Aaron Renn says being employed by a big company "produces a loss of a sense of agency, as people feel at the mercy of large, impersonal forces and institutions they cannot understand or control." But who is more at the mercy of large impersonal forces than the farmer or small businessman? I'd say that American fled rural life and owning their own businesses in order to escape being at the mercy of forces like the weather, rainfall, or changes in fashion and technology. In a big business you can earn a position that gives you control, in a predictable environment, where you can personally affect the destiny of your product, division, or department. I never felt more agency then when I worked for big companies, where I could use my talents to reach specific goals, help meet business objectives, and be recognized for it.
A lot of small businesses can insure or hedge against those kinds of risks. Obviously agricultural land is still being farmed profitably despite those risks, it's just that mechanization and automation made labor productivity skyrocket and there was nothing for all those extra workers to do. To borrow from Reagan, "People didn't leave farming, farming left people."
And yes, healthy private companies innovate and grow, and that means some humans get the task of using talents, judgment, and autonomy to contribute to the development of improved or new products. Looks like you landed one of those positions, and congrats!
But all that in no counter to the broader point about lots of people justifiably feeling miserably stuck in increasingly Kafkaesque circumstances, both inside their own institutions but especially when trying to deal as an outsider with other institutions. Life becomes a sequence of facing zero-tolerance-zero-judgment brick walls, or of getting a spiritual death by a thousand cuts of the constant exertion required to overcome frictions imposed by gatekeeping of accesses or permissions to even meaningfully petition for exceptions.
"Perhaps this is the future of Montgomery County, Maryland."
I don't think so. Nobody without a job says maybe I'll move to Rockville and enjoy the scene. It's been 10 or 15 years since I was in Portland (and much longer since I lived in Gaithersburg) but there were clearly lots of people who came with no job and no skills who thought it was the place to be.
"You can walk past smart kiosks and traffic sensors and still see people collapsed on the sidewalks."
One can do this because the former has nothing to do with the latter, except for the fact that Portlanders eagerly vote for both.
Nearly 200 years ago. the area around Five Points in Lower Manhattan (between City Hall and Chinatown - the area where "Gangs of New York" was portrayed three decades later) was so renown for crime, corruption, poverty, and rampant alcoholism - with people being visibly drunk or passed out in the gutters and all over the place all the time, Opiods-in-SF/Portland-style - that it was literally a tourist attraction for people coming from other parts of the country.
Davy Crockett, the frontiersman, was one of those tourists, deciding to explore the great frontier of New York City and its version of early American urban catastrophe, gave the place the name "Hell's Kitchen" with the quote about the residents, "I thought I would rather risk myself in an Indian fight than venture among these creatures after night. I said to [my friend] ... these are worse than savages; they are too mean to swab hell's kitchen."
Eventually the city fathers finally got both capable and serious about cleaning all that up. The capabilities have never gone away, but the seriousness is another story.
Portland suffers from folks that refuse to believe they could be wrong. My niece, her husband, and 2 kids live in Portland proper. I broach the topic, and they insist it's working. "Portlandia" was less satire and more factual reporting.
It may be "working", just not enough to matter. I've seen this kind of "Resulting-Mood-Oriented Reference-Frame-Selection" a lot in the contexts of New York and the Bay Area. Or as Thomas Sowell might put it, getting better "Compared to what?" The NYC folks like to say things like "Well, it's not ideal, but compared to the worst days ... " Well, yeah, if things aren't actively degenerating, then one can always fool oneself into believing "it's working" when one insists on comparing to rock bottom. It's like when researchers strategically manipulate impressions by messing with the date range and the y intercept of the x axis.
Even if it is working, there is still the progressive political equivalent of Scott Sumner's point about "The Fed Moves Last". The trouble is that there is necessarily no feasible way to keep junkies from taking over the sidewalks except (1) making it harder to be a junkie who sleeps on sidewalks, or (2) very expensively giving the junkies very desirable alternative accommodations.
In the first case, one has the problem of "crud homeostasis ," that is, the progressives will view the decrease in junkies as prima facie evidence that government policies are too harsh and cruel, and so will call for relaxing them again. "Crime is down, which proves we don't need all the incarceration and police." In the second case, you just reinvented the welfare magnet which will guarantee the city gets more junkies than over while also leading to imminent fiscal bankruptcy.
Cities do not get taken over by criminals because there is too much poverty, or even because too few homes are affordable. They get taken over by criminals because Soros-funded judges and district attorneys refuse to let police do their job and instead force them to protect the predators from self-defense by their victims.
I'm surprised Trump hasn't yet seen the need to declare an emergency and have federal police and judges take the affected cities over. Then again, Soros has managed to infiltrate some malicious bad guys into the ranks of Federal police and judges as well as into their state and local counterparts.
If we don't enact a national divorce soon, the collapse of civilization will likely run to completion, making it much harder ever to undo.
As Robin Hanson and Charles Murray have pointed out repeatedly, the American upper classes are as bourgeois as ever (at least in the post-60s era) in their work ethic and orderly life habits, with McCloskey-pleasing cultural excitement about new companies and vanishing shunning of discussion of money-making, though it certainly helps that the economy has evolved to a point where the nouveau riche are now nearly all the really riche.
But that's in part because there are real competitive benefits to being that way for the kind of opportunities available to people in that class. The "marginal rate of transformation" of certain bourgeois behaviors into life success is high for them.
The trouble is that it's gone to near zero or negative for a huge and rising portion of the population, and for those of these for whom it is not easy or natural and who have to fight constant uphill battles against their impulses, the disappearance of both carrots and sticks leads away from "regular participation in the labor force", to put it mildly.
I think I would get on better in the world - certainly on substack - if I had the ability to perform the sheer mental gymnastics - the confidence amounting to effrontery - to write that the solution to Portland’s urban problems is more Portland, and much less Not Portland.
You jest but I am afraid that is the truest thing g anyone’s written this blog. I see it all around me, though it might be closer to Real Mexico City. It took me 3 hrs 20 minutes to drive from Austin to San Antonio last night, outside of “rush hour”, a drive that used to take an hour and a half at the outside.
When the respective cities had edges …
And the truck drivers were Americans and generally knew how to drive better than the rest of us.
While I can’t quite argue about sermonizing vs, writing, all the writers Arnold links to do a fair amount of pontificating, as does Arnold almost every time he writes about Trump. Renn is wrong* about 1900 era farmers having bourgeoisie values, in that “middle class” is mostly a city thing, not among farmers. Working for yourself farming land … tho huge numbers of non-land owning farmers lost their jobs in the dust bowl droughts of the late 1920s, and an enormous job change from farm work to other work was probably a bigger influence on the Depression than monetary policy, tho so many economists don’t like that truth.
Richard Dawkins wants Christian virtues without Christ, and probably most college grad atheists want The Others to be more Christian, and even think better behavior by themselves would be better. AA with God works better. The longer Amy Wax list is like the Success Sequence: 1) Finish HS, 2) get married before having kids, 3) get and keep a job, tho Wax adds more like Be Patriotic or Avoid Course Language in public. Middle class values, that luxury believers often live by but denigrate in public in pursuit of cool status.
The most serious issue is non-monogamous promiscuity. I no longer believe, contrary to Heinlein or Rand, that Responsible Promiscuity is good, or even ok. It’s socially negative, anti-social, even when both people agree. It won’t become much less acceptable until most women agree that general harm to the social norm is worse than the short term individual pleasure of the lovers—if they’re really in love, they should get married. Not that much in love? Just lust, then, the woman is a slut, the man is slut-jerk.
Some 10-20% of women are better off with the current acceptance of promiscuity, 15-25% ok with either but 60-75% would be better off with a no promiscuity norm. Many folk think it’s never going back, and it’s unlikely to get there without leaders leading there.
*I’m trying not to qualify stuff, “something is” rather than “seems to be”. More sermon like, as if certain. Opinions as factually true, tho they might not be sometimes or in some cases. Disclaimers do belong in a paper, not always in every comment.
Most of the 'patriarchal' practices referenced by Alice Evans, including female seclusion, arranged marriages, veiling/hair covering, and 'menstruation taboos,' were also part of traditional Jewish practice, and continue to the present day in certain Orthodox Jewish sects, particularly Hasidism. Her hypothesis about the Muslim origins of such practices in India certainly doesn't apply to Judaism. I always assumed that such practices had pagan origins and were subsequently just folded into religious practice.
Seems to be very widespread cultural pattern or "social technology toolkit" for pre- modern civilizations all over the globe and over dozens of centuries. Things involving blood tend to be very sensitive in many ancient cultures, and that goes double for menses, and I've heard Chinese women say it was traditional to wash the clothes of women on their period separately from the clothes of other family members.
I don't think your quote could make Aaron Renn look much worse. He writes as if he were a twenty year old with no knowledge of history whatsoever. When has society not been in a supposed state of moral decline? Why is this time different?
And as long as we're wishing to go back to the days before company jobs (when was that?), we might as well go back to a time before interchangeable parts too.
Two quotes to ponder regarding the Aaron Renn piece: one from Thomas Jefferson and the other from Adam Smith.
“Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens. They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous, and they are tied to their country and wedded to its liberty and interests by the most lasting bonds.”
“The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations... has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become... His dexterity at his own particular trade seems, in this manner, to be acquired at the expense of his intellectual, social, and martial virtues.”
Aaron Renn says being employed by a big company "produces a loss of a sense of agency, as people feel at the mercy of large, impersonal forces and institutions they cannot understand or control." But who is more at the mercy of large impersonal forces than the farmer or small businessman? I'd say that American fled rural life and owning their own businesses in order to escape being at the mercy of forces like the weather, rainfall, or changes in fashion and technology. In a big business you can earn a position that gives you control, in a predictable environment, where you can personally affect the destiny of your product, division, or department. I never felt more agency then when I worked for big companies, where I could use my talents to reach specific goals, help meet business objectives, and be recognized for it.
A lot of small businesses can insure or hedge against those kinds of risks. Obviously agricultural land is still being farmed profitably despite those risks, it's just that mechanization and automation made labor productivity skyrocket and there was nothing for all those extra workers to do. To borrow from Reagan, "People didn't leave farming, farming left people."
And yes, healthy private companies innovate and grow, and that means some humans get the task of using talents, judgment, and autonomy to contribute to the development of improved or new products. Looks like you landed one of those positions, and congrats!
But all that in no counter to the broader point about lots of people justifiably feeling miserably stuck in increasingly Kafkaesque circumstances, both inside their own institutions but especially when trying to deal as an outsider with other institutions. Life becomes a sequence of facing zero-tolerance-zero-judgment brick walls, or of getting a spiritual death by a thousand cuts of the constant exertion required to overcome frictions imposed by gatekeeping of accesses or permissions to even meaningfully petition for exceptions.
"Perhaps this is the future of Montgomery County, Maryland."
I don't think so. Nobody without a job says maybe I'll move to Rockville and enjoy the scene. It's been 10 or 15 years since I was in Portland (and much longer since I lived in Gaithersburg) but there were clearly lots of people who came with no job and no skills who thought it was the place to be.
"You can walk past smart kiosks and traffic sensors and still see people collapsed on the sidewalks."
One can do this because the former has nothing to do with the latter, except for the fact that Portlanders eagerly vote for both.
Nearly 200 years ago. the area around Five Points in Lower Manhattan (between City Hall and Chinatown - the area where "Gangs of New York" was portrayed three decades later) was so renown for crime, corruption, poverty, and rampant alcoholism - with people being visibly drunk or passed out in the gutters and all over the place all the time, Opiods-in-SF/Portland-style - that it was literally a tourist attraction for people coming from other parts of the country.
Davy Crockett, the frontiersman, was one of those tourists, deciding to explore the great frontier of New York City and its version of early American urban catastrophe, gave the place the name "Hell's Kitchen" with the quote about the residents, "I thought I would rather risk myself in an Indian fight than venture among these creatures after night. I said to [my friend] ... these are worse than savages; they are too mean to swab hell's kitchen."
Eventually the city fathers finally got both capable and serious about cleaning all that up. The capabilities have never gone away, but the seriousness is another story.
A good story I'd not heard about Davy.
Portland suffers from folks that refuse to believe they could be wrong. My niece, her husband, and 2 kids live in Portland proper. I broach the topic, and they insist it's working. "Portlandia" was less satire and more factual reporting.
It may be "working", just not enough to matter. I've seen this kind of "Resulting-Mood-Oriented Reference-Frame-Selection" a lot in the contexts of New York and the Bay Area. Or as Thomas Sowell might put it, getting better "Compared to what?" The NYC folks like to say things like "Well, it's not ideal, but compared to the worst days ... " Well, yeah, if things aren't actively degenerating, then one can always fool oneself into believing "it's working" when one insists on comparing to rock bottom. It's like when researchers strategically manipulate impressions by messing with the date range and the y intercept of the x axis.
Even if it is working, there is still the progressive political equivalent of Scott Sumner's point about "The Fed Moves Last". The trouble is that there is necessarily no feasible way to keep junkies from taking over the sidewalks except (1) making it harder to be a junkie who sleeps on sidewalks, or (2) very expensively giving the junkies very desirable alternative accommodations.
In the first case, one has the problem of "crud homeostasis ," that is, the progressives will view the decrease in junkies as prima facie evidence that government policies are too harsh and cruel, and so will call for relaxing them again. "Crime is down, which proves we don't need all the incarceration and police." In the second case, you just reinvented the welfare magnet which will guarantee the city gets more junkies than over while also leading to imminent fiscal bankruptcy.
Cities do not get taken over by criminals because there is too much poverty, or even because too few homes are affordable. They get taken over by criminals because Soros-funded judges and district attorneys refuse to let police do their job and instead force them to protect the predators from self-defense by their victims.
I'm surprised Trump hasn't yet seen the need to declare an emergency and have federal police and judges take the affected cities over. Then again, Soros has managed to infiltrate some malicious bad guys into the ranks of Federal police and judges as well as into their state and local counterparts.
If we don't enact a national divorce soon, the collapse of civilization will likely run to completion, making it much harder ever to undo.
As Robin Hanson and Charles Murray have pointed out repeatedly, the American upper classes are as bourgeois as ever (at least in the post-60s era) in their work ethic and orderly life habits, with McCloskey-pleasing cultural excitement about new companies and vanishing shunning of discussion of money-making, though it certainly helps that the economy has evolved to a point where the nouveau riche are now nearly all the really riche.
But that's in part because there are real competitive benefits to being that way for the kind of opportunities available to people in that class. The "marginal rate of transformation" of certain bourgeois behaviors into life success is high for them.
The trouble is that it's gone to near zero or negative for a huge and rising portion of the population, and for those of these for whom it is not easy or natural and who have to fight constant uphill battles against their impulses, the disappearance of both carrots and sticks leads away from "regular participation in the labor force", to put it mildly.
I think I would get on better in the world - certainly on substack - if I had the ability to perform the sheer mental gymnastics - the confidence amounting to effrontery - to write that the solution to Portland’s urban problems is more Portland, and much less Not Portland.
Real Portland hasn't been tried yet.
You jest but I am afraid that is the truest thing g anyone’s written this blog. I see it all around me, though it might be closer to Real Mexico City. It took me 3 hrs 20 minutes to drive from Austin to San Antonio last night, outside of “rush hour”, a drive that used to take an hour and a half at the outside.
When the respective cities had edges …
And the truck drivers were Americans and generally knew how to drive better than the rest of us.
While I can’t quite argue about sermonizing vs, writing, all the writers Arnold links to do a fair amount of pontificating, as does Arnold almost every time he writes about Trump. Renn is wrong* about 1900 era farmers having bourgeoisie values, in that “middle class” is mostly a city thing, not among farmers. Working for yourself farming land … tho huge numbers of non-land owning farmers lost their jobs in the dust bowl droughts of the late 1920s, and an enormous job change from farm work to other work was probably a bigger influence on the Depression than monetary policy, tho so many economists don’t like that truth.
Richard Dawkins wants Christian virtues without Christ, and probably most college grad atheists want The Others to be more Christian, and even think better behavior by themselves would be better. AA with God works better. The longer Amy Wax list is like the Success Sequence: 1) Finish HS, 2) get married before having kids, 3) get and keep a job, tho Wax adds more like Be Patriotic or Avoid Course Language in public. Middle class values, that luxury believers often live by but denigrate in public in pursuit of cool status.
The most serious issue is non-monogamous promiscuity. I no longer believe, contrary to Heinlein or Rand, that Responsible Promiscuity is good, or even ok. It’s socially negative, anti-social, even when both people agree. It won’t become much less acceptable until most women agree that general harm to the social norm is worse than the short term individual pleasure of the lovers—if they’re really in love, they should get married. Not that much in love? Just lust, then, the woman is a slut, the man is slut-jerk.
Some 10-20% of women are better off with the current acceptance of promiscuity, 15-25% ok with either but 60-75% would be better off with a no promiscuity norm. Many folk think it’s never going back, and it’s unlikely to get there without leaders leading there.
*I’m trying not to qualify stuff, “something is” rather than “seems to be”. More sermon like, as if certain. Opinions as factually true, tho they might not be sometimes or in some cases. Disclaimers do belong in a paper, not always in every comment.
"It was a city that planned to do everything right."
Larson did not mention land us and building code reform to permit housing and commercial development, nor policing reform. So not quite "everything."
Most of the 'patriarchal' practices referenced by Alice Evans, including female seclusion, arranged marriages, veiling/hair covering, and 'menstruation taboos,' were also part of traditional Jewish practice, and continue to the present day in certain Orthodox Jewish sects, particularly Hasidism. Her hypothesis about the Muslim origins of such practices in India certainly doesn't apply to Judaism. I always assumed that such practices had pagan origins and were subsequently just folded into religious practice.
Seems to be very widespread cultural pattern or "social technology toolkit" for pre- modern civilizations all over the globe and over dozens of centuries. Things involving blood tend to be very sensitive in many ancient cultures, and that goes double for menses, and I've heard Chinese women say it was traditional to wash the clothes of women on their period separately from the clothes of other family members.
I really appreciate the varied references and social science statistics you provide in these posts.
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/its-a-womans-duty-to-choose-well
I don't think your quote could make Aaron Renn look much worse. He writes as if he were a twenty year old with no knowledge of history whatsoever. When has society not been in a supposed state of moral decline? Why is this time different?
And as long as we're wishing to go back to the days before company jobs (when was that?), we might as well go back to a time before interchangeable parts too.
Two quotes to ponder regarding the Aaron Renn piece: one from Thomas Jefferson and the other from Adam Smith.
“Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens. They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous, and they are tied to their country and wedded to its liberty and interests by the most lasting bonds.”
“The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations... has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become... His dexterity at his own particular trade seems, in this manner, to be acquired at the expense of his intellectual, social, and martial virtues.”
Thoughts?