On Economic & Social Reproduction

Pictured above - the picturesque Transylvanian town

of Sighişoara that was once predominantly Germans.

Most left wing social analysis presents deterministic explanations of social phenomena that present individuals and groups as passive products of their social and economic environment. While environments clearly do shape individuals, the left rarely explores the power of individuals and groups to shape and even create their environment. Or more precisely, they rarely acknowledge the power that culture plays in recreating social and economic realities in diverse environments.

A good example are the thousands of German communities that once thrived in Romania, Russia, Lithuania, Latvia and other Eastern European localities. Starting in the middle ages, German craftsmen and merchants were invited by local rulers to settle in their territories. They correctly believe that the organized and energetic Germans would serve as an industrious
middle class and foster trade and enterprise. What is most relevant to this discussion is that in diverse regions and circumstances, they created similar economic, social and physical environments. From Sighişoara (Transylvania) to Saratov (Volga region of Russia) German towns were thriving, tidy islands in otherwise economically and socially lethargic regions. I personally witnessed this phenomena while passing through Southern Chile; the towns with a German presence were noticeably cleaner and more prosperous.

Another important examples is the state of Jewish cultural life in pre-Holocaust Eastern Europe. Under the best case scenario, the state exercised benign neglect over Jewish communal life, in no way promoting education or culture in Jewish communities. And as we are all aware, there are countless examples of the state harassing and hindering Jewish communities. Yet, overall the level of education and literacy was much higher among Jews than their Christian neighbors. And although the mass of Jews were poor, Jews had a disproportionate presence in professional and cultural life. The only rational explanation is that from Łódź to Lwów and later from New York to Northbrook, Jewish culture recreated surprisingly similar social and economic outcomes.
From Istanbul (Turkey) to Esfahan (Iran) Armenians vastly surpassed their Moslem neighbors in educational and economic development, even in the face of endemic discrimination.

Unfortunately culture also allows for the re-recreation of negative social and economic phenomena. The high level of crime and social pathology in Logan Square and Humboldt Park, prompted many (mostly Puerto Rican) families to move out of the said neighborhoods. To prevent their children from "falling into the clutches of gangs," they moved them to (previously) safe and quiet northwest side neighborhoods and suburbs. But, within a few years the gangs, violence and littering that they had fled had taken hold in their new neighborhoods. And previously solid schools had begun to resemble the abysmal schools that they had fled.

This does NOT mean that the majority of new residents were bad, because all it takes is a mere 20% (or so) of new residents to maintain the pathological behavior that characterized their previous neighborhood, to recreate the phenomena that most parents had hoped to leave behind. This of course will accelerate the exodus of previous residents and even prompt some new residents to once again flee social pathology. The end result is that parts of the Cragin neighborhood have become worse than Humboldt Park.

This leads me to believe that the progressive explanation of social and economic pathology is
fundamentally flawed - individuals and communities are not simply passive victims of their environment. For good and for bad we recreate our environments. We are not only actors, but also script writers. We are not only products, but also producers. The implication of this is that the power of the interventionist state to cure the social and economic pathologies that plague individuals and communities is quite limited. Hence we have little to show for our thirty year, trillion dollar war on poverty. Equally this holds true for the disastrous war in Iraq, which shows the folly of attempting to compel other nations to become democratic and modern. At the risk of sounding like Obama, I close this post with the truism: real change has to come from within.