Desire as craftsmanship (23 Jan 2011)

I wrote an essay for the New Inquiry about traveling. I argue that we travel to try to get away from the ease with which we can want things, a modification on Guy Debord's point that traveling can make consuming the same mass-produced goods seem fresh and exciting. "Tourism — human circulation packaged for consumption, a by-product of the circulation of commodities — is the opportunity to go and see what has been banalized."

With consumerism, the goods themselves are often a pretense; what we want is to consume ourselves in some new posture, absorbed by some new desire. (This is one of the dimensions of what Debord calls spectacular consumption.) In consumerism, consumption is a production of the self, not simply a matter of using up some utility-supplying good. In The Culture of New Capitalism Richard Sennett suggests that "for the consumer, stimulation lies in the very process of moving on" -- of finding something new to desire. This energizes and involves our imagination, and thereby seems to increase the dimensions of ourselves. The more we can think to want, the bigger a person we are by consumer society's terms. Expanding the capacity for desire builds the personal brand of the consumer, whose job, after all, is to consume well.

Our selfhood seems bound up with the ease with which we can desire the right things -- a facility that travel takes away from us, forces us to rebuild from guidebooks, instinct, conversation with strangers, and so on. That rebuilding process, I suspect, is what hard-core travelers enjoy most about the experience. But tourists, who lack such improvisational skills, get something else out of travel: the sublime pleasure of having that high-functioning consumer self destroyed -- knowing all along, of course, that it can be safely readopted and even cherished with invigorated appreciation when one gets back home again. How wonderful it is to know what to want, and to know where to be taught to want more. Never mind that this institutionalizes discontent at the very core of our self, thus making it hard to truly love anything. Committing to a particular desire, to nurturing and growing it rather than replacing it, finds little cultural support.

Marketing discourse works not only to make generating new desires easier, but also, crucially, to make the experience of new desires pleasurable, as an increase of personal possibility, as a paradoxical kind of freedom. Desire may seem like bondage, as if one is controlled by need. Consumerism instead makes it appear as the escape from monotony, from the iron cage of ordinary life -- the boldness to imagine alternatives. The consumerist utopia! Here's how Sennett, who's ultimately skeptical, limns it:

What I've described are pleasures which consumers make in things, imposed pleasure which a sober utilitarian would and doubtless should suspect. And the declaration that the "sky's the limit" could be defended on political grounds: people might be set free by dreaming of something beyond the routines and confines of everyday life. In the same way they might be set free by feeling they've used up and exhausted these perfectly workable ways of getting by. Aren't people set free when they transcend in spirit what they directly know, use, or need? The consuming passion might be another name for liberty.

Desire becomes an expression of the craftsmanship of consumption. And consumption itself becomes, as Sennett argues, theater.

The rise of connoisseurship makes this plain; we become proud of knowing how to consume better, how to refine desire to the point where it is never quite satisfied and we are always still hungering for the more exquisite experience. But this refinement doesn't represent the overcoming of restlessness; it becomes a way of perfecting its expression ans a positive quality -- I am restless, thus I am vital. Connoisseurship changes from being a deep, almost selfless knowledge of a subject that one has submitted to, and instead appears as a deep commitment to elaborate the self.

The ethic of connoisseurship seems to militate against convenience, but it's more accurate to say that convenience fuels connoisseurship, making us unimpressed with things simply working, with goods simply satisfying us. The inconvenience of travel makes this dynamic obvious for the tourist, who wants to consume for self-aggrandizement, but suddenly finds it hard to merely consume for sustenance. Sennett notes how convenience divorces us from how things actually work, freeing up that energy to be rechanneled as marketing (and human-potential psychology) encourages us, into the further fashioning of the self.

So connoisseurship no longer is an elitist matter of mediating "good taste" to heathens. It is instead within every consumer's reach; connoisseurship has become the craft of making a perfect self within consumer society's constraints -- namely how automation and capitalist relations have stripped away most other sources of craft knowledge in our lives. Sensual enjoyment falls by the wayside of performing desire -- having a food blog, say, rather than tasting food. Of course one can do both, but they are in constant tension; as fiction writers have always know, it is hard to observe life and live it at the same time. Consumerism tends to make us all life at a meta level, since the self is never given but always being constructed -- the self can never simply experience things but must be watched for what its experiences say about it. Social media is the platform for this metaconsumption of our identity and those of our friends. There, we share well-groomed information about ourselves the way old connoisseurs would have shared it about their particular ruling passion. Social media remakes the idea of "being useful to others" -- that is, of socially necessary labor that we all want to perform to feel recognized -- in its own image in terms of its peculiar version of sharing: sharing details about oneself first and foremost. Narcissism can then masquerade as utility.

Bourdieu and Bouncers (16 June 2010)

TMN linked to this article about recent research by sociologist Lauren Rivera, who worked in a New York City nightclub that preys on the status conscious. She earned the trust of the doormen there and interviewed them about how they decide to let people in.

“Bouncers are status judges who make hundreds of status decisions every night. They do it by having hundreds of patrons line up and on the basis of very little information, they size up who will be an esteemed customer,” Rivera says.

Basically, she was investigating how status can be conveyed and interpreted in an instant, and what sort of skills are required for both signalers and decoders. Also, to what degree are those skills consciously and reflexively deployed, and to what degree are they simply internalized, an automatic way of interacting with the world -- assimilated into the habitus.

The article foregrounds this finding:

Through conversations and observations, she found that bouncers ran through a hierarchical list of qualities to determine in seconds who would enhance the image of the club and encourage high spending. Social networks mattered more than social class, or anything else for that matter.

If you are recognizably famous or connected to someone who is, you get in. You generally don't get in, apparently, if you are (a) not white or (b) not a woman. Not exactly a startling discovery.

More interesting is Rivera's report that bouncers look down on bribes, suggesting that they are invested in their ability to accurately assess something more nebulous than raw wealth -- that they are proud of being able to distinguish souls of gold from souls of bronze. This suggests that they have a nonfinancial stake in making the sort of social and cultural capital that gets you into clubs nonconvertible. The value of those capitals lies in their inability to be priced and sold -- they are not commensurable. They serve as a kind of stringently controlled currency of which the bouncers of all people are the de facto central bankers.

It may be that status is always trying to wash itself of the taint of the money or the primitive accumulation, as Marxists call it, to which it is ultimately traceable. People with status want to close off the route they took to acquire it, protect their place on the perch, so always there is the effort to make status ineffable, a matter of subtle distinctions and elusive signifiers of style. Status must obfuscate its origins; it must seem inevitable and inborn, a matter of blood. But in order to maintain that illusion, would-be aristocrats need to hire gatekeepers, like these club bouncers -- in other words, you still need muscle, an authority that arbitrates what is stylish and what isn't, and enforces the distinction so you don't have to dirty your own hands. The effortlessness, the sprezzatura of the stylish is enabled by minions.

Conspicuous consumption is only a clumsy first step toward a different sort of command over social resources, one which can mobilize large pools of labor devoted to nothing more than protecting your status. An entire bureaucracy of status workers are made necessary by the need to keep social and cultural capital distinct from money, comprising not just bouncers but designers and editors and trend spotters (the ideological bouncers) as well as the more traditional types of servants, the personal assistants and the groomers and so forth.

Status laundering calls for a delicate balance. This bureaucracy must be ceded enough power (or cultural capital) to make status distinctions credible, real, efficacious, but it can't have enough power to acquire too much status for its own ranks. The bouncers can't get the idea to let themselves into the club.

Consumerism and the cold war (20 May 2010)

I have an essay up at Generation Bubble about how the cold war shaped what has become the de facto moral mission of consumerism -- protecting "freedom" defined as individualistic self-fashioning through consumer choices. To put that more plainly, consumerist ideology holds that shopping is a sacred right, and purchasing power is political power. Consumerism was the reward for being born in the West, the best justification for a political and economic system that generated vast and worsening inequality.

Naturally, consumerism subordinates (or rejects) the tenets of the counterdiscourse to it developed in the Eastern bloc, the official ideology of leveling, equal opportunity to all, and personhood through civic responsibility. That ideology, by all accounts, was routinely violated in everyday life under communism in myriad ways; poverty, it turns out, doesn't encourage much solidarity or sympathy, and it takes a massive and invasive state apparatus to suppress the tendency to want to individuate ourselves at the seeming expense of others. What I was trying to get at in the essay is how the ideals of egalitarianism and personal autonomy seem to serve as the horizons of each other, and whether this is a failure of our political imagination or if its an illusion generated to sustain the apathy that protects consumerism or if it's something else.

Programming the poor (1 April 2010)

At Time.com, Barbara Kiviat has a rundown of a New York City pilot program (modeled after Mexico's Oportunidades) in which poor people are given cash rewards for things like going to the dentist and having a job and, at one point, signing up for a library card. It's not that the cost of the dentist visit was covered (though that may have been the case); it's that the program paid people a reward for doing it. This New York Times article has details on how well this has worked. Apparently, results were mixed.

It seems peculiar and patronizing to have to incentivize these sort of behaviors; you would think it is incentive enough to reap the benefits of clean teeth and steady employment and so on. The theory behind the program seems to be that the poor, by virtue of their poverty, are incapable of responding to incentives like those above them in the class hierarchy; they are unable to grasp such subtleties as the benefits of hygiene. Instead, like computers programmable only in a single language of ones and zeros, the poor understand only one sort of incentive: cash. Their condition -- their "complicated, resource-constrained lives" as Kiviat puts it -- has presumably made them morally one-dimensional. Then, though initially motivated by cash, the poor learn by doing what it feels like to experience the non-cash benefits of virtuous behavior. And this apparently will make them change their ways and break the intergenerational poverty trap.

Kiviat praises the empiricism associated with the implementation of this program, so I feel churlish throwing in my two-bit speculations. But I'm not really even getting two bits for them, so I will toss them out there anyway. Cash payments seem a bizarre way to try to change the habitus of the poor. Aside from being sort of self-contradictory (giving cash incentives to try to get people to see the virtue of doing certain things for their own intrinsic value) it basically ignores the importance of social capital. To be able to have your shit together, so to speak, requires having a stable footing in an entire communal system. It means having better transportation, better connections, better access to amenities, friends who can share better solutions to life's problems, etc. Despite its limitations, Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickeled and Dimed offers some insight into this -- how poverty breaks down the middle-class approach to life and brings forth what can appear to middle-class people to be a bizarre and incoherent lifestyle, but is in fact life lived in perpetual triage mode. The poverty habitus derives from that, and I guess I am skeptical that crisis mode can be easily unlearned.

I always think of the same incident when I think of habitus-related questions. About 15 years ago, I was on campus at a university where I was an instructor, and a frazzled woman approached in a panic. People were discreetly avoiding eye contact with her and shifting their direction so as to not engage with her, sort of what happens when a homeless person passes through a subway car. I wasn't fast enough and abruptly she blurted a question out at me about how she could find a particular room number. I asked which building and she didn't know. I shrugged and began walking away but she continued to yell at me, demanding to know where this room was. And she explained that she had to show up at this room to make sure she didn't violate the terms of her parole or probation or something, and she was supposed to be their 15 minutes ago, and on and on. It was all on a paper she got in the mail, but she forgot to bring it. Maybe if I was a different sort of person, I would have taken her somewhere on campus where they would have that sort of information on hand (not that I knew of such a place). But instead I just started walking away faster.

At the time, I kept thinking, if I were in her predicament, I would have tried to show up for this highly critical appointment at least an hour ahead of time, so I could avoid going back to jail. And I wouldn't be counting on total strangers to know what the hell I was talking about if I showed up late. And so on. But it dawned me eventually I had no idea what sort of circumstances the woman was in the midst of and I probably shouldn't apply my frame of reference to her problems. It's more useful to think instead about what the prerequisites are for being prepared and consider how the social coping behavior I take for granted is actually a status marker, and then when I walked away quickly, I was basically trying to preserve my advantage.

The meaning of human capital and the future of the humanities (28 March 2010)

Is college just for the credential, or do people actually learn anything? What improves the college graduates "human capital": what they learned in class or the mere fact of the diploma? Considering the policy of lax grading, just getting in to the "elite" schools seems to function as proof that a student deserve a permanent competitive advantage in the labor market. But that would seem to make the entire edifice of secondary education a big charade, and the professors who are involved with it clearly aren't that cynical or in such colossal bad faith. And motivated students seem to appreciate learning for its own sake, whether or not that helps them gain an economic footing in society. But if we learn for the sake of fulfilling our human potential, but the economy denies us a way of making that fulfillment socially meaningful, we become drop-outs of a different sort, free-loading off society pursuing our own esoterica while contributing nothing. Or the alternative is that we are being trained into a condition of inevitable frustration, "overqualified" for whatever socially necessary but soul-crushingly dull tasks fall our way.

So what is the deal with higher education under capitalism? Is it a consumer good (entertainment for students) or a raw material of production (inchoate knowledge transmitted and transformed into human capital to be applied practically in the economy at large)? Is it a mandatory furlough period to ease job market pressures? A way to stock individuals with useful modes of information processing and a diverse base of more or less random learning that may or may not yield surprising ideas for innovation? A period during which the critical networking skills for the "social factory" are honed? Is it a way of sorting workers into their various destinies based on their ability to figure out the game of capitalism (how to acquire status that can masquerade as hard capital) and master its strategy (figure out who is worth knowing and how to manipulate them into helping you)?

Mark Thoma linked to this post by Frances Woolley, which questions whether human capital is a myth, and highlights what is at stake.

For example, if what is taught at universities actually makes people more productive, then simply taking university courses should be enough increase earnings. In fact, to get much of a payoff from university education, you have to finish your degree (the “sheepskin effect” ). One reason education pays is that completing a degree “signals” your ability, determination, competence and general stick-with-it-ness.
Perhaps we should think of human capital as a fairy tale, a reassuring bedside story. But the power of fairy tales is that they reflect certain elemental truths about the human condition. People who teach economics may find it deeply comforting to think that their pay is justified by their high levels of human capital.
But human capital is more than a comforting story – it is a myth that shapes our understanding of the world and thus public policy. Ontario’s government is urging universities to increase retention rates, so everyone who starts university completes a degree. If the human capital theory is true, then this is sound policy: more students completing university means more human capital means a more productive economy. If, however, the value of university education is as a signal of ability, then one of the most important things that universities do is fail students. Unless some students fail, the ability to complete a university degree confers no special distinction on the graduate.
Whether or not human capital theory is true determines the best response to the demographic challenges ... If education makes people more productive, then more education can increase the productivity of our economy – possibly enough so that fewer workers are able to support the large number of pensioners. If, however, education is basically about sorting workers – if people are getting more and more degrees in hope of eventually capturing that one elusive stable professional job with benefits – then the best way of responding to the demographic crisis is to scale back post-secondary education. Doing so would effectively increase the size of the working age population substantially, easing demographic problems.

Scaling back education is hard to accept from that utopian point of view that it enriches human potential independent of its social benefits -- it helps people live richer lives. Thoma's autobiographical anecdote in his response to Woolley is a pretty good example of that. He defends education for its own sake rather than for productivity, and concludes: "I believe education is the key to a better future and I will not give up trying to increase access to as many people as possible. I don't care at all if it dilutes the signal to employers, they'll just have to figure out some other way to cull the herd."

That echoes a point Marcuse makes in Eros and Civilization:

Productivity ... expresses perhaps more than any other idea the existential attitude in industrial civilization; it permeates the philosophical definition of the subject in terms of the ever transcending ego. Man is evaluated according to his ability to make, augment, and improve socially useful things. Productivity thus denigrates the degree of the mastery and transformation of nature: the progressive replacement of an uncontrolled natural environment by a controlled technological environment. However, the more the division of labor was geared to utility for the established productive apparatus rather than for the individuals -- in other words the more the social need deviated from the individual need -- the more productivity tended to contradict the pleasure principle and to become an end in itself.

But, he argues, historical conditions are so improved by productivity that individuals can begin to see the way back to their own needs, afforded enough leisure to conceive strategies for ending "the subjugation of man to his labor." Education begins to push in two contradictory directions, honing productivity while teaching people not to waste that productivity on meaningless work and channel it instead into their own potential.

At its heart, Eros and Civilization celebrates education for its own sake and not as preparation to reproduce the existing social order. When you strip away the Freudian claptrap, Marcuse's argument is basically that we misapprehend the needs of the system for our own wants and needs. In other words, we become convinced that we need to go to college to get a job rather than to learn, that the job market will reveal to us what we should do with our lives and our time. This he calls "surplus repression," as it directs us toward alienated labor (working for somebody else and not on something that we are personally invested in) that is not really necessary any longer for survival (at least in developed nations -- whether we are obligated to perpetuate capitalism in the West so its benefits can trickle down and liberate the poorer countries is a different question). Marcuse: "The elimination of surplus repression would per se tend to eliminate not labor but the organization of the human existence into an instrument of labor." That is basically what's at stake in defining the purpose of higher education: either it is worker training and sorting, supported by capital and carried out for its benefit, or it is a refuge from that organizing logic, a place where one learns what it can mean to be a human. (Hence, the humanities.)

A Theory of Communicative Twittering (30 Jan 2010)

I think it's safe to say we can finally all throw out our two-volume edition of The Theory of Communicative Action, as Jürgen Habermas is now Twittering, and finally -- finally -- anything worth knowing that he has to say will be properly distilled to a few pithy sentences.

Some will interpret Habermas's use of Twitter as an endorsement of the medium -- I can't tell if that's what Tyler Cowen means to imply by linking the appearance of a Habermas feed with Habermas's notion of an "ideal speech situation." I was coincidentally reading a paper called "Uniting Critical Theory and Public Policy to Create the Reflexively Defiant Consumer, " by Ozanne and Murray, which offered this explanation of the ideal speech situation:

Habermas reasoned that as we enter into dialogue with others, we anticipate that (a) others will speak so that we can understand them (i.e. the norm of comprehensibility), (b) they will communicate their true intentions (i.e. the norm of sincerity), (c) they will communicate based on a shared normative context (i.e. the norm of legitimacy), and (d) they will speak the truth (i.e. the norm of truthfulness).

If these norms are met, we can communicate without "distortion," as long as there is "general symmetry" in the ability "to select and employ speech acts."

Do Twitter's arbitrary limitations help accomplish the norms and general symmetry? It seems they do the opposite, that they serve as an alibi for distortions, using technology (and the convenience-minded brevity it inspires us to chase, in a fruitless quest to always consume more) as an excuse to drift further from the ideal situation. Though it puts anyone with steady internet access on equal terms with regard to broadcasting their messages and gathering those willing to be counted as reading those messages, and it provides an ostensibly public and broadly accessibly place in which a conversation among equals can occur. But that comes at the cost of truncating thought and curtailing its deliberative component -- the point is to concentrate one's expression or make it copious. It seems designed to reduce comprehensibility, sincerity, truthfulness in favor of the legitimacy that comes from publicity itself, from participating in a real-time expression of the zeitgeist and knowing your post may be come up a real-time search for the au courant meme or hashtag. It redirects expression toward the goal of promoting one's own timeliness. It quantifies one's sense of being relevant, and offers new ways to express existing hierarchies that subvert democratic ideals. In short, the Twitter medium is not a window through ideology; it is ideology.

The social factory (14 Dec 2009)

I have a new post up at Generation Bubble about consumerism as disguised labor, uncompensated peer production. It draws heavily from "multitude" theory, and Paolo Virno in particular. The gist is that we don't have much labor to offer that could be exploited in terms of operating machinery or that sort of thing, so the new way of extracting surplus value from our "labor" in what the Italian theorists like to call the "post-Fordist economy" is to turn our social being into a kind of covert work that we perpetuate throughout the day, but in forms that can be co-opted by capitalist firms. The various ways in which we collaborate and socialize with one another becomes value for a business somewhere. Work processes, as Virno explains, become diverse, but social life begins to homogenize in the sense that our identity becomes something we must prove in the public sphere -- we all become concerned with the self as brand. (See Virno's claims here.) This results in the "valorization" -- Marxist jargon for value enhancement -- "of all that which renders the life of an individual unique" -- which is to say our concern for our uniqueness, our identity in social contexts, becomes a kind of value-generating capital, or rather a circulating commodity.

This plays out in seemingly innocuous ways. It can be a matter of hyping a product free of charge but using it or talking about it. Or this can be a matter of going to parties with co-workers, learning to get along better and therefore increasing the efficiency of processes on the job. Or it is a matter of behaving politely among strangers, extending a system of politeness and trust that can be harvested economically as a reduction in transaction costs. Or it can be a matter of friending one another online and creating a social map whose byways can later be retraced by marketing concerns. Web 2.0 is basically a set of tool for capturing that labor, for which we are not compensated with wages but with a stronger sense of self (we shape our identity by promoting products, essentially, associating ourselves with them and attenuating their emotional valence) and a feeling that we are relevant, part of a broader discourse, being recognized for knowing things. As Virno claims, "wage labor is interaction" now. In The Wealth of Networks economist Yochai Benkler writes of this phenomena more positively, identifying ways in which non-market "social" production and "sharing" can nonetheless fulfill economic functions To put it in sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's terms, our habitus -- our manifest and class-bound way of being in the social world -- is transformed into a productive force without our conscious consent by the way various social media have infiltrated everyday life.

The concept threatens to be so broad as to be useless, in that seems to embrace all behavior and reinterpret it as productive consumption -- not clear if that is a product of consumer society or the febrile mind of theorists. Naturally I think it is the former.

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.

Income inequality and returns to ability (10 May 2007)

Economists Gary Becker and Kevin Murphy recently mounted a defense of income inequality on the grounds that it is a sign of increased returns to human capital -- in other words, better-educated and higher-skilled people made more, which is as it should be. Hence they view progressive taxation as being tantamount to a tax on ability.

For many, the solution to an increase in inequality is to make the tax structure more progressive—raise taxes on high-income households and reduce taxes on low-income households. While this may sound sensible, it is not. Would these same indi­viduals advocate a tax on going to college and a subsidy for dropping out of high school in response to the increased importance of education? We think not. Yet shifting the tax structure has exactly this effect.

This seems hardly an exact analogy. Those in favor of progressive taxation would likely favor redistributing some of that money so that others could afford to acquire the skills and education that created the gap in the first place.

But the underlying question of whether an egalitarian distribution of outcomes rather than opportunities is possible (and desirable) remains -- can these concepts be neatly separated, as is often the tendency? Becker and Murphy's argument relies on the idea that merit is on the whole rewarded and they have an impressive battery of graphs and statistics to support that case that I'm not remotely qualified to critique. The implication that we live in a merit-rewarding society seems to require many codicils and exceptions and hedges, most of which revolve around what constitutes merit (being born rich and connected -- this has obvious value and constitutes a kind of human capital; is it being lumped in with the human capital of education? If this kind of old-boys network facilitates productivity, should it be condemned or does it have merit, by that definition?)

So my mind turned to a more abstract question: Is inequality a matter of the return coming from relative differences in skills in a population, or is the return absolute to the skills themselves, no matter how widely they are distributed? If the former is the case, then this would ultimately impinge on equal opportunity, as those with advantages will in accordance with rationally seek to consolidate them rather than let others catch up. Those left behind initially will remain behind, because the meaning and value of the skills they acquire is always defined in relation to those ahead of them, who are presumably maintaining their skills lead.

This is especially the case with education, where the abilities acquired are less significant than the signaling value of the institutions involved. At the Economist's blog, Will Wilkinson, citing Bryan Caplan, makes the point

that university diplomas mostly function to signal prior competence, and that time and money spent in school is largely wasted. If [Caplan]'s right, Becker and Murphy's emphasis may be misguided, and I suspect Bryan may in fact be right, despite the fact that he's never won a Nobel or Clark prize and wears shorts in the winter. In which case it strikes me that there is a huge entrepreneurial opportunity for whomever can come up with an alternative scheme of credible human capital certification. Who cares if people develop their skills by attending classes at their local college, listening to free lectures from MIT, learning on the job, or by sitting in their mom's basement gaining mad hacking skilz? I don't. But employers do.

The point is, signaling communicates relative rather than absolute values -- the Harvard degree has more credibility than the State U. degree, and if we made it such that everyone could get a Harvard degree, some new elite institution would arise to take its place. Whereas the human capital that enhances productivity and quality of life relates not to the signals, which preserve class distinction, but to the actual skills -- the ability to build useful machines and develop useful medicines and so on. The question then becomes do we need the class system to motivate people to pursue the skills, and does coasting on the signaling power at one's disposal -- the habitus and social capital and networking connections -- inhibit the development of their actual capabilities such that they are incompetent when they wind up in power (a certain North American world leader comes to mind). All of this makes me wonder if an alternative human capital certification program is even possible given our current set of social relations -- the University of Phoenixes of the world don't seem in any danger of supplanting Princeton and Yale anytime soon, but the blogosphere may prove a viable arena for autodidacts to build their reputation. (Or destroy it.)

Difficult poetry (25 April 2007)

The other day I was complaining about the way we tend to promote the notion that entertainment's main function is to facilitate self-absorption as a kind of escape. Pop culture often offers vicarious entertainments that are rather undemanding and that flatter us for our limitations, seeming to efface them as we give ourselves over to the entertainment product. In other words, they congratulate us for not thinking.

Having just floated that argument, I found this recent Slate piece by poet Robert Pinsky (a former U.S. poet laureate, if that means anything) serendipitous. He celebrates difficulty, almost for its own sake:

Difficulty, after all, is one of life's essential pleasures: music, athletics, dance thrill us partly because they engage great difficulties. Epics and tragedies, no less than action movies and mysteries, portray an individual's struggle with some great difficulty. In his difficult and entertaining work Ulysses, James Joyce recounts the challenges engaged by the persistent, thwarted hero Leopold and the ambitious, narcissistic hero Stephen. Golf and video games, for certain demographic categories, provide inexhaustible, readily available sources of difficulty.

Difficulty, in short, makes accomplishments meaningful and require us to focus our energies rather than dissipate them. But the problem with difficult poetry is not just that it's hard to understand after a casual breezy read. It's proudly elitist, in that it rewards those who bring the necessary intellectual capital (the result of time and money investments in education as well as what is inherited from literary-minded parents). Pinsky tries to circumvent this by suggesting that poetry can be enjoyed even if you don't really understand what the author may have intended (after all, you wouldn't want to be found guilty of committing the intentional fallacy) and that's almost seems like claiming you can still enjoy chess just by moving the pieces around the board any which way. But it's more that he advocates reading poetry as a rewarding process regardless of the end result, provided it's undertaken with the proper seriousness of intent.

But again we confront a habitus problem -- the necessary attitude for the interpretive process is a learned skill, and its rewards are learned rewards -- we learn to feel rewarded by certain sorts of insights and conclusions, and what they signal about our intelligence and perceptiveness. Reading difficult poetry is no different from listening to difficult music; it opens one to the accusation of pretentious showing off. The question is whether it is possible to separate the enjoyment one gets from reading the poem from the pleasure given by being recognized for reading it. Can you read poetry without consuming it like a lifestyle product, and if so, does the difficulty of the work have anything, really, to do with the distinction?

Job consciousness (24 April 2007)

As part of my autodidactically administered remedial course in political economy (my reading randomly in books I see mentioned elsewhere), I've been reading Mancur Olson's The Logic of Collective Action, which develops the ramifications of a fairly straightforward point: In order for large groups (that is a group in which it's not immediately obvious how much any one member's contribution adds to the group's overall accomplishments) to be successful in pursuing their collective aims, individuals in the group must be compelled to work together for the common aim rather than follow what rationality tells them is their best interest (i.e., become a free rider). This requires organizational costs be met and discipline (the closed union shop, for example) be enforced.

In the midst of making a point about union membership, he cites a passage from Selig Perlman's Theory of the Labor Movement that I found incredibly depressing:

The scarcity consciousness of the manual worker is the product of two main causes ... The typical manualist is aware of his lack of capacity for availing himself of economic opportunities and knows himself neither the born taker of risks nor the possessor of a sufficiently agile mind ever to feel at home in the midst of the uncertain game of competitive business. Added to this is the conviction that for him the world has been rendered one of scarcity by an institutional order of things, which purposely reserved the best opportunities for landlords, capitalists, and other privileged groups.

Though Perlman is criticized for preaching that workers should orient themselves toward business rather than class struggle (rejecting the idea that intellectuals could organize the working class from without to fulfill socialist aims -- for Perlman, organic intellectuals were nascent capitalists, not Gramscian cultural critics), this description of how workers discourage themselves from entrepreneurship rings true, anticipating ideas Sennett and Cobb spell out in The Hidden Injuries of Class. The implication is that workers lack the social capital to lift themselves out of their class, that their inherited habitus includes what Perlman calls "job consciousness" -- a deeply felt certainty that opportunities are limited. A truly egalitarian society would work to rectify this feeling via the educational system, but because American education is shot through with socialization processes, it tends to reinforce the sense of destiny one absorbs from the relative position of one's parents.

The rich have no monopoly on opportunity -- there are many rags-to-riches stories we feed ourselves -- but growing income inequality seems predicated on the rich being in a position to act on their wider opportunities and make the most of them, and use the rewards to continually reshape the playing field to further favor them when they take risks. Any cursory look at successful capitalists reveals how often they fail and how many more chances they are afforded, mainly because they feel entitled to them and have the networks of supporters to drawn on to make them happen -- to secure them credit, or what have you. George W. Bush is perhaps the epitome of this limitless ability to fail without feeling the consequences personally. But for most people, there is instead a crushing sense of limits that generally masquerades as "being realistic." We accept what is on offer from the world, rather than trying to shape our own lives, because the instinct for making ideas operational -- for not being content with the daydream -- hasn't been bred in. We tend to assume that penchant for daydreaming, for settling, for "being realistic" is a matter of personal character, but culturally we emphasize entertainment as precisely this kind of impotent escape. We prize convenience and reconfigure risk aversion as a kind of quiet nobility. We make the martyr complex a species of politeness we might pride ourselves on.

When American society addresses this confidence gap, it tends to promote more individualized attention as a solution (teaching self-esteem, of the joys of compliance as compensatory for the lack of meaningful work -- "it's nice to go home and veg out") rather than address the institutional issues, the tendency for there to be exponentially increasing returns to wealth and an ever-increasing accumulation of social capital at the top of the income pyramid. Is it possible to redistribute opportunity without redistributing wealth, or pursuing a bolshevist program of simply replacing the powerful functionaries of one class with another? It seems that there would some benefit to teaching sociology rather than self-esteem. The lesson of self-esteem is often that you should take your own failures personally rather than see the other factors that contribute. This may sound a little too much like Lionel Hutz ("We're going to put the system on trial!" "I don't use the word hero very often, but you are the greatest hero in American history") but it seems foolish to preach individual opportunity and ambition without also pointing out the factors that circumscribe it and considering what could be done to alleviate them.

The snobbery of Wal-Mart rejection (26 September 2006)

When it comes to Wal-Mart, I can get fully behind critiques that attack its monosoponic powers or its systematic suppression of unionization efforts or its failure to provide adequate benefits. I can even understand the rationale behind Chicago's attempt to force big-box stores like Wal-Mart to pay a "living wage."

But I draw the line at fighting Wal-Mart because it's somehow uncool to shop there: this WSJ story, which details how urban environments are trying to prevent Wal-Mart from opening in their midst, cites Boston mayor Thomas Minino claiming that "Wal-Mart does not suit the clientele we have in the city of Boston." If that were really the case, why make any efforts to prevent them from opening? The store would just go out of business when the clientele fails to materialize. But the mayor knows all too well the store would succeed and be a magnet for lower-income families, for whom the store's cheap goods often provide a real boost in living standards. The mayor favors Target, but not because of its wages or benefits: "It's a different image they have in how they market their product and the appearance of their stores," he says. "That's a lot to do with it, the image of the store." In other words, middle-class shoppers come to Target, whose presence in your neighborhood is likely to improve your property values rather than call them into question. With this classically smug latte-liberal utterance, Minino justifies the cynical culture-war griping of many a Republican reactionary. Ooh, we don't want Wal-Mart's trailer-trash reputation in our precious city, it just wouldn't be Bostonian. What would the brahmins think? It makes every one who has ever complained about Wal-Mart seem a little bit more hypocritical in the eyes of its defenders, as they suspect these kind of aesthetic niceties lie at the root of every protest.

In fact, that's probably part of the reason this story is above the fold on page one of the Journal, and these mayoral quotes feature prominently and early. (It even forced an especially amusing A-hed story, about Belgium's lack of stop signs and the resulting frequency of crashes, down below the fold.) It presents such a perfect picture of those politicos and urbanites who reject Wal-Mart as snobs, and Wal-Mart as the unfortunate victim of unfair discrimination. A city commissioner from Miami is even quoted saying, "I feel bad for Wal-Mart, but that's their image." No one needs to "feel bad" for Wal-Mart, which remains the largest American retailer by a long stretch, in large part because of its successful efforts to broadcast loud and clear its image as a ruthless discounter. Wal-Mart would love to portray itself as a victim of its own irresistibility. The WSJ and Boston's mayor have conspired to oblige, and to make anti-Wal-Mart agitation seem like a variant of the same bourgeois busybody-ism that animates homeowners' associations who fret about people who fail to mow their lawns with sufficient frequency.

But the reason to organize against Wal-Mart is never because it is popular or déclassé; such trivial motives will inevitably trivialize the entire effort. You can't snub the people who shop at Wal-Mart as the wrong sort of people and then complain about the wages the company pays to those very same people; chances are the class bigotry does much more damage than Wal-Mart's business practices ever could do.

Meritocracy and likability (14 September 2006)

At the American Prospect's blog, Ezra Klein and Garance Franke-Ruta combine to refute the myth of meritocracy David Brooks conjured in his NY Times op-ed of September 3. (Elsewhere economists Dean Baker and Jared Bernstein dispense with his specious use of statistics.) Responding to the econo-blogo-sphere debate about income inequality Brooks attempted to buoy the conservative line that inequality (pre-tax) is the natural consequence of differing skills and education, exacerbated by technology (i.e., educated people use computers and get better-paying jobs; poor people fear computers and continue to sweep floors and pick vegetables) rather than any governmental policy (like union-busting, globalization, de facto wage freezes). Arguing that "higher education pays off because it provides technical knowledge and because it screens out people who are not organized, self-motivated and socially adept" and that the "high social and customer-service skills" the well-to-do possess explains the inequalities, Brooks claims that if anything, "the meritocracy is working almost too well."

Well, not really. As Klein explains, we're supposed to "believe that the top one percent now gets paid 16 percent of the total income in this country because they developed 'high social and customer-service skills.' " (Brad Plumer has more statistics that illustrate the ludicrousness of this here as well as a good reminder of why this all matters: economic inequality produces political inequality, which reinforces and worsens the economic inequality.) Klein sees Brooksian meritocacy as a transparent alibi for gross inequality: "In Brooks-land, riches come from being likable, and who could argue with that? All of us think of ourselves as likable, or at least imagine we have the potential to become so. And so all of us can clamber atop that massive income gap and become rich. It's a comforting fiction. To bad it's so wildly wrong." Hence he dubs Brooks's fantasy world "the likability economy," which is extremely apt considering that much of what goes into "likability" are those aspects which can be used to suppress merit, to thwart the premises of meritocracy -- the social and cultural capital that allows merit to become operable, the networks and the habitus of the well-to-do that distinguishes them immediately from the lower classes (which is why mixed income housing is an effective way to reduce poverty -- the middle-class habitus rubs off on the poor). Franke-Ruta links to the relevant data in this post, where she argues that "merit is a product of social position" -- that is "what America's powerful institutions today call 'merit' is the manufactured product of a lifetime of education, training, and invested social capital, and that what the leaders of institutions prefer is also a product of their own biases. This is especially true when personality characteristics are used as employment criteria."

So I'm more skeptical than Klein about the usefulness of the likability economy as alibi, of our being able "to imagine we have the potential to become" likable people. We don't see likability as a means to social mobility unless we already have the social and cultural capital to make it so. Otherwise we just notice how we are inexplicably unlikable to prospective connections and employers. Likability seems a primary way inborn merit is separated from the socially produced version; it's what is used to strain out those who threaten existing class boundaries without having the discrimination become too overt.

The issue, as Reihan Salam gets at in this post, is whether average Americans retain their believe in social mobility despite statistics which dispute it. Part of the problem may be a simple skepticism of economic data, which are often confusing and easily distorted to suit the rhetorical and ideological aims of whoever is using them. Salam suggests that Americans have a "deep-seated bias against zero-sum politics" and reject the idea that the top one percent's good fortunes have anything to do with their situation. That seems possible; it would naturally result from an ideology that rejects the interconnectedness of social life and permits individuals that illusion of total autonomy and responsibility; but I don't think it holds for those who butt up against the likability bias, who discover that no amount of good-naturedness can overcome the ingrained biases of class to protect its own privilege, the values of which reside in their positional and exclusive status.

Update: Read here and here for an elucidation of this kind of nebulous discrimination in action -- Ivy League schools' efforts to avoid admitting too many Jewish and then Asian American students, rejecting them on the basis of their "lacking character."