Production coterminous with consumption...

‘The Distributive Alternative’

Posted By Russell Sparkes On November 6, 2010 7:09 AM

... Probably the greatest and most persistent attack on Distributism was the notion ... that it was an otherworldly invention by Chesterton and Belloc as part of their romantic attachment to the Middle Ages, and alleged desire to return there. This was often caricatured as policy of giving everybody ‘three acres and a cow’, which was in fact a policy slogan of Joseph Chamberlain in the 1880s.

There is little truth in this argument, for, as we shall see later, Chesterton and Belloc did not reject modern technology, but they did fundamentally disagree with the economic system on which modern society is based. As we shall see, they called it ‘plutocracy’, or rule by the rich.

Probably the original inspiration behind Distributism, was both Chesterton and Belloc’s keen interest in English political, social, and economic history. I believe that Chesterton was also struck by a vein of social commentary in literary men like Dickens ... [and] William Cobbett, that doughty fighter for the poor of England. Chesterton describes Dickens’ hated [sic] of the way the free-market economists of the Nineteenth Century, the so-called ‘Manchester School’, advocated starvation and misery for the poor as a necessary evil:

‘He didn’t like the mean side of the Manchester philosophy: the preaching of an impossible thrift and an intolerable temperance…. Thus, for instance, he hated that Little Bethel (a workhouse) to which Kit’s mother went: he hated it simply as Kit hated it. ... [i]

It was also inspired by the recent practical success of Land Reform in Ireland as they were impressed by the peaceful and successful redistribution of land in Ireland which was carried out following the 1903 Wyndham Act. They both knew its author, the Conservative Minister George Wyndham, who became a great friend of Belloc. Finally, both Belloc and Chesterton were Catholics, and they were certainly inspired by the formidable figure of Cardinal Manning, of whom more later.

Hence the ‘received wisdom’ on Distributism—that its main proponents were well-meaning idealists ignorant of the real world of politics and economics is quite wrong. Hilaire Belloc was a Member of Parliament from 1906-1910 before he resigned his seat in disgust. Chesterton was a well-known and widely respected journalist whose views helped shape popular opinion.... In 1927 Chesterton was invited to lecture at the London School of Economics.... 

 In 1936 Keynes revolutionalised economics by inventing macroeconomics in his The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. Keynes’ great discovery was that the focus of previous economists on the individual firm meant that they had ignored the fact that the economy was an organic whole; what to an individual firm was a cut in costs (wages) was to the worker a cut in income. Chesterton made exactly the same point in 1926, before the Great Depression began in 1929 -- but then he was not blinkered by having absorbed the doctrines of economics:

‘Capitalism is contradictory as soon as it is complete; because it is dealing with the mass of men in two different ways at once. When most men are wage-earners, it is more and more difficult for most men to be customers. For the capitalist is always trying to cut down what his servant demands, and in doing so is cutting down what his customer can spend. As soon as his business is in any difficulties, as at present in the coal business, he tries to reduce what he has to spend on wages, and in doing so reduces what others have to spend on coal. He is wanting the same man to be rich and poor at the same time.’ [iii]

One last point about classical economics is how it has often mirrored the wishes of the rich and powerful, contradicting its earlier teaching to do so. ... As Chesterton wrote in 1927:

‘But what is interesting to note is the way in which the sophistry of political economy changes and adapts itself to the needs of the luxurious at any particular moment. Whatever the politician may want to do, there is always a political economist beside him to say that it must be done, and whenever the rich want to be luxurious, it is always opportunely discovered that luxury is a form of economy.’ [iv]

They pointed out that Adam Smith’s insistence on the need to specialize and trade, rather than to produce locally, led economics to neglect transport costs, the uncertainty involved in trade, and broader environmental considerations. As Vincent McNabb pointed out, in the language of economics, Smith’s error: 

‘I have often said that the most efficient social and economic unit is one wherein the area of production tends to be co-terminous with the area of consumption; i.e. that things will be produced where they are to be consumed.’ [v] 

[i] G.K. Chesterton, The Victorian Age in Literature, London, Home University Press, 1910. 

[iii] G.K. Chesterton, The Outline of Sanity, (first published 1926), reprinted Ignatius Press 1992, page 59 

[iv] G.K. Chesterton, ‘Very Political Economy’, from G.K.’s Weekly, 5 August 1927. 

[v] Fr Vincent McNabb, Old Principles and the New Order, Sheed and Ward 1942, page 12.

Thrive by thrift...

G.K. Chesterton’s Distributism

Posted By Dale Ahlquist On August 11, 2011 6:32 AM

The word “economy” and the word “economics” are based on the Greek word for house, which is oikos. The word “economy” as we know it, however, has drifted completely away from that meaning. Instead of house, it has come to mean everything outside of the house. The home is the place where the important things happen. The economy is the place where the most unimportant things happen. ...  

There is another rather neglected meaning to the word “economy”: the idea of thriftiness. ... Chesterton points out that inside the word thrift is the word thrive.9 We can only thrive within our means, just as we can only be free within the rules. The modern understanding of the word economy is, once again, just the opposite. It is about accumulation instead of thrift. Even worse, it is about mere exchange. It is about trade, and not even about the things that are traded. It is about figures in a ledger. It is about noughts. It is about the accumulation of zeros. It is more about nothing than it is about something.

Our separation of economy from the home is part of a long fragmentation process. ... We have separated everything from everything else. We have accomplished this by separating everything from the home. Feminism has separated women from the home. Capitalism has separated men from the home. Socialism has separated education from the home. Manufacturing has separated craftsmanship from the home. The news and entertainment industry has separated originality and creativity from the home, rendering us into passive and malleable consumers rather than active citizens.

There is more to Distributism than economics. That is because there is more to economics than economics. Distributism is not just an economic idea. It is an integral part of a complete way of thinking. ...

It takes a complicated key to fit a complicated lock. But we want simple solutions. We don’t want to work hard. We don’t want to think hard. We want other people to do both our work and our thinking for us. We call in the specialists. And we call this state of utter dependency “freedom.” We think we are free simply because we seem free to move about. ...

The Distributist ideal is that the home is the most important place in the world. Every man should have his own piece of property, a place to build his own home, to raise his family, to do all the important things from birth to death: eating, singing, celebrating, reading, writing, arguing, story-telling, laughing, crying, praying. The home is above all a sanctuary of creativity. Creativity is our most Godlike quality. We not only make things, we make things in our own image. The family is one of those things. ...

But Chesterton’s Distributist ideal not only called for mothers to stay at home, it called for fathers to stay at home as well. The home-based business, the idea of self-sufficiency would not only make for stronger, healthier families, but a stronger, healthier society. ... A home-based society is naturally and necessarily a local and de-centralized society. ...

Though Chesterton would argue that a Distributist society would be most fully realized if it were based on a Catholic worldview, he would not insist upon that basis as essential for achieving such a society. In fact, he would argue that such a society is more congenial to the different religions than any other societal plan. Freedom of religion, as it now supposedly exists under a huge centralized government, actually needs to be “enforced” by that government. The result, as we have seen, is that religion has actually been stifled where the government watchdog is there to “guarantee” the freedom. ...

The dilemma of Distributism is the dilemma of freedom itself. Distributism cannot be done to people, but only by people. It is not a system that can be imposed from above; it can only spring up from below. ... If it happens, it seems most likely that it would be ushered in by a popular revolution. In any case, it must be popular. It would at some point require those with massive and inordinate wealth to give it up. ... The Christian argument, if taken seriously, should be more terrifying to a rich man than a mob with axes and torches. ... The central figure of the Christian religion said quite unambiguously that it is easier for a camel to go through an eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven. No matter how the rich man may try to breed smaller camels and manufacture larger needles, no matter how hard he snorts and stomps, he cannot get around the reality that to cling to his riches is to put his soul in peril. ... As Chesterton says, “The obligation of wealth is to chuck it.”13

But the rich are a small part of the problem–only because there are so few of them. The larger part of the problem is the mentality that drives so many people to chase after money. Again, religion provides a practical solution. There is a commandment that states, “Thou shall not covet.” This little known commandment would have to be rediscovered and re-emphasized in order to build a Distributist society.

Working with your hands...

May 24, 2009

The Case for Working With Your Hands

By MATTHEW B. CRAWFORD

... Many of us do work that feels more surreal than real. Working in an office, you often find it difficult to see any tangible result from your efforts. What exactly have you accomplished at the end of any given day? Where the chain of cause and effect is opaque and responsibility diffuse, the experience of individual agency can be elusive. ... 

... High-school shop-class programs were widely dismantled in the 1990s as educators prepared students to become “knowledge workers.” The imperative of the last 20 years to round up every warm body and send it to college, then to the cubicle, was tied to a vision of the future in which we somehow take leave of material reality and glide about in a pure information economy. This has not come to pass. To begin with, such work often feels more enervating than gliding. More fundamentally, now as ever, somebody has to actually do things: fix our cars, unclog our toilets, build our houses. 

When we praise people who do work that is straightforwardly useful, the praise often betrays an assumption that they had no other options. We idealize them as the salt of the earth and emphasize the sacrifice for others their work may entail. ... But what if such work answers as well to a basic human need of the one who does it? ... Beneath our gratitude for the lineman may rest envy. 

This seems to be a moment when the useful arts have an especially compelling economic rationale. ... The current downturn is likely to pass eventually. But there are also systemic changes in the economy, arising from information technology, that have the surprising effect of making the manual trades — plumbing, electrical work, car repair — more attractive as careers. The Princeton economist Alan Blinder argues that the crucial distinction in the emerging labor market is not between those with more or less education, but between those whose services can be delivered over a wire and those who must do their work in person or on site. The latter will find their livelihoods more secure against outsourcing to distant countries. As Blinder puts it, “You can’t hammer a nail over the Internet.” Nor can the Indians fix your car. Because they are in India. 

... One shop teacher suggested to me that “in schools, we create artificial learning environments for our children that they know to be contrived and undeserving of their full attention and engagement. Without the opportunity to learn through the hands, the world remains abstract and distant, and the passions for learning will not be engaged.”  

A gifted young person who chooses to become a mechanic rather than to accumulate academic credentials is viewed as eccentric, if not self-destructive. There is a pervasive anxiety among parents that there is only one track to success for their children. ... Further, there is wide use of drugs to medicate boys, especially, against their natural tendency toward action, the better to “keep things on track.” I taught briefly in a public high school and would have loved to have set up a Ritalin fogger in my classroom. It is a rare person, male or female, who is naturally inclined to sit still for 17 years in school, and then indefinitely at work.  

The trades suffer from low prestige, and I believe this is based on a simple mistake. Because the work is dirty, many people assume it is also stupid. This is not my experience. I have a small business as a motorcycle mechanic in Richmond, Va., which I started in 2002. ... I have found the satisfactions of the work to be very much bound up with the intellectual challenges it presents. ...  

After finishing a Ph.D. in political philosophy at the University of Chicago in 2000, I managed to stay on with a one-year postdoctoral fellowship at the university’s Committee on Social Thought. The academic job market was utterly bleak. In a state of professional panic, I retreated to a makeshift workshop I set up in the basement of a Hyde Park apartment building, where I spent the winter tearing down an old Honda motorcycle and rebuilding it. The physicality of it, and the clear specificity of what the project required of me, was a balm. Stumped by a starter motor..., I started asking around at Honda dealerships. Nobody had an answer; finally one service manager told me to call Fred Cousins of Triple O Service. “If anyone can help you, Fred can.” ...  

Over the next six months I spent a lot of time at Fred’s shop, learning, and put in only occasional appearances at the university. ... I was rediscovering the intensely absorbing nature of the work, and it got me thinking about possible livelihoods. 

As it happened, in the spring I landed a job as executive director of a policy organization in Washington. This felt like a coup. But certain perversities became apparent as I settled into the job. ... As its figurehead, I was making arguments I didn’t fully buy myself. Further, my boss seemed intent on retraining me according to a certain cognitive style — that of the corporate world, from which he had recently come. This style demanded that I project an image of rationality but not indulge too much in actual reasoning. As I sat in my K Street office, Fred’s life as an independent tradesman gave me an image that I kept coming back to: someone who really knows what he is doing, losing himself in work that is genuinely useful and has a certain integrity to it. He also seemed to be having a lot of fun. ... 

After five months at the think tank, I’d saved enough money to buy some tools I needed, and I quit and went into business fixing bikes. ... The business goes up and down; when it is down I have supplemented it with writing. The work is sometimes frustrating, but it is never irrational. ...
As in any learned profession, you just have to know a lot ... [and] you have to be embedded in a community of mechanic-antiquarians. ... My most reliable source, Fred, has such an encyclopedic knowledge of obscure European motorcycles that all I have been able to offer him in exchange is deliveries of obscure European beer. ... 

[M]echanical work has required me to cultivate different intellectual habits. Further, habits of mind have an ethical dimension that we don’t often think about. Good diagnosis requires attentiveness to the machine, almost a conversation with it, rather than assertiveness, as in the position papers produced on K Street. Cognitive psychologists speak of “metacognition,” which is the activity of stepping back and thinking about your own thinking. It is what you do when you stop for a moment in your pursuit of a solution, and wonder whether your understanding of the problem is adequate. ...  

This active concern for the motorcycle is reinforced by the social aspects of the job. As is the case with many independent mechanics, my business is based entirely on word of mouth. I sometimes barter services with machinists and metal fabricators. This has a very different feel than transactions with money; it situates me in a community. The result is that I really don’t want to mess up anybody’s motorcycle or charge more than a fair price. ... The core experience is one of individual responsibility, supported by face-to-face interactions between tradesman and customer. 

Contrast the experience of being a middle manager. ... Like the mechanic, the manager faces the possibility of disaster at any time. But in his case these disasters feel arbitrary; they are typically a result of corporate restructurings, not of physics. ... Survival depends on a crucial insight: you can’t back down from an argument that you initially made in straightforward language, with moral conviction, without seeming to lose your integrity. So managers learn the art of provisional thinking and feeling, expressed in corporate doublespeak, and cultivate a lack of commitment to their own actions. ...  

How was it that I, once a proudly self-employed electrician, had ended up ... a “knowledge worker” at a salary of $23,000? I had a master’s degree, and it needed to be used. The escalating demand for academic credentials in the job market gives the impression of an ever-more-knowledgeable society, whose members perform cognitive feats their unschooled parents could scarcely conceive of. On paper, my abstracting job, multiplied a millionfold, is precisely what puts the futurologist in a rapture: we are getting to be so smart! Yet my M.A. obscures a more real stupidification of the work I secured with that credential, and a wage to match. When I first got the degree, I felt as if I had been inducted to a certain order of society. But ... it turned out to be a more proletarian existence than I had known as an electrician. In that job I had made quite a bit more money. I also felt free and active, rather than confined and stultified.  

A good job requires a field of action where you can put your best capacities to work and see an effect in the world. Academic credentials do not guarantee this.
Nor can big business or big government — those idols of the right and the left — reliably secure such work for us. Everyone is rightly concerned about economic growth on the one hand or unemployment and wages on the other, but the character of work doesn’t figure much in political debate. ... Yet work forms us, and deforms us, with broad public consequences.  

The visceral experience of failure seems to have been edited out of the career trajectories of gifted students. It stands to reason, then, that those who end up making big decisions that affect all of us don’t seem to have much sense of their own fallibility, and of how badly things can go wrong even with the best of intentions.... In the boardrooms of Wall Street and the corridors of Pennsylvania Avenue, I don’t think you’ll see a yellow sign that says “Think Safety!” as you do on job sites and in many repair shops, no doubt because those who sit on the swivel chairs tend to live remote from the consequences of the decisions they make. Why not encourage gifted students to learn a trade, if only in the summers, so that their fingers will be crushed once or twice before they go on to run the country?  

There is good reason to suppose that responsibility has to be installed in the foundation of your mental equipment — at the level of perception and habit. There is an ethic of paying attention that develops in the trades through hard experience. It inflects your perception of the world and your habitual responses to it. This is due to the immediate feedback you get from material objects and to the fact that the work is typically situated in face-to-face interactions between tradesman and customer. ...  

Ultimately it is enlightened self-interest, then, not a harangue about humility or public-spiritedness, that will compel us to take a fresh look at the trades. The good life comes in a variety of forms. This variety has become difficult to see; our field of aspiration has narrowed into certain channels. But the current perplexity in the economy seems to be softening our gaze. Our peripheral vision is perhaps recovering, allowing us to consider the full range of lives worth choosing. For anyone who feels ill suited by disposition to spend his days sitting in an office, the question of what a good job looks like is now wide open.

Matthew B. Crawford lives in Richmond, Va. His book, “Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work,” from which this essay is adapted, will be published this week by Penguin Press.

Notes on TSR...

It doesn't seem to matter how much I ingest about STR, it's still a mindbender.

Part 2


~2:30 : Since all observers will see the same laws of physics hold, and since the speed of light (c) is a part of the laws of physics, all observers will see c the same, regardless of their state of motion. c is constant. In order to agree on the speed of light, observers may need to disagree about distance and time.

As I was trying to explain to my wife (my weakness, not hers), the reason classic relativity (CR) says object move with different speeds in different reference frames, is actual because the equations work only by keeping c constant. (That this was not known, but that the equations still worked, raises an interesting point about counterfactuals and scientific theory.) A pitcher P on a moving truck will see his pitched ball B move at 100mph, whereas an observer O of the truck-ball system TB would see the ball B moving at 150mph (cf. part 1 of video series). Since the time of measurement is the same for both P and O, and since c must remain constant, the speeds must rise as the relative distances increase. O is removed from TB to an extent that speed will rise in order to keep the ratio between distance and speed constant relative to c. P is closer to TB, so the speed decreases to preserve the c-ratio. In fact, P is "inside" TB so that he will detect no motion (unless he pitches B), which just means that as distance (between P and TB) shrinks to 0, the speed of B in TB shrinks to zero--all the while c is constant.

~7:00 : Reflected-photon clocks C1 and C2 would be precisely synchronized for an outside observer O. If C1 is stationary while C2 is in motion, O will see the time of C2 pass more slowly. why? Since both reflected-photon beams move at the same speed, and the moving clock C2 covers a farther distance than C1, the time of C2 must increase in order to keep c constant (despite other changes like increased distance).

Part 3


~1:30 : All the rulers aboard the moving ship S2 shrink just enough to keep c constant invariantly with respect to increased speed. Time dilation and length contraction.

I was trying to get length contraction clearer in my mind tonight, and here is what I thought of:

The faster object moves towards me, the faster its "trailing photons" will reach me relative to its "leading photons". In other words, when I observe a normal stationary ruler, with one end pointed at me, light from its front end reaches me at no discernibly different time than light from its rear end. But if it is moving at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light, photons from its front end will reach me at about the same time as photons from its back end, and thus it will appear that both ends are closer together (i.e. that the ruler is shrunken). I "understand" that this compression is not merely a result of my neural-observational limitations, but actually holds in a Lorentzian way (cf. Wiki). But what of non-Lorentzian relativity?

~3:30 : The faster you go through space, the slower you go through time. If you could travel at the speed of light in space, you would make no progress in time. If you could surpass c through space, you could travel back in time. If different observers must always agree on c, they must disagree on time and distance.

~5:15 : There is no single time or space on which everyone can agree. [Thus, unless the universe transcends space and time, there is no universe. There is a universe, however, in which c is constant. Therefore the universe as known by humans transcends space and time.] Velocity depends on distance (viz. from which frame of reference it is observed, i.e. how far from its center it is clocked), and time depends on velocity (viz., as velocity increases, time decreases, and distance increases). What is observed far apart in space, appears near in time. What is observed near in space, appears far apart in time (relative to something farther away).

~6:30 : The faster a particle goes, the heavier it goes. In order to maintain acceleration, as mass increases, energy must increase. E = mc^2. Once again, c must remain constant. In a given time, an object's velocity depends on the energy given to its mass.

Part 4


~0:20 : Einstein's STR says that an observer at a constant velocity Ov will observe the same laws of physics as an observer at rest Or. [I think "at rest" here could only mean "an observer moving at the speed of light (Ol). Cf. Einstein's scenario of sitting on a photon.]

~1:55 : Einstein argued that there's no way to tell a difference between being stationary under the influence of gravity versus being accelerated through space. Hence, given the universality of the laws of physics, the laws of gravity must be equivalent to (i.e. transformable into) the laws of acceleration through space.

======

Basic maths for time dilation


γ = 1/√(1 - (v²/c²))

This helps me make sense of the "substantial fraction of the speed of light" condition (i.e. the focus on "motion at relativistic speeds"). As v increases, the ratio of v²/c² nears 0, and the divisor under 1 therefore nears 0, which would make γ into an increasingly large (and potentially infinite) amount. In turn, as γ increases, Δt' decreases. As observed time (t') decreases, time "flows more slowly". Time dilation at relativistic.

======

Time dilation with Dr Wittman


~0:00 : "Moving clocks run slowly and moving things contract in the direction of their motion. Those are two of the amazing conclusions of special relativity."

~ 2:30 : "We have to measure the same speed of light, even if the clock is moving. ... Let's see if it can get to the top of that clock." The faster the photon clock moves, the less distance it travels inside the apparatus, and therefore the less time it traverses. "Moving clocks go slower."

~ 4:05 : γ = c(1/√(1 - (v²/c²))

So as speed increases, time increases and length decreases. Anything beyond the speed of light would be eternal and sub-spatial (i.e. immaterial). And you're telling me natural theology is dead??

~6:30 : In order for the truck driver to maintain c, he must measure "our" v as vγ.

‎"I am a failure. My best years are behind me. My worst habits are my strongest habits. That's why I will never succeed."

Precisely THEN you must go to your desk and continue writing, continue revising, continue praying on paper.

A desire to succeed is anathema to success; fulfilling one goal after another, despite success or anonymity, is the path to success.

In the precincts...

You know you're not dealing with someone of wisdom when he utters the words "just a story." Nothing is "just a story," not even a story.