One evening, as I was walking back to my apartment, I was approached by a homeless person.
“Can you spare some money for me?” she asked.
Her face was lined and her eyes weathered. I don’t give money to homeless people as much as my conscience tells me I should, but for whatever reason, I decided to dig out a few dollars this time—guiltily careful not to show the higher denominations. I handed them to her.
“Thank you,” she sighed, hugging me loosely. “It’s been so hard.”
“I know,” I commiserated.
“No, you don’t.” she said, sadly but gently.
I nodded, hanging my head.
“You’re right. I don’t.”
Writing this series has, at times, been confusing and even frustrating. Even understanding what an ideology stood for was difficult—not to mention trying to reconcile different interpretations and evolutions of the ideology through historical time. Even the most renowned economic historian cannot definitively prove causation on a sufficiently macrohistorical scale, and I have neither the resources nor the expertise of such an economic historian. Still, I believe that we must do the best we can with what we have, and I think we must respond to the demands of the times. And if there’s one thing we can all agree on, it is that now is a moment of great upheaval, both desired and feared by many. What should come out of that upheaval is yet to be determined.
The Curse of Bigness
The idea of the “Curse of Bigness” comes from the eponymous book by Columbia professor Tim Wu which argues that excess size and concentration of corporations is a threat to democratic society. But the Curse of Bigness extends to the political realm as well, and I think this explains a substantial part of the harm done by marxist-leninist and neoliberal regimes, though it’s not just them. Political and economic history are dominated by arrangements in which a few elite actors hold the majority of the power and wealth—equality is the exception, not the rule. This is harmful for several reasons. Most commonsensically, highly inegalitarian relationships lead to exploitation and neglect of those without power. For if there is no credible benefit or threat one can make to another, if information about preferences and incentives gets lost in the bureaucracy without consequence, then there is no reason for one to expect the other to act with one’s interests in mind.
At least on the macro scale, it seems clear that corporations, institutions, and politicians exist in a world explained by power. This routinely reaches extreme levels. A corporation may spend millions on lobbying to keep an ingredient which decreases costs of production by fractions of a cent but causes immense societal harm. A politician may continue to support tax breaks for billionaires who obviously don’t really benefit from them and then turn around and try to gut foreign aid and social security which millions depend on. They can do so, and they do do so, because they believe there are no personal consequences for doing so. In many cases, they are right.
Exchanging Understandings
“Your great-aunts’ generation was sent to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. They felt how difficult life was there, and they told others when they returned to the cities. Yet how many others who lived that kind of life their whole lives have never been able to tell their stories?”
— paraphrased from a conversation with my Dad
Does this mean I believe humans to be evil and power-hungry? While I believe a small minority are (and that we would be much better off without that small minority), I believe most people are more complicated and that many genuinely want good things for a wide range of others. I think it’s likely that many unsuccessful, harmful, or even exploitative policies resulted in whole or in part from a lack of understanding.
Reading books like Poor Economics (halfway done) has at least opened my eyes to how limited our understandings can be. That book in particular is case after case of well-intentioned, reasonable policies which are hampered, in large part, by a lack of understanding. For example, one section describes the failures and challenges of providing very poor people with reasonable loans as well as the complexity of evaluating the impact of microfinancing on the very poor. In cases like these, better solutions were only found by directly dealing and communicating with the individuals and communities on the ground.
We were designed to live in communities of 50 or 500, a million times smaller than the nations of today. And while we must make use of what we have to adapt to a larger world, it is important to recognize this limitation. We’ve evolved things like compassion, friendship, and reputation to manage the problems of social life on the community level, but these do not scale up to the societal level. We routinely treat strangers and statistics in ways which would seem psychopathic if applied to our friends and family, often not because we are evil but simply because we are unevolved.
These inherent problems are enabled and magnified by the insulating effects of size and power. To the large and powerful, we are so small and impersonal that the path of least resistance is to ignore or bat away the offending messenger, as one would a fly or mosquito. After all, what is the organization going to believe: a glossy, hundred-page report from an in-house policy analyst passed through the proper channels, or a few anecdotes of disillusionment?
Challenging Laissez-Faire
“For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance; but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath”
— Matthew 25:29
The modern era might be characterized as the era of intentional bigness and grand planning: governments grew to unprecedented sizes, took on unprecedented roles, and had an unprecedented influence over their denizens’ lives; and so did corporations. This was most obvious in marxist-leninist regimes, but it is a worldwide phenomenon and has been for at least the last century. This is probably the most powerful thrust of the libertarian/anarchist perspective: diminish the power and meddling of the government, and let competition take care of the corporations and super wealthy. Wealth will then flow to those who deserve it and to enterprises which are socially beneficial.
Unfortunately, historical evidence suggests this is not what happens. One can read Professor Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century for a litany of records of pre-modern old world societies, all of which had even more extreme inequality than the United States does today. This is despite the fact that the governments of this era were all much more laissez-faire than any but the most decrepit governments of today. And one needs only to skim Wikipedia to see that monarchies, nobilities, and slavery arose quite naturally in agricultural societies.
Why was this? On the economic side, at least, Professor Piketty’s work gives us something of an answer. His central thesis is that, in the absence of countervailing forces, inequality tends to grow indefinitely in cases where the rate of return on capital exceeds the rate of growth (i.e., where r > g); this has unfortunately been true for the vast majority of recorded history. The minority with large stores of capital thus saw their wealth grow simply by vice of its existence, and not due to any meaningful contribution to society. For the vast majority of history, the vast majority of people lived at pure subsistence; they owned no capital and were thus exempt of its blessings. Even today in developed countries, the bottom ~25% own next to nothing, nothing, or negative wealth.
The Matthew Effect seems to hold true for all forms of power. For example, once Stalin outmaneuvered Trotsky, his power only grew more certain and absolute, until even the purges of 1937 and his blunders in 1941 were not enough to topple him. I shudder to think of how long his reign of terror would’ve lasted if not for the mercy of mortality.
The Way Forward?
We are thus caught in a bind.
On one side there stands the Scylla of control. The system protects some at some times, but others will be torn apart and consumed by the machinery of the giant—sometimes literally. But at least there will be order, even if it is at the cost of horrendous and arbitrary violence.
On the other side there stands the Charybdis of volatility. No longer can we make decisions without considering the interests of distant, unknown others; we cannot live without the farmer and the oil-driller and the schoolteacher. Without constant corrective and collective action, society would fall into disorder.
Modern ideologies and systems have in many ways continued a drift towards control. Bigger and more powerful was considered better by default. Many things have grown and concentrated—governments, businesses, news channels, farms, roads, cities. Both marxist-leninist and neoliberal regimes have accelerated this, the former doing so in both the political and economic realms, the latter doing so most clearly in the economic realm (but also the political realm). By contrast, the power and cohesion of the small—communities, families, localities—seems to have decayed.
There are good reasons for this drive. We need something to coordinate us to maintain order and productivity and peace and survival. More than that, we need collective action to deal with social issues. We cannot go back to the way things were.
Yet there are ways to do this better. Perhaps the biggest exception to the trend of top-down control is (increasingly) representative democracy, and for me, this is a beacon of hope. Many modern regimes have things like (increasingly) universal suffrage and separation of powers. These representative democracies enable citizens to provide information and consequences to representatives while making it difficult for special interests to capture and hold the political machine. While the process is still crude and unideal, it demonstrates the feasibility and benefits of creating a structure which empowers the many and the small.
It does seem that enfranchised citizens of democracies have faced fewer and less severe abuses than disenfranchised people. Notably, the greatest abuses committed by democracies seem to be against non-citizens (e.g., war crimes, exploitation of undocumented people); enfranchised citizens seem to be in less danger of suffering these abuses. And democracy may have been necessary (though not sufficient) for moral progress; the 19th century British, who led the international crusade against chattel slavery, were semi-democratic and had been democratizing since around the 17th century.
Thus, finding ways to further and refine the democratic processes of our society would probably be a relatively robust way to prevent abuses and facilitate moral progress. This is a vague and unsatisfying solution to a difficult problem which I may write more in-depth about at a future time. For now, I’ll say this. Democracy means rule by the people, and it extends much further than simply the right to vote for one’s representatives or formal laws guaranteeing freedom of press. It means a culture of being involved in and informed about the decisions which are made regarding you and those around you. For such a project to fully succeed, there will undoubtedly need to be large-scale, top-down changes championed by our representatives. But a reason I’m writing this is because I believe there also needs to be widespread small-scale, bottom-up and sideways and diagonal change. We need to try building and participating in things on smaller scales and to learn from those attempts. And as individuals, we need to embrace a more democratic, civically engaged mindset.
I’m aware that there are many objectors to democratization—indeed, some argue (many with good intentions) that we already have too much democracy. To this challenge, I say that there were those who questioned and laughed at the American experiment in representative democracy in the 18th and 19th centuries, believing it to be impractical in the modern world and on such a large scale. Fortunately, I think we can say that those doubters were wrong. I believe we need the same kind of courage and imagination today if we are to do better than the ideologies of yesterday.