I hope that readers here do not mind this off-topic conversation. It is a
fascinating aspect of social science that has interested me for many years.
To continue, I wrote:
Wealthy and middle class people have nothing to worry about. Life hands us
everything we need on a silver spoon. Yet most are ambitious and hard
working. If giving people money with no obligation and removing obstacles
causes them to be lazy, then why on earth are people like William Clay
Ford driven 12-hour workaholics?!?
Today's New York Times has a particularly vivid illustration of what I have
in mind here. See: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/07/opinion/07sittenfeld.html
QUOTES:
"The self-containment of [wealthy] boarding schools can create terrariums
of privilege in which students develop a skewed sense of money and have a
hard time remembering that, in fact, it is not normal to go skiing in
Switzerland just because it's March, or to receive an S.U.V. in celebration
of one's 16th birthday. At, for example, Choate Rosemary Hall - one of many
boarding schools starting classes this or next week - room, board and
tuition for 2005-2006 is $35,360. . . Even when these schools hold chapel
services espousing humility and service to others, it's the campus
facilities - the gleaming multimillion-dollar gymnasium, say - that can
send a louder message.
It's hard not to wonder: in a world of horrifying inequities, at what point
do these lavishly maintained campuses go from enriching and bucolic to just
obscene? Can a student living on such a campus be blamed if, logically
working backward, she starts to think her access to such bounty must exist
because she deserves it?"
It is hard to imagine a lifestyle and a set of attitudes that would make
people feel more entitled to whatever they want. Compared to this, welfare
payments could hardly have an effect. For one thing, the amount of money is
$4,572 per year per family on average. $381 per week does not tell the
recipient: "take life easy; don't bother working; you have nothing to worry
about." On the contrary, the message is that life is tightrope and you are
one disaster -- or one toothache -- away from losing whatever job you have
and living on the street. But the other big difference is that message that
comes attached to the check. The wealthy child learns there is plenty more
where that came from; he deserves all that life has to offer; it is his
birthright to take the money, take command, take the best job around, and
run society. The money is a positive incentive. He learns that money is
happiness, and the more you have, the happier you become. Wealth breeds
both a sense of entitlement AND AT THE SAME TIME a work ethic. There is
nothing contradictory about that.
My point is that if we could somehow arrange welfare payments to carry the
same message that the rich child's allowance carries, they would not hurt
anyone's work ethic or motivation. I know this sound ridiculous, but if you
can imagine a situation in which we could afford to give everyone $100,000
a year just as an allowance -- a birthright, if you will, so that everyone
on welfare could afford an upper-middle-class lifestyle, I think this would
completely remove all the deleterious effects of the welfare system. Nearly
everyone, everywhere would eventually learn to proceed to live normal
lives. They would compete to get into college, compete for jobs, go to the
dentist whenever they needed it, and so on. I think it is not free money
from welfare that hurts people's morale and destroys or motivation; it is
the social stigma, and the low amount of money. It is just barely enough
money to sustain a person in a cramped, miserable, hopeless life so that
affords no means of education or self-improvement.
Of course this is impossible today. If we printed bales of money and
distributed $100,000 to everyone, inflation would soon make it worth only a
few thousand dollars. There are not enough resources to go around,
especially because the elite top 1% of population nowadays demands
ownership of 40% of all wealth. * But I believe in the distant future,
industry and agriculture become completely automated, and the necessities
of life will literally become as cheap as air and water. If we build the
right kind of technology and we arrange our laws, taxes education and other
institutions wisely, I believe that in 100 or 200 years we will be able to
give everyone what would today be considered a middle-class lifestyle, and
we will demand -- and need -- nothing in return. There are more than enough
people in this world who are willing to do the serious hard work of
civilization and bear the burden whether you pay them or not. How do I
know? Look at any research institution, in a university or government
laboratory. Look at Stan Szpak or Richard Oriani. They retired years ago.
They are paid nothing. But they come to work every day and contribute more
to society than 100 other ordinary people combined.
As I wrote in the last chapter of the book:
"In the future, I hope that dire poverty will be eliminated everywhere on
earth. People should have as much food and water, health care, higher
education and Internet access as they want. These things should be free,
like street lighting, public libraries and public elementary education are
today. This does not mean I hope everyone will be able to live the way
wealthy people do today, or I hope that great wealth will be abolished. I
want everyone to achieve an American or European middle-class standard of
living. . . ."
That is not utopian. It is not an unreachable goal. It is emphatically NOT
socialism, or communism. The means of production will be privately owned --
but they will be worth a pittance by today's standards. This has been the
trend of history for the last 300 years. The cost of useful energy, in the
form of electricity, has probably fallen by a factor of a thousand or more
since the beginning of the industrial revolution. Or take a pound of flour,
which is the most essential Western food and a historical benchmark. In the
late 18th century, at work camps and construction sites one adult man's
rations consisted of a pound of flour and a pound of salt pork. It used to
take the average person hours of labor to acquire this. Now we can buy one
pound of flour retail for $0.89, or 10 minutes of labor at the minimum
wage. (Note that it costs the mill about $0.12 to produce the flour.) Pork
is about $3 per pound retail. In other words, if we were satisfied with the
typical diet of 200 years ago, we could earn our daily bread doing no more
than 50 minutes of labor per day. If we were also satisfied with the small
houses of 200 years ago, outdoor privies, healthcare (essentially
nonexistent), transportation (walking), a person earning an average salary
today could pay for food, rent and most other necessities working about an
hour a day, 5 days a week. [2] In other words, we have already driven down
our cost of living to practically nothing, but of course we have raised our
expectations. (I am not suggesting there is anything wrong with higher
expectations, for that we should live like people in 1960s communes!)
In the far distant future, everyone will own their own electric generator,
automobile and universal replicator that makes any food, gadget or other
good the owner desires. I am suggesting that eventually technology will
render the definitions of socialism and capitalism equally meaningless.
Communism collapsed in 1989, and capitalism will probably not last much
longer, as Arthur C. Clarke remarked. Economics is mainly the study of how
people trade their labor for goods. When no one needs to do any labor, and
goods are manufactured virtually for free and unlimited quantities,
economics will become meaningless. Of course we will still have to reward
people who do essential work and hard work, with professorships,
decision-making power, large houses, extra salary and so on, but money will
be the least important reward on the list.
I think that after we have achieved this state in the future, people will
wonder what took us so long, or why anyone ever considered this
controversial or impossible. When people first proposed that all children
should be allowed to go to public schools, or that all children be
inoculated against infectious disease, this was considered ridiculous and
utopian. A few weeks after my great-grandmother emigrated from Hungary, she
was stunned and incredulous to learn that all children were not only
*allowed* to go to school in New York city, with no fees, bribes or
entrance exams, they were *expected* to go. And she was an educated woman,
who spoke three languages. Nowadays we take these things for granted, and
no one considers them socialistic, or thinks they are bad for moral, or bad
for your soul.
Out of all technologies, cold fusion will be the most essential to
achieving these goals.
- Jed
1. Source: http://www.endgame.org/primer-wealth.html. There is no limit to
this trend. The elite would take 99% of all wealth, if it could.
2. Medium household income is $42,228, or $844 per week. In this estimate,
food costs $4 per day, and other necessities roughly $6, or $70 per
week. http://www.census.gov/prod/2002pubs/p60-218.pdf
