The Two Economies

Some are in a rush to
 “reopen the economy.”

The economy.
As if there were only one.

But there are two economies:

• the Essential Economy, and
• the Luxury Economy.

Yes, the Luxury Economy is paused.
And yes, it is losing money.

But the Essential Economy is still operating.

And what a lucky, lovely, life-sustaining thing that is.

Ordinary people—those who work in fields to plant or harvest crops, who drive trucks, who stock shelves or operate cash registers in grocery stores, who keep our lights on, who patrol our streets, who fight fires, who drive ambulances, who operate food kitchens, who are doctors and nurses in hospitals and clinics and nursing homes—ordinary people are, each and every one, nothing short of heroes.

Heroism pervades the essential economy, where amazing souls risk and regularly lose their lives just to keep our essential services working.

We haven’t closed that economy.
So there is no need to speak of reopening it.

Of course, there are people suffering in the Luxury Economy. A great many. Not everyone who works for the luxury economy lives in luxury, so please don’t misunderstand.

But if the Essential Economy creates enough food, housing, health care, etc. to sustain us, then the rest of it is just a dance we do because we are not making our nation more fed, more housed, etc.

If we’re not part of the Essential Economy, we’re the entertainment, amusing them and perhaps ourselves, while we wait for a handout. They’re creating all of the essential value. At best, we’re left to creating “optional additional value,” but by definition nothing we can’t do without, or we’d still be doing it.

So we’re operating at a surplus, not a deficit, and the reason we know that is that the essentials are being met even without our whole population working. We’re just bad at dividing up our collective surplus.

The things society needs to do it is still doing, to the extent we ever were. We’ve always been far from perfect at that, but that’s topic for another day. Right now my point is that the Essential Economy isn’t shut down, only the Luxury Economy is.

And so, you see, to speak of “need” to reopen “The” Economy is a slap in the face to the contributions and, frankly, to the sacrifices made by these heroes.

Let’s be blunt: The whining is about when we luxuriate anew, when profit-taking can resume, when we can start polluting again, when businesses can get back to exploiting within impunity.

These things we so urgently need to get back to are not needs. These are just things that some among us are used to doing because money makes them feel important.

But these activities are not what is important—if they are even good for us at all.

We in the Luxury Economy are likewise not what is important.

We matter as individuals. I don’t meant to suggest we’re expendable. But what qualifies as hardship and what is mere inconvenience is something we owe scrutiny. There are some in the Luxury Economy sitting comfortably on accumulated wealth as others are panicked, barely getting by, worried about keeping a roof over their head or where their next meal will come from. But that isn’t a collective wealth problem, that’s a problem with how we distribute surplus.

Also, many of the people sustaining themselves on amassed wealth think of themselves as virtuous, that they did the right things, that they are deserving of their comfort now. But we see now more clearly that if they earned all that wealth in the Luxury Economy, they’ve provided none of the value that is now sustaining them. They’re just lucky they are now sustained. They are asking for handouts right now, just like the rest of us. They differ only in being more smug, in their sense of entitlement to those handouts they need as much as anyone.

We often run on autopilot, indulging the presumption that things are as they are for good reason. But based on an unscientific survey of my friends, most of whom are on the prowl for yet another Netflix series to binge, my guess is that we have time on our hands, time that could be spent contemplating whether we should ge back to familiar routines or get busy finding new ones.

And so, just to sum up…

The fact that many of us have jobs that do not contribute to essentials is proof of our collective wealth. When we need food we go to work—but not to make food, because there is enough, even if badly distributed and poorly shared. No, when we need food, we go to work just to make money, a dance we do to feel worthy of surplus food and essentials made by a few.

We who do not create the true value, the essentials that are largely and miraculously and heroically still available even now should be thankful supply lines are moving and should be asking how we can help that, how we can assure they are properly paid for arduous, dangerous, and relentless work, how we can make sure their families are taken care of while they do this, and how we can make sure their health care is assured, not whining about when we can resume pointlessness again.

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If you haven’t read my essay Corny Economics, you might want to head there next. This post was intended as a sequel, but I tried to write this on the assumption that you might read them in either order. Otherwise, I might have here used the parlance of Corny Economics, replacing “Essential Economy” with “Corn Economy” and “Luxury Economy” with “Harmonica Economy”.

The 1920 photo by Lewis Hine titled Power house mechanic working on steam pump was obtained from Wikimedia, which identifies it as being in the public domain.

The “drop caps” effect I used is a modified version of the helpful advice from Chris Coyier’s article Drop Caps at css-tricks.com, which I found in a Google search. He suggests it’ll work across multiple browsers, and it looked to me like it should. I used it in a span tag, since my use was a one-off and I didn’t want to fuss with style sheets. And I liked the color enough that it influenced some of the other design, and that in turn led me to the idea of working the entire piece in vary sizes and colors, so I evolved the article from there. I had been looking for a visual way to make some of the points clearer and this was one of several things that catalyzed the final result.

I find I often write text to fit visually, I don’t just mark things up after-the-fact. I change the lengths of sentences so that in plausible line-breaking on various browser settings, I expect it to look good. In cases where I am looking for a particular break, I experiment with reshaping windows and watch for widowing and often just replace spaces with non-breaking spaces ( ) so that if a line break occurs, it has substance and semantic units fall, perhaps more raggedly, in meaningful units.

Whatever Should Be, Should Be

A technical standard is a very precise document that is used as a reference for how something should work in the technical world. I spent several years of my life working in this arena and I’d like to relate a peculiar thing I learned in that time.

I learned that the word “should” means “don’t have to.”

I was receiving comments one day from a colleague who had read some text I’d written. He had drawn a red line through a number of sentences I’d written and I couldn’t figure out why. “Why did you do that?” I asked.

“Those sentences don’t say anything,” my colleague explained.

“Of course they do. They tell you what you should do.” I protested.

“Or what? What happens if you don’t. Is it a requirement?”

“No, it’s not a requirement but—”

“Ok, then. Now this phrase over here uses ‘shall.’ Because of the use of ‘shall,’ the user has to do something. It’s in the imperative mode, and so it’s a requirement. And this one here, with ‘must’—another requirement. But the rest of this stuff over here uses ‘should,’ so that’s not a requirement. Nothing happens if the reader ignores your advice.”

“He’s supposed to at least try.”

“But he can decide not to. So from a requirements standpoint, there’s no difference.”

“Right,” I admitted.

“So ‘should’ really just means ‘doesn’t really have to,’ ” he emphasized in triumph.

“Right,” I admitted sadly.

“So take out the text. It has no meaning.”

Although it is routine for Libertarians and Republicans to speak of self-reliance and financial independence, it is never the case in a modern capitalist society that the wealthy have achieved anything on their own because by definition the entire society is based on the consent of others to indulge an economic system in which such wealth is even possible.

I speak of the modern capitalist society because certainly in times past, when the world was underpopulated, there were vast wildernesses available for conquest, and it was theoretically possible to find a place in the woods where one lived without contact with civilization on one’s own. Although even then, it was common to take with one the tools of civilization, such as clothing and weapons, as well as society’s more abstract fruits, such as health and education. The likelihood that a human being, left alone in the wilderness with none of this would survive very long is vanishingly small. So probably even then, and certainly now, we are all beholden to society for our success.

“If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.”
  —Carl Sagan

Since at least the time of the New Deal and the Great Society, we as a nation have tended toward acknowledging the importance of the role of government in protecting our weakest members.

Nor is this mere charity on the part of government. Government derives its power from the consent of the governed. For example, simple mathematics tells us that it cannot be the case that the majority of the population has above-average wealth. That means that the majority of people, upon agreeing to participate in capitalistism, have agreed to take a financial position that is less than average. The theory is that by allowing some to get rich, others will benefit, and the wealth of the country will improve.

It should be easily seen that if large numbers of people are failing to see their basic needs met, while a few profit in a manner that is grossly out of proportion, such a society cannot long stand because at that point the social contract permitting the accumulation of wealth has been violated. A government that draws its power from the consent of the electorate will naturally find it in its own best interest to assure that the price of success on the high end is that basic human needs are serviced on the other end.

The stronger among us must therefore always remember that their wealth is a benefit provided under a contract made with all of society, that the wealth will be used for the betterment of all. Well, not every dime of it. If we required that all the money a person made went to charity, that would be like not giving a person the money in the first place.

And yet, many suffer now after the failure of companies from which a tiny number of individuals have seen handsome profits. What must those who have profited do? What is the moral obligation of the well-to-do in the present times? Is there a special obligation on the part of those who have directly profited from the situations that have bankrupted others?

Well, let’s not speak of obligations, shall we? How rudely pushy of us. It’s true that some may be cast from their homes or have nothing to eat, but really—must we be so rude as to speak in the imperative? If someone made an enormous profit, that’s their money. They have earned their right to do with it whatever they wish. So let us avoid the impertinence of imperatives and speak in a more polite way. Because this matter certainly calls for politeness. Let’s just offer polite advice and they’ll know what must be done with that advice.

They should care about the fate of the poor. Whatever else they do, they should make it their business to assure that their enrichment does not come at the expense of others.

There. That’s it. Just some advice. Nothing pushy. Not a requirement. Just a request that they try.

I feel better now, knowing we all share a clear understanding of what should happen.

“No man is an island, entire of itself...any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
  —John Donne

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Originally published Dec 17, 2008 at Open Salon, where I wrote under my own name, Kent Pitman.

Tags (from Open Salon): politics, class, class warfare, contract, social contract, breach, rich, wealth, wealthy, well-to-do, strong, poor, weak, weakest, obligation, duty, imperative, shall, should, must, modal, semantics, polite, politeness, rude, rudeness, profit, proportion, proportionality