Aggregate demand and the industrial revolution
The concept taken from economics is aggregate demand. Rising aggregate demand allows the economy to
grow in the long-term, furnishing the reason economists had believed automation
would create jobs. By creating wealth more efficiently, automation permits the
employment of more workers, whose increased buying power supports their
employment.
This logic can collapse if workers doing the new jobs are
paid less than the workers replaced in the labor force. Profits will then rise,
and while profits contribute to aggregate demand, they do so less than wages
because the profit-takers are wealthier than workers and spend less of the
increase than workers would spend. Investments in machinery increase aggregate
demand, but the profitability of these investments depends on unreliable technological
opportunities. Every modern society that has been economically expansive
long-term has raised the standard of living of the masses of people.
The fundamental reason the industrial revolution allowed
vast expansion of the economy is that expansion of the labor force occurred
primarily by turning peasants and farm workers into manufacturing workers. Workers
were paid low wages and worked as much as 14 hours a day before they organized
into unions, but still, at least in long historical perspective, their income
was better than that of the peasants they had replaced. Even today,
agricultural workers throughout the world get much lower wages than do manufacturing
or personal-service-sector workers.
The creation of an urban working class meant an expanding economy with
expanding employment. The process is observed today in fast-motion in China,
where an expanding economy is powered by converting very poor peasants into
better-off workers, creating rising aggregate demand. This isn’t the only
tendency in the early and middle industrial revolution. In a countervailing tendency, much emphasized in the popular
imagination, skilled workers are replaced by unskilled workers. The first
tendency is stronger.
During the past hundred years, another trend came to
dominate: the growth of the personal-service sector. “Personal-service sector” (from
which I exclude the “producer services,” which aren’t “personal”) is an
amorphous term including well-paid
occupations, such as physicians, but most advanced-country workers
not employed in manufacturing goods are employed in distributing goods (wholesale
and retail sales), restaurants and hotels, and the nonprofessional health-care
sector, and these workers are everywhere paid more poorly than those employed
in manufacturing. Hence the worry about the “disappearing manufacturing jobs.”
Replacing manufacturing jobs with service-sector jobs entails slower growth in
aggregate demand.
Social-status theory from evolutionary psychology
The question seldom addressed is why service-sector workers,
such as retail clerks, food preparers, and nursing aides, are so poorly paid. Lower
skill requirements may be part of the reason, but the fact that service-sector
jobs remain unskilled may itself be best explained by their inherently lower
status, which is the answer I propose. Socially stratified societies allocate
social status to the various occupations based on criteria rooted in instinct.
The personal-service occupations are accorded lower status because these
occupations carry indicia of servitude and servility.
Modern social-status theory derives from evolutionary
psychology, which emphasizes our continuity with chimpanzees, whose social life
is characterized by dominance hierarchies. But evolutionary psychology also
recognizes that bands of hunter-gatherers were usually egalitarian: “primitive
communist” societies resisting any attempts by strongmen to dominate them or
establish material or other status-based inequalities. With the
agricultural revolution, the accrual of social surpluses and the need for
large-scale social coordination both intensified and unfettered the striving for
social dominance—power, prestige, wealth—from the group control that held them
in harness throughout 90% of humankind’s span of existence, producing societies
divided into social classes.
Allocation of status depends on instinctual triggers, including
the marks of servitude: all else being equal, one who serves has less status
than the one served.
Indicia of servitude aren’t the exclusive basis for awarding
status to occupations, as demonstrated by the vast range of incomes among
occupations in the personal-service sector. Anything associated with power
increases status. Status theory can explain the higher incomes of manufacturing
workers compared to peasants and farm workers by the prestige of cities,
associated with urban power. The link between status and power might also
explain why economists of the early industrial revolution, such as Ricardo and
Marx, underestimated the ability of manufacturing workers to sustain wages
higher than the price of bare necessities: the economists could not foresee the
consequences of the comparatively high social status of workers in
manufacturing, or perhaps, the relative status of manufacturing workers wasn’t
evident to them. Even today, farm workers have far lower incomes than either
manufacturing or personal-service workers. Physicians have high status because
they command medical technologies that afford power over life or death.
Consequently, the large incomes of physicians are a new development: 19th
century physicians weren’t affluent and highly respected, since they didn’t
command the powers of modern chemistry. Occupations that require considerable
skill and demonstrate intelligence are high status. But the trend is
proliferation of personal-service jobs in retail sales, hotels and restaurants,
and health-care, where workers have low status based on bearing indicia
of servitude.
Status inheres in making useful goods that does not inhere
in providing useful services. Dwell, for a moment, on the concept “the dignity
of labor.” Even unskilled work has a dignity that is absent in personal
service; think of the fake smile a sales agent or nurses’ aide must present. Insincerely
agreeable affect is demeaning, compared even to unskilled manual labor, which
may be boring but isn’t humiliating. This is only an example—and not the most
obvious example.
The whole of society may conspire to bring about the low
wages of service-sector workers. Laws protecting full-time workers often don’t
extend to part-time workers, who are more common in the personal-service
sector. But since wages are set primarily by market pricing, the assertiveness
of the workers, especially their collective assertiveness, is probably the main
proximal mechanism by which status influences income. High status produces
confidence and sense of entitlement, a collective refusal to accept conditions
below their due, because of their station in life.
Prospects
These trends paint a bleak picture: rising inequality,
growing unemployment, and social-status deflation. Not only are the
macro-economic trends unfavorable, but the means to resist them politically diminishes
as the assertiveness of the downtrodden declines with their loss of
self-confidence and sense of class entitlement. The analysis does point to a
public policy that might slow or reverse these trends. Although no great cause
for optimism in the absence of any practical means of effecting change, I’ll end
on that note of relative optimism: we must ask how the social status of
personal-service workers might be raised.
If the triggers for low status are
inevitably the signals of servitude inherent in these occupations, upgrading
their status entails adding
high-status signals. Statizing personal-service industries would accomplish
this. Government, being powerful, is high status, and all else being equal, workers
employed by government will enjoy higher status than those working in the
private sector. The evidence includes the strength of unions in the public
sector despite their obliteration elsewhere. Statization of personal services, regretably, isn’t today’s trend.