Unemployment, Figment of a False Economy

Am I the only one who sees the irony in today's jobs announcement (U.S. Economy Fails to Add Jobs)--with joblessness at 9.1%--and the erroneous assumption that what is required to fix the problem is renewed consumer confidence and spending? All the hand-wringing and anxiety about how to jump start growth is laughably myopic, when the prior question of whether growth (in GDP) is even desirable is ruled out of bounds at the start of the discussion. It is perhaps a symptom of our all-too-human hubris that we believe our growth potential to be limitless. (Only God is limitless.) To put it another way, "infinite growth in a finite environment is an obvious impossibility" (E.F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful, 25th Anniversary Edition: Economics As If People Mattered: 25 Years Later . . . With Commentaries, p. 51) Maybe I have been reading too many of the wrong kinds of economics books this summer, but I have to wonder whether an economy built on making work obsolete can produce jobs that are of any value. Must we really make it our goal to do everything by machine that can be done by machine?

In other words, can our current economy--which has disregarded the land, has emptied the rural areas of their population of caretakers ("Rural U.S. population now 16%, record low," Hope Yen, AP), and has turned everything from air and water to animals and people into mere factors of production--really produce meaningful work for people to do? Can our economy, with our current economic values ($$$ as the measure of all things), really produce jobs that help us grow as people? I will listen carefully to President Obama's job speech on Thursday, but I doubt I'll hear much about the foundational reasons for unemployment, especially about the direct correlation between our denigration of work (especially agricultural work of the sort that requires people's minds, backs, and hands to be fully engaged) and the lack of good work to do. I'll probably hear more of the same about the need for consumer demand to stimulate economic growth, increased infrastructure spending, increased governmental spending and hiring, and the like. Everything will be measured quantitatively and the assumption underneath the whole will be that infinite growth is possible in a finite world. Will he say anything about our empty rural areas and the need for people to return to these areas and take care of them? Of the value we must begin to place on a different kind of "hands on" food production? Will his program include the need to value work done by people, work that could be done by machines, but will not be because we value people more than we value GDP growth? I doubt it.

Here are a few questions from my summer reading that might move us back onto the right track. Does our work enable us to become fully human, to develop all of our God-given gifts and talents? Does it encourage us to work together, in and for community, to accomplish common goals? Does our work produce goods and services that people need for a full and abundant life, or are we merely trying to generate desire for what we have to sell (regardless of its intrinsic worth)?

Those are the sorts of questions I have been wrestling with this summer as I worked through three books that my readers will undoubtedly hear more about. I recommend each of them as food for thought and a radically different perspective on our current economic condition.

1) As already mentioned, E. F. Schumacher's heretical economics book, Small Is Beautiful, 25th Anniversary Edition: Economics As If People Mattered: 25 Years Later . . . With Commentaries.

2) Wendell Berry's What Matters?: Economics for a Renewed Commonwealth, especially the essay entitled "What Are People For?" (pp. 105ff.)

3) And, finally, L. H. Bailey's, The Holy Earth, which I intend to share on a regular basis with excerpts on Tumbledown Farm (tumbledownfarm.com).

E. coli in California. Why Sick in Indiana? (And Why Must Immigrants Pick Pears?)

Tumbledown thinks it only obvious that there must be a better way.

According to the FDA today (09/21/2006), "157 cases of illness due to E. coli infection have been reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), including 27 cases of Hemolytic Uremic Syndrome (HUS), 83 hospitalizations, and one death." Eight (8) of these illnesses were reported in Indiana. Though the FDA continues to investigate the source of the outbreak, this much is already clear: these eight (8) Indiana residents did not contract the illness from spinach grown in Indiana. In fact, the "fresh" spinach in question was grown, picked and packed in California. ("The FDA, in working closely with the CDC and the State of California, has determined that the spinach implicated in the outbreak was grown in the following California counties: Monterey, San Benito, and Santa Clara.")

Why does our spinach come from California? Is Indiana not suitable for growing spinach this time of year? Can Indiana not produce its own "fresh" spinach in sufficient quantities to feed its own population in mid- to late September? Of course it could. Tumbledown has mixed greens ready for picking in his own garden at this very moment, and none of it is infected with E. coli O157:H7.

According to the FDA, the "major source of microbial contamination with fresh produce is associated with human or animal feces." Worker hygiene is clearly a concern, as is any unsafe or malfunctioning septic system. But such human contamination is far less likely the culprit in this instance, especially direct contact with human or animal feces. More likely, the spinach (or other fruit, vegetable, or leafy green) has come into contact with contaminated water. And the source of that contaminated water may be "factory farms" and their "manure lagoons." (See Nina Planck's September 21 NYTimes Op-Ed, Leafy Green Sewage. Note: Tumbledown is not convinced [yet] about Planck's animal chemistry connection, acidic stomach and all that. The author of Real Food: What to Eat and Why may have her own axe to grind, but pasture farming on more, smaller, diversified, local farms is certainly an all around better--not more efficient, because efficiency is not the highest good--way of producing food.) The FDA urges the industry to "manage closely" the storage and use of animal manure and biosolid wastes, but accepts the status quo of animal finishing in humongous feedlots--and monstrously large dairies--and their concentrations of feces as a necessary price of food production. Meanwhile the local sale of raw milk is prohibited or overregulated beyond reason.

Is it really necessary to produce spinach (and beef and dairy) in California for sale 2281.7 miles away in Indiana? Tell that to eight (8) sick hoosiers, in a state that could produce its own, easily, safely. (BTW: Indiana has its own manure lagoons. And as long as they exist, they will overflow.) Or tell it to the people of Canada, Mexico, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Iceland, who also eat "fresh" Californian spinach.

A seemingly unrelated story also says a lot about what's wrong with "real farming" today. (Gene Logsdon, "I'm Glad I'm Not a 'Real' Farmer," in Living at Nature's Pace.) And in this case, a picture shouts a thousand words. Julia Preston's September 22, 2006, NYTimes article, "Pickers are Few, and Growers Blame Congress," is headed by a photo of a dejected farmer, Toni Sculli, standing in front of tons of perishing Northern California pears. Perishing for lack of pickers. Labor has always been the #1 problem faced by farmers, but that problem is now exacerbated by monocrop farming in huge quantities. Surplus fruit on a diversified farm--even unpicked, falling off the trees--can be eaten by sheep grazing below, or used to supplement a hog's diet. But on a farm that grows only pears, and in quantities too great for the community to pick, to send to Indiana (where pears grow just fine, thank you) and to India, and Japan, the surplus is catastrophic.

There must be a better way. And there is, if we will but take it. And to take it, we must teach the majority of our children to farm. The growing, picking, and packing cannot be left to those outside our local communities.