September 28, 2004
Randall Jarrell was a deft American poet of deep unsentimental sentiment. (See what you think about The Woman at the Washington Zoo.) His novel, Pictures from An Institution, is superbly funny. I mention this because of a metaphor that appears early in the book. Describing the contortion of an amateur modern dancer, the protagonist is reminded of Greek philosophers having a nervous breakdown, muttering "Is it right to be good?"
Today, so soon after the Jewish High Holy Days, it made me happy to find (via Marginal Revolution) a positive answer to the question, "Is it good to be blessed?" Cecil E. Bohanon and T. Norman Van Cott, professors of economics as Ball State University, take on the manna that fell from heaven in the story of the Hebrews' 40-year wandering in the wilderness enroute to, well, to put it non-politically, a geographical location that they believed was their tribal destiny as well as their destination.
Bohanon and Van Cott argue that, in terms of the big picture, outsourcing means that
lower-cost production alternatives always expand consumption alternatives. Regardless of whether these alternatives trace to manna-like acts of God, new production technologies, foreigners willing to sell their products to us at less-than-prevailing prices, or even immigrants willing to work at less-than-prevailing wages, the result is the same. Consumption alternatives for the natives expand..... Fortunately for the Israelites, Moses didn’t order them to shun manna in order to preserve good jobs in food production.
An important question is how and at what level of magnitude to address the small-chunk problem of those workers who are displaced. The very strengths of a global market work against the tight tribal safety nets of simpler social organization. At the same time, shifts in intersecting market forces are the engine of much that is good.
In Kingsley Amis' novel Lucky Jim, the clear-sighted working-class hero declares that "Nice things are nicer than nasty things." Even mired as so many discussions are in ethical and aesthetic ambiguity, there are worse rules of thumb.
To begin at the level of semantic and perceptual reality:
More is more than less.
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