Wokesters, Wake!

By Deirdre Nansen McCloskey

Thursday, June 10, 2021

 

The “woke” are dead asleep and “capitalism” has nothing to do with the modern world. Aside from that, I’m on board.

 

But wait. It’s good, not bad, to be aware that there are problems. I am a Christian classical liberal, and therefore am impatient with Tucker Carlson conservatives who deny, for example, that the U.S. is a racist country. Come on, people. Get minimally woke. You’ve heard of the experiments sending out identical résumés, one from Charles Jones and the other from Chaquille Jones. Charles gets 50 percent more callbacks than Chaquille. You know that the Federal Housing Administration from its inception in 1934 enforced redlining. I was redlined in Hyde Park in 1975, seven years after it was made “illegal,” though I was a white, tenured faculty member at the University of Chicago. My poor and black neighbors made my whole neighborhood, in the opinion of the FHA, a bad credit risk, and Talman Federal Savings agreed. Guess how my poor black neighbors fared, and still do. You also may have heard about the heinous, execution-worthy crime of a DWB, driving while black. In living memory some 10,000 “sundown towns,” such as Darien, Conn., and Levittown, N.Y., made it in effect illegal to drive after dark if you were any sort of nonwhite, or even Jewish. You’ve heard of the Talk that black kids, especially boys, get at age eight or so to keep them from being killed by white police. If you’re white, your sons view the police as Officers Friendly who will take them home if they get caught with a little pot. Racism is assuredly a problem, and people with functioning souls from George Will to George Bush should work on solving it. In fact they have.

 

But the implication of wokeness is that all you need is to be aware, because it is so very obvious what to do about a problem once you name it and shame it. Many problems, say the woke, can be solved simply by calling on, uh, the police to coerce bosses to hand over more of that unlimited gold they have hidden in the back room. Paid vacation, parental leave, the minimum wage. That’s the economic theory behind adding more and more restrictions on the wage bargain instead of letting people make bargains they think are okay in view of other wage bargains they can make without coercion.

 

Inequality? Easy peasy, say the woke. Tax each year 1 percent of the wealth of the rich, as in Senator Warren’s economy-demolishing suggestion during the 2020 campaign. “Only” 1 percent re­duces by 20 percent the return of an asset earning 5 percent. The woke, such as Senator Warren, don’t stop for self-critical thought. They won’t, for example, look into how the inequality numbers are constructed, namely, by ignoring cash and in-kind government transfers such as food stamps and public housing. If you include such items — setting aside whether they are good ideas for the poor, whom we Christians do want to help but do not want to demoralize — inequality in the U.S. is falling, not rising.

 

The woke have no time to consider, again, that inequality of income comes largely from differences in gifts. As Saint Paul said, “He distributes them to each one, just as He determines.” Saint Paul, who by the way also said that “one who does not work should not eat,” could have mentioned being able to hit a major-league fastball or being able to smash a guitar on stage in an entertaining way. And the woke have no time for the cosmopolitan ethical standard of inequality worldwide, which with the recent economic successes of China and India and other poor countries is falling like a stone.

 

The woke I suppose vaguely realize that some problems are not fixable. But in their angry confidence they don’t sound like they do, instead spotting endless problems and recommending endless expansion of coercion to solve them. Homelessness? Public housing. H. L. Mencken had it right a century ago: “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”

 

I do recommend, though, preaching. Preaching, after all, sometimes works. Notice that advertisers on TV have started to include biracial couples. That’s the ticket. Note the ad for an HIV pill featuring two guys kissing. Hurrah! Listen up, cultural conservatives: Liberty is liberty is liberty.

 

Longer term, the women’s movement of the 1960s did importantly liberate women, by preaching. The career woman Phyllis Schlafly stopped the Equal Rights Amendment, which would have used coercion to protect careers for women, so we have to get along now on sweet persuasion, not state coercion. Woman of the Year, a film of 1942 with Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, is un­watchable now, because its message is that being a career woman is incompatible with being a wife. We’ve moved on, by preaching. In movies during the 1950s, notice, the men, home from the wars and settling in to a fantasy of domesticity, were always man-handling women. You know, they love it. No, dear, they don’t. Preaching ended it, partly.

 

And there are some real problems that the government can do something about, just as the woke assume — except that the policy is usually the opposite of what the woke in their thoughtless way would recommend. Government inaction is regularly the solution. Occupational licensure, for example, causes gross inequality of permission and then of income. In the 1950s about one in 20 U.S. workers required an occupational license from the state. Now it’s risen to about a quarter. This is very, very bad for the poor, in their work and in their consumption. I probably am the only person within sound of this article able to become an apprentice union electrician in the state of Michigan. Only people whose grandfather Fridtjof, whose uncle Joe, and whose cousin Phil were union electricians can become one. Too bad for you.

 

And so it goes, through the literally millions of laws, regulations, protections, and subsidies that our woke friends think are necessary in a complex economy. Zoning. Public schools. Police unions. Teacher unions. Pro­tection­ism. Immi­gration restrictions. Industrial planning. Drug laws. U.S. foreign policy and the militarization of society. All of these damage the poor. And you call yourself a Christian, or at least a thoroughly woke progressive.

 

Narrow wokeness selects alleged or actual problems that the Left can talk about to signal its virtue. The Left doesn’t have to deal with the irritating truth that its quickie solutions usually damage the poor.

 

The woke solutions, of course, come out of an old idea, a soporific rather than woke juice, that like many people I imbibed when young — namely, Marxism, or more broadly the conviction that there’s something dirty about mutually advantageous exchanges be­tween adults. Young people, who come from properly socialist societies called “families” — from each according to her ability, to each according to his need — are pretty much guaranteed to start as anti-market. Saul Bellow said rightly of his early Trotskyism, “Like everyone else who invests in doctrines at a young age, I couldn’t give them up,” though at length he did. Me, too. I still know more union and left-wing songs than my woke friends, and I’ve read more Marx and Lenin and Trotsky than at any rate the lower quartile, maybe even the lower half, of academic Marxists. An old joke describes the life histories of thousands upon thousands of sympathetic and thoughtful folk raised in loving families over the past century: “Anyone who is not a Marxist at age 16 has no heart. Anyone who is still a Marxist at age 26 has no brain.” I adjust the dates to fit.

 

It is highly suggestive that you cannot name a single person who has gone in the other direction, from an Adam Smithian commitment to “the obvious and simple system of natural liberty” to state socialism. True, Marco Rubio has become an advocate for the socialism-lite called “industrial planning.” But you can count on it that Rubio never really understood “capitalism” anyway, and hasn’t read Adam Smith. Or Marx.

 

A crucial problem is that word we use for mutually advantageous exchanges, “capitalism.” It is a foolish one, a scientific error compressed into a term invented by our hateful enemies and then adopted proudly as what the Dutch call a “beggar word” by people like my friendly acquaintance Steve Forbes: “Forbes, the Capitalist Tool.” Really, Steve, get woke.

 

The scientific problem is that the word suggests that capital accumulation is the way to wealth. No, it isn’t. Innovation is. What raised up the wretched of the earth after 1800, accelerating recently, is innovation and its imitation, not piling up bricks or B.A.s, necessary though these are. So are a labor force, sunlight, and the existence of the universe “necessary.” Humans have always massively accumulated, as in the Roman Appian Way or the Chinese Grand Canal. Until 1776 and the gradual implementation of Adam Smith’s “simple plan” of liberalism, the very word “innovation” was disdained. Afterwards, ordinary poor men, slaves, women, colonial people, immigrants, gays were gradually liberated to have a go, as the British put it. Innovation exploded, raising income per person by 3,000 percent. Yes, 3,000, a factor of about 30, from 1800 to the present.

 

What is in fact special about the modern world, and should name it, is not accumulation or exploitation, neither Forbes nor The Communist Manifesto. What’s special, and the word we should be using, is innovism. “IN-oh-vism.”

 

Try hating that, thou woke.