional job loss is possibly made more traumatic because we are less and less accustomed to uprooting and relocating. Focusing on increasing mobility as a cause of rootlessness takes us in an unproductive direction.
... but sometimes it rhymes.
Question. When it comes to breathing, do you prefer inhaling or exhaling?
I have asked this question many times and it always elicits a chuckle. Clearly if you choose one over the other, you end up dead. And if your body decided that this ongoing struggle between inhaling and exhaling was a problem to solved, you would end up dead. Breathing is not a problem to be solved. It is a polarity to be managed.
Polarity management has a much wider application then biology. It applies to a wide range of features in human systems. Economist John McMillian (Stanford) wrote an insightful book called, “Reinventing the Bazaar: A Natural History of Markets.” McMillian makes the case that the never-ending struggle in political economy has been to find the right mix of centralization and decentralization. If power becomes too centralized, then it will become oppressive and destructive. Yet, without centralized power, local tyrants emerge, injustice proliferates, and warring factions square off, sending society into chaos. In this sense, political economy is a polarity to be managed, not a problem to be solved.
Writing in the Atlantic, Eric Liu makes an important observation (emphasis mine):
"We don’t need fewer arguments today; we need less stupid ones.
The arguments in American politics today are stupid in many ways: They’re stuck in a decaying two-party institutional framework; they fail to challenge foundational assumptions about capitalism or government; they center on symbolic proxy skirmishes instead of naming the underlying change; they focus excessively on style and surface.
Americans can do better. Remember: America doesn’t just have arguments; America is an argument—between Federalist and Anti-Federalist world views, strong national government and local control, liberty and equality, individual rights and collective responsibility, color-blindness and color-consciousness, Pluribus and Unum.
The point of civic life in this country is not to avoid such tensions. Nor is it for one side to achieve “final” victory. It is for us all to wrestle perpetually with these differences, to fashion hybrid solutions that work for the times until they don’t, and then to start again.
"America is an Argument." Bingo! I think you will find the same is true in all human structures, including church and family. Part of what facilitates better discussion and arguments is appreciating that we are often wrestling more with polarities and less with virtue and vice.
The Kruse Kronicle byline is, “Contemplating the intersection of work, the global economy, and Christian Mission.” While politics is not the primary focus of this blog, it is impossible to escape how this presidential election is reshaping Christian Mission for substantial segments of American Christianity. In short, we are asking how ought our discipleship shape our political participation?
Before you read further, you should know that I have opposed Donald Trump since he announced back his campaign in June of 2015. My take on policy and priorities leans center right, which should make me lean toward Republicans. While I have considerable policy disagreements with Trump, that it is not what drives my opposition. My conviction stems from being a disciple of Jesus Christ.
Two days ago on Facebook, I posted a link about Independent Conservative candidate Evan McMullin. He is launching a bid to regain control of the heart and soul of conservatism. I commented, “And the battle for the center-right begins.” A Trump-backing Facebook friend asked:
“Why would anyone vote for a Mormon (non-Christian) candidate [McMullin] while citing the immaturity of Trump's (maturing) Christian faith as a reason not to vote for him?”
I used the occasion of that question to unpack my views. Some friends have encouraged me to post this response in a more accessible forum. So here it is with some light editing and a couple of additional comments.
Response
I think the question [quoted above] misunderstands the issue for Christian Never Trumpers. Having no standing to speak on behalf of them as a group, I’ll speak for myself.
My primary concern is not about who wins this election, what happens to the Supreme Court, and so on. My concern is the witness of the Church. We are called to be ambassadors for the coming reign of God, to exhibit love and compassion, to speak up about injustice. We are resident-aliens in this world, not full citizens. Highlighting the intensity of that commitment, Jesus says in Luke 14:26 that the Kingdom even takes precedence over family ties. Ties that compromise that witness are idolatry.
There are no perfect candidates unless Jesus is on the ballot. Every candidate will have shortcomings. We are not looking for perfection. A candidate need not be Christian. The question is about general moral character, not the candidate’s specific religious doctrinal beliefs. The Church stays independent, whoever is elected, lifting up that which is good and offering critique for that which is not, but first and foremost living as a community that exhibits the marks of the Kingdom.
As each of us votes, we must make a determination about which of the candidates, if any, offers sufficient merit to receive our vote. Some conservative voters see Clinton as unacceptable. Fine. Let’s take her off the table. This being the case, some feel they must vote for Trump. Fine. I think that is misguided, but let’s grant that.
The issue is not that someone might vote for Trump. The issue is the attempt by the Christian Right to characterize Trump as basically a good guy, a baby Christian, basically "one of us," who is just a little rough around the edges. Trump is not a little rough around the edges.
Have you read Art of the Deal? Have you watched his life unfold? At the core of Trump’s life is the very antithesis of the Sermon on the Mount. He brags that never needs to apologize or repent about anything. [His recent apology about leaked videotapes was noteworthy for its novelty but also for NOT being an apology to the people he had wronged. It was to the voters who have the power to withhold something he wants.] He has been the apostle for win at all costs. You don’t just defeat opponents. You destroy and humiliate anyone who gets in your way. He advocated seducing the wives of rivals to humiliate them and bragged about having done so himself. He made his fortune exploiting human frailty in the area of gambling. You are unflinchingly loyal to him or you are an absolute loser. I can go on. Everything about him exudes an unstable vindictive predatory character. His “unfortunate” statements are not the product of an unpolished public figure. They are the product of a calculating, manipulative, pathological personality.
Democracy runs on the basis that there are competing views in society. When someone wins an election, the loser concedes and the winner leaves the loser standing, the loser living to fight another day. It is the understanding that no victory or loss is ever final, that keeps society moving along, even with disagreement. Trump routinely demonstrates he cannot tolerate the presence of opposition, period! Not even from beauty queens. From the beginning of the campaign to present, it has all been about what HE is going to do. By sheer force of his personality and will, and without any clear understanding of the basics of governance and a demonstrated unwillingness to learn them, he is going to fix everything. This is World Wrestling Entertainment bravado, not leadership. This grandiosity, coupled with a vindictive predatory temperament, is the recipe for authoritarianism.
Too many Christian Right Trumpers are not simply voting for the lesser of two evils. They are serving as his apologists, legitimizing his profound evils. It is an act of hypocrisy, considering all the criticism leveled at the moral failings of candidates in the past. When it is their agenda that is at stake, all concern about character goes out the window. You think Trump is the better candidate? Fine. But do not insult us with minimizing who this man is.
[As one Facebook friend posted: "You cannot support Ahab because you think he is somehow better than Jezebel and call it righteous."--Dennis Bills]
Let’s assume that by not voting for Trump, a Clinton presidency leads to some very unfriendly policies toward Christian Right people. So be it! The Church’s mission is not to win elections but to give witness to the coming Kingdom. That witness can be given through martyrdom if need be. Christ does not need the help of hateful authoritarian demagogues to achieve his purposes.
I am not that familiar with McMullin. From what I hear to date, he seems to be a principled man with admirable ethical standards, wanting to build a more civil society with aspiration and persuasion. To the degree that turns out to be true, he is a welcomed refreshing voice. I don’t care what his specific doctrines are.
Final Thoughts
In the end, I am sure I was not persuasive. For many on the Christian Right, this election is visceral. Social psychologists write about “motivated perception,” where what we see gets shaped by what we feel is at stake. For so many, legitimate or not, Hillary Clinton is the embodiment of the “other side” in the culture wars of the past forty years. The idea of letting her win, much less vote for her, is nihilistic and apocalyptic. One is forced to choose between letting loose the apocalypse or voting for a candidate who is the antithesis to all you have previously advocated as morally necessary.
The motivation to legitimize and rationalize Trump is powerful. According to survey research comparing 2011 to 2016, White Evangelical Protestants went from being the religious segment least likely to believe that someone who commits immoral acts in private life can govern ethically (2011 = 30%) to the most likely (2016 = 71%). (Source) Jeff Jacoby compares statements by leaders before 2011 with statements after in his piece How the religious right embraced Trump and lost its moral authority. When holding a moral standard means substantial loss, they embraced moral relativity, the cardinal sin of “secular-progressives” they so despise. Again, my point is not that someone will vote for Trump. My concern is that those who decide they will vote for Trump should not minimize and trivialize who the man shows himself to be.
In closing, I will say that our present circumstances in the American Church are not purely the problem of the Christian Right. Across the political spectrum, much of American Church is not formed by the gospel of Jesus Christ. A great many progressive Christians have concluded that the answer to the Christian Right is the emergence of the Christian Left. They participate in the same hyperbolic “othering” that the Right has done and call it “prophetic” and “social justice advocacy.” And what we learn now is that when you have for years embraced characterizations of your opponents as wanting to kill women, equating them to holocaust deniers, and declared them to be functionally no different than the Taliban, you lose the words to name genuine authoritarianism when it appears. (See Crying Wolf, Then Confronting Trump) The answer is not a more progressive church. The answer is a loving community of resident-aliens, seeking the welfare of the city, seeking truth no matter the implications for our host culture’s political agendas. Right, left, or whatever, precious little of the American Church owns that vision.
One of the most persistent worries about population and economic growth is that we will eventually use up all our resources and land. It is based on the intuitive (but false) assumption that if it takes X acreage of land to feed a person today, then it will take 2 times X acreage to feed double the population in the future. This thinking does not allow for ongoing innovation and adaptation.
Look at this graph showing total global hectares being used in farm production from 1960-2009. Note that the global population grew from 3 billion in 1960, to 6.8 billion in 2009.
(Source: Nature Rebounds)
The population will likely grow again by half over the next fifty years. Note that the projections are for the number of hectares used for farming to actually decline. The alternative projection assumes we adopt more efficient food consumption and stop growing crops for fuel. In either case, we will be using significantly less land than we did in 1960.
This is one example of decoupling, where two seemingly connected trends become disconnected. We are seeing this in water consumption, CO2 produced per dollar of produced goods, and with the amount of natural resources we use. The direst predictions about resources and climate tend to minimize or ignore these decoupling developments. We should not allow dire predictions that ignore decoupling to frighten us away from growth and achieving prosperity for the whole world.
Challenges? Yes. But we are not at the edge of doom.
Anthropogenic driven climate change is a fact. As the climate changes, the poorest of humanity will suffer the greatest. The most ardent climate activists tell us this is settled science. So settled that to question these conclusions puts you in a league with people who deny the Jewish Holocaust ever happened. It is science!
Well, there is another issue around which there is even more scientific consensus. Megan Molteni, writing for UnDark:
According to a recent survey by the Pew Research Center in collaboration with the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 88 percent of scientists believe these foods are safe to eat. Only 37 percent of the general public agrees. Republicans and Democrats are just as likely to be opposed to transgenic foods, as are people across different age groups. So why is it that we trust the National Academy of Sciences and the WHO when they say climate change is likely caused by humans, but not when they say these foods are safe?
Molteni highlights the recent development of goats modified to include an antimicrobial enzyme that helps human’s fight off bacterial cells that cause diarrhea and other infections. The milk from these goats aid children in fighting off these diseases.
According to the World Health Organization, 525,000 children under five died last year from diarrheal diseases, mostly in poor communities in developing nations where waterborne diseases are rampant and vaccines and antibiotic treatments are difficult to acquire and distribute.
The modified goats could reduce the suffering, even death, of millions of children. They were developed by a public university and have had nearly two nearly decades of testing and review. The goats could be distributed via whatever strategy seems most effective, even free. There is no sinister corporate entity lurking in the shadows. So why are the goats not in use?
First, regulation. Clearly GMOs must be evaluated and regulated but the present regulatory system is such a mishmash of regulation and entities that it is very costly and time-consuming to get approval. Consequently, the process is skewed toward large corporate entities who can work the system, provoking many anti-GMOers to make the regulatory process even more of a barrier.
Second, anti-GMOers have organized to oppose all GMO usage in developing nations, at times pitting well-funded European and American activists against poor agricultural workers who could benefit greatly from the technology.
But as scientists will tell you, “GMO” tells you zero about the merits of any particular product. What tells you about the merits is looking at the actual merits of the product!
Last month, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine released a report assessing all the science available on genetically engineered crops. It concluded that we shouldn’t be making generalizations about GMOs, but rather asking if a particular crop or GE product makes the world a better place or a more dangerous one, on a case-by-case basis. This was not exactly what people wanted to hear, the authors wrote: “We received impassioned requests to give the public a simple, general, authoritative answer about GE crops. Given the complexity of GE issues, we did not see that as appropriate.”
The goats are not the only product caught up in this controversy. The linked article suggests others. In addition to nutrition and health, GMOs also have a role to play in adapting to warmer temperatures, with crops that grow more food with less water and fewer nutrients, for example.
… improving food security and public health without harming the environment will require the concerted use of many methods, from traditional breeding to organic farming. Genetic modification can’t hold back rising sea levels or fill aquifers drained by years of drought. But there are important contributions to be made with problems that have been unsolvable by other means, the researchers say — if only regulations would allow it.
Climate activists routinely moralize about people who will not get on board with their initiatives, saying deniers are accountable for countless lives that will one day be diminished, even lost, due to our inaction on climate change. The poorest folks will suffer most. This is their scientific conclusion. Yet when the same scientific community says GMO technology is safe, with the potential to save millions of lives in the here and now, while enhancing the welfare of countless others, the activists rise up in opposition to the technology. What this tells me is that while there are some people who are genuinely knowledgeable about the science of climate change and are alarmed about the consequences, the concern by multitudes is less about science and far more to do with subjective narratives with which science (happily for them) agrees. When the “naturalist” narrative is not supported, they disregard science instead of modifying their narrative.
I’d invite to read all of Molteni’s article, Spilled Milk. In the meantime, my climate activist friends, unless you are willing to give full-throated support of GMOs here and now, do not let me ever again here you decry the “anti-science” climate deniers. You are no different. Subjective considerations drive you every bit as much as climate deniers. Right here and right now, people are suffering and dying because of your “anti-science” behavior.
