Is it too late to change my major?

Every so often I find myself wishing I’d been a bit less of a purist in college and had taken an economics course or two. As it was, many of my college peers were econ majors, heading straight to places like Goldman Sachs after college. I had no idea what an investment banker might actually do (still really don’t), and no interest in finding out. I was a true liberal arts die-hard. I put together my own major studying the history of ideas and the interplay of ideas (and ideologies) and culture.

The irony today, a quarter century later, is that the ideas I find myself wishing I better understood are not existentialism and Marxism and the other “isms” I got into back then, but the ideas that must have shined with the promise of a brave new world to my economics-major classmates: supply side, free trade, trickle-down, deregulation, the power of markets to make the world a better place. Because from where I sit now, it seems that the ideology that dominates our world didn’t come from European philosophy but from the University of Chicago. And the cultures that ideology impacts are not the literary and artistic museum culture I was drawn to in college, but the lives of farmers and small business owners around the world.

If it were only about stock market meltdowns and global recession, I probably still would give economics a passing yawn. But I’ve spent that past week or so working my way through Stuffed and Starved by Raj Patel, and my desire to discuss the utter moral bankruptcy of this economic ideology is matched only by my outrage at the way agribusiness, in the pursuit of free trade and free markets, has increased hunger, malnutrition, diet-related illness, injustice, ecological disaster, even an epidemic of farmer suicides – and not just in our country, but around the world. It’s one thing to be on this little pilgrimage I’ve been on to buy local produce in the interests of feeding my family fresher, more nutritious food while also reducing our carbon footprint. It’s quite another to have the global implications of that industrial food system that I’m trying to escape thrown in my face for 300 pages.

This is what I’m talking about: Patel, in his discussion of NAFTA and its aftermath, points out that the main beneficiaries of the free trade agreement in Mexico are large landowners situated close the border. They can produce the fresh fruits and vegetables we’ve come to expect to see in the grocery regardless of the season. The fact that most Mexicans living on the land grow corn, which they can no longer sell since the market is flooded with cheap (heavily taxpayer-subsidized) corn from the U.S., means that basic staples like tortillas cost a lot more than they used to, and the poorest Mexicans are more vulnerable than ever.

But look again at those relative winners—those growing tomatoes a few miles south of the border. Yes, the landowner is making a profit. But who actually grows the tomatoes? A few years ago, I had the opportunity to spend a few days at a ministry in Baja California that our church had been involved in supporting. It’s a well-developed outreach, with an orphanage, medical clinic, food distribution and other ministries. Then there was the evening we went out to the “camps” with a meal, a program for kids and an evangelistic film. The camps, it turns out, are migrant worker camps set up for the people who grow those tomatoes. The workers come mostly from Oaxaca, and live in what could only be described as deplorable conditions.

Anyone who has read this blog at all knows I don’t buy those tomatoes. Simply opting out of the food system isn’t going to change the fact that there’s a market for slightly-pink tomatoes 365 days a year in the U.S., and that the people growing them are going to be squeezed for the lowest return on their labor. There are bigger forces at work here than can be dealt with by signing up with a CSA and recruiting my middle-class neighbors to do the same. It doesn’t change the fact that inner-city neighborhoods have been targeted by fast food joints and liquor stores, but redlined by the big grocery chains. Buying fair-trade coffee won’t change the fact that most growers receive pennies out of the $4.00 latte at Starbucks. The question is how to leverage a system that is controlled by huge corporations that don’t answer to governments – they tend to force governments to make the rules that suit them. I have no idea what the answer is, but it seems that there are no answers without understanding the nature of the problem. So if anyone has some old economics textbooks they want to get rid of…

In the meanwhile, I'll leave you with the sentiments of Bruce Cockburn: "Kick against the darkness till it bleeds daylight" (HT Bill Kinnon)