How the Other Half Live: What Tom Friedman Is Missing

In the May 2005 issue of Harper’s Magazine, Gordon Bigelow analyzes the evangelical Christian roots of free-market economics in nineteenth century Great Britain (and eventually the United States):

Looking back two centuries at these early debates, it is clear that a pure free-market ideology can be logically sustained only if it is based in a fiery religious conviction. The contradictions involved are otherwise simply too powerful….The market is a complete solution, the market is a partial solution—both statements were affirmed at the same time. And the only way to hold together these incommensurable views is through a leap of faith.

Such contradictions made it possible to blame the poor for their poverty, even if the economy could not create enough jobs for all of them.

Today’s free-market advocates have mostly lost the explicitly Christian overtones of their early British counterparts, but you can still see near-religious fervor for market solutions to social and economic problems. Look, for example, at New York Times columnist Tom Friedman’s new bestseller, The World Is Flat.

Friedman’s unbridled enthusiasm for globalization is evident from the very first chapter. Shortly after explaining his choice of title (it has to do with the ability of countries like India to compete against the United States on a level playing field), he writes, “But I was also excited personally, because what the flattening of the world means is that we are now connecting all the knowledge centers of on the planet together into a single global network, which - if politics and terrorism do not get in the way - could usher in an amazing era of prosperity and innovation.” Sounds like Heaven on Earth, doesn’t it?

Elsewhere, Friedman compares the potential of this new era to the age of industrialization. At one point, he actually praises Karl Marx for his insightful examination of “the forces that were flattening the world during the rise of the Industrial Revolution” and because he “foreshadowed the way these same forces would keep flattening the world right up to the present day.” Like Marx, Friedman recognizes that when some people win in this new arrangement, others lose. However, workers displaced by globalization do not have names or stories in Tom Friedman’s flat world. He prefers to interview CEOs, who share his free-market religion.

An even better nineteenth century contrast than Marx for Friedman’s economic evangelism would be the American writer Jacob Riis, whose 1890 classic, How the Other Half Lives, depicted the intolerable conditions which industrialization created for the poor immigrants of New York’s slums. While the book is probably best known for its heartbreaking illustrations taken from photographs of urban denizens in their dwellings, many people forget that cramped ghetto apartment buildings were also workplaces.

“There is scarce a branch of woman's work outside of the home in which wages, long since at low-water mark, have not fallen to the point of actual starvation,” Riis wrote.

A case was brought to my notice recently by a woman doctor, whose heart as well as her life-work is with the poor, of a widow with two little children she found at work in an East Side attic, making paper-bags. Her father, she told the doctor, had made good wages at it; but she received only five cents for six hundred of the little three-cornered bags, and her fingers had to be very swift and handle the paste-brush very deftly to bring her earnings up to twenty-five and thirty cents a day. She paid four dollars a month for her room. The rest went to buy food for herself and the children.

For most Americans, people like these were invisible until Riis came along with his camera and his pen. Riis showed the faces of those hurt by industrialization , and in doing so sparked compassion in the hearts of his readers. Yet in America today, many more writers follow in the footsteps of nineteenth century economic evangelicals than they do Jacob Riis.

Nevertheless, a recent report on NBC’sDateline would have made Jacob Riis proud. It detailed working conditions at a factory making garments for Wal-Mart in Bangladesh, which included starvation wages and forced overtime in a factory with no air conditioning in what is often 90 degree heat.

As part of the report, the National Labor Committee, which assisted Dateline, brought Masuma, a 21-year-old Bangladeshi worker, to a Wal-Mart in Connecticut. There she saw the huge markup that Wal-Mart made on the fruits of her labor. While Tom Friedman might expect Masuma to thank Wal-Mart for making her job possible, she was instead very angry: “They make us work so hard, and they cheat us so much and we're human beings. I'm not an animal. I'm a human being. Of course I'm angry. This is really shocking.”

When NBC showed their research to two bargain-loving shoppers, they both said they would be willing to pay 25 or 50 cents extra for a pair of pants in order to help the workers who made their garments.

Wal-Mart, on the other hand, wants you to look at the globalization as an all or nothing proposition. "If you stop stuff from [abroad] coming into the U.S.," explained one Wal-Mart official to Time magazine recently , "it would mean $180 blue jeans. Is that what Americans want?'' This is a deliberate re-framing of the issue designed to prevent Americans from reaching a consensus on globalization that might hurt Wal-Mart’s bottom line.

There is a compromise position on globalization somewhere between complete protectionism and free market evangelism. Americans are a compassionate people, but we won’t be able to see the effects of this compassion unless more scholars and journalists tell the stories that economic evangelicals like Tom Friedman have decided to ignore.