Our goods are not only plentiful but cheap. I am a book addict. Yet even I am fighting hard to spend as great a share of my income on books as Adam Smith did in his day. Back on March 9, 1776 Adam Smith's Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations went on sale for the price of 1.8 pounds sterling at a time when the median family made perhaps 30 pounds a year. That one book (admittedly a big book and an expensive one) cost six percent of the median family's annual income. In the United States today, median family income is $50,000 a year and Smith's Wealth of Nations costs $7.95 at Amazon (in the Bantam Classics edition). The 18th Century British family could buy 17 copies of the Wealth of Nations out of its annual income. The American family in 2009 can buy 6,000 copies: a multiplication factor of 350.(Chez Panisse, for those not familiar with Berkeley, is the fanciest--and likely most expensive--restaurant in Berkeley.)
Books are not an exceptional category. Today, buttermilk-fried petrale sole with pickled vegetables and parsley mayonnaise, served at Chez Panisse Café, costs the same share of a day-laborer's earnings as the raw ingredients for two big bowls of oatmeal did in the 18th Century.
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Today we still spend about one dollar in five on food—down from the half of income that Americans spent in 1776. The share hasn't fallen more because some of us buy buttermilk-fried petrale sole with pickled vegetables and parsley mayonnaise cooked, served, and cleaned up by others rather than (or in addition to) oats in the gunnysack.
I think this kind of mental exercise is useful for really appreciating the upside of modernity/capitalism. The vast majority of humans for the vast majority of history have had to live in uncomfortable, monotonous, shitty conditions twenty-four hours a day seven days a week for the duration of their lives. The phenomenon of significant portions of humanity living in material comfort is relatively new, and with each passing decade many more are being lifted up out of poverty.
Of course, the trick now is to figure out how we can continue to do this without also rendering the planet inhabitable to ourselves.
4 comments:
Okay, this is a bit ridiculous. The upside of capitalism is that we have unbelievable material wealth and comforts? You don't say. I think that detractors of Capitalism (those who aren't concerned with the damage that it does directly) believe that these material comforts don't result in an overall increase in satisfaction or happiness. That they slowly raise our standards and expectations so that whatever we have seems barely enough. I don't mean to include extremes on either end of the spectrum in this. But there does seem to be something to the idea that our happiness level is largely a practical biological reaction to our circumstances, and one that is very good at adapting to the current situation. I like comforts as much as the rest. I just don't know that I would be that much less happy if it were taken away from me, or if more were given to me, for a sustained time.
"Okay, this is a bit ridiculous. The upside of capitalism is that we have unbelievable material wealth and comforts? You don't say."
My point wasn't to merely assert that the upside of capitalism is material worth--it was to see if we could frame it in a way that makes us appreciate just how extreme the improvement has been. I think realizing that 250 years ago you'd have to spend half your income on food--and that 5 out of 6 meals you bought were fucking oats--helps us truly understand how fortuneate we are to be alive in this place and this time, and how imperative it is that as many humans as possible be liberated from their dismal oats-only existences.
Now, is having material comfort sufficient for being really and truly happy? Well, maybe not. But when you frame the question in terms of a concept so big and monolithic--Human Happiness--the little things--like interesting food, like being able to buy any book you want, like having hot showers in the morning--fall by the wayside. But the cumulative quality-of-life impact of these things over a person's lifetime are significant! These are things that would make anyone, of any era, happier in an immediate and straightforward way.
Shouldn't we be careful not to be too quick to paint people of other cultures and other eras as happy, authentic, in-tune-with-nature faceless peasants and villagers? They are so authentic, they have no need for base materialistic things like televisions, cars, and French cuisine! That stuff doesn't really make you happy anyway, so there's no pressing need to give some dude wasting his life in rural China the opportunity to experience these materialistic trifles that I experience every day! Why, to think otherwise would be crass materialism!
You see what I'm trying to get at here? How there might be some cognitive dissonance at play in all this? Good liberals like us find it discomforting to praise ourselves, to praise capitalism...
Yeah, I know this is a classic lame liberal move, and I didn't make it unconsciously. It's just that I see two actual pieces of evidence that point to it - the first is thinking a little bit about the way the brain surely actually works (there was a TED talk about this). The second is comparing my own experience to potential additional comforts that I might have in the future. It doesn't sound that great, and it's hard to imagine I'll be happier overall, despite the fact that two hundred years from now people will probably look back to my awful state with pity. I mean, alleviating suffering is one thing, but it's important to distinguish when people are actually suffering from when we are projecting suffering on them, because *we* would be suffering in that situation.
I take your point, but also I'd encourage you to go back to DeLong's original post and reread it carefully, because I think he basically comes to the same conclusion that you are coming to.
However, I don't think it's right to think that in 200 years, people will take pity on our awful standard of living--I think in 200 years, people will look at our lives and think they were just fine, just like how we might think that some wealthy noble 200 years ago lived a quality of life that was just fine. There is a real objective standard at work here, which in the DeLong post is quoted from Keynes:
Keynes thought that by today we would have reached a realm of plenty where "We shall once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful. We shall honour those who can teach us how to pluck the hour and the day virtuously and well, the delightful people who are capable of taking direct enjoyment in things, the lilies of the field who toil not, neither do they spin."
In other words, having plenty frees us from lives that are devoted almost entirely to subsistence, and allows us to get down to the business of living good and happy lives. We no longer are forced to spend 50% of our labor just feeding ourselves; we can use the majority of the fruits of our labor on things that are valuable not solely as a means for survival--things that are valuable in themselves.
Of course, the great irony in all this is that human nature--which puts such a prize on status--prevents us from really appreciating how well off we are, causing DeLong to sigh:
I'm convinced that everyone I know can easily imagine how to spend up to three times their current income usefully and productively. (It is only beyond three times your current spending that people judge others' spending as absurd and wasteful.) And everybody I know finds it very difficult to imagine how people can survive on less than one-third of what they spend—never mind that all of our pre-industrial ancestors did so all the time. There is a point at which we say "enough!" to more oat porridge. But all evidence suggests Keynes was wrong: We are simply not built to ever say "enough!" to stuff in general.
So I think DeLong agrees with you that humans in general aren't "built" to appreciate their material fortunes; but that doesn't mean that we can't put in a special effort to appreciate our material fortunes, nor does it mean that our material fortunes are not something truly worth appreciating.
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