I was uncharitable to her here. I was wrong and I apologize. I listened to some of a podcast that Aaron Powell and Trevor Burrus did with her. I was impressed by her command of the intellectual history of egalitarianism.
Nonetheless, I still think that she too readily equates working for a firm with being a slave. If you were a skilled craftsman and did not want to work for a big factory, you could still ply your craft. If you chose to work in the factory, it was because you could earn more in the factory than as an independent craftsman. Which in turn means that you are more valuable to society in the factory than on your own.
Today, nobody is forced to work at a low-wage employer. If you feel sorry for people who work for a low-wage employer and you want to donate money to them, you have my blessing. If you want to force the rest of us as taxpayers to donate money to them, then you are in good company, even among some of us who call ourselves libertarians (the bleeding-heart variety). But if your approach is to force the employer to become a high-wage employer, then I do not think much of your philosophy.
The intractable problem is that what Adam Smith called “the necessaries” and what we might call acceptable modern living standards advance along with median incomes and trend labor productivity.
Incomes and labor productivity on average are driven by the average fashion in which folk are employed. Most of which is in forms that benefit tremendously and cumulatively from scale, specialization, and trade. Whereas independent craftsmen have enjoyed much lower trend growth in productivity and therefore cannot earn enough in a pre-capitalist mode of production to keep pace with market wages and modern living standards. Unless they are subsidized or the market places a premium on products twee and anachronistic (see: hipsters, Brooklyn).
Modernity is a real problem because it’s contagious and bears with it an inexorable industrial logic that is not always pleasing/fulfilling/actualizing, despite its material fruits.
The relentlessly self-reinforcing efficiency (in material terms) of the technological, sociocultural, and economic patterns that both give rise to and result from (Industrial) Western Civilization’s extraordinary productivity and material plenty is not particularly comfortable from the perspective of many individuals/families/communities. (Aldous Huxley: “”Industrial man—a sentient reciprocating engine having a fluctuating output, coupled to an iron wheel revolving with uniform velocity. And then we wonder why this should be the golden age of revolution and mental derangement.”).
I was going to listen but it seems both the links go to your prior blog post.
http://www.libertarianism.org/media/free-thoughts-podcast/equality-capabilities-or-equality-outcomes
You didn’t say she would know nothing about what she gets paid to know about, btw.
I’m 25% through and so far all she has said is what you said a few weeks ago about how sociologists think.
Finished. Exit and voice never came up.
I think Tyler Cowen made a very good, and clear, point: because firms pay workers with a mix of salary and freedom (perks), you cannot simultaneously argue that firms give workers too few freedoms and also too little salary. If salaries are low today, as the Left claims, it means workers have too much freedom, not too little. This contradicts Anderson’s claim.
The way out of this is to argue that firms have monopsony power. It might be true for some isolated rural towns of a few thousand people. But for the entire United States? Nope.