Life or Mars?
The Failure of the Bourgeoisie
It’s always nice to know that whatever you are doing you are doing it optimally. It’s a concept on the rise since the war[1]. Take economic output; is it optimal, do we produce as much of what we want as possible? Ah, I hear you object sagely, even before we consider how we could measure it, who decides what is optimal?
These are familiar problems of measurement and of definition and prioritisation. It sometimes seems like a particular problem of our age; every choice is loaded or partisan or biased, so everything is contested and nobody gets to choose. As soon as you try to assess something, somebody will challenge your benchmarks and reveal your inherent prejudices. Which is fair up to a point; that point being where accusation of privilege becomes a mindless reflex and we drown in relativism. Those old white guys might have been a lot of things, but they knew what was what.
But OK, let’s accept the objection and lower our sights a little. If it’s not possible to detect optimality nor even specify precisely what ‘optimal’ is, perhaps we can at least propose a loose definition and cite some examples where it is clearly absent and see where that takes us.
Is it valid to assume that the market trends bourgeois, that most people in most places have banal, quotidian desires? Without producing survey evidence, it seems uncontroversial to suggest that optimal output would emphasise things like home improvement, whether that means being able to move out of your corrugated iron shack or heading to Homebase at the weekend for some new tiles, food being served to you, in a bucket or on a slate, more leisure time, travel, experiences.
Of course, you don’t need to threaten me with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs for me to concede that there is more to life than this. However, shelter isn’t just a matter of keeping a roof over your head. The appetite for it may not be infinite, but when it extends to an en-suite in every bedroom and double sinks therein, it’s hard to see where it ends. The lower needs may dominate more than we would like to admit, displacing or even acting as vehicles for the higher ones.
So, what can we use as an example of transparently sub-optimal output? Let’s take war, nobody wants that. What is it good for? Absolutely nothing. And yet, and yet, there it is, all the time. Not only does the preparation for war redirect resources to the creation, clothing and equipping of large armies, but the resultant devastation causes severe economic destruction.
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The waste involved was particularly stark in the Middle Ages, when living standards were so low for so many. Yes, it’s possible that some people were inspired to martial fervour by some incipient sense of nationalism, or religious zealotry, but are we to believe this was the preference of society as a whole, that your average peasant would choose this over a more varied diet or not having to share his house with livestock? The imposition of rents and taxes in order to fund all the havoc suggests not, instead n market intervention by appropriation was required to achieve it.
Even in peacetime, the construction of palaces and cathedrals was indicative of imposed reallocation of labour and capital, mediated once again through rents and taxes, and supplemented by theological arguments about the divine order of the universe and the prospects for your immortal soul. To add insult to injury, history has become the story of these things. We teach these deviations from every day wants as if they were the whole point of human existence. Our poor peasant is thwarted in his aspirations, then erased from the human story.
Fortunately, we live in more enlightened times, and we have the neutrality of the market dictating production. Democratic consumerism converts our purchasing power into market signals. Taxation is controlled by elected governments. We are confident that allocation of capital is hard-nosed and efficient, free from the undue influence of the powerful, or the moral or ideological influences of the past. The public gets what the public wants.
But look closer. No, closer still, there is a catch here. The market doesn’t allocate investment based on current profits, or even known future profits. No, it does so based on unknown future profits. Funds flow not to what will be profitable in the future, but to what is expected to be profitable, so control of the narrative around those expectations is crucial.
This is all that is required to again frustrate the will of the common people to enjoy themselves. If you have a messianic belief in what is required for the human race, as opposed to actual human beings, to divert resources to your own ends you must convince the market that your fantasies will be more profitable than budget holidays and mass-market eateries. No imposition of rents or fancy ideological persuasion is necessary. You can pick the public’s pockets without them even noticing.
For sure AI may lead to enhanced productivity for exactly the consumer items people want. It may also develop medical breakthroughs that create better health outcomes. But the pursuit of supercharged machine intelligence may also be harnessed to quixotic attempts to achieve the singularity or colonise neighbouring planets. These efforts are not necessarily aligned with the wants of the general public and may be more akin to grand designs of our medieval forbears. Even the supposedly disinterested market can be distorted by the influence of powerful people. It is an improvement, but we fool ourselves if we think it can always protect us from the same impulses that drove the Sun King to invade the Holy Roman Empire.. Markets are not necessarily flawed but they are vulnerable.
To be clear, this is not about bubbles, where capital is misallocated due to hype and euphoric over-estimation of the profits that will be generated by particular activities, ultimately leading to a correction where the value of the stocks involved collapse and the capital spent is revealed to be wasted. The point here is not about waste; the endeavours may generate profit or at least sustain the idea that they will do. But they may not be as profitable as more mundane alternatives or as reflective of the everyday desires of the population. Alternative futures can be built and maintained that deliver the dreams of the few at a cost to the quality of life of the many.
Silicon Valley has an answer to this accusation and it’s called Long-termism. This philosophy proposes that when making utilitarian policy assessments we should include the interests of all future generations alongside those of us currently alive. In this they are not dissimilar to climate activists who argue we should restrain ourselves to the benefit of future generations, however political currents have pulled the two groups apart. There may indeed by a lesson here for Green parties that they could better advance their cause by developing an inspiring market narrative that fulfils their aims.
The methods may have become less direct, more benign and more subtle in their operation, but what remains consistent across epochs is that the satisfaction of everyday wants is always out of fashion as long as resource allocation is successfully influenced by a few powerful personalities.
[1] Since the war — does anyone say that anymore, or is it to distant to be relevant these days? What is the new reference point?
