Light On Dark Water

Apparently I’m Not the Only One Who Wonders

 I started to search for "is recycling worth it" and when I had gotten as far as "is rec", this is what Google offered:

 Recycle

If you're interested, here's an article at Popular Mechanics that seems reasonable and plausible. The short answer is "yes". The slightly longer answer is that recycling may not be "worth it" by a short-term dollars-and-cents calculation–it may be a money loser–but that it clearly is worth it by a longer-term resource consumption calculation.

I'm glad to see that Popular Mechanics still has articles about slightly goofy inventions like a knife that toasts bread as it cuts.

Maclin Horton

188 responses to “Apparently I’m Not the Only One Who Wonders”

  1. Janet

    What is that last one?
    AMDG

    Reply
  2. Janet

    Never mind, I found it.
    AMDG

    Reply
  3. Mac

    I didn’t pay much attention to the other results, except for a brief brain lockup on “is rectangle a square”.

    Reply
  4. Janet

    Well, Is recoombe human? piqued my interest.
    AMDG,
    Janet

    Reply
  5. Rob G

    ~~~The slightly longer answer is that recycling may not be “worth it” by a short-term dollars-and-cents calculation–it may be a money loser–but that it clearly is worth it by a longer-term resource consumption calculation.~~~
    I’ve heard certain conservatives of a libertarian/pro-market stripe argue against it on this basis. One guy summarized the argument by saying that if it was “worth it” more people would be doing it (i.e., working in the recycling business), implying that profitability = worth, and thus that if it was “worth it” it would be profitable. Needless to say, I don’t accept that logic.

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  6. Janet

    I have often thought, though, that one could do much more good in the way of conservation by buying a refillable fountain pen and a non-disposable razor.
    In the Little House books or something similar that I read, when there was some sort of sociable gathering, people brought their own eating utensils. A pain, yes, but what would that save in plastic cutlery?
    AMDG

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  7. Janet

    Of course, the manufacture of disposable stuff counts for a lot of jobs.
    AMDG

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  8. Mac

    “worth it” might be an acceptable measure if it took a larger view. I can’t call people who take such a short-sighted view “conservative.”
    Re small acts of conservation: the personally small thing that is probably collectively enormous is plastic containers for water and soft drinks.

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  9. Grumpy

    For that reason I constantly reuse the same plastic bottle for water at the gym etc

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  10. Rob G

    I can’t call people who take such a short-sighted view “conservative.”
    Me neither, but this fellow was a self-professed neo-conservative.

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  11. Mac

    It’s for just such views that I sometimes distinguish “conservative” from “right-wing.”

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  12. Janet

    Right, but people are already thinking and talking about plastic water/drink bottles. Nobody ever seems to question the mountains of disposal ballpoint pens that are in everyone’s desks.
    And then of course, why can’t we do something to make computers less wasteful? How many big plastic monitors have y’all thrown away?
    AMDG

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  13. Louise

    “And then of course, why can’t we do something to make computers less wasteful? How many big plastic monitors have y’all thrown away?”
    This is a big issue. I think I have disposed of mine directly to the dump (back in Tasmania) where I think they will recycle anything which can be recycled.
    I really loathe all that technology which is deliberately designed to be completely obsolete within a short space of time.

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  14. Grumpy

    well I have not got through THAT many computers over the years. I had a second hand Obsborne to start with, in the 1980s. Then I had a thing one put floppies into which lasted me down into the mid 1990s when my father broke it by trying to put a hard drive into it. Then I had an office computer at work – I think I got through two of those in 1995-2010, my time in Aberdeen. And I’ve had the same one since I got to SB. I have a lap top now and an office computer. They want to give me a new one at the office but it means they ‘upgrade the system’, and I don’t want that so I’m stalling. So I’ve been through about five computers in 30 years, which doesn’t seem TOO bad to me.
    What REALLY annoys me, now, is that fruit comes covered in plastic wrapping even at the farmer’s market. It’s entirely unnecessary. They could put it in a paper bag.

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  15. Mac

    Janet may have meant “y’all” to refer to the place where I work, which has indeed disposed of a lot of computers over the past 20 years or so. A lot of electronics stuff is actually very recyclable. I think it’s even profitable. Even though people send it to the landfill, I think (not sure about this) some municipalities separate it out and sell it. I have several electronic thingies of various kinds in the trunk of my car, intending to take them somewhere that recycles. Not sure if my employer does that now or not.
    I never have thought of ballpoint pens as being a problem because I don’t use very many of them. I think I got a box of 8 or 10 when I moved into a new office in 2004. When I cleaned out my stuff last December at least half of them were still in the box.

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  16. grumpy

    Yes a widow in California took her husband’s computer to be recycled and now they are looking for her because they sold it for 200,000 dollars. She gets half

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  17. Janet

    Maclin, No, I’m just thinking about all the computers we’ve gotten rid of and all the ones I see sitting on shelves at Goodwill, and, most of all, of the computers we had at the seminary in the basement. They had been donated to the seminary by, I think, the university where Bill works when the university go new computers. They completely filled a space about 20’x10′ and were stack about head high. It was very odd looking because they were in an area that was portioned off by wall made of chain link or something like that and it looked like the were in the lock-up in Mayberry RFD.
    The idea was that they would be used for parts but they sat there for years acquiring dust and a variety of vermin and eventually they were loaded onto a truck and taken away.
    Can the plastic cases by recycled? Because they are the problem. I really don’t know the answer to this question.
    As for pens, I used to order promotional pens by the thousands to give away to prospective students and I would go to trade fairs where booth after booth of vendors would be selling those pens and hundreds of other plastic items to patrons. I see these pens everywhere I go. I can’t imagine how many there must be in the world.
    AMDG

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  18. Janet

    Grumpy, Well, that’s not recycling, that’s more of a museum item.
    But if anyone wants to give me $200K for my laptop, I’m game.
    AMDG

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  19. Grumpy

    well the widow did not know her husband’s computer was a museum item. She left it in a box at the recycle center and when they opened it two weeks later they discovered it was one of the first apple computers and therefore very valuable.

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  20. Mac

    Yeah, I saw that in the news. I had the impression (not reading the stories, just headlines) that they had given it back to her. Still impressive that they gave her half.
    I’m pretty sure those shelves full of old computers can be at least partially recycled, Janet. I don’t know specifically about the plastic–as you know some plastic can be recycled, but I don’t know about that. But it would take somebody going to the trouble to find a place that does it and get the machines to them. Though some of them will come pick it up. Maybe that’s what the truck that took them away did.
    I just picked up two plastic water bottles at the beach. The bottled water fad is surely one of the odder manifestations of consumerism.

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  21. Louise

    “What REALLY annoys me, now, is that fruit comes covered in plastic wrapping even at the farmer’s market. It’s entirely unnecessary. They could put it in a paper bag.”
    That is nuts.

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  22. Marianne

    The bottled water fad is surely one of the odder manifestations of consumerism.
    I say we blame the French, considering Perrier started it all.

    It wasn’t that long ago, after all, that Americans were pretty happy with their tap water. Then, in the summer of 1977, Perrier launched a concerted ad campaign in the United States featuring Orson Welles, hoping to catapult its spring water from a niche product (about 2 million bottles sold a year to what Time called “discriminating, well-heeled ‘Perrier freaks’ “) to a fashion accessory with broad market appeal. The campaign popularized the vague health claims and the appeals to the “mystique” of bubbling-springs-untouched-by-man that would become the de rigueur icons of the mineral-water movement. (Gustave Leven, the company’s then-president, said, “Americans will love Perrier because it is nice for your digestion” and dropped hints about its “nonfattening” heart benefits.) Between 1978 and 1979, sales in the United States rose from $20 million to $60 million. And in the ’80s, fueled by the burgeoning health craze, mineral water’s appeal to celebrities and Wall Street execs as a status-symbol-cum-health-necessity grew sharply. By 1988, Perrier was a juggernaut, selling some 300 million bottles a year; it took a benzene scare to shake its chokehold on the market. At that point, companies like Evian, having already spotted opportunity, were poised to step in and take a piece of the pie.

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  23. Art Deco

    Great Bear produced and distributed bottled water back in the 1960s. My mother took out a subscription when the water where we were living turned rusty. You have places in Upstate New York where the water can be wretchedly mineral infested.

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  24. Mac

    Sure, there’s always been a market for bottled water in places where the drinking water tasted bad or something. But that doesn’t account for the millions of people all over the country nursing an ever-present bottle of water for which they paid Coke or somebody a dollar or more.
    My memory is exactly as that piece describes, Marianne: the vogue for Perrier in the ’80s, followed by, so to speak, a deluge.
    Another factor seems to be that somebody told women that they need to be constantly “hydrated” as a health or weight-control measure.
    Louise, I bought two potatoes at the grocery store the other day, each individually shrink-wrapped. I didn’t want a whole bag, and all the non-bagged ones were wrapped that way. Weird.

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  25. Art Deco

    I’ll get a bottle of water once in a while when I’m thirsty and nothing else is convenient. The alternatives are what other fare the retail outlet has available, and that’s seldom anything that interests me.
    One thing I’ve noticed is that water fountains have largely disappeared and the remaining ones I’d be careful with simply due to disuse. I worked for a number of years in a building open to the public which had been completed in 2007. If we had a fountain on the premises, I’ve forgotten it. We had coolers in non-public areas, of course, with hot and cold taps. and the big jug on top.

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  26. Art Deco

    I’ve never seen anything wrapped at a farmers’ market other than baked goods. I don’t think I’ve ever seen shrink wrapped potatoes, either.

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  27. Louise

    Shrink-wrapped potatoes? Man, that is crazy!

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  28. Grumpy

    Everything in the South Bend farmers market and a lot of things in the Goshen market are covered in cling film

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  29. Grumpy

    Our society seems to be in two minds about recycling/sustainability eco.
    On the one hand, people talk about sustainability and eco awareness a great deal. They have a new kind of toilet roll out there, with no cardboard center. That’s for people who don’t want to waste the cardboard on the roll inside a toilet roll.
    But at the same time, people buy and use Schwiffers – paper towels to put on the end of your mop so you don’t have to clean your mop, you can throw it away. And they buy all kinds of handywipes – paper towels impregnated with cleaning ungents so that they don’t have to wash out a sponge.

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  30. Louise

    Convenience will usually win out, Grumpy.

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  31. Mac

    Just about every time in the U.S. I don’t know if other cultures are different.
    Frequently it takes extra expense and trouble to be very eco-conscious, so you have the phenomenon of conspicuous non-consumption in some small things while consuming like mad in some bigger things. Example: certified “green” house next door which sits unoccupied but cooled/heated most of the time.

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  32. Janet

    I used to be much, much more careful about using paper products to clean before I started working. In fact, I didn’t even buy paper towels for years. Now I’m complete slacker.
    We are self-indulgent, but we are also terribly busy.
    AMDG

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  33. Grumpy

    I suspect that the only way ‘eco’ affects people’s behaviour is that they like to go and see eco disaster movies.

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  34. Janet

    Ha. Too true, and that reminds me of a review that I heard on NPR about the new Disney movie Tomorrowland. David Edelstein says, …[T]he most vivid thing is the message: a critique of films, books and TV shows in which floods, plagues, robots, or nukes wipe out civilization.
    Why are these movies so popular? Are people so overwhelmed with the problem that they want to just get it over with at any cost and get on to the next thing? We just aren’t made to bear all the horrors that we have to know about today because of the efficiency of the media in reporting them. Only in my lifetime have people had to cope with the knowledge of worldwide disasters they way we do. In the past it was at a greater remove. There were terrible things to deal with always, but for most of history, they were local problems or far off echoes–not graphic images broadcast into our homes unceasingly.
    AMDG

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  35. Mac

    Yes, that certainly plays a role in people’s consciousness of how bad things are–not just disasters and potential disasters, but bad stuff in general. I don’t think a lot of people realize, for instance, that violent crime overall has been dropping for 20 years or so now.
    I’ve followed somewhat the same path with paper towels.

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  36. Louise

    “We just aren’t made to bear all the horrors that we have to know about today because of the efficiency of the media in reporting them.”
    True for me, that’s for sure.
    I’m a bit over it!

    Reply
  37. Grumpy

    I think there is some difference between paper towels, the wipey things, and Schwiffers (and their equivalents). In some cases, with some wet surfaces, I do not know how else one could conveniently get them dry without paper towels. Yes, there is such a thing as over using even paper towels, but still, they seem to fulfill a non replaceable purpose – unless one were going to, say, use a tea towel and constantly wring it out and wash it.
    With the Wipey things, they are somewhat more convenient in some cases than using a sponge. I confess to using them when I’m just feeling too lazy to use a sponge and a bowl of water with vinegar in it. There are certainly almost equally convenient equivalents for the wipey things which are more ‘eco’.
    Now, when we get to Schwiffers – I mean the various kinds of ‘diaper’ pads on the end of a stick. There are half a dozen equally easy ways of getting a floor clean. They really do not take more than a few minutes less time to clean a floor, and maybe not even that. One does have to rinse the sponge. I do occasionally use them as a kind of backup to everything else.
    So, because paper towels are really not, in our culture, easily replaceable, I would rank them low in a hierarchy of eco-unfriendly items. I would rank the wipey things lower down, because really there is no need for them, it’s just that they eliminate the need to clean the sponge and have a strong ‘hygenic’ feel to them (though apparently they spread germs from one surface to another). And I would put Schwiffers really low down because they are not even really more convenient or more hygenic-seeming than a mop.
    I have a sponge I bought from an Amish lady at a farmer’s market and I have a head for a mop which goes in the washing machine. So the both go in the washing machine together. It has just struck me since I bought that Amish crochet sponge how extremely more ‘eco’ it is than wipey things or almost any sponge one could buy in a supermarket – simply because it is so durable. I’ve had it for nearly a year now, and it’s beginning to come to the end of its days. It goes in the washing machine about once a week or so, with a bleach tablet.
    I am not making any kind of moral point. I do not have strong moral feelings about the eco stuff, as some people do. My point is simply that no one who uses Schwiffers as their main mopping utensil could possibly care less about eco things or ‘sustainability’ or mountains of trash and landfill.
    I don’t feel moral about using the re-usable Amish dish cloth or a washable mop head.
    To me it’s just the oddity, really, of our society being so full of ‘eco talk’, and yet Lowes and the household goods parts of the supermarkets being full of completely un-eco-friendly utensils.

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  38. grumpy

    The most obvious explanation would be, of course, that upper middle class people love the ‘eco’ talk, and they like to wear re-purposed clothes made of burlap, and they buy expensive green paper towels and so on, while the white trash buy (equally expensive and wasteful) Schwiffer diaper pads.
    But that cannot be the whole story just because of the popularity of the eco disaster movies. Everyone likes to nurse anxieties about the unsustainability of our present way of life.

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  39. Mac

    Don’t leave out propaganda, either. I don’t necessarily mean that negatively–propaganda isn’t necessarily false. But everybody has been inundated with ecological moralizing for the past forty years or so. Younger people have had it for their entire lives. It’s bound to have had an effect.
    I don’t worry about paper towels at all, really. The amount we use is miniscule, and I suspect that even if you added up what everybody uses it wouldn’t be that big a factor compared to other things. I am concerned about things like the cans of paint sitting around our house that will probably never be used, the container of Round-Up that has probably lost most of its potency but that I don’t think I should throw away.

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  40. Grumpy

    What is the matter with Roundup? In GB I had a patch of ground smaller than the car I have now. Since I bought a house here I ha s two huge lawns. I have to get some kind of weedkillr for the plants that grow between the cracks in the driveway. I see huge cartons of Roundup in the gardening aisles but I have some recollection that it is an evil thing.

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  41. Rob G

    If I remember correctly, one of the issues with Roundup was Monsanto’s development of “Roundup-ready” soybeans, which was a variety of soy that Roundup didn’t kill. Farmers could basically spray the entire crop and the Roundup would kill everything but the soybeans. There was concern about a possible resultant overuse of Roundup, drift and runoff, etc., onto neighboring farms, and also the effect of it on the soybeans themselves.
    Monsanto is a dreadful company, although that doesn’t necessarily make Roundup evil.

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  42. Art Deco

    Monsanto is a dreadful company,
    No, it’s just a bogey for poseurs.

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  43. Grumpy

    I have hung out on this site for ten years, and even once been called its resident theologian by Dan Nichols. I have stayed for ten years because Maclin’s posts are so good but also because the conversation has always been enjoyable. There is little snarky and there is good, intelligent agreement and disagreement. I hope this will not change and the chat will not degenerate into name calling.

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  44. Robert Gotcher

    Hear, hear, Grumpy!

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  45. Mac

    Thank you, and so do I. Art, you’re welcome to make the argument for Monsanto (I am more or less agnostic on that score), but not to call someone who says otherwise a poseur. Apart from the principle of the thing, it’s extremely inaccurate and unfair as applied to Rob G, who’s consistently intelligent and interesting.

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  46. Mac

    As for Roundup (Round-up?), I don’t consider it an evil thing, as evidenced by the fact that I have some that I use for just such purposes as you describe, Grumpy. But I don’t know what to do with what I don’t use and which has been sitting around for several years. Actually I think my dilemma has been solved–my concern was that it didn’t work anymore, but I didn’t know how to get rid of it. But it appears to have worked after all on the vines where I applied it–just took longer than I expected.
    I have to say the Round-up-ready soybeans are kind of a creepy idea. It’s the sort of thing that might have sounded good in a naive sci-fi-future sort of way at one time, but in actuality can only be accomplished without a lot of bad side effects. Kind of like the development of tomatoes that survive shipping very well, and so allow the expansion of the market for tomatoes to places and times not previously feasible, except that they don’t have any taste.

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  47. Janet

    There is little snarky and there is good, intelligent agreement and disagreement. I hope this will not change and the chat will not degenerate into name calling.
    My thoughts exactly. One of the great differences between this blog and others is that the comments are respectful. There are multitudinous places on the blog where you can be snarky. Please leave us one island of civility. I’ve gotten to where I am almost avoiding the blog. Please stop.
    AMDG

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  48. Janet

    To me it’s just the oddity, really, of our society being so full of ‘eco talk’, and yet Lowes and the household goods parts of the supermarkets being full of completely un-eco-friendly utensils.
    Yes, I think that was my point about the pens and stuff.
    AMDG

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  49. Rob G

    “No, it’s just a bogey for poseurs.”
    On the contrary there is lots of info out there on the company that backs up my statement, and by no means is it all from dubious sources. I don’t want to enter that debate here, however, so that’s all I’ll say on the subject.

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  50. Paul

    Entirely off-topic, but yesterday, quite by chance, I came across a place selling Dr Pepper and bought one to check my memory. It isn’t at all as vile as I remembered it being 20 years ago. Which isn’t to say I’d ever choose to drink it a third time.
    I think the taste I was associating with Dr Pepper might actually be the taste of Irn-Bru (something else I haven’t tried for 20 years).

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  51. Louise

    “I have stayed for ten years because Maclin’s posts are so good but also because the conversation has always been enjoyable.”
    Just have to join in the chorus of “hear, hears”

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  52. Art Deco

    On the contrary there is lots of info out there on the company that backs up my statement, and by no means is it all from dubious sources. I don’t want to enter that debate here, however, so that’s all I’ll say on the subject.
    It only ‘backs up your statement’ if someone subscribes to your notion of what a ‘terrible’ company is. Monsanto’s been involved in occasional labor disputes (normal for a big company) and has been cited for environmental damage done here, there, and the next place. That’s not surprising for a chemical company operating in an era when what’s valued regarding common property resources has been somewhat protean, i.e. waste dumping which was kosher one place was not some other place and dumping done at one time was not at some other time.
    The most salient dispute Monsanto was involved in concerned PCBs in Anniston, Ala. Calhoun County, Ala does have elevated cancer rates, but they are quite near the Alabama average. With regard to the sort of cancers stoked by PCBs, Calhoun County has elevated rates of one (melanoma) and not the other (liver). Deaths from melanoma in Calhoun County exceed baseline by 1 or 2 a year. Mostly what they did in Anniston was create an eyesore in the form of a dumpsite. Frank Gehry does that everytime he designs something.
    A great deal of what Monsanto does is produce manufactured seed. Aspects of that are disconcerting. The notion that it’s dangerous requires granular knowledge that few tree-huggers have.

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  53. Mac

    Wikipedia on Irn-Bru.
    Wikipedia on Glyphosate aka Roundup.
    If this is at all accurate, hysteria about Roundup would seem to be just that. Which is not to say that it’s harmless.
    I was surprised at your description of the taste of Dr Pepper, Paul. Not surprised that you didn’t like it, but I would have expected “sickeningly sweet” or something to that effect, rather than the comparison to licking a battery. Perhaps Irn-Bru is more bracing.

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  54. Janet

    I have to say that there’s nothing about that link that makes me want to run out and try Irn-Bru. I’m sure that will not distress them too much. 😉
    AMDG

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  55. Paul

    Could 5 million Scotsmen be wrong?

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  56. Janet

    I don’t think I’m qualified to answer that question.
    AMDG

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  57. Rob G

    Monsanto has been involved in hundreds of legal disputes with farmers over both its business practices and the contamination of non-Monsanto farms by their GMO pollens and seeds.
    The problem with Roundup isn’t so much with the product per se, but with these other issues surrounding it. But one of the things that is becoming worrisome is the appearance of Roundup-resistant strains of weeds, which would necessitate the use of other herbicides. In light of this, and some other recent problems, some countries are beginning to restrict its use.
    Of course this doesn’t mean it’s dangerous to spray on your sidewalk, but it does reflect potential long-term problems when used on a large scale.

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  58. Art Deco

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/10/monsanto-wins-lawsuit_n_3417081.html
    Monsanto has been involved in hundreds of legal disputes with farmers over both its business practices and the contamination of non-Monsanto farms by their GMO pollens and seeds.
    Per Huffington Post, it’s about 10 suits a year re royalty claims.

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  59. Rob G

    “Per Huffington Post, it’s about 10 suits a year re royalty claims”
    A) Doesn’t include the ones settled out of court, and B) they’re not always about royalties. Among the small farm and organic farm population, the company has a reputation as being a bully regarding this stuff. Which stands to reason given the amount of money they have backing them, and the amount of clout they carry in D.C. (But I repeat myself.)

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  60. Art Deco

    A) Doesn’t include the ones settled out of court,
    Yes it does. Huffington Post does not enumerate the number of trials, just the suits. (The company claims the number of jury verdicts is nine).
    Among the small farm and organic farm population, the company has a reputation as being a bully regarding this stuff.
    I generally do not concede to organic farmers shooting the breeze that sort of ontological clout.
    The complaint has been that Monsanto could sue (or has sued) farmers over accidental contamination and a class action set went to court to attempt to compel the company to pledge not to sue bar under select circumsances. All of this involves niggling legal distinctions and disputed facts.
    You get these sorts of questions with database subscriptions as well. What’s surprising re Monsanto is that they fancied filing suits was worth their while. I’ve never heard of a company in a roughly analogous situation doing that, but I never dealt with anything you propagate. I think there’s another set of disputes re agicultural implements and the proprietary software for their computer controls (in which John Deere is a party).

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  61. Grumpy

    Well I’m lukewarm about the fountain pens. I went to school until I was 10 in the USA. We only used plastic ‘pens’ as they were called. When I went to school in England shortly after my 10th birthday they only used fountain pens which they called ‘pens’. In England a fountain pen is a ‘pen’ and a plastic thing is a ‘biro’ (after the Hungarian who invented them). So there was a language problem to begin with, because the word ‘pen’ confused me.
    Then there was the ink. This came in two ways. In Bottles – and one used a kind of suction to get the ink in the bottles into the reusable sack in the fountain pen. And then there were cartridges.
    Either way, the ink got everywhere – all over my pencil case and all over my hands. My house mistress/latin teacher used to say, ‘are you trying to frighten me’ – referring to the blue spots all over my fingers as if it were the blue woad the ancient Britons used to frighten their enemies in battle.
    One constantly lost or broke fountain pens – or I did. There were problems about the nibs. If anyone else wrote with one’s fountain pen the nib was rendered fairly useless after just a few strokes.
    But the main problem was the ink. It was a bit like with vacuum cleaners, how all the bags are different. Once one bought a new pen, all one’s supply of cartridges was rendered useless. So one would be trying to jam an ill fitting cartridge into a pen that just didn’t want to take it.
    I would not now, as an adult, mind using a fountain pen (‘pen’) for the very little handwriting which I do. But for 10 year old school girls, they were miserable objects of minor torture.
    Of course, Laura would never have used one as a little girl. They wrote on slates with chalk. Only in the very last books is she shown using a ‘pen’ – for instance, I think, when she signs those ‘friendship’ books which become fashionable when she is about 15 or so.
    All of these things, whether they are fountain pens or real mops or real sponges require one to think a bit more about things going on outside one’s mind. They require a bit of skill and craft. And to people who don’t have those skills and crafts, they are just counter-productive.
    And this is what renders most eco-moralizing as more or less empty nostalgia.
    People don’t learn the skills or aptitudes they need in order not to be wasteful.

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  62. Janet

    Well, I think you are my granddaughter. That would have been exactly how she would have been. I LOVED my cartridge pen and even the fountain pens we had. I even made different colored inks with my chemistry set to use in the pens. (It was the ONLY thing I ever managed to make with my chemistry set.)
    However, my point–or one of my points–is that if we REALLY believed that we were in imminent danger, we would do all those difficult things because we would have to. So, I don’t think that most people really believe it.
    I don’t know what I believe. I’m pretty sure I’ll be dead before I find out the truth.
    AMDG

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  63. Mac

    I agree that most people don’t really believe it. I think it’s fair to say that there’s a lot of hysteria and even superstition in and around the environmental movement. And some people get a sort of pleasure out of that. You see that syndrome in other contexts–the way leftists feign terror of a theocracy, etc. It’s a bit like the pleasure of a ghost story.
    But that’s not to say there isn’t a real problem. Apart from the question of real damage to the natural world and our own health, there’s an aesthetic distaste for so much of what the modern world does. And I don’t mean that disparagingly–it’s justified. People who are at all sensitive to that have a fear that most of the world is going to end up looking like an abandoned and polluted factory site or strip mall, with only a few enclaves of rich people able to get away from it. It’s an exaggerated fear, maybe, but it’s not completely irrational.

    Reply
  64. Mac

    I remember using a fountain pen for a while in my 20s. The memory is a little dim but I think I sort of liked it, but I also think there was a lot of ink where it wasn’t supposed to be.

    Reply
  65. Rob G

    “Yes it does. Huffington Post does not enumerate the number of trials, just the suits. (The company claims the number of jury verdicts is nine).”
    My error — what I meant was suits that were threatened but never filed. The Monsanto site lists the number of actual lawsuits at 147.
    “I generally do not concede to organic farmers shooting the breeze that sort of ontological clout.”
    I’ll trust the word of a farmer, organic or otherwise, over that of a multinational corporation with a tricksy reputation any day of the week. Crony capitalism doesn’t get more egregious than that represented by the relationship between Big Agra and the USDA.

    Reply
  66. Marianne

    Could 5 million Scotsmen be wrong?
    Hmm. They do like haggis as well, so I’m going with wrong.

    Reply
  67. Mac

    “legal dispute” doesn’t necessarily mean “lawsuit”. Monsanto says “Monsanto does become aware, through our own actions or through third-parties, of individuals who are suspected of violating our patents and agreements. Where we do find violations, we are able to settle most of these cases without ever going to trial. In many cases, these farmers remain our customers. Sometimes however, we are forced to resort to lawsuits. This is a relatively rare circumstance, with 147 lawsuits filed since 1997 in the United States.”
    So “hundreds of legal disputes” is not an unreasonable statement.

    Reply
  68. Grumpy

    I wish I could join in this soda pop conversation but I just almost never buy one! Don’t they all more or less taste the same?
    When I went from the USA plastic pen using society to the fountain pen wielding culture of my English boarding school, I was moving from an affluent society to a society which was not yet so affluent and which still had habits of prudence left over from WWII.
    And I think that that is what makes it almost impossible for us to behave as if we genuinely believe there is any kind of ecological crisis in the offing. We have the throw-away mindset of a wealthy society.
    By the time the junk has piled up high enough to make people realize they should change it will probably be a little on the late side to change.

    Reply
  69. Grumpy

    It is very difficult to develop habits of frugality without genuine poverty or lack of money as an incentive.
    I remember watching a Benedictine monk pull a box load of rather wormy, bitter looking greenish apples off a tree and put them in a box and take them up to the main house. It struck me that those apples were what the monks had to eat. They could not send out to Safeway in Elgin for pineapples or mangoes.
    The Ingalls family in the Little House bookshave next to nothing – one doll a piece for the girls, one cup apiece for the whole family etc – and this is a large part of the appeal of the books. It makes everything matter so much. If you have one doll and Ma gives it to a neighbour’s spoiled daughter, that is close to a tragedy. But every object is the subject of intense focus and delight – just because so few possessions are owned.
    Its impossible to recover such a state just by having high moral feelings about ‘saving the planet’. I think the eco people are right about many things – though like Mac I’m an agnostic about Monsanto and GMO crops. The moral feelings about ecology do not have a false object – that’s not the reason they do not motivate many people. But such feelings or values simply cannot motivate affluent people to live like poor people.

    Reply
  70. Robert Gotcher

    I just had Irn Bru for the first time a couple of weeks ago when my daughter returned from Scotland. I don’t think it is like DP. As Maclin points out, DP is sweet. There is some kind of “bite” in IB and the flavor is more “orange.” Not just because of the color. In fact, my kids say like tangerine. There are a couple of other flavors they’ve identified in it that I can’t remembe.r

    Reply
  71. Louise

    “I wish I could join in this soda pop conversation but I just almost never buy one! Don’t they all more or less taste the same?”
    Well, I think they’re all very sweet. I mostly just drink them when I go out for dinner, so I usually drink Coke which is my favourite.

    Reply
  72. Louise

    “I remember using a fountain pen for a while in my 20s. The memory is a little dim but I think I sort of liked it, but I also think there was a lot of ink where it wasn’t supposed to be.”
    Me too. I also had a wax seal. Both were gifts from my mother, I think.

    Reply
  73. Mac

    I want to try this Irn-Bru stuff now. Probably not available in supermarkets here, though. Speaking of soft drinks with “bite,” try Reed’s Extra Ginger Brew. I use it in a mixed drink called a Dark and Stormy. Very tasty. There’s a non-extra version that has less ginger.

    Reply
  74. Marianne

    I just remembered cream soda, which I don’t think I’ve had since I was a kid, and even then I think the only time I drank it was at Portuguese festivals in the San Joaquin Valley. They’d roast a pig and gave you a choice of orange pop or cream soda to go with it. The sweetest concoction you can imagine. I’ve always wondered if it’s a Portuguese thing, especially in the Azores, which is where most of the San Joaquin Valley Portuguese folks came from.

    Reply
  75. Mac

    Re the monks and their not-so-great apples, and the Ingalls with their next-to-nothing, and “every object is the subject of intense focus and delight – just because so few possessions are owned”: in 4th grade we had a state history textbook that was enlivened by stories about the early days. There was one that I remember to this day, about a poor family in which one child was very sickly. The doctor prescribed citrus fruit, so the family made a great sacrifice, they saved money, the father made a lengthy trip to procure…one bag of oranges. While they lasted, the boy got better. But then they were gone, and the family had no money for more, and eventually the child died. The idea that such a small thing could be so important and so hard to get made a big impression on me, because anybody could walk into a supermarket and buy oranges quite cheaply. Looking back on it now, it’s possible that the story was stretched a bit, but the picture is basically valid. A hundred years or so ago it was customary to put fruit in a child’s Christmas stocking, because it was a rare treat.
    “But such feelings or values simply cannot motivate affluent people to live like poor people.”
    Indeed not. There simply isn’t any way that large numbers of people are going to voluntarily deprive themselves of the comforts of modern life. We’ve had some 50 or a hundred years now of people preaching (for various reasons) the back-to-the-land idea, and it keeps not happening except for a handful of hardy and adventurous souls. And there are excellent reasons for that.

    Reply
  76. Grumpy

    The back to the Land thing goes back to the late 19th century. It has to have influenced Chesterton – because what he wants to be distributed is actually physical land. One a key issue that divided the Distributists was whether they should be NO machinery once everyone went back to their two acres and a cow or SOME. Like Louise I find Belloc very funny but I cannot say I share any of Chesterton or Belloc’s political or social ideas.
    True, people are not going back to living in poverty in any large numbers. But we are not talking about living in poverty here. We are talking about taking a re-usable straw bag to the supermarket instead of getting a plastic bag or using a fountain men instead of a biro or using a re-usable crochet sponge instead of a disinfectant wipe. And the answer of the American People to these suggestions is a resounding NO. Because we cannot even live ‘as if poverty’ in a tiny corner of our lives.
    Marianne I can remember having cream soda a few times in childhood and loving it. I do not know if it still exists.

    Reply
  77. Grumpy

    Laura goes to a dinner party about age 15 and eats her first Orange.
    Getting a piece of fruit for Christmas was very common. But I fear not only ‘a hundred years ago’. There are photos of me holding an orange, on Christmas day 1963. It seems to be part of my ‘booty’ for the day….

    Reply
  78. Rob G

    My dad was a great Pepsi drinker, so that’s basically what we grew up with and it’s still my go-to. It is sweeter and slightly more “syrupy” than Coke. I like RC Cola also, which is closer to Pepsi than to Coke, I’d say. The only time I generally drink fizzy stuff is at picnics and such, or with pizza, with which I think it goes well.
    We’d have cream soda when I was a kid occasionally — more like root beer than cola, I think. I’ll still buy it once or twice a year as a treat. Avoid the A&W brand though — like its namesake root beer it’s ridiculously sweet, even for cream soda.
    A friend recently introduced me to San Pellegrino Blood Orange soda. It’s fantastic — best orange pop I’ve ever had.
    Dark & stormies — yes!!

    Reply
  79. Rob G

    “the answer of the American People to these suggestions is a resounding NO. Because we cannot even live ‘as if poverty’ in a tiny corner of our lives.”
    America, being a largely Protestant project, has no concept of the ascetical whatsoever. Even the relatively easy day-to-day asceticism of the Catholic and the Orthodox is a tough sell here. The notion of voluntarily going without something is totally foreign, and is almost always perceived in a legalistic way: “You’re telling me that I have to give up disposable razors and paper towels!”

    Reply
  80. Janet

    Bill used to get an orange in his Christmas stocking. Though his family was fairly poor, I think it had more to do with a tradition passed down from even poorer ancestors. I know a woman from Czechoslovakia who talks about getting an orange for Christmas and how astounding it was to them. It was like getting the sun for Christmas.
    AMDG

    Reply
  81. Mac

    Cream soda (do they spell it “creme”?) is very much with us. I see it in the grocery stores here, alongside the root beer. Doesn’t seem to be very popular, judging by the amount of space it gets on the shelves. I like it–if I drank that kind of stuff regularly I would buy it. It’s as good as Dr Pepper. 🙂
    Rob, if you can find Ron Barrilito rum, make yourself a Dark and Stormy with that and Reed’s Extra Ginger. Oh man… I’ve tried making them with Bacardi and ginger ale, and it’s just another sweet drink. But with those two it’s something else.

    Reply
  82. Janet

    Back to the original question, I do think that recycling is worth it, although we have no practical way of doing it where we live now. I would like to get back to the idea of a kind of pre-cycling which would mean not producing garbage to begin with. Again, given the time constraints of our life at present, I think that will have to wait until we move back to the city.
    While there is a lot of political baggage and mis-information connected to the whole eco-discussion, I would rather step back from that and look at it from a more Christian perspective–that of our original vocation to tend the garden, and the fact that wastefulness is sinful. Even if my actions are not going to destroy the earth, throwing away a lot of stuff because I’m too negligent to arrange things better is not good stewardship.
    AMDG

    Reply
  83. Mac

    From what I’ve read of the austerity of post-war Britain, I shouldn’t be surprised that oranges were still a special prize in 1963. And yes, Janet, I think it continued to be a tradition long after oranges were common here. When I was pretty small we used to get one, and I was always a little puzzled.
    What I meant about back-to-the-land-ism, Grumpy, was just the converse of what you’re saying: if relatively few people will not sacrifice fairly small things for something that they’re told is critically important, the chances of many making a big sacrifice and trying to farm for a living are pretty much nil.
    Btw I first said “50 years” because I was thinking of the American bohemian impulse, then I added 100 because I remembered it was going strong in distributist circles back in the 1920s, at least. I guess the basic idea can be traced back to Thoreau, at least. Not to mention medieval monks.

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  84. Grumpy

    The English Liberal Party of the late 19th century had a number of ‘back to the landers’ in it, and Chesterton was a Liberal for many years as a young man – he would canvass for them at elections, for instance.

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  85. Janet

    Well, pretty much everybody was already on the land in medieval times.
    AMDG

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  86. Rob G

    Not sure about England, but in America what killed the agrarian movement was WWII and the post-war boom. It really didn’t pick back up again in any strength until the mid-70s, when it was seen as (somewhat) allied with the environmental movement. The book that put W. Berry on the map, The Unsettling of America, was published by the Sierra Club for instance, even though it’s not really an “environmental” book at all.
    You did have people like Aldo Leopold and Louis Bromfield writing in the post-war period, but they tended to be looked at more for their conservation ethic than for any intrinsic agrarianism. They’re both still very much worth reading, Leopold especially.
    On Dark & Stormies: you can make a decent one with Myers Dark Rum, but you really do need a good ginger beer to make it work. Ginger ale, even a more ginger-y one like Vernors, just doesn’t cut it.

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  87. Art Deco

    What killed ‘the Agrarian movement’ was that people could earn a better living in other pursuits and have discrete and regular working hours while avoiding a mess of back-breaking labor. Mr. Berry has in some of his essays behaved as if the agricultural exodus was derived from public policy prompted by the Conference Board.

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  88. Rob G

    “What killed ‘the Agrarian movement’ was that people could earn a better living in other pursuits and have discrete and regular working hours while avoiding a mess of back-breaking labor.”
    If the romanticization of farming is one fairy-tale version of the question, you’ve just provided a very able encapsulation of the opposite fairy-tale.
    Berry, by the way, never romanticizes farming, viewing it as he does as a calling, with appeal to a few. What he does argue for, however, is the freedom of people who do feel called to it to be able to take up that calling without interference from either big government or big business.

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  89. Mac

    I have to agree with Art on what killed the Agrarian movement, if by “Agrarian movement” we mean people actually farming, as opposed to the intellectual case for it. Or at least more with Art than with Rob. There were a lot of factors at work, but an awful lot of people who actually grew up on farms jumped at the chance to get away. It didn’t help that the economics of small farming were getting shakier all the time, and larger forces can be blamed for some of that, I’m sure.
    Agrarianism as an idea revived in the ’70s, but not very much as a practice.

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  90. Janet

    I think part of the problem with any “back to the land” movement is that most people aren’t going back, they are just going, and it’s extremely hard to take up farming for the first time when you are older unless you have someone with you to walk you through it for a while. I watch the kids around here with horses, for example, and they were showing the horse when they are three. Now they are about 11 and taking care of horses is second nature to them. It will never be that way to someone who takes it up at 30.
    So, to farm a small farm successfully today, you have to be able to make no mistakes, and a newcomer is bound to make a lot of mistakes.
    AMDG

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  91. Mac

    Good point.
    “…larger forces can be blamed, I’m sure…” — that probably should be “are to blame,” period. I mean, I don’t think it’s in doubt.

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  92. Grumpy

    I tend also to agree more with Art than with Rob G on this.
    I think the ‘back to the land’ movement coincided with its becoming increasingly difficult to make a living on a small farm. The theory looked better and better even as the practice felt worse and worse.
    You can see this in a small way in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s life. Almanzo, her husband, came from a prosperous farm in New York State. But Laura and Almanzo struggled all their lives. Pa was not really taken with the new machinery, but the next generation was – and I dare say that without the new machinery farming was no longer financially viable. But they paid to borrow the money to buy that machinery, and once they were in debt it was barely possible to get out of it.
    Having walked across several hundred miles of France and five hundred miles of Spain, it’s quite obvious from the dozens and dozens of villages one passes that once these were farming communities, and now they are week end cottages for urban dwellers. The French left the land after WWI. The boys did not return to the villages, and the girls had no one to marry – village life died in the 1920s in France. It has revived massively over the past 30 years, but mainly because of city dwellers having second homes in the country.

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  93. Janet

    So really, farming wasn’t financially viable without the new machinery, and farming wasn’t financially viable with the new machinery. And even Pa got into debt to build his house or buy seed when the crop had failed the year before. The small farmers were in constant debt to the banks the way that coal miners were in debt to the company stores. Once on that tread-wheel, it was almost impossible to get off.
    AMDG

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  94. Paul

    Oranges and tangerines are a very big part of Sinterklaas festivities in Belgium and The Netherlands, still now when they’re available in supermarkets year round.

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  95. Paul

    Has anyone seen the Hungarian comedy The Witness? It’s set in the Stalinist era, and an attempt to grow oranges is a major plot point.
    Even if my actions are not going to destroy the earth, throwing away a lot of stuff because I’m too negligent to arrange things better is not good stewardship.
    This is something I agree with very strongly.

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  96. Art Deco

    What he does argue for, however, is the freedom of people who do feel called to it to be able to take up that calling without interference from either big government or big business.

    Neither are preventing you from farming in general. The old system of marketing orders would prevent you from farming certain crops. The system was set up during the Depression and its buttress for decades was…the farm lobby.

    So really, farming wasn’t financially viable without the new machinery, and farming wasn’t financially viable with the new machinery.
    Laura Wilder and her husband farmed until their daughter (and book royalties) put them out to pasture ca. 1930. They made a living at it bar for a 7 year period in South Dakota ca. 1890, and I think the problems during that period concerned bad weather and pestilences (against a background of deflation, which is hard on producers who rely on credit, as farmers do). Their property was still mortgaged in 1920. Not sure about 1930 as the question was not asked in that census.

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  97. Art Deco

    Having walked across several hundred miles of France and five hundred miles of Spain, it’s quite obvious from the dozens and dozens of villages one passes that once these were farming communities, and now they are week end cottages for urban dwellers. The French left the land after WWI. The boys did not return to the villages, and the girls had no one to marry – village life died in the 1920s in France. It has revived massively over the past 30 years, but mainly because of city dwellers having second homes in the country.
    This fellow
    http://www.parisschoolofeconomics.com/hautcoeur-pierre-cyrille/1929.htm
    contends that agriculture comprehended 30% of the labor force in 1930.
    A village in a region of Europe wherein open-field agriculture had reigned would have been foundationally an agricultural settlement. There would be nothing analogous in areas of early modern agricultural colonization (e.g. North America or Siberia), where you tended to have isolated homsesteads.
    I’m very skeptical you have that many people with 2d homes in France. Wagers the occupants are commuters, as rural residents typically are in the states.

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  98. Rob G

    “The small farmers were in constant debt to the banks the way that coal miners were in debt to the company stores. Once on that tread-wheel, it was almost impossible to get off.”
    Right. If you read I’ll Take My Stand you see the resistance in the South to that whole mindset, which had already become dominant in the North. And it’s also apparent that there was a lot having to do with those “larger forces” that was orchestrated socially, politically, and economically.
    So what you had was one group of people leaving farming voluntarily, another group leaving farming because they’d been sold a bill of goods about factory employment, and still another group who would have liked to continue farming but were unable to do so financially.
    Once agriculture was mechanized and turned into a profit-oriented business many smaller farmers simply couldn’t keep up. And as has been well documented, U.S. farm policy has long been on the side of the businessman-farmer: the “get big or get out” refrain didn’t start with Earl Butz.

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  99. Rob G

    “Neither are preventing you from farming in general.”
    Literally preventing you, no. Preventing you in the sense of making things extremely difficult? Yes. U.S. farm policy is decidedly skewed towards bigness.

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  100. Grumpy

    Laura lost all her savings in 1920. She got her first royalty check in 1935

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  101. Mac

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgqVCJpRqWQ

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  102. Louise

    I love Cream Soda! I had forgotten about it b/c I haven’t had any since we’ve been here.
    “We’ve had some 50 or a hundred years now of people preaching (for various reasons) the back-to-the-land idea, and it keeps not happening except for a handful of hardy and adventurous souls. And there are excellent reasons for that.”
    That’s right.
    I think one could do a little bit of self-sustaining farming – a kitchen garden perhaps and keeping a bit of livestock – and combine it with other normal work. It depends on where one lives, works and the real estate prices etc. We kept chickens at our last suburban house and at least had fresh eggs. It wasn’t expensive or difficult. But it’s a question of interest and motivation. I actually own a few farming books. I’m hoping nothing so catastrophic happens to our society such that we all get shoved back to the Dark Ages regardless of our wishes!
    “The back to the Land thing goes back to the late 19th century. It has to have influenced Chesterton – because what he wants to be distributed is actually physical land. One a key issue that divided the Distributists was whether they should be NO machinery once everyone went back to their two acres and a cow or SOME. Like Louise I find Belloc very funny but I cannot say I share any of Chesterton or Belloc’s political or social ideas.”
    You’re basically right, although I think Chesterton would have been just as happy with each family having its own business, or a share in a small business etc.
    I would have thought most of Chesterbelloc’s views were in line with Church teaching for the most part. I’m interested, Grumpy, can you give an example of a social or political thing you disagree with?

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  103. Louise

    I must say, one of the things I really loved reading recently, during my Peter Hitchens Reading-fest was discovering somewhere on his blog where he said he likes the suburbs and thinks they are good. This was startlingly pleasant!

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  104. Grumpy

    Well Louise, for a start, Distributism! Chesterton never had an answer to the simple question of what happened when, after everyone had been given their two acres and a cow, some people mismanaged theirs and ended up losing it to someone else. A massive land redistribution would last about five years max. And Chesterton simply had no ideas about how to keep the land distributed. He didn’t really have political or social ideas as such. He had imaginatve pictures of a good society.

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  105. Mac

    ” He didn’t really have political or social ideas as such. He had imaginatve pictures of a good society.”
    I’m afraid that’s true. Distributism at this point is just a Catholic (mostly) fantasy. However, I’m not so sure that distributists in general are as much at a loss for specific plans as all that. I can’t point you to anything to support that impression, though.

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  106. Grumpy

    Chesterton:
    The righteous minds of innkeepers
    Induce them now and then
    To crack a bottle with a friend
    Or treat unmoneyed men,
    But who hath seen the Grocer
    Treat housemaids to his teas
    Or crack a bottle of fish-sauce
    Or stand a man a cheese?
    How did he actually think grocers make a living? Did he ever think about it?

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  107. Grumpy

    And then there is that weird thread of anti-Semitism which runs from top to bottom in Chesteron’s imagination
    The Secret People
    Our patch of glory ended; we never heard guns again.
    But the squire seemed struck in the saddle; he was foolish, as if in pain.
    He leaned on a staggering lawyer, he clutched a cringing Jew,
    He was stricken; it may be, after all, he was stricken at Waterloo.
    Or perhaps the shades of the shaven men, whose spoil is in his house,
    Come back in shining shapes at last to spil his last carouse:
    We only know the last sad squires ride slowly towards the sea,
    And a new people takes the land: and still it is not we.

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  108. Grumpy

    Louise: At the time when I was being received into the Church I read a great deal of Chesterton. I read his own works which I used to pick up in second hand shops in England, and I read Maisie Ward’s biography of him. Years later my mother gave me a biography of Chesterton by this chap who has lately left the Church (Coren I think he is called). I was a huge fan of it. I still love many of his things – the book on Thomas Aquinas and The Everlasting Man are great master pieces, in my opinion.
    But I slowly became disillusioned with his social and political theory. I was disturbed by his anti-Semitism. And the fact that he seemed to have his own odiums and hatred, such as for grocers, did not really seem to help him see the world clearly. I would question Chestertonians about these things and they did not want to know. Chesterton was simply part and parcel of their creed.
    I took some comfort from the fact that Christopher Dawson wrote about the unpleasant quantity of violence in Chesterton’s narrative verse. He was writing gleefully about stacks of German/Norse bodies at a time when he should have known better.

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  109. Mac

    I’m something of a dissenter on Chesterton, too. Not that I don’t love the best of his work, but I have some definite reservations, too. Russell Kirk referred to Chesterton’s politics as “sentimentally democratic,” which I though was pretty accurate. He’s also been described as schoolboyish, which I think his enthusiasm for martial things sometimes is.
    The distinction he makes in that excerpt between the innkeeper and the grocer is pretty odd. Seems arbitrary. Maybe he knew an obnoxious grocer.

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  110. Grumpy

    Meant to write Laura lost all her savings in 1929: phoning it in!

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  111. Rob G

    Distributism as an “-ism” is mostly a pipe dream, but its basic idea — that an economically just society will have a wide distribution of real property — is valid. It’s telling that those who find distributist notions interesting are mostly political and economic decentralists (Left or Right) of one sort or another.
    There is a lot of newer Distributist literature out there, and some of it does have a certain amount of specificity as to plans and programs. A primer of sorts, The Hound of Distributism, was put out by the Chesterton Society a couple years ago. It’s a collection of essays on various aspects of current Distributist thought, and is worth a read if you’re interested in this stuff at all.

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  112. Janet

    My problem with Distributism is that it assumes that given the same amount of land or whatever, things will remain in some kind of equilibrium. We know, of course, that this is not true. Some people will immediately squander what they have; some will not be able to succeed not matter how hard they try; and some will very quickly rise to the top. Pope Leo XIII (Rerum Novarum) was very definite about the fact that there will always be those who are in authority and those who will work for them. Instead of trying to engineer some kind of false equality, he wrote about the proper relationship of owners and workers in a Christian society.
    So, I’m just throwing this out.
    AMDG

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  113. Paul

    There was a massive experiment in distributism in the UK about 30 years back, when people living in social housing were given the option of buying the house they lived in at a discount. This way of turning over collective assets to small private owners is not “back to the land”, but it is most definitely distributism. I do wonder if the outcome has been as dismal for the majority of owners as some of the criticisms of distributism would seem to imply. I have no idea whether it has been or not.

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  114. Grumpy

    Well it is interesting to wonder what Chesterton would have thought of the grocer’s daughter as prime minister, especially since he did not approve of women’s suffrage

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  115. Mac

    Heh
    “My problem with Distributism is that it assumes that given the same amount of land or whatever, things will remain in some kind of equilibrium. ”
    I don’t think that’s true with regard to people who have thought seriously about distributism. (Not sure whether GKC qualifies as one of those or not.) I mean, I don’t think they assume that.
    I’m not informed enough to point to anything specific, but I think they envision legal mechanisms to prevent and/or penalize excessive concentrations of wealth. That’s one of the beefs that free-marketers have with it–that it would give too much power to the government. I don’t think they seriously envision a completely flat distribution, either.

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  116. Art Deco

    Well it is interesting to wonder what Chesterton would have thought of the grocer’s daughter as prime minister,
    From the time Chesterton was of an age to be reading of public affairs in the newspapers to the time of his death, the only prime ministers who derived from the nobility or gentry were Lord Salisbury and Lord Rosebery. The latter was only in office a year and the former concluded his last term when Chesterton was 28 years old. Several others came from wealthy merchant families (“in trade”). One came from an ordinary merchant family. One was a clergyman’s son. Two others came from working class backgrounds. (In the years since, three have come out of the nobility and gentry, two the children of wealthy businessmen, three the children of professionals, and the rest common-and-garden bourgeois or working-class; Mrs. Thatcher’s been in good company).

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  117. Janet

    Well, I’m sure you’re right. It’s been a long, long time since I read any distributist stuff.
    AMDG

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  118. Mac

    Maybe not “long, long”, but “long” for me as well, which is why I can’t be more specific. As I know I’ve said here before, I’ve pretty much lost interest in thinking or reading about theoretical designs for a Christian society. I’d be pleased if we could just make some crucial reforms in our current society. As I’m sure I’ve also said, and you have, too, almost any system would work tolerably well if people were virtuous, and no system will work tolerably well if they aren’t.

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  119. Grumpy

    Well read his poem that I quoted above about Grocers Art Deco

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  120. Louise

    Thanks Grumpy, I enjoyed reading all that. FWIW I really can’t fathom the Chesterbelloc’s enthusiasm for the French Revolution, so I’m not completely at one with them.
    “Years later my mother gave me a biography of Chesterton by this chap who has lately left the Church (Coren I think he is called).”
    Yes, that’s Coren.
    “As I know I’ve said here before, I’ve pretty much lost interest in thinking or reading about theoretical designs for a Christian society. I’d be pleased if we could just make some crucial reforms in our current society.”
    Yes, I sympathise. I wonder whether one has to do at least a little initial reading about theoretical designs for a Christian society (or at least some history of how the Church influenced societies and changed them over centuries) in order to get at the principles in order to make those crucial reforms.
    E.g. many Americans are allergic to “socialised” medicine, “because Socialism.” Yet I can’t see that there is anything wrong with such a thing, provided the taxes needed are not too high etc. I vastly prefer the Australian system to the US system.
    “As I’m sure I’ve also said, and you have, too, almost any system would work tolerably well if people were virtuous, and no system will work tolerably well if they aren’t.”
    Undoubtedly true.

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  121. Paul

    I’m not sure I’d take a song sung by an innkeeper in a novel as a developed statement of Chesterton’s views on economics, Grumpy.

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  122. Art Deco

    E.g. many Americans are allergic to “socialised” medicine, “because Socialism.” Yet I can’t see that there is anything wrong with such a thing, provided the taxes needed are not too high etc. I vastly prefer the Australian system to the US system.
    “Because Socialism” might have been a common answer in 1965 or even 1980. Not at this time. The sort of people you encounter in the comment boxes of Republican blogs are quite different (on average) than Republican primary voters (who are quite different than the general public. The trouble you get with repairing the system of financing medical and nursing care in this country is that all institutions are set up to enhance the influence of obstructive veto groups. Aside from vested interests, you have various popular interests which have to be taken account of, the elderly especially. If you’re to repair the system of medical finance, some people will be made better off and some worse off, and people who’ve lost something of value are irritated with you and more likely to be motivated than people who’ve received a new benefit (and may not realize it).
    You also have problems with the culture at large. Anything which uses resources has to be rationed. You can ration with prices, you can ration with queues, you can ration with coupons, you can ration with administrative commands, but there must always be rationing because appetites exceed resources. When you’re talking about restaurant meals, people can handle it. When you’re talking about the services of medical professionals, they resent it. Attempts at managed care twenty years ago were abandoned due to the irritation of providers and consumers alike. The way all this has been finessed is an upward creep in the share of national product accounted for by medical services (accompanied by complaints about how much everything costs). Because there is no real price system, there are no signals through which providers might be induced to introduce efficiencies.
    There’s a truth here that the public would be loath to acknowledge if it had to: first dollar coverage of medical services is not, ultimately, economically sustainable absent administrative command systems with a global budget. Such systems are found in this country in one venue, the Veterans Health Service (which has been the locus of so much embarrassment of late).
    So, everyone is distressed with one or another aspect of the system, but there’s always a critical mass of people who would be distressed with alternatives as well. The result was stagnation up to 2010. Then BO’s minions came up with this hopeless spaghetti logic system and induced Congress to enact it when neither the Democratic caucus or the President understood its contents. The technical challenges of making it work and the legal issues attending it have been hopeless. The Republicans during the whole imbroglio decided to stay classy and put out a mess of demagoguery directed at Medicare recipients (who are one day going to have to learn that first dollar coverage is not sustainable, just not till after the next election, please).

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  123. Mac

    Louise, I don’t think there is any principled abstract objection to government-provided health care from the Catholic point of view.
    One reason I don’t care to spend much time thinking about the ideal Catholic system is that any scheme has to be suited to the native temperament and customs of the country. Australia’s system may work very well; the same scheme in the U.S. would not.
    I’m very strongly opposed to implementing nationalized (socialized, “single payer” (what a telling euphemism)) health care in this country, because I think it won’t work very well and will do a great deal of harm. It will be insanely complicated and unwieldy–I think your experience of American bureaucracy will allow you to believe that pretty easily. Worse, it will be a tool controlled and aggressively used by the social left to force conformity to its agenda, and to push Christianity to the margins of society. The half-baked (at best) “Obamacare” has proven all of this, if anyone had any doubt, which I never did.

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  124. Grumpy

    Well back close to the topic I had lunch with a lady journalist who told me that college presidents are being pressured to sign up to a ‘Sustainability’ mandate. It includes getting all the students to pledge to live in an eco-sustainable way or the rest of their lives.

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  125. Art Deco

    almost any system would work tolerably well if people were virtuous, and no system will work tolerably well if they aren’t.
    I think getting a command economy to work well is well-nigh impossible, and it’s not just the deficit of virtue, it’s that market economize on information.
    My own limited reading of distributist thought from the early 20th century suggested to me that they were concerned with topical questions that just are not very salient anymore.
    In this country we went whole hog into promoting home ownership after 1937. My grandfather was in on the ground floor at the FHA from its formation. The new financial products developed during those years worked well. However, we’ve learned in last 18 years that you hit that wall when those living in owner-occupied housing reach 65% of the total population. Where some people are in their life cycle is incompatable with home ownership and other people are bad credit risks. Considering the disaster which ensued when Angelo Mozilo et all pushed the penetration of homeownership from 65% to 68% of the public, we know that’s a social barrier you should not cross.
    As for business property, there’s been research done on this. People who set up their own businesses typically close them after some discrete run of years and do so for a mundane reason: what they get from the business is insufficient to balance-out the irritations which arise from being self-employed. You could improve market conditions some for small producers (by reducing their compliance costs, for example), but it’s a reasonable wager that this will alter things only at the margins. You’ll still have only a single-digit share of the work-force who are self employed.
    Now extend this consideration to agriculture. The exodus from agriculture has been characteristic of any country which has had a successful experience of economic development. In all of the most advanced economies (with New Zealand a possible exception), the share of the labor force working the land is in the single digits and generally low single digits. Even in non-affluent Mexico, it’s maybe 15%. The farmer most proximate to yours truly quit the land in 1949. He retained decades later some of the habits of farmers and grew tomatoes in a garden so as to keep a toe in to food production. He was not, however, sentimental about farming. A very conversational man who talked about aspects of his experience, he was concise when describing the whole: “it was a hard life”. He also never engaged in recreational hunting. He’d hunted as a youngster to supplement household welfare; it wasn’t done so much for recreation, and the primary means in his case was to get the bounties for vermin pelts. The bounty in Virginia in 1942 was around $5. That’s close to $60 in today’s currency, paid out to a youth living in a much more impecunious society in real terms. A contextually similar sum today might be about $240.
    So, the concerns about ‘widely distributed property’ just do not speak much to our current situation, even had the distributists contrived mechanisms to get from here to there.

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  126. Grumpy

    Art my mother lived in a very small village France for ten years from 1998 to 2008 and she and my stepfather were the only people in the hamlet. Everyone else lived there as their second home. The two or three larger small villages in bicycling distance were empty and quiet from September to April and full of visitors from May to August, especially August when as you know the French go on holiday to their holiday homes.

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  127. Art Deco

    That’s one of the beefs that free-marketers have with it–that it would give too much power to the government.
    Estate and inheritance taxes might be one. Legal limits on corporate compensation might be another. Peter Drucker, not exactly a populist sentimentalist, favored the latter. You could call the objectors ‘free marketeers’, but legislation on intergenerational transfers implicate people’s views on private property more than on the operation of markets (although the two are strongly related). Similarly, corporate compensation is driven in large measure by the characteristics of the transaction: it’s not arms length. CEOs are awarding themselves these benefits, with the connivance of boards out of the same stable. That’s not characteristic of free transactions, any more than are markets disfigured by cartels.

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  128. Art Deco

    People concerned about concentrations are neglecting the 3d generation syndrome. It’s difficult for a family to maintain its entrepreneurial mojo for too many generations and their influence disappears as they relinquish control of things of institutional importance and the money is divvied up and dissipated as time goes on; also, some portion of the people holding it are ruined by it. See Casey Johnson for an example.
    Forget Casey for a moment and consider Nelson Rockefeller Jr. He’s an official of a consulting company. That looks like a good job, and he’s got some connections in Republican circles. He likely has quite a packet of money. But, he’s nowhere near as consequential as was his great-grandfather. Rinse, repeat, for another three generations.

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  129. Art Deco

    Well, the U.S. is a more affluent country than France by the conventional measures, and it has cheap land from low densities. Per the Census Bureau, 3.5% of all housing units qualify as recreational, seasonal, or occasional, with the highest frequencies of such to be found in northern New England. I’m wondering if your people are in an area analogous to a lakefront community (see Canandaigua Lake in New York, where the shore is chock-a-block with summer cottages).

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  130. Art Deco

    I suspect there’s a way to make public health insurance work passably, but it would be a series of catastrophic care plans with high deductibles. Milton Friedman sketched out an idea for something like this in Policy Review in 1999.

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  131. Art Deco

    It includes getting all the students to pledge to live in an eco-sustainable way or the rest of their lives.
    It does not occur to them that natural resources made more scarce from exhaustion go up in price ceteris paribus. It also does not occur to them that sticking an excise on certain commodities also constrains consumption.

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  132. Grumpy

    There are three million second homes in France
    http://www.connexionfrance.com/no-limit-on-second-homes-10142-news-article.html

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  133. Art Deco

    OK. The thing is, if population distribution in France is similar to that in the United States, you have 7 million households living out in the countryside as a matter of course. If all of those secondary residences were country residences, yes, you’ve got a large share of the housing stock (30-40%) occupied only seasonally. There’s a bit of distance between that point and “village life died in the 1920s”.

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  134. Rob G

    “concerns about ‘widely distributed property’ just do not speak much to our current situation, even had the distributists contrived mechanisms to get from here to there.”
    By widely distributed property the distributists and agrarians were (and still are) referring to the “small lholdings” of individuals, families, co-ops, etc., vs. the holdings of large corporate entities. In American farming, as I said above, there has been a decided skewing of farm policy towards “bigness,” generally under the mantra of efficiency. This was going on long before Earl Butz vocalized the notion with his infamous “Get big or get out” statement.
    “The exodus from agriculture has been characteristic of any country which has had a successful experience of economic development. In all of the most advanced economies (with New Zealand a possible exception), the share of the labor force working the land is in the single digits and generally low single digits.”
    One can look at this, however, from the reverse angle, as the agrarians do, as the result of the tendency for “advanced” economies to be precisely anti-agrarian and instead, pro-capitalist and economically centralizing, i.e., tending towards the holding of more and more wealth and land by fewer and fewer owners: in short, the ascendancy of Big Agra to the detriment of smallholders.
    Recall that the Nashville Agrarians’ primary beef with industrialism (i.e., industrial capitalism) was not over mechanization but with its inherent acquisitiveness and centralizing tendencies. One can fairly say that they saw “get big or get out” coming, and didn’t like it.
    “People concerned about concentrations are neglecting the 3d generation syndrome.”
    The concentrations in question aren’t primarily those held by families but by corporations. I find it rather disturbing that upwards of 80% of the food production in this country is controlled by a handful of giant firms, and that the production of most of what we see and hear via the media and entertainment is as well.

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  135. Art Deco

    One can look at this, however, from the reverse angle, as the agrarians do,
    You can stand on your head, too. You don’t see the room any better.

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  136. Robert Gotcher

    “You can stand on your head, too. You don’t see the room any better.”
    Not a response to the substance of Rob G’s comment.

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  137. Robert Gotcher

    *of. Mac, if you want to correct it….

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  138. Louise

    “One reason I don’t care to spend much time thinking about the ideal Catholic system is that any scheme has to be suited to the native temperament and customs of the country. Australia’s system may work very well; the same scheme in the U.S. would not.”
    I’ll be very happy to take your word for it, Maclin. I’m just not entirely sure why not, except that I do think the current system cannot simply be changed into something else and I definitely agree re: your remark about bureaucracy.
    I’m not in favour of Obamacare, btw. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned that.
    “I’m very strongly opposed to implementing nationalized (socialized, “single payer” (what a telling euphemism)) health care in this country, because I think it won’t work very well and will do a great deal of harm.”
    I don’t actually know what “single payer” means.
    “Worse, it will be a tool controlled and aggressively used by the social left to force conformity to its agenda, and to push Christianity to the margins of society.”
    I totally agree. It’s just that I think the current system is abysmal.

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  139. Louise

    Re: the division of property. Grumpy, you might be right about GKC’s views, but I had never thought that he considered it would be fairly static, only that it historically had been fairly well divided, meaning that the majority of families had some access to the means of production and that this should be the aim.
    I think at this stage I would settle with a system which enabled the majority of people to marry relatively young and have a family without necessitating both parents to go out to work etc. And to have a system where major health problems would not completely bankrupt a family. Is that unreasonable?

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  140. Mac

    It is, but my motto is “Things could always be worse.”
    Actually I’ve been saying for at least 20 years that if our current nutty system was not seriously reformed we would end up with a system run by the federal government (that’s all “single payer” means). And Obamacare is a step in that direction.

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  141. Louise

    “Well it is interesting to wonder what Chesterton would have thought of the grocer’s daughter as prime minister, especially since he did not approve of women’s suffrage.”
    I think he would have been rather startled! But not because she was a grocer’s daughter.

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  142. Louise

    “It is, but my motto is “Things could always be worse.”
    Actually I’ve been saying for at least 20 years that if our current nutty system was not seriously reformed we would end up with a system run by the federal government (that’s all “single payer” means). And Obamacare is a step in that direction.”
    Right-o. And thanks for the explanation.

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  143. Rob G

    “Not a response to the substance of Rob G’s comment.”
    But pretty much the sort of answer I expected, Robert. Snark seems to be part of the m.o.

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  144. Art Deco

    Not a response to the substance of Rob G’s comment.
    It might occur to you and to Rob G that an observable and universal social process with no exceptions manifest under a variety of institutional arrangements might just indicate something about how human beings, technology, and the natural nenvironment interact and not some misconception about which we can all be set straight by M.E. Bradford and Robert Penn Warren.

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  145. Grumpy

    When are you going to do 52 authors Dek?
    Or did I miss one in lent

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  146. Art Deco

    I think he would have been rather startled! But not because she was a grocer’s daughter.
    David Lloyd-George grew up under the care of his maternal uncle (a small town artisan) and his first language was Welsh. Ramsey McDonald was the bastard son of a Scottish housemaid, a background next to which Jesse Jackson’s looks half-way patrician. Is their any record of GKC being ‘startled’ by that?

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  147. Art Deco

    I find it rather disturbing that upwards of 80% of the food production in this country is controlled by a handful of giant firms,
    You’re confusing agriculture with agro-processing (and your figures are fishy even as regards that).

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  148. Grumpy

    Art Dek, we are doing 52 authors right now. I have done three, Rob G has done two or three. Everyone has done some. It is your turn to nail your colours to the mast.

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  149. Rob G

    “You’re confusing agriculture with agro-processing (and your figures are fishy even as regards that).”
    Nope. Some of these corporations, ConAgra for instance, have their fingers in the pie from farm to table.
    “we can all be set straight by M.E. Bradford and Robert Penn Warren”
    Are you always this big of a prat, or just when you’re online?

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  150. Art Deco

    The concentrations in question aren’t primarily those held by families but by corporations.
    Corporations are not eternal, nor is their rank ordering eternal. The 19 American corporations with the largest market capitalization include six which were founded after 1975, another founded in 1962 which no one outside Arkansas and some adjacent areas had heard of prior to 1975, a derivative of AT & T but a good deal less consequential, and another old business which was completely reconstituted between 1964 and 1985. The headquarters of these 19 companies include New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco-San Jose-Oakland, Cincinnati, Charlotte (NC), Omaha (Neb), and Bentonville (Ark.).
    Corporate profits currently account for 12% of gross domestic income, or about 26% of returns to factors of production other than employee-labor. That refers to the profits of any corporation, not just to impersonal and publicly traded corporations with four or five-digit workforces. The earnings of listed companies might amount to 1/2 that.

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  151. Art Deco

    Are you always this big of a prat, or just when you’re online?
    What’s a prat?
    You brought up a bunch of litterateurs, not me.

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  152. Paul

    Art Deco, your last to Louise misses her point completely, contradicting what she didn’t say in a surprisingly aggressive manner. I’m starting to suspect you’re just looking for ways of being contrary.

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  153. Art Deco

    Nope. Some of these corporations, ConAgra for instance, have their fingers in the pie from farm to table.
    So what? That does not mean they have more than a modest share of overall output or sales. Incorporated enterprises in agriculture are typically limited corporations formed by family members, not publicly traded impersonal bodies. ConAgra’s revenues account for 2% of the gross output of the food processing sector. General Mills, which owns Green Giant, has almost identical revenues.
    There are 2.08 million farms in the United States. About 15% or so have sufficient sales to be making a normal range living at it; the rest are hobby farmers and such. About a quarter of the farmland is held by producers of the largest class, who number 82,000.

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  154. Rob G

    Sorry, but as I said before, flinging stats around doesn’t impress me. I’ve got no way to verify them, for one thing, and even once verified they can be interpreted in different ways. Lies, damned lies, and statistics, remember?
    Next you’ll be telling me my car needs a Johnson Rod.

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  155. Mac

    Squelch the snark impulse, Art. I really don’t want it here. And I have way too much work to do to spend time policing the comments.
    As to the substance, broadly speaking, of your various objections, you seem to somehow regard it as illegitimate to criticize existing business and economic ideas and practices in any fundamental way, or from any point of view that allows non-economic ideas a place in the discussion. That seemed to be at the root of the argument a few days ago about what economics actually should be.

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  156. Art Deco

    As to the substance, broadly speaking, of your various objections, you seem to somehow regard it as illegitimate to criticize existing business and economic ideas and practices in any fundamental way, or from any point of view that allows non-economic ideas a place in the discussion. That seemed to be at the root of the argument a few days ago about what economics actually should be.
    No and no.
    A librarian of my acquaintance offered this about 20 years ago: “All classification schemes are ultimately arbitrary. The point is, can you learn them?”. I’m not quite on board with that statement, but the conventions in academe sort scholars into disciplinary categories and people who study given disciplines develop certain habits and skill-sets and not others. From what I’ve seen of the ‘interdisciplary’ studies, disciplines are better than no disciplines. Economists are economists. It’s tedious to expect them to follow other disciplines, though I know at least one who is likely a competent social theoretician with a more liberal education than most. Referring to antique economics neglects that an integral liberal education was a practice at one time in a way that would be difficult in the contemporary world. Our faculties employ natural scientists, not natural philosophers. You could complain that core curricula are misconceived, but even a locus with the best core would not be calling on the economics department to teach any of it. Philosophy and mathematics are foundational disciplines. Economics is not. Economics aspires to make positive statements about social relations, not normative ones (though normative understandings do influence the direction of inquiry and policy choices).
    And you can criticize anything you want, in a fundamental way or no. If I think that’s misconceived, I’m going to give you an argument. There’s a fellow named Race Matthews who I suspect knows his stuff, but much of the neo-Distributist / Porcher perspective seems to me to rely on striking attitudes, a culture of complaint, and a misconceptions about what the contours of the economy actually are or the influential factors in international relations actually are. So, I think a great deal of it incorporates opportunity cost for public discussion as these folks are lost in blind alleys and not contemplating the truly troublesome aspects of political economy, if they’re trying to illuminate anything at all. About the only trees I’ve seen worth barking up in this discussion is the financial sector and the finance of medical care. The whole discussion of Monsanto seems more appropriate for a discussion of how lawyers are making everyone miserable than of a discussion of how commercial companies injure people.

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  157. Grumpy

    Well Art Deco you are getting up people’s noses and I think the reason is that you only ever criticize. You do not present your own view. So I suggest you do your bit for the 52 Authors.

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  158. Art Deco

    Not only do I present my own view, here and other places, I bore people doing so.

    Rob G, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Department of Agriculture all publish data. So does the World Bank. So does the Bureau of Justice Statistics and the FBI. Nothing you cannot locate and noodle around with.

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  159. Mac

    “getting up people’s noses” Ha. That’s a new one to me. Very evocative image.
    Art, you’re still missing, or at least not admitting, the point about economics. Repeating that the academic discipline of economics is what it is doesn’t address the challenge, which is precisely to apply “normative” thinking to the subject. We don’t have to call the people who do that economists if you don’t want to. But statistics simply don’t tell the whole story of how economic matters affect people.

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  160. Art Deco

    doesn’t address the challenge, which is precisely to apply “normative” thinking to the subject.
    And you keep ignoring me when I point out what’s what: economists are not people very well equipped to do that. Neither are actuaries. Neither are accountants. You need to be asking someone else. That someone else might benefit from conversing with an economist, but very seldom will that person be an economist. Economists who are intent on promoting their perspective are often just irritants, not truly insightful or engaging. See one Bryan Caplan, whose social thought was described by one critic as ‘applied autism’.
    But statistics simply don’t tell the whole story of how economic matters affect people.
    I would not say they did. The question at hand is whether Rob G’s statements about social life are actually, you know, true. The point of the statistics is to state the precise dimensions of things. I’ve watched Rob G dance from one square to another on this board as his claims have been questioned and then finish up with telling me that he was not going to pay attention to empirical data at all. Now you’re telling me that the whole discussion is just so irritating. You are aware of what this looks like, eh?

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  161. Mac

    I don’t even see the point of diminishing returns in my rear-view mirror anymore.

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  162. Janet

    I can’t even figure out what we are talking about anymore.
    In Anthony Esolen’s book, Reclaiming Catholic Social Teaching, he talks about how the word “economics” is derived from the Greek word for “house” and that original it had to do with the management of the home. I doubt that there is much any of us can do fix the bigger economic situation, but as Catholics and Christians we need to be concentrating on the society of the family.
    AMDG

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  163. Paul

    I second Grumpy: it would be interesting to see Art Deco contribute to the 52 authors project.

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  164. Grumpy

    I like to be in a conversation with people who both give and take. Its not easy to show one’s hand but the courage can be found

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  165. Paul

    I think that Art Deco is taking the Burkean position that any change has to be gradual and has to take full account of the facts of the existing situation, and in so far as recommendations for change are abstract rather than concrete they are at best useless and at worst pernicious. But I’m not sure if this is actually the case. What it looks like to somebody outside the discussion (and I don’t know how aware you are that this is how it comes across, Art) is a series of non sequiturs and references to statistics, salted with a few snarls and insults, with no clear statement of what assertions are being proposed or dissented from, and how the factual and statistical statements relate to them.
    On the subject of what economists can be expected to do, I remember a few years back there being a lot about somebody called Amartya Sen in the newspapers that looked as though it might be interesting but I never followed up. I’m pretty sure I remember him being quoted as saying something along the lines of too many economists simply describing economic interactions in mathematical terms, leaving out any human or ethical dimension, and that because of this their models were less useful descriptions of reality than they might be, missing dimensions of real-world behaviour, and at the same time, deliberately or not, that this sort of economics encouraged major economic actors to make decisions without consideration for human or ethical dimensions. I vaguely remember him being described as an economist, and quite an eminent one, so if this is right it seems that there are eminent economists who say this kind of thing. Admittedly, I might be misremembering.

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  166. Louise

    “Getting up people’s noses” is indeed a great expression and one we use a lot in Oz.
    “Art Deco, your last to Louise misses her point completely, contradicting what she didn’t say in a surprisingly aggressive manner.”
    I’m now rather glad I didn’t have internet access yesterday!

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  167. Louise

    Yes, Janet, “oikonomos” is the word and means “household.” I’m no economist, except in the household sense. 🙂
    My own interest in economics as a subject began when I wanted to work out how to ethically invest our meagre savings. I was reading capitalists at the time and could often see the money sense in what they were saying, but their outlook often irritated me and left me thinking there were some aspects of their teaching which were morally wrong. I was reading the St Austin Review at the time and their issue on Distributism became such a favourite that I carried it round with me in the nappy (diaper) bag, along with the chapter “Buddhist Economics” from EF Shumacher’s “Small is Beautiful.” From there I got into the Chesterbelloc etc. I’ll always be very grateful for those years of off-and-on reading in bits and pieces (as you do when you are the mother of multiple little people).
    Should I start reading Burke? He sounds interesting.
    Getting back to the original topic – recycling. I definitely think recycling is worthwhile, provided it does not use up an exorbitant amount of energy (this was looked at in the article but I don’t have time absorb it all – recycling aluminium looked well worthwhile).
    I never really know why people complain about landfill. Clearly this was a problem in NY, but as the article points out it’s not generally a problem.

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  168. Rob G

    “And you keep ignoring me when I point out what’s what: economists are not people very well equipped to do that. Neither are actuaries. Neither are accountants.”
    But you see, this is the entire point. Economics shouldn’t be simply the business of mathematicians, actuaries and accountants. Up until fairly recently economics was considered one of the “humane sciences,” but it has lost the humane aspect. As Daly said, oikonomia has been collapsed into chrematistics. Those economists like Daly, Mueller, Barrera, and Sen (from what Paul is saying about him) have realized this and are attempting to restore the humane element to the science of economics. Heck, along these lines ISI has even recently reprinted Roepke’s A Humane Economy. I’m wondering if even he would meet your qualifications as an economist!
    “The point of the statistics is to state the precise dimensions of things. I’ve watched Rob G dance from one square to another on this board as his claims have been questioned and then finish up with telling me that he was not going to pay attention to empirical data at all.”
    Art, you are missing the point. My beef with your use of statistics is that you are just throwing them out there as if they speak for themselves, like fundamentalists do with Bible verses — proof-texting. In doing so you are avoiding the moral and philosophical issues being raised. Naked statistical or mathematical facts do not answer the types of questions raised by such writers as Polanyi, Schumpeter, Lasch, Bell, Hirschfield, etc. You act as if these guys never wrote a word.

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  169. Rob G

    Remember the old school subject of “home economics”? The point of it was to help young women learn to manage a home. They learned about cooking, cleaning, household bookkeeping, budgeting, shopping, etc.
    Well, suppose that “home economics” survived, but became solely about the financial aspect of housekeeping. Cooking, cleaning, decorating, etc., were all excluded, and the class dealt only with budgeting, checkbook balancing, and paying bills. That’s an analogy to what’s happened in the modern field of economics; it’s as if the entire running of a household could be reduced to the monitoring and adjusting of its checkbook and bank statements.

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  170. Art Deco

    I remember a few years back there being a lot about somebody called Amartya Sen in the newspapers that looked as though it might be interesting but I never followed up.
    Sen’s a Nobel Prizewinner. He may be more of a polymath than a rank-and-file economist at a state college who’s doing satisfactorily getting a paper out every five years. I would not assume that Sen’s cross disciplinary forays are as feasible for economists working in other subdisciplines (or that political scientists are all that appreciative of economists applying tools of economics to political problems).

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  171. Art Deco

    “Art Deco, your last to Louise misses her point completely, contradicting what she didn’t say in a surprisingly aggressive manner.”
    No clue what you’re talking about.

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  172. Art Deco

    is a series of non sequiturs and references to statistics, salted with a few snarls and insults, with no clear statement of what assertions are being proposed or dissented from, and how the factual and statistical statements relate to them.
    It is not non sequitur if you take the time to give thought to what would be the concrete manifestation of Rob G’s statements.

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  173. Louise

    My comment about Chesterton being startled at the daughter of a grocer being prime minister was due to her being a woman, not on account of her background/class. He was, as Grumpy notes, not in favour of female suffrage.

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  174. Louise

    Good comment, Rob G, about “home economics.” I agree with you.
    I always think this expression is something of a tautology: “oikonomos economics”

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  175. Art Deco

    Economics shouldn’t be simply the business of mathematicians, actuaries and accountants.
    Rob G, you’ve not offered one argument here as to why the academic division of labor should differ from what it is now, other than referencing a complaint from Herman Daly (with some terminological trumpery appended). (There’s nothing that has prevented Daly from following his own research programme. You do have to pass through some professional hoops before you can do that and you should accept that not everyone shares your concerns or will publish your work in their specialized fora). Why is conjoining one sort of though with another optimal?
    All discrete attempts to understand social reality are necessarily partial. Marxists may fancy they’ve got a theory of everything, but the rest of us are not compelled to pay them any heed.
    My beef with your use of statistics is that you are just throwing them out there as if they speak for themselves, like fundamentalists do with Bible verses –
    I can footnote them for you, though I keep being told on this thread that I’ve said too much.
    When you complain about concentrations of wealth (and assets have grown more concentrated over the last 40-odd years), I’m pointing out that it is not the same families, and even the richest families can lose their position. They are not necessarily poor, but they go from being fabulously wealthy and influential to merely quite wealthy to local patricians and they do so in just a few generations. (And examples abound). So now you tell me that it’s corporations which concern you. An asset value is a lump sum expression of the income you can expect from that asset. When the retained earnings of corporations amount to about 20% of the income stream from factors of production other than labor (and much of that accrues to modest local corporations, not Monsanto type behemoths), and when corporations come and go and rise and fall in rankings, I’m not sure what the urgency is concerning this. G.K. Chesterton was an admirer of France, in large measure because about 60% of the pre-revolutionary land was rustical land (about 20% was demesne land, 10% Church land, 10% waste, and a small fragment urban or foundational land). He found this much more salutary than the British distribution, particularly the distribution to be had after the dissolution of the monasteries followed by enclosure. Well, we have no nobility or gentry, residential real estate accounts for 80% of the total by value (and a mess of commercial real estate is held by small business); ConAgra and Green Giant notwithstanding, not much farming is undertaken by corporate bodies, and the vast bulk of rural acrage is held by residents, ordinary farmers, and small business.

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  176. Rob G

    “you’ve not offered one argument here as to why the academic division of labor should differ from what it is now”
    Although it’s got nothing to do with the “division of labor,” since I can’t get across to you what I’m trying to say, I suggest you take a look at Mueller’s Redeeming Economics. I’m sure you’ll find a better explanation there.
    Final post on this subject by me. Let there be much rejoicing!

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  177. Art Deco

    Although it’s got nothing to do with the “division of labor,” since I can’t get across to you what I’m trying to say,
    Because you yourself are confused about what you are saying. Sorry, that’s what you are referring to; there ain’t no way around that.

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  178. Paul

    I keep being told on this thread that I’ve said too much
    I haven’t seen that. I have seen a couple of complaints that you haven’t expressed yrouself clearly or entirely civilly.

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  179. Mac

    Art, Paul’s 6:08 AM description of the way many of your posts come across is accurate as far as I’m concerned. So there are at least two of us. You can blame us if you like, but in any case it’s not working.
    Interesting coincidence, Rob: I had never heard of that Mueller book, but just a few minutes ago I was reading someone’s Facebook denunciation of Fr. John McCloskey (as being too right-wing and business-friendly). It included a link to this NYT piece. Then I read your comment, googled the book title, and found this review–by Fr. McCloskey. I could almost be tempted to read it, even though it’s about economics.

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  180. Rob G

    I found parts of Mueller’s book tough going, but worth it.
    Another interesting-looking book that has recently come out is this:
    https://rowman.com/ISBN/9780739182291
    I’ve read two of Fr. Barrera’s previous books, which were quite technical, but this one seems to be aimed more at the general reader. Too bad it’s so darned expensive! I’ve put a request in for it through my library.
    Well worth looking up is the First Things essay called “The Emancipation of Avarice” by Edward Skidelsky, parts of which were incorporated into a book called How Much is Enough? by Skidelsky and his father, Robert, political economist and biographer of Keynes. The article and book look at some of the same things that Mueller does, but in a less technical, and less specifically Catholic way.
    The other really helpful thing that I’ve read was the chapter on economics in Brad Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation.

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  181. Marianne

    The French economist Thomas Piketty, like Amartya Sen, is interested in more than the mathematical/statistical nuts & bolts of economics. The book he published last year, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, stirred up a big fuss — he proposed things like a global tax on inherited wealth and an 80% tax on incomes above $500,000 a year in the U.S. to help iron out the inequalities caused by the capitalist system. The criticisms I’ve seen of his work have concentrated on his technical methodology, not so much on his overall grand-theory approach.

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  182. Robert Gotcher

    I think the question of the nature and purpose, as well as the proper method is part of a discipline itself. So, the relationship between economics as a science and the human (including ethics, psychology, even spirituality) is a question economists must ask as economists. My brother-in-law is a prominent (although not famous) economist in the Scandinavian tradition, but he teaches Sen and Arrow and other economists who ask questions beyond the technical.
    As another example, I think it is a proper question for cinematographers qua cinematographers, to ask what the proper place for explicit sexual material or graphic violence is in a film. Cinematography is a craft, and so can be addressed on a technical level of plot, character, tone, etc., but it is also an art. If a cinematographer wants his art to achieve its purpose (which, of course, is also a question to be addressed), then he needs to ask more than technical questions–as a cinematographer.
    This does not contradict the distinction and proper autonomy (although not separation) of disciplines.

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  183. Mac

    Agreed. But I think in your second example you’re talking about directors, not cinematographers. I think the cinematographer is the person working the camera.

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  184. Robert Gotcher

    Probably. I’m not in that field, so probably have the nomenclature wrong. Although, now that I think of it, there would be an application of the same principle to cinematography, prob’ly. Lots of probablies.

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  185. Rob G

    I forget which, but one of those people I read stated that a big problem with modern economists is that they tend not to know the history of their discipline, so they don’t really have anything at hand to compare the current thing with.

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  186. Mac

    I meant to reply a couple of days ago to this from Louise:
    “I think at this stage I would settle with a system which enabled the majority of people to marry relatively young and have a family without necessitating both parents to go out to work etc. And to have a system where major health problems would not completely bankrupt a family. Is that unreasonable?”
    This more or less existed in the United States for a while after WWII. It didn’t include everybody, and material standards of living were lower across the board. But it was not bad overall. There are many reasons why it broke up.
    Of late the left has allowed working class prosperity (due in some large part to unions) as one exception to its general rule of vilifying the 1950s as a dark age.

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  187. Robert Gotcher

    “as a dark age.” Because everything was in black and white.

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  188. Louise

    “This more or less existed in the United States for a while after WWII. It didn’t include everybody, and material standards of living were lower across the board. But it was not bad overall. There are many reasons why it broke up.”
    That’s very interesting. Sad that it broke up.

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