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We recently posted more short videos on relevant and timely topics.  They include:

–C.S. Lewis – An Alternative Preface

–We Are Agents

–Surveillance Capitalism – When the Rubber Meets the Road

All our videos can be found on our YouTube page here.  We recently put them into 8 playlists, which you can find here.

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What is wokeness when offered by a company as a brand enhancement to attract customers?

Following Thorstein Veblen and Abraham Maslow, I would describe “wokeness” as an intangible status good, permitting buyers to feel better about themselves.  Something like a country club membership or dinner at a trendy, but expensive restaurant.

The good provided by “wokeness” to a purchaser is, more than a little, a self-serving boost to the buyer’s self-esteem.  Separately, it may also provide a public good of advantage to the community.  But where self-interest drives the decision to buy, beauty, as they say, is in the eye of the beholder.  Different buyers will have different utility curves on the marginal advantage to each of the goods – both self-enhancing and community-enhancing – that “wokeness” provides.

Veblen defined “conspicuous consumption” as buying what is observed by others in order to impress the rest of society through the manifestation of the buyer’s social power and prestige, be it real or perceived.  In other words, Veblen explained, social status becomes earned and displayed by patterns of consumption, rather than what the individual makes financially.  Such consumption provides “signifiers” for public display of special, more exclusive and privileged status.

Whatever signals our status as respectable and virtuous has always been a status good within the community we seek to impress.

But as the saying has it, “one person’s garbage is another person’s treasure.”  Customers have differentiated utility curves of personal satisfaction and different marginal utilities for each additional dollar or Euro they have or don’t have.

Thus, when companies sell “wokeness,” they may only attract some in the market for status goods.  The market may be large or small, mass or niche.

The website, ZeroHedge, recently described how entertainment companies misjudged market acceptance of the “wokeness” products:

Entertainment Companies Start Dumping Woke Content as Viewership Tumbles

By Tyler Durden
Sunday, August 7, 2022

They’ll never admit to it openly, but getting woke makes companies broke.  Hollywood has been overtly progressive for decades, but this is nothing compared to the social justice invasion since 2016.  After around five years of an unprecedented leftist onslaught on the entertainment industry, we are finally starting to see the rampage lose oxygen.  There’s a weakness within woke productions that the alternative media has been pointing out for a long time – they don’t make a profit because they are designed to appease a minority of leftist zennials that don’t have any money.  This is the wrong crowd to rely on for cash flow.     

It is fair to say that the entertainment industry was partially conned.  First, there are those tantalizing ESG loans that can be easily had, as long a company loudly declares their fealty to the social justice agenda.  Then, of course, there is the fact that many corporate CEOs and marketing people track Twitter trends with the ignorant assumption that Twitter is actually a reflection of the real world.  The woke mob on Twitter is amplified by the company itself, while most contrary voices are stifled and buried.  Anyone using the Twitter echo chamber as a marketing gauge would be led to believe that leftist ideology is the prevailing ideology of the nation.  It’s not even close.

Most notably, Zaslav was behind the torching of news service CNN+ after less than a month of operation when it utterly failed to pull in subscribers.  Now, he has shelved the $100 million ‘Batgirl’ movie, a woke travesty with woke directors which test audiences hated.  He is also reportedly cutting the impending Supergirl movie, which rumors indicate was designed to replace the beloved Superman franchise with a female version played by a race swapped actress of Colombian descent (the original Supergirl is supposed to be white and blonde).

Another event that shocked leftists was Netflix taking an ax to “First Kill,” a lesbian vampire series that no one asked for and apparently no one watched.

This was after Netflix canceled a host of woke programming in the past couple of months, including a show called “Anti-Racist Baby,” written by well-known Critical Race Theory propagandist Ibram X. Kendi and another animated show called “Q-Force” (Queer Force).

HBO Max recently canceled their “Gordita Chronicles” after only one season.  The show, based on a Dominican immigrant family, heavily pushed leftist narratives of victim group status and depicted America as a racist and oppressive nation.  No mention of the fact that millions of non-white people try to sneak into the U.S. every year, even though it is supposedly “bigoted.”

It is unlikely that they will be able to win back audiences anytime soon, if ever.

The August issue of Newsweek in the U.S. has a long and somewhat breathless article on “The War on Woke,” with the sub heading of “As a growing number of companies adopt liberal causes from abortion rights to racial justice, conservatives are fighting back.”

It would seem from the article that consumer sentiment over cultural and political narratives is divided.  There is no consensus as to what should be believed or must be done.

Geeze – turns out “wokeness” is just like all the other consumer products and services on the market.  Some like Dove soap and others like Bee & Flower sandalwood soap (which I buy when I am in Bangkok).  I like whisky and you like beer.  Who is to judge which is better in the eyes of the cosmos and eternity?

Then, there is the case of competition over more or less “wokeness.”  One Jeremy Boreing, after the company Harry’s, maker of men’s shaving gear, took his ads off their site for being wrong-hearted and “inexcusable,” started his own business competing with Harry’s.  Now consumers have more choice in the market for shaving gear.  In two months, Boreing’s new company sold 63,000 shaving kits.

New “conservative” investment funds are being started which will mimic “progressive” activist shareholders in forcing managements to adopt points of view.  The new social activists are, apparently, pressing companies to focus on profit or at least to refrain from seeking to the change the world as progressives would prefer it to be.

The Free Enterprise Project is buying shares in companies so that it can attend shareholder meetings and ask difficult, upsetting, questions.  William Flaig has started the American Conservative Values exchange traded fund.  He has $30 million in assets.

There is a new conservative “shame and blame” public ranking of companies according to the degree of their objectionable “wokeness.”  The PublicSq. app says “It’s time to stop buying from companies that hate you.”

Professor Valentin Haddad of UCLA is quoted saying: “The initial stage of corporate activism is coming from the Left, and now there is pushback from the Right.  Are companies gaining more from the Left or losing more from the Right?  That’s their debate.”

Maybe old-fashioned, tried and true marketing focus groups would be useful?  Companies need to discern where customers are and what they want over a range of intangible moral and political utility curves.

Levi Strauss brand president Jennifer Sey resigned after she got targeted for being too political in her personal advocacy.  Her work associates accused her of being “anti-science, anti-fat, anti-trans and racist.”

It reminded me of the Cultural Revolution in China, where if you were not sufficiently “red” in mind and heart, you were ostracized and possibly “compassionately” sent to re-education camps to get your personality in line with party orthodoxy.

Maybe capitalism, in this new age of self-actualization and seeking of prestige and status goods, will become more like pluralistic politics – endless arguments among factions, each seeking to have its will drive the dominant narrative for society?

An article by Scott Shepard reports:

Encouraging reports indicate that the more sensible of the states have finally begun to confront not only the leftist takeover of corporate boards and executive suites, but against the attempts by the modern malefactors of great power – Larry Fink and BlackRock, Brian Moynihan and Bank of America and the rest of that crowd – to dictate American economic and social life under the banner of ESG.

That is manifestly not what BlackRock is doing.

The AGs gave BlackRock until August 19^th to reply to their letter and explain its actions fully.

Welcome to the brave new world of selling political and cultural status goods, where there will be winners and losers, just like in old fashioned, private market-driven capitalism.

I have argued that valuation of enterprise – of its capitals – is the mother’s milk of capitalism.  The Caux Round Table’s company assessment metric can be easily used to put probable parameters around future risk, thus permitting a reasonably prudent calculation of a company’s net present value and its total capitalization.

I want therefore to report to you on a recent valuation calculation made by Deloitte of the Colosseum in Rome, completed in 80 CE by the Roman Emperor Titus.  You may find the full report here.

The Deloitte valuation experts estimated a number of different values for the property:

-Social asset value – 76.8 billion Euros

-Transaction value – 1.1 billion Euros

-Existence value – 75.7 billion Euros

-Economic contribution (economic value added – 1.4 billion Euros)

Deloitte undertook this assessment to provide a framework for thinking about cultural heritage – really intangible assets.

The Deloitte report explains:

In addition to the economic contribution, we estimated the visitor value and the existence value of the Colosseum, which constitute its total “social asset” value.  Visitor value is calculated using the market or social value given by the transaction value – the revenue from the sale of goods and services.  In addition to the audience value, public institutions such as the Colosseum provide value to people who do not directly use their services.

This represents its intangible social value, that we can also refer to as its existence value.  This value is perceived by most Italians and not just those who visit it.  Specifically, this value arises when an individual is willing to pay for the Colosseum though she makes no direct use of it, may not benefit even indirectly from it and may not plan any future use for themselves or others.

On the basis of an ad-hoc survey, we found that about 90% of Italian residents believe the Colosseum is an iconic Italian landmark representing the most important cultural attraction in Italy and that it must be preserved under any circumstances.  We also found that Italian respondents are willing to pay a significant amount of money to preserve the Colosseum. Overall, we estimate the Colosseum has a total social asset value of 76.8 EUR/bn.

Of course, the exercise raises questions about the propriety of putting a price value on something so intangible.  Should we even want to use the “cash nexus’ as a measure of worth of such a work of art or say, a moral achievement?  Or is the question not either or, but when and if?  Specificity, especially when using numbers of monetary equivalents (Bitcoins?), has an impact on human thinking and desiring.  Precision, real or imagined, can give rise to overconfidence and illusions of certainty.

On the other hand, moving our discourse from emotions and other normative abstractions so personal to our psyches to mere numbers permits compromise and eases the way to collaboration through expected gains to be shared as agreed.  Facilitating transactions is not always a bad thing.  Many times, standing on principle, as in who was right or wrong in a marriage dissolution, produces intransigence and the breaking of relationships.  Such is a casus belli between nations when ultimatums are given and then cannot be withdrawn.

As the Deloitte methodology permits, we can move our appreciation of value away from simple buying and selling of goods and services to asking what meaning something has for people, what its more transcendent value might be.  We can think about emotional, psychological and political opportunity costs if we don’t have art, spiritual inspiration or heritage to give our identity concreteness in the world of real people and their real circumstances.

Not everything should be reduced to just money as a measure of value, but putting some proportion on our situations (global warming?) will make for better judgement and optimize decision-making.

This past Monday, August 15, in 1945, after suffering from two devastating atomic bomb explosions, the imperial Japanese government broadcast its intent to surrender to the Americans and their allies.

The surrender of the Japanese, after the surrender of the Italians and the national socialist government of Germany, was transformative.  The victory of the allied powers set in motion the “liberal world order” humanity has been living under for 77 years.  Efforts by the Soviet Union and communist China to challenge the hegemony of that order and marginalize its norms and institutions failed.  With its foundation in capitalism and the rule of law for government, that order has produced the most prosperous era in human history.

The role of the American people after the end of World War II was remarkable and egregiously “moral” in pulling together ideas, resources and willing governments to create that order and make it successful for decades.  Most remarkable, perhaps given the time immemorial human norm that “the strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must,” was the decision supported by the American people not to make the peoples of Japan, Germany and Italy suffer for the aggressive war waged by their governments.

I have a particular personal connection with this very American sentiment of concern for others, which I recall from time to time.

On December 7, 1941, news of the unprovoked Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor reached Cambridge, Massachusetts, about lunchtime or a little thereafter.  My paternal grandmother, Marion Hunt Young, immediately asked my father and uncle, “Where is Fumihiko?”

Fumihiko Honjo, later Togo, was a Japanese student at Harvard and a friend of my father.  In 1943, Fumihiko would become the son-in-law of Japan’s Foreign Minister, Shigenori Togo, who had, on December 7, 1941, declared war on the U.S. on behalf of his government.

My father and uncle did not know where Fumihiko was.  Grandmother said, “Go find him and bring him back here.  We will take care of him.”

I recall that my uncle found him and brought him back to grandmother’s apartment off Cambridge Street.  Grandmother said: “Don’t worry.  We will take care of you.  Governments declare war on one another, but that doesn’t mean that peoples have to hate each other.”

Some six months later, I think Fumihiko and other Japanese citizens caught by the outbreak of war in the U.S. were exchanged for Americans similarly caught in Japan.

Fumihiko’s sons are still good friends of mine.

Later, my father served in the U.S. State Department with a focus on Asia.   I remember his telling me about the book, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, written during World War II by Ruth Benedict about the Japanese.  Benedict was an American anthropologist who did not speak or read Japanese.  Using her very American open-mindedness, she nevertheless from readings in translation, watching movies and talking with a few Japanese Americans arrived at insights as to the special Japanese national character, which were most accurate.  Dad used her book as a model for his outreach to Asian cultures.  So have I.

The Wikipedia entry for her book says:

The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture is a 1946 study of Japan by American anthropologist Ruth Benedict.  It was written at the invitation of the U.S. Office of War Information, in order to understand and predict the behavior of the Japanese in World War II by reference to a series of contradictions in traditional culture.  The book was influential in shaping American ideas about Japanese culture during the occupation of Japan.

Although it has received harsh criticism, the book has continued to be influential.  Two anthropologists wrote in 1992 that there is “a sense in which all of us have been writing footnotes to [Chrysanthemum] since it appeared in 1946.”  The Japanese, Benedict wrote, are:

both aggressive and unaggressive, both militaristic and aesthetic, both insolent and polite, rigid and adaptable, submissive and resentful of being pushed around, loyal and treacherous, brave and timid, conservative and hospitable to new ways.

My dad told me that because of Benedict’s book, the American government decided in 1946 not to depose Japan’s imperial house as part of their occupation of Japan after the war, but work with Emperor Hirohito to bring out the Chrysanthemum in Japanese culture, not the sword.

In 1966, I took the course at Harvard on modern Japanese history.  One class was a lecture by a visiting Japanese woman professor.  Her talk belittled Benedict’s effort as falling short of really understanding the Japanese.  Her premise was that an American (or any person from a foreign culture) was temperamentally prevented from understanding a very different culture, such as the Japanese.  A bit annoyed and still an undergraduate, I asked her, “How much of Japanese national character did Benedict get correct?”

The Japanese professor replied, “80%.”

I was stunned.  If I could really understand 80% of the values, motivations and thoughts of another person, say, my girlfriend of the time or my roommates, I would be able to easily work with them or befriend them with sincerity and appreciation for their qualities.

At this time of war in Ukraine, threats to Taiwan, rising populist nationalism and intolerant sectarianism, I would recommend to all whatever it is that some Americans have had and some may still have, which encourages and permits them to try to understand and care about others who come from very different cultures.  I find the recent encyclical of Pope Francis, Fratelli Tutti, very much in harmony with this approach to the “other.”

Divisive, quasi-religious or doctrinal confrontations in politics are so very human.  Those who take a fundamentalist position, who are convinced beyond all doubt that God or some kind of divine right, some absolute, totalizing truth, has blessed them with righteousness in their hearts and minds, push to the limit to get their way – all of it, right now.  They look upon compromise, even on listening to others, as making a deal with the devil, as condoning heresy and evil.

As political philosopher John Locke observed, when there is no common judge over both parties to a dispute, the parties are in a state of war with one another.  The argument then goes to the strongest, no matter what the truth might be or what mercy and compassion might prefer.

I was told that a battle cry of the fanatical Christian Puritans during the English Civil War was: “Jesus Christ and No Quarter!”  So much for the principle of “love thy neighbor.”

Islamic terrorists have joyously called out “Allahu Akbar” when killing innocent people of a different faith.  Khmer Rouge cadres would say when they were about to purify their society by eliminating those who, to them, were human “vermin:” “If you live, we gain nothing.  If you die, we lose nothing.  So, why not kill you today!”

In the summer of 1964, I remember Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater boast in his speech accepting his party’s nomination for that office: “I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice!  And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!”

Absolutist claims are all around us: stop climate change right now or we will all perish; Ukraine is part of the Rus community chosen by God as the Third Rome to redeem humanity; Taiwan has no claim to autonomy from the Chinese Son of Heaven in Beijing; human life begins at conception, so no abortion can be permitted; to carry or not to carry a fetus is only and always the mother’s decision as a matter of her healthcare or of her right to bodily autonomy.

The Caux Round Table Principles for Government offer a different course, one perhaps closer to that recommended by John Locke – civil discourse within community, not war to the death with those who disagree with you.

Our principle says:

Discourse ethics should guide application of public power:

Public power, however allocated by constitutions, referendums or laws, shall rest its legitimacy in processes of communication and discourse among autonomous moral agents who constitute the community to be served by the government.  Free and open discourse, embracing independent media, shall not be curtailed, except to protect legitimate expectations of personal privacy, sustain the confidentiality needed for the proper separation of powers or for the most dire of reasons relating to national security.

Just the other day, I read a commentary by the American public intellectual Peggy Noonan. Noonan worked for Ronald Reagan, but now does not approve of Donald Trump.  In her views, she reminds me of my grandmother Morris – part of a family with gentry status, most comfortable with a strong commitment to prudence, decency and propriety.  Grandmother was what has been called a “country club Republican,” aware of her responsibilities as part of a social and cultural establishment.

However to the point, Noonan recently recommended the ethical principle of discourse for all Americans in their disagreements over abortion.  She associated the ethic of discourse with being centrist, in the middle of a polarized cultural order and its political activists.

She wrote:

Moderate, reasoned, balanced approaches will appeal to the vast middle. …

You have to be clear in explaining how society will arrange itself if you get the measure you asked for. … This is America working it out.

I just read that for the American car company Ford, “quality” has become problem #1.

In the first seven months of this year, Ford issued 46 separate recalls pointing a finger at 6.8 million vehicles with possible flaws and malfunctions.  Ford spends billions each year on warranty repairs and recalls, an expense that drops to the bottom line of net earnings for its owners.

In the 1980’s and 1990’s, some of you may recall Ford’s boast was that “Quality is Job 1.”

Over these many years, I have often asked myself, “Why does nobody talk about the quality movement anymore?”

The Americans, W. Edwards Deming and Joseph Juran, were pioneers in stakeholder capitalism, but now seem to be roadkill on the highway of progress.

Deming’s business philosophy was for a company to take care of employees and customers first and foremost, so that its value would be maximized and be of greater benefit to its shareholders.

The Quality Movement – in Japan – was the impetus for the first meeting of the Caux Round Table in 1986.  American and European business leaders were confounded by Japanese success with consumer electronics and automobile manufacture.  Japanese companies were taking market share in America and Europe to the distress of those business cultures.  Thanks to quality initiatives like just-in-time delivery of parts to assembly plants and decentralization of decision-making to workers in quality circles, Japanese companies were making better quality goods at less cost.  This was a win/win/win/ capitalism for customers, employees, companies and society.

Deming’s 14 points were:

1. Create constancy of purpose for improving products and services.
2. Adopt the new philosophy.
3. Cease dependence on inspection to achieve quality.
4. End the practice of awarding business on price alone.  Instead, minimize total cost by working with a single supplier.
5. Improve constantly and forever every process for planning, production and service.
6. Institute training on the job.
7. Adopt and institute leadership.
8. Drive out fear.
9. Break down barriers between staff areas.
10. Eliminate slogans, exhortations and targets for the workforce.
11. Eliminate numerical quotas for the workforce and numerical goals for management.
12. Remove barriers that rob people of pride of workmanship and eliminate the annual rating or merit system.
13. Institute a vigorous program of education and self-improvement for everyone.
14. Put everybody in the company to work accomplishing the transformation.

A separate, but similar business philosophy to the Quality Movement was the credo set for his company by Robert Johnson in 1943.  The Johnson & Johnson credo is:

We believe our first responsibility is to the patients, doctors and nurses, to mothers and fathers and all others who use our products and services.  In meeting their needs, everything we do must be of high quality.  We must constantly strive to provide value, reduce our costs and maintain reasonable prices.  Customers’ orders must be serviced promptly and accurately.  Our business partners must have an opportunity to make a fair profit.

Our final responsibility is to our stockholders.  Business must make a sound profit.  We must experiment with new ideas.  Research must be carried on, innovative programs developed, investments made for the future and mistakes paid for.  New equipment must be purchased, new facilities provided and new products launched.  Reserves must be created to provide for adverse times.  When we operate according to these principles, the stockholders should realize a fair return.

Should we not give credit to the Quality Movement and its pioneering Japanese advocates for showing that corporate social responsibility/stakeholder capitalism is generically a good?

I was in France last week showing two San Francisco grandchildren both a bit of Paris and two chateaux in the Loire Valley.  Unexpectedly, the trip proved to be a history lesson for me, a lesson in the globalization of our time.

The famous sights of Paris – the Louvre, the Orsay, the Eiffel Tower, Versailles – were inundated by tourists, each room flooded from wall to wall.  Lines everywhere.  Toilets in need of cleaning and replacement of tissues.  Taking the Metro was an experience in being herded.

It was the typical tourist season, which I had expected, only worse, as people from all over were putting Covid behind them and spending their money in conspicuous consumption of status goods.  But the usual crowds of Chinese tourists did not add to the congregating, as they were confined at home.  The hordes of non-Chinese were enough to overflow the city’s tourist attractions and the two chateaux.

It was almost as if most of Paris itself had become a kind of Disney theme park.

As I observed those arounds me – in the Metro; in the ticket lines; in cafes; walking the streets; filling the rooms in Versailles; lining up for a 30-second selfie documenting their presence before the Mona Lisa; and then immediately leaving her without comment – the thought entered my mind that our world has entered a new phase of globalization.

I even imagined that the Mona Lisa herself was calling out to me from behind her protective enclosure with her face seemingly more sad than in my previous visits.  In her expression, I imagined her wanting to say something about the trivialization we humans so easily impose on excellence.

I then focused for a second on the thousands walking right past, without taking any notice three Leonardo’s on the hall just outside room 70, where the Mona Lisa sits in her protective enclosure.

My grandchildren were following the crowd heading toward room 70.  I asked them to step aside for a moment so that I could show them the three other paintings by Leonardo.  They seemed a bit surprised that the museum also had such pictures, as nobody had ever made a fuss about them.  They stood a few minutes looking at them.  I felt down at not being that able to make those pictures too more a part of their awareness of greatness.

One of them, a portrait of a woman which I find more powerful that his Mona Lisa, is:

In our hotel lobby one morning, while awaiting my grandchildren to come down for breakfast, a friendly woman from New York, originally from Haiti, said to me, with a hard expression in her eyes and tenseness in her voice that, in her opinion, the crowds would even pass up a chance to see Jesus, just to put themselves before the Mona Lisa.

What a poignant way, I thought, of asking what determines worth in our culture – popularity; rarity; appearance or essence; convention; what goes viral; or the whim of the masses?  Do we have any standards of quality anymore or is quality a form of social injustice, impossible to allocate equitably to every human soul born alive.

Maybe Shakespeare was correct in concluding that “When we are born, we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools.”

The middle class and even some from the upper lower class in their retirement, at least in Europe and the Middle East, along with many Asians and not a few Latin Americans, has gone global in its aspirations for tourism.  The bounty created by the global, post-World War II “liberal democratic order” has more than trickled down from the top.  It has financed the rise of a large “Third Estate” – Le Tiers Etat – which revolutionized France in 1789 and thereafter, the entire world.

But in today’s phase of success in globalization of wealth and opportunity, those taking advantage of travel seemed to me to have little personal interest in history or art.  The ones surrounding me this past week in Paris evinced in speech overheard, in behaviors, in their rush to get on to the next cell phone photo documenting their presence at a place of renown, no excitement in the presence of greatness or where history happened.

In being carried by the crowd through the royal rooms in Versailles, I heard not one mention of “Louis XIV,” nor any voice make a comment about the France of his time or his role in history – apres moi le deluge.  Not did I hear elsewhere Napoleon’s name spoken in my presence.

In the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles, while waiting for my grandkids, I happened to look up and saw this saying above a mirror: “The king governs by himself alone.” (Le Roi gouverne par lui meme)  I had not seen it in previous visits, but thought – how apt it still was for our time.  This principle of jurisprudence applies to Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Erdogan and in the opinion of some Americans, Donald Trump.  History repeats itself.  Or is it just us, never able to rise above our natures?

The phrase is the title of the ceiling painting executed by Charles Le Brun in 1661:

Le Brun’s painting is:

In any case, did the crowd in the Hall of Mirrors last week have concern to learn from French history about how our governments should be run and who should get to do what to whom?  I doubt if more than a few even looked up at the ceiling except to take a picture.

In the Orsay museum, tourists from all over did not stop before masterpieces by Van Gogh other than to take a photo.

The experience brought to mind the disdain and resentment of “new money” and “the middle class,” the dreadful, even deplorable, gaucheness (as an appalled Hillary Clinton castigated Donald Trump’s supporters in 2016), which dominated the tastes of pre-industrial aristocrats in France and England in the opening century of capitalist accumulation.

The Marquis de Condorcet, Henri de Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte created elitist socialism to elevate the masses properly, not to let them make it on their own through the uncouth experiences of labor and trade.  Even Karl Marx was appalled by the boorishness of the early capitalists, giving them the caricature of being only “Mr. Moneybags” and bitterly recoiling against the “cash nexus.”

Charles Dickens, who wrote of and for the rising middle class in England, denigrated a capitalism gone too far by creating his character, Ebenezer Scrooge, and then sharply contrasting Scrooge with the Christian morality of grace at Christmas time.

It was not only the economic inequality brought about by the economic prowess of capitalism which drew forth a felt need to control the tide of history, but the threat of a crass bourgeois geist taking over and degrading our humanity that called into action those with ideas for the prevention of or, if needed, the remediation of such a baleful contingency.

My question is: Has capitalism, through globalization, now brought that unseemly tiers etat with its banal, collectivized id to global prominence with the “embourgeoisement” of our civilization?

For over two centuries, work or perhaps more precisely, “labor,” has been lifted up as the Achilles’ heel of capitalism.  The essential narrative of Marxism and derivative socialisms is that capital exploits labor and workers deserve much better than what they get from free markets.

Recently, a focus on social injustice and Thomas Piketty’s documentation of the inequality between the very rich and the rest of us has continued to pit labor against capital.

As one American writer and commentator on social class, F. Scott Fitzgerald, said to another writer, Ernest Hemingway, that “The rich are different from you and me.”  Hemingway supposedly replied “Yes, they have more money.”

Was Hemingway inferring that “money,” all by itself, bestows status and elevates us up the social hierarchy?

I recently read a report by Allysia Finley of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board on research on what happened when some “poor” people were given free money.

The findings are here:

Did pandemic stimulus payments harm lower-income Americans?  That’s the implication of a new study by social scientists at Harvard and the University of Exeter.

Liberals argue that no-strings-attached handouts encourage better financial decisions and healthier lifestyles.  The theory is that low-income folks become more future-oriented if they’re less stressed about making ends meet.  The Harvard study put this hypothesis to the test and found the opposite.

During a randomized trial conducted from July 2020 to May 2021, researchers assigned 2,073 low-income participants to receive a one-time unconditional cash transfer of either $500 or $2,000.  Another 3,170 people with similar financial, demographic and socioeconomic characteristics served as a control group.  The trial was funded by an anonymous nonprofit.

Many received cash allocations from the American federal government in the form of a card:

Participants earned an average of about $950 a month and had $530 in unearned income (e.g., food stamps).  About 80% had children and 55% were unemployed.  Over 15 weeks, they were surveyed about their physical, mental and financial well-being.  Forty-three percent also agreed to allow researchers to observe their bank balances and financial transactions.

The top-line result: Handouts increased spending for a few weeks—on average $26 a day in the $500 group and $82 a day in the $2,000 group—but had no observable positive effect on any individual outcome.  Bank overdraft fees, late-payment fees and cash advances were as common among cash recipients as in the control group.

Handout recipients fared worse on most survey outcomes. They reported less earned income and liquidity, lower work performance and satisfaction, more financial stress, sleep quality and physical health and higher levels of loneliness and anxiety than the control group.  There was no difference between the two cash groups.

These findings contradicted the predictions of 477 social scientists and policymakers the researchers surveyed.  That’s not surprising.  Most liberal academics and politicians believe government handouts are the solution to all problems.  If transfer payments were a ticket to the middle class, the War on Poverty would have succeeded long ago.

The researchers posited that perhaps the cash payments weren’t generous enough to generate a positive result.  “Receiving some, but not enough money may have made their needs—and the gap between their resources and needs—more salient, which, in turn, may have made them feel distressed,” they write.

“Needs” is a subjective term.  The theory is that low-income people who got handouts became more stressed when they realized they still couldn’t afford everything they “needed” or more likely, wanted.  If that’s true, simply giving people even more cash would surely lead to the same problem.

More plausible, the payments made work less rewarding, which reduced feelings of personal well-being.  Cash recipients reported less earned income and felt worse about their work.  It’s no surprise that people who received a large percentage of their monthly income for doing nothing were less motivated to work and less satisfied with their work.  Earning a paycheck can give workers a sense of personal agency that encourages them to make better financial and health decisions.  Receiving a handout may do the opposite.

As for financial outcomes, poor people often struggle to manage money and this is one reason why many remain poor despite receiving plentiful government assistance.  Merely giving people more money won’t make them better stewards of it, as the study showed.  In some cases, people spend more than they receive and become overextended.