The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell

I had a mental image of this book that wasn't really correct. You might have it, too.

The standard blurb for The Road to Wigan Pier goes something like this: "In 1937, the Left Book Club sent jobbing Socialist writer George Orwell to investigate the plight of unemployed miners in the North of England. He wrote movingly about their suffering, and the lives of their families and their fellows who are still working." That's not entirely untrue, but it only partially describes the first half of this short book.

In the first hundred pages of Wigan Pier, Orwell visits a few mines and a few miner's homes, giving us some specific reportorial details. But he spends as much time with statistics and theory, explaining why the miner's lives are so horrible and how only The March Of International Socialism can save them. The second hundred pages see Orwell grappling with the inconvenient problem that Socialism was a third-rate political movement in England in 1937, populated mostly by cranks and monomaniacs and weirdos. (Not "decent normal people," his tedious refrain, with himself as the type specimen.) It also sees him spend several chapters describing in tedious detail his own specific set of class-prejudices, and extrapolating outward to assume he can diagnose the prejudices of all the "decent normal people."

(Note that "people" here, and throughout Wigan Pier, clearly means "men." One of the categories of people who are not "decent normal people" is feminists. One frankly starts to assume "decent normal people" is code for "middle-class Tory men," and wonders if politics were different enough eighty years ago that Orwell actually believed his beloved Socialists had a chance.)

The big problem with a book of political agitprop, of course, is that it dates quickly. And Wigan Pier has had eighty years to date. The central battle of the 20th century did not turn out to be Fascism vs. Socialism: Fascism was burned out in one big war, though periodic smaller outbreaks have occurred since. And, not to be too nitpicky, but it wasn't Socialism that defeated the Axis powers, either. Yes, the ruins of Europe moved in a generally leftward direction after the war, but Orwell was a true believer at this point: by Socialism he meant the whole shebang, with government ownership of everything and all the middle classes having "[sunk] without further struggles into the working class where we belong." He spends a lot of time on the devil's-advocate side of both Socialism and the then-current Depression, and frankly makes them both look dismal and horrible, like the choice between being strangled and beheaded.

Wigan Pier is additionally very clearly a book from before the Western Left realized what Stalin really was; The USSR is barely mentioned, except for Orwell to complain that his stereotyped Socialist cranks spend too much time singing paeans to Five-Year Plans and new tractor factories and the glory of Russian industry. This is not a view of Socialism that includes gulags or the Great Terror, which incidentally had been going on for the past several years at this point but still could be ignored by true believers. Socialism, in Orwell's conception, is the one true ideology which can save mankind from itself, and nothing can be allowed to halt it, and calling it that rather than Communism is primarily a matter of public relations, not of serious differences.

Luckily, he learned better. We all learned better, eventually. But that was all to come, in the years after Wigan Pier. This is a postcard from a vanished time, when Fascism seemed more transnational, and the spectre of an English Fascism standing up, taking over, and working hand-in-hand with Hitler was real and frightening. That fact that wasn't what actually happened doesn't mean it wasn't possible, and it's impossible to ever give real percentages on historical events -- well, until we get the cross-time machine working, and we can do some field research to work up the real numbers.

But, still, the spectre of English Fascism in 1937 is a creaky, anachronistic thing to read a long screed against, and Wigan Pier is more than 50% screed by volume. I can't exactly recommend it to most readers in the early 21st century, in particular anyone who suspects they would not be included in Orwell's phalanx of "decent normal people." But, then, as an American, he wasn't talking to me anyway.

Oh, one last note. There is no pier in Wigan. Orwell says it was torn down years before he got there, and never actually says why the pier would be important to a book about coal miners, or Socialism, or impending class doom. So the title is just as satisfying as the rest of the book.

In Which I Pretend I Know What I'm Talking About

Every blogger eventually becomes a crank to some degree or other -- you all know that, right? I've been at this for seven-plus years, so it's probably time for me to turn that handle another few turns and find something really nutty to obsess about.

Which is to say that I've had a thought lately that seems plausible inside my own head, though I'm sure it would be laughed at heartily by people who really know about economics. But, since I'm already typing, let me lay it out for you, and then you can explain why I'm wrong.

It's obvious that previous technological and organizational advances -- railroads, stirrups, the wheel, automobiles, the detailed division of labor, antibiotics, air conditioning, etc. -- allowed more business activity, and thus more jobs, more profits, and an expanding economy. That's the general mantra of progress, and it's a clear and obvious progression -- it may not have always seemed like a bigger economic pie to the Luddities who were thrown out of work at their looms, but there was definitely more products being produced, and a greater total value of products entering the marketplace (and there being exchanged for real money). Again, I'm no economist -- so I may be completely wrong about this -- but it looks to me like the transformation sparked by the Internet is very different: that its defining factor is that behavior that was previously part of a business process is being supplanted by similar behavior that does not generate revenue for anyone -- or, in some cases, generates substantially less revenue than the prior model did. Or, perhaps, some transformations are not as complete, so there's still some revenue attached, but not nearly as much as the pre-Internet version.

Some examples:

• Classified ads, which generated tens of millions of dollars of ad revenue yearly for newspapers, are replaced with free-to-the-user websites like Craigslist.
• Physical advertising -- primarily print, in newspapers and magazines, but some outdoor and other formats -- is replaced by a much smaller spend for online advertising.
• CDs are replaced by downloads, and ad-supported radio is replaced by promotional streaming websites and, occasionally, by ad models that bring in, again, much less revenue.
• Hardcover books are replaced with cheaper ebooks.
• Local newspapers are replaced by mostly unpaid bloggers.
• Software development companies are replaced by open source.
• Journal publishing is under pressure by the concept of "open access" -- essentially that the public should get for free the research that their tax dollars helped fund.

(I'm not even touching piracy of digital materials, since that's completely separate -- what concerns me is the devaluing of the work and the goods, even when there's some chance of payment.)

In many of those areas, there's still some money -- actually, enough money that a few superstars can grab a lot of it. That, I think, has camouflaged the larger picture, or made it look like every other transition -- there are winners and losers now, just like the buggy-whip era! But there are only a few winners, and a whole lot of losers. And there are large areas where entire job categories have disappeared, and have only been replaced by unpaid hobbyists. Sure, there are a million food bloggers out there now -- but how many restaurant critic jobs have been lost to get there?

I don't see how this is a sustainable trend for any economy: that more and more activities are done for free by people who hope they're good, lucky, and popular enough to be among the few to actually get paid for it. And I don't have any answer to the problem -- we clearly can't go backward, and those old models are pretty well smashed now, and are being smashed in more and more areas each year. But I don't like the way things are going, and I don't see how we can get from here back to any kind of economy where well-paying jobs are increasing and I can hope that my sons will do something neat and interesting twenty years from now.

Fridays, Black and Otherwise

Most of the many ways to divide humanity split the world into two groups -- as Benchley archly said, there are those who split people into two groups, and those who don't -- but, in this season, I'm fond of one I heard twenty years ago that had three groups, like Caesar's Gaul.

In this formulation -- and I'm sorry to say that I don't know who originated it -- modern Westerners can be separated by the work they did when they were young and unskilled. One great mass worked in retail, selling goods of one kind or another. A second cohort worked in food service, waiting tables or working a grill. And the third group, seemingly the lucky ones, were those rich or privileged enough not to have to work at all -- the ones who were children, then entirely students, and then set off on their careers, without ever having had "just a job."

That division is most clear and stark among the young, of course -- college students know which of them jet off to Aspen on breaks, which of them have to work a double shift at the Rathskeller on Thanksgiving, and which will be getting up in the middle of tomorrow night to be perky at 4 AM when Sears opens. But it never quite goes away, either.

The second cohort generally overtip throughout their lives; the first group shop online as much as they can, and never violate the law of the "Twelve Items or Fewer" lane. And the third group, never having had to do anything physically dirty or unpleasant in their working lives, run the big offices and make trouble for the first two groups until they finally die from the withering of their black and twisted hearts.

Every year The Wife and I have a conversation about the stores that are open at ridiculous hours on "Black Friday," and, these last few years, we're also reminded of the stores that don't even bother to close for Thanksgiving at all. We're not planning on going shopping ourselves; we're from the first group and we remember getting up early for our own Black Fridays and war-zone Sundays, so we're mostly thinking about how horrible it is for the employees.

(I saw one article in this morning's paper where the apologist for some retail behemoth -- and, sadly, the reporter did not think to ask her if she and the home-office staff would be hard at work today -- proudly stated that their New Jersey employees would be making time and a half today. Feh. I don't know if the laws have completely changed, but we used to get time and a half every single Sunday, and holidays were double time and a half, since there was an additional required holiday rate. Perhaps the union was stronger then.)

I don't want to be King Canute, but please do not encourage this behavior. When societies encourage bad behavior -- like "door-busters" that lead to part-time security guards being trampled to death, or just requiring workers who would really rather be with their families, or still asleep, to be at work at ridiculous hours of the night -- they get more of that bad behavior. If you must shop tomorrow, wait until normal hours to do so. Better yet, take a day to relax -- if you're lucky enough to have that day -- and do your shopping a bit later.

So this year I'm thankful that I don't work retail anymore. But I'm also thankful that I did work retail, once upon a time, and that I can still remember what it was like. And, even if by some miracle I have enough money to keep my sons from having to work when they're teenagers and college students, I'll make sure that they do get "real" jobs -- someplace where they can learn that the world isn't fair, and it isn't consistently fun, but that doing things right can be a great reward in itself.

I hope that you all have things to be thankful for as well, whether you're here in the USA, or elsewhere in the world where November 26th is just another working day.
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Listening to: Kate Tucker & The Sons Of Sweden - The Hours
via FoxyTunes

Point/Counterpoint

Point: Chuck Asay, in this cartoon, sums up one often-mentioned objection to government-controlled healthcare: that it would inevitably end up moving resources from one person to another. In this case, that's from someone relatively more healthy to someone relatively more sick -- but this doesn't seem to be the point Asay thinks he's making. The point he seems to be trying to make is that healthcare will always be scarcer than the places it is needed, which is true but not in dispute -- to quote Churchill out of context, "we already know what you are, madam, now we're just haggling over the price."

Counterpoint: Australia Montoya, who lived not too far from me, died at the age of 43 last week after a long battle with cancer. During that battle, her health insurance -- the rah-rah free market kind of thing Asay and his cohorts thinks will solve all problems -- cut her off after she'd maxed out her benefits, causing an interruption in treatment. There's no proof of anything, of course, but her insurance company certainly didn't help her survival by kicking her to the curb.

So here's the thing: a system that moved expensive machines around to benefit sicker people would be notably better than our current system in some ways. What, precisely, is the objection of Asay and his fellow-thinkers to it? "I've got mine, and you're not taking it"? That relatively poor black women aren't worth saving in the first place? Or that they simply prefer abusive private organizations to abusive public ones?

Sweet, Sweet Schadenfreude

A few days ago, Boing Boing had a post with a bunch of business books with now-funny titles -- things like Why the Real Estate Boom Will Not Bust (with a cover showing a house floating in air, no less!) and Dow 36,000.

But I remembered a book with a much funnier cover...though I had trouble remembering the exact title.

Finally, I found it.

And then I started writing a blog post about it, wasting time and lines to try to put the actual bookshot low enough on the page to come as a surprise to at least some of you.

Did it work?

From the reviews, this was a satirical novel aimed at swelled-head i-bankers to begin with, but it's still a damn funny cover...particularly these days:

Explain Me This

How come I'm seeing a whole bunch of editorial cartoons about the possible car-makers' bailout including some reference to the UAW as some evil personage?

(Take this Lisa Benson cartoon, for example -- the UAW is a giant gorilla, and "Detroit" is a little man acting like his organ-grinder's monkey. The message seems to be that "Detroit" is utterly in thrall of the UAW, which would be a huge surprise to anyone who's followed the history of labor unions in the last fifty years.)

Didn't we use to think that well-paying blue-collar jobs were a good thing? I completely understand the resentment against investment bankers -- more so, enthusiastically share in it -- but I didn't think that we'd sunk so low as to hate relatively well-paid factory workers.

(There's another cartoon from a few days ago -- I can't find it now -- but it was basically blaming retirees for the carmakers' financial problems. As if, you know, if they'd just died like poor people are supposed to, then GM wouldn't have to pay for their meager old-age cottages.)

Oh, and, yes, I do remember American labor's long history of strong-arm tactics and ties to organized crime -- I'm from New Jersey, remember! -- but these cartoons seem to be about something else, as if paying assembly-line workers a high wage is a stupid, evil idea.

Update: And here's another one, from Glenn Foden. The UAW is a giant anchor holding back the stagecoach of the Big 3 automakers from being pulled by a single donkey (which I guess represents car-buyers; he's not labeled). Leaving aside the inadvertently painful precision of Foden's visual metaphor -- the cartoon itself begs one to ask if the Big 3 aren't in trouble because they're trying to drive a stagecoach -- one still has to ask why the similar stagecoaches of Toyota, Honda, and so for -- not shown in this picture -- aren't being similarly hampered.

Editorial cartoonists, everywhere: think about your metaphors before you dive into them.

Oh, and here's one from the other side, by David Horsey.