Pareto Distribution

The past three posts [here, here, and here] were all a declaration that feminism doesn’t speak for me. That was prompted by a video of an interview with Jordan Peterson. I hadn’t been aware of him before, but I was certainly not the only one whose attention was caught by that interview. There were entire collections of responses to it on YouTube, and a series of memes featuring the flummoxed interviewer.

When you watch something on YouTube, a whole list of suggested videos appears based on what you were watching. I was thinking it was time for an economic post. It turns out Jordan Peterson can help there too. I came across one where he talks about income inequality, on the Joe Rogan podcast, from October 2017. (You can watch the whole 25-minute interview below.)

In this discussion, Jordan Peterson presents the problem, or the phenomenon of inequality. He refers to the Pareto distribution, which I had to look up. The Pareto principle is also called the 80/20 rule, which is, in essence, that 80% of outputs come from 20% of causes. And, further, 20% of producers bring about 80% of production in any particular class of production.

Image from Wikipedia, which explains
"The Pareto Principle claims that
only a 'vital few' peapods
produce the majority of peas."

Jordan Peterson explains it this way:

If you look at any creative endeavor that human beings engage in—so that would be an endeavor where there’s variability in individual production. It doesn’t matter what it is. Here’s what happens. People compete to produce whatever that is, and almost everybody produces zero. They lose completely. A small minority are a tiny bit successful. And a hyper-minority are insanely successful. And so, the Pareto distribution is the geometric graph representation of that phenomenon. And so, here’s how it manifests itself.

If you have 10,000 people, 100 of them have half the money. So the rule is, the square root of the number of people under consideration have half of whatever it is that’s under consideration. So, this works everywhere. So, if you took 100 classical composers, 10 of them produce half the music that’s played. And then, if you take the 10 composers, and you take 1000 of their songs, 30 of those songs, which is the square root of 1000, roughly speaking, are played 50% of the time.

So, when people work to produce something—anything: a product, wealth, music—the outcome will be unequal. Quite dramatically unequal. In a distribution we can estimate with a mathematical formula of

√X = ½ Y 

where X is the total number of something, and Y is the recipient of the reward or whatever you’re counting.

There’s a field of study that measures this kind of thing—econophysics. Econophysicists, Peterson tells us, “use the same mathematical equations that represent the propagation of molecules—gas molecules into a vacuum, to describe the manner in which money distributes itself in an economy.” Cool. I didn’t know that.

He also refers to the Matthew effect. This references the parable of the talents. To one man is given five talents (a sizable amount of money); he doubles that for the master and is rewarded. To another is given two talents, which he doubles for the master, and he is also rewarded. To a third man is given a single talent. He does nothing with it and returns only that single talent to the master at the day of reckoning. He made no use of what he was given, so he has that talent taken from him and no reward.

The verse referred to as the Matthew effect is 25:29:

For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.

In a parable, things are metaphorical. It is about using what you have—not about producing five more or two more of something. But sociologists describe this effect as “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.”

As we also know from scripture, “For ye have the poor with you always” (Mark 14:7), there will always be work you can do to help them.

The question being discussed in the podcast is a combination of “Why are the poor always with us?” and “Is there something that can or should be done about it?”

The whole discussion shows just how interrelated economic and social issues are. Given the Pareto effect, as long as people do different things, think up different things, and find solutions to various problems, they will acquire differing rewards for their efforts. Some will create wealth more successfully than others.

As Peterson explains, “The problem is, if you let a monetary system run, all the money ends up in the hands of a few—a very small number of people.” That is only a problem when things are wildly unequal—more than that, wildly unequal and with some having essentially zero—subsistence with no way out. Add to that a sense of oppression or systemic unfairness, and bad things happen.

People with no way out get desperate, which leads to high crime, or revolt. That’s what you see in Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth. I wrote about this result of disparity in 2015:

In Pearl Buck’s novel The Good Earth, there’s a point where the poor are starving and growing daily more desperate, squatting along the walls of the wealthy, until things get so heated, the poor rise up and raid the property of the wealthy, looting and killing. That was a book of fiction, but the Durants’ book [The Lessons of History] describes that as a typical cycle.

It might look like the problem is too much wealth at the top, but it’s really about too little at the bottom. When people are starving and suffering while the wealthy ignore their needs, that is an injustice that won’t stand indefinitely.

As Peterson put it, “If you don’t have any money, it’s really hard to get some. Once you have some, it’s not so hard to get some more.” And that's the underlying problem of inequality--not too much in some places, but too little in some places.

As Peterson points out, “what Marx observed was that capital tended to accumulate in the hands of fewer and fewer people, and he said that’s a flaw of the capitalist system. That’s wrong. It’s not a flaw of the capitalist system; it is a feature of every single system of production that we know of, no matter who set it up and how it operates.” 

But it becomes more troublesome when someone—usually a Marxist—reframes the situation as rich = evil and poor = good. It is not the fault of successful people that they tend to accumulate the good stuff. It is also true that being poor is not simply a matter of failing to work hard enough. Getting the ones at that near zero situation unstuck is necessary, not only for those stuck there to improve their lot, but also for the successful to not lose what they have from a revolt.

I don’t think the discussion got all the way to a solution, but Peterson frames it right:

You need innovation. You pay for innovation with inequality. But you need to bind inequality, because if it’s too intense, then things destabilize. OK, we can agree on that. We’ve got the parameters set. Now we have to start thinking very carefully through how to do the redistribution issue, and we don’t know how to do that.

I understand what he’s saying, but I wouldn’t use the term “bind inequality.” That sounds like something that needs to be imposed from some greater power—although I don’t think he intended that. He’s literally talking about the “redistribution issue,” but I wouldn’t use that term either, although technically that is the issue. Redistribution, again, sounds like something imposed.

What we really want—and he suggests, although I’m not sure how we get there—is “equality of opportunity. Because people are actually not as resentful about the success of others as you might expect; they’re resentful about it if they feel that the game is fixed.” He adds, “It has to be a straight game. And that’s why ethics is so important to keep this landscape stable. People can’t play crooked games.”

So a discussion of civilization has to come into it. People have to be honest in order for it to work for everybody.

Also, people have to care about those stuck at zero, where high IQ and conscientiousness—the best predictors of success—are just not enough to get going. In a civilized society, people care about one another. They give freely to help those who are temporarily downtrodden, or those who are not capable of helping themselves, or who just need a break.

We can only have that to give, if we’ve had enough success to build up surplus beyond our needs. And we only get surplus—or wealth—by creating more than subsistence and having a way to store the surplus. The most effective way ever invented—the natural way—is trade in a free market economy.

The answer comes down to free market—free of crony capitalism and con games—plus philanthropy. We’ve talked about that before [here, here, and here]. The addition today is, there will always be natural inequality, but even the wealthy benefit economically by being honest and giving freely. So, you need a civilized people to get and keep a healthy, prosperous economy.

Choosing to Solve Poverty

Some things are simple but not easy. Solving the problem of poverty is one of those things. But here at The Spherical Model, we have the solution:

Free-enterprise economy combined with charitable giving and service.

We don’t solve poverty by taking from those who have been able to acquire more than they currently need through hard work and good fortune and giving their money to those who have less, for whatever reasons.

How do we know? Prime evidence is the “War on Poverty,” now ongoing for over half a century. I wrote about it two years ago, when it turned 50 ("The Fifty Year War" part I and part II). It is the largest, costliest war ever. Yet poverty rates remain about the same. And government goes on taking money to transfer even though their approach is provably faulty.

Graphic I used in 2014, found here

Maybe there’s something more than numbers involved.

Prosperity requires a free people engaged in a free market—all of which requires a law-abiding, righteous people. Things are interrelated. There’s something that comes up in all three spheres—political, economic, and social—and that is choice.

We need the freedom to choose how we will live, what we will do in life, what we will believe, what we will pursue. So political freedom will set the foundation for greater prosperity than any tyranny can do.

We need a free economy, in which we choose how we work, and more particularly how we spend what we have earned. This encourages the incentive to work harder and innovate, so that we can enjoy the fruits of labor.

But one reason “the poor are always with us” is that some are unable, for reasons that are no fault of their own, to take care of themselves, either temporarily or permanently. Some might lack physical or mental capacity to earn enough to care for themselves. Some might be in the position of taking care of a loved one, which prevents them from earning income.

In a civilized society, we recognize these people in need, we have softened feelings for them, and we want to help. We choose to help.

Those who think there is some other way have always failed, and will always fail. You can’t force good will, or charity, or caring.

But how do we get people to do the necessary giving? Because, what if people just don’t do it? Are we just going to let people die on the streets?

No, no one wants people dying on the streets. But if giving power to government to do charity for us would work, we’d have evidence of that by now. Instead we have proved that coercive “charity” doesn’t work.

Remarkably, though, even though government has tried to usurp this charity role from the people, we have nevertheless been charitable. In the January issue of Imprimis, Karl Zinsmeister writes of “Charitable Giving and the Fabric of America.” He offers some surprising evidence of our choice to give. He says,

Private philanthropy is crucial in making America the unusual country that it is. Let’s start with some numbers. Our nonprofit sector now comprises eleven percent of the total United States workforce. It will contribute around six percent of gross domestic product this year. To put this in perspective, the charitable sector passed the national defense sector is size in 1993, and it continues to grow. And these numbers don’t take volunteering into account: charitable volunteers make up the equivalent—depending on how you count—of between four and ten million full-time employees. So philanthropy is clearly a huge force in our society.

He gives examples of a few of America’s larger philanthropists: Ned McIlhenny, Alfred Loomis, John D. Rockefeller, George Eastman, Milton Hershey. These are all businessmen who then used their considerable wealth to do good in ways they were passionate about.

Then he told the stories of some lesser known, smaller philanthropists, because only 14 percent of charitable giving comes from wealthy people giving to big foundations. And only 5 percent comes from corporate giving. “The rest comes from individuals, and the bulk of it comes from small givers at an average rate of about $2,500 per household per year.”

One such person was Anne Scheiber, a reserved auditor. She retired with $5,000 in the bank in 1944, lived frugally, invested wisely, and amassed $22 million by her death in 1995 at age 101. She left her legacy to Yeshiva University so “bright but needy girls could attend college and medical school.”

Then there was Elinor Sauerwein, who frugally mowed her own lawn, painted her own house, and grew her own garden. She was motivated by a goal to give all she could to the Salvation Army—which was $1.7 million in 2011.

A shoe-shine named Albert Lexie donated his tops to the Free Care Fun of the Children’s Hospital in Pittsburgh. From 1981 to present, he donated over $200,000, which was a third of his income.

There are others. You may know some. People who give to benefit society through education, or hospitals, or on-the-ground charities helping the poor and homeless. There are private societies preserving our history, maintaining libraries, and funding scientific developments.

America is great because America is good. So far. Partly because America is free to choose to be good.

Zinsmeister mentioned a comparison done by historian Daniel Boorstin: “In 1880, the state of Ohio had only three million inhabitants but 37 colleges. That same year, England had 23 million inhabitants but only four colleges. The difference was small-scale philanthropy directed towards education.”

Those who worry that charitable giving can’t possibly do enough look at private philanthropy with variations of three criticisms:

1.       It’s a drop in the bucket.

2.       It’s amateurish, chaotic, and lacks expert coordination.

3.       Private donors act from impure motives.

Zinsmeister then tackles each of these in turn. As for the first, he points out, “The Gates Foundation alone distributes more overseas assistance than the entire Italian government.”  And that single foundation is only “a tiny sliver of American philanthropy directed overseas. Members of American churches and synagogues send four-and-a-half times as much to foreigners in need each year as Gates does,” and far exceeds the foreign aid budget of the US government. Recent annual totals are $31-$39 billion.

About lack of coordination, he offers evidence that local people, observing a problem and acting to meet a need, are more likely to succeed than distant planners. He contrasts a woman named Lizzie Kander, who funded a settlement house for Russian Jewish immigrants around the turn of the last century—she made and sold a cookbook to fund the thing—with his experience working in the White House West Wing.

He asserts, “The healthiest forms of societal improvement result from lots of little experiments. Some will fail, but others will succeed and be copied. This is the method by which private philanthropy proceeds.”

As for the third concern, impure motives, he says, so what? Most donors have altruistic motives beyond a tax break or getting their name on a building. Still, if good things get done, why worry about mixed motives?

What if the government got out of the “charity” business tomorrow? Could we figure things out? I believe we would. I believe good people follow natural impulses to help one another. And the more we are personally connected locally, the more that is true.

My belief is that the natural freedom of the internet makes connecting givers to organizations and individuals working to make a difference easier. There’s also the possibility of fraud there, but I think we’ll get better with time at recognizing and weeding those out.

Some people have money to give. Some have time, talents, or expertise. There are so many ways to give and serve the community.

community service illustration from JustServe.org

My church has organized a website (I think it’s national and international) for connecting givers and servers with organizations in need of the help: JustServe.org. In Houston we’ve had a version of that for a while: VolunteerHouston.org.

For larger disasters and ongoing humanitarian projects, my favorite is LDS Philanthropies and Humanitarian Aid, where 100% goes to aid, because overhead is handled through other, separate donations. 

A couple of my most read posts relate to community service: “Community Service Is Better Than Community Organizing,” and “Peanut Butter News.”

Zinsmeister concludes: “Early on, Americans discovered that voluntary action to lift others up is not only possible, it is superior to the kind of state paternalism that diminishes freedom. Private charitable giving and the spirit of volunteerism have been essential bulwarks of the American character, and they remain indispensable to our national success.”

So, can we eliminate poverty? There will always be poorer people, but in a civilized society they are clothed and fed and sheltered. And paths are made available so that most can find a way out of being at the bottom of earners. That happy outcome happens not from government “being giving,” but by individuals in a free society choosing to give to one another.

Commerce and Philanthropy--Two Sides of the Same Coin

Hillsdale College has an economic symposium going on right now (Sunday through Tuesday), on “Money: History and Controversies.” They have two speakers each evening, with live streaming, and apparently viewable later, because I didn’t get to it until late Sunday evening.

The lecture series is found here.

The one I watched already was Steve Forbes, “How the Destruction of the Dollar Threatens the Global Economy,” which is also the title of a book by Forbes. It was 45 minutes on monetary policy, followed by Q&A. Forbes suggested that, if you ever feel trapped between other passengers on an airplane and want a little extra room, just start a conversation on monetary policy—people will give you a wide berth. It’s not the most enthralling of topics. Nevertheless, he managed to keep it pretty interesting.

There was a large segment in favor of returning to the gold standard, and how that would work. Son Economic Sphere has told me in the past that gold is subject to market forces, and therefore not an ideal basis for money. However, I found Forbes’ logic fairly compelling. I don’t know enough to be able to reproduce the arguments both ways, but I do realize that monetary stability depends on the money supply exactly matching the creation of wealth, which it represents.

Forbes’ thinks that, while not ideal, gold is as stable as anything we have. If we set the price at, say, $1100 per ounce, then when it rises above that, we know money should be slightly looser (more dollars printed). If it goes under the price, then it should be slightly tighter (fewer dollars printed). Maybe so.

He pointed out that, since gold is an element, we don’t lose it. Whatever has been mined up to this point in history is still gold. It can be reforged, reformed. You might have bits of gold in a ring that was first used by ancient Egyptians. Gold is firm but malleable. It’s compact. In other words, there are reasons it has so frequently been used as money.

But what most got my attention was the final question and answer, which I’ve typed up below. It was positive and hopeful, which I think we can use.

Q: When Carter became president, inflation shot up to 18%. We thought we had joined the ranks of the banana republics. Then Reagan became president, and I thought, finally we have turned a corner; we are no longer on the road to serfdom. Now, 20, 30 years later, we are still firmly on the road to serfdom[i]. So even if we get a Reagan again, will it make any difference? Because, afterwards we’ll still go back to walking down the road to serfdom?

A: Steve Forbes: Question about how, after Reagan, could we be in the mess that we’re in today? And part of the answer is, we did not have then what you might call the base of intellectual understanding and ideas and advocates that we have today, that we did not have 35 years ago. And in terms, even among Republicans 35 years ago, there was sort of the feeling that government should play a real big role. And, yeah, we shouldn’t have inflation; we should cut tax rates. But they didn’t take it to the next step.

I think now, morally, people are beginning to realize that if you believe in free markets, you can’t just say they work. You also have to make the moral case for free markets. And that’s still a big task in front of us. That’s why I wrote a couple of books on it. Others are doing it. Numerous have done it for a number of years.

In essence, you succeed in free markets by meeting the needs and wants of other people. Even if you lust for money, you don’t get it unless you provide something that someone else wants.

Now, sometimes, as Steve Jobs said, when he was asked once, “Do you do marketing surveys?” and he famously replied, “No, because people don’t know what they want until we show them.” That’s part of entrepreneurship. You’ve tried something new; you don’t know if it’s going to work. People suddenly may discover they couldn’t live without it.

But, meeting the needs and wants of other people. And just keep in mind, philanthropy and commerce are often portrayed as polar opposites: you succeed in commerce; you make up for your sins by giving it away to philanthropy. They’re not polar opposites; they’re two sides of the same coin—meeting the needs and wants of other people. Different ways to do it, but same objective, which is why the US, the most commercial nation ever invented, is also the most philanthropic nation in the world.

Two sides of the same coin. We have to make that moral case.

There’s a lot more understanding of economics. There’s a lot more understanding about free markets today than there was 35 years ago, 60 years ago, 80 years ago. Now we know, more and more, that when you get these big economic crises, it’s not a sudden failure of free market or outbreak of greed. It is massive government policy error.

Now, I just want to say, it doesn’t excuse wrongdoing in free markets, or wrongdoing by bankers or anybody else. But, human nature hasn’t changed in thousands of years. People’s ability to do bad things preceded Adam Smith. Believe me, just look at the Bible, this is something that predated Adam Smith.

So, it’s a very good question. But now I think we are setting the foundation where, we get a good president, good. But what we want is understanding, as Hillsdale has tried to do, where even if you get a total mediocrity, the accepted wisdom is: Constitution, free markets, having a moral basis of a free society. When that happens, you don’t have to depend on a Reagan. When you have that kind of consensus. So we’ve got to get the consensus right, and not be dependent on particular outstanding individuals.

I highlighted that section near the end, because that got my attention. It coincides with my Spherical Model theory, that the political, economic, and social spheres interrelate. The goals are freedom, which we get from abiding by the US Constitution; prosperity, which we get from free markets (not to be confused with crony capitalism); and civilization, which we get from a moral people living moral lives, which includes strong families to pass along the way to civilization.

I like seeing evidence that we can make progress toward these things. Economically speaking, I think he is right that the understanding is getting through. When I was in college, I was blessed with free market teachers; they were somewhat rare in the late 70s. But now, with so much data to back it up, free market is the most likely kind of economic education you get in college. I’ve observed that change over the past decade and a half. So the hope seems real.

Our freedom, prosperity, and civilization are in trouble, but there’s reason to hope we can make the changes necessary to get them back. He’s right that we’ll need to defend the morality of free markets, that economy depends on meeting the needs and wants of people both through commerce and philanthropy—which requires a morally good people.

We need to express that viewpoint better. My writing here is an attempt toward that end. (See “Anything Evil about Capitalism, Part I, Part II, Part III. For the longer list of my economic posts see Best of Spherical Model Part II and More of the Best Part III.) 

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[i] He is referring to the classic book The Road to Serfdom, by Friedrich Hayek, which details the dangers of attempting to control the economy.

Economic Sphere Basics

Today is the second anniversary of the beginning of the Spherical Model blog, and we’re doing a recap of the basics of what the Spherical Model is. Friday’s summary covered the principles that lead to the northern freedom zone on the Political Sphere. Today’s summary covers the basic principles leading to the thriving free enterprise zone on the Economic Sphere. (I hope you'll read the full version of each.)

The principles themselves are simple. The preliminary discussion is basic economics, which doesn’t get taught nearly enough in schools. Here are some of the main points:

·        Wealth represents the accumulation of the results of labor.

·        Money is a representative, or symbol, of wealth, to make it easier to exchange.  

·        Problems of the economy as a whole always result from interference in the exchange of labor, or value of money.

·        There has never been a national recession or depression that wasn’t caused by interference with the money supply, or in other words dishonesty about the value of money.

·        Capitalism is a system of increasing productivity, and thereby increasing wealth.

o   Capital is extra time/work/wealth that is invested to make it possible to produce more wealth.

o   Capital in and of itself is simply never evil. Capital might be considered always good. It represents work above and beyond what is essential followed by careful use of it toward a good idea, resulting in even more surplus.

·        Government cannot create wealth; government can only spend it. Government can, however, regulate (that is, make standard) monetary units by coining money, or printing money, each unit of which represents a result of labor that can be exchanged for the results of someone else’s labor.

o   Government can cause harm by printing “money” that does not represent actual wealth.

With these things in mind, how do we identify ways to guarantee thriving free enterprise? Limit government to its proper role: protecting people and their property (wealth), and guaranteeing the value of the money. Maybe add to that some infrastructure to help facilitate commerce, and that’s about it. Every intervention by government to redistribute from those who have to those who have not causes unintended consequences that make things worse both for those being taken from and those being given to.

Capital is taken that could have been used for productive purposes, possibly that could have provided employment for those in need. Incentive is taken from those who would have freely given to the needy, taking their surplus so that they can’t decide to give, and making them resentful that they had no choice about the confiscation. And the receivers of government largesse feel entitled to the redistribution, since the faceless government, rather than a neighbor who did the earning of the wealth, has decided they deserve it. They are therefore ungrateful. If there had been a personal connection between willing giver and reluctant but grateful receiver, both could have benefitted and moved forward in a positive relationship.

The way to limit government is to recognize God-given rights and never allow government to usurp power over those things. That requires political freedom instead of tyranny, so you can see how free-enterprise overlays freedom in the north and controlled economy overlays tyranny in the southern hemisphere.

So freedom and economic thriving both require knowing what a right is. The Constitution, again, is handy for that. The first Ten Amendments were not an afterthought; they were understood clearly by the founders, so much so that they went without saying. But then some of the wiser ones wondered what would happen if these rights didn’t remain self-evident. So they were included before the Constitution was ratified.

They are in a way “negative rights”: God has given these to all men, and government shall not infringe upon them. Government, in other words, is limited, while the individual, in regard to rights, is not.

Then along come the “progressives,” who start talking about “positive rights,” things they think every person ought to have, and therefore government should have the ability to bestow upon them, things like a right to a job (regardless of skills), a right to food, a right to shelter. Are these things rights?

If it is a right, God has given it. But we all come into the world naked, impoverished, and inexperienced. It is by growth, hard work, and gaining in expertise that we try to overcome this condition throughout our life. We are born with the right to life, the right to live free (not enslaved), and the right to pursue our own path to overcome the naked impoverished state.

Do we have a right to clothing? Well, it’s sure nice to have the appropriate clothing when you live through a northern winter. But is it your neighbor’s obligation to work to provide your clothing? Or is that your own obligation? Would it be good of your neighbor to give you his surplus clothing if he saw you were in need? Yes. But his giving it to you is charity, or philanthropy, not an obligation to meet your right. If he had no surplus, but just enough clothing to keep himself from freezing, would it be his obligation to give up a coat to you? No. If he were heroic, he might work out a way to share with you and perhaps keep you both alive. But he is not obligated to do so. So, your clothing is not his obligation. Providing clothing for someone other than self is a charitable act.

At the basic level, the relationship of parent to child is charitable. The parent can clearly see that the child cannot provide his own clothing, so the parent, showing his care for the child, provides that clothing. Same with food. You might even say that the parent has an obligation to feed, clothe, shelter, and nurture the child, because the parent brought the helpless child into the world and therefore has an obligation to that child. But the obligation isn’t without limit. The parent nurtures the child to be capable of feeding, clothing, and sheltering himself. And then, at that point, the parent no longer has the obligation to provide. If the grown child has lost a job, and has a temporary need for economic help, it might be that the parent could step in and offer food, clothing, and shelter from his surplus (charity). But the parent would have no such obligation to a grown and capable child who lacked means simply because of unwillingness to work for them. And that parent would have absolutely no obligation to provide from his hard-earned supply to a lazy child of the neighbor down the road.

So, even though we need them, we do not have a right to food, clothing, and shelter. Ditto for a furnished apartment, a television, telephone, medical care, air conditioning, or a car. Nice to have. Important to have. Maybe even necessary to have in order to fulfill one’s purposes in life. But it is a capable person’s own obligation to work to provide these necessities for himself.

In a civilized society, there will be a desire to somehow provide these necessities to those who are not capable of taking care of themselves: the impoverished because of illness, accident, injury, or lowered mental capacity. But it is philanthropy that fills the need—not government taking from a producer by force to give to a non-producer.

Economic thriving, then, requires limited government, adherence to laws protecting property, and then a charitable people to care for the truly needy.

Women Who Civilize

In the last post we talked about some of the special qualities men need to develop in order to contribute to civilization. To be fair, it seems we ought to look at some of the special qualities women need to develop in their contribution to civilization.

I’ve written about the importance of motherhood and women to civilization. Today I think I’d like to look at something specifically connecting economics and civilization, because we count on women to make contributions without remuneration.

Much of the economic debate is limited to the southern hemisphere of the Spherical Model. The statist side (southeast quadrant) believes that people can’t be counted on to earn enough to support themselves, make the best decisions about how to spend any money they earn, and take care of those who are unable to care for themselves (those too elderly, too young, too ill, or too underprivileged). The better parts of the southwest quadrant align with the Atlas Shrugged view, with this creed:

“I swear—by my life and my love of it—that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”

At Spherical Model, the economic answer leading to civilization is always a combination of free market plus philanthropy.

Imagine, seriously, if mothers lived by John Galt’s oath. The world would collapse. It is the fatal flaw of Ayn Rand’s philosophy that she eliminates several essential qualities that are part of womanhood. She admires women who are like men: self-sufficient, intelligent, hard-working, entrepreneurial—all good qualities—but also infertile while sexually promiscuous, unsympathetic, and lacking in altruism. Dedicating your life to care for others for the sake of love instead of earning money is anathema to Rand’s world. (I wrote about this in much more detail in a three-part post here, here, and especially here).

The fact of humanity is that there are some people who depend on others through no fault of their own. Children are essential for our future, and any care we give them pays off for the future of us all. But it is usually women who are willing to do the day-in-day-out loving care, forgoing pay to do it.

I do not in any way intend to discuss whether women should be stay-at-home moms. I only know what God led me to do at various seasons, and I trust that other women can listen to God’s voice in their circumstances. Women are intelligent and capable; in today’s world, women are more likely to have college degrees and succeed academically. Woman can make many many valuable contributions to the economy. Nevertheless, civilization depends on the contributions women make without being paid.

While men can and should do many of these things as well, women as a demographic whole are more likely to give emotional nurturing to children, see to the academic progress of children, seek opportunities for social and physical growth and see to the spiritual training of children. While she goes about this, she is more likely to do volunteer work in schools and community organizations.

She is more likely to care for elderly adults. She is more likely to do the cards, letters, and gifts that keep family and friends connected. She is more likely to plan and carry out holiday celebrations. Imagine Thanksgiving if we expected nothing from women except what we pay for.

Imagine what homes would look like if women didn’t take it upon themselves to surround themselves and their loved ones with beauty and comfort. (Example: look at the difference between a series of girls’ dorm room and boys’.)

There are so many talents and abilities women naturally share, abilities we count on, that there’s a problem with women comparing themselves to the best examples in every category and always feeling they fall short, even when their unheralded giving pushes them beyond exhaustion.

Contrary to popular belief, women receive either equal or superior pay for equal work, and have done for some time. Where there seem to be differences, they are because women choose to spend less time at the office so she can spend more time with family and other ways that contribute to quality of life. She is more likely to break up her career for the sake of children. If her child is sick, she’s more likely to take time off from work than the dad is. If there’s a special event in the child’s life, she’s more likely to rearrange her schedule to be there.

Women make men more civilized than they would be without her, just by being part of his life. He’ll also be more productive and successful in his work than he would be without her in his life. Men want respect, and a wife can give him that; women want to be loved and cherished (more than rewarded with money), and a faithful, civilized man can give her that.

According to the conclusion of the Motherhood Study, many mothers understand she “holds a fragile but nonetheless powerful cultural position as the last best defense against what many people see as the impoverishment of social ties, communal obligations, and unremunerated commitments” (p. 42). Women ceasing to value civilization is a quicker route to savagery than men ceasing to value civilization. Economic necessity might require more of women in the workplace, but civilization also requires that she keep doing what she feels the life-giving need to do regardless of pay.

Women, value yourselves for what you do so unselfishly. Men, let her know how valuable you know she is.