“Chris Blattman”:http://chrisblattman.com/2009/12/08/the-randomized-evaluation/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+chrisblattman+%28Chris+Blattman%29&utm_content=Google+Reader promises us a randomized evaluation of Marx v. Smith.
That is Marx’s rather pessimistic view of wage labor. It is from 1891, in Wage Labor and Capital his precursor to Das Kapital. Marxists ever since fear wage labor means earnings are lost, enslavement to capital emerges, and with it a loss in humanity. There are plenty of unsavory factories to worry about in the world. But the Marxist view is difficult to reconcile with the thousands of Africans that line up for the chance at a factory job (when they’re available). A good number of people – maybe most – already farm or have small businesses…Another view is that farming and small business are hard work, risky, unrewarding, and unpleasant. Factories give a steady wage and less risk, at possibly monotonous tasks. But at what cost? Ill health? Or the noble reproductive power lost?
Chris proposes to test to see what the effects of randomized assignment of factory jobs are on applicants’ lives. That sounds like a very interesting project. But the framing is all wrong. This is one of those areas where Marx and Smith are in complete agreement. Marx may say that factory work deadens workers’ creative powers (Smith, as it happens, expresses very similar worries in _The Wealth of Nations_ ). But Marx is insistent that factory work is _much, much better_ than life as a peasant and that capitalism beats the hell out of feudalism. From Marx and Engels’ “Communist Manifesto:”:http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01.htm
bq. The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life.
The “idiocy of rural life” is a nice, punchy description of the conditions that Chris’s newly minted factory workers are likely trying to escape from. There are plenty of leftwing (and rightwing) writers out there who idealize the conditions of peasant farmers, but Marx isn’t one of them. “Tolstoy v. Smith” may work better as a project title, although it is admittedly not as enticing-sounding.