Life, Inc.

[elfs]

The recent announcement from my neighborhood pharmacist that he would close at the end of this week coincides with the publication of Douglas Rushkoff's new book, Life Inc: How the world became a corporation and how to take it back, and in particular the chapter in which Rushkoff tries to talk about that unpriced externality: neighborhood liveability. It's one of those things that we're notoriously bad about pricing, because it takes a long time to see the damage we do to our neighborhoods when we reduce the diversity of merchants and merchandise, because we're plains apes not well adapted to thinking in those terms, and because our environment of evolutionary adaptation was one where the only long-term strategizing we did was about reproductive options and assumed a stable, indeed unchangeable (except by catastrophe) environment.

Rushkoff gives an anecdotal example:

Jennifer has lived in the same town in central Minnesota her whole life. This year, diagnosed with a form of lupus, she began purchasing medication through Wal-Mart instead of through Marcus, her local druggist--who also happens to be her neighbor. Prescription drugs aren't on her health plan, and this is just an economic necessity.

Why can't the druggist cut his neighbor a break? He's trying, but he's selling at a mere hair above cost as it is. He just took out a loan against the business to make expenses and his increased rent. The downtown area he's located in has been slated for redevelopment, and only corporate chain stores appear to have deep enough pockets to pay for storefront leases. It sounded like a good idea when Marcus supported it at the public hearing--but the description in the pamphlet prepared by the real estate developer (complete with a section on how to compete more effectively with "big box" stores like Wal- Mart) hasn't conformed to reality.

Marcus's landlord doesn't really have any choice in the matter. He underwent costly renovations to conform to the new downtown building code, and needs to pass those on to the businesses renting from him. He took out a mortgage, too, which is slated to reset in just a couple of months. If he doesn't collect higher rents, he won't make payments.

Jennifer stopped going to PTA meetings because she's embarrassed to look Marcus in the face. As their friendship declines, so does her guilt about helping put him out of business.

This is an anecdote, of course, but like all anecdotes it has a certain amount of power, because it has an amount of truth. We are all of us, all the time, making these decisions that are to our short-term benefit, but that in the end reduce our neighborhoods to faceless, uninterested corporate entities. We reduce our lives to monocultures, in which box stores have a much bigger collection of stuff, but the diversity of stuff is restrained to what's in the box stores. Tom Slee put it this way: "The customers see further, but they are all looking out from the same tall hilltop. In Offline World individual customers are standing on different, lower, hilltops. They may not see as far individually, but more of the ground is visible to someone. In Internet World, a lot of the ground cannot be seen by anyone because they are all standing on the same big hilltop." Slee's talking about the diversity of what can be found at Amazon.com or via Google, but his point is about monocultures versus diversity, and we get that with one grocery store and its fifteen different varieties of coffee, all more or less tasting the same, and none of them tasting at all like what fresh Guatemalan beans smell like right out of my home tower roaster.

I know that the phrase "unpriced externality," especially when applied to something as touchy-feely as "neighborhood livability," tends to make my libertarian friends see red, but clean air, clean water, and, yes, neighborhood livability are things that we all share in, that cannot be priced reasonably. Yet libertarians often seem to forget that value itself is illusory: money has as an unpriced cost its lack of intrinsic depreciation as a function of its holding value. Only inflation causes depreciation, and that is simply the "cost" of having a fiat national currency. There are other ways to do money, after all.

And there are better ways of living. I wouldn't want the power of the gun, the government, telling me how to live, but it does that already by buying into the corporatized model of commerce and the all-money-is-debt economic models. There are other models of commerce and even of capitalism, suprisingly enough, and where they vary in efficiency, they also vary in reliability and, maybe, even humanity.

We know now that the libertarian ideal of homo economicus is as much a figment of our imaginations as the New Soviet Man was for communists. I can't tell you what we really need, yet, nor what kinds of market distortions our goverment should or should not be using. I just know that the current model isn't working, and it isn't creating neighborhoods.