The Art Economy

Human society is going through an unprecedented transition for the past hundred years or so, and things are quickly coming to a head. But I suspect that most people haven't really thought about it much. And that's not an accident. To understand what I'm getting at, and how I think we can deal with, I'm going to have to take people through a very quick discussion. So put on your helmet and buckle up your seat belts---because this is going to be high-velocity.

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Image by "Swiggity.Swag.YOLO.Bro", c/o Wiki Commons

This is a graphic representation of way our ecoystem generally operates. Almost all the energy that life uses comes from the sun (we'll ignore the thermal vent guys living off chemical energy.) Everything that dies decomposes (fungi rules!) The base "Primary Producers" are green plants, which harvest all the solar energy that then supports everything above them. For example: maple trees harvest sunlight--->deer eat maple buds--->a bobcat eats the deer--->a cougar eats the bobcat--->a human being eats the cougar. As you can see, each step in the pyramid involves a loss of 90% of the energy.

For most of human history human society operated as something of a analogy to the basic energy pyramid. This isn't an accident, as human society was simply operating by the same rules as every other party of the solar economy---only instead of bobcats eating deer that ate maple trees, we had aristocrats eating wheat, gathered by soldiers and scribes, who took it from peasants.

Ancient Egyption Social Pyramid. Used under the "Fair Use" provision of the
copyright act. Image from Saint Albans Secondary College.

The thing to remember about these two graphics is that they are grotesquely out of proportion to the actual shape of the pyramids. In each of these, the top positions are held by an extremely small percentage of people compared to the bottom ones. This was simply because it took a lot human labour to grow food, which left only a small amount of surplus to feed all the people higher up on the pyramid.

Science and technology have changed all of this. One farmer in Canada can produce a lot more agricultural surplus than any peasant in all of human history. I had a hard time finding a graphic to represent this fact, as there are some complexities. Agricultural production can be measured in terms of production per acre, which has gone up significantly in recent memory. Or in terms of production per man hour, which has gone up even more dramatically. Or, it can be measured in terms of output of energy versus input of energy in terms of oil, fertilizer, etc----which not only hasn't gone up, but in many cases actually declined. (This is an artifact of living in a strange period where fossil fuels were incredibly cheap and used recklessly.) There is also an issue of transitioning from family farms to corporate agriculture, which means that government "silos" end up measuring "agricultural workers" versus "farmers"---which brings "guest workers" versus "Canadian citizens" and all sorts of complexities that confuse people reading statistics.

The best way I found to explain this decline in the base of the pyramid is by showing the following graph. It shows the consolidation of land into bigger and bigger farms owned by smaller and smaller numbers of farmers.

A graph from Statistics Canada showing the decline in the number of farms.
Image used under the Fair Use copyright provision. 

As you can see, the number of Canadian farms has declined from a little under 481,000 from 1961 to 194,000 in 2016. (My family farm was part of this phenomenon---my dad bought out his neighbour, and our neighbour bought out my brother after he inherited from him.) I think you can safely assume that the decline in farmers mirrors a decline in the need for farm labour due to increased mechanization (today there are literally robots that milk cows and self-driving tractors.)

A parallel phenomenon is happening in manufacturing. When I was a teen I built a stereo receiver (which I still use) from a kit. That was because a major fraction of the price of anything electronic was the time people spent soldering the thing together in a factory. This meant that if I was willing to put in the long hours soldiering diodes, transistors, etc, to a circuit board, I could save big bucks. Nowadays all this is done by robots and labour is a trivial cost in the price of a stereo. (Do people still buy stereos? Are they a thing? My amplifier is hooked up to a computer.)

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What this all means is that the foundation of the pyramid is hollowing out. As robots take over our jobs, there are fewer and fewer people in society who are growing the food and making the stuff that everyone else eats or uses.

This should be a great thing for all and sundry. I can tell you from experience that shoveling manure and soldering circuits are not activities I look back upon with fond memories. But unfortunately our society has hopelessly muddled two intrinsically different things: production and distribution. The result is that instead of finding a mechanism to redistribute the wealth created by mechanization, society has instead made heroic efforts to create more jobs for the people made redundant.

Part of this just involves raising people's expectations so they spend more and more money on bigger homes, burning jet fuel flying all over the planet, and, buying more expensive crap that they really don't need. The ecological burden alone would make this a problem. But there are other elements to this effort that make it tragic.

Because society has tied distribution exclusively to employment, great efforts have been made to propagate the notion that in some metaphysical, moral sense, "work" simply as work, has some sort of merit.

My dad, Fred Trump, was the smartest and hardest-working man I ever knew. It's because of him that I learned from my youngest age to respect the dignity of work and the dignity of working people. (Donald Trump. This and all the following come from A.Z. Quotes)

The American culture promotes personal responsibility, the dignity of work, the value of education, the merit of service, devotion to a purpose greater than self, and at the foundation, the pre-eminence of family. (Mitt Romney.)

These are quotes from wealthy people who've never really had to work at a poorly paid, dirty, hard, dangerous job their entire lives. Contrast that with this quote from a man who'd worked as a common seaman all over the world before he became a famous novelist.

 They talk of the dignity of work. The dignity is in leisure. (Herman Melville.)

One of the big problems we face right now is that we are saddled with a cultural "operating system" that no longer makes any sense. It was designed to reconcile most people to doing awful jobs simply because someone had to do them. Now that we are quickly mechanizing all of these "grunt work" jobs, that way of looking at the world is not only no longer necessary, it is positively dangerous. That's because the whole "dignity of work" schtick only works if there actually are jobs to be had that will support you. If there are no jobs at all---or they don't pay enough to keep a roof over your head---all that message does is breed resentment. And that leads to a society with masses of angry people who don't know why their world doesn't make any sense looking for someone to blame. 

Does that sound familiar?

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The problem of the discontinuity between distribution and employment has not been lost on people. That's why so many people are pushing for an extension of financial distribution beyond the Old Age Benefit and the Canada Child Benefit (which are both guaranteed annual income programs---even though most people don't think of them that way.)

I suspect, however, that a lot of people are deeply concerned about the idea of guaranteed annual income because they have bought into the whole idea of "the dignity of work". They fear that people who don't earn their bread "by the sweat of their brow" will be failures as human beings.

One of the key barriers to social change is the problem people have with actually envisioning a different way of doing things. To that end, I will introduce what I see as a better future: the art economy. 

I suppose that I'm a bit of an optimist, but I think that most people have something inside themselves that would grow into something like a vocation---if they didn't have it beaten out of them at an early age. That's why so many folks like to tinker with cars, fix up their own houses, garden, knit, cook, sew quilts, etc. The problem is, however, that no one can make any money off doing that because they can't compete with modern mass production. (That certainly defines describes me writing this blog.)

That's why the only people who can afford to have hand-made, artistic furniture---for example---are the super-rich who can afford to buy from the tiny fraction of people who manage to make a living as cabinet makers. But here's an idea. What if there was a really strong "safety net", one that was so strong that it was actually a "safety floor" that no one was allowed to fall below. Wouldn't that encourage a lot of people to do things that they really love doing---like make a beautiful piece of furniture? or grow amazing vegetables? or sew amazing quilts?

One of the really nice things about good stuff is that it generally survives a very long time. This because it's made well in the first place---solid maple instead of particle board. It's also because people love the stuff, so they take good care of it. And that means that it doesn't get tossed out after a few years. It becomes an "heirloom" that gets passed on through generations. And if you pay more for an heirloom, isn't it cheaper in the long run because you never have to buy another one? And your children inherit it for free? And their kids?

There's an added spin-off, of course. If you aren't building disposable things like crappy dining room sets, then you are putting less stress on the planet. And if you personally are building one very nice piece of furniture that you enjoy working on, then aren't you putting less stress on yourself than if you were in a factory knocking off cheap crap to sell at Walmart?

And if more people were spending their lives being creative---artists, inventors, etc---wouldn't they be less cranky and bitter about the world around them? Maybe that would help our society stop fixating on the supposed slights coming from other people and instead just be content living a peaceful life in harmony with nature.

What an idea!

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Furthermore, I say to you---the climate emergency must be dealt with!