Economic Growth in Mortal Combat with Morality?

Over at everyone’s favorite bastion of devoted liberalism, The American Prospect, Garance Franke-Ruta has a new essay about trends in American culture and how they’ve affected the country’s voting and value. The well-written essay, which is worth reading in its entirety, contains a wealth of interesting analysis and some suspiciously familiar ideas about the American "values matrix," but for now I want to focus on a single idea from the introduction.

American voters have taken shelter under the various wings of conservative traditionalism because there has been no one on the Democratic side in recent years to defend traditional, sensible middle-class values against the onslaught of the new nihilistic, macho, libertarian lawlessness unleashed by an economy that pits every man against his fellows.

And, suggesting that the libertarian-economy-equals-declining-social-mores idea isn’t a purely leftist phenomenon, Ross Douhat also mentions this notion in passing in his response to the piece.

A more libertarian economy does have something to do with the breakdown of "sensible middle-class values" over the last few decades, even if conservatives are sometimes loath to admit it.

I suspect this is a somewhat prevalent notion in a lot of circles, and even many conservatives have been guilted into feeling as thought they have to choose between economic freedom and moral rectitude. In so many cases, whether it’s the environment or cultural values, the left has convinced the public—even many conservatives—that there’s a sliding scale between righteousness and economic growth, and that, consequently, the job of government is to set policies that try to balance between the two allegedly opposite ends.

This is clearly flawed in too many ways to go into here, but one recent heavyweight entry into this debate that needs to be noted is the book The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, by Harvard Economics Chairman Benjamin Friedman. The book’s main argument, as laid out in a recent presentation at a joint AEI-Brookings event, is that, contrary to prevailing ideas like Franke-Ruta’s, economic growth actual produces a society of sounder morals. Friedman singles out four specific developments that occur in response to stronger economies: 1) Provision of opportunity 2) Tolerance – racial, religious, and otherwise 3) Greater willingness and ability to provide for the disadvantaged and 4) Strengthening of public institutions. His point is that, while so many people try to place economic growth and moral correctness at opposite ends of the spectrum, the two are really one in the same. And, of course, economic growth happens best in exactly the sort of libertarian, free-market economy that Franke-Ruta says erodes traditional values. The correlation simply isn’t there.

The other problem with this idea is that many of the community values that people pine over were really just indications of poverty and poor living conditions. I hear wistful comments about the days when everyone knew each other’s names and other such nonsense, but they forget what sorts of dire situations those communities were in. It’s true, of course, that in pre-industrial America and in the wilds of today’s third world countries, it may have been (or may be) more likely that communities would come together to, say, build houses or take care of crops. But would anyone actually say these technologically-lacking, generally resource-poor communities were better off?

Comments like these come from folks who would love to return to the idealized small town communal atmosphere of Fiddler on the Roof—and in doing so they forget that even in its idealized musical form, little Anatevka was poor, hungry and oppressed. These Luddite, primitivist nostalgia trips forget that technological development fueled by economic growth has eliminated massive amounts of human poverty, hunger and suffering—surely that’s better, in the end, than knowing the name of the butcher.