Visibility

Brooding over prize holders and fame this morning as I brewed my early cup, it occurred to me that the actual experience even of very minor fame is rarely pleasing. In tracing this reflection back, I discovered that it began because Paul Krugman is the columnist for the New York Times today; he is the winner of a Nobel Prize in economics. When that prize came to be announced just shy of a year ago, it occasioned the kind of reflection that the Nobel committee often triggers: at the time the thought I had was, Would Krugman have received the prize for economics if he hadn’t been a columnist? Or if he’d been the columnist for, say, the Kansas City Star?

A sour thought, I grant you, but then the Nobel Prize reflects much more on the erratic character of Nobel’s clusters of committees than on the individuals who are their beneficiaries. The recipients are best judged ignoring the honor, a dubious blessing in these latter days: the money is no doubt welcome; the honor may actually be an embarrassment. It may be given for secondary or even accidental aspects of a person’s work.

But my thought this morning, as it meandered on, forgetting its triggering impulse, was that visibility produces unwelcome attentions. The person who has it becomes a reflector in which many others see themselves writ large. They project their own ideals and their own projects on a person who may share neither their views nor aims at all. The only commonality may be a mere label that roughly covers both. I had this kind of visibility for a while as an EPA official administering the Resource Recovery Act, and in the shining eyes of eco-activists I became the focus of an attention I found entirely inappropriate, indeed misplaced. And for those opposed to any kind of governmental intervention into the sacred market, I became the target of negative attention, the personification of a danger. Experiencing such celebrity, however minor, teaches you that “we the people” has quite another meaning in experience than in the lofty national rhetoric. Direct democracy? Please keep it on a leash. And please collect its waste in a plastic sack before you leave my yard.

When a finger points at the moon, please look at the moon and not the finger.

More Notes on the "Divide"

Several posts on Ghulf Genes deal with economics, always in a more or less cultural context; I tend to deal with the subject at a more technical/practical level on LaMarotte. Two entries in particular, one on wealth and one on disposable income have touched upon what I perceive as a gradually evolving divide in society. In both of these cases the mere presentation of the data consumed the space that I allocate per entry, a kind of limit I impose based on personal habits of reading things on a screen: too long and I get restless. But a consequence of that limitation is that I never get to the point that I am after, which is to ponder the underlying factors that produce the situation I spend so much time describing.

As I look back fifty years or so, it seems to me that the great divide began to open up at around the time when the Berlin Wall fell and the Cold War ended. Certainly from the time when I arrived here as an immigrant in 1951 until 1989 when the wall fell, the country underwent a kind of cultural winter. The spontaneous development, the natural life-cycle, of our civilization was suspended during that time—and resumed when the threat of the Communist menace retreated. Ample signs of relaxation began to appear in the early 1960s already, usually associated with youth and hippies. But at the more organized levels of society, the release of tensions awaited the Reagan years. And afterwards Western Civilization—more here than in Europe—resumed its natural vector. All right. This is a personal take. The official or ambient narrative is still that of Progress. Therefore whatever comes out of the future is by definition better, and the coming of the New World Order, the avalanche of technology, the waves of commercialization, the rights revolutions falling over themselves in a rush to ecstatic fulfillment—all this is viewed in positive ways. I try to view all this, including the dangerous cleft I see opening in the society, in a neutral way: before a higher civilization is rooted, the old one must pass away. Hence I ought to praise all signs of breakup. The sooner done, the sooner over. At the same time, I foresee that the future will be ugly; from a strictly rational point of view, I’d like to get there with as little damage to as many people as possible.

The core aspect of the divide, as I see it, is the disaffiliation of the major elements of the society, particularly of the haves and the have nots, a cultural-war in the making. The onset of this cleavage is clearly visible in the sharp drop in marginal tax rates applicable to the wealthy that took place during the Reagan administration. The rate fell by 30 percentage points in the 1981-1989 period. To see a quite revealing graphic showing fifty years of tax rates, I refer you to my post today on LaMarotte. In that post I also argue that high taxes benefit the whole population whereas low taxes benefit elites—another way to talk about the cultural cleavage.
One makes these observations because the picture that opens is fascinating. The practical aspects of such a blog, I fear, are nil. I’m engaged in contemplation rather than advocacy. The phenomena that I’m observing are beyond personal influence, as I think currently unfolding history will show. But what it is likely to show, in the longer reach, will be, I think, rather surprising. In the long haul the left will win, believe it or not. But not in the way in which, perhaps, we anticipate the outcome.

The parallel I now evoke is that of Rome—and that culture because it is the one most accessible to me. Rome’s “world wars” were a combination of the Punic Wars (Rome v. Carthage, Hannibal and Elephants, etc., 264-146 BC, in three separate waves) and the concurrent Macedonian Wars (the conquest of Greece, in four separate conflicts, 215-148 BC). In the wake of these vast and draining conflicts, Roman was left in sole possession of the world—at least as things then looked from Roma. But thanks to the enormous wealth that then began to flow from the possessions that Rome acquired, the same process of social division that I detect taking place here (under the slogans of Freedom, Markets, and Capitalism) began in Rome. The process featured a very powerful and wealthy ruling class and a population of ordinary people increasingly impoverished. Impoverished how? Imported slave labor displaced the ordinary farmer and craftsman. Within fifty-five years of the final defeat of Carthage began what is known as the Social War. The actual disturbances lasted only briefly (91-88 BC), but the processes that then began continued to be violent and eventually led to the fall of the republic. We would today label the two sides Right and Left: the propertied ownership class and the ordinary plebs. The leadership of both came from the aristocracy. Eventually the left, in the figure of Julius Caesar, won the field. Caesar? A lefty? Absolutely. We think of him as an emperor, but he came from a so-so neighborhood in Rome. You know. Small shops, modest houses, a brothel here and there. He was of noble background, poor, but he had lots of talent. And he was on the side of the people against the Establishment. Enantiodromia is one of my favorite Greek words: it means a process that transforms something into its very opposite. The Roman Empire was a left-wing enterprise that never again, after Augustus took power, let the wealthy oligarchs even touch, never mind hold, the reins of power.

The Richer the Poorer?

I’m accustomed to using the lens of statistics to enhance my understanding of cultural phenomena. Here is such a glimpse. Consider that in 1958 disposable personal income per capita was $9,433; in 2008, the corresponding number was $28,741. These numbers are comparable because both are expressed in constant dollars pegged to purchasing power of the dollar in the year 2000. These two numbers tell us that in 2008 we had three times more real wealth per person than we had in 1958. Dwight D. Eisenhower was president at the time; the Interstate Highway System was under construction, had been since 1956. The highest income tax rate in 1958 was 91 percent on income exceeding $400,000 ($3 million in 2008 dollars); the top rate in 2008 was 35 percent on income above $357,700. To the best of my knowledge, no state, county, or school district tottered on the brink of bankruptcy in 1958. And college education was free to all residents of the several States of the Union.

These thoughts surfaced because Brigitte happened across an article on commondreams.org by Ralph Nader titled “Purloining the People’s Property,” available here. The article’s gist is that the situation has drastically changed. Our legislators are privatizing public functions with a kind of desperation unworthy of those we appoint to govern us. But I need not seek examples in Arizona, Colorado, Pennsylvania, Indiana, or Illinois. I have examples right here at home; the de facto bankrupt Detroit School System comes to mind when I look around.

The value of the statistical underpinning is that it shows, beyond question, that the causes of our deterioration are not really financial. Nor can we blame it on war. In 1958 the end of World War II was thirteen years back. It had consumed $4.1 trillion in 2008 dollars. The Korean war was five years back; it had gobbled up $320 billion (same basis) and, in its peak year, it commanded 4.2 percent of Gross Domestic Product. Something else has changed. Unfortunately we have much less precise access—if any, for that matter—to the invisible structures that represent a collective of souls. If we could see that structure unambiguously—as with patient effort we can see the financial structure—we would know where the problem lies and why it persists.

Wealth and its Allocation

If those who keep our national accounts are doing a good job, specifically the Bureau of Economic Analysis, part of the Department of Commerce—the agency that constructs the Gross Domestic Product and its subcomponents—there is no doubt that wealth has increased. I looked at this subject the other day and confirmed it using data from the BEA dealing with per capita disposable personal income expressed in constant dollars.* To look at a reasonable time period, let's take twenty years. In 1988 disposable income per person was $20,740 in the United States. Twenty years later, in 2008, it was $28,741—in dollars of the same purchasing power. Actual purchasing power had therefore increased almost 40 percent in that period. Wealth has definitely grown. And if we go back forty years, real wealth has more than doubled; in 1968 disposable income was $12,892 for every woman, man, and baby in the realm.

But the quality of life does not necessarily mirror increase in real wealth—and that has all manner of interesting implications. The facts bombard us. In getting ready for a move we just discovered some old copies of the Detroit Free Press, Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times from the year 2000. Strange and wonderful: all three papers were physically larger. They were also thicker—because they held more ads. And the Detroit paper, which arrived at our door daily in those days, is now only tossed four times a week. Detroit may be an extreme example, Motown that it is, but it illustrates the subject. We drive its highways. Only those portions leading directly from the airport to the Ford Field football stadium are decently maintained. Why? Super Bowl XL took place here in early 2006. Bridges on many other thoroughfares are literally shedding concrete and bleeding rust. Three of the four domestic auto makers are in bankruptcy. A local malaise? Not really. There are many other signs, not least the well-known economic crisis in banking and housing. Then last Thursday the New York Times ran the article that actually triggered this post; it was headlined: COSTS KEEP RAIL SYSTEM OUTDATED ACROSS U.S. How come? Wealth is increasing; we do have the money.

Once you have wealth—and it is growing—it’s not the wealth that matters any more. It is its allocation. And here the issue boils down to two factors: who gets the money and what is it spent on. Considering the first question, wealth has been shifted to the top fifths of households over time. The following table shows this process over a forty-year period. It is derived from Census data available here.

Share of Aggregate Income by Household Quintiles - in Percent
	Lowest	2nd	3rd	4th	5th	Top 5%
1967	4.0	10.8	17.3	24.2	43.6	17.2
1987	3.8	9.6	16.1	24.3	46.2	18.2
2007	3.4	8.7	14.8	23.4	49.7	21.2

A picture illustrates the change much better. The following bar chart shows change in share for three periods: from 1967 to 1987, from 1987 to 2007, and then for the entire forty-year period. What this tells us is that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Hence the quality of life for most declines despite an increase in wealth. Please note here that the last block, the one labeled “Top 5%” is part of the fifth quintile of households. It merely shows that the very top was the greatest winner in this forty-year race to the top.


This shift of wealth from the lower 80 percent of households to the top 20 percent may, all by itself, explain why our rails (and other activities in the public domain) are no longer maintained. This kind of rather dramatic shift signals that “natural phenomena,” thus market forces—over against conscious policy—govern the fortunes of the population. I have little doubt that this outcome is in large part due to the great expense involved in getting elected. Where the money comes from for that is very important—as are the motives of those who provide it. Are those motives selfish or communal? The money must come from the top fifth, by and large: it has been getting very much richer. It’s motives appear to be selfish, else we would see more allocation of wealth to the commons: our transportation systems, including the public transit, environment and parks, education, health care, the infrastructure, and the genuinely needy. I don’t have any data, but I suspect that the salaries of our elected officials, of their staffs, and the costs of their incidental expenses are much less than what these same officials have to expend on getting elected. If that money comes from corporate wealth—and if he who pays the piper calls the tune—I rather doubt that we still have a genuinely functioning democracy.

But there is a deeper current here as well. Our thinking has become simplistic. The notion that free markets are the answer to everything is unworthy of our species. That concept is modeled on nature, an unconscious process. But we are a conscious phenomenon. We are intentional. We can do better than letting nature rage away, destroying values built up very slowly over long periods by conscious effort. Put metaphorically, it’s nature that produces IPods but it’s humanity that builds a highway system for common use. It’s much easier to persuade individuals to buy a discrete product producing instant pleasure than a vast network of rails extending hundreds of miles.

No, indeed, it’s not the wealth but its allocation that counts—and the allocation needs to have a much higher level of intentionality, and a much more extensive time horizon, than our current system, focused on the next quarter or the next election, “naturally” produces.
---------------
*The BEA uses what are called “chained” dollars with a 2000 base, a newer form of calculating constant purchasing power, thus with the distorting effect of inflation (or deflation) removed.

Economic Foundations

The writing of blog entries, with the implied possibility that people all over the world might just chance to see it, has a somewhat bracing effect on something that I’ve engaged in all of my life—the keeping of diaries or notes. When doing the latter the only presumed audience is yourself, and the reasonable use of the time is to clarify ideas. But when you have the feeling of people peering over your shoulder, you tend to feel the pressure to get things right, to look things up. The process becomes more stimulating. You tend to follow up on hunches and seek out the hard copy of things you remember reading. Thus one of my recent posts somewhere reminded me that the late Stephen J. Gould had written a scathing book about abuses in science. Gould has figured in my thought as a genuinely original thinker—on evolution and much else. It was he who proposed an explanation of evolution (with Niles Eldredge) by a process of “punctuated equilibrium,” thus abrupt departures over against gradualistic changes based on tiny increments. I happen to have a minor (and meaningless) link to the man in that we shared the same literary agent over many years. In any case, having been reminded, I found one of three copies I own of Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man and put the book on my nightstand. But this only by way of introduction—and a little plug for a fine writer on difficult scientific subjects.

I spent several nights perusing the book, particularly the dreary story of how IQ testing began and why it is the sham that it is. But the other night, and now we’re getting warmer, I dreaded once more being awash in the abuses of thought to which Modernity is prone. And not wishing to get out of bed again for one of those midnight hunts of my shelves, I just eased out a volume within my reach but buried deep in time and began rereading Will Durant’s Caesar and Christ. The book was there because quite a long time ago I was restudying the reign of Diocletian—and in the course of that discovered that both that great emperor as well as Constantine were what today we would call Serbs—not Italians at all. In fact when Diocletian retired—to raise those prize chickens of his—he did so in what is today Split, the largest coastal city of Croatia on the Adriatic.

I skipped the introductory chapters that take us to the dawn of Caesar’s time and began reading Chapter VI, “The Agrarian Revolt”—and once more felt the shock I’d felt on the last reading years ago, as my marginal notes throughout the book make clear. I put a representative quote on another blog, visible here, explaining the causes of the revolt which, in due time, set the stage for Caesar’s rise and the days of empire in Rome: slavery. My marginal notes and my refreshed memory of the first reading have to do with the economic foundations of civilization. Ancient civilization was undoubtedly based on agriculture; and Rome’s slow-motion collapse began with the introduction of slavery on a large scale. Rome had transformed its economic base from yeoman farming to military conquest—which yielded the slaves and impoverished its masses. And for me this has obvious parallels in that American civilization was also founded on agriculture; indeed, it was heavily supported by—guess what? Slavery. When cotton was king, it was slaves that produced it. Only later, when we discovered a new kind of slave, did the economy shift from agriculture to industry. That industry, in turn, manifesting predominantly in manufacturing, depends on energy slaves, the fossil fuels.

Now it is worth noting that the imperial period of Rome dawned when the importation of slaves on a grand scale began to deform the Roman Republic—as the quotes on LaMarotte clearly show in summary. We face a similar but two-pronged challenge today, albeit we appear to be at an earlier stage of the problem. And these things are all too clear to me because, for the past twenty years, I’ve either been directly or indirectly the chronicler of manufacturing in the United States—in a statistical series originally called Manufacturing USA and now Manufacturing & Distribution USA. I looked up some data the current editor, Joyce P. Simkin, has complied in the latest edition. It shows decline in manufacturing employment (this predates the automotive collapse) from 17.8 to 13 million people between 1982 and 2006. The decline has been accelerating. This is one prong of the challenge—our yielding a function to imports, not of slaves, as it were, but to those who work at much lower wages than we pay. The second prong of the challenge is that manufacturing in the modern sense is unimaginable without fossil fuels, and we can now clearly see that these fuels will be pretty much exhausted by the end of the twenty-first century.

When I then peruse the shocking consequences to society that the heavy uptick in slavery produced in Rome, I find it entirely appropriate to suggest that we should put our house in order, at every level, in anticipation of bad times to come—not just the usual bad times that come routinely, punctuating our equilibrium, but major transformations that will make the future, even if we master fusion power, utterly different from what we see all around us today.

The Middle Class

Several years ago both Monique and I participated in the production a four-volume work entitled Social Trends & Indicators USA, a project that we’d envisioned ourselves and which then appeared under the copyright of ECDI† in 2003. The concept behind SIUSA (as we abbreviated the project in-house) was to illuminate trends in society by the use of government statistics. Each entry in these volumes consisted of a graphic followed by a page or two of succinct commentary. We placed the actual statistics we’d used to make the graphs at the back of each volume in numerical format—following the general rule that in socio-economic studies others should be able to examine your logic with all numbers disclosed. Six of us labored on this project virtually day and night to bring it home by the deadline. It was a memorable year filled with valuable discoveries. The highlight of each week was a meeting in the course of which each of us presented the entries we’d produced that week in summary—and we discussed them all. Perhaps the most general of our discoveries was that demographic structure drives everything else, all things being equal—but often also when they’re not. But all this just as a preamble to something else.

The other day Monique sent me a link with the laconic subject: “When you have a spare hour…” The link turned out to be the video of the 2007 Jefferson Memorial Lecture presented at UC Berkley by Elizabeth Warren, the Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. (Yes, I do! I bow to those who fund these chairs. Many people don’t share their wealth, and those who do deserve the bow.) The lecture’s title was “The Coming Collapse of the Middle Class.” You can see the lecture here. Yes, it takes an hour. And yes. It’s worth it!

In this living version of the Ghulf clan there are quite a few of us with a keen interest in the cultural and cosmic climates. Tracking and documenting pieces of it that become visible in some way—through statistics, literature, comic books, pop music, esoteric culture, however we can get at it—is occupation as well as preoccupation. SIUSA and the other USAs we have produced were and are part of that effort. So is our interest in Peak Oil and my own in cyclic history. Well, Elizabeth Warren undertook a very careful study, in methodology identical to that which we followed in SIUSA. She compares a representative (median) family of four as it existed in the early 1970s to one as it was in the early 2000s. She too presents graphics and then makes succinct but penetrating comments—and the conclusion that emerges is dramatic. Listening to her one feels as if watching (helplessly because we are so tiny) the slow-motion evolution of a major disaster that’s coming with what seems to be a kind of inevitability.

But enough said. The lecture is worth seeing, the conclusions worth pondering. It’s better always to face the future knowing than not—and we may even be enabled to change the course of the raging river despite only holding a little cup in the hand.
__________
†Editorial Code and Data, Inc.

Types of Economies

Fernand Braudel (see last post) wrote Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century. It's a three-volume work (The Structures of Everyday Life, The Wheels of Commerce, and The Perspective of the World). There are people who can write about a boring subject like the world's economy and make it sound exciting like a novel: wild sagas full of heroes and villains.

Braudel's view of capitalism is neither laudatory nor positive; of course he was a Frenchman. You get the idea of a parasitic phenomenon, but the parasites are people. To interpret Braudel's conclusions, you might say that capital is detached from the community. Its masters treat the people as a raw material, an opportunity. There is no more love lost on the population than we normally bestow on a clay quarry. Capital, Braudel says, will engage in sectors and ooze out over them—so long as risks are low, profits high. When conditions change, capital will abscond as quickly to do its oozing somewhere else. Braudel documents this process by many examples drawn from different times and geographies. Mining, for example, had capital's attention in Europe in the sixteenth century; then profits began to thin. Away went the masters of the universe. As always in such cases, the state had to pick up the pieces. Why does that sound familiar today?

When small groups gain autonomous stature in society, disintegration is around the corner. There is a naïve simplicity involved in picking one or another mechanism and proclaiming it to be superior, not to say transcendent. It's idiotic, really, to think that Markets allocate resources with unfailing wisdom—and therefore those who dominate them must be exempt from rules that apply to mere mortals. To mistake the tooling for the workman is a sign of stupidity. Of course it's done to favor a group, not because people really believe it—unless they really are quite limited. Alas, lots of people in Congress are. The preachers of the market are either fools or hypocrites.

Throughout my times in the economy, people talked about three kinds of economies—no make that four. The fourth was soviet-style socialism. The other three were American capitalism, Japanese style market share capitalism (which I think of as feudal), and European regulated markets. The feudal era in Europe was one of high integration, with the mutual duties of the so-called estates always on every person's mind. Attempts in the U.S. to replace the shareholder in corporations with the wider concept of the stakeholder represent well-meaning gestures in that direction. Sounds nice. A few people try it. But the spirit isn't there. You can't fake culture. It rises up from the gut. I'm reminded of the New Testament question: "If the salt of the earth has lost its savor, wherewith shall it be salted?" In the European context, where the shades of kings still hover in the sky, the state has continued to be an integrated element in commercial life. Ditto in Japan. In what begins to look like a tiresome see-saw, Europeans enviously wish to emulate the American market capitalism (e.g. Sarkozy)—only to be brought to their senses by times like these when, symbolically anyway, skyscrapers are crashing and rubble spreads everywhere. I'm really curious how the current turbulence will work itself out. My guess is that order in the traditional sense will return, in a way, only when the artificial wealth oil has bestowed upon humanity actually runs out. Late twenty-first century? Those will be interesting times.

Capital's Slow Suicide

Legend has it that Henry Ford succeeded because he made cars cheap enough so that his workers could afford them. He lifted his product from luxury item to a product for the masses by lowering its price. Notably, earlier, textiles became humanity’s first modern industry when in the eighteenth century cotton became cheap enough so that even the poor could afford them. (This is a genuinely fascinating story best told by Fernand Braudel, The Wheels of Commerce, published in 1979 but still available through Amazon.com.) I could multiply examples at will, industry after industry, product after product, all showing that genuine collective wealth rests upon the seemingly obvious twin facts that producers are consumers and consumers are producers. When we shatter this pairing, the wealth of nations starts to seep into the ground.

The logic of the matter is certainly obvious. People cost a lot of money. If we can do the work without them, we’ll make greater profits. Should we replace an operator by an answering machine? That’s a no-brainer. The near-term benefits are plain, the long-term suicide is not, can be ignored, can be fended off energetically by saying that “If others do it, I must too.” This is the tragedy of the commons all over again. (If the phrase is new, this will explain it.) The fact is that every position eliminated ultimately shrinks demand for what we sell. The logic is inexorable. If every institution, public and private, attempts to reduce its costs—and each and every one is under pressure to do so—the ultimate result must be universal unemployment and a tiny minority of owners surrounded by armies of deadly robots. At that point, to turn shamelessly apocalyptic, the logic of cost control will powerfully suggest mandatory vasectomy. To expand my insane example in science-fiction manner farther, thus to counter the argument that democracy will counteract such a drastic outcome, we might project that by that time intelligent machines (IMs) will have the right to vote as their owners deem they should, and in times of crisis automated machines will produce the necessary millions of IMs so that the owners' views will always prevail. IMs need not be big. In fact whole colonies of them might be placed on the head of a single pin.

Changing hats from sci-fi author to historian, another scenario opens behind my eyes. The inexorable loathing of humans so plainly manifested by modern institutions must inevitably produce a violent reaction. And it will sweep away the capitalist system as if it had never been. Tempted to say “Praise the day!”? Unfortunately it won’t be happy. Such things never are. Those likely to be reading such writings as this are (knowingly or not) members of the very nobility that will be marched to the guillotine (guilty or not).

What’s producing my strident hysterics?

Ah, friends! Simple things. We bought a new refrigerator to be delivered on Monday, February 16. This morning came a call confirming that delivery. Last night I more or less fell asleep as Republicans were agonizing about the so-called stimulus or bailout package.

The phone call was automated. “If you are Darnay Arsen Julius,” it said, “please press 1.” (That, by the way, is my name back to front.) I pressed 1. “Terrific!” said the male voice in phony jollity. And it went on from there. — Now the logical thing is to ask the delivery man to call ahead on the cell-phone before setting out to our address. Why not just do that? Why this phony rigmarole? That early in the morning my rage rises easily. And in that rage rose memories of the politicians ranting and raving about tax cuts.

They’re committing suicide, I thought. It's happening in slow-motion—seen from a human time frame—but it's deliberate self-destruction nonetheless, wrought in the name of survival no less. That must be insanity. Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad [Euripides].

Messing With Material Gods

Adam Smith’s Hidden Hand, Darwin’s Natural Selection, and today’s Public Opinion are instances of forces ancient people called gods or demigods. What they actually felt about these forces, I’m guessing, was similar to our feelings about, say, being laid off because the Market frowns. Gods give and take away, but we generally endow them with positive values. The invisible hand dispenses the wealth of nations, selection bestows survival, and public opinion, if only we obey it, guarantees collective happiness. Our view simply echoes the Roman saying: Vox populi, vox dei.

Smith’s hand really means that various kinds of feedback loops control human greed so that, if you let people freely trade optimal results will come about. See his own words, along with an early definition of GDP, here. Darwin’s natural selection really means that whatever species survive survive and those that don’t weren’t fit. Extending that concept from biology to social life we get social Darwinism. The rigorous practice of that doctrine suggests a glad embrace of the free markets and manly acceptance of what some call creative destruction. Public opinion is feared and courted not because it’s right in any absolute sense but because, having developed instruments to tap and to decant it, we can use it to do or to prevent what we wish or dread. If we get it wrong, never fear: popular opinion will rapidly change to correct us.

Smith, however, didn’t preach the hidden hand because he saw it everywhere at work. No. He preached it because monopolistic practices were choking off and impeding efficient trade. The eighteenth century was doing its utmost to shake off centralized controls everywhere. The French version, Laissez faire, laisser passer, dates from the same time and was the coinage of François Quesnay. To whom was that saying directed? To governments dominated by hereditary nobilities: Let it be, let it pass—let the people be heard! Well, it happened. In the French Revolution, the people were heard at last, and those displaced from rule departed saying, “Après nous le déluge.” The saying is attributed variously to the Marquise de Pompadour or to Madame de Pompadour, but happens to be an old French proverb, strongly suggesting that what comes around goes around.

Darwin’s core doctrine did not arise because he wished to counter human interference with the gods. Instead, looking for an agency of some sort sufficient to explain changes in the biosphere, he got a hint from human interference. His theory of evolution owes a great deal to studying how people, in raising livestock, fostered the development of varieties pleasing to people by keeping and breeding specific individuals that met the human criterion and simply eating those that didn’t. It then struck him that nature itself did the same—with a single objective guiding the process: survival. The agency, however, was simply anything and everything that happens. A modern phrase comes to mind here…

When the ancients spoke of Fate, they meant something rather absolute, unbendable, beyond human influence. The gods, however, could be cajoled by flattery, sacrifices, and other acts of real or pretended submission. So it is with those who’d use public opinion. It can and must be swayed—hence the prominence of politics and advertising in our times.

* * *

What emerges from all this, as I ponder it, is a dualism or a pairing obscured by our wish to influence that reluctant element, the collective inertia of all and everything beyond but around us. Two forces are at work here: the free action of the human will and the resistant force of nature. Public opinion illustrates this paradoxically. One opinion expresses an individual will. When wills are added they take on a more and more material form.

When I worked at Midwest Research Institute long ago, we once had a project intended to discover ideal highway configurations for various levels of traffic over a 24-hour period. One of our investigators chanced on the bright idea that a model of the roads, made of grooves, could simulate the highway system. That model, lilted up into a slant and covered with glass, could be tested by pouring kernels of rice into the system and observing which particular designs got clogged and which permitted the rice to fall through to the bottom faster. In the collective, tiny objects without any intentionality could easily model masses of people in cars.

Our humanity is submerged by our very numbers in the vast societies in which we live. When Emerson said that “Things are in the saddle, and ride mankind,” he was simply putting this fact in a short phrase. The very weight of this dimension, its massive materiality, submerges an element that is of a radically different character. It is our own conscious reality. Its action, of course, also screws up the machine. Without it no one would ever bite or constrain the invisible hand, interfere with natural selection by genetically modified crops, creative destruction would rage on without cries of woe, and no one would have to court vox populi.