History is a Discipline

Megan McArdle argues that had unions opposed increased productivity

 in 1810, we'd all still be working in cotton mills and dying at 45.

This is an odd argument on several grounds but its central claim is incoherent when you consider the processes through which life expectancy increased.  Increases in longevity are most often the result of decline in infant mortality and this was certainly the case of late 19th century America. Other causes of longer lived folks, improved nutrition and medical care - for example, have nothing to do with economic productivity in the industrial sector.  Better roads and railways, created, sustained, and supported by state intervention in the market place as one example, improved standards for medical professionals and acceptance of the germ theory of disease in the late 19th early 20th for another..  Public hygiene movements, that transformed cities form filthy and disease ridden, used the state's power to recreate cities and, again, have nothing to do with economic productivity. Clean food and drug, air and water acts have nothing to do with economic efficiency or productivity and are responsible for improving the conditions in which people live and work. Humanity's response to the problems created by the exploitative economic relations concerning resources of people lead to intellectual and material improvements: history isn't written in the passive voice.

In this case, as in nearly all cases of improving the material and intellectual position of humanity in a social situation, people decided to overlook economic efficiency because people matter more than profits or things. And its was people acting in the interests of the common good, which is to say clean cities and longer lives, that lead to this improvements. It was also the case that there was an admixture of pure and impure motives for urban renewal: social hygienist were often fans of Eugenics and agents who wanted strong states often transformed cities for reason of their security as well as public health. Lots of American urban reformers of the left and the right spring to mind of the first and Hausmann's Paris for the second. As medicine improved its professional profile, midwifery declined. Nonetheless, let's not throw healthy babies, clean cities, and related whatnottery out with soiled bath water.

Right now this very moment, in the interests of economic efficiency and increased productivity,extractive industries are polluting and working on returning us to the 19th century so we can all die young.


Just as was the case with Baumol's argument about productivity and increased wages things don't just happen they are made to happen by people interesting in making them happen for reasons good and ill. The only reason to ignore the fact that people make their own history, albeit not in a context of their own creation - to paraphrase some old windbag or another, is if you want people to think that the miserable world created  by Neoliberalism's commitment to market fundamentalism is "natural" instead of being foist upon us by unpleasant  men and women who wish that the greatest number of us  suffered for the increasing few.