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I want to make note of a post by Matthew Yglesias from this past week, which I felt really hit the nail on the head. “Slouching Toward Utopia” doesn’t really break a whole lot of new ground, but I think Yglesias really distills a lot of issues down into a simple but very potent summary. The entire last paragraph is really worth quoting:

One problem in the emerging rentier economy is that employing human beings will still serve a kind of status role, especially as it becomes less and less strictly necessary to do so. Horses are no longer production inputs, but they’re still status symbols. At the same time, material plenty means that people who aren’t lucky enough to be enjoying rents will be less and less likely to work. We should expect increasing levels of Murray-style moral panic about working class “idleness” along with an increasing Ryan-style insistence that we “can’t afford” a welfare state despite having become a more prosperous society. As specific segments of the protected workforce are successfully appropriated, the stock of rentless workers will grow even as the well-being of the previously rentless workers rises due to further falls in the objective cost of living. The ideal outcome is that (perhaps after a social crisis à la the Bell Riots) everyone gets expropriated and we abolish private property in ideas and natural resources. Then by taxing pollution, land, congestion, and other externalities, we have adequate revenue to provide a decent social minimum for all, at which point people do what they like. Some people’s hobbies will align reasonably well with some kind of labor-market opportunity whereas others won’t, but society won’t be organized around a “work hard or else you’ll starve and be homeless” model because there will not objectively be a shortfall of food and houses or much of anything else.

There’s still a lot going on in here. I think the early bit comparing the prospects for employment of increasingly unnecessary human labor with horses in an automobile age could be explored a lot further, as it seems painfully relevant to a great deal of what “work” has become in this day and age, arguably along much of the income scale in fact. Even up in highly-paid middle and upper management, I think you could well make that point that much of the real “function” of people who spend their days exchanging e-mails, attending meetings and planning Powerpoint presentations is little more than flattering the ego of those they serve.

And of course down toward the other end, the “service economy” seems largely based on a situation in which hyper-efficient technology has made large numbers of people surplus to production requirements, but the ownership stake in that production is concentrated among a relatively small portion of society who don’t really need most of the remaining population in any meaningful sense but (as long as all of those plebians are around and desperate for some sort of income) will usually be able to come up with some sort of tasks for them which, even if they provide little more than mild amusement, are probably worth the tiny expenditure necessary. This is basically the economic role which Ayn Rand openly and explicitly assigned to non-elites in Atlas Shrugged. The web site fiverr.com offers an appalling preview of what this sort of economy has in store for most people.

But I think the real lightning bolt in Yglesias’ post was his nine-word summation, toward the end, of the alternative to a utopian abundancy economy: “work hard or else you’ll starve and be homeless.”

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I’ve had this loose sense for some years, now, that America (perhaps more than nearly any other society) is becoming a victim of its own success. In more ways than one in fact, probably, but in this case I refer to the long decades of enjoying the fruits of market capitalism. I’ve arrived at this notion that the free-enterprise system has proven both so effective and so relatively easy a means of making so many things better that we’ve now gone generations without really confronting any major problem through any other way.

The last exceptions were probably the civil rights movement and the feminist revolution, and both of those were pretty much complete by the time I was born. And I’m 33.

Outside of those upheavals, the solutions to which I think required effort outside of capitalist free-enterprise but not particularly any direct conflict with it, the vast majority of America has been able to take for granted a pretty comfortable living through a combination of shopping, and a sort of “maintenance” approach to collective society. Basically, vote, at least once in a while, and beyond that just trust that the resultant government may act out amateur drama but will keep the streets paved, the water drinkable, etc., and not screw anything up too disastrously.

Which is understandably a very tempting situation to settle into, I believe, not least from my perspective; I find politics interesting but I don’t want to march or knock on doors or get pepper-sprayed or engage directly with people who disagree with me or, for that matter, people who share my views either, really. I like vote-by-mail! By contrast it’s difficult and unpleasant, hashing out situations where we can’t all simply have our own individual preference without our decision significantly affecting anyone else. Shopping is much more fun.

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Over at The Economist, my BFF notes the strange and wondrously-transformed political context in which, suddenly, “corn-ethanol subsidies are going to expire this year, and [...] no one is defending them.”

Which is remarkable not only for itself, but for the timing, as just before reading the above link I was thinking of a post along similar lines, after seeing this on the homepage of Cleveland.com this morning.

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