The End of the Road to Serfdom

https://doctorow.medium.com/the-end-of-the-road-to-serfdom-bfad6f3b35a9

by ZeroGravitas • 4 years ago

81 78 4 years ago

doctorow.medium.com

they can turn their wealth into pro-wealth policies

He's arguing (of course) for cradle-to-grave socialism while overlooking the obvious: the ultra-wealthy are using their wealth to promote the exact same thing.

fallingfrog5• 4 years ago

Categorically untrue. The one percent have had their taxes cut enormously, and their share of the national income has doubled since the 80's, meanwhile all sorts of welfare programs and boons like almost-free college education have been slashed. Unions were attacked and are now almost non-existent. The minimum wage has been allowed to stagnate for so long that it's now meaningless. Jobs were shipped overseas where labor was cheaper leaving a vast rust belt. And it's the political donations and patronage, usually made discreetly, of the ultra wealthy that has allowed this to happen.

pessimizer4• 4 years ago

The ultra-wealthy have controlled the country for longer than you have been alive, so if they'd wanted socialism, you'd be living in it. The ultra-wealthy also paid Glenn Beck to convince Americans that there was a conspiracy amongst the ultra-wealthy to oppress the ultra-wealthy, so the best way to stick it to the ultra-wealthy was to remove all limits on the activities of the ultra-wealthy.

legitster5• 4 years ago

According to Piketty, capitalism always leads to rich people running the show, and that always leads to the follies of the wealthy few taking precedence over the material needs of the majority, which eventually leads to some kind of collapse, wherein wealth is destroyed and a space opens for a new society.

This is NOT what Piketty's work says. And I wish people would stop regurgitating it. The entire onus of his book (much contested) was that, in a natural order, private wealth grows faster than an economy overall. Everything past that is pure conjecture. And depending on what your view of what "capitalism" is, this probably supersedes it. The presence of market economies is irrelevant - his dataset included non-market based economies.

fallingfrog5• 4 years ago

I think the truth is somewhere in between- Doctorow does seem to have overstated what Piketty said, but not by a huge margin. I don't think this error dilutes Doctorow's argument very much.

From wikipedia (the article on Capital in the 21 Century):

"The book's central thesis is that when the rate of return on capital (r) is greater than the rate of economic growth (g) over the long term, the result is concentration of wealth, and this unequal distribution of wealth causes social and economic instability."

Doctorow got a little hyperbolic and replaced "instability" with "some kind of collapse", and "capital" with "capitalism" which is, as you point out, misrepresenting what Piketty said. But not tremendously.

imtringued2• 4 years ago

Honestly, in retrospect he is saying something very similar to Keynes who says unemployment is caused by an interest rate (r) above the marginal productivity of capital (g).

The difference between Piketty and Keynes however is that Keynes has the concept of a liquidity premium which explains how it is even possible for r to exceed g assuming the central bank doesn't set interest rates.

lifeisstillgood• 4 years ago

Guardian Columnist Jack Schofield suggests China is making a Totalitarian Bet - that with enough software, enough sensors and enough State Security the people of china can be forever controlled and directed.

I think software is too complex, society and opportunity too complex for directed development to work - it must evolve, and like science needs openness and spread of ideas - a Democratic Bet.

One kind of society will be utopia and one ... not.

Everyone will want to live in utopia - and it's on us to code it, vote for it, nurture it.

hilyen• 4 years ago

Code isn't going to solve anything unless the people deciding on what to code are the people who are directly affected by it. Code today written by America's engineers is dictated top down by their CEO's or board who are only looking to enrich themselves, so the result will be the same.

nimbius• 4 years ago

Im a bit of a Doctorow fanboy, but I think hes hit the nail right on the head.

The reason most American trade sanctions seem so poorly defined or defended as of late is because we're not actually fighting to keep china from gleaning yet another ICBM Secret or gobbling up all of our data (American tech companies already do that.) What we're fighting so vehemently against is Huawei's introduction of 5G technology to the global market nearly a full year before any US players myopic market vision decided the US needed it. We're fighting chinese chipmakers --not because they are theives-- but because they are arriving to market with challenging, responsive, disruptive, and in some ways more advanced offerings than traditional western players. The Tiangong space station should have basically settled the oft rattled question from the octogenarians in congress: how close to the US is chinese technology. its there in most cases, beyond it in some.

the sad part of Corys article is the conclusion that for every $chinese_company that now makes it to market with faster tech or better tech, the US will be forced to escalate using counterproductive and increasingly meaningless non-competitive responses like sanctions and tariffs. its a slow death unless the US gets more competitive, and by competitive i mean it cant just be axing domestic labor and posting higher revenue. US companies are going to have to eat their crow and actually offer something customers want, not something theyre told to want.

pessimizer4• 4 years ago

it's a slow death unless the US gets more competitive

It's a slow death no matter what. China has 3x the population of the US, and Chinese people are both just as smart as Americans, and likely better educated. If the US has lost its lead, it's not getting it back.

legitster5• 4 years ago

I might really encourage you to read some Peter Zeihan.

The Chinese economy has aged drastically the last decade, is coasting on fumes by manipulating its own currency, and is entirely dependent on whims of the global market for important commodity prices.

To the extent that they pose any sort of economic threat to the US, it's because we let them by ensuring safe shipping lanes to the middle east for oil and letting them trade in dollars.

astrange2• 4 years ago

China has a much worse demographic outlook than the US.

https://www.axios.com/2019/07/03/demographics-decide-us-chin...

commandlinefan2• 4 years ago

We're fighting chinese chipmakers

Well, hang on, what's the counter strategy here? Part of the reason that Chinese chipmakers are so advanced is because they work 80 hours a week, 52 weeks a year. The whole essay is about returning dignity and prosperity back to the American worker - although I disagree with his socialist slant on how that should be done, I don't think adopting the Chinese work-til-you-drop mentality is the right way to get there, either.

Apocryphon• 4 years ago

Public funding for research and moonshot projects?

timbit42• 4 years ago

Automation. Bringing manufacturing back isn't going to be affordable with our labor costs. We can only do it via automation.

csdvrx• 4 years ago

We're fighting chinese chipmakers

I totally agree, and this is very wrong because it means the government is trying to pick winners.

I like eink readers and phones from China, and I don't like it when daddy government tells me I can't plug a simcard in the device I purchased to use it on say AT&T network, while the device is compliant with international formats.

If the government was so concerned about malicious non-compliance, they could prepare a doomsday removal of all "bad" devices IF AND WHEN they start doing bad things, with the same IMEI blacklist approach, and NOT BEFORE which is only going to hurt customers.

Doing the IMEI blacklist before any device is caught doing bad things means it's just a commercial war.

jstarfish• 4 years ago

The battlefield isn't (only) economic. Whoever deploys more networking gear has visibility into more networks around the world via "accidental" backdoors.

Same goes for IoT devices. They're all just sleeper agents awaiting orders. Be it on price or features, the more commercial appeal the device has, the broader its deployment around the world. There's at least one foreign-produced, internet-connected listening device in every boardroom (and bedroom).

We can insist on pushing Cisco gear so the former exploits are available only to ourselves, but we don't have anything that competes with the latter since we don't actually make anything in this country-- no smart TVs, drones and IoT vibrators that we sell to Chinese consumers. iPhones are about it, and we outsource their production to...China. We make "intellectual property," which is easily stolen and replicated.

They're NIH-adherents so we can't push software on them either-- not only do they subvert ours (Equifax, Grindr almost), they onboard us to theirs (TikTok).

The language of their biggest competitor/adversary is taught in schools. The US curriculum is limited to introductory French or Spanish. Never in my life have I needed to communicate anything in either language that couldn't be conveyed in English. Mandarin or Russian would have been more useful.

They beat us at the spycraft game big-time, but we can't address that in public. So instead we're sowing confusion through vague trade sanctions to disrupt their deployment strategy. Since we never had a coherent plan to begin with, it won't achieve anything. The ultimate disruptor usually ends up being war.

AnimalMuppet3• 4 years ago

Could you give some specifics on where the Chinese chipmakers are more advanced than western players? (Note that Taiwan does not count as "Chinese" for this.)

Also, note that the US didn't try to sanction Taiwanese chipmakers at all, so Doctorow's explanation of "why" seem to not hold water.

yogthos13• 4 years ago

a few examples

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/28/us/politics/us-china-semi...

https://techwireasia.com/2021/12/the-newest-chip-by-alibaba-...

http://en.people.cn/n3/2016/0323/c98649-9034426-2.html

https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202210/1277405.shtml

skywal_l• 4 years ago

It is to be noted that this road was chosen through democratic means. Reagan was elected. Clinton was elected. Thatcher and Blair too.

Only fairly recently people have realized their mistake and started to resist [0] but that's probably too late now. Corporations are people and money talks and have spoken.

Back to the mines people and soon the trenches ?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_establishing_a_Constitu... (look at the bottom of the table)

WalterBright6• 4 years ago

The article has a glaring omission - the US from 1800 to WW2. Never before have such a vast quantity of people been raised from owning nothing to the middle class. You can see it in the stats - dramatically rising height, lowered infant mortality, and longevity. You can also see it in old pictures - lots and lots and lots of middle class housing.

fallingfrog5• 4 years ago

This is not correct. Average American height actually decreased between 1810 and 1900. It wasn't until after 1900 that we see it start to increase again.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/average-height-of-men-for...

Moreover, the increase in height stagnated and even begun to fall at the beginning of the neoliberal era, even while adult heights continued to rise in the more egalitarian European countries.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/the-shocking

cdot22• 4 years ago

The chart you included shows it begin increasing in 1890 which wouldn't seem to have anything to do with the world wars.

pessimizer4• 4 years ago

The thing people leave out about the industrial revolution is that lifespans fell while working hours rose during it.

mbg721• 4 years ago

Does that count American adults by birth year, regardless of where they were born? (I couldn't immediately tell from the link.) I would expect immigration trends to be a big driver during that timespan.

WalterBright6• 4 years ago

You might want to check out the museum at Fort Henry, which contains pre-US adult clothing. It looks like clothing for children. Then go see a Civil War museum. The uniforms look like they're for boys. George Washington was a giant in his day at 6 foot. I saw Henry 8's armor in London. Looks like it would fit a kid.

legitster5• 4 years ago

Yeah, that kind of gets missed out when people analyze the Post War boom. Much of it is a very delayed correction of the prolonged Great Depression. Most of the New Deal labor rights and social programs were blown up during the war, so soldiers returned home to a very liberalized US economy.

Getting to choose your favorite window for your "30 years" is completely a cherry pick.

AnimalMuppet3• 4 years ago

I think he's anchored his idea of "middle class" to a specific set of possessions, rather than to an economically reasonable definition. Specifically, he seems to be using a 1970s definition of "middle class". He gives a description that's all about having specific things like dishwashers and television. People in 1920 didn't have dishwashers, because dishwashers weren't really a commercially-available thing yet. But they were still middle class in terms of their economic relationships.

yogthos13• 4 years ago

Wait till you find out what USSR managed to do when it comes to lifting people from owning nothing. Russia went from a backwards agrarian society where people travelled by horse and carriage to being the first in space in the span of 40 years. Russia showed incredible growth after the revolution that surpassed the rest of the world:

https://wid.world/document/soviets-oligarchs-inequality-prop...

https://wid.world/document/appendix-soviets-oligarchs-inequa...

USSR provided free education to all citizens resulting in literacy rising from 33% to 99.9%:

http://www.revolutionarydemocracy.org/archive/PubEdUSSR.htm

http://www.revolutionarydemocracy.org/archive/anglosov.htm

http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0000/000013/001300eo.pdf

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Likbez

USSR doubled life expectancy in just 20 years. A newborn child in 1926-27 had a life expectancy of 44.4 years, up from 32.3 years thirty years before. In 1958-59 the life expectancy for newborns went up to 68.6 years. the Semashko system of the USSR increased lifespan by 50% in 20 years. By the 1960's, lifespans in the USSR were comparable to those in the USA:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_Soviet_Uni...

https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB5054/index1.html

Quality of nutrition improved after the Soviet revolution, and the last time USSR had a famine was in 1940s. CIA data suggests they ate just as much as Americans after WW2 peroid while having better nutrition:

https://www.scribd.com/document/430076844/CIA-RDP84B00274R00...

USSR moved from 58.5-hour work weeks to 41.6 hour work weeks (-0.36 h/yr) between 1913 and 1960:

https://books.google.com/books?id=x8JYjwEACAAJ

https://b-ok.cc/book/2669908/77497f

USSR averaged 22 days of paid leave in 1986 while USA averaged 7.6 in 1996:

https://www.ilo.org/public/libdoc/ilo/1994/94B09_66_englp2.p...

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/ebs.t05.htm

In 1987, people in the USSR could retire with pension at 55 (female) and 60 (male) while receiving 50% of their wages at a at minimum. Meanwhile, in USA the average retirement age was 62-67 and the average (not median) retiree household in the USA could expect $48k/yr which comes out to 65% of the 74k average (not median) household income in 2016:

https://www.ilo.org/public/libdoc/ilo/1994/94B09_66_englp2.p...

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/could-you-get-by-on-the-average...

GDP took off after socialism was established and then collapsed with the reintroduction of capitalism:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Soviet_Union_GDP_per...

The Soviet Union had the highest physician/patient ratio in the world. USSR had 42 doctors per 10,000 population compared to 24 in Denmark and Sweden, and 19 in US:

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/07356757849... (sci-hub for access)

USSR defeated a smallpox epidemic in a matter of 19 days https://www.rbth.com/history/331857-how-ussr-defeated-black-...

The Social Consequences of Soviet Immunization Policies https://www.ucis.pitt.edu/nceeer/1997-812-03g-Hoch.pdf

Professor of Economic History, Robert C. Allen, concludes in his study without the 1917 revolution is directly responsible for rapid growth that made the achievements listed above possilbe:

https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.50...

Study demonstrating the steady increase in quality of life during the Soviet period (including under Stalin). Includes the fact that Soviet life expectancy grew faster than any other nation recorded at the time:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/2672986?seq=1

A large study using world bank data analyzing the quality of life in Capitalist vs Socialist countries and finds overwhelmingly at similar levels of development with socialism bringing better quality of life:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1646771/pdf/amj...

This study compared western and eastern blocs in measures of the physical quality of life (PQL), taking into account the level of economic development

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2430906/

WalterBright6• 4 years ago

The USSR was doing so well, they had to build an Iron Curtain around it to keep its citizens from fleeing.

jdkee• 4 years ago

! out of 5 Russians today do not have an indoor toilet.

WalterBright6• 4 years ago

to being the first in space in the span of 40 years

Never mind the USSR's rocket program was based on the German V2 ballistic missile and captured German rocket engineers.

(To be fair, so was the US space program.)

There's some evidence that Eisenhower drug his feet on the space program because the matter of orbiting over other countries was not settled and he worried that the USSR would regard it as an attack. By letting the USSR go first, then the US space program could not be seen as a provocation.

imtringued2• 4 years ago

But by the Reagan era, the party was over. People had all the stuff they needed. They’d replace it from time to time.

Capitalism doesn't work if everyone has everything they need. Perfect markets reduce profit margins as close to zero as possible. People will then stop investing because they can just sit on cash instead and do nothing.

If you base your economy on constant profits and endless growth then you will have to reset it with a war every now and then.

ryan933• 4 years ago

His claim that republicans will get rid of social security makes me take the rest of the piece less seriously.

legitster5• 4 years ago

Also, just on the face of the claims it doesn't make any sense with the rest of the thesis.

By design, wealthy people do not pay meaningfully more into the social security program. So the idea that eliminating it is part of some pro-millionaire agenda seems a bit weird.

wnoise• 4 years ago

There are many that have literally admitted to wanting do so.

https://www.barrons.com/articles/social-security-cuts-republ...

ryan933• 4 years ago

It’s evil. But also right wing “virtue signaling”. Won’t happen

rufus_foreman• 4 years ago

Not one Republican in the article you cited literally admits to wanting to get rid of Social Security.

Most of them mentioned in the article are apparently 8 Senate Republicans who are co-sponsors of the TRUST Act which would create Congressional committees to come up with plans to deal with federal programs that are heading towards insolvency, including Social Security. The act was also co-sponsored by 3 Senate Democrats, one Senate Independent, 2 House Republicans and 3 House Democrats. If that is "wanting to get rid of Social Security" (it isn't) then getting rid of Social Security is a bi-partisan effort.

Then you also have one Republican who thinks we need benefit cuts at some point to deal with insolvency, one who thinks Social Security should be moved to discretionary funding rather than non-discretionary, one who thinks all federal programs should need to be voted on every 5 years, and one who made comments about getting rid of Social Security in 2010 but who now says we need to raise the retirement age to deal with insolvency.

georgeoliver• 4 years ago

There is a big disconnect between Doctorow going on about his middle class Phd parents and the plight of 'the workers'. Phds are around 1% of the population and their earnings typically put them in the top 20%. IMO it seems more likely that the interests of this class, and others similar -- the lawyers, doctors, engineers -- will align more with the elite than the serfs, and until that changes the possibility of true structural change in the US feels remote.

AnimalMuppet3• 4 years ago

That depends on the elites (presuming Doctorow's perspective is accurate). Truly smart elites would keep the top 10% in the game. But if Doctorow is right, the elites almost always eventually get greedy and blow this, and the system then collapses, because the elites are not competent to actually run it well (and, my own addition, because the 10% quit propping up the elites' incompetence).

legitster5• 4 years ago

Also, a lot of this analysis only makes sense to children of the elite (ie, the child of a successful author).

There's a natural regression to the mean. Kids of poor parents will be better off than their parents. Kids of rich parents will be worse off than their parents.

So when he looks around at his peer group, he sees the same thing - people who were worse off than their parents. But it's really only a view shared by middle class white people.

advisedwang2• 4 years ago

IMO it seems more likely that the interests of this class, and others similar -- the lawyers, doctors, engineers -- will align more with the elite than the serfs.

It often feels like this in the US. We (educated, well paid, middle class people) do have a closer cultural experience with the true elite. But despite the similar cultural experience the economic underpinnings are very different. Paying your bills from the wages of your job is categorically different from getting yield on an investment.

This economic difference becomes apparent in how the system evolves - when jobs shift offshore, you might see the well paid jobs disappear while owners* continue to make profit from the offshored business.

In other words, it turns out that well paid wage earners like me are actually in the same fundemental economic situation as "the serfs" even if our day to day lives look like the elite, for now.

* Many working people do have stock, especially when you count retirement (thanks to the 401k). This does them owners in one sense - the do literally own part of corps and get some of their profit. But while that's still just a supplement to wages as the main income, it doesn't really matter. If you lose your job or it becomes low-paying, your ownership will dry up rapidly. It hasn't changed your position in the system.

dsfyu404ed• 4 years ago

It often feels like this in the US. We (educated, well paid, middle class people) do have a closer cultural experience with the true elite. But despite the similar cultural experience the economic underpinnings are very different. Paying your bills from the wages of your job is categorically different from getting yield on an investment.

Sure the "elite" and the "well educate and paid but still laboring for money" classes have very different economic reality but the cultural gulf between the techie and the plumber is an order of magnitude greater than any differences the "elites" and the "just barely not's" have.

mark_l_watson• 4 years ago

If you have ever read Thomas Piketty’s 1000 page tome “Capital in the 21st Century” (I have ), this short article can be thought of as an extremely short summary, with some very nice nuances added.

Great read!

machina_ex_deus• 4 years ago

It takes a really distorted world view to on one hand describe so accurately the problems and lack of freedom in America, the disrespect for workers and how they seek freedom and will eventually overthrow the existing order.

And then on the other hand to say China which the author himself described as even more oppressive work environment will somehow be better off in this new enlightened world.

Socialism solves nothing. There's no free healthcare, doctors need to work for that. No free phones either. One way or the other you always pay the price. Authoritarian governments are always worse off because they suppress the criticism that would progress them further.

In some funny way this author is quite similar to the elite in that he is views the working class of china the same way the elite view the working class of rich countries.

midislack• 4 years ago

China has a coherent vision and elevates Chinese, west is the opposite.

The End of the Road to Serfdom

Related Stories