2006 – Jonathan Rowe

Gifts2: Economist Calls Christmas a “Deadweight Loss”

Did you know that Christmas in the U.S. is wasteful? Not in the way that is numbingly obvious to most of us, but in a narrower and more technical way that suits the strange form of human mentation called “economics.” According to media reports, an economist by the name of Joel Waldfogel at the University of Pennsylvania has been asking college students to put monetary values on the gifts they receive from others. Generally these values are less than what the givers actually paid.

The result is what the professor terms, with what one hopes is witting self-parody, the “deadweight loss of Christmas.” He puts this loss at between ten and eighteen percent of Christmas spending, which means that billions of dollars a year go down the drain as he conceives it. That doesn’t mean energy and raw materials, trash and the rest. It means the difference between the dollar value that recipients put on gifts and the amount the givers paid for them.

Gifts

A child is born, and its first cry goes right through you. It changes you; and more it creates you. Something that was latent and unrealized – a parent – comes into being; and from that moment the child’s urgent, insistent, all-consuming need is something you will do your best to meet. You made him or her; and at the same time, he is making you.

I wonder if this reciprocal birth, this raising from the latent if not actually dead, is something of what this day is supposed to be about. I know it is what a human economy is about. Our free market friends regard an economy as an arena where heroic individualists and equally heroic capital do their mighty and self-generating deeds. But in fact an economy is a co-production – a multiple co-production – up and down the line.

The Technology of Obedience: Corporate Research and the Invisible Hand

Is technology an independent force that evolves inexorably along a particular path – the path of best answers? Or do the corporations that drive innovation steer it towards their own convenience and not necessarily for the benefit of the society as a whole? The question might seem naïve. But it still has to be raised, given the ideological hackles that it raises.

About two decades ago, an MIT professor by the name of David Noble made a painstaking study of the introduction of computerized controls in the machine tool industry. In his book Forces of Production, Noble showed how, at practically every turn, managers at the General Electric company had chosen the path that would increase their own control of the shop floor and diminish the role of workers – even when this did not improve the quality of products or the efficiency of the production process.

Who Decides Who’s Sick?

Back when, Ralph Nader used to ask college audiences, “Who defines what a problem is in America today?” Who decides that tired hair, say, is a problem of epochal proportions, while the decimation of species and the befouling of the air flit only episodically across the public screen, rarely long enough to change behavior in any significant way?

Nader was talking about the ability of the marketing industry to channel thought in the direction of problems for which commodities appear to be an answer. Rightward polemicists scoff at the notion that advertising actually could influence an independent and free-thinking people. They don’t explain why corporate leaders, “rational decision makers” that they are, would devote over a quarter of a trillion dollars every year to this purpose anyway.

The Strange “Economics” of Breast Milk

OnTheCommons.org
December 1, 2006
By Jonathan Rowe

You probably heard about the woman who was kicked off a Delta flight recently for breast feeding her daughter. She was in a window seat, next to her husband. She was being discreet; nothing was showing. A flight attendant asked her to cover up with a blanket anyway. The woman declined; and so off the plane they went.

The episode prompted nurse-ins at airports throughout the U.S. The airline apologized; and I’m willing to believe that the flight attendant thought she was just doing her job. Still, there’s an issue here that goes beyond the lingering residues of prudery – namely, the pervasive bias in favor of commodities, and against anything people can do for themselves for free. Has anyone ever been thrown off a plane for giving infant formula to a baby, which is inferior to breast milk? I doubt it.

Consumed by Commerce

Part of the spell that the term “the market” casts upon our minds is that it appears to refer to something specific—but it does not. “The market” of policy is not the world but rather a way of looking at the world—a system of belief, a mental overlay, that has been projected into all space and defines it, regardless of what is actually there. To many, it is the functional equivalent of God.

But in the beginning this was not the case. Markets were particular events, much the way street fairs and farmers’ markets are today. There was society, and part of that society was times and places for commercial exchange. The process by which actual markets have become “the market” has brought a kind of economic failure that economists don’t even know how to see. Their prescriptions, in fact, are making the problem worse, because they are displacing further the productivity of the social commons and stripping away the generative social functions that markets used to serve.

Milton Friedman: Romantic

We tend to romanticize the opposite of what we don’t like, and in political economy the tendency reaches full flower. To those who hate “the market,” the government is a knight in shining armor. To those who hate the government, “the market” can do no wrong.

Milton Friedman, the economist who passed on this week, was in the latter camp. The market to him was not just the combined actions of a bunch of people with all their silliness and hang-ups. It was a thing, the holiest of holies, the hand of God on this earth. Friedman came of age in the shadow of the young Soviet Union and its appeal for Depression-era intellectuals. Like many of his generation he got stuck in that drama, and never grew past it.

The Seed Gestapo and Third World Farmers

In my wife’s dialect of kari-ya, which is spoken on the island of Panay, in the Philippines, there is a word binhi, which refers to the grains of rice that are set aside and used as seeds in the next planting season. There is a knack to choosing these. You want plump grains with no blemishes. Every farmer knows how to do it, and usually their families too.

This is not a quaint Third World custom. Seeds are independence, and survival. “When you have rice under the house,” my wife’s father says, “you do not have worries.” When you have seeds, then you will have rice, given just a little cooperation from nature. Those days might be numbered, though. The creep of “intellectual property” – which is the stalking horse for corporate control – into the fields of peasant farmers, is making their independence a thing of the past, and has put their survival into question.

Blue Commoners, and Abstractions in the Red Zone

The Red States/Blue State trope lost ground last week, at last. It never was what it seemed to begin with. As numerous writers have pointed out, the electoral divide is less between states than between urban, suburban and rural areas within states. California’s Central Valley is Red, while the coast is Blue. Much as with the concept of race, there is as much diversity within the so-called Red states, as between them.

That leaves the big misconception about the Blue areas themselves – namely that they are hip urban enclaves inhabited by “cultural creatives” in the smug and self-congratulatory parlance of the demographic trade. Those Red people with their rec room projects! We have Thai food and couture. In this version Blue is a kind of cultural emanation that floats through the urban ether, imparting an affinity for gay marriage and welfare and a snooty aversion to churches and guns.

Billboards in Space, Accomplices in Enclosure

The greatest ally of the corporate trespasser is our human tendency to forget. So long as a violation lingers in the memory there is a possibility of doing something about it. But when outrage dies, and along with it the memory that things could be different, then the deed is done and the enclosure is complete.

How many people today remember when streetcars traversed our major cities, until oil and automobile companies contrived to do them in? How many think, when they peruse the offerings on commercial television, “Wait a minute. Those airwaves are ours.” Not that long ago, people would be outraged at the thought of junk food ads and vending machines in public schools. Now they are a new normal, and are greeted with a shrug.