Tim, I think you should write to Brad Watson, send him this. I just spent a month traveling the States, talking to all kinds of people--from two retired history professors to an Indian roadside vendors (and extraordinary retired teacher) to the black founder of a little museum who has made it a center of racial reconcilation in a small town, and, as soon as I returned, I realized that practically the only place where I often get snotty treatment and the cold shoulder is the famous and uber-liberal college city in which I live. No harm in reaching out.
While I have empathy for people who feel the world shifting under their feet (as it has done and will continue to do), it seems to beg some key questions, most prominently what the purpose of farming is. Because agribusiness, while soulless, has also done quite a phenomenal job at producing more than enough food to feed everyone at very little cost. To the extent food scarcity is an issue, it's a political rather than economic one. So, in this case, big business is just delivering food much more cheaply and effectively than was possible in the past.
Family farms are, at this point, a luxury business. They can produce higher-quality food and produce than factory farms, but always do so at higher cost. They exist to deliver "farm-to-table" meats and vegetables to high-end restaurants rather than to feed the masses. And that in turn leads us to ask why we should value family farms that can't compete in any segment of the market. Is it that we value people's nostalgia for their family's lifestyle for a couple of centuries and the status that comes with it? If so, why? And if it's about dignity, is the purpose of public policy to preserve that lifestyle? And do we really want to be using public funds to subsidize that lifestyle without doing anything for those to whom that lifestyle was never available (we don't, for instance, see virtually any legacy black family farms in the US, for ugly reasons)?
The politics are pretty straightforward-- there's a collective nostalgia for family farming and assembly line work that is politically powerful. But using public policy to shape the economy for reasons of nostalgia is not, on the whole, a recipe for creating anything but a rather poor society that distributes public resources and subsidies based on privileges enjoyed a few decades (or centuries) ago. And, while telling people that their ancestors' livelihood is now really an expensive hobby if they can't compete in the luxury end of the market is really terrible politics, it's probably the correct policy to essentially help these people do something else.
This kind of argument works for every sort of efficiency-at-scale system of mass production only because it excludes all the negative consequences of intensifying production as externalities and favors only one outcome as worth evaluating: the production of more output with smaller labor inputs and the reduction of cost to the end consumer. Maybe that's not the only purpose of production. Maybe production, maybe labor, are also about sustaining the dignity and integrity of people at work, and if so, of course that's the purpose of public policy in a democracy. Since when is the point of public life in a democratic society about impoverishing labor in both spiritual and financial ways in order to make commodities cheaper? That is the opposite of the Fordist bargain, it is a race to the bottom. If we should celebrate the end of family farms in order to make the unit price of everything in the store cheaper, let's not forget to add the environmental destruction caused by factory farming, the serious risks of monocropping, the impoverishment of the farm labor that is working for the agribusinesses as well as the high rate of injury in meatpacking and industrial dairy, and so on to the tab.
And if it's true for family farms, it's true for almost all of us: we could make all of us obsolescent, perhaps, at which point there's no one left to buy the cheap, cheap goods that all that efficiency can churn out.
I mean, this kind of reasoning is a direct precursor of why people like these farmers voted for Trump in the first place: neoliberal public policy that regards humanity and dignity as inefficient and inconvenient.
If it's about dignity, why stop at farmers? There are two sides of the ledger-- the input from labor, and the output to society. If the output isn't broadly economically viable, how do we weigh what input we subsidize? And why not treat that as leisure? Take something like music. Taylor Swift is an economy unto herself selling her music. But there are plenty of quite talented musicians who have to supplement any earnings from making music with other jobs. There are others who can't really make any money making music, but really love doing it.
Is there a public policy reason we should promise everyone who wants to make music some sum in exchange for doing so? If not, what's the rationale for doing so for farming? It's probably aspirational that everyone that wants to make music should be able to do so and have a basic standard of living that enables them to do so, regardless of how much income their music generates. But that gets afield from the question of whether we should specifically subsidize someone for making music, rather than subsidize everyone's ability to make music while living a basically dignified life.
The harms of agribusiness are somewhat nostalgic as well-- all things considered, it's probably less environmentally destructive to have mechanized, super efficient farming on a smaller plot of land than to have manual farming spread across a multitude of plots. Nor does family farming solve the problem of farm labor being underpaid-- family farms, like family businesses, are hardly known for treating their workers particularly well-- your corner store clerk, for instance, isn't any better off than your typical Wal-Mart worker, and your family farmhand isn't significantly less likely to be injured than a farmhand at a mega-farm; by some accounts, it's the opposite.
I guess the question here is how we define “dignity,” and how we legislate it, and for whom. Say we do that for farmers. What about if someone doesn’t get a sense of dignity from working as a store clerk and wants to be a video game streamer instead. What basis do we have for denying them that, while granting it to the “family farmer”? Is it just that the family farmer’s grandfather was a family farmer? In which case, we’re probably granting a massive subsidy to, essentially, a privilege that belonged to white men throughout our nation’s history that technology is partially making obsolete (see, again, the lack of black family farmers who would benefit from a policy agenda focusing on the dignity of family farmers). Which I think quite gets to the root of a big chunk of Trump’s appeal to these people—he’s promising (white) farmers and (white) coal miners (though there are hardly any of them left anymore) and (mostly white but sometimes Latino) oil field workers a return to an imagined dignity. The “neoliberal” center-left doesn’t have an answer to that issue other than “we can give you some money/benefits so that you aren’t impoverished if you do something else,” but that’s probably a better answer than “yes, we’ll give you money to do exactly what it is you want to do, on the basis that you enjoyed this privilege in the past, and your dignity requires that society maintain it for you.”
A simple reply is: let's not stop with the farmers.
A slightly less simple reply in terms of what lies behind it is that Wal-Mart and Monsanto compound the kinds of exploitation they are capable of at both ends of their economic relationships and concentrate wealth in a way that the Main Street small business and the family farm do not. The scale of their businesses also amplifies harms within their productive activities--a factory farm massifies the environmental consequences of raising pigs, for example, well beyond what a family-owned pig farmer can.
A policy answer that says, "It's the market, there's nothing we can do, here's some money to go retrain in another business, dignity isn't our problem and neither is maintaining communities where they are," is not democracy and it is not a society that cares about or invests in its people. It amounts to idolatry of capitalism and a kind of helpless, mechanistic utilitarianism that enshrines efficiency as the only goal of intentional action by leaders and policy makers.
But that simple reply begs a complicated limiting principle. Because the way "dignity" is typically framed is as nostalgia. So we need to subsidize the family farmer because their grandfather was a family farmer. But that doesn't extend in the popular imagination to the person whose grandfather was a sharecropper. Or whose great-great grandfather was brought to the country to be farm equipment. There's no nostalgia or dignity there. So assuming that's not our principle, what is? Perhaps in the future, we'll be fully post-scarcity, our basic needs will be just about fully automated, and we can pay people a universal basic income to do whatever fulfills them, whether it's make art or play video games. The near-future possibility is to make public policies that give workers more dignity, like what western Europeans do (some more successfully than others).
I don't think bigness vs. smallness is the relevant divide; Wal-Mart doesn't treat its workers worse than your small-town general store; generally, on the margin, it's the opposite. The real divide is Wal-Mart has executives making a whole lot of money while your small town store owner makes moderately more than a Wal-Mart store manager. So long as labor and consumer markets are competitive, bigness by itself isn't doing any work in explaining worker issues. Rather, it's public policy-- does the legal regime enforce competition laws? Do they have labor laws and protections on the books that are enforced? Does the government provide an adequate safety net that allows workers to job search selectively without the risk of financial ruin if they, for instance, get sick? Are workplace safety laws on the books and enforced? Those are all important pieces. But they are also laws that are targeted at dignifying workers’ lives rather than regulating the type of work that they do.
And they don’t, to my mind, really address the “dignity” claims because what your legacy farmer is looking for isn’t the government to provide them with health insurance or the ability to sue a large farmer for anticompetitive behavior; rather, they’re looking to do that work and be compensated a particular amount for it (after all, it’s the compensation that’s the key; the only thing stopping someone who’s desperate to farm from buying a family farm is the fact that it’s mostly not financially viable).
So the real issue is that the dignity claim is really a hierarchical one—the family farmer/coal miner felt like they had a certain status a few decades (or centuries) ago that they’ve lost (and they blame that on pointy-headed liberals who are handing their long-held privilege to others, and those others are, generally, black and brown people). I’m quite confident that a primary reason they overwhelmingly vote for your Trumps is that they see themselves as entitled to a certain social status. The economic center of gravity long ago migrated from farms and factories in the South and Midwest to knowledge hubs on the coasts. And they think (not entirely wrongly) that liberals are focused on remedying past and ongoing wrongs done to minority groups and (extremely and entirely wrongly) that immigrants from those minority groups are stealing their jobs. Now, Trump is a fake populist, but a real populist could, from a policy perspective, be at least as bad, because a policy agenda focused on restoring past hierarchies is entirely poisonous. To my mind, the problem is that the solutions that liberals offer these people aren’t moving the needle for these people, but also the solutions that these people want are quite dark.
Tim, I think you should write to Brad Watson, send him this. I just spent a month traveling the States, talking to all kinds of people--from two retired history professors to an Indian roadside vendors (and extraordinary retired teacher) to the black founder of a little museum who has made it a center of racial reconcilation in a small town, and, as soon as I returned, I realized that practically the only place where I often get snotty treatment and the cold shoulder is the famous and uber-liberal college city in which I live. No harm in reaching out.
While I have empathy for people who feel the world shifting under their feet (as it has done and will continue to do), it seems to beg some key questions, most prominently what the purpose of farming is. Because agribusiness, while soulless, has also done quite a phenomenal job at producing more than enough food to feed everyone at very little cost. To the extent food scarcity is an issue, it's a political rather than economic one. So, in this case, big business is just delivering food much more cheaply and effectively than was possible in the past.
Family farms are, at this point, a luxury business. They can produce higher-quality food and produce than factory farms, but always do so at higher cost. They exist to deliver "farm-to-table" meats and vegetables to high-end restaurants rather than to feed the masses. And that in turn leads us to ask why we should value family farms that can't compete in any segment of the market. Is it that we value people's nostalgia for their family's lifestyle for a couple of centuries and the status that comes with it? If so, why? And if it's about dignity, is the purpose of public policy to preserve that lifestyle? And do we really want to be using public funds to subsidize that lifestyle without doing anything for those to whom that lifestyle was never available (we don't, for instance, see virtually any legacy black family farms in the US, for ugly reasons)?
The politics are pretty straightforward-- there's a collective nostalgia for family farming and assembly line work that is politically powerful. But using public policy to shape the economy for reasons of nostalgia is not, on the whole, a recipe for creating anything but a rather poor society that distributes public resources and subsidies based on privileges enjoyed a few decades (or centuries) ago. And, while telling people that their ancestors' livelihood is now really an expensive hobby if they can't compete in the luxury end of the market is really terrible politics, it's probably the correct policy to essentially help these people do something else.
This kind of argument works for every sort of efficiency-at-scale system of mass production only because it excludes all the negative consequences of intensifying production as externalities and favors only one outcome as worth evaluating: the production of more output with smaller labor inputs and the reduction of cost to the end consumer. Maybe that's not the only purpose of production. Maybe production, maybe labor, are also about sustaining the dignity and integrity of people at work, and if so, of course that's the purpose of public policy in a democracy. Since when is the point of public life in a democratic society about impoverishing labor in both spiritual and financial ways in order to make commodities cheaper? That is the opposite of the Fordist bargain, it is a race to the bottom. If we should celebrate the end of family farms in order to make the unit price of everything in the store cheaper, let's not forget to add the environmental destruction caused by factory farming, the serious risks of monocropping, the impoverishment of the farm labor that is working for the agribusinesses as well as the high rate of injury in meatpacking and industrial dairy, and so on to the tab.
And if it's true for family farms, it's true for almost all of us: we could make all of us obsolescent, perhaps, at which point there's no one left to buy the cheap, cheap goods that all that efficiency can churn out.
I mean, this kind of reasoning is a direct precursor of why people like these farmers voted for Trump in the first place: neoliberal public policy that regards humanity and dignity as inefficient and inconvenient.
If it's about dignity, why stop at farmers? There are two sides of the ledger-- the input from labor, and the output to society. If the output isn't broadly economically viable, how do we weigh what input we subsidize? And why not treat that as leisure? Take something like music. Taylor Swift is an economy unto herself selling her music. But there are plenty of quite talented musicians who have to supplement any earnings from making music with other jobs. There are others who can't really make any money making music, but really love doing it.
Is there a public policy reason we should promise everyone who wants to make music some sum in exchange for doing so? If not, what's the rationale for doing so for farming? It's probably aspirational that everyone that wants to make music should be able to do so and have a basic standard of living that enables them to do so, regardless of how much income their music generates. But that gets afield from the question of whether we should specifically subsidize someone for making music, rather than subsidize everyone's ability to make music while living a basically dignified life.
The harms of agribusiness are somewhat nostalgic as well-- all things considered, it's probably less environmentally destructive to have mechanized, super efficient farming on a smaller plot of land than to have manual farming spread across a multitude of plots. Nor does family farming solve the problem of farm labor being underpaid-- family farms, like family businesses, are hardly known for treating their workers particularly well-- your corner store clerk, for instance, isn't any better off than your typical Wal-Mart worker, and your family farmhand isn't significantly less likely to be injured than a farmhand at a mega-farm; by some accounts, it's the opposite.
I guess the question here is how we define “dignity,” and how we legislate it, and for whom. Say we do that for farmers. What about if someone doesn’t get a sense of dignity from working as a store clerk and wants to be a video game streamer instead. What basis do we have for denying them that, while granting it to the “family farmer”? Is it just that the family farmer’s grandfather was a family farmer? In which case, we’re probably granting a massive subsidy to, essentially, a privilege that belonged to white men throughout our nation’s history that technology is partially making obsolete (see, again, the lack of black family farmers who would benefit from a policy agenda focusing on the dignity of family farmers). Which I think quite gets to the root of a big chunk of Trump’s appeal to these people—he’s promising (white) farmers and (white) coal miners (though there are hardly any of them left anymore) and (mostly white but sometimes Latino) oil field workers a return to an imagined dignity. The “neoliberal” center-left doesn’t have an answer to that issue other than “we can give you some money/benefits so that you aren’t impoverished if you do something else,” but that’s probably a better answer than “yes, we’ll give you money to do exactly what it is you want to do, on the basis that you enjoyed this privilege in the past, and your dignity requires that society maintain it for you.”
A simple reply is: let's not stop with the farmers.
A slightly less simple reply in terms of what lies behind it is that Wal-Mart and Monsanto compound the kinds of exploitation they are capable of at both ends of their economic relationships and concentrate wealth in a way that the Main Street small business and the family farm do not. The scale of their businesses also amplifies harms within their productive activities--a factory farm massifies the environmental consequences of raising pigs, for example, well beyond what a family-owned pig farmer can.
A policy answer that says, "It's the market, there's nothing we can do, here's some money to go retrain in another business, dignity isn't our problem and neither is maintaining communities where they are," is not democracy and it is not a society that cares about or invests in its people. It amounts to idolatry of capitalism and a kind of helpless, mechanistic utilitarianism that enshrines efficiency as the only goal of intentional action by leaders and policy makers.
But that simple reply begs a complicated limiting principle. Because the way "dignity" is typically framed is as nostalgia. So we need to subsidize the family farmer because their grandfather was a family farmer. But that doesn't extend in the popular imagination to the person whose grandfather was a sharecropper. Or whose great-great grandfather was brought to the country to be farm equipment. There's no nostalgia or dignity there. So assuming that's not our principle, what is? Perhaps in the future, we'll be fully post-scarcity, our basic needs will be just about fully automated, and we can pay people a universal basic income to do whatever fulfills them, whether it's make art or play video games. The near-future possibility is to make public policies that give workers more dignity, like what western Europeans do (some more successfully than others).
I don't think bigness vs. smallness is the relevant divide; Wal-Mart doesn't treat its workers worse than your small-town general store; generally, on the margin, it's the opposite. The real divide is Wal-Mart has executives making a whole lot of money while your small town store owner makes moderately more than a Wal-Mart store manager. So long as labor and consumer markets are competitive, bigness by itself isn't doing any work in explaining worker issues. Rather, it's public policy-- does the legal regime enforce competition laws? Do they have labor laws and protections on the books that are enforced? Does the government provide an adequate safety net that allows workers to job search selectively without the risk of financial ruin if they, for instance, get sick? Are workplace safety laws on the books and enforced? Those are all important pieces. But they are also laws that are targeted at dignifying workers’ lives rather than regulating the type of work that they do.
And they don’t, to my mind, really address the “dignity” claims because what your legacy farmer is looking for isn’t the government to provide them with health insurance or the ability to sue a large farmer for anticompetitive behavior; rather, they’re looking to do that work and be compensated a particular amount for it (after all, it’s the compensation that’s the key; the only thing stopping someone who’s desperate to farm from buying a family farm is the fact that it’s mostly not financially viable).
So the real issue is that the dignity claim is really a hierarchical one—the family farmer/coal miner felt like they had a certain status a few decades (or centuries) ago that they’ve lost (and they blame that on pointy-headed liberals who are handing their long-held privilege to others, and those others are, generally, black and brown people). I’m quite confident that a primary reason they overwhelmingly vote for your Trumps is that they see themselves as entitled to a certain social status. The economic center of gravity long ago migrated from farms and factories in the South and Midwest to knowledge hubs on the coasts. And they think (not entirely wrongly) that liberals are focused on remedying past and ongoing wrongs done to minority groups and (extremely and entirely wrongly) that immigrants from those minority groups are stealing their jobs. Now, Trump is a fake populist, but a real populist could, from a policy perspective, be at least as bad, because a policy agenda focused on restoring past hierarchies is entirely poisonous. To my mind, the problem is that the solutions that liberals offer these people aren’t moving the needle for these people, but also the solutions that these people want are quite dark.