Why Seattle Dogs Eat Better Than Many Humans

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And so, there is this. Just Food for Dogs . It's soon to open in Seattle. "We do three things here," claims the company. "We make daily food for healthy dogs and cats, we make a line of prescription food for dogs with specific illnesses and we make custom formulations for sick dogs and cats. And we do it all using ingredients that are 100% certified for human consumption by the USDA." This grub is not cheap; but it is much more nutritious than the standard industrialized pet foods sold at supermarkets.

I actually have no problem with feeding pets good food. Indeed, I think pets deserve to eat food that keeps them healthy and doesn't kill them. So, what is wrong here? Is it that the food sold by this business can be consumed by humans? Or is it obscene to feed dogs like kings while thousands of humans live on the streets? These kind of arguments might inspire moral feelings, but, in essence, they operate within a given framework, rather than outside of it or without it entirely. This framework is apparently democratic. It always says: There two or more sides to a situation, and thereby legitimates itself (a given framework), no matter what side one takes. This framework maintains the nature of value in the kind of economy that dominates our lives today.

This is on the amazon campus in south lake union in Seattle. I stopped on the sidewalk and stared at it for a full two minutes to try to figure out if it was extremely dark installation art. I don’t think it is. pic.twitter.com/cqv73iNMqi

— eve andrews (@eefandrews) November 15, 2018

At this point, I need to introduce you to a book I read this weekend: The Value of Everything. Its author is the talented UK-based economist Mariana Mazzucato. This is her second book. Her first, The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths, was published in 2013 and is a part of new movement in economics that challenges the fundamental assumptions of neoclassical economics and mainstream business discourse. Her point of attack concerned how society codes the capitalist entrepreneur as a heroic, dynamic, and efficient figure. But, according to Mazzucato, the real hero of innovation and economic dynamism is the state, which often funds the kind of research that's too risky for market investors. So how is it that the public still believes that the state is clumsy and inefficient and private enterprise is all that? The facts clearly say otherwise. This is answered by the word "myth."

The Entrepreneurial State, however, mostly focused on discrediting the myth and not explaining why it exists in the first place. Her new book goes into myth, and explains something that I think all heterodox economists know and are now, in one way or other, beginning to express. Economics is not about the management of wealth (which is seen as scarce or super-hard to accumulate), but the stories we tell about it.

Mazzucato might be the first economist to present narratology (the study of narratives) as a potential and maybe the most important category of the field. She makes a huge and even radical claim about the state of economics. It cannot be properly explained by mathematics, but by the stories we tell about wealth: who made it, who gets to own it, who does not deserve it, and so on. She understands that at the heart of this kind of narrative is value. But here is the thing: No one really knows what value is. This fact is revealed if one examines, as Mazzucato does in the second chapter of the book, the history of economics. The location of value in our thinking changes not because it itself changes, but because the story of value keeps changing. It was once all about gold. Then about trade. Then about productions of the soil. Then about labor. Then all about consumers. Today, the financial sector claims to play a vital role in the generation and proper (most efficient) distribution of value. This is just another story.

Mazzucato's book ends with value as value. It does not really provide metaphysics of capitalist value. (If I had the time, I would compare Joan Robison's use of metaphysics, and Mazzucato's use of narratives to explain concepts in neoclassical economics.) For this you have to turn to other thinkers who are not recognized by their profession. Here, I'm thinking of Moishe Postone and Noam Yuran. The former sees the maintenance value (the source of profits) as a kind of ghost (or geist) of a specific form of history (I will explain what this means in another post). The latter sees it as capitalism's key deviation from all other social systems. Other systems began with the necessities of life; capitalism begins with the luxuries—tobacco, sugar, coffee, chocolate, tea, automobiles, and so on. For this reason alone, it can provide consumers with things they do not really need far more easily than it can provide them with things that are really needed. This is at the core of the housing crisis. It's also why value, in the Postone sense, is a treadmill. If value came done to the necessities—highly efficient modes of transportation, nutritious foods, adequate shelter, affordable health services—the motor of capitalist history (which results in technological change) would simply cease.

Our present economic system has no difficulty providing even luxuries for pets. The difficulty it meets at every point is providing something as basic as shelter for all humans.