Back in 1994, I came across an article by Gar Alperovitz titled
"Distributing Our Technological Inheritance" in the October issue of
Technology Review that I found very useful as a rebuttal of the kind of
libertarianism that was thriving in Silicon Valley. Here are the opening
paragraphs:
>>"Many times a day," wrote Albert Einstein, "I realize how much my
outer and inner life is built upon the labors of my fellow-men, both
living and dead." The genius of an earlier era saw clearly how
contemporary knowledge and technological advance depend to an
extraordinary degree on the efforts of many contributors, not to mention
a continuing cultural investment in science and numerous other areas of
human endeavor. In fact, very little of what we as a society produce
today can be said to derive from the work, risk, and imagination of
citizens now living. Achievements from earlier eras, including
fundamental ideas such as literacy, movable type, simple arithmetic, and
algebra, have become so integrated into our daily lives that we take
them for granted. What we accomplish today stands atop a Gibraltar of
technological inheritance. Seemingly contemporary transformations
inevitably build on knowledge accumulated over generations.
For example, Richard DuBoff, an economic historian at Bryn Mawr College,
observes that "synthesizing organic chemicals...could not have been done
without an understanding of chemical transformations and the arrangement
of atoms in a molecule. After 1880, this led to the production of coal
tar and its derivatives for pharmaceuticals, dyestuffs, explosives,
solvents, fuels, and fertilizers, and later petrochemicals...By the
early 1900's the new chemicals were already becoming an essential input
for metallurgy, petroleum, and paper."
Present-day entrepreneurs such as Bill Gates, one of the world's richest
individuals with a personal fortune estimated at $8 billion and hailed
as a technological genius for inventing software for the personal
computer, should therefore be seen as beneficiaries of this long and
fruitful history as well as of significant public investment.
The personal computer itself--without which Gates's software would not
be possible--owes its development to sustained federal spending during
World War II and the Cold War. "Most of [the] 'great ideas in computer
design' were first explored with considerable government support,"
according to historian Kenneth Flamm in a Brookings Institution study.
Now a specialist in technology policy in the Department of Defense,
Flamm estimates that 18 of the 25 most significant advances in computer
technology between 1950 and 1962 were funded by the federal government,
and that in most of these cases the government was the first buyer of
new technology. For example, Remington Rand Corp. delivered UNIVAC, the
original full-fledged U.S. computer, under contract to the U.S. Census
Bureau in 1951.
The government's shouldering of huge development costs and risks paved
the way for the growth of Digital Equipment Corp., which created its
powerful PDP line of 1960s computers. In turn, Gate's colleague [and now
fellow billionaire] Paul Allen created a simulated PDP-10 chip that
allowed Gates to apply the programming abilities of a mainframe to a
small, homemade computer. Gates used this power to make his most
important technical contribution: rewriting the BASIC language, itself
funded by the National Science Foundation, to run Altair, the first
consumer-scaled computer. And indeed, Micro Instrumentation and
Telemetry Systems, Altair's developer, could never have placed a
microcomputer of any variety on the market without the long preceding
period of technological incubation.
Thousands of links in a chain of development--our shared inheritance-
-were in fact required before Bill Gates could add his contribution. But
if this is so, why do we not reflect more full on why Gates, or any
other wealthy entrepreneur, should personally benefit to such a degree?
If we admit that what any one person, group, generation, or even nation
contributes in one moment of time is minuscule compared with all that
the past bequeaths like a gift from a rich uncle, we are forced to
question the basic principles by which we distribute our technological
inheritance.<<
Apparently, Alperovitz has turned this article into a book, based on
this review in the current issue of the Nation Magazine. I plan to read
and review it myself first chance I get, despite the rather lukewarm
Nation Magazine review, which characterizes it as “Fabian”, a charge
that strikes me as the pot calling the kettle black:
Spreading the Wealth: Knowledge as Social Inheritance
By Mark Engler
In crediting luck, Buffett not only points to the birth lottery, in
which some people are born into more privileged circumstances than
others, but also recognizes that to a great extent he owes the
accomplishments of his professional life to the manifold contributions
of other people, known and unknown, past and present. They have
collectively done Buffett enormous favors, affording him security and
education, providing modern infrastructure, science and communications
systems and creating a sophisticated market in which he could do
business. Because of this, Buffett claims, "society is responsible for a
very significant percentage of what I've earned."
"But if this is true," ask Gar Alperovitz and Lew Daly in Unjust
Deserts, "doesn't society deserve a very significant share of what
[Buffett] has received?" This question clearly indicates how thoroughly
Alperovitz and Daly want their new book to upend commonplace notions
about the relationships between economic growth, productivity and
wealth. The duo cite "extraordinary developments" in the study of
knowledge and economic growth as the foundation of their contentions.
But they are actually returning the economic discussion to where it
started, with Smith, Ricardo, Mill and Marx--to moral philosophy and
debates about the values that should inform public policy. Their
foremost ethical question is, given that we owe most of our productivity
to a common social inheritance, to what extent can we say that we have
"earned" our personal wealth? If we see far, it is because we stand on
the shoulders of giants, the argument goes. Therefore, a large portion
of what we claim as payment for our productivity should actually go to
the Goliaths who are doing the heavy work of holding us up. Even if your
eyesight is much better than average, your individual claim is limited.
Most of us with regular work lives get up in the morning, expend our
energy and intelligence to meet the day's challenges and retire,
depleted, in the evening. In this respect, Alperovitz and Daly claim, we
toil away our workdays just as, for example, subsistence farmers did for
thousands of years. What makes us more "productive" than these
forebears--in the sense that they often struggled to ward off
starvation, while we, relatively speaking, are surrounded by
abundance--is not our individual strength, initiative or daring. Rather,
it is our inheritance of thousands of years of cultural knowledge,
innovation and discovery. Owing to this legacy, a person in the United
States working the same number of hours as an American from as recently
as 1870 will produce, on average, some fifteen times more economic output.
As early as the 1950s, economists began establishing a greater role for
socially accumulated knowledge in mainstream understandings of economic
growth. Alperovitz and Daly note that Robert Solow "calculated that
nearly 90 percent of productivity growth in the first half of the
twentieth century (from 1909 to 1949) could only be attributed to
'technological change in the broadest sense.'" This suggestion was a
radical shift away from accounts that stressed the more specific agency
of capitalists and entrepreneurs--or of laborers, for that matter--in
expanding our economy.
But would progress in the realm of science and technology truly have
happened without the grit and determination of hard-working innovators?
Because Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, a creation of
tremendous social value, doesn't he deserve to be exalted as a genius
and richly rewarded for his patent? Not necessarily. The telephone, as
it turns out, was simultaneously invented by another innovator, Elisha
Gray, who visited the patent office the same day as Bell with a superior
design for transmitting vocal sounds but who lagged behind Bell in
completing the patent process. Five years earlier, an Italian immigrant
named Antonio Meucci had declared the invention of a "voice telegraphy
device"; he merely lacked the $10 required to register his work. With or
without Bell, the telephone would have arrived.
This example is not an isolated incident. As Alperovitz and Daly write,
the pattern of simultaneous invention "is so obvious to modern scholars
that it is no longer considered controversial." New innovations rely
upon thousands of previous advances in understanding and technical
capability: "What is called an 'invention,' is always a combination of
diverse constituent elements, mostly drawn from existing technology."
Yet even as mainstream economists cite the increasing role of this
socially accumulated legacy in driving our "knowledge economy,"
inequality grows ever more severe. In 2004, the top 1 percent of
American households held almost half of all "non-retirement account
stocks, mutual funds, and trusts" and Bill Gates's net worth alone "was
more than twice the direct stock holdings of the entire bottom half of
the U.S. population."
Avoiding the Marxist tradition, Alperovitz and Daly tap a long stream of
philosophical thought, running through Locke, Ricardo and Mill, that
distinguishes between "earned" and "unearned" gains. "Nothing is more
deeply held among ordinary people than the idea that a person is
entitled to what he creates or his efforts produce," they note. But if a
person reaps gains through no effort of his own, society has a quite
different view of his deservingness, or what philosophers know as "desert."
One complication of using the "standing on the shoulders" metaphor to
explain the notion of desert is that the "giants" in question are not
discrete living beings. Past greats like Einstein and Newton are not
around to claim their cut of your paycheck. What's left, then, is the
state. Ultimately, what Alperovitz and Daly dub the "knowledge
inheritance theory of distributive justice" offers a much deeper
justification for government-imposed taxation than what Americans are
normally challenged to consider. The closest we have come to hearing
these arguments in contemporary political debate was in the recent fight
over the estate tax, a levy dubbed by conservatives as the "death tax"
and by some defenders as the "Paris Hilton tax." "Responsible wealth"
advocate Chuck Collins, who wrote a book with Bill Gates in defense of
the estate tax, has argued that the justice of such a tax is rooted in
an appreciation of social contributions to prosperity, an idea that has
previously been recognized in American political life. In 10 Excellent
Reasons Not to Hate Taxes, Collins quotes Andrew Carnegie, one of the
key figures of our country's first Gilded Age, who approved of taxing
accumulated wealth: "Of all forms of taxation this seems the wisest,"
Carnegie held. "Men who continue hoarding great sums all of their lives,
the proper use of which for public ends would work good to the community
from which it chiefly came, should be made to feel that the community,
in the form of the State, cannot thus be deprived of its proper share."
In various articles and in a book published in 2005, America Beyond
Capitalism, Alperovitz has rejected the statism of former Communist bloc
economies, and he has expressed a desire to craft a progressive vision
that "takes us beyond both traditional systems" of socialism and
capitalism. Yet this type of "neither right nor left, but forward"
rhetoric represents a fairly weak dodge. The actual political tradition
Alperovitz and Daly seek to revive has deep roots in classical economics
and represents a long-established strand of non-Marxist socialism. The
authors show sympathy for nineteenth-century American reformer Henry
George, who drew an international following with his belief that land
should be the common property of humanity. George promoted free trade
and productive business, but he wanted state control of monopolies and
argued in his bestselling Progress and Poverty for a steep tax on
parasitic rent-seeking landlords. Alperovitz and Daly also align
themselves with many of the leading lights of the Fabian Society, a
group of British intellectuals who were influential in shaping the early
Labour Party around 1900.
Just as unionists who believed in the productive power of labor were
critical of George's sole focus on land, the leftward ranks of today's
political economists may be skeptical of the overwhelming weight of
"knowledge" in Alperovitz and Daly's formulations. But most would
probably agree that the authors strike upon a vital topic when they
highlight the need for the benefits from productivity gains to be shared
throughout society.
As recently as the 1970s, there were discussions on college campuses of
how people would while away all their spare hours after modern
timesaving technology improved efficiency and inevitably shortened their
working days. Since then, productivity has indeed increased
dramatically, but working people have experienced a bitter twist: owing
largely to the waning power of organized labor, real wages have been
stagnant and hours at the office have only lengthened.
The Marxists of old criticized the gradualist tactics of Fabianism,
accusing the British reformers of being naïve utopians who wanted
socialist ends without the class struggle. Whatever the moral validity
of Alperovitz and Daly's argument about wealth, following through on its
public policy implications will require a long and hard fight. And it's
not clear from their book that Alperovitz and Daly are up for a rumble.
When it comes to how we might "take back our common inheritance," their
concluding call to arms tepidly invokes a "renewed moral and political
understanding of [our] responsibilities."
The best Alperovitz has suggested in his recent writings is that
policy-makers concern themselves more with taxing wealth than income,
and that they focus on going after the top 2 percent of households,
leaving those few elites vastly outnumbered by the remaining 98 percent
of the population. This is a sound position, but it is hardly a silver
bullet. At the same time, the nation now seems uniquely prepared for a
new debate about value and desert. Few moments could be riper for
revisiting the connection between our economy and our social ethics. As
housing values--the bedrock asset of the American middle class--fall,
stocks plunge and retirement investment accounts are wiped out, there is
an acute awareness that things do not find their worth just in the
market's valuation on a given day. And even without unusually candid
voices like Warren Buffett's fanning their doubts, Americans have begun
to conclude that CEOs are not so worthy as their bloated compensation
packages suggest.
There is a growing consensus, too, in favor of a more robust public
compact to regulate the conditions under which we are together able to
live, save and retire. Recent scholarly notions about "the developing
trajectory of the knowledge economy" likely have less power than
Alperovitz and Daly imagine to bring about a shift toward the social.
But amid the ruins of our new Gilded Age, a devalued and depressed
American public may nevertheless be ready to demand more.
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