This is part two of a three-part series on moral preferences, social groups and economics. It comes to about 13 printed pages — Dave
On questions of morality, contemporary economics stands mute. Writing about Adam Smith in the aftermath of the financial meltdown of 2008, Harvard's Amartya Sen put it bluntly—
The nature of the present economic crisis illustrates very clearly the need for departures from unmitigated and unrestrained self-seeking in order to have a decent society.
The United States is no longer a decent society, taking the 1950's and 1960's to be The Golden Age. Even if the post-WWII decades weren't actually so golden, at least we can confidently assert that simple decency has declined precipitously in the United States. Decency can be defined in terms of the moral criteria 1) fairness and reciprocity and 2) harm and suffering. I discussed these general and partly innate moral preferences in Part I, called Homo sapiens — The Rationalizing Animal.
Economists use the word moral preferences where non-economists say moral values. I will now adopt that convention throughout this essay. I shall return to the moral preferences of the United States later on, but before that, I will pick up where I left off in Part I to discuss of title question — economics as a moral science?
I put the question that way to echo a famous essay by Kenneth Boulding called Economics As A Moral Science, which I will discuss below.
Morality And Human Nature
Let us first define what we mean by morality. I used Jonathan Haidt's definition in Part I, but I'll use another one today. There are many definitions of morality pointing up subtle differences, but at the appropriate level of abstraction, these definitions are all basically the same. This definition (shaded) is from a paper called Being Nice Is Not A Building Block of Morality by Jessica Flack and Frans de Waal, first published the Jan/Feb issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies (Volume 7, Number 1-2, 2000).
Let us therefore try to define what morality is...
This is not an easy task — nor is it a task to be taken lightly — as many definitions, conceptions, and versions of morality exist. In an effort not to detract from the significance of this variability, we prefer a broad characterization over a definition of morality and moral systems, one that should obviously be devoid of moral prescription.
We understand morality as a sense of right and wrong that is born out of group-wide systems of conflict management based on shared values.
This characterization of morality and moral systems is close to Boehm’s (this issue), for whom morality is the product of shared values imposed on the individual by the group, and to Alexander’s (1987), for whom moral systems are systems of indirect reciprocity.
Moral systems thus provide a set of rules and incentives to resolve competition and conflicts within the group in the service of the ‘greater good’, that is, the benefits (to individuals) derived from resource distribution and collective action.
Morality, by this definition, is closely related to prosocial behaviour...
The moral preferences (values) an individual might follow (here the sense of right and wrong) are always defined relative to some group that individual "belongs" to (i.e., identifies with, is affiliated with, etc.). Those in the group "share" the same set of values and the individual follows those values, or the group imposes those values on the individual. Here it doesn't matter if we look at it either way.
Given the definition above, it is only a short leap to the very important concepts in-group and out-group. The former are the group(s) an individual "belongs "to (Us). The latter are the group(s) an individual does not belong to (strangers, Them). Now you are in a position to fully appreciate something I put in a recent post called Thou Shalt Not....
There are two arguments for continuing jobless benefits, a moral argument and an economic argument. The moral argument is easy to make, and can be stated as a Moses-like 11th Commandment.
Thou shalt not fuck other humans up the ass against their wishes, even when they are strangers to you.
I note only in passing that the Earth would be a far more pleasant place to live if all humans everywhere adhered to this new Commandment.
I wrote that not only for its shock value, but also because I was thinking of the Coen Brothers' The Big Lebowski. The Coens are shrewd observers of the Human Condition. Perhaps it would be a good idea to watch the relevant video now, before we get into heavy human issues concerning moral preferences and group affiliation.
The point of course is that bad things happen when you fuck a stranger in the ass (FSITA). Yet humans fuck strangers in the ass all the time. They are strangers because they are not in some person's in-groups.
In the years preceding the financial meltdown, a considerable number of people in the housing industry—the realtors, the mortgage lenders, the finance people who "securitized" those mortgages into bundles which they sold to "investors", etc.—fucked a considerable number of strangers in the ass, including millions of American homebuyers who were trying to make a buck off rising house prices. Those naive people were told that home prices would rise forever, Those people believed that nonsense! As a result, many bad things happened, and there was a lot of collateral damage, as with The Dude's car.
When an a multinational corporation moves manufacturing or services offshore, leaving the workers of some American town or city high and dry, that's the owners of that corporation fucking a bunch of strangers in the ass. In fact, FSITA is ubiquitous in large, liberalized market economies, and especially in the United States, a large, diverse "melting pot" whose economy is based on "free" markets. Lots of strangers there!
I am talking about this rarely-reflected-upon phenomemon in crude terms in the slim hope that you might become sensitized to what goes on every day here in the United States. FSITA is so common that all but a few people have become desensitized to it, especially when it a happens to strangers. If you're the one taking it up the tail pipe, of course, it's a different story.
Now consider the "moral behavior space" I've defined below.
In the diagram, "moral preferences" refers to 1) reducing harm & suffering among a society's most vulnerable members and 2) treating others with greater fairness & reciprocity, as discussed in Part I.
Let's briefly describe the four cases with respect to economic exchange (buy/sell transactions).
1. In-Group + Moral Preferences — fairness and reciprocity between individuals predominates (green space). Transaction risks are low.
2. In-Group + Self Interest — an individual who follows pure self-interest (in economic exchange) within the groups he belongs to will not be a member of those groups for very long. This space is "unstable" in this sense. This case comes closest to stating how morality and social control evolved in small hunter-gather bands. If you were banished from the group during the paleolithic, death was sure to follow.
3. Out-Group + Moral Preferences — this case, where an individual follows strong moral preferences with all people (regardless of group affiliation) is very rare indeed. Famous religious figures come to mind—the Jesus of the lost "Q Gospel", Mother Theresa, the founder or saints of various religions.
4. Out-Group + Self Interest — this is the danger zone; all bets are off (red space). This is the space we are most interested in, as discussed above (FSITA) and below.
This simple classification hides many complexities, the thorniest of which is group size. This important quote comes from The Moral Foundation of Economic Behavior by David C. Rose (pp. 85-86).
... prosperity [in a large, complex human society] is impossible if economic activity is limited to small groups, but we are fundamentally a small group species for whom small group moral sensibilities come naturally.
This is problematic for any society that wants to avoid widespread poverty, let alone maximize general prosperity.
The importance of group size to understanding human evolution is now widely accepted. Robin Dunbar's finding that human group size tends to be limited to about 150 individuals is now so well known that "Dunbar's Number" has become a familiar locution among social scientists.
Even when we find ourselves in large groups, we naturally form small groups within them. Once possible reason for this is that moral sensibilities play an important role in facilitating co-operation and maintaining group harmony, but our natural moral sensibilities break down in larger groups.
By forming smaller groups we are again comfortable because the moral mechanisms that support social behavior and protect us from opportunistic predation are again effective.
[ My note — opportunistic predation = FSITA ]
The simple diagram above must always be interpreted in light of these remarks.
That diagram leaves out other complications which must be borne in mind. There is always a strong situational component in opportunistic predation. Opportunities abound, but not all opportunities are seized. There may be a justified fear of punishment, especially for the Little Man. On the other hand, if you work for one of the Big Banks in the United States, fear of punishment is greatly reduced and thus risk-taking is greatly enhanced. This situational component is entirely bound up with a society's existing power structures (the Eiite as defined in Part I).
Regarding risk-taking, there is also a strong psychological component in opportunistic predation. Here I am talking about "crazy" people. Take your favorite diagnosis from the DSM-V (e.g., psychopath, sociopath) and apply it to certain individuals (e.g., Bernie Madoff). Whatever the diagnosis and perceived flaw in their character, these people do not follow normal moral constraints on behavior.
There is much more one could say about this simple model, but it is "good enough" to use as a springboard for further discussion.
Economics As A Moral Science?
Practitioners of modern economics like to think that their discipline is value-free, like the physical sciences. Over the last 250 years, economists gradually forgot that their discipline came into existence as a branch of moral philosophy (Adam Smith was a professor of moral philosophy in Edinburgh).
Today I am not interested in reviewing the crumbling foundation of economics as a science per se. (The meltdown of 2008 cast "economic science" into considerable doubt.) Let us instead evaluate the value-free-ness of economics in the context of moral preferences.
Kenneth Boulding tackled this question head-on in his 1969 paper Economics as a Moral Science. I will quote it at length, but I have also carefully selected what I've chosen to quote. Read the original if you want to read the parts I left out. Much of this should now be familiar territory for those who read Part I.
Adam Smith, who has strong claim to being both the Adam and the Smith of systematic economics, was a professor of moral philosophy and it was at that forge that economics was made. Even when I was a student, economics was still part of the moral sciences tripos at Cambridge University. It can claim to be a moral science, therefore, from its origin, if for no other reason. Nevertheless, for many economists the very term “moral science” will seem like a contradiction.
We are strongly imbued today with the view that science should be wertfrei [value-free] and we believe that science has achieved its triumph precisely because it has escaped the swaddling clothes of moral judgment and has only been able to take off into the vast universe of the “is” by escaping from the treacherous launching pad of the “ought.”
Even economics, we learn in the history of thought, only became a science by escaping from the casuistry and moralizing of medieval thought. Who, indeed, would want to exchange the delicate rationality of the theory of equilibrium price, for the unoperational vaporings of a “just price” controversy?
In the battle between mechanism and moralism generally mechanism has won hands down, and I shall not be surprised if the very title of my address does not arouse musty fears of sermonizing in the minds of many of my listeners.
Let me first explain, then, what I mean by moral and by moral science. A moral, or ethical proposition, is a statement about a rank order of preference among alternatives, which is intended to apply to more than one person. A preference which applies to one person only is a “taste.” Statements of this kind are often called “value judgments.” If someone says, “I prefer A to B,” this is a personal value judgment, or a taste. If he says, “A is better than B,” there is an implication that he expects other people to prefer A to B also, as well as himself. A moral proposition then is a “common value.”
[ My note — a "common value' is a group value. ]
Every culture, or subculture, is defined by a set of common values, that is, generally agreed upon preferences. Without a core of common values a culture cannot exist, and we classify society into cultures and subcultures precisely because it is possible to identify groups who have common values...
Here I am going to skip much of Boulding's text, which does not shed much light on the questions we are interested in today.
Let us return then to economics as a moral science, not merely in the sense in which all science is “affected with an ethical interest,” but in the quite specific sense of asking whether economics itself can be of assistance in resolving ethical disputes, especially those which arise out of the continued increase of knowledge. Economics specializes in the study of that part of the total social system which is organized through exchange and which deals with exchangables...
Successful ethical systems tend to create subcultures, and these subcultures tend to perpetuate and propagate the ethical systems which created them. This principle helps to explain the persistent division of mankind into sects, nations, and ideological groups. If we were to map the ethical preference systems of the individuals who comprise mankind, we would not find a uniform distribution but we would find a very sharp clustering into cultures and subcultures with relatively empty spaces between the clusters.
All the members of a single sect, for instance, tend to think rather alike in matters of ethical judgment and differentiate themselves sharply from the ethical judgments of other sects. Individuals tend to be attracted to one or another of these clusters, leaving the social space between them relatively empty, like space between the stars...
Boulding is talking about human "groupiness" and the fact that moral preferences are group-specific. Now he gets to the heart of the matter.
Economics has made its own attempt to solve some of the problems involved in the moral judgment in what we know as welfare economics. I believe this attempt has been a failure, though a reasonably glorious one, and we should take a brief look at it.
Welfare economics attempts to ask the question “What do we mean when we say that one state of a social system is better than another in strictly economic terms?” The most celebrated answer given is the Paretian optimum, which states in effect that Condition A of a social system is economically superior to Condition B, if nobody feels worse off in A than in B, and if at least one person feels better off.
“Better off” or “worse off” are measured of course by preferences, so that we could restate the condition as saying that State A is superior to State B if one or more persons prefer A and if nobody prefers B.
If we permit internal redistributions within the system, that is, compensation, the range of possible superior states is considerably broadened. From this simple principle a wide range of applications has been found possible in a stirring intellectual drama which might well be subtitled “Snow White (the fairest of all) and the Seven Marginal Conditions.”
I will talk about "internal redistributions" below.
Many, if not most, economists accept the Paretian optimum as almost self-evident. Nevertheless, it rests on an extremely shaky foundation of ethical propositions.
The more one examines it, for instance, the more clear it becomes that economists must be extraordinarily nice people even to have thought of such a thing, for it implies that there is no malevolence anywhere in the system. It implies, likewise, that there is no benevolence, the niceness of economists not quite extending as far as good will.
It assumes selfishness, that is, the independence of individual preference functions, such that it makes no difference to me whether I perceive you as either better off or worse off.
Anything less descriptive of the human condition could hardly be imagined. The plain fact is that our lives are dominated by precisely this interdependence of utility functions which the Paretian optimum denies.
Selfishness, or indifference to the welfare of others, is a knife edge between benevolence on the one side and malevolence on the other.
Boulding then goes completely off the rails, and we will stop here.
[Selfishness] is something that is very rare. We may feel indifferent towards those whom we do not know, with whom we have no relationships of any kind, but towards those with whom we have relationships, even the frigid relationship of exchange, we are apt to be either benevolent or malevolent. We either rejoice when they rejoice, or we rejoice when they mourn...
The central premise of this essay is that indifference to those whom we do not know (strangers, those in out-groups) is a necessary precondition for predatory opportunism (e.g., during the Housing Bubble before the financial/economic crisis of 2008 and its never-ending sordid aftermath.) The anthropological literature is absolutely clear on this point. If someone does not accept this premise, as Boulding apparently did not, it is not clear to me what world that person is living in. It is certainly not the world the rest of us are living in, the one I like to call the Real World.
That said, Boulding's points about welfare economics, the Pareto criterion and malevolence are well-taken, and serve as a good introduction to another recent article called (you guessed it) Economics As A Moral Science. This thoughtful piece was written by
The textbook example in the philosophy of economics literature to illustrate the insufficiently acknowledged value-ladenness of economics is the notion of Pareto efficiency, also known as ‘the Pareto criterion’. Yet time and time again (for me most recently two days ago at a seminar in Oxford) I encounter economists (scholars or students) who fail to see why endorsing Pareto efficiency is not value-neutral, or why there are good reasons why one would not endorse the Pareto-criterion. Here’s an example in print of a very influential economist: Gregory Mankiw.
In his infamous paper ‘Defending the One Percent’ Mankiw writes (p. 22):“Discussion of inequality necessarily involves our social and political values, but if inequality also entails inefficiency, those normative judgements are more easily agreed upon. The Pareto-criterion is the clearest case: if we can make some people better off without making anyone worse off, who could possibly object?”
Yet the Pareto-criterion is not as uncontroversial as Mankiw believes. The Pareto-criterion compares two social states, A and B, and makes a claim about whether the act/policy/social change that brings us from A to B is desirable or not. If in B all individuals have at least the same welfare/utility/well-being than in A, and at least one of them has a higher level, then moving from A to B is a Pareto-improvement, and the Pareto-criterion recommends the move from A to B on grounds of efficiency.
Here is the key text.
As many have argued, the Pareto-criterion remains agnostic about the fairness or legitimacy of A as the starting point.
The Pareto-criterion also doesn’t attach any importance to distributive issues in either A or B. If those who are living in misery stay equally miserable, but due to some policy or social change the ultra-rich become even more rich, then Mankiw believes that we would all agree that this social change is a social improvement. Given that many citizens (and political philosophers) believe that certain types of inequality are intrinsically bad, I don’t think that we can draw Mankiw’s conclusion.
Moreover, even if we would take the Pareto-criterion as a criterion of efficiency understood as ‘no-waste’ (in the sense of: ‘let’s get a bigger pie if we can, independent of how the pie is distributed’), then the question still remains ‘efficiency of what’?
Efficiency of what? Good question. I addressed that question in my recent Note On Economic Growth.
It’s entirely plausible that an economic change that is Pareto-efficient in terms of desire-satisfaction is not Pareto-efficient in terms of a set of basic capabilities, or in terms of equivalised household income. So even if one doesn’t attach any value to distributional issues, our endorsement of the Pareto-criterion may be dependent on the “metric” in which it is expressed.
I’m using this example of the Pareto-criterion merely to support the claim that economists need to think more about the values embedded in their theories – a claim on which any philosophy of economics textbook can give us many more examples and more detail.
There is a lot to chew on here, so let's go through it, painful as that is.
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First and foremost, the Pareto criterion distinguishes between socioeconomic states A and B by means of the wonderfully vague terms "better off" and "worse off". Ms.
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Let us reconsider Boulding's clarification that “better off” or “worse off” are measured of course by preferences, so that we could restate the condition as saying that State A is superior to State B if one or more persons prefer A and if nobody prefers B.
The question then becomes whose preferences are we talking about? It is clear that such economic trends can not reflect the actual moral preferences of those I have called the disenfranchised, unless those people feel it somehow benefits them to live with less income over time.
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Straightforwardly, we are talking about the actual preferences of America's elite as described in Part I. One must always distinguish between preferences the elite pay lip service to as opposed to the actual preferences which drive policy. This is the "pay attention to what they do, not what they say" rule. These "real" preferences will eventually show up in the economic data (for example in U.S. income inequality).
This is best explained by example. America's elite do not regard distributional issues as important. It follows that the rich always deserve (have earned) their wealth, regardless of how they acquired it. (There are slight and ultimately unimportant differences between the preferences of political liberals and those of political conservatives.) In fact, unconcern with how the income and wealth is distributed has been a strong moral preference in the United States since its inception, even among the disenfranchised. Even now, in 2014, with wealth & income inequality at their "worst" levels since the Roaring Twenties, many Americans do not regard distributional issues as very important. The opportunity to become wealthy has always been more important to Americans than how the wealth is distributed.
In the United States, by any "reasonable" measure of fairness & reciprocity, or the reduction of harm & suffering among the vulnerable, the Pareto criterion has been violated—in "state" changes from A => B—over and over again for the last 35 years. A relative few people became "better off" and a large part of the population (the disenfranchised) became "worse off" over time. Again, you might look at my Note On Economic Growth.
Let us get back to the title question — is economics a moral science? Certainly some economists have strong moral preferences which go in the "right direction" (toward more fairness & reciprocity and less harm and suffering of society's most vulnerable members). But generally speaking, what used to be called welfare economics is dead, or a "noble failure" as Boulding noted in 1969. Some, like Anthony B. Atkinson, seek to restore welfare economics to a prominent place once again.
This paper argues that welfare economics should be restored to a prominent place on the agenda of economists and should occupy a central role in the teaching of economics. Economists should provide justification for the ethical criteria underlying welfare statements, and these criteria require constant reevaluation in the light of developments in economic analysis and in moral philosophy. Economists need to be more explicit about the relation between welfare criteria and the objectives of governments, policymakers and individual citizens. Moreover, such a restoration of welfare economics should be accompanied by consideration of the adoption of ethical guidelines for the economics profession.
Atkinson's desire to restore welfare economics to a central place in his profession has no future. In short, economics as currently practiced is decidedly not a moral science, and will thus remain mute on moral questions. As I explained in Part I, most working or academic economists are beneficiaries of the status quo. Beneficiaries will always find a way to rationalize (defend) current socio-economic arrangements, even as they suggest piecemeal changes.
I found an exemplary example of that recently, which I will repeat here. This is Stern School economist Nouriel Roubini speaking—
What do policy makers need to address going forward?
They need to have polices that restore stronger growth. There is a risk that if people are unemployed long enough they atrophy, they lose skills, so I think we have not done enough on boosting aggregate demand by using appropriate monetary and fiscal policies or even credit easing.I think the long-term issues that the tech gurus here are all excited about — innovation from IT to energy technology to biotech to new manufacturing technology like robots automation, and so on — the problem with all these great innovations is that they tend to be capital intensive, skill biased, and result in labor savings.
We have a structural problem with job creation, so I would think about changing the taxation of labor versus capital, how we invest in better educational systems, vocational schools, and reducing payroll taxes as a way to increase demand for labor. Otherwise you have vicious cycle of little job creation, a rise in the share of profits and GDP, redistributing from those spending to those saving, that further reduces aggregate demand.
So inequality was also a theme. You have here not just the top 1% but the top 0.01%, So between technology, globalization, trade, the winner-take-all superstar effect, inequality is rising. This is not just a "moral" issue but also an issue of too little consumption and too little savings that is bad for global growth.
So it becomes vicious cycle. It's a bit like the old Marxist idea that if profits grow too much compared to wages, there's not going to be enough consumption, and capitalism is going to self destruct. So I think that insight of Karl Marx is as useful today as it was 100 years ago.
Roubini simply ignores the presence of Boulding's "malevolence" in current socio-economic arrangements in the United States.
This is not just a "moral" issue, Roubini says, with the word 'moral' in quotes. With Roubini, as with any other conventional, non-welfare economist you care to name—Paul Krugman comes to mind—economic growth always supercedes moral preferences. There is a hidden presumption that economic growth always corrects "moral" imbalances in the long run, or as John Kennedy put it in 1963, a rising tide lifts all boats.
It has not been widely recognized that the call for piecemeal policy changes to promote economic growth—Roubini advocates "changing the taxation of labor versus capital, how we invest in better educational systems, vocational schools, and reducing payroll taxes as a way to increase demand for labor,"—is the primary way in which growth cheerleaders economists (and many others) rationalize the status quo from which they benefit.
Thus it is not permissible to make the "moral" argument in so far the general human preference for growth—this is not a moral preference—always overrides it. That is why Roubini (and many others I have seen) either quote the word 'moral' or de-emphasize it in some other way. The growth argument is always put forward and accepted without question—that is to say, in the absence of mindful thought—but the moral argument is always "caught" and dismissed.
That disparity tells you a lot about how humans work. Clearly, the News is not Good. This is an important point you would be wise to consider further. I can not emphasize it enough.
(Note: I am not talking about the regrettable fact that growth in populations and consumption on our finite planet will one day take our species down, and lots of other species with it. I am talking about run-of-the-mill quarterly or annual economic growth (or lack thereof) as people always discuss it.)
That said, there is an even deeper answer to the title question: the moral preferences of economists do not matter, unless the economists in question are bona fide members of some society's elite. Economists do not create policy; the elite sets policy through the vehicle of the political system. These policy-makers can always cherry-pick the economic literature to find rationalizations for what they want to do.
As I've gone to some pains to point out, such rationalizations always exist!
The Elite As Opportunistic Predators
Let us tie these conclusions to Morality And Human Nature as sketched out in the first section. We thus return to David Rose's opportunistic predators, we return to Boulding's "selfishness, or indifference to the welfare of others, as a knife edge between benevolence on the one side and malevolence on the other," and we return to the Coen Brothers' "this is what happens when you fuck a stranger in the ass!"
This is such familiar territory to some observers that it might be good to traverse it again with fresh eyes. When Barack Obama was elected in 2008, "liberal" (and even "progressive") Americans believed that a political miracle had occurred. After 30 years of steady deterioration, salvation was at hand.
Since human memories are short, perhaps it would be a good idea to watch the Grant Park acceptance speech which Obama gave on November 4, 2008 just after he was declared the winner.
A strong stomach is required.
Within weeks of his election, it became entirely clear to a few observers that Barack Obama did not represent the citizens of the United States. Following the appointments of Larry Summers as his chief economic adviser and Tim Geithner, who would protect the interests of the Big Banks, as his Treasury Secretary, among other moral atrocities, it became clear to these observers that Obama was in office to serve America's elite, not its people.
Five years later the Big Banks are making money hand over fist, the wealthy have gotten wealthier, thanks in large part to monetary stimulus (zero interest rates and quantitative easing) by the Federal Reserve, the wages of ordinary Americans have fallen since 2009, and so on. Despite growing GDP, there is no dearth of indicators demonstrating that tens of millions of Americans are worse off than they were when Obama took office. Obama occasionally pays lip service to "stronger" moral preferences for political purposes, but it is now impossible to take such talk seriously.
Even in crafting the "Obamacare" law, and justifying it with moral arguments, Obama and his fellow Democrats in Congress were very careful not to overly disrupt the self-serving, extremely profitable and often outrageous charging practices of America's private health care and insurance industries. The picture is somewhat worse for so-called financial "reform".
In short, Obama is not a Great Man, a breaker of molds, as so many hoped in 2008.
These observations are not born of politically left-wing or "progressive" paranoia. America's elite (a human social group) simply exists, as I discussed in Part I of this series. There is nothing at all surprising about this turn of events. We are trying to look at this stuff objectively as an anthropologist from exoplanet Kepler-62e might do.
Looking at this in terms of human social groups and the moral preferences of such groups, it is crucial to note the increasing social distance between America's elite and the beneificaries of the status quo on the one hand, and its disenfranchised citizens on the other.
All large complex human societies have an elite with shared moral preferences and common interests, but who makes up that elite and the moral preferences of that elite change over time. Indeed, that is precisely what happened in the United States over the course of my lifetime. That is precisely what happened between 1964 when Lyndon Johnson declared a War on Poverty, and January, 2014 when Congress failed to renew jobless benefits for millions of America's long-term unemployed.
One could argue endlessly about how and why this shift occurred, and people do, but for our purposes here it is enough to note that America's elite (and similarly its benficiaries) form an in-group and the rest of America's citizens form an out-group. Thus we find ourselves more and more in the danger zone (the red zone, lower left quadrant) of the "moral behavior space" I sketched out earlier in this essay.
As the distance between social groups grows, so does the tendency toward and opportunity for predatory "fuck a stranger in the ass" behavior among now-opposed groups. The predation is all one-sided, of course; it is the predation of the powerful upon the most vulnerable. The supreme irony is that we are all Americans, which apparently means nothing anymore. George Carlin put it more colorfully when he said (paraphrasing) that those people (America's elite, the benficiaries of the status quo) "don't give a fuck about you." And he was right. George also said "it's a Big Club, and you ain't in it." Right again.
Unfortunately, increasing social distance is not something one can easily quantify or otherwise demonstrate. However, it would be a grievous mistake to then conclude that this phenomenon does not exist. It most certainly does. The world inside Washington D.C.'s beltway (or on Wall Street) is very different from that of Omaha, Nebraska or Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. At this point the separation might as well demarcate different countries, a fact which has not gone unnoticed among those living in the hinterlands. It is no accident that the housing market in Washington D.C. was booming last year.
As other American cities have been buffeted by an uneven economy, Washington's property market has been buoyed by two forces specific to the capital city: a surge of federal contractors and a rising tide of government spending. The result: what real-estate agents and developers are calling an unprecedented real-estate surge...
Washington's economy—which was never hit as hard during the recession as other major U.S. cities—is flourishing. From 2007 through 2012, the local economy expanded 7.6%, compared with the nation's growth of 5.4%, according to economist Stephen Fuller of George Mason University. Federal procurement spending in the Washington area increased by 182% from 2000 through 2010, which has led to an influx of contractors, lawyers and consultants. Overall, the area saw a population increase of 776,280 between 2000 and 2010.
Several large companies have also moved their headquarters to the D.C. area over the past several years, including defense contractor Northrup Grumman, which moved from Los Angeles in 2011. Volkswagen Group of America relocated in 2008 from a suburb of Detroit. Bentley, also part of Volkswagen Group, moved from Boston in January, while Hilton, SAIC, and CSC have all moved recently from Southern California...
You get the idea. It's a different world, a world of money and power. It's no wonder that lots of Americans want to "emigrate" from the hinterlands to Washington D.C.
We're Not All In This Together
In 1964 when Lyndon Johnson declared a War on Poverty, there was a strong sense that Americans were one people, that we were "all in this thing together". Over the intervening 50 years, this sense of societal cohesion disappeared completely in the United States. Now America is one giant game of Survivor.
A professor of sociology named Shamus Kan—not an economist—actually made an argument based on the some of the insights of this essay. (He hadn't read this essay, of course, and I discovered Kan's piece after I had written it.) Kan's article is called We're Not All In This Together and appeared as a New York Times editorial on December 14, 2013.
Kan calls for a morally rejuvenated America, something he knows won't happen easily.
As a worldview, there’s something seductive in imagining that what’s good for me is good for everyone. Realizing my own advantage, then, doesn’t only feel good; it’s the moral thing to do.
But sadly there isn’t much evidence that greed is good.
Absolutely fucking right.
This leaves us with two lessons...
[ The first lesson is hopeless — Dave ]
The second lesson is harder. We are not in this together. We need to get back to what made America great, when the many and not the few were winning.
To do so we must stop conflating moral arguments with economic ones. Instead of operating under the fiction that we will all benefit from a proposed change in economic direction, let’s be honest. If a few of us are better off, then many are not. If many are better off, then the few will be constrained. Which world would you rather live in?
To me the answer is obvious.
As I arrive at the end of this essay, I feel I've said a lot of obvious things too, but I've tried to frame them in a way which is new to me and probably new to you. I can only hope you've gotten some insight into the moral catastrophe called the United States of America.
Thinking in terms of social groups and the moral preferences which arise therein, as opposed to merely expressing moral preferences, which is what most people do, allows us to put some distance between us and the situation we find ourselves in.
In my final essay along these lines, I will examine types of human societies. I will also examine the dubious proposition—
A society organized around self-interest alone will eventually create socially (morally) successful outcomes.
I concluded Part I of this series by saying It Is What It Is.
And unfortunately, if you're looking for "good" moral outcomes, it still is what it is
A question I've pondered from time to time is "How hard can you fuck a stranger in the ass?" The general American public is pretty good about taking a good pounding for a long time. By and large, we've been getting hammered hard since the late 70's/early 80's. Outside of some useless protests, acts of vandalism here and there, and lots and lots of talk, there's been very little action. I can't say I have a good answer to that question.
Posted by: Rob N. Banks | 01/30/2014 at 06:32 PM