Articles by Jerome Segal:

The Worker's Worst Nightmare  

 

Beauty and the Need for Money 

 

Towards a New Central Economic Paradigm 

 

Taking Back Our Time 

 

Consumption and the Cost of Meeting Household Needs 

 

Rising Consumption, Unchanging Needs 

 

Alternatives to the Mass Consumption Society 

 

The Monetary Illusion

 

Money: Reducing the level of Need Required Income (NRI) 

 

The Good Life and Economic Activity

 

The Worker's Worst Nightmare  - SegalForSenate.Org

Beauty and the Need for Money - SegalForSenate.Org

Towards a New Central Economic Paradigm - SegalForSenate.Org

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Taking Back Our Time (2003)

Consumption and the Cost of Meeting Household Needs (2002)

Rising Consumption, Unchanging Needs (1995)

Alternatives to the Mass Consumption Society (1995)

Income and Development (1985)

Towards a New Central Economic Paradigm

 

             At one time, concentration on the fundamental questions of life was thought essential to any reflective social politics.  At a time before there was a distinction between economics and political theory, Aristotle put it thus:

 "A person who is going to make a fruitful inquiry into the question of the best political arrangement must first set out clearly what the most choiceworthy life is. For if that is unclear, the best political arrangement must also be unclear."

 [Politics, 1323a14-17]

             The point of economic and political institutions and policies is to make possible the good human life. It is against this criterion that institutions are to be evaluated.

Often enough, the biggest questions we have to answer are never asked. Because of their magnitude, because of their extensive implications, it is often hard to see that there can be major alternatives to the way things are and the way we typically think about the world.

             The single biggest social policy question confronting us today remains the same question it was 2300 years ago: What is the purpose of economic activity?

             Today this is a question rarely posed, yet while rarely asked, there is an implicit understanding of the good life and its relation to economic activity that underlies modern consumerism. Thus we have:

 The Dominant Economic Paradigm

             - The good life is to be found in the satisfaction of our desires, in particular desires that can be satisfied through consumption.

             - The economy contributes to the good life by providing consumers with the goods and services they desire.

             - Work (along with land, capital and information) is an input within the productive process, as well as the central means through which people earn the income which allows them to purchase goods and services produced.

             - Successful performance of the economy is best understood as the sustained expansion of goods and services (i.e. economic growth).

             - Efficiency is primarily a matter of achieving maximum outputs (goods and services) with any level of resource input.

             This vision, if it ever served us well, is today exhausted. It leaves us adrift in a changing world, hoping than "more and faster" adds up to better. What we need is a new outlook, one that in some ways returns to a more ancient vision. The perspective of simple living offers this  alternative paradigm for thinking about the purpose of economic life:

 The Simple Living Paradigm

             - The good life is a form of simple living, it is found primarily in meaningful activity and the simple pleasures of friends and family. It requires an abundance of time to do things right.

             - The economy contributes to a good life by providing goods and services to meet core needs, by offering meaningful forms of activity, and by providing economic security. Once core needs have been met, the consumption of goods and services is of secondary importance.

            - Work is itself a central arena in which the good life is either found or lost. Work is not a mere means to income or productive output; at its best it is an opportunity for people to engage their highest qualities and creativities in ways that are of value to others. The kinds of work opportunities a society has to offer are its real outputs, the forms of life it makes available.

             - Economic performance should be evaluated not in terms of economic growth but by looking at the levels of need satisfaction, levels of leisure, levels of security, and quality of work roles.

             - Efficiency is primarily a matter of achieving high levels of need satisfaction at low levels of labor time or at low levels of income.

             Put in different terms, a politics of simplicity responds to Aristotle's question by saying that the good life is found as a form of simple living and then turns to both government and the economy and says, "Your purpose is to facilitate the attainment of such lives, to create  an  environment which is supportive of simple living."

             A politics of simplicity recognizes that the real work of creating a meaningful life has to be done by people themselves, with their friends and in communities of common values. At the same time, it looks to the society as a whole, to our national economic and social policies and says that they play a role of tremendous importance in creating the background environment within which such projects will either succeed or fail.

             Making this shift to a different lens, to a different way of looking at economic life, to a different set of criteria for evaluating economic performance, is the single biggest element of a politics of simplicity. In many ways it turns conventional thinking on its head. It says that what are normally viewed as inputs or by-products of economic activity, namely the forms of human activity and interaction that are generated  by economic activity ("work" and "jobs" and "social roles") are its real outputs, and that what is typically viewed as economic outputs (the goods and services received from the economy) are really inputs into life. They are the means that sustain us physically as we seek to find lives of inherent value and significance.

             In making this shift to a different economic paradigm it is important to see that a politics of simplicity is not anti-technology. The primary problem that we as a society face with respect to technological change has to do with the benefits of technological innovation, both in deciding which kinds of benefits to choose and in determining who is to receive them. This is best illustrated with an example.

             Today there are many who fear the impact of new technologies, and there is a growing list of writers who have warned that technological changes on the horizon may threaten the jobs of just about anyone. Let us assume that this is the case; let us assume:

            Five years from now, a Silicon Valley company succeeds in perfecting robot technology. They can create for each individual, an exact robot duplicate. And they can produce this robot at very little cost. Through the internet they then offer every employer in the country an exact replacement of any worker on the payroll. Because they can do so quite cheaply, they undercut the wage demands of each and every worker. No company has any incentive to hire a human.

            Wages fall, but even when wages fall, humans are not hired because their wage demands are always higher than what it costs to buy and maintain the robot copy. Ultimately, even a willingness to accept starvation wages is insufficient to motivate hiring humans, because the replacement cost of the robots is less than what it takes to keep a human being alive. The outcome, then is that, except for a select few, we are all unemployed and we all starve. 

            This is the workers' worse nightmare, and it seems that the devil is in the technology. But actually the technology is quite neutral. Imagine the very same technological story with one small change: rather than the robots being owned by the California company, each worker is the sole owner of his own robot duplicate. Under these conditions, with respect to any work that is not inherently rewarding, you have the option of sending your robot duplicate to work, instead of going yourself. You can create our own leisure. You can do this for a day, a week, a year, or a lifetime. In short, this very same technology is the fulfillment of an ancient fantasy. It liberates each and everyone of us from labor that is not inherently valuable, and frees us to devote our lives to that which will give it meaning.

            Thus a politics of simplicity is not against technological change; it is not against productivity growth. Put in the service of the good life, productivity growth can be liberating. A politics of simplicity can embrace and encourage innovation.  The key issues are the composition and distribution of rewards and decision making power. Will productivity gains result in more leisure or more income?  Who decides? And to the extent that it is income, to whom does it go? In short "Who will own the robots?"

Beauty and the Need for Money

            In the foregoing,  I have limited the discussion to seven core economic needs. Although it is true, as various religious and philosophic traditions have espoused, that it is possible to develop a conception of identity and an outlook on existence in which even these basics are viewed as superfluous, such psychological gymnastics suffer from two problems. First, they can result in an emotionally constricted form of life that is far from ideal for most people. And second, because they call for a vast degree of personal transformation, they are, realistically speaking, unattainable by most people, and even if attained, do not last from one generation to another.

            What I have tried to capture in the seven needs just discussed, is the central economic core of need, which is both motivationally powerful and recognized as legitimate by most people within our society. I believe these needs would also be widely, though perhaps not universally, recognized by most peoples in other cultures and at other times -- though, obviously, with different commodity specifications.

             Insofar as this is correct, the satisfaction of these core needs is required on any conception of simple living that seeks to be broadly relevant to the perspectives and limitations of real people. In Part Two of this book I will introduce and explore a particular conception of simple living termed "graceful simplicity." Graceful simplicity is distinguished in part by the centrality it gives to aesthetic values. To translate this into the present concerns, is to ask about beauty and money -- how much money do we need in order that there be beauty in our lives? Assuming that in addition to the core needs discussed, there is in some sense a need for beauty, to what extent is that need fulfilled, and what has happened over time to the amount of money required to satisfy it?

             This is a much more difficult area to ponder than core needs for food or clothing.  For instance, are we talking about beautiful homes with beautiful furnishings, or are we talking about access to beautiful music and art? Or are we talking about living in a beautiful city or having access to the beauties of nature? Or all of these?  

             A few reflections on the place of beauty within the economics of graceful simplicity may be helpful:

            - Beauty must not be thought of as residing solely or even primarily within things. There is the beauty that is the architecture of time; it requires slowing down and doing things right, and it may call for less income and more time, rather than the reverse.

            - A life of graceful simplicity does not require that our homes be museums; it does not require that every artifact of daily use be striking. At the same time, from the point of view of gracefulness, a life that is aesthetically impoverished is abhorrent.

             - One dimension of graceful living is the awakening of aesthetic appreciation, and with that will come a selectivity that often, without any additional cost, results in the attainment of things of beauty. Anyone who has wandered through flea markets and garage sales and thrifts shops knows that there are great things to be found -- beautiful objects, not seen, not desired, not valued by others.

             - Things of beauty exercise a special power, they radiate within their space, and as they draw us into their orbit they close our consciousness to that which is outside. Thus, it is not necessary that all our possessions, be beautiful, only that some things are.

             - One of the sources, inexpensive sources, of beauty is our own creative ability. In part this is a matter of tapping into our own latent abilities to take a beautiful photograph, to sculpt, to draw, to play an instrument. These to some extent involve mastery of technique -- but within the household, we are constantly engaged with the issue of design and arrangement -- whether it be the utensils, the tools, the furniture, the towels -- what we find in every space, is that beauty resides not just in the objects, but in how they are arranged with one another. Perhaps this is better understood by thinking about marketplaces. If one has travelled in Third World countries and gone into marketplaces, sometimes one is stopped short by a staggeringly beautiful display, formed with fifty loaves of bread, or with several kilos of nuts, or with fifteen cooking pans, or with a few dozen shirts.

             - The beauty in our private spaces, inside our homes, is accessible only to ourselves and our friends. But perhaps of more significance is the aesthetic quality of public space, be it the architecture of houses, yards and gardens, the pavement of the streets, the shops, the trees, the skyline, or access to the sunset. In economists' terms these are public goods, in the sense that the enjoyment of them by one person does not diminish their availability to others. They are not, in the ordinary sense, consumed.

             An enormous part of the need for beauty in our lives can be supplied through the aesthetic quality of the outside space. When one lives in a beautiful city, or when one lives in a beautiful natural environment -- be it the shore, the mountains, a river -- there is an aesthetic abundance that surrounds us, a wealth that we have, merely in virtue of being there rather than somewhere else.

             It is the creation and destruction of this public beauty, whether manmade or natural, that is most significant. No fortune within the home can compensate for not being able to walk outside, for not being able to bear to look outside, for having nothing interesting to see when walking to the store. On the otherhand, it is remarkable how little we feel we need, when we are in a beautiful place. Indeed, rather than retreating to our private spaces, we rush to be outside. How much of our expenditures on our homes, then, represents this failure, this aesthetic inadequacy of public space?

             What has happened over time? Does it take more or less money to satisfy our need for beauty? It is hard to draw up an accurate balance sheet. There are some areas, such as music in which there really have been enormous technological advances -- today at relatively little cost, one can hear, at very high quality, the world's best music played by the best musicians.

             But this it seems to me is more the exception.

 - The "efficiency" of supermarkets, malls, and now ware-house shopping has not only driven out the small shop, but in doing so has robbed us of the chance to walk along an interesting street or to have a friendship with a local shopkeeper.

 - Chain stores rather than individual proprietors have driven out the individual display, the originality and idiosyncrasy that offers opportunities for surprise and discovery.

- Fear of crime has deprived many of us of access to the beauty of the moon and stars; it has made us afraid to take a solitary walk, or run, in the park.

 - Much of our urban world is unremittingly ugly, and suburbanization has made it extremely hard to even arrive in the countryside.

 - Even the possibility of aesthetic delight in our food has suffered. A good bakery, a fine tomato, a nectarine that explodes with sweetness -- these are hard to find, or if we know where to go, running from one special store to another, we pay extra, in time and money, for what was once an inherent part of a loaf of bread and a piece of fruit.

             For many the need for beauty is unfulfilled. For the few that can satisfy it, it is done at very high cost; living in much more expensive cities and neighborhoods; taking vacations to other places that are beautiful, to Paris, to Martha's Vineyard, to Hawaii or Greece. Such escape is very expensive. Necessarily these can only be solutions for a few; the presence of many itself will destroy the aesthetic, and at any rate, it is an escape not a way of life.

             We pay a complex price for our modern world. The world we have lost was in many ways more interesting, more diverse, and often more beautiful than the world we have created. To be aware of these differences only becomes sentimentality if we make the leap to a general idealization of the past. But it is a kind of blindness, if our fear of being accused of sentimentality prevents us from seeing what has been lost.

            Consider just one example: pavement. Goodness knows there are many arguments for pavement. And once one gets started paving things over, there are powerful arguments for asphalt over cobblestones. Yet if one has a chance to walk down an unpaved road, there is no telling what one will find. Perhaps an interesting stone, perhaps a mysterious animal hole that was not there last week, perhaps the erosion caused by last night's storm. What dirt roads lack is "all-the-sameness" and with "all-the-sameness" comes predictability, and predictability makes it easier to go fast. So if you're in the business of getting from place to place, then asphalt is the way to go. But if you're not quite sure of the point of the destination, and not quite sure of the point of being there sooner rather than later,  then pavement is the enemy, and paving over the world is madness.

             There have been tradeoffs, and sometimes we made them quite poorly. This is especially true with things of beauty, because we lack the language for asserting its value. Thus, we sacrificed too much.  We compensate for this aesthetic impoverishment with diverse consumption expenditures, but the road towards a simpler life is one that allows us to regain the aesthetics of public space.

                                                             ****

             More generally we need societies in which the level of NRI is low, or to put it differently, a society in which the efficiency of need satisfaction per unit of income is high. It is the background efficiency of the society that determines how much money the individual household needs.

             In the Third World context the rationale for great social efficiency is simple and powerful -- it allows the satisfaction of basic needs at low levels of income. Thus, some live who would otherwise die. But we may also seek a society with low levels of NRI for a different kind of reason: because it facilitates a distinctly valuable form of life.

             In a high productivity society, if the amount of money a family needs to meet its core economic needs is rather modest, this opens the possibility of simple living. First it allows people to put in less time on the job. Thus, in a socially efficient society, a two career family might be able to meet core needs with two twenty hour jobs rather than with two forty hour jobs. This would be a blessing. It would enable us to restore some peace and harmony to our hectic, harried existence.

             Second, a society with low levels of NRI is one in which we are largely freed from the economic realm. If our needs are met with limited income, we are freed from the money side of life. In chosing jobs we can focus more fully on the non-pecuniary aspects of a good job; if needs are met we can afford to experiment, to make changes in mid-career, to rethink a life plan, to re-educate, to take a bold plunge towards that thing we always wanted to do.

             And if needs can be met at low levels of NRI, then there is less to be anxious about if we suffer a drop in the income stream, if we lose our jobs, or if we walk away from producing or selling goods and services that do not conform to our values.

             In a nineteenth-century essay on Gracefulness, Herbert Spencer, searching for a definition of gracefulness,  reached the conclusion that any action "is most gracefully achieved when achieved through the least expenditure of force . . . .[that] grace, as applied to motion, describes motion that is effected with an economy of muscular powers."

  Using that definitional approach, we might say that an economic system operates most gracefully when it satisfies the needs of the population with the least expenditure of income. The social efficiency of money, the ratio of need satisfaction to income is a measure of such gracefulness, and it tells us the extent to which a society makes simple living feasible. When it is high, then with modest incomes needs can be met; when it is low, needs can only be met if income is high.

             In short, a high productivity society with low levels of need required income is a society that makes possible lives that are less pressured, more centered on friends and family and on activities of inherent value and fuller dignity. How we might begin this transition is the subject of the next chapter: The Politics of Simplicity.

Money: Reducing the level of Need Required Income (NRI)

 

            I have spoken about the cost of meeting core economic needs, but fundamentally the issue is not the monetary costs, but time costs. Simple living is living that is rich in time, this in turn requires that the time spent on purely instrumental activities (e.g. work that is not inherently fulfilling) undertaken to meet core needs must not be excessive. Ideally, a graceful life is completely free from such necessity, but such a goal is both largely out of reach and itself goes beyond what is required.

            From the point of view of the consumer, the amount of time that must be devoted to earning enough to meet core needs depends both on one's wage rate and the total cost of meeting those needs. Dividing the total cost of meeting core needs by the wage rate identifies the required labor time (e.g. $50,000 divided by $10/hour equals 5000 hours required for meeting needs, divided by $50/hour equals 1000 hours of required time).

             Since for the economy as a whole, changes in real wage rates are generally reflective of productivity, the underlying variables are the cost of meeting core needs and changes in labor productivity. If the real cost of satisfying needs remains fixed, need required labor time will decline as productivity increases, provided that productivity growth is taken in the form of higher wages. But as noted earlier, whenever there is productivity growth, a society has a choice. Should the benefits of productivity growth be taken in the form of higher incomes or in the form of expanded leisure? Yet without really deciding, without even recognizing that this is a fundamental decision for us to make, our overall system tends towards income expansion rather than leisure expansion. A politics of simplicity seeks to make this a matter of deliberate political decision. And substantively, it comes down strongly on the side of increasing leisure.

             If we are successful in using productivity increases to reduce labor time, then income remains fixed. If needs are already satisfied then this is not a great problem, but I argued in the previous chapter that for many core needs are unsatisfied and that for many it is a struggle to makes ends meet. How then does a politics of simplicity respond to the financial pressure of the ordinary household?

             Though it remains critical for people at the bottom of the income spectrum, as a general objective, the politics of simplicity looks towards increased social efficiency rather than higher wages, as the means to better satisfy core needs.   Why does it cost so much to meet core needs? And what can be done about it?

             As we saw in the previous chapter, there is no simple story with respect to such costs. In some areas they have been stable, in other areas they have increased enormously, far faster than income growth.

              Looking backwards two areas stand out as problems that have thwarted movement towards simple living: housing costs and transportation costs. Together these two occupy roughly 50% of the typical household budget. Given that for most Americans the needs for food and clothing are relatively well satisfied at historically low percentages of personal income, 12% and 5% respectively, had we managed to hold housing and transportation costs steady, we would have made substantial progress in opening up the possibility of simple living for moderate income families.

             What happened with transportation is particularly unfortunate, because it could have been avoided had there been clarity with respect to the appropriate goals of transportation policy, for instance, had it been a goal of national policy to not evolve into an intensely automobile dependent society. Instead, over the last half century, as first one car and then two cars became a necessity for most families, the percentage of household expenditures for transportation has more than doubled. Today, as we have seen, the average husband and wife  consumer unit (with or without children) spends almost $8,000 annually on transportation, roughly one fifth of total spending. Put in different terms, we might say, that of the five days we work, one day is for transportation expenses. That is a tremendous price to pay in terms of wedding individuals to a work-and-spend cycle, a tremendous price to pay for the absence of good public transport and the collapse of the urban environment.

             A politics of simplicity would make the lowering of the amount of money required to meet transportation costs a central objective. This might involve policies in many sectors, be they public transportation, housing development or urban revitalization. Central to this is avoiding or overcoming automobile dependency, and it is worth a serious effort to ascertain the extent to which this might be reversed.  But assuming that two-car dependency cannot be reversed, it would be worth an effort to see if it could be made significantly less costly.

             We should seek the emergence of a new kind of automobile. It would be one deliberately designed for the simple life. It would be safe, low cost, fuel efficient, and capable of being repaired by anyone handy with tools. It would be intended to last indefinitely, with each long-lasting component capable of being replaced, and with parts permanently available. This is not outside the realm of the technologically possible, and there are multiple policy tools government could use to encourage its development. Indeed, many transportation experts believe that the next generation of cars will be vastly more fuel efficient, capable of attaining eighty or one hundred miles to the gallon. With double or tripled fuel efficiency, doubled life spans, and less costly repairs, a significant reduction in transportation costs is possible.

             Also in the transportation area we might require the kind of labelling that we now have on foods, but instead of information on cholesterol and fat content, we would require information on "automobile liberation day" -- that day of the year on which we stop working merely to pay for the car. To do this one would factor in for each model its cost, fuel efficiency, expected repair costs and longevity. Then using the median wage level, one would calculate how many hours and days of work are just to pay for the car. For instance, if auto-related costs for a particular model account for 15% of median income, auto-liberation day would not be until March 1st -- whereas with the simple living automobile, auto-liberation day might arrive on January 25th. Thus, we might at least become better informed consumers when we make our transportation purchases.

             Even more fundamental than the transportation sector are the problems we face with respect to housing. Here the goal is to facilitate the simple life, making it possible for people to have decent housing with modest incomes. The housing objective should not be understood in purely physical terms, but in terms of safe, perhaps even beautiful neighborhoods with good schools. Of course, the topics of housings, crime and schools are standard issues on any political outlook. A politics of simple living brings to these familiar areas of policy interest a fuller perception of the problem and a new criterion for solutions.

             At this stage a politics of simplicity is not about answers, so much as it is about how to define problems, about opening up new perspectives on old problems, and seeing new meanings in long standing debates. One of the hard lessons of the last several decades, is that solutions to public problems do not come easily. 

             Rather than being dogmatic about solutions, we should be experimental. John Dewey once referred to the individual states as "48 laboratories." That's not a bad way of thinking. We do not yet know how to solve the housing-crime-schools matrix of unmet social need in this country. We do know that when each of us tries to solve it by earning enough to escape from it, two things occur. First, we are wedding ourselves to income levels and life styles that squeeze out the possibilities of a simpler life. And second, we are finding solutions that work for the few, but cannot work for all. We can't all escape from ourselves.

             Thus, a politics-of-simplicity approach to the housing-crime-schools problem, rather than facilitating upper middle class escape, (e.g. through tax breaks for higher housing purchases, or private schools) would emphasize the mobilization of energy and resources to transform the neighborhoods we presently live in. An easy first step is beautification: flowers, trees, picking up trash, painting and polishing. Part of what a politics of simplicity brings to such problems is a perspective that redefines what's at stake -- these are not discrete "issues" or "social problems" -- rather these are the central obstacles that block the path to simpler, more coherent and more vigorous lives.

The Monetary Illusion

 

If money is not the enemy, if money sometimes helps us attain a safer second-best or third-best or fourth-best life, it must be acknowledged that money does contribute to our confusion. Part of the mystery of why we go so wrong in life lies in the “illusion of money,” by which I mean the illusion that the price of things tells us much about their true value.

       What is fascinating about money is that we all know that it does not offer a meaningful picture of genuine wealth. For instance, is it not indisputable that much of what is most important to us—our children, our reputation, the love of another—has no price. This is a commonplace, known to all at the first instant of reflection. Yet, the moment we get up from the easy chair, we seem to set aside our reflections. Or perhaps, even while sustain­ing them, we cannot break away from thinking about wealth in monetary terms. We use money to measure both the income and the wealth of indi­viduals and society. We use monetary measures to consider how income and wealth are distributed, and we use it to make comparisons with respect to standards of living—between different individuals, or between countries, or between two points in time—whether in our own life, or that of society as a whole.

       We suffer from at least two kinds of blindness. First, we tend to measure the value of things in terms of their price; and second, we tend not to see the value of things that have no price. Let us consider these in turn.

 

 

 

The Difference Between Price and Value

 

 

Economists long ago pondered what initially seemed paradoxical, that some of the most valuable commodities, such as air and water, have little monetary value, while others, such as diamonds, are worth a great deal. In struggling with this anomaly, the distinction was made between exchange value and use value. Exchange value means the value that something has in virtue of its being exchangeable for some other item of value. We make these exchanges in the market, and in market economies we exchange labor and commodities for money, and money for commodities. Since money is the common element into which things are exchanged, exchange value can be measured by the amount of money that something exchanges for. The term we give to this is “price.” When people inquire about the price of an item, they are asking, “How much money does one need to exchange in order to get it?” As economists came to greater clarity about these matters, explaining and predicting the prices of commodities emerged as a central task of economics.

       Use value, on the other hand, was seen to mean the actual contribution to human welfare that the commodity makes. Everyone realized that when diamonds are compared to water, water is low in exchange value and high in use value, whereas diamonds were relatively low in use value but high in exchange value.

       For a time, it was a challenge to economic theory to explain how this could be the case. Ultimately, the explanation was found in understanding that the price a commodity exchanges for is determined not by the importance of the commodity as a whole (e.g., water) but by its importance on the margin (e.g., one more gallon of water). Further, what was important on the margin was the cost of supplying one more unit, as well as the value to the purchaser of having one more unit.

       Thus (assume that water is the only liquid), while one might exchange most of one's possessions for a gallon of water if none were available at all, one would give very little for an additional gallon if one already had plenty. Similarly, since an additional gallon can be brought to the market at very lit­tle cost, one need pay only a small price to induce the sale of an extra gallon. Whereas, if we reached a point at which bringing the extra gallon to market was very expensive (although water as a whole may remain inexpensive to provide), unless the price of water was at that high price, the last ga1lon would not be brought to market; and the same for the next to last and so forth. So, in order for any quantity of water to come to the market, its price must rise to the cost of supplying the last gallon. Thus, despite its almost infi­nite use value, water exchanges for little because it is abundant (we have lim­ited desire for more) and because more can be obtained rather inexpensively.

       What is sketched above is the solution that economists in the nineteenth century—the so-called marginalists, such as Alfred Marshall— found to the seeming paradox that things of great value (in use) could have little value (in exchange). But what is most interesting here is this: first, both before and after the paradox was explained, no one was in doubt as to the phenomenon—­that there is no fixed correspondence between the market price and use value. And, second, explaining the paradox made no difference. We still contin­ued to view the prices of things as adequate measures of their value, even though we knew they were not. Such is the hypnotic quality of money.

       Suppose then that there are two people, and that they are in possession of exactly the same items, except that the second person has two of every item, whereas the first has only one. Thus, the second person has two houses, two cars, two blue coats, two refrigerators full of food, and so forth. The first per­son has only one house, one car, one blue coat, and one full refrigerator.

       Insofar as we are measuring the extent of a person's assets by summing up the prices paid for the various items (or the price he could get if he sold them), the second person has twice the wealth of the first person. Having no doubt as to the difference between use value and exchange value, we know that this is nonsense. Moreover, if rather than two houses the person had a house twice as big, and rather than two cars, a car twice as long, it should be apparent to us that he still doesn't have twice the wealth of the first person. We know it is nonsense to believe that he does, yet we do so nonetheless.

       The extent to which we suffer from such illusions is remarkable. It reflects something very deep about our culture, about how thoroughly our vision of things has been molded by markets and the exchanges that occur within them, and about how much of our life activity is organized around bringing things to market and bringing things back from market—most centrally, bringing ourselves (our labor, our skills) to market and bringing back home, in exchange, money or commodities.

       Permanently dispelling the idea that the price you pay for something reflects its value is almost impossible. Nonetheless, it may help to reflect on the following:

 

• While the price of the physical necessities is often low and in some cases zero, their value is almost infinite. If they were in short supply, a billionaire would pay almost all he had for the food and water that you consume. Yet with these items of near infinite worth, having more than is necessary, or having fancy versions, is worth little more than having that which meets our needs.
• With respect to many of the commodities that we have, they would in fact be fantastically valuable (in monetary terms), if it weren't the case that they can be produced cheaply. Thus, con­sider your old car. Perhaps it is worth $2,000—but if, in fact, cars could not be made cheaply, or not made at all, your old car would be worth tens of thousands. If it were the only car, it would be worth millions. The same for your camera or your mirror or a pair of scissors, or a pencil or a piece of paper. Under some cir­cumstances, these could be the most sought after, most amazing, most valuable (in monetary terms) items in the world.
• Whenever we buy something, we are doing so because we have judged that the thing is worth more to us than the price that is asked for it. That's the whole point of exchanging the money for the item. Sometimes this gap is enormous, and not merely with respect to necessities. Consider that it may only cost you $50 to buy a dog that you would not sell for thousands. What was the value of the $1 of painkiller that relieved the worst headache you ever had? How much was the best novel you ever read worth? The bicycle you had for ten years as a child—how did its value com­pare to the $50 paid for it?

 

 

The Value of Things That Typically Have No Price

 

In the 1960s and 1970s the women's movement called attention to a certain blindness with respect to the value of women's labor in the home. The basic problem was that neither the existence of women's labor nor its contribution was recognized, neither within the family nor within the larger society. In response an effort was made to “price out” women's labor at home, to point out what it would cost to hire someone to perform all these tasks. To move in this direction, to focus on monetary equivalents in order to make us appre­ciative of value, is both wrongheaded and quite understandable. It is wrong­headed because the price we might have to pay for the labor is not a good measure of its value; and it is understandable because being blind to all else but monetary terms, what other language can we understand?

       Unfortunately, neither pointing out the monetary illusions we suffer from, nor placing monetary values on that which is not monetized, seems to make a great deal of difference. We are so thoroughly embedded in our ways of seeing that probably nothing short of being reborn in a totally differ­ent culture would really free us from the hold that money exercises upon our minds.

       Still, we must try.                                                                 

       Consider a familiar item without a price, the human body. What is it worth? Well, if we are talking about a dead body, then perhaps very little. Medical schools, as a rule, don't have to pay for the cadavers they teach from; they are donated free of charge.

       But this is not our question. Our question is not about the value of an extra body, but rather about the value of one's own body. We are not really con­cerned with market prices, since those reflect only: the supply and demand of that which is actually brought to market. What we really are interested in is the value of one's own body to the person himself.

       Were it possible, what would someone pay to retain one's body, or perhaps to replace it? That, of course, depends on its condition and the condition of the replacement. Would an eighty-five-year-old billionaire with a life expectancy of five years pay a billion dollars to exchange bodies with some­one who had fifty years to live as opposed to five? How many twenty-five ­year-olds with healthy bodies would rather have a billion dollars plus an eighty-five-year-old body? No doubt some, but not most people. I'd expect most people would not, for virtually any amount, exchange their bodies for significantly older, significantly less healthy bodies. I would imagine that most eighty-five-year-old billionaires would give virtually all that they own to be able to trade for a young, healthy body. Our body—our thinking, feel­ing, living body—is our natural wealth. It is our great property. It is from this property that our flow of experience emerges. It is this that enables us to enjoy all we enjoy, to feel all we feel. It is this that enables us to do and to be.

       In this wealth, with the exception of people with illnesses, we all start out relatively equal. Each of us is given a gift that is worth billions. However, we are cursed at the same time; it is a worth that starts to dissipate the moment it arrives. It flows away from us at a steady rate, like a hole in the bank account—365 days are lost every year. There are some things we can do to make it last a bit longer, but one way or another, we end our lives com­pletely broke.

       One of the reasons that very few people see things this way is the simple fact that there is no technology for exchanging bodies. Medical science can, however, replace body parts, even vital ones, but not entire bodies. Even with respect to vital body parts, markets are largely undeveloped or underground—one cannot go out and buy a young heart.

       But we are likely not far from technologies that will allow us to exchange full bodies. Let us say that we can do this, retaining perhaps enough of the brain so as to ensure continuity of memory and identity. Suppose then that body swaps between consenting adults become a real possibility. Under those conditions I expect that we would all be greatly more aware of the funda­mental equality of our present situation, as well as, ironically, of the fun­damental inequality; some will be buyers of sound bodies, and others will be sellers. Of course having (or occupying) a living body is not all much of a muchness—its, value can vary widely. Certainly a person facing only pro­longed captivity and torture might value his living body less highly than otherwise. There are always deeply troubled, saddened, and lonely persons for whom being alive has lost all value.

       Like all wealth, the wealth we have in our living body represents only the capability of what is good, in itself. Merely being alive is never sufficient for valued living. This wealth in our body is however necessary for any valued human functioning and experience. It is this dependence of all good experi­ences upon having a living body that imparts tremendous derivative value on whatever is itself necessary to sustain the life and health of that body. Thus, as noted, food, and water, and air, taken in the first increments without which life is not possible, are of extraordinary value to the individual, how­ever little they may cost.

       One implication, however, of recognizing the tremendous value of small amounts of life-sustaining necessities, and of the great wealth that we all have in our bodies, is that it seems to call into question the extent of the rela­tive differences in income and wealth of the rich and the poor. If the mar­ginal value of money declines rather rapidly, then the actual value of the goods possessed by the poor is substantially closer to that of those possessed by the rich than a comparison of market costs would indicate. (The use value of a liter of tap water that costs less than a penny may not be so vastly differ­ent than that of a liter of fine wine that cost 20,000 times as much; and that of a $50 bicycle may not be vastly different from that of a $30,000 car.) While this conclusion initially may be disconcerting, it takes on a different aspect when we realize that the transition we seek is not from poverty to wealth, but from poverty to simple living.

 

When Does Money Really Matter?

 

One clear circumstance where the income of the poor and the income of the rich differ enormously in value is when their income differences translate into differences in years of life. Clearly this is true in very poor countries where the life expectancy at birth of the rich and the poor is enormously dif­ferent. The poor may be exposed to infant mortality rates of 1 in 5 while the rich might face rates of 1 in 100. In terms of life experience, that means that if you are poor, there is a good chance that one of your babies will die, while this is a rare tragedy if you are rich.

       Consider the following table, which shows the relationship between per capita income and life expectancy for various countries in the world.

 

Table 8.1

   Country 1994 Per Capita                                  Life Expectancy

                                     GDP (PPP$)                            at Birth

       Luxembourg                   34,155                                  75.9

United States                        26,397                             76.2

Japan                               21,581                                  79.8

Canada                             21,459                                  79.0

Denmark                         21,341                                  75.2

France                              20,510                                  78.7

Australia                          19,285                                  78.1

Finland                            17,417                                  76.3

Ireland                             16,061                                  76.3

Israel                                16,023                                  77.5

Spain                                14,324                                  77.6

Mauritius                         13,172                                  70.7

Portugal                           12,326                                  74.6

Korea S.                               10,656                             71.5

Chile                                 9,129                                75.1

Mexico                             7,384                                72.0

Costa Rico                         5,919                                76.6

Brazil                                5,362                                66.4

Turkey                              5,193                                68.4

Poland                              5,002                                71.2

Jordan                               4,187                                68.5

Egypt                                3,846                                64.3

 

 

Table 8.1 (cont.)

   Country                   1994 Per Capita                Life Expectancy

                                      GDP (PPP$)                         at Birth

Morocco                             3,681                                65.3

Peru                                   3,645                                67.4

Congo                                2,410                                51.3

Senegal                              1,596                                49.9

Kenya                                1,404                                53.6

India                                  1,348                                61.3

Nepal                                 1,137                                55.3

Haiti                                       896                            54.4

Niger                                      787                            47.1

Chad                                      700                            47.0

Sierra Leone                          643                            33.6

Ethiopia                                 427                            48.2

 

Source: Human Development Report, 1997, United Nations Development Program.¹

 

The table suggests a few generalizations:

 

• Income matters. People in countries with higher average incomes tend to live longer.
• Income isn't all that matters. There are some countries with modest income levels, such as Costa Rica, in which people live as long as in the United States, although incomes are less than one-quarter of our level.
• Income level seems to matter less and less as income rises. Thus, comparing countries with less than $1,000 per capita income with those at about $5,000, there is a life expectancy gap of at least fif­teen years. But between countries at the $5,000 level (excluding Costa Rica) and those at the $10,000 level, the gap is around nine years, and comparing those at the $10,000 with those at the $15,000 level, the gap is only around four years. Between those at the $15,000 level and those at $20,000 it is approximately two years. Above the $20,000 level there seems hardly any relationship at all between average income and life expectancy.

 

       These, of course, are numbers for countries as a whole. They do not say anything about the differences within the country. Thus, we must not assume that for individuals within a country, higher income translates into longer life up to the $20,000 per year level, but no further. Unfortunately, data on the relationship between income and life expectancy are not abun­dant. One study that was done for Canada compared the life expectancy at birth of those in the top one-fifth of the income spectrum with those in the bottom one-fifth. It found that in 1986 the life expectancy difference was 5.6 years for men and 1.8 years for women.² Income inequality in Canada is less than in the United States, and access to health care is greater. Thus, one would expect to see a somewhat bigger gap for the United States. One study of mortality in the United States for the period 1979-1985 concluded that, between the highest and lowest income groups, there was a difference for white men of about 10 years and for white women of 4.3 years.³ For all the races together, these differences would be greater. This general picture is supported by a recent study that compares life expectancy of Americans, depending on what county they live in within the United States. It found a gap of about fifteen years, ranging from a low of about sixty-five years to a high of about eighty years.⁴ This gap can at least be partially explained by differences in income, whether understood in its bearing on the quality of medical care available to low-income people or on the levels of homicide in the neighborhoods low-income people can afford.

       On the other hand, one should not jump to the conclusion that the only reason for the gap is that the things money can buy result in higher life expectancy. Part of the explanation for the gap may lie in lifestyle choices, such as smoking, which is more prevalent at lower income levels. In part people with certain problems (e.g., self-hatred) may be both destroying their health and destroying their careers. Sometimes the link between income and health emerges not because money can sustain health, but because people who have health problems (for whatever reason) can't earn much money, sometimes being unable to work at all. Thus, in assessing the contribution that having a higher income contributes to life expectancy, these differences in life expectancy should be viewed as somewhat overstated upper limits to the importance of income. The actual significance of higher income is no doubt less, though still quite real. 

 

Figure 8.1: Estimate of How Money Matters in the United in 1999

 

 

       In relating household income to life expectancy within countries, we can expect to find a structure similar to that found between countries: income matters, income is not all that matters, and there is a declining marginal benefit in life expectancy associated with each increment of income.

       While we don’t have precise figures, we can develop an informed picture of what the relationship looks like for the United States, again remembering that not all of the correlation is due to the effect that higher income has on health.

       There is a dear advantage to being born into a higher-income family. Measured in terms of life expectancy, this value is of diminishing significance as income levels rise. I would conjecture that it reaches zero somewhere around family incomes of $100,000, but is quite small well before that. This, of course, is a guestimate, but it seems plausible to me.

       That there is a declining marginal effect of income on life expectancy must be true. Thus, assume that at levels of family income of $10,000, each increment of $1,000 resulted in a gain in life expectancy of 1 year, and that at the $10,000 level life expectancy at birth was 65 years. If the incremental value did not decline, then at the $60,000 level of annual income life expectancy would be 50 years greater or 115 years long, and someone with $1,01,000 in annual family income would be living until they were 1,065 years old. Because we know that the effect of income on life span has reached approximately zero somewhere below life spans of 100, we know that the actual relationship can't look radically different than my guestimate.

       Whatever the exact relationship, it should not be viewed as fixed for all time. It might be that new technologies will emerge such that vast incomes will enable, for a select few, life spans of 100 years or 120 years. Under those circumstances, the marginal value of money at very high income levels would become extraordinarily high. One can go further and imagine a world in which very rich people simply don't die or suffer ill health at all because new, very expensive technologies keep emerging to sustain them. The point of such speculations is that it helps to remind us of what it would be like if money really did continue to matter at very high levels. In the present world, the marginal value of money in yielding a longer life rapidly declines toward zero as we reach high levels of household income.

       One way of responding to this recognition that beyond a certain point having more money doesn't significantly change life expectancy is to say, “Well that's a reasonable level to aspire to, and beyond that, perhaps it hardly pays to have more.” From the point of view of simple living, however, this might prove a disquieting conclusion-depending on what that “zero impact” level is. It is quite different if money stops contributing to a longer life span at $20,000 in family income than if it stops being useful at $100,000 or $200,000. Moreover, we know from the county-level studies that there are pretty big differences (ten to fifteen years of life) depending on where in the United States you live.

       But as stated earlier, the case for simple living does not depend upon showing that money makes no difference, any more than it depends on showing that consumption makes no difference in responding to complex human needs. Rather, the case for simple living is that high income is not necessary, either to live well or to live long. Thus, from the point of view of simple living, the conclusion is twofold: first, beyond a certain level (what­ever that is), having more money yields little benefit; and second, if one lives properly, one can attain those benefits at much lower levels of income.

       Here, what is important is the existence of the examples of countries like Costa Rica where, with an annul average income of about $5,000, people live as long as in the United States. As was noted above, in Canada, money seems to matter less when it comes to its contribution to life expectancy. We can have a society in which money stops making a contribution to longer life spans at very low levels of income. Such a society facilitates simple living, and is one of the objectives of a politics of simplicity.

 

 

The Value of Unpriced Personal Services

 

Beyond having a healthy body and a long life expectancy, in what else does human wealth reside? As we have seen, the Greek philosopher Epicurus identified friendship as that which was most important to human happiness. In this he was right. Clearly it is our relationships with other people that truly matter; having a loved and loving life partner, having good friends, having loved and loving children and relatives. We do not use the word “property” in these cases, nor do we speak of ownership. Yet we do some times speak of our friends and loved ones as our true wealth, or more commonly as our treasures or treasured ones.

       When we own something, we have certain specific property rights with respect to it: a right to use it as we please; a right to exchange it for something else; a right to sell it; a right to whatever of value emerges from it; a right to restrict the access of others to it; a right to give it away; a right to destroy it. These property rights are what constitute economic ownership.

       When it comes to other people, we have no such rights. Yet even with respect to physical property, such rights themselves confer little of economic value unless they can in fact be exercised. Where there is no expectation that such rights can be exercised, ownership is empty and, in market terms, will yield nothing. It is like being told that you own a million shares of stock in a gold mine, but no one will ever be allowed to mine the gold. The shares are worthless. Ultimately, what gives economic value to the things we own is the belief or expectation that such ownership can be transferred into a flow of things of value: in the first instance into a flow of income (through sale, rent, investment), and then, secondarily, into a flow of valued goods and services through the expenditure of that income. If not the second assumption, then the flow of monetary income is itself without economic value. Thus, it is the potential for transformation into a flow of valued goods and services that gives economic value to what we own.

       How then are our human treasures, our very most valued relationships, related to goods and services? To goods, hardly at all. But what we get from each other, when we have the right others is a unique flow of services. Con­sider, just three of the many things that the other, beloved and true, might provide:

 

• partner: someone with whom you can act in concert, not just doing things together but having a joint project;
• companion: someone with whom one can share the events of the day, someone who listens; who responds, who understands, who helps you see things more, clearly and more fully;
• affection: someone who has genuine concern, someone who thinks of you, who does things that make you feel valued, who helps you see your own worth.

 

       The illusion of money is such that we self-blind ourselves toward these unpriced personal services, just as we do with unpaid household labor. How are we to move out of our restricted way of seeing economic life? How can we find human touchstones for thinking about political economy? How can we relate these “services” that friends and loved ones provide to the ques­tions of wealth and income? A starting point is to rethink the notion of personal services and home production.

 

 

Personal Services and Home Production

 

It has long been recognized that in nonmarket economies much of what is produced is never brought to market, but is intended for home consumption and thus falls outside normal income accounting. Thus, in some Third World countries one might find, as was once the case in the United States, that 70 percent or 80 percent of the population lives on small land holdings, and that most of what they produce is used by the family itself. Thus, a very substantial portion of their income comes not in a monetized form, but rather in the goods and services directly produced.

       In order to develop a more adequate picture of consumption and income and either to allow comparisons with more marketized economies or to make historical comparisons where the degree of marketization has changed, economists have sought ways of placing appropriate monetarized value (i.e., exchange value, price) on these outputs of home production. When the item in question is a good that is itself subject to market transactions (e.g., a kilo of rice, a bushel of wheat), or when it is a clear substitute for a market good, then it is easy enough to simply adjust the income and consumption figures for home production/consumption by using these market prices.

       When no market price exists, an effort sometimes is made to attempt an estimate of what such items might bring if brought to market, or alterna­tively to estimate what price the family might have to be offered so that they would place the item in question on the market.

       This all makes good sense. For most purposes our interest in income or consumption is about something more basic than the amount of money earned or spent by the household, and we can more adequately evaluate the household situation by making these adjustments for nonmarketed goods and services.

       What has not been generally recognized, however, is just how wide such a principle of admission truly is. For instance, if we have agreed, as I think makes sense, that the unpaid household labor and services of women (whether as Third World farmers or in rich country homes) are both part of the income of the household and part of what it consumes, then what basis is there for not similarly treating the very same services when members of the household provide them for themselves? Thus, if it is part of the household income when the homemaker cleans five rooms, it is similarly part of house­hold income if her husband cleans his own room, or cooks a meal for him­self. In short the entire array of household tasks that encompass housework, no matter who does them, are part of the home production of the unit, and part of what must enter into a full notion of economic well-being.

       But this only scratches the surface. When we think of housework we think of those activities that are somewhat arduous and often unpleasant. But this is not a defining characterization of work or of income-producing activities. Some people love their jobs; productive activity can be activity that would be done in the absence of external reward. Moreover, in wealthy economies much of our consumption expenditures are for leisure time activi­ties. In one society a person goes out to work, earns some money, and then provides to the family a TV for their evening entertainment, indirectly pay­ing others for a multitude of entertainment services; in another society an elder mesmerizes the children with ancient tales told around a campfire. This, too, is a contribution to family income. Once we accept the idea that goods and services produced or performed at home which substitute for market goods and services are part of family income and consumption, the range of activities that can be so viewed is wide indeed.

       Often when economists attempt to adjust income numbers for home production they limit themselves to those goods and services that have a clear market substitute. But this is a matter of convenience, not because having a market substitute is a necessary condition for having economic value. Often, the absence of a clear marketplace substitute for home activities, rather than impugning the value of the home activity, is an indication of the inability of the market to actually generate a viable substitute. The most graphic examples of this occur in the area of human relationships (e.g., spending time with friends). When the market tries to provide substitutes (e.g., escort services, prostitution), they are poor imitations of the real thing, yet their prices are often very high. The high prices paid reflect the high value placed by consumers on the real thing. And of those things for which it is near impossible for the market to provide a substitute (e.g., things that have value only when provided free of monetary motivation), one is dealing with things of the greatest value.

       Thus, the idea that a marketplace substitute is necessary to show that a nonmarketplace activity is of value has things backward. The economic history is typically that marketplace items take on their value by being substi­tutes (generally imperfect) for what is produced or done for self or others outside the market. Most of what is truly valuable are personal services, things that people do for each other or for themselves. We are drawn into market economies because of their vastly greater efficiency, even when it means that the services and, to some extent, the goods are less meaningful. Those areas that are of greatest value, or where the personal service relation­ships are unique, are typically areas in which market provision is so inade­quate that it is not undertaken at all.

       Consider then the differences between these two lists of personal services. In the first what most people seek (and need) is the engagement of a particular person who is of most importance to us:

 

• intimate conversation
• sex
• dinner with the family
• sitting on your father's knee
• hearing what happened with your daughter at school today
• having a holiday dinner
• watching TV together
• holding hands
• having a game of catch with your son
• playing chess with an old friend

 

       Most of what the very wealthy hire household workers to do does not fall into these categories. Rather, it is typically the case that others are hired when the personal service has some clear output that is the actual objective of importance, not the doing itself by a particular person. Though people differ, rich people hire others to do things such as these:

 

• cleaning the house
• painting the house
• mowing the lawn
• fixing the roof
• paying the bills
• cooking dinner
• shopping for food
• taking the car in for repair
• driving the kids to soccer practice

 

       With respect to those person-centered services (the first list) in which the value of the activity resides in the fact that it was done by or with a particular other person (a friend, a parent, a loved one), the rich are no better positioned than the poor. Neither can hire someone else to do it for them. Yet it is these person-centered services, which markets cannot provide, that are of the greatest value.

       Moreover, the household is not the only nonmarket source of personal ser­vices; friends and other non household traditions also help meet our personal service needs. Thus, the market can be thought of as servicing a residue of needs that remains when we subtract those needs that are met by all non­market providers, be it oneself, others within the household, friends, and neighbors.

       With respect to simple living, the core wisdom is that the provision of person-centered services can under certain circumstances be, not a demand on a person's time, which subtracts from their ability to live well, but rather an opportunity for them to have a meaningful existence. It is to be able to do this that we need time.

       One of our deepest personal needs is the need to provide significant personal services to others. Having the psychological capacities to do that and having the social opportunities to use those capacities are among our greatest forms of wealth. Here we might remember Seneca's point that we want a friend because we need someone to sustain when he is in need. This is a major part of the contribution to our wealth that having children contributes—it gives us an opportunity to develop into our higher selves and to express those selves by giving to others.

       At bottom a successful form of economic life is one that figures out how to organize society so that we are each performing and receiving such services from each other. The existence of social roles that allow this to occur is a form of national treasure; these roles are the value infrastructure that make it possible for what is truly valuable in human life to emerge. Without know­ing what we do, we often sweep away such forms of human interaction in the name of a false efficiency.

       This may become more obvious when we remember that fewer and fewer workers are actually engaged in the production of commodities; most are providing services, and increasingly these are personal services. For the most part economic life is merely the exchange of services, whether within the marketized segment of life or outside.⁵

       Understanding the value of nonmarket services casts the familiar distinc­tions we make between opulence and simple living in a different light. It appears a distinction that functions only on the more superficial level of goods and marketable services. Once we reach down toward what is most valuable, the chance to give and the opportunity to receive those forms of personal services that are themselves nonmarketable, we find that the simple life can be inherently opulent if it is a life in which human bounty is con­stantly increased through giving to one another.

 

Simple Living: Wealth and Poverty

 

When a form of simple living is advocated, it is generally because it is believed that, by living simply on the material level one can live best in one or another of the nonmaterial dimensions.

       The concept of wealth can be captured within this same framework.

Being wealthy means having the diverse “assets” that allow us to live a life that partakes of diverse form of richness: material, intellectual, spiritual, aesthetic, and social.

       Once approached from this angle it becomes dear that genuine wealth resides in an extraordinarily broad range of “assets”:

 

• in our social relationships, our friendships, loves, and families;
• in our psychological capabilities, our abilities to build relation­ships, our ability to find meaning, to take aesthetic pleasure;
• in our cognitive capabilities, our ability to read, to understand, to learn, to reason;
• in our creative capacities, our ability to make something beautiful, to contribute something different;
• in our political rights, our ability to be a citizen of one country rather than another, our ability to build our own life, according to our own lights;
• in our historical and cultural legacy, in the riches of insight and experience that have been preserved from previous human lives and that are embodied in the great elements of human culture, be they forms of life and traditions, or great literature;
• in our natural and man-made physical environments, the beauty of Florence, or the view from the back porch.

 

       Material wealth is not irrelevant, but its role is largely instrumental, largely in terms of how it facilitates our ability to access other forms of wealth. With clarity about genuine wealth, we may recognize how wealthy we really are (or in some cases, how poor) and, as a result, be better able to choose time rather than money, or make better use of both time and money.

       The life of graceful simplicity is not a life that one can live merely by deciding to do so. To live well is an art, and to live gracefully in time is to be particularly accomplished in that art. It involves drawing on our internal capacities for creativity, appreciation, and generosity; it involves having attained some substantial level of inner peace, of security of identity and freedom from anxiety. And it involves having the good fortune of an external environment in which there is good grass and clean water and an absence of predators, but mostly essentially having space that is abundant in beauty and friendship.

 

 

Notes

 

1. The income figures are provided in terms of “purchasing parity,” which seeks to compare income levels in different countries based on what one can buy with them rather than through reliance on international currency exchange rates.
2. R. Wilkins, O. Adams, and A. Branker, “Changes in Mortality by Income in Urban Canada from 1971 to 1986,” Health Reports 1(2)(1989): 137-74.
3. E. Rogot, P. D. Sorlie, and N. J. Johnson, “Life Expectancy by Employment Sta­tus, Income and Education in the National Longitudinal Mortality Study,” Public Health Reports 107(4) (Jul-Aug 1992): 457-61.
4. David Brown and Avram Goldstein, “Death Knocks Sooner for D.C.'s Black Men,” Washington Post, 4 December 1997, p. 4.
5. We are actually well beyond the point in which most people are engaged in pro­viding services rather than growing or manufacturing things. In 1994, the num­ber of people employed in various occupations was as appears in the following table.

 

Total employed civilians                                                              123, 060

Managers                                                                          16, 312

Professionals                                                                     17, 536

Technicians                                                                      3,869

Sales                                                                                 14,817

Administrative support                                                                18,620

Household and protective                                                            3,066

Other service (food, health, cleaning, hair)     13,847                                                                                      

Transporters                                                                      5,316

Precision production, craft, and repair                                                     13,489

Machine operators, fabricators, and laborers     12,740                                                                                      

       Farming, forestry, and fishing                                                  3,629

 

It is only in the last three categories that we have people involved in making, growing, and building things. There were 29,858 (30 million) people with occupations of this sort in 1994, constituting 24.2.percent of those employed.

       When viewed by industry, independent of exactly what the people themselves might be doing, we get a similar picture.

 

                                                         1979                1992                                                         2005 (pro)

 

total                                                10,363             121,093                                                       147,484

Nonfarm wage and salary               86,491             107,888                                                       132,960

    goods prod excl agr                     26,461               23,142     23,717

       mining                                          958                    631          562

       construction                               4,463                 4,471       5,632

       manufacturing                         21,040               18,040     17,523

    service producing                        63,030               84,746   109,243

       transport, comm., util                 5,136                 5,709       6,497

       wholesale trade                          5,221                 6,045       7,191

       retail trade                               14,972               19,346     23,777

       finance, insur, real est                4,975                 6,571       7,969

       services                                   16,779               28,422     41,788

          business services

          health services

          educational

          legal

          amusement

          auto repair

       government                             15,947             18,653     22,021

Agriculture                                     3,398                 3,295       3,325

Private households                          1,264                 1,116          802

Nonag self-emply/unpaid fam         7,210                 8,794     10,397

 

SAUS, 1995, table 654, Employment by selected industry with projection

 

As a percentage of the total, those employed within agriculture or goods-producing industries is projected to fall to 18 percent within a few years (from 26 percent in 1992). As recently as 1979, those in agriculture or goods-producing industries was 29 percent of the workforce. This is a totally different world than that, say, or 1920, when those in agriculture or goods-producing industries comprised 62 percent of the workforce, or 1850 when it accounted for 81 percent of the workforce (Historical Statistics of the United States Series D. 152-166 Industrial Distribution of Gainful Workers. 1820-1940).