Sam: You seem to be assuming that growth in GDP translates into guaranteed material progress for the mass of people. There are all kinds of reasons why that isn’t so. First, barring war or famine or some other kind of catastrophe, GDP always grows, just as population grows: the key factor is the rate of growth. Second, as several economists have argued, GDP is a lousy indicator of well-being–much less individual well-being. All kinds of things contribute to GDP: a toxic clean-up, an earthquake, a high divorce rate.
Most important, however, is that GDP in itself tells us nothing about the distribution of real income (putting aside entirely the issue of whether real income, beyond a certain point, is or isn’t what facilitates people’s happiness; and there is much evidence to suggest that it isn’t). As I said above, and as you and I have often had occasion to discuss, real income fell for most of the the last 25 years; the gains of the last few years have been disproportionately experienced by a tiny group; and even within the professional middle glass (a group that has gained considerably during this period) most of the gain can be accounted for in terms of more work.
So you need to do more than simply posit that GDP will continue to grow to argue that our great grandchildren will experience wealth beyond our wildest dreams. Unless there is war or famine, GDP will continue to grow: but if the trends are what they were from the '70s to the mid '90s, our great-grandchildren will work harder than we do for less real income.
I’m not predicting that; I’m mere saying that we need some foundation on which to base a more optimstic prediction.
FYI: On this point I’m with Lester Thurow who believes that the society who gets the most optimistic outcome from today’s scenario will be the one that best educates its workforce for the service/technological opportunities to come. And here the US is doing a crummy job (I don’t know about Canada); Europe is (or has been) doing better.
On the matter of kings: you seem to be conflating
the middle ages with the 18th or 19th centuries (and it was never clear which of the latter we were discussing). Suffice it to say that if you were rich in the beginning of the nineteenth century, your life was not half bad.
Sure, we can bring up lack of anaesthesia (chloroform, btw, was introduced for childbirth and surgery in the mid-1800s) and all kinds of things to pinpoint the physical challenges of life 200(+) years ago as you do here…
*“Let’s look at the way kings lived - dark, poorly lit castles, poorly heated and cooled… No anaesthesia…
Food was not nearly as varied and fresh… Even kings didn’t have access to fresh fruit all year round.
Travel was hideous, even for kings. Carriages were hot, bumpy, and slow.” *
What’s interesting here is how willing you are to go into material details; yet how apparently unwilling to extend the same courtesy to the poorest of the poor today. Focusing only on the poor in the US: housing for the poor in most major cities is, typically, poorly lit, heated cooled. Such people generally are not admitted into hospitals to receive state of the art care b/c they have no insurance. In an emergency situation they may well die on their way to public hospital that will admit them. Food is not as varied and fresh as it should be in many inner-city neighborhoods. A lot of these people don’t have access to a good supermarket–the kind that stocks a variety of fresh fruit all year round. And fresh fruit and vegetables are expensive. Exactly the kind of food item that the poorest in the US don’t have much of–unless they’re skimping on something else. Traveling on the IRT on a July day to your minimum wage job–maybe washing dishes in the hot kitchen of a fancy air-conditioned restaurant for 8-10 hours–is not so great.
I’ve read articles about the day-to-day lives of the working poor that I think would make you think. (Perhaps your personal experience of poverty was less grueling because it was a rural experience.) I’ve read of people who can’t afford to take the bus to get to work; who can’t afford their medication; or daycare for their kid while they’re working; or can’t afford to go to a movie.
Is this better, materially speaking, than the life of an industrial or agricultural laborer in the nineteenth century? Almost certainly. But can we cavalierly say that their material lives–not to mention the much more important issue of their ability to seek after happiness, autonomy, self-development–are better than those of kings 200 years ago? No way, Jose.
Such people have extremely limited opportunities: and therefore everything that modern society allegedly promises us is, de facto, denied to them, howevermuch they may not have to endure the pain (just as middle-class and rich people do not have to endure the pain) of having a tooth pulled without modern anesthesia.
Demos: “As for that technotopia bit… keep in mind that Marx’s point was that technology
was what would make Communism happen, because it would eventually eliminate “human want” (which isn’t the same thing as scarcity, of course). The concept of historical materialism is built on the growth of technology and social organization.
The problem, of course, is that Marx hadn’t forseen how what we define as a “want” would change. His predictions might have been off by a couple of thousand years or so.”
I’m not sure what text you’re referring to Demos, but I don’t recognize this as being Marx’s problem (though it may well be the problem of communists). Technology was what would make communism happen because it had enabled the advanced stage that civilization had already reached. As Marx saw it bourgeois technology had primed the West for the next stage which was, inevitably (in his view), communism. And Marx spent no time (to my knowledge) talking about further technological advance and the promise thereof. Also, Marx’s notion of human desire/need was actually very static: and very much like that of s progressive liberal. According to Marx, as according to liberals such as J.S. Mill, humans desire (dare I say it once more) things like autonomy, freedom and self-development. The difference between the two is that Marx believed that only a complete transformation in social relations would enable technological advance to deliver on its potential to provide the latter to the mass of humankind.
Here is a relevant quotation from Capital:
“Machinery, considered alone, shortens the hours of labour, but when in the service of capital, lengthens them;…in itself it lightens labour, but when employed by capital, heightens the intensity of labour;…in itself it is a victory of man over the forces of nature, but in the hands of capital, makes man the slave of those forces;…in itself it increases the wealth of the producers, but in the hands of capital makes them paupers.”
I repeat: nowhere in Marx, AFAIK, will you find him saying that liberation will come in the form of providing more and more “stuff” for people. Rather Marx always figured human needs/desires in ultra-liberal terms: as freedom, autonomy and self-development.
kasagiri: please, will you tell me where I can find Alfred Marshall’s criticism of the labor theory of value?
