The second primitive accumulation

One of the more memorable parts of Capital is Marx's description of the “so-called primitive accumulation of capital” — the historical process where rural people were dispossessed of access to land and forced into industrial employment in cities like Birmingham and Manchester (link). It seems as though we’ve seen another kind of primitive accumulation in the past thirty years — the ruin of well-paid manufacturing jobs based on unionized labor, the disappearance of local retail stores, the extinction of bookstores and locally owned hardware stores, all of which offered a large number of satisfying jobs. We’ve seen a new set of bad choices for displaced workers — McDonald’s servers, Walmart greeters, and Amazon fulfillment workers. And this structural economic change threatens to create a permanent under-class of workers earning just enough to get by.

So what is the future of work and class in advanced economies? Scott Shane's major investigative story in the New York Times describing Amazon's operations in Baltimore (link) makes for sobering reading on this question. The story describes work conditions in an Amazon fulfillment center in Baltimore that documents the intensity, pressure, and stress created for Amazon workers by Amazon's system of work control. This system depends on real-time monitoring of worker performance, with automatic firings coming to workers who fall short on speed and accuracy after two warnings. Other outlets have highlighted the health and safety problems created by the Amazon system, including this piece on worker safety in the Atlantic by Will Evans; link. It is a nightmarish description of a work environment, and hundreds of thousands of workers are employed under these conditions.

Imagine the difference you would experience as a worker in the hardware store mentioned in the New York Times story (driven out of business by online competition) and as a worker in an Amazon fulfillment center. In the hardware store you provide value to the business and the customers; you have social interaction with your fellow workers, your boss, and the customers; you work in a human-scale enterprise that actually cares whether you live or die, whether you are sick or well; and to a reasonable degree you have a degree of self-direction in your work. Your expertise in home improvement, tools, and materials is valuable to the customers, which brings them back for the next project, and it is valuable to you as well. You have the satisfaction of having knowledge and skills that make a difference in other people’s lives. In the fulfillment center your every move is digitally monitored over the course of your 10-hour shift, and if you fall short in productivity or quality after two warnings, you are fired. You have no meaningful relationships with fellow workers — how can you, with the digital quotas you must fulfill every minute, every hour, every day? And you have no — literally no — satisfaction and fulfillment as a human being in your work. The only value of the work is the $15 per hour that you are paid; and yet it is not enough to support you or your family (about $30,000 per year). As technology writer Amy Webb of the Future Today Institute is quoted in the Times article, [It’s not that we may be replaced by robots,] “it’s that we’ve been relegated to robot status.”

What kind of company is that? It is hard to avoid the idea that it is the purest expression that we have ever seen of the ideal type of a capitalist enterprise: devoted to growth, cost avoidance, process efficiency, use of technology, labor control, rational management, and strategic and tactical reasoning based solely on business growth and profit-maximizing calculations. It is a Leviathan that neither Hobbes nor Marx could really have visualized. And social wellbeing — of workers, of communities, of country, of the global future — appears to have no role whatsoever in these calculations. The only affirmative values expressed by the company are “serving the consumer” and being a super-efficient business entity.

What is most worrisome about the Amazon employment philosophy is its single-minded focus on “worker efficiency” at every level, using strict monitoring techniques and quotas to enforce efficient work. And the ability to monitor is increased asymptotically by the use of technology — sensors, cameras, and software that monitor the worker’s every movement. It is the apotheosis of F.W. Taylor’s theories from the 1900s of “scientific management” and time-motion studies. Fundamentally Taylor regarded the worker as a machine-like component of the manufacturing process, whose motions needed to be specified and monitored so as to bring about the most efficient possible process. And, as commentators of many ideological stripes have observed, this is a fundamentally dehumanizing view of labor and the worker. This seems to be precisely the ideal model adopted by Amazon, not only in its fulfillment centers but its delivery drivers, its professional staff, and every other segment of the workforce Amazon can capture.

Business and technology historian David Hounshell presciently noticed the resurgence of Taylorism in a 1988 Harvard Business Review article on “modern manufacturing”; link. (This was well before the advent of online business and technology-based mega-companies.) Here are a few relevant paragraphs from his piece:

Rather than seeing workers as assets to be nurtured and developed, manufacturing companies have often viewed them as objects to be manipulated or as burdens to be borne. And the science of manufacturing has taken its toll. Where workers were not deskilled through extreme divisions of labor, they were often displaced by machinery. For many companies, the ideal factory has been — and continues to be — a totally automated, workerless facility. 

Now in the wake of the eroding competitive position of U.S. manufacturing companies, is it time for an end to Taylor’s management tradition? The books answer in the affirmative, calling for the institution of a less mechanistic, less authoritarian, less functionally divided approach to manufacturing. Dynamic Manufacturing focuses explicitly on repudiating Taylorism, which it takes to be a system of “command and control.” American Business: A Two-Minute Warning is written in a more popular vein, but characterizes U.S. manufacturing methods and the underlying mind-set of manufacturing managers in unmistakably similar ways. Taylorism is the villain and the anachronism. 

Predictably, both books arrive at their diagnoses and prescriptions through their respective evaluations of the “Japanese miracle.” Whereas U.S. manufacturing is rigid and hierarchical, Japanese manufacturing is flexible, agile, organic, and holistic. In the new competitive environment — which favors the company that can continually generate new, high-quality products — the Japanese are more responsive. They will continue to dominate until U.S. manufacturers develop manufacturing units that are, in Hayes, Wheelwright, and Clark’s words, “dynamic learning organizations.” Their book is intended as a primer. (link)

Plainly the more positive ideas associated with positive human resources theory about worker motivation, knowledge, and creativity play no role in Amazon’s thinking about the workplace. And this implies a grim future for work — not only in this company, but in many others who emulate the workplace model pioneered by Amazon.

The abuses of the first fifty years of industrial capitalism eventually came to an end through a powerful union movement. Workers in railroads, textiles, steel, and the automobile industry eventually succeeded in creating union organizations that were able to effectively represent their interests in the workplace. So where is the Amazon worker’s ability to resist? The New York Times story (link) makes it clear that individual workers have almost no ability to influence Amazon’s practices. They can choose not to work for Amazon, but they can’t join a union, because Amazon has effectively resisted unionization. And in places like Baltimore and other cities where Amazon is hiring, the other job choices are even worse (even lower paid, if they exist at all). Amazon makes a great deal of money on their work, and it manages its great initiatives based on their Chaplin-esque speed of completion (one-day delivery). But there is very little ability to change the workplace towards a more human-scale one, and a workplace where the worker’s positive human capacities find fulfillment. An Amazon fulfillment center is anything but that when it comes to the lives of the workers who make it run.

Is there a better philosophy that Amazon might adopt for its work environments? Yes. It is a framework that places worker wellbeing at the same level as efficiency, “1-day delivery” and profitability. It is an approach that gives greater flexibility to shop-floor-level workers, and relaxes to some degree the ever-rising quotas for piece work per minute. It is an approach that sets workplace expectations in a way that fully considers the safety, stress, and health of the workers. It is an approach that embodies genuine respect and concern for its workers — not as public relations initiative, but as a guiding philosophy of the workplace.

There is a hard question and a harder question posed by this idea, however. Is there any reason to think that Amazon will ever evolve in this more humane direction? And harder, is there any reason to think that any large modern corporation can embody these values? Based on the current behavior of Amazon as a company, from top to bottom, the answer to the first question is “no, not unless workers gain real power in the workplace through unionization or some other form of representation in production decisions.” And to the second question, a qualified yes: “yes, a more humane workplace is possible, if there is broad involvement in business decisions by workers as well as shareholders and top executives.” But this too requires a resurgence of some form of organized labor — which our politics of the past 20 years have discouraged at every turn.

Or to quote Oliver Goldsmith in The Deserted Village (1770):

Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay.
Princes and lords may flourish, or may fade;
A breath can make them, as a breath has made:
But a bold peasantry, their country’s pride,
When once destroy’d, can never be supplied.

So where did the dispossessed wind up in nineteenth century Britain? Here is how Engels described the social consequences of this "primitive accumulation" for the working people of Britain in his book, The Condition of the Working Class in England:

It is only when [the observer] has visited the slums of this great city that it dawns upon him that the inhabitants of modern London have had to sacrifice so much that is best in human nature in order to create those wonders of civilisation with which their city teems. The vast majority of Londoners have had to let so many of their potential creative faculties lie dormant, stunted and unused in order that a small, closely-knit group of their fellow citizens could develop to the full the qualities with which nature has endowed them. (30)

This passage, written in 1845, could with minor changes of detail describe the situation of Amazon workers today. "The vast majority ... have had to let so many of their potential creative faculties lie dormant, stunted and unused in order that a small, closely-knit group of their fellow citizens could develop to the full the qualities with which nature has endowed them."

And what about income and standard of living? The graph of median US income by quintile above in constant 2018 dollars tells a very stark story. Since 1967 only the top quintile of household income has demonstrated significant growth (in a timeframe of more than fifty years); and the top 5% of households shows the greatest increase of any group. 80% of US households are barely better off today than they were in 1967; whereas the top 5% of households have increased their incomes by almost 250% in real terms. This has a very clear, unmistakeable implication: that working people, including service workers, industrial workers, and most professionals have received a declining share of the economic product of the nation. Amazon warehouse workers fall in the 2nd-lowest quintile (poorest 21-40%). (It would be very interesting to have a time series of Amazon's wage bill for blue-collar and white-collar wages excluding top management as a fraction of company revenues and net revenues since 2005.)

Here is a relevant post on the possibilities created for a more fair industrial society by the institution of worker-owned enterprises (link), and here is a post on the European system of workers councils (link), a system that gives workers greater input into decisions about operations and work conditions on the shop floor.

The tempos of capitalism

I've been interested in the economic history of capitalism since the 1970s, and there are a few titles that stand out in my memory. There were the Marxist and neo-Marxist economic historians (Marx's Capital, E.P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm, Rodney Hilton, Robert Brenner, Charles Sabel); the debate over the nature of the industrial revolution (Deane and Cole, NFR Crafts, RM Hartwell, EL Jones); and volumes of the Cambridge Economic History of Europe. The history of British capitalism poses important questions for social theory: is there such a thing as "capitalism", or are there many capitalisms? What are the features of the capitalist social order that are most fundamental to its functioning and dynamics of development? Is Marx's intellectual construction of the "capitalist mode of production" a useful one? And does capitalism have a logic or tendency of development, as Marx believed, or is its history fundamentally contingent and path-dependent? Putting the point in concrete terms, was there a probable path of development from the "so-called primitive accumulation" to the establishment of factory production and urbanization to the extension of capitalist property relations throughout much of the world?

Part of the interest of detailed research in economic history in different places -- England, Sweden, Japan, the United States, China -- is the light that economic historians have been able to shed on the particulars of modern economic organization and development, and the range of institutions and "life histories" they have identified for these different historically embodied social-economic systems. For this reason I have found it especially interesting to read and learn about the ways in which the early modern Chinese economy developed, and different theories of why China and Europe diverged in this period. Kenneth Pomeranz, Philip Huang, William Skinner, Mark Elvin, Bozhong Li, James Lee, and Joseph Needham all shed light on different aspects of this set of questions, and once again the Cambridge Economic History of China was a deep and valuable resource.

A  new title that recently caught my eye is Pierre Dockès' Le Capitalisme Et Ses Rythmes, quatre siècles en perspective: Tome I Sous Le Regard Des Géants. Intriguing features of the book include the long sweep of the book (400 years, over 950 pages, with volume II to come), and the question of whether there is something new to say about this topic. After reading large parts of the book, I think the answer to the last question is "yes".

Dockès is interested in both the history of capitalism as an economic system and the history of economic science and political economy during the past four centuries. And he is particularly interested in discovering what we can learn about our current economic challenges from both these stories.

He specifically distances himself from "mainstream" economic theory and couches his own analysis in a less orthodox and more eclectic set of ideas. He defines mainstream economics in terms of five ideas: first, its strong commitment to mathematization and formalization of economic ideas; second, its disciplinary tendency towards hyper-specialization; third, its tendency to take the standpoint of the capitalist and the free market in its analyses; fourth, the propensity to extend these neoliberal biases to the process of selection and hiring of academics; and fifth, its underlying “scientism” and positivism leads its practitioners to devalue the history of the discipline or the historical conditions through which modern institutions came to be (9-12).

 

Dockès holds that the history of the economic facts and the ideas researchers have had about these facts go hand in hand; economic history and the history of economics need to be studied together. Moreover, Dockès believes that mainstream economics has lost sight of insights from the innovators in the history of economics which still have value -- Ricardo, Smith, Keynes, Walras, Sismondi, Hobbes. The solitary focus of the discipline of mainstream economics in the past forty years on formal, mathematical representations of a market economy precludes these economists from "seeing" the economic world through the conceptual lenses of gifted predecessors. They are trapped in a paradigm or an "epistemological framework" from which they cannot escape. (These ideas are explored in the introduction to the volume.)

The substantive foundation of the book is Dockès’ idea that capitalism has long-term rhythms punctuated by crises, and that these fluctuations themselves are amenable to historical-causal and institutional analysis.

En un mot, croissance et crise sont inséparables et inhérents au processus de développement capitaliste laissé à lui-même.

[In a word, growth and crisis are inseparable and inherent in the process of capitalist development left to itself.] (13)

The fluctuations of capitalism over the longterm are linked in a single system of causation — growth, depression, financial crisis, and growth again are linked. Therefore, Dockès believes, it should be possible to discover the systemic causes of the development of various capitalist economies by uncovering the dynamics of crisis. Further, he underlines the serious social and political consequences that have ensued from economic crises in the past, including the rise of the Nazi regime out of the global economic crisis of the 1930s.

Etudier ces rythmes impose une analyse des logiques de fonctionnement du capitalism.

[Studying these rhythms imposes an analysis of the logic of functioning of capitalism.] (12).

Dockès is explicit in saying that economic history does not "repeat" itself, and the crises of capitalism are not replicas of each other over the decades or centuries. Historicity of the time and place is fundamental, and he underlines the path dependency of economic development in some of its aspects as well. But he argues that there are important similarities across various kinds of economic crises, and it is worthwhile discovering these similarities. He takes debt crises as an example: there are great differences among several centuries of experience of debt crisis. But there is something in common as well:

Permanence aussi dans les relations de pouvoir et dans let intérêts des uns (les créanciers partisans de la déflation, des taux élevés) et des autres (les débiteurs inflationnistes), dan les jeux de l'état entre ces deux groupes de pression. On peut tirer deux conséquences des homologies entre le passé et le présent.

[Permanence also in the relations of power and in the interests of some (creditors who favor deflation, high rates) and others (inflationary debtors), in the games of the state between these two pressure groups. We can draw two resulting homologies between the past and the present.] (20)

And failing to consider carefully and critically the economies and crises of the past is a mistake that may lead contemporary economic experts and advisors into ever-deeper economic crises in the future.

L'oubli est dommageable, celui des catastrophes, celui des enseignements qu'elles ont rendu possible, celui des corpus théoriques du passé. Ouvrir la perspective par l'économie historique peut aider à une meilleure compréhension du présent, voire à préparer l'avenir. (21)

[Forgetting is harmful, especially forgetting past catastrophes, forgetting the lessons they have made possible, forgetting the theoretical corpus of the past. Embracing the perspective of the concrete economic history can help lead to a better understanding of the present, or even prepare for the future.] (21)

The scope and content of the book are evident in the list of the book's chapters:

1. Crises et rythmes économiques
2. Périodisation, mutations et rythmes longs
3. Le capitalism d'Ancien Régime, ses crises
4. Le "Haut Capitalism", ses crises et leur théorisation (1800-1870)
5. Karl Marx et les crises
6. Capitalisme "Monopoliste" et grande industrie (1870-1914)
7. Interlude
8. Á l'âge de l'acier, les rythmes de l'investissement et de l'innovation
9. Impulsion monétaire et effets réels
10. La monnaie hégémonique
11. "Le chien dans la mangeoire"
12. La grande crise des années trente
13. Keynes et la "Théorie Générale"La "Haute Théorie", la dynamique, le cycle (1926-1946)
14. En guise de conclusion d'étape

As the chapter titles make evident, Dockès delivers on his promise of treating both the episodes, trends, and facts of economic history as well as the history of the theories through which economists have sought to understand those facts and their dynamics.

Guest post: VK Ramachandran on details of life as a day laborer in India

[V. K. Ramachandran was a Professor of Economics at the Indian Statistical Institute, and is at present vice chairman of the State Planning Board of the state of Kerala. He is the author of Wage Labour and Unfreedom in Agriculture: An Indian Case Study. Previous discussions of Ramachandran's work in Understanding Society can be found here (link, link, link, link), and here is an interview I conducted with VK in 2008; link.]

[Acknowledgement: Extracted from Ramachandran, V. K., and Madhura Swaminathan, (eds.) (2018), Telling the Truth, Taking Sides: Essays for N. Ram, Tulika Books, New Delhi. This is a set of essays dedicated to the impact and progressive legacy of N Ram, journalist, writer, and important voice of the Left in India.]

"Gabriel Selvam: A Biography of Work"

V. K. Ramachandran

Among the many the many things in which N. Ram was an early instructor (and I not good enough a learner) was on how to interview, take notes, edit copy, and present the results from conversation and observation.

NR was the first among us to meet Gabriel Selvam, and the description “upstanding young agricultural labourer” is his.

An Interview in Two Parts, 1977 and 2017

1977: Young Bonded Worker

G. Selvam (35) is an upstanding young agricultural labourer who has bonded himself as a pannaiyal (permanent farm servant) out of economic necessity. Selvam’s family is of the Parayar scheduled caste.

A loan of Rs 100 taken over six years ago from CT, a petty usurer, led directly to his present condition as farm servant. At that time, the loan was taken for subsistence needs and was perceived as a temporary expedient. On account of a 120 percent interest rate, the loan of Rs 100 became a liability of Rs 220 over a year. The usurer pressed Selvam, then 31 years old, to sell his house in order to repay the loan. Selvam, refusing to abandon the family house site, went around asking for a way to work off his debt. The opportunity presented itself in the form of the landlord SCC. This landlord, who was looking for a young and strong farm servant, was willing to advance the money to clear the debt, provided Selvam attached himself as a farm servant for a remuneration of Rs 65 per month plus one sheet and a dhoti, a shirt, and a towel-cloth (thundu) a year.

Selvam took an advance of Rs 100 for going to work as a farm servant, and used that to clear just under half his debt. Then, after the first month of work, he took a loan of Rs 120 to clear the debt.

Since then, that is, for six years, Selvam has been working for well over 13 hours a day. He worked at the salary of Rs 65 a month for four years. Two years ago, when paddy prices soared to nearly Rs 150 per 58-kilogram bag, the farm servants in the village asked their employers for a raise. Selvam was given a wage rise that was long overdue: in 1977 he was paid Rs 110 a month.

SCC, like some other big landlords in the village, has found it much to his advantage to hire a farm servant in this way. He has advanced small sums of money to Selvam over the years, sums always taken “temporarily,” but with no real chance of the debtor repaying the debt and getting out of his present condition. Selvam makes it clear that he is not paid anything near the remuneration he should be getting for this work. “There is no choice,” he says, “I can’t leave my mudalali (employer, landlord) unless I can clear my debt of Rs 300. I would certainly like to leave.”

In his childhood, Selvam was not as badly off as he is today. His father, Gabriel, was a poor or lower-middle peasant, cultivating surface-irrigated land that had been leased in from landlords of the village. His mother worked as a hired labourer.

His father sent Selvam to school. Selvam studied in the Mission School in Gokilapuram, down the road from where he lives today, up to the fifth class. He completed the sixth class at the NMR School in Gokilapuram. Selvam was a good student and his father sent him to Vatthalakundu, where Selvam studied in the seventh and eighth classes, finishing when he was 16 years old. He stayed at a hostel at Vatthalakundu, and his father sent him Rs 20 a month. Selvam returned to the village after finishing the eighth class. He can read and write Tamil and can still read some English.

Selvam’s father tilled 6 kuzhi (3.6 acres) of surface-irrigated land belonging to landlord ST on kuthagai (fixed rent) for 20 years. He also worked 1.5 acres of groundwater-irrigated land belonging to SP, a landlord of Uthamapalayam. Selvam also worked on the land leased in by the family. Selvam married when he was 20 years old. His wife, Alphonse, is from a family of tenant cultivators from Pudupatti in Uthamapalayam taluk.

In about 1967, there was a sharp decline in the agriculture conducted by the family. The surface-irrigated land had poor soil and bad drainage, and standing water after the rain affected the crop. The land was manured only for one crop, one of the reasons for the yield being poor. The groundwater-irrigated land had a well with plenty of water and had a pulley and rope to draw water with. But household cultivation was in decline, the family began to incur debt, and the age-old symbol of a peasant family heading towards destitution became apparent: the cattle owned by the family became thin and weak.

About the same time, eviction took place on a large scale in the village. Earlier, the paddy crops were the traditional parunnel and samba varieties; later, with the introduction of new seeds, yields were higher, and agriculture became more profitable for the landlords. There was also fear among them, Selvam said, that the tenants would assert their right to cultivate the land. Landlords brought pressure on the tenants to leave the land. Rents were raised, rack-rents were imposed on tenants. In some cases, landlords brought great pressure on tenants to leave, offering them small amounts of money to do so. The peasants were disunited, Selvam said, and, out of fear, accepted the money and left the land.

Agricultural Wage Work

Selvam made it clear that the big landlords can always bring pressure on agricultural labourers; as for agricultural labourers, there is little scope for their advance today. Opportunities for employment in some tasks have gone down since the arrival of tractors, Selvam pointed out. The tractor has robbed those with ploughs and bullocks of ploughing work, and those with carts and bullocks of work in basal manuring. Even during threshing, the tractor has deprived agricultural labourers of employment. While earlier, there would be four days’ work at the threshing-floor and four bullocks would be needed to trample the grain for the second threshing, now the tractor can be driven over the sheaves to complete the task in less than an hour.

Unemployment is high and wages are poor, and women’s wages have actually been brought down, from Rs 3 per day to Rs 2.50 per day. There was agitation by Communists five years ago in southern villages of the Valley, Selvam recalls, when men workers won an increase in their grain wages, from 4 measures per day to 5 measures, and women an increase to 3 measures for threshing.

While wages in the village do not vary directly with the caste of the worker, discrimination against the scheduled castes, the overwhelming majority of whom are landless labourers, is deeply entrenched. Most of the farm servants in the village are Dalit.

Selvam has an extremely busy working year. During the 1976-7 agricultural year, he worked on both crops of paddy on surface-irrigated land, in different operations in the cultivation of irrigated sorghum (cholam), finger millet (ragi), tomato, and banana on groundwater-irrigated land, and in little millet (samai) on unirrigated land. In addition to agricultural work every day, he did domestic tasks at the landlord’s house. Selvam’s wife Alphonse laboured at agricultural operations for 57 days in 1976-7, and earned Rs 158.70 as wages. She seeded and cleaned tamarind for 3 days, for which she earned Rs 7.50.

Selvam’s wage is lower than other farm servants in the village, some of whom are paid Rs 130 and Rs 140 by their landlord employers. But when Selvam asks for a wage increase, the landlord arrogantly insists: “I have already increased your wages. You used to get Rs 65, now you get 110.” The standard that SCC uses, Selvam says, is not the wage paid to other farm servants in the village, but the Rs 65 pittance that Selvam himself used to receive before he was paid Rs 110 a month.

When Selvam is unwell, the landlord may give Selvam a small amount of money to buy medicine, but he will not pay for treatment for Alphonse or the children when they fall ill.

As for his home, Selvam cannot afford to erect a complete hut. When he gets a small amount of money, he adds a row of bricks to the hut. Some months ago, he bought a door-frame. Now there is a door-frame, fixed with mud into a few rows of country-made brick, with no wall around it or roof above. The single room in the hut is 8 feet by 6 feet. “We do not know when this hut will be built,” Alphonse said. “We lay a few bricks, and it may be a few months before we can add more bricks. It may take years to complete the hut in this manner.”

With all this, Selvam must also face rudeness and shouts from the landlord, the loud arrogance of SCC as taskmaster of “his” farm servant.

“Life is difficult for me,” Selvam said. He sees his children at 5 a.m. (when he leaves the house), when the older children may be just beginning to wake up. It is seldom, and only in the slack season, that he comes home before they are asleep for the night. And the hours in between are filled with arduous, back-breaking labour that covers every task that an agricultural labourer in the village can perform.

I have seen Selvam, early in the morning, heaving farmyard manure on to a cart and driving the cart to the paddy-fields, unloading it in neat piles across the field. I have seen him, bare-chested, barefoot, and dressed in an old and torn lungi, with a soiled cloth on his head to protect him from the sun, walking with a hoe across his shoulder over the ridge east of the village on the road leading to SCC’s groundwater-irrigated field in neighbouring Anamalaiyanpatti. I have seen him at the field, cutting and clearing water channels before the electricity comes on and irrigation water rushes up; and in the banana field, hacking at the tough young shoots that grow by the banana trees, cutting dry and withered leaves off the tree, and straightening tree trunks with wooden props that have been chopped and shaped by him. I have seen him, in the evenings, working in SCC’s house, watering, feeding, and washing the cattle or chopping a tree trunk for firewood for SCC’s kitchen. I have seen him at the bus-stop in Uthamapalayam, straining to lift a motor pump, newly repaired, on to the carrier of a Gokilapuram-bound bus. Standing under a bus-shelter in Gokilapuram after 11 o’clock at night, I have heard the sound of a cart coming down the road from Anamalaiyanpatti. It is Selvam, urging the bullocks through pouring rain back to the house of SCC. I have seen him after 11.30 at night, rain smudging the red mud that clings to his face and body, entering his hut and eating gruel and pickle by the weak light of an oil lamp, and preparing to catch some sleep before the next day of labour begins.

Selvam states clearly that it is not “loyalty” that keeps him with the landlord. It is his debt and the difficulty of finding alternative employment if he were to leave. “I have heard of the union of agricultural labourers in East Thanjavur. A union is needed, unity of agricultural labourers is needed. If there were a union in Gokilapuram, I would join it.”

May 1977

2017: A Working Life

Selvam worked for a total of 13 years with SCC. When he left, he was paid a mere Rs 400 a month. Selvam said that about 4000 rupees were due to him and unpaid when he left SCC’s employment.

Selvam worked 15 years as a daily worker after he left the employment of SCC. Three years after he left, Selvam’s son Arokiyasami was married. Over the three years, Selvam spent one year as a worker in a cardamom estate in Parathodu in Kerala, owned by Shanmughavel of Pannaipuram.

Alphonse worked as a wage labourer all her working life, that is, until four years ago.

Ten years ago, Selvam began to work for Venkatesan, a retired college teacher. Selvam was hired at a wage of Rs 2000 a month. Venkatesan owns 10.8 acres of thottam land and 1.8 acres of nanjai land in the north of the village, on the banks of the Thamaraikulam irrigation tank, where he grows nendran banana and coconut.

Selvam comes to the field at 7 am every day, takes a break from about 11:00 to 2:30, and works again at the field till 6 pm. He takes care of the field, clears the channels for irrigation, works the locks of the pipes for drip irrigation, supervises and works with other wage workers at some operations (planting and harvest), and weeds and cleans the fields. He also keeps the main trunks of the banana trees free of unwanted side-shoots, and applies fertilizer and undertakes all other plant protection tasks.

After three years with the landlord, Selvam asked for a raise. His new wage was fixed at Rs 4,000 a month (the worker on the neighbouring field gets Rs 6,000 a month, he told us). The landlord agreed, and said that he would henceforth account for Selvam’s withdrawals against the new wage. For Selvam is not paid his wage on a fixed day every month. He takes money for expenses from the owner “whenever I need it,” for household expenses, for festivals. The employer says he is keeping an account; Selvam trusts him and says that he, too, keeps track of how much he has taken from the landlord. He estimates that he has credit of about Rs 10,000 with the landlord. There is no formal account of Selvam’s savings with the landlord.

Four years ago, Alphonse developed a swelling on her right knee. A doctor in Uthamapalayam gave her drugs and an injection, and the swelling “sank to her foot.” Blood and pus was drained with a large syringe from the foot. Alphonse was discharged from the hospital, and was told to spread an ointment on the wound. Selvam did this every day. Alphonse began to scratch the itchy wound before it had healed completely. She eats betel leaf and nuts with lime, and the lime paste on her finger began to inflame the wound. It turned septic. Selvam took her in his son Sekhar’s autorickshaw to Cumbum, where the doctor said that she needed emergency treatment at Theni. Alphonse was taken by ambulance to the Theni Government Medical College and Hospital, where the doctors advised emergency surgery. She had a second surgery, followed by a skin graft.

In the post-operative ward, Selvam watched people on the other beds, and began to realise the importance of dressing Alphonse’s wound correctly – that it was a task that needed an expert, something he could not do himself. He hired a person to change the bandage – at Rs 50 a day – for the three months they spent in the hospital.

Alphonse is back home now. She can move a bit – to the sitting platform in front of the house, to change her clothes, to go to the bathroom; but not more than that. “We do not know how long she will survive. She has never done anyone any wrong. When she goes, it will be to heaven.”

The Children

Arokiasamy (50), the oldest child of Selvam and Alphonse, works as a mason and has a small business as a contractor for constructing small houses. His wife, Sumathi, has a tenth class school-leaving certificate, and works in the panchayat office as a data collector. They have two children, a son, Maniprathi (22), now a student at a polytechnic in Namakkal, and a daughter, Sunitha (21). Sunitha completed a B. A. degree and is now married. Her husband works on the staff of a tea estate owned by N Ramakrishnan, former MLA from Cumbum.

Arokiamary (48), the only daughter of Selvam and Alphonse, is now almost completely blind. She looks after her parents and brother, the much-loved carer in the home.

Shekhar (46) lives in Gokilapuram. He owns an autorickshaw, from which he which earns an income of Rs 500 to Rs 1000 a day. His wife, Thilakam, is a manual worker in agriculture and at non-agricultural tasks. Their children, Merlyn Marcia and Praveen, their grandparents’ joy, study in class 1 and class 2 in the English-language medium section of the Savarimuthu Udayar Memorial Higher Secondary School, a reputed school in the neighbouring village of Rayappanpatti.

Vedamuthu (44) stays at home with his parents. He is a person with intellectual disabilities, and is unable to go regularly to work.

Xavier (41), the youngest son of the family, works at loading and unloading bags of rice at the government civil supplies godown in Uthamapalayam. His wife Muthuarokiyam and he are now residents of Uthamapalayam, where his children Akhilesh, Vimalesh, and Pratibha go to school. Xavier earns 600 rupees a day, and an extra 1000 rupees a month for the manual work at the godown.

Forty Years On

Selvam and family live today in the house whose initial construction costs led him into bondage in 1977. It is completed and expanded now, a neat whitewashed structure that has the meagre furniture and appurtenances of a house that is still, after all, the house of a full-time rural manual worker. They were exploited and extremely poor – near destitute – in 1977. Today, they are still poor, Selvam’s wages are low, and he has no knowledge of how much of his earned wages are held by his employer. But he is no longer destitute, no longer in bondage, and no longer at the mercy of a harsh and cruel landlord of the old type.

They are better off now than they were in 1977 – oh yes, of course we are, Selvam says. Our house is complete, and we never go hungry, we have special things to eat: egg curry twice a week, chicken on Sundays, fish once in about twenty days. Thanks to the public system for the distribution of cereal, there is enough rice for the family. The house has been electrified (Selvam says that they received their electricity connection at the same time, conveniently, as their son Arokiasami’s wedding).

I have continued to meet Selvam over the years. I was associated with resurveys of Gokilapuram village in 1986 and 1999, and continue to be interested in changing agrarian relations in the village and region. I return to the Cumbum Valley regularly for tasks connected with the Gokilapuram Educational Trust, an organisation of which the honoree of this volume is a founder trustee. Travel to the Valley gives me an opportunity to keep in touch with Selvam; as we grow older, we grow more conscious of the value of old friendships.

Selvam asks me if I remember the little kerosene lamp (of course I do -- made of tin and with a flimsy glass chimney) that I used during our survey in 1977. I used it after dark during conversations and interviews in homes that had no electricity. You gave it to me when you left the village after the survey, he says. After electricity came to the house Selvam stored the lamp deep in a loft, where it remains today. He keeps it as a reminder of his friend -- and of the days when they had only a single lamp for light in a half-constructed house.

December 2017

Small farmers in Indian agriculture

Agriculture remains the primary source of income for India's population, and the majority of India's farmers subsist on small farms, less than two hectares (five acres). It is all but self evident that these facts imply continuing poverty and low quality of life for rural Indians. And yet the basic facts and economics of the small farm sector are poorly understood. 

The most recent product of the Project on Agrarian Relations in India (PARI) focuses on exactly this question (link). Madhura Swaminathan and Sandipan Baksi's recent volume, How Do Small Farmers Fare?: Evidence from Village Studies in India, attempts to provide a multidimensional appraisal of the complex realities of the small farm economy in India, including labor, crop productivity, incomes, costs, fertilizer use, credit, climate change, education, living standards, and an overall assessment of how small farmers fare. The book draws upon largescale statistical data collected by the Indian government, but the fundamental insights offered in each chapter are drawn from the intensive village studies conducted by PARI researchers over the past dozen years (link). And, as the resolution and quality of the essays in this volume attest, the PARI village studies constitute an enormously valuable source of information on the rural economy in India in spite of the small number of villages included.

T. Sivamurugan and Madhura Swaminathan provide an excellent survey of the methodology and scope of the PARI project in their chapter on this subject. Their chapter provides detailed information about the methodology pursued in designing and carrying out these village studies in a range of regions in the country.

The Project on Agrarian Relations in India (PARI) began in 2006. One of the objectives of the Project is to analyse village-level production, production systems and livelihoods, and the socio-economic characteristics of different strata of the rural population. As of 2016, 25 villages from 11 States of the country, covering a wide range of agro-ecological regions in the country, have been studied under PARI. In this volume, we have used data on 17 villages from 9 States. (25)

It is apparent that the PARI project considers only a small percentage of India’s villages and farming regions. However, the locations chosen have been selected to provide a useful indication of the economic status of villages and farm households in a variety of locations.

The summary data provided by this research are striking: 

According to the Agricultural Census of 2010–11, there were a total of 138.35 million operational holdings in India. The total area operated was 159.59 million hectares and the average size of an operational holding was 1.15 hectares. The average size of all holdings of size 2 hectares or less – which constituted small and marginal holdings as per the official definition – was 0.60 hectare. Holdings of size 2 hectares or less accounted for around 85 per cent of all holdings and 45 per cent of the total area operated. The number of persons who were part of small farmer households was close to half a billion. (2)

Almost 50% of India's total population consists of small farmers and their families, and 85% of all farms are less than two hectares. Plainly the situation of small farms is of enormous importance to the overall social wellbeing of India.

A particularly important topic in this volume is the assessment of small farmers' incomes that the studies permit. The summary conclusion is that India's hundreds of millions of small farmers earn incomes only slightly higher than subsistence. Rural manual workers earn even lower income.

The levels of income received by small farmer households were low, in both absolute and relative terms. The average incomes received by small farmers were not much higher than the minimum wages in agriculture stipulated by State governments. Minimum wage in India is defined as subsistence wage; hence incomes received by small farmer households were inadequate to meet investments or any requirements other than daily consumption needs. (162)

An important measure of quality of life of poor people is number of years of schooling. The PARI studies show that children in small farmer households have extremely low levels of schooling, and that there are significant difference between boys and girls. Chapter 11 finds similar evidence of deprivation with regard to other material features of quality of life: access to clean drinking water, toilets, electricity, and living space and housing.

Moreover, the studies demonstrate that these kinds of deprivation are further exacerbated by facts of caste and religion.

While small farmer households are the worst off among the peasantry, there exist disparities and differences within the class of small farmers on the basis of social identity. The analysis presented in this chapter shows that SC, ST, and Muslim households among small farmers are far more deprived in terms of housing and access to basic household amenities than households belonging to other social groups. This points to the fact that in Indian society, and more so in rural society, deprivation is not merely economic but social as well. Even though a uniform criterion was used to define small farmer households, we find that higher levels of deprivation among SC, ST, and Muslim households are an outcome of the historical exclusion and accumulated disadvantages faced and inherited by these social groups. Continued practices of untouchability, physical and residential segregation, and isolation shape current outcomes for these groups. (327)

It has sometimes been maintained that small farming is potentially as productive as largescale commercial farming. It is maintained that intensive family labor has the potential for producing crops as efficiently as mechanized capital intensive farming -- presumably because of the lack of efficiencies of scale in farming. The research reported here by Venkatesh Athreya and colleagues rebuts this longstanding assumption about small-scale farming:

At the core of the argument in favour of small-scale farming in terms of its efficiency is the alleged inverse relationship between land productivity and size. It states that small farms are more efficient, de ned in terms of yield per acre, than large farms. It is argued that this relationship holds true more or less universally. This assertion was also the basis of the debate in India on farm size and productivity based on findings from the Farm Management Studies. This argument, which continued through the 1960s, has seen a recent revival. Apart from the empirical challenge posed to this formulation (especially by the green revolution), it has also been theoretically rebutted by Terence Byres…. The body of empirical evidence from FAS surveys too does not support the hypothesis of an inverse relationship between farm size and output per unit of land.

One thing that is noteworthy in this collection is the significant use that the authors make of classical Marxist analysis of agricultural development and the peasantry. Unlike other national traditions in the social sciences, Indian researchers continue to find insights and valuable frameworks in the writings of Marx, Lenin, Kautsky, and other Marxist writers on these topics. And, as the many texts cited in the introductory chapter illustrate, these figures were in fact careful observers of the agrarian systems of Europe. Here is how Athreya et al summarize the Marxist perspective in the Indian context:

The attitude towards the peasantry in the context of India’s development, especially after the country won political independence, has been a matter of much discussion in Indian Marxist literature. Comprehensive land reform is essential to the completion of the democratic revolution in India. Achievement of the democratic revolution under a working class leadership in alliance with the peasantry, especially poor peasants and agricultural labourers as key rural classes in this process, is necessary for further democratic advance. Such a view envisages the continued presence of a large population of small and middle peasants for a long time. We need public policy that supports the peasantry, especially focusing on developing the productive forces among them. (14)

This volume is a very important contribution to development studies in India and other parts of South and Southeast Asia. The dynamics of agriculture remain a critical factor in the social progress of these countries, and this careful and detailed research will provide a basis for constructing more effective development policies in India and elsewhere. And the data suggest that the situation of the rural sector in India is in crisis: incomes for small farmers and landless workers are extremely low with few indications of improvement, and measures of quality of life mirror these findings.

New structural economics

Does economic theory provide anything like a concrete set of reliable policies for creating sustained economic growth in a middle-income country? Some contemporary economists believe that it is possible to answer this question in the affirmative. However, I don't find this confidence justified.

One such economist is Justin Yifu Lin. Lin is a leading Chinese economist who served as chief economist to the World Bank in 2008-2012. So Lin has a deep level of knowledge of the experience of developing countries and their efforts to achieve sustained growth. He believes that the answer to the question posed above is "yes", and he lays out the central components of such a policy in a framework that he describes as the "new structural economics". His analysis is presented in New Structural Economics: A Framework for Rethinking Development and Policy. (The book is also available in PDF format from the World Bank directly; link.)

Lin's analysis is intended to be relevant for all low- and middle-income countries (e.g. Brazil, Nigeria, or Indonesia); but the primary application is China. So his question comes down to this: what steps does the Chinese state need to take to burst out of the "middle income trap" and bring per capita incomes in the country up to the level of high-income countries in the OECD?

So what are the core premises of Lin's analysis of sustainable economic growth? Two are most basic: the market should govern prices, and the state should make intelligent policies and investments that encourage the "right kind" of innovation in economic activity in the country. Here is an extended description of the core claims of the book:

Long-term sustainable and inclusive growth is the driving force for poverty reduction in developing countries, and for convergence with developed economies. The current global crisis, the most serious one since the Great Depression, calls for a rethinking of economic theories. It is therefore a good time for economists to reexamine development theories as well. This paper discusses the evolution of development thinking since the end of World War II and suggests a framework to enable developing countries to achieve sustainable growth, eliminate poverty, and narrow the income gap with the developed countries. The proposed framework, called a neoclassical approach to structure and change in the process of economic development, or new structural economics, is based on the following ideas:

First, an economy’s structure of factor endowments evolves from one level of development to another. Therefore, the industrial structure of a given economy will be different at different levels of development. Each industrial structure requires corresponding infrastructure (both tangible and intangible) to facilitate its operations and transactions.

Second, each level of economic development is a point along the continuum from a low-income agrarian economy to a high-income post-industrialized economy, not a dichotomy of two economic development levels (“poor” versus “rich” or “developing” versus “industrialized”). Industrial upgrading and infrastructure improvement targets in developing countries should not necessarily draw from those that exist in high-income countries.

Third, at each given level of development, the market is the basic mechanism for effective resource allocation. However, economic development as a dynamic process entails structural changes, involving industrial upgrading and corresponding improvements in “hard” (tangible) and “soft” (intangible) infrastructure at each level. Such upgrading and improvements require an inherent coordination, with large externalities to firms’ transaction costs and returns to capital investment. Thus, in addition to an effective market mechanism, the government should play an active role in facilitating structural changes. (14-15)

So a state needs to secure the conditions for well-functioning markets; and it needs to establish an industrial strategy that is guided by a careful empirical analysis of the country's comparative advantage in the global economic environment. In practice this seems to amount to the idea that the middle-income economy should identify the leading economies' declining industries and compete with those on the basis of labor costs and mid-level technology. Lin also emphasizes the important role of the state in making appropriate infrastructure investments to support the chosen industrial strategy. This is a "structural economic theory" because it is guided by the idea that a developing economy needs to incrementally achieve structural transformation from a given mix of agriculture, industry, and service to a successor mix, based on the resources held by the economy that give it advantage in a particular set of technologies and production techniques. Here is a representative statement:

Countries at different levels of development tend to have different economic structures due to differences in their endowments. Factor endowments for countries at the early levels of development are typically characterized by a relative scarcity of capital and relative abundance of labor or resources. Their production activities tend to be labor intensive or resource intensive (mostly in subsistence agriculture, animal husbandry, fishery, and the mining sector) and usually rely on conventional, mature technologies and produce “mature,” well-established products. Except for mining and plantations, their production has limited economies of scale. Their firm sizes are usually relatively small, with market transactions often informal, limited to local markets with familiar people. The hard and soft infrastructure required for facilitating that type of production and market transactions is limited and relatively simple and rudimentary. (22)

Some common development strategies fail to conform to these ideas. So, for example, import substitution is a bad basis for economic development, because it subverts the market and it distorts the investment strategies of the state and the private sector; it fails to guide the given economy on a path pursuing incremental comparative advantage (18).

What this analysis leaves out completely is the goal of economic development -- improving human wellbeing. Indeed, the word "wellbeing" does not even appear in the book. And certainly the perspective on development offered by Amartya Sen in his theory of capabilities and realizations is completely absent. This is unfortunate, because it means that the book fails to address the most important issue in development economics: what the fundamental good of economic development is, and how we can best approach that good. Sen's answer is that the fundamental good is to increase the wellbeing of the globe's total population; and he interprets that goal in terms of his idea of human flourishing. (Sen's theory of economic development is provided in many places, including Development as Freedom. Here is a recent statement by Sen, Stiglitz, and Fitoussi on why GDP and growth in GDP are inadequate ultimate measures of development success; Mismeasuring Our Lives: Why GDP Doesn't Add Up.) Sen's fundamental view is this: the most important goal that a state can have is to create policies that enhance the development of the human capabilities of its population. In particular, social resources should be deployed to enhance education, health, domicile, and personal security. In such an environment individuals can have the fullest satisfaction of their life goals; and they can be the most productive contributors to innovation and growth in their societies. Well-educated and healthy people are an essential component of economic success for a country. But significantly, Lin does not address these "quality of life" factors at all (another phrase that does not occur once in the book).

Even less does Lin's theory address the kinds of issues raised by "post-development" thinkers like Arturo Escobar in Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. Escobar challenges some of the most basic assumptions of classical economic development theory, beginning with the idea that industry-lead structural transformation is the unique pathway to human flourishing in the less-developed world. Escobar's critique involves several ideas. First is the observation that economic development theory since 1945 has been Eurocentric and implicitly colonial, in that it depends upon exoticized representations of the industrialized North and the traditional agricultural South. Against this colonial representation of global development Escobar emphasizes the need for a more ethnographic and cultural understanding of development. Second, this Eurocentric view brings along with it some crucial distributive implications -- essentially, that the resources and labor of the developing world should continue to provide part of the surplus that supports the affluence of the North. Third, Escobar casts doubt on the value of development "experts" in the design of development strategies for poor countries in the South (46). Local knowledge is a crucial part of sound economic progress for countries like Nigeria, Brazil, or Indonesia; but the development profession seeks to replace local knowledge with expert opinion. So Escobar highlights local knowledge, the importance of culture, and the importance of self-determination in theory and policy as key ingredients of a sustainable plan for economic development in the countries of the post-colonial South.

Why do these alternative approaches to development theory matter? Why is the absence of a discussion of wellbeing, flourishing, or culture an important lacuna in New Structural Economics? Because it results in a view of economic development that lacks a compass. If we haven't given rigorous thought to what the goal of development is -- and Sen demonstrates that it is entirely possible to do that -- then we are guided only by a rote set of recommendations: increase productivity, increase efficiency, increase market penetration, increase per capita income. But the fact of substantial rise in economic inequalities through a growth process means that it is very possible that only a minority of citizens will be affected. And the fact that a typical family's income has risen by 50% may be less important than the availability of a nearby health clinic for their overall wellbeing. And both of these kinds of considerations seem to be relevant in the case of China. It is well documented that there has been a substantial increase in China's income (and wealth) inequalities in the past thirty years (link, link). And it is also reasonably clear that China's commitment to social security provisioning is far lower than that of OECD countries. So it is far from clear that China's recent history of growth has been proportionally successful in enhancing the quality of life and human flourishing of the mass of its population (link).

The unstated assumption is that countries that pursue these prescriptions -- "maintain efficient markets, adopt an industrial strategy that accurately tracks shifts in comparative advantage, support investment in appropriate infrastructure to reduce transaction costs" -- will have superior long-term growth in per capita income and will be better able to ensure enhancements in the quality of life of their citizens. But this is nothing more than naive confidence in "trickle-down" economics. It ignores completely the problem of the likelihood of rising economic inequalities, and it doesn't provide any detailed analysis of how quality of life and human flourishing are supposed to rise. Development economics without capabilities and wellbeing is inherently incomplete; worse, it is a bad guide to policy choices.

Measuring happiness internationally

One reasonable way of thinking about the most fundamental goal of international economic development is to increase the level of human happiness in all countries, and to reduce the degree of inequality of happiness within and across countries. But, as Aristotle asked several millennia ago, what is happiness? And how can we measure it, either in a given individual or in a population? Utilitarians and economists chose to avoid the problem of measuring subjective happiness, and the associated problem of comparing utilities across persons, by substituting preference satisfaction for subjective happiness. And worries about the challenges of measuring subjective happiness led philosophers like John Rawls and economists like Amartya Sen to prefer to focus on the objective prerequisites of life satisfaction -- primary goods, in the case of Rawls, and capabilities and functionings, in the case of Sen.

And yet the idea of happiness, or life satisfaction, is too important to dispense with. New efforts have been made to develop survey tools and methods that permit assessment of the average level of life satisfaction for groups of people in different countries. Among others Jeffrey Sachs has played a lead role in conceptualizing and furthering this project. The result is a series of World Happiness Reports, beginning in 2012 (link), which can be seen as a counterpart to the World Development Reports (link) and the Human Development Reports (link). Here are some orienting thoughts from Jeffrey Sachs's introductory essay in the 2012 report.

Most people agree that societies should foster the happiness of their citizens. The U.S. Founding Fathers recognized the inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness. British philosophers talked about the greatest good for the greatest number. Bhutan has famously adopted the goal of Gross National Happiness (GNH) rather than Gross National Product. China champions a harmonious society.

Yet most people probably believe that happiness is in the eye of the beholder, an individual’s choice, some- thing to be pursued individually rather than as a matter of national policy. Happiness seems far too subjective, too vague, to serve as a touchstone for a nation’s goals, much less its policy content. That indeed has been the traditional view. Yet the evidence is changing this view rapidly.

A generation of studies by psychologists, economists, pollsters, sociologists, and others has shown that happiness, though indeed a subjective experience, can be objectively measured, assessed, correlated with observable brain functions, and related to the characteristics of an individual and the society. Asking people whether they are happy, or satisfied with their lives, offers important information about the society. It can signal underlying crises or hidden strengths. It can suggest the need for change.

Such is the idea of the emerging scientific study of happiness, whether of individuals and the choices they make, or of entire societies and the reports of the citizenry regarding life satisfaction. The chapters ahead summarize the fascinating and emerging story of these studies. They report on the two broad measurements of happiness: the ups and downs of daily emotions, and an individual’s overall evaluation of life. The former is sometimes called “affective happiness,” and the latter “evaluative happiness.” (6)

Sachs reports that the research team preparing the ground for a World Happiness Report finds that life satisfaction is affected by a number of intangibles -- for example, "community trust, mental and physical health, and the quality of governance and rule of law" (7). The contributors emphasize that GNP per capita is a component, but not the most important component, of variations in life satisfaction across countries and regions.

What has always been challenging in prior discussions of promoting happiness is the problem of measurement. How do we assess an individual's level of happiness or satisfaction? And how do we assess the level of these goods for a population or group? The second large task, once the measurement problem has been addressed, is to uncover the social factors that account for variations in satisfaction and happiness levels. This problem is a more familiar one, since it can be treated using epidemiological and statistical tools to identify the factors most strongly correlated with positive or negative variations in satisfaction levels.

The World Happiness project relies on value-survey instruments to measure population life satisfaction. Existing surveys include the Gallup World Poll, the World Values Survey, and the European Social Survey and European Values Survey. The primary instrument used in the 2012 report is the Gallup World Poll (GWP). GWP uses a 0-10 scale and asks adults to place their current quality of life on this scale (the Cantril ladder).

In the Gallup World Poll respondents are asked (using fresh annual samples of 1,000 respondents aged 15 or over in each of more than 150 countries) to evaluate the quality of their lives on an 11-point ladder scale running from 0 to 10, with the bottom rung of the ladder (0) being the worst possible life for them and 10 being the best possible. (11) 

Here are distributions across the Cantril Ladder for the world and for several regions:

As the researchers recognize, there is a serious question here of how to calibrate and interpret the responses offered by thousands of Brazilians, Finns, and Thais for this question. What justifies us in thinking that a respondents' ratings of 5 in Brazil and Thailand mean that Brazilians and Thais are about equally happy? Similarly, what justifies us in thinking that a 0 ("worst possible life I can imagine") means the same in the two countries? Hypothetically, if a Brazilian can imagine a quality of life that includes arbitrary incarceration and torture, whereas a Canadian cannot, doesn't this imply that the Canadian's score of 5 reflects a higher level of absolute life satisfaction than the Brazilian? Intuitively it seems that possibilities like these (cultural or circumstantial differences in worst and best life circumstances in different countries) imply that cross-national comparisons of satisfaction levels based on this kind of survey are suspect.

Here is an OECD research report that directly addresses some of the issues raised by the life satisfaction survey methodology; link. This report focuses on several methodological issues, including this comment on the effects introduced by alternative question wording:

In contrast, Helliwell [one of the authors of the 2012 report] and Putnam (2004) examined the determinants of responses to both a global happiness and a life satisfaction question in a very large international data set (N > 83 500), drawn from the World Values Survey, the US Benchmark Survey and a comparable Canadian survey. They found that, although the main pattern of results did not differ greatly between the two measures, the life satisfaction question showed a stronger relationship with a variety of social indicators (e.g. trust, unemployment) than did the happiness question. However, in this work happiness was measured on a four-point scale and life satisfaction was measured on a ten-point scale; it is thus not clear that question wording, rather than scale length, produced this difference. (70)

Helliwell and Wang respond to this concern about question wording in the report:

The bottom line of our comparisons among life evaluations is that when life satisfaction, happiness and ladder questions are asked about life as a whole, they tell very similar stories about the likely sources of a good life. The information base for these comparisons is still growing, however, so there may be some systematic differences that appear in larger samples. (15)

Helliwell and Wang also address the questions of reliability (consistency across measurements of the same variable at different times) and validity (accurate correspondence to the unobservable variable under scrutiny). Their strongest case for the validity of these survey-based attempts at measurement of satisfaction is the fact that it is possible to demonstrate that variations in life satisfaction measures are largely correlated with a small number of factors that are plausibly relevant to the creation of life satisfaction.

As will be shown in the next chapter, more than three-quarters of the cross-country differences in national average measures of happiness can be explained by variables already known through experimental and other evidence to be important. (17)

Perhaps more credible than international comparisons are within-country comparisons of satisfaction levels. We might feel more confident in thinking that Canadians share a conceptual space of worst and best outcomes with each other, and this shared framework means that their assessments of their personal situations along the Cantrel ladder will be comparable. But even here, it seems likely that there are cultural and circumstantial differences within a country that might lead to the same kinds of inconsistencies. Are Brazilian favela dwellers likely to identify the same worst and best outcomes as residents of the elite neighborhood of Botafogo? Helliwell and Wang make a brief reply to this kind of concern (19), but more needs to be said.

Beyond measurement is causal explanation of differences across sub-groups. In Chapter 3 Richard Layard, Andrew Clark, and Claudia Senik attempt to tease out the material and circumstantial factors that account for variation in levels of life satisfaction across groups and countries. The factors that they identify include (59):

• income
• work
• community and governance (trust, equality, freedom, bonding, ...)
• values and religion
• mental health
• physical health
• family experience
• education
• gender and age

They find that these factors serve to explain a substantial amount of the variation in life satisfaction in different groups. Here is a sample regression table based on data from three different surveys.

And here is their effort to recast most of these factors in a comparative analysis, estimating the effect of a given factor as a multiple of a 30% increase in income.

The largest positive effect identified here on life satisfaction is an increase in social support; whereas the largest negative effects are becoming unemployed and becoming separated in a marriage.

This approach to economic development assessment seems important for the outcomes it wants to be able to measure and assess. It is certainly true that average income is a poor measure (to say the least) of the wellbeing of a population. So it is worth exploring other approaches that attempt to get at wellbeing in a more direct way. It remains to be seen, however, whether survey research based on questions about levels of happiness or life satisfaction can do the job. There are certainly interesting statistics coming out of this research pertaining to the level of importance of various factors in causing a higher or lower level of reported satisfaction in a group. But whether the conceptual problems of interpretation mentioned above can be solved is still uncertain. This comes down to the familiar question of validity of the measurement instrument; but in order to assess validity, we need to have better answers to the original question -- what is life satisfaction? And can it be defined in a way that makes sense across persons or groups?

Interdisciplinary discussions in Mexico

I've just spent several interesting days at the second science and humanities conference of the Mexican Academy of Sciences in Mexico City (link). My thanks to Dra. Rosario Esteinou, Chair of the Social Sciences Section of the Mexican Academy of Science, for inviting me to participate.

This forum is a very interesting effort to bring together researchers across the spectrum of the sciences and humanities in useful dialog with each other. Biologists, physicists, biologists, astronomers, sociologists, and humanists from Mexican universities and institutes (along with a handful of international visitors) interacted intensively through a series of panels and plenary talks, with animated conversations taking place in the common areas throughout the days of the conference. Speaking for the Academy in the opening session, organizers set high and convincing expectations about the value of interdisciplinary and international collaboration. I attended sessions on nano-materials, plant evolutionary history, and economic development goals, and I found all the presentations to be of high quality and interest. And more significantly, I witnessed a real intellectual engagement by physicists, biologists, and social scientists around each of these topics.

Particularly interesting for me was a session on well-being and development for poor and disadvantaged populations in Mexico. This season was chaired by René Millán and included presentations by Gonzalo Hernández Licona (Director of the National Council for the Assessment of Social Development Policies – CONEVAL), Rodolfo de la Torre (Director del Programa de Desarrollo Social con Equidad, CEEY), and Gerardo Leyva (Deputy Director General for Research of INEGI). Key themes included human development, the status of indigenous people, the situation of rural women, and the challenge of extending opportunities for all Mexicans.

Speakers showed a real and committed involvement in the importance of poverty reform that really works in Mexico, with an emphasis on creating greater equity and opportunity for all Mexicans. Each speaker took Amartya Sen's theory of capabilities and functioning as given; disagreements turned on how this basic theory might be supplemented to incorporate empirical studies of perceived well-being and how to create policies that worked to broaden social inclusiveness.

Gerardo Leyva framed his presentation around new interest in "happiness" as a goal of development, referring to the United Nations World Happiness Index Report 2016. The heart of his presentation was a report of a study conducted by INEGI on life satisfaction in Mexico, the BIARE survey (link). It turns out that Mexican citizens have an average level of satisfaction of about 8 on a ten-point scale. Of course the absolute level of the average response to the question, how satisfied are you with your life currently?, is not very meaningful. More interesting than the aggregate were the disaggregated results Leyva reported for specific segments of Mexican society, and an analysis of the separate factors that appear to bring down life satisfaction. Here is a snapshot of satisfaction reports by age for Mexico as a whole:

There are not large differences across age groups, but it is interesting to see that 18-29 year-olds report the highest level of satisfaction. In particular, it seems to suggest that young people have a favorable view of their futures in Mexico.

Outside the agenda of the conference I also had a very interesting discussion with David Barkin, professor of economics at the Xochimilco Campus of the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana in México City, and two of his PhD students, about an alternative approach to just economic development, ecological economics. The Center for Ecodevelopment is one node in a global network of researchers, activists, and communities who are actively working to establish new economic practices embodying sustainability and community cohesion. Emphasis is placed on the autonomy and knowledge of the indigenous communities who make their livings in various parts of the world. Here is a paper in which Barkin explains the perspective of this field of development thinking (link). Here is a short snippet from the paper:

Rural communities in general and indigenous groups in particular continue under increasing pressure. Their living conditions deteriorated as their production systems demanded more from the land; they produced crops for human consumption on their rainfed lands, developed handicrafts and other artisan products, and raised animals and horticultural products, including hogs, chickens, fruits and herbs, in their backyards. The most fortunate among them were able to protect their access to other natural resources, such as a lake or river for fishing and to meet their water needs and a forest for wood or hunting. Over the decades, they accumulated a rich experience in managing these resources, developing sophisticated management systems that were integrated gradually into their customary practices. They continued trading activities, among themselves and with others, maintaining and modifying their traditions, adapting them to changing conditions, strengthening their communities and their identity, choosing to protect their most cherished values and practices in each historical moment.

Organizations like the New Rural Reconstruction Movement in China (link) and Via Campesina in many countries (link) came up in the conversation, and the two recent PhD students in this program described their economic ethnographic work in several Mexican indigenous agricultural communities. This work is interesting in part because it is aimed at crafting an alternative to both neo-liberal and classical leftist ideas of an economic future for the developing world.

My overall impression is that the sciences are robust in Mexico today, and that there are energetic efforts underway to solve Mexico's most pressing social problems.