Peter Frase

As a teenager in Minnesota, I attended my first Democratic Party caucus, where we sat in a church basement while a prospective candidate for office appealed for our support. At one point, a member of the audience asked the candidate for his position on the means-testing of public programs. When the candidate responded by asking which programs, in particular, ought to be means-tested, the questioner replied "any that conceivably could be means-tested".

At the time I didn't yet understand what "means testing" meant, but I still found this response a bit peculiar. It suggested that "means testing" was some kind of general point of principle rather than some technical point about implementing specific programs, which is what it sounded like.

I later found out that means testing refers to the practice of making public benefits conditional on one's demonstrated need for them, and on one's financial means of obtaining equivalent services in the private market. Policies that are specifically targeted at the poor, such as food stamps and Medicaid in the United States, are therefore means-tested programs. People like the man at the caucus meeting are in favor of extending this structure to programs which are not currently means-tested, like Social Security. They argue that cash support for the aged should be provided only to those who do not have sufficient income to get along without it.

This position has a superficial plausibility that makes it attractive not only to conservatives, but even to people on the left who are concerned about equality and social justice. It seems unnecessary, even unjust, to provide public benefits to those who are already affluent, particularly when doing so uses up finite public funds that could otherwise be redirected to those more deserving. However, I have come around to the position that means-testing of public benefits is something that the left should essentially never support.

The first justification for this position is entirely political in nature. In short, I do not believe it is possible to sustain the public consensus necessary to defend a generous welfare state regime, if the benefits of that regime are perceived as being directed to a privileged subset of the population. Setting up benefits in this way inevitably breeds resentment among those segments of the working class who pay taxes and do not receive substantial benefits, who then become open to the argument that the poor are parasitic on their hard work. This tendency is accentuated by the fact that the beneficiaries of means-tested programs will tend to be people who are already subject to social stigma and bigotry, such as women and members of racial minorities. The paradigmatic example of this in the United States is the dismantling of "welfare as we know it" in the 1990's. In that struggle, the barely-coded racist imagery of "welfare queens" highlighted a perception that the recipients of welfare were undeserving and opportunistic Others rather than people who could have, with a bit of bad luck, been any of us.

Not all elements of the welfare state suffer the same fate as welfare, however, not even in the United States. Consider, for example, the resilience of Social Security and Medicare in the face of decades of persistent conservative and neo-liberal attacks, culminating most recently in George W. Bush's abortive attempt to privatize Social Security. Those programs remain extremely popular with a broad cross-section of the public, to the point that Republicans will demagogue against Democratic health care proposals by posing as defenders of Medicare.

The difference between Medicare and Welfare, of course, is that Medicare is for everybody. You receive it when you turn 65, with no ifs, ands or buts. It therefore has the character of a social right, an entitlement of citizenship, rather than a special benefit or privilege. If a means test were to be imposed, however, it would convert Medicare into a program like Welfare--or indeed, a program like Medicaid, which, though ostensibly available nationwide, tends to be provided in a quite paltry form in poorer and more conservative states.

I therefore conclude that means testing of public benefits is little more than a trap set for progressives by those whose ultimate goal is the total destruction of these programs. Universal social rights are politically defensible, while particularist benefits are not. This lesson is, I think, supported by the work of Political Scientist Paul Pierson; as Joshua Tucker explains at the Monkey Cage, Pierson "explained how difficult it would be for governments to consolidate or retrench existing social policy programs, because these policies (pensions being the best example) create their own support coalition that reaches far beyond the left-wing electorate."

There is, however, an additional reason to support universalistic rather than targeted public programs, and this is a matter of principle rather than politics. The problem with means-tested benefits is not only that they are politically untenable, but that they inevitably put the state in the business of judging the worth and deservingness of applicants--and thus, by extension, judging the way in which they lead their lives. If, for example, welfare benefits are made contingent on performing work of some kind, then the state must decide what counts as a legitimate form of work. Does, for example, a mother's time spent raising a child count? Does getting a college education count? If it does, are all majors equally acceptable?

The fact that the state must adjudicate these issues--and must do so continually over time, since a person's status is constantly subject to change--means that benefit recipients are constantly subject to arbitrary bureaucratic domination. Universal benefits, on the other hand, require relatively little meddling in people's lives: in a country with universal health care, the only consideration for the state is whether or not you are a citizen. One should not, of course, understate the extremely fraught and contentious politics of citizenship itself, which may turn out to be the Achilles' heel of social democracy in the 21st century. Nevertheless, I regard it as a major step forward if we are arguing over who has the rights of citizenship rather than attempting to judge what makes a person deserving of some particular benefit.  I think that ultimately, means tested benefits tend to make the poor less free and less autonomous than the affluent. This is precisely the opposite of the goal we should be aiming at in thinking about the welfare state, which should be about enhancing human freedom and facilitating human flourishing.

This line of argument is, in a certain sense, in sympathy with critiques of the welfare state that have been offered from libertarian, anarchist, and Foucauldian perspectives. Unfortunately, discussion of these arguments tends to become bogged down in a narrow debate over whether one is "for" or "against" the welfare state. By now, however, we should all understand that there is not one welfare state but many, and that different institutional configurations can have very different implications for people's lives. Thus my goal as a writer and researcher is to promote a vision of the welfare state that enables individual autonomy and freedom by guaranteeing a basic standard of living as a human right, while simutaneously critiquing the idea that public benefits are special supports provided only to the deserving poor, and only in those instances where the private capitalist marketplace has "failed".

Photo by Tony Pierce.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's odd declaration that "there are no second acts in American lives" is, as has been said, among the most inaccurate statements ever made about the country. America is defined by its second lives, and almost nothing--not terrorism, not treason, not even urinating on an underage girl on video--can prevent the eternal recurrence of our public figures.

So I was not surprised by the return of Jaron Lanier. I first encountered this asshat in Thomas Frank's One Market Under God, where he appeared as an example of the bankrupt culture of the dot-com bubble: a guy who was celebrated (by bell hooks, even!) for his dreadlocks and his general counter-cultural persona, but whose contribution to public debate consisted of defending the neoliberal conventional wisdom and sticking up for the Microsoft monopoly.

Now Lanier is back to inform us that the Internet is ruining everything. His schtick is mashup of three old chestnuts: that post-modern, sample-based forms of creation are inferior to "real" creativity, that rampant piracy is making it impossible for creative workers to make a decent living, and that online anonymity trashes civil discourse.

The first argument is so stupid--and so redolent of 1950's parents complaining about rock and roll, or baby boomers trashing rap--that I think it's basically self-refuting for anyone under 40. The second strikes me as a potential but not a real problem, since the Internet has notably failed to make a significant dent in the volume of artistic production. To the extent that online "free culture" destabilizes the careers of people I actually respect--Charles Stross, for example--I'm sympathetic, but still not inclined to join the hand-loom weaver defense committee. We need to find other ways of supporting artistic work, rather than clinging to a repressive and inefficient regime of artificial scarcity.

The denunciation of anonymity is the most compelling, however, and you hear it repeated all the time, by people of all ages and political temperaments. It is undoubtedly the case that anonymous trolls have a remarkable ability to disrupt rational discourse; anyone who has ever had their forum invaded by birthers or accidentally looked at the comments on a YouTube video can attest to this.

However, I do not think we should be so quick to give up the power and freedom that comes from anonymity. Opponents of anonymity will emphasize that when your statements are attached to your real name, you are forced to take responsibility for them. This is true, but it has some ominous implications. What makes the question of identity on the Internet so fraught is that when you reveal your identity you reveal it not just to your immediate interlocutors, but to friends, family, potential employers, the state, and anyone who cares to google your name. This point is often lost, I think, on critics of anonymity who are already public figures (often with secure academic or journalistic sinecures of one kind of another) and therefore have little to fear (and much to gain) from associating their comments with their identity.

Moreover, a lack of anonymity is no guarantee of civility. For a case study, see this thread, in which the pundit Jim Sleeper behaves like a colossal ass while denouncing the anonymity of some acerbic but basically civil critics in one of his comment threads.

Critics of anonymity can, of course, propose the alternative of privacy. That is, even if your interventions in public discourse are associated with your name, employers or governments or schools or credit card companies  can be prohibited from using those words against you. Yet I doubt that this is really the right place to make our stand. There is, first of all, the practical difficulty of preventing state and private entities--which now gather almost unfathomable amounts of data on the population--from making use of information in ways that benefit them. But even more than this, what does the concept of privacy even mean today? We still deploy the concept of a "private sphere" as though it denotes some clearly defined part of our lives that is distinct from the "public" part, that is accessible to everyone. But this division depends for its meaning on a particular social structure, in which we have one set of "public" relations--in politics, and the labor market--and another set of "private" social relationships centered on the family. I'll quote what I said in an exchange with Rob Horning, who invoked Herbert Marcuse as a critic avant la lettre of social networking, consumerism, and the concomitant attenuation of privacy:

What does it mean for the individual to be “thrown back on himself alone”, to be able to “think and question and find”? The full explication is too long to draw out here, but I’ve concluded that the sort of non-capitalist individuality that Marcuse is defending only makes sense within a society that still makes a strong distinction between “public” and “private” spheres. It’s important to note that the private, here, is based on the bourgeois nuclear family, not the individual—Marcuse’s debt to Freud and left-Freudians like Wilhelm Reich is really important.

This kind public-private distinction is itself rooted in a contrast between mid-20th century mass consumer capitalism and an earlier form of capitalism in which the public-private distinction still had more salience (at least for the privileged classes). Such a distinction is historically specific to Marcuse’s time—for people my age (and I think I’m about the same age as you, Rob), our frame of reference is just a previous stage of mass culture. These days that’s basically true for anyone under 65. Thus my suspicion that rejecting social networking, the Internet, etc. is really just a nostalgia for an earlier kind of consumer culture.

So the recourse to individuality as an alternative ends up sounding like a kind of absurd narcissism when you counsel us to “sit quietly in a room, as Pascal prescribed”. In a society that is already totally atomized, rejecting mass culture means being totally anti-social, which is not what Marcuse was recommending.

I’m not sure anymore that defending “privacy” as such is a useful place to make our stand. Privacy from whom, and for whom? Again, without the bourgeois notion of the “private sphere” it seems arbitrary to make this distinction. Which isn’t to say that we shouldn’t be concerned about having every aspect of the self be an open book for Capital. But I wonder if in the 21st century surveillance society, the relevant issue isn’t the right to *anonymity* rather than the right to privacy.

What does it mean to invoke anonymity as an alternative to privacy? One advantage of this move is that it allows us to leave behind the premise that each of us has a single, authentic self. The whole critique of anonymity rests upon the assumption that we can choose one of two ways of presenting ourselves: as our one "true" self, associated with our legal name, consistent and continuing over time, or as an anonymous and irresponsible avatar of the moment, who can drive-by troll a comment thread and then disappear into the night. Neither of these poles represent the way most people actually live, however. Even those of us who never post anonymously online have multiple selves: work self, school self, family self, bar self, fantasy baseball self, or whatever.

The Internet-age culture of pseudonymous handles only codifies this, and in some ways actually makes it more accountable. In the bizarre Jim Sleeper exchange I linked above, a couple of Sleeper's antagonists make an important point: just because their comment-thread handles aren't their real names doesn't mean they don't care about the reputations of those handles. Anonymity isn't a way of avoiding accountability so much as a way of dividing it, acknowledging the reality that we are legion, we contain multitudes.

To the extent that truly one-off, unaccountable, drive-by anonymity is a problem, I think the solution is not to demand that people "take off their masks" but to devise new ways of managing anonymous and pseudonymous communities. That might mean a benevolent monarchy under a blogger like Ta-Nehisi Coates, who presides over the finest commenter community on the political internet. Or it might mean technical innovations like Slashdot Moderation, a breakthrough that I wish was much more widely applied on non-geek sites. But anonymity, I think, is here to stay. And that's as it should be.

Cross-posted from The Activist

"To be a productive worker is therefore not a piece of luck, but a misfortune." --Marx, Capital

"Are you a good team player/remember the boss is your best friend/kill your head." --Born Against

CBS chose to premiere their new reality show, "Undercover Boss", after the Super Bowl, indicating that they expect big things from it. And the premise is undeniably appealing: sending CEOs out to work entry-level jobs at the companies they control. In the first episode, we follow Larry O'Donnell, president of Waste Management, as he picks up litter, rides a garbage truck, and cleans toilets. As cheap populist theater, it's hard to resist.

Predictably, the show is really an affirmation of the class hierarchy it pretends to challenge. Its core lesson is that, should the benevolent corporate ruler deign to walk among the peasants, he will surely recognize the injustice of their plight and leap to action to remedy the situation. We get copious evidence of the CEO's empathy, his heartfelt desire to improve his employee's lives and help them enjoy their jobs. The episode ends with O'Donnell giving a speech acknowledging the struggles of the workers he has toiled alongside, as he promises to be a different and better leader from this day forward. As the credits roll, we are given brief "happily ever after" messages about the fate of the five rank-and-file employees we have met.

Of course, it's trite and obvious to point out that television tends to portray structural inequalities in terms of personal morality and individual solutions. If that was all there was to "Undercover Boss", it wouldn't rate a post. But what really struck me about the episode was something that relates to my recent post on guaranteed income. This show inadvertently makes the point that there is nothing noble or honorable about being working class under capitalism, despite what capitalist propagandists and even some traditional leftists would have you believe. On the contrary, being forced to work at an unpleasant job in return for wages leads to a degradation of the soul and a deformation of one's character.

This is made painfully evident by the heroes and villains in "Undercover Boss". The heroes--other than the CEO himself--are the everyday workers. And they seem like basically good people dealing with difficult circumstances. But their attitude toward their jobs is, at best, a resigned cynicism, like that of the woman who shrugs her shoulders at being followed by corporate spies and forced to urinate in a can in order to make her quota of trash pickups. And at worst, they show that they've internalized a work ethic that causes them to become complicit in exploiting their fellow workers. One man, who holds his job despite suffering from kidney failure, rides O'Donnell relentlessly for being too slow to pick up trash on a windy hillside, and then fires him after ridiculing him for being a worse worker than a dialysis patient. Even more horrifying is the man who brings a cheerful, can-do disposition to his job of sucking unspeakable waste out of the depths of a carnival porta-potty. O'Donnell commends him for his talent at motivating him to do this dirty job, even making it seem "fun". And one can see why as a CEO, he would this employee so valuable. But watching the two of them interact, one is struck by the gulf that separates a man forced to clean toilets, who adopts a positive attitude in order to make the work bearable, from the CEO who patronizingly approves of his attitude.

The villains in this drama are, in their own way, just as poignant. They are, for the most part, middle managers--pasty white guys who sit a bit higher on the corporate ladder than the spotlighted workers, but many rungs below CEO O'Donnell. In several scenes of "Undercover Boss", O'Donnell puts these characters on the spot and calls them out for various overbearing and callous managerial demands. These scenes fall into a long tradition of vilifying middle management in post-industrial American culture: it's the impulse that animates Dilbert, Office Space, and the Office. Middle managers make easy targets because they're the face of the boss that workers actually see--unlike the top managers who will never meet workers face-to-face outside of the fantasy world of reality TV.

At best, people focus their resentment on middle mangers for the same reason that radicals and oppressed people feel a visceral animosity toward cops, even though they are only foot soldiers for a much larger power structure. But watching the interviews on "Undercover Boss", I was reminded of the stories of Soviet peasants and workers, faced with the brutality of, in turn, the Cossacks and the Communist bureaucracy. They would cling to the notion that the big leader--first the Czar, later Stalin--would be outraged if he only knew what his agents were up to, and would surely make things right.

But as the liberal economist Brad DeLong likes to say, "the Cossacks work for the Czar". The squirmiest parts of "Undercover Boss" are the interludes where O'Donnell expresses his shock and dismay at the brutal policies implemented by underlings as they attempt to implement the productivity targets that he himself has imposed. He behaves as though all of these nasty outcomes are the fault of small-minded managers, who simply misunderstood his benevolent motives.

In the end, then, no-one on this show comes off looking good. The boss looks like a smarmy and self-satisfied hypocrite; the managers look petty and cruel; and the rank-and-file look either beaten-down, brutalized, or brainwashed. The secret lesson of the show is that the powerlessness of workers has horrible spiritual consequences both for them and for their bosses. I think a lot of people are reluctant to make this argument--I'm reluctant to make it too--because it seems disrespectful of people who are generally less privileged than those of us with the time to write rambling blog posts about TV shows. But that's a risk I'm willing to take, if the alternative is to patronize people by romanticizing their work even though, in all honesty, I wouldn't for one second consider trading places with them.

The healthiest reaction to the plight of the people featured on "Undercover Boss" is to fight for a society in which people aren't forced to clean out toilets and then pretend they enjoy it. One way to do that is to build strong unions that can stand up for the rights of people who will never be lucky to appear on a CBS reality TV show. But the left needs to think hard about other models, including the one I raised the other day--a minimum income that allows everyone enough to survive on, no matter what. It's hard to imagine that people would be so eager to oppress their fellow workers, or feign enjoyment of their crappy jobs, if they had the same choice given to the star of "Undercover Boss": the choice not to be there.

[Cross-posted from The Activist]

Serious debate about our visions for the future is always welcome, so it's nice to see Jason Schulman and David Schweickart debating "market socialism" and related things on this site. I don't have a lot more to add about formal models of the socialist economy, because frankly I'm not all that interested in them. Schemes for socialist economies--whether market or planned or whatever--tend to come off as a a bit of an exercise in what Marx derisively referred to as  "writing recipes for the kitchens of the future". Trying to predict exactly what socialism will look like is foolhardy--and moreover anti-democratic, since it pre-empts the actions and decisions of the actual masses who will have to make a post-capitalist world happen. So while these thought experiments about alternative economic models can be useful in clarifying our principles, I don't think we need to take the details all that seriously.

Rather than trying to draw up a detailed blueprint of a socialist economy, I prefer to think in terms of what Andre Gorz called "non-reformist reforms": changes to the system that can be implemented under capitalism, but which set the stage for further radical transformations. And I want to highlight one particular such reform that's associated with Gorz, and which commenter R. Burke brings up in the comments of Jason's recent post: the guaranteed minimum income, or "Universal Basic Income" as it's sometimes called.

This is just what it sounds like, an income that every citizen would be entitled to, independent of work. And I find it compelling because it directly addresses one of the most fundamental objectionable things about capitalism, namely the fact that it makes almost everyone dependent on performing wage labor in order to survive. This is despite the fact that we live in a society that is more physically productive than any other that has ever existed. Eighty years ago, John Maynard Keynes was predicting that the greatest problem his grandchildren would face was what to do with their abundant leisure time.  Instead, we are all working more than ever.

A guaranteed income could begin to reverse this state of affairs by giving people the option of opting out of the labor market, which today is only possible for a wealthy few. It would therefore address a goal that Pat Devine mentions in a passage Jason quoted: reducing the amount of unpleasant labor that people are forced to perform. As I already noted, I think this goal is of such paramount importance that I'm baffled by any theory of a socialist economy that doesn't make it absolutely central.

Which brings me to one thing I found quite unappealing about the vision David Schweickart presents. His description of economic life seems to assume that the ideal way to live is to have some job that you go off to for 40 hours a week for the rest of your life. If labor is unpleasant, the solution is to give workers more control, rather than giving them the option of opting out of work--"voice" rather than "exit", to use Albert Hirschman's lovely phrase. Now maybe this makes sense to people who grew up in the mid-20th century, when the labor market was less volatile and careers were more stable. But it doesn't make any sense to me. Even if full employment is possible, why would it be desirable? If there's not enough work to go around, why would you go and create more? And maybe it's true that if we make the workplace democratic, then work will be fulfilling and people won't mind it. But in that case, why force them?

It's at this point that you're supposed to start talking about "material incentives", to take Schweickart's choice of jargon. It usually starts with some troll objecting that socialism is impossible because nobody will do any work without the fear of starvation. The socialist then comes back with some argument about how socialism is going to motivate everyone to go out there and work hard. For Schweickart's system, the answer is that "one’s income is directly tied to the success of one’s firm", and so you work hard for the material reward. Jason doesn't explicitly address this issue, but I'm sure he could come up with a response.

But approaching the problem this way gets the whole issue backwards, by proposing solutions before we have understood what the actual problem is.  If you just talk in general terms about giving people "incentives to work", you're neglecting the reality that while some work would have to get done in any kind of desirable society, other kinds of work should actually be dis-incentivized. Broadly, I'd say that paid work in capitalism falls into at least the following categories:

1. Things that people want done, but which nobody particularly wants to do.
2. Things that people would do voluntarily provided they have enough time, even if they weren't paid.
3. Things that are useless or destructive, and happen only because they facilitate capital accumulation and people need jobs.
4. Things that people may want done and/or may want to do, but which have destructive effects on other people or the environment.

The discussions about material incentives are relevant to things in category 1. But much of the labor in modern capitalist societies falls into the other categories--more of it than we think, I suspect. I'd argue that a lot of artistic and knowledge work falls into category 2. So does child care, although just who does it voluntarily is another matter, which is why feminism is a core part of socialist analysis. Financial engineering, telemarketing, and basically anything that happens at a private health insurance company fall into category 3. So does much of the estimated 25% of U.S. employment that's taken up by what economists Sam Bowles and Arjun Jayadev call "guard labor": supervising workers, running the prison-industrial complex, providing private security, and other stuff that is mostly about preserving current power relations and maintaining inequality, rather than making anything useful. Driving a car or burning coal for electricity may fall into category 4.

Even though I can sketch out examples like this, in general it's pretty hard to differentiate these different kinds of labor in capitalism. That's because capitalism creates a situation where all work is "good" because it provides jobs, which people need in order to survive. However, these different kinds of labor wouldn't get differentiated in Schweickart's version of market socialism either, since he still assumes that everyone is forced to work--moreover, the idea of government as "employer of last resort" implies that we'd be actively creating useless category 3 work for people.  Devine's alternative, meanwhile, would attempt to use a convoluted planning process to differentiate between desirable and undesirable uses of labor. That may be necessary in some cases, but I don't think it should be our first solution--attempting to comprehensively micromanage every aspect of production strikes me as undesirably bureaucratic.

More importantly, I don't think it's necessary to go down this road at all. Rather than starting with these complicated issues of economic planning, we should start with the thing that's actually most desirable: making people less dependent on wage labor. Social Democracy has already gone part of the way in this direction, by removing things like health care and education from the market. But to really attack wage labor at its root, you need something like the guaranteed minimum income--perhaps in combination with reductions in the length of the work-week. 

At this point we get back to the incentives business again, with the critics screaming "but nobody would do any work!" At one level, I think this is just silly. For one thing, at least in the short run, most people would want to make more than the guaranteed minimum, and so would continue to work. For another thing, it's clear that people do various jobs for lots of different reasons that don't have to do with money, and some kinds of work would get more popular if people didn't have to worry about having the money to meet their basic needs. Some jobs really are enjoyable, in other words, and people would do them for free if they could. Other kinds of work give their returns by conferring status--for example, for all but the most famous artists, making art is more about gaining recognition than making money.  One appealing aspect of a basic income is that it would start to sort out the distinctions between the different kinds of labor outlined above. If some jobs start being things people do as hobbies, then great! If some jobs disappear, and we don't miss them, then great! If you have to pay people more to make them take crappy jobs, great!

Which isn't to say that basic income is a one-shot magic solution to all the problems of capitalism (although for the argument that it could be, check out a weird and provocative article called "The Capitalist Road to Communism"). Indeed, he best thing about a guaranteed income is that it stands a pretty good chance of provoking major economic disruption and social crisis--that's what makes it a "non-reformist reform."  In a world with a guaranteed income, it could very well turn out that there are some things that just aren't getting done. It's not clear that you'd be able to find enough people to clean office bathrooms or work the night shift at 7-11 if they had access to a basic income, no matter what you paid them.

Some people invoke the above scenario as an argument against the basic income, but let me emphasize that this is a problem I would love to have. Once it becomes clear what kind of work is both desired and undersupplied, we can have a political struggle about how that work will get done. By offering special rewards (i.e. "material incentives")? By creating some kind of national service requirement in exchange for the basic income (you have to go clean toilets or work the night shift once a month, say)? By finding clever new ways to automate these jobs? Or by deciding we can really do without some things we thought we "needed"?

I can't predict in advance what the solution would be. And I don't have to. That's really the most important point I want to make here.  I think the lesson of history is that momentous social change never happens because someone came up with a detailed plan for the future, won people over to it, and then implemented it. The chaos of real people making their own history always overwhelms such neat plans.

And I want to suggest that socialists, armed with an analysis of capitalism and a set of basic principles for the future, shouldn't be afraid of a politics that aims to provoke a crisis without knowing exactly where it will lead. The idea of a basic income that breaks our dependence on wage labor is a proposal for pushing toward that productive crisis, and for that reason I find it far more compelling than all the sterile blueprints for economic democracies and democratic plans and Parecons and what have you.

Leaving aside the economics, is a guaranteed income politically feasible? It's certainly a long shot--but then, so is any kind of radical economic change. It at least has the virtue of being straightforward and easy to explain. As I noted above, in some ways it's really just a an extension and completion of the historical project of Social Democracy: conferring a "social right" to the necessities of life and reducing the dependence of individuals on the labor market. And oddly enough, some on the right--like Milton Friedman and  the notorious Charles Murray--have endorsed versions of guaranteed income (although with some important differences from the leftist variants). Moreover, if it could be won it would be very difficult for the capitalist class to undo, because truly universal social programs are generally quite popular and nearly impossible to roll back.

Regardless, I think it's something worth talking about and agitating for. And who knows--if the current predictions of a long, high-unemployment "recovery" are borne out, perhaps people will begin to look more favorably on the idea of separating income from employment.

Today Matt Yglesias revisits a favorite topic of mine, the distinction between U.S. manufacturing employment and manufacturing production. It has become increasingly common to hear liberals complain about the "decline" in American manufacturing, and lament that America doesn't "make things" anymore:

Harold Meyerson had a typical riff on this recently:

Reviving American manufacturing may be an economic and strategic necessity, without which our trade deficit will continue to climb, our credit-based economy will produce and consume even more debt, and our already-rickety ladders of economic mobility, up which generations of immigrants have climbed, may splinter altogether.

. . .

The epochal shift that's overtaken the American economy over the past 30 years  . . .  finance, which has compelled manufacturers to move offshore in search of higher profit margins . . .  retailers, who have compelled manufacturers to move offshore in search of lower prices for consumers and higher profits for themselves

. . .

Creating the better paid, less debt-ridden work force that would emerge from a shift to an economy with more manufacturing and a higher rate of unionization would reduce the huge revenue streams flowing to the Bentonvilles (Wal-Mart's home town) and the banks . . . . The campaign contributions from the financial sector to Democrats and Republicans alike now dwarf those from manufacturing -- a major reason why our government's adherence to free-trade orthodoxy in what is otherwise a mercantilist world is likely to persist.

. . .

[Sen. Sherrod] Brown . . . acknowledges that as manufacturing employs a steadily smaller share of the American work force, "younger people probably don't think about it as much" as their elders . . . . Politically, American manufacturing is in a race against time: As manufacturing becomes more alien to a growing number of Americans, its support may dwindle, even as the social, economic, and strategic need to bolster it becomes more acute. That makes push for a national industrial policy -- to become again a nation that makes things instead of debt, to build again our house upon a rock -- even more urgent.

I don't dispute that manufacturing has become "more alien" to the bulk of American working people. But I question Meyerson's explanation for why this has happened, and I wonder whether we should really be so horrified by it. The evidence suggests that the decline in manufacturing employment in this country has been driven not primarily by offshoring (as Meyerson would have it), but by a dramatic increase in productivity. Yglesias provides one graphical illustration of this; here is my home-brewed alternative, going back to World War II:

This picture leaves some unanswered questions, to be sure. First, one would want to know what kind of manufacturing has grown in the U.S., for one thing; however, my cursory examination of the data suggests that U.S. output is still more heavily oriented toward consumer goods over defense and aerospace production, despite what one might think. Second, it's possible that the globally integrated system of production is "hiding" labor in other parts of the supply chain, in China and other countries with low labor costs.

But I don't think the general story of rapidly increasing productivity can be easily ignored. To really reverse the decline in manufacturing employment, we would need to have something like a ban on labor-saving technologies, in order to return the U.S. economy to the low-productivity equilibrium of forty or fifty years ago. Of course, that would also require either reducing American wages to Chinese levels or imposing a level of autarchy in trade policy beyond what any left-protectionist advocates.

Needless to say, I think this modest proposal is totally undesirable, and I raise it only to suggest the folly of "rebuilding manufacturing" as a slogan for the left. As Yglesias observes in the linked post, manufacturing now seems to be going through a transition like the one that agriculture experienced in the last century: farming went from being the major activity of most people to being a niche of the economy that employs very few people. Yet of course food hasn't ceased to be one of the fundamental necessities of human life, and we produce more of it than ever.

And yet I understand the real problem that motivates the pro-manufacturing instinct among liberals. The decline in manufacturing has coincided with a massive increase in income inequality and a decline in the prospects for low-skill workers. Moreover, the decline of manufacturing has coincided with the decline of organized labor, and it is unclear whether traditional workplace-based labor union organizing can ever really succeed in a post-industrial economy.  But the nostalgia for a manufacturing-centered economy is an attempt to universalize a very specific period in the history of capitalism, one which is unlikely to recur.

The obsession with manufacturing jobs is, I think, a symptom of a larger weakness of liberal thought: the preoccupation with a certain kind of full-employment Keynesianism, predicated on the assumption that a good society is one in which everyone is engaged in full-time waged employment. But this sells short the real potential of higher productivity: less work for all. As Keynes himself observed:

For the moment the very rapidity of these changes is hurting us and bringing difficult problems to solve. Those countries are suffering relatively which are not in the vanguard of progress. We are being afflicted with a new disease of which some readers may not yet have heard the name, but of which they will hear a great deal in the years to come-‑namely, technological unemployment. This means unemployment due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour.

But this is only a temporary phase of maladjustment. All this means in the long run that mankind is solving its economic problem. I would predict that the standard of life in progressive countries one hundred years hence will be between four and eight times as high as it is to‑day. There would be nothing surprising in this even in the light of our present knowledge. It would not be foolish to contemplate the possibility of afar greater progress still.

. . .

Thus for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent prob­lem‑how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.

Productivity has continued to increase, just as Keynes predicted. Yet the long weekend of permanent leisure never arrives. This--and not deindustrialization--is the cruel joke played on working class. The answer is not to force people into deadening make-work jobs, but rather to acknowledge our tremendous social wealth and ensure that those who do not have access to paid work still have access to at least the basic necessities of life--through something like a guaranteed minimum income.

Geeky addendum: I thought the plot I made for this post was kind of nice and it took some figuring out to make it, so below is the R code required to reproduce it. It queries the data sources (A couple of Federal Reserve sites) directly, so no saving of files is required, and it should automatically use the most recent available data.

manemp <- read.table("http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/data/MANEMP.txt",
   skip=19,header=TRUE)
names(manemp) <- tolower(names(manemp))
manemp$date <- as.Date(manemp$date, format="%Y-%m-%d")
 
curdate <- format(as.Date(substr(as.character(Sys.time()),1,10)),"%m/%d/%Y")
 
outputurl <- url(paste(
   'http://www.federalreserve.gov/datadownload/Output.aspx?rel=G17&amp;series=063c8e96205b9dd107f74061a32d9dd9&amp;lastObs=&amp;from=01/01/1939&amp;to=',
   curdate,
   '&amp;filetype=csv&amp;label=omit&amp;layout=seriescolumn',sep=''))
 
manout <- read.csv(outputurl,
   as.is=TRUE,skip=1,col.names=c("date","value"))
manout$date <- as.Date(paste(manout$date,"01",sep="-"), format="%Y-%m-%d") par(mar=c(2,2,2,2)) plot(manemp$date[manemp$date&gt;="1939-01-01"],
   manemp$value[manemp$date&gt;="1939-01-01"],
type="l", col="blue", lwd=2,
xlab="",ylab="",axes=FALSE, xaxs="i")
axis(side=1,
   at=as.Date(paste(seq(1940,2015,10),"01","01",sep="-")),
   labels=seq(1940,2015,10))
text(as.Date("1955-01-01"),17500,
   "Manufacturing employment (millions)",col="blue")
axis(side=2,col="blue")
 
par(new=TRUE)
plot(manout$date,manout$value,
   type="l", col="red",axes=FALSE,xlab="",ylab="",lwd=2,xaxs="i")
text(as.Date("1975-01-01"),20,
   "Manfacturing output (% of output in 2002)", col="red")
axis(side=4,col="red")

Via the Monkey Cage, an interesting and comprehensive new database, the "KOF Index of Globalization". I'm generally a bit leery of attempts to boil down complex configurations of political economy into a pat "index", but this one is reasonably straightforward, measuring both "economic globalization" (economic flows and trade restrictions) and "political globalization" (participation in international institutions and diplomatic relations.) The example graph at the Monkey Cage is interesting, but I immediately thought it would be better represented like this:

This could be cleaned up to deal with the overlapping names, and additional information might be useful (such as the average globalization score of all countries in each year, and the maximum and minimum scores), but I think this is pretty informative. You can see the overall political and economic integration of these countries into the capitalist world, for example. There's also the increasing distance between the main cluster of countries on the one hand, and the insular autocracies of Belarus and Uzbekistan on the other.