Unfettered plenitude is not a good thing. I suppose that the Roman Empire overdosed on plentitude and it killed the society. My fear is that our society is destined to the same fate.
Grant McCracken replies: I agree entirely with Teck Wilson. Plenitude needs no government encouragement or subsidy, and any such program now in place should be dismantled. The anthropological fact of the matter is that plenitude has extraordinary generative power and can be relied upon to throw off new and more social species without help from anyone. This is, I guess, good news and bad news for the right. Subsidies may be eliminated, but this will do almost nothing to blunt the cultural experimentation we see on every side.
Daniel Smith is right (and characteristically clever) to note a contradiction between writing about plenitude on the one hand and continuing to use the monolithic categories "left" and "right" on the other. This objection was anticipated with cunning footnotes (#252 in Plenitude 1.0 and #521 in the new version, Plenitude 2.0) which observe that this is an unavoidable problem. Until political discourse catches up to the new social dynamism, we have to use the old categories of analysis. Plenitude 2.0 is, among other things, an invitation for political theorists to construct the language that makes it possible to talk about our new social realities with new agility. (On matters of political theory, I am obliged to admit the limits of my disciplinary competence. More exactly: What do I know? I'm an anthropologist.).
I liked Wesley Hand's observation so much I built it into Plenitude 2.0 as an illustration of one of the prevailing views of our society, and the very thing that Plenitude is designed to address. Before we commit to the unmistakably plausible and tempting notion that the sky is falling, let us be certain we have done our ethnographic homework. What looks like chaos may merely be complexity. Or, as the Santa Fe Institute has endeavored to observe for other purposes: Chaos may not be so chaotic after all.
Plenitude 2.0 is an experiment in plenitude, and I hope readers will feel free to contribute to the discussion of these and other issues at www.cultureby.com, where the book is available for free.
Time Is Money?
I wholeheartedly subscribe to W. Michael Cox and Richard G. Alm's central thesis in "Buying Time" (August/September), but I must quibble with their methodology. Cox and Alm argue that the wonder of capitalism is how many products improve over time while becoming significantly cheaper, to boot. The metric they utilize to substantiate their claim is the concept of work hours. For example, they write that "in 1919, earning enough to buy a three-pound chicken required two hours, 37 minutes of work. Today, it's down to 14 minutes." This analysis, so far as I can tell, compares pretax wages at two different points in time. As we all know, the tax on wages has changed dramatically since the turn of the century. To compare pretax wages, then, is to compare apples and oranges.
Even in different countries at the same point in time, the idea holds. Country A's average hourly wage could be $10, while Country B's could be twice that. We would not, from this information, be able to infer that in Country A a worker has to work two hours to buy a $18 shirt, while the Country B worker need work only one hour. After all, if the tax rate on wages is 10 percent in Country A but is 60 percent in Country B, then A need only work two hours to buy the shirt, while B would need to work two and a half. This contradicts the results obtained by looking at pretax wages. Though the disparity in tax rates may not always be that large, the principle holds. Of course, in different times and in different places, other taxes might apply which would also change the metric. The proper way to measure the time needed to purchase a product is to look at after-tax income. Capitalism's wonders are constrained, then, by the increase in wage taxation, and taxation generally, over time.
David M. Primo
Stanford, CA
"Buying Time" was great! Yet it omitted any reference to the costs associated with the provision of government services. Especially informative would be the annual costs associated with running Congress, or the White House, or the federal judiciary. Or the average costs associated with the trial and incarceration of a capital felon. Or the cost per inmate of our state and federal prison systems.
A review of such costs might give clues to why, in the face of your good news about the cost of food, shelter, and life's goodies, we seem to feel neither especially rich nor financially secure.
Albert B. Hall
Friday Harbor, WA
I have worked the building trades since I was 16. I think my case probably parallels those of most tradesmen.
In 1972 I bought a new pickup and paid $2,200 for it. My wife's new sporty red import was less than $2,500. Our "starter" house was a brick three-bedroom, one bath, and cost about $10,000. All of these major purchases were handily covered by the $4.80 per hour I was making driving nails. I don't think I have lived as well since.
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