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Mass Production and the Emerging Cultural Differentiation – Article by G. Stolyarov II

Mass Production and the Emerging Cultural Differentiation – Article by G. Stolyarov II

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The New Renaissance Hat
G. Stolyarov II
August 5, 2012
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I was recently asked: “But doesn’t mass society make even the atypical dress of [previous eras] unavailable to anyone?  Haven’t we had a kind of widespread proletarianization?“

The question presupposed a particular phase of mass production – one that has largely elapsed. When an extreme scarcity of resources still exists, as it did during the early Industrial era, only a few very basic products can be created, and the incentive for businesses is to make them in as high of a volume as possible, to market to as many people as possible without much concern for product differentiation, or esthetic considerations. (Think of the output of the early cotton mills, or the Ford Model T as examples of this.) The early industrial stage massively raises the living standards of most, simply because they can now have goods such as durable clothing, furniture, and (eventually) transportation and appliances – which were simply not available in any form to the majority of people previously. The same can be said of mass culture during the early days of recorded media. The complaint regarding the crudity and proletarization of mass media is not new. In fact, even Ludwig von Mises brought it up in 1954.

People of erudition and exquisite taste were the minority in every age – but what was new in the early 20th century was that, once the basic material sustenance of most in the Western world was achieved, the early mass-production stage became focused on culture (or “culture” – as you will) instead. At the same time, there came about a massively greater differentiation of physical products in the late 20th century, so that people can much more readily customize their living spaces, for instance. With the advent of electronic media, the prospects for cultural differentiation at relatively low cost have also become much more realistic. Consider that, back when I was a poor college student, the Internet enabled me to locate and afford numerous aspects of my quite extensive and unconventional attire.

We are just now coming into a new era of decentralized production of culture, aided by new electronic technologies that make creation much more convenient, as well as funding platforms (e.g., Kickstarter) that enable new forms of distributed patronage. As an example, I recently conducted a successful experiment where I was able to create a new musical composition and obtain some modest funding via Kickstarter, while releasing the work to my audience for free under a Creative Commons License. I am also technically able to create more such works for no compensation, so it is just a matter of having enough leisure time and inclination (of which I have more than a person in my economic situation would have had in earlier eras). I think many other people will increasingly come to be a in a similar position, triggering a new Renaissance of high culture.

The questioner also asked: “This [ability to use technology to compose more easily] is all true, of course, but do we have any Bachs or Mozarts? Is there anything even approaching late nineteenth-century Vienna, where there were multiple great composers within miles of each other?”

Perhaps such an era is soon to come – except the proximity of the composers will not need to be physical. The Internet and electronic composition programs will enable composers throughout the world to become aware of one another and to communicate and collaborate. The biggest barrier to such collaborations in recent years has been the copyright system and its draconian enforcement by American media/entertainment-industry interests. The advent of the Creative Commons License and similar alternatives to traditional copyright can largely solve this problem and create a far more refined culture that does not rely on the mass-distribution system of the large recording and film studios.

I hesitate to make any comparisons to Bach or Mozart – but there are certainly some promising composers out there. For just two examples, I refer you to the work of Maxwell Janis and Simone Stella. (Look for his original compositions, such as this one.)

Review of Tyler Cowen’s “The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better” – Article by Kevin A. Carson

Review of Tyler Cowen’s “The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better” – Article by Kevin A. Carson

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The New Renaissance Hat
Kevin A. Carson
July 4, 2012
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Stagnation [for Carson]
Published by: Dutton Adult • Year: 2011 • Price: $12.95 • Pages: 128 •

Tyler Cowen’s thesis is that economic growth is leveling off and rates of return decreasing because we’ve already picked the “low-hanging fruit” (meaning innovations and investments that have high returns). The stagnation in GDP and median income in recent decades means “the pace of technological development has slowed down,” and the general population is benefiting less from new ideas.

I would argue, rather, that measured economic growth and income have slowed down precisely because of the increased pace of technological development.

The important trend behind the disappearance of “low-hanging fruit” is the decoupling of improved material quality of life from monetized measures of economic growth and income. Improvements in quality of life—although very real—don’t show up in conventional econometric terms.

Intensive development—increased efficiency in the use of inputs—isn’t necessarily reflected in increased money returns. Unless they’re turned into a source of rents by restrictions on competition, innovations that reduce production costs will benefit consumers in lower prices and better products.

Such rents are central to the business model of “cognitive capitalism”—the “progressive” model of capitalism pushed by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. The most profitable industries in recent years have been those that depend on returns from “intellectual property.” But such artificial scarcities are fast becoming unenforceable, and technologies of abundance are growing so rapidly that they can’t be enclosed as a source of rents.

If anything, we can expect an implosion in metrics like GDP in the coming years, even as quality of life improves enormously.

Cowen almost gets it at one point. “[I]f our food supply chain harvests, retails and sells an apple for $1, that adds a dollar to measured national income.” Exactly: GDP measures value produced in terms of the total cost of inputs consumed—not the use-value we consume, but how much stuff was used up producing it. So anything that reduces the input costs of our standard of living seems to show up as negative growth.

Actually, Cowen contradicts his own thesis. He argues that official GDP figures exaggerate growth because so much of it is simply waste. But that undermines his treatment of reduced money incomes as a proxy for reduced growth in standard of living. If the additional portion of the GDP we spend on waste—and the hours we worked to pay for it—simply disappeared, we’d be better off by that much. He can’t argue both that economic growth is the best measure of technical progress and that the levels of growth that have occurred have too little to do with real productivity.

To be sure, Cowen does address the supposed diminishing returns of technological progress in terms of personal use-value. The blockbuster innovations with the biggest effect on our daily lives, he says, have already been adopted: antibiotics, automobiles, refrigerators, television, air conditioning. There’s been far less change in the character of daily life since 1960 than before. Aside from the Internet, recent innovations have been mostly incremental.

The Internet itself, Cowen argues, may be important in terms of personal happiness, but not of generating either revenue or employment. But to treat revenue generation and employment as ends in themselves—rather than a way to pay for stuff—is perverse. If the price of what we need falls because the amount of labor and capital needed to produce it falls, then we need less revenue—and less labor—for the same standard of living. The real significance of what Cowen mistakenly calls “stagnation” is that a growing share of our needs is being decoupled from revenue by technologies of abundance.

The reduced wage employment needed to produce our standard of living, as such, is a good thing. What’s bad is when artificial property rights enable rentier classes to appropriate the benefits of increased productivity for themselves. Our goal should not be to increase the number of “full-time jobs,” but to make sure that the productivity of the hours we do work is fully internalized.

Cowen focuses mainly on the Internet as part of the furniture of daily life—the fun of web surfing—to the neglect of a far more important benefit: the basic way society itself is organized, the relative power of the individual and networks versus large institutions, and the declining ability of hierarchies to enforce their will on us.

His focus on the objects of daily life ignores revolutionary changes in the way they’re made and on the structure of the economy. There’s not such a revolutionary change in going from picture tubes to gel panels, or from carburetors to fuel injectors. But there’s an enormous difference between John Kenneth Galbraith’s mass-production oligopoly economy and one of networked garage shops using cheap machine tools.

C4SS Senior Fellow Kevin Carson is a contemporary mutualist author and individualist anarchist whose written work includes Studies in Mutualist Political Economy, Organization Theory: An Individualist Anarchist Perspective, and The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto, all of which are freely available online. Carson has also written for such print publications as The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty and a variety of internet-based journals and blogs, including Just Things, The Art of the Possible, the P2P Foundation and his own Mutualist Blog.

This article was published by The Foundation for Economic Education and may be freely distributed, subject to a Creative Commons Attribution United States License, which requires that credit be given to the author.