1-The Spreadsheets and The Cornices
Like the saying about bringing a knife to a gunfight, the Cornices are out-of-step with the times. In small, rural towns across this country, thirty or forty feet above Main Street, proud, silent and sometimes crumbling, these decorative flourishes along the tops of buildings are clueless against the computer technology, faster than a bullet, that causes the empty storefronts and faded “Space for Rent” signs at street level.
With their mute communication the Cornices tell of a time when place mattered, when a small town could be the center, the point of intersection for commerce and ideas, hopes and lives. If their stoic brick and stone could express emotion, they would show bewilderment, sadness and confusion. The Cornices are from a time when a successful person would construct a beautiful building in their home town not only as an investment but also with the hope of bequeathing something of lasting value to future generations—a commitment to the place they loved and considered theirs and special.
At these thoughts the Spreadsheets scoff, “What are they? Sentimental indulgences, that’s all. Beauty? Ha! Just one person’s arrogant assumption that they know what looks nice to someone else. A building might last 100 years. Compound the extra cost of those cornices for a century and think of the value you could create. Sense of place? You mean xenophobic, provincial, jerkwater.”
The Spreadsheets are an extension of the idea that free trade is always good and money is the measure of value. If it makes sense, by the logic of the Spreadsheets, to move manufacturing overseas or import resources from somewhere else, then little by little that logic prevails. The cost to place does not matter to the Spreadsheets, only the bottom line, a number on a computer screen. Place matters only in reference to shipping routes, low taxes and efficiency. Theoretically the value the next generation gets is money, limitless, borderless, fungible, mobile and unattached.
The Cornices are an extension of place. Someone built something in a particular place, put their name on it and put extra effort into making it beautiful, a cost they were unlikely to receive a monetary return on, because that was their place and they wanted to make it better. People whose parents and grandparents came from countries where they could never hope to own property, made good in this country and then gave back to their communities in a thousand ways, some personal and forgotten but not unimportant and some enduring, like the Cornices. Now, as the ever-increasing gravity of big cities pulls young people away from the small towns and rural areas to jobs that pay a living wage, the Cornices remain, a reminder of a bygone age.
The era of the Cornices wasn’t noble. Jim Crow, racism, eugenics, child labor, segregation, disenfranchisement, vast unmitigated poverty and ignorance were features of their time. And yet when you look at the Cornices you feel the commitment to place that emanates from them and the hopeful sense of a future that will be ever better.
The physical representations of the Spreadsheets, the box stores and enormous distribution centers, are as unattached and standardized as the shipping containers which deliver their wares from someplace far away. No commitment to place. No regionalism, provincialism, nationalism and theoretically no racism, sexism or anti-immigrantism, just individuals, atomized, maximizing their consumer choice and personal freedom to whatever extent their finances allow in a supposedly free market.
For a narrow subset of humanity, the promise of the Spreadsheets seems to be working well. These are the very wealthy and also some whose combination of advanced education and technical skills allow them to live more or less as global citizens, nominally citizens of a state, but actually moving their bodies and money around the world as suits their career or entertainment or investments—the Elites. They are connected to whatever place and acquaintances suit them best at any given time. The one value they stand for is the system of globalization which allows them to continue maximizing their freedom and wealth.
There is another group reaping rewards from the Spreadsheets, the Hapless Beneficiaries. These are the truly destitute around the world, the people living on the equivalent of a few dollars a day, the humanity neglected by the rest of humanity. The Spreadsheets, in their voracious appetite for cheaper labor commodity, have discovered that the hands and lungs of this group are just as able to perform hard and repetitive work as more expensive bodies elsewhere. This reality causes rejoicing by the Elites because it is the perfect counterpoint to the destruction wrought by the system that benefits them. “Look, a poor person who used to live on one dollar a day now living on two dollars a day. A 100% increase in wealth. Globalism floats all boats!”
For the rest of us the results are somewhere between mixed and catastrophic depending where in the country you live. Vermont has been spared the worst, so far. The rural midwest and Appalachia have been less lucky. Cities of a certain size seem to be able to maintain their center of gravity. But all across the country the suction created by the Spreadsheets is pulling communities and people apart. The republic is divided against itself, red against blue, urban against rural. It is hard to know who to blame. After all, we voted for this year after year.
2-Uncle Matthew
Uncle Matthew is a racist, xenophobic, misogynist, volcanically angry, wealthy, rural English aristocrat character from Nancy Mitford’s 1945 novel, The Pursuit of Love. The book is based on lightly fictionalizing members of her own family in the years before and during World War Two.
Uncle Matthew is both abusive and devoted to his family. It doesn’t take much reading between the lines to trace the cause of this contradiction to his experiences in World War One. In the book as a whole, he is, somehow, a rather sympathetic character. People who are triggered to negative emotions by reading about white male privilege, class privilege in general, child abuse, racism, death and dysfunction, won’t find the book or the character of Uncle Matthew entertaining.
The following passage is mostly free of his offensive characteristics. I’m including it here because it is such a well written description of the difference between connection to place and devotion to money.
Mitford is describing her cousin, Linda, Uncle Matthew’s second oldest daughter, and her inability to understand the banking family she married into, the Kroesigs, who are of German ancestry, (a fact that causes Uncle Matthew deep suspicion, although not in the passage quoted).
Inwardly their [the Kroesigs] spirit was utterly commercial, everything was seen by them in terms of money. It was their barrier, their defence, their hope for the future, their support for the present, it raised them above their fellow man, and with it they warded off evil. The only mental qualities that they respected were those which produced money in substantial quantity, it was their one criterion of success, it was power and it was glory. To say that a man was poor was to label him a rotter, bad at his job, idle, feckless, immoral. If it was somebody whom they really rather liked, in spite of this cancer, they could add that he had been unlucky. They had taken care to insure against this deadly evil in many ways. That it should not overwhelm them through such cataclysms beyond their control as war or revolution they had placed large sums of money in a dozen different countries; they owned ranches, and estancias, and South African farms, a hotel in Switzerland, a plantation in Malaya, and they possessed many fine diamonds, not sparkling around Linda’s lovely neck to be sure, but lying in banks, stone by stone, easily portable.
Linda’s upbringing had made all this incomprehensible to her, for money was a subject that was absolutely never mentioned at Alconleigh. Uncle Matthew had no doubt a large income, but it was derived from, tied up in, and a good percentage of it went back into, his land. His land was something sacred, and, sacred above that, was England. Should evil befall his country he would stay and share it, or die, never would the notion have entered his head that he might save himself, and leave old England in any sort of lurch. He, his family and his estates were part of her and she was part of him, for ever and ever. Later on, when war appeared to be looming on the horizon, Tony [Kroesig] tried to persuade him to send some money to America.
“What for?” said Uncle Matthew.
“You might be glad to go there yourself, or send the children. It’s always a good thing to have—”
“I may be old, but I can still shoot,” said Uncle Matthew, furiously, “and I haven’t got any children—for the purposes of fighting they are all grown up.”
“Victoria—”
“Victoria is thirteen. She would do her duty. I hope, if any bloody foreigners ever got here, that every man woman and child would go on fighting them until one side or the other was wiped out.”
3-No Borders No Nation
In Trump’s opening campaign salvo the Mexican border and the illegal immigrants crossing there were convenient and exploitable symbols for the destruction of the American middle class caused by the borderless and hard-to-picture Spreadsheets. The vulgarity and racism with which Trump imagined the consequences of open borders diverted the mainstream media, always suckers for a sensational story, from comprehending the enormity of the underlying problem. Trump’s language condensed the problem and a solution with compelling imagery—Mexican rapists and a wall. If it that seems like an oversimplified explanation, it is, but the savant salesman closed the deal and now he’s president.
Whether Trump logically understood the connections he was making or just used his magical salesman powers to intuit the connection, like a jazz musician instinctively improvising on a riff without thinking about chord progression, is an open question. When it comes to selling, he is either an intuitive genius or a calculating one—a question of tactical importance for his political opponents. As for the rest of us, assuming the republic survives his administration, what matters is that the people in power start thinking seriously about the consequences of running the country on the logic of the Spreadsheets for the benefit of the Elites.
The fact that Trump is the messenger who finally got through with this message makes me think of Elon Musk’s comment that the odds favor us being characters in a virtual reality simulation created by some higher intelligence rather than being actors in our own base reality. The game coders of that higher intelligence are probably, as they are here, mostly young men, with typical adolescent humor. How else to explain that Bernie Madoff made off with the money, or that Anthony Weiner texted pictures of his…well, you get the point.
And now this, a man whose only known value is money, who is the walking embodiment privilege, whose business tactics involve systematically screwing small tradesmen and ripping off students, this caricature of elitism is the person who finally got the rest of the elites to recognise that perhaps it is wrong to abandon everything that doesn’t smell like money, that the accuracy of the phrase fly-over-states denotes moral failure rather than wit, that everything can’t be priced in dollars. If only it were just a cruel joke in a video game.
However flawed the product being sold, every successful sales pitch has to contain a kernel of truth. Donald Trump recognised the truth that place is defined by borders and that many Americans feel displaced within their own country. What it means to be part of a place or a country is to have a connection, a value beyond the purely practical or monetary. This idea of value is unquantifiable by the Spreadsheets and therefore incomprehensible to them. If the price is the same it’s all the same to the Spreadsheets who stand only for money and its ability to flow unimpeded around the world relentlessly seeking a better return.
Convincing nearly half the country that he, Donald Trump, an elitist who started life making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year as a toddler-landlord, would reverse the destruction caused by the Spreadsheets, this was salesmanship as masterful as the famous quip, “The prettiest trick of the devil is to persuade you that he does not exist.” The devil captures souls by offering them something they desperately want, in this case, fulfilling the longing of many people to believe that someone in power would protect their place instead of selling it to the highest bidder. As with all deals with the devil, inevitably the final price is the affliction you thought you were avoiding.
4-If not here and now, where and when?
To rephrase the rabbi Hillel, If I am not for a place, what place will be for me? But if I am only for a place, what am I? If not now, when?
For all of human history, there seem to be two contradictory actions people will resist until the last drop of their blood has been spilled. The first is any attempt to usurp or relocated them in any way, violently or through persuasion, from the place they view as their homeland, and this applies no matter how harsh or inhospitable the place is.
The second is any attempt to prevent them from leaving their homeland, if they want to, and seeking a better life in some other place, no matter the risks. People will set off on a flimsy raft across a shark-filled ocean, cling to the wing of an airplane or walk hundreds of miles carrying small children just for the chance of a better life someplace else.
These primal motivations are colliding with globalism. The value of money to the Spreadsheets is in existential conflict with the human desire to be connected to a place or to seek a new place.
When the forces of free trade cause a factory to move, the Elites sigh and shrug. “Sad, but what can you do? The market has spoken.” Then they move along to a bigger city or different country. Perhaps they even have to sell their house for less than they paid for it, a capital loss they can no doubt offset against share price gains in the company that will now have lower labor costs in the new place. The people left behind, who either love their place more than they love money, or don’t have enough money to leave for a new place, they suffer as do the buildings and roads and schools.
When desperate migrants fleeing economic or climate or political disruption flood over a border, the Elites, connected to no place, are perplexed by the stench of racism rising from the people who already live in that place. What did they expect, that communities and voters drowning under decades of stagnant wages and billowing addictions would all smell sweet when they were swamped with immigrants?
The Spreadsheets dismiss connection to place as an outdated notion, like the idea that your last name reflects where you are from, an absurd anachronism like Uncle Matthew and his willingness to consign his children to death rather than give up his place to foreigners. They say that place no longer matters, that in a global economy we all live on one place, the earth, and we should move around as market forces demand.
But this idea fails even more dramatically on a global scale than it does on a local one. The future habitability of the earth, the place we all share, is of no concern to the Spreadsheets. The same Spreadsheet logic that inexorably destroys small communities is just as steadily destroying the climate that gave rise to human civilization.
Whether the earth is a habitable place for human beings is likely of no consequence for the rest of the cosmos. The other life forms on earth will respond to global warming and rising oceans the way life always has, and as, until very recently, our ancestors always did, stoically adapting when possible or else going extinct. But we are unique in our recent ability to make somewhat accurate predictions about the future and also unique in our ability to understand the consequences those predictions protend for us.
After millennia in which we had to take whatever hardships nature handed out, we live in a new world where the lucky among us can exercise a great deal of control over our environment. It will be a huge shame for us if we don’t use enough restraint and planning to be able to continue to enjoy the relative ease with which we can live in these days. If we don’t, it will be awful for us. There is no evidence that anything else in the universe has enough understanding of cause and effect or past and future to even understand what is happening much less care.
Like the rabbi’s aphorism, it’s both at once. We’re going to have to devise a system that respects our individual connection to place and doesn’t destroy the place we all call home. It’s going to have to be a system with borders and trade, a system that allows people to migrate but doesn’t displace people who want to stay in the place they call home. The values that form the foundation of this new system will not be measured by money alone but will have to take into account the value of people and place. If that sounds like a difficult balance to strike, no doubt it is, but as the rabbi points out, the time for this change is always now.
5-The Scam
But it’s also true that much of the elite defense of globalization is basically dishonest: false claims of inevitability, scare tactics (protectionism causes depressions!), vastly exaggerated claims for the benefits of trade liberalization and the costs of protection, hand-waving away the large distributional effects that are what standard models actually predict. I hope, by the way, that I haven’t done any of that; I think I’ve always been clear that the gains from globalization aren’t all that (here’s a back-of-the-envelope on the gains from hyperglobalization — only part of which can be attributed to policy — that is less than 5 percent of world GDP over a generation); and I think I’ve never assumed away the income distribution effects.
Furthermore, as Mark Kleiman sagely observes, the conventional case for trade liberalization relies on the assertion that the government could redistribute income to ensure that everyone wins — but we now have an ideology utterly opposed to such redistribution in full control of one party, and with blocking power against anything but a minor move in that direction by the other.
So the elite case for ever-freer trade is largely a scam, which voters probably sense even if they don’t know exactly what form it’s taking.
Got that? —ever-freer trade is largely a scam—much of the elite defense of globalism is basically dishonest—hand-waving away the large distributional effects—translation, the economists knew globalism would make a few people vastly richer while lots of people got poorer, but they or the Elites they work for, didn’t care. The only way globalism made any sort of sense was if “the government could redistribute income to ensure that everyone wins”—in other words, converting the “losers” to welfare recipients was the best case scenario. To the Spreadsheets income is all the same whether it comes from work in a functioning local economy or a government check.
This was a different scam than pretending that Mexican rapists were a threat to national sovereignty, which was shallow, crude, racist and designed to benefit one man. This was a complicated scam, a dough of fact and fiction leavened with technological change, rising for decades and supported by both political parties and the Elites who benefitted from it. Trump is just an opportunist preying on confused people displaced by the unchecked wildfire of globalism. The real scam is perpetrated by people like the Kroesigs who have streamlined a system in which money is the only object.
Uncle Matthew is a despicable character by any objective measure, even more so by the standards of today than those of his own time, and yet he is also, even to a modern reader, in many ways, entertaining, charming and admirable. His good qualities, such as they are, come from his convictions, and this is where his bad qualities arise as well. The problem is not that he has convictions, but the abhorrent nature of some of them. Yet simply possessing convictions, even a mixed bag, raises him above the Kroesigs who are vacuous and evil in their indifference to anything but money.
Or, to put it in a more modern context, think of the angry, volatile, violent, character of Walter in the movie The Big Lebowski. Walter assumes that the thugs threatening them must be Nazis until The Dude corrects him and explains that they are nihilists. Stunned, Walter observes, “Say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos”. It is hard to find a lower rung for human morality than the Nazis but, in Walter’s opinion, believing in nothing may be even worse. In the end the nihilists turn out to be cowards, muggers only interested in money and their petty greed collapses against Walter’s conviction that “What’s mine is mine.”
Since World War two we have increasingly been living in a world run by people like the Kroesigs whose spirit is only commercial, people without connection to place, people who have signed the purpose of their lives onto the ethos that money is the only measure. Convincing the rest of us not only that this soul-destroying idea is the best way forward but also that it is inevitable, this is a scam that needs to be contradicted with values other than money.
Those crumbling cornices which represented generations of commitment to place, the derelict houses in rural America, the derelict lives of people working hard to live the American Dream but playing in a rigged game, they weren’t inevitable. They are victims of the scam. Here is what is inevitable: Running the world for the interests of people who value only money will have us fighting with each other over who inherits a planet none of us can live on.
The struggle is between belief in something, values, land, a sense of place and belief only in money. As the Spreadsheets have destroyed lives, communities and connection to place they have also created a vacuum and it will be filled by a new ethos. The question is whether the Elites who run the world abandon their money-worship in favor of a more balanced ethos, or whether they let charlatans, opportunists, or worse, fill the void.