I have often thought that if we lived in an America in which anyone, regardless of ability, who works hard and plays by the rules could reasonably look forward to a rich and fulfilling life, then much of the cultural and racial and conflict that is currently dividing our country would simply disappear.
But, of course, we don’t live in such a society today. Some would say that such a thing is not even imaginable, let alone achievable anytime soon. Against that view, I would like to describe a possibility that, however challenging it might be to realize from a purely political point of view, could bring such a society into being in the not too distant future.
What would it look like? Would it be popular with all classes of Americans? The easiest way to answer both of those questions is to quote the results of an old Gallup poll. The question asked was the following:
As a new way to live in America, the idea has been suggested of building factories in rural areas—away from cities—and running them on part-time jobs. Under this arrangement the man and the woman would each work 3 days a week 6 hours a day. People would have enough spare time to build their own houses, to cultivate a garden and for hobbies and other outside interests. How interested would you be in this way of life?
The results were surprising. Forty percent of those interviewed said they would be either “definitely” or “probably” interested in living this way, with another quarter of the population leaving the door open to the possibility. Even more striking, those numbers turned out to be broadly representative of the American public as a whole when broken down by gender, age-group, family income, and years of education. Interestingly, the only exception was by race. Blacks were significantly more interested in the idea than whites (61% vs 38%).
Here, then, to a first approximation at least, is a picture of what such a society might look like. The key innovation, clearly, is the idea of factories in the countryside run on part-time jobs. It would be a mistake, however, to imagine these factories being scattered higgledy-piggledy across the rural landscape. Such a haphazard arrangement would not only be economically inefficient, but it could easily devolve into a new kind of industrial feudalism under which working families would find themselves completely dependent upon a single employer.
To avoid both of these outcomes we should think, not in terms of single factories, but rather in terms of small groups of such factories, looking not solely at the new way of life that these new factories would make possible, but also at the new kinds of local neighborhood communities and small country towns that might develop around them.
Imagine, for example, a collection of twenty or thirty small family homesteads grouped around a central neighborhood green. Such an old-fashioned, village-like arrangement, if properly planned, could foster a rich variety of daily interactions among like-minded neighbors such as we almost never see in big cities today.
Or imagine the town itself being small enough and laid out in such a way that its inhabitants could easily get around on foot, by e-bike, or in cheap, lightweight electric cars that go 30 mph, thereby eliminating their need to purchase high speed automobiles. Think of all the money that would save, and time as well, compared to what it takes to get around in a major metropolitan area.
Or consider two other growing financial concerns that almost every American family will eventually be forced to confront whether it wants to or not. I refer to the high cost of retiring in today’s society on the one hand, and the even higher cost of end-of-life care on the other; two problems which, taken together, threaten the solvency of the way we live now.
To deal with this twin challenge, the future inhabitants of these new country towns will have a new option. In place of the nuclear family that we have come to accept almost as a matter of course, they can transition to a new three-generation form of the family under which parents and grandparents would live the same piece of property but under two separate roofs at opposites ends of the garden.
The advantages of this arrangement would be twofold. On the one hand, grandparents would be in a position to conveniently look after their grandchildren, while they are still infants and toddlers especially, on those occasions that invariably arise when both parents have to be away from home at the same time. Then, later on in life when the grandparents themselves have grown old and feeble and are no longer able to live on their own, their children and grandchildren would be close enough by to help look after them.
Not only would this eliminate the need for assistant living facilities and nursing homes, both of which are prohibitively expensive for most working families today, but it would mean that ones elderly parents and grandparents need no longer depend on their monthly Social Security benefits alone to meet all their material needs.
Nor is this the end of the story. Once work and leisure have been fully integrated into the fabric of everyday life, older people will no longer feel the same need to retire they do today. Especially if they take easier kinds of employment later on in rheir lives, they should be able to comfortably continue working for many years beyond today’s customary age of retirement. That fact, combined with the circumstance that their monthly Social Security benefits can now be lower when eventually they do feel compelled to retire, will go a long way towards establishing the financial sustainability of this new way of life.
These are just some of the ways that living in one of these new country towns will enable ordinary working- and middle-class families to make a much happier and more efficient use of their limited time and resources to satisfy their human needs. I identify a number of others that are equally important in the opening chapter of my new book, which I urge readers to read. But for the moment let me simply assert that I have in fact conceived of a society that meets the criterion with which I began, namely, one in which just about anyone who works hard and plays by the rules could reasonably look forward to a rich and fulfilling life.
Let me turn now to what I think every reader will agree is the most important outstanding question. How in the world will it be possible to persuade hard-headed manufacturers that it will be in their interest to locate their factories in rural areas, away from the cities, and run on part-time jobs?
The answer, it turns out, is surprisingly simple.
We shall argue that with the right kind of wage bargain between labor and management—meaning, in this case, an agreement under which workers’ wages will be tied directly to their output—such factories can be made to run faster and more efficiently than conventional factories, generating higher rates of return on investment in the process. Why can we say this? For two reasons:
First, because part-time workers can work faster and more efficiently than full-time workers—just as in track-and-field the short-distance runners always run faster than the long-distance runners.
And second, because manufacturers will be free to give their part-time employees somewhat fewer hours on the job each week than they might voluntarily prefer.
Putting these two facts together, and given that workers are to be paid in proportion to their output, it follows that these part-time employees will be motivated to exert themselves to the maximum degree possible. Unit labor costs shall remain the same, but even so a given manufacturing facility will churn out more product in any given period of time. The result will be not only higher hourly earnings for the workers involved, but higher rates of profit as well.
In other words, once the initial wage bargain is struck—something that will happen through a voluntary process of collective bargaining between employees and their employers—it will be a win-win proposition for labor and capital alike.
The persuasiveness of this easy-to-understand argument notwithstanding, it must be admitted that factories of this new type will not be able to compete with similar factories in China or in other less-developed parts of the world, where workers are paid a small fraction of what they are in this country. No conceivable increase in labor productivity here in the US could possibly compensate for such a large differential.
This leads to an inescapable conclusion. Only new protective trade legislation in the form of high tariffs on goods manufactured in low-wage countries overseas can cause American manufacturers to voluntarily begin locating their most labor-intensive facilities here in the US once again.
This highlights the essentially political nature of the challenge before us. Before these new towns and this new way of life can come into being, it will be necessary to confront the reigning neoliberal consensus, based as it is on a misbegotten (though highly profitable) notion of “free trade” in a lopsided world. That it is so highly profitable is what makes the challenge so difficult. For what we are up against here is nothing less than the power of organized money: the ten or twelve thousand wealthiest families in America who between them bankroll both political parties and control all the major media. No wonder they are able to set the political agenda and steer the national conversation in directions that divide the electorate and keep themselves in power.
To successfully challenge this capital-owning class in the electoral arena is going to require a new form of organized labor in America on a scale never before seen in this country. Such an organization will not materialize out of thin air. To come into existence it needs a catalyst, something new and exciting around which to coalesce. What better for that purpose than the new towns I propose in my book, given that there are very likely many millions if not tens of millions of ordinary working- and middle-class families in the United States today, young couples especially, who would like nothing better than to pioneer such a revolutionary new way of living on a new American frontier.
This is the reason why I have devoted the last and longest chapter of my book to spelling out in considerable detail just what would be involved in founding a completely new type of national membership organization in America: one that, among other things, can successfully champion the interests all Americans interested in this new way of life either for themselves or for their children and grandchildren, a major goal of which will be to pressure Congress to pass the necessary legislation to make it all possible.
As for this Substack, my hope is that in time it will attract a representative group of young adults from across the US who, between them, possess all the necessary talents and ambitions required to successfully launch such a democratic mass movement for change. If you are sympathetic to the cause, please spread the word.
Thanks. Wanna help?
> No conceivable increase in labor productivity here in the US could possibly compensate for such a large differential.
Why not? A century ago the US had both the highest paid and most productive workers in the world.