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Flyover Country
Ever since COVID started, Guy and I have been taking long road trips — mostly to visit our kids and grandkids who live far away, but also to visit some of our favorite national parks, wildlife refuges, and wild places all across the mostly western United States. As the COVID threat receded, we discovered (in part because we are "retired" and able to take longer trips), that we far prefer road-tripping to flying: no worries about missed connections, canceled flights, lost baggage, or the unpleasantness of jam-packed planes and airports.
The bigger reason, however, was that driving has enabled us to better see the country that we used to just fly over and to understand much more about the lives of the people who live and work there. In addition to discovering the awesome beauty of so many places that aren't on anybody's "bucket list," we developed a better understanding of the nation's vast infrastructure and all the people who do things that we unconsciously depend upon and seldom, if ever, consciously recognize and appreciate.
In the course of our travels, we have crisscrossed California's vast Central Valley, giving us a much better sense of what it takes to provide us with the steady stream of fresh fruits and vegetables that we take for granted. It has taken us days to drive across the corn and wheat fields of the Midwest and hours to drive around gigantic mines that provide us with all sorts of exotic minerals, many of which we had never heard of (but, when we Googled them, we found out how important they are). There are vast oil fields, seemingly endless pipelines, giant waterworks, thousands of miles of power lines, plus the newer wind and solar farms. We have also spent hours driving around giant military bases and taking heed of occasional reminders not to be alarmed by low-flying combat aircraft. We visited wildlife refuges in the middle of nowhere that we learned are absolutely critical to the survival of a great many migrating birds. Finally, there are the ever-present truckers, the mile-long trains, and the occasional giant container terminal that remind us that the economic web that we have been witnessing is truly global.
We were also particularly struck by the age of all this infrastructure — most everything dated back to a time when America really did build things — something that we can't seem to do today (as fragments of California's troubled bullet train project amply demonstrate). Apart from the new fiber-optic cables, we saw very few new projects that are able to overcome special-interest veto power.
We were also repeatedly struck with how different flyover country is from the richer, more progressive, high-tech communities like the one in which we live. Almost without exception, flyover country is Trump country. As you might suspect, this stark reality frequently got us talking about the giant conflict that is dividing the two parts of America. We came to understand why those in Trump's America tend to think, with considerable justification, that they don't get anywhere near enough credit for the enormous value that they contribute to society.
This also led us to start wondering whether those on the left-leaning side of the political debate were overemphasizing distributional questions about "who should get what" and underemphasizing the other side of the economic equation — how all of the goods and services that we are trying to distribute actually get created and how the people who make them and distribute them get compensated for their labors.
Magical Production
This led us to write this post on what we are calling "magical production" — the tendency to unconsciously think that goods and services magically appear in our stores and that the only important question is how to distribute them.
We all go to our grocery stores and buy fresh fruits and vegetables that come from all over the country, and from many other countries around the world. We expect this produce to be there, and be fresh every day, even in the winter, giving little to no thought to where that produce comes from, what goes into growing it, picking it, packing it, and shipping it to every grocery store in the country. Every day.
The same is true for milk and milk products, bread, rice, eggs, meat, and seafood. We expect a wide variety of options available all the time. We seldom consider what it actually takes to produce those things or the people who work so hard to make this magic possible.
Further, many of us decry the "evil corporations" that produce our food, and even more so, the natural gas and oil producers that power the processing plants and the trucks that drive all this stuff to our stores. We just want this stuff to magically appear whenever we want it. We tend to assume that any adverse impacts associated with the production and distribution of food and other goods are the fault of evil corporations that, if they weren't so greedy, could easily avoid these problems.
Now, of course, many progressives do care about farmworkers, and they don't want them to be deported or lose their jobs. In fact, it is quite possible that support for Trump's deportation program will take a nosedive should our grocery store shelves become sparse or bare. But little credit is given to the many other laborers who grow, process, and distribute our food — especially if the work is done by Trump voters, rather than the left's favored identity groups.
And the same is true for non-food products. Amazon will sell us practically anything that we want and get it to our front door in a day or two. Clothing made in Vietnam. Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan. Beauty products made in Korea. Japanese kitchenware. Chinese electronics. We don't think about what it takes to make all these products and get them to us, again, in a day or two. It will be interesting to see, when (and if) Donald Trump's tariffs really do take effect, whether many of these goods suddenly do become unavailable. Trump, apparently, thinks we can make all these things in the U.S. It is hard to see how this can be done in a timely manner, when we can hardly build anything now at all. Unless Trump backs down, it seems likely that we will be looking at a much diminished material quality of life, as we won't be able to get many of these "magical products" that we have become so used to and dependent on. Of course, one could (and some do) argue that withdrawing from the global economy would be worth it, if it improves the quality-of-life for those in this country who have been on the losing side of globalization. (Such improvements, of course, would also come at the expense of people in other countries who have seen their incomes rise substantially as a result of opportunities brought by the global economy.)
Similarly, we decry big corporations for being greedy and don't think about how many people will lose their jobs if we stop buying things from them. We think even less about the people who make all those things. The people we admire are seldom people who make things — they are more often movie stars or sports heroes or popular musical artists. Factory workers? Truck drivers? Construction workers? Road maintenance workers? Do we admire them? Would we want our children to become one of them? No, most of us (who are lucky enough to be part of the cosmopolitan elite) would not. But these are the people who keep us going. They keep our lives manageable, even enjoyable. And these are the people you see when you drive across the country instead of fly. And you understand, a bit more, why their view of the world and politics is so different from that of the elite who live on the coasts and fly from one coast to another, without seeing all the invisible people and production that they are flying above.
Production Equity
All of this also suggests that we need to develop a clearer theory of "production equity" that balances our efforts to think through the problems of distributional equity. We need to remember that a prosperous society is a precondition to being able to address the many problems that each of us would like to see addressed. Building such a prosperous society requires that we cultivate a system that encourages people to safely and efficiently produce all of the things we need and want. One of the big problems with kleptocratic regimes is that, by denying people the fruits of their labors, they undermine the incentive to work and produce things, which then tends to impoverish society as a whole.
In order to maintain and further spread the benefits of our reasonably prosperous society, we need a system that takes fuller advantage of what we have elsewhere called "the engine of social learning" (i.e. Adam Smith's invisible hand). We need to remember that the phenomenal success of free, democratic societies with their capitalistic economic systems is that they create opportunities for people to get ahead by helping solve the problems faced by their fellow citizens.
For the invisible hand to work effectively, however, effective mechanisms are needed for controlling what Kenneth Boulding called "the invisible fist." The invisible fist arises as those that previously contributed value to society (with creative inventions, for example) quit adding new value to society and, instead, focus on the long-term monopolization of their inventions in ways that discourage new innovation and reduced costs. This is what economists call "rent-seeking." Rent seeking is primarily responsible for economic stagnation and the grotesque concentrations of wealth that are now so prevalent. In other words, promoting production equity requires us to focus on building a system that rewards people according to the value that they contribute to society, while also providing a safety net for those who, for reasons beyond their control, are unable to contribute their share of societal value.
We think that such a focus on production equity could help address the widespread unfairness of our current system, by making it harder for greedy CEOs to get rich by exploiting their employees and customers. We need to restructure our reward system to make life more difficult (and less profitable) for rent-seekers. (I was going to write that we should call them out, but then thought about our recent conversation with Frank Dukes, who talked about Loretta Ross and the superiority of "calling in," rather than "calling out.") So perhaps, instead of calling out greedy CEOs who exploit the real producers and distributors, we should call them in to a worldview that better appreciates all these producers and what they do for us all.
We also need to consider what is "fair" in terms of equitable distribution. People who work hard at what they do should be rewarded for that effort. For example, teachers, and childcare and eldercare workers should be well paid, given the essential roles they play in the health of our society. So should farm workers, and truckers, factory workers, and all those in the blue-collar trades.
Though it is popular to denounce capitalism, accusing it of being the source of extreme inequality, it is also the engine of creativity, hard work, and prosperity. Why work to invent something new and better if you won't get rewarded for it? Why take risks if there is negligible payoff for success? Indeed, why work at all if you can just get paid by the government to sit at home and watch TV? (Many people apparently did that when they were able to live off COVID subsidies and not go back to work.) This isn't the way to maintain our high standard of living or keep food on the grocery store shelves. It isn't the way we are going to get our children taught, or ourselves cared for when we get old and feeble.
Rather than denouncing capitalism, we should recognize what it does well, and what it can't do. And we then need to use our ingenuity (and likely government regulations and money and taxes) to figure out how to encourage everyone to contribute to making our society better, and rewarding those who succeed enough to encourage more of such behavior. Sitting around and decrying and bemoaning all of those who we often think are trying to make America worse isn't going to help us. We need to innovate, work hard and collaborate to actually make America better for everyone.
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