Monoculture: How One Story is Changing Everything

by Michaels, F. S.

  The same story holds true for wages: the price for your work is also set by the forces of supply and demand. If you don’t think you get paid enough, your boss isn’t to blame — it’s the market that’s at fault. Your boss doesn’t set your wages — the market does. If help is hard to find, you’ll be paid more. If everyone’s looking for a job, you’ll be paid less. That’s because all things being equal, your boss is also considered to be rational. That means your boss will also make the most efficient choice and hire someone appropriate who costs the least of his or her limited resources.

  If you end up suffering in the world of markets because prices are too high for you to buy, or too low for you to make a living off of what you sell, there’s nobody to blame but the market, which after all, isn’t trying to punish you personally.11 That’s just the way things are. So even though giant retailers and multinational energy companies and global technology firms are all big enough and powerful enough to influence prices and wages, the economic story says otherwise.

  If you’re a buyer in the world of markets, whether you know it or not, you help to keep the market in check. As you browse tables as a buyer at the farmers market, merchants are busy competing with each other for your business. Because you are rational as a buyer, all things being equal, you will buy the most efficient alternative — what meets your needs and uses the least of your resources to do it. The more efficient the seller can be in supplying that product to you, the lower the price can be, which makes you more likely to buy. The economic story says the market is regulated by that kind of competition for buyers and so doesn’t need to be regulated further by anything external to it, like the government.

  Just as buyers and sellers are efficient in the economic story, so too is the world of markets. When buyers are efficient, buying what meets their needs for as little as possible, and sellers are efficient, making the best product they can for as little as possible, buyers will demand more and sellers will supply more. When there’s a balance between supply and demand, the market operates at peak efficiency. Sellers won’t produce too much of what they sell, and buyers won’t pay for what they don’t need, so there ends up being a natural match between what sellers offer and what buyers want. That kind of efficiency, the story says, keeps everyone from wasting resources, which as you’ll remember, are scarce because everyone has unlimited wants and there isn’t enough of anything to go around. Peak efficiency in the world of markets is reached when both markets and the competition that happens in them are as widespread as possible throughout the world, which is an argument for free trade.

  The economic story says there are no limits to how big the world of markets can be, or to how much it can grow. In practice, we keep some things outside of markets, like sex, reproductive services, human organs, political office, prizes and honors, love and friendship, drugs, and homicide. Keeping those areas of life separate from markets means it is mostly illegal to buy and sell sex, children, kidneys, senate seats, Nobel prizes, cocaine, or hits on someone you’d like to see dead — even if there are people who are willing to buy and sell those things.12 Still, the economic story says the market should operate without limits, which leads us to how you and the world of markets interact.

  According to the economic story, you’re free to enter and exit the world of markets as you please. As a buyer, you’re free to choose whether to buy something or not. If you want something and can afford to pay for it, it’s yours. If nothing pleases you, you can “vote with your dollar” and buy nothing. In practice, if you’re less mobile than others in the world of markets somehow, maybe because you’re a child or a senior, or are poor, or have learning disabilities or mental health issues, you don’t have the same access to the market as others do who are more independent. Instead, you’ll likely find it hard to identify your choices and make the best choice, which you need to be able to do for the market to operate efficiently, or you may not have enough money to enter the market to begin with. Sometimes your “best choice” isn’t much of a choice at all; if your two options are to starve or to buy bread at extortion rates from the only seller in town, your “freedom” to enter or exit the market doesn’t amount to much.

  The economic story recognizes that “freedom of choice” limitation and says that the more choice you have as a buyer in the market, the better off you are. The story says you’re most free when you have as much choice as possible in as many areas of life as possible.13 Choice means that competition exists, and in the economic story, competition is good. Without competition, prices won’t operate the way they’re supposed to and the world of markets stagnates. That’s why price-fixing is illegal and monopolies aren’t that desirable, at least from a buyer’s perspective.

  Competition is also important on a personal level in the economic story. As a rational, self-interested individual, you interact with the world of markets by competing with everyone else. You compete against other workers for jobs. You compete against other buyers for what sellers are selling. You compete against other sellers for buyers. No matter what role you play in the world of markets, you are competing for a piece of a pie that just isn’t big enough to go around. Because resources are scarce, you have to make choices about what you want and then compete with everyone else for what little there is. You can tell how you’re doing in the competition by comparing yourself with others. Who’s behind you? Who’s ahead? The further out in front you are, the better.

  Your relationships with others in the world of markets are therefore primarily competitive ones, but they’re also typically impersonal and transactional — a relationship between buyer and seller. You don’t have to be friends with people or know them at all to do business with them. In a given transaction between two rational, self-interested human beings, you are not obligated to the other person past the transaction at hand.

  According to the economic story, your personal experience in the world of markets will be affected by the quality of information you have about what’s being offered in the market. The better your information is, the better off you are. With perfect information, you’ll be able to make the best decision — the most efficient one — and buy what meets your needs for the lowest available price, because you’re rational. No one, of course, ever has perfect information. What you have instead are information asymmetries: potential employees often know more about their real skills than an interviewer does, real estate agents often know more about a property than a house buyer does, and doctors often know more about a medical problem than a sick person does. Information asymmetries make it hard to figure out what your best choice really is; the more information you have, the story says, the better choice you’ll be able to make.

  In the economic story, life gets better when the economy grows. The economy is deemed to be growing and life is deemed to be improving when the value of a country’s economic output — its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) — is rising. When GDP is rising, the story says, your standard of living is going up, your country’s income per person is going up, and your children will end up having more opportunities than you had. Health care gets funded. Education gets funded. The arts get funded. Social programs get funded. In short, economic growth enables social growth.

  Many observers have pointed out that economic growth doesn’t quite tell the whole story; whether growth is good or not depends on exactly what’s growing. If crime is on the rise in your neighborhood, and you buy a gun and hire a bodyguard because you no longer feel safe walking down the street, the spike in gun sales and bodyguard services increases the GDP and grows the economy — so though your standard of living may officially be going up, your quality of life is not. But in the economic story, a growing economy is seen as an unequivocally good thing.

  To summarize then, in the economic story, you’re a rational, self-interested, entrepreneurial individual who is trying to satisfy unlimited wants, whatever they may be. The world is a world of markets populated with buyers and sellers. Prices are set by the forces of supply an
d demand, so power is in the market, not in people, and cannot be personally directed. In the world of markets, sellers strive for profits and buyers buy what costs them the least of their resources. The world is regulated by competition for buyers and is efficient, so scarce resources aren’t wasted. Peak efficiency is reached when markets and competition are as widespread as possible, and market size and market growth know no limits. When you interact with that world of markets, you are free to come and go as you please. The more choice you have, the better; choice stimulates competition, and without competition, markets won’t work. The more information you have, the better decisions you’ll make. You compete with everyone and everyone competes with you. Relationships are impersonal, anonymous and transactional, and economic growth enables social growth.

  Now that we know how the economic story positions who we are as human beings, what the world is like, and how we and the world interact, we’re ready to look at how that story plays out in daily life, creating a monoculture that ultimately constrains us.

  You’re about to discover how different elements of the economic story are being adopted, or have already been adopted, in interdependent but distinct parts of life that were once governed by a much wider range of ideas. In the next six chapters, you’ll start to see the economic story in action. You’ll see how the story’s assumptions are changing how you think and act in terms of your work, your relationships with people and the natural world, your community, your physical and spiritual health, your education, and your creativity.

  You’ll start to see how one story is changing everything.

  YOUR WORK

  It is not correct to say that we managed to maintain employment during the depression because we grew. We grew because we had committed ourselves to the maintenance of employment. This forced us to find new users and new uses for our existing products…I sometimes wonder whether we wouldn’t be well advised to commit ourselves to increasing employment constantly.

  —IBM EXECUTIVE, 1954

  If the world operates as one big market, every employee will compete with every person anywhere in the world who is capable of doing the same job. There are a lot of them and many of them are very hungry.

  —ANDREW GROVE, INTEL PRESIDENT AND CEO, 1995

  Would I ever leave this company? Look, I’m all about loyalty. In fact, I feel like part of what I’m being paid for here is my loyalty. But if there were somewhere else that valued loyalty more highly, I’m going wherever they value loyalty the most.

  —DWIGHT SCHRUTE, THE OFFICE, 2005

  IF YOU WERE EMPLOYED full-time in the 1950s, you expected to work about 40 hours a week. Your job security stretched out into the future indefinitely. Monday to Friday, you’d show up at your boss’ place of business, and do mostly what your boss told you to. You knew what your job entailed because it had specific tasks attached to it. Your work was supervised. You moved from position to position within the company, climbing the promotion ladder. Layoffs, when they happened, were based on seniority: last in, first out. Shareholders, not employees, were the ones who took the risk for how business decisions turned out. Your pay and your performance weren’t really tied together. If you and your coworkers were paid for high performance at all, it wasn’t used to differentiate among you much.1 And, most working people were just like you. Though only about 20 percent of the population worked for wages and salaries in 1820, and 50 percent did by 1900, by 2000, well over 90 percent worked for organizations, and half of those worked for big companies.2

  Back in the 1950s, the relationship between employees and their companies involved commitment and reciprocity; workers were committed to the job in return for wages and promotions, and the company was committed to its workers in return for their hard work and loyalty. Firms invested in training employees and developing their skills, and promoted people from within the firm. That long-term employment relationship, with its stability, regular promotions, and raises, let employees plan on owning a home and sending their children to college or university. In exchange, workers were loyal and didn’t move around much, staying with the same company in the same city for years, maybe even decades.3 If people occasionally had to work long hours, the impact was relatively easy to absorb; whatever didn’t get done at home was usually taken care of by women who weren’t out in the workforce — mothers, grandmothers, wives, sisters, or daughters.

  Then the story changed.

  The economic story tells us corporations compete in a global market as part of the global economy. Because investors are always on the lookout for where to invest their capital next and keep moving their funds in and out of countries, organizations are under pressure to compete efficiently and stay attractive to those investors.4 One way a company can compete efficiently is to have a more flexible workforce — to be less tied to its employees. Since labor costs represent a major expense to most companies, hiring employees when there’s work and laying them off when the work slows down can help firms stay competitive. That means the employment relationship that once stretched out into the future isn’t on the table anymore. Jobs now depend on the changing needs of the company. If the company has work, so will you. If not, you probably won’t either.

  As a result, corporations and employees are no longer that committed to each other. Companies have gradually started limiting job security and now invest less in training employees than they used to while still expecting workers to show dedication to their jobs. Employees, on the other hand, are becoming more mobile; if a competing company approached them, they’d think seriously about switching firms. Employees now also worry about taking care of their own training and skill development to make sure they stay attractive to potential employers. Many workers expect to go back to school to get that training, which costs them time and money. Still, without training, they’re at risk of falling behind because they won’t have the credentials others do in a competitive job market.

  Those workers who do end up laid off when the work slows down might be able to get hired back as consultants or contractors. According to the economic story, being part of that kind of flexible workforce is a great opportunity for workers: being a free agent means you’ll finally be able to end the absurd, dysfunctional long-term relationship between you and your company. You’ll be more secure; having multiple clients is safer than working for just one boss. You’ll make more money. Your work will be more invigorating, more rewarding, more fun. You’ll finally surface your submerged identity, figure out who you are and what you really want to do with your life. You’ll find yourself, finally believe in yourself, become authentic and whole.5

  You also won’t be alone; contingent work is still on the rise in North America, Europe and Asia. But we now know that free agents often end up making less money than they did in their full-time jobs and have fewer benefits like health insurance and a pension.6 Some free agents try to make up lost wages by taking a second job, then end up spending less time with family and friends; researchers studying the effects of contingent work said they saw “real signs of social disintegration, a weakening of the social fabric of these individuals’ lives.”7

  Job security and long-term employment aside, the economic story is also changing how companies talk about their relationship to the rest of society in terms of corporate social responsibility. Businesses exist to make money, to be sure — that’s their traditional purpose, compared to organizations like churches and hospitals.8 But corporate social responsibility is also gaining attention, along with related ideas like sustainable development and social audits. Corporations have started talking about stakeholders — people affected by the company’s decisions who can’t just be ignored when the company is trying to decide what course of action to pursue. Ethicist Richard De George wrote: “The present mandate [between business and society] is different from the simplistic mandate given to business in an earlier time…What is clear in the new mandate is that business must now consider the worker, consumer, and the general public as well as the share
holder — and the views and demands of all four — in making decisions. The good of all must be considered.”9Stakeholders want results too, just like shareholders, but those results aren’t automatically measured in dollars and cents. Profits, while necessary, now aren’t sufficient.

  That changing social mandate and emphasis on stakeholders means companies and their employees are supposed to move from focusing on the financial bottom line to focusing on a triple bottom line of economic, social, and environmental responsibility. Both economic and non-economic factors are supposed to be taken into account in corporate decision-making.

  But in the economic story, the non-economic factors companies are supposed to take into account are reframed in terms of the bottom line again; companies can do well by doing good.10 According to that philosophy, companies that “do good” by acting ethically also end up “doing well” financially. In other words, ethics pays.11 As one public relations expert put it, “There is strong evidence that companies that institutionalize values and codes of conduct be they related to the environment, working conditions, privacy — are rewarded with higher stock valuations, better earnings, and a more highly motivated and satisfied workforce — evidence that doing good is not just good for business, it’s good for the soul. There is even a growing belief that social responsibility is so important to corporate reputation that it should be valued and recognized as a real corporate asset as with any important item on an asset balance sheet.”12