Assorted thoughts on social mobility (18 Jan 2012)

Economic mobility is a different thing from social mobility, as any number of nouveau-riche tales of ostracized woe can testify to. Measuring whether one goes from one arbitrarily determined income bracket to another doesn't tell us much about experiential changes; it doesn't tell us whether one's social circuit had changed, whether one's children now go to a more elite school, with greater opportunities for sycophancy. Social mobility is often about establishing opportunities to be taken seriously by people with more status — or with more cultural capital, if you prefer — rather than raw income levels. Judging mainly by Victorian novels, it takes a lot of income to buy your way out of seeming like a striver when you begin hobnobbing with your betters.

But the difference between economic and social mobility is easy to lose sight of in policy discussions. Once the charts and graphs are trotted out, it's easy to fixate on income differences that can be measured and varying rates of income change over time, with the idea that these comprehensively index the misery suffered through inequality. (More rumination, from Elias Isquith, about social mobility and whether it distracts us from inequality can be found here.)

Class and hierarchy and the ingrained sense of inferiority are not merely matters of money; they are more matters of power and assumed privilege. (That sentence felt a little tautological. I hope it makes some sense.) At Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen offered a few notes on why he thinks measures of economic mobility are "overrated." This is the one that started me thinking about this:

For a given level of income, if some are moving up others are moving down. Do you take theories of wage rigidity seriously? If so, you might favor less relative mobility, other things remaining equal. More upward — and thus downward — relative mobility probably means less aggregate happiness, due to habit formation and frame of reference effects.

Much of that is econospeak for "knowing your place makes you feel better." It's long been a right-wing critique that increased socioeconomic mobility yields only chaos — that liberals are too quick to forget that mobility can approach a zero-sum game: when some go up, others must go down. (Cowen suggests this is why economic growth matters more than mobility qua mobility.) Conspicuous-consumption and hedonic-treadmill theories similarly assume that any symbolic gains in status will be offset when those with the power to determine which symbols have status change the rules. Once the "wrong" people are doing something, the "right" people move on to something else, propelling the wheel of fashions.

But what does that mean for the value of novelty? Novelty is sometimes regarded neutrally as simple innovation, an expansion of the possibilities offered to consumers and thus enhancing their sense of power (which some argue derives meaningfully from the exercise of choice in markets). But a lot of novelty is fashion change driven by status panic. It is meant to be exclusionary; it is meant to cause misery as much as pleasure, as the pleasure is rooted in some else's being rejected.

We adopt the habitus of a particular social status (which to a degree is based on our income) and evaluate our condition mainly with respect to others we see as sharing that status. When downward economic mobility means we can no longer afford to hang out with our class peers and buy appropriate status symbols and amenities, that upsets us, and Cowen suggests that this upset outweighs any gains others might experience from moving up and getting to experience new nice things. That is a sort of paleo-conservative attitude, one that runs counter to the "all novelty is experienced as good" assumption that often animates discussion of consumer behavior today. It turns out that some novelty is experienced as confusion (i.e., me holding an iPhone) and not enhanced utility or pleasure, and class is the index governing this. Given consumer society's hegemony, it may be that once novelty is felt to be threatening, we translate it into a class mobility issue -- we are uncomfortable not because the newness is alienating in itself but because we are now conscious of moving up or down, or testing the boundaries of class habitus.

Concern with mobility is of particular concern to Americans; it's an integral aspect of its founding myths: a country without an aristocracy, where merit is rewarded and no one is born to a caste. Of course, the U.S. falls ludicrously short of that ideal, but that remains a huge part of American exceptionalism. So often mobility statistics are ginned up to compare the U.S. with Europe, the ancestral bastion of inherited privilege. If the U.S. falls behind Europe, it suggests that we are failing at our national mission. Cowen has what struck me as an odd explanation of why Europeans have experienced more economic mobility: "Lots of smart Europeans decide to be not so ambitious, to enjoy their public goods, to work for the government, to avoid high marginal tax rates, to travel a lot, and so on." I wonder to what degree one can decide not to be ambitious, as if that aspect of the self is voluntaristic. "I thought about being ambitious, but the hell with it. PlayStation time."

Cowen claims that European parents don't inspire their children to achieve: " 'High intergenerational mobility' is sometimes a synonym for 'lots of parental underachievers.' " That seems to take a systemic social problem and individualize it: society has lots of opportunities if parents would just force their kids to pursue them more doggedly. This fits with an economistic line of thinking that views the habitus as the sum total of one's response to personal incentives rather than something produced by broader social conditions. If you are not ambitious, it's not because of what RIchard Sennett called the "hidden injuries of class" but because of a personal choice. You just didn't want to be ambitious badly enough. Maybe your parents or your schools failed to motivate you as much as they could have, but the failing is still yours.

The underlying assumption appears to be that mobility is mainly a matter of will, which is really the main idea at stake in arguments about it. Conservatives like to overlook inherited privilege to argue that those who stagnate in poverty do so out of choice; others see class boundaries as institutionalized and carefully policed, not a matter of choice at all.

Wages and Prizes (8 Dec 2010)

I put a link to this post by Jodi Dean on my Twitter feed (@marginalutility -- I have periodically been posting links there, as well as the customary self-promotion) but wanted to highlight it here too. Dean excerpts a portion of her conference paper (draft pdf) on the future of democracy that makes an interesting point about the internet and social media and so on starting to transform labor markets into contests. The shift to a more network-driven economy -- one which exploits the communications common (itself increasingly online and controlled/administered by big internet companies like Google and Facebook) -- means that markets, more driven by power-law distribution, tend to become more winner-take-all for competing conglomerates, which hope to market the mega-selling products that will dominate their sectors. Dean argues that the communication common online is being fostered as a petri dish in which those megasellers ("the one") can be identified or developed: "Exploitation consists in efforts to stimulate the creative production of the field in the interest of finding, and then monetizing, the one. Expanding the field produces the one (or, hubs are an immanent property of complex networks)."

In other words, the pool of quasi-voluntary communication that has been captured online by private companies makes up a big productive resource out of which certain economic winners emerge. The emergence depends on the mass of participants, virtually all of whom get only the satisfaction of participation as their reward, even though the work they are doing for free is removing jobs from the economy, and hurting them all, as a proletarianized class, in the aggregate. Those conditions -- which resemble a general lottery -- naturalize the idea that wages for work should be determined through a contest settled "democratically" by participating individuals, possibly in social media, rather than something negotiated into contracts, possibly by unions. Social media and the communities they tend to generate end up being fake unions that neutralize real ones.

And as consumption and production merge in everyday life for more people, it seems normal to work hard merely for a chance at getting the money one needs to live.

Rather than having a right to the proceeds of one’s labor by virtue of a contract, ever more of us win or lose such that remuneration is treated like a prize. In academia, art, writing, architecture, entertainment, design, and, in the US, increasing numbers of different areas (education, technology), people not only feel fortunate to get work, to get hired, to get paid, but ever more tasks and projects are conducted as competitions, which means that those doing the work are not paid unless they win. They work but only for a chance at pay.

What makes this potentially worse is that such work (being online and contributing or organizing information, sharing), so much closer subjectively to consumption or self-actualization, will register as meaningful and will feel like progress. Perhaps this sort of work (sometimes called immaterial labor), combined with welfare payments, could be the foundation of a less exploitative social order in which what people do "for a living" actually seems to constitute the meaning of their life, and no one is left "unemployed" and rendered socially worthless. But under our current conditions, immaterial labor mainly makes life more precarious, and taints the things we ordinarily would enjoy doing with an urgent anxiety. We can't just be ourselves; we have to make ourselves a personal brand that we desperately need our friends, i.e. networked nodes, to buy into.

Conservative class warfare (12 July 2010)

It appears that NYT columnist Ross Douthat also has class war on his mind after reading that article about strategic defaults on jumbo mortgages mentioned in the previous post. He begins with the proposition that "The rich are different from you and me. They know how to game the system." Another way of putting that is that they know the system is set up for their benefit, so they need not concern themselves with its mores.

What to do about this? Douthat suggests we need "conservative class warfare" -- an oxymoron if ever there was one -- "which would force the million-dollar defaulters to pay their own way from here on out." Much of what he then proposes sounds pretty good to me, and it would be great of conservatives signed on to this sort of conservatism: eliminating the federal subsidy on mortgage-interest payments, which are tax deductible; eliminating corporate subsidies; "attacking Washington’s wasteful spending on the well-connected." (He also wants means-testing for Social Security, a supposed solution for a nonexistent problem with the system's solvency.) He urges conservatives "to recognize that the most pernicious sort of redistribution isn’t from the successful to the poor. It’s from savers to speculators, from outsiders to insiders, and from the industrious middle class to the reckless, unproductive rich."

Agreed. But being "well-connected" by definition means that Washington doesn't take away any of your favors. And the ethos of conservatism tends to regard well-connectedness as some sort of deserved state of exception worth preserving for the overall stability of society. If there must be corruption,the implication often seems to be, let's at least make sure only the right people can get away with being corrupt. And the right people are the ones who already have been getting away with it for longer than anyone can remember.

New frugality as old cultural war (8 Oct 2009)

I was thinking more about a line in the last paragraph of James Surowiecki's New Yorker column about consumer spending.

But the evidence for a radical shift in the way we consume seems more like the product of wishful thinking (there’s a palpable longing among pundits for Americans to become more frugal) than anything else.

It's what is in the parenthesis that interests me, that "palpable longing" that most likely refers to David Brooks, who pined for "economic self-restraint" in this recent New York Timesop-ed. Since I tend to think of cheerleaders for the consumer society as being situated ideologically on the pro-business right, I regarded this kind of rhetoric as a move by Brooks toward the crunchy left, with its preoccupation with environmental responsibility and conservation and recycling and the like. But an old Joan Didion piece about the Washington press corps during the Clinton years (aptly titled "Vichy Washington"), reminded me of the obvious point that Brooks is reaching back to an older tradition of conservative intolerance personified back then by Robert Bork:

Bork is worth some study, since it is to him that we owe the most forthright statements of what might be required to effect "a moral and spiritual regeneration," the necessity for which has since entered the talk show and op-ed ether. Such a regeneration, Bork speculated in Slouching Towards Gomorrah, by one of four events: "a religious revival, the revival of public discourse about morality, a cataclysmic war, or a deep economic depression."

This puts a religious-bigot spin on the The Shock Doctrine thesis: rather than use crisis to implement a neoliberal program of economic deregulation, conservatives should seize the opportunity presented by widespread economic misery to push through a variety of behavioral proscriptions. Didion quotes Bork's outrageous dictum that "moral outrage is a sufficient ground for prohibitory legislation. Knowledge that an activity is taking place is a harm to those who find it profoundly immoral."

This tradition makes it more understandable why pundits are "palpably longing" for a more frugal America and why they overlook the evidence that Americans have been spending more largely because the cost of housing, medical care and education have risen precipitously (thanks in part to the flood of credit inflating asset values). The new frugality seems malleable enough a concept to serve as fresh code for an old battle, that of restricting individual freedoms to preserve religious authority in society. Religious institutions once had a monopoly on meaning and doled it out in return for obedience. Consumerism, and the identity fashioning it enabled at the individual rather than community level, usurped that power, demanding only an obedience that often felt like liberty -- the restriction of self-expression to choosing among a plethora of goods in the consumer marketplace. The longing for a more frugal America is one of way of renewing the call for a more "spiritual" America, which is a way of demanding the legislation of morality in the name of values presumed to be universal and incontestable.

Consumerism: By-product of international finance? (21 Sept 2009)

It's easy to moralize about consumerism, assume it has grown up somehow out of the malfeasance of marketers and the laziness and gullibility of consumers, who are eager to replace other fulfilling ways to occupy themselves with shopping, a seemingly derivative activity that replaces the joy of developing our capabilities with the pleasures of passive ownership. This wish to moralize stems from a desire to individualize things far beyond our control and make it seem as though we are ultimately responsible for the sort of world we live in and that ultimately it suits us; it is the product of the sorts of choices we can imagine people making. Nobody, for instance, might have seemed to want that condo building that went up on the corner, or that brand new shopping center down the street from a nearly identical one, but it doesn't seem so crazy once you see the people living or shopping there. And you can think to yourself, if we can only stop that guy, the guy walking into that new Dick's Sporting Goods, or the guy who just leased that new condo, or who took out the mortgage on that townhouse in the new development where the horse farm used to be, we can restore some sanity and balance to our lives and the rate at which the familiar is changing all around us.

But what if the choices for them (and for us) are stacked, are pre-decided to a far greater degree than we are willing to recognize? What if the matrix in which we are making our decisions is shaped by things that our puny politics can't touch, that our individual choices are grains of sand in a vast socioeconomic combine -- we might have chosen to stick to some contiguous grain to form a minute little cluster, yet some much larger force has decided to shape up into a sand castle built too close to the incoming tide. (That was a little fanciful, but you see what I am getting at.)

The point is, it may be that international capital flows have driven our consumerist microbehaviors much more than we know; that it wasn't just personal ignorance, irresponsibility, cupidity, greed and covetousness that drove the housing bubble and the boom in consumer debt; but instead those moral motives came after the fact, after our fate was sealed by the wash of investment coming in from overseas. We didn't want consumerism, but someone had to sop up all those Chinese exports. We didn't want to be in debt, but there were so many foreigners buying dollars, that the banks basically had to give money away to anybody, and who will turn down money when it seems to be offered to them for free? And if they think it sounds too good to be true, well, that's precisely what marketing is for.

Liaquat Ahamed suggests took something like this took place in the past decade in an essay in the New York Times Book Review, of all places. He taps into a sort of historical reasoning that is far removed from finger-pointing and shaming people for wanting stuff and behaving irresponsibly:

In the wake of the 1997 financial crisis there, countries in East Asia set out to build up war chests of dollars as insurance against domestic banking runs or downturns in the global economy. At about the same time, China embarked on a program of export-led growth, engineered by keeping its currency artificially low.
Interpretations of what happened next differ. Some argue that to absorb these goods from abroad while avoiding unemployment at home, the United States very consciously stimulated consumer demand. The country, in effect, was forced to live beyond its means. Others believe that the Fed misread the fall in prices as a symptom of inadequate demand rather than for what it was — an astounding, once-in-a-generation expansion in the supply of low-cost goods — and kept interest rates low for an unusually long time, which provoked the real estate bubble.

The flood of money was coming in and it had to go somewhere. If you accept this logic, the question becomes, how does a nation "very consciously stimulate consumer demand"? Is it simply a matter of sending out checks -- metaphorically dropping cash from helicopters, Bernanke style? Is it the president telling everyone to return to business as usual and start shopping, as Bush did after 9/11? Is it working ideological visions of what the good life is supposed to consist of in speeches and political campaigns? Or is it something that plays out more indirectly: Banks increase their marketing, which contributes to the promulgation of a certain view of a successful life, one that hinges on consumption rather than savings. Luxury goods makers begin trying to reach aspirational consumers, i.e. turn us into aspirational consumers. People begin to evaluate their wealth not in dollar figures but in belongings, in house size, in car size, in the extent of their credit line. I don't know what the answer is, but it seems that if there is such a throttle that can be controlled for consumer demand, we would want to seize control of it for ourselves. I never got the memo from the "Untied States" that I was now expected to consume more and like it. Instead, I ended up consuming more and felt out of control about it; I found myself spending more time in stores without knowing why and without a clue about how to reverse the trend. (This was before the government started sending out tax rebate checks to "stimulate" us all.)

Ahamed argues that the U.S. "found itself literally operating as a gigantic bank, taking short-term liquid deposits from countries with surpluses and investing the money in long-term, risky assets at home and abroad." -- I don't know if that "literally" belongs there, but the upshot is that the U.S. basically imported risk from abroad and distributed it among its citizens -- with a little creativity one could probably reconstitute this process as what Jacob Hacker has dubbed the Great Risk Shift -- the way in which middle-class people in America now have less of a social safety net. If we wouldn't take on debt and risk voluntarily, we could be forced to by the slow and steady withdrawal of social services. Goodbye Social Security, hello 401K loaded with all sorts of investments that turn out to be surprisingly dicey, like those money market accounts that teetered on the edge of buck-breaking last fall. Ahamed cites FT columnist Martin Wolf:

As Wolf traces out so well in his 2008 book “Fixing Global Finance,” the United States was able to absorb all the goods coming out of Asia only by letting its consumers go progressively deeper into debt — a process that had its own limits. Moreover, the flood of money simply overwhelmed the capacity of financial institutions to handle it. A lot, for example, ended up in the most unregulated segments of the global banking system, like off-shore deposits on the books of non-American banks. These banks, now awash with cash and desperate for places to put the money, became easy marks for American investment banks seeking to peddle securitized mortgages. When a large percentage of these loans went bad, instead of a dollar panic we had a global banking crisis.

It's hard to grasp the idea that a "flood of money" can be a problem, but that is what happens when we confuse money with prosperity -- money has to be moving to ahve value, and there can be too much of it around to keep it moving. Too much money means that the economy has become too imbalanced, that we have exceeded inherent limits, that socially useful labor has become detached from the society it was supposed to be useful for (i.e. impoverished Chinese making junk for underemployed America).

It's not clear what causes these global financial imbalances -- governmental trade policies are part of it. But individual citizen choice doesn't seem to factor in. Still, there must be reliable mechanisms by which the requisite consumer behavior is extracted from given populations. Is it some inborn greed in human nature that gets tapped into or sublimated as the situation requires? Or is it the existing class structures around the world, and the endless struggle for mobility within them (and over the signals that represent belonging) that plays the integral role? Is this the essence of the class struggle, a means of balancing international capital flows?

Anyway, if global money flows have reversed, American consumers will find the field in which they make choices suddenly changed. Suddenly they will seem thrifty and moral again, especially in the aggregate, and we can begin to generalize about what the consumption data means morally, what it tells us about how people really are. This is where a recent post by Anton Steinpilz at Generation Bubble picks up the story:Taking off from one of the dime-a-dozen "recessionista" stories about the New Thrift, Steinpilz claims that the middle classes are now "worried that their children and their children’s children will have snatched from them the exorbitant privilege of indulging their ephemeral pleasures with made-to-break trifles of sweated and immiserated workers throughout the developing world." To replace that lost privilege, they will start to loot the lifestyles of the local poor, raid their T.J. Maxxes and Aldis, and co-opt what constraints the poor have always found inescapable and make them into accoutrements and gestures, apparent trends in the hands of those classes that still might have chosen differently. When the middle class could afford to, because of international financial trends, it emulates the rich; trends have reversed, they emulate the poor; either way they remain class-signifier parasites. The rich could always contrive more positional goods to keep themselves differentiated; the poor instead (if I am reading Steinpilz correctly) find the meaning of their lives seized from them and injected into an alien lifestyle.

So, a theory: Destabilization along the boundaries of social class allows for the calibration of individual behavior with the larger demands of international capital flows, without ever allowing individuals to recognize the connection or opt out of the game without giving up the principles of personal identity altogether.

Resort Motel Architecture in Wildwood (30 Aug 2009)

I've been on vacation the past week in Wildwood, New Jersey, (North Wildwood to be precise) which is down the shore about 30 miles south of Atlantic City, near the southern tip of the state's coastline. It's long had a reputation as a working-class beach town for immigrants from Philadelphia, and it's still not uncommon to see houses down there with the Italian and Irish flags flying from the awnings alongside the U.S. flag. Like its North Jersey equivalent, Seaside Heights, Wildwood has an extensive boardwalk that retains a carnivalesque atmosphere, where scams and bad bargains of all sorts are made to seem innocuous and where the water-gun-game barkers and snake-handling carneys and iron-on T-shirt makers seem like artisan practitioners of threatened traditional crafts.

I played lots of skee-ball to win tickets (my high-risk, high-reward strategy -- always shoot for the 100s), which I could then trade in for plastic army men, balsa-wood propeller planes, and off-brand candy. I also rode an old wooden coaster that may have concussed me; I got off and wandered the amusement pier punch drunk, in search of place to sit and fortify myself with a lime ricky.

The upper middle classes from the Philadelphia area tend to eschew Wildwood in favor of Ocean City and Cape May, Avalon and Long Beach Island -- similar places by and large that have somehow managed to manufacture class distinction for themselves. The aspirational towns tend to push a contrived family-friendliness and institute measures like charging a fee to use the beach to seem exclusive. Thanks to their protected reputations, real estate values rose dramatically during the bubble years in these towns, which meant that much of the earlier generations of buildings (the boarding houses and one-story "shit shacks") have all been razed in favor of generic aluminum-sided, triple-decker condos and elaborate second-home mansions.

But in Wildwood, this hasn't really happened, making it an architectural treasure trove, at least for me -- I have an inexhaustible fascination with vacation motels of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Wildwood is still filled with hundreds of them, some of them renovated, some run down, some essentially unchanged since their construction in the heyday of democratized leisure. The vendors on the boardwalk are as up to the minute with trends as they can be -- they were selling Michael Vick Eagles jerseys (and "Hide your beagle, Vick's an Eagle" shirts) a week after he was signed. But away from the boardwalk, the town becomes a museum. To walk into Wildwood Crest at night is to enter a hushed Edward Hopper world, haunted with a pensive sense of unfulfilled possibility, all these lido decks and lounge chairs under the orderly rows of subdued lights, devoid of people.

Just as consumption itself was being democratized after World War II, with the working classes experiencing the thrills of purchasing power amidst the sudden flood of mass-produced goods, so was leisure democratized, with similarly mass-produced motels rapidly constructed in déclassé seaside enclaves like Wildwood. This motel build-out mirrored the construction of housing developments for lower-income families in the string of Levittowns outside Philadelphia -- workers could now for the first time enjoy their own detached homes in suburban communities, and they could also expect to enjoy their own private rooms in resorts meant to accommodate them when their week of summer vacation -- another novelty -- came around.

These motels tended to come in two sizes. The first is a two- to four- story motel in a L-shape, nestling a small standard-issue in-ground pool (the sort with a 8-foot deep end that rarely gets built anymore -- the drowning/lawsuit risk has made them infeasible now) surrounded by plastic chaise longues, and with a sundeck dotted with fake palm trees. Here's a few pretty typical examples:

Many of these have since been converted to efficiency condos, which is part of what saved them from demolition.

The deluxe version of these are a little larger and typically sit nearer the ocean:

These are the places that are often billed with the somewhat oxymoronic appellation "resort motels."

I probably photographed 50 of these motels, and I only scratched the surface. And this is after untold dozens had been torn down over the years. (In one vacant lot on Ocean Avenue, the local preservation society had salvaged and displayed a few of the neon signs from motels since demolished.) They are pretty much identical, differing only in location and name, and one would think this would make them depressingly banal and interchangeable. But they struck me as strangely hopeful, and that feeling was reinforced with each new iteration of the same model that I came across. In their sameness came not a refutation of the personal uniqueness of the people who chose to stay in these motels -- an ersatz individuality that is largely oversold ideologically and exploited by marketers as a source of insecurity and misery (are you unique enough? have you discovered the real you? how can you be sure if you are not displaying it at all times through a highly personalized set of belongings and experiences? shouldn't you buy more stuff to become more unique? Hmm?)

Instead they evoked an egalitarian feeling that everyone was confident back then of receiving the same standard treatment; that the worth to the patrons of these places was not rooted in laying special claim to some thing or place but in having the opportunity to partake in the vacation spirit embodied by the town as a whole. The sameness in the environment allowed for actual differences among everyone -- differences taken for granted, the peculiarities that aren't dependent on marketing and goods and identity displays -- to show through. It was simply assumed, I imagine, that such stuff as identity mongering was irrelevant in the face of the opportunity to go on the beach, to swim in the ocean, to confront the ceaseless waves. In other words, these cookie-cutter motels conjure a sense that leisure was once beyond the reach of invidious comparison, that pleasure isn't a matter of differentiating our identities or proving our creativity or individuality at all. There is nothing particularly creative or inventive about enjoying the beach, but it is all the more enjoyable for that. You can do what everyone else does and it's okay. It's even liberating -- at least now, when identity and personal branding is so foregrounded.

But it's hard to be sure the original clients of the motels felt that liberation in the same way. We are at the other end of the transformation of subjectivity that for them had only just begun, so liberation for them may have been precisely that birth into branded identity that we are beginning to experience as a prison. It's the elaborate, now-campy names of these places that make me wonder about this -- especially the accompanying signs, with their neon and their futurama fonts, seem like cartoonish, hyperbolic attempts at branding something that has no particular distinction.

Their superfluousness, the gratuitous nature of these names feels significant. Unnecessary on the face of things (many similar accommodations in other seaside towns are content to have only a street address) the garish names were, at that moment in time when the motels were being built, of critical importance to builders and customers alike presumably. The names were something extra that didn't make the places themselves special, but signified that an effort was being made to market something to a class of people who had been mostly ignored by advertising. In a loud, unmistakable way, the names called out to the new mass-market consumers and sent the message that an expense was being made on their behalf, that unnecessary ideas were being called forth, to amuse them for a moment, to make them feel that they were going to stay somewhere where ordinary rules did not apply: places where, for example, doors were painted sky blue and palm trees had blue leaves.

The names and extravagant signs became requisite amenities, along with heat in the rooms and color televisions.

The ham-fisted attempts at branding seem primitive and quaint now, and seem to preclude the possible of their being aspirational, of generating insecurity. For us, they do the opposite of making us proudly and earnestly self-aware; they conjure a time when branding seemed kitschy and fun, impossible to regard seriously and thus allowing us to transcend it all. But they must have had unironic significance in the 1960s, a resonance similar to the unnecessary but ubiquitous names for housing subdivisions built during the recent real estate boom -- nicely lampooned in this post about Denver's exurbs. Maybe names such as these will seem campy (and not awful) to subsequent generations:

The naming protocols signify a token effort to mask a fundamental contradiction, to make mass-produced "luxuries" come across as bespoke. They are fumbling efforts at establishing social capital where none is to be found, and thus readily strike us as wrong, as embarrassing, as shameful, as violations of some natural order. The faux-pastoral, crypto-aristocratic aspect of the subdivision names exposes what they are trying but failing to do, they indicate how the developments are trying to graft themselves on to a social order that would have forbidden their very existence. The resort motels, at least, attempt something different with their branding, something that to me speaks to the optimism of the era -- each an oasis unto itself in a lush profusion of oases without a desert. They don't try to appropriate a class-inflected language and approximate an old dream of country-club exclusiveness. Instead neon signage is used to invoke an aesthetic never before seen.

(Las Vegas is probably the ultimate example of this style, and Learning From Las Vegas, the manifesto by Venturi, et. al., is the standard reference for its significance.)

The opportunity for a mass-produced aesthetic that is its own thing, outside of the war of class signaling, seems to have passed us by. We can only return to the dawn of consumerism with nostalgia for its promise, mingled with despair for all its wrong turns since then. It promised to indoctrinate us all into the pleasures of owning and belonging and instead made us more conscious then ever before of the many things we can't have, the many places we don't belong, convincing us all the while that there can be no recompense for unfulfilled desire, no vacation from the yearning for more. A week at the Armada by the Sea will never suffice to make us forget ourselves.

Class consumers (21 Aug 2009)

Yves Smith noted a WSJ article reporting diminishing retail sales and heralding the new austerity in American consumers. This tidbit didn't quite fit the frame: "A cashier at Target in Los Angeles checks the authenticity of $100 bills." Counterfeiting is not exactly the act of an austere, frugal consumer, though it may be the act of debt-starved one.

Zero Hedge unleashed a long analysis of "the stratified American consumer" last weekend, making the useful point that the way the designation "American consumer" is thrown around tends to conceal the fact that it is not a homogeneous group. Statements like "Major retailers reported that American consumers are continuing to hunker down" from the WSJ article are not especially useful, because it is extrapolating a universal mental framework from aggregate macro data. (The same problem arises when a negative savings rate is extrapolated into "all Americans are spendthrifts," a rhetorically tempting logical leap I've certainly been guilty of.) Zero Hedge:

A drill down of disposable net income (after tax) and net worth, demonstrates why any discussion of "generic" consumers should be much more properly phrased as an observation of the "Wealthy" and "Everyone else". The disposable income difference between the richest 10% and even the next richest decile is staggering: a 3x order of magnitude....
While 10% of the population collects 40% of disposable income, it represents 57% of net worth! This is an impressive conclusion: on a lowest common denominator, the Net Worth variance between the 10% of the population that make up the wealthy and the 50% that comprise the middle class is over 8x! No wonder the aspirational consumer was the most vibrant retail category at the peak of the bubble: if the middle class can not accumulate 8x the net worth it needs to migrate into the top decile, it can at least dress like it. Unfortunately, it did these purchases on credit and is now paying for it (or not).

The upshot of this analysis is not surprising, but worth reiterating: that the data trends tracked regarding consumption reveal consumerism as a middle-class phenomenon driven probably by status envy of the upper-middle class for the upper-upper class. That the gap is widening means that the consumers now discovering austerity aren't liking it very much and that there is no paradigm shift to a culture of maximum utility extraction. Also worth noting: The lower classes (the bottom 40% who consume 12% of what's consumed in America) are statistically and economically irrelevant. I wonder if there is a social corollary to that -- beneath a certain income point, one's subsistence-style consumption becomes anonymous. The thought inspires in me a classic middle-class fantasy of the escape into squalor, a la the George Orwell of Down and Out in London and Paris: the dream that subsistence living is automatically authentic, and this authenticity compensates for the misery of relative deprivation.

The conclusions drawn in the Zero Hedge post seem ominous: The recession has hurt the lower and middle classes more than the wealthy, and has merely increased the wealthy's advantage. Calls for a consumer-led recovery will draw on their increased spending power, and when that spending shows up in the data it will mask the fact that more people in America are making do with less -- suffering the new frugality at the conspicuous spenders' expense.

Is it safe to say that the wealthy have managed to game the system yet again and avoided a significant loss of wealth, while maintaining sufficient access to credit? If in fact that is the case, a case could be made for a consumer lead-recovery, granted one that is massively skewed to the 10% of the population which consumes 42% in the US.

At that point, all the talk of the era of frugality will be over, even though more of us will be living it. What the Zero Hedge scenario means, as some others have remarked (now I can't find the links, grr), the U.S. will become more like Brazil -- a wealthy elite, with a monopoly on the social power that comes from the power to spend in a consumer society, living in gated communities with elaborate collections of luxury goods, with bodyguards for their children and so on, while the rest of the population is increasingly impoverished.

It reminds me of Baudelaire's The Eyes of the Poor, the poor family staring in at the lovers in their leisure at a "dazzling" cafe, whose decorations depicted "all history and all mythology pandering to gluttony." Increasingly, we are becoming that poor family, spectators of the heroic consumption of the upper classes. Thanks to the inexpensiveness of media entertainment, we consume the cheap images of their class status and derive what gratification we can.

The eyes of the father said: "How beautiful it is! How beautiful it is! All the gold of the poor world must have found its way onto those walls." The eyes of the little boy: "How beautiful it is! How beautiful it is! But it is a house where only people who are not like us can go." As for the baby, he was much too fascinated to express anything but joy -- utterly stupid and profound.

Meanwhile economic forces cement the boundary between us and those in the cafe enjoying the splendor, continue the redistribution upward, making sure we can do nothing but marvel at wealth.

Class and classism and the meritocratic fantasy (19 Aug 2009)

Most people would not agree that it's okay to cross the street if you are spooked by the race of someone approaching. But fewer people, I suspect, would feel the same way if you cross because you think the person coming toward you is a lot poorer than you are. In that case, you can ascribe a socially sanctified line of reasoning to the situation -- rationally, that person has a pretty obvious reason to assault you for your money, thus it makes sense to try to avoid them, and if they feel bad about it, well, they should try harder not to be poor.

The idea is that classism is often tolerated where racism (and sexism and bigotry against gays and so on) is not, because prevailing neoliberalism makes it seem okay to ascribe "rational" incentives to other people and discriminate accordingly. After all cynicism about other people's motives is a positive common-sense virtue in a society ruled in all aspects by a free market. An ability to think in terms of costs and benefits and find the applicable way of applying such an analysis to any scenario is the mark of a mind thinking at its clearest. At the same time, when we discriminate along those lines and not along the old racist, sexist, etc. lines, we can congratulate ourselves for how far we have come, regard our existing social order as progressive, and assure ourselves that our own advantages are merited, and not the product necessarily of racism. Eschewing bigotry and promoting diversity strengthens our ideological faith in the meritocracy that hardly exists in reality, as Walter Benn Michaels argues in this LRB book review of a collection called Who Cares about the White Working Class?.

My point is not that anti-racism and anti-sexism are not good things. It is rather that they currently have nothing to do with left-wing politics, and that, insofar as they function as a substitute for it, can be a bad thing. American universities are exemplary here: they are less racist and sexist than they were 40 years ago and at the same time more elitist. The one serves as an alibi for the other: when you ask them for more equality, what they give you is more diversity. The neoliberal heart leaps up at the sound of glass ceilings shattering and at the sight of doctors, lawyers and professors of colour taking their place in the upper middle class. Whence the many corporations which pursue diversity almost as enthusiastically as they pursue profits, and proclaim over and over again not only that the two are compatible but that they have a causal connection – that diversity is good for business. But a diversified elite is not made any the less elite by its diversity.

This is an argument spelled out in his book The Trouble With Diversity. In the LRB piece, he pushes the book's argument further, detecting a similar mechanism in the worries about classism manifest in Who Cares About the White Working Class?:

It’s thus a relevant fact about Who Cares about the White Working Class? that Ferdinand Mount, who once advised Thatcher, is twice cited and praised here for condemning the middle class’s bad behaviour in displaying its open contempt for ‘working-class cultures’. He represents an improvement over those who seek to blame the poor for their poverty and who regard the culture of poverty rather than the structure of capitalism as the problem. That is the view of what we might call right-wing neoliberalism and, from the standpoint of what we might call left-wing neoliberalism, it’s nothing but the expression of class prejudice. What left neoliberals want is to offer some ‘positive affirmation for the working classes’. They want us to go beyond race to class, but to do so by treating class as if it were race and to start treating the white working class with the same respect we would, say, the Somalis – giving ‘positive value and meaning to both “workingclassness” and ethnic diversity’. Where right neoliberals want us to condemn the culture of the poor, left neoliberals want us to appreciate it.
The great virtue of this debate is that on both sides inequality gets turned into a stigma. That is, once you start redefining the problem of class difference as the problem of class prejudice – once you complete the transformation of race, gender and class into racism, sexism and classism – you no longer have to worry about the redistribution of wealth. You can just fight over whether poor people should be treated with contempt or respect. And while, in human terms, respect seems the right way to go, politically it’s just as empty as contempt.

Michaels wants the left to worry more about income inequality and fight for the eradication of the income differences that make for social classes. (I wonder what Will Wilkinson would make of that.)

Built into the idea of meritocracy -- an ideal often conflated with the American Dream -- is the corollary that the poor deserve contempt. It's easy to see how people could overrate their own hard work and its relevance to their own success (such as it is) and believe that hating poor people is a way of providing crucial tough love. We can jumble up the causal links and think that hating hte poor will help make the meritocratic dream more real. It serves as a way of voicing our belief in the meritocratic ideal.

Reflections on revolution (26 March 2009)

In the past, I've occasionally adopted the stance of an armchair revolutionary and opined about how to subvert the state apparatus and destabilize the corporate hegemony and that sort of thing. If pressed about it then, I would probably have had in mind a vague notion that Gramscian organic intellectuals -- people I would relate to and endorse -- would somehow lead the charge, that the efficacious force for radical social change would evolve out of the antiglobalization movement that disrupted the WTO meetings in Seattle in 1999. That was before I had even a rudimentary understanding of the financial system, and social change, in my mind, evinced itself only as a new virtuous life we all could be leading as individuals, not exploiting anyone with our consumerist purchases or any other manifestation of our destructive selfishness. Somehow everyone would be able to feel cool by doing the right thing -- which was more of an aesthetic matter than an ethical one -- and these virtuous new behaviors would never come to seem conformist or anything other than fulfilling and personally gratifying and expressive of our full uniqueness, etc., etc.

But unfortunately, that sort of personalized, self-contained revolution -- together with a few righteous protest marches here and there -- seems altogether irrelevant to the macro forces that shape the world's institutions and systems. Now I've become much more cynical, Burkean. I'm fearful that the "will of the people" becomes relevant only when it becomes a virulent populism, that the revolution will be led not by organic intellectuals who can articulate a plan of attack in the name of a righteous cause, but by demagogic opportunists who can tap into an atavistic rage among the masses, who can exploit their ignorance to achieve no goal other than the seizure of power for its own sake. The revolution often transpires as a series of chaotic, reactionary upheavals that no one can hope to control, regardless of their historical inevitability. In short, revolutions don't happen because smart people suddenly have more influence and scope to operate; they happen because the ignorant get riled up. This happens when it suddenly becomes impossible to ignore that their ignorance is being exploited by the "powerful."

As many have pointed out (though not so bluntly), that is what seems to be happening now in the wake of the serial bank bailouts. Well-informed critics have been saying for years that the real-estate bubble was unsustainable, that financial derivatives should be regulated, that leverage rations were too high, that ratings agencies faced conflicts of interest, that the quants' computer models were unreliable. But their complaints went unheeded; critics were marginalized further, and nothing changed. Now, after the fact, the same criticism is more likely to be raised in the tone Matt Taibbi adopts in this piece, which is well worth reading, even though the implications of its tone are scary. This sort of critique seems entirely righteous, and its deliberately inflammatory rhetoric is what seems to make it credible:

There are plenty of people who have noticed, in recent years, that when they lost their homes to foreclosure or were forced into bankruptcy because of crippling credit-card debt, no one in the government was there to rescue them. But when Goldman Sachs — a company whose average employee still made more than $350,000 last year, even in the midst of a depression — was suddenly faced with the possibility of losing money on the unregulated insurance deals it bought for its insane housing bets, the government was there in an instant to patch the hole. That's the essence of the bailout: rich bankers bailing out rich bankers, using the taxpayers' credit card.

The people who have spent their lives cloistered in this Wall Street community aren't much for sharing information with the great unwashed. Because all of this shit is complicated, because most of us mortals don't know what the hell LIBOR is or how a REIT works or how to use the word "zero coupon bond" in a sentence without sounding stupid — well, then, the people who do speak this idiotic language cannot under any circumstances be bothered to explain it to us and instead spend a lot of time rolling their eyes and asking us to trust them.

The degree to which we all feel somewhat powerless in the face of these monumental events warrants the contemptuous tone, which is proportionate to our impotence. In the run-up to the Iraq War, a similar impotence was felt, but generally only by those who could be ignored as pacifistic pansies from whom impotence was to be expected. The populace at large could enjoy a good war as a pep rally inspiring nationalistic pride. But there is no vicarious pride, no shock and awe to be found in the bank bailouts.

As this populist contempt builds, it worsens the conditions for doing business, the same conditions that bankers have already abused -- so it becomes a vicious spiral. Corruption seems like it may as well be the rule, from the top down to the little people. The tunneling Simon Johnson described becomes the rule for everyone -- the purpose of doing business is to loot, not to produce.

The furor over the AIG bonuses, et.al. has Felix Salmon wondering if class warfare has at last reached America.

In one corner are the technocrats not only in finance but also in government and the media: people who can understand the importance of distinguishing between a $250,000 base salary, a $2.5 million bonus, a $250 million bonus pool, a $2.5 billion bonus pool, a $250 billion bailout package, a $2.5 trillion monetary stimulus, and so on.
In the other corner are the real people, the angry people, the unemployed people -- and with them their elected representatives in Congress. They're not interested in such distinctions any more, they're not interested in what's fair or what's sensible. They saw their real wages stagnate for decades as the orgy of plutocratic self-congratulation reached obscene levels only to keep on growing. All they ever had was the American Dream: the idea that they, too, might one day become dynastically wealthy and join the overclass.
Now, of course, that dream is shattered.

Carson Gross, a guest poster at Basline Scenario, examines "the cultural costs of bailout nation" and reaches similar conclusions. "There may be technical solutions to the banking problem. However, if those solutions do enough damage to the cultural framework on which the system was based in the first place, even the most brilliant among them will be useless." The real problem, though, is that cultural framework may always have been inherently flawed, or as Marixsts argue, riven with unreconcilable contradictions.

What's frightening is that no one knows in precisely what form this incipient class warfare will erupt. Would anyone be shocked to see anti-Semitism spike over the next few months?

Update: This morning, the NYT tries to throw some cold water on populist fire with this sentimental letter from a former AIG trader.

Als sie die Banker holten, habe ich geschwiegen; ich war ja kein Banker (2 Feb 2009)

All of John Quiggin's essays on economic doctrines now refuted by the current crisis are worth reading. It illustrates well how rationalizing ideology is generated to paper over contradictions, unsustainable imbalances, and inevitable reckonings.

In his most recent post, about trickle-down theories, Quiggin predicts a reemergence of class struggle in the wake of economic failure. He concludes:

Politically, the failure of the trickle-down theory seems likely to produce a resurgence of the class-based politics pronounced dead in the era of economic liberalism. The contrast between the enforced austerity of any recovery period, and the massive, and massively unjustified, excesses of the financial elite during the boom period, will produce a political environment where phrases like “malefactors of great wealth” no longer seem quaint and old fashioned.

It's tempting to cheer this development as long overdue. But when we turn to politics merely out of dissatisfaction and disgruntlement (our chance at unfettered consumerism is receding!) rather than a habit of civic duty, the danger of reactionary policies and demagoguery increase dramatically. Class-based critique is not automatically demagoguery, as conservatives assert, but in a country that has had a hard time acknowledging the existence of a "power elite" and that can be complacent about the ideals of social mobility and equality of opportunity, class-based politics can quickly devolve into the more familiar forms of American ressentiment: racism, nationalism, anti-intellectualism, and so on.
Literary critic Walter Benn Michaels makes a similar point about the disappearance of class from public debate, arguing that novelists tend to focus on those same forces of ressentiment and congratulate ourselves on our moral clarity in rejecting them, instead of looking at, say, poverty and our complicity in perpetuating it.

So maybe it’s time to forget about the Holocaust for a while and focus on the free market instead, to stop congratulating ourselves on being against genocide and to start questioning what it means to be for free trade. Although it doesn’t appear anywhere on the Times’s list [of the best novels of the past 25 years], Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho is a far better novel than most of the ones that do, and the Psycho’s self-consoling reminder, “I am rich—millions are not,” has the merit of problematizing the upper middle class’s sense of its virtue rather than, like Roth and Morrison, pandering to it.

Basically, prejudices are easier to accept and use than the hard facts about the tenacity of social class and how privilege is preserved at a more fundamental economic level. When a country that rejects class as a category has to acknowledge its real existence as a malign social force, outlandish ideologies can start to emerge. During boom times, consumer capitalism insulates us from politics, keeps the bulk of us in a stupor of self-centered individualism. When the boom ends, we generally lack the competence to engage in democratic politics in a way that's consistent with the ideals we had been taking for granted. Suddenly feeling vulnerable, we lunge at anything that might promise to punish the forces that disrupted our fever dream of hedonism. The lunatic-fringe ideas that have been gathering in world's unkempt corners like so much lint can be swept up together and take substantial form; reasonable people, bewildered by heretofore unthinkable institutional failures, may find them suddenly plausible.

No doubt financiers have been over compensated and reckless; their myopic selfishness has damned us to several years of difficult readjustment that many in no way deserve. The difficulty will fall hardest on those who prospered least during the bubble. But the financiers weren't acting out of spite or evil; they were merely enacting the logic of the system. Their behavior reflects, as Robert Reich argues here, a structural problem. If our critiques don't ascertain that, they will be futile and dangerous. Bankers will be hanged, for the wrong reasons, and those same wrong reasons will authorize a host of subsequent injustices as yet untold.

Oh, what I want to know is are you kind? (6 Jan 2009)

Via 3QD comes a link to a Guardian article by Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor, lamenting the lost art of kindness. The gist is that the rise of rational self-interest under capitalism has made the inherent impulse to be kind seem suspect. Of course, this is hardly a new question; it was a dilemma that greatly exercised 18th century moral philosophers. The authors cite Hume (somewhat misleadingly) and attribute to him this rather maudlin commonsense view: "Any person foolish enough to deny the existence of human kindness had simply lost touch with emotional reality, Hume insisted: 'He has forgotten the movements of his heart.' " But the question of whether we have a moral sense that compels us to varying degrees to be benevolent stretches through much of the English philosophical tradition, most notably in Shaftesbury and Francis Hutcheson, an influence on Adam Smith, whose Theory of Moral Sentiments has a great deal to say about human motive and instinctual sympathy.

The moral sense was a kind of mental organ that conveyed the rightness or wrongness of a deed without our having to make recourse to logic or reasoning or upbringing. People of better quality were presumed to have a more strongly developed moral sense as a given, though it could be sharpened through exercise -- this is one of the early excuses for sentimental fiction; it trained readers when to cry as if on cue. Thanks in large part to sentimental fiction -- one of the first forms of entertainment to reach a broad audience -- the issue of the moral sense became the crux of the sensibility fad, one of the earliest examples of a commercially manufactured zeitgeist. Typically sentimental heroes and heroines are depicted as emotional sounding boards, passively responding to tragic events and modeling the reaction readers are supposed to have. Meanwhile, rational calculators pursing their interest are demonized as heartless and cruel, eradicating kindness of altruism and the rest of it. Luckily, God generally steps in to resolve the impracticalities of ignoring the realities of incipient capitalism. (Outside of fiction, we don't have that leisure.) The appeal to innate kindness was invariably a method for building up class distinction, whether to preserve aristocratic prestige from vulgar upstarts or to give the vulgar upstarts a way to compete with aristocrats on a level playing field. The moral sense, which anyone can claim, supplants the bloodline as the preferred mode of innate justification for class privilege. Sensibility also serves as a way of redeeming the cruelty of what Marx calls "primitive accumulation" -- the various methods of dispossession and immiseration and proletarianization necessary to launch capitalism in earnest. If you assert the durability of the human heart under siege, and furthermore imply that the heart's glory is revealed only under duress, you do much to justify that siege and embrace that duress as a necessary if not fortunate evil.

Also, by associating kindness with extraordinary heroism, it makes it into a kind of abnormality, as the authors of the Guardian piece point out. "Kindness is seen either as a cover story or as a failure of nerve. Popular icons of kindness - Princess Diana, Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa - are either worshipped as saints or gleefully unmasked as self-serving hypocrites. Prioritising the needs of others may be praiseworthy, we think, but it is certainly not normal." But I don't think it follows that kindness is now universally regarded "with suspicion" as the authors assert -- that seems like a purely polemical proposition intended to evoke the possibility of some revolution in friendliness after which everyone will smile on everyone, no polite nicety will go unperformed, we'll all ride on unicorns, sing and dance with peace and love, and anger will be an altogether forgotten emotion, a distant memory, like racism and sexism and all those other forms of discrimination we have defeated. Maybe if we solved some of society's obvious injustices, kindness would take care of itself. The authors assert that "Most people, as they grow up now, secretly believe that kindness is a virtue of losers." That is wrong; I think that they openly know that it is the condescension of the entitled.

There's a good chance that I am precisely the curmudgeonly sort of independence-loving troll the authors would like to gulag, but I found this utterly false:

There is nothing we feel more consistently deprived of than kindness; the unkindness of others has become our contemporary complaint. Kindness consistently preoccupies us, and yet most of us are unable to live a life guided by it.

Is there really such a deficit of kindness? I live in a reputedly unkind place, New York City, but I experience quotidian kindness from strangers on a near daily basis, whether it's someone reminding me that I've dropped my scarf, or someone slowing down in a revolving door so I don't get smashed, or someone exchanging a look with me about something odd going on, or what have you. It's hardly the "forbidden pleasure" the authors make it out to be. I get the sense of humdrum human solidarity so routinely that I only realize how much I take it for granted when I experience the false pleasantry in the suburbs from salespeople, who are virtually the only strangers I have occasion to interact with. Usually I have no need to be preoccupied by it and am not afflicted with the absence of opportunities to express it. That doesn't mean there are not also routine expressions of callousness either -- every time someone stops at the top of the subway steps to continue their cell-phone conversation, I am reminded of how easy it is to slip into a private world of blithe inconsiderateness. And when I am approached for spare change and fail to break my stride, my own callousness is brought home to me. But I'm hardly preoccupied by it and rarely complain of it.

I wanted to sympathize with the authors' concern with the dearth of kindness, which seems closely related to my cardinal complaint about society, its celebration of convenience as an end in itself. But the authors' nannyish tone about the subject, I must admit, made me increasingly annoyed. Probably because I am desperately rationalizing my meanness:

Kindness - that is, the ability to bear the vulnerability of others, and therefore of oneself - has become a sign of weakness (except of course among saintly people, in whom it is a sign of their exceptionality). No one yet says parents should stop being kind to their children. None the less, we have become phobic of kindness in our societies, avoiding obvious acts of kindness and producing, as we do with phobias, endless rationalizations to justify our avoidance.

But a concern with kindness seems like a fundamental evasion of more substantial problems; kindness itself is the rationalization, the way to short-circuit arguments about the institutional change we should be seeking. Alas, I am one of those "radicals and socialists determined to replace charity with justice, elite kindness with universal rights." I should recognize that instead, we just ought to worry about being nicer and less competitive. The authors recognize the "bullying" of kindness welded to power, but seemingly fail to recognize that they are inseparable. Kindness only becomes salient, becomes worthy of note, as a dimension of power. Outside of power, it's just an expression of the species' inherent activity (as the authors' reference to Darwin supports). It's nice to be nice, but something is not nice about noticing it and advertising it. At that point, kindness is being offered as justification for something unkind we are doing elsewhere.

A theory: When kindness is performed out of social necessity by those without the privilege of inward-looking selfishness and individualist isolation, it doesn't register as "kindness." When one finds they must make a conscious effort to be kind and must trumpet their efforts to have it recognized as such, it's probably already too late for them to be worrying about kindness -- they have already become the beneficiary of an unequal society to the degree that they are conscious of being or not being kind. If you think, "how kind of me," how kind have you really been? Being kind has already become an expression of class privilege, not human fellow feeling.

Institutionalizing savings (14 Oct 2008)

When contemplating the massive pile of debt Americans have racked up in recent years, it's easy to assign blame to individuals, impulsive and weak and blind to the virtues of savings. They are clearly aided in their imprudence by the consumerist culture, which assails them with ads and marketing ploys and seeks to persuade them (or at least reinforce the idea) that they are what they buy and their freedom is realized in the ability to spend -- that spending itself is the supreme achievement in society and the act for which we will secure the greatest recognition. It's tempting to assume people should simply show more impulse control and make better decisions.

But "For a New Thrift," a think-tank report cited in this BusinessWeek article about the allegedly imminent "New Age of Frugality," raises the important point that our tendency to save is dependent on the institutions around us. Human nature is inherently foolish, which is why we design social institutions to guide our behavior into constructive channels. This is particularly true about capital accumulation. Once, the legal framework prohibited much predatory lending, but as these laws were relaxed, the usury business thrived and gained for itself a veneer of respectability. The authors of the report argue that state-run lotteries abetted this, and helped vindicate the anti-thrift logic at work in payday-loan centers. As a result, society has split into two groups. The first is those who save responsibly, aided by investment institutions they have ready access to, whether through employer-based retirement savings programs or neighborhood banks or internet usage, and have the social capital to understand how to do it. The others are those who live from paycheck to paycheck, view the lottery as something other than a total sucker bet reserved only for chumps, and typically fall into revolving debt traps through lack of resources, financial savvy, and non-usurious alternatives. From the report:

The lottery class, on the other hand, lacks such ready access to pro-thrift institutional disciplines. Many members of the lottery class are not working in jobs that offer benefits such as 401(k)s, profit sharing, or retirement plans. (In 2004, 70 million of America’s 153 million wage earners worked for employers without a retirement plan.Nor are people in the lower half of the income distribution pursued by investment firms, tax accountants, or major banks. Instead, they are targets of payday lenders, subprime mortgage brokers, credit card issuers, tax refund lenders, and their friendly state lotteries. Their extra dollars do not find a convenient or automatic pathway into a savings account. Instead, they are drained off into high interest payments on predatory loans or used to support a daily lottery habit. Nor do they get tax-avoidance advice or tax advantages in return for their investments. More likely, they give up some of their tax refund dollars to franchise tax preparers in exchange for fast cash. And the leading public anti-thrift, the state lottery, imposes what amounts to an excise tax on them as well. In this way, millions of working Americans who might, under more favorable institutional circumstances, join the class of savers and investors, are now being recruited into a burgeoning population of debtors and bettors.

This seems worth remembering when considering the circumstances that poor people confront and the choices they make that seem so dubious to us, watching from outside, safe and coddled in a host of institutions geared toward preserving our privilege.

Inorganic democracy (10 July 2007)

One more post about Ellen Meiksins Wood's The Retreat From Class. Wood spends a chapter casting doubt on the idea that socialism might evolve naturally out of bourgeois democracy without the need for a revolution. She sees this as arguing that there can be socialism without having to redefine the economic organization of society, which wouldn't amount to socialism at all. Instead, she argues that the claim that politics and economics are independent of each other is one of capitalism's main lines of defense -- this separation allows the exploitative prerogatives of private property to coexist with a discourse of rights in the political sphere. The point at which political rights are used to question exploitation, the political system becomes a battlefield, and the privileged classes will use their concealed leverage, and the barriers inherent to limited representation, to protect their interests.

Wood then raises the point that it's dangerous to become enamored of democracy as an abstract end unto itself. It is a good, as far as socialists are concerned, to the extent that it allows for collective social action, but is there an inherent, organic human desire for democracy, that human nature demands democracy as an expression of its essence? Doesn't seem like it when you look at history. Here's what Wood writes about such advocates of democracy for its own sake:

We are given little guidance as to who in particular might want or need democracy, whether some people might want or need more -- or different aspects -- than others, how a social force capable of bringing it about might come into being -- or indeed why there should be any difficulty or conflict about it at all. If, on the other hand, the democratic drive is not universal, or not immediately so, and yet at the same time is not constituted by material conditions and class relations but is constructed by ideology and politics more or less "autonomously," then are we not again thrown back upon the old utopian elitism which Marx himself denounced? Must we not look to some privileged producers of "discourse" to implant the democratic impulse from without, giving a collective identity to an otherwise shapeless mass, creating the "people" and then imparting to them a socialist or democratic spirit which they cannot bring forth out of their own resources?

This not only sheds light on the hubris of the American project of exporting democracy to the Middle East as if the shapeless masses there were just waiting to be shaped into pseudo-Americans, but it's a reminder of the problem of classes requiring "organic intellectuals" to harness a group's potential power and direct it toward a goal that will continue to motivate and unify them. Because of this, the temptation is always there for those shut out from participating in the revolution to revise that requirement, and come up with ways in which the working class can be told what is in their best interests by those who don't necessary share them, or to argue (a la Laclau and Mouffe) that the working class is not necessarily pertinent to socialism. But there's no way of knowing where the class struggle is headed once the fellow travelers take the wheel.

Hipster politics (9 July 2007)

A longstanding conservative belief holds that until a class has risen above base material needs -- until it is free from necessity -- its politics are invalid, immature, determined, contingent, etc. In other words, they are not disinterested the way politicians, if they are to be truly noble and just, should be. This is the logic behind Rockefeller Republicanism: if politicians are already rich, they have no reason to be corrupt. And it's the same idea that animated cultural politics in the so-called age of sensibility, the late 18th century, when much was made of disinterestedness as a precursor to rational judgment and true feelings (beyond greedy calculation and selfishness), a trend that culminates in Kantian ethics. And as Ellen Meiksins Wood argues in The Retreat From Class, her diatribe against postmodernized socialists like Laclau and Mouffe (my looking for perspective on Hegemony and Socialist Strategy led me to it), the notion that the poverty disbars one from clear-headed politics goes back to Plato. But her main gripe is that the postmodernist presumption that politics and ideology are constituted through discourse and not necessarily material conditions essentially leads to a covert assumption that the working class (bound by "economism"; tainted by material needs) doesn't have the mental or ideological flexibility to promote a broadly successful socialist program. Instead, this would need to be led by a elite cadre of broad-minded intellectuals who can make the case for socialism without being tainted by the potential for getting something concrete out of it. Any desire for socialism beyond the altruistic, disinterested concern for justice and equality is discrediting for the practitioners of what Wood derides as the "New True Socialism" -- a reference to Marx's contempt for those who dreamed of a socialism so utopian that any action toward trying to achieve it was ultimately self-defeating in its apparent ethical impurity.

Wood's argument is useful for contextualizing what is so off-putting about the political feints of hipsters and other fashionable leftists, who want to consider themselves against capitalism but don't want to be involved in anything as grubby as class warfare. They want socialism without having their cocktail parties sullied with tiresome and potentially ill-mannered workers, who might not get their ironic references. Instead they can congregate amongst themselves, swap artworks and go on dumpster-raiding missions and reject animal products, and feel as though they are making a radical political intervention. Rather than focus on the exploitation of workers that sustains capitalism and class difference, and acknowledge that in this exploitation comes the animus to make a real assault on the system, they prefer to see themselves as exploited when the bands they like get too commercial or the neighborhood they live in gets more gentrified and less edgy. The evident distaste hipsters seem to have for those whose interests they occasionally claim to represent (as a pseudo-vanguard, though Wood is quick to point out that Laclau and Mouffe's argument virtually precludes the existence of a vanguard, since there is no real gap between material interests and political practice that they could help close -- it's all constituted ad hoc in discourse), makes their politics so easy for the right to ridicule or dismiss. Plus, they can use the hipster archetype to discredit all leftist politics, plausibly paint it all as self-aggrandizing and patronizing and egoistic, about establishing the do-gooder's identity rather than redressing any actual social problems. Unfortunately for John Edwards, he seems to be an emblem for this in the public's mind -- "he cries a lot for the poor, but he's still getting his fancy haircuts and making his millions." He comes across like an ideological carpetbagger, no matter ho wmuch he plays up his humble roots or courts union rank-and-filers.

In the Age of Sensibility, this phenomenon took the form of men and women of feeling doing things like visiting Bedlam or unwed-mothers' homes and making a show of their feeling hearts by weeping, etc. And if they couldn't do these things, they liked to read about doing them and fantasize. Often in fiction, these sensitive souls were not made for this world -- they felt too much -- and they would die some extremely noble, self-sacrificial death. But the point was to recognize and demonstrate your own virtue, prove that beyond a doubt -- those who suffered were just convenient occasions for the establishing the proofs, and thus in some ways their misfortunes were necessary, not something that was to be eradicated. Of course, conservatives argue all along that there's no eliminating others' suffering, which is often their own fault and ultimately their own responsibility to rectify. So conservatives can work to ameliorate suffering without seeming hypocritical. They never pretend not to feel superior to the objects of their pity, so that their charity comes with a feeling of superiority doesn't seem to invalidate it.

So the problem remains, the problem that has started me reading these political science texts -- how does one declass oneself so as to become a fellow traveler with the exploited classes without exacerbating their exploitation? In other words how does a bourgeois like me do anything to advance socialist causes without actually exploiting those who I mean to help via the process of establishing my political bona fides, for my own peace of mind? How does one contribute to the cause despite not being an "organic intellectual" of the class whose consciousness you imagine requires raising? I'm guessing there's no simple answer to this question, but I imagine it involves finding yourself way out of your comfort zone, doing the hard work of bridging across the habitus gap between classes, trying to communicate with those indifferent to your plight or your sacrifice. But maybe that's too pessimistic.

Terrorism and class struggle (5 July 2007)

Is Islamic terrorism an expression of class struggle? Or, in other words, is it a consequence of the deprivation that comes from disparities of income and the injustice that derives from systematic exploitation? Is it merely a religious expression of proletarian discontent? In his Capital column in today's WSJ, David Wessel takes a look at the research Princeton economist Alan Krueger has done on the closely related question of terrorism's relationship to poverty levels.

"As a group, terrorists are better educated and from wealthier families than the typical person in the same age group in the societies from which they originate," Mr. Krueger said at the London School of Economics last year in a lecture soon to be published as a book, "What Makes a Terrorist?"
"There is no evidence of a general tendency for impoverished or uneducated people to be more likely to support terrorism or join terrorist organizations than their higher-income, better-educated countrymen," he said. The Sept. 11 attackers were relatively well-off men from a rich country, Saudi Arabia....
"The evidence is nearly unanimous in rejecting either material deprivation or inadequate education as an important cause of support for terrorism or of participation in terrorist activities," Mr. Krueger asserts. The 9/11 Commission stated flatly: Terrorism is not caused by poverty.
So what is the cause? Suppression of civil liberties and political rights, Mr. Krueger hypothesizes. "When nonviolent means of protest are curtailed," he says, "malcontents appear to be more likely to turn to terrorist tactics."

This line of inquiry reminded me of some of the issues at stake in Laclau and Mouffe's Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. (I expended so much mental energy trying to extract coherent ideas from that dense thicket of opaque abstraction that I'll grasp at any occasion to make reference to it now.) Looking at the Marxist tenet that the working class has a unique interest in socialism, they argue that politics may not necessarily spring from economic interests -- that the politics and the ideology supporting them may develop independently, that they are contingent and constructed ad hoc by discursive practices at any given moment. (In some ways this is an elaborate way of making Frank Luntz's or George Lakoff's point about framing. Carefully crafted language can shape the debate surrounding issues in ways that influence people regardless of what their economic interests dictates they should believe.) Hence demagogues or interloping intellectuals can attempt to contrive a unified movement around basically any idea that generates a reaction, that seems to address sources of discontent, which themselves may be recharacterized in various ways by a skilled rhetorician.

If politics, when separated via language and identity-construction issues from economic grievances, indicates the possibility of the "radical democracy" Mouffe and Laclau theorize, then terrorism detached from economic misery may not be an symptom of the lack of democratic values, as Krueger and Wessel suggest in the article, but may instead be a twisted expression of them, a misguided belief that the "people's will" is being implemented directly rather than through institutional change, whether it be revolutionary or incremental. The idea that politics is merely a matter of discourse, of momentary tactics of garnering attention and magnetizing eyeballs, opens it to the conceivable possibility that it can be shifted dramatically not by building up awareness of class struggle, formalizing class unity, intensifying the contradictions inherent in the relations of production and so on -- working with a theorized praxis backed by a historical analysis -- but instead through sudden irrational interventions, terrorist acts designed to assign a different valence to governing notions in circulation. Such a theory of "radical democracy" may make desperate acts seem credible and efficacious. If you rule out subjects in history and plausible ends such subject may have, then terrorism -- a means with no achievable end -- seems a reasonable political practice.

Bourgeois blues (19 June 2007)

With poor people literally lining up at paycheck loan kiosks, it can seem distinctly whiny to fret about middle-class suffering, as law professor Elizabeth Warren did in this testimony to the Senate Finance Committee from May. But I found it pretty persuasive, at least for its insight into what Americans are consuming. Routine critiques of consumerism -- my own included -- tend to focus on frivolous overconsumption of branded products or status goods, but Warren points out that spending is trending downward for clothing, food, appliances and cars. Spending on electronics is up, but understandably so, considering recent technological changes. Instead, spending is going increasingly to what Warren labels as fixed costs -- housing, taxes, health care, child care, education and transportation expenses. These costs are exacerbated by the fact that both parents in a child-rearing household have to work, in part to keep up with these very expenses, creating a self-perpetuating cycle. (It also left me wondering why anyone chooses to raise children -- from a rational-economics standpoint, the incentives are all wrong; I suppose the desire for the music of children's laughter is an exogenous variable.)

Warren then offers some middle-class friendly policy prescriptions: subsidies for education, better health insurance, universal preschool, and more-stringent regulations on credit markets, which she details further in this piece for the journal Democracy. These seem like wise political ideas, since they are likely to appeal to voters in contested districts and battleground states. And they would probably help alleviate what Jacob Hacker has dubbed the Great Risk Shift, the recent tendency of government rescinding the safety net it once promised. Above all, such prescriptions would assure that the middle class lifestyle would appear as an entitlement to those already possessing it, but they may not do much to give hope to those on the outside that they ever might enjoy such privilege. Directing entitlements at the middle class may only help the middle class guard its turf, to build the walls higher, or help them maintain a safe distance from the lower classes they are trying to differentiate themselves from.

Brand equity and class warfare (10 January 2007)

Sometimes your money really isn't good enough. Here's something to remember the next time you hear an argument that extols how purchasing power is emboldening democracy: Today's WSJ has an article about Tiffany's strategy to alienate existing customers -- trend jumpers, teenagers, aspirational lower-class folk; the wrong sort of customers, apparently -- and the huge profits they brought the company and shareholders in order to make the brand as a whole seem more exclusive. The company believes its image is ultimately more valuable in the long run than whatever profits it surrenders by pricing its once popular line of silver jewelry out of the reach of the little people: " 'The large number of silver customers did represent a fundamental threat -- not just to the business but to the core franchise of our brand,' says Tiffany CEO Michael Kowalski." The company was frustrated that its initial price raises couldn't scare away enough consumers, so it boosted prices again and again until demand was finally quelled.

Tiffany is declaring essentially that it's more important to make slim profits by selling to rich people than to make big profits selling to everyone. "Like a growing number of publicly traded luxury-goods makers, Tiffany is attempting to walk a razor-thin line: broadening offerings to the upper-middle-classes while pitching privilege to the truly rich. The dilemma is particularly common these days, as investors clamor for sales growth on one side and fickle luxury buyers demand exclusivity on the other." This is pitched as a reasonable long-term strategy, but what Tiffany is trying to preserve is not profitability but a class structure that it has positioned itself to police. In our democracy, the state has forsworn much of its traditional role of conserving privilege to the people who already have it. This opens up the field to capitalists. In the absence of a repressive state enforcing castes, companies like Tiffany spring up like rent-a-cops to do the necessary policing of class boundaries, controlling supplies of positional goods and keeping the lid on aristocratic social capital. Jealously guarding its supply of exclusivity -- which is valuable less in monetary terms than in its priceless, near timeless, significance to class antagonisms that predate the cash economy -- Tiffany will do what it can to make sure that its fine, upstanding name is not used to give the hoi polloi any dignity. Apparently, preserving that class gulf is more valuable than any cash profits could ever be.