The idea of American's modern work place causing us to disappear into made up worlds that I introduced in The Class War That's Not and an Honest Man's Last NYT Column sounds strange in this country but in Japan its just part of the culture as the opening music of Ghost in the Shell puts it
Stand alone . . . Where was life when it had a meaning . . .
Stand alone . . . Nothing's real anymore and . . .
.
.
.
Calling, calling, for the place of knowing
There's more than what can be linked
Calling, calling now, never will I look away
For what life has left for me
Our economy is like a giant Ouija board that everyone is pushing on as hard as possible but no one admits interfering. For those of you who think the result has been an increasingly productive economy, behold - where is your god now?
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics it now takes two workers in retail or construction to serve the same number of people that required one person in 1939. Almost 2 1/2 2010 workers in financial services are required where proportional to the population one 1939 worker was employed.
Another interpretation of these pictures would be that education and health care is six times better and so needs proportionally six times as many workers, local and state government more than twice as good, etc. I'm going to argue that it is politics...
As a warm up exercise let's see what kind of dystopia can be constructed in a perfect democracy. By perfect democracy I mean rational voters and no corruption - every voter votes his interest and every elected official works to maximize his votes. To guide the imagining of this dystopia we have two quotes:
The first (HT pelagicray) supposedly from Alexander Tytler
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury. After that, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits with the result the democracy collapses because of the loose fiscal policy ensuing, always to be followed by a dictatorship, then a monarchy.
and the second from
Alexis de Tocqueville (for minority read
unemployed)
If ever the free institutions of America are destroyed, that event may be attributed to the omnipotence of the majority, which may at some future time urge the minorities to desperation and oblige them to have recourse to physical force. Anarchy will then be the result, but it will have been brought about by despotism.
Both Alex agree that any loop between government subsidy and votes won't end well.
The military industrial complex is not alone. Its been joined by the FIRE (financial, insurance, real estate) complex, the health care complex and many others. According to the Great Stagnation we never fixed the leak in our economy caused by any of these out of control entities. We just didn't notice as much before because our overall economy was growing fast enough to bail us out. And think of the effort that went into slowing down the tobacco industry to get an idea of just how difficult it is to shrink even the most odious sector.
Conversely growing the number of workers in one of the most agreed upon important sectors is equally hard.
Scientific research and development services provided 621,700 jobs in 2008. Research and development in the physical, engineering, and life sciences accounted for about 90 percent of the jobs; the rest were in research and development in the social sciences and humanities.
Financial activities employed over 8 million people in 2008. Many of these these employees were top students that could easily have, in a more productive society, attempted some useful scientific labor instead of helping bring the world to its economic knees. Without Too Big To Fail maybe some of these workers would right now be making their way towards something useful.
Delusions of economic productivity also help explain a lot of the growing wealth inequality in America. If your economy is built on mafia like sub societies then you of course cannot expect much in the way of equality - people in glass houses don't throw stones.
This is a modern problem; a society where most people work on a farm could never drift this far from productively using people's time (though it might take Enclosure Acts to get them off the farm - that was a political shift too). But we cannot afford the luxury of imagining that we can solve this problem by going back in time or wistfully hope that an economic crash flings us to a simpler world. Of course ending globalization and bringing back manufacturing to this country will help a lot but doing that correctly means heavy environmental regulation, enforced union friendliness and massive government subsidy. It will spawn a new complex - which is a good thing since the existing ones have been strangling anything new - but we will still need a way to regulate "government sponsored enterprise".
Unfortunately the masses we needed to rise to this occasion are submerged deep in the bowels of the beasts that we are fighting. Politics has become an endless turf war between voters in one industrial / government bloc or another. Each citizen solemnly believing that life would be better if only all other complexes could be shrunk. From within these career shells our interaction with people in other self-imposed realities is limited.
I had one such interaction with a farmer in Indiana. The corn there grows so tall that I used to detour through it with visitors and pretend I was lost just to see them panic on a road where all you can see is stalks. The farmer, gesturing at the endless crop line, said to me, "People don't realize that this is the strength of the country that makes everything else possible". True enough and for workers in real estate the country revolves around housing - which it does. If you are in the military the US obviously is all about the strength of its armed forces - also true. If you are a small businessman then small business is the backbone of America - correct.
When I was growing up in North Carolina people elected Jesse Helms to go fight for Big Tobacco and sometimes other farmers or Research Triangle Park. Were there a Daily Kos at the time the discussion about Jesse would have been his crazy social issues beliefs but those were not why he was being elected. The only way to defeat him would be to convince voters that you will back exactly the same local industry policies while at the same time will be more sane on social issues. So the fight between Democrats and Republicans became all about social issues but on economic issues each candidate was near identical.
So early neo-liberals perhaps thought they were really onto something with globalism - these entrenched industries would be shaken up by foreign competition! Of course we know now that is nonsense. Globalism just makes workers and governments compete - not corporations. We finally after decades have General Motors producing the Volt to compete with Nissan's Leaf but that's only after GM was essentially acquired by the federal government. We could have simply long ago passed regulations forcing GM to produce electric cars without killing them. Instead of causing corporate competition the neo-liberal agenda just became a subsidy to the banking lobby as money began circling the globe in ever increasing amounts.
I was a long time understanding what was happening under President Obama. The change is not that any of these complexes will have their power in Washington reduced or even their corporate citizenship revoked. The change is that we have all been given back stage passes and can finally see the true drama unfolding.
Health care reform did not fail because our democracy is broken. It failed because our democracy is too pure - a cold exchange of votes for services without the interference of leadership. Polling voters whether or not they would like to see the health care complex reduced is irrelevant. Poll them asking if they want their complex reduced because a logical voter can do the calculation that successfully shrinking health care might put the military, financial, entertainment, or whatever his bloc is in danger of being shrunk next. This is where we are and though I am upset with Obama on some of the leadership part I now must admit that he went out on a limb with voters just to show us the under side of the rock.
On the other hand the President did not have much choice, these entities have reached a size where their existence can no longer be hidden behind the trappings of traditional economic doctrine. Take this post from Krugman
But Henry Farrell shows us the way, pointing out that Greenspan’s piece contains this remarkable passage:
Today’s competitive markets, whether we seek to recognise it or not, are driven by an international version of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” that is unredeemably opaque. With notably rare exceptions (2008, for example), the global “invisible hand” has created relatively stable exchange rates, interest rates, prices, and wage rates.
Henry then asks readers to chime in with other uses of the “with notably rare exceptions” phrase. Among the entries:
With notably rare exceptions, Newt Gingrich is a loyal and faithful husband.
With notably rare exceptions, Japanese nuclear reactors have been secure from earthquakes.
Though unredeemably(sic) opaque, Mr. Madoff’s operations delivered excellent returns, with notably rare exceptions.
With notably rare exceptions, the levees protecting New Orleans have held fast in the face of major hurricanes.
With notably rare exceptions, locking all exits to the workplace is a harmless way to improve your employees’ productivity.
With notably rare exceptions, petroleum extraction has minimal environmental impact.
You see the difference right? People in America are still suffering but if we choose to peer out from our driver's seats, cubicles, schools, retail stores, prisons, teller windows, tiny offices, barracks, call centers, restaurants, libraries, hospitals, TV shows, children's soccer games and factories and find the dark humour -
then we can laugh. And laughter is a powerful thing.