Idiocracy
The Gross Domestic Pissants
by Theodore Dalrymple
April 20, 2014
A small item in one of those free newspapers that end up on the seats of the world’s subway systems caught my attention yesterday. It was in the Paris Métro; I read it while sitting next to an old schizophrenic lady who was addressing her hallucinations with vehemence, while a female drug addict, who could have come straight out of Belsen were it not for the piercings through her eyebrow and right cheek, solicited alms from the rest of the not very understanding passengers.
The item informed the no doubt riveted Parisians that the unemployment rate in Great Britain had fallen to 6.9 percent and that the number of people in employment was higher there than ever before in history. Is this good news? It might seem so when viewed from an economically stagnant France, where the unemployment rate is considerably higher.
The day before I arrived in France from Britain, I happened to read in the financial pages of one of the sceptered isle’s slightly more cerebral newspapers that, recent economic growth notwithstanding, the gross product of the British economy had not yet regained its level from immediately before the crisis struck. In other words, if one put the two things together, people in Britain were working more to produce less.
The British, and no doubt many others, are unable to distinguish between work and activity. This is not really surprising, since they call anything work if they would not do it without being paid. Whether this work, as they call it, but remunerated activity as I call it, contributes to the production of anything of value, economic or otherwise, is not a question for them. If they wouldn’t do it without payment, it’s work.
I realized a long time ago that a very large number of people in a modern economy are paid to do things that not only fail to add to the economic product of the country, but on the contrary reduce it, insofar as they obstruct others from producing as much as they otherwise might.
There is, as every petty official knows, a great deal of pleasure to be had from the obstruction of others, especially if they appear to be more fortunate, better placed, richer, or more intelligent than oneself. There is a pleasure in naysaying, all the greater if the naysayer is able to disguise from the victim the fact that he is not only doing his duty but gratifying himself. Indeed, there are many jobs, meaningless in themselves, in which the power to say no is the only non-monetary reward.
More to be feared even than the secret sadist, however, is the person who genuinely believes in the intrinsic value and even indispensability of his absurd task. He is as dangerous as any true believer. In my hospital, I saw many such people, scurrying like the White Rabbit in Alice from one meeting to anothermeetings which medical staff were required to attend, thus diverting them from the main purpose of having medical staff in the first place. A friend of mine who had waited all day for a minor but potentially life-preserving operation was told at the last minute that his operation had been postponed because the surgeon had been called to attend a meeting. Only a credible threat by my friend of dire consequences for the hospital if the operation were not performed as planned diverted the surgeon from his pseudo- to his real work.
I am obliged by law to charge some of the publications for which I write Value Added Tax, which I then have to forward to the Treasury. The publications, however, are permitted to claim back from the Treasury the Value Added Tax with which they have been charged. No doubt most of this to-ing and fro-ing is done by computer, but it must involve some human labor, which clearly constitutes activity rather than work.
How many people, I wonder, are laboring hard to reduce the economic output of their country? In total it must be many millions.
But how reliable are the figures quoted in the articles upon which I base my remarks? The GDP of a country can be increased or decreased at statistical will, it seems. For example, it was recently decided that the GDP of Nigeria was 90 per cent greater than previously thought, making its economy the largest in Africa, overtaking South Africa. If it were suddenly announced that the life expectancy of a population had been revised upward by 90 per cent, we should certainly doubt either the vital statistics of that country or the ontological reality of what was being measured.
To conclude correctly that productivity in Britain had fallen we should have to be certain, first, that the present GDP really was smaller than it was when the crisis broke (and the difference, being small, might well be within the margin of error), and second, that the fact that there were more people in work now than ever before, including when the GDP was at its peak, really meant that more hours were worked than ever before. If more people were in work, however, but working on average fewer hours, it might well be that fewer hours in total were worked despite more people being in employment, and therefore that productivity had risen rather than fallen.
What you believe depends at least as much upon your global apprehension of the situation as upon the statistics. On the train to the airport in England, and at the airport itself, I saw a population that struck me as more militantly ugly and unintelligent than any other known to me, one that consumes without discrimination and enjoys without taste. With regard to ugliness, for example, it added to whatever ugliness Nature had bestowed upon it by refusing to wear any clothes that might possibly lend it any dignity, rather choosing apparel that accentuated its natural unattractiveness. Grossly fat slobs, for example, insisted upon wearing figure-hugging T-shirts that did not quite meet the tops of the shorts that exposed their fat white tattooed calves, exposing their repellent midriffs to the appalled gaze of the minimally sensitive. Of the women it would be kinder not to speak; suffice it to say that they made the men look like Beau Nash or Beau Brummel.
Their taste in everything from food to music and clothes is base, vulgar, stupid, and crude. It is not that they know no betterinnocent vulgarity can be amusing and even refreshingbut that they know better and reject and hate it, refuse to aspire to it, and try to intimidate others into abandoning it, with some success, it must be admitted. The productivity of such a nation is unlikely to rise very fast or far. It will be lucky if in the modern world, with so much competition, it achieves stagnation.
http://takimag.com/article/the_gross_domestic_pissants_theodore_dalrymple/print#ixzz2zWgG4Euf
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