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Musings Report 2022-48 11-26-22 Social Renewal and Decay: How Easy Is It To Become Middle Class?
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Social Renewal and Decay: How Easy Is It To Become Middle Class?
Why did Western Europe become globally dominant and the East (China and India) falter despite their many advantages?
There is no one answer of course; the constellation of factors is complex. In previous posts, I've described my own conclusion that China's failure to exploit its many technological innovations was the result of a centralized power structure that viewed innovation as potentially threatening.
Rather than embrace the risks of adaptation, China's centralized power structure embraced the goal of maintaining the status quo as it was. Stripped of the opportunity to evolve, societies stagnate.
I've also discussed the cycles of opening to the world / expansion and closing to the world / stagnation in Chinese history.
As for the rise of Europe (and particularly Western Europe), commentators have identified many factors, ranging from geography (numerous ports and navigable rivers, etc.) to cultural to political to historical.
The rediscovery of ancient Roman and Greek source manuscripts is an example of a factor that is difficult to assess. The spread of these ideas and ideals within the European intelligentsia was certainly revolutionary, and a key factor in the Renaissance.
This article explores the specific cultural adaptations which set the stage for Europe's adoption of a market economy as the primary social-economic force, supplanting family and monarchy / feudal ties. When did Europe pull ahead? And why?
The author notes that Northern European economic expansion began in the 1300s, before the Protestant Reformation, the discovery of the Americas and the printing press--all factors others have identified as key to Europe's rise to dominance.
He identifies the assimilation by Catholic Europe of two Northern European cultural traits--individualism and the ban on cousin marriages, which led to social trust extending beyond the immediate family-- as critical preconditions for the acceptance of a market economy.
He then adds a third condition: the suppression / elimination of violent males from the social order via harsh secular and religious punishment of evil-doers. Murder rates declined as the most violent were executed or imprisoned in large numbers.
Here are some key excerpts from the article:
"Those three causes--individualism, impersonal sociality, and a pacified environment--allowed the market economy to grow beyond its former limits.
"The Market" could thus spread farther and farther beyond the marketplace, replacing older forms of exchange and ultimately replacing kinship as the main organizing principle of society.
The English as a whole became more and more middle-class in their mindset: "Thrift, prudence, negotiation, and hard work were becoming values for communities that previously had been spendthrift, impulsive, violent, and leisure loving."
The Western world thus embarked on a trajectory of sustained economic growth. This is in contrast to what we see in other times and places, where economic growth tended to stall after a while and give way to stagnation or even contraction.
Western Christianity (which assimilated pagan characteristics of northern Europe) enabled "the peace, order, and stability that allowed the middle class to expand and become dominant." (end of excerpt)
I am wary of relying on any limited set of reasons for Europe's rise, but I think the social willingness to trust strangers is a largely overlooked factor in stable, prosperous societies.
Modern-day surveys find that Scandinavian people tend to have high levels of trust in strangers, and this correlates to high levels of general prosperity and individual happiness.
Clearly, economies in which business is only conducted with family members or equally narrow circles is far more limiting than economies in which business is conducted with strangers and impersonal corporations.
As for the rise of the middle class, I think this is really the core driver of expansion, innovation and democracy.
As people acquired means, they could afford more education, and they had a stake in the system that needed to be defended / advocated. This advocacy nurtured democratic / legal institutions and a free press.
As the book The Inheritance of Rome detailed, the egalitarian aspects of Roman rule continued to influence everyday life in Europe for hundreds of years.
It took centuries for feudalism to eradicate these holdovers from Roman rule (for example, peasant ownership of land).
The rise of ths middle class broke the stranglehold of feudalism by encouraging free movement of labor and capital. This helped strengthen weak central governments to the point that feudal fiefdoms answered to the central government again, as in the Roman and Carolingian eras.
In my view, the key factor that determines the rise of a middle class is the relative ease of laborers becoming middle class.
In the classical Roman era, freed slaves often ended up doing very well for themselves and becoming middle class, as the class boundaries were porous enough to enable craftworkers and small merchants to improve their lot in life.
Is a change of values and habit enough to propel workers into the middle class? In other words, are "thrift, prudence, negotiation, and hard work" enough to lift a family from penury to middle class?
If the answer is "yes," then the ladder to middle class security is open to anyone who adopts these values / habits.
If the answer is "no," then the ladder to middle class security is not open to everyone, and the economy stagnates.
Broadly speaking, virtually anyone who rigorously adopted "thrift, prudence, negotiation, and hard work" in the fifty years from 1946 to 1995 could (once they married and gained a two-income household) eventually afford a family and a stake in the system--a house and/or small business, a pension, etc.
Once financialization and globalization rose to dominance and distorted the economy with increasing wealth and income inequality ("winner take most"), this was no longer the case.
Workers with average skill, motivation and wages who adopt "thrift, prudence, negotiation, and hard work" can no longer afford a family or a stake in the system--at least in high-cost, enormously unequal locales.
This is true not just of the U.S. but globally.
This reality has fueled two trends of decay: 1) a dependence on speculation as the only means to "get ahead" and 2) "laying flat" / "let it rot"--giving up on marrying, having a family and acquiring s stake in the system because these are out of reach.
Once these aspirations are only available to those with the right connections or extraordinary drive / talent, society and the economy decay and collapse under the weight of inequality--an inequality defended by those who made it to the top and want to preserve the status quo as it is.
This is the same pattern I've described in previous posts: once the elites devote themselves to suppressing adaptations and defending extremes of the wealth-income-power inequality that benefit them, the system decays and collapses.
The top 10% want the status quo to continue as is, even as the bottom 90% fall behind. When enough of the bottom 90% decide to "let it rot," the entire rotten structure collapses under its own weight.
If we want social / economic renewal, we have to make it easy to climb the ladder to security for anyone willing to adopt the values and habits of "thrift, prudence, negotiation, and hard work." That's the entire purpose of a labor-backed currency, a new way of creating and distributing money that favors labor rather than financial elites..
Highlights of the Blog
What Do You Value Most? Thanksgiving 2022 11/24/22
Demographic Cliff + Let It Rot = Collapse of Global Growth 11/22/22
There's No Bottom Until Frenzied Speculation Turns to Dust 11/20/22
Best Thing That Happened To Me This Week
Our first avocado harvest: four years of nurturing finally pays off.
From Left Field
NOTE TO NEW READERS: This list is not comprised of articles I agree with or that I judge to be correct or of the highest quality. It is representative of the content I find interesting as reflections of the current zeitgeist. The list is intended to be perused with an open, critical, occasionally amused mind.
Younger Chinese are spurning factory jobs that power the economy
South Korea has almost zero food waste. Here’s what the US can learn.
Nature, nurture and old age: How much is the human lifespan driven by our genes (via Paleo Trader)
The Carbon Emissions of Producing Energy Transition Metals: Charted (via Paleo Trader)
ELECTRIFICATION Charted: The Most Expensive Battery Metals
NASA's Mars Curiosity Rover Sol 3609 (September 30, 2022) -- a dead planet, too small to retain a useful atmosphere, too distant from the sun to be warm...
How Europe's Energy Crisis Could Turn Into A Food Crisis
The Difficult Search for Dangerous Space Junk: Earth's orbit is filling up with satellites, rocket bodies and debris. The companies hoping to profit from the cleanup job need a better picture of the problem. (WSJ)
Delicious meals for $20 a week: June Xie on changing the way you cook (Guardian UK)
China may have ‘passed the point of no return’ as Covid infections soar
"The majority merely disagreed with other people's proposals, and, as so often happens in these disasters, the best course always seemed the one for which it was now too late." Tacitus
Thanks for reading--
charles |
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