An example tied to the bold conjecture
So, my not-so-modest conjecture accused pragmatists of deriving ought from is. I don't think that any 21st century pragmatists are going to agree with any of the following, but I wonder whether their 18th and 19th century counterparts would have done so.
If you are going to look at a current state of affairs and conclude that, well, whatever is best for everyone, efficiency, progress, and all of that may be used as the bases for judging a policy (I don't, but then I'm an ideologue in their eyes), then I suggest that you must conclude that certain out-of-style labor policies in US history were good policy. Why?
As Pietra Rivoli relates in The Travels of a T-shirt in the Global Economy, Gavin Wright found institutional failure in the agricultural labor market in the south in the 18th-19th century. Cotton required labor to be available, sometimes on a moment's notice, to hoe weeds and to pick the cotton when it was ready. The weed-hoeing depended on rainfall in the spring, while the harvest went on for four months in the fall. Further, harvesting could not take place while the bolls were wet from rain, but then again, the bolls have a tendency to fall to the ground and/or get spotted and weak from rain, so the labor had to be available during harvest, within about 4-7 days after a rainfall. Markets for such labor could not exist in an era with poor communication and transportation.
Further, cotton yields apparently increased with farm size up to 600 acres. Thus, a large plantation was more efficient than a small farm. However, it would have been difficult for would-be large plantation owners to find white labor because they had to compete with a pesky competitor: land was relatively cheap, and almost no capital was required (not even a mule in the early days), so most white laborers could have run their own family farm. Since the family farm would have needed the same irregular attention as the plantation, no plantation could have gotten off the ground while the family farm existed. [1] Legally sanctioned slavery, practiced by paternalist owners, resolved the failure.
Dr. Rivoli proceeds to find similar issues in the post-slavery era. Sharecropping was another effective method of resolving the labor market problem, but there were two new problems (from the landowners' perspective): first, the tenants might borrow money from someone besides the landowner, breaking the dependency cycle, and second, the tenants might find higher paying work elsewhere. The former was thwarted through the passage of crop lien laws, cutting off the tenants' access to capital markets, while the latter was thwarted through such methods as vagrancy and anti-enticement, what Rivoli calls "alienation of labor", laws. Later, during WWII, the labor shortage created by wartime demand led to the creation of the Bracero program. Once again, the special conditions of cotton growing created institutional failure, which was addressed by (1) having the Department of Labor screen the workers for health, potential productivity, and absence of certain political tendencies; (2) restricting the laborers to only one employer so that they couldn't be bid away to the highest bidder; and (3) having specific numbers of workers ready to be picked up on the farmers' schedules.
In summary, the benefits are quite clear: cotton and then textile production sparked the Industrial Revolution, and later kept the Southern and then the West Texas economy afloat. The institutional failures are also quite clear: large farms reap economies of scale, but in the days when cotton production was labor intensive, there was no way to obtain the labor when and where it was needed, and at a reasonable price, because of the lure of family farms, other farmers, and competitive capital markets. We can see that your average, pragmatic, non-ideological, empiricist would have found the Bracero restrictions, and before them the legal restrictions on sharecroppers, and before them slavery, to be good things and beneficial state policies. Those pragmatists would have included Northern industrialists dependent on the cotton trade (especially the Lowells, but also New York shippers and financiers) as well as those who relied on the South as a market for manufactured goods, but certainly no small number of intellectuals supportive of Hamiltonian means would have defended the policies on the basis of the undeniable outcome. Those people who were committed to certain -- yech! -- Manchesterite, hyperindividualistic ideologies might well have been found in the company of the much-hated, unreasonable abolitionists.
I can hear the protests now: "Oh, but that's not what we mean! We're not in favor of efficiency at all costs."
Really?! Is there some sort of universal moral axiom that was violated by those policies?
-----------------------------
[1] We know from more recent experience that state intervention to increase the effective size of the farm is thought by empiricists to have been a good thing because it increased the percentage which any farmer could have left fallow. See, for example, this review of Tim Egan's The Worst Hard Times.
If you are going to look at a current state of affairs and conclude that, well, whatever is best for everyone, efficiency, progress, and all of that may be used as the bases for judging a policy (I don't, but then I'm an ideologue in their eyes), then I suggest that you must conclude that certain out-of-style labor policies in US history were good policy. Why?
As Pietra Rivoli relates in The Travels of a T-shirt in the Global Economy, Gavin Wright found institutional failure in the agricultural labor market in the south in the 18th-19th century. Cotton required labor to be available, sometimes on a moment's notice, to hoe weeds and to pick the cotton when it was ready. The weed-hoeing depended on rainfall in the spring, while the harvest went on for four months in the fall. Further, harvesting could not take place while the bolls were wet from rain, but then again, the bolls have a tendency to fall to the ground and/or get spotted and weak from rain, so the labor had to be available during harvest, within about 4-7 days after a rainfall. Markets for such labor could not exist in an era with poor communication and transportation.
Further, cotton yields apparently increased with farm size up to 600 acres. Thus, a large plantation was more efficient than a small farm. However, it would have been difficult for would-be large plantation owners to find white labor because they had to compete with a pesky competitor: land was relatively cheap, and almost no capital was required (not even a mule in the early days), so most white laborers could have run their own family farm. Since the family farm would have needed the same irregular attention as the plantation, no plantation could have gotten off the ground while the family farm existed. [1] Legally sanctioned slavery, practiced by paternalist owners, resolved the failure.
Dr. Rivoli proceeds to find similar issues in the post-slavery era. Sharecropping was another effective method of resolving the labor market problem, but there were two new problems (from the landowners' perspective): first, the tenants might borrow money from someone besides the landowner, breaking the dependency cycle, and second, the tenants might find higher paying work elsewhere. The former was thwarted through the passage of crop lien laws, cutting off the tenants' access to capital markets, while the latter was thwarted through such methods as vagrancy and anti-enticement, what Rivoli calls "alienation of labor", laws. Later, during WWII, the labor shortage created by wartime demand led to the creation of the Bracero program. Once again, the special conditions of cotton growing created institutional failure, which was addressed by (1) having the Department of Labor screen the workers for health, potential productivity, and absence of certain political tendencies; (2) restricting the laborers to only one employer so that they couldn't be bid away to the highest bidder; and (3) having specific numbers of workers ready to be picked up on the farmers' schedules.
In summary, the benefits are quite clear: cotton and then textile production sparked the Industrial Revolution, and later kept the Southern and then the West Texas economy afloat. The institutional failures are also quite clear: large farms reap economies of scale, but in the days when cotton production was labor intensive, there was no way to obtain the labor when and where it was needed, and at a reasonable price, because of the lure of family farms, other farmers, and competitive capital markets. We can see that your average, pragmatic, non-ideological, empiricist would have found the Bracero restrictions, and before them the legal restrictions on sharecroppers, and before them slavery, to be good things and beneficial state policies. Those pragmatists would have included Northern industrialists dependent on the cotton trade (especially the Lowells, but also New York shippers and financiers) as well as those who relied on the South as a market for manufactured goods, but certainly no small number of intellectuals supportive of Hamiltonian means would have defended the policies on the basis of the undeniable outcome. Those people who were committed to certain -- yech! -- Manchesterite, hyperindividualistic ideologies might well have been found in the company of the much-hated, unreasonable abolitionists.
I can hear the protests now: "Oh, but that's not what we mean! We're not in favor of efficiency at all costs."
Really?! Is there some sort of universal moral axiom that was violated by those policies?
-----------------------------
[1] We know from more recent experience that state intervention to increase the effective size of the farm is thought by empiricists to have been a good thing because it increased the percentage which any farmer could have left fallow. See, for example, this review of Tim Egan's The Worst Hard Times.
Labels: history, philosophy, vulgar 2nd Best Theory
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