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.

Comments

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

Captialize the L in Libertarian when you're talking about unrealistic folk.

I tend towards little-l libertarian, of a somewhat more realistic, *sustainable* variety. I recognize from the get-go that the Mall-Wart model of civilization is inherently unsustainable; the whole stock market is based upon the idea that a stock can go on biggering and biggering and biggering.... but there are only so many trufula trees on the planet, and when you chop the last one down, the pyramid collapses, and the Barbaloots move out, the fish and the geese go away, and all you're left with is UNLESS. Microsoft is currently learning this painful lesson. They *had* 95%++ of the OS market... but you can't bigger from that. And now Apple is making inroads in the desktop market, and Linux and other things with a hash prompt on the server side.

And there is a cost to money.

No, I believe in, as much as is practical, supporting your local business. I try to buy my CDs and books directly from the author, or if not, from a local indie store. I shop at supermarkets, but I tend towards local products when possible.

I do disagree with the same-hilltop thing on the Internet. Each of us has our own hilltop. All of us can see yonder thumping huge mountain, but we can also use the satellite feed to see over and around the mountain, and find what's on the other side of it. (to stretch a metaphor.) When I shop for books online, often I use the A-word to poke around... but if it's not at Third Place, I go hit Powell's for the actual purchase. Heck, you can find all sorts of little hilltops online. Sites like Etsy, Craigslist, Cafepress.... Drollerie... all are in the business of build-your-own-hilltop. Same with news. Wordpress. Blogger. Flikr. Picasa. YouTube.

Yes, we're in transition. The big boys are in trouble, they just haven't figured it out yet. (Except for the banks, and the ones most dependent on them - GM, anyone?) The transition will be interesting in the Chinese sense... but hopefully not *too* interesting. It probably will take a major effort - or, more likely, a whole bunch of minor efforts - to make neighborhoods neighborhoods again. But I think we'll get there. I hope, anyway.

[hugh-mannity.livejournal.com]

Another factor in the decline of the independent pharmacy is the health insurers. My company has a prescription plan which only deals with certain pharmacies. If you get your medication anywhere else, you have to pay the full cost, submit paperwork, and be (eventually) reimbursed, less the copay. At the "approved" pharmacies, you just pay the copay.

The best deals though are for mail order -- 90 days supply for a copay of about 45 days at the pharmacy.

There aren't a lot of people who can afford to turn down that sort of deal for long-term meds.

[brentn.livejournal.com]

This article was particularly well-timed for me, as I'm in a discussion with a "privatize the air you breathe" sort of libertarian on a mailing list. What I find absolutely frustrating about the discussion is the nonsensical insistence that if it can't be precisely valued, then it has no value. It's almost like making Chicago-school economics a religion and having a fundamentalist adherence to its dogmas.

The ironically amusing part of this is that, despite all the supporting evidence, the same people also deny the sort of positive externalities that come from having a well-stocked network/neighborhood - the Metcalfe's Law-based benefits that accrue from cooperative behavior. I suppose that this ultimately means that these wacky libertarians are going to be self-defeating in their insistence on pure self-reliance. :)

[http://users.livejournal.com/_candide_/]

Being that we humans are social creatures, the whole idea of, "self reliance," is an illusion. Nobody's purely self-reliant. We get help from our families, at least.

Really, the only humans who don't have interactions with others are sociopaths.