Late 20th-century America was supremely efficient at growing food; that was why it had hardly any farmers.
No, late 20th century America was supremely efficient at enclosure and monopoly. The absence of farmers was a side-effect of economic fascism, and not because a diversity of medium-sized farms is inherently any less efficient than Big Agro.
Likewise with intellectual activity, Big Media is reinventing itself through enclosed spaces like MySpace and YouTube, where content is crowd sourced for free and the owners of the space sharecrop it to convert it into income.
I don't think Krugma understands that markets don't just aim to dominate financial activity, but all activity. In a perfect neoliberal world it would be impossible to set policy without relying on a mainstream economic intellectual frame. In fact it would be impossible to do anything at all without assuming that frame.
So the enclosures extend into intellectual and creative work. Work which doesn't use the mainstream economic frame disappears or becomes inaccessible.
Krugman seems to think this is regrettable but accidental. I agree it's regrettable. I don't think it's accidental. I don't think there's a conspiracy, but neoliberalism is a coherent intellectual movement and it does try to influence politics, business and academia.
If it's allowed free reign, independent scientists and artists will become as rare as independent farmers.
In fact it would be impossible to do anything at all without assuming that frame.
Capital is the central organizing principal of our society and all things have a price, regardless of whether that price measures value in any subjectively meaningful sense. Capital is to our social and political organization as gravity is to our physical world. This has come to be written into the structure of our social fabric so that questioning it makes one seem crazy. As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
He's using some of the same arguments I was planning to diary soon, which is interesting, I guess, because it suggests the obvious flaws are obvious enough to be significant points of weakness in the theocratic model.
But the way in which we organize our lives, derive our incomes, and understand our social relationships very definitely is an ongoing social construct and it has been constructed to the benefit of the few who could see what was happening and shape that process. Shakespear understood this when he wrote: "Nothing is but that thinking makes it so." Our problem is that we inhabit a reality that has been defined in terms that are invidious to the vast majority of us and most of us have been convinced that this "reality" just is. The religious would have us believe that this is how God made the world. We can do better. As the Dutch said while fighting the Spanish: "It is not necessary to have hope in order to persevere."
