Monday, 11 October 2010
A BRIEF THANK YOU
A shout out to Matt Lister, the first reader of this blog to respond to my appeal for donations to USSAS. Many thanks, Matt.
A PAUSE FOR A REPLY
Two commentators -- JP and Angus -- have raised some fundamental questions about the underlying thesis of my exposition, and I am going to pause in my frantic writing long enough to respond to the two of them. I think what I have to say will deepen and clarify my argument, although I doubt it will convince them.
Here is a part of what JP writes: "I fail to see the argument here. If I give the unemployment-rate I am saying that, in a certain society, X number of people meet a certain proxy-standard for "unemployed". Saying this does not commit me to the claim that this measure applies to all societies, that it is somehow natural or given, or even to the claim that the relevant proxy is a good measure of unemployment. Could you say a bit more with regards to objectivity or neutrality?"
I shall certainly try. Obviously, in some very narrow, definitional sense, JP is of course correct. An unemployment percentage is a ratio between two quantities, and I can form a ratio of any two quantities I choose, so long as they are measured in the same units. [I cannot ask what percentage of 100 oranges 10 apples is, because, as we say, that is apples and oranges, but I can ask what percentage of 100 pieces of fruit ten pieces of fruit is, and in that case it matters not at all that the 100 are oranges and the 10 are apples.]
But that, I suggest, is not what is actually happening when the BLS cranks out its monthly unemployment estimates. The BLS, like all of us, starts with a pre-analytic non-technical conception of employment and unemployment, a notion that speaks to our concerns about the health of the economy, about the direction in which it is going, about the well-being of the people in America, about the stability of the economy and society, and so forth. The technical definitions crafted by the BLS are designed to capture those underlying notions in a way that will produce numbers useful to us in addressing those questions, while also serving as formalized terms suitable for sampling, surveying, and measuring.
The underlying notions of employment and unemployment are part of a broader understanding of our society, an understanding that embodies assumptions and evaluations that, taken all together, constitute an ideology -- i.e., a systematic rationale for the way things are. The BLS does its best to craft concepts that capture those notions, always recognizing that some compromise may be necessary to make the concepts measurable in a scientific manner. When we use this notion of unemployment as part of our public political discourse, we are buying into the conception of, and rationale for, capitalism, what I am calling, following Karl Mannheim, an ideology.
How would we conceptualize unemployment in a pre-capitalist Walton world? [The Waltons live in Depression era America, which is of course a capitalist world, but I introduced them in a feeble effort to put a face on an abstract argument, or, in the immortal words of W. S. Gilbert in THE MIKADO, "merely corroborative detail, designed to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative."] Suppose some thoughtful theoretician, well ahead of her time, were to try to form a concept of unemployment in the sixteenth century. Proceeding in the same manner, she might conceptualize unemployment to mean refusal to accept the role of a serf or apprentice, instead taking to the road and becoming a vagabond. She might note that as a result of the enclosure of farm land for the purpose of raising sheep for the wool trade, increasing numbers of former farm laborers are being driven off their traditional lands and are becoming a floating vagabond population of the poor, leading to the imposition of Poor Laws and the founding of Poor Houses in an attempt to control this socially disruptive phenomenon. In formulating this concept, she would be capturing accurately the world view and ideology dominant in England at that time. Suppose now that a colleague were to offer an alternative concept of "unemployment", using the BLS definition. This concept would technically be fully as precise and accurate as it is when used by the BLS in 2010, but it would find very little use in the sixteenth century, not merely because the statistics would be unavailable, but because there were at that time very few people being paid money wages for their labor, and indeed there would be, in the public discourse, no recognizable concept of a wage labor force.
One of the ways in which capitalism mystifies itself is by presenting itself as simple common sense, as nothing more than the way rational people behave when they are free of all superstitions and willing to abide by contracts freely made in a free marketplace. The point of Marx's historical account is to exhibit capitalism as one historically located system of social relations of production, ownership, law, and religious rationale, masquerading as mere simple reasonableness. My goal in writing as I do about the unemployment rate is to expose one aspect of that self-justifying self-description, and to show that it encapsulates and promulgates a normative justification of capitalism for which there is actually no ground.
Now, faced with my arguments, it is always open to anyone to say, "I am merely deploying a proxy-notion, formally defined. I intend no larger claim, no justification of capitalism, nothing more than the exhibition of a simple numerical ratio." And since each of us is the world's leading expert on his or her own state of mind, I cannot challenge such a claim. The person who is making it is the recognized authority on the subject.
However, I can and do suggest that the universal use of this concept of unemployment expresses and at the same time rationalizes the particular set of social relations of production that define a capitalist economy, and that even economists, who perhaps should know better, use this concept as though it were an adequate conceptualization of an acceptable state of affairs [not that the particular number is acceptable -- everybody agrees it is currently too high -- but that that concept of what constitutes unemployment, a concept that for example excludes the discouraged workers, the housewives, the prison population, and the armed forces from the calculation, articulates an image of the good society.]
Just to give you an example of the way in which this slippery shifting of concepts takes place [I am not at all suggesting that JP or Angus says anything like this -- it is just an example drawn from economics], consider the argument so popular in right-wing Cato Institute circles that in a free market workers are paid a wage equal to their marginal product, so that a federally mandated minimum wage distorts the labor market and results in higher unemployment. [If you have not heard this argument, you have been living under a rock.] This argument is based on a model of the economy that assumes an economy-wide linear homogeneous production function, to which one can then apply a famous theorem proved by the great eighteenth century mathematician Leonhard Euler. But as every first year graduate student in economics learns, Euler's theorem applies only to an economy in long-run equilibrium, in which there are constant returns to scale and a zero profit rate. Since there never has been and never could be a functional capitalist economy with a zero profit rate, the argument is irrelevant. But it is perfectly correct technically. IF one has an economy in whose production function is linear homogeneous, THEN each worker is paid his or her marginal product. That is what undergraduates are taught in their Intro Econ courses, and since most of them get no farther, they go through life thinking that really smart economists have conclusively proved that a minimum wage is a bad idea.
At this point, let me turn to Angus' question, which fits right in here. He asks, "Are you saying that it is impossible even for careful individuals to keep all normative connotations of unemployment at bay and just focus on what it is actually measuring, or just that society as a whole cannot sever the concept from its normative connotations?"
Well, obviously I am not saying that careful individuals cannot keep all normative connotations at bay, because here I am doing just that. But the situation is actually very much more complicated than that. I have written about this at length in the first chapter of my little book, MONEYBAGS MUST BE SO LUCKY, where I connect it up with Socratic irony and the proper interpretation of English Metaphysical poetry [no one ever accused me of limiting myself to one discipline.] It would take me much too much space reprise that entire argument here. It is, I honestly believe, one of the subtlest and deepest interpretations of Marx ever written, and I am enough of an author, not a blogger, to feel that if I have written it and published it, I ought to be able to assume that interested persons will take the trouble to read it.
Briefly, Marx argues in Chapter One of CAPITAL that all of us experience capitalist economic phenomena as mystified, even though we may have worked our way to a level of understanding at which we, like Marx, can see through that mystification. Completely to be free of it requires not an intellectual effort only but a political effort. "Up til now, philosophers have only interpreted the world; but the point is to change it." [The 11th Thesis on Feuerbach, more or less loosely quoted from memory.]
I am not going to say more, because I am afraid that someone reading a brief summary of my ideas on this subject will mistake them for the full exposition. I will say again, if you are really interested in this subject, read my little book. It is only 80 pages or so long.
Tomorrow, back to my fable. The Marx family s next.
Here is a part of what JP writes: "I fail to see the argument here. If I give the unemployment-rate I am saying that, in a certain society, X number of people meet a certain proxy-standard for "unemployed". Saying this does not commit me to the claim that this measure applies to all societies, that it is somehow natural or given, or even to the claim that the relevant proxy is a good measure of unemployment. Could you say a bit more with regards to objectivity or neutrality?"
I shall certainly try. Obviously, in some very narrow, definitional sense, JP is of course correct. An unemployment percentage is a ratio between two quantities, and I can form a ratio of any two quantities I choose, so long as they are measured in the same units. [I cannot ask what percentage of 100 oranges 10 apples is, because, as we say, that is apples and oranges, but I can ask what percentage of 100 pieces of fruit ten pieces of fruit is, and in that case it matters not at all that the 100 are oranges and the 10 are apples.]
But that, I suggest, is not what is actually happening when the BLS cranks out its monthly unemployment estimates. The BLS, like all of us, starts with a pre-analytic non-technical conception of employment and unemployment, a notion that speaks to our concerns about the health of the economy, about the direction in which it is going, about the well-being of the people in America, about the stability of the economy and society, and so forth. The technical definitions crafted by the BLS are designed to capture those underlying notions in a way that will produce numbers useful to us in addressing those questions, while also serving as formalized terms suitable for sampling, surveying, and measuring.
The underlying notions of employment and unemployment are part of a broader understanding of our society, an understanding that embodies assumptions and evaluations that, taken all together, constitute an ideology -- i.e., a systematic rationale for the way things are. The BLS does its best to craft concepts that capture those notions, always recognizing that some compromise may be necessary to make the concepts measurable in a scientific manner. When we use this notion of unemployment as part of our public political discourse, we are buying into the conception of, and rationale for, capitalism, what I am calling, following Karl Mannheim, an ideology.
How would we conceptualize unemployment in a pre-capitalist Walton world? [The Waltons live in Depression era America, which is of course a capitalist world, but I introduced them in a feeble effort to put a face on an abstract argument, or, in the immortal words of W. S. Gilbert in THE MIKADO, "merely corroborative detail, designed to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative."] Suppose some thoughtful theoretician, well ahead of her time, were to try to form a concept of unemployment in the sixteenth century. Proceeding in the same manner, she might conceptualize unemployment to mean refusal to accept the role of a serf or apprentice, instead taking to the road and becoming a vagabond. She might note that as a result of the enclosure of farm land for the purpose of raising sheep for the wool trade, increasing numbers of former farm laborers are being driven off their traditional lands and are becoming a floating vagabond population of the poor, leading to the imposition of Poor Laws and the founding of Poor Houses in an attempt to control this socially disruptive phenomenon. In formulating this concept, she would be capturing accurately the world view and ideology dominant in England at that time. Suppose now that a colleague were to offer an alternative concept of "unemployment", using the BLS definition. This concept would technically be fully as precise and accurate as it is when used by the BLS in 2010, but it would find very little use in the sixteenth century, not merely because the statistics would be unavailable, but because there were at that time very few people being paid money wages for their labor, and indeed there would be, in the public discourse, no recognizable concept of a wage labor force.
One of the ways in which capitalism mystifies itself is by presenting itself as simple common sense, as nothing more than the way rational people behave when they are free of all superstitions and willing to abide by contracts freely made in a free marketplace. The point of Marx's historical account is to exhibit capitalism as one historically located system of social relations of production, ownership, law, and religious rationale, masquerading as mere simple reasonableness. My goal in writing as I do about the unemployment rate is to expose one aspect of that self-justifying self-description, and to show that it encapsulates and promulgates a normative justification of capitalism for which there is actually no ground.
Now, faced with my arguments, it is always open to anyone to say, "I am merely deploying a proxy-notion, formally defined. I intend no larger claim, no justification of capitalism, nothing more than the exhibition of a simple numerical ratio." And since each of us is the world's leading expert on his or her own state of mind, I cannot challenge such a claim. The person who is making it is the recognized authority on the subject.
However, I can and do suggest that the universal use of this concept of unemployment expresses and at the same time rationalizes the particular set of social relations of production that define a capitalist economy, and that even economists, who perhaps should know better, use this concept as though it were an adequate conceptualization of an acceptable state of affairs [not that the particular number is acceptable -- everybody agrees it is currently too high -- but that that concept of what constitutes unemployment, a concept that for example excludes the discouraged workers, the housewives, the prison population, and the armed forces from the calculation, articulates an image of the good society.]
Just to give you an example of the way in which this slippery shifting of concepts takes place [I am not at all suggesting that JP or Angus says anything like this -- it is just an example drawn from economics], consider the argument so popular in right-wing Cato Institute circles that in a free market workers are paid a wage equal to their marginal product, so that a federally mandated minimum wage distorts the labor market and results in higher unemployment. [If you have not heard this argument, you have been living under a rock.] This argument is based on a model of the economy that assumes an economy-wide linear homogeneous production function, to which one can then apply a famous theorem proved by the great eighteenth century mathematician Leonhard Euler. But as every first year graduate student in economics learns, Euler's theorem applies only to an economy in long-run equilibrium, in which there are constant returns to scale and a zero profit rate. Since there never has been and never could be a functional capitalist economy with a zero profit rate, the argument is irrelevant. But it is perfectly correct technically. IF one has an economy in whose production function is linear homogeneous, THEN each worker is paid his or her marginal product. That is what undergraduates are taught in their Intro Econ courses, and since most of them get no farther, they go through life thinking that really smart economists have conclusively proved that a minimum wage is a bad idea.
At this point, let me turn to Angus' question, which fits right in here. He asks, "Are you saying that it is impossible even for careful individuals to keep all normative connotations of unemployment at bay and just focus on what it is actually measuring, or just that society as a whole cannot sever the concept from its normative connotations?"
Well, obviously I am not saying that careful individuals cannot keep all normative connotations at bay, because here I am doing just that. But the situation is actually very much more complicated than that. I have written about this at length in the first chapter of my little book, MONEYBAGS MUST BE SO LUCKY, where I connect it up with Socratic irony and the proper interpretation of English Metaphysical poetry [no one ever accused me of limiting myself to one discipline.] It would take me much too much space reprise that entire argument here. It is, I honestly believe, one of the subtlest and deepest interpretations of Marx ever written, and I am enough of an author, not a blogger, to feel that if I have written it and published it, I ought to be able to assume that interested persons will take the trouble to read it.
Briefly, Marx argues in Chapter One of CAPITAL that all of us experience capitalist economic phenomena as mystified, even though we may have worked our way to a level of understanding at which we, like Marx, can see through that mystification. Completely to be free of it requires not an intellectual effort only but a political effort. "Up til now, philosophers have only interpreted the world; but the point is to change it." [The 11th Thesis on Feuerbach, more or less loosely quoted from memory.]
I am not going to say more, because I am afraid that someone reading a brief summary of my ideas on this subject will mistake them for the full exposition. I will say again, if you are really interested in this subject, read my little book. It is only 80 pages or so long.
Tomorrow, back to my fable. The Marx family s next.
Sunday, 10 October 2010
THE STUDY OF SOCIETY PART SEVEN
Seventh Post
Since some of you are getting into the spirit of the thing, and rooting for one family or another [we have at least one Galt fan], perhaps I should remind you why I am doing this. My larger purpose is advance the thesis that our understanding of society is inevitably, ungetoverably ideologically encoded, partisan, politically implicated. There is no standpoint -- what the Greeks called a pou sto -- from which I can achieve an objective, scientific, neutral point of view. Hence, despite the phrase "Social Science" that is now used universally, the study of society is not, and cannot be, in the contemporary sense of the term, "scientific."
To explain this claim, and offer at least some supporting evidence for it, albeit of a particular or anecdotal nature, I have chosen the concept of the social rate of unemployment. First, I sketched briefly the process by which our most reliable source for such data, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, arrives at a social unemployment rate, and I explained some of the problems with that number, and how the BLS attempts to adjust for what they themselves understand quite well are its inadequacies. Now, I am showing you three quite different conceptions of work, and hence of unemployment, using the rather facetious device of three "families" to illustrate what I have to say. Thus far, I have said a few words about a pre-capitalist conception of work, as illustrated by the fictional Walton family of Walton's Mountain. Now we move on.
What of the Galts? [There is no Galt family, of course. But never mind. I am making this up as I go along, and posting it almost before I have time to proofread it. You will get the point.] In the world of Galt, which is to say the pristine world of pure capitalism, each person has only one obligation to others -- namely, to abide by all contracts freely entered into. Strictly speaking, there are no families -- no Grandmas who must be looked after should they have strokes, no sons who owe it to their fathers to help out in the sawmill. Indeed -- and this is one of the most profound and brilliant of Karl Marx's many insights -- capitalism denies the normal work rhythms and cycles of day, year, and lifetime, replacing them with continuous, homogeneous, standardized production. Since this is so important an idea, and since it is actually crucial to the definition of an unemployment rate, which is the example we are exploring, I shall expatiate on it for a bit.
We human beings are born, we grow up, we work, we grow old, and we die. As the Good Book says, there is a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted. Productive labor is natural to us, and it has its rhythms. When the harvest time comes, we work from before dawn until after dusk to gather in the grain before the rains come. In winter, work slows, and we mend our tools, do necessary chores, prepare for the next season. The same rhythms are essential to constructing a building, crafting a chair, mining iron ore, caring for the sick, even writing the laws by which we are governed. Hard work performed according to the natural rhythms of the human body is invigorating, satisfying, fulfilling. Marx captures this brilliantly in his youthful writings, in which he compares productive labor to the creative efforts of the artist, the painter or sculptor.
But these natural rhythms interfere with the steady, calculable, profitable accumulation of capital that is capitalism's reason for being. Hence, slowly, irresistibly, capitalism invades the natural human activities of production and transforms them into standardized, regularized, ceaseless commodity production. [The two greatest film images of this process are Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times and the scene from The Lord of the Rings in which Saruman is seen directing the efforts of the Orcs at Isengaard. Note that it is nature, in the form of the Ents, or tree wardens, who destroy their inhuman creations, and it is the forces of nature -- i.e., the irresistible force of water -- by which they accomplish the destruction]
The transformation has a subjective side and an objective side. On the objective side, the endless variety and individuality of craft production is transformed into standardized commodity production. For purposes of rational calculation, storage, and sale, each yard of cloth must be like each other, each safety pin identical to its mate, each dwelling interchangeable with each other. This is accomplished in part by the introduction of machinery, in part by the routinization of the assembly line or the bureaucratic office, in part by the standardization of the record keeping that becomes an essential element in commodity production.
On the subjective side, labor is standardized and routinized, so that it is carried on independently of the natural rhythms of the hour, the day, or the season. Factories run around the clock, for to shut them down is to let capital lie idle and unproductive. This means that some workers must work when they would normally sleep, and sleep when they would normally work. Human beings vary in the rate at which they work. Some are fast workers, some slow, and all of them have periods of intense labor and periods of rest or idleness. But the assembly line never stops moving, so workers must be compelled to adjust themselves to the demands of production, rather than adjusting production to the needs of workers. [Think, for example, of the famous old I Love Lucy episode in which Lucy is working on an assembly line in a candy factory, and falls behind in her job of putting cherries on top of the candies as they flow by relentlessly on the conveyor belt. The scene is played magnificently for laughs by Lucille Ball, but it is a terrifying image nonetheless.]
In a Galt world, there is no acknowledgement of the personhood of the workers, who are conceptualized by the economists who theorize this world as inputs into production. A Galt world is thus free of racial, religious, ethnic, or age prejudice. Capital is blind to all such human distinctions. It will employ men, women, or children, Whites or Blacks, Irish or English, Jews or Muslims or Christians or Satanists [there is hope therefore that Christine O'Donnell might finally find a full time job]. Anyone who can do a standardized day's labor for a standardized day's pay is equally welcome to enter into a wage bargain with the entrepreneur who is the living embodiment of Capital. This is one of the great attractions of a Galt world, and we must never forget it, for one of the triumphs of capitalism is its extinction of pre-capitalist prejudice.
In a Galt world, capital makes no allowance for the natural progressions of human life. Even though the next generation of productive workers can be provided to capital only through the processes of pregnancy and birth, capital makes no allowance for working mothers. Nor does capital make a place for young workers just learning the ways of productive labor, or for aging workers whose level of productive effort must necessarily be lower. In contrast with the world of the Waltons, in which an appropriate place is found for everyone in the collective productive life of the family, in a Galt world, a person is either employed full time at a competitively determined wage, or is totally unemployed. All of us are familiar, either from personal experience or from movies, television, and literature, with the worker who is fully employed one day and completely unemployed the next. [I speak from personal experience, of course, being now officially retired. All of us who have gone through this wrenching and completely non-human transformation cling to the shreds and tatters of our former lives. I call myself "Professor," even though of course I no longer am a professor.]
Thus, the concept of an unemployment rate is itself a product of capitalism, as standardized as the IPods and Dining Room Suites and yards of cloth that come off the assembly lines. Simply to use the concept -- and how can we avoid it? -- is implicitly to accept the ideological underpinnings of capitalism, and to endorse them by failing to call them into question. To ask "Has the unemployment rate ticked up this month?" is to enter a Galt world.
To be sure, there are a few theoretical problems with the concept of an unemployment rate in a Galt world, one of which is that according to the classical laissez-faire economists who keep the sacred flame of that world, persistent unemployment is impossible. Hence, during the Great Depression, when one quarter of America's workers were out of work, economists insisted for some time that unemployment was simply a transient result of normal friction in the labor market. They were saved from their madness by Keynes, but seventy-five years later, we see a resurgence of the old-time Galt religion.
Well, enough of the Galt world. Tomorrow, we visit the Marxes.
Since some of you are getting into the spirit of the thing, and rooting for one family or another [we have at least one Galt fan], perhaps I should remind you why I am doing this. My larger purpose is advance the thesis that our understanding of society is inevitably, ungetoverably ideologically encoded, partisan, politically implicated. There is no standpoint -- what the Greeks called a pou sto -- from which I can achieve an objective, scientific, neutral point of view. Hence, despite the phrase "Social Science" that is now used universally, the study of society is not, and cannot be, in the contemporary sense of the term, "scientific."
To explain this claim, and offer at least some supporting evidence for it, albeit of a particular or anecdotal nature, I have chosen the concept of the social rate of unemployment. First, I sketched briefly the process by which our most reliable source for such data, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, arrives at a social unemployment rate, and I explained some of the problems with that number, and how the BLS attempts to adjust for what they themselves understand quite well are its inadequacies. Now, I am showing you three quite different conceptions of work, and hence of unemployment, using the rather facetious device of three "families" to illustrate what I have to say. Thus far, I have said a few words about a pre-capitalist conception of work, as illustrated by the fictional Walton family of Walton's Mountain. Now we move on.
What of the Galts? [There is no Galt family, of course. But never mind. I am making this up as I go along, and posting it almost before I have time to proofread it. You will get the point.] In the world of Galt, which is to say the pristine world of pure capitalism, each person has only one obligation to others -- namely, to abide by all contracts freely entered into. Strictly speaking, there are no families -- no Grandmas who must be looked after should they have strokes, no sons who owe it to their fathers to help out in the sawmill. Indeed -- and this is one of the most profound and brilliant of Karl Marx's many insights -- capitalism denies the normal work rhythms and cycles of day, year, and lifetime, replacing them with continuous, homogeneous, standardized production. Since this is so important an idea, and since it is actually crucial to the definition of an unemployment rate, which is the example we are exploring, I shall expatiate on it for a bit.
We human beings are born, we grow up, we work, we grow old, and we die. As the Good Book says, there is a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted. Productive labor is natural to us, and it has its rhythms. When the harvest time comes, we work from before dawn until after dusk to gather in the grain before the rains come. In winter, work slows, and we mend our tools, do necessary chores, prepare for the next season. The same rhythms are essential to constructing a building, crafting a chair, mining iron ore, caring for the sick, even writing the laws by which we are governed. Hard work performed according to the natural rhythms of the human body is invigorating, satisfying, fulfilling. Marx captures this brilliantly in his youthful writings, in which he compares productive labor to the creative efforts of the artist, the painter or sculptor.
But these natural rhythms interfere with the steady, calculable, profitable accumulation of capital that is capitalism's reason for being. Hence, slowly, irresistibly, capitalism invades the natural human activities of production and transforms them into standardized, regularized, ceaseless commodity production. [The two greatest film images of this process are Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times and the scene from The Lord of the Rings in which Saruman is seen directing the efforts of the Orcs at Isengaard. Note that it is nature, in the form of the Ents, or tree wardens, who destroy their inhuman creations, and it is the forces of nature -- i.e., the irresistible force of water -- by which they accomplish the destruction]
The transformation has a subjective side and an objective side. On the objective side, the endless variety and individuality of craft production is transformed into standardized commodity production. For purposes of rational calculation, storage, and sale, each yard of cloth must be like each other, each safety pin identical to its mate, each dwelling interchangeable with each other. This is accomplished in part by the introduction of machinery, in part by the routinization of the assembly line or the bureaucratic office, in part by the standardization of the record keeping that becomes an essential element in commodity production.
On the subjective side, labor is standardized and routinized, so that it is carried on independently of the natural rhythms of the hour, the day, or the season. Factories run around the clock, for to shut them down is to let capital lie idle and unproductive. This means that some workers must work when they would normally sleep, and sleep when they would normally work. Human beings vary in the rate at which they work. Some are fast workers, some slow, and all of them have periods of intense labor and periods of rest or idleness. But the assembly line never stops moving, so workers must be compelled to adjust themselves to the demands of production, rather than adjusting production to the needs of workers. [Think, for example, of the famous old I Love Lucy episode in which Lucy is working on an assembly line in a candy factory, and falls behind in her job of putting cherries on top of the candies as they flow by relentlessly on the conveyor belt. The scene is played magnificently for laughs by Lucille Ball, but it is a terrifying image nonetheless.]
In a Galt world, there is no acknowledgement of the personhood of the workers, who are conceptualized by the economists who theorize this world as inputs into production. A Galt world is thus free of racial, religious, ethnic, or age prejudice. Capital is blind to all such human distinctions. It will employ men, women, or children, Whites or Blacks, Irish or English, Jews or Muslims or Christians or Satanists [there is hope therefore that Christine O'Donnell might finally find a full time job]. Anyone who can do a standardized day's labor for a standardized day's pay is equally welcome to enter into a wage bargain with the entrepreneur who is the living embodiment of Capital. This is one of the great attractions of a Galt world, and we must never forget it, for one of the triumphs of capitalism is its extinction of pre-capitalist prejudice.
In a Galt world, capital makes no allowance for the natural progressions of human life. Even though the next generation of productive workers can be provided to capital only through the processes of pregnancy and birth, capital makes no allowance for working mothers. Nor does capital make a place for young workers just learning the ways of productive labor, or for aging workers whose level of productive effort must necessarily be lower. In contrast with the world of the Waltons, in which an appropriate place is found for everyone in the collective productive life of the family, in a Galt world, a person is either employed full time at a competitively determined wage, or is totally unemployed. All of us are familiar, either from personal experience or from movies, television, and literature, with the worker who is fully employed one day and completely unemployed the next. [I speak from personal experience, of course, being now officially retired. All of us who have gone through this wrenching and completely non-human transformation cling to the shreds and tatters of our former lives. I call myself "Professor," even though of course I no longer am a professor.]
Thus, the concept of an unemployment rate is itself a product of capitalism, as standardized as the IPods and Dining Room Suites and yards of cloth that come off the assembly lines. Simply to use the concept -- and how can we avoid it? -- is implicitly to accept the ideological underpinnings of capitalism, and to endorse them by failing to call them into question. To ask "Has the unemployment rate ticked up this month?" is to enter a Galt world.
To be sure, there are a few theoretical problems with the concept of an unemployment rate in a Galt world, one of which is that according to the classical laissez-faire economists who keep the sacred flame of that world, persistent unemployment is impossible. Hence, during the Great Depression, when one quarter of America's workers were out of work, economists insisted for some time that unemployment was simply a transient result of normal friction in the labor market. They were saved from their madness by Keynes, but seventy-five years later, we see a resurgence of the old-time Galt religion.
Well, enough of the Galt world. Tomorrow, we visit the Marxes.
Saturday, 9 October 2010
YOU MUST READ THIS
OK, you have to read this, from The Onion of several days ago. Here is the link.
http://www.theonion.com/articles/historians-admit-to-inventing-ancient-greeks,18209/
You can't click on this [I forget how to do it], so just copy it and paste it in your command line. Johnathan Swift is not dead.
http://www.theonion.com/articles/historians-admit-to-inventing-ancient-greeks,18209/
You can't click on this [I forget how to do it], so just copy it and paste it in your command line. Johnathan Swift is not dead.
THE STUDY OF SOCIETY PART SIX
Sixth Post
Each month, BLS employees fan out across America and knock on the doors of the 50,000 households in the BLS sample. They ask questions of the persons in the household [if they are there and are willing to talk -- another complicated practical problem for which the BLS has devised elaborate solutions -- see their literature.] "Were you employed last month? For how many hours a week? At what wage? If you are not now employed, have you looked for work in the last month?"
This last question is the crucial one. The BLS considers people to be "in the labor force" only if they are currently employed or have looked for work in the last month. At one point, the BLS broadened the definition to include people who had looked for work in the last two months. But this, as they well know, does not capture the phenomenon of the "discouraged worker," someone who looked for work, failed to find work, finally grew discouraged and stopped looking, but would start looking again if he or she thought there was any chance of finding something. So the BLS started generating a second set of figures measuring a different, expanded, and -- in bad times -- obviously much larger group of people who could, by some plausible conception, be thought of as "unemployed."
Stop and reflect, for a moment, on the set of images that lie implicit in this conception of unemployment. Imagine a town in which the major employer is Acme Manufacturing, which runs the big plant on the edge of town. Acme lays off 2,000 workers -- mostly men, of course -- who make a half-hearted attempt to find other jobs and then sit at home, waiting for word that Acme is hiring again. When the BLS representative comes to the door, the man in the house says that he has not looked for work in thirty days. The BLS rep checks off the "not unemployed" box. Then things look up and Acme starts hiring. It is not a large town, and word spreads like wildfire. All the former workers go down to the loading dock looking for work. The BLS rep asks the same question, and is told, "I looked yesterday." The "unemployed" box is checked. Then he is taken back on, and next time, the BLS rep checks off "employed."
But this image no longer really fits the current reality. More often than not, when the Acmes of this world lay off workers, they are outsourcing the jobs, which never come back. In a service economy or information economy, jobs in the local factory are a dwindling proportion of the totality of jobs in America. So the assumptions on which the concept of "unemployment" is constructed must be revised, reconsidered, or perhaps even -- as we shall see -- rejected.
Everyone who works with these figures understands all of this. It is why, when the economy starts to get going after a recession, unemployment at first goes UP. Laid-off workers who had stopped looking for work start looking again, but are not yet hired.
Lying behind these figures on employed workers, unemployed workers, discouraged workers, and all the rest are a set of competing theoretical and ideological conceptions about the nature of labor in the economy, and despite the endless discussions of the unemployment rate, these underlying conceptions rarely get brought to the surface and discussed openly. Indeed, I think it is fair to say that most economists and sociologists, no matter what their technical sophisticated, are not even aware of these questions and have never thought about them. So I am going to talk about them for a while, as a way of showing you how deeply embedded our conceptions of society are in normative ideological presuppositions. That is really the message of this entire series of posts, as I indicated earlier.
Let me spend a few moments talking about three quite different organizations of the role of work in society. I will identify these, fancifully, with three different families -- the Waltons, the Galts, and the Marxes [you must forgive me -- it is five minutes to six in the morning as I write these words, and my gravitas filter is not yet fully operational.] Each of these families represents a different conception of work in society, which we might also call the pre-capitalist, capitalist, and socialist conceptions. [For you youngsters, the Waltons are a depression era rural family in a wonderful old television night time series of the same name. For you lefties, John Galt is the Ayn Rand hero of her novel ATLAS SHRUGGED, now the bible of serious right-wing libertarians. The Marxes are, of course, the Karl Marxes, although, as is well known, Marx led a thoroughly bourgeois life, albeit from time to time an impecunious one.]
The Waltons live in rural Virginia, on Walton's Mountain. They are a three generational family, consisting of Grandpa and Grandma Walton [Grandpa played by the wonderful old actor, Will Geer], John and Olivia Walton, and their seven children, most notably John-Boy, who is the narrator and central figure. [The actor who plays John Walton, Ralph Waite, resurfaced not long ago as Agent Leroy Jethroe Gibbs' father in an episode of NCIS. It was an inspired casting choice.] John and Grandpa operate a sawmill, and the family does some farming and raising of chickens and such. The story is built on the life-cycle conception of the human condition, with people at every stage in that cycle save infancy. Everyone in the extended family has some economic role to play, and everyone's labor is needed if the family is to survive hard times during the Depression. John and Grandpa run the sawmill, and John-Boy, the oldest child, helps. The younger children perform subordinate economic roles either on the farm or in the house. Without labor-saving electric appliances, there is a good deal of work to be done just making meals and maintaining the household, and all the women from Grandma to the youngest daughter contribute their efforts [the traditional gender division is irrelevant to my point here, so let us not have a lot of huffing and puffing about it.] When the actress playing Grandma had a stroke, this was written into the story, and she returned to continue playing Grandma, her role in the household chores diminished BUT NOT ELIMINATED.
In the world defined by the Waltons' extended family, there is no such thing as "unemployment." There are good times and bad, determined principally by whether there is a demand for the services of the sawmill, but no one is "laid off." What is more, there are no sharp lines dividing the start and the end of the part of life when one "works." Grandpa and Grandma are, no doubt, of retirement age by modern standards, but they do not retire. As they age, the quantity and nature of productive labor required of them changes. At the other end, the children have chores as soon as they are old enough to perform them, and unlike chores in a modern upscale nuclear family, these chores are an essential component of the productive activity of the extended family unit. Although none of them has ever heard of Karl Marx, they organize their lives in accordance with the slogan that Marx imagines emblazoned on the banners carried by workers into the Revolution: "From each according to his ability. To each according to his need."
Well, this is developing into something not quite of book length but a good deal longer than an answer to a question on a blog. I am just going to assume people are interested. If I haven;t hooked you yet, I figure I never will. Tomorrow the Galts.
Each month, BLS employees fan out across America and knock on the doors of the 50,000 households in the BLS sample. They ask questions of the persons in the household [if they are there and are willing to talk -- another complicated practical problem for which the BLS has devised elaborate solutions -- see their literature.] "Were you employed last month? For how many hours a week? At what wage? If you are not now employed, have you looked for work in the last month?"
This last question is the crucial one. The BLS considers people to be "in the labor force" only if they are currently employed or have looked for work in the last month. At one point, the BLS broadened the definition to include people who had looked for work in the last two months. But this, as they well know, does not capture the phenomenon of the "discouraged worker," someone who looked for work, failed to find work, finally grew discouraged and stopped looking, but would start looking again if he or she thought there was any chance of finding something. So the BLS started generating a second set of figures measuring a different, expanded, and -- in bad times -- obviously much larger group of people who could, by some plausible conception, be thought of as "unemployed."
Stop and reflect, for a moment, on the set of images that lie implicit in this conception of unemployment. Imagine a town in which the major employer is Acme Manufacturing, which runs the big plant on the edge of town. Acme lays off 2,000 workers -- mostly men, of course -- who make a half-hearted attempt to find other jobs and then sit at home, waiting for word that Acme is hiring again. When the BLS representative comes to the door, the man in the house says that he has not looked for work in thirty days. The BLS rep checks off the "not unemployed" box. Then things look up and Acme starts hiring. It is not a large town, and word spreads like wildfire. All the former workers go down to the loading dock looking for work. The BLS rep asks the same question, and is told, "I looked yesterday." The "unemployed" box is checked. Then he is taken back on, and next time, the BLS rep checks off "employed."
But this image no longer really fits the current reality. More often than not, when the Acmes of this world lay off workers, they are outsourcing the jobs, which never come back. In a service economy or information economy, jobs in the local factory are a dwindling proportion of the totality of jobs in America. So the assumptions on which the concept of "unemployment" is constructed must be revised, reconsidered, or perhaps even -- as we shall see -- rejected.
Everyone who works with these figures understands all of this. It is why, when the economy starts to get going after a recession, unemployment at first goes UP. Laid-off workers who had stopped looking for work start looking again, but are not yet hired.
Lying behind these figures on employed workers, unemployed workers, discouraged workers, and all the rest are a set of competing theoretical and ideological conceptions about the nature of labor in the economy, and despite the endless discussions of the unemployment rate, these underlying conceptions rarely get brought to the surface and discussed openly. Indeed, I think it is fair to say that most economists and sociologists, no matter what their technical sophisticated, are not even aware of these questions and have never thought about them. So I am going to talk about them for a while, as a way of showing you how deeply embedded our conceptions of society are in normative ideological presuppositions. That is really the message of this entire series of posts, as I indicated earlier.
Let me spend a few moments talking about three quite different organizations of the role of work in society. I will identify these, fancifully, with three different families -- the Waltons, the Galts, and the Marxes [you must forgive me -- it is five minutes to six in the morning as I write these words, and my gravitas filter is not yet fully operational.] Each of these families represents a different conception of work in society, which we might also call the pre-capitalist, capitalist, and socialist conceptions. [For you youngsters, the Waltons are a depression era rural family in a wonderful old television night time series of the same name. For you lefties, John Galt is the Ayn Rand hero of her novel ATLAS SHRUGGED, now the bible of serious right-wing libertarians. The Marxes are, of course, the Karl Marxes, although, as is well known, Marx led a thoroughly bourgeois life, albeit from time to time an impecunious one.]
The Waltons live in rural Virginia, on Walton's Mountain. They are a three generational family, consisting of Grandpa and Grandma Walton [Grandpa played by the wonderful old actor, Will Geer], John and Olivia Walton, and their seven children, most notably John-Boy, who is the narrator and central figure. [The actor who plays John Walton, Ralph Waite, resurfaced not long ago as Agent Leroy Jethroe Gibbs' father in an episode of NCIS. It was an inspired casting choice.] John and Grandpa operate a sawmill, and the family does some farming and raising of chickens and such. The story is built on the life-cycle conception of the human condition, with people at every stage in that cycle save infancy. Everyone in the extended family has some economic role to play, and everyone's labor is needed if the family is to survive hard times during the Depression. John and Grandpa run the sawmill, and John-Boy, the oldest child, helps. The younger children perform subordinate economic roles either on the farm or in the house. Without labor-saving electric appliances, there is a good deal of work to be done just making meals and maintaining the household, and all the women from Grandma to the youngest daughter contribute their efforts [the traditional gender division is irrelevant to my point here, so let us not have a lot of huffing and puffing about it.] When the actress playing Grandma had a stroke, this was written into the story, and she returned to continue playing Grandma, her role in the household chores diminished BUT NOT ELIMINATED.
In the world defined by the Waltons' extended family, there is no such thing as "unemployment." There are good times and bad, determined principally by whether there is a demand for the services of the sawmill, but no one is "laid off." What is more, there are no sharp lines dividing the start and the end of the part of life when one "works." Grandpa and Grandma are, no doubt, of retirement age by modern standards, but they do not retire. As they age, the quantity and nature of productive labor required of them changes. At the other end, the children have chores as soon as they are old enough to perform them, and unlike chores in a modern upscale nuclear family, these chores are an essential component of the productive activity of the extended family unit. Although none of them has ever heard of Karl Marx, they organize their lives in accordance with the slogan that Marx imagines emblazoned on the banners carried by workers into the Revolution: "From each according to his ability. To each according to his need."
Well, this is developing into something not quite of book length but a good deal longer than an answer to a question on a blog. I am just going to assume people are interested. If I haven;t hooked you yet, I figure I never will. Tomorrow the Galts.
Friday, 8 October 2010
THE STUDY OF SOCIETY PART FIVE
Fifth Post
Several readers of this series of posts have themselves posted very interesting comments. Since I am writing this as I post, I have really not had time to respond to these comments as I ought. Be patient, if you will, and I will try to offer some sort of response in a day or two. Now, let me continue.
When we expand our attention to large, complex, modern societies, with hundreds of millions of citizens, the problems attendant on devising usable concepts for grasping so complex a social reality metastasize. The most obvious problem is simply data collection, although that turns out to be much less theoretically significant than one might suppose. When my wife and I go to Paris, and sit in our local cafe, Le Metro, we see many young couples pushing baby carriages. But this sort of anecdotal evidence is obviously useless in telling me whether the birth rate in France is above or below the replacement rate. [It is, as it happens, below -- without immigrants, most of whom are reviled by the French, the population would be declining precipitously]. To form a usable concept of the rate of expansion or contraction of the population of France, one needs population statistics.
In the United States, statistics of all sorts are regularly collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, an arm of the Labor Department of the Federal Government. If this subject interests you at all, I strongly urge you to familiarize yourself with their work. [Any University Library that is a "repository library" will have the full run of their publications. At one point, when I was deep in the details of employment and compensation statistics by job category, I had occasion to email the Bureau, and ended up in contact with a fascinating character who was quite comfortable with my Marxist beliefs. He was spending his career in some obscure government office, possessed of radical leanings that rarely found an avenue of expression.]
There are two theoretical problems with the social statistics collected by the Bureau and used by virtually everyone in getting a conceptual grasp of American society. In brief, these are the sampling problem and the index number problem. The first is manageable although it is a good deal more complex than one might at first imagine. The second is completely insoluble, a fact that has the most profound implications for our understanding of social reality.
Every month, the BLS [i.e., Bureau of Labor Statistics] tells us how many new jobs have been created. How on earth do they know that? A little thought will convince you that they cannot possibly count every man and woman hired by every employer in America. The answer, of course, is that they carry out a carefully constructed sampling, and then extrapolate. [Literature tip: If you have the time, take a look at the fine old book by Oskar Morgenstern called ON THE ACCURACY OF ECONOMIC OBSERVATIONS -- this is the same Morgenstern who is the junior author of one of the great books of the twentieth century, von Neumann and Morgenstern's THE THEORY OF GAMES AND ECONOMIC BEHAVIOR.] Every month, the BLs defines a sample of employers [and another for households, etc.], constructed so as -- they hope -- to mirror the array of employers nation-wide. Then they ask the employers in that sample a number of questions: How many new workers did you employ last month? How many of those were full time? What wages did you pay them? How many employees do you anticipate hiring -- or firing -- in the coming month? And so forth. Then they extrapolate to national figures.
The technical problems with designing sample and then calculating the probability that it successfully mirrors the total population of which it is sample are well known and have for more than a century been the subject of sophisticated theoretical investigation. [I am going to assume that the readers of this series of blog posts are sophisticated about such matters, and understand concepts like "margin of error" and "standard deviation." If not, perhaps I will try to say something about them.] But there are problems lurking even in this region. Let me take a moment to talk about just one such problem -- the definition of a national unemployment rate.
These days, unemployment statistics are constantly in the news, as more and more Americans go for extended periods of time without being able to find jobs. At first glance, the determination of the unemployment rate seems to be a straightforward sampling problem, but a closer examination reveals very deep difficulties that will bring us closer to the thesis I am leading up to asserting. [I should indicate that the problems I am about to discuss are well known by the folks at the BLS, who are really quite intelligent and sophisticated economists. They are constantly struggling to deal with these problems, in ways that deepen our understanding of American society.]
What is an "unemployment rate?" It is presumably the proportion of the labor force that does not have a full-time paying job. So to say that the unemployment rate is 9.5% is to say that 95 out of every one thousand persons in the labor force are without full-time paid employment. We imagine a city [or state or nation] in which a certain group of men [and women -- this raises interesting problems], the labor force, wake up each morning to go to work, but 9.5% percent of them have no full-time jobs to go to. So the unemployment rate is 9.5%. [I keep saying "full time employment" because there may be a great many people employed part-time, some of them by choice, some of them of necessity.]
But just who is in the labor force? Are all Americans above a certain age [say, sixteen] in the labor force? Are all Americans sixteen or over who are not in school in the labor force? Are all women over the age of sixteen in the labor force, even those who conceive of themselves as housewives, whether or not they have small children at home? Is a woman with a ten year old in the labor force even if she believes that it is morally incumbent upon her to stay at home and make dinner for her husband and be there for her child during all of the hours when she doesn't have school? Is the prison population of the United States in the labor force? Are members of the Armed Forces in the labor force, even though it is not open to them to leave that job, if it is a job, and look for another one?
These are not frivolous questions. From the perspective of Capitalism, which cares only about market relations and profits, housewives are not in the labor force unless they look for paying jobs. But from the point of view of some Scandinavian countries, housewives, because they perform a vital productive function, are part of the labor force. In those countries, household workers are included in the labor force figures, and elaborate calculations are made of the wages implicitly earned by housewives performing essential productive functions. [If you doubt that housewives do perform essential productive functions, ask yourself how long a society will continue to exist if no one raises the next generation of paid workers -- indeed, how long the society will exist if no one cooks diner for the paid workers and does their laundry and maintains the household in which they live when they are not at work.]
How does the BLS handle these questions? Tomorrow, I will talk about that, and the problems that are posed by any attempt to define the labor force.
Several readers of this series of posts have themselves posted very interesting comments. Since I am writing this as I post, I have really not had time to respond to these comments as I ought. Be patient, if you will, and I will try to offer some sort of response in a day or two. Now, let me continue.
When we expand our attention to large, complex, modern societies, with hundreds of millions of citizens, the problems attendant on devising usable concepts for grasping so complex a social reality metastasize. The most obvious problem is simply data collection, although that turns out to be much less theoretically significant than one might suppose. When my wife and I go to Paris, and sit in our local cafe, Le Metro, we see many young couples pushing baby carriages. But this sort of anecdotal evidence is obviously useless in telling me whether the birth rate in France is above or below the replacement rate. [It is, as it happens, below -- without immigrants, most of whom are reviled by the French, the population would be declining precipitously]. To form a usable concept of the rate of expansion or contraction of the population of France, one needs population statistics.
In the United States, statistics of all sorts are regularly collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, an arm of the Labor Department of the Federal Government. If this subject interests you at all, I strongly urge you to familiarize yourself with their work. [Any University Library that is a "repository library" will have the full run of their publications. At one point, when I was deep in the details of employment and compensation statistics by job category, I had occasion to email the Bureau, and ended up in contact with a fascinating character who was quite comfortable with my Marxist beliefs. He was spending his career in some obscure government office, possessed of radical leanings that rarely found an avenue of expression.]
There are two theoretical problems with the social statistics collected by the Bureau and used by virtually everyone in getting a conceptual grasp of American society. In brief, these are the sampling problem and the index number problem. The first is manageable although it is a good deal more complex than one might at first imagine. The second is completely insoluble, a fact that has the most profound implications for our understanding of social reality.
Every month, the BLS [i.e., Bureau of Labor Statistics] tells us how many new jobs have been created. How on earth do they know that? A little thought will convince you that they cannot possibly count every man and woman hired by every employer in America. The answer, of course, is that they carry out a carefully constructed sampling, and then extrapolate. [Literature tip: If you have the time, take a look at the fine old book by Oskar Morgenstern called ON THE ACCURACY OF ECONOMIC OBSERVATIONS -- this is the same Morgenstern who is the junior author of one of the great books of the twentieth century, von Neumann and Morgenstern's THE THEORY OF GAMES AND ECONOMIC BEHAVIOR.] Every month, the BLs defines a sample of employers [and another for households, etc.], constructed so as -- they hope -- to mirror the array of employers nation-wide. Then they ask the employers in that sample a number of questions: How many new workers did you employ last month? How many of those were full time? What wages did you pay them? How many employees do you anticipate hiring -- or firing -- in the coming month? And so forth. Then they extrapolate to national figures.
The technical problems with designing sample and then calculating the probability that it successfully mirrors the total population of which it is sample are well known and have for more than a century been the subject of sophisticated theoretical investigation. [I am going to assume that the readers of this series of blog posts are sophisticated about such matters, and understand concepts like "margin of error" and "standard deviation." If not, perhaps I will try to say something about them.] But there are problems lurking even in this region. Let me take a moment to talk about just one such problem -- the definition of a national unemployment rate.
These days, unemployment statistics are constantly in the news, as more and more Americans go for extended periods of time without being able to find jobs. At first glance, the determination of the unemployment rate seems to be a straightforward sampling problem, but a closer examination reveals very deep difficulties that will bring us closer to the thesis I am leading up to asserting. [I should indicate that the problems I am about to discuss are well known by the folks at the BLS, who are really quite intelligent and sophisticated economists. They are constantly struggling to deal with these problems, in ways that deepen our understanding of American society.]
What is an "unemployment rate?" It is presumably the proportion of the labor force that does not have a full-time paying job. So to say that the unemployment rate is 9.5% is to say that 95 out of every one thousand persons in the labor force are without full-time paid employment. We imagine a city [or state or nation] in which a certain group of men [and women -- this raises interesting problems], the labor force, wake up each morning to go to work, but 9.5% percent of them have no full-time jobs to go to. So the unemployment rate is 9.5%. [I keep saying "full time employment" because there may be a great many people employed part-time, some of them by choice, some of them of necessity.]
But just who is in the labor force? Are all Americans above a certain age [say, sixteen] in the labor force? Are all Americans sixteen or over who are not in school in the labor force? Are all women over the age of sixteen in the labor force, even those who conceive of themselves as housewives, whether or not they have small children at home? Is a woman with a ten year old in the labor force even if she believes that it is morally incumbent upon her to stay at home and make dinner for her husband and be there for her child during all of the hours when she doesn't have school? Is the prison population of the United States in the labor force? Are members of the Armed Forces in the labor force, even though it is not open to them to leave that job, if it is a job, and look for another one?
These are not frivolous questions. From the perspective of Capitalism, which cares only about market relations and profits, housewives are not in the labor force unless they look for paying jobs. But from the point of view of some Scandinavian countries, housewives, because they perform a vital productive function, are part of the labor force. In those countries, household workers are included in the labor force figures, and elaborate calculations are made of the wages implicitly earned by housewives performing essential productive functions. [If you doubt that housewives do perform essential productive functions, ask yourself how long a society will continue to exist if no one raises the next generation of paid workers -- indeed, how long the society will exist if no one cooks diner for the paid workers and does their laundry and maintains the household in which they live when they are not at work.]
How does the BLS handle these questions? Tomorrow, I will talk about that, and the problems that are posed by any attempt to define the labor force.
Thursday, 7 October 2010
THE STUDY OF SOCIETY PART FOUR
Fourth Post
In the course of this fourth segment, I shall refer to some books that I consider especially suggestive or helpful in understanding society. I think of these books as "recent," but you need to remember that I am seventy-six, so to me, recent can mean dating from the middle of the twentieth century. Sorry about that.
My purpose in starting with a small medieval village, and then spending time on the rabbit eating fantasy, was to demonstrate that even in the simplest, most apparently transparent situations, there is still a great deal of conceptual opacity in our understanding of society. Before moving on to the real subject of these remarks -- our cognitive grasp of modern, complex societies -- I want to spend some time talking about two important aspects of this conceptual opacity.
The first point is that society, even at the apparently simplest level, is essentially mystified. In using the term "mystification" I do not mean to suggest that society is puzzling, or difficult to understand, or that it requires special sorts of knowledge to understand. All of that may be true, of course, but mystification is something else entirely. To say that some aspect of society is "mystified" is to say that it systematically presents itself as other than what it is, in such a way that it resists being understood as it truly is. [With these remarks, I recommend that you read my little book, MONEYBAGS MUST BE SO LUCKY, which is a literary/philosophical interpretation of the first ten or fifteen chapters of Volume One of CAPITAL by Karl Marx.] The heartland of mystification of course is a Roman Catholic Mass, where the ancient language [I refer to the old style of the Mass], the incense, the supposed transubstantiation of wine and wafer into the blood and body of Christ all conspire to delude the communicants into believing that they in the presence of a miracle. But, as Marx persuasively argues, the market is as thoroughly mystified as the alter, or indeed as the throne, where ordinary mortals present themselves, and are experienced, as Kings. In the market, the inverse of transubstantiation takes place. At the altar, the accidents [i.e., properties -- smell, taste, etc] of the host remain unchanged, but the substance changes, so that what was bread becomes the body of Christ [hence the word "transubstantiation".] But in the market, during the sale of a commodity, the accidents change [cloth becomes money, money becomes bread], but the substance [value] remains unaltered, for equals exchange for equals. Marx shows us that the mystification is so successful that none of the participants in the market exchange are aware of any mystery at all. [All of this is gone into at greater length in my book.]
Marx loved the novels of Charles Dickens, and for very good reason. One of Dickens' most successful literary devices is to present people as though they were objects [The Aged P being fluffed up in his chair from time to time like a pillow that has sagged] and objects as though they were people [the fog in the famous first chapter of BLEAK HOUSE.] In just this way, in Capitalism, workers are treated and conceptualized as though they were things -- inputs into production -- while things, "product," take on the allure and life of people, growing and expanding in value as though they were reproducing.
Later, I will return to a crucial point that I do not want to belabor here, namely that the mystification of society is ideologically encoded. Indeed, I shall argue [this is really the boffo conclusion of this entire multi-part exposition] that society is essentially, unavoidably ideologically encoded. There is not, there could not be, a neutral objective standpoint from which society could be viewed scientifically, in a non-ideological fashion. But it will take me a while to get to that.
The second point I want to make is that the conceptual opacity of even the simplest societies is rooted in the processes by which the newborn infant grows into an adult member of society. Here I draw my insights from Sigmund Freud, especially from his theory of primary and secondary thought processes and the way in which, in response to the inevitable frustrations and adjustments attendant upon interactions with independent reality, the infant and young child internalize ways of emotional and conceptual being that constitute us as persons. By the time a child is old enough actually to put words to its experiences, it has so thoroughly internalized habits of being, ways of managing its rages and desires, its bowels and its hungers, organizations of erotic energies in structured roles and practices, that it is recognizably a child in some particular culture and social stratum. It is not open to the child, or the young adult, to choose completely to change this foundational organization of personality. The child, or adult, then experiences such roles as father, mother, son, daughter, worker, and eventually citizen, as objectively determined and given, hence as unalterable. Even radical rebellion has its styles, and different cultures organize those deviances differently.
Several reading suggestions, since Luke's Mother started all of this by asking for some book titles. If any of this interests you, I would urge you to read Capital [and my book], to read some Freud [THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS wouldn't be a bad place to start, but also Richard Wollheim's splendid 1971 book, called simply SIGMUND FREUD. Then read Erik Erikson's classic work, CHILDHOOD AND SOCIETY. After that, rake a look at any of Erving Goffman's wonderful books, such as THE PRESENTATION OF SELF IN EVERYDAY LIFE, or ASYLUMS [Reading Goffman is like eating nothing but chocolate deserts. Every page is delicious.]
All right, enough for today. Tomorrow, I will expand my discussion to modern, complex societies, which is really what I am interested in. I do hope you are finding this useful. It is fun to write.
In the course of this fourth segment, I shall refer to some books that I consider especially suggestive or helpful in understanding society. I think of these books as "recent," but you need to remember that I am seventy-six, so to me, recent can mean dating from the middle of the twentieth century. Sorry about that.
My purpose in starting with a small medieval village, and then spending time on the rabbit eating fantasy, was to demonstrate that even in the simplest, most apparently transparent situations, there is still a great deal of conceptual opacity in our understanding of society. Before moving on to the real subject of these remarks -- our cognitive grasp of modern, complex societies -- I want to spend some time talking about two important aspects of this conceptual opacity.
The first point is that society, even at the apparently simplest level, is essentially mystified. In using the term "mystification" I do not mean to suggest that society is puzzling, or difficult to understand, or that it requires special sorts of knowledge to understand. All of that may be true, of course, but mystification is something else entirely. To say that some aspect of society is "mystified" is to say that it systematically presents itself as other than what it is, in such a way that it resists being understood as it truly is. [With these remarks, I recommend that you read my little book, MONEYBAGS MUST BE SO LUCKY, which is a literary/philosophical interpretation of the first ten or fifteen chapters of Volume One of CAPITAL by Karl Marx.] The heartland of mystification of course is a Roman Catholic Mass, where the ancient language [I refer to the old style of the Mass], the incense, the supposed transubstantiation of wine and wafer into the blood and body of Christ all conspire to delude the communicants into believing that they in the presence of a miracle. But, as Marx persuasively argues, the market is as thoroughly mystified as the alter, or indeed as the throne, where ordinary mortals present themselves, and are experienced, as Kings. In the market, the inverse of transubstantiation takes place. At the altar, the accidents [i.e., properties -- smell, taste, etc] of the host remain unchanged, but the substance changes, so that what was bread becomes the body of Christ [hence the word "transubstantiation".] But in the market, during the sale of a commodity, the accidents change [cloth becomes money, money becomes bread], but the substance [value] remains unaltered, for equals exchange for equals. Marx shows us that the mystification is so successful that none of the participants in the market exchange are aware of any mystery at all. [All of this is gone into at greater length in my book.]
Marx loved the novels of Charles Dickens, and for very good reason. One of Dickens' most successful literary devices is to present people as though they were objects [The Aged P being fluffed up in his chair from time to time like a pillow that has sagged] and objects as though they were people [the fog in the famous first chapter of BLEAK HOUSE.] In just this way, in Capitalism, workers are treated and conceptualized as though they were things -- inputs into production -- while things, "product," take on the allure and life of people, growing and expanding in value as though they were reproducing.
Later, I will return to a crucial point that I do not want to belabor here, namely that the mystification of society is ideologically encoded. Indeed, I shall argue [this is really the boffo conclusion of this entire multi-part exposition] that society is essentially, unavoidably ideologically encoded. There is not, there could not be, a neutral objective standpoint from which society could be viewed scientifically, in a non-ideological fashion. But it will take me a while to get to that.
The second point I want to make is that the conceptual opacity of even the simplest societies is rooted in the processes by which the newborn infant grows into an adult member of society. Here I draw my insights from Sigmund Freud, especially from his theory of primary and secondary thought processes and the way in which, in response to the inevitable frustrations and adjustments attendant upon interactions with independent reality, the infant and young child internalize ways of emotional and conceptual being that constitute us as persons. By the time a child is old enough actually to put words to its experiences, it has so thoroughly internalized habits of being, ways of managing its rages and desires, its bowels and its hungers, organizations of erotic energies in structured roles and practices, that it is recognizably a child in some particular culture and social stratum. It is not open to the child, or the young adult, to choose completely to change this foundational organization of personality. The child, or adult, then experiences such roles as father, mother, son, daughter, worker, and eventually citizen, as objectively determined and given, hence as unalterable. Even radical rebellion has its styles, and different cultures organize those deviances differently.
Several reading suggestions, since Luke's Mother started all of this by asking for some book titles. If any of this interests you, I would urge you to read Capital [and my book], to read some Freud [THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS wouldn't be a bad place to start, but also Richard Wollheim's splendid 1971 book, called simply SIGMUND FREUD. Then read Erik Erikson's classic work, CHILDHOOD AND SOCIETY. After that, rake a look at any of Erving Goffman's wonderful books, such as THE PRESENTATION OF SELF IN EVERYDAY LIFE, or ASYLUMS [Reading Goffman is like eating nothing but chocolate deserts. Every page is delicious.]
All right, enough for today. Tomorrow, I will expand my discussion to modern, complex societies, which is really what I am interested in. I do hope you are finding this useful. It is fun to write.
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