On Consumer Choice... and the Lack of it

Aditya Chakraborttywrote today in The Guardian about how the

“British are more powerful shoppers than ever before, at work they are becoming less independent”.

He describes how the number of choices in a McGonnagal’s menu has gone from a few items in 1984 to some 49 or so dishes today.

But, he argues, the other side of this picture is worker’s loss of autonomy. In other words, today’s workers have less and less choice over what they do.

Aditya is missing a key piece of this puzzle, and without it the picture doesn’t make much sense: : why would the increase of menu options in a McGonnagal’s relate to the decrease in agency for workers?

What Aditya is missing is that this increase in consumer “choice” goes hand in hand with decrease in consumer “choice”. Yes, you read that right.

It is true that McGonnagal’s menu now has a bazillion choices, but the important question is: who many alternatives are there to McGonnagal’s?

I wasn’t in Britain in the 80s but I’m pretty sure that back then there were far more independently owned restaurants, cafes and “chippies”. Keep in mind that one single independently owned business is a “one of a kind”, while yet another McGonnagal’s is another example of the same thing.

If we were to mathematically compute “choice”, then each independent business would count as “one”, while McGonnagal’s as a whole brand would count as “one” as well. McGonnagal’s may have thousands of restaurants, but they all sell exactly the same thing. 

But forget about computing “choice”. The fact that I was having the same meal as Aditya while living in a different continent approximately 9 thousand miles away tells us all we need to know about the presence of “choice”.

The political meaning of “choice” isn’t “how many combinations of McGonnagal’s ingredients are there in the menu” but rather “how many alternatives are there to McGonnagal’s”.(And if you wanna get really political, the question is actually "who owns these businesses").

Incidentally, for a lot of poor people, the answer is increasingly “none”. There aren’t many places in town for the poor to go to relieve their hunger. Ok, I’m exaggerating: there’s always Burger Ming.

Speaking of which, yesterday I passed a coffee shop that is no more. It was open last month, though.

And in entirely unrelated news, another “Costa” has opened its doors, this one next to the Students’ Union. How nice. Now young people can pay their fees while learning the skills they will need for future employment… of barista, that is.

Aditya is right of course when he speaks about the loss of autonomy for workers. People have less and less “choice” or (“voice”) over what they have to do in their workplaces.

But how does that relate to McGonnagal’s menu choices?

Simple. Whereas before you had a McGonnagal’s, and a coffee shop, and a Chinese restaurant, and a chip shop, and a bakery, now you have… just a McGonnagal’s. Oh, and a PlanetsBucks, of course.

And what do those two have in common? They are humongous, global brands with thousands of venues.  

It’s easy to understand why the larger a company is, the less power workers have over what they do.

For instance, if you work for a small Chinese restaurant and you want to change a recipe, all you have to do is talk to the cook and/or owner.

If you work for a McGonnagal’s and you want to change a recipe… well… you can’t. Those decisions are taken thousands of miles away, somewhere in the US, by someone so up the food chain that you would never have access to them.

And it’s not like you could just change a recipe and get away with it. Because brands like McGonnagal’s require that every product is the same everywhere. They call it “brand consistency” and it matters, for some reason, that everywhere in the whole planet people are tasting exactly the same burger as everyone else.

Brands like McGonnagal’s and PlanetsBucks get larger at the expense of smaller businesses; that’s why their menus grow. This can only mean that people are working for them instead of opening their own shops.

And the larger these brands get, the more hierarchical and “top down” workplaces get.

The same story repeats itself on every aspect of the economy, so you can apply the same idea to your area of choice. For example, the number of magazines at the supermarket rack hides the fact that they are all owned by a few companies.

* I know that according to “journalistic” standards I should refer to him by his surname, “Chakrabortty”, but “Aditya” is such a nice name!

Housing Benefit as Business Subsidy

Cross posted at Liberal Conspiracy. YAY ME!

Last Thursday night I had the unenviable experience of watching “The Future State of Welfare Reform”, with John Humphrys.

If you haven’t seen it, do yourself a favour: don’t. Watch Tory propaganda instead; the two are barely indistinguishable.

I want to use a small point made during the programme to make my own point on a topic I know too well: housing benefit, and the Tory plan to push poor people out of London.

Humphrys and his production crew managed to find one of those “Daily Male” benefit cases that tick all the boxes. An Ecuadorian family, all of them with brown skin, living in a big-ish flat in Islington, apparently unable to utter a single word of English.

The father and sole earner of the family was a cleaner. His wages wouldn’t have been enough to pay the rent for such a “palace”, so, as a person on “low income”, he is entitled to housing benefit to help him bridge the gap between what his employers feel like paying him and what he actually needs to live.

Mr Humphrys asked the man “whether he feels the state should subsidise his flat”. Or something like that.

Mr Humphrys, being, of course, well educated and doing a job that is reserved for those who are as well educated as him or more, got it wrong. Very wrong indeed.

The state isn’t subsidising Mr Housing Benefit Recipient; the state is actually subsidising Mr Cleaning Company Who Employs Mr Housing Benefit Recipient because he cannot cough up the wages that his employee would need to live on.

This point is hardly ever made by the Left, and I can’t understand why. This is an unashamed transfer of public funds into private landlord’s and private companies pocket’s.

It is up to employers to pay enough for employees to live, that is what wages are all about. If employers don’t feel generous enough, then employees need to go somewhere else. Low wages, no employees. At least that’s what would happen in a functioning “free market”. Instead, the state steps in and gives Mr Housing Benefit Recipient enough money to pay his rent.

Notice that neither him nor his family get to “enjoy” this wealth, for having a roof above their heads is non negotiable; it is a pre requisite for any worker to go and do their jobs.

The ones who do enjoy “extra” wealth are the private companies who get away with paying, essentially, below subsistence wages, safe in the comfort that the state will step in and fill in the gap so that their workers can make do.

If private companies were to pay living wages, it would make their profits sink. See? Housing benefit neatly translates into private profit.

This is the reason why the Welfare State doesn’t “work”. Benefits are supposed to be there to provide workers with a safety net; they were never meant to compensate for low wages simply because employers cannot be bothered to pay more.

But don’t expect Humphrys to tell you that. I suspect he’s too educated.

A Magical Door to Beat the Corporation-Gods

So here I was, reading “Castle in the Air” (“An exotically magical sequel to Howl’s Moving Castle”) when I came up with this handy analogy for how corporations work. And why we can’t beat them in their own game.

Imagine you work in a country where the wages are highest, say The US. But you also live in a place where taxes are lowest, like the Cayman Islands. While at the same time you are domiciled in the country with the best welfare state, so you get lots of quality stuff for free, like Sweden. Yet, when you do your shopping, you go to the country with the weakest currency, like Vietnam.

It’s easy to see how you’d be pretty minted. You’d be earning lots of dollars (cheers, US), you’d give up none of them (cheers, Cayman Islands), you’d get education, healthcare, safety net and the like for free (cheers, Sweden), and you will be spending peanuts on life essentials (cheers, Vietnam).

Unfortunately you, and I, and the vast majority of people in this world, can’t do that. On account that we are a single human entity and cannot live in more than one place at the same time. Most of us have to live where we work, which means that wherever we are we end up spending as much as we earn just to live.

Corporations, on the other hand, are not single human entities. They are human “creations” and they are allowed to “live” in as many places as they like. Notice my use of the word “allowed”; at any given time we could stop “allowing” them to do anything we didn’t want them to.

So corporations make their products where wages are the lowest (Vietnam), then come to rich countries, where they can sell those products at tens of times the amount the cost to produce (US), while at the same time they are domiciled in the Cayman Islands and pay no taxes.

I believe this means that they delay the well known “Marxist crisis”. (Though I could be wrong).

We have created these entities which are larger than us. In a different epoch, we would have justifiable called them “Gods”. This is probably the first time in history when colossally powerful entities have been brought to life, by humans, without at least the pretence of acting for the benefit of all.

In order to compete fairly with corporations, we would need a magical castle like Howl’s. A door with access to different worlds, and different places within the same world, would mean that we would have at the very least the same rights as a corporation.

Without Howl’s door, however, we become mere pawns in the chess game played by the Gods that these corporations have become.

And the reason why I will be one of the best political writers out there is because I can hold simultaneously in my head the world of politics and the universe of fantasy.

Note: Do read the books if you haven't. And watch the movie "Howl's Moving Castle". Really, you won't regret it.

The Problem With "Live And Let Live" - More on Moran

During the Newsnight debate, Caitlin Moran revealed to Paxman and the audience her life motto of "live and let live" (adding after that "when my head hits the table, please order me a taxi". Presumably because it sounds transgressive and "edgy".)

Moran’s bubbly, perky and boisterous cry of “live and let live” fits the neoliberal agenda to a T. By doing nothing on a social level, by “allowing anything to happen” we are literally leaving the doors wide open for corporations to do what they want. It’s not a far cry from “deregulation”. And we know how well that went with the banks.

Think about the actual meaning of “live and let live”. What it doesn’t say, but is implied, is this:

A) we will allow everyone to do what they want, we won’t stop anyone from doing what they want. Translation: we will allow businesses to sell whatever they want, and if people want to buy, that’s their choice. (And if the product is bad for them, it's their own fault for buying)

B) we assume that “doing” stuff is good. Translation: buying trumps not buying. We will allow the selling of everything.

C) we can’t say that anything is “bad”, and therefore we can’t stop people from doing what they want. Translation: we can’t judge anything as morally "wrong", but we can nevertheless say that stopping a business is not allowed, while allowing a business to exist is.

What this type of ideology never addresses is this: why is it that “live and let live” always translates into more businesses opening rather than less? Wait, that’s not a good way of putting it. Here’s another: why is it that “live and let live” comes to mean “stuff will be produced and sold” and it never means “stuff will not be produced or sold”?

For a clear-cut example, why is it that nobody ever, like, EVER, brings up this argument to use it against the arms trade? Nobody ever says “look, I believe in live and let live, so stop making weapons”. AHA! How about “I believe in live and let live, and since cars kill tens of thousands of people every year, it would be a great improvement on letting other people live if we all gave up cars”. Instead, the argument, which is never applied to this case by the way, takes the form “look, let people have cars, live and let live”.

Do you see it now? Even when the “letting people do whatever they want” actually gets in the way of people living, the argument “live and let live” is still applicable. Why? Because it’s not the innocent request for “everyone to get along” or "respect other people's choices" . It’s actually the nasty propagandistic shtick used to silence dissidents by painting them as “intolerant”. What they really mean is “let people do whatever they want” and under they breath they add “because there is no such thing as society”. Your actions should never get in the way of another person’s actions. Because, it is assumed, that the actions of another will never affect you or anyone else. 

And that, my friends, is at the very core of every exploitative economic system. So long as the actions of another never affect you, the ruling classes can get away with doing anything to anyone. And that’s important to remember: while we argue over whether something is “good” or “bad”, whether it has “negative” or “no” consequences, while we get into discussions and end up, out of sheer frustration, “agreeing to disagree” and stating that “there is no way to know”, corporations get busy with ruling the planet, opening new shops and malls, and before you know it you can’t get together outside of the city library because it belongs to John Lewis. Yes, you read that right. We, the public, argue over which member of the public should decide for all of us. And while we argue, what is left of the public space gets appropriated by corporations. We can stop arguing then, surely. There’s no point anymore: we no longer control our lives.

WHOOPS! It seems like somebody decided what was “good” while we were busy arguing over whether it should be done or not.

I leave you with a really cool post I found accidentally while searching for Moran and "live and let live" titled "When the personal becomes apolitical", by Frances Grahl at shareorshelve. Sometimes the internet works.