The Pity Party (12 page)

Economic growth has always had detractors: both on the Left, of the
Whole Earth Catalog
variety; and on the Right, such as the Southern Agrarians. Among those who view it as fundamentally good, most conservatives are inclined to treat growth as a necessary and virtually sufficient condition for improving human life, while the disposition to regard it a necessary but far from sufficient condition increases with one's political liberalism.

It is important, in any case, to emphasize how necessary that necessary condition really is. Economist Deirdre McCloskey calculates that in “the countries that most enthusiastically embraced capitalism” some two hundred years ago, real, per capita economic growth has increased by 1.5 percent annually. Owing to the miracle of compound interest, this increase has meant a
19-fold increase
in living standards over the past two centuries, which, she contends, is a “change in the human condition” that “ranks with the first domestications of plants and animals and the building of the first towns.” McCloskey argues that this enormous economic result had a cause that was cultural rather than economic. Humans did not suddenly become more acquisitive or creative. Rather, “When people treat the marketeers and inventors as having some dignity and liberty, innovation takes hold.” The new
respectability
of bourgeois life, the belief that the creativity of capitalism's creative destruction more than offset its destruction, was the decisive attitudinal change that rendered human life in the past two centuries decisively different from what it had been throughout the preceding millennia. In McCloskey's view, “I don't much care how ‘capitalism' is defined, so long as it is not defined a priori to mean vice incarnate.” The default position for modern thinking, however, characterizes “commercial society at the outset to be bad by any standard higher than successful greed.”
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An economically dynamic society is likely to be a good place to be poor not only because there will be many opportunities, but because the habits of thought and action conducive to creating those opportunities are also directly beneficial to the aspiring. The time poor people spend being poor is likely to be even briefer by virtue of a bourgeois nation's social capital, the thick network of religious, civic, and informal associations that provide contacts, solace, encouragement, and—when necessary—admonitions to those who are down on their luck. And when economic dynamism and social capital still leave some people (the disabled, for example) in poverty, a robust economy does the best job of generating the surplus wealth that will fund charitable and governmental safety nets.

For liberals, by contrast, what makes a place a good place to be poor is, above all, the strength of both the welfare state and the social taboo against blaming the victim. In such jurisdictions it may be possible to be poor briefly, but the main point is to facilitate being poor comfortably, respectably, and indefinitely. Just before the 2012 election the
New Republic
's Jonathan Cohn argued that the “blue states,” the eighteen carried by the Democratic presidential nominee in 2000, 2004, and 2008, look “more and more like Scandinavia.” The twenty “red states” carried by the GOP in those three elections, by contrast, increasingly resemble “a social Darwinist's paradise.” He argues, “By nearly every measure, people who live in the blue states are healthier, wealthier, and generally better off than people in the red states.” Why? Cohn allows that causation is difficult to prove, but believes the strong correlation between government spending and social well-being “is hard to dismiss.” In blue Massachusetts, for example, “health care is available to almost everybody . . . [w]elfare benefits are among the most generous in the country, and the state spends hundreds of millions on public housing each year.” Red Texas, by contrast, “doesn't even try to provide the kind of protection for its vulnerable residents that Massachusetts does. It has more uninsured residents than any other state in the country; its lawmakers have repeatedly refused money from the federal government to expand health insurance for kids. Its welfare program is among the nation's stingiest. . . .”
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This stark disparity would explain why civilized Massachusetts is growing so much more rapidly than barbaric Texas . . . if that were the case. In fact, the population of Massachusetts was 8.8 percent larger in 2010 than it had been in 1990, meaning it grew at one-third the rate of the other forty-nine states, while the Texas population increased by 48 percent, more than twice as fast as the rest of America. More generally, the blue states' total population increased by 15.9 percent between 1990 and 2010, while the red states grew 32.9 percent.
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The moral of the story appears to be that the blue states are good places to have money, partly as a result of a regulatory environment that privileges established enterprises against newcomers, and land-use policies that drive up the cost of housing in order to protect those who can afford to live there from problems like sprawl and congestion.
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They're also relatively good places not to have money, for all the reasons Cohn applauds. It's just that blue states are not such good places to
make
money, which is why the red states grow so much more rapidly. It's no surprise, then, that a
Chief Executive
magazine survey of five hundred business leaders found that the best states for business—in terms of taxes and regulations, and also public education and health, quality of life, and housing affordability—were a mix of red and purple ones, while the worst were solid blue. And, predictably, the best states for business accounted for a larger share of the national population in 2010 than in 1990, while the worst accounted for a smaller share. In lowest-ranked California, the magazine points out, the average lead time necessary to open a restaurant is two years, compared with the eight weeks or fewer that are customary in top-ranked Texas. Taking note of the relative opportunities and impediments, the company that owns the Carl's Jr. chain plans to open three hundred restaurants in Texas and zero in California.
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Cohn has a simple solution for this predicament, one that has nothing to do with getting blue states to reconsider tax and regulatory policies inconducive to economic growth. Quite the opposite—if Americans are voting with their feet against the blue-state model, nationalizing that model will render all such relocations pointless. The problem, Cohn believes, is that American federalism has left us with fifty safety nets, which is forty-nine too many. Giving “states a lot more control over the size and shape of the social welfare state” would mean giving them “the liberty to let a whole class of citizens suffer.” That must not happen. “This country has room for different approaches to policy,” Cohn writes. “It doesn't have room for different standards of human decency.” There should be room for just one standard, one that closely resembles the Massachusetts standard while repudiating the appalling one favored in Texas.
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Cohn's call for a bluer, more Scandinavian America comes at a time when some in northern Europe are voicing fears that their social policies have become a little too Scandinavian. When a Danish legislator challenged a skeptic of the hypergenerous welfare state to see for himself how hard it was, still, to live on what Denmark provided the poor, the answer turned out to be . . . not very hard at all. He discovered “Carina,” a thirty-six-year-old single mother who had been on welfare continuously since she was sixteen. Her total benefits package was worth $2,700 a month, more than the amount many Danes who work full-time live on. No Scandinavian country is going to resemble Texas anytime soon, but the
New York Times
reported in 2013 that “Denmark has been at work overhauling entitlements, trying to prod Danes into working more or longer or both.”
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“Carina” had the judgment to use a pseudonym and, eventually, stop talking to the press altogether, neither of which can be said of Susan Moore, whose biography is quite similar. Moore was declared “Britain's Laziest Woman” by the
Sun
in 2004, when it was discovered that she hadn't held any kind of job since dropping out of college at age eighteen in 1988. Susan shared a home with her divorced mother, for which they were receiving a £45 weekly housing allowance. Both also received a “Jobseeker's Allowance,” worth £40 a week in Susan's case, though she hadn't sought a job in sixteen years, and her mother had not done so since Susan was born in 1969. Ms. Moore turned down a job that would have involved answering phones on the weekend since “I shop on a Saturday, and on Sunday I sit at home and relax a bit.” The British welfare state, though giving out assistance with fewer strings attached than even the bluest parts of America, is less generous than Denmark's. As a result, Moore received “just enough to enable her to avoid making anything of her life,” according to columnist Mark Steyn, “enough to let her sit around all week ‘listening to CDs and watching videos.'”

“I just haven't been given a chance,” says Susan. But when the space on your CV for the period from adolescence to early middle-age is one big blank, no one's ever going to give you a chance. It's hard to think of anything capitalism red in tooth and claw could have done to Susan Moore that would have left her worse off than the great sapping nullity in which Her Majesty's Government has maintained her for her entire adult life.
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Several lessons can be drawn from the stories of Betsy Wilson, Mpinga Bomboku, “Carina,” and Susan Moore. First, as conservatives are always insisting, those keen to divide wealth cannot hurtle along disdaining the people and processes that multiply it. Few Danish experts, the
New York Times
reports, believe Denmark can afford to maintain its full menu of welfare state benefits, which includes “free” maid service for the elderly who need it, regardless of their income. They see, instead, the necessity of “trying to wean more people—the young and the old—off government benefits.” Among Danes between the ages of 15 and 64, 27 percent are not in the workforce, and many of the rest “work short hours and all enjoy perks like long vacations and lengthy paid maternity leaves, not to speak of a de facto minimum wage approaching $20 an hour.” Denmark's minister of social affairs and integration told the paper, “In the past, people never asked for help unless they needed it.” Today, however, “They think of these benefits as their rights. The rights have just expanded and expanded.” What people become accustomed to they eventually believe they are entitled to. But no national economy is dynamic enough to pay for a mass entitlement to prolong college into your mid-thirties and then commence retirement by your mid-fifties. Certainly Denmark is not. Its per capita GDP of $38,300 is three-fourths the size of America's.
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Conservatives, worried about the macroeconomic consequences of the taxes, borrowing, and regulations that make a welfare state like Denmark's possible, often invoke the French author Frédéric Bastiat. “There is only one difference between a bad economist and a good one,” he wrote in 1850. The “bad economist confines himself to the
visible
effect; the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be
foreseen.
” The import of this simple distinction is “tremendous” because “the bad economist pursues a small present good that will be followed by a great evil to come, while the good economist pursues a great good to come, at the risk of a small present evil.”
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Second, liberals betray neither compassion nor regret for enacting policies that enable some citizens to lead lives amounting to great sapping nullities. This outcome is not so much unforeseen as dismissed. Liberals resist the conclusion that an adulthood squandered listening to CDs and watching videos in public housing is a suffering situation, since nothing in that tableau distresses the liberal onlooker the way evicting Susan Moore and demanding that she get a job would. And if liberals find it difficult to commiserate with Ms. Moore they find it impossible to condemn her, as that would be moralistic and hurtful.

The word “judgmental,” which adroitly passes judgment against those who pass judgment, has grown up with modern liberalism, having been used for the first time in 1909, according to the
OED
. Liberals, sure that they're right to condemn those who are too sure that they're right, are defiantly nonjudgmental of lifestyle choices, while being vehemently judgmental of lifestyle scolds. “Lifestyle,” first used in 1915, is only slightly newer than “judgmental” and has the same topspin against the idea that some ways of life are better and others are worse.

But people convinced there is no reason they should ever be ashamed are left with no basis on which they can ever be proud. Social scientist Charles Murray contends that happiness, which the Declaration of Independence says men have an inalienable right to pursue, and which James Madison in Federalist No. 62 called
the
object of government, was understood by America's Founders “in its Aristotelian sense of lasting and justified satisfaction with life as a whole.” A “life well-lived” is usable shorthand for this concept, and it takes fierce commitment to the principle of being nonjudgmental about lifestyles to insist we have neither the right nor the basis to declare that “Carina” and Susan Moore are far along in the process of fashioning lives badly lived. Murray argues that a life may be well lived by some who are guided by “one of the world's great religions” or others who take seriously “one of the world's great secular philosophies.” It cannot, however, be lived by those who believe that because humans “are a collection of chemicals that activate and, after a period of time, deactivate,” the highest “purpose of life is to while away the intervening time as pleasantly as possible.”
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