Notice
To all my friends and readers,
I will probably stop posting stuff on this blog for a little while, as I am currently preparing for my Law School Admission Test (LSAT). The test is going to be held on Oct 2, 2004, at Swarthmore College, a very prestigious institution fairly close to Penn, my alma mater. It is noteworthy, at least to a Quaker like me, that Swarthmore was first established by Philadelphia Friends, who named it after Swarthmore Hall, residence of George Fox and Margaret Fell, founders of Quakerism.
Brother Thomas
I also talked to my former high school principal lately, Brother Thomas Favier, a member of the Institute of the Brothers of the Christian Schools.
Brother Thomas is a good embodiment of all that is good in the Christian religion. After becoming a novice of his order at the tender age of 16, he has determined to serve the poor and needy of the world through educating their youths. Unlike all other Roman Catholic orders, the Christian Brothers, aside from the vows of poverty and chastity, also pledge to educate young boys and girls who are otherwise denied proper education. The founder of the order, St. John Baptist de La Salle, was a Frenchman who first introduced the idea of having teachers trained in professional schools (normal schools), and one key doctrine of theirs is that they would never instruct students in the classical languages, for the teaching of Latin, etc. would inevitably lead to education being regarded as luxury.
After obtaining his degree in English and education in England, Brother Thomas served briefly in Southeast Asia, before he went to Hong Kong in 1963. He quickly established himself as an able teacher in English literature and a fantastic coach of soccer. It was under his leadership as sportsmaster (1978-1986) and principal (1986-2003) that the soccer team of my alma mater, St. Joseph's College, became the most highly decorated team among all high schools in Hong Kong.
Aside from his interests in theology, literature and soccer, Brother Thomas is also a great motorbike rider. This may surprise people who consider all clergy as stuffy old men who have no interest in modern sports whatsoever.
It was he who first recognized my talent (if I may use the word) as a debator and my potential to be a scholar. It was also he who first imparted the idea that knowledge is not just about grades and academic data to me and my classmates. Without his mentorship, I would have remained a physically weak, spiritually feeble and socially awkward bookworm. I still remember the day when he appointed me to be the captain of the volleyball team of my class! For heavens' sake, I have not even mastered the basic skills of volleyball at that time! At least he forced me to.
He has recently retired from his busy career. I am sure he will continue to inspire young people to live up to their very best.
Liberation
I also have to mention how much liberated I feel, as I no longer have to put up with my on one hand fanatically conservative and on the other hand mindbogglingly hypocritical roommate.
Peace be upon his soul. Although I doubt it, since as the son of a fundamentalist pastor, he has every reason to remain hypocritical. It's not even like he's blinded by some deceptive propaganda: he stands to gain from being hypocritical.
New apartment
I'm currently in the process of moving in to my new apartment in downtown D.C. It's a townhouse rented by a friend, who's leaving for England very soon, and I am going to housesit her place in the meantime. The location is very convenient, and the neighbors are wonderful.
Yesterday I helped my landlady out by setting up three bookshelves for her. It was a very exciting experience for me since I don't really have any previous experience in carpentry. I really enjoyed the labor.
The only downside is that as I move out of my apartment, I lose access to its gym (which isn't that well-stocked anyways). I guess the best I can do is to do pushups and situps in my living room and jog every morning in some park instead.
Hopefully before the end of the summer, I would be able to publish my reviews on
Marxism and Philosphy
and
The Theory of the Leisure Class
.
The Way of Man According To The Teaching Of Hasidism (1964)
Notwithstanding my burning rage thanks to that religious bigot and hypocrite, I decide to write something about a beautiful mind and heart. This heart and this mind belongs to the late Martin Buber, a Jewish philosopher who was the preeminent scholar in Hasidic theology.
Hasidism, whose certain understandings are not unlike those of Quakerism, was a mystical movement that captured the spirits of eighteenth century Jews in eastern Europe. If the Reform movement, led by Moses Mendelsohn, could be considered as the Jewish answer to the European Enlightenment, and an attempt to rationalize the Jewish faith, Hasidism should be understood as a mysticism that shares many methodology and spiritual understandings with the Christian Pietist movement, that gave birth to the Religious Society of Friends and the Anabaptist churches, namely, the Mennonites, the Amish, and the Brethren, during a slightly earlier period, in Commonwealth England and Thirty-Year War Germany.
Unlike mainstream Christianity, Judaism, Hasidism in particular, does not make each man's salvation his highest aim. Instead, our souls are regarded 'as serving members of God's Creation, which by our own work "is to become the Kingdom of God; thus no soul has its object in itself, in its own salvation." True, each is to know, purify and perfect himself, but not for his own sake--neither for the sake of his temporal happiness nor for that of his eternal bliss--but for the sake of the work which is to be performed upon the world.
Furthermore, Hasidism, while recognizing the absolute transcendence of God, believes that the world, while being an "irradiation of God," is endowed with "an independence of existence and striving...to form a crust around itself." Thus, a divine spark lives in every thing and being, but each such spart is enclosed by an isolating shell. Only man can liberate it and re-join it with its Origin and Maker: by "holding holy converse with the thing and using it in a holy manner, so that his intention in doing so remains directed towards God's transcendence." Thus, man could be aptly described as possessing a divine force within himself.
These are very Quakerly ideas. Like the Hasids, Quakers believe that there is that of God in every man, and every person is a potential channel of the Divine Truth. Man's sole purpose of living in the temporal world is to allow his Divine Seed to blossom, allow it to direct his every thought and every behavior. In short, man's sole purpose is to be an instrument of the Divine. It is from this very belief that God and His Kingdom reside not in a parallel space called "Heaven" but in our very heart that gave birth to the Quaker testimonies. The Peace testimony, which admonish us not to engage in violence against one another, due to the very fact that every one of us is created in the Divine image. The Equality testimony, which holds that no one should accord any honor that is due God to any temporal person, and whatever honor we accord to one person, we must accord it to all. The simplicity testimony, the truthfulness testimony, etc. all develop from the very initial belief of man's possession of something divine in himself.
The difference between Hasidism and Quakerism is essentially the fundamental difference between Judaism and Christianity. Unlike Judaism, which does not address the question, Quakers could not help but ask themselves whether mankind is endowed with adequate strength to fully realize the Kingdom of God on Earth. Unfortunately, to the Christian understanding, the answer is negative. Due to distractions, due to human frailty and weaknesses, etc., human beings often fall short of the Divine expectation. It is at this juncture that Christians yearn for a living Truth. It is worth noting that the concepts of Jesus and Christ are in some way separate, the latter being the fountain of the law of nature, the first Word of God and God. It was always out there and human beings could always discern elements of It through the exercise of reason. It was due to human inability to uncover this universal Truth that Christ has to be materialized so that Truth could live among us, and show us its content in a concrete fashion. Whether Jesus of Nazareth, believed by the Christians to be the incarnation of Christ died for our sake, and whether we will receive salvation really are trivial and selfish questions for human beings like me to ask.
In this smallish book, which comprises of only 32 pages, Buber revealed to us many priceless gems in Hasidic thoughts. The book itself is divided into 6 essays, which contains various stories told by Hasidic rabbis. In short, the following themes are discussed. In the first chapter, Prof. Buber stressed the need for every one of us to search his own heart. After one has done this introspective search, one should choose one's own way to serve God. Before one start one's adventures, one must first bring about the unity of his being, and when one start it, one must begin with himself, finally, when one does it, one must not be preoccupied with himself and his own goodness and spiritual welfare, etc.
The stories are really touching. I'll include one of them here.
Rabbi Hayyim of Zans had married his son to the daughter of Rabbi Eliezer. The day after the wedding he visited the father of the bride and said, "Now that we are related I feel close to you and can tell you what is eating at my heart. Look! My hair and beard have grown white, and I have not yet atoned!"
"O my friend," replied Rabbi Eliezer, "you are thinking only of yourself. How about forgetting yourself and think of the world?"
We see a zaddik ("a proved one"--JC), a wise, pious, kindly man, reproach himself in his old age for not yet having performed the true turning. The reply given him is apparently prompted by the opinion that he greatly overrates his sins and greatly underrates the penance he has already done. But what Rabbi Eliezer says, goes beyond this. He says...."Do not keep worrying about what you have done wrong, but apply the soul power you are now wasting on self-reproach, to such active relationship to the world as you are destined for. You should not be occupied with yourself but with the world."
Sick
Today I am very sick: I had a hard time breathing and I feel like something's on my chest. Nevertheless, I had the pleasure of playing
Go, a Chinese/Korean/Japanese chess game for the first time. I played with a very seasoned player in the Border's bookstore in downtown D.C.
The gentleman taught me quite a few rules and principles of the game, and I really appreciate that. A graduate of William and Mary and an elementary school teacher, he has been to most part of the world, from China (where he further perfected his art) to Senegal. He's also the chairman of the
Go club in D.C. metro area.
I also finished reading a smallish pamphlet, called
The Way of Man According to the Teaching of Hasidism, written by the late Prof. Mordecai Martin Buber of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, a formost moral philosopher and Hasidic scholar. A more detailed book review will be posted later. It turns out that Hasids and Quakers, mystics in the Jewish and Christian religions, share quite a few understanding in the nature of the good life.
Corporation (2004)
Just watched a very interesting movie
Coporation (2004) in a theater at 11th and E, downtown D.C.
It's a movie about the rise of the modern corporation and how it's power has penetrated into every single aspect of our lives. It is also what I would call a socioanalysis of an economic system known to the world as capitalism.
When you have commentators like tha anarchist Noam Chomsky, the left-liberal Howard Zinn and the arch-libertarian free-market champion Milton Friedman agreeing with each other, you know something interesting's going on.
So what exactly is a corporation? A corporation, by definition, is a legal person who, under the law, has a one-dimensional character. And that dimension is profit-maximization. Everything comes second. Milton Friedman was in his best when he stated that it is preposterous, undemocratic and perverse for corporations to try to act on "its" conscience, for ethical considerations, etc. are beyond the scope of their natural duties and their expertise. They are created to act in certain ways, and these certains ways must lead to profit maximization. End of the story.
The film also is a socioanalysis of capitalism, in the sense that it tries to dissect the character of this legal person called the corporation, and the consequences of it. The material consequence was kind of a repetition of what Robert Heilbroner had said in his
An Inquiry into Human Prospect (1974) and Andre Gunder Frank's core-periphery dependency theory in his
Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America (1967). Basically, it pointed out how the world is sharply divided between the First World (core): the capitalist/imperialist nations, and the Third World (periphery). The development of the first world depends exactly on the underdevelopment of the third world, for the third world is no more than a market and raw-material provider for the first world, and the terms of trade is unequal...the scene in which thousands of Peruvians went to the streets, rioting and protesting against the privatization of RAIN WATER reminds me of the Algerian revolts at the end of the classical
La Battaglia di Algeri (1965), a film about the blood-soaked liberation of the Algerian nation from French colonial rule.
Even more interesting is the film's psycho-analysis of the corporation and those who are affected by it. In this respect, it harks back to the Korsch-Gramsci-Lukacs thesis of false-consciousness; John Kenneth Galbraith's theory on demand manufacturing; and Penn's very own Edward S. Herman's theory on consent-manufacturing. Since the major media, regardless of whether it's Fox News or CNN, essentially share the same interests, they necessarily collude to provide information they want the rest of the world to know. It's not even like they're plotting this in a sinister way. No, these are great people, Rupert Murdoch and Rush Limbaugh are not monsters, they are simply spreading things you and I would spread as well should we be in their place. In this sense, both capitalist and non-capitalist (theoretically, we, as wage earners, are all proletarian) are mentally trapped in the"system."
Through carefully calculated advertisement and selective media coverage, corporations gradually create consumer demands. A good example would be ads that target young kids so that they can nag their parents to buy them a new toy. This is in fact a violation of the idea of free market, where every player is rational and makes rational choices. The most interesting debate regarding consumer supremacy kicks in at this juncture as well. When debating the virtues of the market, Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises claimed that the market is the best solution for the satisfaction of our wants, through its utilization of the price system. Maurice Dobb, a Marxian economist at Cambridge in response said, "Yeah, suppose the market really does a good job in doing so...nevertheless, who tells you that consumer satisfaction in a capitalist society really is of supreme importance? Who tells you that they really are making rational choices free of outside perversions?" This corresponds to Galbraith's contention that most demands are manufactured, and therefore trivial. The keypoint is the word "trivial." If I am brainwashed into doing something against my interest, should another person be entitled to stop me from making such irrational choice?
A even more terrifying prospect is the manufacturing of social norms and mores by the corporations. It is a question of conscience-creation. Through their control of major institutions, corporations are able to alter the course of higher learning. Every year, major corporations pour billions of money into think tanks and universities that would come up with studies that they appreciate,and scholars that they deem fit. Judge Frank Easterbrook of the Seventh Circuit is an interesting example. When he was Lee and Brenda Freeman Professor of Law at the University of Chicago, he wrote an article for the Michigan Law Review, in which he argued that if the cost of compliance to a law exceeds the profits of disobeying it, companies should simply refuse to obey a law, and count the fines, etc. as transaction costs. Whereas I do appreciate the rigorous scholarship of neo-Institutionalists like Richard A. Posner and Judge Easterbrook, one need not be terribly smart to see what they really mean when they say the objective of law is wealth maximization and efficiency promotion. When a scholar like Robert H. Bork argues that antitrust law underdimes the market's efficiency, he really means it undermines the Kaldor-Hicks efficiency of the system, instead of Paretian efficiency, and we all know what this really means. A legal rule is Pareto efficient if it makes at least one person better off, without making any other person worse off, whereas it is Kaldor-Hicks efficient if it could be made Pareto efficient by a side-payment. This side-payment will have to be paid by some player in the market. Thus, to sum it up, Pareto efficiency means everyone is better off, whereas Kaldor-Hicks efficiency implies that although everyone could be better off, someone is going to pay a price for it. Judge Bork, in his
The Antitrust Dilemma (1977) apparently measures efficiency in the Kaldor-Hicks sense of the term.
Sometimes you also have conflicts between the creation of false-consciousness and the actual profit-making of corporations. Is Larry Flynt a bleeding heart liberal or is he an unscrupulous capitalist? In reality he really is the latter. A most ingenious and unscrupulous player in an unbridled free market. Nevertheless, supposedly pro-market pundits bash him and he proclaims himself to be a liberal. Why? Because in his case, his company, Hustler magazine, carries out only half of his natural function: profit maximization. It fails to generate norms and mores and false consciousness for the masses that together form the ideology of a capitalist society: namely, the Puritanic ethics.
How very interesting: I think both Friedman and Chomsky could finally agree on one thing: we live in an era where one-dimensional legal persons, known as the corporations, reigns supreme. The only determinant of social relations is that of a capitalist production relations. The only link I have with a convenience store clerk is not one between living human beings, but that between the banknote I have and the goods his store provide. Alienation anyone?
Soviet Zion
This is something I mentioned to my friend Rachel a long while ago, although I think it's a topic interesting enough for me to post:
There was once a far and remote dream shared by a handful of socialist intellectuals in the turn-of-the-century, the dream of young women and men whom I would call the alternative-Zionists.
Here is the link:
http://birobidzhan.swarthmore.edu/
For these people, Rosa Luxumburg, Leon Trotsky and most leaders of the Second International included, it was unrealistic to establish a homeland for *all* Jewish peoples since the Diaspora has already created such linguistic and cultural differences amongst them that they had eventually developed into different ethnic groups (Ashkenazim, Sephardim, Yemeni, Ethiopian, or even Chinese Kai-Feng, etc.) If one were to include them all in one nation-state, that state would inevitable bear a religious character, which is, of course, repugnant to the progressive conscience. The alternative solution would be a homeland for Yiddish speaking Ashkenazy Jews of Eastern European origins.
Strangely enough, although the Constitution of such an alternative Zion was drafted by the Soviet government in mid-20s, the plan was executed in 1934 by Josef Stalin, and a Jewish Republic was established in the Far East.
This was a heroic failure, and although the republic still exists even until today (call the Jewish Autonomous Republic of the Russian Federation, the Jewish population there accounts only for 2% of the entire "Jewish" republic. Nevertheless, the official language, etc. of this republic is still Yiddish, and Yiddish newspapers are still published.
Nixon the liberal
Just saw a book in my favorite used-book store. It's called
Nixon on the Issues, and was published in 1968 by the Nixon-Agnew presidential campaign committee.
I flipped through a few pages, and realized immediately how Dick Nixon's gonna' be among the most liberal members on the Hill today if he's still alive and in politics. Especially on environmentalism, affirmative action and diplomacy: Nixon's gonna be
the moving target of right-wing pundits these days.
He's not even that conservative even on fiscal issues: most fiscal policy packages a Democratic politician would give serious thoughts to would be summarily rejected by Nixon. Tax cuts in the middle of a war? An unjustifiable war in the first place?
Oh well, Nixon, Ford, Eisenhower......old school centrist Republicans who were probably friendlier to the legendary East Coast liberal Republican establishment represented by Nelson Rockefeller than to segregationist Strom "I finally died" Thurmond and his proud heirs Jesse "I hate niggers and commies" Helms and Trent "I wish ole' Strom were the President" Lott. The final showdown between the two camps of course came in 1986-1992, during the Iran-Contra investigations, when eighty-year-old liberal Republican Judge Lawrence Walsh sent 14 indictments and 11 convictions as Christmas presents to the Bush Sr. White House.
Anyone remember who desegregated Little Rock Central High? Hint: It wasn't a democrat.
Karl Korsch (1886-1961)
The next book I am going to commnent on is Karl Korsch's
Marxism and Philosophy.
Korsch is a forerunner of the school of critical theory, that has been dominating Marxian philosophy in the west since 1930s. Today it is one of the three major branches of philosophies in the West, the other two being phenomenology and exietentialism. The word "postmodernism" in fact was created by critical theorists like Theodor Adorno.
Born in Todstedt and raised in Thuringia in a petty bourgeois family, Korsch determined early in his life to become a lawyer. After a rigourous education every German lawyer has to undertake in the Universities of Munich, Berlin, Geneva and Jena, he obtained his Juris Doctorate at Jena in 1910.
After two years of research fellowship at the London School of Economics (1912-1914), Korsch was forced to return to Germany after the War broke out. Despite being a pacifist who refused to bear arm, he was wounded twice and was decorated twice with the coveted Iron Cross.
Upon his discharge from the army, Korsch was appointed to a professorship in law at the University of Jena. It was about the same time, at around 1919, that he became a communist militant.
Following the failed communist uprising in Germany in 1919-1921, Korsch started to write extensively on why and how the proletariat had failed, reaching his famous conclusion simulteneously with Georg Lukacs of Hungary and Antonio Gramsci of Italy. (A ground-breaking thesis that could be used to explain the culture war today in the U.S.) Namely, that the proletariat was philosphically and psychologically un-prepared to seize power, and that a material overthrowing of the economic infrastructure and and demolishing of the political superstructure of a bourgeois society must be preceded by the thorough refutation and abolishment of the bourgeois ideology, be it fundamentalist Protestanism or the "cult of property rights."
In 1923, Korsch was elected to the Thuringian Diet, and joined the Government of that state as Minister of Justice the same year. In fact, he accepted to lead the Justice Department in order to better facilitate an all-out armed rebellion. After the failure of the Hamburg uprising in 1924, he resigned his post, and was elected instead to the Reichstag of the Weimar Republic.
During the period 1929-1933, Korsch vigorously defended the Republic he despised so much against the encroachment of the Nazis. Following the burning down of the Reichstag in February in 1933, he was forced to flee.
Korsch pretty much spent the rest of his life in exile, in Denmark, England and finally in the United States. He became more or less cut off from the intellectual world. In order to support his family, he was forced to accept a professorship in the law school of Tulane University, and lived in a segregated society that never failed to thoroughly disgust him for a couple of years.
In 1945, he accepted a position in the Institute of Social Research at Columbia University, where he spent his next five years writing on sociology. It was also in New York where he collaborated with Kurt Lewin, of MIT, to establish the modern science of organizational dynamics.
Karl Korsch died in Massachusetts in 1961, a man whose passion was revitalized by the revolutions that have broken out everywhere in the Third World.
An Inquiry Into Human Prospect
This is a very grim book written by Professor Robert L. Heilbroner of the New School University in New York City.
Heilbroner is a very versatile writer and Institutional economist, and has written such classics as
The Worldly Philosophers (1955), The Nature and Logic of Capitalism (1980), Marx: For and Against (1979) and
The Making of the Economic Society (1963). His
The Worldly Philosphers sold over 4 million copies and is the second best selling written on economics in the 20th century. (The first being Samuelson's
Economics)
Among these books, Marx: For and Against is in fact one of my personal favorites. For those of you who doesn't have the time or patience to read through
Das Kapital, Heilbroner's book is a really fascinating non-dogmatic introduction.
Unfortunately, his An Inquiry into Human Prospect came off as a slight disappointment. This is because although most of the topics he covered are still timely, some of the scenarios he conjectured are less realistic today than they were, and the solution he provided is very grim.
In this little booklet Heilbroner discussed in great details the challenge posed to human beings by natural disasters like global warming; population explosion and its possible repercussion, etc.
He mentioned things like how poor nations would attempt to nuclear-blackmail immoral first world nations, yet so far this has happened only with North Korea, which is not even a third world country, in Heilbroner's analytical framework (it's a Marxist-Leninist dictatorship).
He also made a very very elaborate analysis on how well the two great world systems, capitalism and socialism, could respond to these challenges. Alas he based his socialist model on Soviet reality, which is no longer a reality. He should probably compare relatively unbridled capitalism, like that in the U.S., with social democracies, like the Scandinavian economies.
His prediction is very interesting though. Being faced with third world challenge and an increasingly Malthusian situaion, Heilbroner argued that the only way the world could even survive is to thoroughly abolish the political system known as liberal democracy. I really don't think I am even entitled to comment on this suggestion, since I really have not done enough of comparative study of governments and polities. What I do know is, given the conservative nature of the Western peoples, and the common quality shared across cultures known as inertia, a radical reform of government probably is not going to take place, at least not in the United States of America. Whereas I certainly hope the U.S. could undergo some radical reform, I do not think this is ever going to happen.
The Affluent Society (1958)
The Affluent Society, written by John Kenneth Galbraith of Harvard, is probably one of the most popular and most hated economic texts written in the twentieth century. A staunch Keynesian, Mr. Galbraith is also very well known for the lucid prose he writes. Paul Samuelson, Nobel laureate in economics, once commented on how people actually question the validity of Mr. Galbraith's argument based on the fact that he's style is "
too elegant" to be something serious.
But it is Galbraith's defiance towards the
conventional wisdom that earned him his share of scorn from his professorial colleagues. In fact, it was he who first coined that very term in the book.
Galbraith started off first by describing the term "conventional wisdom." According to him, the reason why economics is such a dismal science is because most of its precepts were formulated by dead people living in dismal epochs. People like Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo, who lived amidst the soot and smoke of industrial England; Karl Marx, who saw the horrors of the
reification and
alienation and increasingly severe
business cycles; Thorstein Veblen, who saw the corruption of the gilded age; Joseph Schumpeter, who witnessed the madness and brutality of an imperialist era and the world wars it generated; and John Maynard Keynes, who published his
General Theory in the midst of the Great Depression.
We, students of economics, who live in an affluent society, Galbraith argued, should think in different perspectives.
After going through a brief historical account of economic thoughts, Mr. Galbraith asked us: how do we measure how well our economy is doing?! By its production level, right? But why? Why are every single one of us judge our government's performance by looking at the GDP?
This very obsession with production is exactly something we inherited from our starving forebears. Together with what he called the
"paramount position of production," inequality and economic security are the two other obsession that cause endless useless debates between liberal and conservative economists.
Get over with it. These are no longer pressing issues. When compared to a middle-income family in Africa, even the worst slum in the United States are very affluent.
Galbraith then examined the
"imperatives of consumer demand," and came to the conclusion that first, conventional wisdom define the decreasing marginal utility of goods in a fashion that is too narrow. Not only does utility falls as we increase our consumption of EACH good, but it also falls as we move from necessities to luxury goods. Therefore, even if it is true that Paris Hilton is throwing her first party in the Buckingham Palace, her utility level is still terribly low, when compared to the one-hundredth loaf a hungry refugee is eating.
Since this
diminishing urgency of wants is not admitted by "mainstream" economists, of course they would refuse to denounce the fact that we actually don't need certain goods as badly as others, and hence, the production of those goods are not of
paramount concern. The production "that supplies these goods (e.g. Paris Hilton's makeup gears) and services (her party in Buckingham), since it renders [presumably] undimished utility, remains of undiminished importance."
So what then? Such a narrow understanding is not per se harmful, but, when coupled with the fact that most demands are artificially created through media brainwash (what Galbraith called the
Dependence Effect), poses serious threat to our society. The picture gets even dimmer if we consider that a lot of powerful people have vested interest in maintaining the paramount position of production: these people, among others, include big manufacturers and businesspeople.
What we then have is a
Social Imbalance. On one hand, things that are demanded by brainwashed teenagers are always produced
en masse, on the other hand, public goods, that have to be delivered by the Government, are underproduced. So what do you get? Well, terrible water drainage system and terrible public education on one hand, and very delicate fake jewelry on the other hand.
Other than this social imbalance, we also have an investment imbalance. Investment imbalance is the imbalance of investment in material capital and human capital. Since material capital is utilized by private firms that produce "trivial" goods, it's always over-invested. And since human capital has to be invested through the public education system, it always fall short of what we really need.
In the middle of the text, Galbraith also discussed some very intricate topics on fiscal and monetary policy, in which he railed relentlessly against Milton Friedman's supposed fixation on monetary supremacy. Since it is quite technical, I'll just skip it.
The real problem I have with his books are: first, his solutions to the problems he suggested unsettle me. He claimed that we should divorce production from security by handing out checks to people who never work. Any proposal that suggests otherwise, Mr. Galbraith claims, is due to the fact that we are being blindfolded by the outdated puritanic work ethic. Probably true. But here's a problem. I do tend to be a workaholic. Is this purely a result of puritanic work ethic? I doubt it. Even Karl Marx would argue against Galbraith, that work somewhat has its intrinsic value. The evil of capitalism lays not in its imposing work on people, but in the fact that it has forced human beings like you and I to forsake meaningful
work and perform meaningless
chore (labor). What Mr. Galbraith seems to be suggesting is that we should not provide incentive for both work and chore. What then would we get? A citizenry that neither work nor labor. Now if Galbraith's real point is, that the government should subsidize its citizens so that they could labor less and invest their time in meaningful creative work, then it's an entirely different question. Nevertheless, one would want to know, how we are supposed to ensure that people indeed engage in meaningful activities instead of getting continually brainwashed by TV shows.
The second suggestion Mr. Galbraith made, regarding how we should address the investment imbalance, is also quite interesting. He argued that we should automatically make a pro rata share of increaasing income available to public authority for public purposes. Tax cuts, even when it favors the poor (p. 228), should be resisted by the true liberal, if it is at the price of social balance.
The problem though is, Mr. Galbraith does make an
a priori assumption here, namely, that education has to be provided by the government. This is problematic, because unlike many public good (e.g. roads and canals), education is not exactly the kind of good that would lead to free-riding problem. It is not non-rivalrous and it is not non-excludable. Not everyone could benefit from a school and not everyone can attend it without being required to fulfill some requirement. Unlike a road. His arch-nemesis, Milton Friedman is even arguing for school choice programs these days, I wonder how Mr. Galbraith would respond to that. Now there is one non-economic reason why we would want to supplant private schools (esp. religious ones) with public schools, which I will elaborate in a little while.
The third suggestion is more intriguing. Mr. Galbraith argues that we should impose a high sales tax on luxury goods whose urgency in fact is lower than necessities. We can then use the tax money on public services. This is problematic, especially when Galbraith is an Institutionalist. According to Thorstein Veblen, the most famous Institutionalist, demand for luxury goods (Veblen goods) in fact increase as their prices increase. So the more sales tax you impose on it, the high demand it's going to enjoy. It's probably going to upset the social balance further.
Despite having these inconsistencies,
The Affluent Society is a great read. For it does pin-point many strange assumption we made, and questions like, "Why are you obssessed with production level?" and "Why would you measure prosperity with production growth" are very thought-provocative. When a libertarian rambel against government waste, Galbraith would simply answer, "Waste? What waste? Oh you mean a decreased production level. What's wrong with that? If the trade-off is more leisure and more private time, I'll go for it."
