In Dusty Archives, a (Ridiculous) Theory of Affluence

I need to note that this post is based on the review  of Gregory Clark's book, A Farewell to Alms (2007, Princeton University Press), by Nicholas Wade in today's New York Times... I have not read the book and may get things wrong as a result.

First off, Wade states:

"For thousands of years, most people on earth lived in abject poverty, first as hunters and gatherers, then as peasants or laborers. But with the Industrial Revolution, some societies traded this ancient poverty for amazing affluence."

However, the vast majority of anthropological data accumulated during the 20th century clearly shows that hunters and gatherers lived anything but impoverished lives... their "abject poverty" is rooted in the ethnocentric and ahistorical imposition of advanced industrial norms and standards on people who's values and desires were radically different than our own.

Wade also finds Clark arguing that:

"The middle-class values of nonviolence, literacy, long working hours and a willingness to save emerged only recently in human history"

as if anyone with an historical sense believed otherwise.  Making matters worse, of course, is the wrong-headed assumption that the middle class is 1. committed to non-violence (spousal abuse, corporal punishment and beating animals were common in the middle class until very recently -- if not through to the present), 2. didn't embrace the forty hour work week of the post-war era (much less the still-shorter one in Europe to this day) and 3. is centrally concerned with an interest in saving (has anyone heard of credit cards, second mortgages, etc?)

The argument is basically that:

the economy [from 1200 to 1800] was locked in a Malthusian trap — each time new technology increased the efficiency of production a little, the population grew, the extra mouths ate up the surplus, and average income fell back to its former level.

As such, Wade argues that incomes, in 1790, were "pitifully low" in terms of the grain people could buy and that peasants lived on about the same number of calories as contemporary hunter-gatherers.  Perhaps the measure of caloric intake is accurate, though the focus on purchased food is likely a problem when peasants, distinguishable from independent farmers (tenant and otherwise), produced much of their food outside of the market.

Equally important, however, is the technodeterminist line taken here that suggests productivity was primarily constrained by technological -- rather than sociocultural limits -- and that new technologies, rather than new ways of organizing production, were the key to the boom in productivity.  Anyone who appeals to changes in the nature of humanity or the determinates of technology is almost surely hiding (or failing to take into account) changes in social relations.

What is most staggering, however, is the utterly uncritical appeal to Malthus' argument about population outstripping food production when Malthus' argument has been so thoroughly savaged on intellectual and empirical grounds -- starting with Marx.  The idea that the English Industrial Revolution increased productivity faster than the English people could produce people of course misses the extraordinary flow of people out of England to the Americas, South Africa, Australia, India, New Zealand and beyond.

In rather extraordinay fashion, however, we don't learn until half way through the long article that Clark's argument is largely based on a comparative analysis of the wills of the rich and poor when it is all-but impossible to believe that the majority of peasants between 1200 and 1800 had wills, much less had wills that survived in comparative numbers to those of the mercantile and elite classes of England.

Clark apparently argues that:

Generation after generation, the rich had more surviving children than the poor, his research showed. That meant there must have been constant downward social mobility as the poor failed to reproduce themselves and the progeny of the rich took over their occupations. “The modern population of the English is largely descended from the economic upper classes of the Middle Ages,” he concluded.

This, too, is flabbergasting.  On the one hand, I have no idea when Clark starts collecting his data.  On the other, and again this may be Wade more than Clark, in 1200 the proportion of the English population who were wealthy would have been inordinately small and, from 1200 to 1800, the vast majority of peasants and independent producers didn't have professions for left over elite kids to take over!  The church and marriage were quite specifically for taking up excess boys and networking with other elites for girls.  In fact, one of the major problems for the manorial and royal populations was subdividing lands.

What really knocks my socks off, however, is that none of the Marxist, Weberian, Wallersteinian, Foucaldian or other arguments about changes associated with the enclosure of the commons and proletarianization of the peasantry, the rationalization of bureaucracies and production, the dynamics of interconnection between the colonial core and colonized periphery, or the disciplining of bodies and minds even begin to be addressed in this argument.

As I should have noted in my previous posting about  Carl Zimmer's reporting on  Martin Nowack's work, the problem in passages like this:

After the Industrial Revolution, the gap in living standards between the richest and the poorest countries started to accelerate, from a wealth disparity of about 4 to 1 in 1800 to more than 50 to 1 today. Just as there is no agreed explanation for the Industrial Revolution, economists cannot account well for the divergence between rich and poor nations or they would have better remedies to offer.

resides in the intellectual and disciplinary limits of economics far more than anything else.  That Wade and Clark would rather appear to arguments about changes in human nature rather than changes in human behavior rooted in changes in the material and ideological conditions of social life speaks once-again to the spread of relatively uncritical sociobiology-positive reporting in the Times. 

A few critics are presented at the end of the piece but they are straw men for utterly fallacious arguments about natural selection having something to do with lactose tolerance in Northern Europe and changes in the population genetics of the people of Puerto Rico which are used to undermine more sociological/institutionalist accounts.  Natural selection is about the evolution of species, slight differences in the genetic composition of geographic sub-groups of individual species are all-but surely not about natural, but are about social, selection.

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Getting Iraq, Politics and the Academy Wrong

In Michael Ignatieff's exploration of how he got the stance he took on the Iraq War so wrong, he says some provocative things. Among these are that

The philosopher Isaiah Berlin once said that the trouble with academics and commentators is that they care more about whether ideas are interesting than whether they are true. Politicians live by ideas just as much as professional thinkers do, but they can’t afford the luxury of entertaining ideas that are merely interesting. They have to work with the small number of ideas that happen to be true and the even smaller number that happen to be applicable to real life.

While the argument about the academy would seem to, maybe, apply to the humanities, certain moments in the social sciences and some of the more interpretive/contested areas of the natural sciences, this strikes me as a deeply problematic generalization about te academy.

Imediately after the quote above he argues that

In academic life, false ideas are merely false and useless ones can be fun to play with. In political life, false ideas can ruin the lives of millions and useless ones can waste precious resources. An intellectual’s responsibility for his ideas is to follow their consequences wherever they may lead. A politician’s responsibility is to master those consequences and prevent them from doing harm.

The disjuncture between this quote and the history of the academic legitimation of racist, sexist, xenophobic, ethnocentric and other forms of hate-filled "play" and policy is rather striking. Furthermore, the absolute silence with respect to recent trends in politics and corporatization of the academic definition of true and false ideas is also rather stunning. In a world where state regulation is increasingly defined by public-private collaborative governance and where life in many areas of Reseach I universities is increasingly driven not by the viability of ideas but by the capacity to draw external, and often corporate, funds the focus on the truth or falsity of ideas is quite misleading.

I’ve learned that good judgment in politics looks different from good judgment in intellectual life. Among intellectuals, judgment is about generalizing and interpreting particular facts as instances of some big idea. In politics, everything is what it is and not another thing. Specifics matter more than generalities. Theory gets in the way.

Here again, this account seriously mis-states the historical conditions of work in universities. In the North American social sciences, where I am situated, an intense empiricism (with an associated deep suspicion of theoretically-driven interpretations) pervaded the scientization of these disciplines after WWII and continues to this day as part of the quantitative-qualitative research fractures in geography, sociology, and anthropology (as well as the political theory vs. government studies dynamic in Ignatieff's own field of political science).

What is meant by the idea that theory gets in the way? If theory means philosophy -- which is most often taught as ideas abstracted from any engagement with material reality... the realm of first principals and traditional ethics -- then this may be the case. However, if theory in the academy and politics means the conceptual product of engaging with the material world in order to abstract trends, tendencies, contradictions and opportunities then theory had better be the foundation of the kind of self-reflexive pragmatic politics Ignatieff spends so much of the rest of the article embracing.

Moreover, putting forth the idea that "[i]n politics, everything is what it is and not another thing" verges on the ludicrous. What is abortion, what is immigration, what defines terrorism, what is welfare, what is socialized medicine, what is science, what is religion, what is agriculture, what is a good education, what is global warming, what are mileage standards, what are taxes... what world is Ignatieff talking about?

He writes:

An intellectual’s responsibility for his ideas is to follow their consequences wherever they may lead. A politician’s responsibility is to master those consequences and prevent them from doing harm.

Is this really an intellectual's primary responsibility? Perhaps an intellectual's responsibility to to operationalize their ideas in a way that does not support harmful policies? Ignatieff has ideas about the differences between ideas and policy, between the academy and politics, that might have had some viability at the height of modernity but in todays utterly hybridized, synthetic and interdisciplinary world such stances make no sense whatsover. But even if this understanding of the role of intellectuals and politicians made sense once, it was in this period that many of the people who constructed nuclear bombs said: "Hey, I just build them, what the politicians do with them is neither my concern nor responsibility."

Perhaps the deepest problem with this article is that it so deeply feeds American anti-intellectualism at the same time that it promotes a liberal mode of political self-reflexivity. He notes:

As a former denizen of Harvard, I’ve had to learn that a sense of reality doesn’t always flourish in elite institutions. It is the street virtue par excellence. Bus drivers can display a shrewder grasp of what’s what than Nobel Prize winners. The only way any of us can improve our grasp of reality is to confront the world every day and learn, mostly from our mistakes, what works and what doesn’t.

The problem is not that a sense of reality fails to flourish at elite institutions and it doesn't matter at all that some bus drivers have a shrewder grasp of reality than some Nobel Prize winners, the problem is that the reality bus drivers, housewives, family farmers, skilled union millwrights and army corporals live is so separate from that of most academics awarded prizes of any sort. The problem is that the character of contemporary society separates so many of us from so many of the rest of us that modernist arguments like Ignatieff's still make sense in the kind of public space that is the New York Times, even though the vast majority of folks outside the academy (or undergraduate students in it) and inside the government (or engaged in working with it) know that these splits are infinitely more "theoretical" than "real."

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Carl Zimmer's Sociobiological Hagiography

I've noted this kind of thing once before with respect to Carl Zimmer's hagiographic accounts of Harvard "Scientists at Work", but it'd be really nice if the New York Times' science writers knew, researched or presented readers with a little bit more about their topic.  While the omission of the contested nature of sociobiology in an account of David Haig's work on the "combat" between fetuses and mothers is more problematic (to me) than the idea expressed in Zimmer's recent article on Martin Nowack which contains the quote below, the quote below (which makes the rest of the article possible) is still scientifically problematic and misleading.

When biologists speak of cooperation, they speak more broadly than the rest of us. Cooperation is what happens when someone or something gets a benefit because someone or something else pays a cost. The benefit can take many forms, like money (when did biologists start talking about money? - APR) or reproductive success. A friend takes off work to pick you up from the hospital. A sterile worker bee tends to eggs in a hive. Even the cells in the human body cooperate. (How could we live if they didn't?!  How is this surprising?! - APR) Rather than reproducing as fast as it can, each cell respects the needs of the body, helping to form the heart, the lungs or other vital organs. Even the genes in a genome cooperate, to bring an organism to life. (These last two sentences are farcical in that life itself would be impossible if genes, cells, organs, etc. didn't cooperate... my question is which of them is "paying the price" for this "cooperation"? - APR) ,

The key is that there is not technical definition of cooperation in biology and if there were it wouldn't be "getting something because someone else pays the price"... perhaps most particularly because so many of the examples (which lean towards commensualism and symbiosis) in the article do not fit this model.  Under these conditions however, the regularly implicit anthropomorphic assertion of intentionality to cells, bacteria, etc… verges on scientific irresponsibility (though it speaks to what may be Zimmer's ongoing and uncritical take on sociobiology and its scientific kin).

The variants of "cooperation" in biology – mutualism, symbiosis and commensualism (differentiated from competition and predation) – are widely variant, just as are the number of associations and trophic levels involved.  Doug Boucher, Sam James and Kathleen Keeler (1982, "The Ecology of Mutualism.," Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, pp. 315-347) write that they 

"use the term mutualism, defined as 'an interaction between species that is beneficial to both'…. Symbiosis is 'the living together of two organisms in close association,' and modifiers are used to specify dependence on the interaction (facultative or obligate) and the range of species that can take part ( oligophilic or polyphilic)…. Thus mutualism can be defined, in brief, as a +/+ interaction, while competition, predation, and commensualism are respectively –/–, –/+, and +/0." (315)

And also, that:

"Although exceptions abound, symbiotic mutualism tend to be coevolved and obligate, while facultative mutualisms are frequently nonsymbiotic and not coevolved…. On the one hand, an enormous number of ecologically and economically important interactions, found throughout the biosphere, would seem to be mutualistic [broadly defined – APR].  On the other hand, few studies have actually demonstrated increases in either fitness or population growth rate by both of the species in the interaction." (316)

Certainly there has been a great deal of work done on these kinds of relationships since 1982, though the flawed definition of cooperation, much less its uncertain connection to mutation and selection leaves the article in the land of public disinformation rather than civic utility.  As before, seeking to ground theories of the evolution of cooperation on strategic models of competition, uncertainty and "naturally" scarce resources (a la the Prisoner's Dilemma and its derivative mathematical games) is a long-contested and oft-critiqued approach to theorizing society and nature and I believe the TImes' readers are done a disservice by reporting this stuff so uncritically.

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