Welfare Efficiency and Morality (2)

(Part 1)

In concluding my thoughts on Reckoning with Slavery, I turn to a passage from that book that I thought was especially excellent. It's by economists Paul A. David and Peter Temin, and it's a chapter entitled, "Slavery: the Progressive Institution?"

What is one to make of this effort to separate "economics" from "morality"? A dichotomy works two ways: the authors' insistence that economic matters should not be permitted to becloud issues of "pure morality" also suggest that no prior ethical judgments have contaminated the "purely economic" findings upon which Time on the Cross is based. But do the methods of welfare economics enable one to carry through an ethically neutral re-examination of the comparative social efficiency of the system of slavery? Is it possible to conduct the sort of "value-free" inquiry which Fogel and Engerman appear to envisage as establishing the economic facts concerning the consequences of this particular institutional arrangement, the objective historical truths about which moral judgments subsequently may be made?

The brief answer is that modern welfare theory is quite incapable of supporting such an undertaking. Not only does the central analytical concept of the "welfare efficiency" of a specific pattern of resource allocation have a distinct ethical content, but the ethical premises upon which it rests makes this a peculiarly inappropriate framework within which to comprehend systems based on varying degrees of personal involition.

The notion that questions concerning the allocative efficiency of alternative economic arrangements usefully can be separated from concerns with other aspects of those arrangements, such as the distribution of wealth, income, and ultimately of the human happiness that may be derived from them, is fundamental in modern economic welfare theory. But this notion rests on the idea that maximization is good-that a state of the world in which more of an inherently desired thing is available to be (potentially) shared by all is "better," in some widely shared sense of the word, than states in which there is less. For by moving to such a state at least some individual could be given more of what he desired (made "better off") without necessarily rendering anyone worse off. To such a change reasonable men freely would assent. Economists describe states where any individual's further gain must come at someone else's expense to be welfare-efficient, or Pareto-efficient; and a move toward such a position is said to be "Pareto-safe."

Pareto efficiency, then, is not an ethically neutral concept. It rests on the premise that each individual's desires (preferences among goods, and between goods and leisure, and goods today versus goods tomorrow) should be allowed to count. Thus Pareto-safe moves are ethically safe for the "scientific" economist to recommend only because maintaining the new position I:' presumably would require no coercion. Indeed, it is because one presumes that all commodities "consumed" are- voluntarily chosen, and all efforts and sacrifices made for the production of commodities are freely rendered, that the commodities ethically can be called "goods." But, once the presupposition of autonomous individual preferences is seriously questioned, it becomes unclear how truly voluntary "choice" is. The serious possibility that what individuals seem to want may be systematically shaped by what they have been allowed to have therefore undermines the ethical foundations of normative welfare analysis. If people who had been long enslaved eventually "chose" to continue in the security of their chains, should we unhesitatingly say that this test revealed bondage to be a "better" condition than freedom?

Welfare analysis based on the search for Pareto optimality not only subscribes to the complex ethical character of that criterion, but "counts" individual preferences only as these can be expressed through market behavior. Recommendations of Pareto-safe changes in the pattern of resource allocation therefore must implicitly accept the past and the existing distribution of income and wealth, the institutional working rules, and the larger social and political power structure. The criterion applies to consensual, "no injury" changes from whatever status quo has come to prevail as a result of the past economic and non- economic processes.

But because the prior specification of property rights can, and usually does exercise a powerful role in determining whether a particular change is deemed Pareto-safe, the rule of unanimity itself carries a strong bias in favor of the status quo. A slave set free might not be able, given his prior lack of training, to earn sufficient income both to compensate his master for the loss of his services and improve his own economic welfare. The two parties could not agree on manumission. Yet if a prospective master were obliged fully to compensate a free man for the welfare loss entailed in entering perpetual bondage, it is unlikely that the two could agree to that change either. So in determining which, between slavery and freedom, is the more welfare-efficient economic system, the thing that may well matter most is whether the new economic historian will start from an ethical resumption of the human right to freedom, or accept a factual status quo which finds a people already "stolen" and held in bondage.

Modern welfare economics is grounded on the supposition that '" all market and non-market transactions of interest between -individual actors are voluntary. Involuntary transactions, in which goods are wrested from unwilling "sellers" or forced upon unwilling "buyers," amount to theft and extortion, respectively. Such a theory is not helpful for deriving precise statements about the welfare consequences of changes which entail the introduction or further extension of involuntary transactions of the sort essential to slavery. As the ethical premise that each individual's preferences must count underlies the notion that the only "Pareto-safe" (welfare-efficiency justified) changes are those to which there would be unanimous assent, it is difficult to use this apparatus to assess the comparative economic welfare efficiency of slave and free societies. For in imagining the -change from one to the other you must acknowledge that the entailed redistribution of property rights violates the ethical premises for making formally justifiable statements about the resulting change in social welfare. When people are enslaved, welfare necessarily is transferred to their masters, and there is no ethically neutral way to compare the welfare-efficiency of the resulting institution with the set of outcomes characterizing an alternative institution, under which that particular interpersonal welfare transfer need not take place. Any such comparison would require weighing the slaves' losses against the masters' gains.

"Slavery: the Progressive Institution?" p.228

It is my view that economics has failed to assimilate this lesson, and become a theodicy of coercive capital.

Welfare Efficiency and Morality (1)

Recently I finished reading a book by Paul A. David, et al., entitled Reckoning with Slavery. This book is primarily a scrutiny of Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery, which was published in 1974. Robert Fogel won the 1993 Economic Nobel Prize, largely as a result of Time on the Cross (which he co-authored with Stanley Engerman). Fogel was honored because he putatively established the superior power of economics to perform historical research; in effect, his book alleged that non-economist historians of slavery, such as Kenneth Stamp, had created a totally false impression of the past because of their reliance on subjective and politically-charged sources.

Time on the Cross addressed the period of slavery in the USA, especially after 1830. Fogel & Engerman argued that, while slavery was morally wrong prima facie, otherwise it was a benign institution. More specifically, they argued that:

1. Capital invested in slaves/slavery had high rates of economic return; i.e., apart from the personally lucrative returns of individual owners and traders, slavery was claimed by F&E to have produced tremendous material benefit relative to the economic inputs used
2. Slavery in the antebellum period was a flourishing institution; there was little risk of a severe recession in the slave economy--to say nothing of an "imminent collapse" (as, for example, per J.R. Hummel)
3. The slave economy was economically efficient, i.e., it was very successful at producing what people wanted, given their scarce incomes.
   
4. Slavery contributed to a progressive Southern economy, which was organized along rational and meritocratic lines.
5. Slavery provided relatively favorable conditions for slaves

These arguments are advanced in very strong forms. Point (3) may sound like a reiteration of (1); in fact, the distinction is largely between comparisons of technical efficiency, which measures output relative to inputs, and economic efficiency, which compares achieved results to potential results, in the light of participants' tastes (more detail here).

Item 5 is deeply disturbing to me and to the authors of Reckoning. First, it's a bit as though F&E had proposed to write a detailed account of the Holocaust without so much as considering the input of Jewish European inmates/victims of the event, on the grounds that survivors' testimony is partial, biased, and acrimonious. Imagine if they proposed instead to rely exclusively on the testimony of SS officers running the camps, using (perhaps) data submitted by legal defense teams at the Nuremburg Tribunals. Second, in the actual event, F&E insist on making sweeping dismissals of the prior impression on the basis of extremely flimsy evidence (namely, a single plantation owner's diary on a single plantation over the course of three years, 1839-1842). The diary of Bennett Barrow is the sole foundation for several astonishingly sweeping and determined contentions made by Time, including the (arithmetically incorrect) claim that "the average slave" was whipped (flogged) only 0.7 times per year.¹

A startling feature of F&E is their own copious flogging of the racist allegation; a Google book search reveals that they accuse others of being racist 33 times, or an average of once every 8.18 pages. In some cases the accusation is directed at Ulrich B. Phillips, an early 20th century historian.² But the allegation is also directed at abolitionists, whom F&E regard with undiluted and undisguised loathing (rather out of place in a book supposedly promising a cool, dispassionate look at the numbers). F&E argue that negative descriptions of slave conditions were degrading to the victims, and the attacks on slavery's technical efficiency was nothing less than an attack on Black labor.³ The internecine conflict over how "racist" certain antebellum interpretations may be, opened up an ideological space for a spectacularly virulent apologia for the most monstrous racist crime of all recorded history.

However, there is actually another realm in which F&E's revision of slave history runs off the rails, and it is one which is of much more urgent concern to contemporary readers. That has to do with their attempt to push the morality of slavery back into the woodwork, and examine it "objectively" as a path of economic development. I'll be addressing that in part 2.
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NOTES

1. Herbert Gutman and Richard Sutch, in "Were slaves imbued with the Protestant Work Ethic?" Chapter II of Reckoning with Slavery (p.57-61) establish that, as always, F&E overestimated the number of slaves Barrow owned, may have underestimated the number of reported floggings (and definitely failed to mention that Barrow used other punishments as well), and got an erroneous figure. In reality, Barrow's plantation not only flogged slaves an average of 1.19 times per worker per year, it flogged at least one slave every four days. As a result, slaves lived under conditions of constant intimidation.
2. Ulrich B. Phillips (1877-1934) was a fairly prominent historian who performed comparative research of slavery in Jamaica and the Antebellum South (American Negro Slavery, Life and Labor in the Old South). He argued that slavery was not brutal at all, but represented a paternalistic and waning system of economic organization. Phillips' account agrees with the later F&E in saying that slavery was benign (if morally "problematic"), but disagreed that it was technically efficient.
   
3. This is really twisted logic: again, analogous to alleging that critics of the Nazi's "ghetto economy" were antisemitic, because they attacked the productivity of Jews forced to labor at piecework in the new ghettos. However, there exists a bizarre quandary over the debate on slavery. Kenneth Stampp was and is the most influential historian on the history of slavery; his book The Peculiar Institution (1956) shocked the nation with its account of a savagely oppressive system. Stanley Elkins' Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional Life (1959) extensively likened slavery to the concentration camps.
   
   This created something of an irrepressible conflict among historians. If Elkins was right, then the African American was descended from a group of people whose personalities were shaped by a totality of barbaric cruelty (inflicted by White masters). Some reasoned that this was too close to Ulrich Phillip's image of the "Sambo," who lacked agency or volition. Elkins himself sought to explain why African Americans [mostly] accepted their lot. For a combination of historical reasons and unlucky timing, Elkins became something of a villain to some Black militants, who were uncomfortable with his claim of residual social pathologies.
   

Home Tech: Washing Machine Problems (2)

(Part 1)

I didn't want for there to be more to this. My research on the Kenmore revealed that I had made a big mistake; the HE 3.1 is a notorious mess, prone to bearing failure (more on that below). This became apparent after replacing the belt several times, staring, spinning the big wheel, and so on. Finally I was looking at it with the "tub" full of soggy clothes that the machine had failed to spin. With the tub full, it was obvious.

In the diagram on the right, the first picture illustrates how the actual tub assembly is supposed to "look." The second is cut away to show the tub (the inner cylinder) tilted. In fact, the tilt is just enough to pull the belt off. After putting the belt back on about four times I realized what was wrong; by then, however, the belt broke.


I learned later that this is a common problem with Kenmore machines. The bearing that connects the tub to the wheel is weak and prone to leakage, which of course accelerates its destruction. One thing I'm concerned about is the possibility that the bearings at the front are now ruined.