This reminded me of you.
"Monday, May 02, 2005
One of those counterfactuals...
I wish I knew what conservatives believed would happen if liberals had their way--and I would be most grateful if someone would tell me. In fairness, I should give an account of what I think would happen if conservatives were able to push through their agenda.
Suppose that conservatives had a free hand and reorganized things in the US so that there would be less bureaucracy and regulation, lower taxes and less support for public services, and much of what government delivers in other affluent countries would be the responsibility of individuals, families, churches and other private organizations.
Life would be much, much riskier: the kinds of lives we lived would depend far more on dumb luck. The luck of the draw--whether we were born rich or poor, black or white, male or female, smart or dumb, able or disabled--would play a greater role in determining our lot in life and at every stage of our lives we would be vulnerable to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Those of us who could afford it would be able to save or to buy into insurance schemes to protect ourselves, but the ability to afford these hedges would itself be a matter of dumb luck.
If conservatives have their way, most of us will be more dependent on the good will of others. Workers will depend on the good will of employers for reasonable wages and decent working conditions, and employers who are morally committed to treating their employees decently will find it hard to compete: nice guys will finish last, and the Walmart model will triumph. The elderly will depend on their children for housing and financial support and the poor will depend on the voluntary contributions and support of those who are better off.
Public facilities will become a last resort for the poor. Outside of wealthy suburbs, where very few of us can afford to live, public schools will become charity institutions for the destitute and near-destitute. As middle class parents opt out of the system, public schools will increasingly become holding tanks for the "unsalvageable."
Society will become increasingly fragmented and tribal. The rich will live in gated communities patrolled by private security guards, send their children to private schools, generate their own electricity and drink bottled water as they do in other Third World countries. The white working class, attracted by affordable, segregated housing will increasingly migrate to exurban boom towns floating on a low-wage, low-skilled service economy (like Surprise, Arizona). Urban areas will become the exclusive property of the very rich and the very poor--the urban elite, gay and straight, who neither marry nor are given in marriage, living and working in glitzy high-rises, in a world without children, surrounded by squalid slums where the non-white underclass, new immigrants, and all the disabled, chronically ill and elderly who have no families to look after them, live in fear of violence and crime.
As opportunities and support services for women diminish, educated women married to high-earning upper middle class men, who can afford to stay home, will drop out of the labor force. At the same time, as wages and benefits for working class males decline, more working class women will be squeezed out of the home and forced into dead-end pink collar shit work in the expanding service sector. More women on net will enter the labor force but sex-segregation and the wage gap will increase as women become a permanent class of drudge workers.
On the bright side, as we become poorer, less educated and willing to accept less desirable work at lower wages, off-shoring and out-sourcing will decline. Firms, both domestic and foreign, will increasingly exploit cheap, largely female labor to do tedious tasks for low pay. Maquilladoras will move across the border to the US, sweatshops will flourish and Indian firms will contract work to American call centers. The declining dollar and exports of sweatshop products will diminish our trade deficit and, as we take our place in the Third World, people in other poor countries may resent us less and even forgive us.
// posted by H. E. @ 9:25 PM
Comments:
I have in my possession a children's annual dated 1937 that takes a look at the future "50 years from now". Apparently we were all supposed to be living in mile-high cities, commuting to and from work in personal gyrocopters etc. etc. Most attempts at future-gazing seem to me to be wildly over-optimistic or dystopic. I guess this one counts as the latter! One of the few things that futurologists seem to agree on is that linear extrapolations are only of benefit in the short term. Beyond that it's open to externalities that create stepwise change. So I suppose the question to ask is "what sort of thing is going to stop this process dead in its tracks?"
I can't really comment, as a European, on the future of the US. I really, seriously, do not understand this wild-eyed obsession of dividing up everything into liberal and conservative - not as a descriptor of actions but of people individually or by group. Nor do I understand the way in which Americans accede to this classification and turn the descriptive into the prescriptive. What's going on? And why?
Not - I hasten to add - are these strictures aimed in your direction, Dr. Baber. One of the interesting parts of visiting your blog is witnessing you giving your own side a good kicking when they get above themselves!
Best regards - Ian
# posted by Anonymous : 8:07 AM
Charles Murray wrote a column for the Times a few weeks ago arguing, convincingly it seemed to me, that your scenario was already playing out across the USA.
Incidentally, I assume that you are not a Humean compatibilist? Obviously for those of us who are the counterfactual is not persuasive.
# posted by MikeS : 11:05 AM
I really, seriously, do not understand this wild-eyed obsession of dividing up everything into liberal and conservative
Liberal/conservative is code for class. The American ideology of a classless society with endless opportunities for anyone willing to work hard precludes our using the C-word--even though the discrepancy in wealth between the rich and poor in the US is greater than it is in other affluent countries and growing. Moreover almost all Americans except for the ultra-rich and the homeless consider themselves "middle class.
Coding class differences as ethical and political ones allows participants in Culture Wars to dress up their snobbery and resentment in moral terms, and to congratulate themselves for it. "Liberals" who would never dream of saying, even to themselves, "We don't like lower class people because they're boring, have bad taste and are just unpleasant to deal with" can castigate them as intolerant, bigoted Fundamentalists on jihad, who are unsympathetic to cute furry animals and trash the environment. Working class people who resent "Liberals" for being snobs and enjoying wealth and privilege that they don't seem to have earned, condemn them as unpatriotic cowards and libertines out to undermine important moral values. So everyone is convinced that they have the high moral ground.
I don't claim that the liberal/conservative divide tracks class perfectly or that the endgame scenario I described--American sweatshops and call centers--is likely to happen: this is my blog so I can have fun and I don't have to be careful or footnote. But I think this is roughly the way things are and, as Mike has pointed out, the scenario is already playing out. Check the link to the NYTimes Magazine article on Surprize, Arizona--there are exurbs like it in my area, as well as expensive gated communities, and some coastal cities especially are getting close to what described.
# posted by H. E. : 1:50 PM
Thanks for that - it certainly makes sense to me.
I wouldn't quibble with the observations about direction - rather, I was trying to draw attention to the fact that historically such long-run trends are quite rare and are more frequently interrupted by supervening trends whose origin lies elsewhere. A group of events that includes violent revolution of course.
In this context, have you read Stanley Kurtz's article in Policy Review "Demographics & the Culture War"? That would meet the criteria in Europe and, I guess latterly, in N. America too. To what extent it will happen is another matter of course. - Ian
# posted by Anonymous : 2:13 PM
Interesting article on declining population--have to say though the artificial womb scenario seems even less convincing than the mile-high city and monorail fantasies. Some European countries have been able increase fertility rates by offering generous parental leave, child care and other benefits--no artificial wombs.
Re futurology, I just lectured on Turing's 1950 paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence in which Turing predicted that "within 50 years" computers would be able to fool people into thinking that they were people. So far none have won the Loebner Grand Prize for managing it.
What neither Turing or anyone else at the time predicted was that computers would become common household appliances or that people like me would carry around notebook sized computers, pick up the internet on wifi, display stuff in class, and have students online to chatterbots--who can't pass the Turing Test. Somewhere in the 60s I think some pundit predicted that "within 20 years" computers would be the size of houses.
# posted by H. E. : 6:53 PM
I agree that a radically deregulated state with no safety net may devolve into something approaching the dystopia you describe. However, I think that you commit two fundamental errors in the development of your thesis: one qualitative and one quantitative.
The qualitative error is that you place far too much faith in your assumptions about the nature of human nature and American culture. I would thus dispute your conclusions to the extent that I disagree with these assumptions.
I am familiar with the left's copious documentation regarding "dumb luck" (e.g. Barbara Ehrenreich's book) but, honestly, I just don't find it convincing (Ehrenreich, for example, never stayed in any position long enough to earn the trust of those who might help her improve her supposed lot in life).
This is the Left/Right dichotomy in a nutshell: the belief or doubt in the efficacy of human initiative. The Left sees people as mostly helpless and believe freedom must be enabled by the state (re. our previous discussions of Amartya Sen). The Right sees the individual's behavior as determinative of his or her own fate and describes freedom in terms of the right to take responsibility for one's own actions. Neither view is wholly defensible but both have enough evidential support that entire intellectual movements have been built around them. Thus, while no thinking person can deny that chance plays a part in life, it strikes me as profoundly wrong and, indeed, inhumane to argue that personal initiative plays little determinative role in the unfolding of our lives.
Returning to your explanation, we split on the effectiveness of the individual in mitigating his or her own life risks: I would argue that personal initiative and a culture that celebrates and rewards the same is a powerful bulwark against the 'risk' you decry. Furthermore, I'd argue that perceived self-sufficiency is an essential attribute of human nature. For example, you may call this "rough individualism" but nearly every man I grew up with would prefer to live in a modest but loving home by the fruits of their own labor than to live in a mansion by virtue of handouts. This preference may make no sense for Homo Economicus but it apparently is a common feature of Homo Sapiens.
Now, is this smart? Well, in a culture supportive of individual initiative, it is the foundation of self-respect, happiness and a powerful engine for wealth creation. In contrast, a culture that assumes citizens should be the 'good children' of the state, derides or denies the association of effort with reward, and elevates the corporate-drone pop star over the physician, it leads to alienation and "right-wing" anger.
Both of these cultures have always played some role in the American national personality. However, I think it fairly obvious that the rise of Progressive politics from the 1920's on has been accompanied by an ascension of the second culture over the first.
The problem for the Right is that many of the drivers of these cultural changes were morally necessary: the civil rights movement, the busting of big business trusts, and the efforts to suppress organized crime were all disruptive of the culture of self-sufficiency. So how do you restore a culture of self-sufficiency while preserving the Liberal values of racial equality and respect for all men regardless of wealth? The Republicans have tried to answer this question with initiatives like the 'Ownership Society.'
The Left, however, does not appear to understand that there is anything even at stake here because they simply don't share or understand the underlying ethic of self-sufficient individualism (witness the argument in "What's the Matter with Kansas").
Thus, rather than engage the arguments inherent in the Ownership Society, the Left has found it easier to brand this initiative - as well as the wider opposition to the cultural changes of the 20th century - as rooted in racism or the result of the Right-Wing brain washing of unwitting 'dittoheads.' Correspondingly, the Left now finds itself politically adrift.
Thus, I disagree with the dystopian vision captured by your piece first because I think the underlying assumptions of human nature from which your predictions spring are incorrect. They are close enough that I think that some predictions might come to pass. But, on the whole, I doubt that they would characterize most of American society.
My second objection is quantitative: I seriously doubt that all but the most strident Right-winger would want to eliminate all regulation. It might be convenient to speak in these terms when you are trying to roll back our regulatory burden from 100,000 pages to 80,000 pages but Americans - including most Republicans - simply would not stand for the wholesale abolition of our environmental and financial regulatory laws. Thus, you are abstracting from rhetoric that is clearly and obviously political in nature. To your broader question - what would society look like if we engaged in several serious rounds of deregulation, lower taxes and welfare "reform" - I think the answer is pretty clear. The economy would expand (as it did in the 80s and 90s) and welfare rolls would shrink while a variety of social ills would be ameliorated or left unchanged (as they did in the late 90s). If the changes went too far, then obviously you would not enjoy these benefits. But I think that you do not need to speculate on the likely outcome of a reasonable shift toward more Conservative policies because the last 25 years have given you a real-world laboratory in which to study exactly this proposition.
# posted by WildMonk : 8:23 AM"
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