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The epigraph is germane to our third maxim from La Rochefoucauld below.
“The argument for the promising rule goes by appeal to the value that the practice of promising has for us as members of a society. The chief value of the practice of promising is social coordination and cooperation—promises (and cognate phenomena like contracts and agreements) allow people to trust one another, which in turn allows for all sorts of cooperative benefits, e.g., divisions of labor, solutions to coordination problems and collective action problems, exits from prisoners dilemmas, etc. The theory is first offered by Hobbes (Leviathan xiii–xv).
Hobbes’ framework for assessing the rationality of moral rules assumes that the over-arching goal is to exit the state of nature into a civil society. In the Hobbesian state of nature, our expansive natural rights, our over-large appetites and our natural inclination to dominate result in constant, irresolvable conflict, what Hobbes called the war of all against all (Lev. xiii: 88–89). Against this backdrop Hobbes claims that practices that allow us to escape this condition are ‘Laws of Nature.’ i.e., mandates of rational self-interest,* and that keeping promises is one of those practices (Lev. xv: 100 ff). Hobbes takes promises to be a part of the larger and more complex system of contract. A contract for Hobbes is a mutual transfer of rights in things. A covenant is a contract where one of the parties must perform after the other, and thus promises the first performer his later performance. Hobbes takes covenants to be the ‘fountain and original of justice,’ and the keeping of covenants is a mandate of the Law of Nature (Lev. xiv: 100).
Hobbes’ picture is complicated by the fact that he doesn’t think that the appreciation of the fact that promise-keeping is valuable is sufficient to guarantee compliance. He thinks this because he thinks that people are passionate creatures whose reason is often overwhelmed by those passions, and because he conceives of covenants as cases where the promisee puts himself at risk by trusting the promisor. Such risk is forbidden by the first law of nature (self-defense) unless the promisee has some very good reason to assume that the promiser won’t betray his trust. And since mere reason isn’t enough (ex hypothesi) to make that guarantee, promisees can’t trust promisers. As such, Hobbes claims that promises made merely on the grounds of trust are not promises at all (cf. Lev. xiv: 96 & xv: 102). Hobbes’ solution is to ground promissory obligations not directly in the rationality of keeping promises, but rather in the rational fear of the sovereign, whose job it is to enforce contracts by punishing renegers. In this way, Hobbes has an indirect justification of promissory obligations by appeal to the rationality of promise-keeping: Rationality mandates the establishment of a sovereign, who will enforce contracts by threat of punishment. The existence of the plausible threat from the sovereign in turn makes promise keeping rational. So promises aren’t a way to exit the state of nature, rather they are a necessary component of civil society made possible by the exit from the state of nature by the establishment of a sovereign.”—Allen Habib
* That the Hobbesian “Laws of Nature” are merely “mandates of self-interest” is an eminently arguable proposition and one I believe, after S.A. Lloyd, to be false. Lloyd argues “that the only end reliably served by the Laws of Nature is the common good, or the good of humanity generally, and not the preservation or profit of the individual agent who is to follow those laws.” Please see her Morality in the Philosophy Thomas Hobbes: Cases in the Law of Nature (Cambridge University Press, 2009), as well as her earlier book, Ideals as Interests in Hobbes’s Leviathan: The Power of Mind over Matter (Cambridge University Press, 1992).
* * *
“We all have strength enough to endure the troubles of others.”— La Rochefoucauld
“We often pride ourselves on even the most criminal passions, but envy is a timid and shamefaced passion we never dare acknowledge.” — La Rochefoucauld
“Our promises are made in proportion to our hopes, but kept in proportion to our fears.” — La Rochefoucauld
Sidebar on the last maxim: In the case of Anglo-American contract law, however, it seems promises are an exception to rule of the second clause, that is, insofar as promises are not “kept in proportion to our fears,” at least when that fear is in reference to considering or calculating the consequences for breach of contract (cf. the ‘law and economics’ idea of ‘efficient breach’), the fear in question in reference to the possible (legal) penalties in the wake of that breach (we won’t here touch upon the sanctions that might follow the violation of a social norm).* The remedies for breach of contract are not intentionally (or unintentionally) punitive, hence one reason Seana Shiffrin points out that the legal “doctrines of consideration, mitigation, and the ban on punitive damages [emphasis added] are in tension with the corresponding [moral] structure of promising.” Shiffrin does appreciates the fact that “because it [i.e., law] is a cooperative activity of mutual governance that takes institutional form, its moral values and principles may well be distinct from those comprising interpersonal morality.” Nonetheless, she proceeds to argue that
“If either moral agency must be accommodated from respect for agents’ interests in leading moral lives or a robust culture of promissory commitment is necessary for a flourishing political society, then we have a political interest in ensuring that we do not as a community invoke and recognize promises within our political institutions but then treat them or act on rationales inconsistent with their value. Even if our interest in invoking promises is not directly one of supporting or encouraging the culture of promising, we may still have a duty, taking something of the form of a constraint, not to act or reason in ways that are in tension with the maintenance of a moral culture of promising.”
Shiffrin’s overarching motivating concern revolves on the possibility of articulating a (presumably prescriptive) theory of contract “that would treat the conditions of moral agency and the culture of promising in a more complementary way,” in other words, how might we “conceive of a distinctively legal normative conception of contract that would sit more comfortably with our moral agency.”
* In this discussion I am not assuming (nor need we assume) that contracts are best (descriptively) explained by the “promised-based or autonomy argument” or contract theory (of obligation) made (in)famous by Charles Fried’s Contract as Promise (1981) (it seems clear by now that no one principle—promise, consent, efficiency, what have you—can suffice to explain the praxis of contract law). And I agree with Brian Bix that the “ideal of freedom of contract (and its corollary, freedom from contract) is not always fully realized,” indeed, “the deviations from the ideal are pervasive, especially in consumer transactions.”
References & Further Reading:
Several years ago I occasionally posted on my Facebook page selections from La Rochefoucauld’s (Tr. Leondard Tancock) Maxims (Penguin Books, 1959, first published in 1665) and I thought perhaps RLL readers might enjoy them as well (apologies to those few who are found in both groups). It is one way for me to mark the start—and is in the spirit—of summer.
Permit me to introduce the first group of these with some wise observations from Jon Elster:
“Alone among the moralists, La Rochefoucauld offered something like a theory of human motivations. In fact, his views about unconscious motivation and unconscious cognition are probably more valuable than anything found in twentieth-century psychology. To some extent it is true, as Jean Lafond says, that ‘a certain verbal exuberance together with the exaggeration required for an original assertion turns the psychology into mythology.’ Yet…some systematic views can be extracted from what first appear as a random collection of diamond-like maxims.” — Elster on “the French Moralists” in a work that evidences his singular capacity to see with remarkable clarity both the forest and the trees in the study of emotions, namely, Alchemies of the Mind: Rationality and the Emotions (Cambridge University Press, 1999). The four writers he treats in one part of the book—Montaigne, Pascal, La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère—“mark the beginning and the end of the greatest era in French intellectual and cultural history.” Whether or not he intended it as such, we might read this, in part at least, as an indirect comment on the overweening infatuation with postmodern French philosophers among more than a few academic intellectuals.
I may comment on one or more maxim (as below) to say something directly or indirectly related to the perspectival truth ensconced in a particular maxim.
* * *
“One of the reasons why so few people are to be found who seem sensible and pleasant in conversation is that almost everybody is thinking about what he wants to say himself rather than about answering clearly what is being said to him. The more clever and polite think it enough simply to put on an attentive expression, while all the time you can see in their eyes and train of thought that they are far removed from what you are saying and anxious to get back to what they want to say. They ought, on the contrary, to reflect that such keenness to please oneself is a bad way of pleasing and persuading others, and that to listen well and answer to the point is one of the most perfect qualities one can have in conversation.”—La Rochefoucauld
“Spiritual health is no more stable than bodily; and though we may seem unaffected by the passions we are just as liable to be carried away by them as to fall ill when in good health.”—La Rochefoucauld
“Nothing makes it so difficult to be natural as the desire to be so.”—La Rochefoucauld
Indeed. This last maxim calls to mind a mental fallacy Jon Elster, after the late psychologist Leslie Farber, termed “willing what cannot be willed” (that is, in reference to those mental states or states of affairs in the world—like spontaneity or sleep—that cannot be the direct product of willing but are rather the—indirect—outcome or by-product effect of other mental states or actions). See Elster’s Sour Grapes: studies in the subversion of rationality (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1983): 43-66.
And yet, in Daoism, for example, we learn that one can engage in an “intentional project” to “be natural,” which in this case is characterized as wu-wei (lit., non-action). Livia Kohn’s entry on this concept from The Encyclopedia of Taoism, 2 Vols. (in Pregadio, ed. 2008: 1067) provides us with a succinct formulation: “Wuwei or ‘non-action’ means to do things the natural way, by not interfering with the patterns, rhythms and structure of nature, without imposing one’s own intentions upon the world.” The “natural way” is not meant here in the sense of how most of us, most of the time, “naturally” behave or act (which may be a function of habit, mindlessness or inattentiveness) but has a more specific or technical meaning depending on the way in which the natural world is said to be intrinsically in harmony with or expressive of (in an immanent sense) of the Dao. Thus wu-wei is not, literally, non-action but refers instead to a qualitatively distinct and uncommon kind of action, what the late Huston Smith called “creative quietude,” meaning one acts with a still or clear (‘unmuddied’) mind in a manner that embodies or incarnates or exemplifies the Dao. Such action is characterized by a freedom and spontaneity (ziran) that come from a heart-mind experiencing, it seems, an ecstatic or blissful oneness (or simply a kind of contentedness) with “all-there-is.” It is the characteristic and conspicuous action of the sage (shengren) and the ideal ruler in the political realm and is, arguably, a direct product of ascetic praxis and mystical states of consciousness. In short, wu-wei is acting with a meditative heart-mind (like a polished mirror, to use a prominent metaphor) in harmony with the natural world and tian while instantiating the Dao.
Ascetic self-discipline, training in the arts, and meditative praxis are necessary yet not sufficient conditions for wu-wei. In other words, while “making every effort,” “striving,” “working hard” or even “willing” are, in one important sense, truly the antithesis of wu-wei, arduous striving, self-discipline and training the mind are no less integral to the eventual accomplishment of wu-wei. The “acting naturally” that is wu-wei, therefore, does not come naturally to us, hence we are instructed, by way of an “intentional project,” to “return to the uncarved block,” dampen the passions and still the mind, all by way of attaining a “second” nature in Joel Kupperman’s sense, as it requires forms of self-discipline and self-knowledge that are arduous, that involve ascetic or ascetic-like training of the body and the heart-mind (i.e., reason and the emotions). Only then might we prove capable of acting in a timely fashion with the consummate skill, grace and spontaneity befitting alike the exigencies of daily situations and unique circumstance, and in a manner indicative of our ability to “be” one with Dao. In sum, acting naturally in the Daoist sense means cultivating what for us does not come naturally, and thus self-cultivation brings about, so to speak, a second nature, a nature in accord with the natural world, and capable of spontaneously and effortlessly realizing the Dao. [This material is taken from a short unpublished essay found here.]
This bibliography is now available on my Academia page. What follows is the Epigraph and Apologia for this compilation.
Epigraph
“The wealthiest and most powerful nation in the world may be the poorest in what was supremely precious to the highest cultures of classical antiquity and the renaissance of world history—the availability of time for thought and contemplation, for relaxation and creative work, for conversation and study, for love and friendship, for the enjoyment of the arts and the beauties of nature, for solitude and communion, for doubts and dreams. There is little room or time for indolence and excellence, for salons and coffeehouses and the market-place, for laughter and tears, for poetry and philosophy, for song and dance and worship, for birds and beasts, for sleep and convalescence, for birth and death; time to live and enough time to dwell on eternity. Can the mere availability of more time teach the most time-saving society in history how to spend time, how to transcend it, and how to appreciate timelessness? [….]
A crucial feature of the [Guaranteed Annual Income or ‘GAI’] model is that communal time will be employed not only in creative work but also in informal associations. This is the immense opportunity made possible by the enormous increase in leisure consequent upon the enactment of the GAI. The arts of friendship, participation in new forms of folk activities and play activities, and of conversation and dialogue are casualties of the present industrial society. They are the lost arts which could be vital in the new society, giving it a richer way of life than is now known to Americans, helping to transform a mechanistic ‘utopia’ into a high culture and a true civilization. The great ages of achievement in world history reflected a fortuitous clustering of creative individuals, a high degree of social and especially intellectual mobility, the confrontation and eventual fusion of diverse world-views and personal philosophies, the concentration of common energy on pervasive and transcending themes, the magical release of imagination from the ruts of conformity and effete tradition, the free flow of persons and ideas. The art of conversation requires that each member of a voluntary group be judged by his individual value and not as a member of a class or race or status group. As centers of extended conversation arise, the issues of deepest concern to men—the ultimate questions of life—can be explored with a degree of freedom that organizations with formal and partisan allegiances cannot allow—academic or political, vocational or religious.” — Raghavan Iyer, from the essay, “An Unfinished Dream,” in his Parapolitics: Toward the City of Man (Oxford University Press, 1979): 299-331. This chapter discusses the Guaranteed Annual Income (or ‘basic income’) proposal in light of Edward Bellamy’s utopian novel, Looking Backward (1888).
Apologia
This compilation assumes there are several profound truths and urgent questions embodied in our epigraph. In addition to works that more or less directly address topics in the title, I’ve included material that treats—in whole or part—philosophical and psychological presuppositions and assumptions one finds in exploring the subject of “free” or discretionary time, including how such time is relevant to the quest for human fulfillment and sundry forms of self-realization.
The voluntary group of associating individuals Iyer refers to in our epigraph is close in spirit if not letter, for example, to the meaning of “eudaimonistic” communities in the work of the late David L. Norton, the praxis of salons in the Republic of Letters in the French Enlightenment, and the radical social circle(s) that included the provocative anarchist philosopher William Godwin; and all three conceptions are importantly different from those found in the “communitarian” literature* insofar as these exemplary communities serve individuals, that is, provide the propitious (yet not all of the necessary) conditions for would-be self-responsible and self-actualizing (if not self-governing) individuals, conditions conspicuously conducive to the actualization of objective value(s) in the world. I want to elaborate a bit on the third example from Godwin’s “radical” world by way of concluding our apologia.
The anarchist philosopher William Godwin (1756 –1836) drew inspiration for his model of the anarchist society and its well-known reliance on sophisticated individual judgment as a vehicle of rationality and benevolence from “the context of the social circles in which he lived, worked and debated.” These radical social circles in turn “were part of a larger middle class community which drew on a range of philosophical and literary traditions in developing critical perspectives on contemporary social and political institutions” (Mark Philp). To be sure, Godwin drew upon the philosophes and British radicals, as well as the periphery of the early Liberal tradition (e.g., Paine), but especially the “writings, sermons, and traditions of Rational Dissent” when composing An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (first edition, 1793, later editions to 1798), but his belief in the veracity of his critique and vision was grounded in the daily life of the social circles of metropolitan radicalism in which he worked and spent his convivial and leisure activities. While this social and intellectual culture soon succumbed to government repression, it provides intimate empirical evidence that might be said to confirm Godwin’s belief—one shared with Condorcet—in the “perfectibility” (which is distinct from ‘perfectionism’) of man and the anarchist society for the provision of fertile soil for same. Godwin was not a political activist (although he knew members of radical groups and organizations) but a philosopher, but the radical social circles in which he lived temper the utopian (and crudely utilitarian) tendencies of his great work, at the very least they demonstrate the viability of at least some radical principles through their incarnation in daily praxis, even if Godwin lacked sufficient appreciation of the wider and deeper socio-economic and political conditions that made possible that praxis and served as a necessary condition for radical sentiment and actions.
“Given the assumptions and conventions of his background and his social circles” writes Philp, “his position could be rationally defensible.” Godwin’s seemingly naïve faith in the power of private rational judgment was confirmed in his experience of these social and intellectual circles, which included, but were not limited to academics. In Philp’s words,
“… [Godwin’s] membership [in] a literate and intellectual culture … cannot be identified politically, socially or intellectually with either aristocratic privilege or with the potentially violent and disruptive London poor. It is in this group that we find the politically unattached intellectuals and writers who had greeted the French Revolution and who had called for reform at home on intellectual and humanitarian grounds. [While this group is] “diffuse and made up of heterogeneous social and intellectual currents … there seems to be no doubt that in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, there existed in both London and the provinces significant number of critical, literate, professional men and women who held often very radical views on social, political and religious issues who regularly met together for the purposes of discussion in a number of overlapping social and professional circles. [….] Godwin moves in the company of artists, portrait painters, engravers, grammarians, industrialists, writers, editors, publishers, antiquarians, librarians, actors, theater managers, playwrights, musicians, novelists, poets, classical scholars, scientists, dons, lawyers, mathematicians, doctors, surgeons, and divines—and this list is not exhaustive. We should also recognize that members of these groups sustained a commitment to radical thinking throughout most of the last decade of the century.”
The middling class radicalism of these men and women was not simply the product of a Dissenting background, the French Revolution, and the influence of the philosophes, for it required the warp and woof of a cultural experience of that type of sociability that formed the “basic fabric of late-eighteenth century intellectual life:”
“Once he had concluded his morning’s work Godwin’s day was free and he generally spent it in company—talking and debating while eating, drinking and socialising. His peers’ behavior was essentially similar; they lived in a round of debate and discussion in clubs, associations, debating societies, salons, taverns, coffee houses, bookshops, publishing houses, and in the street. And conversation ranged through philosophy, morality, religion, literature and poetry, to the political events of the day. Members of these circles were tied together in the ongoing practice of debate. These men and women were not the isolated heroes and heroines of Romanticism pursuing a lonely course of discovery; they were people who worked out their ideas in company and who articulated the aspirations and fears of their social group. Their consciousness of their group identity was of signal importance….”
Here we discern the skeletal structure of Godwin’s anarchist ideal of a natural society, one which is fundamentally “discursive” or, better, conversational, in other words, a society defined by “intellectually active and communicative agents, a society wherein advances are made through a dialectic of individual reflection and group discussion.” Reason and “argument” were the lifeblood of a radicalism that flourished in this kind of sociability:
“The rules of debate for this group were simple: no one has a right to go against reason, no one has a right to coerce another’s judgment, and every individual has a right—indeed, a duty—to call to another’s attention his faults and failings. This is a highly democratic discourse, and it is essentially non-individualist: truth progresses through debate and discussion and from each submitting his beliefs and reasoning to the scrutiny of others.” The values of openness, rationality, and discussion or conversation that distinguished this sociability were likewise suffused with the norms and values that animated the literature of “sensibility.”
* For an uncommonly incisive analysis and sympathetic critique of that literature from an Enlightenment perspective, please see Robert E. Goodin’s Reflective Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2003): 26-47. As Goodin explains, the “sovereign artificer” of the Enlightenment “stands partially apart from the ’we’ in question, constituting an independent locus of value and judgment to be blended with others to form the ‘we’ in question.” The communitarian’s “encumbered self,” on the other hand, “in so far as it is constituted by the attachments that constitute the ‘we,’ is naturally subsumed within it.”
* * *
The bibliography is here.
Propositions pivotal to the “default liberal optimism about human welfare:”
The Systematic Imprudence thesis:
Human beings are systematically prone to make a wide range of serious errors in matters of personal welfare. These errors are weighty enough to substantially compromise the expected lifetime of well-being for individuals possessing a high degree of freedom to shape their lives as they wish, even under reasonably favorable conditions (education, etc.).
From Daniel M. Haybron’s The Pursuit of Unhappiness: The Elusive Psychology of Well-Being (Oxford University Press, 2008).
* * *
“The Socratic allegories, unlike the Homeric myths, inherently encourage dissatisfaction with the existing state of affairs. They thus motivated us to try to go on in different ways. If Socrates is right that we have been living in a dream [cf. the complex—and different—use of dreams and dreaming in the Advaita Vedanta and Buddhist traditions1], then these allegories serve as a wake-up call. If he is right that, unbeknownst to us, we have been living in prison [the Platonic Cave], then in becoming aware of that we begin to chafe at the chains. [….]
As such, the Cave seeks to instill a new form of Socratic ignorance. As is well known, in the Apology, Socrates says that he discovered that he was the wisest among humans because he knew that he did not know. But the Cave is a story that is designed to put Glaucon, and anyone else ready to hear it, into a position in which they can begin to recognize that they do not know. Socrates says that education is not a matter of putting knowledge into souls, but of turning the whole soul away from the darkness and toward the light [as several classical Greek and Indic philosophies, as well as teachings in the Judaic tradition would have it, it is a matter of having a proper disposition to truth2]. Certainly, what we are turning away from are images, shadow, echoes, allegories, not recognized as such. Thus we are turning away from a dreamlike state. And what we are turning toward is a recognition that if we are to understand what these images, we must grasp that they are images, and we must struggle to understand what these images are images of. Indeed, the process of turning away is constituted by coming to recognize the ‘allegorical’ nature of ordinary experience [this has a Daoist flavor3]. We may not yet be able to say what the deeper meanings are [although perhaps philosophical, psychoanalytic, or spiritual therapy can help!4]—thus we remain ignorant—but we are able to glimpse that the images are pointing toward deeper meanings; and thus we at least know that we are ignorant. So the allegory of the Cave facilitates a Socratic movement from being ignorant, yet ignorant of one’s ignorance, to being ignorant but aware that one is ignorant. And insofar as ordinary life is like a dream [thus involving illusions and delusions5], then we are moved toward Socratic ignorance, we begin to wake up.”—Jonathan Lear, from one of the essays in his latest book, Wisdom Won from Illness: Essays in Philosophy and Psychoanalysis (Harvard University Press, 2017)
Notes:
Further Reading (i.e., in addition to the titles found above):
Donald Trump’s economic plan (as inferred from his budget proposal) looks backward with overweening nostalgia, believing that “one of the greatest achievements in all of economic history,” namely, the “Great Leap Forward of the American level of labor productivity that occurred in the middle decades of the twentieth century,” can be attained once more, hence his singular and inordinate fondness for “industries that powered the American economy in the mid-20th century, particularly manufacturing, fossil fuel extraction, and construction.” His campaign slogan to “Make America Great Again” (which first appeared in Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign), makes literal or at least sub-conscious reference to this period of economic history, the budget plan enshrining both socio-economic nostalgia and messianic yearning. According to Robert J. Gordon,
“… [T]he year 1970 marks a distinct break point between faster and slower growth.* The ten decades between 1870 and 1970 deserve their accolade … as the ‘special century.’ The inventions of the second industrial revolution gathered momentum between 1870 and 1920 and then between 1920 and 1970 created the most rapid period of growth in labor productivity experienced in American history, bringing an utter change from 1870 in most dimensions of human life. The inventions of the third revolution, though revolutionary within their sphere of influence—entertainment, communication, and information technology—did not have the same effects on living standards as had electricity, the internal combustion engine, running water, improving life expectancy, and the other Great Inventions of the special century, not to mention the improvement in the human condition as work hours declined from 60 to 40 per week.
By definition, growth in output per person equals growth in labor productivity plus growth in hours worked per person in the population. Starting in the late 1960s, there was a distinct slowdown in labor productivity growth. However, growth in output per person avoided suffering a similar slowdown until after 2000, because its growth rate exceeded that in labor productivity by the contribution of rising hours of work per person. This occurred as women shifted from house work to work in the market, meaning that each woman who made this shift raised average hours of market work for the population as a whole. Since 2000, we have seen a sharp decline in growth output per person and its two components—growth in productivity and in hours of work per person—after corrections for the ups and downs of the business cycle. [….]
The aggregate record across all sectors of the economy shows that productivity growth slowed down markedly after 1970 and experienced a brief revival during 1996-2004 that most analysts attribute to the influence of the invention of the web, search engines, and e-commerce, as well as to the sharp spike of investment in information and communication technology (ICT) equipment. In the past decade, productivity growth has been even slower than it was between 1970 and 1996. This story of slowdown, revival, and further slowdown, as told by the economy-wide data, conceals substantial differences in performance across sectors of economic activity.” [….]
Today we are in the midst (perhaps even the downside) of a “third industrial revolution” (IR #3) that began with the first mainframe computers in the 1950s and now “encompasses the digital age of information and communication technology” (its principal benefits for ‘productivity growth’ having occurred between 1994 and 2004). The kind of growth during this period is conspicuously different, quantitatively and qualitatively, from the prior “special century” which, as Gordon says, “changed everything.” To be sure, changes have and are occurring, but they’re of the bleaker kind:
“The problem created by the computer age is not mass unemployment but the gradual disappearance of good, steady, middle-level jobs that have been lost not just to robots and algorithms but to globalization and outsourcing to other countries, together with the concentration of job growth in routine manual jobs that offer relatively low wages. The gradual slowing of economic growth … combines disappointing productivity growth over the past decade with a steady rise of inequality over the past three decades. …[H]eadwinds … have intervened to prevent most Americans from enjoying real economic gains equal to the growth of economy-wide output per hour. These headwinds constitute barrier to the equal distribution of productivity gains, including the effects of rising inequality, educational stagnation, declining labor force participation, and the fiscal demands of an aging population. [….]
The combined effects of growing inequality, a faltering educational system, demographic headwinds, and the strong likelihood of a fiscal correction imply that the median disposable income will grow much more slowly in the future than in the past. When combined with the implications of a smaller effect of innovation on productivity since 1970, there is little room for growth at all. When all the headwinds are taken into account, the future growth of real median disposable income per person will barely be positive and fall far below the rate enjoyed by generation of Americans dating back to the nineteenth century.” — Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War (Princeton University Press, 2016).
Which brings us back to Trump’s economic plan, apparently crafted within the presuppositions, assumptions, and parameters of another economic era, one decidedly behind us:
“Rusty lever won’t lift U.S. economy”
By Ronald Brownstein for the Los Angeles Times, 9 June 2007 (Brownstein is a senior editor at The Atlantic)
“[Trump is] attempting to restore the primacy of industries that powered the American economy in the mid-20th century, particularly manufacturing, fossil fuel extraction, and construction. In the process he is sublimating—if not opposing—the needs of the sectors driving growth today: information technology, professional services, clean energy, entertainment, education, tourism, and healthcare.
With decisions such as last week’s blustery withdrawal from the Paris climate accord, Trump is betting on industries whose greatest contribution to American prosperity is behind them. [….] When Trump talks about the economy, manufacturing and fossil fuel production usually take first billing, followed by construction—the target of this week’s infrastructure proposals. [….]
… [E]ven if you count Trump’s approach as an unqualified benefit for his favored industries, he’s still banking on sectors that have been shrinking for decades. [….] Measured as a share of total U.S. employment, Trump’s three favored industries have plummeted precipitously. In 1965, manufacturing, mining and construction provided about one in every three non-agricultural jobs. Today, it’s fewer than one-in-seven jobs. [….]
The entire article, as of this writing, not available on the Los Angeles Times website, can nonetheless be found here.
* This has considerable bearing on the Trump administration’s projections of economic growth under his proposed budget plan: “The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projects that, under current laws and policies, the economy will grow 2.3 percent this year but growth will average just 1.9 percent a year over the coming decade (i.e., between now and 2027). As a candidate, President Trump boasted that his economic plan ‘would conservatively boost growth to 3.5 percent per year on average . . . with the potential to reach a 4% growth rate.’ And Secretary Mnuchin has said that under President Trump’s policies, economic growth will pick up to ‘3 percent or higher.’”
Further reading: For a “global” dimension missing from Gordon’s argument, please see the following books, a couple of which I’ve cited several times before on this blog (our authors have different perspectives on this ‘dimension’):
See too this piece by Rick Wartzman from the Los Angeles Times, written after posting: “Populists want to bring back the blue-collar Golden Age. But was it really so golden?”
What follows—in the hope of whetting your appetite—is the tentative epigraph and apologia to my latest (comparatively short!) bibliography: Beyond Capitalist-Attenuated Time: Freedom, Leisure, and Self-Realization.
“The wealthiest and most powerful nation in the world may be the poorest in what was supremely precious to the highest cultures of classical antiquity and the renaissance of world history—the availability of time for thought and contemplation, for relaxation and creative work, for conversation and study, for love and friendship, for the enjoyment of the arts and the beauties of nature, for solitude and communion, for doubts and dreams. There is little room or time for indolence and excellence, for salons and coffeehouses and the market-place, for laughter and tears, for poetry and philosophy, for song and dance and worship, for birds and beasts, for sleep and convalescence, for birth and death; time to live and enough time to dwell on eternity. Can the mere availability of more time teach the most time-saving society in history how to spend time, how to transcend it, and how to appreciate timelessness?” — Raghavan Iyer, from the essay, “An Unfinished Dream,” in his book, Parapolitics: Toward the City of Man (Oxford University Press, 1979): 299-331. This chapter discusses the Guaranteed Annual Income (or ‘basic income’) proposal in light of Edward Bellamy’s utopian novel, Looking Backward (1888).
Apologia: This compilation assumes there are several profound truths and urgent questions embodied in our epigraph. In addition to works that more or less directly address topics in the title, I’ve included material that treats—in whole or part—philosophical and psychological presuppositions and assumptions intrinsic to exploring the subject of “free” or discretionary time, human fulfillment, and self-realization.
Update: While doing (occasional) research for my bibliography, “Beyond Capitalist-Attenuated Time…,” I vaguely recalled a book I’d read some years ago, thinking it might contain some relevant material owing to its brilliant analytical and historical treatment of “abstract” and “concrete” time in the light of Marx’s critique of capitalism. Oh my, it sure does! I’ve been reading it afresh (quickly for now, with more care later) and quite thankful it came to mind. The book? Moishe Postone’s Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A reinterpretation of Marx’s critical theory (Cambridge University Press, 1993).