The Tale of the Serf

I was just reminded of an old favorite blog post, Brad DeLong’s 2004 Tale of the Serf, a riposte to glibertarians. I’m posting it entire here, because DeLong’s website is so screwy that one can only see it in the Internet Archive.

Here are two situations:

• In the first, you are a free and independent peasant living in a village. Your field is your own. Your crops are you own. After working, you huddle before the fire in your peasant hut until you fall asleep. A smallpox epidemic comes. You, your spouse and your children all die.
• In the second, you are a peasant living in a village. Once a year a thug with a spear — Sir Pierre de Bois-Guilbert, say — comes and takes 10% of your crop. He uses his takings to live well in the castle up on the hill. He also employs a troubadour who comes and entertains the peasants nightly in the village square, singing, juggling, and telling stories. He also employs chirurgeons who undertake research into the balance of the four humours. One day, the chirurgeons come with their knives: they cut the arms of you and your family, and insert some cowpox-infested tissue. When the smallpox epidemic comes, you and your family (and the other families in the village) survive.

In which situation are you “freer”? Do you really care whether you are “freer”?

It is worth contextualizing DeLong as an economist well known as one of the chief proponents of liberal-neoliberalism as practiced by the Democratic Party during the Clinton-through-Obama era … and he also offered a famous 2019 admission of the limitations of that movement:

⋯ I think it is fair to say that the already-broken American political public sphere has become significantly more broken since November 8, 2016. On the center and to the left, those like me in what used to proudly call itself the Rubin Wing of the Democratic Party—so-called after former Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin, and consisting of those of us hoping to use market means to social democratic ends in bipartisan coalition with Republicans seeking technocratic win-wins—have passed the baton to our left. Over the past 25 years, we failed to attract Republican coalition partners, we failed to energize our own base, and we failed to produce enough large-scale obvious policy wins to cement the center into a durable governing coalition.

We blame cynical Republican politicians. We blame corrupt and craven media bosses and princelings. We are right to blame them. But shared responsibility is not diminished responsibility: We ourselves cannot escape all blame. And so the baton rightly passes to our colleagues on our left.

We are still here, but it is not our time to lead.