Notes for a New Age : From a Money-Economy to a Life-Economy - Lewis Mumford (EN/FR)
The higher the vital standard, the less can it be expressed adequately in terms of money.
In the pecuniary economy that developed during the last five hundred years, there was only one criterion of effort: profit. If more profit could be obtained by baking stones than by baking the bread, stones would be baked, even though in fact people were starving. Scarcity and surplus, demand and supply, had reality not in relation to men's actual wants, but in relation to the market. Wants that could not be expressed in terms of the market remained unfulfilled, unless they were satisfied through an institutional life brought over from another period. Money was the symbol of power, and power was the chief end of man.
Under the pecuniary economyn wants that can be expressed in terms of a demand in the market kept on expanding: this was marked first by an increase in the variety of goods offered, and second by an increase in the amount created through mechanized production. In order to make the highly specialized division of labor possible, in an anonymous and indirected production for a world market, it was necessary that wants should keep on increasing: likewise that the rate of consumption should be hastened: by this means alone could production be geared higher and profits increased, or at least kept secure. Saturation of the market, with new production limited to legitimate replacements, would decrease the opportunities for profit and undermine the existence of the over-expanded plant: stability meant, in terms of profit, frustration; contraction meant bankruptcy.
Under this pecuniary economy, the civic and domestic meeds of the greater part of the population have never been satisfied through the ordinary process of the market. Calicoes, knives and watches might be cheaper, as they entered the channels of international trade and displaced increasingly the local products, by a price competition which often concealed the eventual inferiority of the goods, but the low wage levels which entered into the productions of these cheapened goods made it impossible for any large mass of workers to make an adequate demand of dwellings and for the community equipment that goes with urban living.
This held true in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with results that I have described in detail in earlier chapters: but the point is that it holds equally true today. Without doubt the prime obstacle to urban decentralization is that a unit that consist of workers, without the middle class and rich groups that exists in the big city, is unable to support even the elementary civic equipment, if roads, sewers, fire department, police service, and schools. At present it is only by remaining in metropolitan areas, where the taxes derived from the well-to-do districts can be partly applied to the working class quarters, that the workre can obtain even a modicum of the facilities for a good life.
This fact was discovered by the planners of Radburn, New Jersey, in attempting a rational organization of its municipal life and it was further demonstrated by Mr. Clarence Stein in a study made for the the Resettlement Administration. It has been amply substantiated by the London County Council's efforts at municipal decentralization: Becontree, for example.
What effect did machine production, corporate economy, specialized division of labor, and concentration of output on a blind market of buyers have upon the provision of dwelling houses? Here again the total inadecuacy of a pecuniary economy to satisfy the essential biological and social needs of a community has been completely demonstrated. As the standards of housing have risen, the opportunities for profit through their sale or rent have dropped. In a capitalist economy, this means that produciton has gone into other channels. Result: a quantitative shortgage in dwelling space has been chronic in ginning of the nineteenth century, and in the more over-crowded industrial centers, like London, since the sixteenth century.
In order to make it possible for capital to enter this fields at all, the qualitative standards have kept consistently below the level of decency available under the existing technology. The dwelling house, far more than the farm, has been the backward point of modern technics. Wage levels and incomes have borne simply no relation to the requirements for a decent dwelling. The failure of the pecuniary economy in this department is abysmal- all the more because rent is the largest single item in a family budget, rising from ten or fifteen per cent among the working classes of Holland to between twenty and thirty per cent for those in other countries. Rents that occupy more than twenty per cent of the total, especially on the lower income levels, mean a sharp curtailment of vital necessities at other points in the budget.
The failure of decent housing to obtain capital through competition in the market has led to widespread attempts to foster home-ownership among the workers; under the guise of offering security, those who haved fostered this mouvement, including government agencies, have sought to burden the worker with risks: risks whose returns are not sufficient to attract the necessary capital from the more wary. This diversion of the worker's meager budget to housing not merely undermines his standard of life: it lessens his freedom of mouvement and, during a financial crisis or a local shutdown, often results in the complete loss of his entire investment-and the roof over his head as well.
Needless to say, this is no solution of the housing problem: even apart from the fact that the building of individuals houses is technically and extremely wasteful process. Except for the income groups well on the comfort level, the building of houses for profit has been carried on throughout the Western world only by debasements of design: systematic overcrowding of the land, and overpopulation of the interior quarters on the part of those who must eventually rent them. And so long as pecuniary canons remain uppermost, there is no prospect for a change.
What do all these facts signify? they signify that some of the most essential items in the construction and equipment of cities cannot be produced, on any terms, under a pecuniary economy; and that houses in particular can be built only by ignoring the positive standards, based on scientific data, that are appropiated in an advanced civilization. This discovery has been slowly sinking into the minds of thoughtful people for the last century; and in the realm of both city development and housing it has resulted in a series of measures that cannot be sanctioned in terms of private gain and pecuniary aggrandizement.
Housing, in fact, is the focal point in that change from a pecuniary economy to a biotechnic economy which has been slowly developing throughout the Western World, and which received a great impetus in the decade that followed the Fist World War. The older type of industrialism chose to meet the inadecuacy of income to a genuine standard of life by maintaining low wage levels as long as possible and ignoring the possible existence of a positive standard of life. Whatever the worker could get along on, whatever a landlord could demand, in the main determinated the rental levels and the standard of accommodation; even during periods of relative prosperity for he worker, housing remained a third choice in his expenditures. In the Middletown, the Lynds discovered workers who owned automobiles of the latest model, whilst they bred their families in houses that lacked even bare sanitary conveniences. Even the worker, guided by advertising, sales talk and emulation followed fashions.
Under the biotechnic economy, these conditions are reversed. Instead of wages and income directing market demand, vital demand determines the level of income and directs production into socially useful channels. First we must erect a standand of living. In terms of housing, the minimum standards are set by objective criteria of air, water, sunlight, heat, privacy, and so forth, and further modified by those social provisions which tradition and current investigation prove to be necessary for the nurture of children and the education of responsible citizens. At any given period, in any given region, these standards should set a minimum level for wages: industries that cannot meet such a level must be looked upon as economically inefficient and socially defective, to be abolished or taken over by the community.
Where such standards have been set to a greater or less degree in publicly aided housing, one or two things must happen: either incomes in industry will rise to the necessary level, or the state will tax the larger incomes and make the reapportionement directly in the form of subsidies to the housing- money lent at low interest rates, subsidies to rents to make up the difference between the cost of the house and the worker's ability to pay, or outright grants. In the governmental housing that has been undertaken so widely throughtout Europe, beginning with the first efforts in England and Belgium after the middle of the nineteenth century, one or all of these methods have been used. Inevitably. Had the capitalist discovered for himself a way to supply decent housing to a depauperate or indigent population at a profit to himself he would have followed it.
Now, in a pecuniary economy, production for sale and profit dominates: the surplus over current need goes back; apart from the minimum expenditures for private display and public services, into further mechanical production. In a biotechnic economy, on the other hand, consumption and service must take precedence. Production must be directed, in greater amounts, into channels where a surplus of energy is made available, either for direct use in life, as house, city, as regional habitat, or for storage against future vital uses. The benefits of automatic machinery, the economies of finely organized production, the displacement of labor, the surplusage of modern agriculture all mean - if they mean any human benefit- this release of energy for the direct service of live. Whereas under a pecuniary economy profit come through the expanded role of the machine, the biotechnic economy will be marked by a general contraction of the machine and, with balanced regional economies, a diminution of the importance of the world market, now to be reserved for surpluses and specialties.
But consumption itself, under a biotechnic economy, is not consumption anyhow, in any quantities, towards any purposes. Capitalism has no need to inquire into the quality or end of consumption: indeed its most ardent advocates during the period of intellectual formulation even defended the adulteration of foods and drugs in the competitive market, on the ground that to erect a standard of purity would be to do away with free competition. Unde a biotechnic economy, consumption is directed toward the conservations and enhancement of life: a matter where qualitative standards are imperative. One uses the world life in no vague sense: one means the birth and the nurture of children, the preservation of human health and well being, the culture of the human personality and the perfection if the natural and civic environment as the theater of all these activities. Here are substatial goals for consumption not envisaged in the abstract doctrine of increasing wants operating within an ever expanding circle of new inventions and multiplying productive mechanisms.
Against the wasteful duplication of mechanical equipment, the aimless productivity, the random expansiveness of production under pecuniary canons of success, a biotechnic economy erects rational goals: the best possible environment for human nurture and culture; the primacy of consumptive and creative activities over the instrumental processes, the denial of "success" embodied in the destructive facilities of war and the mounting certificates of debt which mark the prevalence of a pecuniary economy. But to normalize consumption is to erect a standard that no single class, whatever its expenditures, posseses today. That standard cannot be set down in terms of any arbitrary sum of money, like the five thousands dollars a year suggested by Bellamy: for it involves the use of a complicated civic equipment whose individual appropriation is beyond the scope of even wealthy individuals. And indeed, the higher the vital standards, the less can it be expressed adequately in terms of money, and the more remote it is from the operations of the market. Vital standards must be expressed in terms of leisure and health and biological activity and esthetic pleasure and social opportunity: that is in terms of goods and environmental improvements in which machine production and all the devious and indirect processes that subverve such production have but a subordinate part.
In putting a vital standard first, we thereby make the dwelling house, the school, and the city the concrete, all-engrossing end of industrial and agricultural production. The aim is not more goods for more people to buy, but more opportunities for them to live: hence only such increases in goods as are instrumental to the "the best life possible". Under such an economic order, communal choices become more important than individual choices, and more and more of the activities of the citizen's life are released from pecuniary constraint.
Under such standards are erected, planned production is merely a wishful abstraction, and none of the preparatory incidents of current production, however resourceful in a technical sense, can contribute more than a modicum of their possible benefits to the community. Fortunately, our civilization as a whole is now at a point technically where it is feasible togive the population as a whole that basis in good breeding and good nurture which has hitherto been the exclusive possession of aristocracies.
This, then, is the meaning of the change that has been slowly taking place in our civilization since the third quarter of the nineteenth century. The increase of collectivism, the rising of municipal and governmental housing, the expansion of co-operative consumers' and producers' associations, the destruction of slums and the building of superior types of community for the workers- all these are signs of the new biotechnic orientation. This change is so deep, so pervasive, that it can be witnessed even in places where the profit system, which is the antithesis, has reached a pinnacle. One can behold it, for example, in the budget of a great municipality like New York, which annually expends more on education that even on transportation or street cleaning; one may watch it at work in a country like England, which has been tearing down slums and planting new communities whose tiled roofs are deeply embedded in green trees and greensward. One saw it on a grand scale in Germany when, in five quick years after 1925, before the suicidal impulses of Nazism got the upper hand, one beheld in every department of life the outlines of a new human culture: a complete conception of the good life which put pre-Nazi Germany at the very forefront of modern civilization.
Whereas the pecuniary economy expanded the role of the machine, the biotechnic economy enlarges the role of the professional services, a greater proportion proportion of the income and free energy go into the support of the artist, the scientist, the architect and technician, the teacher and physician, the singer, the musician, the actor. This shift has been going on steadily during the last generation: the tendency is statistically demonstrable. But its signifiance has not been generally grasped: for its results must be the transfer of interest from the subordinate mechanical arts to the direct arts of life. And it brings with it another possibility, indeed another necessity: the universal rebuilding of our cities for the sake not merely of better conditions of living, but of a more purposive creation and utilization of the social heritage- such a life as men have occasionally had a glympse of in Jerusalem, Athens, Florence or Concord.
