More on jobs and people in Michigan

Olivier Blanchard and Lawrence Katz did an important empirical study of regional adjustment to employment shock in 1992 (link). Here is their central conclusion:

"We have shown that most of the adjustment of states to shocks is through movements of labor, rather than through job creation or job migration." (54)

In other words, they find that the US labor market is fairly well integrated, and an extended period of unemployment and low wages leads workers to seek new opportunities in other regions. (Here is a recent book by Katz and a collaborator; The Race between Education and Technology.)

What implications does this have for Michigan? Let's say that Michigan's unemployment rate will adjust to approximately the national rate by 2020, and that the national rate will recover to 6% by then. This implies 6% unemployment for Michigan, compared to 14% today. Let's assume that less than half of the recovery comes from new and imported jobs. What does this imply for out-migration and population loss for the state?

The arithmetic is straightforward. There are currently about 4.2 million jobs in Michigan and 681,000 unemployed workers, for a labor force of about 4.9 million. (Here is a page of data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics for Michigan; link.) What would it take to bring Michigan's unemployment rate down to 6% by 2020? Here is one solution: 150,000 new jobs and 250,000 out-migrants from the labor force. And assuming that each worker has one dependent on average, this means a loss of about 500,000 people from Michigan's current population of about 9.9 million--for a total population of 9.4 million in ten years.

This is a significant but not overwhelming loss of population -- about 5%. And the number of jobs required on this scenario is moderate and achievable -- 150,000 new jobs in ten years. This amounts to about 4% jobs growth per year.  We can make some educated guesses about the demographics of the population that leaves the state -- they are likely to be young, they are likely to have children, and they are likely to be better educated than the general population. So the economic and social impact of this exodus is likely to be greater than their 5% share of the general population. But all of that conceded, it would appear that there is a reasonably achievable pathway for Michigan to dig itself out of its current crisis.

So let's get serious about preparing the ground for a healthy recovery; let's enhance K-12 education, extend the reach of university attainment, improve the quality of life in our cities, and get serious about redesigning our state's fiscal system.

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Posted in: CAT_Michigan,economic development

Spatial patterns in the US

Here are four interesting graphics representing different kinds of activity in the United States.  The top panel represents population concentrations across the United State.  The second image is air traffic across the country, and the third image is internet traffic across the country.  The final image is a photograph of the United States from space at night, showing the concentration of lights across the country.  Basically the images correspond to where people live; where they travel; and where they exchange data.  Unsurprisingly, the maps line up very well.

The most interesting question to consider is not the structure of the networks represented by air travel and internet activity.  The nodes of both air travel and internet traffic line up exactly with the cities and metropolitan areas represented in the population map, and they align well with the concentration of lighted areas in the bottom frame as well.  The patterns of both air travel and internet traffic take the form of a swath extending from the dense eastern corridor of the US (Boston to Washington) to California (San Francisco to San Diego), with Chicago standing out as a significant node in the middle of the country.  This is entirely obvious and predictable; travel and communication follow population density.

Rather, the more interesting question is this: to what extent is there evidence of internet and air traffic at a node that is disproportionately greater than would be expected given the population of that node?  This is the kind of question that drives Saskia Sassen's classification of cities as local, regional, national,  and global (The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo and Global Networks, Linked Cities).  (Here is an earlier post on Sassen's work.)

Fundamentally, a city that originates 10 times the volume of internet traffic compared to other cities of similar size is worth looking at in detail.  Its activity level suggest an exceptional concentration of organizations and people that are unusually integrated into global networks of communication and data exchange.  It is a location for knowledge-intensive activity: high-end services, banking, universities; and it is a place with intensive relations to other nodes.  Likewise, a city that originates 5 times as many air-travel passengers as comparably sized cities elsewhere is likely to be a specialized location for business and high-end service activity (or else a population of very dedicated tourists).  In other words, the most interesting feature that these data sets might show us about the economic roles of US cities is not visible in the graphics presented here.

So it would be very interesting to be able to "divide" the activity levels represented by the middle two graphs by the populations represented by the top graph, so we could see which cities in the US are "super data exchangers" and "super travel generators".  And this would give us an indication of the degree of high-end, knowledge-intensive activity that is concentrated in the place -- thereby providing a measure of its importance in the national and global economy.  It is possible, for example, that Ann Arbor or Madison would show up as spikes of internet activity relative to their relatively small populations; and Raleigh-Durham might show up as a spike of air travel relative to population, reflecting an unusual concentration of high-end service businesses in this region.  The above-average data and air-traffic nodes are perhaps the dynamic centers of 21st-century economic activity.

Likewise, it would be interesting to identify the cities that have lower-than-expected levels of travel or internet activity; this would suggest local economies that are somewhat more self-contained and less integrated into the national economy than other locations.  And it would be interesting to see if there are significant pairings among locations for either kind of transaction; for example, is the volume of data exchange between Los Angeles and New York significantly greater than that between New York and Chicago or Boston?  And would this serve as an indicator of the degree of economic and business integration between these specific locations?

These views of the United States are interesting because they allow us to see the country as an inter-connected system of places and activities. They serve as something like a dynamic CT scan of the brain: certain connections between places "light up", providing an indication of systemic activities that warrant further investigation.

(The middle panel was published in the Harvard Alumni Magazine (link).  The population map comes from Urbanomnibus (link).)

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Posted in: CAT_structure,social networks,spatial pattern

Michigan's population loss

Earlier posts have raised the possibility that Michigan's jobs crisis will lead to significant population loss (link, link, link).  The basic idea is this: Michigan has lost more than 800,000 jobs since 2002.  Its population in 2002 was about 10 million.  The current unemployment rate in the state is about 15%, or just under.  In order to bring the unemployment rate back to the 2002 levels (~6%), roughly 800,000 jobs need to be created; or else the working population needs to decline by about that much.  Assuming one dependent for each worker, that amounts to a loss of about 1.6 million people.  Other combinations are possible; create 400,000 jobs and only 800,000 Michigan residents would leave; etc.

So what is the situation of out-migration today?  Here are some recent reports over the past twelve months:

• Detroit News 4/2009: Eight-year population exodus staggers state (link)
• AnnArbor.com: 89,844 residents lost 2005-2008 link
• CrainsDetroit 12/23/09: population falls below 10 million; low birthrate and high out-migration responsible link
• Michigan State University report on population loss 12/09 link
• Toledo Blade: Michigan is tops in 1-year population loss 12/09 link
• Detroit Free Press: Rochelle Riley, City's rebirth at risk over lack of births link
• Data Driven Detroit: data sources on population in Detroit link

And where are Detroit metro families going?  Here is a map Forbes published (link) showing the destinations in 2008:

Notice that almost all the lines are red, indicating out-migration.  Compare that with the pattern of migration for Seattle:

And Chicago:

In other words, a significant amount of out-migration has already occurred in Michigan, and there is no indication that this process will slow down.

In fact, some observers have argued that Michigan's population losses have been less than expected in the past 18 months because of the generally bad economic conditions in other parts of the country (and because of the difficulty of selling a house).  But if this is a factor, then we should expect an increase in out-migration when job creation takes hold in other parts of the country.

There is another worrisome part of this story: the fact that the best-educated and most talented people are likely to be the first to go.  They are nationally competitive with skills that can bring value to employers in other parts of the country; so population loss is likely enough to be talent-drain as well.

It is hard to find any political or business leader in the state of Michigan who believes that it is possible to create 100,000 new jobs a year in the state over a prolonged period.  This seems to imply chronic high unemployment in the state for a very long time, with all the features of poverty, poor health, and low quality of life that comes along with this scenario.

So is there a different possible future for Michigan that assumes a different paradigm: a smaller population; smaller cities; but a more robust and diverse economy and a higher overall standard of living?  Is it time, perhaps, to be planning for a smaller but more prosperous and healthy state?

There are many serious challenges that this transformation would create.  A declining population implies a declining tax base; so state and municipal revenues would decline as well.  School systems were built for a certain level of capacity; take 15-25% of the children out of a school system and you have a funding crisis in the schools as well.  Detroit's Mayor Dave Bing is grappling with the need to consolidate the land area of the population served by the city of Detroit, in order to achieve a balance between resources and needs.  And, of course, the state would continue to lose representation in the House of Representatives.  So designing a strategy for "smaller, healthier, wealthier" is not simple.  But it may be time to begin thinking along these lines.

UPDATE December 28, 2010

The results of the 2010 census are now available, and Michigan is the only state in the country to have lost population since 2000.  The country as a whole gained 9.6%, whereas Michigan lost .6% of its population -- roughly 60,000 people.  Here is a news article from AP (link).

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Posted in: CAT_Michigan,economic development,employment

Marx's relevance as a social scientist

What was Karl Marx's enduring contribution to the social sciences?  Does he deserve the status of being one of the founders of sociology, along with Durkheim and Weber?  Did he put forward substantive hypotheses about the workings of the modern world that continue to illuminate our social world?  Is there anything important for sociologists, political scientists, or economists of the current generation to absorb from Marx as they construct their own hypotheses about social processes and organizations?

Below are the concluding paragraphs of my 1986 book, The Scientific Marx.  Here I tried to assess whether the theories and frameworks that Marx advanced in Capital and his other scientific writings were of continuing relevance today.  The question for me in 1986 was this: does Marx still have important scientific and theoretical insights into the structures, institutions, and behavior of modern capitalism?  And I came to a tentative conclusion: that Marx's most important insights were about the institutions and mechanisms of capitalism (not a formal economic theory), and that these insights continue to have some validity and importance today.  Here is the conclusion:

Throughout this work I have examined the logical features of Marx's social science, not its correctness as an analysis of capitalism. In discussing Marx's use of empirical evidence, for example, I have not been concerned to discover whether the available evidence confirms or falsifies Marx's account, but rather the logical question, namely, whether Marx uses evidence in such a way as to permit him to empirically evaluate his account. Thus my primary endeavor has been to examine Marx's practice as a scientist and to determine whether his efforts at explanation, inquiry, and justification are reasonable ones within social science. It may be appropriate in closing, however, to offer a view of the status of Capital as a body of theory about a social and economic system that continues to dominate our lives in the West. Is Capital still capable of offering scientific insights into the nature of twentieth-century capitalism?

There is a sense in which Marx's own views would make him suspicious of the claim that an investigation of the social relations of production of nineteenth-century capitalism should remain valid for the social system that emerges from that mode of production over a century later. For Marx is insistent on the historical specificity of the relations that define any mode of production. He raises this point in connection with cross-modal judgments of timelessness (for example, the idea that precapitalist modes of production must "really" have been based on bourgeois exchange relations). But the point is equally valid in application to the development of a single mode of production over time. To the extent that the social relations of production that define twentieth-century capitalism are significantly different from those that defined nineteenth-century capitalism, Marx's analysis must be modified before it can offer relevant commentary on the present.

There are unmistakable differences between capitalist property relations in 1850 and in the mid-1980s. On the side of capital, at least these changes have occurred: the accelerated separation of ownership and management, the increasing role of finance and credit within capitalist enterprises, the creation of the modem multinational corporation as the basic unit of capital, and the increased involvement of the state in the affairs of capitalist enterprises. Changes have emerged on the side of labor power as well: increasing government regulation of work conditions, the shift from industrial to service employment, the creation of effective units of organized labor in all capitalist countries, the rise of mass-based socialist parties with proletarian support in Western Europe, and the emergence of much more extensive social welfare systems in all capitalist systems.  All these factors potentially may influence the dynamics of modem capitalism, and they all were of only minor importance in the economic structure Marx investigated.

At the same time there are substantial continuities between nineteenth-century and twentieth-century capitalism. (It is these continuities that justify our identification of the modern American or Western European economies as "capitalist.") The fundamental requirements of capitalist property still exist, namely, the effective separation between a minority class that owns and controls the vast majority of all productive wealth and a majority class that possesses no productive wealth and is obliged to sell its labor power. Capitalism remains a system of class power and privilege -- witness the uninterrupted power and influence of the minority class that owns and directs the productive wealth in each capitalist nation. Capitalism remains a system in which class power and privilege derive from ownership of wealth -- witness the sharp inequalities of wealth and income that persist to the present day. Moreover capitalism continues to depend on the accumulation of capital, and it continues to reflect a deep conflict of interest between owners and workers in the productive process. Finally -- in Marx's technical meaning of the term -- capitalism remains an exploitative system: The social surplus is still expropriated from the class of immediate producers by the class of owner of productive wealth.

Given these important similarities and differences between the property relations of nineteenth- and twentieth-century capitalism, it becomes a problem of continuing research -- of the sort Marx provided so extensively in Capital -- to determine whether the fundamental dynamic of contemporary capitalism should be predicted to resemble that of nineteenth-century capitalism. Only detailed empirical and theoretical analysis will permit us to determine whether the continuities are sufficiently fundamental to offset the alterations introduced by changes in the social relations of property and class. For we have seen that Marx's arguments for the "laws of motion" of capitalism depend essentially on assumptions about the details of capitalist relations of production, and those relations have not remained fixed.

This finding suggests that the application of the findings of Capital to contemporary capitalism must be somewhat tentative; it is surely not possible to derive particular laws of motion of contemporary capitalism from Marx's analysis alone. Rather, Marxist social scientists and political economists must provide the sort of detailed account of modem property relations and economic institutions that Marx provides for nineteenth-century relations and institutions. This is not to say that Marxist social science must begin de novo. The continuities between modern capitalism and nineteenth-century capitalism are crucial to understanding modem capitalist phenomena, and Marx's analysis of those basic features of capitalism remains profoundly illuminating. But it is necessary to supplement, modify, and extend his account to draw particular conclusions about the course of modem capitalism.

Significantly, contemporary Marxist social science conforms to this view of the relevance of Capital today. Thus Marxist political economists have put forward detailed studies of modem capitalist relations of production--e.g. Ernest Mandel's Late Capitalism and James O'Connor's The Fiscal Crisis of the State. Other Marxist social scientists have offered analyses of particular post-capitalist modes of production -- Rudolph Bahro's The Alternative in Eastern Europe or Donald Hodges's The Bureaucratization of Socialism, to name two. And Marxist political sociologists have refined and extended his treatment of class, property, and politics, for instance, Erik Olin Wright's Class Crisis & the State and Ralph Miliband's The State in Capitalist Society. What these works have in common is not pious deference to Marx's texts -- in Capital or elsewhere. Rather, they are unified in being vigorous attempts, using extensive contemporary data, to offer theoretical accounts of modem social institutions within a framework of analysis that is greatly indebted to Marx's treatment of capitalism. Contemporary Marxist social science is rooted in Marx's insights, but it is not confined to his conclusions or to the particular features he singled out for fine-grained analysis. Thus Marx's Capital established a research program for twentieth-century social science, and it is a program that has borne fine fruit indeed. 

So how does Marx hold up in the first decade of the twenty-first century?  And how does this assessment of my own, written almost twenty-five years ago, hold up as well?

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Posted in: capitalism,CAT_foundations,Marx

Social progress

What is involved in "making society better"? What do we have in mind when we aspire to improving society? I suppose there are several things we might mean by this idea. Superficially we might say that a society is better off when its members are better off; but is there more to the story? There seem to be several different lines of thought to pursue.

First, we might have a small number of dimensions of goodness in mind -- something like a social welfare function -- and we might understand social progress as aggregate improvement with respect to these dimensions of welfare. Social progress is defined as "aggregate improvement in quality of life for the population" (income, health status, freedom), and it is achieved through a series of steps in which one or more of these measures is improved. This definition is potentially more complex than a utilitarian moral theory, but it shares the basic structure with utilitarianism. It defines the good of society as the sum of the goods of individuals in society. (We might also have a theory about the processes through which these improvements need to take place; for example, we might say that all improvements need to be Pareto-improving: making some better off without reducing the welfare of anyone.)

Second, we might have a list of specific current social defects in mind -- the widespread fact of urban homelessness, the incidence of childhood obesity, or the incidence of violence in society -- and we might define progress as the reduction or elimination of these defects. Social progress is the result of sequential reduction of social harms.

Third, we might have a set of moral-structural theories in mind: fairness, equality, democracy, self-determination. And we might define progress as a reform of institutions that increases one or more of these features of society. We might be thinking here along the lines that Rawls suggests in talking about imperfect justice; improving society means reforming unjust institutions and practices. Or it means reforming institutions that unnecessarily interfere with citizens' freedoms. Or it means reducing the ways in which institutions treat citizens unequally. This differs from the standard-of-living definition, in that it looks at the characteristics that need to be addressed as relational and systemic characteristics, not simply aggregates of the wellbeing of the individual members of society.  A society is better when it is more just or more free.  Here we might find ourselves in a position of saying that "Society A is in a better position than society B, even though citizens of B have a higher level of material wellbeing than those in society A." Apartheid was a particularly egregious example of a systemic defect in a society, and it required fundamental structural change to improve the apartheid society. Current discussions of democratic institutions fall in this category; the idea is that institutional reforms can create new procedures that better embody the ideals of democracy.

Fourth, we might have in mind the important point that social institutions and practices work in very specific ways and have differential effects on different groups of people in society. So we might have in mind the idea of improving the workings of the basic institutions of society -- improve their effectiveness and efficiency, or improve their equity in terms of their effects on different groups. This is analogous to the goal of "making the air transport system better": we look at the goals the system serves and the practices and procedures through which it does this, and we try to design better procedures to accomplish the goals of the system. We might notice that the environmental regulations governing the siting of hazards tend to disfavor poor people, and we might try to make them more democratic. Or we might notice that land-use permitting processes are very cumbersome in many cities, thus discouraging new and productive uses of land, and we might try to change them in the direction of greater efficiency. Each effort could be described as "making society better."

Fifth, we might try to locate "social progress" entirely in terms of the wishes and preferences of the members of society.  This is a liberal and democratic definition of social wellbeing: the wellbeing of society, and what counts as an improvement in social wellbeing, is entirely specified once we know what the citizens prefer.  So on this approach we might say that "social progress" is entirely procedural: a set of changes represent progress just in case they were arrived at through a fair and equal process of collective decision making.

An important issue that arises in thinking about social progress is the question of myopia and design. Think of the analogy with the evolution of species: natural selection is a myopic process in which each change is fitness-improving, but there is no longterm plan for what the species will eventually look like. Coming up with a better bicycle, on the other hand, is usually the result of a far-sighted design process, in which the architecture of the bicycle is reconceived so as to achieve certain design goals. The thing about a myopic process of improvement is that it is possible to get trapped in a local maximum, unable to take one step back in order to achieve a higher nearby equilibrium. (Richard Dawkins describes this possibility in Climbing Mount Improbable.)

So what about social progress: should we think of social improvement as the net result of many small, myopic reforms; or should we think about it ideally as the result of a comprehensive policy design process? To what extent are we in a situation of improvement resulting from a large number of small adjustments, versus the possibility of large designed reforms leading to discontinuous jumps in quality and equity? The constraints of democracy strongly suggest the former rather than the latter. Building legislative and democratic majorities for change seems to imply piecemeal reform and a degree of myopia. It is difficult to see how a comprehensive, multi-decade plan for social reform could be implemented and sustained. (Adam Przeworski considers some of these issues in Democracy and the Market: Political and Economic Reforms in Eastern Europe and Latin America.) So piecemeal and gradual reform on several fronts may be the best we can do.

Generically the concept of reform fits into these ideas very tightly. Reforms are intended to improve the social situation in one way or another; and the cumulative effect of an extended series of reforms may be a significant enhancement in equity, democracy, equality, and quality of life.  But two things are usually true: first, reforms are generally selective and partial; and second, the cumulative effects of an extended series of reforms may lead to outcomes that were never anticipated.  A reform process is not a utopian process: it is generally not guided by a comprehensive vision of what the ideal society ought to look like, and the results of reform are generally pragmatic and limited rather than sweeping and socially transformative.

(The image above is drawn from a manual on forestry management in Karnataka, India (link).  It depicts a sequence of social systems of land use governing farm land, cattle husbandry, and forests.  The middle panel represents degradation of the system and the worsening of the standard of living of the population; the final panel represents the improvement of the system of land use and a major step forward in the standard of living as a result of a major legal reform, confined cattle and protected regenerated forests.)

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Posted in: CAT_policy,democracy,justice

What now for Michigan?

The Detroit Regional Chamber Leadership Conference at Mackinac has come and gone. Leaders from all sectors in Southeast Michigan participated in discussions about how the state might move forward and regain the vitality and quality of life that the state has lost in the past decade. All agree that the state faces very tough challenges. And solutions and strategies were put forward. Central themes included a range of strategies -- Create more jobs.... Improve K-12 schooling.... Create and retain more college graduates.... Improve the climate for business and entrepreneurs.... So there are ideas about what is needed, and there are organizations investing effort in achieving some of these goals.

So why might one board the ferry from the island with a sense of disappointment? For a few reasons. First, there are a number of critical social issues that got no public discussion at all: the persistence and depth of urban poverty in each of Michigan's cities, the continuing reductions the state is imposing on the social services budgets, the enduring inequalities the state accepts along racial lines, and the state's stubborn refusal to face up to its fiscal crisis, to list several. One might imagine that these problems would disappear if and when the state's economic crisis abates; but I'm not persuaded of that.

A more fundamental source of disappointment is the lack of serious, realistic analysis of the problems we face in the state and what interventions might actually succeed in addressing them. The lack of realism in these discussions is often truly staggering. There are exceptions, of course; for example, Lou Glazer's efforts at Michigan Future are data-driven (link), and the Citizens' Research Council has done great work on the fiscal crisis of the state (link). But all too often various political and business leaders have picked out one small issue and have tried to present it as a comprehensive strategy. For example, leaders in state government tout the opportunity represented by alternative energy and the manufacture of windmills. But there is no honest calculation of the likely scope of labor force demand created by this sector; and to date, the numbers are tiny. The state has lost over 800,000 jobs in the past eight years, and windmill manufacture has the potential to employ a few thousands. So how can this be a realistic avenue for "putting Michigan to work again"?

Similar comments might be made about the idea that Michigan should focus on biotechnology. The state has assets in this field, to be sure, including world-class researchers in many of its universities. But how many states and regions have already declared themselves for the future of biotechnology (including Pittsburgh, several of whose leaders spoke at the conference); and how many are likely to succeed? So picking out alternative energy and biotech as the primary areas of growth in the state sounds sexy but unrealistic.

More credible is a broad strategy of improving the human capital and quality of life of the state. Logically, it makes sense that dramatic improvement in K-12 education, educational attainment, and college graduation will add a broad-based and fungible resource to the state's arsenal for productive activity in the future. And equally, it seems very logical that creating appealing, safe, and fun cityscapes will be conducive to productivity, quality of life, and business growth. (These are Richard Florida's central insights in the CreativeClass.) So investments in education and the urban environment seem to be very practical ways of increasing the prosperity of the state in the medium run. (The unemployment rate of baccalaureate adults is about 1/3 that of high school graduates in the state right now.)

But significantly, each of these areas of public investment has declined in the past 8 years. State support for K-12 and post-secondary education has declined significantly over the past eight years. All cities and municipalities in Michigan are facing a current and severe fiscal crisis because of declining property values and revenue sharing, and this crisis will get dramatically worse in the next 5-10 years. So improving urban quality of life is not being supported either.  (Proposal A makes matters worse, since it means that it will take many years for cities to regain the tax base they lost during the real estate meltdown in the past several years; link.)  So the result is that Michigan is disinvesting in exactly the factors that hold out the greatest promise for improvement in the next 15 years.

It is possible that there is no intelligent solution to Michigan's crisis -- no smart strategy that could be pursued by public and private organizations that would do this set of things in order to bring about that set of good results.  It is possible that regions come out of economic tailspins only through a lot of trial and error, and sometimes they come out in a much reduced state.  Nothing guarantees that the end of this story will be a happy one, resulting in a prosperous society of 10-12 million people moving forward confidently.  In other words, it may be that repairing deep economic and social damage is essentially beyond our ability.  But one would want to think otherwise.  We would want to think that there are investments and reforms that can be adopted now that will make recovery most likely and full.  And we would want to think that it is possible to identify some of the broad structural obstacles to productive growth, and work to remove these.  Each of these efforts is likely to bear fruit -- much as a baseball team increases the odds of success by recruiting and cultivating strong players, working on the essentials of teamwork, and removing the process issues that may be in the way of success.

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Posted in: CAT_Michigan,economic development

Real Utopias

It is worth thinking a bit about the intellectual project of envisioning a utopia. By definition, a utopia is a vision of a social order that is profoundly different from the real historical circumstances and institutions in which we live.  It would correct important flaws in the social world we currently inhabit. It is a social order that does not yet exist.  And there is an implication that this better social order is not simply a marginal improvement over the current world, but rather a sweeping revamping of the institutions and practices that create the social order.  To be a utopian thinker is usually to have an intellectual disposition of impatience for small, gradual change.  Mill was patient and gradualist -- and not utopian; Marx was impatient and revolutionary -- and utopian.

So to think about a utopia, we need to have a set of values that specify the features that we would like to see in the social institutions that govern us. Such a system of values provides the basis for social criticism.  These might include moral equality of all human beings, or the freedom of all human beings, or the intrinsic importance of community, or a preference for a world in which each individual is in a position to realize his/her full human potential.  As social critics, we hold up the values, and we measure the current functioning of social relations and institutions to see how well or badly they conform to the value prescriptions.  How free or equal are individuals within these institutions?  How good is the sense of community that actually exists?  And we criticize the actual on the grounds of its divergence from our moral ideals.

So envisioning a utopia requires that we have a basis for social criticism, grounded in a social philosophy specifying some system of important values.  But it requires something else as well: a credible argument for the feasibility of a concrete and specific set of institutions that do a better job with respect to the values -- without simultaneously creating new harms that are even more terrible.  This is a call for a science of the hypothetical alternative: "Here is how this complex set of institutions should be expected to work if they were established and were populated by ordinary human beings."  This is one part of the story where the social sciences can help; social scientists have a lot to say about how institutions work, and how alternatives might function as well.

Here is an example. A Chinese social critic in the 1930s might have observed tenant peasant farming in North China; he/she might have argued that the system was exploitative, unfair, and inefficient (three different social values); and he/she might have argued that the collective farm was a superior alternative, being more democratic, fair, and efficient.  The collective farm might have been offered as a utopian alternative to tenant farming.

This is where careful institutional analysis is required, and the analysis needs to be rigorous and empirically and theoretically informed.  What incentives would be established by the collective farm?  How would authority be exercised?  Who would make important decisions?  And how would ordinary human behavior be conducted when it came to labor, consumption, and power relations?  We might hope that this careful effort at analysis would have arrived at some important results:

"There will be a lot of 'easy riding' because of public goods problems; there will be a lot of petty tyranny because of the vacuum created by the institutions when it comes to collective decision-making; and there will be chronic over-consumption because food is a common resource."  

So the collective farm is likely not to be a utopian solution to China's rural problems in 1930.  And in fact, subsequent history confirms this conclusion; the Great Leap Forward famine was the consequence of many of these institutional failures.

But let's say that our institutional analysis indicates that a given system of institutions would work as advertised.  The next thing we need is a theory of a feasible pathway through which these institutions could be established; a pathway of how we might get from here to there.  It may be that there is a stable equilibrium of stacked dominoes embodying a certain topological structure; stable simply means that, once established, the configuration will survive small shocks.  But this isn't very useful information if there isn't any way to get the dominoes into that configuration through a series of incremental steps.  So to engage in "real utopian" thinking, we need to have some theories of pathways of change that are realistic when applied to real people.

So utopian thinking requires critique; envisioning of alternatives; and discovery of pathways from here to there.

How can social theory and social research help inform our thinking about "utopian alternatives"?   And what is a "real utopia"?  The Real Utopias project has been going for almost twenty years now (link).  And some of the most interesting thinkers writing today in social philosophy and criticism have been involved -- Erik Olin Wright, Josh Cohen, Joel Rogers, John Roemer, and Archon Fung, for example.  One of the most recent titles to come out of the project is Deepening Democracy: Institutional Innovations in Empowered Participatory Governance (Real Utopias Project) (v. 4), by Archon Fung and Erik Olin Wright.

Erik Olin Wright talks about the underlying rationale for the project in this fascinating interview by Valerio Bacak (link).  Here is how Wright sets up the problem:

The Real Utopias Project is, in a sense, a response to a deep problem within the Marxist tradition. Here’s the issue: Marxism is, above all, an emancipatory critique of capitalism. It identifies an array of oppressions and harms generated by capitalist relations and dynamics and then makes the extraordinary claim that these harms could be eliminated if capitalism was radically transformed. This kind of system-level, radical critique of the basic structures of society requires a huge leap of imagination: how is it possible that the basic institutions of society, which seem so natural to most people, could be radically changed without generating chaos and massive perverse consequences?

And here is his preferred approach:

Develop a coherent, positive social scientific theory of feasible alternative institutions without attempting a prediction of their likely emergence. The idea is to explore alternative designs of institutions in terms of three criteria: first, to what extent would the institutional design, if implemented, contribute to the realization of emancipatory values of one sort or another; second, in what ways might the institutional design generate perverse side-effects and are their plausible strategies for countering these; and third, if implemented, is the institutional design sustainable, does it generate a social dynamic that reinforces rather than systematically undermines its own conditions of possibility. I refer to this strategy as envisioning real utopias: “utopias” insofar as the agenda is anchored in vision of emancipatory social change; “real” insofar as the analysis revolves around institutional feasibility. This is a wide-open theoretical and empirical agenda. It involves explorations of theoretical proposals which have no immediate real-world exemplars as well as empirical cases in which efforts at constructing, not just envisioning, real utopias have occurred. The premise of this third strategy is that while there are real limits on the possibilities of emancipatory futures that cannot be breached simply by an act of will, those limits are not fixed independently of our beliefs about what is possible. While it is false that “where there is a will there is a way” it is nevertheless the case that without a “will” many “ways” become impossible, and envisioning real utopias is part of the process of creating a will for change.

What the Real Utopias project is aimed at validating, most fundamentally, is the idea of emancipatory agency: that it is possible for us humans to restructure our social institutions in a direction that fits our fundamental values better than the present institutions do.  And it is worth underlining how important, but also how risky, this effort is: important, because it gives a basis for thinking that we can create a better world; and risky, because many of the worst historical experiences of modern memory came from "utopian" efforts to redefine society.  (This is a point that James Scott makes in Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (link).)

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