Chapter 20. Greed

"People have always eaten people.

What else is there to eat?

If the Juju had meant us not to eat people,

He wouldn't have made us of meat."

So wrote Michael Flanders in his song, The Reluctant Cannibal (At the Drop of a Hat, by Flanders and Swann, Angel record no. 65042). Throughout history, and no doubt before that, those who have advanced their own welfare by profiting from the victimization of others have often sought to excuse the viciousness of their behavior by citing a supposed ``natural law'', not unlike the cannibal of Flanders' song, and today it is being adduced in support of the ``Global Economy''. It is hard to realize that this was offered in defense of slavery in America, of the extermination and expropriation of the indigens of North America (Manifest Destiny), of the Spanish-American War, etc.. More to the point of this book, it has been cited in the field of labor relations. It was said that the Iron Law of Wages is an inescapable consequence of The Way Things Are, and in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was frequently cited in support of the proposition that labor unions were immoral, and clearly contrary to God's Will, as manifested in this ``natural law''. [For a discussion of The Iron Law of Wages, see Appendix B.] I understand that there are still some who believe this, though they have been much quieter in the past half-century. Adam Smith was a great believer in the immutability of the principle which condemned the vast bulk of the population of his day to miserably long hours of toil for the merest of pittances. He acknowledged it as heart-rending, but proclaimed it as unavoidable, and to the best interests of all, in some larger sense.

The history of the past fifty years has clearly shown that in this Henry Ford was smarter than Adam Smith. He posited that his best interest would be served by an America in which ordinary working people would be able to buy his cars, and also believed that the same was true of every manufacturer. He was willing to pay his workers double the prevailing rate, and urged a similar strategy on other employers, but to little avail. It was not until the unions brought about the condition he had advocated that the truth of what he had maintained was proved. It is an irony that Ford opposed that union movement with all the force he could muster, amounting even to murder.

Today, as employers use the force of the army of desperately unemployed people to smash the unions and to lower wages and benefits, they again sing the siren song of natural law. They claim that they are forced by competition to pay the lowest wages possible, to deny health insurance, and even to oppose any increase in the minimum wage. Of course, if they were genuinely concerned for their workers, they would support compulsory health insurance and an increase in the minimum wage, for these would enable them to offer these benefits without suffering adverse competition. But we all understand that the underlying argument is not genuine, so discrediting it is meaningless.

The greatest example of this doctrine of natural law today is to be found in what is given the sanitized name of The Global Economy. This is also treated as an act of God, visited on us by the Laws of Nature. Actually, it is about as natural as slavery, cannibalism, theft, rape, and every other activity by which powerful people take what they want from those who cannot help themselves. The fact that those who can will frequently do it is the evidence offered that it is natural, and thus should bear no opprobrium. Actually, this ``Global Economy'' is an artifact of predatory employers who have taken it as a mechanism for utilizing labor in those parts of the world where unemployment is so severe that they can obtain workers for wages barely sufficient for survival. This labor is not slavery in the technical sense of actual chattel ownership, but it comes near enough to bear the onus. And just like Flanders' cannibal, the practitioners expect not only to escape criticism, but even to be admired. They present their predation as bringing employment to the poorest parts of the world. And just by accident, they find it, in the words of James Russell Lowell, ``prosperous to be just''.

I have coined the word exoslavery to describe this form of vicious exploitation. Although chattel slavery has been outlawed in most of the world for over a century and wage slavery is tempered in the United States by the Fair Labor Standards Act (and by similar legislation in most advanced countries), it is possible to escape the strictures of this advanced humanitarianism by carrying one's operations to places where wages are minimal, hours very oppressive, work conditions abyssmal and unions suppressed. That is, one can export the conditions of slavery or near-slavery to a foreign location where it is not illegal, while putting the blame on God or Nature.

Indeed, if these malefactors of great wealth had chosen to open factories in these downtrodden lands which would pay the same wages and have the same protections as labor in their own countries, we might well admire their altruism, but that is not the name of the game. The Global Economy is not a sharing of wealth, but simply a way to avoid the laws against economic rape which have been established these past fifty years in the industrialized world. [It is interesting to note that in many of these same underdeveloped countries, the laws protecting children from literal rape are absent, so that many of these same businessmen are buying other illicit pleasures there as well.]

This aspect of greed is part of a rhetorical constellation which today afflicts departments of Economics, masquerading under the name of ``rationality''. It is said to be irrational not to move one's factory to the source of the cheapest labor, and the resort to this alleged rationality is proclaimed to be, in some sense, a sacred duty. Thus, no matter how unpleasant the consequences, it is what one is compelled to do, and no blame can apply.

This perversion of the good name of reason is reflected in an amazing bit of trash which circulated among departments of Economics a few years ago. When I first heard of it, it was through my brother (at Northwestern University), my son (at Cornell) and my colleagues at the London School of Economics. It is so bizarre that I was certain that it was a hoax, and that no one actually believed it, but in each case I was assured that the proponents were in deadly earnest, and resented the implication that their attested belief was in fact a complicated joke. The matter concerned the tipping of waiters by diners such as travellers who expected never to eat in that place again. It avered that since the purpose of the tip is to secure good service, tipping in the present is a way of obtaining that in the future. If there is to be no future intercourse between that diner and that waiter, then the tipping is irrational and should not be undertaken. The fact that there is an understanding that the waiter is being paid for services already rendered is waved away by the fact that there is no explicit contract and that the diner is legally (and thus arguably morally) permitted to escape payment. However, all concede that they do not put the waiter on notice of their understanding, leaving him * to the belief that he * will be tipped in proportion to the perceived value of the service rendered.

The interesting thing about this phenomenon is that the argument can be seen as a reductio ad absurdum of the argument of self-serving rationality. As such, one would expect it to be swept under the rug by the argument's proponents. Instead, presumably on the theory that offense is the best defense, they press it stridently. Since it cannot be imagined that these people are really eager to pocket the small sums of money they would save, and since I have my doubts in any case that they actually submit themselves to the stress of carrying out their program, I take the exercise to be more hortatory than practical. But I am assured that they do maintain the position with fervor, so that it clearly means something to them. Rationality, indeed!

Chapter 21. Free trade.

Among the idols being worshiped in the pantheon of greed, the doctrines of ``free trade'' and ``free labor'' stand out. It is a bad joke that the model of free labor is slavery, punning on the two uses of the word ``free''. But it is in this very fact, mentioned earlier, that the Global Economy is a mechanism for recreating a world bound by Ricardo's Iron Law of Wages, that a valid analysis of the new meanings of ``free trade'' are to be found.

For those whose admiration of Adam Smith projects into our own time and serves as a basis for their advocating what he wrote, there are important data to consider. In Smith's time, every country was bound by this cruel law. In fact, slavery was then openly practiced in the whole of the British Empire, and was not condemned in his Wealth of Nations. Indeed, a century later, Stephen Douglass, in debate with Lincoln, pointed out that in many cases the conditions of hired labor, which could be worked to death without economic loss to the employer, could be worse than that of chattel slaves. In purely economic terms, it might have been hard to draw the line of favor between the lives then of Welsh coal miners and those of the slaves of Mississippi. After the Civil War, many of the freedmen * found themselves faced with the possibility of death from starvation, a fate they rarely encountered during their years of servitude. [This does not in any way detract from the fact that the near-universal opinion of these people was that they would not trade the one condition for the other.] Smith lived in a world in which death from starvation was a commonplace in every developing capitalist country, and many others as well. It was a context in which his opinions made much more sense than they do today.

In addition, Wealth of Nations precedes both the American and French revolutions. The measure of what recourses were available to the downtrodden did not seem to him to include overthrowing their tormenters and cutting off their heads. More to the point, there was no reason for Smith to imagine that a program of prosperity for working people could enrich the rich. Smith would certainly have believed the exact opposite. And today's desperately poor have at their disposal mechanisms of predation of their own, mechanisms which can impoverish the lives of the proprietor classes. All of this argues against a world in which it is profitable for the rich to impose desperate poverty on the people among whom they live.

I have no problem with applying Smith's analysis to the trade among more or less equal contenders in the world marketplace. It is easy to believe that the exchange of goods between, say, the United States and France can be to the advantage of both, in exactly the way that Smith expostulates. Even Britain, with its somewhat lower standard of living, is an acceptable trading partner. But I do not accept the slogan of Free Trade as a means of putting the genuinely liberated working classes of the developed world into direct competition with the quasi-slaves of Thailand, Malaysia, or India. We can buy the shirts they make, but what will they buy which is produced in the United States? Even management services are beginning to be bought from Asia, imported by satellite communications from offices in Bombay. These people do not buy many Chevrolets manufactured in Detroit, and even their purchases of jetliners from Boeing are increasingly contingent on a substantial degree of participation in the production process.

I advocate that the price of entry into a Global Economy by the poorest nations of the world should be the adoption of standards of wages, benefits, and conditions of employment comparable with those of North America, Europe, the Antipodes, and Japan. That would bring them into the market with the ability to buy goods of our manufacture. The present arrangement makes them merely a source of cheap, nearly free, labor.

Chapter 22. Economists

At this point, I run into a serious methodological problem. It concerns the economists. They are as a group very intelligent, and most are people of integrity and compassion. Yet their pronouncements in the areas which I have been discussing have mostly been in directions quite opposite to what I have written here. I feel I must answer their criticisms in advance or face the fate of being ruled out of the discourse. Of course, the simple position is that they are right and I am wrong, and I have no doubt that I will be subject to much criticism of that coloration. And I have given much attention to that possibility. I am, after all, an amateur on their turf, and my sources of information do not rise above college courses from nearly fifty years ago and what I remember from mostly periodical literature in the intervening time. However, I have always had a great semi-professional interest in Economics and Scoiology, which I catered to during the years when I was Professor of Mathematics at the London School of Economics. Nonetheless, it is their turf. So I give them the deference their expertise commands, but I cannot convince myself that their analysis is more reliable than my own. I continue to believe that what I say is right by such a margin as would allow substantial errors in the data without being invalidated. So I will put aside that explanation and wait for the professionals to make that case against me.

However, it seems to me that in answer to the nearly universal rejection of my thesis by economists of nearly every political persuasion, including those with whom I imagine I share many fundamental beliefs, I need to say why I do not give their expertise the deference they say is due. It is not really what this book is about, but I am eager that readers should not dismiss my arguments simply because the professionals disagree with them.

Economists have risen and fallen in the estimation of the ``practical people'' of business over the decades according as whether their analyses indicated policies which those people wished to see pursued. About a century ago, when many economists were also sociologists (e.g. Karl Marx and Thorstein Veblen), they put much emphasis on the ills which capitalism had inflicted on society. They were dismissed as cranks, but when the system of unrestricted monopoly capitalism collapsed in 1929, their theories gained more support and became, to one degree or another, underpinnings of the various forms of national planning which swept the industrial world in the middle third of this century, notably Socialism, Fascism, and Keynesianism. The teachings of Adam Smith were laid aside as discredited by the disaster which had crippled the world for a decade. However, the ``practical people'' never lost their affection for a world in which they were freer to prey upon the weak.

The mid-century brought a period in which Science began to be revered as a possible savior of the world from the curses of poverty and disease, and many subjects sought the status then being accorded to Physics, which claimed to hold the keys to unlimited quantities of power, both military and electric. Examples are Political Science, Military Science, and Domestic Science. Psychology disdained the status of a healing art, and demanded recognition as a science, History sprouted Cliometrics, etc.. And the economists also sought to break the historic link with Sociology, denouncing its researches as ``mere journalism'' and claiming status as the peer of Physics and Chemistry.

One of the chief figures in this transformation was John von Neumann, one of the most brilliant mathematicians of the mid-century. In his book THE THEORY OF GAMES AND ECONOMIC BEHAVIOR with Oskar Morgenstern (Princeton U Press, 1944), he attempted to bring the study of economic phenomena under the kind of analysis which Isaac Newton had brought to Physics. The work, and the theories which have sprung from it, have been magnificent in the quality of their analyses and admirable as examples of deductive thinking, but they omitted the fundamental basis which underlay the work of Newton and his followers: they were unable to submit their theories to the discipline of experiment.

It is in the nature of Economics that all its theories are subject to the human factor, and that every experiment, if it does not go as expected, can be alibied by the fact that either the theory was not implemented to the full or that an incalculable datum (drought, war, election) intervened to render the outcome meaningless. Thus, the acolytes of Adam Smith allege that the cycles of boom and bust in the 19th century, leading to the Great Depression, were not a disproof of his theory, because his theory had never been fully tried. The same comment applies to socialists who reject the argument that the failure of the Soviet Union was a refutation of Marx's theories, or even of Lenin's. The Keynsians argue that the New Deal was undercut by the Nine Old Men who nullified the National Recovey Act, and even the fascists can claim that their nostrum would have succeeded but for the military idiocy of Hitler and Mussolini. And today the advocates of ``shock therapy'' in Eastern Europe do not admit that it failed because they allege it was never really tried.

Nations, peoples, tribes cannot be experimented with as Galileo dropped cannonballs from Pisa's tower. Thus economic theory always depends on its own intrinsic plausibility, and little more. In this, it is more like Aristotelian physics than Newtonian. The results are always implicit in the assumptions, and we have only the most meager of observations to underpin our axioms. In particular, the assumption of universal greedy behavior is included as an axiom of both Smith and von Neumann not because it is an observed feature of human conduct (It is not.), but because no other assumption will lend itself to quantitative analysis. Even in the more subtle Utility Theory of von Neumann, there is no way to account reliably for altruism, pity, joy or the anticipation of reward in Heaven. (Cf. Pascal's Wager.) By this standard, our theory of Economics should also postulate universal cannibalism, rape, robbery, and every other form of predation.

Still, the longing of economists to be ranked among the scientists was great enough that modern theories based on the classicists are embraced even by those who find their consequences hateful. (They call themselves neo-classicists; I call them neo-Victorians. I forbear to call them Dickensians.) When, in the last forty years, they came up with a theory which, like Smith's,put the imprimatur of inevitability on the policies most favorable to the ambitions of the rich, the disdain of businesspeople melted and the ``scientific'' outlook became the qualifying study which fitted students to enter graduate business schools and also to be equipped there to enter the management suites of the corporations run by those same businessfolk.

The consequences for the practitioners of Economics of this viewpoint has been magnificent. First and foremost was the flow of support for their research efforts and their schools and departments. Then there was the demand for their services, as had been the case for physicists, chemists, and mathematicians in the 1960s, leading to a plentitude of positions and higher salaries. Finally, there was even the purchase by the Central Bank of Sweden of a ``Nobel Memorial Prize'', designed to be mistaken for a Nobel Prize (as it has been) and to admit the likes of Milton Friedman into the apparent company of Einstein and Pauling. It is a heady concoction, and one which dictates to its recipients a community norm which requires them to support its validity. (See Chapter 41, The courtiers.)

I would not wish to be misunderstood as denigrating the value of this study of deductive Economics. It is one of the most interesting and most demanding of the mathematical sciences, and I have been an enthusiastic participant for many years in some aspects of Game Theory and the Theory of Social Choice. But it is only a pale reflection of economic reality, even paler than what we find in theoretical Physics and Chemistry. It should be studied and from time to time casts a weak light on what we see in the world (as e.g. the light which Game Theory sheds on The Iron Law of Wages in Appendix B), but we should not become so bemused that we forget that the theorems are, as in Mathematics, merely a distillation of what we ourselves put into the axioms.

I think the economists know this, for one of them has made an extraordinary career out of studying how actual people play actual games. He has been generously supported, though the direct consequences of his findings are meager, in the light of the broader scope of Economics. However, it seems to me that the economists have been so pleased to be able to add any form of experiment to their discipline that they have been open-handed with financial support for him, even in a time of constrained resources for research.

An example of the failure of deductive economic theory is perhaps the best-known example of quantitative economics, the setting of prices. This supposedly occurs at the intersection of the supply and demand curves, and this ``theorem'' is the nearest we come to something like the Law of Universal Gravitation. It would be magnificent if knowledge of these two curves would lead us to learn what the price should be, but that does not happen. Instead of having the known shed light on the unknown, what we know are the actual prices; the curves are conjectured based on these, and the conjectures, where they are made, are often wrong. So the theory is based again, in true Aristotelian style, on its own plausibility. And plausibility, as von Neumann well knew, is often a hiding place for error.

The weakness in mathematical economics lies not in the analysis of the models, which is excellent, but in the nature of the models themselves. They are full of ``simplifying assumptions'', without which analysis would be swamped by cataracts of details. A parody of this is the supposed economist who starts his analysis with the simplification that all people are spherical. The consequences of such an assumption (as in calculations concerning dispersal of bodily heat) might be interesting, but must eventually be connected with the test of reality. Since we have good reason to believe that economic reality is chaotic, in the technical sense, that is, that large changes in outcome can be generated by small differences in initial conditions, we must be skeptical of placing too much reliance on the results of the calculations.

A parable which is appealed to by both sides of this argument is that of the drunk searching for his lost key under the street light. When asked, he says that he actually lost the key in the next block, but that the light there is too poor to find anything. Looking under the lamp might turn up something of value, but it is highly unlikely to open his door. We should always look where there is some light, and value whatever we find, but it is a chutzpah to allege that it is what we were seeking unless we have good evidence for that, especially where the lives and welfare of people are involved.

One of the seamier aspects of this particular hubris of the mathematical economists is their evident contempt for the practitioners of the other social sciences. Sociology, Politics, Anthropology and History are dismissed as ``mere journalism'', and those economists, like Galbraith, who mix their quantitative analyses with concern over social problems are scorned as ``unscientific''. Thus, the same people who chafe under the unwillingness of physicists and chemists to recognize them as equals are also the practitioners of their own brand of snobism.

If I illustrate how a support of the economic theories of, e.g., Milton Friedman and Jeffrey Sachs enhance the finances of those who do it, I am sure they will allege that I am overstepping the bounds of credibility. Yet how should we measure the protestations of those whose message in the classroom is that only self-interest is a reliable guide to people's behavior and that the claims of those who would rely on altruism as a motivation in economic life are childishly naive? Public spirit, they tell us, can never stand up to the profit motive in determining what people will do. Perhaps the same is true of what people say? Even economists?

As a result of the demand for business-school graduates by employers, and of classically-trained economics majors by the business schools, there has been the kind of demand by universities for economists which parallels the need for mathematicians and physicists during the years when the national task was to get Neil Armstrong to the Moon and back. It is not desired that those economists teach that the ``automatic'' operation of the economy by the unseen hand of the market produced escalating disasters during the century (roughly from 1830 to 1930) when it was free to work its supposed magic. The business cycle is still taught as a mystery, and today's students are not introduced to the analysis of Marx. This is because the official position in our colleges, as in our newspapers, is that the validity of Marx's analysis of capitalism is somehow rendered false by the corruption which has always existed in Russia and was not ended by the Bolshevik regime. [We can read all about it in Tolstoy, Gogol, Chekhov, and Gorki.] Our economists lay claim to the status of scientists, but are apparently immune to the evidence of experiment. The legacy of unplanned capitalism produced the Great Depression, which was the greatest worldwide economic disaster since the Year Without A Summer. This last was a natural disaster, not amenable to human correction. But economic planning, when not distorted by greed, has for the most part succeeded in averting another Great Depression. Now, however, large numbers of economists, marching in the army of Milton Friedman and his acolytes, tell us that Adam Smith was right, and that the key to prosperity lies in restoring the economic conditions of Victorian England. Dickens tells us otherwise.

Let me say that it is true that the 19th Century was a period of great economic growth, but I attribute that to the growth of knowledge, and not to the magic of the market. Indeed, the market was an impediment to growth, and only on the most outrageous terms was invention to find investment there. Even when Edison had already established a reputation as a genius, he could only get financial support for electric lighting by turning over to J. P. Morgan and his junior partners the vast majority of ownership and control in the Edison General Electric Corporation, and after it was successful, the jackals managed to do him out of his share in it. But the advance of knowledge was so great that not even the excesses of capitalist greed were able to hinder its bounty, up until the Great Crash. And it must be said that the New Regime of the capitalists in the 19th Century was more efficient than the Old Regime of the 18th. But the half century of prosperity since 1945 has been heavily dependent on central planning. Even the Friedmanites say that some nationwide planning is necessary, but they allege that all we need can be had in manipulation of the interest rates. Again, experiment has proven them wrong, but the belief sustains itself on the basis of mere argument. The official line in the economics departments is that it was the Free Market which produced the wonders, and it was government which was the impediment. For this, they have no evidence, except insofar as government has been permeable to the corrupt demands for unwarranted favor from powerful agents of well-heeled interests.

In contradistinction to the experience of panics and collapses of the unregulated market, we have the 250-year-old theory of market economics, a theory which is plainly inapplicable to a world in which gigantic corporations do indeed plan the economy, and plan it to their own best interests. There is nothing in Adam Smith which supports the belief that this, too, will be for the best of everybody. But it is taught that way because it suits the needs of those who use our complaisance to maximize their profits. And a diligent attention to the equations by those who proclaim (and hope) that they describe the Economy will yield a comfortable living to most, and the honor of an imitation Nobel Prize to the leaders of the pack.

As illustration of the deleterious effect of the ``free'' market on the advance of knowledge and invention, I offer two instances I know of. The first is Brunel and the Great Western Railway in Britain. He correctly observed that the gauge of British trains (about 4' 8", inherited from the Roman chariots) was inferior in terms of passenger comfort and safety at high speed to a much wider one. The Great Western gauge was just over 7' . The trains ran better and safer, but the political and economic power of the established railroad companies defeated him. He was forced to accept their obsolete standard, and the investment in superior technology was not made. Today, Britain still runs on the gauge which was obsolete over a century ago, and it continues to hamper the development of adequate rail service there. In America after 1945, the Tucker Motor Car was a substantial technological advance over what was being offered by the established companies. As with the railroads in the previous example, those companies were able to use their economic and political power to drive their superior competitor out of business.

As an outstanding example of the complicity of the economists in the misinformation of the voting public, let me remind the reader of a laughable incident which goes by the name of the Laffer Curve. During the presidential campaign of 1980, Arthur Laffer, an economist, observed to Ronald Reagan that the amount of income tax the government could expect is a function of the rate of taxation. He observed that if the rate were 0 % or 100 %, the revenue was 0, and between these two, there was a curve (he drew one on a napkin) showing the amount of tax that he said would be paid. The curve he drew showed a maximum below the 50 % rate, and thus he persuaded the anarithmetic Mr. Reagan, who was more than willing to believe it, that cutting the rate of income tax, particularly for the rich, would increase the amount of tax collected. The whole incident was farcically ridiculous, for anyone with any competence in economics or even just Calculus, but it was introduced seriously into the campaign by the seemingly feckless Mr.Reagan. He even maintained that he would be able to finance his projected increase in the cost of the armed services out of the additional revenues the tax cut would produce. I remember asking some of my economist friends why it was that this scam, which was uniformly derided by all mathematicians of my acquaintance, was not publicly denounced by every economist jealous of his * subject's integrity. I was then answered that economics is not an exact science, and that no one could reputably declare that Laffer was disreputable. It is not what they say of themselves when they are today declaring ex cathedra that free trade is the only alternative to poverty for the advanced nations of the world.

I call upon my colleagues to think again. We can plan our economies better than the invisible hand can do it. We are not bound by the laws of nature to a system which wastes so much of our industrial capacity and most of our labor, which decrees that a minority will work too much and most will not work at all. We can devise solutions, and even devise so that most of the solutions will work. We need to yoke our intelligences to that task, but we will not do so while we are ourselves constrained by an ideology which is tailored to the greed of the rich.

In the propaganda of this day, we hear that co-operation and public purpose can only be had at the price of Gulags and Russian-style corruption. Merely to state it baldly is to expose its falsity. We can build a better world, if we set our minds to it. But the madness of free private enterprise must be evident as the United States struggles to climb out of a mini-Depression while the rich grow richer and the working classes slip toward proletarian misery. That is the price of our accommodation with those who use our support of this doctrine to secure public compliance with their projects.

Chapter 23. Tuberculosis.

I said in Chapter 1 that I would limit myself to economic matters, and eschew arguments to externalities. Yet there are some external considerations which also reach to economic considerations. Certainly at least some of the issues of health are in this category. One of these is the impending epidemic of tuberculosis. This disease, which has haunted the human race from almost as early as we have bones to examine, is now looming again on the horizon. Its reappearance is due to causes which are only partially understood, but we can make out the shape of a large part. Some twenty years ago, TB was more or less considered a conquered disease. There were antibiotics which would attack the mycobacterium tuberculosis, the pathogen which produces the illness. Then, as time passed, some strains of the mycobacterium began to appear with a degree of resistance to the drugs then in use. A therapy was devised which would make use of a cocktail of what we had, and that worked for a while. Then came Reagan.

The parsimonies of the 1980s resulted in a huge increase of the homeless people who live in our streets, our bus stations, in culverts, under bridges, in doorways, wherever shelter could be found. These were the jobless, the drug addicts, the runaways, but they were augmented by the chronically mentally ill, who were being turned out of mental hospitals to spare the taxes of the rich. It is a constant of history that these undernourished and hypothermic populations are the ones most vulnerable to TB. When they showed up at public hospitals, they were given the most advanced drugs available, and many of them became walking breeding grounds for resistant strains of the disease. They took the drugs, not for the whole six months which was needed, but only until they felt well enough not to bother any more. And in many cases, the disease was still in force, though quiescent, and the partially resistant bugs could reproduce and mutate further, developing in the direction of drug resistance.

It is now expected that the process is continuing, that there is no way within our current legal and governmental structure to hinder it, and that every destitute patient we treat becomes a potential hothouse for the breeding of drug-resistant strains of the disease. I know of no one who thinks it avoidable. The rich and the middle classes look the other way, imagining that this is a problem for Them, for the underclass. And indeed, that is where it lodges for the most part, for the nonce. But the history of the 18th and 19th centuries tells us that the White Death manages to cross class lines, especially in an age of public transport, elevators, and crowded streets. Somehow, like the Red Death in Poe's story of that name, it creeps into even well-defended fortresses. And in addition to the suffering, the cost in dollars will be enormous.

One thing that might have helped to prevent the coming catastrophe would be if we had understood that the proletarianization of the working classes would bring back plagues of this kind. That knowledge was there to be had, if anyone were interested in knowing it. It is easy to blame the lack of knowledge on the incapacities of Ronald Reagan's mind, but he had counselors who were as bright as anyone had to be to perceive this, and they, like he, were blinded by their greed. But in addition to the fragility of the homeless and the mentally ill, there is also the lack of weaponry on the part of medical science at the time when subtle intervention was needed.

Since the discovery of penicillin at midCentury, we have been hunting in all sorts of places for evidence of new antibiotics. And we have found many, but we are not yet in a position to actually manufacture them out of whole cloth. As a metaphor, we are in the position of early stone age people who knew to search for stones of certain shapes and sizes, but had not yet learned to chip flint to specified useful shapes. We are still looking to find our antibiotics. We do not understand the microbiology of the pathogens, the physiology of ourselves, or the chemistry of protein synthesis to the point where we can keep a jump ahead of the germs by creating drugs faster than they can adapt to them.

For the most part (though this is also changing), our political leaders have been willing to finance research which was directed at particular diseases, so long as the diseases were at least fairly widespread, the researchers major figures, and the prospects of early success so apparent that even persons of average intelligence might understand the benefits to be expected. But when the connection between the research and the desired end was problematic, or even not to be anticipated by the researchers themselves, the fear of disease and death fell away as a motivation for the appropriation of money for study. This is very short-sighted, as we will see in the next chapter. It is hard to make even the most esoteric argument that the study of Piers Plowman can have any effect on the search for a strategy to defeat tuberculosis, but in fact it is only a few orders of magnitude less likely than some of the bits of knowledge which have come to have meaning in the struggle against disease and death.

I think it likely that the increase in the cost of the TB epidemic due to the parsimony of public funding of research in the past twenty-five years will exceed many time the cost of the research not done, even the cost of all the research foregone in this quarter-century. And that does not even count the loss in blood and tears.

Chapter 24. Health.

The past twenty-five years have seen enormous strides in the field of health, most especially in its technology. By this I mean not only such machinery as CAT scans, heart-lung machines, and pacemakers, but also advanced procedures like transplants, angioplasties, lithotripy, and thousands of new drugs. And every time I hear tell of a new wonder, I seethe over my perception that there could have been more, if only the knowledge machine had not been throttled back after Apollo XI. Of course, it is not possible to know what specifically would have been learned. To know that is to know already what is true. To say that we are seeking a cure for cancer is merely a cliche, while the conjecture that a specific gene will produce a protein that will shut down a breast cancer relies on knowledge which is already almost the whole way to the establishment of the fact.

In fairness, I must agree that in the case where the road to the full discovery can be foreseen, the United States and the whole world have in general been fairly open-handed in appropriating money to attempt to finish the job. It is in the cases where knowledge is sought which cannot be foreseen as helpful that the crunch comes. There, the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake must be relied upon to produce results, most of which do not result in economic or even health gains. I have a few anecdotes in that direction to make this point. And the value of those few cases is so strong that ... . But I repeat myself. Let me tell you the stories.

In the 1940s, a farmer came to the laboratory of Prof. Karl Paul Link of the University of Wisconsin. His cows had been dying of a mysterious malaise, which no one could diagnose. It was already conjectured that this syndrome (which other farmers had also noted) was somehow connected with the use of sweet clover as part of the silage. But no one knew how. Prof. Link took up the challenge, and discovered that the cows in question had a deficiency in their blood which impeded the functioning of the clotting mechanism. Further research showed that the deleterious effects of the tainted silage could be offset by feeding the cows a diet rich in Vitamin K. Case closed. A boon to the dairy agriculture sector so vital to the economy of the State of Wisconsin. But Prof. Link was a product of the knowledge culture, and he wanted to pursue the matter and find out what it was in the silage which produced the bleeding. He isolated a compound called dicoumerol, and showed that animals which ate it had thin blood which resisted clotting. He produced a variant of this material, which was more reliable and dependable in its effect, and called it Warfarin in honor of WARF, the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, which sponsored research at that university, and conjectured that it would be possible, and profitable, to use it to give sweet clover disease to animal pests. Under various trade names, it contributed to the easing of famine in much of the world by reducing the amount of food lost to vermin, in particular rats and mice.

However, the story does not end there. Eventually, medical researchers decided that perhaps carefully controlled doses of Warfarin could be used to thin the blood of cardiac patients, especially in the critical six months following a heart attack or cardiac surgery. Further testing made this credible and many people, including two presidents and myself, were eventually to be given this treatment. No one can say which of these, or exactly how many, were saved from death by this therapy. What is important is that the basic step was not taken in a hospital laboratory by cardiac researchers, but by a biochemist following a line of research which would never have been funded by the National Institutes of Health.

If the link between biochemistry and medicine is fairly clear, we can look at the CAT scan and the MRI. The development of computer technology was undertaken in connection with rocket flight, both of weapons and the Race to the Moon. It was not imagined that a significant outcome of the research would be the possibility of producing enhanced x-ray pictures by use of what forty years ago would have been considered unachievable computing feats. The CAT scan was a byproduct of the computer which would, in this application alone, have justified the billions of dollars which that technology cost. But there is no way that any medical foundation would have considered the expenditure of even mere millions in computer research as justified. It was not thought of as medical research.

An even more striking example is to be found in the MRI. At the end of the 1930s, Prof. I. I. Rabi of Columbia University came upon a phenomenon he called nuclear magnetic resonance. Subjecting materials to a strong oscillating magnetic field would cause them to resonate, and different materials resonated in different ways. No one imagined that this could be connected in any way with medicine or health. But it was interesting stuff, and its study was pursued, when time and funding could be found for it. Those were the days when Physics was done ``with sealing-wax and string'', as a kind of intellectual enterprise by the univerities. Nearly half a century later, after the CAT scans had been made to work by nearly infinite computer effort, a similar technology was able to separate the tiny resonances of different materials in the same body to identify what was going on inside an object such as a patient's body. It was a blessing which saved untold expenditure in exploratory operations, not to mention the suffering it averted. More significantly, it was able to discover things which no x-ray or operation would have reached, such as the edema in the marrow of my femur which was causing me pain in my knee. Such edemas had never been known of prior to the MRI. (Unfortunately, it was a newly-discovered malady for which no treatment had yet been devised and I had to get well on my own.) Now I have recently learned that other research in Physics has had a startling impact on medical technology. One isotope of Helium has only one neutron in the nucleus instead of the usual two. In ordinary helium, the spins of the neutrons and those of the protons balance, and the material is magnetically neutral. But the isotope 3He is capable of being detected, since nuclear magnetic resonance is based on detecting the effect of reversals of spin. To be detected, a body of 3He must have a predominance of one spin over the other, and this is achieved by a process called ``polarization''. A polarized body of 3He can be ``seen'' by the MRI. This means that a lung which has a quantity of polarized 3He can be accurately mapped in a way that no x-ray and no unassisted MRI can accomplish. The lung tissue itself is just too light and sparse to show up with either of those technologies.

The ability to ``see'' a lung inside an intact body has great possible implications for the impending TB epidemic. Its value will be enormous. Yet no one in the 1930s, or even the 1960s, would have had the chutzpah to seek funding for magnetic resonance research from medical sources on that basis. Even in the 1980s, research on polarized 3He was not supported on that basis. But in those years, the U. S. government was planning to build a superconducting supercollider (SSC) to investigate properties of matter beyond the reach of the machinery then available. Eventually the project was abandoned because its cost (almost one billion dollars a year for over eleven years) was considered exorbitant. Yet it is clear that if it were to contribute in any significant way to the effort to defeat TB, it would have been a wild bargain. Was there any prospect of its doing that? Not that anyone could foresee, but I have just shown some wonderful results in the field of health that arose from knowledge that no one would have thought to be health-related. And the similarity of polarized 3He to the kind of research which would have flowed from the SSC is not a very great stretch for the imagination.

One can understand how the brand of selfishness which our economists teach us is the engine of progress might lead our legislators and executives to eschew the kind of educational effort which would raise more of the underclasses into highly productive lives. It is a cloddish and short-sighted policy, but one which accords easily with ordinary human grossness. The privileged know that if they cut the expenditures on public education, their own children will still go to good private schools and universities, possibly even thereby gaining an advantage over intelligent poor children who might otherwise outshine them. And an absence of a national health service will not prevent them from getting the best medical care to be had in the world, for which they can pay either directly or through expensive insurances. But they cannot buy knowledge when they need it. It must be bought well in advance. And that is why they have always been ready to pay, and pay well, for what they can recognize as medical research. But apparently our legislators and presidents, even the smart ones, are not so smart that they can take the long view on what medical science will require from even Physics, Chemistry, and Biology, to mention nothing of Mathematics, Psychology, Sociology, or even Economics. And to suggest that there is wisdom to be found in Literature, Music, or Sculpture which will be significant in relieving the curse of death, disease, and pain is to be classed as a complete fool.

So we are stuck, in the field of health, with what a Senator or a President can foresee, and since even the Physicists and Chemists cannot say with any degree of certainty what their work will bring forth, we must suffer the loss of this vital knowledge. As a very wild guess, I have assumed that the slow-down of basic research during the past twenty-five years has cost us at least half of what we could have produced at full throttle, such as we knew it in the 1960s. And thus, when I see new things coming forth, my gorge rises and I ask after the rest of it, the lost knowledge which could already have been saving lives.

A final note is called for here. In early 1996, the conservative House of Representatives actually voted a severe cut in the budget for the National Institutes of Health as part of their passion for a balanced budget. They were so committed to their ideology that they were even, implicitly, willing to lay down their lives, and the lives of their loved ones for it. But self-interest prevailed, within their limited horizons, and direct medical research was restored. The deep scholarship and invention which might underpin and accelerate it, however, was in fact cut.

Chapter 25. Waste.

As intelligence, and especially educated intelligence, is our greatest resource, so its expenditure in directions which are of provably zero or minor benefit to the human race generally is to be deplored and, where possible, discouraged. There are several such places. One of them is in the markets for commercial assets, particularly stocks, futures, and other place-holders for economic assets.

The stock market is an important feature of the system of capital we rely upon for funding our industries and other enterprises. It is important that the holders of these instruments be able to buy and sell them as their values, realized or anticipated, change. However, there is no particular value to the public generally, or even to the market for capital, that it should be profitable for people to make money on minor fluctuations in the value of particular shares. The market for homes, e.g., is in large part dependent on a certain underlying liquidity, but the fact that it usually takes weeks or months to sell a house, and that a few percent of the price must be devoted to the costs of doing it does not materially detract from the value of the home, even when seen as an investment. Indeed, if it were so fluid that the market for homes were to be as volatile as the market for securities, there might well be fewer people willing to risk the losses in order to obtain housing.

At the present time, we see a large number of bright young people who are making a good living in the trading of securities, and an even larger number who are training for that career. In a world in which the more traditional forms of scholarship are offering only very unreliable careers, the demand for training in these specialities is overwhelming the universities. At the same time, the amount of mathematical talent which is being devoted to the science of portfolio management is prodigious. Much of this work is addressed to the question of realizing quick gains from small fluctuations in the prices of specific stocks, rather than canny estimates of the long-run prospects of particular issues. Indeed, if there is one word which increasingly describes the sickness of western capitalism, it is ``short-run''.

A tax of a few percent on all transactions in securities, including all contracts for future purchase and sale which rely on the courts for their enforcement, would greatly slow down the velocity of trading, and especially that trading which is predicated upon small fluctuations in prices. Recent trading in the stock markets of the world is far more volatile than any basic appraisal of long-term outlook would warrant. Large moves in prices based on estimates of changes in the prime interest rates of a fraction of 1 % are an extreme case. The same comments apply somewhat less to the market in bonds, but more to the market in commodities futures.

A more sober market, less attractive for gambling, would be more useful in promoting the productive functions which are always adduced for maintaining a free market in securities. Of course, the volume of trading would diminish greatly, stocks would cease to be a place for holding money in the short run, and the need for talented and well-educated people in what amounts to a huge gambling house would be lessened. It might be argued that the loss of this non-productive labor would exacerbate the slackness of the employment situation, but it should not be beyond the ingenuity of such a creative people as ourselves to find a way for these talented workers to be paid for doing something of genuine value.

In the same way, there are problems being solved in our courts which should and could be settled in other, more productive, ways. An example is the burden of litigation which has overtaken the system of worker's compensation, a system which was explicitly designed to ease the lawsuits which bloomed once the courts decided that employers were indeed liable for accidents on the job which were due to the negligence of (among other things) the slackness of fellow workers. Now, in recent times, the question of what injuries are work-related is eating up the benefit gained. I have suggested to union people and to labor lawyers that a system which would extend accident coverage to workers when they were not on the job would save those costs to be distributed between labor and capital. The benefit would have a value to the workers which would be beyond the saving to the employer, and the difference would be available for distribution between them. In many industries, the additional premium would be zero, according to my sources. But the biggest saving would be in the use of intelligent, educated people who are working at doing a job whose value is less than zero. A similar comment applies to medical malpractice. If all persons who were made sicker or more disabled by medical treatment could be compensated without fault and within limited constraints (e.g. medical expenses and loss of earnings up to a stipulated limit), it would cost somewhat more in total outlay, but it would also pay something to the vast majority of those injured, who never claim for damages. A specified legal definition of the value of a life, an eye, a limb, etc., as we do in death and dismemberment insurance, would obviate the need for high-priced lawyers to emote in front of juries. Those whose lives or body parts were more valuable than that would need to bear the cost of obtaining their own insurance, as is often the case (e.g. the hands of successful musicians).

But these examples are as nothing compared to the cases in which people do work which is genuinely antisocial, as in the advertising of tobacco products or the obfuscating of the cost of consumer credit, or the managing of assets to produce not a productive profit but a tax advantage. Cases abound in which the purchase of certain assets produces more tax relief in the first year alone than the cost of the asset. This is misdescribed as accounting, but a huge proportion of our CPAs are engaged in this kind of tax fiddling. The restructuring of our tax laws to salvage the intelligence of our people could add to the profits to the human race of more innovation and creativity.

However, if the effect of changing these practices were merely to add the intelligent to the rolls of the unemployed, that would hardly be a benefit. As labor is only saved if useful employment can be found, so is it true for the minds liberated by simplifying our world. How shall we weigh the value of a person investigating even an obscure and esoteric iota of knowledge compared with his * expending that time and effort on reacting to the effect on the stock market of a .25% decrease in the prime interest rate? For me, the answer is simple.

In his 1963 book, THE PAPER ECONOMY, David T. Bazelon argued that we are deceived in equating the economy of goods and services with the economy of paper. By goods and services he includes automobiles, restaurant dinners, haricuts, medical attention, etc.. By paper, he includes currency, checks, deeds, stocks, bonds, leases, bank accounts, etc.. The existence of the paper economy is justified as a necessary control mechanism for the economy of goods and services. However, he argues that the needs of paper have become over-reaching, and are distorting the best use of the resources which should be put to the more central concern. In sum, he concludes that the paper economy is parasitic and insufficiently productive for the resources of time and money which it now consumes. To this comment, I add that the overuse of the limited endowment of intelligence and education by this economy is even more wasteful. Given the amount of money which is involved, and the riches to be drawn from basically unproductive profit-seeking from episodic volatility, only a taxing of the enterprise can restrain it within reasonable bounds. A similar argument applies to the other wasteful abuses of this resource.

Chapter 26. The common.

The concept of public domain, like that of common property, is one which needs investigation here. Who owns the common? In one formulation, it consists of things which are free for the taking, by whoever has the means of taking. In another, it belongs to all, and all are entitled to a share of the bounty which may flow from its use. Thus, it is not generally held that one is entitled to fence in public land and build a house upon it, except in special circumstances, like those created by the Homestead Act. On the other hand, it appears that one may freely publish editions of e.g. Tom Sawyer without paying royalties to anyone. There have been frequent examples of people who have grown remakably rich by finding a use, legal, semi-legal, or illegal, of what is in effect the People's property. An early case involves the enclosure of the village commons and the impoverishment of the peasantry. In more modern times, the railroads were ceded huge tracts of land in the American West, ostensibly because it was the only way to get them to lay track there. In more recent times, the federal government took possession of the airwaves on behalf of the People, and proceeded to give the radio and television licenses away to people who became very wealthy by using the People's property, without paying for it.

However, these examples pale by comparison with the appropriation of our common knowledge by people who have made small advances in it, patented the result, and charged us for the use of products whose major component was the knowledge which rightfully belongs to all of us. Quite an extreme case is to be found in the work of George Washington Carver. Whom are we to consider the more legitimate heirs and beneficiaries of Carver's accomplishments, the American underclass or the Archer-Daniels-Midland Corporation? I think there is no doubt about which of these would be named if Carver were alive to say. But he is not, and his work lies in the public domain. Similar comments apply to the works of most of those who have pushed forward the boundaries of human knowledge. (See the next two chapters.)

It is, however, very difficult to assign the proportion of each person's income which arises from use of the public domain. However, if we consider that the public domain is the public's property, then a stiff income tax of, say, 50% or 60% is likely a gross underestimate in most cases. Even for those who do not use the knowledge directly, they are likely feeding off the prosperity occasioned in others by their use of it. (I am thinking of such persons as entertainers, realtors, and tennis instructors.) For the few people who are genuinely unconnected with the common knowledge in any way, even not relying on their own literacy or health, I could only say that every scheme for taxation carries an irreducible residue of injustice, but that this one would likely be minimal. In addition, there is the matter of risk, which we deal within Chapter 32. This puts the issue of payment of income tax not on the question of who can afford it, but who owes it as a matter of paying for the materials out of which their financial success has been created. In this, it is an heir to the legacy of Henry George's single tax on the value that nearby inhabitants create in land, and which the landowner owes to the polity. The tax becomes a restoration of (in this case, part of) the value the successful person derives from that which the whole of humanity properly owns.

Of course, those who succeed would prefer to keep the knowledge they use without paying for it. It has been the custom in the past, and is a corollary of the general principle that might makes right. But this formulation is a protest against that principle, and a reclaiming by the whole of the People of the knowledge which they not only own by legacy from the past, but which they are actually paying for in the present and would pay more willingly in the future if they were assured that they would share more substantially in the winnings.

Chapter 27. Amateurs and professionals.

Prior to the 19th century, the vast bulk of advance of knowledge was attributable to amateurs, people who made their livings at other things and dabbled in science or art or scholarship as a sideline, an avocation. In many cases, they were independently wealthy or had the sponsorship of wealthy patrons. Sometimes the sponsorship was in the form of prizes offered by governments for inventions of special value, such as those offered by the British navy for a shipboard chronometer, or by Napoleon's army for the preservation of provisions, which led to canning. But most such advances were undertaken for the pure satisfaction of personal interest. The results were not, in general, patented but flowed immediately into the public domain. We owe a great debt to those amateurs. Their bounty has been included in many of the inventions and advances we see today, though the level of participation of amateurs is now much reduced.

Beginning roughly in the 19th century, we began to see two major kinds of professionals. The first was the independent inventor or artist, who made a living from the sale of his * product in one way or another, as by patenting and producing a machine or by publishing a symphony or selling a painting. The second was the hireling. This was a person hired to produce material of value to someone else. A minor example of this was the professional academic, someone who actually made a living as a teacher but was also an innovator and creator. This professional was also something of an amateur, as the rewards for publication were rather insignificant until the 20th century.

In this century, there began to be major underwriting of scientific, cultural, medical, and artistic efforts by various agencies, but it was not until the Second World War that we see really massive investments in knowledge, mostly investments in military technology culminating in the atomic bomb and the vengeance rockets. Since that war, there has been a sustained effort in arms research of various kinds, but also a great deal more effort on the civilian side, even including the Moon Project, which was only semi-civilian.

We now raise the question of what was the public attitude toward the accumulation of knowledge during these two periods in our recent history. The first made people feel that knowledge was something that just happened, that it``falleth as the gentle rain from heaven''. The second was even more pernicious as it made people feel that knowledge was private property, and would accrue to the common only when most of its value had been used up. Both views were unreasonable, but understandable in the light of the times. The view that the work was on behalf of humankind in general would have been thought vainglorious for the amateurs and hypocritical for the professionals. Yet the amateurs can be thought of as working on behalf of the human race generally, as can the institutions, charities, universities, and foundations which have funded so much of the advance by professionals in recent years.

The most reasonable view of the Knowledge Business today is that it is properly a public enterprise, to be pursued by professionals on behalf of the People and at public expense, at reasonable compensation and at the greatest pace which the endowment of intelligence will make possible. The fruits of this endeavor should then return in major part to the People who have made it possible. This must include those who did not actually participate in the new discoveries, but who, through their taxes and other support, contribute to the outcome. And what of the fruits of the work of yesterday?

As I mentioned in the previous chapter, I am laying claim, on behalf of the People, to the rights of all the work which is attributable to the amateurs. There is no indication, in most cases, that they intended the benefits to accrue to any but the public generally, and not in particular to whosoever should grab up pieces of the common patrimony. Even in those cases where particular beneficiaries were intended, the rights have, in most cases, now passed to the human race in general. As I noted, the reasonable way of collecting on this ownership is by a substantial tax on all large incomes, which in almost every case would be less than the public investment in the mechanism which produced the wealth.

The case of the professionals is rather more complicated. Many of these did indeed patent their inventions, and many of the patents are still in force. Still, essentially all of these patents represent only small advances on the vast body of knowledge which make them possible, which knowledge in itself is public in nature. Most of our scientists and engineers have, in addition, been educated partly or wholly at the expense of others than their families or direct patrons. Scholarships at elite schools were not established for their individual benefits, and education at the public schools was also for the benefit of the whole of the human race, or at least of the nation or state which paid for it.

But there is a subtlety in the case of the professionals. For many of them, and in particular for many of the best, a large part of the reward for the work they have done has been the joy and the opportunity of doing it. And this now leads into another subtlety. The door to participation in this business has not always been open to all, and is still not. In addition to the restraint of affordability, there have been other restrictions of class, race, gender, etc., and also of politics. During the period when I was in college, the United States was under the influence of rabid antiCommunists like Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin. In the face of the hysteria and the perceived threat of Soviet Communism, many career opportunities were closed to anyone of suspicious political coloration. I remember that in the late 1940s, I asked one of my college classmates whether he would sign a petition. It had nothing to do with global geopolitics, but was probably something like a request for a federal anti-lynching law. He replied that as a prospective Physics graduate student, he would not sign any petition for anything, as he hoped soon to qualify for a graduate fellowship funded by the Atomic Energy Commission, and those required security clearance. It was the general wisdom at that time that signing any petition for anything was presumptively subversive behavior, and especially for anything favored by left-wing opinion. (Such matters were routinely excoriated as ``Communist-inspired'' by those who opposed them.) I did not press him on the issue. I understood that anything which acted to stand between a budding scientist and his science would have entailed a great sacrifice.

At that time, access to many of the career paths in Science, or even in education generally, were closed to those who were (or were imagined to be) of left-wing political persuasion. Inclusion in the profession and access to its machinery were reserved for those who were PR (Politically Right). So a great price was extracted from those who laid down their ethical principles to reserve the option of becoming scholars in certain fields or at certain institutions.

At the same time, a mystical mood was growing among academics, partly as an antidote to the imposition of Political Rightness. The Subject became an idol. The service of Mathematics, or Music, or Economics was seen as an absolute. I remember particularly a very prominent mathematician who was deeply committed to the cause of saving Soviet Jewish scientists from the oppression of antiSemitic feeling which was running rife in the USSR in the late 1970s. After my visit to Moscow and Leningrad on behalf of the committee in which he was active, I advocated that a journal which had a policy of excluding Jewish authors be denied the support which it obtained from being translated and disseminated by the American Mathematical Society. That was too much for him, and the conflict between his concern for the Soviet Jews and his veneration of Mathematics was resolved in favor of the latter. He opposed (successfully) the proposal I had made. The Society continued to publish the antiSemitic journal, and even paid them handsomely for the privilege.

To continue the status of professional for the practitioners of the arts of knowledge-accumulation while freeing the product for use by the whole of the human race, we must be prepared to support the professionals who have become the more or less sole suppliers of this esoteric product. In exchange, the People should take, as our legitimate dividend, a large portion of the wealth which the product generates. I will take that up later, in Chapter 32 on Risk.

Chapter 28. The dark side of the force

The accumulation of knowledge is not without its dangers and its faults, leading (among other things) to the Luddite rebellions we take up in the next chapter. For the benefit of those who deny the significance of these dangers, I will take a chapter to mention some of the major ones which come to mind. It is especially significant that the power conferred by knowledge makes the misuse of office by the government even more significant, but the problem does not even end with government. There are other powerful malefactors.

A very important category of scientific abuse revolves around the issue of nuclear weapons and the ancillary question of nuclear energy. In recent years, we have seen some second-guessing about the decision to build an atomic bomb during the Second World War. It is an interesting question, but not the one I want to take up here. But the bomb did open a wound in the fragile fabric of civilization, and that wound may never heal. Certainly it shows no sign of healing yet. After the defeat of Japan, the temptation to the United States to continue as Boss Nation by virtue of having the super-weapon proved insuperable. Even so famous a thinker as Bertrand Russell, later to gain repute as a partisan of peace, advocated using the threat of preventative nuclear war as a way of forcing upon the Soviet Union a mode and degree of disarmament satisfactory to the Western powers. ``Absolute power corrupts absolutely.'' (Acton) When the Russians failed to fall in line with the Baruch Plan of the Truman administration, further research was pursued by the United States to create the hydrogen bomb. This required a vastly expanded program of testing of nuclear weapons, mostly in Nevada, with special care taken that the fallout of fission products drift to the Northeast, away from Los Angeles. A decision was taken in Washington to sacrifice the ``downwinders'' (as they would later be called), the people living in Nevada and Utah upon whom the deadly rain would fall. In reply to the protesters who claimed that this was happening, the government not only lodged denials backed by the full credibility of the United States, but also recruited scientists to swear to the lies. And to sustain the untruths in the minds of the people, they required the scientists to lay on the line the full credibility inherent in the priestly character in which Science had been wrapped since the late 19th century. The denials issued by such major figures as Edward Teller, John von Neumann, and E. O. Lawrence were only just not made wearing the white laboratory coat which had become almost a priestly robe in the minds of a credulous populace.

At the same time that the innocent and unsuspecting downwinders were being subjected to nuclear fallout, patients in various hospitals were being secretly subjected without their consent to large doses of radiation from radioactive materials being injected into their bodies or from x-ray machines. Again, the scientists involved were government employees prostituting their professional responsibility in order to serve the power needs of the politicians. Even today when the truth is finally coming to light half a century later, some of these doctors are continuing to deny the truth of the crimes they committed on the orders of the American government. The same applies to all sorts of outrages committed in the service of nuclear armaments.

One of the programs undertaken to endear the horrid atom to the skittish public was the promise of nuclear energy. It would be, we were told, ``too cheap to be worth metering''. Those who said that it would turn out to be the most expensive energy the world has ever seen, if all the costs were taken into account, have proven right, and in addition, the potential costs of accidents and decommissioning of the plants are a large multiple of the value of the energy produced. Nonetheless, it was a seductive prospect. Physics came to be viewed as a technology which would generate infinite wealth, and the physicists became a very well-rewarded group of scientists. Even today, they continue to claim, as a kind of recitation of allegiance to their Subject, that a perfectly safe and economical nuclear power plant can be built and run, basically the same story they have been telling us for the past fifty years. This is not the place to plumb in detail the merits of the claim. I rest the rebuttal here simply on the well-known fact that if such a plant were required to buy insurance against all possible catastrophes from a financially responsible private source, not a single one would ever again be built.

The important issue here is not the settling of this debate, but the way in which the social pressures of the particular science obtain a degree of conformity to a public stance which benefits the practitioners regardless of the interests of the human race which they claim to serve. It is, of course, completely in accord with the ways in which people are supposed to act under capitalism. One acts to advance one's own interests, and all is said to be for the best in this most possible of all possible worlds. But when these people, in their own best interest, call down the credit which the People have learned to place in Science for the advancement of their own work, they commit a foul and place in jeopardy the credit of the human race's most precious resource, the store of knowledge on which we all depend.

In the late 1960s, the resistance to the war in Vietnam caused many of the students on American campuses to carry their protests to any manifestations of US authority which were at hand, particularly any which were in any way connected with the Pentagon. Among the most visible of these were the various research projects scattered at universities everywhere by the Department of Defense. The scientists reacted badly to this attack on their means of funding that which had become for many the most meaningful aspect of their lives, and they sought and received the aid of the bulk of the scientific community. It became a cliche of the anti-war movement that Science was a corrupt enterprise and that no person of conscience would sully himself * by inclusion in it or co-operation with its aims. If its sanctity had been overblown and vainglorious up to that time, its fall from grace in that period was equally spectacular.

One of the most prominent expressions of Pentagon science on a university campus was the U. S. Army Mathematics Research Center on the campus of the University of Wisconsin. It was well known before the war in Vietnam became a major issue that there was secret work being done there for the Army. The building had been operated under conditions of severe security, and the exterior proudly displayed the Army's seal. It was to become a symbol of the war, located right in the middle of the University. It became even more of a target than the Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC). The mathematicians, experiencing an era of prosperity previously unknown in all human history, rallied round the Center for the most part. And yet, there was a substantial and growing group who were against the War, and wanted the world to know that war was not a project of our profession, prosperity notwithstanding. I for one was eager to conduct a poll of the American Mathematical Society for the purpose of demonstrating to an impressionable cohort of university students that Mathematics was not a world-destroying enterprise in the pay of the war-mongers. I carried my fight to the membership meeting in January 1971, but lost there by a narrow margin.

Another outstanding example of the misuse of the prestige of Science was an agricultural chemist at the University of Wisconsin who continued through the 1960s and 1970s to maintain that DDT was harmless to birds and mammals. He often gave talks on campus to whoever would listen, which one afternoon was the Wednesday noon lecture series of the Mathematics Department. In that talk, he went so far as to stir into a glass of water a large dollop of what he said was DDT and proceed to drink it. I have no idea of whether any of his own work was funded by the chemical industry, but he was probably reflecting the viewpoint of his colleagues in the College of Agriculture. I do not know what ultimately became of him, but the intervening years have certainly left his position discredited.

If government and universities were often corrupt, it seems that industry was corrupt almost full-time. One of the career strategies for bio-chemists was employment by the cigarette companies or the Tobacco Institute. They were hired as a public-relations stratagem to help dispel the public perception that smoking was leading large numbers of people to early and painful deaths. Some of these chemists were told outright that their work was to obtain data indicating the harmlessness of cigarettes or discrediting the work of those who were proving the opposite. Others were hired under the ruse that they were to produce a safer cigarette, and left when they understood that that was not their true function. In the meantime, all these scientists served as cover for a campaign of lies, designed to use the prestige of Science to help keep people enslaved to their deadly addiction. Their work did not escape the attention of those who have come to the conclusion that knowledge is dangerous and that we should seek the shelter of ignorance to protect ourselves and our loved ones, not to mention the persistence of life on Earth.

And finally, I must repeat my example of the economists, who have made a consensus around the view of economic reality most agreeable to the wealthy industrial and financial interests who hold the key to both a growth in prestige and a comfortable living. The attempt to raise the level of credibility of their work affords them a chance to bask in the glow of glory reflected from intellectual giants like Newton and Einstein and also gives to the promoters of the Global Economy (with its attendant corollary of exoslavery, as noted in Chapter 20 on Greed) the aura of inescapable fact, a perception which helps to avoid any restrictions which responsible national authorities might impose. This point of view is so generally held by the dominant forces of that profession that it is taught as fact in the basic courses, rather like the Law of Universal Gravitation, and those economists who dispute this orthodoxy are for the most part treated as idiots, if not traitors. The story about the rising tide raising all boats is repeated as though it were known to be true, which it clearly is not. (And, as we will see below in Chapter 34 on College, is not promoted in the circumstances where it is true.)

It is bad enough that in all these cases, scientists and economists are selling the public on falsehoods which they have enough background to be able to see as false if they were not blinded by the official wisdom of the discipline to which they owe their allegiance. It is much worse that they bring the honor and the reputed integrity of those disciplines in the service of these untruths, so that the public which sees through the deception also learns to distrust the practitioners of the Knowledge Business, lumping them with other self-seeking (not to say corrupt) chasers after private gain at public cost. These researchers sully the name of Progress (see Chapter 31) and open the door to often well-meaning but misled Luddites, of which more in the next chapter.

Chapter 29. The Luddites

For many reasons, some of which can be found in the previous chapter and the succeeding ones, there are many people who are so oppressed by the negative features of the knowledge business that they are seduced by the vision of a simpler and purer time and life. Some are stigmatized as Luddites, including both those who have committed or advocated acts of violence and those who have expressed any degree of sympathy with them. Yet the assault on the Luddites is excessive, as is the ideology of the Luddites themselves. The matter needs a more subtle analysis.

The Luddites take their name from Ned Lud, a worker in the late 18th century who broke up some of the stocking frames which were destroying the possibility of employment for himself and others. In the early 19th century, under the impetus of increasing mechanization of the textile industry, other workers took to attacking factories and wrecking the new machines. In our histories, we read about them solely as ``enemies of progress'', with almost no attention being paid to the devastating circumstances driving them to their desperate responses. In this, we see a triumph of the ideology of the investing classes to the almost total negation of the needs of working people.

The description of the plight of these workers in the literature of the time pays essentially no attention to them as human beings. There is almost no concern expressed for the fact that they were being essentially condemned to death. Later analyses would focus on the need for progress, as though the replacement of human labor by machines was an automatic good. There is talk of the long-term benefit to the People generally, and of course the rhetorical cliche about the rising tide raising all boats. But in fact,those workers' boats were being sunk and we might well have seen an entirely different analysis if the victims of the ``progress'' had been people whom the prevailing ethos had defined as worthy of protection. I have mentioned above the way in which the ruling classes rallied to protect the owners of poorly-designed railroads against the costs of adapting to Brunel's superior technology, an unadaptive stratagem which hobbles British and American railroads even unto the present day.

In fact, the 18th and 19th centuries were a time of labor surplus, in which the workers being dispossessed of their employment could only find substitute employment by displacing other workers, so that the total of the effect of their loss of work was to add that number to the unemployed, and to further empower the employers who were profiting from Ricardo's Iron Law of Wages. (See Appendix B.) And we see a repetition of that situation today, when the reduction of the labor force does not release labor for other employment but merely adds to the army of the unemployed and the supply of cheap, desperate workers competing for manifestly unsatisfactory jobs creeping ever closer to the level of bare subsistence.

Viewed from a macroeconomic perspective, we can compare the situation in which a machine replaces the work of, say, ten people. If the machine works and the people are unemployed, they become a problem in society. In many cases,their families suffer, their marriages might deteriorate, their children might become troubled, and they themselves might sink into hopelessness, homelessness, alcoholism or other drug addiction, mental illness, vandalism, crime, or suicide. In addition (and this is new), they might turn to the antisocial organizations, like the ``militias'' which have sprung up in this time of trouble, which blame their problems on other members of the working classes and on a supposedly tyrannical government, and which represent a threat to the very basis of our civil society. By comparison, if it is the machine that is idled, that is something that machines do very well. Indeed, the machine would most likely be idled by not being built, but even if built it might be like the automatic cotton-pickers in the 1930s, which were suppressed for socially necessary reasons. The one fly in this ointment is the additional profit lost by the employer who could reduce his * labor costs by the replacement of human effort by the machine. We hear very little comment to the effect that his * insistence on his * profit is destructive of progress, or of the rising tide that raises all the boats.

In the macroeconomic sense, we can only call machinery labor-saving if it frees time and effort for some useful application, such as the production of something else or the expansion of leisure. In saying this, we must be clear that unemployment is not leisure, but in general merely idleness. Thus, the machines against which the original Luddites rebelled were in essence labor-wasting technology. But the bias in favor of having work done by machine is very deeply ingrained in our technology-loving culture, and I myself have said that it is beneath the dignity of a human being to do work that a machine could accomplish. But there are limits, and the degradation of long-term unemployment (not to speak of permanent) is even greater. An example can be found in a conversation I had some years ago with a close friend, a professor of Chemical Engineering. We were discussing the problem of recycling garbage, and I spoke of the fact that people of very few skills, and even of substantially sub-normal intelligence, could easily muster the resources to distinguish among wood, paper, glass, and metal, or among the various colors of glass, or the different metals. He noted that there were machines being designed that could do that job almost as well as a mentally-impaired human being. I countered that the person I had described would likely then go unemployed, and that the use of that person in a valuable job would not only add dignity and fulfillment to his * life but would actually be highly economic in that the we would have to support him * in any case and that this way at least his * labor would not be totally wasted.

The efforts of the Luddites were in any case misdirected, in that they addressed the machines rather than Society's way of dealing with them, almost as though we were to attempt to deal with the problem of lynching by outlawing rope. Of course, at the time working-class consciousness was in its infancy and no one was speaking of the rights of the common people, with the exception of such visionaries as Thomas Paine. In the meantime, we have seen the appearance of Karl Marx and the aberrant misapplication of his theories in Soviet Russia, together with a reaction which condemns all working-class consciousness as an attempt to impose an oppressive police state on what would otherwise be a libertarian paradise. And still we must find a way to accommodate the basically valid protestations of the Luddites (and their philosophical heirs in the present day) within a pattern of genuine progress which is not based on the dehumanization of some people to advance the profits of others.

In this age, we have seen a man, designated as the Unabomber, who has attacked the mechanicians rather than the machines, the technologists rather than the technology. The failure in that is not only that it is an inhuman way of dealing with the problem (which it is), but that it is unavailing and unproductive. That is, it is a failed mechanism of protest. It does not even garner sympathetic attention to the problem(s) it seeks to correct. Instead of seeking ways to direct the stream of knowledge in ways which will benefit all, and thus genuinely raise all the boats, Luddites of this persuasion seek to stop the juggernaut, and crash against the rocks of public indifference when they are denounced as the enemies of progress. We need instead to look for a form of progress which is genuinely progressive, and not predatory. That is the business of the next two chapters.

But I must not forget to raise another issue which is very important in the creed of many neoLuddites, and which emerged in some commentaries on the very Unabomber mentioned above. It concerns the despoliation of the planet by a human race whose fertility and resistance to disease have been enhanced by the workings of medical science, a planet whose resources have been raped by the depredations of industry. Whatever be the other considerations, it is clear that by the time our race had invented agriculture (and even earlier, according to some commentators), its population was destined to expand to the limit the Earth could bear, and even beyond. During all that time, and even now in less educated places, this process continues. The goatherds who travel along the Southern edges of the Sahara Desert, extending its reach by some forty yards with each visit, are not the products of the machine age. The despoliation of the slopes of the Himalayas in Nepal or of the plains of Ethiopia is not the work of multinational corporations, but of simple people who cannot afford even the cost of considering the next year's crop while struggling to survive until then. However, it is true that the rate of destruction due to such practices as strip-mining and waste-dumping is even more spectacular than that. The difference is that it is only in the past century that the preservation of the Earth bacame a major concern of a noticeable portion of the human race, and that the mechanisms of Science are beginning to be bent to the task of its salvation. That knowledge and that science are inextricably linked in their history to the industrial revolution which created the means for their flourishing up to this point. Without it, the Earth would have been doomed to a more certain, if a slower, destruction. It is a hard calculus, but one which points up again the urgency of proceeding at the maximal rate possible with the accumulation of knowledge, and it is the business of the next chapter.