Back in the 1960s academic policy discourse encountered a "methodological
crisis". In simplistic terms, the core assumption that institutions make
rational decisions based on an objective analysis of the salient factors
and available options had to be abandoned. That core assumption, in turn,
had been modeled on the economists' famous assumption about the utility
maximizing behavior of individuals.
Partly in response to this methodological crisis, practitioners in the
1970s pursued a subjectivist approach, emphasizing process and
consultation. If you can't know the facts, it was supposed, at least you
can find out how people feel about the facts. Two factors derailed this
approach. One was that the process was often cumbersome, expensive and
inconclusive. The other was that sometimes the outcomes were "excessively
democratic", that is they sharply conflicted with elite interests.
By the late 1980s the theoreticians were still wringing their hands about
the unresolved methodological dilemma while many of the practitioners were
blatantly faking it. To put it bluntly, the most urgent rhetorical appeal
to the authority of science was likely to be found in the least scientific
policy analysis. The most urgent rhetorical appeal to consulting the
public was likely to be found where the conclusions had been scripted in
advance.
In the face of all this unscientific science and nonconsultative
consultation came a "turn to discourse" in policy studies -- the
examination of how the rhetorics of science and the rhetorics of
consultation are deployed in the policy process and, most specifically, in
texts guiding or documenting that process. As an early proponent of this
turn to discourse, I have to confess that openly practicing it is
tantamount to renouncing hope of remuneration for work in policy
analysis. No matter how carefully explained, research proposals grounded
in the approach are "too innovative" to be funded. I suspect that "too
innovative" really means too threatening to the established ways of doing
things, which have lost whatever integrity they may have had in the days
when faith in their methodology was naive.
As luck would have it, my research into the rhetoric of policy discourse
over the past six years addresses precisely Gail's theme about work
potentially being regarded as a utility rather than as a disutility
producing income as a side-effect. Featured in my now five and a half year
old research proposal was a brief analysis of the story structure of
Jeremy Rifkin's The End of Work. I compared Rifkin's core narrative to the
traditional folk tale, Strega Nona.
If I may leap over six years of research and many pages of analysis to a
rather bleak image, I would say that we are today living in a propaganda
echo chamber, crudely constructed at the turn of the 20th century by a
motley congregation of zealots, embezzlers, scare mongers, opportunists
and publicists. This group cooked up their own patented, ready-to-serve
economic mythology and sold it like breakfast cereal.
Did I say breakfast cereal? Grape-nuts to be exact. One of the principal
chefs of the pre-cooked doctrine was C.W. Post, dyspeptic inventor of
Grape-nuts and pioneer of the patent-medicine style of promoting packaged
processed foods. Another founding member of the crew was William Collison,
a one time trade union organizer who, when passed over for a paid
position, went off and started his own strike-breaking operation.
Here's how the echo chamber was set up. One of the group's front
organizations, say the Citizen's Industrial Alliance of America, would
hire a prominent, if somewhat moth-eaten and crusty, academic to deliver a
banquet speech on the labour issue. The esteemed professor's well-worn,
grubbily-solicited and cheaply-bought pastiche of hoary platitudes would
then be widely trumpeted as the indisputable consensus of the best
scientific minds in the field. The technique was exactly modeled on Post's
method of obtaining "medical" endorsements for the claimed health benefits
of his products, as was the practice of intimidating newspaper editors who
declined to go along with the show.
Over the years, the phony doctrine became textbook lore (without source
attribution, of course) and eventually one of the unexamined articles of
faith of mainstream economists. In the process, the mythology has managed
to displace the more progressive theoretical view -- as opposed to banquet
bluster -- developed by reputable economists in the first decade of the
century.
The eclipsed, orthodox theoretical position, developed unevenly from
Stanley Jevons to John Rae and culminated in an analyis of the Hours of
Labour presented by Sir Sydney Chapman in his presidential address to the
economics and statistics section of the British Academy of Sciences,
delivered in Winnipeg in 1909. Chapman began his Winnipeg address
apologizing that his topic was not of "immediate local interest" but
offering assurances that "my subject has a direct reference to Canadian
affairs, though the extent of this reference is not apparent till we look
ahead and view things in perspective."
Chapman inherited from Jevons the argument regarding the positive or
negative utility of labour itself and its relationship to the optimal
length of the working day. This part of the argument remains standard fare
in economic textbooks and would be, I think entirely uncontroversial among
economists. Chapman stated the case as follows:
"Leisure consists in rival satisfaction-yielding occupations, active or
passive, which are rendered possible by wages. There is consequently a
close connection between this and that other determinant of the
operative's choice, namely, the positive or negative utility associated
with labour itself. It may be granted that in the long run, after the
working day has exceeded a certain length, any further addition to it
diminishes the satisfaction directly derived from working or adds to the
balance of dissatisfaction."
Where Chapman's analysis departed from Jevon's, though, was in his
determination that employers and workers bargaining over hours of work in
a freely competitive environment would be unlikely to arrive at a proper
balance between the increased dissatisfaction (or decreased
satisfaction) derived from an additional hour of work and the utility of
an extra hour's worth of income at a rate determined by the marginal
productivity of that hour. On the contrary, both employers _and_ workers
would tend to settle for hours of work exceeding such an optimum.
Chapman's argument was counter-intuitive but is well supported by
algebraic demonstration and was for several decades universally
acknowledged as the "classical statement on the hours of labour". It has
never been refuted. By contrast, the cereal-box dogma of Post and his
cronies was based on the more simplistic notion that, labour being a
uniformly disagreeable activity, workers would tend to mistakenly favour
an uneconomically short working day and unscrupulous unions would exploit
this naive preference.
Guess which view dominates the public policy decision process in Canada
(although not the analytical reports that end up being ignored by the
decision makers).
Tom Walker
Sandwichman and Deconsultant
Bowen Island
(604) 947-2213
