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Thanks to a reader for the heads-up on the continued shift in how we talk about creativity - moving to understanding the creative force as an economic force, and addressing creative issues from an economic angle so government and society think it’s worthwhile to pay attention to.

Here in British Columbia, where I live, they’re holding conferences about it, describing creativity as “a new and dynamic business sector.” A main objective is “to sensitize the creative sector to the contribution of the creative economy to job creation and overall economic growth.”

And so it goes.

A few weeks ago, I came across a book in my public library called Parenting, Inc., which is about the commercialization of parenting. The title reminded me of another Inc-book that ended up in the bibliography of Monoculture, called Culture, Inc, which broadly, was about the commercialization of culture.

That started me wondering just how many Inc. books there are, which gives you some kind of idea of just how many things have been commercialized, or commoditized, or changed from their original in some way to become more market-oriented.

So I did a quick search on Amazon.

And this is what I found.

• Self Help, Inc.
• Propaganda, Inc.
• Power, Inc.
• India, Inc.
• Identity Theft, Inc.
• Downtown, Inc.
• Earth, Inc.
• Sports, Inc.
• CIA, Inc.
• Martha, Inc.
• Me, Inc.
• Prison, Inc.
• Search Engine Marketing, Inc.
• Brides, Inc.
• University, Inc.
• Escape from Church, Inc.
• Future, Inc.
• Holy War, Inc.
• Family, Inc.
• You, Inc.
• Creative, Inc.
• Dog, Inc.
• Life, Inc.
• Outlaws, Inc.
• Craft, Inc.
• China, Inc.
• Fun, Inc.
• Mission, Inc.
• Organic, Inc.
• Pink Ribbons, Inc.
• Arts, Inc.
• Creativity, Inc.
• Human Rights, Inc.
• Barack, Inc.
• Activism, Inc.
• Rome, Inc.
• Black Power, Inc.
• Your Idea, Inc.
• Generations, Inc.
• Militainment, Inc.
• USA, Inc.
• Bud, Inc.
• Another Food, INc.
• Pot, Inc.
• Japan, Inc.
• Social Innovation, Inc.
• Immigrant, Inc.
• Higher Education, Inc.
• Lincoln, Inc.
• Freedom, Inc.

From today’s National Post, one of Canada’s big newspapers: two competing stories about what libraries are about.

Here’s one side:

The Toronto Public Library Board is seriously considering having the TPL become the first major library system in Canada or the U.S. to slather itself in advertising. As per a report from their staff, possible vehicles for advertising may include: “In-branch posters and brochure displays; Online text and display ads on the Library’s website; Networked computer screens including the Library’s in-branch wireless network, public computers and LCD screens; The Library’s truck fleet, excluding the Bookmobiles.” But first, they’re going to begin by selling ads on the backs of due-date slips.

And the other side:

It’s not hard to imagine how advertising in libraries could be tacky and annoying, but it’s equally possible to imagine a system being in place that raises some modest amount of money for the library system and stops short of pasting flyers for Vincenzeo’s Pizza Joint over pages of literary classics. I take the following position — extra revenue is good. Not good at any price (so to speak), but all things being equal, good. Every buck the library can raise for itself is another buck it has, and another buck the city has free to devote to another worthy cause. And I make the following prediction — the overwhelming majority of people won’t be any more bothered by an ad on their due-date slip than they are any of the other places they see advertising.

(This discussion is happening because city council is talking about privatizing Toronto’s public library system - one of the busiest in North America. Librarians are talking about work stoppages, and apparently LSSI, the big private library management company that is eyeing Toronto’s libraries, has hired lobbyists with ties to Toronto mayor Rob Ford. Who, incidentally, said he wouldn’t know Margaret Atwood, one of his better known constituents, if he passed her on the street.)

One of the areas in which the economic story and its assumptions of efficiency, productivity, scales of economy, individualism, etc. are particularly well-documented is in food production.

Watch the food documentary FRESH if you get a chance for a good explanation of what’s happening to what’s on our plates in the name of the economic story.

I was in the doctor’s office today, waiting with a sleeping baby for his four-month checkup, and came across an interesting article in the March 2012 issue of Canadian Family.

The article was about Canada’s lack of a national child-care program, where “lack” means we’re tied with Ireland for last place out of 24 economically advanced countries in early childhood education and care, according to a 2008 UN report called The Child Care Transition.

What’s interesting is that in Canada, child care is thought of as a private individual problem, and not a structural one. (That assumption represents a basic assumption of the economic story, of course, where people are understood primarily as individuals and not as group members with group responsibilities.) That means that some people argue that those who decided to have children are the ones who ought to pay for them.

Nancy Folbre, a nonmarket economist who looks at work that isn’t directly paid for and so is hard to price, is the author of The Invisible Heart: Economics and Family Values. She points out that people used to raise children who then went to work for the family. In that kind of situation, the “private problem” of child care at least stays in the family - meaning that the time and effort you put into raising your children has a chance to come back to you, so to speak.

But today, Folbre says, we tend to raise children who grow up and go to work for someone else. She says, “Parents subsidized capitalists, producing workers that employers could hire without paying the actual cost of producing and training them.”

The author of the magazine piece, Ann Douglas, argues that child care is a social responsibility, like education and health care, because society has a vested interest in quality care.

So two things -

First, given that our kids are going to grow up to become solid members of society (or not) and good contributors in that society (or not), even if you think the issue of child care should be handled privately, the issue will eventually become societal. If you create low quality child care that is damaging to the child, those “private” problems will eventually become societal problems as the child moves from the family out into the world. And by then it’s probably a tremendous amount of work to do much about it.

And second, lest we still think that fields like education are still perceived as social goods, the argument that public goods are actually private goods is also happening in those arenas. There, the argument underlying the withdrawal of government support is that those who benefit from education personally should pay for it personally, which sees dwindling government dollars, deregulation of professional programs like law and medicine, rising tuition rates, and greater access to student debt (personal debt) to pay for the whole thing. And that goes against the idea we once had that educated citizens are good for our society as a whole, which is why we once supported education with public tax dollars to begin with.

So - what we’re really up against with the child care policy debate is what we’re up against with the education policy debate, and any number of other policy debates; namely, the larger cultural trend that sees the assumptions of the economic story taking hold across so many of our institutions and undermining our other values.

Ann’s article ends with a quote from someone who hits the crux of the problem exactly: “‘We need to ask ourselves ‘What kind of country do we want to be?’ A question like ‘What is Canada’s place in the world?’ is very much related to whether Canadian parents get good child care.”

And, I would add, that question is very much related to whether Canadians get high quality, publicly supported education, and high quality, publicly supported health care too.

I’m the author of Monoculture: How One Story is Changing Everything (Red Clover, 2011) - winner of the 2011 NCTE George Orwell Award for outstanding contributions to the critical analysis of public discourse, and one of The Atlantic’s top 11 philosophy/psychology books of 2011. 

I write about big ideas, culture, creativity, and the interaction of complex systems.

A reader asked:

“Do you think that there is there a relationship between utilitarianism and the economic monoculture? It seems to me that utilitarianism is the default ethical framework and it seems to fit well within the assumptions of the economic story.”

Well, I agree that it does seem that there’s a relationship between utilitarianism and the economic story, but I don’t think it’s the default ethical framework, even though some of its assumptions fit within the economic story.

Utilitarianism is a moral theory with a lot of variations, but in general, it’s a theory about what’s right, where the only good thing is utility, or wellbeing, and where wellbeing is pleasure, versus pain. The theory says that wellbeing should be maximized, and that’s similar to the economic story’s general emphasis on maximization. But utilitarianism and the economic story differ in what is supposed to be maximized. 

Utilitarianism says you should be neutral about whether it’s your own wellbeing that’s being maximized, compared to other people and even other sentient beings (like animals) - that it’s the greatest total welfare that should be maximized, even if your own happens not to come into it. It’s a kind of cost-benefit analysis, and that’s similar to the economic story of course. And it focuses on outcomes, rather than on process, which the economic story does too.

The economic story, though, says that individuals are interested in maximizing their own self-interest - not anybody else’s, and certainly not anybody else’s at your own expense. So that’s one big difference.

Utilitarianism assumes that wellbeing can be directly compared across different people’s lives, and the economic story gives us a way to do that by measuring wellbeing in terms of how well your preferences (whatever your preferences happen to be) are being satisfied. When no one individual can be more satisfied without someone else being less satisfied, the economic arrangement in play is said to be efficient (that’s called Pareto optimality). 

So it seems like utilitarianism and the economic story play off of each other, in part - but overall, I’d argue that utilitarianism is in fact not the default ethical framework in the monoculture. 

Why not?

Well, if you think of ethics as a system of values, I’d argue that the economic story is its own system of values. That means it’s its own ethic, and its own ethical framework. It gives us a version of human nature, a version of what the world is like, and a version of how you and the world interact. What is good and right is what is efficient and effective. The answer to the question, “What should we do?” is “Whatever is efficient.” And efficiency has a particular definition in the economic story: whatever course of action costs you the least of your (scarce) resources.

That’s it for now. I’m happy to answer reader questions, so ask away.

I’ve got a guest post up at The School of Life today, so head over there if you’re interested in reading more:

A.C. Grayling’s The Good Book: A Humanist Bible is a compilation of Western and Eastern insight from thought and literature that’s derived from over a thousand texts. It collects our best musings about what it means to be human from hundreds of authors who have come before us, down through the centuries.

As I’ve been reading, I’ve been particularly struck by the gap between the wisdom of the ages and the wisdom of the moment.

read more