Something to Like about Human Scale
This is the last in a series of impressions of Kirkpatrick Sale's Human Scale. The others were mostly criticisms: Part I, Planned Obsolescence, Part II, Mass Production = Expensive and Low Quality, Human Scale Part III - Self Sufficiency, and Part IV - Rational ignorance and irrationality.
I am always mindful of the difficulty faced by people who have a vision of the future and wish to see us get there. There are two problems: one is in developing and describing the Vision and in convincing others of its validity. The other is in describing the means by which Change from the present condition to the future Vision will take place. They are separate problems, each with its own difficulties. A Vision, such as Human Scale, is usually Utopian: he is arguing that nearly everyone will be better off in nearly every way. There is nothing inherently wrong with that, except that I find that such Visions usually gloss over the likely problems.
Readers who like Human Scale will also probably enjoy another book, A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction, by Christopher Alexander et al. A Pattern Language answers the question of what Human Scale is: not just buildings, but communities, businesses, neighborhoods, etc. Sale seems to gloss over questions of what is or is not Human Scale; apparently, silicon or more exotic semiconductor materials used to make photovoltaic energy systems and the inverters, storage batteries, and other microelectronic control systems are okay, but add a hard drive, keyboard, monitor, and Internet connection, and now you have something that Sale would like to smash with a sledgehammer. He never explains the difference in general terms that one might be able to apply, say, 100 years in the future when we might have such questions. Incidentally, A Pattern Language is organized so that you can enter and browse randomly rather than sequentially, which I find to be more accessible than Human Scale, which tends to define its terms as it goes and thus requires the reader to move sequentially forward through a rather long but otherwise easy read. Both books share visions of local governance: small communities, about 10,000 or so. I find this to be completely harmonious with the libertarian value of decentralization.
Few libertarians have problems with local government: police to protect against crimes against person and property (murder, assault, theft, fraud), traffic ordinances, courts, streets, parks, schools. Perhaps some of these things could be managed better with quasi-private mechanisms such as user fees for schools, waived on the basis of income, while modest user fees for parks ($0.50 a visit or $5/year for a pass) would keep vandalism down and allow the park to pay for its own upkeep while providing an exact measure of how popular and useful it was. As for the other things that the federal government does for us, well, it just isn't the case that we need them. As in this post, the federal government did little if anything to help the unemployed that local governments weren't already doing. And before the "Progressive Era" of the early 20th century, people dealt with problems of health insurance, sick benefits, unemployment, long term disability, survivors benefits, and the like, all privately, as David Beito details in From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State: Fraternal Societies and Social Services, 1890-1967. The federal government turned those private programs into patronage programs to buy the votes of everyone foolish enough to think they were getting something for nothing. Since the same government now controls the education system, few new voters know that such things ever existed.
Local government means people vote on things they understand and can monitor and with which they probably have some interaction. Local tradeoffs are personal: pave a road or build a new library, pay lower taxes or get more services. Either is just as likely to benefit the people paying for it. In contrast, federal tradeoffs are unknowable: build a bridge in Alaska, or a tunnel in Boston. Relatively few people are likely to benefit from those things, much less understand what they do or whether they are done economically or even well. Everyone thinks their own Congressmen is relatively clean and all the others are pork dealers. Sale seems to share this distrust and even dislike of large government.
Unfortunately, Sale barely touches on a subject in which he seems in complete agreement with an argument David Friedman makes in Machinery of Freedom: that defense from external aggressors is perhaps the hardest problem for an anarchist (how Sale, who favors democracy in both personal and civic life, got to be known as an anarchist is beyond me though). Sale's answer is that small, no-growth, stable villages are not likely to be attacked because there is nothing they have that is worth stealing. Perhaps, but that doesn't mean that external aggressors will note that, or that they will understand that they can't have the thriving village's golden eggs if they kill the goose. Brutes have always thought that they could easily steal and emulate the success of capitalist societies: Mussolini, Stalin, Hitler, and Mao all seemed to think that they could have the advantages of the West by centrally planning to do so, and for generations their apologists promoted their planning systems. As the war with and between the totalitarians was coming to a close, Schumpeter (Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy) was writing that entrepreneurship was outdated and that economies could be managed, while Hayek stood up nearly alone to warn people that markets were not chaos just as the British were preparing to make their ill-fated march down the road to nationalization, with Keynes leading an intellectual vanguard and Attlee preparing to take the command of the state from Churchill. If it weren't so tragic, it would seem almost comical that people voted to go down the same path as the broken societies with whom they just warred.
I also enjoyed reading Sale's account of alternative work organizations. His emphasis was on two kinds of organizations: all-encompassing communitarian societies exemplified by kibbutzim, 19th century and 1960s communes, Amish and Mennonite communities, and peer-group firms, exemplified by the Mondragon group. I might add to this the United Defense Aberdeen plant, described in Rebirth of American Industry as a a group of self-directed teams who manage their own hiring, firing, promotions, schedule, training, and quality. I am fascinated with alternative work organizations (as evidenced by this series of posts), but am unconvinced by Sale's enthusiastic but one-sided description of such places (detailed in the prior posts).
As an enthusiast of alternative and/or renewable energy systems, I cast a jaundiced eye on those aspects of modern, Western organization and culture which have developed around the decidedly non-human scale aspects of the petrofuel industries and find myself sympathetic to Sale's discussion of energy, food, waste, and transportation (four separate chapters). As I have written before, I believe that if people had not gone along with Samuell Insull's self-interested theories about natural and regulated monopoly, and had instead let the utilities compete while consumers were still autonomous and not dependent on so-called "cheap" electricity, then we would today have a more decentralized system in which conservation was at least as important as reliability and ..., well, bigness. Similarly, if the various states and then the federal government had not gotten into railroads, or if the populists had been able to differentiate between business or technical entrepreneurs and political entrepreneurs, we would today have a society in which rails, trolleys, and bicycles were at least as important as the almighty automobile. But that wasn't the case: indeed, as I complained last time, when you allow people to move decisions out of the economic realm and into the political, where it costs nothing to vote, they are just as likely to vote for politicians (and through them, their patrons) who promise cheap transportation and cheap energy.
In fact, by moving such decisions into the democratic realm, you make it even harder to deal with large, complex issues of external costs because of the accusations: if you are against giving land and capital to railroads, you must be against railroads and progress. If you are against regulating railroads, you must be in the pocket of the trusts. If you are against subsidized roads, you must be against freedom to travel and confirmed in the pocket of the railroad trusts. If you are against regulating electricity companies, you must similarly be in their pocket. Why, everything the government does is in the interest of the people, so in so opposing, you must be against people! Here again, Bastiat had already encountered and ridiculed such silliness:
Another area in which I think I am in agreement with Sale: the education system is in need of a massive overhaul (my last post on the subject was here). It is based on outdated methods codified in the distant past. First, the school calendar was based on the agrarian culture in place at that time, 150 years ago, and today those schools are silent except for on the practice field from 4 in the afternoon until 7:30 the next morning, and for 1/4 of the school year between May and late August. Then, school texts were scrubbed of anything that offended anybody, reducing them to pablum and a thin gruel. In part, that happened because of the quest for economy of scale, and the interaction between book publishers, the state, and citizen watchdog groups as detailed in The Language Police. Sale cites statistics similar to those found in Andrew Coulson's Market Education: The Unknown History: "In 1950 there were 139,000 elementary schools in the U.S. - 60,000 of them small, one-teacher affairs - serving an enrollment of 21 million children. By 1975 there were only 79,000 schools, barely a thousand of them one-teacher size, although the enrollment had risen to 32 million." Sale cites similar consolidation statistics for high schools and universities, and that was in 1980. Since then, Ross Perot leveled the charge that the only reason schools are as large as they are is so that eventually you can get 11 guys good enough to win a state football championship (it is still a mystery to me, no matter how many song lyrics Bill Waddell quotes, why people can play soccer and baseball in private leagues, and in Europe all teams are clubs separate from the schools, but Americans need to spend vast sums of school district money on football and basketball teams). Since then, Ted Kennedy wrote, and George W. signed, the No Child Left Behind Act, which consolidates all schools into one big district on the principle that everyone has to pass a test that determines federal funding. That act was the culmination of decades of consolidation, was written by a Democrat, and under W. the federal spending (which is only 8% of the total education spending) has increased by far more than under any president in history (Clinton wasn't even close), Republicans still claim they are for small government, and Democrats continue to "blame" the president for the "lack" of spending while ignoring their own role and the basic problem: size. Meanwhile, our students are enrolling in remedial education in record numbers.
All in all, I would recommend Human Scale to both classical and modern liberals; there are consequences of largeness of which we should all take heed. I doubt if modern conservatives would find anything of interest here. But while I am interested in discovering the underlying causes of the size of particular groups or industries - for example, is there an actual scale economy benefit or a distortion caused by a feature in the Internal Revenue code? - , Sale is more interested in describing a future in which everything is considerably smaller without examining how things got big. I find that a little disturbing, since his favorite remedy, direct democracy, is at least a little likely to be the cause rather than the solution, especially of the largeness of government which he rightfully fears.
I am always mindful of the difficulty faced by people who have a vision of the future and wish to see us get there. There are two problems: one is in developing and describing the Vision and in convincing others of its validity. The other is in describing the means by which Change from the present condition to the future Vision will take place. They are separate problems, each with its own difficulties. A Vision, such as Human Scale, is usually Utopian: he is arguing that nearly everyone will be better off in nearly every way. There is nothing inherently wrong with that, except that I find that such Visions usually gloss over the likely problems.
Readers who like Human Scale will also probably enjoy another book, A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction, by Christopher Alexander et al. A Pattern Language answers the question of what Human Scale is: not just buildings, but communities, businesses, neighborhoods, etc. Sale seems to gloss over questions of what is or is not Human Scale; apparently, silicon or more exotic semiconductor materials used to make photovoltaic energy systems and the inverters, storage batteries, and other microelectronic control systems are okay, but add a hard drive, keyboard, monitor, and Internet connection, and now you have something that Sale would like to smash with a sledgehammer. He never explains the difference in general terms that one might be able to apply, say, 100 years in the future when we might have such questions. Incidentally, A Pattern Language is organized so that you can enter and browse randomly rather than sequentially, which I find to be more accessible than Human Scale, which tends to define its terms as it goes and thus requires the reader to move sequentially forward through a rather long but otherwise easy read. Both books share visions of local governance: small communities, about 10,000 or so. I find this to be completely harmonious with the libertarian value of decentralization.
Few libertarians have problems with local government: police to protect against crimes against person and property (murder, assault, theft, fraud), traffic ordinances, courts, streets, parks, schools. Perhaps some of these things could be managed better with quasi-private mechanisms such as user fees for schools, waived on the basis of income, while modest user fees for parks ($0.50 a visit or $5/year for a pass) would keep vandalism down and allow the park to pay for its own upkeep while providing an exact measure of how popular and useful it was. As for the other things that the federal government does for us, well, it just isn't the case that we need them. As in this post, the federal government did little if anything to help the unemployed that local governments weren't already doing. And before the "Progressive Era" of the early 20th century, people dealt with problems of health insurance, sick benefits, unemployment, long term disability, survivors benefits, and the like, all privately, as David Beito details in From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State: Fraternal Societies and Social Services, 1890-1967. The federal government turned those private programs into patronage programs to buy the votes of everyone foolish enough to think they were getting something for nothing. Since the same government now controls the education system, few new voters know that such things ever existed.
Local government means people vote on things they understand and can monitor and with which they probably have some interaction. Local tradeoffs are personal: pave a road or build a new library, pay lower taxes or get more services. Either is just as likely to benefit the people paying for it. In contrast, federal tradeoffs are unknowable: build a bridge in Alaska, or a tunnel in Boston. Relatively few people are likely to benefit from those things, much less understand what they do or whether they are done economically or even well. Everyone thinks their own Congressmen is relatively clean and all the others are pork dealers. Sale seems to share this distrust and even dislike of large government.
Unfortunately, Sale barely touches on a subject in which he seems in complete agreement with an argument David Friedman makes in Machinery of Freedom: that defense from external aggressors is perhaps the hardest problem for an anarchist (how Sale, who favors democracy in both personal and civic life, got to be known as an anarchist is beyond me though). Sale's answer is that small, no-growth, stable villages are not likely to be attacked because there is nothing they have that is worth stealing. Perhaps, but that doesn't mean that external aggressors will note that, or that they will understand that they can't have the thriving village's golden eggs if they kill the goose. Brutes have always thought that they could easily steal and emulate the success of capitalist societies: Mussolini, Stalin, Hitler, and Mao all seemed to think that they could have the advantages of the West by centrally planning to do so, and for generations their apologists promoted their planning systems. As the war with and between the totalitarians was coming to a close, Schumpeter (Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy) was writing that entrepreneurship was outdated and that economies could be managed, while Hayek stood up nearly alone to warn people that markets were not chaos just as the British were preparing to make their ill-fated march down the road to nationalization, with Keynes leading an intellectual vanguard and Attlee preparing to take the command of the state from Churchill. If it weren't so tragic, it would seem almost comical that people voted to go down the same path as the broken societies with whom they just warred.
I also enjoyed reading Sale's account of alternative work organizations. His emphasis was on two kinds of organizations: all-encompassing communitarian societies exemplified by kibbutzim, 19th century and 1960s communes, Amish and Mennonite communities, and peer-group firms, exemplified by the Mondragon group. I might add to this the United Defense Aberdeen plant, described in Rebirth of American Industry as a a group of self-directed teams who manage their own hiring, firing, promotions, schedule, training, and quality. I am fascinated with alternative work organizations (as evidenced by this series of posts), but am unconvinced by Sale's enthusiastic but one-sided description of such places (detailed in the prior posts).
As an enthusiast of alternative and/or renewable energy systems, I cast a jaundiced eye on those aspects of modern, Western organization and culture which have developed around the decidedly non-human scale aspects of the petrofuel industries and find myself sympathetic to Sale's discussion of energy, food, waste, and transportation (four separate chapters). As I have written before, I believe that if people had not gone along with Samuell Insull's self-interested theories about natural and regulated monopoly, and had instead let the utilities compete while consumers were still autonomous and not dependent on so-called "cheap" electricity, then we would today have a more decentralized system in which conservation was at least as important as reliability and ..., well, bigness. Similarly, if the various states and then the federal government had not gotten into railroads, or if the populists had been able to differentiate between business or technical entrepreneurs and political entrepreneurs, we would today have a society in which rails, trolleys, and bicycles were at least as important as the almighty automobile. But that wasn't the case: indeed, as I complained last time, when you allow people to move decisions out of the economic realm and into the political, where it costs nothing to vote, they are just as likely to vote for politicians (and through them, their patrons) who promise cheap transportation and cheap energy.
In fact, by moving such decisions into the democratic realm, you make it even harder to deal with large, complex issues of external costs because of the accusations: if you are against giving land and capital to railroads, you must be against railroads and progress. If you are against regulating railroads, you must be in the pocket of the trusts. If you are against subsidized roads, you must be against freedom to travel and confirmed in the pocket of the railroad trusts. If you are against regulating electricity companies, you must similarly be in their pocket. Why, everything the government does is in the interest of the people, so in so opposing, you must be against people! Here again, Bastiat had already encountered and ridiculed such silliness:
By leaving such issues as electricity in the private realm, it makes it much easier to then point out the problems of pollution since you aren't simultaneously fighting both the externality producer and the bureaucrat or politician who must defend the subsidies and enact the regulation to control the effects of the subsidies. What you end up with is the mess Al Gore proposed to address the impact of sugar subsidies on the Everglades. There, the Army Corps of Engineers drained the swamps and built levees and other systems to "reclaim" the land for "small, family" sugar farmers (all US sugar farming is actually controlled by only about 4-5 small families). Then, the government guaranteed floor prices for domestic sugar, thus making sugar more expensive than high fructose corn syrup to the benefit of both the sugar cartel and "small, family" corn farmers and their former representative, Bob Dole. Then, without intentional irony, Al Gore proposed to tax sugar and use the proceeds to restore the Everglades. At any point in the growth of these labyrinthine systems, a critic finds that there are entrenched interests with which to fight, and the more the complex it becomes, the more difficult it is to address the root cause without getting crossways with one of those powerful interests. If the sugar farmers had tried to drain the swamps themselves, the problems would have been obvious and the whole affair never would have happened.Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all. We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain.
Another area in which I think I am in agreement with Sale: the education system is in need of a massive overhaul (my last post on the subject was here). It is based on outdated methods codified in the distant past. First, the school calendar was based on the agrarian culture in place at that time, 150 years ago, and today those schools are silent except for on the practice field from 4 in the afternoon until 7:30 the next morning, and for 1/4 of the school year between May and late August. Then, school texts were scrubbed of anything that offended anybody, reducing them to pablum and a thin gruel. In part, that happened because of the quest for economy of scale, and the interaction between book publishers, the state, and citizen watchdog groups as detailed in The Language Police. Sale cites statistics similar to those found in Andrew Coulson's Market Education: The Unknown History: "In 1950 there were 139,000 elementary schools in the U.S. - 60,000 of them small, one-teacher affairs - serving an enrollment of 21 million children. By 1975 there were only 79,000 schools, barely a thousand of them one-teacher size, although the enrollment had risen to 32 million." Sale cites similar consolidation statistics for high schools and universities, and that was in 1980. Since then, Ross Perot leveled the charge that the only reason schools are as large as they are is so that eventually you can get 11 guys good enough to win a state football championship (it is still a mystery to me, no matter how many song lyrics Bill Waddell quotes, why people can play soccer and baseball in private leagues, and in Europe all teams are clubs separate from the schools, but Americans need to spend vast sums of school district money on football and basketball teams). Since then, Ted Kennedy wrote, and George W. signed, the No Child Left Behind Act, which consolidates all schools into one big district on the principle that everyone has to pass a test that determines federal funding. That act was the culmination of decades of consolidation, was written by a Democrat, and under W. the federal spending (which is only 8% of the total education spending) has increased by far more than under any president in history (Clinton wasn't even close), Republicans still claim they are for small government, and Democrats continue to "blame" the president for the "lack" of spending while ignoring their own role and the basic problem: size. Meanwhile, our students are enrolling in remedial education in record numbers.
All in all, I would recommend Human Scale to both classical and modern liberals; there are consequences of largeness of which we should all take heed. I doubt if modern conservatives would find anything of interest here. But while I am interested in discovering the underlying causes of the size of particular groups or industries - for example, is there an actual scale economy benefit or a distortion caused by a feature in the Internal Revenue code? - , Sale is more interested in describing a future in which everything is considerably smaller without examining how things got big. I find that a little disturbing, since his favorite remedy, direct democracy, is at least a little likely to be the cause rather than the solution, especially of the largeness of government which he rightfully fears.
Labels: book, decentralization
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