[This is Chapter One of Murphey’s book The Emerging Crisis of Economic Displacement: How a Free Society Must Deal With It, whi

[This is Chapter One of Murphey’s book The Emerging Crisis of Economic Displacement: How a Free Society Must Deal With It, which was written in 1998 but is being published for the first time on this Web site.]

Chapter One

DANGEROUS ASCENT: AN INTRODUCTION

An exponential growth of science and technology, the creation of a world competitive market, and the impending displacement of hundreds of millions of workers by non-labor-intensive processes are all combining to introduce rapid and profound change into today's world. It is a process that has in effect just begun and that has much further to go. The result is that almost everything we have thought about society and human life within it will have to be re thought, no matter what point of view we have held up to now.

The tone of this book will be that of a personal intellectual odyssey. My purpose will be to invite the reader into it so that the issues become the reader's own, with us sharing them together. We will look at what is happening in the world and will ponder the impact of the changes on much that we have believed.

The burden will be on me to persuade the reader that the changes have the implications I think them to have. Only to the extent we are mutually persuaded of that impact will we travel to the end together, reflecting with each other about what is to be done. The persuasion will not be by special pleading or any sort of pressure. It will be by what I hope the reader will consider the most commonsense possible reading of events and of how they relate to political and social principles that have been embraced by the main competing points of view about society.

There is much to go through. It will be a long but hopefully not tedious journey. I hope to make it as easily understood as I can while doing justice to the serious ideas and issues at stake.

The primary difficulty, I am sure, will be with the desire that each reader naturally has to hold tight to the thinking that has made up his mindscape. No one wants to abandon ideas that have become not only dear friends but part of the essential framework of the person's existence as he perceives it. A challenge to those ideas can be as serious as a challenge to life itself. With this in mind, I will try to avoid posing the implications as a challenge. Instead, we will want to see why the transformation of our thinking, reflecting the changing conditions, better serves the very things we ourselves believe in most. If we constantly keep in mind that we are shedding some fur, in effect, in order to take on a better coat, perhaps our innate resistance to intellectual change will give way to a common quest.

This is not to say that those who reach a different conclusion than I do about something are per se chargeable with resistance to change. I respect the views of those who differ from me more than that. In the social and political debates that will tear through society in the years to come, mutual respect will be essential to civility; and civility will be imperative if constructive directions are to be found. It will be a revolutionary time shaking the foundations of everything we have known, and that portends chaos and carnage unless the temper can be kept even. More than anything else, we need to think things through together.

Let me introduce a term that will be foreign to many readers. If you are already acquainted with it, please be patient, knowing that necessarily this book will be addressed to many different people. Hopefully, the readers will include those who are already highly informed in social and political philosophy. But there will also hopefully be a great many others, educated and intelligent but not versed in this particular area. They will need some instruction as we go along, not as one would teach a child but as one would initiate a valued colleague into something outside his own area of expertise.

What I am thinking of is the term "classical liberal." To understand the point from which I will start my own intellectual odyssey here, it is necessary to know that I have all my adult life considered myself a classical liberal. (This is the philosophy that underlies what in popular speech most people would call "conservatism" in the United States today; what we are talking about is "liberalism" as it was spoken of in Europe and the United States during the nineteenth century--as referring to the "philosophy of individual liberty"--before the word took on a very different meaning signifying a point of view that wanted the State active in society and the economy. The word "classical" is meant to suggest "original." I am not making up the label; it is commonly used in political thought.) Many readers will not consider themselves classical liberals, which means they won't be starting this "mutual odyssey" from the same place I am. I urge these readers to "stay the course"; they will be able to jump aboard soon enough. And they will be most welcome in this multiple-party monologue I hope to be conducting.

I can best explain classical liberalism in personal terms. I lived in Mexico just after infancy, and from a distance grew up revering the United States and all that I understood it to symbolize. That was the philosophy of individualism, not in any coarse "rugged individualist" version, but in the sense of upright, stand-tall men and women who carved out a life of individual liberty within a Constitutional system that limited, separated and divided the power of government and who relied most essentially upon their own energies within a market economy. Of course, I didn't understand all that at age eleven. But as I grew older and began to inquire into the basis for the image I had of America, I took on more sophistication about the philosophy's components, including knowing its name, "classical liberalism." I especially studied it when I found the philosophy under attack. When later most of my professors in political science and philosophy at the University of Colorado were deeply alienated against the very thing I revered, and advocated more or less openly a socialist alternative, I found a copy of Ludwig von Mises' Human Action in the library and read it until the cover stripped off. Mises was a leading member of the Austrian School of Economics, which has been the fount of neo-classical economics and since the mid-nineteenth century unquestionably the most stalwart center for the defense of free market capitalism.

I served two years in the Marine Corps after three years of pre-law, and during those two years I wrote the first draft of my book Emergent Man, which I rewrote after finishing law school at the University of Denver. The book amounts to a young man's exploration of the principles and institutions of a classical liberal free society. From an early age, I was deeply concerned with questions about how a society based on individual liberty works.

So I started out and have remained a classical liberal. An important additional fact about my intellectual orientation can be discerned, however, from my experience when I attended the graduate school of business administration at New York University before I started law school. (I was admitted as a "special student," since my pre-law had just been three years rather than the four needed for graduation.) My reason for going to NYU was that Ludwig von Mises, having fled a Nazified Austria late in the 1930s, taught his classes and famous Thursday night Washington Square seminar there. During the time I was writing the first draft of my book, I had become concerned that a classical liberal free society would become unsustainable if the market economy again went through a collapse such as that of the Great Depression of the 1930s. I wanted to know whether free market thinkers had both theoretical and practical solutions for the booms and busts of the trade cycle. In Human Action, Mises advocated both a gold standard and something he called "free banking." Would those be sufficient? And, if so, could society be persuaded to adopt them? (I'll mention right now, since I have led into it, that I didn't find myself persuaded by these proposals. Instead, I came to think that Milton Friedman's monetarism, proposing that the central bank control the quantity of money and increase it gradually to match the growing productivity of the economy, created the best monetary framework for the market. With that in mind, it seemed to me that capitalism did not have an inherent and fatal flaw. Certainly the Great Depression had not been caused by such a flaw, but by mistaken policies that were clearly avoidable in the future. A realization of this freed me to go on to law school and into later explorations of classical liberal thought.)

What I would have us notice about my brief time in Mises' seminar is that although I was a passionate devotee of "the free society," I was not willing to take even Mises' thought as a disciple does. Unthinking assimilation of ideas has never been my idea of a reasoned process. Alongside all that I found valuable, there were things in Mises' thinking that I didn't agree with, and this led me to submit papers to the seminar that were at odds with the otherwise unanimous opinions of the splendid people who participated around the large conference table. Mises was an elderly man at the time (he was born in 1881 and it was then 1956 and early 1957), was unfailingly gracious, gentle and dignified, and treated my heresies without the slightest rancor. Although I was not then and am not now a "disciple" of him or the Austrian School, I think of him and those associated with him in the Austrian School with great reverence and affection.

My differences with the doctrine have led me sometimes to call myself a "neo-classical liberal," thus complicating the semantic picture even further. It has for forty years seemed to me that free market thinking is often learned as if by rote, and as a closed system. As such, it has an answer for everything regardless of the facts, just as any doctrinaire system, including most religions, do. I later wrote a monograph called The Principles of Classical Liberalism and then a book exploring in detail the philosophy's specific ideas, and these works entailed exploring several weaknesses and even fallacies in the theory while at the same time I expressed a close identification with the overwhelming thrust of what it had to say. The "neo" comes from the fact that I stood outside the most commonly accepted system of its thought, feeling it needed extension and some amendment. To my mind as I placed it in historical perspective, classical liberals, though fundamentally correct, were forced on the defensive by the rise of the world Left in the early nineteenth century and ceased to question their own doctrine and to extend it into subtleties that had not been thought of by its founders. The pure doctrine, forced by these circumstances into a closed system, could not be taken as the final truth; what was needed was for it to continue to be intellectually alive, refining, extending and even correcting its thought in response to further thinking. It could (and must) do this in a way that is not untrue to its core values. In fact, a failure to do these things would be the surest way to serve it poorly.

This is important background especially for readers who are close to me philosophically and who see themselves variously as free market advocates, classical liberals, conservatives or libertarians. They need to know that I am a friend--but also that I have long called upon all supporters of an individualistic free society to think beyond the closed system. As this book progresses they will see that I am neither an enemy to the values they cherish, nor a friend "who has gone off the reservation" (suddenly or otherwise). When I urge them to join me in rethinking much of the system of thought that has been second-nature to them and to me, it is not to move them away from individual liberty as the central principle of society. It is to point toward a more sustainable philosophy of a free society under changing conditions that will almost certainly make many of the ideas we have thusfar held untenable.

Here, essentially, is what is happening. And you can see why when I reached the mid-point in this study I expected my conclusions to shock my closest intellectual associates. (They have not reacted with shock, oddly enough, after reading my initial article on the subject in late 1996.[1] Several, in fact, have indicated that they share many of the concerns I voiced there. The U.S. Business and Industrial Council Educational Foundation even gave me their 1997 "American Values" award because of the article.) Here is what the changes point to:

That the high-technology "information age" is fast bringing upon us changed conditions that will undercut virtually all of the "factual and moral predicates," so to speak, that serve as the foundation for classical liberalism.

That, at the same time, virtually all the underlying suppositions about people and society that socialist thought has been preaching for two hundred years--suppositions that every classical liberal including especially myself have considered dangerously off the mark during all that time--are now being confirmed.

How can this possibly be? Especially within such a short time after "the fall of Communism" confirmed the free market economy as the preeminent form of economic organization, an economy that not only provides innovation and enormous productivity but also leads to widespread political participation and to the limitation of governmental power? We have had reason to think that socialism is dead, even if some of its embers still glow in certain parts of the world. Free trade, deregulation and privatization: these have been the rallying cries for twenty or more years.

And, too, what do these implications mean? Are they not so horrifying to an opponent of socialism as to be beyond credence? If they are in fact true, what hope is there for a free society in any form to survive? The underlying premises of the world going socialist!? To those who, like me, have understood socialism as anathema to individual liberty, that is unthinkable. The whole prospect is both shocking and repulsive to those of my persuasion.

Somehow I have myself avoided a sense of doom about it. There has been surprisingly little trauma for me during the past year and a half (i.e., since early 1996) as I have come to see first the changes and then their implications. Since those implications have seemed apparent to me, I have tended to take them as givens and have accordingly been more concerned with how a free society can be continued, perhaps even strengthened, despite or even through them. My primary apprehension was anticipatory: that I may be considered an apostate by so many people whose ideas I respect and whose good opinion I value. I have no relish for "placing myself in the other camp" from those who see themselves, in one way or another, as anti-statist. That is why it is the burden of this book, among other tasks, to persuade them that the changes in society do have the implications I believe them to have and that individual liberty will be best served by taking those implications fully into account. In fact, I hope to impress upon them that classical liberalism can only maintain its standing among our fellows by doing so; otherwise, free market thinking will almost certainly go into disrepute, and beyond that will become hated by countless millions. Those millions will not repudiate it because they are evil. It will be because their lives will depend upon organizing society around other principles. Classical liberalism, unless it becomes a leader in establishing a new paradigm, will have failed theoretically and practically.

But I imagine many readers are by this time impatient to know what the changes are that are occurring so rapidly and so massively in society (even though I spoke of them briefly in the opening lines of the chapter), and why I say those changes "falsify many of the underpinnings of classical liberalism and affirm those of socialism." (To avoid misunderstanding, I should take time to add that this shift does not imply anybody's needing to embrace socialism as we have known it. If non-socialists come to see the necessity for much redistributionism to assure everyone's participation in the society of the future, it will be even more important to them to "chain the state down" with every means at their disposal to prevent the abuse of concentrated power. These means can include a Constitutionally mandated separation of the redistributional mechanism from the State that exercises regulatory, military and police functions. It will also be desirable to continue a vigorous market economy to the fullest extent feasible both as a spur to innovation and as a freedom-enhancing option for individuals. As we will see, there will, at least in the advanced economies, be no contradiction in having such a continuing free market. It will be sufficient if we come to have what I will call "a shared market economy" in which there is a vigorous market that all people share in as part-owners. The means by which this sharing of ownership can be accomplished will be discussed in a later chapter. For reasons that will be explained as the book goes along, even those who have favored a "mixed economy" or socialism per se will have reason to favor both a limitation on the powers of the State and the continuation of a vigorous market sector. In other words, there should be common ground for people who until now have held widely varying views.)

The early chapters of this book will recount what hundreds of books are now reporting: that the world is experiencing an exponential growth of science and technology, especially of computerization. Even though we see it all around us and perhaps think we are heavily engaged with it, the fact is that we are just barely into it. There is much further to go. The possibilities for even the near-term future are staggering.

The acceleration of communications and of transport, and the development of a worldwide financial market, are increasingly making each country's economy a mere subset of a worldwide competitive market. Again, a nation such as the United States is just partly into the change; only in recent years have the percentages of imports and exports in relation to the total economy increased rapidly; but the transformation to a world market is proceeding at an accelerating pace. In this worldwide market, virtually everyone is or soon will be in close competition with everyone else. This produces a relentless drive to reduce costs. Anyone who does not cut costs again and again will be undersold and forced out of business.

It is no longer silly to postulate near-utopian possibilities from all this in terms of human well-being (though hardly in terms of human character). Food, goods and services of kinds we have not even thought of yet, health care, entertainment: the prospect is imminent that all can be produced at low cost and in massive volume. The potential is near-at-hand for affluence, not just in the industrialized countries but everywhere, beyond the wildest dreams of anyone but a science-fiction writer. The science and technology are here, or soon coming. What is necessary is that they be put fully into use, that the inertia of existing ways not serve to block them--and that civilized order and humane values be maintained so that societies can churn their way through times that will truly be revolutionary. So great are the needs in the world that a full realization of this affluence will occupy humanity, even under the best conditions, for a very long time. The means, however, are coming into our possession. That is why this will not be a "Luddite" book opposing the new science and technology. They are the wings that can carry the world's billions into a better future.

The prospects are wonderful if this is all there is to it. But, unfortunately, there's more, which is why I have named this Introduction "Dangerous Ascent": The economic systems of the present, as of the past, are centered around scarcity, the need for production and work. To live, everyone who is not supported by relatives, friends or government must find a place in that productive system to obtain income from it. That is, entrepreneurship or work in some form is a necessity not just for production but for people's participation and consumption. We judge people by their performance in these terms; and their livelihood depends upon it. Now, however, the global economy puts workers throughout the advanced nations into direct competition with hundreds of millions of workers, many of them increasingly high-skilled, from among the poorly-paid peoples of the Third World. Profits for firms and investors shoot up, but the inexorable process of supply and demand, given the immense source of low-cost labor, trends the wages downward potentially to depths unimaginable to Americans. Many authors see this as an impending crisis for workers in the advanced economies as they come under increasing pressure about how to make a living from and find a place in the economy. It is important to realize, however, that this offers to be, relatively speaking, a short-term phenomenon, even though it is no doubt very important in that short term. Computer integrated technology (CIT) and other scientific-technical advances promise to undercut, cost-wise, even the poorly paid workers of the Third World. When something can be made dirt-cheap in the laboratory, there is a competitive undercutting of the ability of people to play a role as workers everywhere. The result will be a crisis even more for the low-paid workers of the Third World than for people in the advanced economies.

There is even a crisis for the scientific-technical system itself: the old "purchasing power" bugaboo that critics of a market economy have been arguing for almost two centuries without justification comes to life as a very real fact, and unless the billions of human beings who make up the world's population can find some way to share in the revenues of the economy, those revenues will begin to drop off as mass markets disappear or fail to develop. In that case, the utopian possibilities fade, and even those who as investors own the technology will cease to make vast sums from it.

What we see is that the world faces a problem not unlike the one that concerned me when I went to attend the Mises seminar in the mid-1950s to ponder the solution to the trade cycle. The issue is whether capitalism--the market economy--, despite its capacity (in combination with science and technology) to produce abundance, will continue to work for everybody. If not, two of the basic assumptions of classical liberalism--that people in general can "make it" if they strive with enough gumption and energy, and that accordingly a free market will lead to a vast middle class--are falsified. Think how fundamental those assumptions are. Classical liberalism's legitimacy depends upon them. If a massive problem falsifying those fundamentals doesn't force a reorientation within classical liberalism itself, nothing will.

Devotees of a free market will be thinking at this juncture that "the market is always self-adjusting through its price system. Free markets always clear themselves of the goods and labor that are offered." If that holds true, there should be no displacement, only adjustment. But consider this: hundreds of millions shifted from agriculture into industry as the industrial revolution proceeded; in recent years, millions more have shifted from industry to the "service sector" as industry has needed relatively fewer works to produce an ever-increasing volume of products. Where, then, do the millions or even billions of people go, for the earnings that will allow them to be consumers, when non-labor-intensive technology offers more and more to diminish the amount of labor needed even for service functions? Will people be picking up scraps and hoping from those to be consumers at the lush table that technology can set?

A vast displacement of workers and of all economic effort is certain to occur in the less developed economies; and classical liberalism, if it continues to aspire to be a universal philosophy, will need to address their needs. There is a possibility, though, that an ultimate displacement of workers (as distinct from a series of temporary displacements as they continually search for new jobs and niches) will not occur within the advanced economies, and that people won't be reduced to searching for scraps. Even in a "best case scenario," much "churning" will occur as people are made insecure and tossed about by constant "restructurings" as business reacts to the relentless drive to cut costs. (The "downsizings" and "restructurings" of the past few years aren't over; rather, they are "just starting.") Despite this churning, "ultimate" as distinct from "temporary" displacement may conceivably not occur. Why do I suggest this? Let's use an illustration: In a town in 1849 California, it was sufficient if, say, thirty percent of the men worked in the gold and silver mines nearby. Their income was enough to support a large number of mercantile stores, dentists, doctors, saloon-keepers, and so on. The latter were not parasites, but regular parts of the local economy. In the world of the near future, if thirty percent of the public can make a good living out of technical work, or if a significant part of the population draw income from the economy as owners of stock such as in their retirement funds, that may be enough to make possible a thriving economy for the others.

An economic polarization will then be the main manifestation of the changed conditions. Why a polarization? There will be those who participate in the highly rewarding high-tech economy as skilled technicians, as owners, or as people who reap vast earnings from mass markets. And there will be the great mass of other people, in comparatively vast supply, who compete with each other, with foreign labor, and increasingly with non-labor-intensive technology for the supporting roles. Science and technology may under those circumstances raise the overall level of life, but the differences in income and wealth will be immense.

What we need to realize is that many societies have accepted vast inequality as normal. In the eighteenth century, classical liberals did not accept it when they saw in the ancien regime an hereditary inequality that had no market justification. They knew that that inequality was of a sort antithetical to liberty. Later, however, in the debates between classical liberalism and socialism since the French Revolution, classical liberals had good reason to defend a fair amount of "inequality" as both the motive-power and by-product of a competitive market system. They have seen this market-based "inequality" as a hallmark of freedom as against the demands for an egalitarian leveling. But what is essential now is for the proponents of individual liberty to see that the inequalities of the high-tech future will not be of the same kind. Not only can major inequalities calcify into the sort of class system that classical liberals earlier knew to be inimical to a free society, but the inequality will find little legitimacy based on the theory of property, earnings and contract that has been fundamental to classical liberalism. When, for example, Mike Tyson made $30 million dollars (before it was reduced by a fine of $3 million) for his part in the infamous ear-biting fight with Evander Holyfield, how much of that was "due to his own efforts"? Earnings at that level were the product of a worldwide marketing mechanism made possible by advanced communications. Did Tyson create that? Certainly not. Did anyone else in particular? No. It was a product of the accretion of vast scientific-technical-entrepreneurial-even governmental effort by countless people. Because of that accretion, Tyson was, in effect, walking into a field and "mixing his labor" with orchards overhanging with fruit, with bushes loaded with berries, with venison waiting patiently to be taken. To be sure, his own labor as a prizefighter was important to the mass-marketing as the product to be packaged, but it was just a small part. Under such circumstances in which the great mechanism for affluence is much more than ever before an accumulation of accomplishments from those who have gone before, if a people begin to divide into those who are fabulously-rich and a great mass of second-class citizens, are the classical liberals of the future going to be true to their own beliefs if they find it sufficient simply to say "they all earned their place"? To say that will be to cling to what has been true in the past, while at the same time being untrue to the essential purposes of their own philosophy. Classical liberalism will have been transformed into what socialists have so long argued erroneously that it has been, a special-pleading rationale for the rich. One of the purposes of this book will be to persuade those who cherish individual liberty that they will be truer to their own philosophy if they see that there are limits to polarization. This means that "the market" and "contracts entered into within the market," cannot under the coming circumstances be considered the sole criterion for what ought to be.

By this time, it may be apparent why this dialogue will interest not just pro-market thinkers but people of all persuasions. Those who see the market as harsh and want "a more compassionate society" will find much of my analysis congenial. Most of the specific points raised by present-day liberal and socialist thought will, in fact, be satisfied by a "shared market economy."

The question will be how much they desire to share common ground with classical liberals such as myself in wanting to constrain the potential concentration of governmental power that a major on-going redistributionist program will entail.

For all those who are serious about making the "mixed economy" or "social democracy" humane, respectful of individuals and genuinely participative, this will be an invitation for the ideological divisions of the past two centuries to come to an end. Those who have held widely differing viewpoints can come to share common ground.

There is a major stumbling-block which we need to face honestly. During the past thirty years, I have devoted much attention in my writing to a phenomenon called "the alienation of the intellectual" that has been one of the principal forces in modern civilization since Rousseau in the mid-eighteenth century. Especially since the beginning of the Romantic movement in the early nineteenth century, the predominant literary, artistic and professorial culture (to which there have been many individual exceptions) has been deeply disaffected with the mainstream "bourgeois" (i.e., middle class, commercial) culture. Socialist thought came to be championed by this alienated subculture, in fact, as its members sought out, in succession, every unassimilated or disaffected group as allies in the ideological, political struggle with the commercial middle class and sought to mold an ideology that would appeal to those groups. Much of the social-political history of the past two hundred years has reflected this bitter division, and the major systems of thought about society and politics have systematized the viewpoints of the respective antagonists.

There have been several reasons for this alienation. I believe they go much deeper than just the complaints the Left has found to make against a market economy. I analyzed several causes in detail in my book Understanding the Modern Predicament. The objections to capitalism certainly were one of them. To the extent those complaints have been a significant cause of the disaffection, a move into a common outlook based around a "shared market economy" should cause the alienation to die away. If that happens, we will move into a new phase of history for a reason additional to those we have already mentioned. It will not be the end of conflict, since human beings will still retain their mixed nature from which power and avarice will almost certainly never disappear. But the basis will exist for a reconciliation of many of the antagonisms the world has known for several generations.

It is an open question, however, whether the alienation will actually wither away, because other causes are at work. During the Communist years in eastern Europe, two social analysts, Konrad and Szelenyi, wrote a book entitled Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power. That very name raises the question: Is there a yearning by "intellectuals" for power that will continue even into a new, much more egalitarian, age? I would ask each of my readers who may identify with the angry artistic and literary culture to ask himself, probing deeply into the bottom of his soul, just how he feels about that. (Women readers are included in this, of course. The masculine pronoun in this case is meant in the traditional sense as a general pronoun not specifying sex.) Fundamentally, there will be conflict, not reconciliation, between those who want an egalitarian society as a vehicle for power and those who want it to serve individual liberty. However, since I am discussing how this book will speak to people of varying persuasions, I should speak even to those who see themselves as future antagonists. They may find it a good idea to follow my ideas to their conclusion, if for no other reason than to "know the enemy." If they are persuaded along the way, so much the better.

Our discussions here should also be of interest to peoples everywhere around the world. Much of the time I will be talking from the perspective of someone in an advanced economy, but it will be apparent that our subject is much broader than that. The onrushing changes in the world economy offer unbelievable promise to--and at the same time profoundly threaten--peoples everywhere.

A realistic given should be this: that it simply will not be possible for the industrialized nations to support the burgeoning billions in the world population even with the new technology. The world population is just too vast and deep an ocean, so to speak, for that. Nor would those billions' self-respect as individuals and in the context of their respective cultures necessarily welcome that support even if it were possible. Since "the market" will simultaneously offer both utopia and displacement--with the latter removing the possibility of total reliance on the market--, political action will be essential. Such action will be vital if the benefits of the coming technology are to be realized by entire peoples, if vast suffering and anti-civilizational revolutionary chaos are to be prevented, and if (for its own sake and in support of both these purposes) there is to be assurance that everybody in a given society will share in the means of life. And what will this action call for? In the advanced economies where innovation and continuing production are predictable based on what already exists, a "shared market economy" will be a natural solution. But in a country like Pakistan, say, whose economy is almost entirely agricultural, the very real question arises about how it is to have any economy at all in a world where indoor farm-factories come to undercut outdoor farmers everywhere. In much of the world, the societies may be forced to operate on the old socialist prescription "production for use, not for profit." Let's express it bluntly: If government or non-profit institutions use the technology directly to produce and to distribute, that will be "socialism" per se. This book will be of potential value in pointing to the dangers such socialism poses in light of Lord Acton's axiom that "power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." It will be for erstwhile non-socialists (and hopefully socialists themselves) to ask: What will be the means that can be used to restrain that power? How can we hope to prevent those dangers?

The peoples of the advanced economies will have a profound self-interest in the well-being of the other peoples of the world. Concern for those peoples will be far removed from a naive "do-goodism." Hundreds of millions--in fact, billions--of displaced people will be bitter and desperate adversaries if displacement becomes the primary reality for them. In an age of terrorism and of potential nuclear, chemical and biological warfare, it will be a disaster for everybody if hatred looms so large. Or by physical migration those billions will "swamp out" the richer nations, such as is portrayed in Jean Raspail's haunting novel The Camp of the Saints.

These needs, both compassionate and self-interested, will make essential a sharing of technology, as it is developed, all over the world. The advanced economies can't support the other peoples, but they will have a way vitally to assist those peoples in gaining the means to support themselves.

It is conceivable that the tendency toward a worldwide mixing of cultures and diminution of national sovereignties will continue. The ever-growing ease of communication, transportation and travel will push toward that. But the necessity of political solutions by whatever institutions are politically viable points in another direction. In today's world those institutions are the nation-states. A "world government," given the present level of civilization in a world whose evolution has taken it only so far as to the twilight between civilization and barbarism (a theme of my book Understanding the Modern Predicament), would portend disaster.

If the nation-state is to be the main center for addressing the needs of peoples under the coming circumstances, and if affluence is achievable, a by-product will be that it should become possible for peoples to retain their respective cultures, cultivating the local texture of life that adds so much to the richness of human experience, if that is their desire. This should be true for peoples everywhere. It will be especially meaningful for the Islamic countries and for the West, but it will also be important for any society with a culture its people value. With both Islam and the West, their future existence is now threatened, given the trends of the past. The peoples of the West in particular have even been losing the will to survive. This is most apparent in the existentially-redefining extent of immigration they have for several years been permitting.

Not only will national entities be called upon to see to it that their peoples enjoy benefit rather than suffer calamity from the coming age's technology, they will also be able to create the framework for modes of life that the people may choose, even though the relentless cost-cutting of the market would not itself allow them. Factory farms, say, may turn out the foodstuffs needed, but millions may choose to live a rural existence pursuing what we might consider "hobbyist" farming. When scarcity has ceased to be the central economic fact and there is a mechanism for assuring everyone's participation in the output of the economy, there can be a blossoming of freely-chosen ways of living.

No doubt there will be differences of opinion about the desirability of survival for any given culture--and that can be a source of conflict. (That it can be so may seem strange, since the right of any people to retain their culture may seem a given; it is, however, something that is very much "at issue" by the end of the twentieth century for Europe and the United States. I have been on panel discussions with "minority activists" who would take great offense at the barest suggestion of perpetuating Euro-American culture.)

The erosion of European and American identity has to a large extent come, however, from policies that have reflected the attitudes of the alienated intellectual subculture. That subculture presently has controlling voice in the media and major institutions, dictates what is "politically correct," and champions minorities of every kind as against the mainstream population. Again, if that alienation ceases to exist, or even moderates considerably, the search for unassimilated allies may disappear and the whole "attack on the West" may evaporate. We simply don't know what will happen. I can at least tell readers, in advance, my own preference: as someone who cherishes the United States and sees enormous value in the heritage the United States has received from Europe, I think it is imperative that the opportunity be taken to reaffirm the recognizable existence and cultural identity of the nations with a European heritage. I can only hope that most readers will join me in this. If thought through seriously, it should serve non-Europeans' interest as well as Europeans and those of European extraction. It is not something that even the peoples of other continents should have a quarrel with, if they are able meaningfully to affirm their own cultures in their own home countries. Then we will truly be in a world with the richness of "multiculturalism" in its best sense.

The issues I have just mentioned illustrate that this book will not be without its provocative elements, even in addition to those that were originally so apparent. I am going to make this an honest book, avoiding nothing among the major questions as I see them. Those who read only things with which they already agree are warned: quit now! The rest will want to join me in a dialogue of the utmost importance and, I hope, fascination.

This introductory chapter has mostly been devoted to an overview of the main topics that will be discussed later. Before we conclude, let us consider a few preliminaries:

1. After my initial article on this subject appeared in the fall of 1996, I sent copies to about 80 friends, mostly professors, writers and think-tank scholars, around the United States, asking for comment. There were many excellent replies.

Some of these warned against trying to see too far ahead and over-reacting. One of the correspondents, W. Edward Chynoweth, a man of learning and Burkean conservative texture, impressed on me the risks of theorizing about social changes before they occur. Can we doubt that he was right when he warned that "there is a thin line between wise foresight and senseless futurism"? Another friend. Bob Clack, wrote that "the predictions of the great minds such as Malthus and H. G. Wells have been spectacularly wrong. Why then should we start believing them now?"[2] It is not always possible to tell the difference between foresight and foolishness before years go by and hindsight provides illumination. Chynoweth was especially concerned that groundless predictions can fuel "overzealous, premature changes, based on mere speculation." He also raised a fundamental point about the extent to which we are even capable of seeing ahead: "When one reflects on history's usual litany of seminal inventions--gunpowder, the printing press, the airplane, the moonshot, wine, etc.--doesn't it seem as if we still are trying to assimilate all the ramifications? Therefore, isn't it beyond our capacities to plan ahead to accommodate the myriad aftereffects of developments still embryonic? Wouldn't it possibly even be a mistake to do so?"[3]

I agree with each of these points. I have written similar cautions recently about the "global warming" scare, in the name of which vast sums are being spent but which so far has continued to be refuted by the best scientific evidence such as the satellite temperature readings. And yet I persist with this book. Why? Because it seems to me that the risks are similar to those someone takes in investing in the stock market. Those are certainly right who warn that the market may fall, or even that another depression might strike. What is being overlooked is that there is perhaps an even greater possibility of inflation--just as much a risk to the value of ones wealth as a fall in the market--, and that one cannot avoid risk by not budging. Applied to our subject in this book, there is clearly the risk that the changes now being predicted in the world economy will not occur, or that they will not have the effects we foresee for them. If in the future the market economy continues to pump out goods and services and spur innovation, all without major dislocations and polarization, an analysis based on dislocations will, depending on how it is perceived, amount to a humiliating embarrassment. A future generation may look back on the analysis and on the policies it engendered as examples of incredible folly. On the other hand, I am convinced that if the changes occur and have anything like the effects they would seem to portend, a failure to begin to reorient our thinking now, and to follow through with appropriate policies as events come to indicate their need, will spell the doom not just of market theory, but of the entire set of ideas that have composed the principles and values of a free society. So I would seem to disagree, at least in emphasis, with such friends as I have just quoted. One such friend is Angus MacDonald, who wrote that "we should continue along the present path until facts prove us wrong."[4] Patrick Buchanan has an apt quote from Lord Melbourne that serves as a counter-weight to their admonitions: "Nothing that the wise men promised has happened, and everything the damned fools said would happen has come to pass!"[5]

Fortunately, the policy implications I will suggest (mostly to create a "shared market economy") are not radical in the sense that they will undermine the existing market-centered world economic system. Even if we begin to think about them now, they will not have to be implemented until the need for them becomes obvious.

So after a balancing of risks I prefer getting the discussion started. The warnings from Chynoweth, Clack and MacDonald suggest another feature, however, well worth considering. Is it necessary to understand our discussion as being based on dogmatic assertions that "this or that is certain to happen"? When I say, as I did a few paragraphs ago, that "a vast displacement...is certain to occur in the less developed countries," what ought to be understood by such a statement? I will hardly be able to avoid predictions as I talk about the forces and their implications, unless I weaken the analysis and load each statement with qualifications about the uncertainties of life. Let us very properly agree, right here at the beginning, that no one of us is omniscient, that we are feeling our way, and that all predictions are colored by uncertainty. As Richard Lacayo said recently in Time magazine, "The first rule of forecasting should be that the unforeseen keeps making the future unforeseeable."[6]

So armed, we can perhaps resolve that to the best of our ability we will wait to "take action" only with prudence and wisdom. Action can wait until after events have clarified its necessity. (In making this resolution, we need to keep in mind that we may not see action as necessary even when it comes to be needed unless we are intellectually prepared to see the necessity. The thought of that spurs me on. I do not want us justifying enormities just because we are looking at them with ideological blinders on.)

2. Even though this Introduction has given an overview of where we are going, there is much it has not been able to say. Our subject is a complex whole, which we have to take a piece at a time. This demands the reader's patience, since a reader may at least subconsciously wish that all the nuances could be made clear simultaneously.

Repetition ought not to be a problem. The book as a whole will go into detail about what I've already mentioned, but each part will have its fresh aspect. In this Introduction, we have barely scratched the surface.