Joan Robinson predicted our future
Joan Robinson, one of the greatest economists of the twentieth century, never won a Nobel Prize. Here she is, in 1962, writing to Robert Solow, a very good economist in the 20th century, who did win the Nobel Prize:
Dear Bob,
To me you are a fascinating study—A clever man who cannot see a simple point.
Here is Robinson, also writing in 1962, in a prescient piece for the New Left Review on what we now call the care economy and Baumol’s cost disease:
The services to meet basic human needs (particularly healthcare and education) do not lend themselves to mass production: they are not an easy field for making profits, especially, as with our egalitarian democratic notions, they have to be offered irrespective of means to pay. Consequently, they must be provided largely through taxation….To supply goods is a source of profit, but to supply services is a “burden upon industry.” It is for this reason that when, as a nation, “we have never had it so good,” we find that we “cannot afford: just what we most need.
Notice that Robinson stipulates that it is “our egalitarian democratic notions” that give rise to the idea that healthcare and education should be provided to citizens “irrespective of means to pay.”
It looks like, rather than ensuring that people can get healthcare and education regardless of their means to pay, the way we’re increasingly resolving this problem in this country is simply to junk the idea of equal citizenship in a democracy.
Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that healthcare and education have been the leading edge of right-wing animus over the last 15 years, underpinning the right’s crusade against democracy and citizenship. It began with the Tea Party’s attack on Obamacare and has continued with the attack on schools and universities.
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4 Comments
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Steve Bruns
That she said Milton Friedman was a charlatan is enough to earn her a real Nobel and not just one of those Sveriges Rijksbank pretenders.
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jonnybutter
“..you are a fascinating study—A clever man who cannot see a simple point.” She deserves some kind of prize just for that line – it’s one for the ages, especially this one.
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ed
Rather than an “egalitarian notion” or a “human right”, as Bernie puts it, I’d call it a civil right in a country “for the people”.
Does anyone here feel that we are beating around the burning bush, giving the fire more oxygen? -
You describe this as if disbelief in equality is a new thing and not the deep structure and experience of Americans as far back as you care to look. It is easy to reject equality because it’s always missing from the facts of reality. Growing up in the 70s in public schools, I thought we were supposed to try to assert and impose fairness up to a point. I also took the point from family and others who felt I was being colonized by secular liberals, and they didn’t want any part of it.
Conservative and particularly religious groups’ opposition to public schools goes all the way back to their beginning in the US and Europe. Where there was not already a “state church” imposed by an ethnic hegemon, “state schools” were met with resistance as colonizers who pretended their merely “secular” interests were neutral or good for everyone. That is an accurate criticism and one black nationalist used to good effect in the 70s, alongside more and less racist Christian fundamentalists.
Public healthcare has struck me as a related part of the irritable conservative gut. It didn’t register in my family until Hillary Clinton — the devil incarnate — made it an issue, and after the 90s it stayed their third rail of politics. Synonymous with the nanny state sneaking in some socialism. But way back a century earlier — and more — it was medical and life insurance that was opposed in the oldline ethnic Protestant and Catholic churches, certainly in middle America. People were born and died at home, got cared for at home, and doctors (who did not break the bank) made house calls. It was the loss of their own culture and control over it that motivated resistance in the face of commoditized bodies, “health,” life, and death.
Call it an anarchist, libertarian, communitarian, or traditionalist position — it is very old and anti-statist in its bones. It didn’t come from fools; it came from farm and labour folk, the Jeffersonian progressives and prairie populists who did manage to get public health care in the Canadian provinces. (If American states had the autonomy of Canadian provinces they might have health care too.)
There is also a throughline in foreign policy. The same people who voted for Bryan and Wilkie didn’t want to fight Europeans they still had a strong kinship with and where there would be no profit. Much of the Trump agenda seems like a very late, crooked and confused, revanchist version of what was once a nearly victorious alternative, possibly less statist option for middle American conservatives with different ideas about fairness and equality.
