The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

504 chapter 48Maseratis had fallen in price 1970 to 2000 the way calculation did, they wouldby 2000 have sold for twenty-three cents per car. The proletarian laborrequired to make a radio, a windowpane, or a car is disappearing toward nil.Workers on the line in manufacturing peaked at about a fifth of the laborforce after World War II in the United States and have since been disappearing,at first slowly and now quickly. What is left is bussing tables on the oneside and bourgeois occupations on the other. In fifty years a maker of thingson an assembly line in the United States will be as rare as a farmer.That’s not because the “jobs go overseas,” as noneconomists think. Evenif they stay at home, fewer and fewer people push the buttons. And that’s agood thing, not bad, whether accomplished through foreign trade orthrough automation, or both, because it is another way of saying that wecan get more per person. There is no such thing in the moderately long runas technological or foreign-trade unemployment. If on the contrary whatyou read in the newspaper about “losing jobs” were good economics, thenpractically no one would still be employed. There are no jobs nowadays fortens of thousands of canal-boat teamsters c. 1850 or tens of thousands ofblacksmiths c. 1900. Understand: I advocate ample provision for those hurtby change. But I advocate, too, change. If the Internet replaces professoriallectures I will retire gracefully, on a pension income earned from the greatproductivity of the American economy.The change is making proletarian occupations fewer and the enlargedbourgeoisie richer. The Creative Class edges ever upward in size, to the benefitof the remaining poor. Engels wrote to Marx (“Dear Moor”) in October1858 that “the English proletariat is actually becoming more and more bourgeois,so that the ultimate aim of this most bourgeois of nations wouldappear to be the possession, alongside the bourgeois, of a bourgeois aristocracyand the bourgeois proletariat.” 17In 1933 a German writer declared that “the Bourgeois epoch is coming toan end....Today it does not look as if the youth were of a mind to enterinto [the inheritance of bourgeois life]. They have no feeling for the Bürgertum’sparticular virtues, its particular mix of commitment and humanemoderation. The mixture has been a distinguishing feature of liberalism,which is much maligned today.” 18 So it has frequently been said. And yet—admitting the seriousness of the challenge to bourgeois virtues mounted inthe 1930s and 1940s—from the 1950s to the present the bourgeoisie andits values and its liberalism has spread. The Good Germans of our era,