A claim I see often is: capitalism is great because of all this *stuff* we have. The poorest person in capitalism lives materially better than kings and emperors did. Isn’t that great?

So why did our ancestors not adopt such a system? Some thoughts.

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Let’s set aside the question over whether capitalism or mass fossil fuel use drove any improvement in material wealth. Let’s also set aside the wild inequality of material wealth under capitalism and its environmental costs. Let’s just focus on the issue of *why*.

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Why did people not adopt capitalism or something like it before ~350 years ago in Britain? Is it because they were stupid? No, I’d argue. On the contrary, they were very smart! And I think they made a deliberate decision to live with less material productivity.

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Consider, for example, medieval England’s badger laws: three commercial laws, mostly applied to the sale of food, that were deeply anti-competitive. It was illegal to regrate, to buy up food and resell it at a profit in the same market.

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It was illegal to engross, to buy up so much of a commodity that you could inflate the sale price. And it was illegal to forestall, to buy up commodities coming into a market or dissuade another seller from entering the market, again to raise the price.

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All of these laws restricted profits, and therefore almost certainly restricted supply and the ability of sellers to meet changes in demand. They were *inefficient.* Why did medieval England hate efficiency?

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Karl Polanyi, in “The Great Transformation,” offers this explanation based on his anthropological survey: anti-competitive restrictions deliberately traded *efficiency* for *stability.*

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Consider too my favorite hobby horse, the medieval open field system. Fields were long & skinny because it was hard to turn a team of oxen pulling a plough through heavy soil. But they were also *scattered.* Farmers rarely worked contiguous strips. This was very inefficient!

8/

Deirdre McCloskey estimated that the inefficiency of having to work scattered fields costs peasants a whopping *ten percent* of their agricultural productivity, at a time when many were subsistence farmers and agriculture accounted for 80% of incomes. Were they stupid?

9/

Probably not. McCloskey estimates that the open field system was a hedge against disaster. Scattered fields, in a variety of soils and exposed to varied weather, were less vulnerable to a single disaster, like a flood, than concentrated fields.

10/

https://www.deirdremccloskey.com/docs/pdf/Article_50.pdf

I discussed another aspect of this in a previous thread: the deliberate segregation of markets, physical places, to walled enclaves or other sites outside of the community, to keep the vagaries of trade from disrupting daily life.

11/ https://twitter.com/andyindc1/status/1352961126875721728

We see a pattern: not a foolish oversight, but a deliberate strategy to trade profit and productivity for stability and security. And we might say: that was for them, but we are more willing to take the risks to reap the rewards.

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But I think that, on the contrary, we are trained to not even consider those risks, or to think of them as risks that we have a choice over. It’s all around us, and it’s devastating.

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Consider Detroit. We’re all familiar with the story: the riots, the white flight, the economic decline, the fall into ruin. But note that Detroit was losing population as early as the 1950s, long before the riots.

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This decline was driven by a decline in Detroit’s chief industry, car manufacture, as American producers lost market share to European and Japanese manufacturers. Producers and consumers made decisions all over the world and an entire city was *destroyed.*

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This isn’t speculation; it’s fact. Consider: the inclusion of China in the WTO correlates strongly to an increase in deaths of despair, suicide and drug overdoses, in those American economies most economically vulnerable to trade liberalization.

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https://www.aeaweb.org/conference/2018/preliminary/paper/kesFZbin

The point is not, as neoliberals imagine, to argue that “trade is bad” in the abstract. It’s that trade exposes our lives—jobs, incomes, education, healthcare—to decisions made around the world that we can’t see or have any say over.

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A factory exec in Tianjan makes a decision about output and halfway around the world, an Ohio convenience store owner loses their store as customers dry up. It can feel like the end of the world, and for many it was. And it must have felt like a force of nature.

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But it wasn’t natural. It was the product of *decisions.* And history tells us that we’re fully capable of making different decisions and gaining meaningful, if different, benefits. Maybe we have a few fewer tchotchkes, but also millions more of us don’t commit suicide.

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But we don’t get to make that choice. We’re not even told there *is* a choice. Our society runs on an ideology of the free market: the market runs itself, with a mystical “invisible hand,” as if it is not simply an agglomeration of human decisions.

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Economics are like a force of nature, and the state has no legitimate role in the economy. Sound familiar? It’s the neoliberal creed. But these decisions are decisions, and they should be under democratic control as much as any other.

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But our elites benefit from capitalism’s intensification while bearing virtually none of the risks themselves. So they’re never going to voluntarily give this up. We die, our cities crumble, and they shrug and ask “what is to be done?” as if it’s just a thing that *happens.*

22/

I’ll finish by pointing out: suicide among hunter-gatherers is virtually unknown. People who control their economic fates tend to choose stability over risk, and those people tend to survive and thrive despite making less *stuff.* Doesn’t sound too bad.

https://so06.tci-thaijo.org/index.php/pub_jss/article/view/158266/114650