If you haven't already heard of Theodore Dalrymple (pictured right), it's time you did. Theodore Dalrymple is the pen name of Anthony Daniels, a retired British psychiatrist and physician, who spent much of his time in practice in prisons in close contact with the "underclass," as he calls many of the people he has encountered who seem stuck at the bottom of society. Appropriately enough, he has gained fame as an essayist writing about societal dysfunction. His essays don't always necessarily make for sunny, upbeat reading (though they are always engagingly written), but they do call attention to crucial problems destroying the lives of a surprisingly large segment of the population. His diagnosis is uncomfortable for anyone accustomed to modern debates about human character that avoid questions of right and wrong and the freedom of the will, because his single-most important concern is individual moral responsibility. Society cannot function if individuals are too lazy to find out what is right and to do it. (For instance, he refutes the claim that drug addicts cannot choose to stop.)All of this is by way of introduction to a recent (longish) essay of his which appeared in City Journal: "Inflation's Moral Hazard." In this piece Dalrymple discusses what appears to be a less criminal topic--the danger of inflation to the character of a people. After opening with an anecdotal reflection on the prevalence of inflation in the contemporary economy, he concludes:
But asset inflation—ultimately, the debasement of the currency—as the principal source of wealth corrodes the character of people. It not only undermines the traditional bourgeois virtues but makes them ridiculous and even reverses them. Prudence becomes imprudence, thrift becomes improvidence, sobriety becomes mean-spiritedness, modesty becomes lack of ambition, self-control becomes betrayal of the inner self, patience becomes lack of foresight, steadiness becomes inflexibility: all that was wisdom becomes foolishness. And circumstances force almost everyone to join in the dance.
The ultimate danger of inflation, though, lies in its tendency to discourage ordinary people from relying on their own efforts to lead a simple life, and instead encourage them to rely on the government for their livelihood. Inflation, in short, makes individual moral responsibility very difficult to achieve.
And what are the consequences of this lack of individual moral responsibility? Economists and social theorists (Dalrymple among them) may debate the exact consequences in this life, but at least for Dante the eternal consequence was quite clear: Circle 8, Bolgia 10 of Hell.
Photo credit: The Brussels Journal
8 comments:
I took a look at his refutation of drug addiction, and I have to say that it's marvelously well-informed and articulate. But still, it's a veritable dung-heap of ignorance. I don't know how someone with so much field research and experience can gloss over so many complexities of psychology and addiction, unless it's to make some kind of point about psychology in itself. I mean, is it a practiced ignorance? I find his attitude not so much offensive as just bizarre.
PS Apologies for not responding to the central post itself, though the same murky methodology exists there as well.
Um, could you elaborate on the dung-heap a little? I think you're right that he's trying to make a bigger point about psychology itself, at least the "sub-Freudian buried-treasure conception of psychology."
I know that in the article about drug addiction he does acknowledge that withdrawal from certain substances (he mentions alcohol) can be difficult because of the physical dangers; he just denies that withdrawing from opiates is as dangerous as usually supposed. However, I think that the editor's blurb ("to kick an addiction, you just need will power") overstates Dalrymple's own position.
The rhetoric of the article seems antagonistic, fixated on placing blame on one party and accusing the other of placing blame on the other. He makes blanket statements about large and diverse groups of people. Addicts are addicted for many reasons, and the treatments for addiction are even more various. Each case is highly individual, and while, yes, the physiological element of addiction is manageable and predictable, the psychological predilections that allow the addiction to prosper are much less obvious. While what he writes may be valid for some of the cases, his notions do not reflect everyone's experience and certainly not the majority.
I really have to wonder what he hoped to accomplish here. His interest is clearly not in the interest of the patients, nor is it in the enlightenment of his readers. If either of those ends were of value to him, he would have attempted to address the very messy realities of addicts and their psyches. Instead, we get a clean, misleading gloss of tens of millions of lives, designed to lead readers to an oversimplified conclusion.
So what we get, in the end, is a piece designed to prey not only on our mistrust (sometimes well-deserved) of the medical industry, but also to prey on common misunderstandings about psychology. All of this, I can only guess, is to free us from our nagging sympathies for our fellow human beings while disguising it as fulfilling our moral responsibilities.
...which, come to think of it, is pretty damned irresponsible in itself.
I'm not sure I agree with the claim that "asset inflation — ultimately, the debasement of the currency — [is] the principal source of wealth" in our society. One might argue that speculation is fast becoming a major source of wealth (though the financial turmoil of the last year has put an end to much of that).
Inflation typically runs a tad below the going rate of interest on a savings account. How many people simply live off their interest? Moreover, if one was able to do so, and chose to do so, instead of gambling such a fortune in potentially more lucrative ventures, I'm hard pressed to see how that constitutes imprudence or un-thrift.
Moreover, I don't see how this "encourage[s] [people] to rely on the government for their livelihood."
I only skimmed the article, so perhaps there's something I missed. But what I saw was hardly a convincing case. "I remember an eminent professor’s telling me, with a barely concealed exultation, that he was making nearly $1,000 per day, week after week, merely by owning a very large house in a fashionable area: an amount that, needless to say, dwarfed any savings he might salt away from his salary." That's not inflation. It's either speculation, which is baseless and dangerous to society as a whole. Or it's a canny investment, realizing that legitimate demand for housing in a given region is likely to go up in the future, and moving there first.
Perhaps the problem is simply one of terms, that he means something much broader by "inflation" than I do. I agree with him that there are a lot of moral hazards in the way people conduct business these days. And tightening the money supply would do much to end many of those. But the more specific term for that is "credit". Easy credit is the moral hazard. But credit is only one factor leading to inflation. (And, in fact, I think some eras of greatest inflation, such as the 1970s, had rather little to do with credit, though I don't claim to be an economist.)
Aaron,
You're right about the article conflating easy credit and inflation, which are distinct phenomena. The question today, though, is: How distinct are inflation and easy credit at a time when government monetary and fiscal policy plays such a large role in the economy, when the government guarantees a large number of loans, etc.?
You're also probably right that he overstates his point when he says that inflation is the principal source of wealth. But, his main point really is that much of what we would call speculation (like the rich professor) is not as crazy as it seems when you take the rate of inflation into account. Inflation gives an incentive for speculation.
Mike,
Rather than saying that the rhetoric of the article is "antagonistic," I would say that he's trying to debunk some erroneous assumptions and to speak some unpleasant truths. So, he's not trying to free us of our sympathies for our fellow human beings; instead, he's trying to get us to see that much of the sympathy we direct toward others is really aimed at assuaging our own feelings rather than actually helping others.
I would also disagree with your contention that he's not interested in his patients. I suspect that what you thought was lack of interest is really frustration.
0. His conflation of asset appreciation (speculative or otherwise) and inflation (i.e., increase in the price level) leads me to wonder how much stock I should put in his thesis.
1. Asset appreciation can reduce one's incentives to save. However, not all such appreciation is speculative or ill-founded.
2. The pre-1913 halcyon days of "sound money" were hardly free of financial panics or speculation. The prospect of inflation may induce speculation...or it may simply lead more conservative investors to put their $ in TIPS & the like.
3. Though I haven't done a statistical analysis, a reduction in the US savings rate doesn't appear to correlate w/ high inflation. See here:
http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2009/10/august-pce-and-saving-rate.html
For what it's worth, here's an interesting passage I came across today in Gerald P. O'Driscoll, Jr., "The Financial Crisis: Origins and Consequences," in The Intercollegiate Review, Fall 2009, p. 4:
"From November 2001 to December 2004 the Fed funds rate was at or below 2 percent. From June 2003 to June 2004 the rate remained at 1 percent. For much of this period, real (inflation-adjusted) short-term rates of interest were negative. In other words, amounts of money to be repaid in the future would be worth less than what was borrowed due to inflation. It literally paid to borrow money, especially to finance an appreciating asset like residential housing in overheated markets in California, Nevada, Arizona, and Florida."
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