Via Megan McArdle’s shiny, new Atlantic blog, Brad DeLong has an absolutely brilliant post about early 20th century America. You really should read the whole thing, it’s pretty stunning. The thing that sticks out most is the absolute material poverty in which essentially everyone lived.
Few households in Homestead in 1900 had running water or a hot water heater. Water came in buckets from a faucet in the street into the house, and then heat it on the stove. In the–relatively prosperous for its time–factory steel town of Homestead, Pennsylvania at the start of the twentieth century, only one in six working class households had indoor bathrooms in 1910. Half of “Slav” and “Negro” families lived in one or two room houses. Most white families lived in four room houses. And most households in Homestead in their one or two or four-room houses had boarders: male, unrelated, single workers sleeping and eating in the house. The work of the housewife thus brought income directly into the household. Remember the three farmhands in the Wizard of Oz, set in 1890s Kansas? Odds are they slept in the house with Dorothy, her Uncle, and Auntie Em–or they slept in the barn.
A quarter of American households in 1900 had boarders or lodgers (compared to two percent today). Half of American households in 1900 had fewer rooms than persons (compared to five percent today). A quarter of American households in 1900 had running water (compared to ninety-nine percent today). An eighth of American households in 1900 had flush toilets (compared to ninety-eight percent today). Less than a fifth had refrigerators, less than one-twelfth had gas or electric lights, less than one-twentieth had telephones or washing machines, and of course there were no radios or televisions or vacuum cleaners or central heating, to list just those major appliances that have greater than ninety percent coverage today.
These paragraphs are in reference to mill workers in Homestead, PA. And remember, those jobs with US Steel: grueling 12-hour shifts, six days a week, with a large probability of injury or death were the sort of jobs people crossed oceans on cramped ships to get. Imagine sailing three weeks across the Atlantic, after an overland journey from the Ukraine or someplace, so that your family could have a shot at living in a two room house with some strangers while you worked 72 hours a week in a steel mill. Imagine you did this because that prospect was immeasurably better than the prospects you had in your native country, and because those mill jobs were some of the better ones you could get anywhere.
Compare that to any part of the Western, industrialized world today. In any major city in the US, I can easily find a job that will provide for my material needs, a home with running water and no boarders, I’ll work less than 40-50 hours a week, I’ll have virtually no chance of on-the-job injury, and I’ll even be able to maintain a balanced diet and do my own laundry without need for servants or for spending an entire day at it. In the past 100 years the absolute material well-being of pretty much everyone in the industrialized world has improved so greatly that the every day tribulations of persons working relatively good jobs for the time are completely unrecognizable to essentially anyone in the West today.
Unfortunately, those sorts of problems: high infant mortality, bad diet, long work hours in bad conditions, and crushing material poverty, are still a daily reality for much of the world’s population. And this ties directly into what I mentioned the other day about the moral case for trade.
That a vast majority of the world’s population lives, as it always has, in absolute material poverty is one of the great injustices of the modern age. By chance of luck some of us, myself among the lucky few, have the good fortune to be born wealthy by historical standards merely because we happened to be born in a developed country. Even the poor in the US, while they face plenty of problems the rest of us don’t, have a good lot by historical or even current global standards. Virtually everyone in the United States, or Canada, or Europe, or Australia can read, has running water, and some kind of access to modern medical care (even if only in emergencies or after long periods of waiting, or at great expense). While possible to argue, the position that the poor in industrialized nations face anything similar to the absolutely terrible conditions seen by much of the world’s population is, to my mind, completely farcical.
And, as who has such things is truly the purview of luck, it isn’t a particularly fair outcome. It doesn’t seem right that being born in one arbitrary geographical region should make one so rich by comparison. Even my chilled, libertarian heart finds those advertisements requesting money for starving children in sub-Saharan Africa sort of compelling, although I don’t think charity is likely to solve the problem. Now, before anyone accuses me of having lost my libertarian cred by endorsing some sort of socialism, let me explicitly state that while I agree this sort of material poverty is unfair and is a problem, I completely reject any solution offered that involves straight transfers. That is, I think Foreign Aid is counter productive, and morally questionable.
If third-world poverty is an issue, and neither charity nor government aid is the answer, what is? Simply, trade. Nothing has done more to raise material living standards of hundreds of millions than the free flow of goods, capital, and labor across national boundaries. America was made prosperous by an influx of immigrants, and trade with America helped rebuild Europe after nearly half a century of brutal war. The global economy offers more wealth and more opportunity than any other human construct in history and there is no case, at all, for attempts to exclude small, poor nations from its benefits.
When a member of Congress calls for trade restrictions to protect “American jobs” the correct rebuttal is not that the proposal will make America worse off, because the harm will likely be small or those helped will benefit enough to benefit the US somewhat, but that the proposal is quite literally taking food and money from the world’s poor. The talk you hear these days has very little to do with restricting trade between developed nations, and much to do with “unfair” competition from nations with relatively cheap unskilled labor: Mexico, China, Africa, India, what have you. Is there a compelling case to value maintaining the, relatively high by any reasonable measure, living standard of a call center worker in the US at the expense of leaving someone in India unemployed and perhaps starving? To say that an arbitrary border drawn long ago by men with guns is a sufficient reason to value the welfare of one person over the welfare of another seems not only arbitrary but also extremely capricious.
Who has more alternatives? Which economy is likely to have another job of relatively similar pay available? Who is likely to suffer more in material terms as a result of a shift in the labor market? The dynamic nature of the modern industrial economy can easily absorb a little bit of structural change, and the poor of developing nations suffer immensely from restrictions aimed at keeping them out of the global economy. Quotas on the importation of sugar cost the average US consumer $8 a year, but at what price to sugar exporters from places like Cuba or India? Not to mention the reduction in global price as a result of US overproduction.
The overall point is that trade restrictions in large nations like the US, especially those aimed at developing nations, serve only to take money (extract rents to be jargony for a second) from some of the poorest people in the world. If we care about enriching the truly poor, about ensuring that the currently impoverished are able to come out of it, a key part of our policy must be removal trade barriers with those countries and elimination of other domestic policies — such as farm subsidies — that serve a similar end. This is the argument to use, for it has the greatest chance of success: people likely want to assist the world’s poor, and if they can gain an understanding of the best way to accomplish that goal, they’ll likely become greater supporters of trade. Rather than emphasize the somewhat technically suspect benefits to the US from removal of trade restrictions, we must focus on the benefits to the world’s poor.
Good post.
It would also make a good op-ed or basis for a letter-to-the-editor in your local newspaper. Would like to see these moral kinds of arguments reach more people.
Stevo Darkly
August 30th, 2007