Wednesday, February 25, 2004

A brief comment on outsourcing:
A service economy is based on just what the words describe: servitude.
Are we to have an economy in which the working class is defined entirely by it's direct dependence on it's masters?
I know economists are not particularly interested in non economic factors, or I suppose on any sort of meaning that can not be quantified, but most people -even economists- try their best in to resist the quantification of their lives, and the determining factors of social life do not end when we step outside the door.

The social value of my neighborhood for it's inhabitants over the past hundred years was that it gave them a place of their own, a place the masters would not bother to visit, and where they could enjoy their vulgar and uneducated tastes without fear of embarrassment. Those days are gone now of course, and my neighbors are condescended to in their own home. What's the logic of outsourcing if not to continue and extend this process?

Economic logic knows and recognizes only itself. Social logic, on the other hand, knows and recognizes economic, non economic and even anti economic logic.
How can social logic be seen justly to constrain economic logic? Good question. But then you have to begin with a discussion of social logic, and economists, even those with social lives, begin somewhere else. Why? Because even at their most liberal, they start from an assumption that economic relations are the lowest objectively recognizable common denominator of human interaction. By that logic we're the moral equivalent of ants.

My neighbors are not ants, they're peasants.

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