Among the blogs linked in to our companion blog Lex Anteinternet is the blog of the Adam Smith Institute.
I'll confess when I linked it in, I'd run across it and had confused it with another entity, perhaps The Philadelphia Society. No matter, this British institution celebrates the thinking of Scottish economist Adam Smith, a person whom free marketers herald, and with good reason.
In terms of economics, I'm a distributist, which puts me in a group of about five people or so, all of whom have to spend endless time, if the topic comes up, just trying to explain what distributism is. Distributism, a species of free market economics, hasn't been popular in the main since the Second World War, and to compound the problem of its obscurity, its not only saddled with an unfortunate name, but it attracts people who are sometimes on fringe of wacky, or not outright wacky. For example, as its modern founders were Catholics (Chesterton and Belloc), and English, it'll attract very conservative Catholics who have strayed into thinking they are monarchists. As Belloc had an absurdly romantic concept of the Middle Ages, and as some Belloc fans think everything he said must be accepted without analysis, perhaps there was some inevitability to that, and to a completely inaccurate view of what Medieval economics were like (and I do mean completely inaccurate).
Anyhow, the Adam Smith Society posts some really thought provoking items, and todays' entry is not exception.
THE GOOD OLD DAYS ARE RIGHT NOW - AND DON'T FORGET IT
I'll admit, I don't really fully agree with what the headline relates, but in some significant ways, this is really correct. They correctly note, for example:
We’re richer, live longer lives, have more choices, are, in general, just the generation of our species living highest upon the hog. At levels quite literally beyond the dreams or imagination of those significantly before us.
They go on to honestly note, however:
However, happier is more complex, one correspondent grasping this point:
Here's an interesting item on this:
This is why all those surveys showing that female - self-reported - happiness has been declining to standard male levels over recent decades. That wholly righteous economic and social liberation of women has led to greater choice and thus higher opportunity costs. As women gain those same choices as men therefore happiness rates converge.
The article doesn't really draw any conclusions, save for one, these are the "good old days". And it makes some pretty solid arguments.
All of this is in reply to a post in The Guardian, which posed the question of "when", or "what" were the good old days. [1]. It wanted reader comments on the same.
The Guardian is a notoriously left wing newspaper with frequently very radical ideas. It's gained global circulation in the age of the Internet, and it now is fairly widely read in the US, helped in part by the fact that it lacks a "pay wall", unlike the Washington Post or New York Times. My point here isn't to criticize those latter papers, but to simply note that's how The Guardian is now read by the same folks in rural Wyoming who read the NYT. Indeed, perhaps they're more like to read The Guardian, even though its radically "green" position is likely to make some folks pretty upset locally and they are, in my view, often way off in left field.[2].
Anyhow, the Adam Smith Society likely is correct that in all sorts of substantial ways, we're in the good old days right now. But it is interesting that female happiness is declining. And what its declining to is the rate of male unhappiness.
A couple of years we reported on the finding that workplace discontent is way up over 50% in the United States. That makes it seem like Joanna might be right in her comment to Peter in Office Space that "everyone hates their job", but if that's true, it's really distressing, to say the least.
The Guardian item brought a lot of replies, and its clear that a lot of people really do look back on a prior era, material advances not withstanding, as happier than the current one. Some people cited the 1950s, which seems to often hold this status in people's recollections, in spite of the really scary Cold War, the hot Korean War, and for the British the falling apart of the British Empire all being a feature of it. One person commented that it was the 1970s, which wouldn't occur to me, as I lived through the 70s and have a pretty good recollection of it.
Indeed, there's a good case to be made that "the good old days" were the days in which you were young and without burdens, as your parents took care of them, or some past era you didn't experience, reflected through a mirror, inaccurately, with the bad things filtered out. There are, for example, people who are real fans of the 1940s, and the 1940s were generally horrific on the main. The British often look fondly back at the 40s, I'd note, as, at least in modern times, it really was "their finest hour." Be that as it may, if you were on a beach at Dunkirk hoping not to become a casualty or a German prisoner of war, it would have been unlikely to be seen as a nifty time, at the time.
But I digress.
Focusing on the rising level of female discontent, the Adam Smith Institute correctly notes the following, in my view.
That's pretty hard to disagree with.
What that comment means is that the calls by those who would really return truly to the past are misguided due to the horrors of the past. One of those was high infant, and female, mortality.
Both of those factors are well known but easily forgotten in romantic recollections of the past. Indeed, its interesting to see how this has evolved over time.
To set things in a bit of context, if we went back, let's say, to the 1700s, we'd find that the normal state for men and women to live in was, not surprisingly, marriage. No matter what moderns may like to believe, this is the normal state and for a society on thinner resources, it was actually the only one really safe if people were to yield to their reproductive instincts in any fashion. This is not a surprise.
What might be a surprise, however, is that remarriage by males was extremely common at the time due to a high female mortality rate mostly associated with childbirth. I.e., lots of women died in childbirth and the men usually went on to remarry. It must of hung like a cloud over pregnant women like nothing else.
Additionally, infant mortality was really high. Indeed, a lot of the illusion that we now live longer is based on the massive reduction in the deaths of infants and young children. Take those figures out, and average lifespans aren't much different than they are now. Additionally subtract those figures for women who died in childbirth and this is even more the case.
Not too many women in developed countries now die in childbirth and infant mortality is also way down. We know this intellectually, but we have a hard time grasping it in real terms. I don't know of a single person, personally, who has died in childbirth. I know of couples that have lost infants in childbirth, but not many.
So the Adam Smith blogger certainly has a point.
But it also begs a point. If being free from the high risks of death in childbirth and the risk of losing an infant aren't making women happier, why is that.
That gets back to what we've noted before. People aren't really meant to live this way. I.e, in an industrial society.
And that gets back to the overall happiness rate.
We noted the other day that what the Industrial Revolution achieved, in social terms, was to take people off the land and into factories and work places, but not all at once and not by gender all at once. It took men first, due to their physical build in part but also in part as it was easier to spare them from the home. I.e., you can take a young man with a child and send him down a coal mine without the child, but you really can't send a nursing young woman down the coal mine without the kid.
We're so used to the concept of men being out of the home and away from their families that it not only seems the norm, it became celebrated as the social norm for a long time. However, as we've also noted here in the past, the development of domestic machinery changed that for women over time and their labor became surplus to the home. When that happened, they were redeployed in the economy in the workplace. That went from a more or less temporary matter in a lot of households to a necessary one over time and now the economy demands it. It demands it so much, in fact, that a recent (and maybe still ongoing) effort in the U.S. Congress was to subsidize the workplace by government funding for daycares. People are so used to this concept by now that they don't recognize that for what it is, which is a pure subsidy for employers so that women with children have no excuse but to go to work.
Starting to resist that are women themselves. We just dealt with that more recently here:
A lamentation. The modern world.*
That post contained this item from a young woman in her early twenties from Twitter:
I don't mean to keep belaboring this point, and this does all recall, kind of, Thomas Wolfe's comment that "you can't go home again and stay there". That seems to be sort of true, but then what Chesterton stated, and which is featured on the footer of this blog, about clocks being human contrivances and being capable of being set back is also completely true. What we seem to have achieved, however, is to create a system that makes us materially much wealthier but its contributing to some degree to our misery.
Why is that?
Well, it might be that a major deep seated reason for all of these changes was to secure us from the wolf at the door, but it was never meant, psychologically, to take that door out of the field. In other words, maybe we burned down the farm, in order to save it.
And we could always rebuild that.
Footnotes.
1. My favorite reply to the question was this one:
I remember a time when nostalgia was a thing of the past.
I'll get my hat...
2. The Guardian aids itself in being taken seriously, I'd note, by not prominently featuring Cheesecake like so many other British newspapers.
I've a certain fondness for Distributism. Our view at the ASI though is a little complex, or perhaps subtle. The basic underlying logic seems sound, people do tend to be happier when in control of their own fate. A society of proudly independent petit bourgeois strikes as desirable.
ReplyDeleteHowever, there are things that simply cannot be done on a small scale. TSMC, the chip maker, spends whatever it is, $20 billion a year or something, on capital investment. We're not going to be able to do that in the absence of large scale capital markets.
At which point we borrow from Ronald Coase (Theory of the Firm). Well, why this method or organisation here? And why that there? Because those are the forms that best suit that particular task, in that time and that place.
Which leads us to an insistence that capitalism is just fine, as is voluntary socialism, communal ownership, independent and so on, through the possible changes. But we need the market in forms of organisation - just as we do in terms of mere exchange - as well, in order to find out which is the best method for any specific task.