As it was in the Ancien Regime, and as it has been ever since, those who have wealth and power gather around them courtiers who flatter and feed them and are in turn patronized with a share of the goodies. Some of these courtiers are mere parasites, living off the vanity of their patrons. But some of them are genuine resources of power, occasionally achieving quite a bit of power themselves. The most powerful leave their names in history, like Richelieu, Metternich, and Bismark. Others, less distinguished, still manage to make quite a good living for themselves.
In our time, we have seen examples of these in the areas of
The Knowledge Business. I have mentioned some of them in Chapter
28 on the dark side of the force. What is most impressive about
those who are perceived as having sold out to the Establishment is
that they are a minority, and that the majority of the Magicians
are diligently devoted to the public interest. I must say at this
point that those I will identify as the courtiers also believe
themselves so dedicated, but of course their perceptions are
rendered suspect not only by the rewards those opinions reap for
them but, more importantly, by our own evaluations of the
consequences of their actions.
At an accelerating pace over the past fifteen or twenty years,
the public has been persuaded to slacken in its support of the
knowledge business. At the same time, many of the same parties and
interests which have promoted the retreat have also moved to seduce
selected intellectuals into their own service. As examples,
corporations have supported particular research projects, usually
those which promote either the technical needs of their operations
or their public relations needs, as in the case of tobacco
companies. I do not suggest that the courtiers necessarily alter
their conclusions to suit their patrons. More likely, the patronage
goes to those whose conclusions seem to be moving in the direction
the patrons would like to see. In an old piece of counsel, the
mother advises her daughter not to think about marrying for money:
``Go where money is, and marry for love.'' So, we have seen many
scientists who have gone into corporate research, or who in the
universities have taken corporate or government support for
specific research projects reflecting their own interests. Those
whose interests were less attractive to funding agencies found
themselves stigmatized as less productive, less successful, less
deserving of their universities' own honors and rewards. They even
found that they were judged less deserving of tenure and might even
on that basis have been flushed out onto the general economy where
their only employment might have been the very projects which they
eschewed as academics.
Such was certainly the case for many at the time I was a
graduate student and a young academic. In the Mathematics
Department at Yale, life was rather more comfortable for those who
were included in a major project funded by the Navy than for
students in other fields. The Navy project was for the writing of
a book which has become a veritable encyclopedia of a major portion
of the mathematics of the midCentury. There was nothing wrong with
it, nor was it particularly militarily oriented, but those whose
interests lay elsewhere definitely had a harder time making ends
meet long enough to write a dissertation. In more recent times, as
funding for universities become thinner, more and more of them were
tempted to fund their research through extramural support, though
I do not know of any other case like that in which MIT accepted a
wholly-owned subsidiary of a corporation as a university
department.
An extreme case of this patronage involves the whole of the
field of mathematical economics, which has come under the aegis of
the financial and industrial community. The particular brand of
the subject is one which has anointed as unquestionable the version
of neoclassical economics which most canonizes greed as a
progressive and constructive force in human life. (See Chapter
20.) Models are built which supposedly represent the reality of
the economic world, and conclusions are drawn from them. As I
mentioned earlier, there is no way to test the validity of the
models or the worth of the conclusions. Whenever predictions are
made and confirmed by experience, that is taken as proof, but when
the contrary happens, there is always an alibi to be found in the
vagaries of human behavior or in the accidental factors (such as
drought, revolution, crime, or sun spots) which impinge on economic
reality.
One of the things that sovereigns have always been able to do is to confer validity on their favorites by granting them medals, honors, etc.. To choose an example nearly universally discredited today, Josef Stalin was able to elevate his favorite scientists into the Academy of Sciences, and their status as academicians was then a bolster to their prestige and contributed to the public relations exercise which would support their theories. The great example, hooted at by scientists in the West, was an agronomist named Trofim Lysenko, whose theories of inheritance lay closer than Mendelism to the beliefs of Stalin in the field of genetics.
Not drawing a comparison, but looking at an occurrence in the
West, we see that economists have always hungered for acceptance as
scientists. When ``scientific socialism'' was a synonym for
Marxism, their pretensions were ridiculed by practical
businessmen
*
. But when the monetarists of the Chicago School
supported their favorite policies, these practical folk began to
see how deep the formulas of the economists could be. In the 1960s,
the Central Bank of Sweden, an institution of great wealth and
power, created a prize for economics similar to the Nobel Prize for
Chemistry, Physics, and Medicine. The purpose was to win for the
subject the credibility which those ``hard'' sciences had earned
over the course of centuries. Other sciences with a greater claim,
such as Astronomy, Botany, Geology and Mathematics did not attract
their philanthropy, since these did not particularly serve any
interest close to their hearts or pocketbooks. Also Sociology and
Anthropology were not honored, the possible reason being that the
Bank did not see them as sufficiently scientific.
The Nobel Memorial Prize (not actually a Nobel prize, since he
did not think Economics worthy of his attention) was designed to be
mistaken for a Nobel prize, and for the most part has been, as a
reference to e.g. the Encyclopedia Britannica will reveal. The
honor, conferred mostly on the practitioners of that brand of
Economics which best supports the banks' view of economic reality,
is one of the mechanisms for winning public acceptance of the
policies which the banks favor. And a concurrence in this practice
brings the patina of scientific credibility to those whose view of
the world is most agreeable to the practitioners of predatory
investment. ``People have always eaten people.''
In today's intellectual world, the power of moneyed interests
(radio, press, TV, corporations, think-tanks, universities) to
define canon makes them extremely powerful in the world of ideas.
Even Arthur Laffer, the author of the laughable Laffer Curve, makes
a handsome living telling the wealthy what they want to hear: that
the predatory economics which brings them so much profit is the
natural order of things. Other scientists also pay court to those
who can establish them at the bank and in the public eye. It is a
seductive symbiosis. It has always been so.
One of the characteristics of courtiers is the importance of
finding favor in the eyes of the sovereign. This results in a kind
of competition which is more common among school-children than
among mature professionals. It is more important to be better
recognized than one's peers than to actually do the work or
accomplish the mission. I sometimes tell a little parable about
the professor who is visited at midnight by the Evil One. He is
offered a choice of a raise of 25 % in his salary, in which case
everyone else at the university will get 50 %, or he can have 10 %
and everyone else gets 5 %. What is interesting is that telling
this story gets nervous titters from the audience of professors.
They don't usually say what they would do, but it is clear that the
desire to be recognized (pride) takes precedence over both greed
and altruism. There is also a lack of community feeling. Success
is defined as getting the best grades in the class, or in the
school, or even being the teacher's pet. The teacher, in this case
the Dean or President, or the head of an important foundation, has
the power to award medals and perquisites, not to mention a genuine
or imitation Nobel Prize. The deep internal rewards of knowing
that one is advancing the welfare of the human race takes a lower
priority in the thinking of one who is living the life of a
courtier.
Throughout the developed world today, but especially in the
United States and the United Kingdom, we are seeing a revolt by the
rich against the taxes which support those who are trying to make
their way in a world beyond their ability to cope. The taxes are
seen as taking money from those who have earned it (even when it is
called unearned income) to pay to those who are perceived as
feckless, stupid, lazy, or criminal. The mechanism for this anger
is to accuse the government of a policy of ``tax and spend'',
though the money spent on such things as armaments and subsidies to
powerful interests does not seem to get a lot of attention. The
taxes are themselves seen as illegitimate. They are money taken in
the interest of being generous with those without any valid claim
on the generosity. But the agent of this illegitimacy is the
government. One of the purposes of this book is to focus on the
role of taxes as investment and, better yet, as repayment for the
use of public assets in the creation of wealth. It is perhaps
futile to hope that the greedy will be persuaded that they have any
responsibility to invest for their children's generation or to
repay for their own capitalization, but perhaps it will be possible
to fortify those who are so inclined with arguments to be made
against those arguing that greed is in the best interest of all.
I once heard a wonderful quote which I, in sloth, did not have inscribed in some permanent material to keep in a place where I would not lose it. I have tried to reproduce it, but my poetic gifts are not up to the original. If any reader can direct me to it, I shall be grateful. Approximately, it said
The finest and most elegant examples of the art of rhetoric are to be found in those arguments purchased by the rich and powerful to convince the rest of us that it is in the best interests of all that they should continue to enjoy their wealth and privilege.
With less elegance, the poor and downtrodden have always grasped to
find a valid claim why they should also enjoy some of the good
things of life. The arguments to altruism and human fellow-feeling
have always been met by supposed scientists arguing the ``hard
truths'' of the ``dismal science'' of Economics. On the other
side, we have seen claims advanced by such as Karl Marx that it is
labor which creates all value, that employment is synonymous with
exploitation, etc.. Whatever the validity of these claims, they are
made to justice rather than to expediency, with predictable lack of
success.
Contemporarily with Marx, we have the phenomenon of Henry
George, the author of the Single Tax. Like millions of other high
school students, I learned that George proposed a tax on land to
finance all the functions of government, but it was not until I
studied legal history that I came to know what the basis of his
claim was. He wrote that land had almost no intrinsic value, in
economic terms. Land was given value by the presence not only of
its owner, but also that of the owner's neighbors, and the more
neighbors, the greater the value, in general. Thus, since it is
the People who create this value, it is properly their property,
and they may validly tax back that value in the form of rent. In
this context, the claim for taxes becomes neither theft nor
charity, but a mere restitution of property to its rightful owners.
The theory was very popular a century ago, but it was never
adopted. The owners of property managed to persuade those who
could vote then that this was a dangerous levelling doctrine.
In a sense, my suggestion follows in the tradition of Henry
George's Single Tax, and may well suffer a similar fate, or even a
more ignominious one. But it does have a feature that George's
argument did not. It relies not only on the claim of justice, but
also that of efficiency. The maximization of knowledge promises a
maximization of wealth for all. Thus, it is the reverse of the
arguments of the rich and powerful, in that I argue that it is in
the best interest of all that the human race draw the most we can
from the Earth, our Mother, consistent with the need to preserve
ourselves by preserving Her. And the key to this is the
maximization of knowledge.
I have mentioned the national net worth. It is clear that it
is the obligation of each generation to replenish, repair and
replace as the legacy of our children the physical assets which we
inherit, and also to replace the erosion of the assets of knowledge
through age and death. In this way, we tax ourselves to renew the
national net worth as time takes its toll of it. And in addition,
if we love our children we will endeavor to pass on our world to
them better and richer than we received it from our parents, as the
ephebes of ancient Athens swore to do. If we love our children, we
will pour them full of all the knowledge they can use, and in the
process make ourselves rich in the present, as I noted earlier.
But even if we are loath to sacrifice for them, we have at least
the obligation to allow them to provide for themselves, by
borrowing for their education and development the money which they
will be able to repay out of the fruits of that investment. If we
will not tax ourselves for their benefit, at least we should make
it possible for them to tax themselves in this way.
Instead, we have been both unwilling to bear the taxes
ourselves, and the debt which could pay for our children's
education we refuse, giving the ludicrous excuse that we are doing
it to avoid burdening them with our debts. I hear this from people
who I know are too intelligent to believe this if they were to give
the matter more than the shallowest of thought. I know of no
prosperous family which would deny their children an education in
order to save the money for their inheritance, and yet that is the
essence of this argument. But I speak too soon, for I recently saw
an editorial in the Wall Street Journal to the effect that at
current prices for college education, the investment of an
equivalent amount in blue-chip stocks would yield a greater return
than the average value of the increase in earnings of college
graduates. So low are we sunk into the slough of Mammon that a
serious news medium carries the message that a lifetime of
collecting unearned income from the labor of others is to be
preferred to the equipping of our children to improve the world.
And what rate of taxes should our children claim from their
generation if indeed they did borrow to send to college all who had
the appetite to go? I would not specify, except that it should be
enough to pay off that debt, and possibly also a bit of the debt
the same generation inherited. It should not tax an income as low
as the BWR. It would be impossibly difficult to assess for each
income the value of the knowledge which produced it. But there
would, of course, be those who would maintain that the common
knowledge was no part of their equipment for obtaining prosperity.
I cannot imagine what constellation of circumstances would sustain
such an argument, but there are a few cases which spring to mind
and can be dismissed. The entertainer or athlete may operate on a
natural talent which is totally or nearly totally untutored, but
even he
*
capitalizes on the general prosperity, which does flow
from the world's knowledge. The rentier who lives on the
inheritance from a parent or grandparent is ipso facto a parasite
on that knowledge. He
*
who finds gold not only is likely
influenced in where to look by the common lore but relies on the
wealth of others to turn the find into goods and services for his
*
own use. In general, it might be efficient simply to dismiss such
claims on the general grounds, common in tax law, that it need be
no more than just in the large. And yet, it might not hurt to
allow such claims to be made, and to be sustained if just,
providing the adjudication were stern and the presumption adverse.
If one can prove such a case against the presumption, it might be
allowed. But I would opt against allowing an opportunity to create
yet another metier (the advocacy of such claims) which would waste
the valuable resource of intelligence in the service of proving
such a useless cause.
In the interests of simplicity, a steeply progressive income tax with a large portion exempt from taxes should serve to repay the debt of the generation which indentures itself to provide free public education to everyone with the talent and the inclination to make use of it.
One of the difficult facets of my diatribe against exoslavery (See Chapters 20 and 21 on Greed and Free trade.) is that in many of the countries where wage slavery or even actual chattel slavery is in effect, the alternative to the slavery is starvation. My friends Max and the red baron (a Labour member of the House of Lords) suggest that I am advocating condemning those hopeless millions to death in order to support the comparatively affluent workers of America. It raises a question which deserves analysis in depth. Dickens raises the issue implicitly in A Christmas Carol when he has Bob Cratchit toast Scrooge at his Christmas dinner as ``the author of this feast.'' Most of us have never thought much about it, beyond seeing Cratchit as a good man, possibly foolishly good, for his gratitude to his miserly employer. But it is worth thinking about it as Dickens saw it. I am convinced that he sees Cratchit's attitude as the proper one, for his position with Scrooge, as bad as it was, was the only alternative to destitution in the context of predatory Victorian capitalism. The alternative on Scrooge's part would be open-handed generosity, which our mathematical economists of the 20th century call irrational. People who call on others to stiff those waiters who will have no opportunity to retaliate would not countenance Scrooge's paying Cratchit more than the Iron Law of Wages dictates.
To bring this issue into clearer focus, I want to study two incidents in recent years which have impinged on the liberal consciousness. The first is the disaster at Bhopal, in India. There, a Union Carbide plant had a safety failure which resulted in the liberating of a large quantity of isocyanic gas, highly poisonous and with catastrophic effect on the population. Although I have no hard evidence to support my suspicion, I believe that one of the major factors which led Union Carbide to locate the plant in India was exactly the absence of the close regulation under which their plant in West Virginia (a nearly exact twin of the Bhopal plant) had to operate. Like the low wages and the suppression of union activity, the absence of regulation is touted, often sub rosa, as a reason to relocate economic activity from the advanced countries to those which are in an earlier stage of development. In fact, the potential closing of the Bhopal plant was seen by the local labor force as a greater threat than the isocyanic peril. A similar thing happened in West Virginia, when the federal regulators discovered that the plant there was at risk of a similar accident. The threat to close the plant until the danger was obviated resulted in a major protest demonstration by the local population. Their fervent support of the corporation which was endangering their lives was an almost perfect replica of Cratchit's expression of gratitude to Ebenezer Scrooge.
The liberal view on Bhopal was that Union Carbide should have
built the plant there to American standards and maintained it with
the scrupulous care which was required in the United States. (This
was before the discovery of the peril in West Virginia.) I agree,
but then I think they should have paid American wages and had an
American level of union activity. The hole in that view is that
Union Carbide would likely not have built the plant on that basis.
They have never been thought to be in the business of broadcasting
charity, except when it brought them profit. Forcing dangerous
surroundings on poor people as the only alternative to starvation
is a nasty business. We are seeing it more and more as toxic or
nuclear waste facilities are being foisted on poor populations both
at home and abroad in exchange for pittances they are in no
economic position to refuse.
To see the other side of the Bhopal situation, we should examine the circumstances surrounding the closing of the coal mines in Britain. There, the mines were being operated by the government, under the British Coal Board, at a loss. That loss was small, amounting to a few pounds per worker per week. In a clever political move, Prime Minister Thatcher precipitated a strike as a way of showing political muscle and securing the support of the urban middle classes against what was seen as the unbridled power of the coal union leaders. When the strike had been defeated, Thatcher sold off the mines at a huge loss, and many of them were closed, forfeiting essentially forever substantial reserves of coal which are becoming unreachable as the earth reclaims miles of tunnels. The miners have become a much greater burden on the public purse as the economies of their areas have collapsed and hundreds of thousands have gone on the dole. It has been seen, and is still seen, as a disaster for Northern England and South Wales.
Seen from the liberal position on Bhopal, however, Thatcher's
move can be seen as a gift to the North and to Wales, a gift which
no Tory government would have made if petitioned by the mining
communities. For generations, the miners have had a peculiar
schizophrenic relationship with their vocation, being proud of the
manly courage with which they have faced the terrors of the
underground fires and explosions, the agony with which they have
dug the coal at the most inopportune faces, the dangers of collapse
from inadequate shoring up of the tunnel ceilings, and the fine
coal dust which has rotted their lungs and carried so many to an
untimely death. At the same time, and in spite of the joys of
comradeship with those who faced all this with them, every
generation of mine workers and mine leaders has sworn to end this
terrible life and to bring their children and grandchildren out of
the pits. If they had asked the Nation to support them by closing
the pits and granting them the dole on a nationwide basis, they
would likely have been met with the sort of resentment being
expressed today against welfare-dependent people in the United
States. They would have been accused of sloth, and of living off
their more diligent compatriots. The closing of the mines by the
Tories, over the miners' loud protests, puts the onus on the Nation
and hardly anyone has been so coarse as to accuse the miners of
laziness. Willy-nilly, their children have had to find other
sources of income, and the burden has been picked up, to one degree
or other, throughout the United Kingdom.
The exporting of low-wage and/or high-risk jobs to the
desperately poor people of the developing world is not an act of
charity. It is a way to reduce the workers of the industrialized
world to the same level of penury. It is a mechanism for breaking
the unions, for setting workers at each others' throats in search
for the remaining jobs. In fact, we see the results in the United
States and in Europe in our own time. Although the productivity of
labor has risen sharply as a result of the use of the People's
knowledge, and the per capita income, in real money, of Americans
has risen in the past fifteen to twenty years, the incomes of the
poorest 60 % has fallen, and an additional 20 % have seen no
increase. Even the market of the United States for other foreign
goods than the exported industries make has fallen off as American
workers have less disposable income. The Cratchits of the Third
World must know that it is not in their genuine interest to have
governments which will sell them as slaves to the greedy rich of
America.
If we are to help the starving masses of the rest of the
world, we must restrict our imports only to those from countries
which do not countenance slavery or near-slavery. There would be
less in that for the corrupt classes which conspire with the
purchasers of that labor to deliver it on the basis we see today.
In the short run, it would advantage our Cratchits over theirs.
But it can never be to the advantage of the workers to cut each
others' throats over the race to the bottom, restoring the
Victorian horrors which Dickens portrayed so vividly in the last
century.
The smartest man I know has always kidded me about my desire to ``make nice''. He accuses me of wanting to be a Jewish Mother to the world. Said Jewish Mother wants to tell her children, ``Play nice; don't fight.'' But the animal psychologists tell us that aggression is intrinsic to the reptilian center of our human brains. What are we to believe?
The utopians have always operated on the supposition that there is enough for all. They have said this even in those times when, seen from today's perspective, there clearly wasn't. And there is the question of whether the Earth can support all the humans which we will impose upon it if all the peoples of the world continue to breed at the rate which we have seen in the 20th century. All these are significant questions, but they are not the questions which separate this thesis from those I wish to challenge. For the shortages which current economics seeks to understand are not those which arise from the genuine limitations of the environment, but are shortages created in the minds of the players in the economic game. They are not shortages of food, or of basic housing resources, of schools or even of roads or automobiles, but perhaps of titles, landed estates, Picasso paintings, boxes at the Royal Opera House, yachts, etc.. Since so many of the economists are paying court, in one way or another, to those for whom these are the real issues of economic life, it is not surprising that these things, sometimes referred to as ``positional goods'', are seen as so important.
However, in democratic states the power of the vote resides in
people whose basic needs are to have the things I referred to in
Chapter 37 on The People's share: adequate food and clothing, a
home with a bedroom for each child, all the education that anyone
might want, all the health care that anyone might need. And
several weeks' vacation each year with the funds to do something
interesting with it. It is this which our ``scientists of
scarcity'' claim cannot be achieved universally. Or at least not
without depriving us of the impetus to do more and do better.
The interesting thing about this claim is that it is
demonstrably false, and that this patent truth counts as nothing in
the reckoning of the fashionable economists. In fact, during the
1960s and 1970s, the situation of plenty was nearly achieved in the
industrialized world. And this in circumstances when labor was far
less productive and nearly every consumer item required more
materials and more labor than at present. It is true that the
population, even of the industrialized world, was smaller than now,
but even that is an illusion. Those nations would in fact be
smaller in population than they were then, but for the effect of a
quite substantial immigration. Much of this immigration was
deliberately fostered, either by the governments directly or by
elements in the economy which saw it in their own interest. Thus,
there was the ``guest worker'' program in Germany and the
deliberate courting of illegal immigration by the farm estates in
California and the restaurants of New York. In the less developed
parts of the world, people were beset with philosophies which
spurred them to greater fecundity than their lands could sustain,
and some of these saw emigration as the natural vent to their
overpopulation.
However, I will restrict my attention in this chapter to the
industrialized world, and almost exclusively to the United States,
though I think that most of what I say applies to the whole of the
G7, the richest seven countries in the world. There, as I said,
for all of the 1960s and 1970s the standard of living for the vast
bulk of the population met the criteria I had set forth, but not
for all. The way of dealing with those others was to fob them off
with the dole, euphemized as ``welfare''. However, in the past
twenty years, as labor became more efficient and as the GDP per
capita grew in real terms, the ranks of the unemployed, the
welfare-dependent, and the underclass generally grew as well. The
power of the unions shrank and the rich took unto themselves more
than the whole of the new wealth. The per capita income of the
bottom 60 % actually shrank. Though there was some redistribution
involved within that group, that hardly affected the whole,
especially with the next 20 % gaining nothing. The nation felt it
could afford to support the unemployed on the dole, and to overlook
the deterioration of the living standards of the underclass. And
in all of this, the sense was that we were being kind and tolerant,
even of those who were portrayed in the press as being cynically
and opportunistically welfare-dependent. We saw ourselves as
``making nice''.
However, by the late 1980s and into the 1990s, we have opted
for nasty. Although every major study has shown that punishment
does not deter violent crime, we have pushed for increasing amounts
of it. And in spite of the evidence to the contrary, we are now
acting to get people employed by punishing them if they are not.
There is a national mood now for the death penalty, and although it
is known that this will not stop murder, the push is for vengeance
rather than deterrence. Similarly for the long sentences, up to
life imprisonment, for possession of small amounts of drugs, even
marijuana. It is not the prospect of deterring crime which speaks
to the people, but the wish to ``get even'' with those who will not
do as they should. In the area of welfare, ordinarily decent
people are ready to starve the children of unmarried or abandoned
mothers if these are unwilling or unable to conform to what is
expected of them. As the rich press down on the people, the people
turn against anyone who is an available target, not to say a
scapegoat.
The image of the rising tide which raises all the boats is
invoked to get people to be tolerant of the excesses of those above
them in wealth and status, but it carries no weight when applied to
the enriching of the poor. Even the raising of the minimum wage is
bitterly opposed by the minions of the rich, as is the prospect of
universal health care and free public education from the cradle to
the grave. Yet all these things are within our grasp at this time,
and without removing the incentive to succeed. We had it in the
1960s and 1970s.
The past twenty years have been a period of class war, by the
rich against the working classes and by the working classes against
the idle poor. These forms of class warfare go unremarked and
uncriticized. It is only when the poor or the workers lay claim to
class interest that the kept press and the courtiers among the
intelligentsia find voice against the horrors of class warfare, by
which they usually describe such innocuous tactics as appeals to
use the ballot box to redress their grievances. But there is even
worse in the offing, perhaps, if the powerful continue to press
their advantage. For despite the considerable disinclination to
actual revolution, and despite the fact that no revolutionary class
has seen an advance in its own lifetime or even that of its
children, the upheavals, when they come, are always unexpected and
are always, in a deep sense, the responsibility of the former
rulers, who waited too long to correct that which they had every
reason for seeing, if only they had been willing to see. The
degree to which Patrick Buchanan could rally the resentment of the
working classes in the Republican primary elections in 1996 should
warn us that the results of playing nasty could get out of hand in
a hurry, either in the hands of a Fascist or a Communist, and then
it would be too late to try to cure things with a Kerensky style
Government. Revolutions were narrowly averted in England in 1832
and in the United States in 1932, but I doubt that we have until
2032 this time.
So it is time to make nice. It is time to distribute at least
half of the economic gains of the past twenty years to the people
at the bottom of the economic pyramid, and to restructure the
economics of knowledge in the interests of the legitimate owners of
most of it, the common people.
My friend Al criticizes this book for preaching to the choir.
So now I turn to the choir and preach directly. These words are
for those who have been convinced by what I have written thus far.
Many of you are people who wanted to believe from the start, and of
course we should all be wary of believing what we want to. It is
entirely too easy. But now comes the hard part, because there is
a cause to be advanced, a campaign to be undertaken, and it will
not be easy or particularly cheap, either in time, effort, or even
money. It will cost.
I address myself first to the economists. It is here that I
expect my greatest resistance from within the intellectual
community. I have intruded into the established paradigm of the
day, and invited you to overturn it. I know that you are
comfortable with that paradigm and with the prosperity which has
flowed from your embrace of it. I have spoken of the rewards of
courtiership, and I know that these are subtly seductive. There is
gold in them thar hills, whether the gold of comfortable salaries
or the gold medals of the Nobel Memorial Prize. But there is
something more important at stake, and I call you to its service.
We have a special destiny in the nurturing and flowering of the
human race. I have not called us magicians for nothing. And while
a magician can be a mountebank, he
*
can also be a healer and a seer
and a saver of lives. And that is exactly what I now call upon all
of us, and especially the economists, to help with.
While the cult of greed, known more gently as the school of
rationality, which has flowed from von Neumann and Friedman, has
dominated the most rewarded heights of the economic community for
the past half century, there is also a gentler and more humane
tradition reaching back to Veblen and beyond, and represented in
our time by such as Galbraith. It is a tradition which is short on
statistics and formulae but longer on intuition and insight. For
those who aspire to be thought the peers of Einstein and Pauling,
these are ``mere journalists'', and ``journalism'' is the epithet
of most extreme contempt in those circles. But in fact, The Theory
of the Leisure Class was one of the most important and influential
books of the 20th century, though much less read of late, and The
Affluent Society bears rereading today as the school of rationality
carries us further from those virtues which these two books, and
their authors, proclaimed as paramount in the building of a new and
better life for the people of the world.
It is tempting to seek a Newtonian economics, but to
accomplish it we need to reduce all economic life to measurable
quantities and that is not realistic. The models present wonderful
and interesting problems of mathematics but their depiction of the
economic world is questionable. The approximations are gross and
there is more than a little suspicion that the underlying reality
is chaotic in the technical sense, so that even tiny distortions in
the hypotheses can have tremendous effect upon the consequences.
The various fields of institutional economics, which have been
getting short shrift recently, can offer us some human and humane
tempering of the brutal and selfish message of the rationalist
school. When we assume that all of utility can be arithmetized and
then that everyone will seek the maximization of that utility on
pain of being excoriated as irrational, we build into our
definitions the conclusion that we are somehow morally obliged to
be greedy. It is not then surprising that the greedy applaud those
efforts, support them generously, and run to hire those who have
been baptized into that faith.
I know that it is hard to incur the animus of the commercial,
industrial and financial community which has lived in symbiosis
with the adherents of the Chicago School for so many years and
brought their pronouncements such honor and prosperity, and I
wonder how much altruism I might expect from those who think it
irrational to tip a waiter they will not see again, but I offer you
this crown of thorns modestly and with respect, in the hope that
you will take it up and wear it.
I address myself next to the rest of the academic community, for it is we who must carry the message, with or without the support of our cousins, the economists. We might well be thought guilty of special pleading, as those who would benefit most from the orientation I am proposing are precisely those who live by the product of the mind. But it is not all benefit. In Chapter 16, I speak directly of the obligation to share what bounty is available so as to maximize the production of knowledge, and not to set too stringent limits on who will be available to partake. It might result for many in the sort of genteel poverty which used to characterize the lives of those pre-World War II professors who were so unfortunate as to have to live on their salaries. There are limits, of course, to the sort of penury we should have to endure in this cause, but I have nominated the floor below which no one should fall, and that is sufficient if we understand that the benefit of sharing is that we should all have the time and resources to pursue our studies and the more of us there are in the pool, the less will our assigned duties impinge in our scholarly efforts. If, in the process, we individually and/or collectively raise the standard of living of the human race, we too shall profit thereby. Again the tide and the boats.
I next address myself to the intellectual community beyond the
walls of the Academy and the further reaches of the research and
development community. You are our first audience, and our major
contact with the wider world. That you read this book indicates
that we have a special relationship with you which we often find
difficult in extending further. We will need your help in
promoting an acceptance of this new formulation. And here I reach
the end of the choir and ask you all to join me in singing to those
in the nave, and even to those who are not now of the congregation.
For the Knowledge which is the Business of this book is not the
property of the academics or the intellectuals, and is only briefly
the possession even of those who invent, discover, or create it.
It belongs to the common people, the whole human race, to
generations yet unborn who will reap its bounty millennia into the
future.
I pray that my trumpet should not make an uncertain sound, for
the battle to enrich our progeny with all the knowledge that our
endowment of intelligence will sustain is indeed the holiest and
most valuable vocation I can imagine, and I only hope I will be
worthy and able to proclaim its gospel to a world which hardly
seems inclined to accept it.
Chapter 46. Knowledge is wealth
Knowledge is the treasure of the human race. Accumulated over
the megalennia, at first slowly and with great difficulty, and
accelerating with time so that the majority has been discovered in
this century and the majority of the remainder in the last, it is
our hope and our shield in a world where the fecundity of our
species literally threatens to extinguish most vertebrate life in
our consumption of the world's land and resources. It is a process
which would have happened even if our knowledge had not taken us
beyond the level of the agricultural revolution, though it would
have happened more slowly. But the only hope of arresting the
process lies in more knowledge and its wider distribution. It is
the scientists and philosophers who have uncovered this peril and
it is they who must find the road out of the morass. Those who
seek refuge in ignorance and retrogression can only impede the
process until possibly it is too late.
Literacy is knowledge, and so is literature, and art, and
music. Knowledge gives us the hope of living with less disease, of
living longer, of seeing our children grow to maturity, of having
grandparents to sweeten our childhoods. Knowledge has created the
possibility of a life freer of toil, in which we can fill the
leisure hours with these treasures. If we have misused the
blessing in the pursuit of our greed, it is knowledge which can
point the way to undo the abuse. If we have raped the Earth in our
immoderate demand for materialistic pleasures, it is an error we
can amend by finding ways to use less while enriching our lives
even more with deeper satisfactions. A violin can provide a
lifetime of pleasure to one who will learn to play it, and for less
cost, in money and in resources, than a skiing trip. A bicycle has
more to offer of lasting value than a speedboat. A copy of The
Wizard of Oz has more magic in it than a trip to Disneyland.
Let me here take note that the deep and simple pleasures I
refer to are known to be favored more by people who have more
education. Thus, knowledge is also a key to its own door. The
illiterate is locked out of the world of books, a world which may
become, in the age of information, more widely available than ever
before. Those with only an elementary education will be less
likely to be able to plumb the depths and experience the joys of a
Shakespeare play. For them, the need for a motorcycle or a trip to
the excitements of Las Vegas may well be more important.
Educated people, and especially worldly ones, are less
susceptible to the fevers of nationalism and are less tempted by
the excitement of war. I wish I could say they are immune, but
that is patently false. Maybe with yet more learning, ... . They
are also somewhat less given to the nastiness which has overtaken
our decade; they are less devoted to capital punishment and are
more inclined to see the amelioration of social problems as the
most successful way of preventing crime. They are, on the whole,
more compassionate with those they do not know. They are more
likely to want to ``make nice''.
Knowledge leads us to value freedom, and is essential in the
operation of Democracy. It dulls the instincts against equality
and fraternity. It is indispensable in an informed and empowered
electorate. History and the other social sciences are essential in
the thinking of those who have in their hands the power of
decision, whether the atomic trigger or the ballot.
Knowledge is power. It is freedom and democracy and literacy. Knowledge is health and sometimes life. Knowledge is wealth.