Human Scale Part III - Self Sufficiency
This is a review of Kirkpatrick Sale's Human Scale, continuing from Part I, Planned Obsolescence and Part II, Mass Production = Expensive and Low Quality. Although I have started with criticisms, I do eventually plan to get to what I liked about the book and its ideas.
Self sufficiency
This idea seems to be very poorly thought-out despite being a major theme throughout the book. The few times it has been tried in recent history, it has with few exceptions been an unmitigated disaster, resulting in either failure or widescale terror and dictatorship. That alone is not enough to condemn it, since Sale's premise is that few things work on a large scale, and many things simply work better on a small scale. However, it is worth considering whether or not things that fail that badly on a wide scale will not also lead to similar problems on a small scale. What, after all, is the defining line between "wide" and "small"?
The concept of self sufficiency guided some of the worst dictatorships known to man. One of those, achieving its power through democratic means, and the other two, which were brought on with widespread support and - later, after they lost that support - were defended as pro-labor, managed to kill more people than were lost in the two world wars of last century. Two of them could be said to be responsible for those wars. In their terminology, they referred to self sufficiency, autarky, and lebensraum. I am of course talking about the communist dictatorships of the Soviet Union and China, and the National Socialist regime of Herr Hitler. But it is actually larger than that, since "self sufficiency" was also the guiding force behind Imperial Britain, France, Belgium, and Germany under the Kaiser, whose clashes eventually sparked WWI. When self-sufficiency through trade within an empire - the colonizer and the colony - failed, Germany and Russia turned to autarky, the idea that you should create entirely within your own country the markets, sources, and consumers of every agricultural and industrial product.
Perhaps we could argue that self-sufficiency on a large scale leads to intractable problems having to do with large scale agriculture, industry, transportation, and government necessary to make it work. Fine, but I am arguing that some of those problems would be true no matter on what scale you attempted it. On a single family farm, I simply would not have both manufactured goods and food. I would have to trade. In a community in the American Southwest, I would certainly not have enough of either food or manufactured goods. Most places are not blessed with a wide variety of iron ore, reliable energy sources, lead, technical know-how, and so on. There are issues of both absolute and comparative advantage that lead us to trade for mutual benefit. And on this point, Sale himself eventually backs into the position that trade would be okay:
For another view of self-sufficiency - and I hate to beat this dead horse, but the parallel seems so striking - we have the lean literature on local production. In Lean Thinking, Womack et al discuss the travails of the simple aluminum soda can. From the mine to the smelter to the rolling mill to the can maker alone takes several months of storage and shipment time, yet there is only about 3 hours worth of processing time. A good deal of aluminum smelting is done in Norway and/or Sweden, where widely available hydroelectric power makes aluminum production from alumina very cheap and relatively clean. From there, the cans are shipped to bottlers where they sit for a few more days before being filled, shipped, stored, bought, stored, and drank. All told, it takes 319 days to go from the mine to your lips, where you spend a few minutes actually using the can. The process also produces about 24% scrap (most of which is recycled at the source) because the cans are made at one location and shipped empty to the bottler and they get damaged in transit. It's an astounding tale of how wasteful the whole process is, yet still results in a product that - externalities aside - costs very little to the end user. Could this type of thing be done locally? After all, every town is awash in a sea of used aluminum cans, and the reprocessing cost is much lower than the original processing cost (which is why Reynolds and ALCOA buy scrap aluminum).
Taking this problem to the obvious conclusion, Bill Waddell and other lean consultants have been trying to convince manufacturers that if they would only fire the MBAs and actually learn to manufacture, they could do so much more cheaply locally than they can by offshoring their production. Labor costs simply aren't the deciding factor, no matter what the local Sloan school is teaching: American labor may be more expensive then foreign labor, but it is also more productive. Further, all of the (chimerical) gains to be made from going to cheaper labor are likely to be lost in shipping costs. Think of that flotilla of shipping containers on cargo ships between here and Asia as a huge warehouse on the ocean, warehouses that not only charge rent, but also for fuel.
But what about following Sale's model and establishing self-sufficiency within a local community, and therefore banning trade (around which he tiptoes despite leaving the backdoor open to it)? First, we would almost certainly see the rise of small monopolists in place of the hard-nosed competition between large concerns that we see today. The local computer manufacturer would offer nowhere near the head-to-head competition (and its benefits) as we get from Dell v. H-P; the local fuel industry would not see the vicious competition between BP, Shell, ExxonMobile, and others; as a guitar player, I would have to settle for the product of the local luthier instead of a shop where both his and the products of Peavey, Fender, Gibson, and others vie for my hard-earned dollar. A couple of weeks ago, we went to a local farm to buy chile; it was going for between $0.50 and $1 per pound (self-pick vs. pre-picked), versus the $0.50-$0.55 per pound at the local chain supermarkets including Wal-mart (all of which, by the way, sell local products as demanded). Was it worth the extra fuel to drive out there? Not to mention the externalities (fuel-use, road congestion, etc.)?
Second, the few examples of communities cited by Sale as having succeeded in self-sufficiency are no more impressive. He begins with a paean to paleolithic communities: I think we might consider that after the nuclear winter that knocks a few billion off the planet, but not before. I have long been a fan of Amish and Mennonite communities, but Sale's treatment of them does not seem to consider the cultural ties that bind them, ties that most of us would not gladly assent to after lifetimes outside those communities. He mentions the communitarian experiments of the 19th century and tries to argue that they were not failures. "Perhaps the most useful examples [...] are the American communes of the nineteenth century and the British New Towns of the twentieth." Here, he lists Bethel, Missouri (founded by a Methodist minister, lasting from 1844-1880); Hopedale, Massachussetts (according to the town history, it was bought up by "idealists who wanted to combine biblical individualism with social responsibility and religious liberalism" and went bankrupt 15 years later); a community (unnamed in Human Scale, but it was Ripon, Wisconsin) founded by the Wisconsin Phalanx (a group of Fourierists) that imploded in a dispute; the Oneida colony (who believed they could bring about "Christ's millennial kingdom"); and so on. They were financially successful for a few years, about the same length of time as a Fortune 500 company, for example, but none lived past a generation. He doesn't mention the Owenist community of New Harmony, which was well-funded by its industrialist founder, populated with hand-picked citizens committed to their ideals (Owen coined the term "Socialism" and later provided inspiration to Marx and Engels), and a complete failure. He briefly mentions the kibbutzim, which sprouted out of the pre-Israel Zionist movement, peaked in the 1970s and collapsed afterwards as it seemed that Israel was going to survive without the privation demanded of the kibbutz dwellers.
In the end, Sale advocates as much self-sufficiency as the inhabitants see necessary, but admits of the benefits of trade. This alone gives us no clear rules to guide us.
Self sufficiency
This idea seems to be very poorly thought-out despite being a major theme throughout the book. The few times it has been tried in recent history, it has with few exceptions been an unmitigated disaster, resulting in either failure or widescale terror and dictatorship. That alone is not enough to condemn it, since Sale's premise is that few things work on a large scale, and many things simply work better on a small scale. However, it is worth considering whether or not things that fail that badly on a wide scale will not also lead to similar problems on a small scale. What, after all, is the defining line between "wide" and "small"?
The concept of self sufficiency guided some of the worst dictatorships known to man. One of those, achieving its power through democratic means, and the other two, which were brought on with widespread support and - later, after they lost that support - were defended as pro-labor, managed to kill more people than were lost in the two world wars of last century. Two of them could be said to be responsible for those wars. In their terminology, they referred to self sufficiency, autarky, and lebensraum. I am of course talking about the communist dictatorships of the Soviet Union and China, and the National Socialist regime of Herr Hitler. But it is actually larger than that, since "self sufficiency" was also the guiding force behind Imperial Britain, France, Belgium, and Germany under the Kaiser, whose clashes eventually sparked WWI. When self-sufficiency through trade within an empire - the colonizer and the colony - failed, Germany and Russia turned to autarky, the idea that you should create entirely within your own country the markets, sources, and consumers of every agricultural and industrial product.
Perhaps we could argue that self-sufficiency on a large scale leads to intractable problems having to do with large scale agriculture, industry, transportation, and government necessary to make it work. Fine, but I am arguing that some of those problems would be true no matter on what scale you attempted it. On a single family farm, I simply would not have both manufactured goods and food. I would have to trade. In a community in the American Southwest, I would certainly not have enough of either food or manufactured goods. Most places are not blessed with a wide variety of iron ore, reliable energy sources, lead, technical know-how, and so on. There are issues of both absolute and comparative advantage that lead us to trade for mutual benefit. And on this point, Sale himself eventually backs into the position that trade would be okay:
Self-sufficiency would probably mean the loss of Iranian caviar and Polish hams and French fraises-des-bois, not to mention in most cases Idaho potatoes, and Wisconsin cheeses and Florida oranges, except insofar as any particular community would feel it necessary to establish trade relations for such things or itinerant traders would find a market for them.and later,
I think a small town can without much difficulty provide for virtually all material needs on a household or community level [... b]y networking, where necessary, with other communities. With judicious linkages with nearby towns -- a sharing on a municipal level like the sharing on a personal level -- a community could enlarge its economic possibilities and diminish its manufacturing requirements without necessarily sacrificing its self-sufficiency. [the apparent emphasis in the original is due to the fact that this is a section heading]But these nods to trade don't seem remarkably different than what we have now with the exception that Sale declares them to be different. Actually, I am overstating that and will return to this in a future post.
For another view of self-sufficiency - and I hate to beat this dead horse, but the parallel seems so striking - we have the lean literature on local production. In Lean Thinking, Womack et al discuss the travails of the simple aluminum soda can. From the mine to the smelter to the rolling mill to the can maker alone takes several months of storage and shipment time, yet there is only about 3 hours worth of processing time. A good deal of aluminum smelting is done in Norway and/or Sweden, where widely available hydroelectric power makes aluminum production from alumina very cheap and relatively clean. From there, the cans are shipped to bottlers where they sit for a few more days before being filled, shipped, stored, bought, stored, and drank. All told, it takes 319 days to go from the mine to your lips, where you spend a few minutes actually using the can. The process also produces about 24% scrap (most of which is recycled at the source) because the cans are made at one location and shipped empty to the bottler and they get damaged in transit. It's an astounding tale of how wasteful the whole process is, yet still results in a product that - externalities aside - costs very little to the end user. Could this type of thing be done locally? After all, every town is awash in a sea of used aluminum cans, and the reprocessing cost is much lower than the original processing cost (which is why Reynolds and ALCOA buy scrap aluminum).
Taking this problem to the obvious conclusion, Bill Waddell and other lean consultants have been trying to convince manufacturers that if they would only fire the MBAs and actually learn to manufacture, they could do so much more cheaply locally than they can by offshoring their production. Labor costs simply aren't the deciding factor, no matter what the local Sloan school is teaching: American labor may be more expensive then foreign labor, but it is also more productive. Further, all of the (chimerical) gains to be made from going to cheaper labor are likely to be lost in shipping costs. Think of that flotilla of shipping containers on cargo ships between here and Asia as a huge warehouse on the ocean, warehouses that not only charge rent, but also for fuel.
But what about following Sale's model and establishing self-sufficiency within a local community, and therefore banning trade (around which he tiptoes despite leaving the backdoor open to it)? First, we would almost certainly see the rise of small monopolists in place of the hard-nosed competition between large concerns that we see today. The local computer manufacturer would offer nowhere near the head-to-head competition (and its benefits) as we get from Dell v. H-P; the local fuel industry would not see the vicious competition between BP, Shell, ExxonMobile, and others; as a guitar player, I would have to settle for the product of the local luthier instead of a shop where both his and the products of Peavey, Fender, Gibson, and others vie for my hard-earned dollar. A couple of weeks ago, we went to a local farm to buy chile; it was going for between $0.50 and $1 per pound (self-pick vs. pre-picked), versus the $0.50-$0.55 per pound at the local chain supermarkets including Wal-mart (all of which, by the way, sell local products as demanded). Was it worth the extra fuel to drive out there? Not to mention the externalities (fuel-use, road congestion, etc.)?
Second, the few examples of communities cited by Sale as having succeeded in self-sufficiency are no more impressive. He begins with a paean to paleolithic communities: I think we might consider that after the nuclear winter that knocks a few billion off the planet, but not before. I have long been a fan of Amish and Mennonite communities, but Sale's treatment of them does not seem to consider the cultural ties that bind them, ties that most of us would not gladly assent to after lifetimes outside those communities. He mentions the communitarian experiments of the 19th century and tries to argue that they were not failures. "Perhaps the most useful examples [...] are the American communes of the nineteenth century and the British New Towns of the twentieth." Here, he lists Bethel, Missouri (founded by a Methodist minister, lasting from 1844-1880); Hopedale, Massachussetts (according to the town history, it was bought up by "idealists who wanted to combine biblical individualism with social responsibility and religious liberalism" and went bankrupt 15 years later); a community (unnamed in Human Scale, but it was Ripon, Wisconsin) founded by the Wisconsin Phalanx (a group of Fourierists) that imploded in a dispute; the Oneida colony (who believed they could bring about "Christ's millennial kingdom"); and so on. They were financially successful for a few years, about the same length of time as a Fortune 500 company, for example, but none lived past a generation. He doesn't mention the Owenist community of New Harmony, which was well-funded by its industrialist founder, populated with hand-picked citizens committed to their ideals (Owen coined the term "Socialism" and later provided inspiration to Marx and Engels), and a complete failure. He briefly mentions the kibbutzim, which sprouted out of the pre-Israel Zionist movement, peaked in the 1970s and collapsed afterwards as it seemed that Israel was going to survive without the privation demanded of the kibbutz dwellers.
In the end, Sale advocates as much self-sufficiency as the inhabitants see necessary, but admits of the benefits of trade. This alone gives us no clear rules to guide us.
Labels: book, decentralization
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