Economics and Change
Social Change, Week 7
This week was all about economics: the study of human choice under constraint1. This fills a big gap that I’ve been feeling so far in the course: when we talk about values and culture evolving, or a particular technology being adopted, we sometimes think of them all as on equal footing, but as I said three weeks ago about ideas, some of them are much less compatible with material reality and human nature than others. In Simpsons terms, this is the “world peace” problem; in game theory, if you’re proposing people in a certain system will act outside a dominant strategy, or at least a Nash equilibrium, then you’re in trouble2.
As a single example, recent advances in genomics mean that designer babies are feasible today, and future progress will add new features to select and reduce the cost. In the seventh chapter of Krznaric’s History for Tomorrow, he discusses how turning eugenics from a government-sponsored campaign into a consumer technology raises ethical issues that we don’t have the cultural tools to answer: what if certain people are engineered out of society by millions of individual choices? Is eliminating Down syndrome an improvement in population health or a market-driven genocide? What happens when money can buy better genes for your descendants? etc. Krznaric’s approach is to treat the genetic pool of humanity as a common treasure, much like all the people who gave to the March of Dimes3 funded the development of the polio vaccine, which was then made public4.
What Causes Economics?
Economic systems are human inventions, monkey money notwithstanding. Because they are basically just a set of institutions, norms, and behaviors, it seems reasonable that they could be influenced by a society’s underlying culture. Max Weber’s 1930 classic The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism makes exactly this argument: Protestantism conditioned England, the United States, and similar nations to the kind of hard work as proof of worth that enabled capitalism to take hold there and flourish5.
Beyond values, though, capitalism historically did emerge in a very specific institutional context. Karl Polanyi’s classic, The Great Transformation, explains how the English nobility enclosing the commons and the government gutting protections for the poor created a willing/desperate workforce, allowing for rapid industrialization and leading to the proliferation of capitalism, adorable orphans, and lots of diseases named after the workers who get them.
What Does Economics Cause?
Or maybe it's more useful to look at it the other way around, at the effects of dramatic economic change on societies. Thomas Friedman talks about how global capitalism and trade has “flattened” the world, with a dramatic increase in global connection and the elevation of individual capacity. This doesn't necessarily mean a reduction in inequality, but rather the ability for individuals to reach and have an impact far away that in previous eras would have required something like a nation. This has many manifestations: outsourcing, international terrorism6, and increasing specialization.
As the economic wheel turns, and especially as new technologies become important and their effects spread through the economy, they change social structures by changing the mix of jobs and skills. Whether this is just a general process of “creative destruction” as described by Schumpeter, where resources are continually shifted to more efficient modes of production, or more of a formal structure like Kondratieff waves where a general-purpose technology transforms the economy and pulls society out of stagnation every few decades, capitalism and technology have created a powerful engine of change in the last few centuries. As Andy Hines has written, it seems like this process is changing the very values of society and what we see as important.
What If Economics Is All There Is?
No discussion of economics and change would be complete without a discussion of Marxism. Though Karl Marx invented neither communism7 nor socialism, he was the one who created comprehensive theory explaining how they emerge naturally from capitalist systems8: because capitalism alienates the workers from the product of their labor and enrich the owners of capital, workers will eventually reject wages and rise as a class to overthrow private ownership of capital and create a socialist state (where the government owns all the property on behalf of the workers) and then eventually to true communism (where the idea of ownership itself is abolished). Moreover, his commitment to materialism9 was total: he categorized societies by the arrangement of labor and the means of productions, he saw all people in similar position as interchangeable members of the same “class”, and saw the struggle between class as determining the progression of history. That is, both the key features of society and the drivers of change are fundamentally economic. This monomania is why I don’t usually enjoy reading Marxists: assuming a priori that the dynamics of any situation can be described by finding out who (by class identity) is the oppressor and who is the oppressed (and that there is definitely one of each on each side) is one of the most dogmatic ways to filter reality.
I like this definition because it’s provocative. Does this mean economists decide they’re experts in things like terrorism? Yes! Does it mean that economics would disappear in a post-scarcity society? Maybe?
Sure, you can tip the scales by just asserting things about the incentive structure, such as that people will just start valuing cooperation and caring more than amassing and dominating. Lots of the futures from the Swinburne school are like this, imagining the emergence of a higher consciousness that will make all the people act for the benefit of the earth and future generations. Good luck, I guess?
The campaign was helped along, of course, by being one of the key tests for attaining an afterlife with Golden Boy peanuts.
If you’re keeping track, Krznaric pretty frequently points to common/public/state ownership as the solution to society’s problems: not just the human genome, but water, social media and even the pricing system itself…
Like I said in the context of the printing press, much technological progress has had the basic effect of making it so that fewer people are needed to disrupt society.
Indeed, Marx argued that all pre-agricultural societies, not being organized around ownership of land, were fully cooperative and a form of primitive communism. Going back to themes from two weeks ago, painting all non-agricultural peoples with a single cultural brush is not only a bit racist, but also an easy way to be wrong.
And yes I realize that Marx wrote a whole lot of stuff and my summary doesn’t capture all the detail and nuance. If you think I’m wrong on the major points, though, I’d love to talk about it in the comments.
That is, the actual observable world describes reality, not thought and ideas.
Really interesting- I never read about eugenics and Marxism within the same article. Thanks for the ideas :).