Snowbound!

Early Saturday afternoon, 1/13/24

Winter has finally arrived in northern Michigan. Almost halfway through January, we are having the weather that many years has landed on us as early as November – cold winds, snow squalls, heavy accumulation and blowing and drifting. Lots of horizontal snowing, Friday from the south, Saturday from the north, Sunday morning from the west, as far as I can tell. Everyone, in villages and countryside, is praying we don’t lose electrical power. The power company was busy clearing trees away this past fall, but those of us in the country, on wells and without generators, took the precaution ahead of the storm of filling large containers with water, because this is not our first rodeo.

Snowy Juliet

Sunny Juliet loves the snow and doesn’t seem to mind the cold wind. She will often put her nose and paws to work to unearth (unsnow?) hidden treasure, which could be – and has been more than once -- a mouse nest or a deer leg. I’m relieved when it’s only a windfall apple.

What's under here?

An apple!

You might guess that, besides water, I am prepared with plenty of books for a snowbound siege. On the serious end of things, I’m halfway through Angus Deaton’s Economics in America and should finish it soon, though it isn’t the book I expected. Rather than a unified treatise on how the American economy is put together and how it works overall, the book is a compilation of various shorter pieces written by the Scottish author (who is at now Princeton now and has lived in the U.S. for a couple of decades) over a long period of time, updated and introduced for this volume. There is a lot in it about economic inequality (as well as what he calls “relational” inequality), with closer looks at American health care costs and retirement finances, all of which he is able to contrast with those overseas, usually in the U.K. and Europe. So far my favorite observation is this one: 

 

Chicago economics gave us a healthy respect for markets, as well as a previously underdeveloped skepticism about the idea that government can do better, but it left economics with too little regard for the defects of markets and what they can and cannot do. Not everything should be traded. The profession bought too far into the idea that money is everything and that everything can be measured in money. Philosophers have never accepted that money is the sole measure of good, or that only individuals matter and society does not, and economists have spent too little time reading and listening to them.

 

It isn’t often that anyone outside academic philosophy thinks that philosophers deserve a listen, so thank you, Angus! Here’s another bit in the discussion of Chicago economics and Milton Friedman that I found thought-provoking: 

 

Friedman dismissed much of inequality as natural; some people like to work hard and get rich, while others prefer to enjoy their leisure. Some like to save and build up fortunes for their heirs, while others are more concerned with their own immediate enjoyment. Any attempt to diminish this sort of inequality would penalize virtue and reward vice. 

 

A couple of thoughts come to mind here. 

Hard work does not necessarily lead to riches. My maternal grandparents were some of the hardest-working people I’ve ever known, and I know people today, younger than I am, who labor intensively for hours no rich person would ever consider and who will never be rich. Sometimes their hard work is a choice, while other times it is not choice but necessity. There are plenty of people who work hard, do not get rich, and have little leisure. Friedman’s dismissal (if Deaton has summarized it fairly, and I have no reason to think otherwise) is an oversimplified false dilemma. Life is not that either/or.

For those among the not-rich, whether hard workers or otherwise, if they have chosen a way of life that does not involve hard work and are content with not being wealthy, why should this be seen as “vice”? And why is working to accumulate wealth, apart from other life goals, to be considered “virtuous”?

 

Economics fascinates me. I have never understood people who hold strong political views, many of them based on economic policies, who have never themselves explored the subject of economics but rest content with a chosen ideology.

 

My snowbound reading, however, is not all so serious. My own home bookshelves turned up a children’s book I don’t remember ever reading, The Trolley Car Family, by Eleanor Clymer and illustrated by Ursula Koering. Published by David McKay, with a copyright date by the author of 1947, The Trolley Car Family opens with Mr. Jefferson, grouchy next-door neighbor of the Parker family. Mr. Jefferson has to hitch up his horse and wagon in the middle of the night to deliver milk while the rest of the neighborhood is still asleep, and when he comes home to try to sleep, the Parker children are always making noise. 

 

Mr. Parker is a motorman on a street car, and (unlike Mr. Jefferson) he loves his job. Complications arise when the trolley company decides it is going to transition from trolleys to buses. Buses! 

 

“Always hated the durned things,” said Mr. Parker. “They won’t stay on a track. You never know what they’ll do, careening all over the street. Now with a street car, you know where you are. But with these buses, the cars are all the time swooping in and out around you. I don’t like it.”

 

“I don’t blame him,” said Mrs. Parker. “I never did like to see a man do something he didn’t like.” 

 

Things take what looks like a temporary turn for the better. When Mr. Parker is able to buy his old street car and rent a piece of land five miles from town, and Mr. Jefferson offers the use of his horse and wagon to get the street car from the end of the line to the rented land. The Parkers invite Mr. Jefferson to come along, and he obtains vacation time to do so.

Everyone is happy except for reminders that this summer idyll is not a permanent solution. Sally, the oldest Parker child, reads the writing on the wall.

 

…The boys could hardly wait to be grown up. They were going to do such wonderful things! But Sally had a feeling that it wasn’t going to be so easy. When you were little, you thought that grownups could do whatever they liked. But lying there in the twilight, listening to their voices, she knew that they couldn’t.

 

Pa and Mr. Jefferson just wanted to stay out here, milking the cows, or weeding the garden. But Mr. Jefferson had to go back to his job, and Pa would have to find a job soon, and they would all have to go back to town and leave this nice place. And Ma knew that Pa liked farming, and felt sorry that he would have to stop. But they couldn’t do as they liked. They had to think of the children. The children had to go to school, and have meals and clothes. So the grownups had to work.

 

Sally felt like waking the boys up and telling them what she had discovered. But she knew it wouldn’t be any use. They were too young. 

 

Of course, this is a book for children, a mostly happy book, where all ends charmingly for everyone, so I managed to enjoy it without thinking too much about Earl Butz coming along with his “Get big or get out!” policy for small farmers, but what a coincidence that a bit of this mid-century children’s book should echo some of my thoughts while reading Angus Deaton on economics….

I have also started Eagle Drums, by Nasugraq Rainey Hopson, and want to get back to Henry Van Dyke’s Little Rivers, and then there is a beautiful little antique volume I received as a Christmas present, Le marquis de Grignan, a book about Madame de Sévigne’s grandson by Frédéric Masson. 

– Oh, oh, oh!!! And it’s about time I start re-reading Bonnie Jo Campbell’s The Waters, too! Plenty to occupy me for as long as this winter storm lasts!

Watching from indoors...

...with my girl by my side.