Impacts- Econ Bad- A2: Democracy- Freidman Indicts

Impacts- Econ Bad- A2: Democracy- Freidman Indicts

As I see it, high economic growth, especially in developed nations, entails sacrificing ever more of the elements that make for a good society. The way this comes about is vividly illustrated by a silly but delightful story in Jules Vern’s Around the World in Eight Days. On the last leg of the trip, the locomotive that serves the race is running out of coal. To keep it running, first the walls of the wagons are fed into the fire and then those of the caboose itself, leaving the racing passengers sitting on a bare rod, in the cold with barely anything to hold onto. The West, especially the United States, is moving in this direction by sacrificing ever more for efficiency. The “24/7 society” is an exaggerated but proper term for the direction in which the “have” societies are moving in order to engage in unfettered competition with people who have few health care benefits, no retirements funds, no worker compensation, and pay no mind to the environment. They hence work longer and harder and have less time for their children, spouses, elderly parents, communities, cultures and much else. Friedman argues that over the past 200 years the workweek in the United States has declined. However, since 1964 the average workweek has hardly changed. Above all, over the past 30 years or so, household income has increased while per capita income has barely changed because more and more women have turned to gainful employment, so that now it takes about 1.7 workers to earn the same household income that one worker used to earn. Moreover, given that most women are now gainfully employed, further increases in household income must come from somewhere else. It is now achieved by more and more high school students working as many as 20 hours a week or more in fast food restaurants and other such jobs, and more and more senior citizens being forced to work (although often off the books and hence to reflected in many statistics). In addition, more people are taking work home with them, to PTA and rare town hall meetings, and even to the beach, in what might be called the “Blackberry culture.” The result is that there are few human resources to attend to the members of the household, the sick, the elderly, friends, and social and cultural activities.

Unfortunately, Friedman’s argument cannot accommodate the Maslowian notion that at some point, once one’s needs for basic creature comforts are sated, one might be better off- and indeed a better human being, one much more willing to allow others to catch up-if one's satisfactions were driven by greater "investment" in relationships and culture, which require few economic resources. For instance, embracing a set of values defined by voluntary simplicity (a moderate version of the counterculture) or a civic religion of communitarianism can serve as a normative counterweight to reference groups that spur people to work harder for goods they do not truly need. This in turn may release such goods to those who have not yet gained whatever creature comforts they require-without any sense of loss or sacrifice in other sectors of society.

Impacts- Econ bad- A2: Democracy- Friedman Indicts Cont’d

Analysis flawed and arbitrary – no interpretation of moral consequences
Wilkinson 6 (Will, Cato Institute, Book Reviews, http://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cj26n1/cj26n1-11.pdf, 4/10/06, AD: 7/6/09)

Benjamin Friedman’s The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth is magnificent and flawed. It is a work of astounding scholarship and exhilarating intellectual imagination as well as disappointing partisanship and theoretical fragility. Moral Consequences is primarily an extended defense of the hypothesis that steady economic growth “fosters greater opportunity, tolerance of diversity, social mobility, commitment to fairness and dedication to democracy” (p. 4). The hypothesis is defended with a spectacular range of evidence from disciplines including economic and political history as well as popular culture and literature. However, as the book proceeds, it becomes increasingly difficult to say what exactly Friedman means by “moral consequences.” And that in a nutshell is the big problem for this big book. As Friedman shifts without comment or justification from a broad Enlightenment conception of moral progress to a rather parochial American welfare-statist conception of political morality, the nature and importance of the dependent variable in Friedman’s equation becomes ever more elusive. Without a rather more rigorous normative framework, the reader is left arguing with the author about whether the examples he has chosen to prove his point really count for or against it.
Friedman’s work is to arbitrary and contradictory
Wilkinson 6 (Will, Cato Institute, Book Reviews, http://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cj26n1/cj26n1-11.pdf, 4/10/06, AD: 7/6/09)

The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth is an enormously ambitious book that suffers from a lack of ambition, like the Sistine ceiling in black and white. The overarching logic—Adam Smith’s logic—is impeccable. Friedman deserves credit for marshaling a huge quantity of historical evidence to flesh out the case for growth. But his rigorous economic and historical scholarship is in the end undermined by theoretical laxity on the normative side of the equation. Someday someone will write the book on the moral dimensions of economic growth.

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