The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State are Leaving Communities Behind. Raghuram Rajan
mankind’s lack of self-control. No wonder historian Thomas Carlyle termed economics ‘the dismal science’! Malthus was wrong. Humans do not have an uncontrollable urge to reproduce. Indeed, prosperity has been a powerful contraceptive, with people becoming less willing to have children, even as they can afford more of them. Fertility rates for women are now below population replacement rates, not just in rich countries but in a number of emerging markets. Nevertheless, his views offered those who opposed even humanitarian government aid a theoretical rationale. Any relief schemes for the unemployed or the poor only encouraged them to reproduce more, and thwarted natural checks and balances. The indigent should be left free to starve, for only through a market-induced cull would succeeding generations have a better life.
Even if such callous theorising was never actually translated into action, it did help harden policies toward the poor and the destitute. As the eminent historian and sociologist Karl Polanyi pointed out, the Poor Law in England, which mandated parish support for the indigent, was made harsher in 1834, especially for able-bodied males. This was just as difficult economic times and the new machines of the Industrial Revolution were putting thousands out of work.9 Some tried to put a better light on these policies, arguing they placed the community back in charge of any voluntary support, others claimed rich farmers were misusing Poor Law subsidies. There was some truth to these explanations. It was also true that Parliament was dominated by the propertied well-to-do, who had been complaining about the high taxes they had to pay before the Poor Law was reformed. Clearly, they were also voting for their pecuniary interests.
With the demise of feudal institutions, the powerful no longer had an obligation to the weak in the community, while market fluctuations and automation left workers, especially those who had left their traditional communities, utterly exposed. Something between the extreme individualism of unregulated markets and the enforced collectivism of an authoritarian, overweening state had to be rebuilt on the ashes of feudalism. Before getting to that, though, what did a market freed from all restraint look like?
THE UNBRIDLED MARKET
Initially, it resembled the perfect competition of textbooks, with producers competing with one another to give the consumer the best deal, but this did not last. For as Adam Smith recognised, competition drove down profits, making any producer’s life greatly uncertain. The inexorable political tendency of a free, unfettered, unregulated market was for the producers, after experiencing the rigors of competition, to attempt cartelisation.
John D. Rockefeller, the richest man in the world in his time, made his money in rock oil or petroleum, in the early days of the industry when oil’s primary uses were for fueling lamps and lubricating steam engines. Rockefeller was not attracted to the risky business of prospecting for oil. Not only was unscientific drilling more likely to unearth dry wells than oil, excess production whenever oil was found in a locality could bankrupt producers as prices plunged.10 Rockefeller wanted a more stable business, and he found it in oil refining in Cleveland, the urban portal to Oil Creek, Pennsylvania, where oil had been discovered first. As Rockefeller worked to make his refinery the lowest-cost producer – at one point reducing the number of drops of solder on the tin cans used to carry kerosene from forty to thirty-nine after checking that any further reduction would cause the can to leak – he managed to drive out the truly incompetent and gained market share.11 Yet many, having sunk money in their investments, and having debts to pay, refused to quit, and kept the price of refined products low – so long as the price was a little more than their incremental cost of refining, the zombie producers staggered on. At one point in the 1870s, refining capacity was three times greater than demand.12
Rockefeller wanted to bring order to refining, and his first target was the twenty-six remaining independent Cleveland refiners. In 1872, as Ron Chernow details in his biography of Rockefeller, Rockefeller struck a deal with the railroads serving Cleveland, whereby Rockefeller and his cartel would get discounts (from the posted transport price) for the crude and refined oil they shipped. More egregious, the railways agreed to pay the cartel for every barrel shipped by the competing independent non-cartel refiners. Effectively, this meant the railways would face a higher cost to transport non-cartel products, and thus would have to charge the cartel’s competitors more.13 In addition, the cartel was to get full information about the oil shipped by competitors. In exchange, the three participating railroads each got a fixed share of the oil that the cartel shipped, and fixed transport fees, thereby eliminating the cutthroat competition they otherwise engaged in. The arrangement would bring stability to their revenues. Rockefeller’s keen business sense helped him recognise that both refiners and railroads might want to cartelise, and the combination would be deadly to those not in the cartel.
With no alternative methods of transport, the angry oil drillers along Oil Creek decided to boycott the cartel and sell only to local independent refiners. Protesters attacked the railroads, emptied oil cars and spilled their contents on the ground, and ripped up tracks. Even as the industry was in turmoil, though, Rockefeller bought up twenty-two of his twenty-six Cleveland competitors. As an owner recounted, ‘There was a pressure brought … that if we did not sell out we should be crushed out … It was said they had a contract with the railroads by which they could run us into the ground if they pleased.’14
In the face of prolonged public protests, legislators eventually withdrew the charter for the shell company at the center of Rockefeller’s cartel, while Congress started investigations. The railroads, who were much more dependent on government favour and public opinion for their activities, backed down, and instituted uniform rates for all shippers once again. In the meantime, Rockefeller had created a refining monopoly in Cleveland, as well as a strategy that would serve him well going forward – cost efficiency was good, but monopoly on top of it was even better. Five years after what became known as the Cleveland Massacre, Rockefeller’s company, Standard Oil, controlled 90 per cent of oil refined in the United States. There were about a hundred struggling small independent refiners still in existence at that time in the United States, which allowed Rockefeller to maintain the pretense of competition in the refining industry.
In Rockefeller’s mind, he had only helped his inefficient competitors end their misery by taking them over – in many cases, he closed their plants.15 The surviving refiners would enjoy greater economies of scale and more stable prices, their workers would be more secure in their jobs, and customers would benefit in the long run. This argument for cooperation among producers – coordinated by Rockefeller – instead of competition, while not entirely implausible, was entirely self-serving. Competition was the only guarantee in a free market that a producer would be solicitous to customers, whether through innovation, better customer service, or low prices. Faced with a refiner monopoly, customers were dependent on Rockefeller’s benevolence. How much could it be trusted?
Rockefeller was a superbly efficient businessman in the Calvinist mode; he saw his work as his calling. His confidence in his own capabilities blinded him to alternative paths. He saw unfettered competition as greed, causing unnecessary booms and busts, and impoverishing the entire industry. What he tried to restore were cooperative structures such as trusts, pools, and monopolies that brought order to markets – and he had no hesitation in bribing entire legislatures or misleading public hearings with fake testimonials to get his way.16 Manipulating government was just another means to business success. Many successful businessmen of the time thought similarly – Rockefeller was just more successful at executing plans. Many at the receiving end saw the kind of order he brought, which was spreading to a number of industries in the United States such as railroads and steel, as monopoly capitalism, perhaps the worst form of calculated greed. For essentially, the capitalists at the center of these cartels insisted that they, not the free market, knew what was best for the public.
The free market was not perfect. Bouts of euphoria, fuelled by easy money, undoubtedly led to overexpansion and industry hangovers. However, eliminating these wasteful and volatile