Fwd: qotd: Commodification harms not only our health care

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Subject: qotd: Commodification harms not only our health care
Date: Tue, 24 Dec 2013 11:08:32 -0800
From: Don McCanne <don@mccanne.org>
To: Quote-of-the-Day <quote-of-the-day@mccanne.org>



The Washington Post
December 23, 2013
Do bigger governments lead to happier people?
An interview by Dylan Matthews

Benjamin Radcliff is a professor of political science at the University
of Notre Dame. His current research focuses on how public policy affects
human happiness.

Dylan Matthews: You argue that social democratic or left-leaning
policies are more conducive to happiness. What sorts of things are you
talking about? Government spending? Regulations? Both?

Benjamin Radcliff: I have organized my research around two dimensions
of policy. The first is the size of government, i.e. of what it is
government does, from the tax burden to the generosity of the welfare
state to the total impact of the government in terms of its overall
consumption on GDP. The second involve institutions that protect people
in labor markets, which means labor unions and economic regulations (the
minimum wage, mandated vacation time, etc.), which provide a degree of
sovereignty and power for workers in their employment relationships. Two
sides of the coin: the general scope of what government does to make
life more secure for people and the stuff that works specifically in
terms of peoples' work conditions.

Both types of policies contribute to what social theorists call
"decommodification," meaning limiting the degree to which in a
capitalist economy people have to act as commodities in order to
survive. You have to sell your labor power on the market.
Decommodification measures how much people can opt out of the labor
market, whatever the reason, and provides a way of judging to what
extent have we made them free of market commodification.

More decommodification makes people happier, and it does so for rich and
poor people, men and women, and controlling for just about any other
thing. Similar empirical results obtain when considering total social
spending on education, health care, total government consumption, the
tax burden, a well-known OECD measure of employee protection
legislation, even indices on the size of government and labor market
regulation from the conservative Fraser Institute. The smaller the
government, the less happy people are.

Another variable I find of interest is labor union membership and
density, i.e. do you belong, and the percentage of all workers who
belong the unions. People who belong to unions are happier, and, more
importantly, union density is strongly related to levels of happiness
for union members and non-members.

Dylan Matthews: How does that compare to the effects on happiness of
non-policy things like, say, the effect of being married or unemployed?

Benjamin Radcliff: The literature would tell you that being married has
a huge positive impact on wellbeing, while unemployment has an equally
powerful negative effect. They thus make nice benchmarks for comparing
the effect of other variables. My results suggest that the effect of the
political variables is much larger by orders of magnitude.

Dylan Matthews: Can you talk a bit more about what you mean by
"decommodification"? Do you mean not being reliant on work to live — not
being a commodity yourself — or the carving out of certain things (human
organs, say) that just aren't commodities you can buy and sell?

Benjamin Radcliff: A society is decommodified to the degree to which
people are not entirely dependent on labor market participation in order
to survive — principally because they are aged, because they are ill, or
simply because jobs are scarce, but also, potentially, so that they can
take time to care for a new child or an ailing family member, etc. My
research suggests people lead better lives in those societies that are
the most decommodified. The reasons are easy enough to understand:
There's a famous quotation observing that a capitalist economy, whatever
its many positive aspects, creates a situation in which people have to
behave as commodities in order to survive. It doesn't take great insight
to realize that people do not enjoy being reduced to commodities, so a
society that limits that necessity is likely to be a better one in which
to live.

Now, to be sure, the market economy absolutely contributes to human
well-being in other ways — no one can deny that — but we have a macro-
vs. micro-problem. At the macro level, capitalism works well. I would
agree that the market society is one of humanity's greatest
achievements. But at the micro level it depends at the very core of its
logic, as even Adam Smith was at pains to point out, on the idea of
using other people (employees) as a means to making profits for oneself.
The people we hire to do work are just mere commodities in the
profit-loss calculations, no more worthy of special concern than barrels
of oil or bushels of grain. The last chapter of my book ("The Political
Economy of Human Happiness") discusses these moral tensions that
capitalism creates. My conclusion is that the social safety net, labor
market regulations and labor unions all limit the degree to which people
become mere commodities, and thus are more likely to lead fulfilling lives.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/12/23/do-bigger-governments-lead-to-happier-people/


Comment: On a positive note just in time for the Holiday Season, we can
be assured that we have it within our power to increase happiness
throughout the nation by joining together, as a government, in
decommodifying ourselves within our own society, but that means that we
cannot leave power in the hands of those who would commodify us.

Peace.