Two Friedrichs and a Ludwig: Nietzsche and the Austrians

A couple of years ago I posted here a series of entries on the origins of capitalism, or more precisely on the evolution of Western thought regarding capitalism, from Adam Smith through Ayn Rand. Looking back, I see that that series excluded some important contributors to this intellectual current, in particular the authors of the “marginal revolution” in late nineteenth-century economics and the creators of the “Austrian school” of the twentieth century. I neglected the former group because I didn't know anything about them at the time, and the latter because I assumed their importance had declined relative to the Nietzschian novelist and cult leader Ayn Rand, about whom I wrote at length. In May 2013, however, political scientist Cory Robin published in The Nation a provocative essay joining all of these men and women – the marginalists, the Austrians, Nietzsche, Rand – into a single school of reactionary thought. “Nietzsche's Marginal Children” became the subject of a forum on Crooked Timber, and generated such hostile commentary there that the author published another long essay in Jacobin magazine defending his conclusions. All deserve some commentary here, if only as a coda to my earlier series and a reflection on the illiberal nature of capitalism.

The marginalists, more specifically William Jevons, Carl Menger, and Leon Walras, introduced to economics the concept of marginal utility, which tied the price of a good or service to the usefulness of one additional unit of that commodity to the consumer. Marginal analysis stipulated that the price of a good depends both on its importance and its scarcity, which is why water is cheaper than diamonds, even though the former is more universally useful. Marginal analysis suggested that labor, being more abundant than land and capital – or, rather, owned by more people than land or capital – should command a lower-unit market price than those latter commodities. It was thus a useful concept for elitists who feared that the revolutions of 1789 and 1848 had destroyed the values of the ancien regime and substituted only Marx's labor theory of value, which gave entirely too much power to the working class – to the mob. Marginalism promoted instead the idea that scarcity and the making of difficult choices determined value.

The same fear the mob lay behind the elitism of Friedrich Nietzsche, whose philosophical works argued that the masses, obsessed with their “finite” lives, could not create anything of enduring value. Value, Nietzsche admitted, was a human invention, but it came only from the works and the esteem of “exalted men of culture,” a tiny minority of warriors, statesmen and artists whose thoughts and struggles were the only sources of beauty and dignity. The purpose of a society, he insisted, was to serve as the support structure for this aristocracy. To borrow a phrase from Theodosius Dobzhansky, Nietzsche believed that common people were “a manured soil in which to grow a few graceful flowers of refined culture” (quoted in Fernand Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life [U. of California Press, 1992], 186.) A democrat he was not.

Nietzsche had a considerable influence on early twentieth-century European fascists, and on several important American philosophers, notably Leo Strauss and Ayn Rand. His impact on the Austrian economists, particularly the ur-libertarians Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, is harder to prove, and Robin argues that Nietzsche did not directly influence them. The three men instead came of age in the same problematized intellectual environment, that of late nineteenth-century middle-European gentry struggling to defend their position and their culture against the working class. The Austrian economists took their initial cues from the marginalists, who argued that landowners and capitalists were more economically valuable (because scarcer) than an equal number of laborers. The marginalists also imparted a certain romance to the marketplace, insofar as “economic man” had to make sacrifices in order to determine what was economically valuable to him.

What Mises and Hayek added to these assumptions was the belief, alien to Nietzsche and unnecessary to the marginalists, that the capitalist market economy was a moral system. Morality, Hayek argued, concerned the ordering of ends, or goals, and because scarcity determines marginal utility, a free market forces individuals to prioritize and rank their goals. “The economy,” Robin observes, thus “becomes a theater of self-disclosure...It is not in the casual chatter of a seminar or the cloistered pews of a church that we determine our values; it is in the duress—the ordeal—of our lived lives, those moments when we are not only free to choose but forced to choose.” Economic man became through his choices a moralist and (because the market was actually a moral theater) an artist.

Thus far the Austrians' view could theoretically support social democracy, insofar as it makes ordinary workers' and consumers' economic lives morally significant. Mises and Hayek, of course, were not social democrats. Instead, they viewed the market as “the proving ground of aristocratic action.” In his 1960 work The Constitution of Liberty, Hayek argued that consumers were never free to make all of their own economic choices; instead, the inventors and entrepreneurs who develop complex technologies and the wealthy capitalists who are the leading arbiters of taste shape the choices of the consuming multitudes.* Economic freedom was not an end in itself but a means to an end: the creation of an economic sphere in which an entrepreneurial and cultural elite could flourish. To give Hayek his due, one should note that he was a trickle-down elitist: a flourishing entrepreneurial class and aristocracy would, he believed, create benefits for society as a whole, providing ordinary schmoes with jobs, security, and access to mass-produced consumer goods. Contrast him with Nietzsche, who argued that the highest purpose for hoi polloi was to support the elite, and Ayn Rand, who described the 99% as “moochers and looters” for whom the great-souled elite should feel nothing but contempt.

Since a society could not flourish without nurturing a free-market elite, however, Hayek viewed any government which threatened capital and markets as a menace, and considered its overthrow, even by a dictatorship, as a positive good. He reserved particular contempt for totalitarian systems like Nazi Germany's, but he believed social democracy was also dangerous, insofar as it replaced a rule-based economy favorable to capital with a discretionary political economy controlled by the mob. A temporary dictatorship, Hayek believed, might occasionally become necessary to purge a nation-state of its constitutional “impurities” and restore a free-market economy. In the early 1960s he sent a copy of The Constitution of Liberty to Antonio Salazar of Portugal, hoping to persuade him to become that nation's law-giver, and later Hayek became an influential cheerleader for Augusto Pinochet of Chile. That Pinochet violently deposed his predecessor, Salvador Allende, and then tortured and murdered his political opponents does not appear to have bothered Professor Hayek. A “liberal” dictator, Hayek argued, was preferable in the long run to an illiberal social democracy. Jeanne Kirkpatrick would certainly have approved.

Robin's essay has its shortcomings. His writing style is diffuse, digressive, and occasionally difficult to follow, and I find his connection of the Austrians with Nietzsche both strained and unnecessary. One may successfully argue that Mises and Hayek were elitists without invoking Thus Spake Zarathustra. I think “Nietzsche's Marginal Children” and the sequel that Robin published in Jacobin, "Nietzsche, Hayek, and the Meaning of Conservatism," are noteworthy for other reasons. Fans of the Austrian school of economics generally characterize Mises and Hayek as the intellectual heirs of nineteenth-century liberalism, and Robin persuasively argues that they were not. They were instead reactionaries, for whom a free market was not an instrument for egalitarian social progress but the crucible of aristocracy. Robin also usefully summarizes the work of another, equally influential Austrian economist, Joseph Schumpeter, whom Mises and Hayek found inspiring but with whose historical conclusions they disagreed. Schumpeter attributed technological progress to a small elite of entrepreneurs and inventors, whom he characterized as eccentric, romantic geniuses willing to flout social norms and destroy older industries. Schumpeter argued that a mature capitalist economy had little place for the entrepreneur, but the other Austrians disagreed, asserting that the entire purpose of a free-market society was to nurture such capitalist heroes.

Perhaps Robin's most controversial contribution is his linkage of Hayek with modern dictators, a liaison which actual classical liberals, like John Stuart Mill, would have found appalling. In noting Hayek's fondness for Salazar and Pinochet, Prof. Robin observes that we do not often appreciate the role of violence in creating capitalist societies, or in transforming socialist countries into free-market ones. This is a point addressed by David Graeber and Naomi Klein, and one upon which I would like to expand in a forthcoming blog entry.

**

(The above image, of octogenarian Friedrich Hayek enjoying a sherry and a scowl, is from Wikimedia Commons.)

*  Hayek made analogous observations about free-market price systems: prices are extremely useful for consumers and investors, but they the product of complex socio-economic interactions that most people don't fully understand; one can "use" prices just as one uses advanced technology, without fully understanding the intellectual and social labor that went into them.

Over-Rated, but Inspiring Nonetheless

Today (with tomorrow and Wednesday) marks the 150^th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, which, in addition to producing enough casualties to fill a cemetery, came to inspire an iconic political address, a memorable William Faulkner quote, an excellent historical novel, a mediocre movie, and an array of board and computer games. In his 1990 Civil War series Ken Burns called the three-day battle “the most important...fought in the Western Hemisphere,” which strikes me as exaggerated to the point of inaccuracy. I can think of at least two other battles, namely the 1521 siege of Tenochtitlan and the 1759 Battle of Quebec, which proved more important than any American Civil War engagement, insofar as they determined which European cultures would come to dominate the New World. Moreover, I don't think Gettysburg was nearly as decisive a battle as many Civil War buffs assume. William Fortschen, in the conclusion to the anthology Alternate Gettysburgs (2002), makes a persuasive case for the battle's strategic irrelevance: even if Robert Lee had defeated George Meade at Gettysburg, he would not have been able to go on and take Washington, as that would have required him to slog through several days of hard rain (which began the evening of July 3-4) and attack a well-fortified city defended by 40,000 federal troops. Perhaps a federal defeat at Gettysburg would have fatally undermined Union morale, but I doubt it, given that the Union would shortly learn of the surrender of Vicksburg (July 4), a far more important event. Today I think the Battle of Gettysburg remains important more for the political speech it inspired than the strategic reverse it inflicted on the Confederacy. If one were so inclined one could add a comparative remark about pens and swords, and which was stronger than the other.

In Defense of French Scholarship in a State That Apparently Forgot Its Origins

Herewith, the short entry on Louisiana and the French that I mentioned in an earlier post.  It relates to current academic events, rather than historical scholarship, and so I hope non-academic readers will accept a digression that may not be of interest to them.

While initially settled by Native Americans, Louisiana, as most Americans know, was colonized by the French, who named the province for King Louis XIV.  At the time of the Louisiana Purchase the region that would become the state of Louisiana had 40,000 non-Indian inhabitants, the majority of whom were Francophones.  The state remains officially bilingual today, and its largest city still celebrates its French Quarter and French heritage.  There is considerable demand for French language classes in Louisiana's high schools, and thus for university-trained French teachers.  This heritage and these demands, however, are currently far less important to the bean-counters that run Louisiana's universities than cutting costs and casualizing the academic workforce.

In 2010 administrators at Southeastern Louisiana University unilaterally announced the termination of the university's French major and the firing of its three tenured French professors. Administrators declared that the program and the classes it offered were underutilized, but 1) in the wake of the firings SLU is still offering French classes, taught (of course) by contingent instructors, and 2) SLU is a public institution in a state which needs college-trained teachers of French.  The move appears to have been primarily a demonstration of administrative power over the faculty, and SLU administrators have subsequently ignored a faculty senate recommendation that the professors be reinstated and a censure vote from the American Association of University Professors.

Faced with a choice between surrendering to arbitrary power and resisting, the three fired professors have chosen to fight, in the courts. The national AAUP and its Louisiana chapter have begun to organize a legal defense fund for the three plaintiffs, to which your humble narrator, who takes both tenure and the French language rather seriously, has decided to contribute.

What Civilization Means to Me

“I found myself in the visitors' bar at Granada jail – a shiny, modern building sticking up, incongruously, out of fields of olive trees twenty miles from the city...A British photographer had asked to come along. 'Wherever I go [in Spain] they have a bar,' he said. And he was right. That morning we had had breakfast – freshly squeezed orange juice and thick, toasted rolls drowned in a garlic-flavoured olive oil and tomato pulp – at the bar in the Renault dealership in Seville. There are said to be more than 138,000 bars in Spain. This is as many as the rest of Western Europe put together. The prison was doing its bit to keep the numbers up.” - Giles Tremlett, Ghosts of Spain (Bloomsbury, 2006), p. 160.

If, as Dostoyevsky once wrote, one may judge a civilization by its prisons – and by its pubs – then modern Spain is many centuries ahead of the United States.

The Great Lakes Country in 1718: An Index

For the convenience of readers who might like a brief summary of and TOC for my blog series on Jacques-Charles Sabrevois's Memoir on the Savages of Canada:

Part One (23 November 2012): Niagara Falls, Seneca porters, the rivers and hunting prospects of the Ohio country.

Part Two (12 December 2012): The Odawas, Potawatomis, and Hurons of Detroit – dwellings, clothing, dances, games; fortunately, Yahtzee is not among the latter.

Part Three (23 Jan. 2013): The Odawas of Michigan's lower peninsula; the Indians of Green Bay (Ho-Chunk, Menominee, Sauk, Mesquakie); Mesquakie dress and lifeways.

Part Four (22 April 2013): The Illiniwek and their Frenchified customs.

Part Five (1 May 2013): The Maumee and Wabash Rivers, the Miamis, and the similarities between their forts and the Tuileries; conclusions.

A little more to come in the near future on matters French and Louisianan.

Niall Ferguson is still a bigoted, pseudo-intellectual windbag

Those of us who hoped my intense scolding of Niall Ferguson last year had a suitably improving and chastening effect were no doubt disappointed this past weekend by the news that the Not-So-Good Professor has made some homophobic remarks about John Maynard Keynes. At the annual Altegris Conference, a forum with several hundred financiers and financial counselors – presumably well-to-do, presumably not terribly liberal – Niall-o took Keynes's famous remark “In the long run we are all dead” to mean that the economist was uninterested in the fate of posterity, and made the off-the-cuff remark that of course one would not have expected a gay man without children to be concerned with the long term. In the same talk, Ferguson further intimated that Keynes was a swishy girly-man by remarking that Keynes and his wife preferred discussing poetry to having sex. Several people at the forum took sufficient offense with Ferg's remarks to leak them to the press, and Senor Bonehead, realizing that there might be wealthy and powerful people in the world who were also gay, quickly apologized.

This doesn't sound like the kind of episode on which one ought to dwell, except that the Sexiest Scotsman's remarks are typical of the kind of carelessness and general intellectual slovenliness that characterizes his recent articles and his recent book, Civilization (which, my readers will recall, I reviewed at some length). Ferguson deliberately took Keynes's famous quote out of context to imply that Keynes was uninterested in the long-term impact of his fiscal policies (e.g. running a deficit to fight unemployment). As Paul Krugman, one of the leading neo-Keynesians, recently observed, what Keynes actually said was: “This long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is long past the ocean is flat again.” Keynes's point, or one of his points, was that simply waiting for a depressed economy to regain its pre-depression equilibrium was a rotten policy for the immediate term, and that economists needed also to focus on relief in the short term if they wanted to have any useful impact on government policy. To put it another way: it may be irresponsible for governments to saddle young people with heavy long-term public debts, but it is even more irresponsible to saddle them with years of unemployment – and unpayable student-loan debts – that permanently depress their earnings (and the government's future income-tax revenues) in the same term. In his apology, Ferguson did not suggest that he understood what Keynes was actually trying to say.

 

Niall-o also acknowledged in his apology that Keynes, despite his homosexuality, was also married and may have been trying to have children (his wife had a miscarriage), so his observations about Keynes's childlessness were somewhat inaccurate. I think this is rather beside the point, as sexual orientation, child-rearing, and other aspects of one's personal life have little impact on the quality of one's ideas, unless one's ideas primarily relate to sexual orientation. Karl Marx had a fairly untidy personal life, but this by itself did not affect his ideas about economics and history. Hannah Arendt's youthful affair de coeur with Martin Heidegger may be interesting of itself, but I haven't seen a convincing explanation of how it shaped her powerful (if rather turgidly expressed) liberal ideology. Ferg, however, finds it difficult to acknowledge this, because like many other modern conservatives he follows Paul Johnson's assumption that an intellectual's personal life necessarily shapes his or her ideas.  (Johnson himself was, as Christopher Hitchens discovered in the 1990s, a philanderer and afficionado of spanking, but this is only relevant when one is considering that he criticized Rousseau for having the same fetish, and presented himself to both British and American conservatives as a firm opponent of adultery.)

Probably Ferg would have been better off if he had stuck to the mild defense of Keynes he made in Chapter 5 of Civilization, but I suspect he felt this would not have made him popular with a fiscally conservative audience, and so decided to take a few cheap (and dimwitted) shots in order to earn a few cheap laughs. This is one other besetting sin of the Sexiest Scotsman: a pathological need for public approval, even if one can only extract it from a particular source by lawsuit.  One might almost feel sorry for Ferguson, except that there are other people - several billion of them, in fact - far more worthy of our concern and consideration.

Through the Eighteenth-Century Midwest with This Guy Named Sabrevois, Part Five

(For the previous entry in this series, see here.)

Sabrevois concludes his jaunt around the Great Lakes with a description of the Maumee River, which he follows to its headwaters at Kekionga and then across that portage to the Wabash. The Maumee was quite shallow, which may explain why it was an expensive water transport route in the early modern era, and it presented “continuous marshes” for the first 20 or 30 miles upstream from Lake Erie. It was, however, richly populated with waterfowl, so much so that in the spring “one cannot sleep on account of the noise made by their cries” (p. 375). Halfway up the river, 60 or 70 miles from its mouth, Sabrevois points out The Glaize, “the place of clay,” where bison used the clay banks as a wallow. 75 years later the Northwest Indian confederacy would build its settlements, plant its crops, and hold its meetings at this site; its occupation by Anthony Wayne (1794) dealt that confederation a heavy blow.

At the head of the Maumee River, 60 leagues (approximately 120 miles) from Lake Erie, was the town of the Miamis, the principal members of the Miami confederacy. Sabrevois puts their population at “400 men,” which, assuming he means “fighting men,” translates to a total population of 1,600 – 2,000. Across a three-league portage from the Maumee flowed the headwaters of the Wabash River, which Sabrevois here confuses with the Ohio. This is understandable if one knows that colonial French cartographers referred to the lower Ohio River as the Wabash. On the actual Wabash River resided the Weas, who by Sabrevois's reckoning were the larger part of the Miami confederacy: 1,000 – 1,200 men, or 4,000 – 6,000 people overall, residing in five towns (Ouiatenon, Peticotia, Les Gros, Peangnichia, and one other). He does not mention that the Weas and Miamis may have been offshoots of the neighboring Illini, or that by 1718 they outnumbered their “elder” brethren to the west.

Sabrevois was perhaps tiring by this point in his memoir, because his descriptions of the Miamis' and Weas' lifeways are repetitive and reminiscent of his descriptions of other Lakes Indians. Both peoples raised corn and other crops, both adorned themselves with vermilion, both preoccupied themselves with “gaming and dancing” (375). In both nations women wore ample clothing and men very little - presumably Sabrevois refers to summer attire. Regarding the Miamis, Sabrevois adds that the men wore many tattoos, that men's and women's garments were principally of deerskins rather than cloth, and that men punished adultery by cutting off their wives' noses. The author notes that only the Miamis had this punishment for adultery, and only applied it to women, though we may note that the Chickasaws had a similar practice by the 1760s – perhaps Chickasaw men borrowed it from their Miami allies? Sabrevois, who is uninterested in gendered violence, presumably includes this detail to let travelers know when they are in Miami communities rather than Illini or Wea ones. Of the Weas, the lieutenant says that their fields were very extensive and that one of their towns had a fortified enclosure with a very clean interior, covered in a layer of sand “like the Tuileries” (376).

Sabrevois's choice of ethnological details helps explain the purposes this memoir was to serve. The lieutenant was writing not as an ethnographer but as an imperial functionary, and he intended, I think, for his document to be used by other French colonists, especially traders and officials. In discussing various Indian nations he provides details of clothing, tattoos, and games not to provide local color, but to help French travelers distinguish between Indian nations whose people physically resembled one another and often spoke similar languages. Such distinctions were important for Europeans who needed to know whether the people they visited were French allies. Sabrevois counts the male population of each Indian nation as a kind of military inventory, to let French officials know how many gunmen they could potentially raise from each of those nations in wartime. Sabrevois's interest in Indian subsistence and food supplies, finally, was not intended as a reflection on Native Americans' civility, but rather an indication of how easily various communities could feed French travelers. In sum, his memoir is an instrument of empire: a device allowing officials and traders to operate more freely in territory claimed by the French monarchy, describing waterways and available food supplies (both domesticated and wild), identifying distinctions between different Indian nations with whom one might wish to trade (or whom one should avoid), and counting Native American men who might rally to the French colors in wartime.

Such is the case with nearly all historical documents; the purpose for which they were written is vastly different from the purposes to which the historian wishes to put them. Such is arguably the case with all writing: the author cannot know or control his or her readers' interaction with their finished work. Would Jacques-Charles Sabrevois have been amused, puzzled, or horrified by the uses to which later ethnohistorians have put his memoir? And does that really matter?

Through the 18th-Century Midwest with Mister Sabrevois, Part Four

(For the previous post in this series, see here.)

The Illini are a very large collegiate drinking team that occasionally watches team sports and goes to a few classes. They derive their name from the Illinois or Illiniwek Indians, who in the seventeenth century were one of the largest Native confederations in the Great Lakes region. They were still a powerful nation in 1718 when Sabrevois wrote his survey of Midwestern Indians, and thus he devotes several pages of his memoir to them and to their kinsmen, the Miamis (of whom more in the next and last post of this series).  

Sabrevois takes us southward along the west bank of Lake Michigan, passing the Mascouten and Kickapoo towns "on the bank of a river whose name I have forgotten" (I assume it's the Milwaukee), en route to the Saint Joseph River. The lieutenant mentions in passing that the Mascoutens' and Kickapoos' customs resemble the Mesquakies' - not surprisingly, they were often military allies of the Fox Indians – though he adds that they still use bows and arrows to hunt and that some of their hunters can "run down the stag afoot" (372). Arriving at the Saint Joseph River, which he claims was abandoned by its Indian inhabitants during the Fox War (only temporarily, if so) he notes the valley's excellent soil, abundant wild birds, and wild grapes. "It is the best region in all that country." (373) Sabrevois does not suggest that the French colonize the region, instead advising his superiors to induce the Miamis to return there.

Sabrevois then hops a short distance westward to the towns of the Illiniwek on the Illinois River, near the French post of La Roche. They have about "400 men," translating to 1600-2000 people overall, in these settlements, and retain many of their old material customs. They use bows and arrows, wear deerskin clothes and bison robes (as well as garments woven from bison hair), and adorn themselves with elaborate tattoos – "all sorts of figures and designs" (374). The lieutenant does mention that they make excellent "powder horns," indicating they do have gunpowder and, presumably, firearms, obtained in trade with the French.  

Further down the Illinois River are the Illiniwek communities of Pimitoui and Cahokia, 50 leagues from La Roche; 30 leagues further still stands Kaskaskia, the "most prosperous nation among all the savages," whose people are numerous and "industrious." The Illiniwek in these communities, or some of them at least, have adopted French customs: they raise French melons and wheat, as well as cattle, pigs, and chickens; have constructed three mills, one of them horse-driven, to produce flour; and many in Kaskaskia have become Christians. Sabrevois is uninterested in Native American women, so we must rely on Sophie White's Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians (U. of Pennsylvania, 2012) and Susan Sleeper-Smith's "Women, Kin, and Catholicism" (Ethnohistory 47 [Spring 2000]: 423-52) to inform us that most of these converts were women married to French traders. They became Christian converts, in many cases, to join themselves to new religious kinship networks (i.e., godparents). They raised their communities' crops and livestock, allowing their French husbands to trade, hunt, smoke, and behave, in short, like Illinois Indian men. Given that Illinois women also wore French textiles and dressed according to a modified European style, we may conclude that photos of University of Illinois women posing as "Princess Illiniwek" while wearing stereotypical Plains Indian garb are perhaps not 100 percent historically accurate.

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The above image, "Princess Illiniwek (Idelle Stith, Oct. 26, 1943)" is courtesy of the University of Illinois Archives and is used with their kind permission.

A Letter to the Class of 1988, from One of Your Future Selves

My high school class is holding its twenty-fifth reunion this summer, and unfortunately, due to a conflict with a professional conference, I will probably not be able to attend. I thought instead I might reflect on the extent to which the world has changed - and not changed - since 1988, and to put my reflections into the form of a letter, slightly snarky and occasionally vague (though easily deciphered by 2013 observers), from my 43-year-old self to all of the seniors with whom I graduated. What mostly emerges from these reflections is a reminder that it is very difficult to predict the future, particularly when it comes to politics. (Technological changes are a little easier to predict.) As Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., asked some years ago, "Who in 1940 would have guessed that the next three presidents after FDR would be an obscure back-bench Missouri senator, a lieutenant colonel in the army, and a Harvard undergraduate?"

Anyway, here's the letter:

**

Dear Students of the Class of 1988:

Hello there. It's one of your classmates, reporting, in a virtual-time-traveling/wishful-thinking sort of way, on the changes that have occurred in the world since your graduation a quarter-century ago.  While I can't be too precise about the events of the last 25 years (that would spoil all the surprises for you), I can say that most of what happened in the world in the 1990s and 2000s was beyond the power of all but the craziest futurologists to predict.

1) No, we haven't had a nuclear war, nor have we been conquered by the Soviet Union. Actually, we call it "Russia" now, and it's smaller than it was in your day.

2) As you might have guessed if you have been following Mr. Gorbachev's career for the past few years, the Cold War is over. The bankers won.

3) Our current Worldwide Existential Threat is global warming, which many of you are going to hear about for the first time this summer (1988). Some people deny it exists. Let me note that summer temperatures in Australia now reach the 110s and 120s (Fahrenheit), and the Arctic Ocean is nearly ice-free for part of the year.

4) Japan has not become the world's leading economy. China is going to be taking that role, unless they poison all of their air and water first.

5) Sub-Saharan Africa was pretty messy in the 1990s, with a frightening genocide in one country and a war in another country that has killed over three million people.  Currently, though, the continent is experiencing 5 percent annual economic growth, and there's a big amateur film industry in Nigeria, of all places.

6) Also, South Africa has changed somewhat since 1988. Mostly peacefully, mostly for the better.

7) There is still no cure for AIDS, but we have drugs that make the disease manageable, and there are subsidies to provide them to poor people.

8) There is also no cure for cancer, though we have a vaccine against one common form of it.

9) The American manned space program is dormant at the moment. There is an International Space Station but it receives its supply and crew via Russian space craft. On the other hand, we have several robot cars on Mars.

10) Speaking of outer space, Pluto isn't a planet anymore (astronomers have relabeled it a "Kuiper object.") To replace it, we have discovered over 100 planets orbiting other stars. None are Earth-like, but we'll keep looking.

11) Futurologists predicted that one day every American would have in their home a machine that played TV programs, movies, music, and games, and acted as a videophone. We now have such machines – we call them "computers." Perhaps you've heard of them?

12) Okay, maybe you need more explanation. Many if not most Americans use a communications technology called the "Internet" to download entertainment and send messages and video images from their computers. Also from their "wireless devices." Also from their "phones." (There are phones today that have 100 times as much computing power as your home computers.)

13) We don't call them "videophones," by the way; we call them "Skype," after the Estonian technology company that developed the software. Yes, Estonia is a real country.

14) You can probably guess who the next president after Ronald Reagan is going to be. After him, the next three presidents will be a) the governor of a Southern state, who will be impeached for having oral sex in the White House, b) a man who will start a war with a Middle Eastern country because of daddy issues, c) a 27-year-old who's going to start law school this fall.

15) Ronald Reagan is no longer alive, which should come as no surprise because he's already 135 years old. Perhaps his most lasting legacy is economic inequality: in 2010, the top one percent of the U.S. population had six times as much wealth as the bottom 80 percent.

16) Elvis is still dead. So is his son-in-law, Michael Jackson. No, I'm not making that up.

17) The top-grossing movie of the 1990s will be a film about the Titanic by a man who currently directs sci-fi action movies. The top-grossing movie of the 2000s will be a sci-fi action movie about giant blue people, directed by the same guy.

18) Assuming you're reading this in June 1988, the top-selling music album in the United States today is by a British pop singer who is currently one month old.

19) As for our class, we're all (I think) still alive, out of jail, mostly employed, mostly content. Life goes on.

Debt: The First 5,000 Years: Conclusions

(For my summary of David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years, see here.)

Perhaps the most important general theme in Graeber's book is the historic interrelationship between debt, religious obligation, and violence. Graeber describes a very old, if complicated, relationship between violence and debt: indebtedness frequently led to enslavement, the breakup of families, and the redefining of people as things, and indebted merchant-adventurers engaged in violent or morally opprobrious pursuits in order to keep ahead of their own interest payments. Public debt, while it is not much older than the modern nation-state, is similarly linked to state violence: the nation-state created public debt to finance its war machine, and the modern state that cannot cheaply borrow money is one which cannot defend itself.  Conversely, however, the modern state with lots of military bases and nuclear weapons can usually “persuade” its creditors to keep the money spigot open.*

The relationship between debt and moral obligation, however, has changed repeatedly in the last 5,000 years; as recently as the Medieval era, several of the world's largest religions (Buddhists, Muslims, Christians) either stigmatized debt or downplayed it as a distraction from one's religious debts. It is only in the more materialistic early modern era that we (by which I mean “Westerners and their twentieth-century imitators”) have come to see human beings as mere bundles of rationalized economic capacities and interests, and debt and compound interest as engines of positive progress. The notion that an individual, particularly a wage laborer, can free him/herself of debt, is even more recent: Graeber argues it only became possible for large numbers of workers when the governments of industrializing countries enlarged their money supply in the 1800s.** Westerners subsequently began to assume that individuals could free themselves of debt through hard work and thrift, and that therefore debtors must be lazy, profligate, and immoral. Since 1970, however, as wages stagnated and as governments around the world dismantled progressive tax codes and social safety nets, this idea has become much harder to sustain. (One of my colleagues continues to defend thriftiness, of a sort, by distinguishing between “bad” debt, like consumer debt, and “good debt,” like student loans and mortgages. The collapse of the Western housing market in 2008 and the explosion of high-interest student loans in the United States makes even this ideological crutch a rickety one.)

It is past time, Graeber concludes, to change the way Westerners and other industrializing societies view private debt. The notion that debtors are immoral rather than unlucky is quite a recent one, and therefore subject to change. State-sponsored debt relief is an old and morally well-grounded institution, practiced by governments both ancient (Sumerian city-states, Egyptian pharaohs) and modern (American state governments in the 1780s), and justified by several world religions' traditions, like the Jewish practice of jubilee. It is also a good economic policy: people crippled by debts they cannot avoid incurring, like medical debt or student loan debt (which American students can only avoid if they accept the likelihood of long-term unemployment), cannot become good customers for American businesses.

Perhaps, though, we need to take an even more radical approach, and question not only the legitimacy of debt, but the legitimacy of capitalist values. Modern capitalism, Graeber observes, mandates continual productive growth in order to allow investors (and workers) to stay ahead of their debts. In practice, this now means that workers need to slave away at multiple jobs just to stay financially afloat, societies need to promote the continual expansion of consumer demand and consumer debt, and businesses need to exploit their workers and destroy the environment. Some of us, I think, assume toil, debt, and consumerism are worthwhile social goods, insofar as they keep the rabble under control. People who are exhausted by mindless work, held down by debt, and drugged by television and junk food are less likely to cause trouble for the ruling class. (George Orwell made these observations, substituting radio for television, in Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier.) But not all of us agree with this, and even if we did we cannot allow businesses to keep damaging the environment unless we aim at collective suicide.

We must stop, Graeber argues, promoting hard work as our highest socioeconomic good. Graeber says he'd like us to stop criticizing the “undeserving poor,” those who produce little but don't do their neighbors much harm.  He also argues that it is much more humane, and much more typical of human societies until very recently, to value leisure and collective celebration over one's “career.” My own experience is that there are some people in capitalist countries, like teachers and airline pilots, who really do like their jobs, but for the vast majority of workers there is nothing to be gained from extra effort. Since the 1970s gains in worker productivity have all gone to the top decile of salary-earners, and even losing one's job has had much more to do with stupid corporate managerial decisions than with one's own ineptitude. We should be placing more value on our relationships and our hobbies, shifting away from a consumerist lifestyle that turns people into hoarders, and making “I resolve to do less” a more common workplace slogan. "Better living through laziness" may not have the same ring as "Workers of the world, unite!", but it's likelier to appeal to those of us in the slacker generation, and less likely to kill the planet than seven billion people living by the code of "Root, hog, or die."

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* I'm not sure how valid this argument is. The Soviet Union had a huge army and thousands of nuclear weapons in the 1980s, and yet this didn't stop European banks from threatening to cut off its credit if Gorbachev tried to suppress the Eastern European revolt in 1989. The United States' ability to borrow money cheaply, which Graeber attributes to our being armed to the teeth, actually has more to do with our large, relatively secure tax base and the federal government's disinclination, until quite recently, to default.

** Graeber is incorrect when he attributes industrial-era inflation to deliberate government policy. Eric Hobsbawm observed (in The Age of Capital, 1848-1875) that this was instead due to the huge nineteenth-century gold strikes in California, Australia, and South Africa. Otherwise the general tendency in industrializing countries was toward deflation, which would have made life more difficult for debtors and workers.

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(Above image via StrikeDebt Chicago and StrikeDebt Tucson.)