Abundance and Its Discontents
By the 1950s, abundance had become a technical puzzle for economists to solve, not a cause for celebration that promised emancipation from the imbecilic imperatives of eight-hour days devoted to the production of superfluous goods. This is where abundance goes to die, and a new book helps to bury it.
James Livingston
The Europeans who invaded and conquered North America were uniformly astonished by the cornucopia they found: skies darkened by flocks of birds, waters crowded with schools of fish, forests and meadows crawling with all kinds of small game.
But those who came to settle, to subdue and cultivate the earth – especially those who had decided to subdue and cultivate New England – were also worried.
They feared that the sheer extravagance of the place would steer minds away from the obligations of this world, specifically from the rigors of necessary labor.
Those New England Puritans were in flight from a place where the recent growth of great fortunes and the concentration of landed wealth threatened their independent economic standing as freeholders or skilled craftsmen, and thus put their souls – and their free will – at risk.
So, the last thing they wanted was a place where such fortunes were easy to come by, where “great estates” would flourish and new grandees would rule.
For in such places, hard-working, God-fearing men would be forced into wage slavery, into dependence on those whose highest calling was idleness and luxury – where control of their own volitions had been remanded to their hell-bent employers.
How could they then claim to have freely chosen to follow the will of God?
John White, the ideologue of the Great Migration that brought 30,000 English souls to America under the leadership of John Winthrop (the governor of that “City Upon a Hill”), addressed the question in “The Planter’s Plea,” his 1630 pamphlet explaining the purposes of the Massachusetts Bay Company.
The “greatest advantage must needes come unto the Natives themselves,” White maintained, because “commerce and example of our course of living” would teach them “civility,” which in turn would “make way consequently for the saving of their soules.”
White had the limited natural resources of rocky New England in mind.
In such a place, he acknowledged, a competency – that is, a small holding – was the most that could be expected from the hard labor of settling a heathen land.
But that was his strongest selling point, and how he closed the pitch: “Now wee know nothing sorts better with Piety than Competency.”
The fabled frontier, that margin of excess which soon came to define the American character, had a similarly doubled role in the imagination of white settlers.
On one hand, it was “virgin land,” an entirely open range where any man could go to claim a homestead, the piece of property that would make him someone whose time was free of the claims of the lord, the overseer, or the boss because he was now anchored in space.
On the other hand, the frontier held a devious abundance of attractions, where any man or woman’s desires could be met by “going native,” indulging in all the savage delights made familiar by the sensational stories of missionaries, pioneers, and captives.
The closing of the frontier in 1890 was an economic and cultural watershed, as Frederick Jackson Turner famously noted three years later.
But the questions that followed were political, for the most part, because, absent the so-called safety valve of the frontier, where propertyless men could “start over,” social classes would form and harden, just like in Europe.
Would the extraordinary class struggles of the late-nineteenth century intensify under this circumstance, leading toward proletarian revolution?
New Frontiers
Then, in the very early twentieth century, two new frontiers appeared, both framed by the apprehension – the perception and the fear – of abundance.
This time, abundance took the form not of natural endowments, but of a surplus of finished goods and idle capital that seemed to have no remunerative outlet, products whose redundance drove their marginal value toward zero, and bottom lines toward bankruptcy.
The new frontier we know as the American Empire was one obvious and lasting consequence of this apprehension: it would “export” the social question raised by the closing of the old frontier by selling or investing that man-made surplus in foreign markets.
The pioneers who settled the other new frontier were less visible, and less voluble, perhaps because they were more ambivalent about its possibilities.
The map that mattered most in this uncharted territory was drawn by the University of Pennsylvania economist Simon Patten, who claimed in his best-selling 1907 book, The New Basis of Civilization, that the US was far along in the transition from an Age of Deficit to an Age of Surplus, or, more vividly, from an economy of pain to a pleasure economy.
Patten didn’t predict the end of necessary labor or a real-life “Land of Cockaigne.”
Instead, he wondered whether consumer demand could be magnified and organized to the point where it would be effective enough to clear the market of a seemingly limitless supply of goods, at profitable prices.
But in addressing such prosaic concerns, Patten imagined a new world.
For the first time in human history, the deferment of gratification, or “saving for a rainy day,” would appear as the principal impediment to economic growth, now conceived as a consumer-driven sequence of events that required no net additions to either the labor force or the capital stock.
As a result, profit-seeking by capitalists had become what John Maynard Keynes called, in his 1930 essay “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” a “somewhat disgusting morbidity,” a vestigial trace of an antiquated social order.
Along with America, the idea of abundance had come of age.
Patten’s students and followers carried the message to a very wide public, typically emphasizing the features and connotations of a “pleasure economy.”
Walter Weyl, a founding editor of The New Republic, published The New Democracy (1912), which showed how and why income redistribution via taxation was both possible and necessary in an age of permanent surplus, but only if the point of economic development was democracy.
Stuart Chase, a TNR regular and author of The Economy of Abundance (1934), grasped the origin of the Great Depression – as Patten had predicted – in a shortage of effective consumer demand.
Rexford G. Tugwell, a member of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “brain trust,” was an outspoken advocate of what came to be called the Keynesian consensus.
And Keynes himself drew the moral of Patten’s story from J.A. Hobson, who argued that underconsumption was the proximate cause of economic crisis (and imperialism), and from William James, who worried that a “pleasure economy” – he quoted Patten in “The Moral Equivalent of War” (1910) – would leave boys without enough work to make real men of themselves.
And it was Keynes who framed the question confronting Western civilization: What moral order would replace one that had assumed a scarcity of goods and had stipulated, accordingly, that the anal-compulsive urge to accumulate wealth – that “disgusting morbidity” – made for the most efficient allocation of those goods?
Could material abundance underwrite a social ethic based on the ancient Christian criterion of need?
By the 1950s, many if not most economists had concluded that private savings and investment were not the principal levers of growth and development (public investment had long since superseded private investment, anyway).
This implied that the supply side was of much less concern than the demand side, where wages and salaries were the “revenue” in question.
The problem was not the production of goods, but their consumption, or, more specifically, achieving a distribution of income between capital and labor that would create enough consumer demand to pay for the surfeit of goods on offer.
Abundance had become a technical puzzle to solve, not a cause for celebration that promised emancipation from the imbecilic imperatives of eight-hour days devoted to the production of superfluous goods.
The Consumer Condition
This failure of imagination is all the more striking in view of what social scientists had discovered in the 1950s: the end of work and its corollary, the advent of a post-bourgeois, “other-directed individual.”
These discoveries presupposed the existence of abundance, and in that sense assumed that the problem of production had been solved.
Luminaries like Daniel Bell and Hannah Arendt wrote books about the impending end of work, the latter in a study commissioned as an assessment of Karl Marx, which turned out to be a poignant meditation on poiesis, the work of the skilled craftsman (and, not incidentally, a covert rehabilitation of Martin Heidegger’s artisanal concept of being-in-the-world).
Meanwhile, David Riesman made the cover of Time magazine for writing The Lonely Crowd (1950), which popularized the reporting of the Frankfurt School – Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Erich Fromm, and friends – on the whereabouts of the “inner-directed” individual.
That productive, energetic self-mastering man and omnicompetent citizen of the nineteenth century had, it seems, given way to the “other-directed” twentieth-century type, the languid consumer of goods and information who, as a latent “authoritarian personality,” was a likely candidate for recruitment to revanchist social movements.
The eminent historian David M. Potter drew these strands together in People of Plenty (1954), a book meant to explain the “American character” by the outsize extravagance of its natural and artificial habitat.
It is not a pretty picture.
This “other-directed individual” is clearly a laggard who needs to relearn the lessons of his Puritan forebears, among them the fear of what abundance will do to the Protestant work ethic:
“Prior to the attainment of abundance, Riesman remarks, people are concerned primarily with increasing production.
In their own temperament this requires hard enduringness and enterprise; in their external concerns it requires concentration upon dominating the physical environment; in their personal economy it requires thrift, prudence, abstinence.
But once abundance is secured, the scarcity psychology that was once so valuable no longer operates to the advantage of society, and the ideal individual develops the qualities of the good consumer rather than those of the good producer.
He needs now to cultivate interests that are appropriate to an enlarged leisure, and since he is likely to be an employee rather than an entrepreneur or to be engaged in one of the service trades rather than in production, the cordiality of his relations with other people becomes more important than his mastery of the environment.”
If this sounds both familiar and slightly ridiculous, it is because Potter has given us Willy Loman’s back story in prose fit for a peer-reviewed academic journal.
But public intellectuals on the order of Susan Sontag, Paul Goodman, and Herbert Marcuse were indicting “consumer culture” on the same grounds, at the same time, and in the same words, as if they had memorized some Frankfurt School master text (Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization (1955) was an attempt to grasp automated abundance as the portal through which society would pass beyond necessity and glimpse true freedom, but in One-Dimensional Man (1964), he reverted to the Frankfurt School line).
Back to Work
Their indictment still resonates, at least with Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, whose Abundance claims to “take inspiration from People of Plenty, the historian David Potter’s brilliant 1954 book on how abundance shaped American thought and culture.”
Klein and Thompson announce that they have written a book about supply-side politics, not economics, but their critique of consumer culture could have been composed by Arthur Laffer or Jude Wanniski – or Riesman.
For some reason, intellectuals still code consumption as effeminate, passive, pliant, and conformist, not aggressive, creative, unruly, and contrarian.
Klein and Thompson are no exception, even though fashion, where the most expendable consumer goods are the centerpiece, is the scene of constant disruption, and leisure time is a highly customized domain where people treat each other as ends in themselves, not as means to the advancement of their careers.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, a staff writer at The Atlantic, are forthright about their intended audience – the broad US left that installed the regulatory apparatus now in place, most of it legislated in the early 1970s – and they are fearless in their criticisms of its failings.
They issue an impassioned plea for a new “articulated vision of the future” which will inform new attitudes, animate new energies, and above all, dictate better policies.
Subsidizing demand, the supposed Keynesian cure for all that ails the body politic, is not only inefficient and insufficient in addressing the problem of economic development; it is also socially enervating and politically poisonous.
Redistribution is over.
Instead, reconstruction must take place at the point of production, and on that site some very hard work is required.
This is a promising premise of supply-side politics, because it lets us see that the scarcity politics of the right have always been about redistribution in reverse: taking from the poor to reward the rich for being, well, for being rich, on the assumption that life is a zero-sum game.
Of course, the rigorous public rationale for that massive shift in income share from labor to capital was always that cutting taxes on wealthy individuals and corporations would leave them with more to invest in industries that produce “good-paying jobs.”
As a result, income per capita and living standards would rise, and overall tax revenues would actually increase, despite (or because of) the reduction in marginal rates.
But it’s a rationale that has never worked as advertised, because it can’t.
Since the 1920s, the profits generated by corporations have not, generally speaking, been needed for reinvestment, and even if they are so allocated, they don’t produce jobs, let alone good-paying ones.
Meanwhile, wealthy individuals buy yachts or hand their tax gains over to hedge funds and private equity raiders, who use it to buy companies and strip them for parts.
No matter, say defenders of the orthodoxy, who, like true believers when the end of days doesn’t arrive on schedule, simply revise the calendar.
Klein and Thompson aren’t buying it.
They assume that public investment is the crucial engine of progressive change, that is, change for the better, for all, in the name of the more perfect union called democracy.
So far, so good.
But the hard work that would underwrite abundance then boils down to the technocratic crafting of public policies that will unlock the forces of production now fettered by an unfathomable welter of competing claims from officials and agencies at every level of government.
California is Exhibit A here, as it is for right-wing stalwarts like Ron DeSantis, Mike Johnson, Marc Andreessen, and other avowed enemies of whatever supposedly hamstrings technological innovation (which in practice means profitable technological change).
Their agenda requires a political approach resembling the one now prevailing in Washington, channeled by a man who believes that deal-making is humanity’s highest calling.
It is disconcerting, to say the least, that the vision defended in Abundance dovetails so neatly with that of Donald Trump’s second presidency, which enfranchises a “unitary executive” and lionizes a leader who can “get things done” by revoking federal agencies’ independence and suspending rules and norms of democratic governance.
Of course, their model is not Trump, but someone like Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, who, after a major highway bridge collapse in Philadelphia, declared an emergency and suspended the application of local, state, and federal rules governing construction.
In the end, Klein and Thompson take the side of the late economist Mancur Olson, who indicted the state that James Madison inscribed in the US Constitution.
For Olson, the multiplication of interests fostered by “extending the sphere” of republican self-rule over a broader social plane –resulting from the conquest of new territory and the addition of new states – would lead not to more rational decisions as a result of prolonged debate among those interests, as Madison intended, but rather to political deadlock and economic stagnation.
This is where the idea of abundance always goes to die: at the hands of people who believe that the rational allocation of limited resources is the task at hand, to be overseen by experts like them, who know what’s good for us better than we do, and who already have the resources – the power – to get things done more efficiently than we can.
Not coincidentally, it is also where democracy goes to die.
Paradise Unimagined
Arriving at this judgment about a book so full of energy, intelligence, and hope is unpleasant.
But it becomes an obligation when so much is at stake, when the idea of abundance and the possibility of democracy are both near death.
Klein and Thompson blame the broad left for its lack of a vision that goes beyond the redistribution of actually existing resources.
That criticism is to be expected, and even applauded, at this stage of liberalism’s intellectual decay, and when the radical left has become a caricature of many nineteenth-century anti-slavery abolitionists, who eschewed the inevitable corruptions of electoral politics and policymaking for the sake of their souls’ purity.
But the alternative vision Klein and Thompson offer reveals a technocratic horizon that is well behind us, a line we crossed eight years ago, when Trump announced his intention to revoke the republic.
But most important, the vision Klein and Thompson offer makes the idea of abundance sound like what awaits the Tribulation Force of the Left Behind film franchise, whose members prove they are worthy of joining the Raptured in heaven by working hard against the anti-Christ on Earth.
The abundance we need and deserve cannot be incentivized by monetizing it and attracting private investors and contractors emboldened by relaxed regulations and officials who are willing and able to bend the rules.
Nor does it have to wait on the arrival of another “political order” that will deliver the goods because it tells a “better story,” as per the historian Gary Gerstle’s periodization of the US political party system (eagerly cited by Klein and Thompson).
Abundance is here and now, abiding in the simple fact that economic growth doesn’t require more savings, more work, and more fossil fuels (and thus the incineration of the planet), because growth – at any pace – no longer demands larger inputs of either capital and labor.
Yes, we need new ideas, and we desperately need a coherent vision of the future.
But only by entertaining the idea of abundance in all its historical plenitude can we hope for a better future than the one Klein and Thompson articulate.
And only by assuming that policies without politics are just talking points, and that transformative politics are animated by social movements, can we understand what is required of us.
With that in mind, let us take Weyl, rather than Potter or Olson or Gerstle, as our starting point.
Let us dispense with compassion and charity as the reasons for redistributing income through taxation.
The goal is to approximate equality in the interest of democracy, neither of which is attainable if the rich get richer because we don’t tax their “earnings” on the specious grounds that this gives them an incentive to invest and innovate.
With the revenue supplied by this new attitude toward taxation and the public investments it would fund, there is no limit to what we could achieve on the supply side.
Abundance is within reach, but we need much more than technocratic policies if we are not to squander it.
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, Abundance, Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster, 2025.
James Livingston, Professor Emeritus of History at Rutgers University, is the author of six books, including No More Work: Why Full Employment Is a Bad Idea (The University of North Carolina Press, 2016), and the forthcoming The Intellectual Earthquake: How Pragmatism Changed the World, 1898-2008 (University of Chicago Press).
0 comments:
Publicar un comentario