- The shift to services was to some degree facilitated by globalization, as industrial production moved elsewhere in the world. Although the proportion of workers in manufacturing might have gone down in the West, it increased dramatically elsewhere in the world, as people moved from agriculture to industry. Likewise, although the United States, for example, produces relatively fewer material commodities than used to be the case, the rate at which consumer commodities are accumulated in the United States has remained as high as ever. The only diference is that many of those commodities are now imported.
- The general tendency to hoard then might be explained by aversion to loss of goods that are inscribed with the sacrifice involved in the labor exchanged for the money used to buy them. David Lord Smail (2014) has suggested that hoarding has both a neurological and a cultural-historical basis and that the study of the epigenetics of the behavior might be a fruitful way to bring the two together.
c h a pt e r 5 : e c o n o mi c f a i r n e s s a n d t h e w a g e l a bo r bac kg r o u n d
- Some psychologists, especially those inclined toward evolutionary explanations, hold fairness in a very general sense to be a transhistorical category, perhaps even extending beyond the boundaries of the human species (Humphries 2006). These analysts draw on experimental evidence that indicates that fairness plays a major role in social behaviors to support the claim that “it is in the nature of human beings to value objective fairness” (Mack 2006). The suggestion is that a sense of fairness is part human nature, a component of a “moral instinct” that is inscribed in our genes. Be this as it may, the diversity of cultural conceptions of fairness evident across time and space suggests that if there is an invariant substrate to the instinct to be fair, it is rudimentary and underdetermining. As evolutionary game theorist Ken Binmore (1994) has observed, even if it is the case that people have a “fairness gene,” how it gets expressed is clearly mediated by, and therefore contingent on, historical and cultural context.
- This is not to say that the idea of objective equal exchange itself was new with modernity. Aristotle (1982), in book five of the Nichomachean Ethics, considers the question of fair exchange at length. But Aristotle’s philosophical inquiries were not the basis of an ideology governing economic activity in the ancient Greek world.
- For example, in the feudal system lords would grant land to vassals in exchange for military service, while peasants gave labor services in exchange for protection and the right to work the land (Bloch 1961).
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Notes to Pages 116–124