Springtime

With the return of Spring, it's time to get back on the bikes. Not only does Kathleen commute, but I like it to get around and to exercise when I'm off work.

One of the things we like to do is to ride over to the Saturday morning Farmer's Market. Somewhere, I remember reading that McKibben's Deep Economy contains a statistic to the effect that 10 times more conversations are struck up in local markets like this than at Wal-Mart. I believe it - I usually don't bother asking Wally World employees for help because they generally are about as familiar with their own stock as I am. But the employees at both the local co-op usually know where to find stuff. Sure enough, the FM didn't disappoint.

The animal shelter was out with a pack of dogs. I met an old friend who was working with them; she said they had adopted out 7 dogs that day. I would have guessed 7 per week was about normal.

Then we came across a bluegrass band (The Salty Dogs). Many dogs sitting around, beckoning the wife to pet them. I struck up a conversation with Matt, who was riding a modified bicycle he used for "bike tramping". It was modified with an Xtracycle, which I thought would be something useful for grocery shopping. Matt had some, um, unorthodox views of the world, including a belief (that we did not explore) that the current economic downturn was intentionally arranged; that fluoride (which he described as an "iron oxide" class of chemical) was used to dumb down the population, a trick we picked up from the Nazis; that Kissinger was a criminal; that Godzilla-derived foods from Monsanto were poisoning us and causing diabetes; that those foods and water in plastic bottles were causing cancer; that this nation has a scary hive mentality; and some kind of anti-immigrant thing. As we parted, I realized that it's probably a good thing I keep my mouth shut since I probably come across the same way to the average person.

After that, my wife stumbled upon someone selling sewn goods [1] right across from someone with a ... is that? Yes, it's a Nolan Chart with dozens of little stick-on stars on it. No doubt as to who these people are. They were just packing up the booth (we got there late), so I stopped to confirm my suspicions. They saw me eyeing the chart, asked if I wanted to take the World's Smallest Political Quiz, I pointed to the top corner and told them I could save them some time if they would just put my star "here". They wanted to know if I wanted to join and I made a crack about being president of the Anarchy Club. "Oh, no, we're not anarchists, but someone called us ... what was that? Minimists?" I suggested, "Minarchists?" "Yeah, that was it." Er, several years ago, the Chair, the lonely, lonely Chair, asked if I would like to be Vice Chair of the county LP. I turned him down. Even then, I thought there was something vaguely wrong, and now I know (thanks to Kevin Carson) that the thing that bothered me most (still does) was the vulgarity of the LP. Anti-tax, anti-regulation, but not necessarily anti-large corporation. As if Wal-Mart sized organizations sprung up shortly after the foundations of the Ziggurat of Ur were laid.

Next up: someone advertising an Earth Day bicycle ride.

Then a woman selling some really interesting red chile sauce mix (note to MR readers: "chili" is a greasy concoction of beans and hamburger meat favored in Texas, "chile" is a red or green fruit noted for its spicy hotness and used in Mexican cuisine). Very good, less than half the price of the canned stuff we were using for enchiladas (its a very particular, locally canned sauce that we like), and much spicier.

Then, two people who were sitting in for the abuelita who sells fresh local herbs and spices (she may be a curandera?). Turns out she is the mother of one. Her meticulously packed plastic bags are hand-labeled, sometimes with very interesting descriptions and misspellings.

Then, our favorite vendor. We usually get a few sticks of incense from her for the shop. Today, she has a new dog that she just adopted (Buddy).

Then, we look at the interesting homemade breads, grains, nuts, and other stuff sold by a family who practices their own faith that seems to be an eclectic mix of Mennonism and Seventh Day Adventism. Good snack cakes, we got there too late to get any. On to the Asian artist who sells really, really decadent deserts, coffee cakes, etc.

Yeah, this is a lot more fun than Wally World or the Sons of Albert.

[UPDATE: Oh yeah, now I remember what Matt's anti-immigrant thing was: actually, it wasn't anti-immigrant so much as it was pro North American Union. He had implied that there was no real enforcement of immigration laws because, as we all know, the USA and the dollar are going to be gone in the next couple of years. Lest it be thought that I am tring to make him out to be a crackpot, let me say that he seems like a really nice guy and someone you'd probably want around in a Mad Max scenario.]

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[1] I learned from her that Albertson's is offering a $0.05 discount if you bring your own bags. I bought reusable bags from the Albertson's in Albuquerque. I take them into Wal-Mart with me. Gradually, I hope to get their checkers trained to hand stuff to me so I can load my own bag.

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?

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[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.

A Bold Conjecture

I have the germ of an idea that I need to present in three parts today, with an example in the near future. The three parts are An Interpretation, a Reinterpretation, and The Question Begged.

If we look at political economic history, we find that the state, especially the national government of the US, has evolved from a very simple set of rules (the Constitution was a few pages) to a very complex set of interlocking and sometimes contradictory rules, interpretations, agencies, and so on (the CFR is several volumes, best measured in linear inches rather than pages). The growth is due to the fact that at every stage, the rules created conditions for new problems which have to be addressed by new rules. For example, the rules which allowed transnational railroads to prosper led to the industrialization described by Chandler (energy + transportation => scale economy), creating the conditions for labor exploitation and unrest, followed by a new round of rules to constrain the industrialists and protect the workers, creating ... and so on. The explanation provided by the defenders of state intervention is that each of these changes has been largely beneficial, and that the few negative consequences may easily be managed by a new round of regulations that are also largely beneficial. They lay claim to pragmatism and empiricism, setting those in opposition to dogmatism or ideology, noting that they simply want to use the best means for achieving the best ends. We are all better off, so those policies were beneficial.

We could reinterpret this by working backwards. Today, we are better off than a generation ago, and a generation ago was better off than the previous generation, and so on. Thus, in order to get the improvements that we need today, it was good that they enacted those policies a few years ago. In order to get to the preconditions for today's prosperity, the need for previous policy choices are obvious. Thus, we should be grateful for those policies and for the idea of state intervention in general. For example, we need the current transportation system, so it was good that the state built roads. And to get the cars that ply those roads, we needed the railroads, so it was good that national regulations to govern railroads were put in place.

But this begs a question: What do they mean by "need"? In one sense, their argument is circular: in order to have the existing set of social, economic, and political mechanisms that we need to perpetuate the existing system, we had to have made those choices in the past. But why do we need the existing system? Indeed, why did the people in the 19th century need the railroad choices? "Need" means that a person or society can not continue to exist without those things. If anything, the fact that society had existed and evolved for thousand of years to that point without those institutions or policies is proof that those things were not needed in any meaningful sense of the word.

When the word "need" is used or implied, red flags should be raised. Who needs (or needed) it? Why? And is (was) the proposed policy the only way to achieve the need? And what, exactly, is needed? Remember this the next time you encounter one of the world's Polanyist, William Jamesist, pragmatic empiricists, who suddenly seem to have shed their pragmatism in favor of some Platonic ideal toward which their programs are working. Did society "need" the specific policies that were involved in the creation of transnational railroads? The railroad owners would appear to have needed them more than society at large; people wanting to farm profitably further west, further from water routes, markets, and hungry customers needed them; politicians wanting to influence the type of farmer in order to influence the type of state (pro- or anti-slavery) needed them; people wanting to enlarge the market for their manufactured goods and thereby increase profits (McCormick, for example) needed them; but those groups do not come close to comprising a majority of the citizens of the country. And if they had not gotten those policies -- laws regarding incorporation, bankruptcy, interstate regulation, subsidization and land transfers -- they still would have had other options, most of which would simply have been more expensive in the short run, but perhaps less so in the long run. For example, prior to the massive build-out of railroads, private roads and canals were all the rage. Fogel, in his response to Rostow, even noted that a horseless carriage existed in 1830 and that "not only the fundamental internal combustion engine theory, but even that of the diesel engine was published as early as 1824," citing D. C. Field's "Mechanical Road Vehicles" and Orville Charles Cramer's "Internal Combustion Engine" in A History of Technology (Charles Singer, ed., 1958) and Encyclopedia Britannica, (1961), respectively (see also Samuel Morey). As these predated the discovery of oil, they would have led to the creation of a more local, environmentally friendly, efficient (in the sense of having fewer externalities) transportation system and if a national system had evolved, it would have been more organic, i.e. the economies of scale would have driven the system rather than the system driving the economies of scale.

Bold enough?