Whimsley

Infrequently Asked Questions

I did say I have a few pieces I wanted to post still, so here (now the Ontario election is over) is one of them. A few questions a few people have asked me about No One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart...

Where did you get the title?
The title evolved along with the content of the book. I think the first version of it came from Paul Krugman's essay Enemies of the WTO which was published in Slate on November 24, 1999. I'd admired Krugman's writings for some time, and yet had anti-globalization leanings. The end of his essay (which I quote and misattribute on p. 190) encapsulates the challenge I wanted to address:

Although they [anti-globalization protesters] talk of freedom and democracy, their key demand is that individuals be prevented from getting what they want--that governments be free, nay encouraged, to deny individuals the right to drive cars, work in offices, eat cheeseburgers, and watch satellite TV. Why? Presumably because people will really be happier if they retain their traditional "language, dress, and values." Thus, Spaniards would be happier if they still dressed in black and let narrow-minded priests run their lives, and residents of the American South would be happier if planters still sipped mint juleps, wore white suits, and accepted traditional deference from sharecroppers ... instead of living in this "dreary" modern world in which Madrid is just like Paris and Atlanta is just like New York.                                    
Well, somehow I suspect that the residents of Madrid and Atlanta, while they may regret some loss of tradition, prefer modernity. And you know what? I think the rest of the world has the right to make the same choice.

Just before that paragraph he uses the sentence "And nobody forces you to eat at McDonald's", which I latched onto. When I first sent the book to the publisher I took a couple of syllables out, shortening it to "No One Makes You Eat at McDonald's".

The change to Wal-Mart came about for two reasons. First, the McDonald's example turns out to be a difficult one that I only address 90% of the way through the book, and so the title didn't match the structure of the manuscript. My Wal-Mart story had moved into Chapter 1 by that time, as the very first story in the book, and so "No One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart" just made a lot more sense. Also, of course, in the years between 1999 and 2005 Wal-Mart had supplanted McDonald's as the pre-eminent symbol of rampaging capitalism. So that decided it.

In retrospect: I'm pretty pleased with how the title worked out. It's misleading because everyone thinks it's a book about Wal-Mart and assumes it's kind of a popular journalistic polemic, but at least it catches the attention and that's all you can hope for.

 

Why do you call the town Whimsley?

To me the name is a mixture of something whimsical and something down to earth, both of which the stories are meant to be. I think the whimsical-whimsley part of that is obvious enough. The "ley" ending is a reference to the many millstone grit towns of Yorkshire that end in that syllable - Burley, Ilkley, Batley, Bramley, Barnsley and probably hundreds of others, but particularly Otley, the nearest town of any size where I grew up. There cannot be many more pragmatic, realistic places around.

In retrospect: I still like the name.

Why are the two characters called Jack and Jill?

These names are a reference to the R.D.Laing book Knots, which I was introduced to by either Nigel Perry or Clive Norris in 1978. It's a quirky book that sets out patterns of tangled behaviour in short structured vignettes like this:    

    Jack is afraid Jill is like his mother
    Jill is afraid Jack is like her mother

    Jack is afraid
                 Jill thinks he is like her mother
    and that     Jill is afraid
                                    Jack thinks she is like his mother

    Jill is afraid
                Jack thinks she is like his mother
    and that     Jack is afraid
                                    Jill thinks he is like her mother

To tell the truth, I never really got very far with the book, slim though it is, but the recursive form of these vignettes has stayed with me. I had hoped I could make my stories condensed and elegant in the same fashion, but they ended up being more pedestrian. Ah well. (In earlier drafts the two characters were called Winston and Julia, but that is melodramatic and obvious, so it went.)

Why did you coin the word MarketThink?

Was it needed? I'm not sure now. At the time it seemed important. It is close to the idea of market populism that Thomas Frank writes about so well in One Market Under God, and close to the idea of market fundamentalism, a phrase used by many people. But both of these terms convey the idea that their supporters are promoting markets as solutions to all problems. The reason I didn't want to use those is that those who promote this loose, populist ideology do not always promote free markets - certainly not ideal competitive markets. Intellectual property is an obvious area where promoters of private industry are keen to prevent the competition they claim to believe in elsewhere. Nevertheless, the rhetoric of MarketThink portrays the world (governments aside) as if it works like an ideal competitive market, even when proposing actions that contradict that portrayal. Boeing is quite happy to argue for the necessity of government subsidy in the name of markets, and companies that grew large under protectionist regimes are happy to promote free trade as long as they are beneficiaries. So I thought a different word was needed, and MarketThink seemed to be it.

In retrospect: I'd probably avoid coining a new word and simply use "market populism". I was splitting hairs.

Attack of the Snobs - American Enterprise Gets It All Wrong

It's not quite clear whether Andrew Potter agrees with the American Enterprise Online when he posts pieces of an article that is part of their issue Attack of the Snobs. AP himsels makes no comment, but my guess is that he approves of the article in some sense, or else he'd say so. The article itself is entitled In Praise of Ordinary Choices. Given AP's love of tweaking eaters of organic foods, my guess is that he's on board with the American Enterprise Institute on this one.

Nevertheless, and much as I enjoyed most of Rebel Sell, he would be wrong. The AEI piece is MarketThink at its crudest.

First, let's get past the sneers. There's the title "Attack of the Snobs" itself, of course. Then organizations opposing Wal-Mart are "a regular terrarium of screamers".  The leaders are "Kerry and Dean assassins and union activists" -- two groups of people it's really hard to tell apart, I'm sure. Wal-Mart's success has come about "contrary to snotty stereotypes,... not by piling clip-on ties and plastic shoes ever deeper on tabletops, but rather via intensive, inventive, high-tech management". I don't know anyone who believes that snotty stereotype, so I think AEI are indulging a few stereotypes of their own. Then they have graphics showing a drawing of a placard with "Suburbia is Rape!" on it -- not a real placard, mind you, just the American Enterprise image of what a placard might be. Once you get past that stuff, you've thrown out 80% of the AEI papers.

But there is a bit left over. And in that bit there is a big assumption right at the heart of "In Praise of Ordinary Choices" that persists in the other articles I've read from the issue (ie, those that are free).  Which is that we've somehow chosen our cities and living environments, and that the fact so many people shop at Wal-Mart means they approve of everything it does. That's what they mean by "ordinary choices", and that's why they start the lead article by saying "The problem with most writing about cities is that people go out and say, 'Here's what I like', and the corollary to that is usually, 'This is what cities ought to be'." In contrast, the AEI believe that our preferences as revealed in our "ordinary choices" are reflected in the growth of cities. They praise author Robert Bruegmann, saying that he

"observes carefully, and shows respect for the billions of small judgments made by ordinary citizens in the course of their daily lives---choices which have cumulatively created the complex "horizontal" communities that Americans now call home."

This is wrong in two ways. First, it is basically an assertion that the good things about places where we live [and yes, there are good things] came about because of free-market choices, though even south of the border cities are a mix of market-driven development and urban planning. So that assertion is wrong. Second, it asserts that as long as we have free choice, we'll get the kind of cities we want. But even if the AEI believes this, Andrew Potter knows that's not how individual choice works. He wrote a big part of Rebel Sell based on the problems of arms races and collective action problems, in which individual choices lead to bad results.

Robert Bruegmann himself makes the same kind of assertions. "Europeans are moving into suburbs in increasing numbers... In country after country across Europe, consumers are demanding the convenience of longer store hours, shops closer to where they live, and easier access by automobile. The result is a proliferation of large supermarkets, shopping centers, discount centers, and Big Box retail outlets like Wal-Mart or Target". The implication is clear, in context, that because people want longer store hours, they are somehow voting for the Big Box outlets and the environment they bring with them. But that implication is false. It doesn't follow.

Or in "Live with TAE", Witold Rybcynski is quoted as saying "Sprawl has got good and bad sides, but it's what we've chosen as a people" which is also simply not true.

So let's be clear. To oppose the developer-driven, market-driven model of city growth that the AEI is promoting does not make you a snob (or an assassin come to think of it). And to observe that we live in sprawling cities doesn't mean we've chosen them. I hope AP agrees, but I fear he doesn't.

Lots of cars => fond of cars?

I don't have much to stay about this - I just need a place to keep a quote.

Here is an paragraph from Saturday's (May 6) Kitchener-Waterloo Record, which ran a survey about the most important issues that Waterloo Region will have to deal with in the next five years.  The big ones are public goods: transport, healthcare, population growth, and clean water. There is a significant fall-off after that to taxes, almagamation, infrastructure, education, and housing.

Anyway, here it is:

Statistics from Waterloo regional police suggest residents here are fond of their cars. Since 1993, the region's population has increased about 15 per cent while the number of cars registered in the region jumped about 34 percent. Registered vehicles in the region totalled 228,000 in 1993. Today, that figure is 390,000.

You do see this logic all the time. It uses an implicit revealed preference argument: we have bought more cars, so we must like them (be fond of them). It's at the root of a lot of the claims about consumer sovereignty and the economy.  But it's wrong, of course. Buying a car (or not) is a reaction to the transport system you live in, not an expression of some kind of fondness, and a small change that helps to shape that transport system.

Galbraith and the Conventional Wisdom of Economics

There have been many reflections on JK Galbraith and his impact on economics over the last few days, of course. They provide some insights into how the course of the economic mainstream is guided, and the role of politics and culture in that guidance.

From this morning's Globe and Mail appreciation on page B1, B4 (not from the obituary).

But for the last 30 years of his life, Mr. Galbraith was increasingly a voice in the wilderness, as the conventional wisdom grew ever more skeptical of the ability of government to intervene constructively in the economy, and ever more confident in the marketplace.

In a similar vein, here is Brad DeLong in his review of the Galbraith biography [J. Bradford DeLong (2005), "Sisyphus as Social Democrat: The Life and Legacy of John Kenneth Galbraith," Foreign Affairs 84:3 (May/June) ]

The right-wing claim that the most efficient economy is one in which the gales of perfect competition scour the land is, in Galbraith's view, nonsense. Modern industrial and post-industrial production is a large-scale process, large-scale processes require planning, and planning requires stability -- which means that the gales of the market must be calmed.

This political vision, however, has been in retreat since the early 1980s. Nobody wants to hear about the importance of Big Government, Big Bureaucracy, or Big Labor (which hardly even exists). Galbraith's economic views have undergone an even more distressing eclipse. Among economists (excluding economic historians), the 70-year-olds have read Galbraith and think he is very important; the 50-year-olds have read Galbraith and know that the 70-year-olds think he is important but are not sure why; and the 30-year-olds have not even read him.

...

What has survived throughout is the American myth of rugged individualism, and it is this that Parker's political story neglects. The power of this myth has meant that the United States is not, and never will be, a European-style social democracy. People may come together for barn raisings, but America is still the land of upward mobility and opportunity, where the most common questions are, I've done it, so why haven't you? and Doesn't this social solidarity stuff mean that I've got to pull more than my share of the weight? In spirit, it is still a nation of upwardly mobile immigrants blessed with an abundance of resources (free land) and an absence of government constraints (free labor).

Galbraith would say, sardonically, that this national self-image is just another fraudulent piece of conventional wisdom -- nurtured by the delusional, who cannot see reality, and the rich, who see it all too well but know that such delusions make them richer and more powerful. And Galbraith would be more than half right. But this self-image is also a very powerful social fact, and this more than anything else explains his waning influence on U.S. politics. It is not that the Democratic establishment has lost its nerve or been seduced by law firms and lobbyists; it is that the old Horatio Alger myth has proved extraordinarily durable.

Amartya Sen, not talking about Galbraith, said some of the same things about the way that economics has changed in the last 30 years:

There was a time -- not very long ago - when every young economict "knew" in what respect the market systems had serious limitations: all the textbooks repeated the same list of "defects."  The intellectual rejection of the market mechanism often led to radical proposals for altogether different methods of organizing the world (sometimes involving a powerful bureaucracy and unimagined fiscal burdens), without serious examination of the possibility that the proposed alternatives might involve even bigger failures than the markets were expected to produce. There was, often enough, rather little interest in the new and additional problems that the alternative arrangements may create.

The intellectual climate has changed quite dramatically over the last few decades, and the tables are now turned. The virtues of the market mechanism are now standardly assumed to be so pervasive that qualifications seem unimportant. Any pointer to the defects of the market mechanism appears to be, in the present mood, strangely old-fashioned and contrary to contemporary culture (like playing an old 78 rpm record with music from the 1920s). One set of prejudices has given way to anoother--opposite--set of preconceptions. Yesterday's unexamined faith has become today's heresy, and yesterday's heresy is now the new superstition. [Development as Freedom, p 111].

The role of myth, political outlook, and cultural climate is clear. One would think that in a discipline claiming to be objective that there would be a real effort to challenge its own assumptions, but such efforts appear to an outsider to be peripheral. Until such time as they are central, economics remains unscientific.

Voting With Their Feet?

This blog is a shameless attempt at promoting my forthcoming book, "No One Makes You Shop At Wal-Mart", which the fine people at Between the Lines are publishing next spring.

The book is an argument against a certain kind of thinking -- a very common way of thinking I call MarketThink. MarketThink is the belief that (in the absence of government action) the world really does work according to the rules of the idealized free-market. MarketThink is the claim that, as long as we can exercise individual choices, the invisible hand of the free market guarantees that we get what we want.

The title of the book comes from one particular phrasing of that claim. Wal-Mart has commonly been criticised for the damage its edge-of-town stores do to city centres. In response to these criticisms, one of the arguments that Wal-Mart's supporters make is that "no one makes you shop at Wal-Mart", and that if people really felt that Wal-Mart was bad for their cities, they would not patronize it.

An example of this kind of thinking comes from Ron Galloway, director of the new film "Why Wal-Mart Works & Why That Makes Some People Crazy", who said on CNN's Showbiz Tonight on October 31 that "138 million people vote with their feet to go to Wal-Mart. And Americans are pretty smart. And I think Wal-Mart, if Wal-Mart were really doing something genuinely wrong, the American people would be able to figure it out and not go."

What is wrong and why? Well, that's what this blog is about.